Since restarting this blog last year, I’ve tried to probe the depths of what exactly Christian contemplative prayer is. It’s really easy to take a viewpoint that is too phenomenal, too superficial, too ephemeral. But if we want to have a foundation that is truly solid for our prayer life, that takes a lot of work. The primary reference point that I’ve been exploring in these past months is the documents of Pope Francis himself.

Pope Francis distinctly connects contemplation and beauty. He speaks of “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” in the singular (Querida Amazonia 55–56), offers a lengthy meditation on “the aesthetic experience… which contemplates other persons as ends in themselves” (Amoris Laetitia 127–129), and asserts that we can “contemplate the beauty” of creation in gratitude to the Father (Laudato Si’ 97). These quotes all come from high-level teaching documents (encyclical letters or apostolic exhortations). They’re something to take seriously. The Holy Father, I think, pretty clearly connects this teaching on contemplative prayer to Catholic teaching on the transcendentals (unity, truth, goodness, beauty, etc.).

In other words, both contemplation and experience of beauty engage us as knowing and loving beings simultaneously. What we contemplate is beauty. When that beauty is the world of grace or some reality experienced in grace, then we have Christian contemplative prayer. This, I take it, is the Pope’s teaching.

What I have held back on until now is the fact that, however rare this simplification of Catholic teaching down to these super-condensed essentials, Pope Francis is not completely alone. He was preceded on this path by Marcel Văn (1928–1959). The writings of this Vietnamese Redemptorist brother offer the same principles. Like in the Holy Father’s writings, nothing is set forward as a treatise. But all the same elements are there. And like with Pope Francis, if you study it carefully, there’s no other conclusion to reach. What we contemplate is beauty. The unity of the transcendentals holds the only adequate explanatory power for such an audacious claim.

What we contemplate is beauty

Marcel is adamant, without being disputatious, that contemplation and beauty are intrinsically linked. He has no grand phrases like Pope Francis’ “God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” in the singular or “the aesthetic experience… which contemplates other persons as ends in themselves.” Yet the link is unmistakable to an attentive reader of his complete works. Over and over again, he connects the two words “contemplate” (or “contemplation”) and “beauty” (or “beautiful”).

Notably, this isn’t something that he cribbed from Thérèse of Lisieux. However much he regarded her as a spiritual big sister, however much he learned from her, however much he thinks he is merely reproducing her teaching, this is new. He has come up with it himself. Admittedly, there are not exactly zero antecedents in Thérèse. In one of her poems, for example, Saint Joseph is said to “contemplate beauty” (PN 14.1).[1] In a prayer, she writes, “O Adorable Face of Jesus, the only Beauty that delights my heart, deign to imprint in me your Divine Likeness, so that you cannot look at the soul of your little life without contemplating yourself” (Pri 16). But the theme amounts to far less in the French Little Flower than in her Vietnamese Petal. These are almost chance coincidences. With Marcel, contemplation and beauty constitute a persistent pairing.

Since this is a Laudato Si’ Lent (and bearing in mind that I will come back to Văn’s notion of contemplating the natural world in another post), we can begin with a long paragraph on the beauty of creation:

I was quite sad, and I did not know what to do to dissipate my sadness. I gazed into the distance, contemplating the country which unfolded before my eyes, but nothing could make me happy; there were everywhere collapsed houses, trees fallen down higgledy-piggledy, presenting me with a spectacle without any natural beauty. In passing and looking at the paddy fields, there were workers only occasionally and their demeanour betrayed their discouragement; there was nothing of that joy that one noticed in times of peace. There were also places where the rice was already beautiful, and where the breath of the wind raised the water of the paddy field up to the level of the stems. These places reminded one a little of harvest time, but the few workers did not have that hurried pace of the workers and planters of former times. (OWV 885)[2]

This is, admittedly, a complex passage, but the emphasis I’ve added helps guide us for a first approach. Marcel is travelling by train back to his hometown from Hanoi. What he sees is a piebald reality. Some things are beautiful. Others aren’t. Still, he contemplates the whole. Meanwhile, the natural world is the main focus. But the realities of human beings intermingle. He seems to be contemplating the second group in partial reference to the first. But contemplation isn’t reserved for the natural world. It’s connected to beauty—either that is present or should or could be.

We get a lot of explicit confirmation in other writings that contemplation can be of the beauty, not just of nature, but of persons, the world of grace. As he is on retreat preparing to make his religious vows, Marcel writes to Jesus, “it will suffice for us to remain seated and contemplate our mutual beauty” (OWJ Aug 25, 1946). About a month prior to profession, he had written to Jesus: “we will both contemplate our mutual smile and our mutual beauty. Is that not so?” (Conv. 704)[3] Similar notes are hit in a passage from the date of first religious profession itself:

When I look at you, the sight of your infinite beauty intoxicates me with love and the marks of affection that you are giving to me at this time throw my soul as if into an ecstasy, so that I cannot even say a single word to you. I can only remain silent to contemplate you at my leisure, remain silent to listen to the quickened beatings of our two hearts overflowing with mutual love, remain silent, finally, to hear each of your breaths. (Conv. Appendix 3: Sep 8, 1946)

Added here are the notes of silence and love. But clearly, what is contemplated is beauty. Conditions for such a contemplation to be possible seem to include our silent gaze on the other person, the full attention, and the love to hold us fixated on all that the person is.

The theme never leaves Marcel. A couple of years later, he comes back to it in reference to his religious vows. He took his vows and became the spouse of Jesus “so that Jesus may be the only one to contemplate the beauty of my soul” (To his parents, 8 Feb 1948).[4]

Where does he get this insistence on the connection between contemplation and beauty? It seems that the earliest instances that we know of come from the Conversations, the text of his mystical discourses with Jesus, Mary, and Thérèse during his novitiate year, which his formator had him commit to writing. Early in this journey, Jesus tells Marcel, “Little friend of my love, when I contemplate your soul, I am delighted by its beauty” (Conv. 7). Not much later, he says, “My little flower, never allow your beauty to appear externally so it may be something reserved for your only-beloved who finds his joy simply in contemplating you” (Conv. 18). Months later, Jesus calls Marcel a bird of beautiful plumage and a flower with radiant beauty, then asks to contemplate him (Conv. 176–177).

In the negative register, Marcel is hypersensitive to a lack of beauty. He doesn’t want to fail in this regard. It concerns him deeply. Sometimes when he would try to do beautiful actions they would fail: “Whenever I want to do something beautiful, the opposite results” (Conv. 332). He doesn’t realize. It falters. So he knows beauty is often something to be contemplated—and that with the inner eye, not with regard to exteriors.

Always, no matter what, when the word “beauty” is uttered, “contemplation” is not far from the surface, and when one might “contemplate” something, the possibility of “beauty” is not far distant. What we contemplate, for Văn as for Pope Francis, is beauty.


Beauty is diffusive

If we assert that what we contemplate is beauty, that answers one question. We know what the object of any contemplation is, and the contemplation that is prayer must be a regard for the beauty of or in grace.

But answering one question often leads to another. What, then, is beauty?

Without explicitly trying to, Marcel offered several important stabs at answering this question. In his view, beauty is something that attracts us: “The beauty of the person was such that it had the appearance of a very gentle ray of light. At the sight of such beauty I turned hurriedly to lie on my back so as to contemplate it more comfortably.” (A 661)[5] In this short passage, we can see again the connection of beauty and contemplation. But importantly, Marcel asserts the attractiveness of this beauty. Its goodness grabs his attention. Its desirability locks his attention in. Everything about the beauty sucks him in. He hurries to see it. Yet it is not overpowering. It is gentle. There is a power here that respects boundaries, yet acts beyond them.

Not only are we pulled in. We are changed. In a vision in which Marcel figures as a toddler, he sees Thérèse. Văn himself was very beautiful in the vision. “Thérèse also was very beautiful,” and “her smiling and fresh face” could be said to be “still adding to my beauty” (Conv. 128-4). Beauty is not completely self-contained. Its goodness is transmissible. It is additive. It is communicable and “diffusive,” as the Church Fathers would say.

Beauty is something loved

The next volley Marcel throws at the question of beauty is to tell us that if something is not lovable, it is not beautiful. Consider first this passage, written to his sister preparing, as he himself had, for a religious vocation:

Now is the time of love, the time when your friend Jesus wishes to take possession of all that belongs to you, your heart and your freedom, the people and things, the immense landscapes, the hills, the waterfalls; Jesus, your friend, has wanted that you leave all the space to him, to him alone and in future contemplate only he who is the beauty of Love. (To Tế, 1 Aug 1954)

Love itself is beautiful. And what will attract Văn’s little sister is the beauty of things, and that which she will bestow on them is love. The movement goes in both directions. Beauty is loved. Beauty is lovable. There is an interchangeability. This is what Christian tradition teaches us to be prepared for with the transcendentals. Get one, get them all.

In preparation for his final vows, Marcel says rather the same thing. He has meditated on this connection between beauty and contemplation for some time now. He and his Jesus have been engaged in that quite a lot. But he starts to become explicit that love is an integral part of this experience:

Of course the day will come when God will grant to me to contemplate in him my extreme beauty, and will make me delight with him in this beauty, since his love is without limit and does not include any egoism. He has already given it to me to love him and he will give to me again to delight in this love with him. (OWN2.62)

There is no contemplation of the Other without a beauty in the Other. Meanwhile, we cannot appreciate that beauty as something in itself, unless we truly love the Person. Marcel has this tied up quite tidily and smartly for someone who didn’t get to middle school. He sure makes me appreciate his intellect and simplicity. But of course, he’s nowhere near done…

Love is not without reason…

Next on Marcel’s agenda is the fact that love has its reason, and knowledge combined with love entails an experience of beauty. In other words, he brings in a new transcendental: truth (objectively) or knowledge (subjectively). And he’s not going to separate this transcendental from the others—no way!

In a personal notebook, Marcel works some of this out. He think that, when we love, we have to have our reasons. Nobody loves without knowing something about the thing or person they love:

There must be a reason for loving. One does not love without reason. One loves when one has a real reason for loving. When one loves, one no longer asks why, because one has already reasoned why. No one admits to loving without a reason. (OWN1.20)

The same is said in a letter:

A reason is necessary to love. When one loves it is because there is a reason for loving; no one will admit that he loves without a reason. But when he finds a real reason for loving, is it necessary to tire oneself unceasingly in reasoning? Love is already the result of right reason.

Yes, truly, when one loves there is nothing more at all to reason; but before loving, a reason for loving is necessary. (To Father Antonio Boucher, beginning of Dec 1951)

That is to say, love goes farther, at least in this life, than knowledge. One is the launching pad, the other the rocket. We neither spring into orbit without a launching pad, nor think the earth is the place to stay once we’ve already attained lift-off.

Knowledge and love are both integral parts of the experience of beauty. Harking back to the contemplation, the gaze directed towards the Other, which is beyond words and in some kind of silence, Marcel writes to Jesus:

Ah! I now know your love has made you, like me, beside yourself, in such a way that we both understand each other solely by love, without the necessity to have recourse to the language of love of this world, language which can only express created love adequately. (A 862–863)

Note the presence of understanding and love together, and this is in direct reference to what Marcel earlier described as the contemplation of beauty. Assuming that Marcel is being deliberately consistent, there is only one conclusion. Knowledge/understanding and love are both present when an experience of beauty, which is contemplation, takes place. Whether this is only the beauty of the world of grace, or whether the notion extends more generally, he does not give us anything further to go on. But the connection has been made. As far as contemplative prayer is concerned, the matter seems settled. He arbitrates in the same way as Pope Francis.

Yet when love is not interested…

Pope Francis, though, has noted an important condition of the appreciation of the beauty of something. We have to appreciate something as an end in itself to find it beautiful. If we wanted to consume a painting, it wouldn’t be striking us as beautiful. If we wanted to dam a river, we wouldn’t be having an aesthetic experience of nature. If we don’t respect the proper constitution and limits of a person, we couldn’t be contemplating them. In other words, the love in a contemplative gaze is disinterested. It’s not about usefulness.

Marcel also believes—or learns to believe—that love is about the reality of the Other, the end of the Other, the value of the Other. When, during his novitiate year, he asks, “Little Jesus, what’s the use of loving you?” Jesus tells him “that’s a clumsy question.” Indeed, he adds: “What’s the use of loving you, Marcel? I get absolutely nothing from that. It is through pure Love that I love you.” (Conv. 373)

Yet we should not make this out to mean that something has to be perfectly whole and beautiful, unblemished, to be an object of our loving, contemplative gaze. Beauty is not connected to wholeness, uniformity, or perfection as we normally envisage it. “Your weaknesses, Marcel,” says Jesus, “far from reducing my value of you, only make it increase further, since they are, for you, grounds for much greater confidence in me, which makes our union firmer still…” (Conv. 386) If value corresponds to worth, and worth is what is contemplated, that is, beauty, then this connects a lot of things together. Confidence springs from weakness. Confidence in God increases our union with him, as well as our beauty in the divine eyes.

There is the whole panoply of Christian virtues involved here. Never rush to conclusions. The integral value of a person is critical. Respect for their worth, their constitution, their value, is paramount. But as small as the person is, even as blemished, they still contain a particular beauty that delights our heart and draws it in, through the grace of God.

… Love leads to unity

Marcel comes to believe not only in the connection of the transcendentals of love, knowledge, and beauty to Christian contemplation. He also sees a dynamic relationship of all this to that other transcendental, unity. The platform for this discovery is his prayer-life with Jesus. In a letter, Marcel states: “Since my departure from Quảng Uyên I have to look at Jesus no more from afar; my glance and his have become a single glance” (To Father Maillet, 8 Aug 1946). Regarding the day of his first vows, he tells the Lord:

each time we love each other, let us then both keep silent. In fact, in this moment we do not cease loving each other, and it is because we love each other a lot that we do not know what terms to use to express our love. Love has changed us both so much that we are now only one. Ah! Unity! It is that which explains that we no longer have need of words to understand each other, since unity is the outcome of love. (A 863)

Silence, contemplative gaze, love… and ultimately, unity, unification, a drawing together, togetherness. This is a term. It’s not completely achieved. It progresses. There are big leaps, like the one Marcel is currently describing. But in the end, the point is that contemplation ( = knowing love, loving knowledge) of beauty engenders unity.

Marcel speaks of his upcoming profession in terms reminiscent of those with which Thérèse describes her first communion: gazing on one another, “fusion” (Ms A, 35r). But the Petal, in contrast to the Little Flower, seems to have a more developed vocabulary and conceptualization.

Initially, it might sound like Marcel and Jesus will be made truly one. They’ll collapse into each other. Monism seems to be a danger here. Yet if we pay careful attention, we’ll notice that Marcel is aware that the unity effected is not one of being, but one of intention. It’s a unity in and of love.

There are numerous examples of the intentionality of unity. “Later you will see his love and yours melt into one,” Thérèse says in a poem composed for her little brother (Conv. 154). Jesus likewise says: “Marcel, may your love melt entirely into mine and then you will possess exclusively all love” (Conv. 226). Marcel in his own voice attests that they are “one together in a single love” (Conv. 719). Similarly: “Because we love each other, we have become a single love” (Conv. Appendix 3). And again: “I am completely yours and you are completely mine, together we are but one in Love” (OWN2.17).

With these very clear affirmations in place, I don’t think there can be any lingering confusion when Marcel says to Jesus, “Just as we make but one, there is, also, only a single love that links us together” (Conv. 720). It is not the persons of Jesus and Marcel that fuse, but rather their desire and intentionality. Their loves melt into one another. The fusion feels like unity, but it is forged not by melting two persons into one, but pouring both their loves into a single fire. John of the Cross, with his “two natures in one spirit and love” (Canticle 22.3), would be eminently proud!

Unity is beautiful

We can now turn back around. Having walked so far as to realize that the coincidence of knowledge, love, beauty, and contemplation leads to unity, we now turn on our heal and march from unity back towards beauty. Unity itself is beautiful. Marcel on one occasion writes: “If today Jesus’ clothes are already so beautiful, they will be even more so on the day of your union with him” (Conv. 173).

When there is union, there is more beauty. This isn’t too surprising. If we have truly grasped Marcel’s experiential theology of Christian contemplation, then this all follows naturally. United things or persons have more relationships. There is more to know. What we can love increases. Where knowledge and love abound, there can be more experience of contemplation. Beauty is more fully appreciated. Logically, any union is beautiful. Marcel is self-consistent.

Love is beautiful

If unity is something beautiful, then so too of course is love. Jesus tells Marcel, as regards the tears of love that he sheds during times of joy and times of suffering on earth, “together, we will contemplate all their beauty” in heaven (Conv. 55). Each little moment and act of love is something that, when knowledge clears enough room, such as in the Beatific Vision, we will be able to contemplate it—contemplate its beauty. Again, the transcendentals coincide and connect in Marcel’s teaching.

By the way of humility, littleness, suffering

Finally, we need to stress, I think, that however much we are talking about aesthetic experience, the moral life is never far from the surface. Christianity doesn’t see a divorce between these two facets of humanity. When we break them apart, we get an “aestheticism” or “aesthetic relativism”—and Pope Francis has been determined in his fight against that deviation from the fullness of Christian truth in our era. We need to keep aesthetics (beauty) and morality (intentionality, love, action) bound up together, without confusing them.

Since we are talking about love, intentionality, the moral life, the ascetic life, the supernatural life, the life of grace, then there is a cost. Marcel is not deluded about the cost. He knows that he has to “take all my feelings of love merged into one” (Conv. 741) if somehow his love is to merge with that of Jesus. If he were too disunited inside, it wouldn’t be possible to be unified with another person outside him. That would make no sense—and he realizes it. Even more astutely, Marcel realizes that he cannot do this. His love is not enough. Obviously the one love that he shares is not his, but divine. In truth, “we are both engulfed in your infinite love” (Conv. Appendix 3). As simple as this all is, it’s difficult. Marcel is under no delusions.

This truth comes back many time in Văn’s corpus. A slightly longer passage asserts the connection to suffering and difficulty:

Little brother, in the sincerity of your soul you know the beauty of love, but you must understand also that no beauty is acquired without passing through work and difficulty. To love, to wish to learn to love with a sincere love, that does not happen without suffering. As for frivolous love which is satisfied with words accompanied solely with this or that external gesture, is a deceptive love, a love worthy of scorn. Little brother, you who have understood what love is, be brave and act in such a way to give all its beauty to your love. You will love eternally, yes, eternally. (OWN6.14)

Of course, we can’t do this all ourselves. It’s grace. During his novitiate, Jesus tells him: “Little Marcel, you have not the slightest virtue. And, to speak frankly, in your case there is nothing; one finds there nothing of beauty. But do not be sad because of it.” (Conv. 201–202) In other words, we do not need to fret that we possess no beauty, because, by the way of humility and littleness, Jesus gives everything.

Conclusion

Marcel offers no developed treatises, no elaborate teachings, no university courses, no textbooks or journal articles. His formal education ends in elementary school. In the religious life, he was no more than a coadjutor brother.

Yet he has foreseen what is perhaps the greatest revolution in the theology of Christian contemplative prayer since the dawn of the modern era: the fact that what we contemplate is beauty, and that the transcendentals (unity, truth, goodness, beauty) have a central place in any exposition of Christian contemplation as an experience of beauty. This revolution is properly Pope Francis’ at the ecclesial level. He’s the one to put it into the formal and official magisterium. But he is not the first person to put all the pieces together.

Văn could somehow see ahead to all this. All the ideas are in him, too. They are not systematized in his writings. But that’s hardly a swipe. They aren’t particularly systematic in Pope Francis either. And anyway, Marcel has a “lived theology” or an “experiential theology.” He’s not a systematic theologian. You can’t expect an apple tree to give you oranges.

What this apple tree provides, though, is some of the most astonishing, whole, complete apples to have ever existed. And I’m nowhere near done. This is just the first of four articles on Marcel Văn’s experiential theology of Christian contemplation.

[1] All references to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux using the system in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cerf / Desclée de Brouwer, 2023), with translations my own.

[2] OW = Marcel Van, Other Writings, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 4; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018). Additional system for abbreviations explained on page 14, e.g., OWN = notebooks; OWV = various writings.

[3] Conv. = Marcel Van, Conversations, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 2; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2017).

[4] To = Marcel Van, Correspondence, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 3; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018).

[5] A = Marcel Van, Autobiography, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 1; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2019).