Thomas Merton (1972, 1) once wrote: “Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.” Derived from the Latin contemplatio, contemplation is an important term in spiritual and philosophical contexts as it translates the Greek θεωρία (Hart 2024, 26–27). Etymologically, θεωρία denotes a beholding or a seeing of something.1 As a practice, contemplation is most frequently associated with the spiritual life. Various spiritual practices such as prayer (Merton 2018, 111–21) and lectio divina (Bouyer 2013, 77–78) can be termed “contemplative.” But it is not easy to define contemplation in an unambiguous and objective manner. By its very nature, contemplation is a practice that fully involves one’s interior life. Due to this subjective and immersive experience, practitioners and theorists of contemplation alike may disagree on what constitutes contemplation or what resembles a contemplative experience. For a start, there are several major contemplative traditions around the world: Christian (Laird 2006), Islamic (Badri 2018), Buddhist (Wallace 2006), and Daoist (Roth 2021). Within the Christian tradition, there are debates regarding whether contemplation should be distinguished from meditation (Hart 2024, 38–46; Bouyer 2013, 93–101; Baier 2019). This emerges as part of a wider debate on whether contemplation is of a purely passive character or whether it is a form of activity (Bouyer 2013, 101–10). In more mystical traditions, contemplation aims at reaching a state of immersive beholding in which the subject and the object of vision become one (Hadot 1993). This rich depth also makes Merton (1972, 6) say this about contemplation: “The only way to get rid of misconceptions about contemplation is to experience it.”

In ancient Greek and early Christian philosophies, to contemplate is an end in itself, since it is regarded as the highest form of human activity (cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7; Origen, Commentary on John, I.91–92). In light of this contemplative ideal, for centuries, inquiry into nature was situated within the contemplative life (vita contemplativa) (Hadot 2006, 95–98; Lollar 2013, part I). The ancient Greek “physics of contemplation” involved beholding the universe in its full grandeur. This physics of contemplation stood in contradistinction to the “physics of utilisation,” which strived to unveil the secrets of nature through human technology for the sake of overcoming nature (Hadot 2006, 91–94). The ideal of beholding nature (theoria physikē) also occupied a central place in early Christian natural philosophy (Lollar 2013; Foltz 2013, 158–74; Christie 2013; Ip 2022; Costache 2025). In early Christianity, contemplation trains the human in every philosophical virtue (cf. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John 10.2). Training one’s mind to contemplate visible things, such as nature, cultivates the virtues required to gaze at higher invisible mysteries, the highest of which is the vision of God (cf. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue, sec.2). In the tradition of Greek and early Christian philosophy, the vita contemplativa forms the key context in which the study of nature was situated.

We can speak of monks contemplating, philosophers contemplating, but can we speak of natural scientists contemplating? Does it make sense to situate contemplation in the context of the modern scientific life? One influential narrative suggests a shift in the relationship between scientific inquiry and contemplation in modernity. According to Hannah Arendt (1958), the rise of the natural sciences and its success—in the case of Galileo, for example—initiated a reversal of the relative importance between the contemplative (vita contemplativa) and the active life (vita activa) in relation to human knowledge seeking. The success of modern science, in this narrative, has shown that human doing and the products of our hands (e.g., telescope and experiments) are indispensable for gaining access to sure knowledge. This discovery, according to Arendt, has led contemplation to become increasingly meaningless in modernity, having been gradually replaced by the ergetic ideal (Greek: ἔργον = “work”) as the primary way of human access to knowledge (Arendt 1958, 289–94; Funkenstein 1986, 290–99). This narrative suggests that unlike in ancient Greek and early Christian natural philosophy, modern natural sciences have eliminated contemplation as the key context for knowledge seeking. Sociologically, this shift in epistemological ideal also goes hand in hand with a shift of modern scientists’ perceived location in society: “The vita contemplativa as the circumstance for the pursuit of natural knowledge was being replaced by the vita activa, the re-situation of the man of science from the cloistered domain of contemplation to the civic sphere” (Shapin 2010, 41).

But the absence of an organic relationship between contemplation and modern scientific inquiry is by no means absolute. There are exceptions to this narrative in both biology (Gedda 1967) and physics (Russell 1993, 138–44). More recently, some contemporary scientists have called for a revival of the contemplative nature of scientific inquiry (Francl 2016; Heller 2016). An important scientific voice here is the late British theoretical physicist Tom McLeish (2014), who argues that the ultimate value of natural scientific research today cannot be detached from a reconfiguration of the relationship between scientific inquiry and contemplation.2 While accepting the diagnosis that modern science is largely severed from the vita contemplativa, McLeish (2021) proposes that today’s natural sciences need to recover what he calls the “contemplative stance.” For McLeish (2014, 20), this means a recovery of the ideal that the natural sciences are a seeing that heals—one where humans are reconciled with the “sheer inhuman otherness of matter.”3 What makes this bold is that by presupposing the vitality and centrality of contemplation is possible in the context of contemporary natural scientific research, McLeish implicitly extends the domain of contemplation beyond spiritual and philosophical life to encompass contemporary scientific life. To make this extension, however, raises a critical question: Which parts of the scientific experience in contemporary natural sciences might be identified as “contemplative”?

In this article, I set out an empirical approach to address this central question. To offer an intelligible account of contemplation in the natural sciences today, a bridge is needed between the vocabulary of contemplation in spiritual and philosophical contexts on the one hand and that of the scientific research life as it is lived and practiced today on the other. While there is a wealth of scholarship in the rapidly growing multidisciplinary field of contemplative studies (Komjathy 2017; Flanagan and Clough 2024), there is a gap in the literature that can be filled by drawing from sociological research into scientists to probe the phenomenon of contemplation in the natural sciences. Although the emerging body of sociological literature on the spirituality of scientists has covered a wide range of phenomenon such as enchantment (Nicoli, Sbalchiero, and Vaidyanathan 2024), beauty (Ivanova et al. 2024), spiritual yearning (Nicoli, Sbalchiero, and Vaidyanathan 2025), and spirituality more generally (Di et al. 2021), it has not touched on contemplation. What does not yet exist is an empirical approach to study contemplation in the natural sciences that (a) is based on a rigorous account of contemplation and (b) can draw from data in the sociological study of spirituality in natural scientists. This gap significantly hinders the possibility of utilizing the growing body of sociological research in this area for the purpose of theorizing about the nature of contemplation in a natural scientific context.

This article attempts to fill this gap through a history-of-ideas-driven approach to studying contemplation empirically. To provide a preliminary picture of what contemplation might look like in a scientific context, I draw from an epistemologically and cognitively driven definition of contemplation from a key medieval theorist of contemplation, Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173). As I argue in section two, while this framework is neither comprehensive nor universally accepted,4 its epistemological and cognitive orientation renders it a useful heuristic for empirical research into contemplation in contemporary scientific experience. I first sketch out this framework and explain why it is useful for our task (sec. two), before applying it to interpret the scientific experiences of biologists and physicists in four countries (India, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States) from a recent international sociological study of the spirituality of scientists conducted by Spiritual Yearning in Science between 2023–26 (secs. three and four). I end by discussing the insights gained from this qualitative analysis and some major limitations (sec. five).

What, then, is contemplation? For the purpose of this article, I propose a heuristic that is theoretically coherent and empirically useful for our question.5 One of the most systematic frameworks of contemplation can be found in the work of medieval thinker Richard of St. Victor, a twelfth-century philosopher known as one of the major theorists of contemplation (Aris 1996; Palmén 2014; Hart 2024, 38–46; 79–83). Richard’s approach to contemplation represents an important synthesis of Greek philosophy on the one hand and of early Christian traditions on the other (Palmén 2014, 13–49). As such, it can be regarded as an expression of one major contemplative tradition. More importantly for the purpose of this article, while Richard’s framework was originally set out in a spiritual and philosophical context, it is very useful from the practical point of view for undertaking qualitative analysis of reports of scientific experience. This is because his framework defines contemplation primarily based on epistemological and cognitive considerations without “restrict[ing] it to certain Christian presuppositions and spiritual disciplines” (Baier 2009, 329). This makes it relatively straightforward to translate Richard’s vocabulary of contemplation into a scientific context. As we shall see, this framework has the advantage of being able to easily bridge the language of contemplation in the context of the spiritual life with the language commonly used by scientists to speak about their scientific research.

According to Richard of St. Victor (1957, 15–56), contemplation is a mode of knowing that spans all possible forms of human knowledge.6 To reach the character of contemplation, he distinguishes between three human abilities for knowing (Benjamin Minor I.7, Richard of St. Victor 1957, 145–46):

Each of the three modes of knowing can serve as the primary basis for a form of contemplation. Moreover, we must recognize that two of the triads of imagination, reason, and understanding can combine to form a distinctive mode of contemplation. For instance, we can perceive the world primarily through the senses but aided by reason. This gives rise to Richard’s classification of six possible types of contemplation (Table 1; Palmén 2014, 255–65).

Table 1 outlines a basic framework that can be used to identify potential instances of contemplation in contemporary scientific experience. As the practice of contemplation has much greater depth than what is described, Table 1 should be regarded as a heuristic that captures an important dimension of contemplation without exhausting it. As shown by the third column, the usefulness of Table 1 springs from the way it relates contemplation to various kinds of knowing familiar in the contemporary scientific context.8 From the perspective of conducting qualitative analysis, Table 1 provides the researcher a stable reference point for bridging the theoretical landscape of contemplation and contemporary scientific practices.

The primary research question driving the following qualitative analysis is this: What might the possible manifestations of contemplation look like in the context of contemporary scientific experience? The data for this analysis was collected by a team of sociologists in the international project Spiritual Yearning in Science.9 In this study, researchers conducted 104 sixty- to ninety-minute in-depth interviews with biologists and physicists across four countries (India, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between November 2023 and May 2024. Participants were recruited from a previous international study of scientists conducted in 2021.10

In the recruitment material, the project was described as “a study designed to investigate the deeper motivations that drive scientific inquiry, experiences that scientists find profoundly meaningful, and obstacles to achieving a sense of connection and fulfilment,” without explicit mention of “spirituality” to eliminate bias against the term. Respondents were asked to consider a number of prompts before the interviews: “(1) Think of times either in your work as a scientist or elsewhere when (if at all) you felt a profound sense of connection with (i) nature, (ii) yourself, (iii) others (iv) and/or God or a higher power. (2) Do you ever feel a desire or yearning for deeper connections in these areas? If so, what, if anything, do you do to achieve those?” In the interview guide for the project, the research team delved into the following key topics: experiences of (dis)connection with nature, self, others, and God or a higher power; spiritual yearning; (dis)enchantment; mystery; and meaning. The interviews invited participants to share anecdotal experiences rather than specify personal beliefs. Related to the purpose of this study, it is important to mention that interviewers did not specifically directly ask the participants to ponder or discuss “contemplation” (or related words) during the interviews. Table 2 summarizes key demographics of the in-depth interview sample.

After data collection was completed, all interview transcripts were uploaded into ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis software. To manage the large amount of complex data and identify key themes, the research team developed a coding scheme using ATLAS.ti to effectively identify interview passages relevant for subsequent analysis around key themes. This was done by tagging relevant passages with corresponding codes related to the key topics mentioned.

Since the original study was not designed to directly answer this article’s research question on contemplation, I proceeded with a secondary data analysis to identify the relevant data for this study, as follows. First, I focused on the code “NATURE,” which comprised a large number of text segments relevant to a sense of (dis)connection with nature reported by the interviewees. After the text segments related to a sense of connection with nature were identified, I narrowed the scope of my dataset to passages reporting experiences specifically related to scientific work. Finally, from this dataset, I identified passages reporting experiences that most closely resembled “contemplation,” defined according to the heuristic outlined in Table 1. I then classified each of them according to the six-fold classification of contemplation. It was in this final step then where theological and philosophical informed interpretations entered the data analysis.

I will now present reports from biologists and physicists of different orientations towards religion and spirituality who have experienced moments in their professional work that resemble different kinds of “contemplation.” Apart from the sixth kind of contemplation, which was entirely absent in the data, I have identified a number of paradigmatic examples under each of the first five kinds of contemplation. These examples offer a preliminary picture of what each type of contemplation might look like in the context of contemporary scientific practice.

The objective of this study was to provide an empirical approach to shed light on what contemplation might look like in the context of contemporary natural sciences. The most important insight that emerged from the analysis is that contemplation in the natural sciences should be approached as a multifaceted phenomenon. The six-fold classification of contemplation is a useful heuristic for distinguishing between different kinds of “epistemological beholding” in relation to the objects of scientific research amongst biologist and physicists. The upshot is that contemplation cannot be simplistically assumed to be associated with the natural sciences as a single phenomenon. Instead, contemplation needs to be framed in the scientific context as a set of interrelated experiences emerging from specific scientific domains (e.g., experimental microscope work, field work, mathematical modelling, etc.). The advantage of the heuristic framework used in this study is that it already positions the researcher to anticipate a variety of modes of contemplative experiences in the natural scientific context.

Looking at scientific practice as involving multiple modes of contemplation also opens up a richer account of what the knowledge creation process in the natural sciences involves. Biology, physics, ecology, and such likes are all “scientific” disciplines, but each involves the scientist in a distinct form of beholding. Scientists engaging with a direct observation of nature in some way—astronomy, ecology, cell biology, and so on—tend to report direct contemplation of a specific thing in the sense-perceptible world: plants, the stars, cells, and so on. Whereas theoretical physicists who work with mathematical models tend to engage in the contemplation of intelligible ideas—what is invisible and graspable by the human mind through reason, e.g., the universal laws for pendulum, the causal structure underlying motion, and so on. In light of this, attempts to theorize a shift from the contemplative to the ergetic ideal of knowledge in modern science will need to provide a multidimensional account of the relationship between contemplation and the individual sciences.

This study also indicates that contemplation may well possess the potential to cut across religious and nonreligious groupings. It is somewhat surprising yet intriguing that religious and nonreligious scientists alike report engagement in contemplation beyond the first four kinds of contemplation in our framework. According to Richard of St. Victor (Benjamin Major I.7, 1957, 146), the first four kinds of contemplation engage with that which is created, whereas the final two kinds engage with that which is uncreated. Outside a rigid Christian theological framework, however, we can interpret this result as follows: religious and nonreligious scientists alike can engage in contemplation in scientific work that leads them to speculations that go beyond the scope of human reasoning about the world. Mysteries in nature, perhaps, are available for the religious and nonreligious alike to contemplate.

Lastly, the entire absence of relevant reports related to the sixth mode of contemplation in our heuristic is worth further exploration. It is perhaps unsurprising that contemplation involving a complete breakdown of reason that leads to engagement with things contrary to reason is entirely absent in scientific inquiry. This might be interpreted as suggesting that contemplative-like experiences in the natural sciences do not entirely overlap with contemplation in more traditional spiritual settings. In the latter, the beholding that leads to a breakdown of reason involves contemplation of the highest mystery in the Christian experience, i.e., the trinity. Might something analogous be conceivable in a natural-scientific setting?13 This is an open question, and future research in this direction could provide a more precise account of the differences between contemplation in a scientific setting and contemplation in traditional spiritual settings.

Methodologically, the foregoing analysis illustrates the strength of an epistemologically and cognitively orientated framework for defining contemplation in the natural sciences. Such an approach is useful because to bridge the gap between the vocabulary of contemplation in historical sources and the data collected from in-depth interviews, it is important that the theoretical framework for defining contemplation (1) is not overly tradition-specific in its vocabulary to maintain easy translatability for empirical studies, and (2) offers a distinctive understanding of what contemplation involves that is intelligible in a scientific domain. Richard of St. Victor’s framework fits both of these criteria, which explains why it is a useful heuristic for the kind of empirical approach undertaken here.

There are two major methodological limitations in the approach undertaken in this article. The first is related to the nature of the kind of data used in the qualitative analysis. In this study, I have relied entirely on the self-reflection and descriptions of the scientists interviewed with respect to the nature of what I have interpreted as kinds of contemplation in science. These reports, however, might not be accurate or sufficiently precise as empirical evidence of the quality of contemplation actually practiced by these interviewees in their day-to-day activities. Nor should we be uncritical in supposing that what has been reported by the scientists in the interviews is coextensive to the totality of contemplative-like practices or experiences present in their scientific work.

A key example illustrates the significance of this methodological limitation. By relying on self-reporting and interviews, it is difficult to check if the reported experiences analyzed truly resemble contemplation rather than meditation, an important distinction.14 This raises further questions, such as: How do thinking and meditation relate to contemplation in the scientific life? Do different scientists, depending on their professional experience, progressively ascent from one kind of contemplative nature to another? Or do scientists tend to experience only one kind of contemplation due to the specific nature of their scientific work? Addressing these specific questions within the context of scientific practice—and thereby distinguish between contemplation and meditation—would require a longitudinal study that tracks scientists’ lives across a significant period of time. This limitation is an inherent design feature of the Spiritual Yearning in Science project and not a restriction on the range of possible analyses enabled by the heuristic proposed here. A sociological study designed to investigate contemplation-like experiences in scientists might make use of this heuristic to create interview guides that can probe more deeply into the range of experiences.

The second major limitation is theoretical and relates to the heuristic used in the analysis (Table 1). I have suggested that in order to speak intelligibly of contemplation in the natural sciences, it is necessary to propose a method that can bridge the gap between the vocabulary of contemplation, normally situated within the context of spirituality and philosophy, and the context of contemporary scientific research. Such a heuristic is important to make contemplation a recognizable phenomenon in reports of scientific experience in the data. For this article, I chose Richard of St. Victor’s epistemologically and cognitively orientated approach to contemplation as a guide for data analysis, on the grounds that this framework could be straightforwardly applied to sociological data. Of course, this is not a universal framework for defining contemplation, as there are other frameworks both within the ancient Greek and Christian traditions as well as outside the intellectual setting that underlies the heuristic used in this article. Furthermore, it can be disputed how much the experiences identified in the analysis are truly contemplative, given the narrowly epistemological and cognitive focus in the heuristic used to guide the analysis. These are indeed significant limitations. But they do not take away the usefulness of this heuristic for bridging the gap between the traditional vocabulary of contemplation and the empirical data reported in a sociological study of scientific experience. A more sophisticated approach would require data from studies with a methodology designed to probe deeper into the first-person phenomenological experiences of scientists doing research. Such depth in the data is needed to apply more sophisticated frameworks from different world contemplative traditions.

In conclusion, do natural scientists contemplate? This article has attempted to offer a preliminary empirical approach to address this question. More work will need to be done to establish a more rigorous methodological bridge between the study of contemplation and the sociological study of scientists. There is a fertile field to be opened up here between the two bodies of scholarship. This article developed one empirical approach to open up this field, which is offered to stimulate further empirical studies of contemplation in the natural sciences. Future research should consider different epistemologically and cognitively orientated approaches to contemplation in the theoretical literature. Different institutional contexts (e.g., university versus industrial companies), spaces (e.g., laboratory-based research versus field research versus desk-based data analysis), and seniority (teaching-free research fellowship versus principal investigators) affect the possibility of contemplative activity being incorporated in future analyses to shed light on the (un)favorable conditions for contemplative activity in a natural-scientific context. Larger datasets, inclusion of a wider range of disciplines, or even ethnographical studies could further widen the empirical basis for considering contemplation as a scientific practice. Moreover, this preliminary study should stimulate further debates on how to measure contemplation in a scientific context based on more complex theoretical tools from different contemplative traditions. Engagement with the methodology in the growing field of contemplative studies (Komjathy 2017) could open up promising avenues. A more systematic direction should consider translating contemplation as a spiritual and philosophical practice into various measurable components (e.g., absorption; Luhrmann et al. 2010) that can be studied through well-established and validated social-scientific methods. Doing so will enable even greater translatability between the definition of contemplation understood in theoretical sources and by spiritual practitioners on the one hand and what relevant empirical data one can bring to bear via existing social scientific methods on the other. It is only by closing this gap that a fully empirical approach can be established for assessing whether natural scientists indeed can be said to contemplate.