Abbé Gosselin well sums up the ordinary Catholic teaching. “Meditation consists of discursive acts which are easily distinguished from each other, both because of the kind of strain and shock with which they are produced, and because of the diversity of their objects. It is the ordinary foundation of the interior life and the ordinary prayer of beginners, whose imperfect love requires to be thus excited and sustained by distinct and reflective acts. Contemplation consists, strictly speaking, in direct ‘non-reflex’ acts,--acts so simple and peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul could distinguish one from the other. It is called by the Mystical Saints ‘a simple and loving look,’ as discriminating it from meditation and the latter’s many methodic and discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and loving consideration and view of God and of divine things, certified and rendered present to the soul by faith. It is the ordinary prayer of perfect souls, or at least of those that have already made much progress in the divine love. For the more purely a soul loves God, the less it requires to be sustained by distinct, reflective acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an embarrassment to it in its prayer--it longs but to love and to contemplate the object of its love.” Or as Fénelon puts it: “‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely itself Pure Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love operates.… ‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely the purity of Love, but is the effect of that purity.”[177] Yet, as M. Gosselin adds, “It must be admitted that without Contemplation the soul can arrive at a very high perfection; and that the most discursive meditation, and hence still more all prayer as it becomes effective, often includes certain direct acts which form an admixture and beginning of contemplation.”[178]