Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor in the Divinity School at Duke University. His most recent scholarly books are Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (Chicago UP, 2023), which consists of his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University, and Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul (Columbia UP, 2024). In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Hart discusses how this book draws from his passion for poetry, its relationship to the Stoics and Epicureans, and how he approaches the art of writing.
What is your work about?
Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul is a brief introduction to the practice and theory of contemplation, primarily with regard to Western thought and specifically in relation to Christianity. I consider various classical, patristic, medieval, and modern ideas about contemplation. The book begins by identifying several assumptions in play when thinking about contemplation, and I distinguish the concept from others that are related to it (e.g., “meditation,” “mysticism”). I pass to questions of practice and cognition (e.g., lectio divina, and how God gives himself to us). Then, I consider different ways people have practiced contemplation and broach the question of what can be contemplated. Throughout, I distinguish aesthetic, philosophical, and religious contemplation. Finally, I ask the question, “Why contemplate?” Along the way, I make some passing comparisons with contemplative practices in other world religions as well as in ancient and modern philosophy.
The book contests the common idea that contemplation is to do with bringing about the stillness of the soul. I go back to Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite’s poetics of contemplation, in which he distinguishes three different movements of the soul. In his remarkable treatise on the active and contemplative lives in the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas confirms what the Pseudo-Dionysius says. This understanding of contemplation has been lost in modern times, largely because contemplation has been approached almost entirely from the perspective of Buddhism and other Asian religions. No doubt, there is much that can be learned from Asian practices, but there is also a good deal that is valuable in Western thought, and it needs to be recovered and relaunched.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
My Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow University over the last few years, were on contemplation as well. It was the only way in which I could plausibly adhere to the terms of Lord Gifford’s will and talk entirely about natural theology. These lectures gave rise to a big book, Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation. I’m concerned in that book to recover a sense of (some) modern poetry as contemplative and to show how it can be read contemplatively. I read Hopkins’s “The Windhover” as contemplating a kestrel and, at the same time, a Jesuit saint who is pointing the young novice to Christ. Then, I turn to longer poems. I read Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” as a contemplation of the Arnoldian thesis that poetry can and should replace religion. I read A. R. Ammons’s long poem Sphere as a flawed recovery of natural or philosophical contemplation; and I read Geoffrey Hill’s long poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy as a sustained contemplation of Péguy as a “radical soul,” both as Socialist and as Catholic. We don’t read poems the way we read arguments, proofs, or theorems; rather, we tend to read, pause, go back a bit, anticipate what’s to come, reflect on a particular image or cadence, and so on. You might say, with Pseudo-Dionysius, that we move in straight lines, circles, and spirals. All this is rather different from reading the “poetry of meditation” that we associate with several seventeenth-century poets: John Donne, George Herbert, and Robert Southwell. That poetry is often tightly structured with inherited Catholic (often Jesuit) modes of meditation in mind, and when we read it, we tend to replicate those meditative modes. That’s not what happens in Stevens, Ammons, and Hill.
I doubt that outside the academy, many people practice the old hermeneutics of suspicion elaborated by Paul Ricœur in his Freud and Philosophy. Even in the academy, it’s become rather tedious in recent years and encourages a loveless reading of poetry, drama, and narrative. Criticism without love quickly turns into resentment or even hatred. In Lands of Likeness, I try to develop a “hermeneutics of contemplation,” by way of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Husserl. It doesn’t exclude the hermeneutics of suspicion—no one wants to be hoodwinked when reading anything—but positions it within a larger context. In Lands of Likeness, I distinguish consideration from contemplation, and fascination from contemplation, and show that there is a poetry of consideration as well as a poetry of fascination. But these are different at heart from the poetry of contemplation. The shorter book doesn’t address poetry or hermeneutics; it’s meant for undergraduates, church groups, and ordinary people who simply want to find out more about the practice.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
I discuss the “spiritual exercises” practiced by Stoics and Epicureans, among others, in Hellenistic culture, and draw attention to two distinct currents of thought about contemplation in the Middle Ages: Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century, and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Richard proposes that one can contemplate anything at all, although he charts a progression from contemplating sensuous particulars to contemplating God himself. Aquinas dislikes this approach and insists that only God is a proper object of contemplation. Yet, it is Richard’s model of contemplation that is the more helpful when reading poetry.
Another concern in both of my books is the revival of contemplation over the period from Kant to Husserl. In the Critique of Judgment Kant says some interesting things about contemplating nature, and these are taken up and greatly extended by Coleridge and Schopenhauer. Coleridge is well aware of the Victorine contributions to the understanding of contemplation, but most of his remarks on the topic are annotations to books he has been reading. Schopenhauer goes further than anyone in the nineteenth century in developing a cohesive theory of aesthetic contemplation. For him, it is the best way in which we can overcome the strict confines of causality, on the one hand, and stultifying bourgeois morality, on the other. I read Husserl as effecting a shift in meta-philosophy: he passes from thinking of philosophy as analysis, critique, or dialectic to philosophy as reflection. In many ways, his account of reduction is a “spiritual exercise,” one that prompts contemplation of the constitution of the world about us.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
I have recently completed a short book, Kierkegaard and Phenomenology, for Cambridge UP. I would rather have written on Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, but the series editor was eager for me to write on the topic given in the title. I enjoyed writing the little book, which clarifies what “phenomenology” means and then looks at what prominent phenomenologists have made of Kierkegaard. In the final two chapters, I sketch Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of the spiritual life and also his phenomenology of the kingdom. I was allowed only 30,000 words for the whole book and tend to think the material could have been better explored in 40,000 words. I found that I could discuss the authorship only glancingly, and I regret not being able to write about Kierkegaard on sacrifice, for example.
Now, though, I have returned to my main project, Phenomenology of the Christ, which is the first of a five-volume systematic theology. In the first volume, I show partly how the Gospels offer a phenomenology of Jesus as Messiah and partly how Jesus presents his own phenomenology. We can understand some passages in the Scriptures better if we read them phenomenologically, trying to see, for example, how John the Baptist grants us a mode of access to Jesus. And we can see Jesus more sharply when we see that he performs a reduction in his parables and other teachings, but a very unusual one, not from the res to transcendental consciousness but from “World” to “Kingdom.” The volume really needs a companion, Metaphysics of the Christ, but that would make the entire project unwieldy and would probably mean that I’d never complete the whole. Besides, there’s plenty of interesting material on the metaphysics of incarnation, for example, and not much on the phenomenology of Jesus and the phenomenology he commends to us.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
I hope that Contemplation will be read by undergraduates—it’s already set for study in at least three colleges—but above all, I hope it gets beyond the sphere of tertiary education. I would like it to get to church book groups and ordinary folk looking to deepen their prayer lives or even engage more thoughtfully with the world around them. Contemplation might show some people that their tradition is richer than they had thought. It might teach them more than one can learn by reading guides to mindfulness and practicing exercises of attention. It’s a short book that anyone can read; it could be read, at least for the first time, on a train while commuting to and from work. I hope that the book will help people to slow down, quiet the hive of the mind, and reflect more on themselves and the world. Those who become interested in the topic can then read my larger book, Lands of Likeness, if they wish to do so.
How have readers responded?
It’s early days, but I’ve had many emails from folks who have read the book and told me they’ve already benefited from practicing contemplation. I’ve had an email from a local Methodist minister who told me he had featured some of what I had to say in a recent sermon. To my surprise, the book has been picked up by a Japanese publisher and is to appear next year in Japanese translation. So, the book is getting some attention in Asia. I thought it might appeal to French, Italian, and Spanish readers; but perhaps that will happen in time.
What tips do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?
I think it’s a good idea for philosophers and theologians to distill our ideas in short books that can reach a wider audience than our more specialized studies ever will. I was asked to contribute a volume to the “No Limits” series at Columbia UP. They proposed that I write on faith. But I found that I couldn’t do so in only 40,000 words: there is too much theological material to work through and too many philosophical questions to pose and weigh. I suggested that instead, I write on contemplation since I thought I could condense some of the thoughts I have had over more than a decade of reading and thinking about the topic. I started thinking about contemplation in 2011, so I’ve marinated in it for quite some time. I also wanted to explore some new material on the topic for those just beginning to think about it. I doubt that most people would read all of Lands of Likeness—it’s a book for specialists—but the short book might appeal to many different sorts of readers. I found it easy to write: mostly, I think, because I had been reading in the area and thinking about it for a long time. I wrote for six mornings a week while on sabbatical in rural France, and within a month, I had completed a fair draft. Then I spent some time back in the States revising the whole. The best tip I can give for writing a book like Contemplation is to combine what you know about a topic with the usual practices of dialectical inspection. I remember reading G. E. Moore’s Ethics as a graduate student. At the time, I thought it was a model exposition of Utilitarianism, in particular, and still today, I admire how Moore went about his work. I tried to do something similar in my little book.
Kevin Hart
Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor in the Divinity School at Duke University. His most recent scholarly books are Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (Chicago UP, 2023), which consists of his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University, and Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul (Columbia UP, 2024).
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
