THE medieval use of the word ‘contemplation’ covers a range of different approaches to spirituality, not all of them well assorted, at least at first glance. This essay will attempt to give a brief outline of these different approaches and the issues they raise, particularly those issues that tend to cause difficulty to modern readers of medieval mystical texts. At the same time, by taking a chronological approach to the development of these different strands, this essay will attempt to draw them into some kind of serviceable overview.

The word ‘contemplation’ provides a useful way into this complex field, as it is the medieval writers’ own preferred term: our modern term ‘mysticism’ is not one they use to describe their endeavours or their experience, although, of course, they use the adjective mysticus to describe the ‘hidden’ or ‘spiritual’ meaning of Scripture. I propose briefly to trace the word ‘contemplation’ back to its Greek and Latin roots, following the lead of the magisterial Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, as this leads us straight into the first difficulty encountered by modern readers: the emphasis on withdrawal, not only from the ‘world’, with all that the term implies, but also from the love of all ‘creatures’, including the nearest and dearest human beings.

Both the Latin contemplatio and the Greek word theoria, which it translates, have as their root syllable te ‘see, sight’. Thus the ‘temples’ of the head were thought to be the seat of vision, and a ‘temple’ was a place of vision – at first, not so much a building as a sacred space from which to study omens, such as the weather and the flight of birds. Thus ‘vision’ is associated from the outset with scrutinising the heavens. Indeed, the long tradition of Greek philosophy, which was to issue in the great edifice of Platonism and neo-Platonism, began with astronomers also scrutinising the heavens – thus the verb theorein implies not only ‘to see’, but also ‘watch’, ‘inspect’; that is, an intentional and focused kind of seeing. Similarly, the early mathematicians used their theoria to produce ‘theorems’; that is, from particular examples they formulated a universal principle of relatedness between particular phenomena.