ABSTRACT
The nature of the contemplative (theoretic, speculative) life and the problems to which it gives rise had occupied the attention of the Greek philosophers, and the subject has been dealt with from many standpoints by many writers on ethics and religion ever since. Yet I do not know that the history of thought on the contemplative life and the active, and the relations between them, has ever been made the object of a special study, or that any treatise has been composed on the subject. So comprehensive a work as Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics has no article on ‘contemplative life’ yet would the subject be fraught with interest. If this history ever comes to be worked out, it will, I think, appear that no previous writer had discoursed with such fullness and insight as Augustine on the nature of the Two Lives and the claims of each of them on the individual; and no later writer with such discerning judgement and practicality as Gregory.
