Practice Timelines in Mysticism

Ludovic de Besse on the act-habit distinction

Mystics are often drawn as serenely accepting life yet one defining characteristic of the “mystic” in the Western Christian tradition is their restless appetite for perfection. The mystic is dissatisfied with the quotidian arrangement whereby grace arrests a person unexpectedly. They want access to grace at will; they want, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the extraordinary saturating the ordinary, and the ordinary itself elevated to something bordering on the uncanny. In particular, they want to enjoy continually — not merely serendipitously — the blissful, delectable state into which grace plunges its recipient.

Mystics are pleasure-seekers in this regard, and the practice of cultivating contemplation lies at the heart of the mystic’s hunt for increased and sustained delight, for Augustine’s “heavenly sweetness” (coelestem delectationem).

For this reason, most manuals and accounts of mystical prayer in the Western Christian tradition are preoccupied with the question of effort, of how much it takes before we are able, in Ludovic de Besse’s striking phrase, to “[draw] abundant grace upon ourselves.” Provided they enjoyed it, the question of how to have more inevitably becomes paramount for the person who has had their first taste of a contemplative state.

Leaving aside for a moment the theological consequences of this desire (I’ll return to them in a later post) manuals of contemplation tend to maintain the non-contradiction between grace and human effort. For instance, in The Science of Prayer (1925), Besse observes — drawing on over forty years of experience as a spiritual director — that while grace cannot be controlled, human receptivity to grace is subject to voluntary alteration. (Or, as his contemporary Augustin Poulain puts it in The Graces of Interior Prayer, “if we cannot produce the mystic state at will, we can at least dispose ourselves to it.”)

Besse, for his part, is quite detailed on human effort in relation to grace. He even gives a practice timeline, suggesting that a few months of daily practice at most will suffice for a person to succeed in making their first contemplative “acts” in a dependable manner. By “acts,” Besse means not the ability to experience contemplation (a natural ability, according to the Western mystical tradition) but the acquired skill of disposing oneself at will to grace; that is, the ability to enter a contemplative state as a correlate to one’s own efforts.

Besse notes that the precise nature of those efforts will vary, but, like many other twentieth-century manualists, maintains that (depending on the method or school followed) they typically involve some form of meditation, culminating in affective prayer and a wordless, silent regard. The initial stages of contemplation emerge from this silent regard, as a practitioner’s mind is arrested suddenly by an onrush not of their own making. Besse suggests that a daily practice of a longish nature (I suspect he means a minimum of 30 minutes, for reasons I will explain below) is required for the timeline he proposes, which is vaguely defined but seems to fall around the 2-4 month mark.

Besse’s timeline, such as it is, conforms more or less to other common recommendations in the manualist tradition, which suggest anywhere between 4-6 weeks for a dedicated person to transition from meditation to contemplation. “Dedication” in many older manuals indicates a minimum of an hour of daily practice but many influential authors — such as Teresa of Ávila — recommend as much as two hours daily. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is conceived as a month-long retreat with the practitioner dedicating at least an hour or more each day to meditation. Besse, however, does not think much of the Ignatian method, since it is unrealistic for most lay persons, and he doesn’t agree with those monastics who insist that prayer under two hours’ duration cannot be called properly mystical. Rather, Besse seems to prefer the advice of Jane de Chantal, who observed that among her sisters, a regular daily practice invariably brought a practitioner to the beginnings of contemplative prayer within a few months. Chantal is fond of recommending a minimum of 30 minutes daily, an advice also repeated by many of her followers. For this reason, I suspect Besse would favor the 30 minute minimum recommendation.

But Besse’s reflections on practice timelines are not confined to experiencing contemplative acts. In Science of Prayer, Besse makes a distinction between two different timelines of practice, one for producing acts of contemplation, the other for acquiring the habit of contemplation. Acquiring the habit of contemplation involves spontaneity but now in a — paradoxically — cultivated form; contemplation is now an experience that, while beyond human control, nonetheless is initiated or “prepared” (a metaphor preferred by Besse) at will, through specific practices.

Besse’s experience as a spiritual director suggested to him that many who succeeded in making contemplative acts were not necessarily able to experience those acts at the drop of a hat; they possessed the ability to produce acts, but lacked the power to produce those acts spontaneously. Besse argued that a person who had reached the point where they were able to enter into contemplative states following a period of meditation would never lose this ability — persons who had not practiced for years were still able to make contemplative acts successfully, according to Besse. Persons who returned to contemplation after years of neglect, “recover the power of praying as they had done previously.” Yet, “I speak of the act of contemplation, not the habit,” remarks Besse, adding that the latter “cannot be recovered with such facility.” Persons returning to the practice were not able to enter contemplative states at will without meditative prayer, that is, without some effort.

By contrast, what Besse calls “the contemplative habit” is the outcome of practitioners sustaining their daily practice beyond an initial practice timeline, to the point where the efforts initially required to “prepare” for grace no longer are needed, or are so subtle as to be virtually imperceptible to the practitioner: “When the contemplative habit is formed,” he argues, “this prayer becomes in a sense natural.”

Besse writes about persons able to be “prepared” spontaneously for the arrival of grace and receive it in a matter of moments, without any initial meditation, affective prayer or silent regard. It is this ability that Besse identifies as “continual prayer”: “Those who…live in a continual state of prayer, are practically always prepared.” Citing John of the Cross, Bess reflects how such persons “are able to produce the contemplative act whenever they will” (emphasis in the original). Besse describes this as the result of contemplation becoming second nature or habitual:

The habit is gradually formed, and in the end [the acts of contemplation] are produced without any effort, and without the need of preparing the way by reflection. Habit, they say, is a second nature. Consequently it can be said of such a soul that supernatural acts are produced naturally. There is no contradiction in speaking in this way, for the simple reason that the word naturally here means nothing else but easily.

Besse suggests that in order to make contemplative states habitual in this way, a continual daily practice is required. The beginner, too, requires a daily practice for at least a few months in order to begin making contemplative acts, but the beginner is free to cease entirely from the practice without losing the basic skill of being able to perform contemplative acts. But acquiring the contemplative habit requires sustaining a daily effort more or less indefinitely. Depending on the practitioner’s diligence (depending on the length and intensity of their daily practice), ecstasy and rapture may follow, according to Besse. For this reason, Besse does not specify a timeline for acquiring the contemplative habit. Rather, he gives a number of signs, chief of which is the ability to put oneself in the presence of God without any preparation. For Besse, this ability is the result of maintaining and above all intensifying a daily practice — or not.

In the same way, Besse explains that falling away from the habit will, after a period of time, result in a need to re-cultivate continual prayer by means of meditation, even though the basic skill-set in question — the ability to make contemplative acts at all — is never lost by those who once achieved it.

Developing the act-habit distinction is, to my mind, the principal contribution of Besse’s Science of Prayer. Yes, there’s the effort it takes to get the hang of contemplation and master the “knack” of it, as it were. But there is also the effort it takes to make that “knack” habitual to the point where it becomes second nature. And because second nature is subject, always, to dissipation (due to the fundamentally cultivated rather than spontaneous character of acquired habits), the effortlessness of the mystic’s contemplation is only natural to a point. Without cultivation, that is, without effort, progress is not possible. And progress is paramount, because grace is by definition always in excess of finitude. Hence the mystic’s restless hunger for more.

Besse even goes so far as to suggest that a person who seems content where they are in their “progress” is not progressing at all. “It is,” he explains, “to imagine we have made sufficient progress” (my emphasis). For a mystic, progress is never sufficient, because the delight they draw down is not contained by human measures. Settling is the great temptation. “We are willing to be content with a very small degree of perfection,” muses Besse, citing Jean-Joseph Surin: “We do not aim high enough…and for that reason make such small progress in prayer and in perfection.”

Works cited

Ludovic de Besse, The Science of Prayer (Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1925)

Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable. Volume 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Augustin Poulin, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology, trans. Leonora Smith (Kegan Paul, 1910)