Jacques Maritain and the "Aura of Contemplative Love"

That [hidden] apostolic quality or function that is found in every Christian’s life, taken in the large sense (and not the understood meaning [the traditional, macro-sign-sense of “apostolic”], as I have been explaining), is the same as the invisible and nearly invisible witnessing which we have been examining. And the first of these, invisible witness, is an inherent property of infused contemplation; the second, nearly invisible witness, is an overflowing effect of that contemplation. Nothing here of the accepted and received meaning of the word apostolic, in the sense of transmitting the Word of God through human speech, as well as the work done in teaching, preaching, enlightening and converting souls.[1] [...]

Just as the Word remains hidden in God, so the word of faith remains hidden in our heart, the heart of each of us. “For those whose soul is consecrated to the deepest love of the Lord,” Maritain advises,[2] “there is all around them a sort of aura of contemplative love.” This recognition of the order of microsigns, prior to and more pervasive than is even possible for an “establishment” at macro-sign level, opens to our awareness an unanticipated variety of “vocation,” indeed a “subtler version” of the life of faith which does not at all gainsay but at once subtends and transcends faith as manifested primarily in the order of macrosigns. Such is the vocation constitutive of the new apostolicity, a “witnessing through signs,” but “infinitely small signs,” “a look, a gesture, a friendly smile, and even less than that, a certain manner of listening or of paying attention to this or that, what we would call microsigns.”

Source: John Deely, "Taking Faith Seriously," presentation at Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, 12 October 2010; Rev. Roum. Philosophie, 55, 2, p. 391–415, Bucureşti, 2011, 408/18, 411/21.

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Notes:

1. “À Propos de la Vocation des Petites Freres de Jesus”, letter included in a “memorial pamphlet”, p. 11–24, published shortly after the 28 April 1973 death of Maritain; subsequently published also in the Cahiers Jacques Maritain nº 1 (avril 1981), 53–69. Quotation from pages 16-17.

2. Ibid., 16.