What Is Contemplative Realism—And Why Do You Need It?
By Katy Carl
When I first heard contemplative realism described, I knew it for the very thing I had been seeking in my own efforts as a writer and editor for years, without ever before having been able to name it. Contemplative realism — a concept and a style of art first identified and articulated by Joshua Hren — seeks to unite the highest literary developments of the past 150 years with the deepest insights of the contemplative life, as that life has long been understood in Catholic, Christian traditions.
But even if you are already closely formed in either of these veins of thought, seeing how they dovetail can feel complex until the lenses click into focus. This short introduction cannot possibly exhaust, it can barely even open, either topic, let alone both together. My hope in offering it is simply to awaken what critic James Wood calls your “reality-hunger” — your appetite to know more.Aristotle, that fosterer of both realism and contemplation, was not wrong when he said that all human beings, by their very nature, desire to know what is really real and take particularly deep pleasure in poetic knowledge — meaning knowledge that appeals to our senses. Our Lord rightly told us that the truth would set us free — and yet David Foster Wallace, a literary novelist of the twentieth century, was not wrong to add: “The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.” Contemplation and art are not the sole purview of monks or aesthetes. They help us reach the summit of what we were made for.
For now, to bring along as many readers as possible, let us begin by noticing about contemplation that the word can carry more than one connotation. Its most inclusive meaning is the one Josef Pieper articulates in Only the Lover Sings: “seeing, beholding, perceiving some reality.” Catholics identify two kinds of contemplation: natural and supernatural. Both kinds partake in the rooted reality of perception, but the perception takes place at different levels in each case.
Two Roads, One Direction
Natural contemplation is a way of looking at the world. It is an open disposition to perception, a receptive gaze of wonder, common and accessible to all people across cultures and times. Art and science alike arise from this disposition, which leads us to observe closely and to record in some self-consistent way what we observe.
As with any other virtue, including the virtue of art, a person can develop greater facility with natural contemplation by practice, effort, and perseverance. Natural contemplation can lead us to find out the truth of many things. The more people cultivate natural contemplation, the more truth we are able to discover and communicate, leading — ideally — to actions that make greater sense. The more receptive we become to the truth, the more we can sift the specious from the precious, good from evil, beauty from its counterfeits. Contemplative realism is rooted in honesty: the world is filled with grandeur and violence, saints and serial killers, impassioned prophets and lukewarm millions. In order to keep it real, we typically have to remember to recover whatever we are disinclined to see naturally.
(The converse is also true: The more we ignore our surroundings and circumstances, refusing to look at or acknowledge what is really there, the less truth we can discover and communicate and act upon, and the worse things get for everyone.)
By contrast, supernatural contemplation is a gift from God by which He lifts the mind to perceive truth about Himself and about spiritual things. It is a high form of prayer, but not the kind of prayer that arises from human practice, effort, or perseverance. Although we can go some way toward preparing for the gift of it, supernatural contemplation is received, not crafted or constructed or invented by human agency. For God to unite Himself to a person, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30-35). Human surrender into His hands alone is the key to God’s saving purification and unification.
No amount of human input can create an experience of supernatural contemplation. Those who experience it can hardly explain it! Although the mind may be able to sketch out a rough description of such an experience after the fact, contemplatives universally complain that human language is too clumsy a material for the delicate task. Here all recordings fall short of the reality — yet we seek to make them anyway.
Human effort could, it’s true, refuse an experience of supernatural contemplation — but this is almost too sad a story to tell, when we consider what is here being offered. Seeing how much we love our capacity for physical vision, how much more will we desire this vision of the soul?
Here is the good news: Anyone at all who seeks this vision can be a contemplative realist, in the sense of sharing a way of seeing. It is not necessary to practice an art to see in this way — though the practice of art can be both an aid to, and a fruit of, enriched and flourishing sight.
As a practitioner of an art, literary or otherwise, to be a contemplative realist is to be open to having one’s faculty of natural contemplation shaped and transformed by an experience of supernatural contemplation, while remaining committed to practicing the virtue of art attentively and fully, and — here’s the hard but really important part — to depicting things as they are rather than as our wishes might dictate.
Realism in Real Life
And here we enter upon the complex work of actual literary realists — who tend to treasure natural contemplation, but not all of whom by any means acknowledge the possibility of supernatural contemplation. How can readers who may be just beginning their engagement with fiction understand why the style of literary realism matters and how it differs from other approaches to literature?
Let me say a word here to disambiguate style from form and genre. When we talk about literary style, we are talking about the way an author uses language at the line level to create an overall, total effect. By close attention to both sentence-level mechanics and careful choices about which words to use, the author can build an impression in your imagination that closely resembles the impression the author desires to communicate. Realists tend to want to create an impression that most closely matches the “feel” of everyday life in a given society, as their characters would experience it.
Form, by contrast, is the overarching shape and structure of a given work, which determines the category into which that work falls — prose or poem; novel, drama, essay, short story; sonnet, villanelle, tercet, ghazal, haibun. Form is the container within which style works, the blueprint the architect uses to build the solid edifice upon which style plays.
Genre, as opposed to form, refers to various groupings or family resemblances into which critics sort literary works. As contemporary readers, we might imagine genre as the bookshelf on which a given work belongs, the category in the bookstore under which it is shelved. In academic contexts, we might find that we want to define hundreds of genres and subgenres, classifications and subclassifications. But classically, genre refers to the four major moods or lenses through which events might be selectively filtered: tragic, comic, epic, or lyric. We could say much more about each of these lenses — curious readers, I refer you to Louise Cowan’s wonderful anthologies on the major genres — but for now it is enough to say that the contemplative realist style can be brought to bear on any of these genres.
In short: Realists practice a literary style, rather than being married to any one form or genre. Realists turn their efforts in art toward depicting life as it appears in common experience, not necessarily as we feel about experiences or as we would wish they were, are, or will be.
Admittedly, the very thought of “common experience” may feel tricky or vague these days, as so much discursive emphasis lands on the incommensurability of some experiences to others, on our purported inability to understand each other or meet on level ground. A contemplative realist might counter this by saying that the territory of attention to experience is an especially apt and open place where we can yet meet each other, if we are willing. As Joshua Hren writes, riffing on a text of St. Bonaventure:
God’s goodness can unfailingly be found by one who opens his eyes, alerts the ears of his spirit, applies his heart, and opens his lips in magnification of our maker. Far from being a conventual escapist, the contemplative is one who “considers the actual existence of things.”
Skeleton Keys
There is too much more to say; how will we approach it? The bulleted list, as a form, lends itself to satire and to self-satire. Still, we both know you are likely to be reading this on your phone in the five or ten minutes you’ve crowbarred out from between other tasks (we all do it). And lists, in this situation, are a mercy to the scattered mind.
Here, then, are some of the central aims contemplative realism pursues:
- To restore the vision of what is most real, within this world and beyond it, for human beings
- To cleanse contemporary vision of the many filters and blinkers forced upon it by ideological, technological, and other kinds of distortions
- To restore a sense of the transcendent, by means of which sense we may resist the flattened, materialistic-reductionist vista of the cultural mainstream
And here are some of its characteristic intellectual and aesthetic commitments (unless stated otherwise, direct quotations in this list come from the full text of Contemplative Realism):
- To accept that having truth is not a matter of constructing truth for ourselves but, rather, a matter of receiving truth from its Source, and that truth is not a possession to wield but a treasure that makes demands and implies responsibilities on its holder
- To “store up in the heart a fullness of perception” as to “what not everybody sees” (Pieper)
- To seek out a “right sight of nature” — not romanticizing the natural (or artificial or technological) into “mere spectacle” or “soothing anodyne,” but holding in mind that “if nature croons with beauty it also groans for redemption,” in a way that Grace can build on without destruction or erasure
- To “favor mystery over ambiguity” — not to deny the existence of the ambiguous, but to refuse to cast a shadow of doubt over matters where at least some understanding can be achieved by the human mind, and to treat irreducible perplexity as a “blessed puzzle” that increases our appetite for ultimate resolution rather than tempting us to despair
- To “presence” the veil of mystery, to “dramatize mystery’s hiddenness” — neither failing to listen for the multiple levels on which truth may reside, nor presuming to see more than the light of faith can illuminate
- “To register the separate parts of creation as bearing different levels of significance depending on the story’s situation”
- To locate the problem of evil within humanity’s tendency to misidentify and misappropriate the good, and to respond accordingly
- To recognize that “mundane decisions have eternal significance; each infinitesimal yes or no of our days tips the divine scales closer to salvation or damnation”
- To stay alert to the intersection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of reality, the marriage between the mundane and the divine
If, reading this, you feel you may be a contemplative realist—if anything here awakens in you a “What, you too? I thought I was the only one”—I encourage you to pick up a copy of the original text of Contemplative Realism by Joshua Hren and to join me over at my Substack, Depth Perception, where I write more short essays relating to the treasure-house of thought Hren’s text represents.
—Katy Carl is writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas--Houston, where she earned her MFA in creative writing. Author of As Earth Without Water, Fragile Objects, Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World, and Praying the Great O Antiphons, she is editor emeritus of Dappled Things magazine, on whose editorial board she has served since 2007, and a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society.
