Recent Posts

Friday 24 July 2015

Three Definitions from The Maritains


Silent Prayer: "...not meditation in which the soul is occupied in considering ideas, concepts and images, but a wordless, intuitive, and quite simple prayer, a loving attention to God in which the soul is primarily occupied in letting God having His way with it and which, as St. Thomas expresses it, it suffers divine things in a silence void of words, concepts and images.


Recueillement: "an inner state which, far from being ‘concentration’ due to voluntary effort, is rather a gift received, a quiet absorption of the soul which, far from being inertia, is a secret and unifying activity too deep to be perceived."


Contemplation"Christian contemplation is the fruit of the gift of Wisdom; and this gift, although a habitus of the intelligence… depends essentially on charity, and consequently on sanctifying grace, and causes us to know God by a sort of connaturality – in an affective, experimental and obscure manner, because superior to every concept and image."


More on this later today....