PAUL FREEDMAN: We're
going to talk about
monasticism today.
And monasticism in the popular
imagination, and accurately,
is linked to learning.
We all have this image of
monks quietly copying
manuscripts, and those
manuscripts being how the
learning of the ancient
world was transmitted.
We're going to talk a little
more about that when we come
to near the end of the course on
intellectuals in the court
of Charlemagne.
But monasticism and learning
are linked in our mind, but
they are not intrinsically
linked.
There is no logical reason why
monks should copy manuscripts.
They should pray.
They should live in some kind of
renunciation of the world.
Generally speaking in the
medieval West, they live in
communities.
Generally speaking, they are
engaged in a kind of corporate
rather than individual prayer.
All of these things follow
from the way
monasticism was conceived.
And the major text, though not
the only one, but the most
influential text about how
monasticism is conceived, was
the sixth century Rule
of Saint Benedict.
The Rule of Saint Benedict has
some possible references to
sacred reading as it calls
it, or to some kind
of program of knowledge.
It assumes that the monks are
literate, for example, a lot
to assume at that time.
But nowhere does Benedict say,
"Please preserve the classical
tradition by being scribes and
writing and the Scriptorium."
So how does this come about, is
one of the problems that we
will deal with.
But what we're really interested
is monasticism
without the learning.
And the reason we're interested
in that is not only
is this the prevailing spiritual
movement of the
early Middle Ages, but it has
a tremendous influence on
society outside the
monastic walls.
Because central to our
discussion is a paradox.
The paradox is that while the
monks are trying to escape the
world, the world is
following them.
The world is very interested
in their prayers, because
their prayers are thought to
have a powerful real-world,
this-world, effect.
So as the monks become more
distant from society, God
hears their prayers with
more and more sympathy.
Therefore their prayers have
a kind of power, a power to
benefit others.
This notion of power is
like some kind of
almost electrical utility.
They're building up an
incredible amount of
electricity, if you want to
call it that, or let's say
spiritual energy to
be more accurate.
Way more than they need; way
more than they can consume.
They're like some little Persian
Gulf state that is
producing ten percent
of the world's oil.
There's no way they can
use all of that.
In this case then, how does the
surplus get distributed?
It gets distributed through
the generosity of people
outside the
[correction: monastic]
world worried about the
condition of their souls.
The notion that I, possessor
of spiritual reserves and
spiritual power, can pray for
you, sinful knight, sinful
king, sinful merchant, is
called intercession.
The notion that I can
intercede for you--
and we've already seen
this, haven't we?
We've seen this with the saints
in Gregory of Tours and
in other texts.
We've tried to emphasize how
important the saints are, not
just for our understanding of
medieval religion, but for our
understanding of medieval
society.
Remember that I tried to
emphasize that one of the
problems, once you're done with
the Roman Empire, is how
society is held together.
In the Roman Empire,
it's pretty clear.
It's held together by
institutions that, although
not the same as our own, are
translatable to our own: law,
administrative structure, land
holding, the whole panoply of
what passes for civilized
life.
But in the early Middle Ages,
after the collapse of the
Roman Empire, we've seen the
society does not have as much
literacy, does not have
very good records.
The kings are thugs.
The political order
is very unstable.
There's an awful
lot of warfare.
There's a lot of disorder.
You can't just dial 9-1-1
and expect a response.
So the question then
becomes what holds
that society together?
And we mentioned some things,
including the Church.
And here we're looking at a
particular instance of how
that works.
Because the monks, far from
being kind of out there in the
forest or desert or some remote
region, or even if they
are in the forest or desert and
some remote region, are
extremely important to how
society functions.
Because this is a society in
which the spiritual, the
military, the political, the
economic, are not easily
conceptually separated.
This is the Middle ages, OK?
You love the Middle
Ages, otherwise we
wouldn't be here together.
But this is the part of the
Middle Ages that is perhaps
most medieval.
What could be more medieval
than monasticism?
When I started teaching, which
wasn't that long after the
Middle Ages, but when I started
teaching, monasticism
was a real problem, because
it was so alien.
What are these people doing?
In a way the situation is
better, because monasticism is
sort of chic, at least temporary
weekend monasticism.
People think of monasteries
sort of like spas.
You go there to get cleansed.
In fact a lot of monasteries
have taken on a lot of new
business with retreats, and
detoxification, and
pilgrimage, and these
kinds of concepts.
But at the same time, while I
think we understand the desire
to renounce the world or to take
time off from the world
or to leave the personal digital
devices at home and
think about something for more
than three seconds at a time,
all of this is temporary.
The whole point of
detoxification is that you
then go and re-toxify yourself
or go back to normal life.
What we have to understand
here are people who have
decided to embrace a
world-renouncing
way of life for good.
Now monks therefore,
are clergy.
They are professional members
of the Church.
But they're not priests.
It's key that you understand
the difference.
Priests interact
with the laity.
Layman, laity, are people who
are ordinary people, believers
but not clergy.
The priests interact with the
laity through mass, the
performance of the sacraments,
things like baptism, a little
bit later than this period,
confession,
anointment of the sick.
These are things in which the
sacred is conveyed from the
spiritual world to laypeople
via priests.
Priests are in that sense the
intermediaries between the
divine and the material.
But because priests are involved
in the world, there
are certain aspects of their
differentiation from the
world, and there's a lot of
debate in the Church at
various times over whether that
includes celibacy, not
getting married.
In the era that we're dealing
with, there are married
priests, or there are priests
who are more or less married.
And then there are priests
who are celibate.
But monks are not supposed to
interact with the world.
They are leading a life of
contemplation and self-denial.
True, they cannot focus only
on their own salvation.
Because that would
mean ignoring the
Christian's duty to others.
One of the problems about being
a contemplative in the
Christian tradition is as soon
as you say something like,
"Boy, I am really contemplating
great today."
Or, "Wow, I am really seeing
the mysteries of the
universe." Or, "I can't believe
I haven't had anything
to eat or drink for three days
and am feeling great."
You are falling off.
You're falling away.
You're selfish.
You're taking pride in your
own accomplishments.
So from the beginning is the
notion that the monks have to
abandon everything, including
self-satisfaction.
In fact even most importantly
self-satisfaction.
And this is where Benedict's
notion of humility comes from,
which is very strong in The
Rule of Saint Benedict.
Where does this desire
to rid oneself of
the world come from?
It's very strong in
Christianity.
It's all over the
New Testament.
That is actually part of
the Christian message.
It's awkward, because most
people don't follow that,
including most people
who are believers.
They don't in fact give away
everything they have to the
poor and follow Christ. They
don't renounce the pleasures
of life, of the flesh,
and so forth.
But that is sort of what they
are telling you to do.
The first monk, the first guy
who we know of to decide to
run away to the desert and lead
a life of contemplation
is Saint Anthony of Egypt.--
Well Anthony, you know
how to spell that.--
He lived from 251 to 356.
I have trouble believing this.
The sources are pretty good.
I have trouble believing that
anybody could live to be 105
in the Roman Empire.
Or indeed, at any time before
ten years ago or so.
But there it is.
At least we know that in 270,
he heard the saying of Jesus
in a Church: "Go sell all you
have. Give to the poor and
follow me." And he followed
this literally.
He established himself as a
solitary hermit in Egypt.
And Egypt is a great place for
monasticism, because Egypt has
a very narrow strip of
incredibly fertile land on
either side of the Nile.
The Nile, which until the
building of the Aswan Dam,
flooded every year.
And its silt, that it brought
down from its sources, was so
rich that it created this
marvelous soil on which all
sorts of things could grow.
But once you got beyond that
limit, you were in the desert.
So you have absolute and total
really Sahara-like desert,
very close to fertile land,
the best land of the
Mediterranean.
So that you could have a kind
of interaction between--
I mean, it's not like you decide
that you want to be a
hermit and you live
in Manhattan.
And you drive and you drive and
you drive, and you get to
Long Island, and you're in the
suburbs, and then you're in
the ex-urbs.
And then you're in sort of gas
stations and strip malls.
And then you're in
the Hamptons.
It's very, very hard--
I mean you can, actually, if
you go north, pretty soon
you'll get if not hermit
country, at
least a decent isolation.
Of course the problem with New
York is that it's really cold.
It's great to be a hermit
in September.
But the Adirondack hermitages
present
problems in the winter.
Egypt is hot, all right,
but certainly no
exposure to cold problem.
Anyway, the first monks
are in Egypt.
And they are known as
the Desert Fathers.
Often, they live alone as
hermits, but sometimes they
live in communities.
They have their own cells in
these communities, but they
can come together for prayer or
for some sort of spiritual
companionship.
What's interesting is that right
from the start, these
hermits or first monks, appealed
to the people who had
no plans to become monks.
They appealed to the people of
the cities of Alexandria or
Thebes, etc.
of Egypt.
The reason is, and the reason
why people would become monks,
is the establishment of the
Church as the official church
of the Roman Empire.
There are no monks in the first
years of Christianity,
because just being a Christian
means denying the world.
The threat of death at the hands
of the Roman authorities
and the illegality of the
religion means that you are
already in a world-renouncing
position.
But once the church becomes
established, once all sorts of
people start joining it for
motives that have nothing to
do with spiritual reasons, or
maybe ten percent spiritual,
ninety percent it's time, my
career, I want my kids to grow
up in the sort of right faith.
Then those of real spiritual
bent, devotion, desire, have
to present themselves as more
than merely attending church
as serious about Christianity
in some sense.
So monasticism has to be
understood in its earliest
years as a reaction against the
compromises and comfort of
official Christianity.
And we see this in Augustine's
Confessions.
Where, you will recall, the
emotional crisis that finally
tipped Augustine over the edge
into his conversion experience
was hearing about the monks of
Egypt from someone who had
come to Milan and had been in
Egypt, and described these men
and actually women who were
not well-educated were
certainly not trained in
rhetoric, law, and the
classics to the extent
of Augustine.
Yet nevertheless, they had in
Augustine's words, "stormed
the gates of heaven." They
had by their spiritual
renunciation hence their
spiritual power, become close
to God in ways that he,
Augustine, and his friends
with all their knowledge,
had not.
And this contrast is what
decides Augustine to embrace a
way of life that although not
monastic and much more active
in the world, is a renunciation
of the standard
career, the standard definitions
of success in the
Roman Empire, and involvement
in the world in things like
marriage, property
owning, etc.
So in fact, if the monks are
these not very well-educated
people, if embracing their
values means giving up Cicero
and the classical tradition, it
looks as if monasticism is
an anti-intellectual movement.
We've come back to this paradox
of the monks as
custodians of learning.
It's not quite the fox as the
protector of the hens, but it
is not automatic that the monks
would find themselves in
the position of copying
down Cicero.
So the first forms of
monasticism are those of the
Egyptian desert.
There's a kind of tension from
the start between ascetic
individualism and collective
monasticism.
Ascetic individualism means
one person engaging in
practices that dramatize the
renunciation of the world.
A classic example is not from
Egypt but from Syria.
These are the saints who sit
on top of pillars for
decades at a time.
Individual, right?
They're alone on this pillar,
maybe it's this wide, or maybe
this wide at the top, thirty
feet high, fifty feet high.
These saints collectively
are known as Stylites.
A "stylite" is a pillar.
And the most famous of them,
Saint Simeon of the Desert, or
Saint Simeon Stylites, lived on
top of this pillar for what
is it, thirty-five years?
Something like that.
Thirty-five years up there,
in the rain, in the sun.
Imagine the sanitary
arrangements.
Imagine this.
I mean this is world
renunciation.
But he was not alone.
He was alone on top
of the pillar.
He was a hermit.
But people came and
visited him.
There are pictures of ladders
going up to him, people
climbing these ladders,
sometimes delivering a little
message: "Would you pray for
my child who is dying of"--
well I don't know what
he's dying of.
Asking for things in the world:
"Please deliver me from
a bankruptcy;" "Please deliver
me from illness;" "Please
protect me on this voyage."
Why don't they ask
God themselves?
Save a trip to the desert
out of Antioch?
Save perhaps a donation to
the Saint Simeon Stylites
Foundation?
Because God is going to listen
to Simeon, right?
Why?
STUDENT: Because he's worthy
to speak to him.
PROFESSOR:
And why is he worthy?
What has he done to make
himself worthier?
You're quite right.
He's renounced the world.
STUDENT: And he knows Latin.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
He's not unbelievably
cultivated, probably
Syriac in this case.
Probably those notes
are in Syriac.
But his world renunciation has
imbued him with power.
This is not unique to
Christianity, right?
Shamanism, the idea of a person
who is an outcast in
society, or who has
renounced the
normal comforts of society.
What's the problem with just
getting married, having kids,
having a job?
Wondering what's for dinner?
From the Christian
point of view.
That's what most practitioners
are doing.
STUDENT: You're focusing on
the world and not on the--
PROFESSOR: You
have to focus on the world.
Supposing you wake up one
morning and say, "I'm going to
be a much more spiritual
person." And then there's
wailing from your kids, and
your spouse is nagging you
about fixing the dripping
faucet.
I mean this is stuff
you've got to look
forward to, most of you.
I don't expect you to
go into monasteries.
But this is a distraction from
what the New Testament
tells you to do.
The New Testament doesn't
say, "Go ahead.
Be happy.
Amass property.
Get a great job.
Make a lot of contacts.
Get ahead Have a bunch
of children.
Get them into good schools.
Get them coaches for
the SAT's." And so
forth and so on.
If you have done that, because
you just got trapped-- well,
one thing led to another
and here you are.
If insofar as you have spiritual
anxieties and
desires, then you're going
to want to have a patron.
You're going to want to have
someone who can intervene with
you, just like way back when
you had somebody write a
letter recommendation because
they were on the board of some
company, or they had
some influence.
Here your patron is a spiritual
patron, and it is
monks or hermits.
So the role of the holy man in
society is of somebody who has
a heroic ability denied to
most ordinary people.
This is a spiritual superhero
who, like comic book
superheroes, isn't just a
superhero for his own benefit.
He doesn't just fly around
because he likes the sensation
of flying around.
But who helps those who
are weaker than him.
And the intervention
of somebody--
a very important Saint like
Simeon Stylites, transcended
the merely curative.
Simeon was without fear of
the emperor, for example.
What could the emperor do to him
that was worse than living
at the top of a pillar,
after all?
The emperor Constantius, one of
the sons of Constantine in
the early fourth century, was
going to punish the city of
Antioch for defying the
tax collectors.
Tax had been collected
in Antioch.
There'd been a riot.
Lots of people were killed.
Normally, you'd expect the wrath
of the emperor to come
down on the city and punish
it very severely.
Simeon was able to intervene
with Constantius to prevent
this from happening.
Constantius listened to
him because he was a
little scared of him.
People are a little scared of
those who are not only not
playing the game, but who are
playing a different game
according to unique and very
difficult to imitate rules.
So there's a paradox here.
Again, as the withdrawal from
society becomes more dramatic,
the imputed spiritual power
becomes greater.
If Simeon's renunciation
were limited to
something kind of small.
Suppose he became a vegan.
Would people believe
in his power?
And then this brings up the
question of, then, what is the
power of The Rule of
Saint Benedict?
If you read The Rule of Saint
Benedict, there's nothing in
there about living outdoors
all the time at
the top of a pillar.
There's nothing about
extreme asceticism.
Yet Benedictine monasticism
would prove more durable than
pillar sitting.
It would prove more durable than
the desert saints even.
Monasticism was brought to the
West in several forms. But
generally speaking, although
there are lots of hermits, we
hear more about the communities
of monks.
Monks who live in an
establishment.
And beginning in the late sixth,
and particularly in the
seventh century, a lot of
monasteries were established
in rural parts of Europe,
rural or small
town parts of Europe.
Places like St. Albans
in England, which is
not far from London.
Or Bede's monastery of Jarrow
in Northumbria, more remote.
Or Fulda in Germany.
Reichenau, a monastery in
southwestern Germany on a
little island in
Lake Constance.
These monasteries owned
property, and indeed many of
them became very rich.
Because one way of affiliating
yourself with a monastery was
to give to them, to donate land,
money, serfs, coins,
booty, whatever.
And the reason people donated is
because of the violence of
their lives.
The people who had the stuff to
donate usually had gotten
it by violence.
Because it's a society that, as
you've seen in the pages of
Gregory of Tours particularly
but not exclusively, it is a
society organized
around warfare.
All of these guys in Gregory
of Tours have
blood on their hands.
You cannot be successful without
a certain amount of
the infliction of pain
on other people.
And although the rich and
wealthy in any society do not
believe themselves to be rich
and wealthy for vicious
reasons, indeed the rich and
wealthy generally speaking
think they're great.
In this society, the rich and
wealthy think they're great
all right, but they're
also very anxious.
It's not just a question of,
what is the phrase that's
often used by donors to
universities, "give back to"
Yale, for example, or give
back to society.
It's not just a question of
giving back to society: "Yes,
I made $40 billion, so I feel
I need to give back
something." It's a question
of, "I'm going to hell.
What can I do?
I know I'm going to hell,
because I killed 80 people in
the course of just
business deals.
The closing of this deal
required that 10 people be
killed." Or 500, or 2,000.
So there is a symbiosis,
to be cynical about it.
And as you know, I'm not really
a very cynical person.
I hope that has come through.
I hope it's come through
that I'm a really
idealistic, even naive.
But if you'll forgive a moment
of cynicism, there is a
symbiosis between the monks,
who are amassing this huge
quantity of spiritual energy,
and the leaders of society,
who are amassing this huge
quantity of sins.
It's a natural trade
agreement.
So there are paradoxical
consequences of monastic wealth.
As these places get richer and
richer, they become too
important to the kings, the
leaders of society, just to be
left to a bunch of weird,
world-renouncing hermits.
They start to be administered
by people who themselves are
from high families,
of high lineage.
In order to become a monk at
Fulda or Reichenau, you can't
just wander in and say, "I'm
renouncing the world." You've
got to be from a good family.
You've got to come with
an endowment.
Generally speaking to get into
Reichenau as a monk, the
family's going to have to pay
a huge amount of property,
money, some form of wealth
that endows that monk.
So at some point maybe people
will stop believing that
Reichenau is such
a great place.
Maybe they'll stop believing
in its spiritual energy.
This would happen later.
But not yet.
Not yet.
The preservation of the
monasteries and their growth
and success is due to the
rule of Saint Benedict.
The most important development
of Western monasticism--
and there are all kinds of
other monasticisms in the
Christian world.
But the monasticism that would
characterize Western Europe is
the rule of Saint Benedict,
late sixth century, who
devised a set of regulations
for communal monasticism.
So The Rule of Saint Benedict
is a manual for the monastic
life, how to set up and
run a monastery.
It's not the first. It's
based on an older rule.
We don't have to go into sort
of who is responsible for
inventing Benedictine
monasticism, as it's called.
But the monasteries of the West
would be for the most
part Benedictine until the
twelfth century, when you
start to have other orders.
That is, there would be
thousands of monasteries
throughout Europe.
And they would follow more
or less the rule
that you have read.
Why is this rule
so successful?
For one thing, it is moderate.
It is reproducible
on a large scale.
It is ascetic, all right.
It does involve giving
up a lot of things,
but not to an extreme.
Not to be compared to the life
of a desert hermit or a desert
pillar-sitter.
Or the harsh monasticism
of the Irish tradition.
You don't have to go to some
little island that's one
square kilometer large and out
in the middle of the windy
Irish sea, and build
some little beehive
hut and live there.
Ascetic monasticism of
the extreme sort is
all over the place.
Because hostile environments
are all over the place.
Now it's not as if Benedictine
monasteries are all located in
cheerful, hilly, fertile
countryside.
But a lot of them are.
A lot of them are located
in productive land.
But more important than that,
they require a certain kind of
asceticism.
The asceticism of a Benedictine
monastery is
renunciation of self in favor
of the community.
In that sense, it's almost an
opposite of the kind of
monasticism that hermits or
pillar saints practice.
What's ascetic about a
Benedictine monastery is not
only the celibacy part, or the
prayer part, or the isolation
from worldly stimulus part, but
the fact that you're not
alone most of the time.
You have to subordinate
your will to
communal rituals and life.
You have to subordinate your
will to the abbot.
Remember how much Benedict
emphasizes obedience.
This is not just a good
management tool for making it
clear who's in charge.
It is a form of self-abnegation,
a form of
renunciation.
Benedict also enjoins
manual labor.
This is a penitential tool.
But it's also something that
has perhaps something to do
with the economic success
of these foundations.
These are monks who are engaged
in primarily two
activities, labor and prayer.
Prayer, we'll talk about in
a moment And is quite
understandable.
But labor is more interesting
and innovative.
Because the ancient world
despised labor.
The whole idea of how you should
live in pre-conversion
Augustine's opinion, which
reflects that of late Roman
society, is what was called
leisure with dignity.
Leisure with dignity is what
most professors aspire to.
That is to say, leisure but not
just to take naps and play
with your dog or surf various
dubious sites on the internet.
Leisure, to read, to think, to
engage in a kind of genteel
contemplation.
And this is the ideal of those
Roman senators who were
writing philosophical
dialogues.
But work, actual work, is
degrading, horrible in the
ancient world.
Not to be engaged in by anybody
who could call himself
a gentleman.
So by making people work,
including people who come from
the upper classes, this is a
penitential labor indeed,
particularly labor
with your hands.
Though other kinds of labor
were envisaged.
In Section 48, Benedict
talks about
labor and sacred reading.
And this is one of those places
where you can draw out
from its meaning that
copying manuscripts
is a form of labor.
Reading texts is a
form of labor.
So the transformation, or at
least the addition of learning
as part of the mission statement
of monasteries, is
implicit here, but certainly
not drawn out by Benedict.
Prayer.
One of the things that is
involved in this surrendering
of your will to the greater
communal good is the
performance of prayers.
Benedict emphasizes humility.
The monk's life as a
ladder of humility.
Humility is encouraged by
obedience, silence.
In Benedictine monasteries,
you weren't
silent all the time.
But there is a discouragement
against mere chatter.
Labor, all of these are
penitential activities in
which the individual
will is suppressed.
And if you think of experiences
in which the
individual will is suppressed so
that the person focuses on
the community, we are all
familiar, in fact you are more
familiar than I am probably,
more immediately, with such
activities.
Any kind of training or boot
camp-like thing, or a senior
society, or an a capella group,
makes you do stuff with
the group that may be
unpleasant, difficult,
self-sacrificing, but
that reinforces
the esprit de corps.
This is the heart
of the military.
Military beats you up
in order to make you
focus on the group.
And many other organizations,
including businesses, this
idea of going out into the
mountains and turning you
loose with a tent and some rope
and seeing which groups
are able to survive, or
whatever they do.
This is part of this
kind of training.
It's not just to train you into
depending on other people.
It's to train you into focusing
on the success of the
organization or group as
opposed to your own
aggrandizement.
The difference again is, you
come back from the little
upward bound experience.
Or you come back from
the retreat.
Or you come back from
the scavenger hunt.
In this case, this
is your life.
But in addition to obedience,
labor, silence, prayer is the
most important renunciatory
activity.
Because these are not just
prayers like, "OK, I'm going
to go in for five minutes and
recite some prayers." These
are prayers that go on all
day with some breaks.
One of psalms seems to suggest
that you should make prayers
seven times a day.
So they begin a little
bit after midnight.
Then they go to sleep
for a little while.
And then they get up a little
before dawn and they pray.
And then they go back to sleep
for a little while.
And then they have a kind of
early morning session, and so
forth and so on, seven
times a day.
And these are prayers they go
through the psalms primarily.
Different monasteries have
different liturgies.
A liturgy is a kind
of ritual cycle.
Some monasteries have more
prayer and less contemplation,
or less prayer and more work.
But they all are engaged in
the performance of group
prayers, not individual
but the community.
And these go on and on and on.
And they take on a kind of
rhythm or a monotony, or a
kind of visionary power that's
such experiences can convey.
And it is these prayers that are
what are really storing up
those spiritual reserves
I was talking about as
characteristic of monasteries.
There's this tremendous power
that all these repeated
prayers have that cannot be
duplicated outside the walls
of the monastery.
So this heavy round of prayer
involves a significant
sacrifice of comfort
and of the self.
This is a kind of sleep
deprivation.
Monks never really quite make
up the sleep deficiencies.
They sort of stagger into
Matins, as the first hours are
called, or Lauds, the
pre-sunrise hour.
But this is very impressive
to the outside world.
The outside world, the
donors, love this.
They love the buildup
of these prayers.
And they would like the prayers
to take place in a
nice place.
Rather than having the monastery
church being some
kind of dank or fire trap wooden
structure, they'll
build beautiful churches for
them and beautiful dormitories
for them as well.
And beautiful refectories
for them.
If you're a donor, you would
rather that the stuff that
you're donating for take place
in nice surroundings.
Donors like it if the lawns
at Yale are well-clipped.
And I think I've said
this before.
The closest thing to a monastery
is a college, with
some obvious differences.
But communal living?
The quadrangle is like the
cloister focused in on itself.
The emphasis on the group.
Identification with
the institution.
The notion that your activities
will benefit society.
Not so much your prayers, but
all that great research we're
allegedly doing.
OK.
The parallel does not
carry perfectly.
But it is no accident that this
university looks a little
bit like a monastery.
It is to evoke a tradition of
contemplation, isolation.
People speak about the Yale
bubble, but it's supposed to
be a bit of a bubble.
It was constructed that way.
That is the ideal.
Now you may not have chosen to
go to the places that really
reproduce the monastic ideal.
I went to the University of
California at Santa Cruz.
It was like up on a hill in a
redwood forest. That was sort
of like a monastery.
Or Earlham College
in Indiana, or
Marlboro College in Vermont.
I know you rejected these
places, I know you just
laughed at them just thinking
about going to them.
But there are people who've
decided to go-- no?
Devastated that you didn't
get into Earlham?
Well, OK.
But this is an American ideal
that is similar to the
monastic ideal.
It is a sort of renunciatory
ideal.
And it is an ideal
of learning.
So how do we get to learning?
In the last few minutes I
just want to trace these
connections.
The Benedictine Rule, as you
will have noticed, does not
encourage learning.
And Benedict himself did
not regard this as a
primary duty of monks.
He did expect the monks
to read the Bible.
He expected them to
listen to readings
from the Church Fathers.
And very key, he says that the
monks should take out a book
from what he calls
the bibliotheca.
"Bibliotheca" is the Latin
word for library.
It's not clear when monasteries
had libraries.
But really the idea of
collecting books and copying
them comes from late Roman
culture, from a desire to
understand the Bible and from a
transformation of that world
of cultivated leisure, where
the intellectuals like
Augustine and his mentors,
were the custodians of
learning, to a world in which
the clergy and particularly
the monastic clergy, were the
custodians of learning.
Because the monks had three
key elements: They had
learning, that is they
were literate.
They had time, even though the
prayers consumed a lot,
they're not in the world.
And they had wealth.
It's not inevitable that time,
learning, and wealth should
lead to a cultural
efflorescence.
But they are certainly
favorable conditions.
So I leave you with that
implication of the rule.
We will develop it further
in a few weeks.
What we're going to be talking
about beginning on Monday of
next week is Islam.
So we are moving into a
different post-Roman reality.
Thanks.
