Attention and Prayer

'Attention is absolutely necessary for prayer.' St. Thomas Aquinas

I gave this talk on June 27th at The Thomistic Institute annual Study and Sanctity Conference in Washington, DC., where throughout the weekend Thomistic Institute Chapter Leaders received formation in the true meaning of the unity of the intellectual life and the life of faith.

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In her posthumously published work, Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil says the following about attention and prayer,

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

And,

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

These are strong words, and they demand our understanding.

In order to do so, I will begin by outlining the semantic history of the term, before then detailing its nature and significance in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, ahead of turning to Weil’s corresponding yet intensified understanding, according to which these introductory quotations should appear before us as perfectly sensible insights.

Attention: The Ground of Things

If we trace the history of the term into its ancient roots, we see that ‘attention’ includes two elemental notions, namely, ‘to stretch-forth’ and ‘to hold-fast.’ They are elemental because everything begins with them, since all relationality begins in a stretching-forth, and all relationality endures through a corresponding holding-fast. And since the order of things arises on the basis of the relation of things, the harmonious order of reality emerges from this stretching-forth and holding-fast, though that order be remarkably assorted in kind and remarkably varied in the manner of its stretching-forth and holding-fast.

In its modern sense, this stretching-forth and holding-fast has all but exclusively come to signify the essential relationality of the mind, insofar as it is found in the mind’s ability to stretch-forth toward what is objective, together with its corresponding ability to hold-fast to what it stretches toward and encompasses in its penetrating gaze. So considered, attention is foundational and central to the activity of the mind—foundational in terms of what it initially encounters, and central in terms of what it eventually comes to know and understand. In this modern sense, attention needs to be distinguished from the closely related term ‘intention,’ which has such a wide overlap of sense with ‘attention’ as to be nearly indistinguishable in its native meaning. Yet, while the center of gravity of in-tention is found in the ‘stretching-forth’ of the mind and its subsequent ‘penetration-into’ the reality beheld, the center of gravity of at-tention lies in its initial ‘turning-toward’ and its subsequent ‘holding-fast’ to the object intended.

Though we all understand the significance of the intentional dimension of intellectual activity, for it is that by which we come to know and understand, we may not always appreciate just how decisive is the attentional dimension, and for several reasons: for if we do not pay attention we will never actually intend anything; and if we do not still our intention with attention we will pass over everything with only a fleeting gaze; and if we do not steady our intention with attention we will grasp everything only superficially. Attention then enfolds intention at all sides—establishing its possibility, undergirding its spotlighting, providing its staying power, and furnishing its endurance—so that it is only according to our attentional capacity that any intended object can be grasped in its proper nature and depth. And this is perhaps why Weil says, ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,’ for it is that by which we primarily give ourselves over to the objective world in all its astonishing meaning and immense value.

St. Thomas on Attention

(See Summa theologiae, IaIIae, 33.3.)

St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of attention is both keen and insightful. Though he does not speak extensively on the subject, what he says clarifies much about its centrality in human life.

keen eyes, keenly attentive

First, St. Thomas reveals how attention is a unique kind of meta capacity and act that undergirds (or at least can undergird) our cognitive activities, and thus everything volitional in our lives, and also the activity of every other faculty available to cognition and rooted in volition. It is meta precisely because it lies beyond the acts of cognition and volition, even while it is not separable from them, but is rather that by which these faculties are exercised properly and with their full power. As a result, we have a foundational dichotomy: if cognitive or volitional acts are performed with relatively little attention, neither are properly or powerfully performed; but, on the other hand, if such acts are performed with intensified attention, both are performed properly and powerfully. This is, of course, of utmost importance, given the centrality of both intellect and will in human life. Yet, it becomes even more clear when we see how knowing and loving any object to a suitable natural depth brings with it a heightening of attention. This heightening brings us into a true and deep encounter with the beloved object, an encounter by which the object is actually given in all its natural glory—and this is especially the case when the beloved object is God or other persons.

Second, St. Thomas clarifies that our attention is also heightened when we do things that bring us pleasure, and that this heightening enables us to bring these acts to their proper completion, a completion that represents both a perfection of the acts themselves and of their allied pleasures. By enabling us to perform such acts with more ease and readiness, and with more skill and agility, while simultaneously expanding our awareness of what we are doing, pleasure then evidently assists us in fulfilling the fully personal meaning of these acts. In this way, pleasure can be seen to come together with a heightening of attention, for pleasure strengthens our attention by capacitating us to apply ourselves more fully to what we are doing, while attention also increases our pleasure by perfecting our actions so that they can be performed in a way that frees their natural pleasure. Well, all of this is the case if the pleasure is proper to the act itself, rather than pleasure located in some or other way external to the act, for it then steals our attention away from what we are doing, and attempts to bend our attention in (an)other direction(s).

Finally, St. Thomas clarifies that fixing one’s attention on one thing draws it away from everything else, or leaves it only vaguely present to other things. There is much that can be learned from this simple recognition, for if attention is a finite capacity that is capable of prioritizing and deploying its power only in a limited way, then the question of how we apply our attention—that is, upon what, how and why—becomes all the more important. Moreover, since it could be argued that St. Thomas implies that the living power by which we exercise our attention is consumed when we are attentive, while also being replenished when it is applied in certain acts relative to certain objects, we again see in a deeper way that the question of how we us our finite capacity for attention is of utmost importance—and, more practically, even ethically, that we learn to do so wisely, lest we waste our attention on bare curiosities.

To pay attention is then not the same thing as focusing or concentrating on something. Even though both are often involved in being attentive, coming about as a result of attention while also capacitating us to be more firmly fixed on what we intend, attention is actually something other than focusing and concentrating. We understand this when we see in what way attention is differentiated by the different kinds of acts and their objects that it undergirds and accompanies. Different acts and their objects involve different modalities of attention, one for mathematics, one for poetry, one for personal conversation, etc., etc. Because of this, focus or concentration can actually begin to frustrate or foil our capacity to be attentive if they are wrongly applied. Nor is paying attention the same thing as stilling or steading the mind. Though both are also usually decisive in paying attention, by facilitating attention and by being facilitated by attention, attention stands behind all stilling and steading of the mind, and is precisely that by which we can bring the mind to stillness and steadiness on some or other object.

Now, with all this in place, we can describe the nature of attention as a heightening of our awareness in its application to some or other cognitive or volitional act, together with all acts available to cognition and rooted in volition. This heightening of awareness always brings a corresponding stilling and steadying of our faculties, and this stilling and steadying then usually draws certain things into focus while enabling us to concentrate if it is appropriate to the act and its object. Thus, our ability to attend enables our faculties to be captured by the wonderous character of the objects that lie before them, the things of the created world, and especially its persons, as well as its Creator. ‘Capture’ is here the right word, for when we are properly attentive, our minds are arrested by the immense beauty of the world, and what is objective can entirely absorb our consciousness and fulfill its searching gaze. Then, together with such heightened awareness, we have the capability to realize an intensification of our activities, as well as their gentle dissipation and repose, and a corresponding potential to have our searching desires attain their own deepened satisfaction. This, of course, is all centrally significant toward living a fully human life.

Therefore, let us not restate the general position of St. Thomas by summarizing his central insight: Attention is precisely that dynamism of the mind that makes it possible to prioritize what we experience, and thus bring our experience, and thereby our lives, into an ordered unity. Without this ability we could not truly know or understand anything, we could not freely choose or love anything, and our relationships with God and with one another would be intolerably fragmented. We would literally be inwardly splintered and outwardly divided.

St. Thomas on Attention and Prayer

(See Summa theologiae, IIaIIae, 83.13.)

When St. Thomas applies these general insights to the life of prayer, he reveals that attention is decisive here too, since it foundationally coordinates our relationship with God through the way it inwardly shapes the character of our prayer to God. Looking first at vocal prayer, St. Thomas says,

There is a threefold attention that can be applied to vocal prayer: one which attends to the words, lest we err in them; another which attends to the sense of the words; and a third which attends to the end of prayer, namely, to God and to the thing for which we are praying—and which is most necessary.

Of course, this is all perfectly sensible: We must first pay attention that we say the right words, then that we mean these words by deliberately intending them, and finally that we direct these words to whom they are intended, God, the primary and ultimate object of our attention, and what we are asking of Him. And this is all just to say that when we speak to God, God Himself should consume our awareness, where all our faculties and powers are drawn into a unity toward Him. Aquinas is explicit about this last point and comments that such attention is ‘absolutely necessary’ if our prayer is going to be efficacious—for our relationship with God, in our souls, and toward the outward effects of prayer. Without such attention we cannot successfully obtain: 1) the effect of prayer: blessings upon the world; 2) the merit of prayer: ennoblement of the soul; 3) the spiritual refreshment of prayer: satisfaction for the soul in beholding God; and 4) the end of prayer: communion with God.

Now, this analysis of Aquinas is evidently just a wonderfully clear exposition of Jesus words, ‘In praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words’ (Mt. 6:7), for Aquinas is making the case that these words of Jesus are fulfilled by attention, and only by attention. Therefore, rather than amass words emptied of their meaning, and thus rendered vacuous, we must go into the stillness of our ‘inner room’ (Mt. 6:6), into ‘the soul of the soul’ in the words of Edith Stein, and there discover the words that lie in the innermost depths—the words God knows before they are on our lips (Ps. 139:4), those words He wishes to hear when we speak to Him—that is, lest we become like hypocrites (Mt. 6:5), mere masks and counterfeits, when we are meant to be persons, substantial characters made to His image (Gen. 1:27).

However, notwithstanding leaning heavily on the absolute necessity of attention in matters religious, Aquinas is also forgiving of our weakness before the grandeur of attention, noting that even should our attention drift while in prayer, as long as we have not been negligent God receives our prayer according to our initial attention, while, so to speak, ignoring any distraction that follows upon our natural human weaknesses, for ‘to wander in mind unintentionally does not deprive prayer of its fruit.’

Simone Weil on Attention

(See Gravity and Grace, pp. 119-28; emphasis sometimes added.)

Now, with St. Thomas’ understanding of attention before us in all its clarity and seriousness, let us turn to the coordinate understanding of Weil, whose thought, though not as expansive, comprehensive, or coherent as that of Aquinas, does hit upon key insights in such pithy formulations that our minds are arrested by their force. We are so to speak, brought to attention by her aphoristic manner of presentation, and thus brought more readily to that resolve needed to effect what we already know to be the case.

a gaze infused with attention

This is no more true than in Weil’s reflections on attention itself, a central tenet of her whole philosophy. In fact, Weil could rightly be called ‘the philosopher of attention,’ because she not only recognizes its foundational and universal significance, like St. Thomas and others, but she presents this significance with its greatest force and eloquence, and in a most sustained way throughout her wide-ranging thought.

I will begin by looking briefly at what Weil says about attention and the intellectual life, before turning to her understanding of the centrality of attention and the nature of true love, and finally revealing how attention across all areas of life has significance toward realizing a life of prayer in its fulness—here understood as a life lived prayer-fully before our Creator.

Weil first clarifies that attention is ‘a method for the exercise of intelligence which consists in looking,’ and immediately links this kind of looking to the virtue of humility by reasoning that ‘in the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.’ So considered, we immediately see that attention involves a present-tense receptive openness to reality precisely as it is given; and moreover, that this receptivity is underwritten by something active, namely, the determinate choice to allow the world to be itself. Genuine attention is then the opposite of the power hungry need to control and dominate reality, and especially the human other; rather, in stark contrast, genuine attention disarms this fallen human tendency to take control and dominate, and thus provides something of an inoculation to such fallen tendencies.

When such general attentiveness is applied to the life of studies, Weil clarifies that studiousness is ‘a form of gymnastics of attention,’ a place where we exercise our attention and train our abilities by practicing attention in its various differentiated forms, depending on the particular areas being studied. Reading especially requires ‘a certain quality of attention’ lest this naturally ennobling activity fails to lead us to a deeper understanding of reality, and rather comes to obey ‘the law of gravity’ by becoming a force that draws us away from creation and its Creator Cause. On the other hand, on the side of the educator, Weil notes that ‘teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training attention, for the possibility of acts filled with truth, beauty and goodness.’ Here we see not only how central attention is to education, and likewise education to attention, but we see how Weil closely relates attention to that other central focus of her thought, that of action, by showing how attention could and should bear fruit in actions that are properly noble.

The centrality of attention becomes even more significant when we then look at the nature of love, since, as Weil frequently clarifies, there is no true love without attention. Though we often get carried away by the false illusion that we can love without paying attention, such ‘love’ is not love in its proper dimensions, and nor is it love properly matured, even if such ‘love’ wears a loving face and brings certain things about that are actually beneficial. For if we do not actually look and truly see the one who stands before us, and if we are not then stirred by their true value, we are not actually able to love them in a way that is accordant to what and who they actually are. Weil says, ‘The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.’ In this way, she shows that genuine love arises out of an attentive looking and seeing, and only out of such a looking and seeing, and how such love remains intimately tied to this true looking and seeing. The motivant of love is then its entire justification. Love is caused in the lover by the beloved.

But if such a looking and seeing does not ground our love, but we then proceed to perform acts of love, our love is then necessarily determined by some or other externality—perhaps some rule or convention, or some law or command, or maybe even some hidden self-centered desire or need—but definitely not by the other as such, not by who they are and what they actually need or desire. Moreover, if the beloved is not the true cause of love, then our love will most certainly miss its mark (except by some chance happenstance), and it may actually become something pernicious and harmful to the beloved and lover alike. In such situations, whether with respect to a child, a romantic partner, or a friend, some flavor of overcoming is always involved, however veiled this dominating current might be. But, in the presence of such a malformed intention, the beloved begins to feel insecure and unsteady, unseen by the gaze that has lost its object, unheard by the ear turned inward. Yet, the whole picture is transformed when attention alights on the beloved, for, as Weil explains, ‘authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of full attention to the object.’ Just so, attention brings love into accord with its object and thereby infuses all expressions of love with the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Love has then reached its proper dimensions, it is then both whole and mature, for it has reached the beloved, and reached her with a nobility of expression that bespeaks real seeing and hearing.

By setting this contrast so starkly—between inattentive ‘love’ and attentive love—Weil reveals how attention capacitates us to summon our power in such a way that our action actually realizes love and actually brings us unto union with the beloved—with a love that is true to the beloved, a love that is genuinely good for the beloved, with a love that is beautiful to behold by the beloved and lover alike, and by all others who witness this love borne by a true seeing.

Simone Weil on Attention and Prayer

(See Gravity and Grace, pp. 116-28; emphasis sometimes added.)

Having looked at Weil’s understanding of attention in general, while having also detailed Aquinas understanding of its nature and significance, let us now turn to the area that interests us most, Weil’s understanding of attention and prayer. In the end, our aim is to understand our introductory quotation, that ‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’ And I wish to do so from the perspective of the Pauline dictum to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thess. 5:17), for it is only by interpreting Weil’s insight from this perspective that we can see its deep and wide meaningfulness. Moreover, the value of Weil’s insights into attention in general are then also felt most forcefully in this domain, for, as she affirms with equal force, ‘attention reaches its true dimensions only when it is religious.’

That this interpretation of Weil is correct is immediately clear at the beginning of the chapter aptly titled ‘Attention and Will,’ when she says, ‘The most commonplace truth, when it floods the whole soul, is like a revelation.’

Let’s have that again, for this powerful enunciation deserves repetition and emphasis:

The most commonplace truth, when it floods the whole soul, is like a revelation.

Now, evidently something cannot flood ‘the whole soul’ if the soul is not paying attention. As we’ve seen with Aquinas, attention brings the faculties of the soul to a point, so to speak, by ordering and prioritizing our experience so that we can actually encounter what lies before us. With such attention at play, the soul can then receive the true meaning and value of reality, receiving each thing in itself and all things together, so that what things are can be revealed to the mind and earth in all their natural grandeur. But we come to understand that this natural revelation to the soul is also a natural revelation of things divine when we see that perceive things rightly only when we see them as a creaturely enunciation of their Creator, and, conversely, when we then see all things in light of their Creator, for as St. Augustine so eloquently clarifies, all things cry out ‘I am not He but He made me.’ (The Confessions, Bk. X).

Let us marshal the words of Sacred Scripture to help us better understand this truth. In Genesis we learn that the act of creation is identified as an act of divine speaking. Only three versus in, this opening book of the Bible reveals, ‘God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good’ (Gen. 1:3). This enunciation then continues each day in the cycle of creation until it culminates on the sixth day with the creation of the human creature, when ‘God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”’ (Gen. 1:26). Though some might think this mere metaphor, there is a deeper metaphysical truth at play. God’s expression of though in speech is powerful, powerful enough to creates both being and life and all other perfections ex nihilo. Now, we discover the very same truth, though immensely deepened and personalized in the Gospel of St. John when we read ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ (Jn. 1:1-5). Here we discover that God has not only spoken the world into being, but that He has done so by expressing something of the meaning of His own Being, and precisely by meaningfully speaking His meaningful creatures into existence through His own Word, His Logos (Λόγος). The result of this is that reality as we know it is ‘word-based’ and ‘word-centered,’ for reality is grounded in and centered around the Word of God. Thus, in a word, reality is logocentric—it revolves around words and their meaningfulness and value.

Now, in this logocentric world, only the human creature, as a being endowed with intellect, can read reality for its meaningfulness, and only the human creature can subsequently be moved by the corresponding value of these meaningful things. Indeed, this is the very meaning of the term ‘intellect,’ which derives its sense from the conjoining of two Latin words, ‘intus-legere,’ and thus natively means ‘to read from within.’ Thus, as intellectual, the human creature has an ability to read the meaning of reality from within the things it encounters in the world, as well reading the order that exists between these things in their mutual interrelation with respect to one another. In other words, in making us like Himself, intellectual and free, God has given us the ability to read the words He writes in the Book of Creation, His natural revelation, and respond with our own words. And all we need to do to make this a reality is to think truly about the meaning of things, each thing individually and all things in their interrelation, and therein be stirred by the depth of their value—meanings and values that now have their proper dimensions as expressions of the divine mind.

But now everything comes to a point, and we begin to glimpse why attention is so necessary for prayer, for how can we discern the proper meaning of things, and how can we then love them according to their values, if we do not pay attention to how ‘what is’ has been spoken forth by their Creator? We cannot. While we earlier spoke about the importance of paying attention to our own words when addressed to God in prayer, is it not of first importance that we pay attention to the words He is speaking to us—in all things, and thus in all our experiences, whatever may be their character? Since all things are His creatures—the entirety of the natural cosmos and its history—everything is expressive of divine thought and will, and all are one singular act of communication to the human creature, and all we need to do to receive this communication is to avert our attention to this truth. Therefore, again, we must pay attention to what we are experiencing, and in two senses, by paying attention to the things in themselves, and then also to the fact that they are His words spoken to us. In other words, we must pay attention to the speech and the speaker, but of course to the speaker with priority.

And then we must then learn to follow this hearing of God’s meaningful words with our own meaningful speech: first in a response that flows fourth in action underwritten by attention, in what we could call a living response to His communication; then in a response that flows forth in prayer underwritten by attention, in what we could call a specifically personal response to His communication. This is what it means to be a friend of God, for then the whole of life becomes one simple dialogue with God, a dialogue that perseveres in good times and bad as a perpetual state of faithful interpersonal love. And moreover, this brings the whole of reality into relief, for the whole of reality, one’s own life included, becomes the site of ongoing dialogue with God, a hearing of His Word in every experience, in all the words of the world, and a speaking forth of our own words in a prayer and action that proceeds ‘without ceasing.’

Accordingly, we can now conclude, with Aquinas and Weil, that attention—this stretching-forth and holding-fast to reality—is ‘absolutely essential’ if we are to hear the voice of God. Moreover, we must prevent the possibility that the clear still voice of God be drowned out by the noise of the world, which happens whenever we fail to prioritize rightly and draw experience into a unified harmony. Therefore, we simply must pay attention to everything we meet on life’s journey, and by so attending we must discern the words God is speaking to us, and thereby learn how to read the story He is writing in creation with our lives. And only then will we be able to see things as they are in themselves, for only then will we be able to properly interpret reality as it is given—that is, by its Speaker.

Simply stated, God is speaking to us in all things, yet only those ‘who have the ears to hear’ will actually hear His words (See Isa. 6:10; Ez. 12:2; Jer. 5:21; Mk. 4:9, 23; Mt. 11:15; 13:9; Lk. 8:8; 14:35; Rev. 13:9). This requires attention, to the world, and to its Personal Principle, the Speaker of all things. Should we actually take this truth home, and should we actually become persons with ears that hear, then together with St. Thomas and Weil we can come to know the two absolutes, that ‘attention is absolutely necessary for prayer’; and that ‘attention taken to its highest degree is the same thing as prayer… [and] absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

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References:

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. E Crawford and M. von der Ruhr (Routledge: London, 2002).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Rome: S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1888–1906).