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I
THE MONASTIC PEACE
1. Puritas Cordis [Purity of Heart]
We have defined a monk as a man who leaves everything else in order to seek God. But this definition is not going to mean much unless we also define the search for God. And that is not an easy matter. For God is at the same time, as one of the Fathers said, everywhere and nowhere. How can I find One Who is nowhere? If I find Him, I myself will also be nowhere. And if I am nowhere, how shall I be able to say that I am still “I”? Will I still exist to rejoice in having found Him?
How can I find Him Who is everywhere? If He is everywhere, He is indeed close to me, and with me, and in me: perhaps He will turn out to be, in some mysterious way, my own self. But then, again, if He and I are one, then is there an “I” that can rejoice in having found Him?
God, says philosophy, is both immanent and transcendent. By His immanence He lives and acts in the intimate metaphysical depths of everything that exists. He is “everywhere.” By His transcendence He is so far above all being, that no human and limited concept can contain and exhaust His Being, or even signify it except by analogy. He is so far above all created being that His Being and finite being are not even said to “be” in the same univocal sense. Compared with God, created being “is not”; again, compared with created being, God “is not.” For He is so far above His creation that the concept of Being, applied to Him, means something basically different from what it means when applied to everything else. In this way, God “is nowhere.”
The monk is one who is called by God to enter into this dilemma and this mystery. But it is less complicated for him, because he is not usually a philosopher. He seeks God not by speculation, but by a way more likely to find Him—the obscure and secret path of theological faith.
The monk, then, is one who has heard God speak the words He spoke once through the Prophet: “I will espouse thee to me in faith, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord” (Osee, 2:20).
God is said to be “found” by the soul that is united to Him in a bond as intimate as marriage. And this bond is a union of spirits, in faith. Faith, here, means complete fidelity, the complete gift and abandonment of oneself. It means perfect trust in a hidden God. It implies submission to the gentle but inscrutable guidance of His infinitely hidden Spirit. It demands the renunciation of our own lights and our own prudence and our own wisdom and of our whole “self” in order to live in and by His Spirit. “He that is joined to the Lord,” says St Paul, “is one Spirit” (1 Corinthians, 6:17).
To be one with One Whom one cannot see is to be hidden, to be nowhere, to be no one: it is to be unknown as He is unknown, forgotten as He is forgotten, lost as He is lost to the world which nevertheless exists in Him. Yet to live in Him is to live by His power, to reach from end to end of the universe in the might of His wisdom, to rule and form all things in and with Him. It is to be the hidden instrument of His Divine action, the minister of His redemption, the channel of His mercy, and the messenger of His infinite Love.
Monastic solitude, poverty, obedience, silence and prayer dispose the soul for this mysterious destiny in God. Asceticism itself does not produce divine union as its direct result. It only disposes the soul for union. The various practices of monastic asceticism are more or less valuable to the monk in proportion as they help him to accomplish the inner and spiritual work that needs to be done to make his soul poor, and humble, and empty, in the mystery of the presence of God. When ascetic practices are misused, they serve only to fill the monk with himself and to harden his heart in resistance to grace. That is why all monastic asceticism centers in the two great virtues of humility and obedience which cannot be practiced as they ought to be practiced, if they do not empty a man of himself.
Humility detaches the monk first of all from that absorption in himself which makes him forget the reality of God. It detaches him from that fixation upon his own will which makes him ignore and disobey the eternal Will in which alone reality is to be found. It gradually pulls down the edifice of illusory projects which he has erected between himself and reality. It strips him of the garment of spurious ideals which he has woven to disguise and beautify his own imaginary self. It finds and saves him in the midst of a hopeless conflict against the rest of the universe—saves him in this conflict by a salutary “despair” in which he renounces at last his futile struggle to make himself into a “god.” When he achieves this final renunciation he plunges through the center of his humility to find himself at last in the Living God.
The victory of monastic humility is the victory of the real over the unreal—a victory in which false human ideals are discarded and the divine “ideal” is attained, is experienced, is grasped and possessed, not in a mental image but in the present and concrete and existential reality of our life. The victory of monastic humility is a triumph of life in which, by the integration of thought and action, idealism and reality, prayer and work, the monk finds that he now lives perfectly, and fully, and fruitfully in God. Yet God does not appear. The monk is not outwardly changed. He has no aureola. He is still a frail and limited human being. The externals of his life are the same as they always were. Prayer is the same, work is the same, the monastic community is the same, but everything has been changed from within and God is, to use St Paul’s expression, “all in all.”
By monastic humility, the monk ceases to swim against the stream of life, gives up the sinister unconscious struggle which he has always waged to assert himself against the will of others, to resist the desires of his superiors, to impose himself upon his brothers as a distinct and superior being. He now no longer speaks and acts in his own name, but in the name of his eternal Father. Like Jesus, he finds his meat and nourishment in doing the will of “Him Who sent me.” And with Jesus he can say: “He that sent me is with me, and he hath not left me alone, for I always do the things that please Him” (John, 8:29).
This does not mean that the monk becomes incapable of sin. Indeed, his weakness and helplessness have shown him that it is impossible for him to realize, on earth, a state of absolute moral perfection. Like St Paul he is compelled to say: “I am delighted with the law of God according to my inward man, but I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind” (Romans, 7:22-23). But also with St Paul he can declare: “I know that to them that love God all things work together unto good” (id. 8:28) and “Gladly will I glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may dwell in me. For which cause I please myself in my infirmities, in reproaches for Christ. For when I am weak, then am I powerful” (2 Corinthians, 12:9-10).
The victory of monastic humility is the full acceptance of God’s hidden action in the weakness and ordinariness and unsatisfactoriness of our own everyday lives. It is the acceptance of our own incompleteness, in order that He may make us complete in His own way. It is joy in our emptiness, which can only be filled by Him. It is peace in our own unfruitfulness which He Himself makes immensely fruitful without our being able to understand how it is done.
But for humility to take possession of his soul, the monk must finally and completely renounce all the worry and agitation with which he strives to hide his limitations from himself and disguise his faults as virtues. Perfection is not for those who strive to feel and look and act as if they were perfect: it is only for those who are fully aware that they are sinners, like the rest of men, but sinners loved and redeemed and changed by God. Perfection is not for those who isolate themselves in ivory towers of an imaginary fault-lessness, but only for those who risk the tarnishing of their supposed interior purity by plunging fully into life as it must inevitably be lived in this imperfect world of ours: life with its difficulties, its temptations, its disappointments and its dangers. Perfection, too, is not for those who live for themselves alone and occupy themselves exclusively with the embellishment of their own souls. Christian sanctity is not merely a matter of “recollection” or “interior prayer.” Sanctity is love: the love of God above all other beings and the love of our brother in God. Such love ultimately demands the complete forgetfulness of ourselves.
And yet, the monk is traditionally one who leaves the world, flies from the company of men and seeks to purify his soul by living alone with the angels. Does he not thereby run the risk of losing all contact with reality and falling away from the life-giving union with his brothers in Christ, by which alone he can be sanctified? Is not the monastic life, then, an escape into sterility, a flight from the responsibility of living? Does it not so completely diminish and restrict a man’s life that he ceases to live and spends his days vegetating in the throes of a pious delusion?
It must be admitted that every vocation has its professional hazards and the monk who loses sight of the meaning of his monastic calling may well waste his life in sterile self-preoccupation. But the meaning of the monk’s flight from the world is precisely to be sought in the fact that the “world” (in the sense in which it is condemned by Christ) is the society of those who live exclusively for themselves. To leave the “world” then, is to leave oneself first of all and begin to live for others. The man who lives “in the world but not of it” is one who, in the midst of life, with all its crises, forgets himself to live for those he loves. The monastery aims to create an atmosphere most favorable for selflessness. If some of the monks make a bad use of their opportunity and become selfish, it is because they have physically left “the world” while bringing its spirit with them into the monastery in their hearts. They have not come to seek God so much as their own interests, their own profit, their own peace, their own perfection.
But now we have come to the true secret of the monastic life and the answer to the question, what does it mean to seek God?
It means to live in Christ, to find the Father in the Son, His Incarnate Word, by sharing, through faith and the gift of self, in the obedience and the poverty and the charity of Christ.
The monastic life is not only devoted to the study of Christ, or to the contemplation of Christ, or to the imitation of Christ. The monk seeks to become Christ by sharing in the passion of Christ.
Life in the monastery, says Cassian, is lived “under the sacrament of the Cross” {sub cruets sacramento).*
But to live in the mystery of the Cross is to live in union with Christ in His “obedience unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Philippians 2, 8-9).
Many details of the monk’s austere life may be relaxed by his superiors. There may be modification in his daily prayer, his manual work, his fasting, his silence: but in one thing there can be no change—in the monk’s fundamental obligation to be “obedient unto death.” This means that he must relinquish, if not life itself, at least his stubborn will to “live” and exist as a self-assertive and self-seeking individual. To renounce the pleasure of one’s dearest illusions about oneself is to die more effectively than one could ever do by allowing himself to be killed for a clearly conceived personal ideal. Indeed, we know it is quite possible for a man to lay down his life to bear witness to his own will and to his own illusions. But the true and complete renunciation of ourselves is demanded by the monastic life. Even if our superiors seek to spare our weakness God Himself will not spare us, if we are truly seeking Him.
However, to live “under the sacrament of the Cross” is to share in the life of the Risen Christ. For when our illusions die, they give place to reality, and when our false “self” disappears, when the darkness of our self-idolatry is dispelled, then the words of the Apostle are fulfilled in us: “Arise, thou that sleepest, and Christ will enlighten thee” (Ephesians, 5:14). And again: “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus” (2 Corinthians, 4:6).
