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12 - Actio et Contemplatio/Action and Contemplation

from Part II - Key Terms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Amy Hollywood
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
Patricia Z. Beckman
Affiliation:
St Olaf College, Minnesota
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Summary

For most Christian mystics, the experience of the presence of God not only alters their interior journey but also radically transforms their exterior life. Leonardo Boff outlines a new vision for sanctity and mystical union with God that entails being contemplative while working toward liberation. This call to be contemplativus in liberatione, echoing Jerónimo Nadal’s characterization of Ignatius of Loyola’s spirituality as simul in actione contemplativus (“contemplative while in action”), involves a critique of reductive configurations of the relationship between ora et labora (“pray and work”) that devolve into polarizations or spiritual monophysitisms (traditionally the term monophysitism refers to the “heretical” belief that Christ has only one [Greek monos] nature [Greek physis], as his humanity is absorbed and transfigured by his divinity; in this particular context, it signifies a one-sided emphasis on either action or contemplation). For Boff, the summons to be contemplatives in liberation expresses a synthesis of prayer in action that holds the two poles together dialectically, “treating them as two spaces that are open to one another and imply each other.” Boff’s discussion highlights tensions that Christian mystics have wrestled with as they have articulated the relationship between actio and contemplatio. Yet the assertion that a dichotomy between action and contemplation is characteristic of the Christian mystical traditions (mirroring a putative dichotomy between body and soul, world and church) is controverted by an examination of several seminal Christian thinkers.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

Nadal, Jerónimo, Epistolae P. Hieronumi Nadal. IV. “P. Hieronumi Natalis in Examen Annotationes” (Madrid, Spain: Typis Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1905)
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: The Modern Library, 1950)
Bavel, Tarcisius van, “Double Face of Love,”Augustinian Studies 17 (1986)Google Scholar
Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008)
Augustine, Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992)
Constable, Giles, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss (New York: Paulist Press, 1991)
Ignatius of Loyola, Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1959)
Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. George E. Ganss (New York: Paulist Press, 1991)
Young, William J., Finding God in All Things (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958)

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