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Essays
2004
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Address to The Association of Benedictine Colleges and Universities,
June 22, 2004
[Revised and published in The
American Benedictine Review 57:1 (March 2006) 3-17.]
by Gary M. Bouchard, Saint Anselm College
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
It is a fairly reasonable bet that so long as there are tweed coats, Birkenstock sandals, Volvo station wagons, misplaced modifiers and irony there will also continue to be English Departments.
The self-inflicted vandalism of literature in the 1980s known as deconstructionism was as dramatic as it was ineffectually French. It made a few theorists obscenely rich by the standards of humanist's bank accounts, and it sent some impressionable graduate students off muttering to themselves before bewildered undergraduates, but its implosion was as quick as it was predicable. If, after all, words could devour their own meanings then there was nothing left to do but close up shop and truck off the vast store of anthologies and critical editions and bury poetry beneath a desert in Utah like so much spent nuclear waste. It would have bubbled up above the ground, though, forming a lush oasis. It would have bubbled up you see, because various isms notwithstanding, the beauty of words can never be hidden for long.
It may be easier in a Post-Structuralist world to find a course in Caribbean Women Writers than one in, say, Milton, Chaucer or Joyce. But even as the attention shifts to the colonized rather than the conqueror, one can live with the hope that hope that even Homo Britannicus will withstand the anthropological interrogations of cultural materialism and the indelicate scrutiny of Queer Theory, and live to stand with ever new shades of irony before yet one more generation and, harrumph, "justify the ways of God to man" Or, at the very least make mention of God's inherently patriarchal ways to women.
What I wish to consider here is more than just the survival of English Departments and the teaching of literature. I wish to explore the specific connection between Benedictines and literature, considering as I do the shape of poetry within this world of ours, how the life of the Benedictines is itself like poetry, and why Benedictine institutions -- monasteries, convents, schools and colleges -- may have a special responsibility to foster literary studies.
Let's begin by considering Saint Benedict's suspicion of words to which the title of essay alludes. Twice in his Rule Benedict uses the Book of Proverbs to caution that "in a flood of words you will not avoid sinning." It is not, of course, individual words, or well-articulated speech or poetry against which Benedict cautions his monks. It is rather the thoughtless and careless proliferation of words to which the wise abbot gives warning.
We can imagine that as an abbot, Saint Benedict no doubt found each morning that his in-box was once more flooded with e-mails, only two out of two dozen of which had anything to do with the proper business of the monastery, and none of which were edifying. He held firm in keeping a television out of the monastery, but some of his monks were pulling 57 different cable channels on their laptops and had exchanged their rosary beads for cell phones. Then there was the rest of the Internet, called appropriately "the Web." There were radios, CD players and DVDs, not to mention the usual non-electronic sources of prater, gossip, political argument, idle conversation, crude humor, and the general blather that had driven him to a cave in the wilderness to begin with.
By recognizing all of this as a flood and calling it so, Benedict did not wish to discourage those who had wise things to say, but those who thought they always had to say something wise. He would not refute the beauty of language, but neither was he naive about its capacity to distract, to do violence and cause severe pain for the speaker, the listener and the one spoken about. To be sure, Saint Benedict loved language and would have it used with the same reverence and care, say, as the monastery's plough, only more so. For its potential for good or for harm far surpasses that of any other tool in the monastery. It is, after all the means by which God fashioned the world and speaks sacred scripture; words were how Benedict fashioned his Rule, and the manner of all articulated prayer. No sacrament can take place without it. Used well, therefore, it is no less than a means by which we can ascend towards heaven, not in the towering babble of an ill-conceived internet construction project, but in songs of praise, repentance, forgiveness and love.
Let us turn then to the historical connection between Benedictines and English literature? We may hope here for a litany of Benedictine poets. But we will be disappointed. For such a litany would be, I fear, disappointingly brief. Even so, it would begin with two Benedictine monks. Any credible anthology of English Literature begins with the Venerable Bede, the historian, intellectual, scripture scholar, and, indeed, an important literary figure. For his Ecclesiastical History, even as it presents a remarkable record of the Anglo Saxon conquest, the spread of Christianity, and growth of the English Church among the rugged landscape and personage of that isle, contains evocative literary ingredients. Who can forget the image of the Saxon king who describes the limitation of his pagan religion by noting that it tells only of the brief flight of the bird from the time that it has inadvertently flown in one window of the castle hall and haphazardly found its way out the opposite window? From whence the bird came or to where it goes, we know nothing. So too, he observes, is our knowledge of human existence. Since Bede and his monks can speak of "what was in the beginning" and "what ever shall be" he reasons, we will adopt this Christianity that they bring. Conversion by way of metaphor.
Bede's single most important literary contribution, however, was to introduce us to the first poet in the English language, Caedmon, an illiterate cowherd employed at the Abbey of Whitby who miraculously receives the gift of song. Caedmon's real miracle, of course, was to use the meter and language of the oral pagan songs he knew to give voice to Christian themes, and to fashion the first extant poem in the English language, a hymn to creation written some 1300 years ago that begins thus:
Nu sculon herigean |
heofonrices Weard |
Now we must praise |
heaven-kingdom's Guardian |
Afterwards, Caedmon the singing cowherd becomes a monk at the Abbey of Whitby and lives a life devoted to serving God and writing hymns. We don't learn exactly how long Caedmon lived, but we hope it was a good long while since, alas, he is not only the first anthologized Benedictine poet in the English language . . . but the last.
The reasons for this are themselves more historical than poetical. To be sure there is little English poetry extant at all from Caedmon's first hymn until the thirteenth century. The most famous work of this old English period is, of course Beowulf. Since its author is unknown, we can imagine that he might have been a Benedictine, though the pagan ingredient of Fate seems just beginning to give way to Grace, and the poet's Christianity seems to be inchoate.
With the Norman invasion the English language itself goes through a substantial conversion, but during England's richly Catholic Middle English period, the most memorable Benedictine is the nun on Geoffrey Chaucer's road to Canterbury. The other most significant poet in this period besides Chaucer is an anonymous poet whom we call the Gawain poet because he or she wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Since he also composed three very religious poems, we could again speculate that his poet was Benedictine, but since the poem Pearl is a long lament upon the death of the speaker's daughter, it seems unlikely.
We should at least mention, before our brief litany ceases, the poetry contained within the prayers of St. Anselm. Though not written in English nor regarded by many as poems, these prayers are rich in poetic device and achieve a beauty that it makes it possible to add to Anselm's many other descriptors the title of poet.
Even so, if we are searching the English landscape or literary anthologies, we need to concede that if there was a great Benedictine poet after Caedmon, his or her verses have been lost. At the same time we would need to acknowledge that Benedictine monasteries were responsible for the copying and preservation of sacred as well as non-sacred texts, that they recognized early on the value of preserving human poetry, whether it was expressly Christian or barely even allegorically so.
The meager presence of Benedictine poets in England is not at all surprising. For after the reign of Richard II in the 14th century England itself is rather lost. After the brief expansionist triumphs of Henry V, the fifteenth century becomes mired in the famed Hundred years War, chronic civil strife, punctuated by all-out battles, over which family had rightful claim to the throne. When enough Yorks and Lancasters had finally been killed and the red rose united with the white the great Tudor reign commenced. And just as England was recovering enough to begin to manifest some of the fruits of the renaissance that the European continent had been enjoying, Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, needed the Pope's permission to dispense with the dispensation he had received for his divorce so that he might marry yet once again.
We recall the sad history that follows. Thomas More's head was the first of many Catholic heads to fall as Henry the Defender of the Faith anointed himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England. Alas Europe's great reformation arrived upon the shores of England ahead of its renaissance, and by the time poetry flourishes for the first time in modern England, in the great Elizabethan age, the Benedictines were largely vanquished.
One would find not only no Benedictine poets in the abbeys of sixteenth century England, but no abbeys at all, the monasteries, convents and priories having been confiscated and used as estates for nobles loyal to Henry. We might meet occasionally a displaced vagabond monk upon a back road, but what we would find within the monastery walls is what Shakespeare, in a bold and haunting line from Sonnet 73 called "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang," an extraordinary image to describe the bare branches of late Autumn by which we behold "that time of year" in the speaker's face. The line nearly invokes the voice of the ghost of Caedmon resounding off the ruined walls of Whitby.
There was in the nineteenth century Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic convert and extraordinary poet who, well after his death acquired a substantial literary reputation as a pre-Modern and is now generously anthologized as such. Hopkins was very nearly a Benedictine monk, but chose instead to be a Jesuit, one of only two Jesuit poets in the English canon. Cardinal Newman, who received Hopkins into the Church, remarked to him in a letter: "You would not have been happy as a Benedictine." I continue to disagree with Newman on this. Suffice it to say, that the Benedictines could scarcely have made Father Hopkins any less happy than did the Jesuits. He would have been spared, in any case, being "fortune's football."
Since literary anthologies offer us only a thin connection between Benedictines and poetry for the past 1200 years, we may either abandon hope or blink and look again. I suggest the latter. In fact, if we leave our eyes closed and open our ears we shall hear a most obvious and profound connection, which will then help us to see that -- anthologies notwithstanding -- Benedictine life and poetry are not only connected, but intimate.
The songs we should attend to are those that the "late birds sang." in those "bare, ruined choirs" of sixteenth century England, the most sacred verse ever written, the Psalms. Not long before Shakespeare penned that haunting line that compares the bare branches in winter to the ruined monasteries on England's landscape, Sir Philip Sidney, the poet, soldier and courtier's courtier was penning a Defense of Poetry. A defense against whom? Why, against the Puritans and their ilk, the fundamentalists of their day, those who believed that the Tudor monarchy had not gone far enough in its purification of the church. They would purify England of much more than its monasteries and papist idolatry. Unlike those medieval Benedictines who recognized the value of a wide range of literary expression, the Puritans were all-too-willing to destroy and prohibit all literature that was neither biblical nor strict Protestant catechism. While the likes of Sidney had not spoken up to defend the holy houses where the Psalms had been chanted, the Psalms themselves, ironically, serve as Sidney's first defense for poetry. Sidney invokes the Latin word vates, or prophet, asking rhetorically:
"And may I not presume a little further, to show the reasonableness of this word vates, and say that the holy David's Psalms are a divine poem? If I do I shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men both ancient and modern.... Even the name of Psalms will speak for me, which being interpreted, is nothing but songs; then that it is fully written in meter . . . principally, his handling of his prophesy, which is merely [entirely] poetical: for what else is the awakening his musical instruments, the often and free changing of persons, his notable prosopopoeias [personification], when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty, his telling of the beasts joyfulness and the hills leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith." (Defense of Poetry).
It in no way diminishes the sacred office of the monastic cloister, nor the
psalms themselves, to point out that those who pray the psalms four times a
day are also reciting poetry out loud that frequently. And not just any poetry,
but some of the most remarkable verse ever written. It is no small matter that
the monastic cloister is one of the last places on earth where poetry is still
recited on a daily basis.
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