Apophatic contemplation(imageless, receptive, silent, listening for God) is the highest form of contemplative prayer possible in this life. It is the form of contemplatiion in which the soul remains passive and receptive, divesting itself of concepts, images, and all active operations of the faculties(intellect, will, memory, imagination), in order to receive a supernatural infusion of the spirit of God into the substance of the soul, in stillness and silence, and, generally, in secret from the normal operations of the faculties. However, the infusion of the divine spirit into the substance of the soul during contemplation, even though secret from the faculties, is often accompanied, in those who have reached the state of union, by an awareness of the peace of God, stability, and well-being, as well as love, engendered in the substance of the soul, as opposed to the faculties, by the Holy Spirit. The effects of this divine contact, substance of God infused into the substance of the soul, often are experienced most profoundly in the period shortly after contemplative prayer. Whereas, the normal operations of the faculties are natural operations, contemplative prayer is the supernatural activity of God, and therefore exceeds the capacity of the normal operations of the soul.

However, there are times when the faculties receive overflow from the substance of the soul, and (actively)participate in the same love and light of infused contemplation that are normally(habitually) being secretly received from God in the substance of the soul that has reached the state of union. While the habitual action of God in the substance of the soul, in those who have reached the state of union, provides a great stability, peace, and ongoing satisfaction of spiritual companionship, the additional active involvement of the faculties may become a “torrent of delight,” which become times of great spiritual inebriation, festivity, and power.

In such contemplation, God is the principal agent of action through infusions of the Holy Spirit. The soul cooperates with the divine graces of contemplation through retaining its loving receptive attitude, free from all natural operations of the faculties, and by its overall vital response, returning the same infusions of love it receives to the Beloved, as it participates in the power and prompting of the Holy Spirit.

St John of the Cross teaches us:

"But in the contemplation we are discussing, by which God infuses himself into the soul, particular knowledge, as well as acts made by the soul are unnecessary. The reason for this is that God in one act is communicating light and love together, which is loving supernatual knowledge. We can assert that this knowledge is like light that transmits heat, for that light also enkindles love."

"There is no reason to fear idleness of the will in this situation. If the will stops making acts of love on its own and, in regard to particular knowledge, God makes them in it."(Living Flame of Love, Stanza I, p. 50)

Fr. Jordan Aumann, O.P., defines contemplation as follows:

"Supernatural or infused contemplation has been defined by various formulas, but the essential note that all definitions have in common is that supernatural contemplation is an experimental knowledge of God. Moreover, as a supernatural activity, infused contemplation requires the operation of faculties that are likewise supernatural, both in their substance and in their mode of operation. Consequently when we speak of contemplation as a grade of mystical prayer, we restrict the word to signify the loving knowledge of God that is experienced through the operation of the gifts of wisdom and understanding, presupposing, of course, faith informed by charity.(Spiritual Theology, Contemplative Prayer)

Thomas Merton

“Contemplation, by which we know and love God as He is in Himself, apprehending Him in a deep and vital experience which is beyond the reach of any natural understanding, is the reason for our creation by God. And although it is absolutely above our nature, St. Thomas teaches that it is our proper element because it is the fulfilment of deep capacities in us that God has willed should never be fulfilled in any other way. All those who reach the end for which they were created will therefore be contemplatives in heaven: but many are also destined to enter this supernatural element and breathe this new atmosphere while they are still on earth.

“Since contemplation has been planned for us by God as our true and proper element, the first taste of it strikes us at once as utterly new and yet strangely familiar.

“Although you had an entirely different notion of what it would be like (since no book can give an adequate idea of contemplation except to those who have experienced it), it turns out to be just what you seem to have known all along that it ought to be. (Thomas Merton, “New Seeds of Contemplation”)

Thomas Merton continues:

"Contemplative prayer is, in a way, simply the preference for the desert, for emptiness, for poverty. One has begun to know the meaning of contemplation when he intuitively and spontaneously seeks the dark and unknown path of aridity in preference to every other way. The contemplative is one who would rather not know than know. Rather not enjoy than enjoy. Rather not have proof that God loves him. He accepts the love of God on faith, in defiance of all apparent evidence. This is the necessary condition, and a very paradoxical condition, for the mystical experience of the reality of God's presence and of his love for us. Only when we are able to "let go" of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life."

In order to achieve the desert of spiritual emptiness and poverty, the contemplative must undergo a purgation and purification process which is a lifelong, gradual transformation of the spirit, recreating it in conformity with Love, which is conformity with Jesus Christ. It is an ongoing process involving the breaking, and elimination of the habits, self-righteous beliefs, superstitions, and defensive practices of the proud, natural false self, the egotistical self inherited from Adam, and the simultaneous establishment of the new man, the true self, which is a gift of grace, and is born and raised to perfection in charity in the image of God. It involves learning deep humility, and to forgive, and to pray for, all those persons we have formerly disliked, or even hated, as their perceived evil behaviour periodically rises from our memory to present consciousness. It is this process which prepares the soul for participation in the fullness of divine love, and which includes the gradual implementation of Christ’s radical command to: “Love your enemies!” It is the necessary preparation for the full-flowering of self-giving, Trinitarian Love. Thomas Merton describes this purifying process below:”

"Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false "faith" which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our "religion" is subjected to inexorable questioning. This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas.

”Hence it is clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe - for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: to enter, the existential alter which simply "is." (Merton, Thomas. _New Seeds of Contemplation_. New Directions Publishing Co. 1961, p. 12-13.)

> "The fourteenth-century English mystic Walter Hilton says in his Scale of Perfection::

"It is much better to be cut off from the view of the world in this dark night, however painful this may be, than to dwell outside occupied by the world's false pleasures . . . For when you are in this darkness you are much closer to Jerusalem than when you are in the false light. Open your heart then to the movement of grace and accustom yourself to dwell in this darkness, strive to become familiar with it and you will quickly find peace, and the true light of spiritual understanding will flood your soul." ( Scale of Perfection (London, 1953), II, 25, p. 209 )

"Contemplation is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy. And yet in a certain sense, we must truly begin to hear God when we have ceased to listen. What is the explanation of this paradox? Perhaps only that there is a higher kind of listening, which is not an attentiveness to some special wave length, a receptivity to a certain kind of message, but a general emptiness that waits to realize the fullness of the message of God within its own apparent void. In other words, the true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. he does not demand light instead of darkness. he waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is "answered," it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. it is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.

"But we must not take a purely quietistic view of contemplative prayer. It is not mere negation. Nor can a person become a contemplative merely by "blacking out" sensible realities and remaining alone with himself in darkness. First of all, one who does this of set purpose, as a conclusion to practical reasoning on the subject and without an interior vocation, simply enters into an artificial darkness of his own making. He is not alone with God, but alone with himself. His is not in the presence of the Transcendent One, but of an idol: his won complacent identity.He becomes immersed and lost in himself, in a state of inert, primitive and infantile narcissism. His life is "nothing," not in the dynamic, mysterious sense in which the "nothing," nada, of the mystic is paradoxically also the all, todo, of God. It is purely the nothingness of a finite being left to himself and absorbed in his own triviality.

"The Rhenish mystics of the fourteenth century had to contend with many heretical forms of contemplation and both Tauler and Ruysbroeck carefully distinguished between the dark night of genuine contemplation and the arbitrary, self-willed passivity of those who adopt a quietistic form of prayer as a matter of systematic policy, simply cultivating inertia as though it were, by itself, sufficient to solve all problems. Of these, Tauler says:

"These people have come to a dead end. They put their trust in this natural intelligence and they are thoroughly proud of themselves for doing so. They know nothing of the depths and riches of the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They have not even formed their own natures by the exercise of virtue and have not advanced along the ways of true love. They rely exclusively on the light of their reason and their bogus spiritual passivity." (Sermon 52 in Spiritual Conferences, p. 233)

Thomas Merton continues:

"The trouble with quietism is that it cheats itself in its rationalization and manipulation of reality. It makes a cult of "sitting still," as if this in itself had a magic power to solve all problems and bring man into contact with God. But in actual fact it is simply an evasion. It is a lack of honesty and seriousness, a trifling with grace and a flight from God. So much for "pure quietism." But does such a thing really exist in our day?

"Absolute quietism is not exactly an ever-present danger in the world of our time. To be and out-and-out quietist, one would have to make heroic efforts to keep still and such efforts are beyond the power of most of us. However, there is a temptation to a kind of pseudo-quietism which afflicts those who have read books about mysticism without quite understanding them. And this leads them to a deliberately negative spiritual life which is nothing but a cessation of prayer, for no other reason than that one imagines that by ceasing to be active on automatically enters into contemplation. Actually, this leads one into a mere void without any interior, spiritual life, in which distractions and emotional drives gradually assert themselves at the expense of all nature, balanced activity of the mind and heart. To persist in this blank state could be very harmful spiritually, morally and mentally.

"One who simply follows the ordinary ways of prayer, without any prejudice and without complications, will be able to dispose himself far better to receive his vocation to contemplative prayer in due time, assuming that he has one. True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us only as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

"The logic of quietism is purely human logic in which two and two seem to make four. Unfortunately, the logic of contemplative prayer is of an entirely different order. it is beyond the realm of strict cause and effect because it belongs entirely to love, to freedom, and to spiritual espousal. In true contemplation, there is no "reason why" emptiness should necessarily bring us face to face with God. Emptiness might just as well bring us face to face with the devil, and as a matter of fact it sometimes does. This is part of the peril of this spiritual wilderness. The only guarantee against meeting the devil in the dark (if there can be said to be a guarantee at all) is simply our hope in God: our trust in his voice, our confidence in his mercy.

"Hence the contemplative way is in no sense a deliberate "technique" of self-emptying in order to produce an esoteric experience. it is the paradoxical response to an almost incomprehensible call from God, drawing us into solitude, plunging us into darkness and silence, not to withdraw and protect us from peril, but to bring us safely through untold dangers by a miracle of love and power.

"The contemplative way is, in fact, not a way. Christ alone is the way, and he is invisible. The "desert" of contemplation is simply a metaphor to explain the state of emptiness which we experience when we have left all ways, forgotten ourselves and when the invisible Christ is our way. As St. John of the Cross says:

"A soul is greatly impeded from reaching this high estate of union with God when it clings to any understanding or feeling or imagination or appearance or will or manner of its own, or to any other act of anything of its own, and cannot detach and strip itself of all these . . . Wherefore upon this road, to enter upon the road is to leave the road; or to express it better, it is to pass on to the goal and to leave one's way and to enter upon that which has not way, which is God. for the soul that attains to this state has no longer any ways or methods, still less is it attached to such things or can it be attached to them . . . although it has within itself all ways, after the way of one who possesses nothing yet possesses all things. (Acent of Mount Carmel, ii, 4. )

This might aptly be completed by the following words from John Tauler:

"When we have tasted this in the very depth of our souls it makes us sink down and melt away in our nothingness and littleness. The brighter and purer the light shed on us by the greatness of God, the more clearly do we see our littleness and nothingness. In fact this is how we may discern the genuineness of this illumination; for it is the Divine God shining into our very being, not through images, not through our faculties, but in the very depths of our souls; its effect will be to make us sink down more and more deeply into our own nothingness.(Loc, cit., p. 232 )

"There are two simple conclusions to be drawn from this. First, that contemplation is the summit of the Christian life of prayer, for the Lord desires nothing of us so much as to become, himself, our "way," our "truth and life." This is the whole purpose of his coming on earth to seek us, that he may take us, with himself, to the Father, whom no man shall see and live. By dying to ourselves, and to all "ways," "logic" and "methods" of our own we can be numbered among those whom the mercy of the Father has called to himself in Christ. But the other conclusion is equally important. No logic or our own can accomplish this transformation of our interior life. We cannot argue that "emptiness" equals "the presence of God" and then sit down to acquire the presence of God by emptying our souls of every image. it is not a matter of logic or of cause and effect. it is not a matter of desire, of planned enterprise, or of our own spiritual technique.

"The whole mystery of simple contemplative prayer is a mystery of divine love, of personal vocation and of free gift. This, and this alone, makes it true "emptiness" in which there is nothing left of ourselves.

"An emptiness that is deliberately cultivated, for the sake of fulfilling a personal spiritual ambition, is not empty at all: it is full of itself. It is so full that the light of God cannot get into it anywhere; there is not a crack or a corner left where anything else can wedge itself into this hard core of self-aspiration which is our option to live centered in our own self. Such "emptiness" is in fact the emptiness of hell. And consequently anyone who aspires to become a contemplative should think twice before he sets out on the road. Perhaps the best way to become a contemplative would be to desire with all one's heart to be anything but a contemplative; who knows?

"But, of course, this is not true either. In the contemplative life, it is neither desire nor the refusal of desire that counts, but only that "desire" which is a form of "emptiness, " that is to say which acquiesces in the unknown and peacefully advances where it does not see the way. All the paradoxes about the contemplative way are reduced to this one: being without desire means being leg by a desire so great that it is incomprehensible, it is too huge to be completely felt. It is a beyond desire, which seems like a desire for "nothing" only because nothing can content it. And because it is able to rest in no-thing, then it rests, relatively speaking, in emptiness. But not in emptiness as such, emptiness for its own sake. Actually there is no such entity as pure emptiness, and the merely negative emptiness of the false contemplative is a "thing," not a "nothing." The "thing" that it is is simply the darkness of self, from which all other beings are deliberately and of set-purpose excluded.

"But true emptiness is that which transcends all things, and yet is immanent in all. For what seems to be emptiness in this case is pure being. Or at least a philosopher might so describe it. But to the contemplative it is other than that. It is not this, not that. Whatever you say of it, it is other than what you say. The character of emptiness, at least for a Christian contemplative, is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined by any thing, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and the unjust. "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." This purity, freedom and indeterminateness of love is the very essence of Christianity. It is to this above all that monastic prayer aspires.(Thomas Merton, "Contemplative Prayer")