tended to conflate the distinction between Roman Catholic and Puritan meditation.^175
Further, Wakefield interestingly suggests there are some parallels between Looking
Unto Jesus and Bishop Guevara’s Mount Calvary, though Ambrose “meditates upon
the whole work of Christ from Creation to the last day, and thus sets Calvary in its
context of the universal purpose of God in Christ.”^176 John Flavel indicates that
Ambrose had addressed the subject of meditating on Jesus and “done worthily” and
provided guidance for his own work.^177 While Flavel does not follow the structure of
Ambrose, especially in his detailed sections on stirring up the affections, he does
cover the same topics beginning with Christ’s pre-existence and concluding with his
final judgment.
Ambrose devotes slightly less than half of the work to the nine affective
categories of looking, included knowing, considering, desiring, hoping, believing,
loving, joying, calling, and conforming to Jesus’ life. One wonders about the origin
of these nine ways of gazing at Jesus. One pattern that reflects some similarity is
Rutherford’s Christ Dying which Ambrose quotes in his introduction declaring it is,
“[a]n act of living in Christ, and on Christ, in the acts of seeing, enjoying, embracing,
loving, resting on him, is that noone-day divinity, and theology of beatifical vision.”^178
Thomas Hooker, writing nine years earlier, offers another pattern that reflects even
greater similarity in his discussion of how the soul grows in union with Christ
asserting, “the soule settles itselfe upon Christ, hoping, expecting, longing, desiring,
(^175) Horton Davies, (^) Worship and Theology in England (^) , 2:88. Davies lists Rous,
Thomas Goodwin, and Peter Sterry as Puritans possessing mys 176 tical tendencies.
177 Wakefield, Puritan Devotion, 95-6.^
178 Flavel, Fountain of Life, 23, 272.^
Christ Dying Ambrose, , To the Reader, [11].Looking Unto Jesus, To the Reader, [3]. The reference is Rutherford,