Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling towards God 9781641893121, 9781802701074

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SPIRITUALITY AND MONASTICISM, EAST AND WEST

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MEDITATION AND PRAYER IN THE ELEVENTH- AND TWELFTH-CENTURY MONASTERY STRUGGLING TOWARDS GOD

by

LAUREN MANCIA

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2023, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copy­ right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Chapter 1. What Were “Meditation” and “Prayer” in the Medi­eval Monastery?. . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2. The Journey to God Through Meditation and Prayer According to Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Monastic Thinkers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Chapter 3. From Theory to Practice: The Experience of Monastic Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Chapter 4. Envisioning the Invisible: The Use of Art in Monastic Meditation. . . . . . . . . . 53 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Select English-Language Biblio­graphy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Eleventh-century prayer manu­script from the monastery of Bec in France. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 13593, fol. 54v.�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 30

Figure 2: Eleventh-century “Hitda Codex,” from the abbey of Meschede in Germany. Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS 1640, fols. 6v–7r. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 56–57

Figure 3: Late eleventh/early twelfth-century trumeau from the abbey church of Ste. Marie in Souillac, France. ������������������������������������������������ 58 Figure 4: Early twelfth-century copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job from the abbey of Cîteaux in France. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 168, fol. 103b. �������������������������������������������������������������� 60 Figure 5: Twelfth-century carpet page from the abbey of St. Amand in France. Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, MS 0001, fol. 5v. ���������� 61 Figure 6: Twelfth-century nave of the church at Fontenay Abbey in France. �������������� 62 Figure 7: Thirteenth-century image of God the Father as architect of the universe. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2554, fol. 1v.���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 63 Figure 8: Twelfth-century cloister from the abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa in Catalonia. New York City, The Met Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 65 Figure 9: Twelfth-century Speculum virginum, from the abbey of St. Mary, Eberbach in Germany. London, British Library, MS Arundel 44, fol. 83v.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 68 Figure 10: Prayer postures modelled for the monks of the abbey of Ottobeuren (in Germany), from Peter the Chanter’s twelfth-century illustrated prayer manual De oratione. London, British Library, Add. MS 19767, fol. 194v. ������������������������������������������������ 70 Figure 11: Twelfth-century prayer manu­script from the monastery of Ripoll in Catalonia. Ripoll. Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, 214, fol. 6v.�������������������������������������������������������������� 72

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List of Illustrations

Figure 12: From the twelfth-century church of St. Eulalia in Erill la Vall, Catalonia, now in Vic, Museu Episcopal MEV, Museu d’Art Medi­eval. �������� 73 Figure 13: Twelfth-century relief from the cloister of the monastery of Silos in Spain.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 74 Figure 14: The twelfth-century “Cloisters Cross,” attributed to the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in England. ���������������������������������������������������������� 76

Figure 15: The ninth-century prayer book of Charles the Bald. München, Schatzkammer der Residenz, ResMü Schk 4WL, fols 38v–39r.��������������� 80–81 Figure 16: The fourteenth-century Rothschild Canticles. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, Rothschild Canticles, fols. 18v–19r.������������������������������������������������������������������������� 82–83 Figure 17: A thirteenth-century psalter. Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS B.11.4, fol. 119r. �������������������������������������������������������������� 84

To Grandma Rose and Grandma Lucille, with gratitude and love.

And to their great-granddaughter, my daughter, the miraculous, inquisitive Ellie.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my sincere hope that this book is accessible to a wider audience. I have written

it for fellow scholars of monasticism, Christian devotion, and the Middle Ages, but also for students just beginning their exploration of the medi­eval landscape and for general readers interested in the beauty that is found in medi­eval asceticism. This book was written from 2020 to 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when trips to the physical library and archives often weren’t possible. Instead of going bonkers, I took refuge in teaching, in my family, in connecting with friends over Zoom or in parks, and in this project. My first thanks go to Alison Beach for recommending me and Simon Forde for asking me to publish a book with Arc Humanities Press. Tyler Cloherty and Becky Straple have shepherded this book as its editors for several years—I am quite grateful for their support, time, and enthusiasm. I give thanks also to the copy editors, production department, and marketing team at Arc and Amsterdam University Press, for making this publication possible. And many thanks to the series editors and anonymous external readers who improved this book with their helpful feedback and generous encouragement. Several colleagues and friends were essential sounding boards as I thought through the book in its early stages: my thanks to Susan Boynton, Katie Bugyis, Isabelle Cochelin, Jay Diehl, Azélina Jabolet-Vercherre, Sara McDougall, Christia Mercer, Piroska Nagy, Alexandra Naskret, Sarah Novacich, Raquel Otheguy, Nathaniel Peters, Gunja SenGupta, Karen Stern, Jeff Ulrich, and Brandon Woolf. As I was writing, I presented some of this material to scholarly audiences around North America (on Zoom). I would like to thank Xavier Biron-Ouellet, Piroska Nagy, and the participants in the séminaire de recherche Pour une histoire de l’expérience: le laboratoire medi­eval, at the Université de Québec à Montréal, for their feedback on my paper and for a year’s worth of inspiring talks that they shared in 2020–2021. I would also like to thank Antonio Lenzo, Johannes Ruhland, and the members of the Medi­eval Studies Workshop at Stanford University for their insights. I would like to thank Philip Napoli for inviting me to present to my home department at Brooklyn College. Thanks to Desi Allevato for the superb index. From 2020 to 2021, I taught several seminars on Zoom filled with brilliant students who helped me think through some of these ideas as I developed them. I here gratefully acknowledge the students in my Spring 2020 HIST 4001/Medi­eval Visionary Thinkers; the graduate students in my Summer 2020 MVST 5708/Meditation and Prayer in the Medi­eval Monastery at Fordham University (and Scott Bruce for inviting me to teach them); the students in my Fall 2021 HIST 3033/Medi­eval Christianity class; and Brooklyn College alumni Corey Browning, Nolan Frontera, Eliseo Nesci, and Grace Paré. I am also thankful to the editors of Memini and the Société d’É� tudes Médiévales de Québec, the editors of the Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies and Indiana University Press, and the editors of the volume Boundaries in the Medi­eval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman (2017) and Brepols for allowing me to reproduce pieces of my previously published work in this book. Finally, thanks go to the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, the Brooklyn College Tow Research and Creativity

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Acknowledgements

Grant program, and the Leonard Hastings Schoff and Suzanne Levick Schoff Memorial Fund from the Columbia University Seminars Program for their generous subvention of the costs associated with performing this study and publishing this manu­script. I am grateful to friends and colleagues who helped me laugh on the regular over the last few tough years: Tobin Anderson, Jeannie Birdsall, Verna Gillis, Julia Kelly, Julian Mancia, Namita Manohar, Philip Napoli, Brigid O’Keeffe, Rosamond King, Raquel Otheguy and John Pierpont, Diana Pan, Naomi Schiller, Brian Sowers, Karen Stern, Lisa Weiser, Jocelyn Wills, Brandon Woolf and Tina Petereit, and Nancy Wu. I am bound to acknowledge my deep debt to the Bursting Pomegranates (Andy Arlig, Todd Davis, Jay Diehl, Meredith Fluke, Arnold Franklin, and Sara McDougall) and to the Quiz Masters extraordinaire, Tony Capra and Laurel Waycott. I am thankful to the teachers, camp counsellors, and babysitters—especially Ms. Johnson, Mr. Shaw, Ms. Smith, Ms. Tyson, Laura Avelar, Melanie Fringuello, J. Ferretti, Uncle JuJu, Oma, Nonni, and Grandad—who braved the pandemic, cared for my daughter, and gave me the time I needed to work on this manu­script. I am so grateful to my daughter, Ellie, who just by living and growing continues to remind me how the world beyond the Middle Ages is rich and full of meaning and discovery in equal measure—and how, no matter how much ground we lose as women in America, there is still hope in the women to come. Last but not least, I am beyond appreciative for my husband Adam, who listened to me as I talked through this book at many different stages, receiving it regularly with more excitement than I have been trained to possess myself (well done, patriarchy!). He never doubted that I would find the voice I needed to write this. This book was written at a time when several beloved women in my family— Gail Freeman, Adele Gidwitz, and Joanne Repole—passed away without the grand celebration they deserved. Their passing, and the insidious persistence of misogyny and patriarchy in the United States, has gotten me thinking more than ever about my indebtedness to the matriarchs who came before me. My grandmothers—Rose and Lucille—were women who made such tremendous, selfless sacrifices for the sake of their children and grandchildren; their strength is incomparable, and honestly inconceivable. They each, in one way or another, delayed and forsook their own dreams for the sake of the next generation’s. Such self-denial would make even medi­eval monks blush—it is the epitome of struggle. I therefore dedicate this book to my two most immediate and beloved matriarchs, Rose (Rosina) Savasta and Lucille (Lucia) Mancia. I write in honour of their struggle, proud to be a piece of their legacy, and to enshrine in print a small piece of the gratitude due to them. While I wrote the final pages of this manu­script, the little girl whom I carried for twenty weeks inside my womb passed away. She was to have been called Francesca Lucia. Franny was here long enough to fill me to the brim with love, purpose, and joy, much like her sister Eleanor Rosina. I will always think about this book as the thing that helped pull me out of the sadness of losing her—and to think of her as the one who helped propel me to finish these pages. I hope she knows that she is loved. And I delight in the idea that Adele, Gail, Joanne, Lucille, and Rose might be currently enjoying her company. Brooklyn, New York Summer 2022

INTRODUCTION This truly is the vision of God: Never be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more. Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God.1

The study of

medi­eval western Christianity can be the study of many different things. It can be the study of Christian ritual, the liturgy constructed by and shared between various communities around Europe and the Mediterranean. It can be the study of power, the observation of how institutions often used Christian doctrine and law as a means to dominate, conquer, and oppress other peoples. It can be the study of interpersonal relations and “othering” in the medi­eval world, an examination of the discourse that emerged as Christians constructed themselves against non-Christians, whether that was “heretical” groups, or Muslims or Jews, or others. It can be the study of human invention and the techno­logy of writing and literacy; of developing European economies; of emerging European relationships to geo­graphy, space, and to the environment; of the cultural diffusion of different myths, stories, scriptures, and icono­graphies; of charismatic preachers, saints, and charlatans. The study of medi­eval Christianity can be a window into almost any topic you can imagine, for it is, at its essence, the study of the emergence of medi­eval Europe from 500 CE to 1500 CE. In this book, I am particularly interested in investigating what we can learn about the spirituality of medi­eval monks and nuns in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by examining their practices of prayer and meditation. I have written these pages so that they can be accessible to many types of readers: to students and scholars new to the medi­eval monastic world of this period, and to professional medi­evalists and specialists in monasticism as well. Relative to the topics outlined in the para­graph above, this is, in some ways, a very narrow study. I write here about the emotional, spiritual lives of arguably the most elite and educated people who practiced Christianity in Europe in the medi­eval period. I focus here not on the liturgies (i.e., the prescribed, ritual practices of psalmody, chant, and readings that filled the monastic days), but rather on monastic extra-liturgical practices, monastic conversations with God outside of these prescriptions. In my study, I will incorporate evidence from monastic liturgy, material culture, theo­logy, political lives, and monastic worship of the saints and veneration of relics, only in so far as these practices inform monastic meditation and prayer. For this reason, the parameters of this study are somewhat artificial. After all, medi­eval monastic life was tremendously intertextual, interdisciplinary, and interconnected: political practices blended with spiritual practices, economic practices bled into spiritual practices, extraliturgical prayer happened during the communal liturgy, culinary practices and hygiene practices became spiritual practices in the medi­eval monastery, et cetera. Monastic lives were not compartmentalized, separating the “spiritual” from the “secular” or the “pri1  Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist, 1978), 116.

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Introduction

vate” from the “communal,” as our lives often are today. The personal was the political, the secular was the spiritual, the private was the communal.2 And yet, the intense focus on monastic prayer and meditation practices in this book, while somewhat artificial, is deeply worthwhile for students and scholars of medi­eval Christianity today. With increasing regularity, Anglo-American scholarly studies of the monastic life of this period analyze not the content, practice, belief, or emotion of monastic spirituality, but rather what monasticism reveals about other important discourses at work in the medi­eval world, about gender roles, or social bonds and networks, or class and the medi­eval political order. These studies, while incredibly important, often neglect deep analysis of the substance, content, conviction, and experience of medi­eval monastic spirituality, especially when examining the Latin monastic culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. If we take these spiritual men and women at their word, if we focus on their devotional methods, arguably the primary purpose of their lives, what is revealed? What do we discover and amplify about the medi­eval monastic mindset when we zero in on the content of their spiritual longings and hopes? What beauty is found there? And what do we discover about ourselves, in contrast, in the process of looking particularly at these eleventh- and twelfth-century men and women, who spent their lives cloistered away from society, struggling towards God? By focusing on prayer and meditation in the eleventh- and twelfth-century monastery, I am using this book to highlight the emotional lives of arguably the most advanced, expert religious practitioners of Christianity in the medi­eval landscape: monks and nuns. My study outlines monastic culture’s spiritual goals and preoccupations, to be sure, but also highlights (perhaps surprisingly) the devotional frustrations and self-perceived inadequacies of these monastic devotional experts. Through the narrow focus of this study, we can amplify the inner lives of a group of medi­eval people who lived over one thousand years ago, and we can discover that their pursuit of God was not adept or seamless; rather, it was a constant struggle towards a goal that was never guaranteed. The monastic purpose in life—to understand God, to better connect with God, to pray so that God would find the pray-er worthy enough to listen—was one of the most elusive tasks that monks and nuns participated in on a daily basis. Isn’t that fascinating? The very people who studied how to be “closest” to God in medi­eval Europe also felt themselves to be inadequate to the task! Moreover, their struggle in this spiritual work sparked a devotional inventiveness in the medi­eval monastery that created all kinds of devotional tools, some of which eventually made their way into wider lay devotional practices in later time periods, and others of which are too infrequently appreciated as artifacts of monastic innovation and spiritual practice by students of history. 2  For a larger, more comprehensive understanding of monastic life in this period, see, for instance, Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); James Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011); Gert Melville, The World of Medi­eval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life (Kalamazoo: Liturgical, 2016); C. H. Lawrence, Medi­eval Monasticism (New York: Routledge, 2015); The Cambridge History of Medi­ eval Monasticism in the Latin West, ed. Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).



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This study, then, is an examination of the ingenuity that self-doubt, insecurity, and deep desire birthed in the monastery one thousand years ago. It is a celebration of an environment deeply dedicated to the pursuit of God before scholasticism, before the codification of Christian devotional practices in the later medi­eval and early modern periods, before the printing press, before the confessionalization of Christianity, before the invention of the mendicant orders, before more accessible vernacular piety was popular, and when the display of devotional vulnerability in desire was not fashionable public performance, but genuinely frustrated experimentation. It is an examination of what happens when devout subjects—monks and nuns—make meaning of their lives and themselves through emotion, rather than reason, and in humble contrast with a divine being much greater than themselves. This book hyper-focuses on the oft-ignored emotional laboratory that was the medi­eval monastery in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a multi-media landscape in which devotees regularly articulated the unexpected and often beautifully expressed, limitless struggle towards God. It is an appreciation of the poetry and psycho­logy of these medi­eval monastic efforts; and it is a study which intends to highlight these efforts because they stand in such marked contrast to the mindset of our contemporary world. This dissimilarity makes the “foreignness” of the monastic mindset even more stunning; and the juxtaposition is also intended as a gentle critique of contemporary culture, as we will see in the concluding chapter. Historically, the scholars who have embarked upon studies in medi­eval monastic spirituality have usually been themselves monks and nuns.3 For this reason, studies of monastic spirituality have often been met with skepticism by, for instance, Protestant scholars unconvinced by Catholic historians’ interpretations of medi­eval spirituality, or by secular scholars scared of the potentially “biased” studies written by such religiouslycommitted historians. In the last hundred years or so, studies of medi­eval spirituality by secular historians have more regularly focused not on monastic devotion of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but instead on the devotional writings of “mystics,” particularly quasi-religious women in the late medi­eval period. In part, this is because “mystics” are more palatable both to Protestant scholars of religion, who have understood “mysticism” as extra-institutional and defiant of the Catholic Church, and to secular scholars, who viewed mystics as more “genuine” religious visionaries because they more often operated as proto-Renaissance individuals ahead of their time. Medi­eval mystics have thus been widely credited with a spirituality that was innovative and creative, sometimes set in explicit contrast with the “run-of-the-mill,” institutional monastic orthodoxy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, because mystical individuals were always in “process of creating universes of meaning,”4 expressing their own emotions and reflecting on their interior selves while longing for connection with God. In an attempt to vindicate monastic spirituality, some scholars have gone so far as to call the monks and 3  For instance, renowned monastic scholars David Knowles, Benedicta Ward, Jean Leclercq, André Wilmart, Columba Stewart, and Chrysogonus Waddell are all monks or nuns.

4  Jure Kristo, “The Interpretation of Religious Experience: What do Mystics Intend When They Talk About Their Experiences?” The Journal of Religion 62 (1982): 21–38, at 34.

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nuns of the Central Middle Ages mystics.5 But this does not happen regularly, since many think that “mystical spirituality” requires an ecstatic, solitary existence, because one of the earliest scholars to define such experience—William James—argued that “true” 6 mystics were required to be “individual men in their solitude…stand[ing] in relation to whatever they may consider the divine,” not men and women living in community and influenced by the institutional trappings of monasticism.7 Moreover, many mystics of the later Middle Ages achieved remarkable visionary success—they saw God, or experienced rapture—and this kind of confident vision does not regularly characterize eleventh- and twelfth-century monastics’ experiences (or religious experiences generally); as we will find out later in this book, monks and nuns of our period more often express their inabil­ ity to “see” God, rather than record their fulfilled visions of the divine. As a result, Franciscan and Dominican friars who lived among lay people in late medi­eval cities, or late medi­eval beguines or female mystics who wrote in the vernacular, are often considered to be more “genuine” spiritual strivers than coenobitic, “Benedictine” and “Cistercian” monks who were cloistered away from the world.8 Scholars have even gone so far as to think that monks and nuns before the twelfth century did not practice “affective piety,” or a charismatic emotional devotion to a more human, suffering Christ, in part because they are (wrongly) understood to be more interested in the obedience required by an ever-triumphant, domineering and angry God (and by the Church more generally).9 But what happens if we give eleventh- and twelfth-century monks the attention they deserve, and search for the ways that they actually had meaningful spiritual engagements with their God, filled with self-understanding and emotional, human striving? Despite our modern cynicism that makes us wary around religious institutions and elite monastic populations, can we understand monastic spirituality, including its requirements of obedience and its rigid lifestyle regulated by “orthodox” doctrine, as potentially yielding spiritual consciousness on the part of its participants?10 If we do not overlook the spiritual lives of medi­eval monks and nuns; if we do not assume that monks and nuns’ spiritual lives were rote, prescribed, and mechanical, coerced by the institutions regulating them and the obedience required of them, what do we find? By “demand[ing] a radical submission to something external to oneself,” by requiring the rigorous culti-

5  Most importantly Bernard McGinn, whose second volume of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism series covers monastic writers in addition to more “traditional” mystics; see The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century (New York: Herder and Herder, 1996). 6  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1999), 453. 7  James, Varieties, 33 and 36.

8  “Benedictine” and “Cistercian” are here placed in quotations to acknowledge the new work that has been done that questions whether these orders of monks were even recognized or practiced as uniform orders in the Middle Ages. 9  Lauren Mancia, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 1–17.

10  Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6.



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vation of prayer and meditation, did eleventh- and twelfth-century monasteries in fact enable deep emotional connection to spiritual practice among its participants?11

Chapter Outline

The chapters of this book attempt to define monastic spiritual consciousness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and systematically show how their practices of prayer and meditation—successful and unsuccessful though they might be—cultivated deep emotional devotional experience. In Chapter One, we begin with definitional answers to the following questions: what was “prayer” to medi­eval monastics? How was it different from “meditation” or “contemplation,” and why might those differences matter? Where and when did extra-liturgical prayer, meditation, and contemplation take place in the space of the monastery and in the schedule of the monastic day, and was it ever practiced “alone” by individual monks and nuns? Was extra-liturgical prayer distinct from communal prayer? And why is the period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries a particularly rich period for studying these devotional practices in the medi­eval monastery? Once those logistical parameters are established, Chapter Two outlines the ideal practice of monastic meditation and prayer to eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic writers. In this chapter, manuals on meditation and prayer written by famous eleventhand twelfth-century monks like Anselm of Canterbury, Guigo II the Carthusian, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, and Richard of St. Victor are ransacked for their prescriptions for perfect meditative practice. The early Christian writings that served as the foundation for these texts are also explored, noting how eleventh- and twelfth-century thinkers were using age-old structures to formulate their prescriptions. Finally, the chapter concludes with the example of an eleventh-century prayerbook from Anselm’s monastery of Bec that outlines these idealized practices both in word and in diagrams, visual aids for the monastic student of the eleventh century. Note that, for the purposes of time and space, my study will not scrutinize gender differences in the responses of men and women to prayer—the gendered approach deserves its own book on the subject. For this limited study, and in this chapter, I am simply focusing on the prescriptions for meditation and prayer given to monks and nuns alike (though more often than not written by male authors). Chapter Two ends by posing a major problem: despite all of these ideal models in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries, in practice, monks and nuns never felt like they perfected this process at all. Chapter Three addresses this issue, showing how, in reality, monks and nuns never felt that they succeeded or achieved the ideal meditative ascents outlined in Chapter Two. Chapter Three scours textual sources to see what we can know about the monastic lived experience of meditation and prayer, in contrast with the romanticized templates prescribed in the period in manuals. Emphasizing the extent to which meditative experience was filled with doubt and uncertainty to these monastic 11  Amy Hollywood, “Spiritual but Not Religious,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2010, https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/spiritual-but-not-religious/.

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Introduction

practitioners, this chapter ends by reflecting on what the ultimate meaning and practice of prayerful devotion could have been to monks and nuns who constantly lived in insecurity and never reached their devotional goals. Having acknowledged the real experience of meditative struggle that was alive and well in the monasteries of this period, Chapter Four proceeds by exploring the extratextual tools that were available to monks and nuns to facilitate their prayer to God. Through an investigation of images, manu­scripts, monastic buildings, sculptures, art works, and objects, this chapter shows the material and visual resources prescribed for and used by monks and nuns to stimulate and strive towards “right” devotional practice, showing just how inventive, aesthetic, and multi-media monastic devotional yearning could be. Finally, the Conclusion works to reflect on the contrast between medi­eval monastic prayerful invention and practices of the twenty-first century, suggesting what the monastic medi­eval example can teach us in comparison with our contemporary cultural values.

Chapter 1

WHAT WERE “MEDITATION” AND “PRAYER” IN THE MEDI­EVAL MONASTERY? From the earliest

moments of Christianity, prayer and meditation were required practice for devotees. But how one prayed—and what that meant—was rather unclear. Jesus recommended prayer to his brethren throughout the Gospels, saying things like: “Go to a room by yourself, and shut the door…and do not go babbling on like heathen, who imagine that the more they say the more likely they are to be heard.”1 But, soon after Jesus’ death, the apostle Paul seemed to contradict Jesus’ words, advising Christians to “pray without ceasing.”2 The early Church Fathers took Paul at his word in the following centuries, emphasizing, as the third-century Cyprian of Carthage did, that Christians should not just pray the “Our Father,” but rather that “there should be no hour in which Christians do not frequently and always worship God, so that we who are in Christ...ought to be constant throughout the day in petitions and prayer...We who are in Christ—that is, always in the light—ought never to cease from prayer during the night.”3 Accordingly, Anthony of Egypt, who by many accounts was the third-century founder of Christian monasticism, followed Cyprian’s advice, spending “the whole night groaning and lamenting, reflecting on the great number of enemies that humans have and the struggles they must endure against such a great army and their difficult journey through the air to heaven.”4 Even the earliest instructions about Christian prayer, therefore, remain a vague and contradictory foundation for Christians past and present. What is “babble,” and what distinguishes it from “prayer”? How does one pray unceasingly without “babbling”? What does “worship God” mean? Why is prayer filled with “groaning and lamenting” and not celebration? What is prayer, and how does a good Christian do it? The answers to these questions varied over Christian time and between distinct Christian contexts, identities, and geo­graphies. But there was never a more intense laboratory for medi­eval meditation and prayer than the Christian coenobitic monastery, and never a more inventive moment in that laboratory than in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Thus, in this chapter, we will attempt to define (1) what medi­eval monks and nuns came to mean by “prayer” and “meditation” in practice in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and (2) why prayer and meditation were deemed particularly suitable activities for Christian monks and nuns, since they ultimately required unceasing focus and discipline. We will also explain (1) the logistics of monastic prayer, 1  Matthew 6:5–13.

2  1 Thessalonians 5:17; Luke 19:1.

3  Beginning to Read the Fathers, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Mahwah: Paulist, 1985), 176.

4  Athanasius’ Life of Anthony in Regular Life: Monastic, Canonical, and Mendicant Rules, ed. Daniel Marcel La Corte and Douglas J. McMillan (Kalamazoo: Medi­eval Institute, 2004), 49.

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describing where, when, and why medi­eval monastics developed practices of prayer and meditation, and (2) what happened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that made this period of prayer practice and production in the monastery particularly exceptional. Thus, this chapter will serve as an introductory foundation for the more focused elaborations and examinations of eleventh- and twelfth-century prayer and meditation in the subsequent chapters.

Defining Terms: “Prayer” (oratio) vs. “Meditation” (meditatio) vs. “Contemplation” (contemplatio)

In the field of religious studies, “meditation,” “prayer,” and even “contemplation” are regularly used interchangeably by modern scholars, evincing an assumption that the three terms meant the same thing across different contexts, different periods, and even different religions. As discussed in the introduction, these terms have been greatly affected by scholars’ own biases and judgments over time, but they were also understood as subtly different by medi­eval people as well. Specialists have noted that the terms are not employed consistently over the western European Christian Middle Ages to rigidly mean one thing or another; this is in part because Christian terms in the Middle Ages (a.k.a. the still-early days of Christianity) were more often defined by emerging praxis, rather than prescribed doctrine. Unlike Protestant sects, who benefited from 1500 years of Christian experimentation and thus more often than not mapped termino­logy onto specific ideas and beliefs, medi­eval Christians before 1500 were often ad-hoc practitioners, not working off of theories, but rather theorizing after localized practice.5 For instance, the term “prayer” was technically theorized in the late second/early third centuries by Origen and Tertullian; but different monastic practitioners, from Augustine to Cassian to Benedict, affected the understanding of “prayer” in this period just as much (if not more) than these theoretical prescriptions did. Even in the case where a theory existed, medi­eval Christians often favoured the customs of praxis over the practice of theory. For this reason, the early medi­eval definitions of “prayer,” “meditation,” and “contemplation” are rather inconsistent and unsystematic between medi­eval monastic Christian texts and over time. Moreover, the archival records of these practices also remain inconsistent and piecemeal: though monks and nuns were arguably the most lettered members of medi­eval society from the late antique period on, prayers and meditations were not always written down: often, they were spoken or sung,6 and so we (unfortunately) do not usually have a transcript of the “groaning and lamenting” that, for instance, happened unceasingly in Anthony’s cave. But as medi­eval Europe increasingly came to have records of liturgical customs (and the hymns and prayers that were prescribed therein), the use of the words “prayer” and “meditation” became more codified as well, even 5  Stephanie Clark, Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018), 17, 51. 6  Roy Hammerling, “Introduction,” A History of Prayer: The First to Fifteenth Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 4.



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extra-liturgically, and especially as time wore on over the course of the Middle Ages.7 Below, I will describe these distinctions as they emerged over the course of the medi­eval era, and as they pertained to monastic definitions specifically. To the earliest Christian theorists on prayer, Origen and Tertullian, prayer was defined as a vow.8 Prayer replaced the sacrifices and material, animal gifts that were given to God in the Temple in Jerusalem, but they still served the same purpose: prayer righted humans’ relationship with their God.9 For that reason, Origen explains, it was necessary to make these vows—these prayers to God—in the right way, for the right things, and without doubt.10 Cassian clarifies Origen’s instructions specifically for a monastic audience in his Conferences, where he outlines the four types of monastic prayer. Monks and nuns, Cassian says, have vowed to renounce the world and to serve God, and therefore must fundamentally live a life of prayer, their very vocation dictated by this vow to serve the divine.11 To Cassian, such “vows” can be one of four types: they can either be prayers of (1) supplication (when one apo­logizes for sinful deeds and begs God for pardon on behalf of oneself)12; (2) intercession (when one prays on behalf of someone else)13; or (3) thanksgiving (when one prays in gratitude for a gift from God).14 The fourth (4) kind of prayer defined by Cassian is classified as the most “ardent” or “sublime” type of prayer in which one can engage, and it is this “fiery” type of prayer that is both the most intense and the most elusive in monastic life. Cassian describes this prayer as less concrete (because it is not an apo­logy, an intercession, or a prayer of thanks); rather, it is “truly…ineffable…[it] pours forth as from a copious fountain in an accumulation of thoughts…an agony…shed forth…as an example of a purpose.”15 Such “fiery” prayer sometimes incorporates aspects of supplication, intercession, or thanksgiving, and certainly uses the recollections of sins past to “arouse in [the devotee] a healthful fervour of spirit.”16 But there is, in Cassian’s estimation, an essential tension in this type of prayer: it is a prayer that both requires God’s grace to be accomplished, and seeks God’s grace in order to be done well. “Fiery” prayer is therefore deeply elusive and fleeting, both all-consuming and never consuming enough for the practitioner—and it would remain so throughout its monastic reception in the Middle Ages. 7  Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources,” Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines, Disciplina monastica 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 27–72. 8  Origen, Origen’s Treatise on Prayer, ed./trans. Eric George Jay (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1954), 91.

9  Tertullian, Tertullian’s Tract on the Prayer, ed. Ernest Evans (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 56. 10  Origen, On Prayer, 82–83.

11  John Cassian, The Conferences, ed. Boniface Ramsay (Mahwah: Paulist, 1997), Conference 9. XII. 12  Cassian, Conference 9.XI.

13  Cassian, Conference 9.XIII.

14  Cassian, Conference 9. XIV; cf. I Timothy 2.1. 15  Cassian, Conference 9. XXV.

16  Cassian, Conference 9. XXVI.

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In early Christian parlance, “meditation” was used rather infrequently (it started to show up in Christian texts more regularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as will be discussed below). When it was used, however, it was seen as a warm-up to prayer, a “surfacing of the affective practices”17 that ignited the imagination and set the practitioner on a prayerful path towards divine truth.18 In this way, meditation was more restless, cogitative, and ruminative than prayer, which was the “ask” made at the end of a process of meditation, an ultimate vow filled with conviction. Meditation was regularly characterized as an internal process in texts where it was discussed; it was always done silently, while prayer could be spoken or silent, done privately or in community.19 “Contemplation” is another word that emerges more often in eleventh- and twelfthcentury texts than in earlier Christian writings. Still, somewhat consistently, “contemplation” even in early Christian texts referred to the feeling of admiration and astonishment that emerged in the devotee after a prayer was made; it was the deep understanding that came after the process of meditation-to-prayer was completed; and it was a moment rarely reached. Evagrius Ponticus says that the meditation-to-prayer-to-contemplation process was “the spiritual method for cleansing the affective part of the soul”20; but to Evagrius, prayer was the highest “undistracted” action of the intellect, an “inner experience” that was “a prelude to immaterial and uniform knowledge,” which was contemplation.21 The movement from meditation-to-prayer-to-contemplation, then, was a movement of expanding knowledge and focusing attention; the devotee turned from being distractable, to ruminating (meditation), to becoming focused and determined (prayer), to acquiring knowledge (contemplation).

Meditation, Prayer, and the Monastic Life Throughout the Middle Ages

Who would have had the time to perform such all-consuming “sublime,” “fiery,” “ardent” prayer in medi­eval society, in either the early Christian period or the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Who would have the wherewithal to move intentionally from meditation to prayer to contemplation? The answer is: really, only monks and nuns. Even clerics and priests needed to stop praying to minister to their congregations—only monks and nuns had the luxury of being able to pray regularly, without interruption, as the main work—the opus dei—of their days. Because the earliest Christian writers like 17  Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medi­eval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 84. 18  Karl Baier, “Meditation and Contemplation in High and Late Medi­eval Europe,” Yogic Perception, Meditation, and Altered States of Consciousness (Vienna: Australian Academy of Sciences, 2009), 325–49 at 327.

19  Barbara H. Jaye, Artes Praedicandi and Artes Orandi, Typo­logie des sources du Moyen Age occidental (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 84.

20  Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1972), 36. 21  Evagrius, The Praktikos, 60, 61, 69.



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Cassian and Anthony emphasized constant prayer, prayer and meditation were regularly integrated into the “rhythms of daily living”22 in monastic life, simply because monastics had the time to devote to such constancy. Mary Carruthers has thus characterized the monastic livelihood as the “craft of making prayer continuously.”23 After all, prayer was The Chief Work of monasticism, since the motto of the Benedictine order was ora et labora—prayer and work.24 But the monastic embrace of prayer was not just because monks and nuns had the time to do it. Monks and nuns before the twelfth century explicitly dedicated themselves to the “contemplative life” (the vita contemplativa) as opposed to the “active life” (the vita activa): they chose to be cloistered away from the world and contemplatively separated from active society, so that they could have a more pure existence and better focus on striving towards God. For the same reason that libraries are places to study (as opposed to cafeterias or athletic fields), monasteries were suitable places to pray, since they were free from distractions. This was not to say that monks and nuns thought an “active life” was bad; the ninth-century Diadema monachorum, by Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, for instance, does not besmirch the active life, which was led by churchmen like bishops and priests who practiced their Christianity in the world, performing good works with integrity (at least ideally). But Smaragdus notes that it was only the practitioners of the contemplative life—monks and nuns—who were dedicated to the “beholding of things above,” precisely because they were separated “completely from all the activities of the world.”25 Ceaseless meditation and prayer was the preoccupation of those who led the vita contemplativa because this was what they did—this was their daily action, this was the means to beholding God.26 “We are fervent in spirit if we are cold to the world,” Smaragdus proclaims.27 Prayer and meditation ignited such spiritual fervency whole-heartedly. Even with prayer and meditation as their chief work, however, these tasks were not easy for monks and nuns, especially when they were performed regularly, every day, eight times a day at least. It is harder to “persevere than to originate good thoughts,” Cassian warns—and perseverance was the name of the monastic prayer game.28 To 22  Douglas Burton-Christie, “Early Monasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 46. 23  Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.

24  Constant Mews, “Monastic Theo­logies, ca. 1050–1200,” in The Cambridge History of Medi­eval Monasticism in the Latin West, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Alison Beach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 698.

25  Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, The Crown of Monks, trans. David Barry (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2013), 61–62. 26  Clark, Compelling God, 74.

27  Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, Commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. David Barry (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2007), 533. 28  Cassian, Conference 9. VII.

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have “continual intercourse with the spirit with God,”29 monks and nuns could not zone out and merely go through the motions of prayer; they needed to train their deepest desires as well as their outward actions in prayer. Like any professional athlete, monks and nuns had to acquire both the physical and mental prowess to constantly perform their prayers regularly—and to do that they had to constantly train. Their training was through the work of “reading, vigils, and prayer,” since these were considered “the things that lend stability to the wandering mind”30 and increase the ability of the heart to concentrate on the divine in meditation, prayer, and contemplation.31 For this reason, Renie Choy has argued, meditation and prayer were not seen by medi­eval monks and nuns as petitionary exercises in which devotees would convince God of their own devoutness; rather, meditation and prayer were seen as tools for devotees to persuade themselves that they were engaged with and worthy of the divine.32 Prayer and meditation was for the pray-er, just as much if not more than it was for God; they were methods in which devotees would psych themselves up for contemplating God, techniques of convincing themselves to remain focused on God. A monk or nun would meditate and pray because it affected and changed oneself psycho­logically and habitually.33 The actions of meditation and prayer sculpted a new disposition—what Pierre Bourdieu would call a habitus—in each monastic practitioner, helping them cleave towards God more deeply, and creating an opportunity for them each to cultivate their own attention. Prayer and meditation allowed monks and nuns to de-centre themselves,34 reshaping their consciousnesses and leaving only God in their sights, finally making space for God’s grace in their hearts.35 This process could only be effectively achieved through intentional repetition of meditation and prayer in the monastery, “drill[ing] it into [monks and nuns] really deeply...[and] pierc[ing their] hearts through and through”36 Disciplined repetition of the practice of prayer and meditation, therefore, is what allowed the transformative power of prayer to work: “by the protracted practice of discipline and unremitting spiritual exercises, it is possible for righteous people to weaken and enfeeble concupiscence, which is innate and inborn, so that it does not prevail.”37 This repetition was deemed 29  Evagrius, The Praktikos, 56.

30  Evagrius, The Praktikos, 20.

31  As quoted in Frans Van Liere, Introduction to the Medi­eval Bible (New York: Cambridge, 2014), 212.

32  Renie Choy, “The Brother Who May Wish to Pray by Himself: Sense of Self in Carolingian Prayers of Private Devotion,” in Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Sister Benedicta Ward, ed. S. Bhattacharji, R. Williams, and D. Mattos (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 111, 115. 33  Clark, Compelling God, 11.

34  Merold Westphal, “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self,” in The Phenomeno­logy of Prayer, ed. Norman Wirzba and Bruce Ellis Benson (New York: Fordham, 2005), 15. 35  Norman Wirzba, “Attention and Responsibility,” in The Phenomeno­logy of Prayer, 88–89.

36  Baldwin of Ford, Spiritual Tractates: Tractates IX-XVI, vol. 2 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1986), 78. 37  Baldwin, 80.



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necessary because human beings were understood by medi­eval people to be sinful and therefore inconstant, even the most “perfect” religious monks and nuns. As the twelfthcentury Cistercian Baldwin of Ford complained, even monks could not focus: “I do not find my heart when I come to pray…it dashes away and flies back; it sallies forth, scampers about, and hurries back again… when I try to grasp it, it slithers out from my hands as if it were greased!”38 Such repetitive, required discipline was moreover quite familiar to the monastic livelihood, where obedience and ritual were key structures, and replication was a way of life that was understood to nourish virtues and wipe away sins. Additionally, discipline was necessary because it was understood by medi­eval people as the way that deep-seated belief could be inculcated, through habit.39 In the Christian world, where the divine was hidden and not entirely known, there was little active and obvious reward for prayer—one could seek God, struggle and supress the self, and approach God, but one could never entirely obtain the presence of God until after death when one was in heaven. It was therefore only the structured repetition of the practice of meditation and prayer that drew the monastic practitioner closer to God, by developing the pray-er’s consciousness and understanding of the divine and by bringing the practitioner regularly into an undistracted meditative space in which a glimmer of God might occasionally be achieved. The discipline and repetition, the regularity of that ritual, was the only sure reward for the practice of prayer. God would not be swayed by such constancy, but a devotee himself might, which would make all the difference.

The Logistics of Monastic Prayer Throughout the Middle Ages

In an effort to explicitly codify the disciplined repetition of meditation and prayer for monks and nuns, the earliest monastic institutions instructed when prayer would happen during the monastic day, and these prescriptions only got more intense over time. Initially, after Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, monks and nuns assembled together for morning and evening prayer, and said the Pater noster an additional three to seven times a day, as per Jesus’ prescription in the Bible.40 These formal, communal prayer offices were inherited from the Jewish synagogue, liturgical alternatives to the sacrifices made in the Temple.41 By the sixth and seventh centuries, monks and nuns prayed at eight regular liturgical hours during the course of the day; and by the founding of the monastery of Cluny in the tenth century, monks and nuns began to chant through the entire psalter regularly over the course of a single week. Regular communal daily prayer in the monastery—especially the recitation of the psalter—likely multiplied in part because of the private prayer encouraged by Paul, Origen, Tertullian, and Cassian, who each prescribed that prayer be “constantly said in the heart”; in other words, to 38  Baldwin, 80.

39  Michael Raposa, Boredom and the Religious Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 120–1. 40  Clark, Compelling God, 61.

41  Edward Phillips, “Prayer in the First Four Centuries,” in A History of Prayer, 32, 35.

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increase the “constancy” of prayer in the monastery, the number of prescribed liturgical offices increased over time.42 But when there were eight hours when monks and nuns were singing and praying the liturgy, when did monks and nuns find time for extra-liturgical meditation and “fiery” prayer of the kind described by Cassian above, that moved from meditation to prayer to contemplation? Monks and nuns likely did not make a distinction between prayer they performed in community and that said in private; they likely regularly prayed “privately” when in community, and said “communal” liturgical prayers when alone, making no real distinctions between internal, solo prayer and communal ritual.43 Moreover, within the communal monastic liturgy, private prayer was encouraged: a short pause was permitted after each psalm for silent prayer.44 Still, there were spaces in the monastery where brothers and sisters “who may wish to pray there by [themselves]” could go: starting in the sixth century, the oratory of the monastery was created for this purpose, indicating that sometimes devotees preferred to be alone when performing their prayers and meditations, even though they also likely felt free to perform such prayers beside their brethren.45 In the spaces between the liturgical hours, then, it is likely that monks and nuns spent their time in meditation and prayer: working in the fields, or while walking in the cloister, and certainly while reading and studying throughout the day. The monastic day was in fact fortified with activities beyond the liturgical offices that likely explicitly encouraged and instigated solo meditation and prayer. For instance, by the time the Rule of Saint Benedict was composed in the sixth century, reading (sometimes called divine reading, lectio divina) was encouraged in the monastery between one and one half and three hours a day at a minimum.46 Reading in the monastery involved the recitation of scriptural and/or patristic texts over and over again, with the aim of committing them to memory and simultaneously focusing the wandering mind (an act in fact called “meditation” by Benedict in his Rule).47 In accordance with Cassian’s Conferences, such reading was seen as a kind of consideration of scripture, whereby through repetitive reading, the “mind [was] strengthened,”48 and “impregnate[ed] with the words of Scripture.”49 In this way, reading bled into meditative practice, hooking and focusing the devotee, and ultimately informing practices of prayer:50 “for whatever our mind has been thinking before the hour of prayer is sure to occur to us while we are 42  Phillips, “Prayer in the First Four Centuries,” 46–47.

43  Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 89.

44  Columba Stewart, “Prayer among the Benedictines,” in A History of Prayer, 206; see also the Rule of Saint Benedict, chap. 20. 45  Boynton, Shaping of Monastic Identity, 90.

46  Stewart, “Prayer among the Benedictines,” 208. 47  Stewart, “Prayer among the Benedictines,” 209. 48  Clark, Compelling God, 86–87.

49  Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 73.

50  See the special issue on “Practices of Devotion” of the journal Representations 153 (2021).



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praying through the activity of memory,” Cassian observed.51 Thus, beyond the hours when they were singing and praying the liturgy, monks and nuns had opportunities to fill their day with reading, which led to meditation and ultimately prayer. Mary Carruthers reminds us that the majority of the monastic day was filled with silent work as well, which was potentially another great time for one to wrap one’s thoughts up in meditation and “fiery prayer.”52 We should remember, of course, that monks and nuns would regularly pray on behalf of others throughout their monastic days as well. With the institutionalization of monasticism in the sixth and seventh centuries, monks and nuns moved from being individual ascetics to being members of monastic institutions that generated prayers for their patrons in the surrounding medi­eval landscape. Neighbours regularly asked for monasteries to perform prayers of thanksgiving, or intercession, or remembrance, asking monks and nuns to execute the required prayerful services to God that their neighbours in the secular world could not as effectively perform (because of lack of time, or excessive sinfulness, or lack of expertise). Monks and nuns were employed to do spiritual “battle” for secular lords, to curse their enemies, and beg God to forgive their sinfulness.53 Monks and nuns regularly prayed for their neighbours out of sheer Christian charity and brotherly love as well, using their prayers to solidify the social bonds of medi­eval society.54 “Monasticism [w]as a public institution standing at the centre of a medi­eval topo­graphy of power in which prayer featured as economic currency.”55 Yet spiritual patronage was by no means the only motivating factor that inspired monks to pray. While social responsibility was taken seriously by monks and nuns, it seems it was a task that they did with unshaken confidence. Rarely do we hear monks and nuns complaining about being unable to perform right prayer for someone else; it is the conversation between themselves and God that torments them the most, and that therefore seems to most fuel the kind of regular, internal self-examination involved in “fiery” prayer. The heart of the ascetic struggle that defined the prayerful life of monks and nuns, then, seems to have been that of “fiery” prayer for oneself more than practices of intercession on behalf of others.56 And this was particularly true in our period of focus, the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

51  Cassian, Conferences, Conference 9.III.

52  Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 61.

53  See, for instance, Penelope Johnson, Prayer, Patronage and Power: The Abbey of La Trinité, Vendome (New York: New York University Press, 1981); or Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer” in The New Cambridge Medi­eval History, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 622–53. 54  Gordon Blennemann, “Ascetic Prayer for the Dead in the Early Medi­eval West,” in The Cambridge History of Medi­eval Monasticism in the Latin West, 278–96. 55  Renie Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (New York: Oxford, 2017), 8. 56  Choy, Intercessory Prayer, 18.

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Transformations of Monastic Prayer in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries Over the course of the Middle Ages, meditation and prayer in the monastery evolved, becoming even more standardized monastic practices. The codification of coenobitic Christian monasticism in the sixth century with the Rule of Saint Benedict, for instance, was the moment when the liturgical hours observed in the monastery were formally prescribed. The reforms of Carolingian monasticism in the eighth and ninth centuries completed yet another phase important for the development of medi­eval monastic prayer, standardizing the wording of certain prayers and making explicit prayer’s usefulness to the practice of penitence, for example. But the time frame to which this particular book is dedicated, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marked an incredibly important phase in the evolution of “fiery” prayer specifically in the monastery. This is the moment widely acknowledged by scholars to be the time when extra-liturgical meditation and prayer really became a focus of medi­eval monastic life and writing; and when the dimensions of individual excavation that accompanied such prayer began to be explicitly recorded by monastic writers. Increasingly over the eleventh century, monks and nuns began more regularly asking for tools to “stir up” the mind and affections for “fiery” prayer and meditation. The eleventh-century abbot Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, became famous for sending his brethren writings that he found effective in igniting his own mind to practice meditation and prayer.57 In fact, the word “meditation” was applied with more regularity to medi­eval texts in this period after Anselm popularized it as a term.58 The eleventhcentury abbot John of Fécamp likewise wrote a whole treatise designed to foster the emotion appropriate to meditation and prayer, called the Confessio theo­logica. In this work, he says: Out of the great avidity of my desire for you [God] I have applied myself to this little compilation of readings for your praise, in order that I might always have a short and handy word about God with me, and from the fire of reading it, as many times as I grow cool, I may be reignited in your love. For since we are placed in the midst of snares, we easily grow cold in our heavenly longing. And so we lack a constant defense, so that, after having been roused, we run back to you, our true and highest good, whenever we slide away...59

Here, John asserts that he wants to send his work out for the personal edification of his monastic readers, helping them individually to cultivate their practices of meditation and prayer. To further foster this newly intensified interest, the eleventh century saw the invention of a new kind of prayerbook, one that was filled with devotional texts to be read outside of the liturgical hours, small manu­scripts that could easily have been 57  Anselm’s letter to Matilda of Tuscany, in The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, trans./ed. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 1975), 90.

58  Thomas Bestul, “Meditatio/Meditation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medi­eval Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 158. 59  John of Fécamp, in Un maitre de la vie spirituelle de Xie siecle, ed. Jean Leclercq and Jean-Paul Bonnes (Paris: Vrin, 1946), 182.



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carried in a person’s pocket for occasional reference and private reading between the required hours of the divine office.60 Another new development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was that leading writers, like John and Anselm, began writing model prayers entirely in the first person. The first person “I” seen in eleventh- and twelfth-century texts aimed to provide a contemplative model so that any reader could speak the prayer and personalize it in his or her own devotional practice.61 These were texts that did “not so much express the inner thoughts of the author [my emphasis], but function[ed] rhetorically by constructing a speaking exemplum that an audience [could] respond to or even model its conduct upon.”62 The “I”s that dotted eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic texts for meditation and prayer were thus performative “I”s; they were the means by which the reader could speak and appropriate that text’s confessional words for themselves, better rousing oneself to embrace the contemplative method prescribed therein.63 While the action of communal liturgical prayer was regulated in the monastery in community, the extra-liturgical prayer texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries attempted to seize the internal devotion of one reader at a time, inviting the reader to speak along with the text provided in the small, individual prayer manu­scripts that were newly circulating. In this way, whether meditating and praying in public or in private, the reader could work to reform their own emotional palate, to feel as connected as possible to God in their own heart and with their own tears while externally performing pious actions. In this period, therefore, the new treatises attempting to regulate prayer and meditation did not just describe or prescribe a method for prayer to their readers passively; rather, they imposed it upon them, giving them individual books and first-person pronouns. Why was such self-examination and interior devotion more à la mode in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than it was in the earlier periods of medi­eval Christianity? One argument is that, by the eleventh century, Christianity had gotten to a place where Christians no longer needed to debate the fundamentals of Christian doctrine and the Christian God. By the Central Middle Ages, everyone had finally come to understand the basic orthodox doctrines of Christianity, so the experiential aspects of Christianity suddenly became more interesting for Christian practitioners to elaborate and explore.64 60  Jonathan Black, “The Divine Office and Private Devotion in the Latin West,” in The Liturgy of the Medi­eval Church, ed. Thomas Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medi­eval Institute, 2001), 60.

61  A. C. Spearing, Medi­eval Auto­graphies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

62  Thomas Bestul, “Self and Subjectivity in the Prayers and Meditations of Anselm of Canterbury,” in Saint Anselm: Bishop and Thinker: Papers Read at a Conference Held in the Catholic University of Lublin on 24–26 September 1996, ed. Roman Majeran and Edward Iwo Zielinski (Lublin: University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1999), 151. 63  McNamer, Affective Meditation, 67–73.

64  Niklaus Largier, “The Rhetoric of Mysticism: From Contemplative Practice to Aesthetic Experiment,” in Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1700, ed. Sarah Poor and Nigel Smith (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), 358–9 and 365–7.

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Christian spiritual exercises like prayer and meditation were suddenly up for deeper investigation once Christian belief was regulated and stable. As a result, monks and nuns were interested in moving beyond simple creedal statements in prayer and really probing the depths of their connection with God through meditative practice. Monks and nuns of this period often talked about their right “conversion” to God. Whereas in earlier centuries, such “conversion” would mean literally embracing Christianity as one’s religion, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries this practice came to signify a Christian’s inner discipline and focus on right Christian thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. The problem of “conversion” understandably became a hot topic in the monastic writings of this period because it was likely a very monastic problem: since monks and nuns prayed to God every day of their lives, eight times a day, they likely did not always feel acutely connected to their actions at all times. Sometimes their actions felt a little redundant and rote (“we easily grow cold in our heavenly longing,” John says above). Therefore, experiences of “conversion” could help these monks and nuns feel truly renewed and connected to their God, as if they were new, zealous converts discovering Christ for the first time, not monks and nuns spending yet another day going through the motions of prayer. And prayer and meditation could help these monastics to “convert” in this way, to go beyond simple confession and creed and feel deeper connections to God despite the regularity of their prayer practice.65 The most important part of Christian praxis in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was no longer that one believed, but rather how one believed; the training and preparation for regularly renewed belief was meditation and prayer.66 Spiritual progress in prayer was now not just about regular performance, but also about internal, emotional changes that occurred in the “inner chamber” of the monastic mind. This emphasis on proper “conversion,” and on the devotee’s proper engagement with God, led to a lot of self-examination and introspection in the prayer process. While priests and the men of the secular Church ministered to others and persecuted heretics in the vita activa, monks and nuns had the luxury of being deeply introspective and obsessed with their own spiritual formations in the vita contemplativa.67 Prayer and meditation texts and treatises held a mirror up to the devotee, reminding them of how much farther they needed to take their own spiritual practice.68 Augustine’s more introspective texts, like his Confessions and Soliloquies, became more popular than they ever had before in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries, since they were filled with the introspective tone that was newly sought in the period, popularized by writers like John of Fécamp and Anselm of Canterbury.69 And these eleventh- and twelfth-century medita65  Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), xiii, xv. 66  Bestul, “Meditatio,”157.

67  Clark, Compelling God, 63.

68  Ineke Van ‘t Spijker, Fictions of Inner Life: Religious Literature and the Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 235. 69  Mancia, Emotional Monasticism, 65–67.



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tions and prayers served as important models to more popular, widespread, individual prayer practices in later Christian periods.70 So, then, what did these eleventh- and twelfth-century writers advise? What were the ideal practices for right prayer, meditation, and contemplation for monks and nuns in this period? These are the questions we will ask in the next chapter.

70  Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medi­ eval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and C. J. Jones, Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medi­eval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Chapter 2

THE JOURNEY TO GOD THROUGH MEDITATION AND PRAYER ACCORDING TO ELEVENTH- AND TWELFTH-CENTURY MONASTIC THINKERS In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, monastic thinkers wrote about the processes of meditation and prayer in more depth and detail than Christians ever had before.1 Indeed, it was not really until the eleventh century that monks and nuns began to develop step-by-step guides for meditative ascent and contemplative prayer to God. With the professionalization of monasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries at places like the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, where there was a greater focus on building occasions for uninterrupted prayer, monks and nuns were able to really turn their attention to the ins and outs of their meditative practices.2 But these central medi­eval monastic writers did not invent the proverbial wheel by themselves. They built their ideas upon several centuries of writing that had come before, piecing together prescriptions from earlier monastic writers to create full-fledged programs for meditation and prayerful ascent for their monastic brethren. Moreover, busily applying their minds “to seek knowledge of hidden truth,”3 the evermore routine monastic prayer practice also likely brought forth a better understanding of how generally to best perform meditation. Practice, in other words, made perfect, and it also generated ideas about ideal models for prayer practice in the medi­eval monastery. The “zealous attention of the mind,” Augustinian prior Richard of St. Victor believed, allowed one to “break through obstructions” and “penetrate into hidden things” in devotion; thus, the attention of praxis itself enabled the envisioning of the ideal process of meditative ascent for Christians.4 In this chapter, we will examine these theories, recommendations, and prescriptions by monks and nuns of what the religious practitioner should ideally do while meditating and praying (as for what medi­eval practitioners actually experienced in prayer, see Chapter Three). In its most essential form, meditative monastic prayer practice in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was uplifting: it moved the practitioner from their lowly, sinful position upwards, towards divine, heavenly heights. Prayerful voices were “lifted,” “spiritual muscles” were “stretched,” sinners were “roused” from sloth.5 Meditation and 1  Amy Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 60. 2  For more on why there is an increased examination of prayer practices in this period, see chap. 1, and Rachel Fulton Brown, “Prayer,” in Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism, ed. Bernice M. Kaczynski (New York: Oxford, 2020), 319, 321, 326. 3  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1981), 68.

4  Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs and The Mystical Ark (Mahwah: Paulist, 1979), 7.

5  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, Prayer, Meditations (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1970), 98, 118.

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prayer were moving and dynamic, not static, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; when they were successful, they ascended.6 In this chapter, we will explore how medi­eval writers mapped out the strenuous climb towards God. This chapter begins by exploring the oldest sources of inspiration for monastics’ eleventh- and twelfth-century schemata for prayerful ascent, treatises that medi­eval monastics had built upon from before their time. Next, we will outline the varieties of prayerful ascent theorized in texts from the eleventh- and twelfth-century period. Finally, we will end by witnessing how such theories of ascent might have been enforced by diagrammatic and material tools for monastic meditative practice, specifically how they were encouraged in the structure of prayerbooks.

Early Precedents for Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Meditative and Prayerful Ascent

The idea that meditation and prayer aided the worshipper’s difficult ascent to God was not invented by eleventh- and twelfth-century monks and nuns. Since the late antique period, Christian thinkers had marveled over the fallen status of human nature, and wondered how it might be possible that sinners could fathom meditative or prayerful ascent to a God who was both transcendent and immanent.7 The idea that God was a being above the rest had its structural origins in pre-Christian Platonic thought, where passive individual souls regularly embarked upon vertical approaches toward the indivisible World’s Soul8; then, late antique Christian thinkers like Origen, Evagrius, Cassian, and Augustine took that Platonic model and adapted it for Christian prayerful and meditative purposes9; and finally, in the sixth-century, thinkers like Benedict of Nursia and Pseudo-Dionysius created prescriptive hierarchies in their texts which became foundational for monastic thinkers for the remainder of the Middle Ages. These early texts served as inspirations and models for eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic meditators, and helped them to create a blueprint for ascending Christian prayer. In some ways, an upward drive was a given thanks to Christian theo­logy: fundamentally, God was considered above in heaven while humans were below on earth. But it was the fourth-century ascetic John Cassian who explicitly made heaven the monastic telos, naming it as the goal for cenobites struggling towards God in prayer. In his Con­ ferences, outlining the principles of asceticism, Cassian aimed to create what he called 6  Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medi­eval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 43.

7  Julia A. Lamm, “A Guide to Christian Mysticism,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia A. Lamm (Hoboken: Wiley, 2012), 16. 8  Willemien Otten, “Platonism,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, 60–64.

9  Constant Mews, “Monastic Theo­logies, ca. 1050–1200,” The Cambridge History of Medi­eval Monasticism in the Latin West, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Alison Beach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 699.

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an “orderly way,” a prayerful route that served as a “spiritual and sublime tower.”10 The journey needed to be taken gradually upwards, one step at a time: [Start] off easily and gently so that, having been nursed…and been brought along little by little, [you] may mature and thus slowly and gradually mount from the depths to the heights. When… [you have] entered…into the gates of…that [which] is being approached [i.e., heaven], [you] will arrive directly and effortlessly at the inmost recesses and loftiest heights of perfection.11

Following the principles of eastern Christian ascetics, Cassian outlined a multi-level path of spiritual exploration that served as the basis of every prayer plan ascending to God that Christians made after him. First a Christian needed to experience purgation (i.e., to gain control of the flesh); only then could illumination (i.e., reveling in the Gospel) and union (i.e., marriage of the soul and God) happen. Cassian established that routines of prayer fostered the devotee’s movement through purgation towards illumination and union. The routines guaranteed what Cassian called “fiery prayer” (as described in Chapter One); and they also served as the basis for the “ladder” to God that would be further elaborated by the father of western monasticism (Benedict of Nursia) several centuries later. Augustine of Hippo described his own three-part journey to God in his autobio­ graphical work Confessions. Confessions tells the story of Augustine’s conversion, using it as a model for how anyone can move from depravity to union through prayer, and specifically noting the thought processes that a sinner should engage at each subsequent stage. Augustine details his spiritual journey through the “purgation” stage extensively, describing his own human frailties in the first nine books that he writes. Then, once he converts to Christianity in the narrative of his text, Augustine explains how he doesn’t simply convert and maintain his illumination consistently thereafter. Instead, Augustine explains that his ability to envision and feel close to God needed to be repeatedly, routinely maintained and strengthened. In the concluding four books of his Confessions, Augustine details the faculties required of the devotee to maintain closeness to God after purgation. In the first of these, in Book Ten of Confessions, Augustine discusses memory as an important faculty enabling illumination because it allows the devotee to reflect on their past and reject past sin. In Book Eleven, Augustine outlines his understanding of time to show how a devotee’s anticipation of the future is helpful in envisioning the divine telos for which they long. In Books Twelve and Thirteen, Augustine explains how a rational understanding of human will also better enables spiritual illumination. In this way, Augustine teaches his readers that the ideal journey of Christian faith moves from purgation to illumination to potential union (as Cassian recommended), but he further details a methodical process towards God by encouraging an active reflection on the past, a vision of the future, and an ignition of the will.12 10  Cassian, Conferences, 329.

11  Cassian, Conferences, 377.

12  Robert McMahon, Understanding Medi­eval Meditative Ascent (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 77–78.

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The works of Cassian and Augustine were read by monks and nuns living in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside the works of two sixth-century thinkers: Benedict and Pseudo-Dionysius.13 The Rule of Saint Benedict was a text that Benedict of Nursia wrote to regulate monastic life in the sixth century, and it became the most important rule book for coenobitic monasteries in the Middle Ages. In chapter seven of the Rule, Benedict established that all of the rules he outlined were ultimately useful in helping monastics to climb the “ladder of humility and discipline” towards heaven. The ladder image was based explicitly on Jacob’s ladder from Genesis (cf. Genesis 28:12),14 and, to Benedict, it undergirded every decision in the monastic environment: “That raised ladder is our life in the world, which, in humble hearts, should be hoisted by the Lord to heaven. For we say that the sides of the ladder are our body and soul, in which our divine calling has placed the various rungs of humility and discipline we must climb.”15 Benedict described the rungs of this ladder to his brethren in the Rule in parallel with the purgation-illumination-union stages discussed above: monks and nuns began their prayerful journeys in fear of God and moved on to learn to love God’s will and not their own, trying to conform to God’s own image and love as best they could. For this reason, the Rule claimed, monastic devotees needed to live under an abbot and the yoke of the discipline of the monastery (i.e., the will of others). Christians who did not live in community, or under an abbot, held themselves and their own wills in too high esteem, and would never reach God. In Benedict’s opinion, one “descend[ed from God] by exaltation and [only] ascend[ed to God] by humility…[only] if we humble our hearts will the Lord raise us to heaven.”16 The foundation of Benedict’s path to God therefore was strict obedience and discipline; he envisioned a prayerful life that was governed by rules, regulations, and humility. To Benedict, spiritual meditation, prayer, and vision could only happen in the structure of a monastic community with stringently-outlined practices of self-regulation. The journey to God needed to be a self-denying struggle. The theo­logian Dionysius the Areopagite (also referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius) was the second sixth-century thinker who was deeply influential to eleventh- and twelfthcentury monks and nuns. Pseudo-Dionysius, whose work was translated in the west in the Carolingian period, wrote a book called Mystical Theo­logy, which mapped a journey of ascent to a divine that was apophatic (i.e., unknown) rather than cataphatic (i.e., known, prescribed, and describable). Pseudo-Dionysius’ modeled journey to God was a negation of the kinds of prayerful ascents that had been outlined before by Chris13  For more on how these particular titles regularly appeared in monastic libraries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see for instance Geneviève Nortier, Les bibliothèques médiévales des abbayes bénédictines de Normandie: Fécamp, Le Bec, Le Mont Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, Jumièges, SaintWandrille, Saint-Ouen (Paris: Lethielleux, 1971).

14  This ladder also inspired John Climacus, an eastern monk, to write his own text called the Ladder of Divine Ascent. This text infiltrated the west through Italy in eleventh century Byzantium, see Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge (Paris: É� ditions Albin Michel S.A., 2000), 96. 15  Benedict of Nursia, Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Bruce Venarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 47. 16  Benedict of Nursia, Rule of Saint Benedict, 45–47.

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tian thinkers. It instead moved from perceptible, material things to conceptual, understandable things, then to things beyond perception and conceptualization (i.e., God). In this way, Pseudo-Dionysius’ program was explicitly a ladder to the unknown (unlike Benedict’s), moving from complexity to simplicity to hiddenness:17 it “lead up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture” and “into the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”18 In this version of a journey to God, the devotee was not expected to climb closer and closer to understanding God, but rather was expected to leave “behind everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and…towards union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.”19 Ascent to Pseudo-Dionysius was about abandoning the self and the ego and renouncing all; he admitted that the devotee could know nothing about what would be found in their prayerful ascent to God. Prayer was a struggle into the unknown, not a struggle ending in affirmation. Pseudo-Dionysius explained that “the fact is that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming.”20 Since God could not be understood, to ascend was not to ultimately experience enlightenment or illumination, but rather to ultimately experience darkness, to no longer be confined to what human beings were even capable of envisioning. Pseudo-Dionysius’ “hidden” God had a deep effect on the quality of the investigative, prayerful ascent prescribed five hundred years later, especially by the twelfth-century Cistercians and Victorines, as we will see in the next section; and it also further bolstered the eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic emphasis on humility, since it required sinners to admit their complete incapability of knowing or understanding the hidden God.

Programs of Monastic Meditative and Prayerful Ascent in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Eleventh- and twelfth-century monastics took the thoughts of these four thinkers and used them to shape their understanding of how best to meditate, pray, and struggle their way towards God. Monks and nuns in this period understood meditation to be the first phase of that journey, and prayer as the next, more advanced phase, the two-step “craft of making thoughts about God.”21 In this period, there were various routes (sometimes called “ductus”) taken to make such thoughts, meditative and prayerful paths that were outlined by various monastic thinkers. Each route, however dissimilar in its details, had a similar outline to the schema that were provided by Cassian, Augustine, Benedict, and Pseudo-Dionysius earlier in history: the journey towards God was an ascent of one kind or another.

17  Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 44. 18  Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (Mahwah: Paulist, 1987), 135. 19  Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 135. 20  Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 139. 21  Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 2.

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By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these routes for meditation and prayer became increasingly structured. Many argued that one needed to move from outside themselves to inside themselves (where the devotee found God hidden), their interiors being considered the “bedchamber of the soul,” as per the popular scriptural text the Song of Songs22; meditation and vision, in the words of Hildegard of Bingen, could not be found “by the ears of the outer self.”23 Additionally, meditation and prayer in the central Middle Ages was increasingly discussed as a process of ascent through “conversion” (conversio), a transformation from inexpert distraction on the part of the devotee to a more expert focus on God. Meditation was required for human beings who were far from heaven because it turned (literally conversio means to turn) human sinners towards God. To further emphasize these ideas, thinkers of the period regularly described the meditative journey as one from selfishness (loving oneself and one’s own desires) to selflessness (to loving God for God’s sake), being “emptied out of yourself…belonging to heavenly and not to human love.”24 The final stage of prayerful ascent was therefore an ultimate blurring of devotee’s individual will and God’s. Often called “contemplation,” “union,” or “vision,” this last stage was rarely achieved in this lifetime, and momentarily if at all—it was the stage guaranteed at the end of time, after death. The struggle towards God, then, was constant in the lives of men—it was never finished, it was never satisfied, it was never successful. In the words of Bernard of Clairvaux, “citizens [of heaven] do not need this ladder, but those in exile [i.e., on earth] do…[for] what need has someone who is already in possession of the throne of a ladder to reach it?”25 In the rest of this section, we will see the variety of ways that these core principles were emphasized and elaborated in the works of eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic writers. Guigo II

The most famous structured ascent towards God outlined in this period is The Ladder of Monks written by Guigo II, prior of the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse from 1174 to 1180 CE. To Guigo, there were four simple stages of spiritual ascent: reading (lectio), meditation (meditatio), prayer (oratio), and contemplation (contemplatio).26 Reading was characterized as the initial stage for beginners, the careful study of scripture that inspired meditation and ascent. The reading here referred to was the particular monastic process called lectio divina: the reading, rereading, and mental perseveration over scriptural words, stories, and ideas. The process of reading was, to Guigo, “like a grape that is put into the mouth [and] filled with many senses to feed the soul…. the soul begins to bite and chew upon this grape, as though putting it in a wine press, 22  Laura Diener, “Entering the Bedchamber of Your Soul: How Religious Women Learned the Art of Monastic Meditation,” in A Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Ronald Stansbury (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 348. 23  Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart (Mahwah: Paulist, 1990), 60.

24  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God,” in Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (Mahwah: Paulist, 1987), 195. 25  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Consideration,” in Selected Works (Mahwah: Paulist, 1987), 148–49.

26  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 67–68.

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while it stirs up its power of reasoning to ask what this precious purity may be and how it may be had.”27 The reading would direct the meditator towards God through repeated mastication, setting the meditator on the right path, as its meaning became clearer and clearer with every bite and taste of the biblical words and concepts. Stage two, to Guigo, was meditation, considered to be reading that was “concerned with inward understanding”28: it was less rational and more internalized, allowing the content of what was being read to “go to the heart of the matter,”29 a true digestion of the divine sweetness that was found on the higher rungs of the meditative ladder. Once knowledge of the divine was found rationally by reading and meditating, the sinner would realize that they could not “attain by [themselves] that sweetness of knowing and feeling for which it longs,”30 and thus would enter into prayer—the stage subsequent to meditation—begging for God’s intervening grace to help the sinner to obtain what they finally know they need: “the more I see you, the more I long to see you, no more from without (in the rind of the letter), but within (in the letter’s hidden meaning).”31 If lucky enough, God might grant the devotee the opportunity to “taste the joy of everlasting sweetness” by holding the mind “above itself” in contemplation,32 allowing the sinner to become “wholly spiritual,” “slak[ing] its thirst”33 and “inebriat[ing] the thirsting soul with the dew of heavenly sweetness.”34 But, more likely than not, such an opportunity would be reserved for a devotee after they had reached heaven, after death. In Guigo’s conception, then, meditation and prayer were the process of recentreing God in a devotee’s life. The process lifted the monk or nun from earth to heaven, ascending from novice level (reading, meditation), where one learned and internalized what one was lacking, to more sophisticated devotion (prayer and contemplation), that potentially obtained the divine. If God’s majesty was high above, in heaven, and the sinner’s depravity belonged in the abyss of turpitude, the shape of the meditative process would naturally be a ladder, a climb upwards towards God. Anselm of Canterbury

The striving self-examination that Guigo II modelled for his fellow eleventh- and twelfthcentury monks was embraced by others as well, like the proto-scholastic theo­logian, prior, abbot, and archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (1033/1034–1109 CE). The map of meditative ascent in Anselm’s work was not as explicit as it was in Guigo’s. Guigo’s Ladder of Monks was essentially a how-to treatise on monastic meditation, and Anselm’s 27  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 69. 28  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 80. 29  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 70. 30  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 73

31  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 73. 32  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 68. 33  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 74

34  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 79.

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relevant works were more often themselves prayers and meditations, rather than didactic manuals. In other words, Anselm’s writings actually perform and model the kind of meditative ascent that Guigo advised, with Anselm’s prayers serving as a kind of script for meditation for practitioners. Anselm’s Proslogion (ca. 1077–1078 CE) famously makes the case for the onto­logical proof for the existence of God, arguing that God existed precisely because he was a being than which nothing greater could be thought. It initially seems, then, like Anselm’s is not a work explicating meditative ascent; but the structure in which Anselm presents his argument is an ascending one that implicitly maps out an upward-lifting journey to God. Anselm says in direct address to God in the book, “I am trying to make my way to your height, for my understanding is in no way equal to that”35: and indeed, the book sketches out a program striving towards the divine. The first chapter of the Proslogion, for instance, describes the devotee’s initial wretchedness (the “purgation” stage, or the lowest rung of the ladder, in the conception of other thinkers); and each subsequent chapter slowly constructs a mounting climb towards God until God is approached and described in cataphatic terms: he is proclaimed to be every possible good, including existence, and to be the greatest thing of which a human could possibly conceive. The Proslogion therefore uses the ascendant structure with the movement from exterior to interior that came to characterize eleventh- and twelfth-century prayer treatises in order to construct its vision of God. To Anselm, one first tastes God outside oneself (extra se); then within oneself (intra se); then in his full glory, above oneself (supra se).36 In this way, Anselm’s Proslogion allows the reader to raise his mind up to God as they read the work, following along in a “progressive conquest of innerness with the perspective of the soul’s self-knowledge to seek God by faith, or rather, a journey of the mind into God (itinerarium mentis ad Deum).”37 Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations (ca. 1070–1080 CE) are a bit less systematic than the Proslogion, in part because the prayers are not through-composed treatises but rather momentary instigations of reading and meditation. The prayers and meditations are useful in revving up the reader towards an initial stage of purgation: they encourage sighing, hungering, and desiring God, and they help to situate the reader at the very beginning of the meditative process. They also are empathetic to the plight of the devotee in need of purgation: the prayers admit to knowing the difficult process ahead: I cannot fly from myself, nor can I look at myself, for I cannot bear myself. But see, it is worse still if I do not look at myself; for then I am deceived about myself. O too heavy weight of anguish. If I look within myself, I cannot bear myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself. If I consider myself, what I see terrifies me; if I do not con-

35  Anselm, Proslogion, in The Prayers and Meditations of Anselm of Canterbury, ed./trans. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 1975), 244. 36  McMahon, Meditative Ascent, 60.

37  Paolo Martines, “Meditation According to Anselm of Canterbury,” Patristica et Mediaevalia, 40 (2019): 17–27 at 19.

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sider myself, I fall to my damnation. If I look at myself, it is an intolerable horror; if I do not look at myself, death is unavoidable.38

Here, Anselm commiserates with the devotee, but also mandates a look inside; he prescribes conversion to his readers, and he encourages that they start the meditative process with biblical reading (much like Guigo): “Chew the honeycomb of his words, suck their flavor which is sweeter than sap, swallow their wholesome sweetness. Chew by thinking, suck by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing. Be glad to chew, be thankful to suck, rejoice to swallow.”39 If they begin the steps towards proper meditation and prayer, ascent will come; Anselm says: “I am sure that if I give thanks, love, and live to your glory, through you I shall at last come to that good.”40 Novices can become experts and can find God if they begin little by little, prayer by prayer, trying to turn their sinfulness around. Elisabeth of Schönau agrees with Anselm on this front: “when all impurity has been purged, these things lift up the eyes of the heart: meditation of the marvellous essence of God, examination of pure truth, clean and strong prayer, joyful praise, and burning desire for God.”41 Anselm’s prayers show, then, that sometimes the treatises for meditation and prayer in this period were long, outlining the complete process; and sometimes they were bite-size, useful for igniting prayer and meditation in a moment. Either way, though, they depicted a hard road ahead for any aspiring devotee. The Cistercians and the Victorines

Determined to be even more ascetic and spiritually-engaged than the orders that had come before them, numbers of the reforming Cistercian order of monks newly-emerged in the twelfth century devoted themselves to a prayer process wholly characterized by strife in meditation and prayer. The most famous member of their order, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153 CE), called this meditative process “consideration”: “Climb, if you can, to a still loftier thought and God will be exalted.”42 How to perform such a climb was something Bernard and his fellow Cistercians were actively interested in mapping out throughout their devotional writings. Cistercians emphasized and ordered their devotional dynamics and prescriptions for ascent to God more than monks had ever done before.43 In one of his earliest treatises, On the Steps of Humility and Pride, Bernard of Clairvaux announced, “I don’t want to be immediately at the top; I want to advance step by step.”44 There was something even more valuable in the progressive ascent towards God to Cistercian minds: starting at the bottom and moving upwards performed a kind of ascetical purification of the 38  Anselm, Prayers, 130.

39  Anselm, Prayers, 230. 40  Anselm, Prayers, 104.

41  Elisabeth of Schonau, The Complete Works, trans. Anne Clark (Mahwah: Paulist, 2000), 169.

42  Bernard, “On Consideration,” in Selected Works, 161.

43  Bernard McGinn, The Great Cistercian Mystics: A History (New York: Herder and Herder, 2018), 15, 42. 44  McGinn, The Great Cistercian Mystics, 42.

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devotee, in addition to promising illumination and (eventually) union.45 The purgation stage was a necessary cleansing that Cistercians reveled in. Bernard believed that he learned the truth and progressed towards God because he was raised up by confession,46 by the cleansing of admitting his wrongs; to him, “in these steps of our descent, you will perhaps find steps up.”47 When a sinner himself became aware that their own soul did not want to hear the truth of God, that was the moment when that sinner could point to evils within, and, by pointing, propel themself upwards; it was then that they could begin to “gaze upward through the window.”48 That part of the struggle to God, in Bernard’s opinion, was the most valuable. The ascending direction of meditative practice promoted by Cistercian thinkers specifically alluded to the journey of Christ, who at the end of his life ascended back from human life to his divine father. William of St. Thierry describes the soul as being able only to venture in the direction that Christ has already traveled: “The soul attains to the holy place where none may stand or take another step, except he [Christ] who was bare footed, having loosed the shoe strings of all fleshly hinderances.” 49 The catch was, however, that because the path was Christ’s, prayer could only really begin when a devotee’s soul had become as pure as Christ himself: “the soul may enter only with her affections clean and pure.”50 Because being as pure as Christ was impossible for a sinful human, such purification could ultimately only be granted by means of God’s grace, when God extended a “hand which will lift us up” and “strengthens our trembling knees.”51 Only then, with God’s help, might the monastic practitioner, like Christ, deign to have intimate knowledge of God. Bernard of Clairvaux famously describes this aided ascent as a progressive kiss in his sermons on the Song of Songs. The devotee longs to kiss Christ on the mouth, but he cannot begin there immediately; he must get there gradually instead: First, we cast ourselves at his feet and deplore before God who made us the evil we have done. Secondly, we reach out for the hand which will lift us up, which will strengthen our trembling knees. Last, when we have obtained that, with many prayers and tears, then perhaps we shall dare to lift our faces to the mouth which is so divinely beautiful, fearing and trembling, not only to gaze on it, but even to kiss it.52

The climb towards true intimacy with Christ—a kiss on the mouth—is a progressive ascent, aided by God’s grace, in the mind of Cistercian thinkers. This is Bernard of Clairvaux’s big provocation, in his famous sermon 3 on the Song of Songs: “I am attempting to discover if any of you has been privileged to say from his heart: ‘Let him 45  McGinn, The Great Cistercian Mystics, 44.

46  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On the Steps of Humility and Pride,” in Selected Works, 113. 47  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On the Steps of Humility and Pride,” 143.

48  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Conversion,” 84.

49  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 128. 50  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 116.

51  Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermons,” in Selected Works, 223.

52  Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermons,” in Selected Works, 223.

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kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.’”53 Have any of his brethren been lucky and pure enough to really see God intimately, as Christ did, Bernard asks? If they haven’t, Bernard advises, they shouldn’t go stampeding for the mouth, but should instead move step by step, “beginning by kissing the feet,” “advanc[ing] by degrees,” slowly making their way upwards on the path towards God. That slow and steady method was the only advisable way to pray. “Advancing by degrees” was also a method embraced at the Abbey of St. Victor outside of Paris in the twelfth century. The Augustinian regular canons who lived there pushed meditation and prayer practices to become even more structured and systematic than they had been previously, even to Cistercian writers. At St. Victor, a major centre for the study and composition of biblical exegesis, several canons developed hierarchical systems concerning meditation and prayer alongside their exegetical, theo­logical, and philosophical writings. Twelfth-century prior Richard of St. Victor, for instance, defined meditation in Benjamin Minor as an “eager exertion of the mind which affectionately tries to investigate something.” But Richard also saw the process of meditative ascent as a kind of methodical scientific experiment, as more rationally-guided than the thinkers described above had before. To Richard, meditation was focused thinking and exploration of the purpose (utilitas), inner structure (ratio), and ultimately the truth (contemplatio) of the divine. In his view, meditation drew on senses and imagination in the first stage (a process which he called cogitatio), then reason and intelligence in the second (meditatio), and finally willed contemplatio in the final stage. Here, cogitation is “accustomed to relax at almost every moment,” without restraint or attention or direction; meditation is more conscious, arduous, human-motivated, and “zealously attentive,” a hard-fought wresting of the soul from its wandering; contemplation is trusting of the impulses that God’s grace supplies.54 Richard said that “whereas cogitatio is like crawling on the floor and meditatio like walking and sometimes running, contemplatio is comparable to a free flight and a view from above, which sees the whole landscape at once whereas the meditating person has to wander on the surface of the earth from one point to the other discriminating and collecting the different parts and dimensions of the meditated object.”55 Richard therefore saw contemplation as “superior” to the other two, being more infused with divine grace; but he is also considered it an “intellectual watchtower,”56 a “raising up of the mind above activity when human understanding is divinely illuminated…[a] knowledge…which it is [in]capable of acquiring by any activity of its own.”57 Meditative and prayerful ascent in the hands of the canons of St. Victor became an ever more rigorous investigation and process of knowledge acquisition, as well as a process of spiritual growth. The struggle towards God, in their hands, was more structured and gradated, but also more rational and intellectual.

53  Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermons 3,” Sermons on the Song of Songs, trans. Killian Walsh, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971), 16. 54  Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, 157, 153, 155.

55  Karl Baier, “Meditation and Contemplation,” 4; Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, 407. 56  Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, 235. 57  Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, 314.

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Like Richard, Hugh of St. Victor, perhaps the most famous theo­logian to emerge from the abbey of St. Victor, saw the stages of the soul’s ascent to God as more intellectual as well, moving from action (in reading), to affection (in meditation), to understanding (in contemplation).58 Hugh transformed the categories provided by Guigo II into a progression with a more intellectual bent, one that ran parallel to the three-fold understanding of scripture embraced by the Victorines.59 In his Didascalicon, Hugh explains: Meditation is sustained thought along planned lines: it prudently investigates the cause and the source, the manner and the utility of the thing. Meditation takes its start from reading’s rules or precepts. For it delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those causes of things, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving nothing doubtful, nothing obscure…there are three kinds of meditation: one consists in a consideration of morals, the second in a scrutiny of the commandments, and the third in an investigation of divine works.60

Here, one can see in Hugh’s language that “investigation” is key for him as it was for Richard; meditation is not just about self-knowledge, but a wider-ranging, reasondirected enquiry, an ascent to the highest cognitive faculties. This is what distinguished Hugh’s method from Guigo’s, its explicit connection to reason—for Hugh, prayer is a kind of free-flowing narration; but then there is also more directed and “planned” meditation, one that begins in reason and ends in love.61 The process of the ascent to God in the hands of the Victorines became more academic, perhaps suitable for the twelfthcentury moment before the birth of scholasticism and the universities. Despite their commitment to rational ordering, however, Victorine plans for meditation were not coldly analytical; meditative texts were also infused with human emotion and the kinds of human frailties and insecurities seen earlier in Anselm and Guigo’s writings. Richard of St. Victor’s On the Four Degrees of Violent Love, for example, “thirsts” for God acutely, more than he does in his analytical theo­logical texts that discuss meditation (like Benjamin Minor). Even Richard’s definition of meditation in On the Four Degrees is more wounded and visceral than the analytical definitions he gave in Benja­ min Minor: Richard says that meditation “penetrates one’s mind to the core of his being and transfixes his feelings so much that he is completely incapable of containing or concealing or boiling of his desire.” This vision of a “shattered mind” is much more evident of practiced human insecurity than the more amorphous, unpracticed ideas contained in Benjamin Minor.62 Moreover, wretchedness characterizes the first stage of Richard’s plan of mystical ascent, the stage where the sinner is the most separate from his God. 58  Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1996), 375, 388. 59  Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 120.

60  Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book,” 61. 61  Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book,” 76.

62  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” in On Love: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, and Godfrey of St. Victor, ed. Hugh Feiss (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 277.

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Richard’s second stage is a directed “binding,” where the sinner “thirsts towards God” in a more rapt way and begins to align his desires with God’s; his third stage is a moment of “jubilation,” where the sinner “forgets external things and passes into God,” incapable of doing external things any longer, becoming more unified with the divine; and his fourth and final stage is full “compassion,” when the sinner “thirsts in accordance with God” and achieves a version of union that is “insatiable.”63 To further clarify his meditative ascent process in On the Four Degrees, Richard uses the metaphor of a cold iron cast into a fire: “without a doubt it first appears as black as it is cold. But after it has spent some time amidst the flames, little by little it becomes hot, and little by little it lays aside its blackness.”64 This is Richard’s affecting description of the struggle towards God: a sinner starts the process as cold and black, but then, thrust into the flames of divine love, the heat of meditation and God’s grace starts to transform the devotee. As intellectual as he might be elsewhere, Richard really feels the fight to ascend in On the Four Degrees. Word choice alone indicates that in this text Richard is actively acknowledging the emotional realities of ascent: the novice sinner is asked to “boil” his desire,65 to “languish” in love and become “weak” with “ardent” desire,66 to acquire “burning and seething…and fiery love.” 67 The attention to the misery of “human feelings,”68 the process of their “soften[ing]” and “liquifi[cation]” so they can be transfigured and shaped by the divine will,69 and the hopeful longing for the ultimate “consummation of love,”70 allows the text to read more like a circumspect and empathetic manual than the more rational schematizations by Richard and Hugh outlined above. In this text, Richard becomes a voice closer to Anselm or Guigo’s than he does in his other texts, while still retaining a rigid order akin to the other Cistercians and Victorines: the ascent to God, in his mind, is indeed a struggle when practiced, no matter what he prescribes in his other more theoretical works.

The Ascent to God as Encouraged by a Medi­eval Prayerbook: The Case of the Eleventh-Century Manu­script BnF ms. lat. 13593

Anselm’s prayers, Richard’s treatises, and Guigo’s manual all advised their readers on the medi­eval monastic meditative and prayer processes explicitly. But sometimes it was not literal prescriptions for meditation that inspired and taught monks and nuns how to struggle towards God; sometimes practices of ascent were encouraged by prayerbooks, themselves tools structured to instigate meditative and prayerful ascent among monas63  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 282.

64  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 292. 65  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 276. 66  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 280.

67  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 275, 276. 68  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 282. 69  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 293. 70  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 296.

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tic audiences. Since the Carolingian period, monasteries had produced libelli precum, prayer collections often appended to psalters, intended to serve as scripts for both public liturgical rituals and private prayer.71 The libelli often had a regular format, providing the psalm text for the reader to meditate upon so that they might begin their contemplative ascent with a kind of self-examination grounded in an authority, and then move on to shorter prayers when they were ready.72 Prayers like Anselm of Canterbury’s started to be gathered in prayer collections in the late eleventh century, varying the libelli formats so that even when the psalms per se were not provided in these new books of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, other texts for meditation were usually included, to give the prayers instructive context, inter-textual flavour, or scripts to guide monastic meditation.73 Sometimes these prayer collections were even organized so that monks could use the texts to guide a structured ascent, from lectio to meditatio to oratio to contempla­ tio, progressing in their meditative progress over days, years, or lifetimes. One such collection encouraging a struggle towards God is the eleventh-century manu­script Paris, BnF MS lat. 13593 (which I will hereafter call “Paris 13593”).74 Measuring no bigger than a human hand at 16.5 cm × 10.9 cm (6.5 × 4.29 inches), and likely from the Norman monastery of Bec, Paris 13593 is a through-composed compilation of texts for the reclinationum anime, as the rubric on fol. 1v of the collection announces. A single hand penned the texts from the first to the last folio, with no quires or pages added later at the end of the book. The codex begins with a series of quotes from the Church Fathers explaining humans’ sinful condition and the merits of contrition (fols 1v–39v). The book then presents several prayers for the reader which aim to put words to a process of confession and contrition (fols 40r–51v). Then, in a twist unprecedented in early prayer manu­scripts, the manu­script supplies several extensive devotional diagrams made to summarize and schematize the teachings of the Fathers and the prayers that precede them (fols 52r–54r).75 By the time the manu­script concludes, capping off with a short prayer to the cross and a neumated hymn (both on fol. 54v), Paris 13593 has presented a wide variety of approaches to divine contemplation. Patristic prose, prayer, visual schemas, and song all combine and re-combine in the manu­script to aid the reader in his understanding and performance of the contemplative process that was far from perfunctory. 71  Susan Boynton, “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters,” Speculum 82 (2007): 895–931. 72  Bestul, “Mediatio/Meditation,” 157–66.

73  Thomas H. Bestul, “The Collection of Private Prayers in the ‘Portiforium’ of Wulfstan of Worcester and the ‘Orationes Sive Meditationes’ of Anselm of Canterbury,” in Les mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe-XIIe siècles, ed. Jean Pouilloux (Le Bec-Hellouin: CNRS, 1984), 355–64.

74  Paris, BnF MS lat. 13593 has remained unpublished and unexamined in our modern era, save Lauren Mancia, “Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manu­script: A Case Study of Paris, BnF, MS lat. 13593,” in Boundaries in the Medi­eval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, eds Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 161–85. 75  These diagrams, to my knowledge, appear in no other surviving medi­eval codex.

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The order of the text types in Paris 13593 is by no means random; in fact, each builds upon the other sequentially in such a way as to foster a prayerful ascent towards the divine. The first section—a collection of quotes from the Fathers—is prescriptive. It speaks to the reader in the second or third person, serving as a collection of maxims on the merits of contrition and the ultimate promise of salvation. The second section of the manu­script is a series of five first-person prayers: the first asks for the courage required to inform a subsequent confession before the altar (fol. 40r); the next four are more emotive, filled with longing for the divine and admitting to the inadequacy of the sinner in the face of God (fols 40r–51v). This prayer section of the manu­script acts on the patristic readings, providing model language for the reader to use to perform the very contrition prescribed by the Fathers. The third section of the manu­script then moves beyond language, distilling the prescriptions and prayers into concept diagrams that could fuel meditation (Figure 1). The diagrams weave the Fathers’ warnings with the promises and feelings of contrition accomplished by the prayers, forming schema that could be used to internalize and remember these contemplative lessons.76 The summary nature of the charts also works as a digest, an overview propelling the reader towards the ultimate fruit of contemplation, a vision of God. The final section of the manu­script provides a hint of this vision in two ways: first, with a vision of the cross in the Versus in laude sanctae crucis, and, next, with a piece of heavenly song (the neumated Dona nobis domine sempiternam requiem). The ordering of these texts in Paris 13593 thus creates a kind of contemplative climb, one that starts with intellectual prescriptions, moves on to emotional prayers, then condenses memorable, meditatable concepts, and finally suggests the salvific, transcendent end to such labour. It models a struggle towards God. The model of ascent provided by the ordering of texts in Paris 13593 simultaneously accords with several extant medi­eval models of prayerful ascent in use in the manu­ script’s own time: a movement from lectio to meditatio to oratio to contemplatio.77 This process aligns well with the presentation of texts in Paris 13593, whose readers start with the Church Fathers (lectio), move on to confessional practice in the first prayer (meditatio), then to prayers (oratio), and finally to the heavenly, song-filled vision of the cross (contemplatio). The ordering also provides an Anselmian move from exterior understanding (intelligere) to interior feeling (sentire) in one’s contemplation of God: Paris 13593 transitions from patristic prescriptions (understanding) to affective prayers (feeling). The charts at the end of the manu­script provide a “mnemonic anchor for ascent,”78 the kind of aide-mémoire that Mary Carruthers has explored as essential to the process of medi­eval contemplation.79 While most of the Paris manu­script’s devotional diagrams work to reiterate the different types of sin and contrition in accordance with the rest of 76  The use of such charts as mnemonic devices in the monastery is discussed extensively in Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 11–12. 77  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 68.

78  Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81 (2006), 711. 79  Carruthers, The Craft of Thought.

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Figure 1: Eleventh-century prayer manu­script from the monastery of Bec in France. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 13593, fol. 54v. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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the book’s texts, contemplative ascent is a theme made explicit in the unique final chart of the codex (the bottom, zig-zag image on Figure 1). The chart serves as the ultimate summary point for all of the synoptic diagrams, and also for the entire manu­script itself: a singular example from its time, it presents a visual ladder, ascending towards a vision of God. The chart works as a twisting scaffold, itself moving from the bottom of the folio (deum audiendo) to the top of the folio (eius visione perfrui), causing the reader’s eyes to zig-zag up the page as if moving up the rungs prescribed towards the heavenly vision: Deum audiendo / cognoscere debemus / cognoscendo / amare / amando / sequi / sequendo / adipisci / adipiscendo / eius visione perfrui (“We need to hear God / in order to know him / we need to know God / in order to love him / we need to love God /in order to follow him / we need to follow God /in order to attain him / we need to attain God / in order to enjoy his vision”).80 The ladder here works as a visual representation of the Latin rhetorical technique of gradatio. As each Latin phrase builds on the next (cognoscere, cognoscendo; amare, amando; sequi, sequendo, etc.), the diagram visually reflects this steady gradation; it is not a direct, vertical ladder, but it moves up as if taking switchbacks on a mountain path. Spiritual ascent, it argues, is not a straight shot, but a layering of complexity, whose higher levels reiterate the lower levels they are predicated upon in a more complex way. At the top of the chart, marking the end of the ascent, is a small sign of the cross in red. The sign, on the one hand, is punctuation, helping the reader to know to read the chart from bottom to top, indicating that this top corner is the end of the ladder, not the beginning. But, on the other hand, the cross stands for the vision of God attained at the top of this ladder in heaven and it matches the small red cross that prefaces the Versus in laude sanctae crucis that concludes the manu­script on the next folio. With the visual marker of this small red cross, then, the manu­script seems to suggest that the versus picks up where the ladder leaves off: it is a glimpse of the reader’s eventual vision of God after death. Moreover, the ladder can also be read as a synopsis of the process of ascent in the entirety of Paris 13593. The quotations from the Fathers (fols 1r–39v), a call to God in the third person, align with the bottom rung of the ladder (i.e., “[we] need to hear God / [in order] to know him”). The confession of sins (fol. 40r) aligns with the second rung, in an effort to understand God’s precepts (i.e., “[we] need to know him / [in order] to love him”). God’s love having been ignited thanks to confession, the following series of prayers (fols 40r–51v) align with the third rung of the ladder (i.e., “[we] need to love him / [in order] to follow him”). The subsequent series of charts (fols 52r–54r) are themselves routes one must “follow” (i.e., “[we] need to follow him / [in order] to attain him”). Finally, the prayer to the cross (fol. 54v) serves as a sign of ultimate vision, as already suggested (i.e., “[we] need to attain him / [in order] to enjoy his vision”). The cross in this reading thus becomes the crowning ending to the manu­script: it is the sign 80  I have translated these as gerundives here. Alternatively, we could take the verbs as active infinitives, and the translation would then be: “by hearing God, we get to know him; by knowing God, we get to love him; by loving God, we get to follow him; by following God, we get to attain him; by attaining God, we get to enjoy his vision.”

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that, after reading, confession, prayer, and contemplation, will give the requiem in and visione of God. While we will talk more about how manu­scripts and other artistic media in the monastery corroborated, encouraged, and extended practices of meditation in Chapter Four, we can see here how closely certain textual media in the monastery aligned with the writing on meditation and prayer of its own time. Thanks to manu­scripts like Paris 13593, monks and nuns could follow the popular models of meditative and prayerful ascent without even reading the important theories of ascent of their day. Prayer manu­ scripts encouraged a move from reading to meditation to prayer to contemplation, even for monks and nuns who had no interest, ability, or access to the works of Guigo, Anselm, Hugh, Richard, or Bernard. The ascent to God was thus encouraged and mapped as the ideal for monastic devotees in many different ways in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Conclusion: The Incompleteness of “Ascent,” the Need for Humility, and the Potential Source of the Human Struggle Towards God

In the years following the twelfth century, monastic programs of ascent became even more ordered and systematic, following in the path of the Victorines. In the thirteenth century, Franciscan friar St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium in mentis Deum (The Mind’s Journey into God) put forward six stages of ascent, a journey towards God paralleling the six days of active creation. Benedictine nun Gertrude the Great’s Spiritual Exercises likewise put forward seven stages, paralleling the seven days of creation. Each program of ascent put forward by each monastic thinker in the later Middle Ages maintained a hopefulness that such patterns and stages would work. But they also regularly simultaneously acknowledged the fact that union was rarely achieved by humans in their lifetime. If union with God was rarely achieved, one might ask: what was the point of these models? Was it simply that the journey was more important than the destination? Or was something else going on here? This caveat—that union was rarely achieved, that God was rarely seen by humans in their lifetime—makes it clear that monks and nuns rarely got very far along the paths of the prescribed and idealized models discussed above. Indeed, these programs of ascent each required an awareness on the part of every monastic meditator that deep-seated humility was more likely achieved than a vision of God. Goscelin of St. Bertin, following St. Benedict and many others, regularly reminded his readers that progress towards God, precisely because God was never “seen” or achieved in this lifetime, was merely “progress in humility.”81 Guigo II also insisted that praise for God was only assured when humility was achieved: “God is exalted” only when “the heart abases itself.”82 William of St. Thierry similarly emphasized humility as the key ingredient in the process of his ascent to God: 81  Goscelin of St. Bertin, Goscelin of St. Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, ed./ trans. Monika Otter (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 124. 82  Guigo II, Ladder of Monks, 73.

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As long as I continue sometimes to accede unthinkingly to certain small suggestions of my own superiority, and fail to shake myself free of them with sufficient speed when they are offered me, then I know quite well that I am not really humble. There is another sort of humility—namely, the knowledge of oneself. In that, if I am judged according to what I know about myself, it is, as they say, all up to me, and my appearance before [God’s] just tribunal is ill-starred…for my inward gaze turns so often to the foulness of my sins (even when I do not want to think of them and am intent on better things) that I detest myself because of it.83

Ascent required and resulted in humility to the thinkers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in part because that’s all that humans could be guaranteed: the sinfulness, frailty, and inadequacy of humans bred humility instead of vision. John Cassian acknowledged that it was only from the deprivation (privatione) of humility that one obtained “discernment.”84 Bernard described “humility [as] a virtue by which one recognizes one’s own unworthiness because one really knows one’s self.”85 A state of humility was the key to any spiritual ascent being deemed “successful” particularly because it followed in the steps of the crucified Christ, the chief monastic exemplar of a humble servant.86 Obediently, Christ submitted to his death in accordance with the will of God the Father (not his own), and (as a result) ultimately rose to heaven because of this humility. Likewise, monks and nuns were expected to submit to the will of their God in order to achieve the heavenly kingdom after they died. Richard of St. Victor, in his On the Four Degrees of Violent Love (ca. 1170), described Christ as an ideal model for the monastic devotee precisely because of this: if a monastic devotee, like Christ, imagined himself without his own will, as a slave to God, only then “does the soul in this state easily adapt itself to every wish of the divine will…just as a liquified metal easily flows down into whatever passage is open to it…thus the soul in this state voluntarily humbles itself to every act of obedience and bends itself freely to every humiliation according to divine arrangement.”87 Monastic authors in this period thus dwelled more on the fact that humans were inadequate to the task of divine contemplation—to the task of journeying to God—than they reported experiences of divine vision. They remained constantly pessimistic that human practitioners were up for this challenge: human devotees were constantly using their own pride to cover their shameful sins, and thus moving in the opposite direction than they should, away from humility and from God. As Bernard of Clairvaux admits in On Loving God: “Our strength is insufficient…those who struggle on are exhausted by the length of the roads and the uselessness of their efforts...If they would only be content

83  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 135.

84  Cassian, Conferences, Conference 2.

85  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On the Steps of Humility and Pride,” in Selected Works, 103.

86  Dominique Iogna-Prat, Agni immaculati: Recherches sur les sources hagio­graphiques relatives à Saint Maieul de Cluny, 954–994 (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 119, 329. 87  Richard of St. Victor, “On the Four Degrees,” 293.

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with reaching it all in thought and not insist on experiencing it!”88 The idealized models contained in this chapter were thus aspirational, but rarely, if ever, achieved. This, it seems, is the fatal flaw of the models of idealized ascent from the eleventhand twelfth-century monastery. The monastic models were likely understood and yet not experienced with any regularity. If monks and nuns recounted experiences and not ideal ascents, they would have more likely described see-saws, or slides, rather than ladders. The question then remains: what was the monastic experience of meditation, as opposed to the monastic meditative ideal? If the ascents described in this chapter were the dream contours of the monastic struggle towards God, what were the lived realities of monks or nuns who practiced meditation and prayer regularly? How did they cope with the failure and inadequacy more regularly encountered on their journeys towards God? How did they not get discouraged? These are the topics of our next chapter.

88  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God,” in Selected Works, 190.

Chapter 3

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE THE EXPERIENCE OF MONASTIC MEDITATION AND PRAYER IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

In the last chapter, we explored the way that medi­eval monastic thinkers under-

stood the ideal process of meditation and prayer. But, in practice, did monks and nuns really engage in straightforward, progressive ascents towards God through prayer and meditation? How did medi­eval monks and nuns actually experience their meditative and prayerful efforts in their lives? When considering the category of religious “experience,” many medi­evalists and scholars of religion reach directly for their collections of late medi­eval mystical writings, equating religious “experience” with ecstatic union, rapture, and mystical “vision.”1 Many deem ineffability and passivity to be the only signs of “genuine” religious experience, since this quality was particularly important to William James, who famously described “religious experience” as an encounter with the divine that happens to a subject, rather than one instigated by them. While James’ idea does reflect the medi­ eval Christian notion of grace (which medi­eval monastics thought was bestowed upon a devotee as an unsolicited gift from God), it also exposes a bias against the cultivation and instigation of religious experiences—a bias that seems to have infiltrated modern scholarship as well.2 The regulated and prescribed nature of the medi­eval liturgy, for instance, or other devotional celebrations externally “imposed” by the medi­eval Church, are regularly seen by scholars as a kind of institutional mind control (as opposed to spontaneous experience) of the devotee.3 Moreover, with a few key exceptions, those authorities doing the prescribing of religious practice and the writing of devotional scripts in medi­eval society—clerics, theo­logians, and, most important for our purposes, abbots and monks—are questioned as “experiencers” of religion themselves. Part of this is because abbots and monks are often depicted by scholars as manipulative authoritarians, more interested in controlling their audiences with their regulations than feeling authentically connected to their own ideas.4 But it is also because, with the influence of social and cultural history, medi­eval historians often wrongly separate sources for reli1  See, for instance, Anita Obermeier and Rebecca Kennison, “The Privileging of Visio over Vox in the Mystical Experiences of Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc,” Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997): 137–67, or Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism,” Spiritus (2001): 156–71.

2  For more on all this, see the Introduction; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1994). 3  See, for instance, G. Althoff, Rules and Rituals in Medi­eval Power Games (Turnhout: Brill, 2020).

4  See, for instance, Talal Asad, “On Ritual and Discipline in Medi­eval Christian Monasticism,” Economy and Society 16 (1987): 159–203, or the historio­graphy expertly refuted in Isabelle Cochelin, “Community and Customs: Obedience or Agency?” in Oboedientia: Zu Formen und

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gious “experience” from theo­logical productions of the institutional Church, mischaracterizing experience as the domain of extra-institutional individuals in medi­eval society,5 and leading to a “dichotomous still-life picture with often inherently judgmental or devaluative underpinnings.”6 The religious experiences of powerful orthodox Benedictine abbots of the eleventh and twelfth centuries have remained especially neglected by secular scholars, who are often unwilling to see these elite clergymen as anything other than power-hungry dogmatic elites.7 The study of monastic devotional experience in the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been deeply affected by all of these historio­graphical forces. Eleventh- and twelfthcentury Benedictine monks, often explicitly members of the institutional Church as papal advisors, Church Fathers, persecutors of heretics, and educated theo­logians, are especially depicted as slaves to the Rule of Saint Benedict, as brainwashed religious automatons, going through the liturgical motions, believers for the sake of power. Monastic religious “experience,” when addressed by secular scholars at all, often refers to a Jamesian “ecstasy” and union, to contemplatio realized, following the example of the famous sculpture of Teresa of Avila by Bernini, or the mystical embrace of Bernard of Clairvaux or Rupert of Deutz, rare examples of revelation achieved. According to the sources, however, an “experience” of God in the Jamesian sense— i.e., divine union—was actually one of the most elusive tasks for these elite, privileged medi­eval monks and nuns in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Especially in this time period, monastics took great care to describe their efforts to “experience” God as not successful, and rather as an ineffective, complete struggle. Indeed, according to monastic writers, their attempts to reach God were so regularly thwarted that we should actually characterize our notion of monastic religious “experience” in the Central Middle Ages not as an experience of union, but as an experience of God’s absence, and an experience of feeble humanity, filled with doubt, strife, frailty, and inadequacy. The “experience” of monastic meditation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was not Teresa-of-Avilaecstatic, but rather confusing, disheartening, unsatisfying, and frustrating. This chapter will investigate the features of what Bernard of Clairvaux calls the “book of experience”8 in the eleventh- and twelfth-century medi­eval monastery: what actually happened when monks and nuns meditated and prayed. First, I will outline the Grenzen von Macht und Unterordung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. S. Barret and G. Melville (Münster: Lit, 2005), 229–53.

5  John H. Arnold, “Histories and Historio­g raphies of Medi­eval Christianity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medi­eval Christianity (New York: Oxford, 2014), 23–41; Kim Knibbe and Helen Kupari, “Theorizing Lived Religion: Introduction,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 35 (2020): 157–76; Robert Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live In? Special Presidential Plenary Address,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42 (2003), 169–74.

6  Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo, Lived Religion and Gender in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2021), 2. 7  Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historio­graphy,” The Journal of Religion 84 (2004) 514–28; Mancia, Emotional Monasticism, 193–95. 8  Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971), 21.



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characteristics of monastic experiences in the words of a handful of monastic authors. Next, I’ll describe the emotional landscape of monastic experience, quoting monastics who described it as filled with inadequacy, doubt, and uncertainty. By the end of this chapter, then, I hope to shed light on the lived experience of western European monks and nuns for what it was: an exercise in futility and uncertainty, remarkably unlike the ideal ascents described in Chapter Two.

Meditative and Prayerful Experience as Rehearsed, Shaped, Ritual Action

If we think about the process of ideal meditative ascent discussed in the previous chapter, we recall that many medi­eval monks and nuns thought of the foundational stage in such ascent as “lectio,” or “reading,” namely, the acquisition of knowledge, the consumption of the prescription of what should be done. To the Carthusian Guigo II, reading was the spiritual exercise of collecting ideas, knowledge, and theories9; to the compiler of the manu­script Paris 13593, the first pages of his meditative manual were excerpts from the Church Fathers, pieces of theories and prescribed practices for meditation.10 But ultimately, meditatio, Guigo II says, is a different stage from lectio. Meditation is the “busy application of the mind to seek with the help of one’s reason for knowledge of hidden truth.”11 Meditation is knowledge internalized “in the heart,” practiced action based on what lectio prescribed.12 Complete “knowledge” was seen as a marriage of learning and doing, and therefore could not be fully acquired by monks and nuns simply by reading, but needed to be applied and rehearsed. The reading was the easy part; the application of what was read was difficult to achieve, even for the monks and nuns who dedicated their lives to trying to achieve it. In the eleventh- and twelfth-century monastery particularly, religious “experience” was aggressively cultivated by monks and nuns through rehearsed practice.13 There are several ways such practice was encouraged and shaped. First, through the monastic environment: M. B. Pranger describes the whole monastic landscape as “artificial,” constructed precisely in order to create an intense religious “experience” through the sharp contrast between monastic life and society outside the monastery. By vowing to strip one’s life of secular pleasures, a monk entered a rigorous setting in which he could more easily feel situationally-conditioned “religious” emotion.14 Evelyn Underhill notes that monastic life in community specifically worked to breed religious experience 9  See chap. 2.

10  See chap. 2; Mancia, “Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manu­script,” 161–85.

11  Italics my emphasis. Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1979), 68. 12  Guigo II, Ladder, 69.

13  William A. Christian, “Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain,” in Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford, 2004), 33–50.

14  M. B. Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 23–28, 115, 122.

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because the rigour and discipline of the monastic world nurtured it.15 The atmosphere of penitential asceticism, and the regulation of the monk’s daily environment, down to his clothing and food, served to condition monastic behaviour with an affective intensity that better encouraged devout practices.16 The expectations that monks would cultivate their devotional “experiences” were not just set up by their stark environments. From the earliest days of monasticism, intention and attentiveness was explicitly encouraged by early monastic leaders like John Cassian. In his Conferences, Cassian distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge: there was the knowledge of biblical texts, sung or written down (i.e., that which is acquired by lectio), and the knowledge of “experience” (i.e., that which was cultivated through “meditatio”). For Cassian, these two types of knowledge are not in opposition to each other: intellectual lectio is not distinct from practiced meditatio. Instead, that which is known from reading and that which is known from experience are part of a progression that moves from reading to experience, and then, eventually, from experience to more meaningful “proof” of what was read. Cassian explains: For divine Scripture is clearer and its inmost organs, so to speak, are revealed to us when our experience (experientia) not only perceives but even anticipates its thought, and the meaning of the words are disclosed to us not by exegesis but by proof. When we have the same disposition (affectum) in our heart with which each psalm was sung or written down, then we shall become like its author, grasping the significance beforehand rather than afterward. That is, we first take in the power of what is said, rather than the knowledge of it, recalling what has taken place or what does not take place in us in daily assaults whenever we reflect on them.17

To Cassian, a monk should not just understand a Scriptural text, but rather “become” it, viscerally knowing it through experience “in [the] heart,” “in daily assaults”—in other words, in the “proof” of the body, rather than just in the head. Experience goes beyond reading Scripture to experiencing the power of Scripture, to feeling and embodying the proof of Scripture in one’s heart’s disposition. Cassian further clarifies his own ideas on the importance of “experience” as something cultivated to be authentically “inborn.” The twenty-first century reader might see authenticity as something spontaneous, “natural,” or unlearned.18 But Cassian explains that this is not the way monastic thinkers understood experience. To them, knowledge was acquired through reading, and then authentically grasped and internalized by rehearsed practice, which then “led the way” to further internalizing and “penetrating” that knowledge. Cassian says: 15  Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: Bantam, 1990), 22–28, 40–42.

16  Piroska Nagy and Damien Bouquet, Medi­eval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Medford: Polity, 2018), 76, 83.

17  John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman, 1997), Conf. 10.11, 384. 18  Monique Scheer, Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (New York: Oxford, 2020), 55–62.



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Having been instructed in this way, with dispositions as our teachers, [monks] shall grasp this as something seen rather than heard, and from the inner disposition of the heart we shall bring forth not what has been committed to memory, but what is inborn in the very nature of things. Thus we shall penetrate its meaning not through the written text, but with experience leading the way.19

The monastic mind believed that one cultivated a practice of the “disposition” of the heart. Knowledge could be passively acquired by reading, but only experience allowed it to be truly, deeply, actively understood. As Cassian puts it elsewhere in the Conferences, the “efficacy of understanding [to a monk]…is gained by experience.”20 In the monastic estimation, it was only once divine learning was actively rehearsed daily that it could be authentically comprehended. One could not acquire devotion by reading—one needed to practice devotion to really be devout. Following Cassian, eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic scholars likewise asserted that one could not really understand God without practice. Sigbjørn Sønnesyn has shown that this principle was embraced by twelfth-century thinkers Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, and Hugh of St. Victor, who all agreed that it was from the practiced “encounter” with logical arguments, through their embodiment and experience, that textual knowledge could become concrete.21 In his Metalogicon (1159), John of Salisbury determined that “constancy of practice” was key to understanding philosophy and virtue.22 Practice was how one acquired rational knowledge. Building on Augustine, John emphasized that, just as infants learned language by imitation and practice, monks should practice meditation to climb to lofty religious insights. Bernard reiterated this same point, saying that experience taught monks at a deeper level than book learning did. He says in his On the Steps of Humility and Pride that it is only through the action of climbing—not just by reading how to climb—that one really comes to know and understand humility: “As you climb up,” Bernard says directly to his reader, “you will read [these ideas] better in your heart than in this book.”23 In On Conversion, Bernard similarly says that “you do not need to look [conversion] up in the pages of a book. Look to experience instead.”24 There was trepidation about the dangerous stasis that could come with avoiding experience and not putting “understanding” into practice. Many monastic authors warned against monastics who believed they were done with active practice because they felt they “understood” religious principles. A confidence in one’s own understanding of the religious life could lead to lazy sinfulness. By stressing experience, monastics required heightened attention and constant striving for all, even the most learned among 19  Cassian, Conferences, Conf. 10.11, 385.

20  Cassian, Conferences, Conf. 10.9, 378, italics my emphasis.

21  Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, “Word, Example, and Practice: Learning and the Learner in TwelfthCentury Thought,” Journal of Medi­eval History (2020), 1, 2. 22  Sønnesyn, “Word, Example, and Practice,” 5.

23  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Humility and Pride,” in Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (New York: Paulist, 1987), 143. Italics my emphasis. 24  Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Conversion,” 85.

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them. Classic monastic texts like Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job prescribed that devotees constantly engage in “self-examination and self-restraint.”25 Gregory insisted that a Christian “must always scrutinize the soul for hidden sins and repent of them, even if one does not know what they are.”26 To Gregory, novices actually did not have to scrutinize as much as “experts” did; in fact, the more advanced a devotee, the more diligent they needed to be with self-scrutiny: “the more I subtly understand [God’s] speaking, the more humbly I examine myself.”27 Following Gregory, twelfth-century monks like Aelred of Rievaulx gave similar advice to their readers. To a female acolyte, Aelred says: “in this life we are all prey to inconstancy, as we never remain long in the same state of mind, we will best avoid idleness by the alternation of exercises and safeguard our peace by varying our occupations.”28 He later warns: “I would have you never rest secure but always be afraid.”29 What a contrast to the historio­graphy characterizing these monks as the self-assured, confident, manipulative churchmen of the Middle Ages! By stressing practiced experience as the most important route in the religious life whether you were a novice or an abbot, monastic texts ensured that brethren would not grow overly confident and stale in their divine pursuits, abandoning actively-engaged experience simply because they “understood.”

Meditative and Prayerful Experience as Inward

When monks referred to “experience,” they were not often referring to their bodily actions and exterior involvements. While it was cultivated by the exterior environment, “experience” mostly took place internally, inside the monk’s self. Cassian, Benedict, and Bernard all say that a monk reads the book of experience not with his eyes and lips, but “in [his] heart.” It was “the inner movement” of monastic life with which experience was associated.30 In his Confessions, Augustine models how a Christian might touch the heart’s “inner chambers and inward parts as it were with the hands of experience.”31 Here, Augustine discards external knowledge and embraces this inner life. Knowledge, he says, “puff[s] up” the Christian believer—is superficially and vainly acquired, not virtuously internalized. Experience, in contrast, imprints in the believer’s “inner self,” 32 25  Carole Straw, “Job’s Sin in the Moralia of Gregory the Great,” in A Companion to Job in the Middle Ages, ed. Franklin T. Harkins and Aaron Canty (Turnhout: Brill, 2016), 71–100: 72–73. 26  Straw, “Job’s Sin,” 100.

27  Moralia in Job, 32.3.4.

28  Aelred of Rievaulx, Treatises and Pastoral Prayer (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971), 55. 29  Aelred of Rievaulx, Treatises, 68.

30  Renie Choy, “‘The Brother Who May Wish to Pray By Himself’: Sense of Self in Carolingian Prayers and Private Devotion,” in Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward, SLG, ed. Santha Bhattacharji, Rowan Williams, and Dominic Mattos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 101. 31  Augustine, Confessions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38. 32  Augustine, Confessions, 145.



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allowing the believer to deeply adopt God “not merely as an end to be perceived, but as a realm to live in.” 33 Augustine’s language of the heart became a key metaphor for medi­eval monastic descriptions of the “interiorization” of meditative experience.34 Many subsequent manuals for monastic contemplation and meditation spoke in these terms.35 Using Augustine as an explicit model, eleventh-century abbot John of Fécamp described this path to religious “experience” as a move from exterior praise of God to the “interior senses of [one’s own] soul.”36 Peter of Celle wrote a twelfth-century essay about the “knowledge of the heart.”37 He equated monastic meditation with an interior experience specifically, calling it “conscience”: “Having cut open the veins of the heart with the scalpel of persistent inquiry into the nature of conscience, I have called upon the vital blood of the veins of a complete meditation, so that from the blood of purified contemplation, the heart may with a stylus commend or adapt what is sufficient for the writer and retain for itself what it needs to live.”38 Peter emphasizes that such consciousness is not an intellectual knowledge, but is instead emotional, “originat[ing] from fear, advance[ing] and proceed[ing] by submission, and…perfected and completed in love.”39 It is in the heart where the spiritual senses are located, according to Peter, Bernard, William of St. Thierry, and others, and thus there where God can be perceived.40 In the words of Richard of St. Victor, it is only in the “interior realm…where the soul joins the Creator.”41 Divine experience could only be found in the “inner human.”42 This is not to say that the “interior realm” is an immaterial one, uninfluenced by embodied practices. As Monique Scheer has written, the “inner” emotions are very much cultivated by practices of the body, habituated processes called habitus.43 Scheer 33  Augustine, Confessions, 130.

34  Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (New York: Belknap Press, 1998).

35  Niklaus Largier, “The Art of Prayer: Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medi­eval Contemplative Practice,” in Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought, ed. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 58–71.

36  “...interioribus sensibus animae meae” to John of Fécamp, in Un maître de la vie spirituelle de Xie siècle, ed. Jean Leclercq and Jean-Paul Bonnes, (Paris: Vrin, 1946), 179. This idea is also found elsewhere in medi­eval texts. See, for instance, Piroska Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medi­eval West,” Social Analysis 48 (2004): 123. 37  Peter of Celle, “On Conscience,” in Peter of Celle: Selected Works, trans. Hugh Feiss (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1987), 150. 38  Peter of Celle, “On Affliction and Reading,”143

39  Peter of Celle, “On Affliction and Reading,” 156.

40  Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8 (2008), 7. 41  Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, trans. Grover A. Zinn (Mahwah: Paulist, 1979), 62.

42  Patricia Dailey, “The Body and its Senses,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge, 2012), 264–77. 43  Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is that What Makes them Have a

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outlines this process of embodied emotional refinement in four phases: (1) shaping, such as through a penitential ritual; (2) naming, following William Reddy’s idea of “emotives,” which recognized that simply saying, “I am sorry and I am wretched” actually makes one experience sadness more acutely than when one does not verbalize the feeling; (3) communicating to an audience, such as in a public display of penitential selfflagellation; and finally (4) regulating, or establishing a performative norm for devotional situations, such as when people come to expect that a flagellant will be crying when he is properly penitent. While monks and nuns certainly instigated meditative experience through extra-textual tools (for more on this, see Chapter Four), medi­eval textual sources often record processes of experiential activation through their words. If we revisit Peter of Celle’s comments above, for instance, we see these stages on display. Monastic meditators are first shaped by “persistent inquiry” (which Peter describes as a wounding: “Having cut open the veins of the heart with the scalpel of persistent inquiry into the nature of conscience”); then they name their experiential process, “call[ing]” it in a prayerful solicitation (“I have called upon the vital blood of the veins of a complete meditation”); then they communicate these ideas between the feeling heart and the contemplative mind (“so that from the blood of purified contemplation, the heart may with a stylus commend or adapt what is sufficient for the writer and retain for itself what it needs to live”44). Scheer’s fourth stage, regulation, is found in the very dissemination of Peter’s text, when it then could serve as a script to prompt and shape the norms of other monks’ and nuns’ meditative practices and experiences, cultivating their habitus through reading.45 Medi­eval monks and nuns likely would not see such implicit structure as confining, but rather as welcomed scripted discipline; as the Rule of Saint Benedict stated, the goal of discipline was ultimately to create a habitus that would yield devotional openness: “to [eventually] observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue.”46 The surrender to meditative and prayerful discipline, the rehearsing of the regimented script of spiritual regulation, was the chief route to spiritual experience in the medi­eval monastery.

Meditative and Prayerful Experience as Dynamic, Fleeting, and Filled with Struggle

As tapped into the inner senses as a monk might have been, however, practice did not regularly make perfect. The monks and nuns of the eleventh and twelfth centuries knew that introspection and a cultivated habitus did not mean a satisfying encounter with God. At its base, the experience of spiritual introspection yielded an awareness of one’s own human inadequacy and imperfection more than anything else. “Recognize the History?)? A Bordieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2012), 193–220. 44  Peter of Celle, “On Affliction and Reading,” 143.

45  On reading and habit, see Stock, Augustine the Reader, 116–17. 46  Rule of Saint Benedict, chap. 7, lines 67–69.



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state in which you are,” Aelred of Rievaulx advises a female recluse, as his first step in his guide to meditation.47 Since it was performed by an imperfect human practitioner, experience was dynamic, ever-changing, and some days more successful than others. While “knowledge” was seen as complete, whole, and perfect—truth belonging to an unchanging God—“experience” was seen as a transient state, as imperfect as the inconstant humans who felt it. This distinction between the stasis of knowledge and the dynamism of experience is parallel to descriptions in Aristotle, where “experience” is about particulars (constructed by human memory and imagination), and reason is about universals.48 Meditative and prayerful experience was in “dynamic relation with the world in which it is situated.”49 This is the chief way in which meditative texts outlining theory (such as those discussed in Chapter Two) and meditative texts mirroring experience differ: meditative “experience” is recorded in monastic texts as grappling and struggle, not achievement; it depicts humans striving against their own laxity and inadequacy. The monk most famous for exploring this quality of “experience” is Anselm of Canterbury. Throughout many of his meditative texts, especially the Prayers and Meditations and the Proslogion, Anselm repeatedly “trie[s] to rise up to the light of God, [but discovers he] ha[s] fallen back into the darkness of [him]self.”50 What is this darkness that stands in his way? It is human frailty, what Anselm calls sin, that keeps monastic attempts at mystical ascent from being successful: “I touch, but do not feel your yielding. I taste, but do not know your savour…The senses of my soul have been hardened, dulled, and blocked by the ancient sickness of sin.”51 Darkness, hardened dullness—these are the perceptions of one trying to reach God, but unable to do so. But these are not perceptions of failed religious experience—instead, failed union is the essence of monastic experience in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Monastic meditative experience was not ecstatic or complete—it was instead filled with inadequacy, absence, and strife. Gregory the Great calls this experience “reverberatio”—a reverberating cycle of being briefly elevated towards union and then falling back into darkness.52 Anselm’s most frequent metaphor for his experience of his own religious flailing is that of “lukewarmness.” “Turn my lukewarmness into fervent love of you!”53 Anselm longs after God: “Let my darkness be illuminated, my lukewarmness blaze up, my listlessness be stirred.”54 In his Prayers and Meditations, Anselm pleads with God to grant him a heightened experience of “fervour,” in contrast with what his own “hardened 47  Aelred, Treatises, 75.

48  Peter King, “Two Conceptions of Experience,” Medi­eval Philosophy and Theo­logy 11 (2003), 203–26 at 203. 49  Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (New York: Cambridge, 2020), 48.

50  Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion, trans. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 1973), 259. 51  Anselm, Prayers, 258.

52  Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel, 2.2.12. Many thanks to Xavier Biron-Ouellet for this reference. 53  Anselm, Prayers, 94.

54  Anselm, Prayers, 116.

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heart” yields him, namely dullness55: “My soul melts in me, my flesh fails; if only my inmost being might be on fire with the sweet fervour of your love, so that my outer being of flesh might wither away.”56 Here once again we see the inner/outer dichotomy of monastic experience at play: Anselm wants his heart and soul—his “inmost being”— to be softened, but his “outer being”—his sinful flesh—prevents this from happening. Anselm’s only solution, then, is to call out to God in his frail state, aware of his own depravity. Exiled from God like an “orphan,” Anselm calls out for his senses to be ignited: “I thirst for you, I hunger for you, I desire you, I sigh for you, I covet you,”57 he cries; my “senses are almost dead with grief!”58 But Anselm acknowledges that his human frailty is here to stay: “my perverse heart is dry and cold as a stone when it comes to deploring the sins I have committed, but when it comes to resisting occasions of sin it is indeed pliant and soon defiled.”59 Though he understands that he has brought such suffering upon himself, Anselm also feels how impossible it is for him not to sin. And so his resulting experience is of God’s absence. It is a series of unanswered questions: “What shall I say? What shall I do? Whither shall I go? Where shall I seek him? Where and when shall I find him? Whom shall I ask? Who will tell me of my beloved?”60 Caught between the promise of union and his own inability to make that happen, Anselm longs for God’s presence, alone and unfulfilled. It is important to note that this unfulfilled longing is a necessary part of meditative experience, and a productive one. It is not ennui on the part of the monastic worshipper. It is not indicated by the words tristitia (dejection) or pigritia (sloth) or acedia (a malevolent kind of boredom), all mortal sins. Acedia, the most popular of these, was discussed by early Christian monks and universalized by Gregory the Great in his Moralia on Job as a “noon-day demon” that threatened to tempt a meditating Christian away from his spiritual practice when he was bored and listless.61 Cassian describes it as such: “we lament that in all this while, living in the same spot, we have made no progress, we sigh and complain that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit; and bewail ourselves as empty of all spiritual profit…taking ourselves elsewhere as quickly as possible…vacant in every spiritual activity.”62 The difference between the longing described by monastic meditators and the acedia described by Cassian is that monastic meditators are not lost, unfocused, or inconstant in their practice—they lament their lack of progress, but they do not then give up. Neither their expressions of self-inadequacy nor their overwhelming frailty is lethargic or distractable. These meditators are unfulfilled, 55  Anselm, Prayers, 129.

56  Anselm, Prayers, 124 57  Anselm, Prayers, 94.

58  Anselm, Prayers, 127. 59  Anselm, Prayers, 197. 60  Anselm, Prayers, 97.

61  Ian Irvine, “Acedia, Tristitia, and Sloth: Early Christian Forerunners to Chronic Ennui,” Humanitas 12 (1999), 89–103. 62  As quoted by Irvine, “Acedia,” 95.



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to be sure, but they are not unfocused from the righteous goal of longing for God: they are focused on their uncertainty about their capability of reaching him, and they keep yearning for him all the while. Religious “experience,” then, for a monastic practitioner, is not close to the orgasmic, visionary “union” of late medi­eval mystics, but is rather one of unrelenting, focused “hunger.” It is close to the “fervour” Anselm desires, but instead of being a fervent, ecstatic consummation of religious desire, it is a fervent, desperate recognition of the absence of God. As Peter of Celle says, “if you are a son in the cloister, you should thus have a heart which is ready to suffer and even to congratulate itself on the opportunity, saying ‘for I am ready for the lashes.’”63 In fact, the twelfth-century abbot, Baldwin of Forde, warns against those monks who “fail to recognize their own weakness, and thereby believe that they can do what they know they want to do.”64 A monk’s identification of his own frailty, Baldwin says, is “a wonderful dispensation of God” because if monks allow themselves to witness their own failure “for a time,” they do “so that they may rise up all the stronger, so that they may be more cautious, so that they trust less in themselves, so that they recognize their weakness more perfectly, so that they cling to God more firmly, so that they hold his grace without which they can do nothing, as more worthy of commendation.”65 Baldwin says the focus on this hunger is healthful—it allows devotees to cling to God even more, in longing and unconfident uncertainty. Moreover, an experience of one’s own darkness, Baldwin recognizes, actually allows a monk to better perceive and experience the contours of God’s grace through contrast: a weakened human more completely requires the “strengthen[ing of] the grace of God [to] rise up again.”66 This religious “experience,” then, is actually an “anti-mysticism,” a negativity and apophatic spirituality that contrasts with the “experientialism” of James and others like him.67 It is the experience of the deprivation of God and of the critique of the devotee’s self that a monk feels—not the “positivist” union promised by James’ interpretation of Christian spirituality.68 And yet, through the experience of God’s absence, a monk would come to better know God by yearning so much more for God’s strength.69 63  Peter of Celle, “On Affliction and Reading,” 95.

64  Baldwin of Forde, Spiritual Tractates, vol. 1, trans. David N. Bell (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1986), 154. 65  Baldwin of Forde, Spiritual Tractates, 155.

66  Baldwin of Forde, Spiritual Tractates, 77.

67  Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5. 68  “Positivist” is Turner’s term, The Darkness of God, 259.

69  This understanding of the other—in this case, God—through its opposite—in this case, the pathetic human subject—is a discourse that rippled throughout monastic life elsewhere in the monastery. The monk would have seen such discourse in polemical writings and sermons, where the construction of a good Christian was better understood when presented with its perceived opposite—a heretic, a Jew, a Muslim. The monk would have seen that same discourse employed in dialectical theo­logy. And the monk even would have seen it in the art in his monastery (for more on this, see chap. 4), in which God—the invisible—would be able to be seen (in images), and even literally touched (in tactile sculpture) and tasted (in the Eucharist). With these other contraries

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The pronounced effort of the monk’s experience, then, the unmistakeable will of a monk to experience, is seen as essential in this context for connecting with God—and this stage of longing imperfection better reveals that will to the meditator himself.

Meditative Experience as Doubt-filled and Uncertain

Sometimes, however, this experience of inadequacy started to bleed into an experience of doubt in one’s own faith in God. In the space of the monastery, where there was room for deep, interior self-excavation, monks regularly were contending with the meaning of the incomplete nature of their own unrealized faith: “faith is not grasped by a human of this world,” William of St. Thierry says70; “[Holy] men walk in faith [but] they have not yet reached the end of their journey [i.e., God].”71 The luxury of the orthodox reputation and institutional protection of cloistered medi­eval monks was that they could go so far as to venture into doubtfulness and uncertainty, having both the time and space in which to ransack their souls, rooting out the parts of themselves that were the most incredulous on their journey to God.72 This doubtfulness therefore emerged as a part of religious experience in the monastery in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. When we think about doubt in the Central Middle Ages, we often think about the cathedral schools and the intellectual project of proto-scholasticism. Peter Lombard (1100–1160) claimed that too much credulity actually prevented one from fully understanding and embracing the truth73; Peter Abelard famously (and controversially) said: “by doubting, we come to question and by questioning we reach the truth.”74 But doubt was not just an intellectual path for schoolmen—it was an experiential path in the supposedly “un-scholastic” environment of the monastery as well. For many monastic writers, doubt was a way to ignite the experience of divine truth. Otloh of St. Emmermam (1010–1072) found that it was in fact “complete doubt and darkness of mind” that brought him back to his faith because it caused him to pleadingly appeal to God,75 a process that made him a “friend of doubts (amator dubitationis).”76 Hugh of St. Victor paving the way for this kind of thinking, a monk’s experience of his own sinfulness would be a way of better experiencing the greatness of God through the contrast with its opposite—namely, through the contrast with the depth of human inadequacy.

70  William of St. Thierry, The Enigma of Faith, trans. John D. Anderson (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1974), 35. 71  William of St. Thierry, The Enigma of Faith, 53.

72  John Van Engen, “Faith as a Concept of Order in Medi­eval Christendom,” in Belief in History, ed. Thomas Keslman (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), 19–67 at 45.

73  Marcia L. Colish, “Faith in Peter Lombard’s Collectanea,” in Fides Virtus: The Virtue of Faith From the Twelfth to Early Sixteenth Century, ed. Marco Forlivesi, Riccardo Quinto, and Silvana Vecchio (Munster: Aschendorff, 2014), 48.

74  From Abelard’s Sic et non as quoted by Sabrina Flanagan, Doubt in the Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 12–13. 75  Flanagan, Doubt in the Age of Faith, 76, 81.

76  Dorothea Weltecke, “Doubts and the Absence of Faith,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medi­eval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold (New York: Oxford, 2014), 367.



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also saw faithlessness as important because it ignited the will to truly embrace faith.77 Any assumption that certainty and determined, undeterred devotion would characterize monastic religious experience is completely anachronistic. Scholar Eileen Sweeney writes: “It is a kind of truism that the search for certainty, achieved by grounding knowledge in certain, indubitable foundations is a modern, not a medi­eval, project.”78 Lesley Smith concurs: “uncertainty was permissible, indeed desirable, since it should lead to greater understanding. Certainty and uncertainty, then, could live side by side.”79 Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), and Baldwin of Forde (1125–1190) all agreed that hesitation (hesitatio) was different from doubt—and closer to acedia—because it was a sign of a weak faith, “born of a lack of devotion since it doubt[ed] the trust of faith and distrust[ed] the promise of God.”80 But “doubt” (dubito) was not hesitation—it was the opposite of apathetic, it was a propellant that required engagement with—and sought the active experience of—faith. In the central medi­eval monastery, doubt was more than a rhetorical strawman. It was cast in the terms of active experience—as an essential part of the plight of one seeking. In the Proslogion, Anselm portrays doubt in the terms of experience, in terms of the inwardness and practiced dynamism that is outside of knowledge. Anselm defines doubt as key to constructing “meaning of faith from the point of view of one seeking, through silent reasoning within himself, things he knows not.”81 Here, Anselm describes the monastic experiential struggle as outlined above—he seeks that which is “within” him actively, seeking a faith beyond “know[ledge].” This kind of doubtful seeking—this particular experience of struggle in monastic texts—is often called cogitatio by monastic writers: pondering, struggling, deliberating, and wrestling. Baldwin of Forde explains cogitatio in this way: There is a type of doubting that makes us nervous in times of danger or afraid that we will not be heard in prayer; and it often happens that the more we are afraid of not being heard, the more we want to be heard! This type of doubting, I say, is not always born of culpable wickedness, but sometimes [comes] from human infirmity and faint-heartedness, or from imperfect faith.82

77  Flanagan, Doubt in the Age of Faith, 121.

78  Eileen C. Sweeney, “New Standards for Certainty: Early Receptions of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics,” in Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages, ed. D. G. Denery II, K. Ghosh, and N. Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 37–62 at 37. 79  Lesly Smith, “Uncertainty in the Study of the Bible,” in Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages, ed. D. G. Denery II, K. Ghosh, and N. Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 135–54 at 154.

80  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2000), 62; Flanagan, Doubt in the Age of Faith, 98, 107–8. 81  Anselm, Prayers, 82; italics my emphasis.

82  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 64. See also Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medi­eval Church, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018): “Doubt was a fertile state of mind, so long as it was passing and led ultimately to a firmer faith. It was also a necessary companion to free will (25).”

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Baldwin recognizes that fearful, infirm human believers are often doubtful on the heels of insecurity and worry that they will not be heard by God. He continues, “When they doubt in prayer because they are uncertain of being heard or because they are unsure of the suitability of their petition, they do not hesitate through distrust...It is right to believe and hope; but one is also permitted to fear and doubt devoutly.”83 Baldwin argues that such doubtful posturing is actually an experience of focused, trusting, active devotion, a sign of humility and self-consciousness appropriate to (and necessary for) a Christian in the face of God. Baldwin says that, in order for belief to be actively acquired and experienced (not simply, superficially, passively known), the mind must wrestle with one’s suitability and worthiness of God through this progressive process: “in a wonderful way, [the devotee] is led by this to believe.” 84 The beginning of faith, Baldwin asserts, is thus “cemented in this fear.”85 Tested by doubt,86 faith increases; paradoxically, doubt arises in order to ultimately sustain an active engagement with faith. Human beings, naturally imperfect, are expected to be doubtful according to Baldwin, asking constantly: “Lord I believe; Help my unbelief. Is there anyone who does not sometimes doubt? Is there anyone who does not need to increase his faith?”87 The very longing and pleading with God characteristic of Anselm was, in Baldwin’s estimation, elicited by doubtful questioning. But that questioning was not untrusting, dangerous acedia; it was anxious, but devout, doubt. Baldwin’s fellow Cistercian William of St. Thierry (1075?–1148) also writes to assure his brethren that doubt is an important step to experience on the road to complete faith. William writes to his readers who are “troubled by anxiety rather than threatened by danger, [and who] drove [him] to write for their consolation and help their faith.”88 William explains that “so great is not only their faith but also their love that they feel the greatest aversion for anything that seems to be contrary to faith [like doubt]... Then it is pitiful to see how they lament [about such doubt], as if their faith has suffered a shipwreck...”89 In his book The Mirror of Faith, William seeks to console these readers, reassuring them of doubt’s role in the experience of the faithful monastic struggle, much as Baldwin did. Here, William further explains the dynamics of the “lukewarmness” that Anselm described, making its experience even clearer to modern ears: Yet these same persons in believing, that is in thinking about matters of faith, are in darkness and struggle. This is the burden and burdensome weakness and astonishing blindness of the human mind. In fact, it is often extremely easy and convenient for many, if necessity or opportunity presents itself, to die for the faith. But it is not easy for them to acquire the purity of faith itself by believing, that is, by pondering matters

83  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 67–68.

84  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 91. 85  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 92.

86  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 128. 87  Baldwin of Forde, The Commendation of Faith, 149.

88  William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, trans. Theodore Berkeley (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971), 4. 89  William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 5.



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of faith90...[W]hen temptations of the physical senses—stumbling blocks of faith, sad hesitations, and darkening questions, begin to boil up in the heart, coming so much from the indifference of a sloppy mind or the shallowness of the normal fervour in our reasoning ability, the faithful soul is accustomed sometimes to being in darkness91... Even some among the ranks of the faithful stumble quite often...The fool says in his heart: there is no God; and someone else says: how does God know or how is there knowledge in the Most High? He has doubts about the providence of God. Someone else wonders if for the salvation of humans God ought to have been made human. And there are many things along this line. Even minds quite fervent in religion, but still rather immature in faith, often undergo this kind of temptation...They do not say: “yes, yes!”, “no, no!”, but whisper “maybe, maybe!” Maybe it is so, they say, maybe it is not! Maybe it is otherwise, maybe it is otherwise than written—on account of something that was not written down.92

William’s described “whisper” of “maybe, maybe!” is a haunting depiction of this bleak, “burdensome” moment of “darkening questions” on the part of the believer—and a wonderful description of the monastic struggle. William describes this experience as all interior, self-critical and self-examining: “The man of God takes a good look at himself, therefore, and examining himself spiritually says: what is it, O my soul, whereby you disturb me? Are you not firm in faith?”93 One can imagine that, when he began his lifetime of devotion and entered the monastery, that a monk might have had an expectation of constancy in his own faith, of perfection. But such a standard was impossible to uphold—and dishonest—for human practitioners of monastic Christianity; and so monastic brethren called on leaders like Baldwin and William for “consolation,” to reassure them that their overwhelming experience of imperfection was okay. A question about the “genuineness” of these humble declarations of imperfection arises. Julius Schwietering argues that these protestations of imperfection were part of a humility topos required of monastic writers in their written work.94 Indeed, writings from this period are filled with opening pleas for humility by monastic voices, each longing for God to set them straight. John of Fécamp, an eleventh-century abbot, writes in his Confessio theo­logica (ca. 1028 CE), “Give to me the humility and true obedience! A true submission and mortification! So that I do not live only according to my own pleasure, and do not drive myself according to my own will…so that I walk always with you in the simplicity of my heart.”95 The paradox of these statements, of course, is that just as each speaker purports to need God to help him find proper humility, each performs the necessary humility in front of God, demonstrating the very virtue they claim to still be seeking. Perhaps these claims of imperfection and doubt, then, are more calculated and 90  William of St. Thierry, The Mirror of Faith, trans. Thomas X. Davis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1979), 21. 91  William of St. Thierry, The Mirror of Faith, 26. 92  William of St. Thierry, The Mirror of Faith, 29. 93  William of St. Thierry, The Mirror of Faith, 30.

94  Julius Schwietering, “The Origins of the Medi­eval Humility Formula,” PMLA 69 (1954), 1279–91.

95  Jean Leclercq and Jean-Paul Bonnes, Un maître de la vie spirituelle au XIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1946), 134.

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demonstrative than they are honest; perhaps they are merely formulaic, not genuinely experienced or authentically felt.96 Here, we must again return to Gregory the Great. As said earlier, in his Moralia in Job, Gregory insists that as one more subtly understands God, one must “humbly examine” oneself even more.97 Declarations of imperfection must then only have increased as the monastic worshipper became more skilled in his or her spiritual exercises. These clamours were not mere humility topoi, I would argue; they were cries for help from sinners, cries that were essential to each sinner’s spiritual progress because they needed to stem from a true experience of imperfection. “You will perhaps find steps up [towards humility, and towards God],” Bernard says in his On the Steps of Humility and Pride, but “you will read them better in your heart than in this book.”98 It is only through the challenge of lived, heart-felt experience, Bernard warns, that one can truly ascend in meditation.99 A mere performance, passive and unexperienced, would have no salvific benefit, if it was not genuinely in a monastic devotee’s heart. No one would know that better than the devotees themselves. This dynamic between faith and doubt was therefore an important part of monastic (indeed human) life in the secular world. William of St. Thierry assures that such doubtfulness would not exist in heaven, when a vision of God was assured: “When we have arrived at where we are headed, faith will no longer exist. Will anyone ask us [in heaven]: do you believe? No indeed! For we will see God and contemplate him.”100 The struggle between faith and doubt was a necessary experience in a saeculum where monks did not encounter the God whom they sought, did not have concrete reassurance, did not regularly experience “union” if at all, and were so aware of their own inconstancy and imperfection. God is “within me and around me and I do not have any experience of [him],”101 Anselm says. In a world with no experience of God himself, Anselm and other monks needed to settle for the experience of seeking God, with all of its ups and downs, contradictions and oxymorons: “Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you; let me find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you.”102 These monastic thinkers proved that quests for the divine were not rational—in fact, they were filled with paradox and obfuscation.103 They were guided by feel, not passively receiving, but actively fighting.104 They were practitioners restless until they reached heaven and rested in God. 96  Nicole Guenther Discenza, “The Paradox of Humility in the Alfredian Translations,” Studia Neophilo­logica 76 (2004), 44–52.

97  As quoted by Mancia, Emotional Monasticism, 51.

98  Bernard, “On the Steps of Humility and Pride,” 143.

99  See Lauren Mancia, “Seeking Unworthiness, Self-Knowledge, and Truth: Humility in the Medi­ eval Monastic Tradition of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Oxford Philosophical Concepts volume on Humility, edited by Justin Steinberg, forthcoming 2023. 100  William of St. Thierry, The Mirror of Faith, 3–4. 101  Anselm, Prayers, 97.

102  Anselm, Prayers, 86–87.

103  Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal,” Spiritus 8 (2008): 44–63.

104  Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medi­eval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215



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Conclusion: From Medi­eval Experience to Early Modern Certainty? In view of all this, I would like to use another word to describe monastic meditative experience: insecure. What is so remarkable about this monastic attention to “experience,” and the contrast that monks drew between it and “knowledge,” is that these eleventh- and twelfth-century devotional “experts” took solace in and drew meaning from insecurity—from their own sinfulness, from their failed grasps at God, from their occasional doubts—in addition to their more extensive intellectual learning, the confident program of meditative ascent outlined in our Chapter Two. The medi­eval monastic reliance on struggle-filled, inconstant, dynamic, fluid experience trickles in bits and pieces into later theo­logical history. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, defined faith ultimately as “assent”—something that needed to be actively engaged and known with one’s own will (cum assensu cogitare).105 Even as late as the seventeenth century, working off of medi­eval precedents, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) saw faith as a “feedback loop to the mind,” the tense oscillation between trust and doubt, and “a disposition to accept a content that remains opaque.”106 But, by the end of the twelfth century, this monastic version of experience as insecure and uncertain had become less widespread and less actively encouraged by Christian thinkers. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the idea that belief was firm and did not budge—firmiter credimus—became more widespread, especially as “heresies” became a greater concern107; and the newly-formalized processes of confession began to police doubts in the interior landscape, as well as in exterior actions.108 While Martin Luther initially embraced a monastic view of insecure “experience,”109 by 1518, he revised his stance and claimed that faith needed to be secure and certain in order for “justification by faith” to work.110 Calvin likewise deemed the monastic version of insecure “experience” untrustworthy. Such experience, to Calvin, could be the same for the elect and the “reprobate”—and therefore the best Christians only grappled with the “solid reality of faith,” which, in Calvin’s estimation, was always secure.111 Juan de Valdés, a Catholic in the early sixteenth century, followed his Protestant contemporaries, writing that valid Catholic experience was “immediate,” and could only be stable godly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 4.

105  Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” Representations 103 (2008), 1–29: 12, 13. See also Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 24, 62. 106  Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” 12, 14.

107  Weltecke, “Doubt,” 386; Flanagan, Doubt in the Age of Faith, 154.

108  Susan Kramer, Sin, Interior, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medi­eval Studies, 2015). 109  Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49. 110  Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 57.

111  Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 68.

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“truth” which a believer “knew for certain.”112 By the end of the early modern period, the use of the “book of experience” had transformed from the monastic version, in which God’s absence and human frailty were accepted and even valued, to a more modern, more certain version.113 By the modern age, religious experience had changed from a (medi­eval) shades of grey landscape to a (modern) landscape of black and white, a slippery slope towards the Jamesian notion of spiritual experience as instantaneous, ineffable, passive, clarifying, and revelatory. The omission of eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic religious “experience” from the scholarly conversation about medi­eval monastic religiosity has distorted our view of medi­eval monasticism, to be sure. We have neglected the study of monastic devotion as they saw it, dismissing monks as too orthodox, too expert, too unfeeling, and too elite. An eye towards meditative “experience” as eleventh- and twelfth-century monks understood it allows us to see these monastic devotees for what they really were, not rigid but insecure, devoutly doubtful, and striving in their devotion. The reassertion of the monastic idea of religious “experience” can help us see how “human” these monks were. It can allow us to understand that, even in the medi­eval “age of faith,” belief was still about wrestling, about restlessness, about doubtfulness, and about work—and that such a struggle was not sinful, even in the bastions of Christian orthodoxy in the medi­eval world. Even in the monastery, in the most sacred of medi­eval places, devotion was not about otherworldly union, or about religious exceptionalism, or about buying into the fantasy constructed by an authoritarian church. Monastic religiosity was not a blind or easy or automatic commitment on the part of the monks; it was not evidence of their submission to the institutional Church. What made it impressive was that it was a lived experience of constant struggle; of trying to really match one’s inner experience and practices to one’s knowledge; of humble uncertainty even at the highest levels of the most elite medi­eval Christian institutions. Monastic meditation was not about the potential for perfection, nor was it a guarantee of heaven on earth. It was instead about the monastic will to desire and seek God, knowing that they were never to find him in this lifetime. Likewise, monastic religious devotional emotion, and monastic belief, was not a “passive assent to a clear set of propositions,” but rather an “active process of construing, negotiating.”114 This active construction should not be discredited by our modern cynicism that sees belief and religious practice as only “real” if it is certain, or blackand-white, or passive, or individual. Medi­eval monastic meditation—and the beliefs that undergirded it—needed to be activated by rehearsed experiences of emotional struggle, just as much as it needed to be rationally instructed. The medi­eval monastic integration of uncertainty into their daily religious experience was more flexible, realistic, sophisticated, and realistically faith-full than modern religious practitioners could fathom.

112  Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise, 223–26. 113  Scheer, Enthusiasm, 20. 114  Scheer, Enthusiasm, 14.

Chapter 4

ENVISIONING THE INVISIBLE THE USE OF ART IN MONASTIC MEDITATION I say nothing of the enormous height, extravagant length and unnecessary width of the churches, of their costly polishings and curious paintings which catch the worshipper’s eye and dry up his devotion… what good are such things to poor men, to monks, to spiritual men? …In the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read—what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures, part man and part beast?...In short, everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God.1

If they had

just taken Bernard of Clairvaux’s word for it, medi­eval monks and nuns might have shied away from using extra-textual means to facilitate devotion. In his twelfth-century Apo­logia, quoted above, Bernard famously claims that art in monastic spaces was so plentiful as to be inhibitive of meditation and prayer. But were material objects, “exterior” things, the art works that surrounded monks and nuns in the monastery, really understood to be obstacles to devotion?2 Did these extra-textual tools for devotion really “deflect the attention…of those who pray and thus hinder their devotion”?3 Actually, in practice, it seems this art did just the opposite: these images in fact were extremely helpful in orienting monastic contemplatives’ attention towards God. Monastic men and women used many different media to facilitate their struggle towards God. Despite the commandment against graven images in the Old Testament, despite Bernard’s seeming distrust of images, art was seen as a key, useful external tool available to Christian monastic devotees in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Extra-textual tools like monastic art, monastic spaces, and manu­script diagrams were especially important stimuli for monastic meditation and prayer.4 Some images 1  Bernard of Clairvaux, Apo­logia ad Guilelmum Abbatem, trans. Conrad Rudolph, in The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Apo­logia” and the Medi­eval Attitude Towards Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 282–83; Thomas E. A. Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa,” The Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 402–36.

2  Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medi­eval Germany (Princeton: Zone, 1998), 115. 3  Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Apo­logia” and the Medi­eval Attitude Towards Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 278–83.

4  In the case of manu­scripts in this period, we can be fairly certain that monastic scriptoria were producing the books monks used, allowing us to understand monastic meditators as constructing the manu­scripts in question, instead of workshops outside the monastery; see Diane Reilly “The

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were seen as, in the words of Hugh of St. Victor, “visible sign[s] of a deeper truth”:5 they represented the divine (i.e., God) for monastic meditators, and, thereby, they helped direct devotees towards richer meditative experience and away from the chaos of sin and meditative frustration. In the words of William of St. Thierry, these images enabled the devotee to experientially “cling to God” in a “certain familiar and devout conversation” filled with vision, while others were “more intellectual,” inspiring a “search for truth, asking, seeking, knocking until they receive.”6 Images were vehicles for commiseration for monastic meditators: they helped the meditator express the persistent longing and struggle that filled the meditative experience, acknowledging the incompleteness and dissatisfaction that was endemic to every monastic meditative experience, as discussed in the last chapter. This chapter will align with the chapters that have come before it: I will show that art and space fostered monastic meditation, forecasting the ideal vision that could be rewarded at the end of meditation (cf. Chapter Two); I will also show that art often reflected the monastic experience of frustrated, unconsummated meditative practice (cf. Chapter Three). These tools operated in two modes, much as meditative texts from the medi­eval monastery did: they promised the ideal ascent by encouraging meditators to envision divine truth; and they also acknowledged the limits of monastic ascent by further emphasizing the confines of human vision and the torments of monastic meditation.

The Visible Image of the Invisible Truth: Using Images to Reach Contemplative Goals

In the early eleventh century, Abbess Hitda of Meschede commissioned an evangeliary, now called the “Hitda Codex.” On fols. 6v–7r (Figure 2), alongside a full-page image of Christ in Majesty, lies a full page inscription which reads: “This visible image represents the invisible truth/Whose splendour penetrates the world through the four lights [i.e., the Gospels] of his new doctrine” (Hoc visibile imaginatum figurat illud invisibile verum cuius splendor penetrate mund[um] cum bis binis candelabris ipsius novi sermonis). Here, we see the eleventh-century creators of this manu­script acknowledging the role of the visible image in facilitating monastic devotion: its image leads its viewers to the real, “invisible truth” of God, a “visible image” to aid in contemplating divine “splendour.”7 The usefulness of “visible forms” was widely acknowledged throughout the monastic world as a catalyst for “invisible contemplation.” Monk Peter of Celle planned programs of metalwork and stained glass at St. Rémy at Reims where he was an abbot in the Monastic World View in the Artistic Tradition,” in Ecclesia in medio nationis, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns, Medi­evalia Lovaniensia, vol. 47 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011), 186. 5  As quoted by Thomas E. A. Dale, Pygmalion’s Power: Romanesque Sculpture, the Senses, and Religious Experience (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019), 11.

6  William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu, trans. Theodore Berkeley (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971), 70–71.

7  Herbert Kessler, “Turning a Blind Eye: Medi­eval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theo­logical Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 413.



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twelfth century, precisely because the art would help “raise [a monk’s] mind from visible form to invisible contemplation.”8 In his Golden Epistle, William of St. Thierry noted that “what is within us is benefited in no slight degree by what is around us, when it is arranged to accord with our minds and in its own way to correspond with the ideals we have set before us.”9 Gregory the Great and Pseudo-Dionysius, earlier writers whose ideals undergirded those of many eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic contemplators, also emphasized that the visible image could lead devotees to the invisible God.10 Accordingly, many monks and nuns advocated for an external, visual model to help monastic contemplators achieve the interior heights to which they aspired. Often the visual provided to medi­eval meditators was a portrait of God or Christ, much like that displayed in the Hitda Codex. To many monks and nuns, this was the ideal form on which to meditate during monastic meditation: it showed their ultimate goal. Even Bernard of Clarivaux himself, in a seemingly contradictory position, proclaimed that a “soul at prayer should have before it a sacred image of the God-man.”11 Many specifically advised an image of the cross, or an image of the Passion, to be the most useful images for this purpose. William of St. Thierry advised that one “make a mental picture of [Christ’s] passion for ourselves, so that our bodily eyes may possess something on which to gaze, something to which to cleave, worshipping not the pictured likeness only, but the truth the picture of your passion represents…The cross itself becomes for her the face of a mind that is well-disposed to God”12 Hildegard of Bingen described the use of these images as a mere “mirror of faith,” inadequate visible images that remind the devotee that the only way that the faithful can “gaze at God” is with the “interior vision of the soul.”13 The eleventh-century customary of the Italian monastery of Fruttuaria emphasized that such visible images even allowed contemplators to imagine that they could actually see God, as if performing such sight could make it so (acts before faith, as it were). The customary explains that the visible images of Christ allowed for it to “seem that we [monks] ourselves have gone to meet the Son of God…although he may not indeed be seen physically, yet the person whose inner eyes [God] will have opened has the power to see that we have gone forth to meet our Lord Jesus Christ.”14 Many monks and nuns believed the monastic meditator was best served by looking at images of Christ himself, that is by looking at the chief divine subject and addressee, at the very being whom the meditator longed to most fully embrace. 8  Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 206 and 257. 9  William of St. Theirry, The Golden Epistle, 61.

10  David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 164–65; Jeffrey Hamburger, “Idol Curiosity,” in Curiositas: Welt­ erfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittealter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Lorraine Daston, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Christian Kiening, Klaus Krüger, and Niklaus Largier (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 52, 57. 11  Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 121.

12  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, Prayer, Meditations, trans. Penelope Lawson (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1970), 153–54. 13  Herbert L. Kessler, “Speculum,” Speculum 86 (2011), 2. 14  Kessler, “Turning a Blind Eye,” 413.

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Figure 2 (above and opposite): Eleventh-century “Hitda Codex,” from the abbey of Meschede in Germany. Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS 1640, fols. 6v–7r. Used with permission.



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Figure 3: Late eleventh/early twelfth-century trumeau from the abbey church of Ste. Marie in Souillac, France. © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg /Art Resource, NY.



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But it was not only portraits of Christ that best directed meditators towards the “invisible truth.” In addition, many monastic meditators used visual images that portrayed God more abstractly for their meditative purposes. In fact, many of these images emphasized the contrast between the chaos of the world (in all of its sinfulness) and the calming order of God’s creation. In this way, these images provided meditators with the intended experiential effects of meditation on the devotee, taking the meditator from an experience of chaos and misdirection (further from God) to one of order, clarity, and calm (closer to God). As we have seen in previous chapters, meditation was often seen as having to navigate the errors and pitfalls of life—much like a labyrinth, with the possibility of many a wrong turn.15 Throughout the monastic meditative landscape, many images thus paralleled the labyrinthine tumult and “truthful” chaos of the sinful world. Sometimes these were visions of hell, or visions of damned souls, chaotically tumbling to the bottom registers of tympana above the doorways of medi­eval churches. Sometimes they were images of more unspecific, generalized chaos, such as disordered beasts eating each other and confusedly populating an artistic space to emphasize the struggle inherent in the created work (such as those found in the Trumeau from Ste. Marie in Souillac, Figure 3, or in the initials of this twelfth-century Cistercian copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, Figure 4). What really clarifies these images as images of ungodly, sinful chaos, is their sharp contrast with other images found in monastic manu­scripts and church spaces, images of symmetry, geometric harmony, and order. Carpet pages (Figure 5) in monastic manu­scripts both emphasized the profound mystery of God’s truth in his figural absence, and served as a visual disentanglement of the chaos that one could see elsewhere in monastic visual culture. As full manu­script folios fully covered with aniconic, symmetrical geometric designs (looking much like the Persian rugs of later centuries), such pages were the kind of ordering, amazement, and wonder that only God the Creator could provide. As Laura McCloskey says, carpet pages “required a precise understanding of the geometric and arithmetic principles governing unity and proportion: flowing interlace needed to be balanced with correct scale and intricacy throughout the folio.”16 Unity, proportion, balance—these were the gifts of divine complexity, the effects of the truth of the invisible deity. Hugh of St. Victor approached these images as complicated pictures that required rumination and meditation (much as God did). Hugh says that “one first sees only an overwhelming jumble of fragmentary detail, then as one meditates one begins to collect the pieces, and then in contemplation forges a meaningful pattern.”17 Such images of the “divine truth” without 15  Adam Cohen, “Art, Exegesis, and Affective Piety in Twelfth-Century German Manu­scripts,” in Manu­scripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 47, 49, 68.

16  Laura McCloskey, “Exploring meditatio and memoria in Ireland through the Book of Durrow: Manu­script Illumination as the Intersection of Theo­logical and Artistic Traditions,” Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medi­eval Studies 11 (2018): 32–59 at 45. 17  As quoted in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medi­eval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 255.

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Figure 4: Early twelfth-century copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job from the abbey of Cî�teaux in France. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 168, fol. 103b. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon.



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Figure 5: Twelfth-century carpet page from the abbey of St. Amand in France. Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, MS 0001, fol. 5v. Used with permission.

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Figure 6: Twelfth-century nave of the church at Fontenay Abbey in France. Photo­graph by Manuel Cohen; image from Art Resource, NY.

literal or figural representation of God required a bit more of their viewers. Keen looking was required, and concentration too, much as it was required in the meditation. As Gerard of Cambrai remarks, with images like these, “you might say that this was the work of an angel and not of a human. For my part, the more often I see the book, and the more carefully I study it, the more I am lost in ever fresh amazement, and I see more and more wonders in the book.”18 This way of repeated looking as discovery, as leading to wonder and amazement in the organization and plan of God, is also akin to the promises of meditative ascent. In the words of the twelfth-century monk Richard of St. Victor, such was a geometria contemplativa, a geometric structure that supported contemplation.19 18  Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 255.

19  Mary Carruthers, “Geometries for Thinking Creatively,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. M. Kupfer, A. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 41.



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The geometrical ordering seen in carpet pages in monastic manu­ scripts also was reflected in monastic architecture, likewise to facilitate meditative ascent. Madeline Caviness has argued that the monastic environment featured such geometric ordering in stark contrast with the disordered landscape of the natural world. The perfection of the symmetry of the nave of the church of the Abbey of Fontenay (Figure 6), for instance, the hypnotic order of its east window, and the rational concordance and harmony of its architectural plan, encapsulated the experience of God as the creator and organizer of the universe.20 It also channeled light into the space in a Figure 7: Thirteenth-century image of God the Father as architect of the universe. Vienna, Ö� sterreichische way that lit the space in a systemNationalbibliothek, MS 2554, fol. 1v. Photo­graph by atic fashion, allowing for the order Erich Lessing; image from Art Resource, NY. of this space to literally be “illuminated,” and allowing the coherence of the monastic church’s interior to be deliberate. These ambient light conditions could have emphasized the “presence of God’s invisibility,” agitating a kind of spiritual liveliness despite the absence of a figural God.21 Using the capitals at Cluny, Sébastien Biay has argued that music overlayed on top of this architecture was also seen as an essential part of the complete order and (literal) harmony presented in the monastic space.22 By the thirteenth century, the liberal arts university curriculum explicitly emphasized how geometry and music were reflections of God, the great master mathematician who ordered the universe (Figure 7). If God’s creatures palely mirrored their creator, the geometry of the created universe did too, and could therefore be another pathway leading the devotee back to God himself. As Augustine observes, “the properly trained contemplative eye…will glimpse in the objects of the sensible world the reflection of the beauty and goodness of the creator, whom we see now only, in Paul’s words, ‘through 20  Madeline Caviness, “Templates for Knowledge: Geometric Ordering of the Built Environment,” in The Visualization of Knowledge, 405, 406, 424.

21  Bissera Pentscheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010), 8.

22  Sébastien Biay, “Building a Church with Music: The Plainchant Capitals at Cluny c. 1100,” in Resounding Images: Medi­eval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 224.

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a glass darkly.’”23 The geometries of the monastic space bestowed those mirror images upon monastic meditators, encouraging meditation in a way that was even more fruitful than portraits of Christ, simply because of their (more precise) indirectness. As Caroline Walker Bynum has observed, medi­eval images and objects were often “likenesses onto­ logically…Incense is really like the rising up of a prayer; gold is really like heavenly light or power in more than an arbitrary or simply attributed sense.”24 In this way, geometries provided calm and divine order, an indirect portrait of God, and a correction to the disorder and chaos of the sin-filled world, all at once.

Harnessing Meditative and Prayerful Restlessness: Tools for Focusing, Redirecting, Disciplining, and Ordering the “Routes” of Devotional Practice

The practice of meditation and prayer, however, was not just about envisioning God’s order and calm. As discussed in Chapter Three particularly, so often meditative texts were about the struggle and inability of the devotee to really focus enough on the task at hand. Visual tools in the monastery often acknowledged this struggle and attempted to assist the meditator with it, helping to focus, redirect, and structure meditative practice. Rather than merely indicating to whom a devotee should direct their meditative gaze, these tools would actually aid a devotee in how they might direct their gaze, period: they would encourage focus and discourage the restlessness that usually came with meditation. Mary Carruthers calls this encouragement a ductus, a path carved out in the mind, ordering and directing meditative thoughts.25 In this section, I will show how such refocusing and directing happened in two exemplary monastic encounters with visual and spatial tools: first, in the cloister; and, secondly, on the manu­script page, through diagrams. As mentioned above, in 1125 CE, Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux marveled at the “ridiculous monstrosit[ies]” that appeared “in the cloisters, before the eyes of the brothers while they read.” Thomas Dale has identified those “monstrosities” as the beasts that appeared regularly in the sculpted capitals that adorned the cloister pillars in many eleventh- and twelfth-century monasteries, such as that of St. Michel de Cuxa (Figure 8). In the Central Middle Ages, monastic churches often featured monstrous figures on their exterior tympana, warnings to those who entered the church that the Last Judgment was coming.26 But the monsters in the Cuxa capitals did not serve to warn laymen (who weren’t allowed in the cloister), and the monks who lived there didn’t need to be warned about the Judgment to come. Instead, the cloister served a space that either 23  Dale, Pygmalion’s Power, 10.

24  Caroline Walker Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medi­eval Europe (Princeton: Zone, 2020), 47.

25  Mary Carruthers, “The Concept of ‘Ductus,’ or, Journeying through a Work of Art,” in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 26  Dale, Pygmalion’s Power, 140.



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Figure 8: Twelfthcentury cloister from the abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa in Catalonia. New York City, The Met Cloisters, the Metro­ politan Museum of Art. Image from Art Resource, NY.

actively facilitated monastic meditation (by housing monastic readers and pray-ers) or passively, subconsciously instigated it (by serving as the conduit for monks from one place to another in the monastery). The cloister was a place of discipline and order, a regulated space of enforced, meditative silence.27 Scholars posit that the parapet beneath the arches of the cloister arcade was a place where younger monks would sit to be taught by their teachers; and monastic records show the cloister to be a place for liturgical processions, ritual washing, and perhaps even independent reading.28 Most importantly, as the central quad of the monastery, the cloister’s colonnades made a square frame for a garden at its centre, which served as a symbol of Eden, of the paradise that angelic monks might eventually access through their meditative efforts.29 For this reason, Peter of Celle called the cloister “on the border of angelic purity and earthly contamination.”30 These practical and symbolic valences are key to understanding the cloister’s role in encouraging monastic meditation and prayer. Think of yourself as a monk or a nun, walking in the cloister corridor. Imagine you wanted to turn into the cloister garth and 27  Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 231.

28  Megan Cassidy Welch, Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 60. 29  Cassidy Welch, Monastic Spaces, 49, 68.

30  As cited by Dale, Pygmalion’s Power, 141.

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walk through the open-air garden at its centre. What stands in the liminal space between the cloister corridor and the garden are a row of sculpted “monstrosities” in the cloister capitals. What you need to walk past to get into the garden, then, are these sculpted beasts, beasts that were often fantastical (featuring multiple heads, or multiple bodies and one head) and poised to spring out towards the viewer (as the Cuxa monkeys are in Figure 8). Peter the Venerable reflects that monastic practices of prayer and meditation are constantly under attack from the “devil and his legions.”31 These corruptible influences, this sinfulness, these distractions from meditation, are likely all allegorized by these sculpted monsters, ready to jump out of the marble and pull the viewer’s focus from the garden (Edenic paradise) beyond. The beasts in the capitals distract a monk from his focus on the garden, just as sin might distract a monk from his heavenly aims. At the same time, these sculpted beasts could also serve to focus the monastic viewer on the garden, to tunnel his vision towards his heavenly goal and block out all distractions that might seek to pull his attention away from his aim. The distracting capitals could serve to help a monastic viewer become even more eagle-eyed, narrowing his focus on the cloister garden (i.e., his or her heavenly goal) and blocking out any other diversion.32 Some scholars have postulated that the interplay of light, garden, and sculpture in the cloister fostered an inwardness that was ripe for meditation in viewing monks,33 inspiring them to follow Gregory the Great’s maxim that meditators “recognize about [them]selves both what is monstrous and what is beautiful.”34 Others have even noted that the light pouring through the cloister might have cast beast-shaped shadows on the floor of the cloister corridor, or regularly-arched, “rhythmic” shadows from the cloister arcade, which could have inspired an attentiveness to the art and its meaning in different ways at different times of day.35 All of these possibilities are ways in which the cloister space worked to sculpt a meditative route, a “ductus,” in the mind of its monastic practitioners. “Ductus,” however, needed not only to guide devotees away from sinful things and towards more meaningful meditative and prayerful paths. Visual tools in the meditative arsenal were also used to actively construct memories and ideas useful to meditation; they were helpful in encouraging meditation filled with re-composition, rumination, and an energetic contemplation of divine themes. Oftentimes, manu­scripts used in monastic meditation contained not only texts to be read and ruminated upon, but also diagrams and charts, mechanisms for structuring the cognitive processes involved in meditation.36 31  Dale, Pygmalion’s Power, 154.

32  Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medi­eval Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

33  Aden Kumler, Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medi­eval France and England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 162. 34  Conrad Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemic in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 84. 35  Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 260, 264.

36  Jeffrey Hamburger, Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremburg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’ Poems in Praise of the Cross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 17, 21.



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Diagrams helped medi­eval meditators continually rediscover the necessary order for their meditative processes by outlining a well-honed path for them.37 A great example of such visual tools are the images that circulated with the Speculum virginum, a twelfth-century text attributed to Conrad of Hirsau that advised monks and nuns of the path to God through an exegesis of the Song of Songs. The text was technically a dialogue between a monk named Peregrinus (literally a “pilgrim”—i.e., a journeyer on the route to God) and a nun named Theodora. Despite the gendered positionality of these characters, the Speculum was used as an advice manual for both nuns and monks alike throughout the Middle Ages, with both men and women using “Theodora” as their avatar to learn about the spiritual journey.38 The Speculum virginum is filled with images in its manu­script copies—trees, ladders, crosses, wheels—each serving as diagrams to help map out the path to salvation for its readers. For instance, in an early copy (British Library Arundel MS 44) from the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey of St. Mary, Eberbach (Figure 9), a cross-ladder is presented to the reader, with God at the top and a serpent at the bottom, and the virtuous steps to be taken towards the divine personified in between. The challenge of human devotees approaching prayer is presented in the image with inscriptions encircling God at the top: “Unhappy human that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?” (Infelix ego homo, quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius, a quote from Romans) and “The lust thereof shall be under you, and you shall have dominion over it” (Sub te erit appetitus eius and tu dominaberis, a quote from Genesis). How will I have full dominion over unhappiness, lust, and death? the image asks alongside the reader. How can I reach God (here called Deus optimus at the top of the cross)? The answer is provided by the rest of the image. The Spirit (here called Spiritus melior, the woman at the top of the cross grasping hands with God) and the Flesh (here called Caro bonum, the woman in brown directly below Spirit) strive upwards towards Christ. An ascent is mapped by the image, from Flesh (here called “good”) to Spirit (here called “better”) to God (here called “best”). The reader is instructed by the image to use their “free will” (liberum arbitrium) to triumph over the “age-old Deceiver” (Deceptor veteranus, the beast at the base of the cross, personifying lust, unhappiness, and death). And the tools useful to the devotee are also personified alongside the climb towards God, namely “Reason” (Ratio) and “Wisdom” (Sapientia) on the arms of the cross, and below them the sword-bearing “Law” (Lex—specifically the law not to covet—non con­ cupisces). This image echoes the many other ladders that appear in prayer manuals of the time (such as the textual diagram discussed in Chapter Two), providing a visual map of ascent to the viewer and a ­graphic summary of the advice of the Speculum virginum itself: to embrace the will found in the spirit and fortified by reason, wisdom, and the law of biblical learning. In this way, the manu­script provides its monastic readers with a visual that could be fortifying in prayer practice, easily looked at again and again, foster37  Jeffrey Hamburger, “Mindmapping: The Diagram as Paradigm in Medi­eval Art—and Beyond,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. M. Kupfer, A. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 67. 38  Newman, Virile Woman, 21–22.

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Figure 9: Twelfth-century Speculum virginum, from the abbey of St. Mary, Eberbach in Germany. London, British Library, MS Arundel 44, fol. 83v. © The British Library Board. Used with permission.



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ing discovery with each repeated viewing thanks to its detail and intricacy, and cultivating a different way to experience the textual instruction of the rest of the book.39 Another example of a diagram used to facilitate monastic meditation is that contained in the eleventh-century libellus precum from the Norman monastery of Bec discussed in Chapter Two (Figure 1).40 The coloured twists and turns that undulate between each phrase on this eleventh-century diagram allow the monastic reader to become a pilgrim. It does not simply present its ascent in a straight-forward manner, however, the way the ladder of virtue does in the Speculum virginum.41 Instead, the shape of this diagram represents the experience of meditation: a winding path, one that plateaus with each ascent, one that emphasizes vision is reserved for only the highest echelons. Here, meditative ductus is visualized in an encouraging way, one that emphasizes the indirectness endemic to the meditative experience, and consoles monks by showcasing the real endurance required in prayerful ascent. Whether mapping out routes away from sin or towards meditative and prayerful success, the visual tools available to monastic meditators regularly modelled ideal ascents (as in the Speculum) and acknowledged the circuitous paths that often came with monastic devotion (as in Paris 13593).

Method Acting, Meditation, and Prayer: Engaging and Embodied Perception and Knowledge

Notably, in each of the examples depicted above, the devotee is playing the role of himself when confronting and manipulating these extra-textual tools. There is no escaping the devotee’s own identity (and frailty) in the cases of the Hitda Codex, or the carpet pages, or the Cuxa cloister, or the Speculum virginum. But this positionality was not the only mode in which monks and nuns interacted with medi­eval art in preparation for meditation. Many artworks and spaces actually invited a kind of method-acting on the part of the devotee-viewer, aiming to facilitate a monk or nun’s meditative practice by inviting that devotee to imagine themselves as a part of a biblical scene, in an fictional lived-intimacy with God.42 The omnipresence of this method, even in the eleventhand twelfth-century monastery, reveals the keen insights medi­eval people had into the psycho­logical and spiritual benefits of an encouraged embodied perception: medi­eval monks and nuns embarked on devotional performances in order to facilitate their own contemplative efforts. If they became imagined onlookers, beholding God as he lived, as he was crucified, or as he was buried, perhaps they could better witness God in prayer and meditation, too. William of St. Thierry explains that such playacting was necessary for frail human minds to really get into the meditational groove, in the same way that a human Christ 39  Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 255.

40  For more on this, see Mancia, “Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manu­script,” 153–77.

41  Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medi­eval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 115.

42  Christopher Swift, “A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears,” in Crying in the Middle Ages, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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Figure 10: Prayer postures modelled for the monks of the abbey of Ottobeuren (in Germany), from Peter the Chanter’s twelfth-century illustrated prayer manual De oratione. London, British Library, Add. MS 19767, fol. 194v. Used with permission.

was necessary to translate the abstract divine into a form that humans could better grasp and understand. “Your babes in Church,” William says, addressing God, “still needed your milk rather than solid food…are not strong enough spiritually to think of you in your own way.” To William, they needed “a form not unfamiliar to themselves [i.e., the incarnate Christ]…in offering their prayers they might set this form before themselves…while they are still unable to gaze into the brightness of the majesty of your divinity.”43 Thus, it is “better and safer,” to William, “to put before…one when one is praying or meditating a 43  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 153.



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representation of our Lord’s humanity—of his birth, Passion, and resurrection—so that the weak spirit which is only able to think of material objects and their properties may have something to which it can apply itself.”44 Such a staging, William believed, would place God in front of the viewer in an accessible manner, allowing the devotee to literally “embrace the manger of the newborn babe, to venerate the sacred infancy, to caress the feet of the crucified, to hold and kiss those feet, when he is risen, and to put her hand in the print of the nails and cry ‘My Lord and My God!’”45 This kind of physical interaction with a material representation of God was a training of the monk or nun through performance, with the hopes that such embodiment would encourage in the devotee a heightened spiritual perception that would then better fuel their meditation.46 Meditation and prayer were always understood as embodied practices by medi­eval monks and nuns—the body was trained alongside the heart and the mind. Christians from Cassiodorus to Peter the Chanter had long recognized that prayer was better facilitated by the proper positioning of the body: that prayer was more effective when it was in Church rather than at home, and when it was in community rather than in private.47 The humiliation of the body—particularly its prostration, such as in kneeling—was something that was a part of wider medi­eval culture: vassals knelt before their lay lords and kings in part because medi­eval people understood that the body expressed what the heart and mind understood.48 In his twelfth-century treatise on proper prayer, Peter the Chanter says explicitly that a praying devotee should go beyond the typical “orant” position of arms outstretched (see the front cover image of this volume for the initial from the eleventh-century Werden Psalter); instead, one should use “his whole heart and body,”49 instructing monastic devotees how to stand to pray, when to lower in penitence, when to turn towards Jerusalem or the altar while praying, etc., “for the state of the exterior human tells us about the humility and affect of the interior human.”50 In the thirteenth-century copies of Peter’s prayer manual that survive, images of monks and nuns perform these postures as a further guide for the reader (Figure 10). Peter’s instructions—and these prayer postures—seem to have been followed in earlier moments as well, judging from images such as that from an eleventh-century monk in a Catalonian prayerbook in Figure 11. Such actions enabled devotees to perform their internal state (prayerful, humble, loving), allowing them to shape their emotions from the outside in. Like the monastic 44  William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 69.

45  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 152.

46  Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medi­ eval York (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 18, 25.

47  Richard C. Trexler, The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual Attributed to Peter the Chanter (Tempe: ACMRS, 1987), 43. 48  Trexler, The Christian at Prayer, 47–48.

49  Trexler, The Christian at Prayer, 35. 50  Trexler, The Christian at Prayer, 39.

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Figure 11: Twelfth-century prayer manu­script from the monastery of Ripoll in Catalonia. Ripoll. Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, 214, fol. 6v. Used with permission.

tonsure or habit, a monk relied on the trappings and conformities of his body to shape his proper habitual obedience and devotion.51 Embodied practices at the monastery, however, could be even more performative and theatrical than simple acts of prostration. Monks and nuns were regularly participants in the liturgy, performing the roles of biblical characters, allowing them to imagine themselves in bible stories, instead of outside of them. For instance, many western European monasteries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries featured an Easter drama often referred to as the Quem quaeritis play, performed between Matins and Lauds on Easter.52

51  Giles Constable, “The Ceremonies and Symbolism of Entering Religious Life and Taking the Monastic Habit, from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedi­evale occidentale (Spoleto: Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1985), 771–834; and Kathryn Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 171. 52  Diane Dolan, Le drame liturgique de pâques en Normandie et en Angleterre au Moyen-Age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975).



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Figure 12: From the twelfth-century church of St. Eulalia in Erill la Vall, Catalonia, now in Vic, Museu Episcopal MEV, Museu d’Art Medi­eval, photo­grapher: Salvans. Used with permission.

During this short play, four monks (or nuns) were chosen from among the congregation to play the roles of the three Marys who visited Jesus’ tomb and the angel who appeared to them there. Impersonating these characters, the actors would enact the revelation of the resurrection in real-time, testifying to the glory of God, and imitating the emotions of the characters so that they themselves could vicariously revel in God’s majesty. Such role-playing was a kind of method acting that would allow participants to both feel the deprivation of God (in the empty tomb) and the magnificence of God (at the announcement of his resurrection) in the liturgical space, such drama bringing the devotee closer to their religious longings.53 Moreover, these dramas did not always need live performers to enact all the roles; they could also be performed by manipulated sculptures and art objects too.54 Sometimes life-size sculptures were featured players in such pieces, like those from the Church of St. Eulalia in Catalonia (Figure 12). Romanesque sculpture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was becoming increasingly three-dimensional and more vividly painted, and therefore served as a part of the dramatic mimesis of these liturgical plays, bringing to life the divine and biblical figures imaged in these works of art and allowing the viewing monks and nuns to interact with them as if they were part of the mis en scène. William of St. Thierry himself explicitly calls upon such sculpted likenesses as 53  Swift, “A Penitent Prepares.”

54  Laura Weigert, French Visual Culture and the Making of Medi­eval Theater (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7, 26, 45–46.

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Figure 13: Twelfth-century relief from the cloister of the monastery of Silos in Spain. © DeA Picture Library; image from Art Resource, NY.



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tools for meditation in the quote cited above: “You will allow her [my soul], for example, to embrace the manger of the newborn babe…to caress the feet of the crucified, to hold and kiss those feet when he is risen, and to put her hand in the print of the nails and cry…”55 It is the “embrace,” the “caress,” the “hold[ing],” and the “put[ting]” of the hand “in the print of the nails”—that tactility and embodiment—that stirs the soul’s desire in William’s estimation. Such opportunities for “incarnational contemplation”56 were not merely relegated to holidays when liturgical dramas were to be performed, however. Monks and nuns also engaged with the sculpture that surrounded them in experiential ways throughout the year. The monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, for example, featured in its cloister walk a relief of Jesus’ disciples on the journey to Emmaus next to a relief of the Doubting Thomas scene (Figure 13). As Silos’ monks walked around the cloister, they would walk alongside these sculpted reliefs daily, walking in the same direction as the disciples, as if they themselves were accompanying them on their journey. This could have allowed the monks of Silos to develop a concrete understanding through regular embodiment: the monk would have “corporeal evidence” that he himself was a spiritual sojourner akin to the apostles.57 Moreover, once the monks reached the Doubting Thomas panel, they would be greeted by an inscription, inviting them to touch and physically engage with Christ’s body along with Thomas himself: “Put thy finger here, and see my hands; and bring hither your hand, put it into my side; do not be faithless but believing.”58 The inscription addresses the viewer, suggesting that the monk experience Christ through the sense of touch. The sculpture invokes a quintessential paradox: by offering its tangible materiality as a way for the viewer to explore the divine, the sculpture is giving the monk a chance to literally grasp the ungraspable, to stick his finger into the tactile wound of the otherwise invisible God. The material and embodied engagement encouraged by monastic art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries increasingly privileged the sense of touch over all other senses, suggesting that tactility was an equally important gateway to belief, since it triggered meditation in a different (and more active) way than reading or sight.59 Even when objects could not be grasped by their viewing public, however, they regularly invited imaginative and theatrical immersion, further engaging the viewer in an embodied way. 55  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 152.

56  Eleanor Johnson, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theo­logy in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 113.

57  Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, “Touch Me, See Me: The Emmaus and Thomas Reliefs in the Cloister of Silos,” in Spanish Medi­eval Art: Recent Studies, ed. Colum Hourihane (Tempe: ACMRS/The Index of Christian Art, 2007), 64. 58  As quoted by Dale, Pygmalion’s Power, 3.

59  Jacqueline E. Jung, “The Tactile and the Visionary: Notes on the Place of Sculpture in Medi­ eval Imagination,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights into Medi­eval Art and History (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, 2010), 209.

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Figure 14: The twelfth-century “Cloisters Cross,” attributed to the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in England. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; image from Art Resource, NY.



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A profound example of this kind of engagement is the twelfth-century Cloisters Cross, an Anglo-Norman altar cross (Figure 14).60 With ninety-two figures and ninety-eight inscriptions on its five surfaces, the cross was meant to engage its monastic audience on several levels: it spoke to its well-educated monastic viewers via highly-abbreviated Latin inscriptions; it was tactile, with low and high relief figures, including a now-missing sculpted body of Christ; it was visual, featuring various biblical scenes alongside portraits of prophets and Evangelists; it was a prop for liturgical performances, likely used in the liturgical Easter dramas celebrated at whatever monastery to which it belonged; and, most importantly for our discussion here, it attempted to instigate meditative emotion on the part of its viewer. On the simplest level, The Cloisters Cross makes a typo­ logical presentation of Christ’s Passion and the scenes following the Crucifixion during Holy Week, aligning scenes from the Hebrew Bible with the scenes from the Christian Scriptures that medi­eval Christians believed the Old Testament scenes foreshadowed. On the front side of the cross (Figure 14) hung the body of Christ (now missing). Behind Christ’s head was the still visible Moses and the Brazen Serpent, an Old Testament story often used as a type for Christ’s crucifix, since both the cross and the serpent were understood as salvific signs. Three surviving terminals of the cross surround the Brazen Serpent roundel, each depicting one of a series of Holy Week scenes: the deposition and burial of Christ; the visitation of the three Marys at Christ’s tomb; and the ascension of Christ. Just below the Ascension plaque and above the roundel with the Brazen Serpent is a scene of Caiaphas and Pilate, arguing about the inscription they have carved on the titulus beneath their feet (and above the head of the body of Christ that would have hung there). The titulus’ inscription, carved in Latin, Greek, and (pseudo-) Hebrew, reads “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Confessors,” and is accented by a hand of God the Father, blessing from its perch on a stylized cloud the figure of Christ that would have hung below. Finally, the cross presents a couplet carved in large letters on the two sides of the shaft: “Chaim laughs when he sees the naked private parts of his parent. The Jews laughed at the pain of God dying.” It is the content of this couplet (which certainly reads as anti-Jewish to modern sensibilities) that is important to the immersive emotional project of the cross. The cross invited viewing monks to imagine themselves at its foot, witnessing the crucifixion of Christ as his mother Mary herself did at the real crucifixion. But it did not cast the monks to imagine themselves as Mary; instead, it presented an immersive opportunity for monks to imagine themselves as something completely antithetical to their religious identities: as unbelieving Jews, in need of confession and conversion to Christ for the first time. The chief way the cross does this is with the large inscription written on its shaft concerning Chaim and the laughing Jews. Several scholars have interpreted this inscription as addressing contemporary Jewish viewers of the Cloisters Cross, medi­ eval Jews who were regularly being attacked in this period and eventually were expelled 60  Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Abrams, 1994); Lauren Mancia, “Tools for Monastic Emotion: Confessio and Conversio in Augustine, John of Fécamp, and The Cloisters Cross,” Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies 5 (2020): 41–71.

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from England, Germany, and other areas of Europe soon after the cross’s fabrication.61 While there is no denying that anti-Jewish polemic was intensely inflamed during the era of the cross’s production, and had very real effects on its Jewish victims, the Cloisters Cross was not for Jewish viewers, but was instead used to teach and perpetuate anti-Jewish polemic against imagined “Jews” in the minds of its twelfth-century Christian onlookers. Christian polemic against Jews and Muslims was more often aimed at correcting Christian belief than it was directed at real or imagined non-Christians62; in the High Middle Ages, “Jews” were often used as allegorical stand-ins for the doubting insecurities of Christians, serving as “index[es] of perception” for Christians,63 witnesses who served to represent those imperfections which the viewing Christian could not see in himself. Thus, just as penitential poems likened the state of the sinful Christian to that of the Jews clamouring in the desert, so too did the Jews here serve as avatars for Christians who used them to explore their own impious behaviours.64 The Cloisters Cross’s program invited the monk-onlooker to imagine himself a “Jew,” one who did not recognize Christ’s divine nature because he had not properly confessed to Christ, “king of the confessors.” Monks would have understood confession to be the mandated act of admitting their own sins and expressing their own praise of God. The Cloisters Cross’s titulus, by calling Christ “King of the Confessors,” invites its monk-viewers to imagine themselves Jews in order to better confess and convert to Christ in real time. This thought experiment would have been very much in line with monastic meditative approaches we have already discussed. In their meditations and prayers, monks and nuns could use the scripts of prayers to better articulate their particular devotional position and better “convert” to a particular devotional practice.65 Imagining themselves Jews denying Christ, particularly Jews “laughing” at the crucified God, would have done similar work: it would have underscored for Christians the offensiveness of their “cooled,” “lukewarm” positions, since twelfth-century monastics knew laughter—the opposite of godly reverence—to be forbidden in the monastery.66 The “Jewish” position—an imagined neglect of the crucified God—hence would have served as an apt allegory of the “cold” behaviour of unfeeling monks lost in their habitual practices of sin. Feelings of “coldness” essentially turned monks into “Jews” who had forgotten and neglected Christ. What better way to turn back towards Christ than to re-envision oneself as a “Jew” who might embrace Christ anew in rapt conversion, and feeling as connected to him as a new Christian might be? The Cloisters Cross focuses on allowing the monastic audience to perform as Jews, giving its viewers an idealized opportunity to 61  Nina Rowe, “Other,” Studies in Icono­graphy 33 (2012): 131–44; Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medi­eval City (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 61–74.

62  Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, Christian Society Faces Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 338–57. 63  Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medi­eval Origins of Anti-Jewish Icono­graphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 80. 64  Parker and Little, The Cloisters Cross, 171. 65  Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 97.

66  I. M. Resnick, “Laughter and Medi­eval Monastic Culture,” Revue Bénédictine 97 (1987): 90–100.



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confess to the “King of the Confessors.” This performative dimension provided by the cross encouraged penitential conversion in monastic meditation, immersing the monk in a rejuvenating experience. By using anti-Jewish tropes and imagined Jewish avatars, monks could better recognize their own sinfulness, more fully complete their conversion, and more effectively reignite the “fire” of longing for God by performing a confession to Christ. Whether engaging through touch, or movement, or immersive sight, then, the embodied practices of monks and nuns vis à vis their material objects in the monastery were essential in getting them to the emotional place that prepared them for more engaged meditation. In the words of the famous twelfth-century Abbot Suger, the monastic’s “dull mind rises to truth through that which is material; and, in seeing this light, is resurrected from his former submersion.”67

Conclusion: The Persistent Inadequacy of the Devotee

With so many tools at their disposal, one would imagine that a monk or a nun would have had everything they might need to fully achieve meditative prowess in the monastery. And yet, they did not, by their own admission. In the words of Carthusian Guigo II, “the more [my soul] searches the more it thirsts…as long as it is meditating, so long is it suffering…the fire of longing, the desire to know [God] more fully, [only] increase[s].”68 Such continued yearning, as discussed in Chapter Three, was ultimately all a monk could achieve: not fulfillment and vision, but excitable frustration and longing. Like the treatises on meditation written by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastics, the extra-textual tools at the monastery emphasized this persistent inadequacy, never promising complete or certain vision. Sometimes it was that images of God were placed just out of the reach of devotees, such as for the nun Margaret Ebner, who yearned to touch the sculpture of the crucified Christ in her convent, even though it was alas “too high up for me and…too large in size.”69 If at Silos monks could stick their fingers in Christ’s sculpted wound, we can imagine that here the simultaneous desire and incapacity to touch was planned; the crucifix could have been placed lower, but its placement just out of Margaret’s reach fostered a kind of yearning that might have been an intentional conduit for meditation. Likewise, twelfth-century monk Rupert of Deutz expresses frustration at thwarted touch in his Commentary on Matthew, in which he longs to touch God and yet, “what could I do? He was too high on the altar for me to reach.”70 It is from that moment of desire for union with God that Rupert has a vision of Christ leaning down off the cross and deeply kissing him. This vision teaches the medi­eval viewer that such 67  Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. Erwin Panofsky and Gerda Panofsky-Soergel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 48–49. 68  Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1981), 71, 73. 69  Jung, “Tactile and the Visionary,” 220n72.

70  Sara Lipton, “‘The Sweet Lean of His Head’: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208 at 1175.

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Figure 15: The ninth-century prayer book of Charles the Bald. München, Schatzkammer der Residenz, ResMü Schk 4WL, fols 38v–39r. © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, Münchner Digitalisierungszentrum, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. Used with permission.

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Figure 16: The fourteenth-century Rothschild Canticles. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, Rothschild Canticles, fols. 18v–19r. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, Yale University.

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Figure 17: A thirteenth-century psalter. Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS B.11.4, fol. 119r. Image courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.



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longing is not for naught; indeed, it could serve as a basis for ultimately feeling rewarded by God’s grace and moving closer to God momentarily. The unknowability of God was not only emphasized by sculptural placement in monastic spaces; it was also reiterated by manu­script images as well. This trope was not new to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Indeed, the Prayer Book of Charles the Bald (Figure 15), a ninth-century production, emphasized that, as close as a devotee (like Charles, on the right) could come to his God, he would always be somewhat separated from the divine; in the prayer book, Charles remains on the left folio, arm outstretched towards Christ on the right folio, the gully of the book and the margins of the manu­script forever keeping them apart. In this way, the artist emphasizes that, while Charles can “see” his God, he cannot “touch” him, consummate their relationship and be satisfied. In a similar way, the early fourteenth-century Rothschild Canticles (Figure 16), a florilegium potentially for a monastic audience composed of prayers and meditations, depicts a devotee attempting to pierce Christ with her dart of love, but unable to reach him because of the gully of the book binding. And artists found other ways to emphasize God’s unknowability in manu­script images: for instance, they often depicted devotees as incapable of looking at the divine. In the eleventh-century Catalonian image mentioned earlier (Figure 11), for instance, the monk devotee peers out at the viewer, unable to look directly at the vision of Christ above him. In a thirteenth-century psalter from Trinity College Library (MS B.11.4, Figure 17), two nuns are shown an image of the trinity, but cannot gaze at the face of God himself, because it is covered with a petal-shaped disk.71 The pictures attempted to extend the vision of the viewer to the divine beyond, but the monastic devotee was still only granted partial sight. Still, as Cassian prescribed in one of the earliest treatises on monastic meditation and prayer, these images allowed the devotee to steady their focus: “we fasten all our attention of mind and body upon him, and hang with trembling expectation on his nod... if in the midst of the prosecution and trial any coughing or spitting or laughing or yawning or sleep overtakes us, with what malice will our ever watchful opponent stir up the severity of the judge to our damage…”72 The devotee needed a focusing tool in their material surroundings to steady their frail human imagination, according to William of St. Thierry: “by means of some mental picturing…In offering of their prayers they might set this form before themselves, without any hinderance to faith, while they are still unable to gaze into the brightness of the majesty of your divinity…so that our bodily eyes may possess something on which to gaze, something to which to cleave, worshipping not the pictured likeness only, but the truth the picture… represents.”73 Despite the fact that Bernard believed that monastic devotees “would rather read in the marble than in 71  Kessler, “Speculum,” 6.

72  As quoted by Robert W. Gaston, “Attention in Court: Visual Decorum in Medi­eval Prayer Theory and Early Italian Art,” in Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrew Ladis and Shelley E. Zurwa (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 142–43. 73  William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God, 152–53.

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books, and spend the whole day wondering at every single one of them than in meditating on the law of God,” he was precisely wrong. The extra-textual tools around the monastery were not “extravagant” and “unnecessary,” and did not “catch the worshipper’s eye and dry up his devotion,” as Bernard suspected.74 In fact, they did just the opposite: monks and nuns used images, spaces, light, and material objects in order to cultivate a fuller meditative experience than they could without them. The “dried up devotion” that they experienced was not because of the art, but despite the art. Their longing, suffering, and struggling was channelled, focused, comforted, and encouraged by these extra-textual tools, “for what is within us is benefited in no slight degree by what is around us, when it is arranged to accord with our minds and in its own way to correspond with the ideals we have set before us.”75 But the fact of the matter remained: no matter what monks and nuns did, they always were human, sinful, frail, and struggling towards God.

74  Bernard’s Apo­logia as quoted above.

75  William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 61.

CONCLUSION No matter what monks and nuns did, they were always human, sinful, frail, and

struggling towards God. There’s something about that persistence that’s quite admirable and inspiring. There’s something about that dedication in the face of failure that’s quite beautiful. And there’s something about these lifetimes of selfless efforts in the medi­eval monastery that feel quite foreign to our modern sensibilities. In a recent semester, I held my final class for my Medi­eval Christianity course at Brooklyn College. For our last session, we reflected as a group on medi­eval Christianity’s uses and misuses since 1500. We read about how contemporary American white supremacists, German Nazis, and the planters of the American South all used romanticized notions of the Middle Ages to better model the world order that they hoped to effect.1 But of all the things we read, the students were most interested in the idea of “neo-medi­evalism,” an international relations theory that, in some iterations, envisions a new globalized world order that is post-nation/post-sovereign states, and is instead organized by a universal political organization parallel to that which was organized by the Church in western Christendom.2 How international relations theorists characterized (or, perhaps, mischaracterized) the medi­eval world was less interesting to my students; what preoccupied them was the question of what could possibly serve as “Christendom,” as a universal, overarching system, in our contemporary world? After spending some minutes recognizing that post-medi­eval religious confessionalization made religious unity impossible in the contemporary world, the students then spent the rest of the class period marveling at how the only unifying principle that could potentially invoke universal loyalties in the world of the 2020s was money. Capitalism had replaced Christendom in their minds; money had become the principle that sparked every political and personal decision in their view. “Because money doesn’t tell you how to live your life the way the Church did,” one student said, “the morality of our society—our purpose for living—is completely messed up.” The students then had a litany of examples of how money had eroded the moral compass of actors large and small: from the United States trading with countries who violated human rights, to cults of celebrity being more important than “truth,” to “everyone’s obsession with superficial stuff on social media,” the students began to articulate a listlessness that overwhelmed our classroom. “No one has any passion anymore, they just want to major in business because they just want to make money in their lives,” one student said. “There’s no community without morality,” another student said. Students who were themselves serious practitioners of religions—mostly, in our class, Muslims and Jews—explained that their faith and their faith community gave them purpose. In reaction to those comments, a 1  For more on these kinds of studies, see Andrew Albin et al., ed., Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (New York: Fordham, 2019); ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein, The United States of Medi­evalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).

2  Bruce Holsinger, “Neomedi­evalism and International relations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medi­evalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 165–79.

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third student said, “I don’t think Catholicism is the answer, but I kind of wish it was.” The class concluded in a crescendo of remarks that were deeply satisfying—they were using the history classroom as a space of reckoning!—and deeply depressing all at the same time. It is hard in our present moment to find a way to teach students about history that feels inspiring. Students are quite inured to the sense of “progress” that used to propel classrooms of burgeoning historians. The Middle Ages is still exciting as a point of origin for many modern phenomena, but those modern phenomena highlighted by scholars now are not always signs of the positive evolution of humankind (“the discovery of the individual” or “the birth of the modern state” or the evolution of science and techno­ logy and global connectivity). Instead, “modern progress” is increasingly paired with the persistence of persecution and inequality that characterizes modern society, and so the Middle Ages is now seen as a point of origin for those harmful social and political forces (“the invention of race” or “the birth of capitalism”). While these new narratives do not negate the great achievements (the university! Gothic architecture! the codex!) of the medi­eval period, they do require medi­evalists to find new ways to justify the study of their period to students so that we can inspire students and not just teach them these essential and important (though somewhat gloomy) stories of medi­eval origins of oppression. One possible solution might be to revel in the invention and beauty that came out of the fruitless struggle of medi­eval monastic devotion. I find the monastic examples and processes discussed in this book reassuring and inspiring in the face of contemporary culture as my students described it above. Even in an era that had much discomfort and uncertainty, medi­eval monastic spiritual strivers persisted, re-focusing when they found themselves unfocused, helping each other to keep their mutual eyes on the prize of eventual salvation. The ever-present spiritual longing of monks and nuns gave them directional purpose, even if it also regularly reminded them of their inadequacies. In fact, their inadequacies didn’t ultimately discourage them, but inspired them to work even harder: success and perfection were not everything, and they found meaning in the very fact that they were not perfect and still needed to reach God. Moreover, rational understanding—just knowing what they had to do—didn’t satisfy them: “I think therefore I am” would not have been enough for Anselm or Bernard. For these monastic devotees, it was the doing that was of prime importance, the enacted, embodiment of devotion, even if it ended in failure, even if it was always going to be fruitless and inadequate proof of a devout actor’s helplessness. Monastic conviction and introspection drove these medi­eval monastic men and women forward, drove them to reach beyond themselves and their egos, drove them to radically renounce their individual desires, and led them to march towards the divine in common Christian purpose. The devotional priorities refined and articulated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries created an urgency that propelled monastic lives, inspired monastic art-making in text and image, sparked a revolution of how humans conceived of themselves and their abilities, and reminded monks and nuns—at the very least—to regularly be present in what they were doing and intentional about how and why they were doing it. This resolve that characterized the monastic men and women of the 1120s could inspire the students of the 2020s. The monks and nuns in this study did not stop their



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efforts for prayer and meditation after they failed to be perfect, or failed, by their accounts, to be even a little successful. Instead, they picked themselves up and made meaning through an unfulfilled struggle towards God that was the fundamental work of their lives—and that created beauty as a result. Monks and nuns found a kind of transcendence that came with a drive towards something deeply believed (even if never achieved)—the journey was, for them, what allowed for joy, hope, and invention. Passionate pursuits, presence in action, moral direction, perseverance despite failure, meaningful struggle—these unifying ideals are what my students articulated was missing from our contemporary culture on that last day of class. After what is now years of COVID quarantines and uncertainty, in a time when global warming and our environment seems to be an inappropriately low priority, in a political landscape where fascism is on the rise, and in a techno­logical climate where we find ourselves increasingly distracted, unfocused, disembodied, and isolated, it is hard to cultivate passion, to be fully “present,” to find moral direction, to withstand failure, and to see struggle as ultimately meaningful. But perhaps that is because our current historical context still privileges individual achievement, instant gratification, and easy monetary rewards. There was no instant gratification for meditating and praying monks and nuns, no fulfilled achievement, individual or otherwise. Monetary reward was absolutely not what was most valuable or praise-worthy to medi­eval monks and nuns, and an “easy” prize of any kind was mistrusted by them. Instead, monks and nuns fought towards something deeply believed to be the Most Important Thing. They had a mission, and they were driven towards it, encouragement or no, success or no. This book showcases a distinctly medi­eval passion in the hopes that it might inspire us to also begin to displace our current mindsets and instead demand a radical submission to a moral force or a passionate cause external to ourselves. With luck, in the twenty-first-century context, that external force will not ultimately be a strongman, or the almighty dollar, or a doctrine of hate, but rather something more hopeful, healing, and beautiful; a spiritual force, perhaps, or an emotionally-present livelihood, or a commitment to equality or eco­logy or societal transformation. Whatever it is, may it be some ecumenical chance at salvation, redemption, and conversion, a promise of heaven for all humankind.

SELECT ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BIBLIO­GRAPHY Primary Sources Aelred of Rievaulx. Treatises and Pastoral Prayer. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1971. Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Translated by Benedicta Ward. New York: Penguin, 1975. Baldwin of Forde. The Commendation of Faith. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2000. Benedict of Nursia. Rule of Saint Benedict. Translated by Bruce Venarde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bernard of Clairvaux. Selected Works. Translated by G. R. Evans. Mahwah: Paulist, 1987. Cassian, John. The Conferences, edited by Boniface Ramsay. Mahwah: Paulist, 1997. Elisabeth of Schonau. The Complete Works. Translated by Anne Clark. Mahwah: Paulist, 2000. Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1972. Goscelin of St. Bertin. Goscelin of St. Bertin: The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, edited by Monika Otter. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004. Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Translated by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Mahwah: Paulist, 1978. Guigo II. Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations. Collegeville: Liturgical, 1981. Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart. Mahwah: Paulist, 1990. Hugh of St. Victor. Didascalicon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Origen. Origen’s Treatise on Prayer, edited by Eric George Jay. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1954. Peter of Celle. Peter of Celle: Selected Works. Translated by Hugh Feiss. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1987. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Translated by Paul Roren. Mahwah: Paulist, 1987. Richard of St. Victor. The Twelve Patriarchs and The Mystical Ark. Translated by Grover A. Zinn. New York: Paulist, 1979. Tertullian. Tertullian’s Tract on the Prayer, edited by Ernest Evans. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2016. William of St. Thierry. The Enigma of Faith. Translated by John D. Anderson. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1974. —— . On Contemplating God, Prayer, Meditations. Translated by Penelope Lawson. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1970.

Secondary Sources

Asad, Talal. “On Ritual and Discipline in Medi­eval Christian Monasticism.” Economy and Soci­ ety 16 (1987): 159–203. Astell, Ann W. and Catherine Rose Cavadini. “The Song of Songs.” In The Wiley Blackwell Com­ panion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia A. Lamm, 25–40. Hoboken: Wiley, 2012. Bestul, Thomas H. “Meditation/Meditatio.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysti­ cism, edited by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman, 157–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Brown, Rachel Fulton. “Prayer.” Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism, edited by Bernice M. Kaczynski, 317–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

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Boddice, Rob and Mark Smith. Emotion, Sense, Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Boynton, Susan. “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters.” Speculum 82 (2007): 895–931. Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medi­eval Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Choy, Renie. “The Brother Who May Wish to Pray by Himself: Sense of Self in Carolingian Prayers of Private Devotion.” In Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Hon­ our of Sister Benedicta Ward, edited by S. Bhattacharji, R. Williams, and D. Mattos, 101–21. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. —— . Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Clark, Stephanie. Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018. Cochelin, Isabelle. “Customaries as Inspirational Sources.” In Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, edited by Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines, 27–72. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Dale, Thomas E. A. “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of StMichel-de-Cuxa.” The Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 402–36. —— . Pygmalion’s Power: Romanesque Sculpture, the Senses, and Religious Experience. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. Dailey, Patricia. “The Body and its Senses.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysti­ cism, edited by Patricia Z. Beckman and Amy Hollywood, 264–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. De Jong, Mayke. “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer.” In The New Cambridge Medi­eval History, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 622–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Diener, Laura. “Entering the Bedchamber of Your Soul: How Religious Women Learned the Art of Monastic Meditation.” In A Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Ronald Stansbury, 339–61. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Flanagan, Sabrina. Doubt in the Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Fulton, Rachel. “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice.” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–33. Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medi­eval Germany. Princeton: Zone, 1998. Hammerling, Roy. A History of Prayer: The First to Fifteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Hollywood, Amy. Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Reli­ gion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. —— . “Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism.” In The Cambridge Com­ panion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman, 59–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Justice, Steven. “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” Representations 103 (2008): 1–29. Kramer, Susan. Sin, Interior, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medi­eval Studies, 2015.



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Kristo, Jure. “The Interpretation of Religious Experience: What do Mystics Intend When They Talk About Their Experiences?” The Journal of Religion 62 (1982): 21–38. Kumler, Aden. Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medi­eval France and England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Lamm, Julia A. “A Guide to Christian Mysticism.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia A. Lamm, 1–23. Hoboken: Wiley, 2012. Largier, Niklaus. “The Art of Prayer: Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medi­eval Contemplative Practice.” In Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought, edited by Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, 58–71. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Lipton, Sara. “‘The Sweet Lean of His Head’: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages.” Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–208. Mancia, Lauren. Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. —— . “Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manu­script: A Case Study of Paris, BnF, MS lat. 13593.” In Boundaries in the Medi­eval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, edited by Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix, 161–85. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Martines, Paolo. “Meditation According to Anselm of Canterbury.” Patristica et Mediaevalia 40 (2019): 17–27. McGinn, Bernard. “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism.” Spiritus 1 (2001): 156–71. McMahon, Robert. Understanding Medi­eval Meditative Ascent. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Nagy, Piroska and Damien Bouquet. Medi­eval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages. Medford: Polity, 2018. Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medi­eval Religion and Lit­ erature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Pentscheva, Bissera. The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010. Pranger, M. B. The Artificiality of Christianity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Raposa, Michael. Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Rudolph, Conrad. Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemic in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Rudy, Kathryn. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is that What Makes them Have a History?)? A Bordieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220. Shagan, Ethan. The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Spearing, A. C. Medi­eval Auto­graphies: The “I” of the Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Stevenson, Jill. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medi­eval York. New York: Palgrave, 2010.

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Stock, Brian. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpreta­ tion. New York: Belknap Press, 1998. Trexler, Richard C. The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual Attributed to Peter the Chanter. Tempe: ACMRS, 1987. Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Van Engen, John. “Faith as a Concept of Order in Medi­eval Christendom.” In Belief in History, edited by Thomas Keslman, 19–67. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1991. Van ‘t Spijker, Ineke. Fictions of Inner Life: Religious Literature and the Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Westphal, Merold. “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self.” In The Phenomeno­logy of Prayer, edited by Norman Wirzba and Bruce Ellis Benson, 13–31. New York: Fordham, 2005.

INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to images.

abbots and abbesses, 10, 35–36, 40, 54 Abelard, Peter, 46 acedia, 44, 47–48 advice, to monks and nuns, 40, 67 Aelred of Rievaulx, 40, 43 Anselm of Canterbury on doubt and longing for God, 43–45, 47–48, 50 model prayers by, 10–11, 21–23, 27–28 Prayers and Meditations, 22–23, 43–44 Proslogion, 22, 43, 47 Anthony of Egypt, 1, 2, 5 anti-mysticism of monastic experience, 45 Apologia. See Bernard of Clairvaux Aquinas. See Thomas architecture, monastic, 62, 63–64 ardent love, 27 ardent prayer, 3–4 Aristotle, 43 art God depicted in, 55, 57, 59, 63, 67, 80–84, 85 See also Jews, meditation, prayer, sin, symmetry, visual aids ascent, spiritual (ascendant prayer) early theories of, 16–19 ideal models of, 29–32 monastic experiences of, 32–36, 43–50, 79–86 practices of, 38–42, 64–66, 69–72, 70, 72 structured models of, 19–27 tools to aid, 10, 27–31, 30, 54–62, 67–69, 68, 76–79, 76 visual depictions of, 30, 68 asceticism, 9, 16–18, 23–24, 38 attention, 4–6, 15, 39, 44–45, 53, 66, 85–86 Augustine of Hippo, 12, 16–17, 40–41, 63 Confessions, 12, 17, 40 Soliloquies, 12 Baldwin of Forde, 7, 45, 47–49 beasts, visual depictions of, 53, 59, 60, 64–67, 65 Bec, monastery at, 30, 69

belief, 7, 12, 46–48, 50–52, 75, 78 Benedict of Nursia, 8, 16–19, 40 Benedictines, xvi, 5, 32, 36 See also Rule of Saint Benedict Benjamin Minor. See Richard of St. Victor Bernard of Clairvaux Apologia, 53 on experience and practice, 36, 39–40, 50, 88 On Conversion, 39 On Loving God, 33–34 On the Steps of Humility and Pride, 23–24, 39, 50 on spiritual ascent, 20, 23–25, 33–34, 47, 50 on use of visual images in meditation and prayer, 53, 55, 64, 85–86 Bernini, 36 Biay, Sébastien, 63 blood, imagery, 41–42 body engagement with Christ’s, 75, 77 movement, 70, 71, 79 position and movement of during prayer, 71–72 spiritual knowledge and the, 18, 38, 41, 85 Bonaventure, Saint, 32 The Mind’s Journey into God, 32 book binding, symbolic use of, 85 boredom. See acedia Bourdieu, Pierre, 6 Bury St. Edmunds, abbey of, 77 See also Cloisters cross, 76, 77–79 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 64 Carolingian monasticism, 10, 18, 28 carpet pages, 59, 61, 63, 69 Carruthers, Mary, 5, 9, 29, 64 Cassian, John, 3, 5, 7–9, 33, 40, 44, 85 Conferences, 3, 8, 16–17, 38–39 and spiritual ascent, 16–18, 38–39 Cassiodorus, 71 Caviness, Madeline, 63 cenobites. See monasticism

96

Index

chaos, of sin, 54, 59, 60, 64 Charles the Bald, 81, 85 charts. See diagrams Choy, Renie, 6 Christ, 24–25, 33 images and sculptures of, 54–55, 57, 59, 64, 68, 72, 81, 83, 84 monastic interactions with represen­ tations of, 71, 73, 75–79, 85 Passion, 55, 71, 73, 77 Church Fathers, 1, 8, 28–29, 31, 37 Cistercians, xvi, 19, 23–25, 27, 48 Cîteaux, abbey of, 60 climbing, imagery, 18–19, 21–24, 29, 30, 39, 67, 68 cloisters, as spaces for prayer and meditation, 8, 64–66, 65, 74, 75 Cloisters cross. See Bury St. Edmunds Cluny, monastery at, 7, 15, 63 cogitation (cogitatio), 25, 47, 66 Commentary on Matthew. See Rupert of Deutz compassion, 27 concentration. See focus (attention) Conferences. See Cassian Confessio theologica. See John of Fécamp confession and contrition, 24, 28–29, 31–32, 51, 78–79 Confessions. See Augustine Conrad of Hirsau, 67 Speculum virginum, 67, 68, 69 “conscience,” references to, 41–42 contemplation (contemplatio), 2, 4–6 contemplative life, 5, 12 contemplative models of prayer and meditation, 11, 15, 28–29, 30, 31 as an interior, invisible experience, 41–42, 54–55 monastic struggles to achieve, 33, 36 as stage of spiritual ascent, 20–21, 25–26, 28–29, 32 of visual objects, 59, 62–63, 66, 75 See also ascent contrition. See confession conversion (conversio), 12, 17, 20, 23, 39, 78–79 cross, imagery, 30, 31, 55, 67, 68, 76, 77–79 customary (liturgical book), 55 Cuxa cloister, 64, 65, 66, 69

Dale, Thomas, 64 darkness, 19, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 66 De oratione. See Peter the Chanter designs. See geometric designs desire, monastic expressions of, xiii, xv, 10, 23, 26–27, 44–45, 50, 79 devotion, of medieval monks and nuns, 35–37, 46–50, 88–89 devotional experiences of monks and nuns, 36–39, 51–52 embodied, 41–42, 69–72, 70, 72 personal and interior, 11, 40–41, 48 unfulfilled and struggling, 42–50, 79, 80–84, 85–86 devotional practices, monastic spaces for, 63–65, 65 texts and tools for, 10, 28–31, 30, 64, 66–67, 68, 69 use of art in, 53–55, 56-58, 59, 60-61, 62, 63, 73–79, 74, 76 See also performance devotional writings. See individual writers Diadema monachorum. See Smaragdus of St. Mihiel diagrams, used in meditation and prayer, 28–31, 30, 53, 66–69, 68 Didascalicon. See Hugh of St. Victor Dionysius of Areopagite, 16, 18–19, 55 discipline monastic, 18, 38, 65, 72 prayerful, 1, 12, 18, 42 as repetition and practice, 6–7 distraction, 4, 7–8, 20, 44, 66, 89 Dona nobis domine sempiternam requiem, 29 doubt (dubito), monastic experiences with, 36, 46–51, 75, 78 Doubting Thomas, 74, 75 ductus, meditative, 19, 30, 64, 66–67, 68, 69 dullness, experiences of, 43–44 Easter dramas, performance of, 72–73 Eberbach, abbey of St. Mary, 67 Ebner, Margaret (nun), 79 Eden, as symbol, 65–66 Elisabeth of Schönau, 23 embodied practices of monastics, 41–42, 69–71 immersive interaction with sculptures/ physical objects, 73–79, 73, 74, 76



liturgical performances, 72–73 prayer postures, 70, 71–72, 72 emotions, of prayer and meditation, 10–12, 26–27, 29, 41, 52, 71, 77–79 See also doubt ennui. See acedia Evagrius Ponticus, 4, 16 experience, meditation as, 37–40, 43 “book of,” 36, 40, 52

faith and belief, monastic experiences of, 46–52 fervour, 3, 5, 43–45 “fiery” prayer. See prayer fire, imagery, 10, 27, 44, 79 focus (attention), 4–5, 7–8, 20, 25, 44–45, 86 tools to help, 64–66, 85 Fontenay, abbey at, 62, 63 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 51 frailty, human, 17, 26, 33, 43–45, 69, 85–86 Fruttuaria, monastery at, 55 garden, as meditative space, 65–66 gaze at God, 55, 70, 84, 85 meditative, 24, 26, 33, 64 geometric designs, and meditation, 59, 61, 62–64 Gerard of Cambrai, 62 Gertrude the Great, 32 Spiritual Exercises, 32 God monastic experiences of absence and unknowability of, 36, 44–45, 50, 52, 59, 85–86 early descriptions, 16–19 through active struggle and seeking, 23–27, 29, 32, 54, 88 through structured meditation and prayer, 20–23, 31 See also devotional experiences, doubt visual depictions of, 55, 59, 63, 67, 80–84, 85 Golden Epistle. See William of St. Thierry Goscelin of St. Bertin, 32 grace of God, in medieval religious experience, 3, 6, 21, 24–25, 27, 35, 45, 85 gradatio, 31 Grande Chartreuse monastery, 20

Index

97

Gregory the Great, 40, 43–44, 50, 66 Moralia in Job, 40, 44, 50, 59, 60 Guigo II, 20–22, 26–27, 32, 37, 79 Ladder of Monks, 20–21

habitus, created by meditation and prayer, 6, 41–42 heart, in meditation and prayer, 6–8, 11, 21, 32, 37–42, 44, 50, 71 heaven, as monastic telos, 1, 15–18, 20–21, 33, 50, 66 hell, visual depictions of, 59 heresy and heretics, 45n69, 51 hesitation (hesitatio), 47 See also doubt Hildegard of Bingen, 20, 55 Hitda Codex, 54–55, 56–57, 69 Hitda of Meschede, 54 Hugh of St. Victor, 26, 39, 46–47, 54, 59 Didascalicon, 26 humility, 18–19, 32–33, 40, 45, 48–50, 71 hunger for God, imagery, 43–45 illumination, as step in ascendant prayer, 17–19, 24 images. See visual aids imperfection and inadequacy, monastic experiences of, xiv, 29, 33, 42–43, 46–50, 79, 88 inquiry, meditation and prayer as, 41–42 intercession, prayers of, 3, 9 introspection, 12, 40, 42, 47, 66, 88 interior realm and inward under­ standing, 21, 40–42, 47, 51, 66, 71 invisible God, 54–55, 59, 63, 84

James, William, xvi, 35–36, 45, 52 Jesus, and prayer, 1, 7. See also Christ Jews, depicted in monastic art, 76, 77–79 John of Fécamp, 10–12, 41 Confessio theologica, 10, 49 John of Salisbury Metalogicon, 39 journey of Christ, 24 meditation and prayer as a, 1, 17–20, 22, 30, 32, 46, 67, 75 Juan de Valdés, 51

98

Index

kiss, imagery, 24–25, 71, 75, 79 kneeling, 71 knowledge acquisition and expansion of, 4, 21, 24–25, 37–39, 43 embodied, 41–42, 69, 71 of self, 22, 26, 33, 40–41

labyrinth, 59 ladder, imagery, 17–22, 30, 31, 34, 67, 69 Ladder of Monks. See Guigo II landscapes. See monasteries Last Judgment, depictions of, 64 lectio. See reading lectio divina, 8, 20–21 libelli precum. See prayer collections light of God and Christ, 1, 19, 43, 70, 85 in monastic spaces, 63, 66, 86 lifting and upward movement, imagery, 15–17, 19, 21–25, 67 liturgy and liturgical prayer, xiii, 7–11, 28, 35, 65, 72–73, 75, 77 Lombard, Peter, 46 longing, unfulfilled, feelings of, 29, 44–46, 48, 54, 79, 85 love, divine, 10, 20, 26–27, 31, 44, 50 lukewarmness, feelings of, 43, 48–49, 78 Luther, Martin, 51

maps, for meditative ascent, 18, 30, 67, 69 Mary, mother of Jesus, 73, 77 McCloskey, Laura, 59 media. See visual aids meditation (meditatio), 1–4, 7–8, 15 embodied practices of, 41–42, 69–75, 70, 72 monasteries as spaces for, 62, 63–66, 65 monastic experiences of, 32–34, 43–50, 79–86 practice and repetition of, 37–39 as stage of spiritual ascent, 19–22, 25–26, 28–29 use of art and visual aids in, 54–62, 67–69, 68, 75–79, 76 memory and memories, in meditation and prayer, 9, 17, 66 memorization of texts, 8 Metalogicon. See John of Salisbury

Middle Ages, xvi, 2–5, 9–11, 18, 40, 46, 64, 71, 78, 87–88 mind, as centre of contemplation, 10–12, 21–22, 25–26, 37, 42, 51, 64 See also focus The Mind’s Journey into God. See Bonaventure The Mirror of Faith. See William of St. Thierry model prayers See prayer monasteries as constructed landscapes for religious experience, 37 physical environment of, 45n69, 62, 63–66, 65, 74, 75 as places of prayer, 5, 7–9, 46 as sites of prayerbook production, 28, 53n4 monasticism, coenobitic, xvi, 1, 3, 10, 16, 18, 52 See also Rule of Saint Benedict monks, medieval monastic life, 4–5, 7–10, 18, 37–38, 46, 49, 65, 71–72 See also devotional experiences, devotional practices, spirituality Moralia in Job. See Gregory the Great movement. See body music, and harmony of monastic spaces, 63 mysticism experiences, xvi, 26, 35–36 medieval mystics, xv–xvi, 45 Mystical Theology. See Pseudo-Dionysius neo-medievalism, 87 novices, 21, 23, 40 nuns, medieval. See devotional experiences of monks and nuns, devotional practices, monastic life, spirituality obedience, xvi, 7, 18, 33, 72 objects, immersive meditative experiences with physical, 71, 73–79, 73, 74, 76 On Conversion. See Bernard of Clairvaux On Loving God. See Bernard of Clairvaux On the Four Degrees of Violent Love. See Richard of St. Victor On the Steps of Humility and Pride. See Bernard of Clairvaux



oratio. See prayer Origen, 2–3, 7, 16 Otloh of St. Emmermam, 46 Ottobeuren, abbey of, 70 “Our Father” (Pater noster), 1, 7

Pascal, Blaise, 51 Passion. See Christ Pater noster. See “Our Father” Paul, apostle, 1, 7, 63–64 penitence and penitential practices, 10, 38, 42, 71, 79 perception, spiritual, 19, 69, 71, 78 performance, devotional liturgical playacting, 72–75 prayer postures, 70, 71–72, 72 personification, in meditative tools, 67, 68 Peter of Celle, 41–42, 45, 54–55, 65 Peter the Chanter, 70–71 De oratione, 70 Peter the Venerable, 66 Platonism, 16 practice, as repetition and training, 6–7, 15, 39–40 practices, meditative. See devotional practices, meditation, prayer Pranger, M. B., 37 prayer (oratio) contemplative, 15 early Christian, 1-3 early models of, xvii, 15–19, 21–22 “fiery” prayer, 3–4, 9–10, 17, 43–45 model prayers, 11 monastic, 4–13, 15, 18 embodied practices of, 41–42, 69–72, 70, 72 extra-liturgical, 3, 8, 10–11 liturgical, xiii, 2, 7–11, 28, 35, 65, 72–73, 75, 77 monasteries as spaces for, 62, 63–66, 65 monastic experiences of, 32–34, 43–50, 79–86 practice and repetition of, 37–39 prayers as models for meditative ascent, 10–11, 22–23 prayers of supplication, 3 prayers of thanksgiving, 3, 9 as stage of spiritual ascent, 19–20, 28–29

Index

99

use of art and visual aids in, 54–62, 67–69, 68, 75–79 prayer books as manuals for ascendant prayer, 16, 27–31, 30, 71, 72 as personal devotionals, 10–11 prayer collections (libelli precum), 28, 30, 69 Prayers and Meditations. See Anselm of Canterbury pride. See humility Proslogion. See Anselm of Canterbury prostration, 71, 72 psalters, 7, 28, 71, 84, 85 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 16, 18–19, 55 Mystical Theology, 18 purgation, as step in ascendant prayer, 17–18, 22–24 purification, through prayer, 23–24

rationality and reason, 17, 21, 25–26, 39, 43, 52, 63, 67 reading (lectio), 8–11, 65, 75 as stage of spiritual ascent, 20–23, 26, 28–29, 37–39, 42 Reddy, William, 42 Reims, abbey of St. Rémy, 54 remembrance, prayers of, 9 repetition, 6–9, 21, 62, 69 resurrection, 71, 73 reverberatio, 43 Richard of St. Victor, 15, 25–27, 33, 41, 62 Benjamin Minor, 25–26 On the Four Degrees of Violent Love, 26–27, 33 Ripoll, monastery of, 72 Rothschild Canticles, 82–83, 85 routes, prayerful, 17, 19–20, 31, 66–67, 69, 75 Rule of Saint Benedict, 8, 10, 18, 36, 42 rumination, 4, 59, 66 Rupert of Deutz, 36 Commentary on Matthew, 79

St. Amand, abbey, 61 Santo Domingo de Silos, monastery, 74–75 St. Eulalia, church of, 73 St. Michel de Cuxa, abbey, 64, 65, 66, 69

100

Index

St. Rémy. See Reims salvation, 29, 49, 67, 88 Scheer, Monica, 41–42 Schwietering, Julius, 49 scripts, devotional, 28, 35, 78 sculptures and use in prayer and meditation, 66, 73, 74, 75 self-examination and self-knowledge, 9, 11–12, 21–22, 26, 28, 40, 45 selfishness and selflessness, 20 serpent, imagery, 67, 77 silence, 19, 65 silent prayer, 4, 8–9 sin, sinfulness, and sinners, 15, 20–21, 24, 26–29, 33, 40, 43–44, 45n69, 50–51 represented in monastic art, 58, 59, 60, 76, 78–79 Smaragdus of St. Mihiel Diadema monachorum, 5 Smith, Lesley, 47 Soliloquies. See Augustine Song of Songs, 20, 24–25, 67 Sønnesyn, Sigbjørn, 39 Souillac, abbey church of Ste. Marie, 58, 59 soul, 17, 43–44, 49, 55, 59, 75 meditation and the, 20-22, 24–26, 33, 40–41 Speculum virginum. See Conrad of Hirsau Spiritual Exercises. See Gertrude the Great spirituality of monks and nuns, xiii, xv–xvi, 7, 10–12, 35, 87–89 struggle and strife, in meditation and prayer, 18–20, 23, 64 as meaningful, 24, 29, 48, 88–89 monastic experiences of, 33, 36, 43, 45–49, 52 Sugar, Abbot, 79 supplication. See prayer Sweeney, Eileen, 47 sweetness, imagery, 21, 23, 44 symmetry, in monastic art and architecture, 59, 63

tasting and chewing, imagery, 20–23, 43–44 telos, divine, 16–17 Teresa of Avila, sculpture (Bernini), 36 Tertullian, 2–3, 7 texts, for meditation and prayer, 10, 28–31, 30, 64, 66–69, 68

thanksgiving. See prayers of thirsting for God, imagery, 21, 26–27, 44, 79 Thomas Aquinas, 51 tools, for prayer and meditation spatial and physical, 62, 63–66, 65, 73–79, 73, 74, 76 textual, 10, 27–31, 30, 31, 64, 66–67, 68, 69 visual, 54–62, 58, 60–61, 67–69, 68 touch, and meditation, 75, 79, 85 tower, imagery, 17, 25 training, for monastic prayer, 6, 12, 63, 71 tree, imagery, 67 Trumeau of Ste. Marie, 58, 59 truth knowledge of divine, 4, 23–25, 43 and doubt, 46, 51–52 hidden, invisible, 15, 37, 54–55, 59 tympana, visual depictions on, 59, 64 Underhill, Evelyn, 37–38 understanding, and knowledge, 4, 19, 23, 25–26, 29, 39, 46, 75 union, divine elusiveness of, 32, 36, 43–45, 50 as fulfillment of ascendant prayer, 17–20, 24, 27

Versus in laude sanctae crucis, 29, 31 Victorines, 19, 25–27, 32 vision, limits of human, 54, 85 visions of God, 22, 50, 79 as fulfilment of ascendant prayer, 29, 31–32, 69 rarity of, 20, 32–33 visual aids for meditation and prayer, 53–54 diagrams, 28–31, 30, 66–69, 68 art and illustrations, 54–55, 56–57, 58–62, 60, 61 sculpture, 73–79, 73, 74, 76 visual representations of ascendant prayer, 29, 30, 68 vita contemplativa, 5, 12 vow, prayer as, 3–4 walking, prayer and meditation and, 8, 25, 49, 65–66, 75 Werden psalter, 71



wheel, imagery, 67 will, the, 17, 33, 45, 47, 49, 51, 67 William of St. Thierry, 24, 32–33, 41 on devotional practice, 69–71 on faith and doubt, 46, 48–50 Golden Epistle, 55 The Mirror of Faith, 48 on using visual aids in meditation and prayer, 54–55, 73, 75, 85 writers, monastic, 10–13, 15, 48–49 See also specific individuals writing, imagery, 41–42 yearning for God, 45, 79, 85

Index

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