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    Light and Images: Elements of Contemplation
    Light and Images: Elements of Contemplation
    Light and Images: Elements of Contemplation
    Ebook122 pages2 hours

    Light and Images: Elements of Contemplation

    By Adrienne von Speyr

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    One of Adrienne von Speyr's most cherished concerns was to rekindle Christians' desire for contemplation and thus to renew the Church's prayer. Light and Images is one of the most important of her works on the subject. She sets forth the deepest theological foundations of contemplative prayer according to the reciprocal relationship between "light" and "images".

    Like the simple images that open up infinite depths to the eye of faith, this little book contains an overwhelming wealth of insight into contemplation. One comes away from it with a vastly transformed understanding of the nature of prayer and an appreciation for its irreplaceable role in Christian life. With its disarmingly simple language, Light and Images is immediately accessible; and yet the new perspectives it offers on prayer surprise and challenge at every turn. The book is therefore both an incomparable introduction for those who wish to learn what it means to pray, and excellent spiritual reading for those seeking to draw more deeply from the Church's great treasury of prayer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIgnatius Press
    Release dateApr 2, 2012
    ISBN9781681492971
    Light and Images: Elements of Contemplation
    Author

    Adrienne von Speyr

    Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) was a Swiss medical doctor, a convert to Catholicism, a mystic, and an author of more than sixty books on spirituality and theology. She collaborated closely with theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, her confessor for twenty-seven years, and together they founded the Community of Saint John. Among her most important works are Handmaid of the Lord, Man before God, Confession, and her commentaries on the Gospel of Saint John.

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      Book preview

      Light and Images - Adrienne von Speyr

      Introduction

      There is no end to teaching about prayer, especially contemplative prayer. Adrienne von Speyr has already published an extensive work on the subject, The World of Prayer,¹ in which she descends from the eternal conversation within God himself, passes through the prayer of Christ and Mary, and leads us to the fullness of the states of life and situations within the Church: the prayer of those who are consecrated to God, of those with the office of priesthood, of the married laity who live in the world; the prayer of people at different ages and stages in life.

      The present little book complements the more extensive work in a decisive way. Here, the theme is the highest and broadest theological presuppositions of contemplative prayer. The whole is governed, just as it is in Thomas Aquinas, by the reciprocal relationship between light (lumen) and image (species).

      God’s revelation is twofold: on the one hand, the communication of his eternal light of truth, of life, and of love, which becomes visible and manifest to us in Jesus Christ (I am the light of the world) and sinks into our heart as the light of the Holy Spirit ("O lux beatissima"), of faith, of hope and of love, so that the light is both present before us [gegenständlich] and present within us [in-ständlich], both objective and subjective. As such, it therefore binds us to and gives us a share in the object of God’s revelation in the most intimate way possible. This light of divine truth and love that pours itself out into the world also appears, however, in the form of the shadows and the night of the Cross, at least insofar as the Cross is the Redeemer’s atoning and reconciling assumption of human vanity and darkness, a work that places the contemplating believer also under this same law.

      It is characteristic of Adrienne von Speyr to present this law of night simultaneously in the general form of faith experiences as such and in the particular form of mystical experience. To be sure, she does not identify the two; nevertheless, the mystical experience of night ultimately appears as the conscious unfolding, in particular contemplators, of a universal and fundamental state [Grundbefindlichkeit] of all Christian existence and all Christian contemplation. And while she does not deny the aspect of purification, which is necessary for the contemplative, she accords a more important and more central place in the teaching of the dark night to the aspect of one’s inclusion within the law of redeeming grace: because the Son on the Cross had to experience divine love and truth in the mode of abandonment and darkness, therefore the disciple of Jesus cannot be spared, in prayer, something significant along these lines.

      The second fundamental principle is that of the image, which we could describe here as a concrete and tangible correspondence of truth between heaven and earth. Revelation is the revelation of heaven on earth—not through the production of words and images about the eternal, divine world, which only have to be dialectically eliminated or crossed out in the manner of negative theology, but in a positivity, which can ultimately be understood only on the basis of love, and in love. Christ, the Son and Image of the Father, who became man, who died, but who was raised up and ascended into heaven, no longer crosses out the Word that he himself is, the Word that he unfolded in thousands of words, deeds, gestures and prayers, through his return to the Father. Indeed, he expands the sphere of images, in which genuine contemplation is alone able to unfold, until it includes the whole of creation. For the Creator, the Father, already laid the world upon the Son, and it needs the Son in order to be contemplated in its definitive meaning and to be interpreted.

      Becoming incarnate, the Son takes hold of these image-laden intimations that rise up from below rather than descend from above, by filling these earthly images in his omnipotence with eternal meaning. Admittedly, this meaning is not accessible to the grasping sinner and unbeliever; in order to be received and taken in, it requires reverent faith and adoring contemplation, in which the earthly image opens up to its mysterious eternal content. And this content does not merely flash for a moment like a bolt of lightning, as it does for dialectical theology, but it is available in a certain stability in all of the images the Son has given: in the sacraments, God’s truth is present in signs that are valid—indeed, they are definitive for the duration of the world; and God’s heavenly Jerusalem, in which Christians receive a share in faith and prayer, is present in the Our Father and in all of the Son’s words of prayer, just as it is in the liturgical words of the Church. The world as a whole, because of the presence of the incarnate Son who is the definitive Image of the Father, is transformed into a sort of sacrament of divine truth and love. Already by virtue of nature, the individual man is an image modeled on Christ (and through him on the triune God), and for this reason (as Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4), he cannot understand or see himself merely in relation to himself; rather, only by looking to Christ can he become who he is, and only in Christ can he interpret and comprehend himself. In this way, the act of contemplative prayer becomes an indispensable act of human self-realization, which however is not something man affirms and practices in the first place for his own sake, but rather in obedience to God, who desires and needs human beings as disciples and followers of Christ. In the deepest sense, contemplation is the loving obedience that man gives as an answer to the Word of God.

      Images are not there in order to be rejected and destroyed, buried in God’s imageless abyss. In the Ascension, God’s earthly image is seized and drawn up definitively to the Father, and the disciples, before they are sent back to Jerusalem by the angel, stand blessed and full of longing, filled and emptied at the same time on the Mount of Olives, staring after the One who has disappeared into God. The Transfigured One took their hearts with him up to God, and they will never again feel altogether at home in the temporal world, for that part of the world which they most loved is now with God. And this is why everything that they see on earth becomes transparent to heaven. The Holy Spirit, which the Son sends to them from heaven, kindles in them the fire of longing, in which every image on earth becomes radiant for heaven, for the everlasting life that springs up from triune love. To show this is the aim of the present little book,

      —Hans Urs von Balthasar

      1. The Idea in God

      God looks upon God from all eternity. His life is this vision, in which the three Persons are transparent to one another and consummate and confirm their oneness in being in ever renewed exchanges of love. What God is in his eternal being is in the life of the three Persons a constant now, an actually occurring event. Eternal love sees to it that their unity be manifest as unsurpassable and inexhaustible in every respect. God’s contemplation of God is the most fruitful contemplation imaginable. It is an unending flow of giving and receiving, and at the same time it takes a direction, like the movement from the spring to the sea. The spring in God is so mighty that everything originates from it and no other prior origin can be sought behind it. Out of all the meanderings of its flowing love, it ultimately forms an ocean, which in its boundlessness illustrates God’s infinity. What flows out, however, does not distance itself from the Father’s spring, but is received and taken in by him. Ebb and flow, spring and sea, are all one in the endlessly flowing Godhead. When God contemplates, he sees God, the eternal God of action and contemplation: the God who performs actions and the God who receives them in order to contemplate them and who does not thereby close them but rather opens them up. This opening up of contemplation stems from the openness of the one who contemplates. If a man loves a woman, he will do everything he can to be transparent to the one he loves and to grant her an insight into him, and the beloved, the moment she perceives his love, will do the same. In this way, a unity of being and of will grows between them, though it does not violate their personhood or eliminate the boundaries that distinguish them. Man remains man and woman remains woman. The ultimate mystery of their person is not laid bare; indeed, their reciprocal revelation to one another serves only to deepen and quicken this mystery. Now, to be sure, we cannot speak of a deepening in God, for God is eternally the same. But he is also the one who constantly and tirelessly produces and receives the exchange of love. And this exchange is not an idle exercise, but a brimming event.

      If God the Father creates man with the cooperation of the Son and the Spirit, then he guides man along with all the rest of creation toward the Son. The origin of all the contemplation in the world lies in this movement of being guided toward the Son that is willed by the Father, God wants to give to the Son, whom he sees, all of those who do not yet see him. And this gift is carried out in both directions from the beginning: God gives himself to man, but he also gives man to himself, so that man stands in the midst of a flowing exchange. Man does not grasp this exchange with his natural senses, but faith makes it visible at a level that remains withdrawn from human reason and its calculations. The believer, who stands outside of God’s nature insofar as he is a creature, receives a share in God’s interior world through faith: he who does not see the things of God on the basis of his nature receives a share in God’s seeing. Faith is God’s gift that opens up the world of God’s inner life to him, and when it does, man sees this inner life, not as a distant and inaccessible illusion, like a Fata Morgana. Instead, God

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