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The Monks Did It
If we move beyond a piecemeal approach to medieval Christianity, we can mine the rich vein of its spiritual, intellectual, and practical resources.
This weekend I am attending the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. This is the largest and most prestigious international gathering for medievalist scholars, convening over 3,000 scholars in over 600 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, and performances.
Frankly, though I am no medievalist, just thinking about being there is making me drool.
What's an American church history geek doing attending a meeting that will feature hundreds of highly technical papers in a field I hardly know, based on texts in languages I've never learned - Latin, Old English, Old Norse?
Maybe it's the new monastics' fault.
For several years, I've been a sympathetic follower-from-afar of this movement.* I have to say that the new monastics sometimes seem curiously oblivious to those values that animated the original monastics. However, they have cautiously reached out to the "old monastics" in venues such as the annual Monastic Institute held at St. John's Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota. This has led to some interesting meditations on the value for today's Christians of monastic disciplines such as obedience, stability of life, and the like. For a fascinating glimpse of this engagement, see Inhabiting the Church, co-authored by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Tim Otto, and Jon Stock.
Another thing that has spurred me to engage medieval history is . . . well . . . this will raise eyebrows, but I'll say it: I am a long-time fan of fantasy literature, and a one-time enthusiastic player of Dungeons and Dragons. Both that genre and that game (with all of its countless spinoffs) were inspired by the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. And if the number of sessions at the Medieval Congress dedicated to Tolkien is any indication, there are plenty of folks doing medieval studies today who love Tolkien - including, I don't doubt, many who got into the field of medieval studies through reading Tolkien.
The potential lesson here for evangelicals goes beyond The Lord of the Rings. Some of modern evangelicals' favorite writers are scholars of the medieval period: along with Tolkien we can list C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Surely we should stop cherry-picking these authors, concentrating on the "mere Christianity" that they defended so eloquently and imaginatively, and ignoring their strong sense that the medieval world has something to show and tell us today.
One more thing that has spurred me to dig into the Middle Ages has been the trend among younger evangelicals toward returning to "tradition" as a resource for tomorrow's church. Though the main energies of this movement are still focused on the early church, younger Christians in particular are going on retreats at monasteries, practicing the Lectio Divina, and walking labyrinths.
Surely evangelicals who are sampling these medieval wares would benefit by moving beyond a piecemeal, "consumer" approach to medieval Christianity into a more systematic, in-depth study. Beneath the surface of now-trendy medieval practices, and amidst that era's wrong turnings and corruptions, lies a rich vein of spiritual, intellectual, and practical resources. I can think of at least nine facets of medieval faith and life that we can stand to learn from today:
- their willingness to engage in spiritual disciplines,
- their theologically grounded devotional and even "mystical" practices,
- their high valuation of tradition handed down in texts,
- their passionate search for theological knowledge (fides quaerens intellectum--"faith seeking understanding"),
- their moral seriousness, expressed for example in the lists of "deadly sins" and "cardinal virtues,"
- their adaptation of classical learning to Christian theology (which paved the way for the birth of modern science and continues to provide a model for Christ-culture engagement today),
- their deep affection for the doctrines of creation and incarnation, issuing (for example) in many profoundly spiritual treasures of Western art and literature,
- their high valuation on eternity over temporal life, and the "art of dying well" (ars moriendi) that developed from this commitment, and
- their insistence on works of charity (fides caritate formata--"faith formed by love").
Well, these sorts of thoughts have spurred me to start reading seriously in the area of medieval studies (still as an amateur, rather than as a scholar), seeking a "usable past." At the outset, I focused on three figures: Gregory the Great ("father of medieval spirituality" and "Doctor of Desire"), Dante Alighieri (author of the Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), and Margery Kempe (a charismatic and odd laywoman from late-medieval England who has recently been enjoying a resurgence of interest among modern readers - see for example "Mapping Margery Kempe."). Each of these has become a chapter in my forthcoming IVP book Patron Saints for Postmoderns.
A couple of years ago, given some gracious funding from the Alumni Association at Bethel, I was able to spend a week at Wheaton College's Marion Wade Center, pulling medieval strings leading from Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, and Sayers, to see where they would lead. I was also able to purchase a small starter library of primary and secondary sources in medieval studies. This work morphed into a course at Bethel Seminary, "Medieval Wisdom for Modern Ministry." (And will soon, I hope, become a book.)
And so tonight at 9 pm, after teaching an internet-based class session from my St. Paul office, I will get into my car, plug in cassette #1 of the BBC's dramatization of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and strike out for Kalamazoo. Perhaps by next month's blog entry, I will have processed that conference's rich smorgasbord of scholarly medievalism enough to report a few highlights.
Until then, peace - and may the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Gregory, Dante, Margery, and all the saints be with you.
* What are the "new monastics?" In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre compared the state of the West to the decadence of the late Roman Empire and called for "another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict." Then in 1998, in a little book called Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World, Protestant theologian Jonathan R. Wilson transformed McIntyre's call into a plea for a Protestant "new monasticism." Since then, Wilson's own son-in-law Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and such other self-identified "new monastics" as Shane Claiborne have "joined up," forging a new communal lifestyle in urban "abandoned places of empire," lived out in solidarity with the poor.
Image: Medieval writing desk via Wikimedia Commons from the G. F. Rodwell's "South by East: Notes of Travel in Southern Europe" (1877)
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Comments
Chris:
This is a good post and it raises expectations for your forthcoming book. I like your choice of the word "piecemeal" to describe today's evangelical penchant for free borrowings from Christian antiquity. Evangelicals are rightly criticized for their prooftexting Scriptures without proper regard for the setting from which texts come; we seem to repeat the same habit in our readiness to borrow and appropriate, smorgasbord style, from early and medieval Christianity.
I think this tendency is illustrate by the way in which, recently, Baker and IVP have published three paperbacks in which evangelical authors extol (variously) the Benedictine, the Franciscan, and the Dominican paths as superior. But each of the authors has a kind of tunnel vision and shows no awareness of the wider monastic story, and how there was an evolution of the conception of what represented "the ideal".Monasticism did not stop with Benedictinism because the conception of what ideal monasticism should be "moved on". The growth of urbanization, in particular, provoked thought about how monasticism needed to become socially activist and oriented to the urban poor. Thus the order of St. Francis. The growth of medieval heresy provoked the thought that monasticism could help to combat errors by right teaching: thus the Dominicans. And so on. I find it interesting to ask the question "How do the various monastic orders, in their chief tendency, approximate the emphases shown in various strands within evangelicalism?" For example, Anabaptism and the Salvation Army share uncanny resemblances to the Franciscans. I think many conservative Reformed personalities rather closely resemble the Dominican emphasis.
Also, we easily pass over the fact that a high proportion of the Reformers of the sixteenth century had been monks, and that a good proportion of early Protestant ministers had been monks too. This certainly means that they knew what they were leaving behind; but it also allows us to explore what parts of the monastic heritage they carried with them. For example, while they generally repudiated monastic celibacy, it does not follow that they repudiated community, or the idea of poverty, or care of the poor.
Again, they did not stop reading monastic authors. Bernard of Clairvaux ranks after Augustine and Aquinas as most-quoted authors in Calvin's _Institutes_. And Bernard was one of the clearest witnesses to justification by faith in the pre-Reformation period.
In sum, evangelicalism needs more study of the medieval (as well as early)church, and more evangelical specialists who can interpret these centuries for us. One of the real up-and-comers is Cambridge University's G.R. Evans, whose books are being published in N. America by IVP.
Posted By: Ken Stewart | May 7, 2009 8:54 AM
This a good one keep it cause more Movies and books on this so many and just starting to explode something good give God all the praise here.
Posted By: Michael R. Brown | May 9, 2009 12:56 PM
Chris, excellent post. I hope you'll return here to summarize the gathering.
Posted By: cindy | May 10, 2009 4:00 PM
Ken,
As always a stimulating response. What are the titles and authors of the three books you mention? Is one of them Ockholm's _Monk Habits_? Ford's _Attentive Life_?
Posted By: Chris Armstrong | May 11, 2009 10:53 AM
A good beginning, this post of yours. I envy your energy and attitude. Regarding the early centuries of church development, I have always thought the closer you get to an event in time, the better the understanding of the event, and the people, and their actions/reactions. The Orthodox Church has been passed over for so long due somewhat to it's repression in that area of the world. It's books and documents are a wealth of knowledge in understanding monastic origins and developments. It just seems natural to best appreciate an apple standing in an apple orchard rather than in the supermarket fruit section across country.
Posted By: Tom Page | May 11, 2009 12:25 PM
Chris:
The three are:
Scott A. Bessenecker, The New Friars, (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006), Dennis E. Okholm, Monk Habits For Ordinary People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), Karen E. Sloan, Flirting with Monasticism: Finding God in Ancient Paths (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006)
Posted By: Ken Stewart | May 12, 2009 12:14 PM
Thanks for this succinct description of the heart of Medieval Christianity. I started finding value in it when I was introduced to Kempis' The Imitation of Christ. It's amazing how much rich experience, knowledge, and history has been ignored, to our spiritual detriment.
Posted By: Cheryl Toliver | May 12, 2009 9:21 PM
Yes, the Bessenecker book is a good one in particular. I've used it in the classroom. He does focus on a Franciscan model, but he also uses other historical models liberally throughout the book. And reading about these on-fire young people living, today, in solidarity with the poor in "foreign lands" is tremendously challenging. Just as it was with the "old friars" (and monks), though we may not all be called to the same vocation as these people, we need to see them live out the gospel in these radical ways.
Posted By: Chris Armstrong | May 16, 2009 11:07 AM
I enjoyed your thoughts, Chris, and yours, too, Ken. Laurel and I had a wonderful semester at the Collegeville Institute/Saint John's University 14 years ago. We recently published some reflections on "What Evangelicals Can Learn From the Benedictines," in The Bible in World Christian Perspectives: Studies in Honor of Carl Edwin Armerding (Regent College Publishing, 2009)
Posted By: Ward Gasque | May 17, 2009 12:33 AM