Book Review – Peter Tyler
Contemplative Prayer: A New Framework
Author: David Foster
Date: 2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978-1-4081-8710-4
pp 216 pbk, £12.99
Dom
David Foster, a monk of Downside Abbey, begins his book with a somewhat
alarming experience for a Benedictine monk – a sense of having ‘lost God’ in
his student days and how he subsequently had to build up a new relationship
with God coming from this place of comparative darkness. From this starting
point he constructs an analysis of prayer from what he terms the ‘philosophical
point of view’. To this end he references his account of prayer from the
perspective of many 19th and 20th Century, mainly
European, philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger,
Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. If these names put you off then this is
not a book for you for Foster loves his philosophy and his philosophers and
brings his wide acquaintance with their theories to bear on his experiences of
prayer. If, on the other hand, these philosophical discussions appeal then you
will find the book of great interest and fascination. Particularly well done
are the sections on the apophatic or Dionysian perspectives on prayer and how
they relate to the current ‘postmodern’ or what he sometimes terms ‘nihilist’
culture within which we currently reside (in the West at least). His
supposition throughout, supported in his argument by writers such as
Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is that ‘contemplative prayer springs from the
roots of our human being’, which for him, using Heidegger’s phraseology, is a
case of being related to our ‘underlying structure of our experience of being.’
The problem, I always feel, when constructing a philosophical analysis from
various thinkers who often contradict each other is what do we do with the
discrepancies and rough edges between the various viewpoints – either we must face
them head on, avoid them or smooth them over. Foster goes for the last position
and so we find Wittgenstein’s linguistic analyses, Heidegger’s philosophy of
being (or should that be ‘Being’?) and the Nietzschian ‘transvaluation of
values’ all brought together in a great synthesis around the Christian
experience of ‘contemplative prayer’. As I have said, for those of a
philosophical bent this may well prove attractive. For those without that
particular affliction I hope the book will still appeal as it does at least
induce a dialogue between our strange postmodern times and the older narratives
of Christian contemplative prayer for, as the author states, this search ‘has
taken people to the frontiers of experience, where we need to recognize the
limitations of reason and conceptual thinking.’ If, as Wittgenstein suggested,
our philosophical speculation acts as a finger pointing to that ‘whereof we
cannot speak’ then it has probably done as much as it can in the present times.
Dom David concludes by hoping that contemplative prayer will ultimately lead us
beyond philosophy to the place where we ‘have life and have it in abundance’.
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