The Cave Where Western Monasticism Was Born

I would like to dedicate a few posts to the story of monasticism in medieval Europe. Sunday’s essay introduced this topic by way of poetry, which I think is fitting, because a well-lived monastic life was a supremely poetic life. By this I don’t mean that monks and nuns devoted long hours of every day to reciting (or singing) poetry, though that is precisely what they did. I also don’t mean that they composed poetry, but they did that as well; St. John of the Cross comes first to my mind, and we could also mention Teresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas, Adam of St. Victor, Hildegard of Bingen, Guillaume de Saint-Paier, Jacopone da Todi, John Lydgate, and perhaps even the author of Beowulf. Neither do I mean that medieval monks read and copied, and therefore preserved and disseminated, poetic treasures of Antiquity—though this they also did.

Rather, I mean that their lives—when faithful to the Rule, as verse must be to the constraints of form—were poems incarnate. The figures and symbols, the meter and rhyme, the beauty and intensity, the paradox and mysticality, the peace and tranquility, the pathos and passion: it’s all there, in his flesh, his mind, his habit; in her posture, her step, her voice; in their choir, their cloister, their cell. This is not only the poetry of the psalter, of the dark night of the soul, of the Aeneid; it is also the poetry spoken of by the English essayist William Hazlitt:

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself…. Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that ‘spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun’,—there is poetry, in its birth.

Where might the story of medieval monasticism begin? In Eden? On Mount Carmel, with the Prophet Elijah? On Mount Tabor, with Peter, James, and John? In the desert, with Anthony and Pachomius? In Ireland, with Patrick and Columba? These are all legitimate options, but they don’t seem quite right to me. When I say medieval monasticism, I’m referring to something that was born—like the One by whom the monastery lives—in a cave.