- contemplative
- 1. adjectivea) Pertaining to one who contemplates or is introspective and thoughtful.
1873 Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he. — John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, [ Chapter 5.]
b) Pertaining especially to a contemplative Roman Catholic religious or one of the contemplative Roman Catholic religious orders.1870 Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House [...] may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkletons half-yearly accounts. — Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, [ Chapter 3]
2. nounA cloistered Roman Catholic religious.The Dominican is the image of St. Dominic. As a canon of Osma, before he became an apostole, he was a contemplative. Here is how Jordan of Saxony describes these years at Osma: "Day and night he frequented the church, giving himself without interruption to prayer. Redeeming the time by contemplation, he scarcely left the walls of the monastery." — William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., Dominican Spirituality: Principles and Practice [ online here]
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