Monk?

Timothy George has written a fine article titled The Pattern of Christain Truth (First Things, June/July 2005) on the process of the development of Christian doctrine vis a vis the light, oddly enough, heretical movements have shed on the core truths of the faith, the result being a deeper understanding of the substance of the faith. He points out Augustine’s distinction between the two ways of knowing, scientia, the way we learn say a language, and sapientia, wisdom, gained often as pure gift …”an unexpected insight. In such monents cognition becomes recognition and you know this is not achievement but gift. This is the kingd of knowledge that generates humility before the mystery of the holy.”

It is this knowledge, sapientia, which the monk seeks, and for which he gladly accepts the lifelong practice of monastic ascesis. I can hear the question being asked: “But if this knowledge the monk seeks is pure gift then why does he have to go through all that monastic discipline? And after all, this gift isn’t reserved to monks alone, but to all Christians.” Well, now that’s a nice theological subject for discussion!

Christians reject the idea of a disembodied spiritualism, which would make the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Jesus absurd. It is the monastic respect for the body that informs its realistic approach to the search for the Triune God, and thus its ascetical practices of silence, withdrawal from the world, fasting, vigils, and the like. It is not because the monk is trying to induce this gift, but because the monk in his profound humility before the joys and limitations of his corporeal reality, he wants to respond fully to the personal call he hears from his God to love with all his being.

God gives where, when, and to whom He pleases. The monk does what he can and waits. As Timothy George ends with a quote from the Russian Bishop of the nineteent century, Theaphon the Recluse, so will I:

The principal thing is to stand before God with intellect in the heart, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life.”

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”.