Poiesis and Mimesis

 It may not have become obvious yet, but this blog is about the contemplative life.   Specifically, how does a contemplative life look for a layperson?    Should it be a thing at all?  If so, why?

Eucatastrophe and contemplation are closely connected, it seems.   I found a PDF article called Medieval Realism and Mythopoiea making this point.  Under the surface of how things look, there is how they really are, which is never reducible to appearances though neither is it separate from them.  Rather, appearances, phenomena, are our entry point.  

Tolkien's tale Leaf by Niggle deals with this entry point, if I remember correctly.  I have not read it in a long time.  Sub-creation is a participation in the thoughts of the Creator through mimesis.   

Aquinas says:

Now contemplation of the truth befits a man according to his nature as a rational animal: the result being that "all men naturally desire to know," so that consequently they delight in the knowledge of truth. And more delightful still does this become to one who has the habit of wisdom and knowledge, the result of which is that he contemplates without difficulty. Secondly, contemplation may be delightful on the part of its object, in so far as one contemplates that which one loves; even as bodily vision gives pleasure, not only because to see is pleasurable in itself, but because one sees a person whom one loves. Since, then, the contemplative life consists chiefly in the contemplation of God, of which charity is the motive, as stated above (1 and 2, ad 1), it follows that there is delight in the contemplative life, not only by reason of the contemplation itself, but also by reason of the Divine love.

Poetry -- literature -- is etymologically poiesis, making.   In Christian terms, it goes beyond a shadow-reflection of an art and involves the whole being, in participation.

An article about Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper makes the point:

Pieper strenuously defends contemplative seeing—we need to remember that the Latin contemplatio corresponds to the Greek theoria—as having already reached what the critical thinker is still trying to reach. Pieper’s literary proof-texts for these epiphanic moments tend to come from Goethe’s late letters, but Anglophone readers will recognize the same gesture in an English contemporary of the late Goethe. When John Keats, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” rejects opiates and intoxicants in favor of poetry, he performs a similar operation as Pieper would have us perform with the act of intellectual perception. Access to the object of beauty is as immediate, and unmediated, for the poet as access to truth is for the philosopher.