"We"? Reflections on Affinity and Dissonance in Reading Early Monastic Literature

I write these reflections in a small Benedictine monastery in Japan founded from our community of St. John's in Collegeville, Minnesota. This house is filled with instantly recognizable elements that echo features of the home monastery. The cloister gates are crafted in the same distinctive pattern of wood slats, allowing visitors a glimpse of the monastic enclosure. Because all of the furniture was made in our woodworking shop as a gift to our brothers when they moved to a new site, the chairs feel right. The habits they wear are of the American Cassinese variety, with hoods fixed to the scapular by a button rather than sewn on. My abbot's photograph is on display. Some of the monks are men I lived and worked with in Minnesota; the Japanese have been my students.

However, the ease made possible by affiliation and a shared way of life goes only so far, and many of the ideas I brought with me for my brief stay must be left, along with my shoes, at the front door. The notes on the bulletin board are in a script that I cannot even begin to decipher, and the liturgy so deeply familiar in form flows briskly past me as a river of verbal incomprehension. Benedictines like to bow, but here bowing is everywhere: at the exchange of the pax in the Eucharist, in veneration of the consecrated bread and wine, as the presider takes leave of the assembly. (Even the schoolchildren bow to motorists when they cross the street.) Japanese Benedictine life chastens even as it fascinates. Here, as during my stays in the Middle East, I am reminded not to imitate those who have looked east to escape their own cultural constraints or to fulfill fantasies of oriental splendor. A domesticated exoticism of carefully edited motifs betrays everyone involved, both self and the plundered other. To think we can "own" another culture, either through colonial occupation or religious inheritance, is a very perverse--and destructive--form of blindness.

I read, teach, and write about early monastic literature. I love these texts deeply, though I have moved beyond the stage of wide-eyed infatuation with Antony, Evagrius, John Cassian, and the rest. First fervor has its own wonder, but one cannot make a life of it. I am trying now to see these texts more clearly than I could when I first read them, not so as to spurn or debunk them, but to appreciate their achievement more accurately. I hope that mine is now a wiser and more mature love; it is certainly more honest. Spending a couple of decades in close dialogue with these texts, decades of tremendous growth for me, has led to what Cassian suggests of long-term interaction with the Bible: "as the renewal of our mind grows by this study, the face of Scripture too will begin to be renewed, and the beauty of holier understanding will in some way develop as we develop." ¹ My reading of these texts is inseparable from my reading of life, though neither is simple.

Although I am a male celibate, have professed monastic vows, live in a monastery, teach monastic literature, and help to train young monks, the cultural differences between me and the texts I endeavor to interpret are increasingly evident. For all that I find astonishingly apt in the literature of monastic Egypt and its kindred traditions both east and west, there are vast regions of those works and the world they represent that will always be as inaccessible to me as the back side of the moon. The difference between early monasticism and the moon, however, is that nothing lulls me into pretending that I know, or even should know, that invisible lunar terrain. So much, however, conspires to make me claim monastic literature as my patrimony and my...