Monk?

Monk Reading

I’m a librarian, my professional life is grounded in the importance of literature and learning. There is no denying how critical ‘book learning’, to use a time-worn phrase, is, and the negative impact its neglect has on a life, and a society; poverty, crime, and the loss of hope are its legacy.

And the importance of study to the life of prayer and contemplation has gone hand-in-hand with the establishment and development of the monastic life in the West, a truth reflected in the very structure of the monk’s day, with its scheduled time set aside for sacred reading, and the centrality of libraries throughout its history. As the European monastic adage has it, “A monastery without a library is like a fort without an armory”. This focus continues down to our own day. Without grounding in a knowledge base man swims in a sea of subjectivity and ignorance, as true for the monk as for the rest of us.

Still, knowledge for its own sake has never been the goal of the monastic life, rather the tradition understands the destructive power such an ethos can have personally and communally. The great Benedictine scholar, monk Jean Leclercq, catalogs this wonderfully in his landmark book The love of learning and the desire for God: a study of monastic culture, where he contrasts the literary work of the emerging university scholastics with that of monastic writers such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

And what distinguished the monastic intellectual from his scholastic counterpart? In a word: experience, for the goal of the monk is not the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, but the Source of that knowledge, the contact with which humbles, and dissociates his self from the products of his experience, his meager attempt to express the ineffable. As Leclerq states it: “There is no spiritual literature without spiritual experience: it is the experience which gives rise to the literature, not the reverse.” (p. 264) And what underlies the monk’s experience of God is the whole edifice of monastic culture and the virtues it cultivates in him, especially the virtue of humility.

St. Bernard in self-deprecation expresses the monastic approach beautifully:

And now someone may perhaps ask me what it is like to enjoy the Word. And I shall answer him: “Seek out, rather, someone who has had the experience and ask him. For if it had been given to me, even to such as me, to have that experience, do you think that I could express the inexpressible?”… Oh you who are anxious to learn what it is to enjoy the Word, prepare not your ear but your soul; for it is grace that teaches it and not language. The secret remains hidden from the wise and the cautious, and is revealed to the little ones.
(St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Patrologia Latina, Super Cantica, 85.14)

And the monastic way has been and continues to be a place where one learns to “prepare your soul”.