The Inspective Way
Origen of Alexandria on Inner Inquiry
The study called inspective is that by which we go beyond things seen and contemplate something of things divine and heavenly, beholding them with the mind alone, for they are beyond the range of bodily sight. — Origen of Alexandria1
I once saw a t-shirt with the slogan: “Meditation: Inquire Within.” It’s a clever play on words, but beyond the pun it points to what the ancient Christian mystic Origen of Alexandria called “inspective” contemplation. Inspective is an unusual word: in everyday English the suffix -ive (meaning a tendency or disposition to act in a certain way) is more likely to be used in a word like prospective, which means “the act of looking forward” — like a prospective customer refers to someone who in the future might make a purchase. The word inspect, in ordinary English, means to examine something carefully, and perhaps critically, as in an inspection at work when the boss wants to make sure everyone is doing their job properly. The heart of this word is -spect which means to see: think of spectacles, an old-fashioned word for eyeglasses (although nowadays, a singular “spectacle” singular is an extraordinary sight to see, like clowns making spectacles of themselves at the circus).
In contrast, here we have Origen, using inspect- not to mean some sort of external “inspection” but a more internal seeing. The unusual word inspective therefore means “the act of looking within” — using your imagination to, in Origen’s words, “see and contemplate something of things divine and heavenly.” It’s still a type of “inspection” but now an entirely interior examination, marked not by a careful evaluation of some external object, but perhaps an equally careful scrutiny aimed within. Clearly, this involves something other than our physical eyes!
To be inspective, therefore, is to be engaged with the imagination, calling upon the “inner eyes” of the mind to visualize divine and heavenly things. Origen is fairly coy when he makes this statement, and does not spell out what such exalted “things” might be. But I believe we can assume a visionary “spectacle” of angels, of the saints in paradise, and even of God in God’s three persons.
So we “inquire within” to encounter that which cannot be seen by our physical eyes. I know this is something that skeptics and atheists might scoff at (for example, “angels, just a figment of your imagination”). However, we who engage our mind’s eye from a posture of trust rather than cynicism may keep our minds open to the possibility that the wonders we imagine are spiritually “real,” even if they can never be measured or documented. How do we know that spiritual things are real? Simply by the difference in our lives, especially over time.
Quotation source: from Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, page 11.