Homero Aguilar – Contemplation
Origen of Alexandria came up with the idea first.
Unless you’re a Christian history geek, chances are you’ve never heard of Origen. He lived in Egypt from about 185 to 253—meaning he was a third-century Christian, who died sixty years before Constantine decriminalized the faith. In other words, he lived long before the desert fathers and mothers, before the rise of Christian monasticism, before what we now know as “Christian mysticism” or “contemplative spirituality” really took shape. Indeed, Origen’s extensive writings inspired the great desert father Evagrius, who is generally considered to be the first Christian writer to describe contemplative prayer in his work.
The “idea” that I’m referring to is the notion that Christian spirituality can be understood as involving three stages. To give this notion a bit of gravitas, Origen appealed to the Hebrew Scriptures. He saw three of the wisdom books: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, which appear in consecutive order in the Christian Old Testament; as symbolic of these three stages, which he labeled (in Greek) ethike, physike, and enoptike. Translated into English, the stages involve the acquisition of virtue or ethics, which leads to a more Godly way of relating to the natural world, which in turn prepares one for the vision of God, or contemplation.
It’s not hard to connect the dots with the wisdom literature Origen appealed to: for Proverbs is moralistic and concerned with proper behavior; while Ecclesiastes, deeply existential and almost cynical in tone, seems to suggest a detached, “spiritual” way of relating to the world; leading finally to the Song of Songs, the sensual collection of love poems interpreted by Origen as a grand metaphor for the love of God for humanity.
Origen’s ideas were shaped and adapted by future spiritual writers, finally reaching a classic formulation in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an anonymous Syrian monk who lived around the year 500. In his essay on angels called The Celestial Hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius describes the “beatitude of God” as “purifying, illuminating, and perfecting; or rather it is itself purification, illumination, and perfection.” This “threefold way” appears again and again in subsequent spiritual teachings, both in the eastern and western churches; writers as diverse as St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Ruysbroeck, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange have used some form of this three-step model in their explication of the spiritual life.
Read HERE the rest of this excellent article by Karl McColman.
Persona 