This article is adapted from the preface to A Benedictine Education (Cluny Media), which presents two essays by John Henry Newman on St. Benedict and Benedictine schools.
Josef Pieper begins his magnum opus, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, as St. Thomas Aquinas might have done: with an objection. Many will argue, he says, that now (that is, post-war Europe) is not the time to talk about leisure. After all, “our hands are full and there is work for all.” On the contrary, he answers, it is precisely in this period of civilizational rebuilding that we must begin by restoring the meaning of leisure.
The same argument might be made of the Benedictine life today. Now, some might argue, is not the time to retreat from the world. Now is the time to go forth, to engage, to confront.
Like with Pieper’s leisure, the reality is more complex, even paradoxical: Just as the difficult work of rebuilding of Western civilization requires a recovery of leisure as its source of vitality, so a broader evangelical engagement with secular society demands the cloister.
In his essay on “The Mission of St. Benedict,” St. John Henry Newman argues that the fruit of the cloister, the heart of the Benedictine life, is the cultivation of a certain spiritual disposition which he calls “poetic.” It is this Benedictine poetic vision, he argues, which transformed civilization once—and has the power to do so again.
For Newman, poetry expresses a way of seeing the world. Newman writes that poetry “demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet…. Poetry [addresses] the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love.” Poetic perception is the receptive attitude of mind, which, formed in silence, and undertaken in charity, is capable of apprehending the whole of reality. This attitude of contemplation, which informs the poetic disposition, is at the heart of the Christian life.
As executive director of Portsmouth Institute for Faith and Culture, a Benedictine center for the Catholic intellectual and contemplative life at Portsmouth Abbey and Saint Louis Abbey (English Benedictine Congregation monastic houses in the United States), and a teacher of humanities at Portsmouth Abbey School in New England, I have a deep interest in a renewal of what I call the “Benedictine principle” in the life of the Church, rooted in monastic humanism, lectio divina, and the liturgy. These three activities, which inform the whole Benedictine way of life, tap a source on which Newman drew in articulating his understanding of Benedictine poetry.
Monastic Humanism and Poetic Vision
One means for recovering the poetic disposition is through what Benedictine scholar Jean Leclercq, O.S.B. calls monastic humanism.
In Love of Learning and Desire for God, Leclercq writes that monastic humanism is a “humanism wholly inspired by classical antiquity, a humanism whose touchstone is Christ crucified, risen from the dead, who by His example and His grace makes us renounce evil in order to lead us to the heavenly city.”
Further, Leclercq writes that the “Benedictine life shows that grammar [or literature] can—in no insignificant sense—lead to God.”
This anagogical interpretation of literature, in which the written word has the power to pull the reader up into the divine and direct him towards his end, is at the heart of the poetic life of the Benedictine. Reflecting on Newman’s understanding of Benedictine poetry, André Gushurst-Moore argues that “a poetic view of the world is a sacramental view.”
Monastic humanism develops in the student the capacity of perceive poetically, which is to say, sacramentally. The sacramental, poetic view of the world allows the student to participate more deeply in the Incarnation and thus the ultimate reality of existence. Gushurst-Moore continues: “Unless our education is founded in the sacramental sense of the created world, we shall not enable persons or the culture to see things as they really are.” Poetic perception enables the student to perceive things as they really are, to grasp the sacramental view of creation, and to thus become more humane.
The poetic life is uniquely possible in a Catholic environment, where we that see Christ, through His Incarnation, “is all and is in all” (Col. 3:11). Thus, all creation, all poiesis, becomes sacramentalized, charged with God’s grace. Through this encounter with God’s grace in literature, and through an exploration into the truth, goodness, and beauty of the created order, we allow ourselves to be transformed—to experience the Benedictine vow of conversatio morum, or what the Gospels call metanoia.
Lectio Divina and the Poetic Life
The monastic practice of lectio divina, or divine reading, is a prayerful reading of Scripture, wherein the reader listens to the Logos, the Divine Word, speaking directly to him or her. Lectio divina is fundamentally poetic in that it is, in Gushurst-Moore’s words:
[T]he cultivation of grammar, the art of reading, which is the active process of interacting with the world, so as to read things as they are, and to see our place in the story. In the widest as well as the nearest sense, Benedictine lectio is the beginning of the encounter with the Gospel, the completed story at the heart of the universe, written in the language of the Logos.
Obedience—the second monastic vow—comes from the Latin oboedire, to listen. Lectio forms the reader into a person who is receptive to hearing divine wisdom. By properly listening—receiving—one is able to be transformed (conversatio morum) through an encounter with the Logos.
Liturgy and Poetry
The intellectual, moral, and spiritual activities of a Benedictine education—its humanistic studies and its lectio divina—combine in the liturgy. The poetic disposition which Newman attributes to the Benedictine finds its most meaningful expression in the opus Dei of the monk: the Divine Office and Holy Mass.
As Leclercq notes in his chapter on the “Poem of the Liturgy,” the literary pursuits of the monks were always and everywhere illuminated by “the light of the liturgy”:
It is, to begin with, the general atmosphere this literature breathed, the atmosphere of Christian optimism, of faith in the redemption, which makes Christ’s victory a constant and personal cause for hope. If each author, each reader, in a word each monk, believes he can attain to a certain experience of God, it is because he knows that this union between himself and the Lord is realized primarily in the mystery of the liturgy… Ecclesiology and eschatology unite, consequently, as the two dominating themes of a literature born in the atmosphere of the liturgy.
Poetic vision achieves its perfection in the liturgy, where the worshipper is taken up into the sacramental reality of God’s Word in Scripture and, especially, in the celebration of the Blessed Sacrament. Poetic vision reveals the heart of the liturgy by allowing the Christian to perceive the Incarnational reality of the sacramental life.
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Like the cloister itself, the Portsmouth Institute is a place where one might grow in contemplation and poetic perception, where through the practices of monastic humanism, liturgy, and lectio divina, one can learn to see the presence of God’s grace in our world and in our lives. For as the dying priest says at the conclusion of George Bernanos’s A Diary of a Country Priest: “Grace is everywhere.” We need eyes prepared to see it.
Christopher Fisher serves as Executive Director of the Portsmouth Institute for Faith and Culture, and teaches in the Department of Humanities at Portsmouth Abbey School.
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