Things about the schedule. This is a good time to do it because, I'm sure we have an in-person with Ms. Jack also, because during the last week or two things have been very unusual, some people being out and so on. I don't know whether you have a copy of this schedule for the edition. That means observers, questions, notices. Most of it you're aware of, but some things seem to slip away sometimes, especially those meditations in the morning and evening. I can have this copied for you if you need it. 4am vigils, 6.15am morning prayer and mass, followed by this 30 minute silent group meditation in the church. That's one of those things that tends to get forgotten. The assembly professor is supposed to stay with that for a year after they make preparation, and that retains a kind of continuity and

[01:00]

gives a kind of support to the militia. We don't have anybody in the militia now, only apostrates, but that's the same procedure. Then, midday prayer together in the chapter 1150, and then in the evening, after evening prayer, there's another one of those 30 minute silent group meditations. I know that things get in the way of that sometimes, like the kids and the bakery sometimes has, but we've got to try to work around it, I think. We've got to try to schedule things so that there's a minimum of losing of those meditation periods. So, if there are problems there, we can talk about them and get together, but I think we have to change things around. I know the kids are going to be a problem, but the other things I think can be changed. It's kind of important to establish that practice and to establish it together. It's quite a lot easier to keep on with that. It's only a minimum, just a

[02:06]

bare minimum. In the old days, actually in the constitutions we had, there were two 30 minute periods of meditation, but that is just a bare minimum. The idea in the monastic tradition always was that when you weren't doing something else, you were basically in some kind of attitude of prayer. That is not that you have a kind of circumscribed time for meditation or for prayer, but that's what you're up to, that's what you're interested in, and there's nothing else that you have to do. So, actually the two 30 minute things in the old days just came in from canon law or something like that, from laws that were made for other religious orders, for active religious orders in particular, where they really had to specify a minimum, otherwise they just get carried away with the work that they have to do, and they don't leave room for anything, as frequently happens anyway. I don't know if that's still in the canon law, but it's not so meaningful for monks.

[03:06]

It's a little connected with the things we're talking about here. Any questions about that? If there are any individual problems, I can talk about that to you. Now, today we want to start a new subject. Let me review a bit. We were talking about the history of monasticism and the history of the religious life as a whole, and monasticism in it. And then we were talking about the present situation. Remember for the history part we used various sources. We used Knowles' book on the history of religious life. We used the Hughes article on the history of religious life. And both of us have a kind of theory behind them, of course, which we tried to look at in some detachment. Then we used Merton's article from Contemplation and the Road of Action, an article of problems and prospects for looking at the current situation. And remember we found some problems with the article itself, because in a way it's criticizing things that are not the main problems in others,

[04:09]

not precisely the main problems anyway. It changed the nature of that. And it was kind of a pessimistic article in places, or you might say an over-critical article, not perhaps the best thing to use as a decorative point in our study. Nevertheless, it did put us into the present context with a certain amount of historical background. Now what I'd like to do is kind of look at the foundations of the monastic life, and the foundations of the monastic practice, or praxis, actually, by considering the Word of God and the lecture of the demon. Because really, I believe, with I think very good grounds, that that is the foundation of monasticism, the monastic life. It's easy for us to turn the monastic life into something else, to make something else of it. But when we do, we find that it loses its balance, it loses its power, and it's out to lose its authenticity, it's out to become our own truth. Because as Christians, what we're up to is to listen to the Word,

[05:14]

to receive the Word, conceive the Word, be drawn into the Word, let the Word take life within us and transform us. Which should not be only a kind of abstract theology, it should be real folks. Now, what I want to go into is partly, just to persuade you of it, to persuade you of the importance of the Word. What we're talking about is, I was thinking this morning, it's like traveling through a place, you know, and you hear the name of the place, and you go through it, and then you go away, and you come back, and you go through it again. You pass through it many numerous times. And then, one time you discover that that's your home, that that's where you live, that that's where you're supposed to be, that's where you're going to be. And that's the way it is with the Word of God. It seems to be one among other things. And then you find out that it is the thing, and that is the way in which God is relating to me, the way in which God is sort of putting together my spiritual life and my monastic life, and the way that God is calling me. And so, you see that we mean the Word of God not just in the sense of the Word of Scripture

[06:18]

that you believe. In a bigger sense, in which that particular sense, the Word of Scripture is very important and essential. We'll get into that as we move around in this subject. When we move to this now, I'd like to take André Louf as a principal guide. We used Merton before in looking at the contemporary scene. Louf doesn't look at the contemporary scene in the same way. The two make an interesting contrast, actually, Merton and Louf, because perhaps they are the most, how would you say, the best known, or the most highly regarded Cistercian spiritual writers, monastic spiritual writers really, in Europe and in the United States respectively. Louf is not quite so well known in the USA. He's written very little. He's in a monastery in the north of France. Actually, he's a Belgian. Louf is a man of the tradition. He's a man of classical monastic tradition. If you read

[07:20]

his book, Teach Us to Pray, you'll find that what he is doing is simply translating the consistent tradition of monasticism into contemporary terms. He's translating it into our language. But if you read Merton, you find something else, don't you? You find a kind of questioning that goes far beyond the Christian monastic tradition itself. In fact, when you start reading Merton, if you read his early books, you may find him talking more about John of the Cross, the Carmelites, than about the Christian monastic tradition itself. And if you read his later books, you find him talking more about Zen sometimes than he is about the Christian monastic tradition. So he's got a different center of gravity than Louf has. He's traveling on a different axis. He's got a very different background. I think Louf was quite young when he entered the monastery, so it was a more typical vocation. Whereas Merton is a related vocation. And remember, he had quite an experience in the world before he entered the monastery. So he brings a lot of the world with him in a way that Louf doesn't.

[08:23]

And he lets go of it for a while, but he doesn't let go of it permanently. He's always very concerned with what's happening outside the monastery. The social scene, and war and peace, and all kinds of theological and religious problems, the state of mankind, all those things that concern him, as well as literature. He was very interested in South and Central American literature, and Russian literature, all those things. Louf does not present us with the same world. Louf takes us back to the roots and the source of the tradition. Likewise, if you compare the two with regard to the Word of God, you'll find Merton talking about the Word of God frequently, I would say, and frequently quoting it. But if you compare him with Louf, I hope I said Merton, I was talking about Merton. If you compare him with Louf, you'll find that Louf is obsessed with it. Merton respects it, quotes it, serves it, preaches it, but Louf is obsessed with it. In other words, that's his one subject.

[09:26]

And this is an important track in the classical monastic tradition, and Louf is one of the ones who's responsible for putting it back where it belongs today. Because monasticism, like most of the things in the Church, has been, most of the ancient currents of tradition in the Church, has been rather alienated from its proper stream path during the past few centuries. And it's people like Louf who are helping to get it back into the track, back into the stream of its own proper charism, its own real nature. And that means the Word of God. Now, Louf didn't originate this, and when you read that article of his, you'll see that he got this idea from several other people. It's just something that's happening, something that the Holy Spirit is producing in our time, and monasticism participates in it. You may remember some time ago when we were talking, maybe it was in the other class, we were talking about what's happening in our time in the Church. And there have

[10:28]

been several revivals, several movements, if you want to put it that way, during the past 60 years, let us say, ever since the turn of the century. One of them is the liturgical movement, the liturgical revival, studying the liturgy, the sources of the liturgy, the time when it was first put together, say in the 3rd, 4th, 5th century, and then trying to bring the present contemporary liturgy back closer to what it was in the beginning. Then there's a biblical movement, and then there's a patristic movement too, and there are some others as well. Each of these going back and trying to recover a primitive tradition, an early tradition, at least from the first five centuries of the Church. And similarly there's a monastic movement which borrows from these others and brings them together in a certain way. Now, what we're talking about, about this notion of the Word of God being central in monasticism, is partly a product of this biblical movement, this biblical

[11:32]

renewal, which itself I think received its push from the liturgical movement, but it's been coming for a long time. Because you see, in the Catholic Church we've been too separated from the Word of God. The Word of God has been very much mediated for us, mediated to us. Now that's not such a big thing right now. Right now it's perfectly open and people are encouraged to read the Word of God, but it wasn't always that way since the Council of Trent. The problem between Catholicism and Protestantism, and Protestant insistence on the Word of God without the tradition of the Church, without the authority of the Church, led the Church to take a defensive position and to sort of discourage people from reading the Word of God and stuff. Okay, so it took a renewal, it took a movement to get the Word of God back into the center of the picture. And so it's still something that we have to learn in a way. It sounds a little alien to us. When we read this article of Luke's, we find him talking about that discovery in monasticism, and a little bit of suspicion, a little bit

[12:32]

of apprehension that accompanies it, as if, well, is this a Protestant thing we're talking about? It comes with this notion of bouillé, or this notion of chorus. Note that they both come from a Protestant background, too. But it's Catholics that had to rediscover the Word of God partly from the outside. Not from outside of Christianity, from outside of the Catholic Church. And then we find that it's our own core. I'll give you some references for this. Maybe eventually I'll put them down on a piece of paper, but let me just read some off now for you. And as we move around in this subject, we'll touch one or another of them. One immediate reference is to our own Constitutions, okay, which have a section on Lectio Divina. It's in Scheme 6, Numbers 12 to 15, on page 39 and 40, in

[13:32]

all these Constitutions. I think you've got an index in the front of there, so if you don't write this down, you can find it anyway by looking for it. It's in Scheme 6, and the one on prayer. There's a section on the Eucharist, and there's a section on Divine Office, then a section on Lectio Divina, and then it gets down to personal prayer. Then, the Rule of St. Benedict. Do you remember where the Word of God is particularly talked about, where Lectio Divina is particularly talked about? It's in the same chapter that Emmanuel wrote this chapter, chapter 48. We read it, I think, just a few weeks ago. Chapter 48 on the Daily Manual, I think. It talks about work and reading together, and the whole treatment is intertwined. And then you remember the last chapter of the Rule gives you a kind of list of the things that the monk is to read, the Scriptures and the Fathers, basically.

[14:33]

That's chapter 73. And then throughout the Rule, of course, the Rule itself is woven in a sort of scriptural quotation, so it's a kind of, in a sense, manual of reading Scripture or interpretation of Scripture itself. One very important document right now is the Vatican II document on Divine Revelation, which is called Dei Verbum. If you have that edition of Flannery, it's page 750 in the following pages. It's in all of these. It's one of the big four constitutions of Vatican II, so it's in all of the editions. Dei Verbum means the Word of God. Remember, the four big constitutions were the one on the Church, the one on the Liturgy, the one on Divine Revelation. And then the fourth one, I think, was the Church in the modern world. What is that? The fourth big one. I'm trying to

[15:37]

remember whether that had the rank of a constitution or not. Yeah, pastoral constitution. Those are the four constitutions. The others have another lesser rank, as decrees or one thing or another. Now, Dei Verbum gives you the basic theology of the Word of God, the theology of the Scripture, and it's very important that it be expressed at this time in the history of the Church in a solid way. After a lot of our theology has somewhat got a little away from it. There's a good article in the Dictionary of Biblical Theology on the Word of God. I'd recommend that. In fact, I think I'll ask you to read a couple of things before next time. Besides this article of Loof's, his own experience with Lectio, I'll ask you

[16:38]

to read that article in the Dictionary of Biblical Theology, entitled Word of God, and Chapter 4 of Loof's book, Teach Us to Pray. I think all of you have a copy of that. If you don't, I'll find you one somewhere. Rami will let you have some, if you haven't got one. Chapter 4, which is called The Living Word. The article in the Dictionary of Biblical Theology, as you would expect, gives you the theology of the Word of God. This is the book. Now, there are two or three of these over in the library. It's around the 220.96 is the catalog number. 220.96. Dictionary of Biblical Theology. It's a book that it's good to get familiar with. If you want to find out what something means in the Bible, what a word means in the Bible, or what the Bible says about a particular notion,

[17:41]

about a particular thing, this is the book to look at, the first book to look at. The ones in the library are a little thicker than this, and they have a black lining. If there aren't enough of them over there, there's something asking you to borrow this one. We'll get a couple more around somewhere. This is the book of Loof in its paperback edition. We've got one or two apart on this one. We're going to run into a number of other references as we go through Loof's article, and also a chapter of his book. One that I should mention, though, is Charlier, the Christian Approach to the Bible. C-H-A-R-L-I-E-R. The Christian Approach to the Bible. That's a kind of classic on the theology of the Word of God itself, and how it all converges

[18:43]

in Christ. 20 or 30 years ago, those books were rare. Now there's almost a gluttony, and it's common. It's the sort of thing that everybody says. But it wasn't so easy to find that, to hear that, a few decades ago. It's just surprising. Amazingly so. There are a couple of references to Boyer that are important. We'll find Loof referring to Boyer's The Meaning of the Monastic Life as we go through that article a bit. And the place is Part 2, Chapter 5. It starts on page 168. It's the chapter on the Word of God. It's ten pages long, and eleven pages long. It's a beautiful job, as Boyer's writing usually is. And the other one is the Introduction to Spirituality, Chapter 2. We've got a long section on the Word of God and spiritual life, including different methods of reading the Scriptures.

[19:45]

Yeah, Introduction to Spirituality. There's several of those over in the library. This one, there's a paperback edition of Boyer's book. He's the man who tells you what everything is about. He tells you what the meaning of the monastic life is, tells you what spirituality is. He's got another one, what do you call it? Yeah. And then, of course, Loof refers to Barth. We've got half of the first volume of that church dogmatics. He's a rather copious writer. He writes by the yard, sort of. And this is half of one volume. This is half of his introduction to what he's talking about. And this is on the Word of God. Loof, on one of his own enlightenments, reading Barth.

[21:00]

It's not that I want to make a bibliophile out of you, you know. But you need to know your way around a little, in order to find a better thing. Okay, let's take a look at that article now, of Loof. Lectio Divina and the Experience of Andre Loof. This was originally in French, and it was, I think, a tape of a talk that he gave at a conference of novice masters and novice mistresses over in France a few years ago. And of those talks that were given, there's a book that thick. Now, several of the talks, several of the articles were translated and put into that liturgy magazine in Gethsemane. And that's where this comes from, and then we've got a few more to look at later on. It was a whole big long session on that sort of thing, quite a valuable meeting. Here he's talking about his own spiritual itinerary, about his own journey.

[22:02]

And for him, the discovery of the Word of God and Lectio is central. So, he's a good spokesman for this particular point. He entered the monastery, evidently, in 1947. Montesquats, or Engelbert is the German name of it. Wasn't it Engelbert? No. Katsberg, of course, up in northern France. Loof, I don't know if you know his reputation, though. He's probably the best-known Trappist abbot. He has a reputation, in fact, for being a kind of maker of abbots, because a lot of his own friars have been elected abbots of other special communities. He's widely respected as a spiritual prophet and a teacher in the spiritual realm. Somewhat outside the monastery also. First, he's asking, did he have any... Notice the very particular significance that he gives to Lectio Divina. This Latin expression, Lectio Divina, what does it mean? Lectio is reading, and Divina... Divina is divine reading, apparently. Divina is that word, divine, so often in English.

[23:03]

So, we say spiritual reading. But the word spiritual is rather weak for it, as you can see. So, basically it means reading the word of God, it means reading the scripture. And then it means reading other things which, in some way, transmit the word through us. The notion of the word, in large, is the notion of Lectio, in large, is beyond the word of scripture itself. That's what its center is. Now, that may seem... A lot of these things seem like arbitrary statements, arbitrary affirmations, or things like... Things that you believe, but maybe aren't that true, but they're good to believe. And then, gradually, you become convinced of these things, especially about the word of God. You can become convinced that it's got everything in it. You can lose some conviction. It's not very hard to deduce as you read these pages, because it leaks right out. But the importance of this reading of the scripture for himself, it's become the center of his life. He tells his first experience back in college.

[24:06]

He was in a college that was, unevidently, religious or priest. Where a spiritual director or priest would sit him down beside him and read one of the prayers from the missal. Or just one of the bits from the liturgy of the day. And then he'd give a spiritual commentary on it. Father Elridge, you'll notice, he often gets upset when he finds the prayer of the mass mistranslated. They'll complain about these wretched little leaflets that we use. You know, the missalettes and so on. They never bother me, because I don't know what the original was, usually. But there's a kind of density in the original Latin text. You see, some of them, which go back way to the early centuries of the Church, which often gets lost in the translation. There's a real richness there. So, those liturgical texts have a density and a power. Something like the power of the Word of God. Something like the Word of Scripture. In fact, often, not so much the prayers, but the other liturgical parts of the mass

[25:07]

are very selected pieces of Scripture, or sometimes they're the fusion of two scriptural texts, something like that, to have a particular meaning, to have a particular impact. Which was the original? The Latin text? No, the Latin is usually the original, because those prayers were composed for the Latin liturgy. I don't know what they had before they had the liturgy in Latin. Some of them may be derivatives from earlier prayer in Greek, let us say. But, I don't know about that. As far as I know, they all go back to the Latin original. I asked Father Elliot about this. Which means they go back, some of them go back to the 4th, 5th century. Some of them, for instance, would be composed by St. Leo the Great, who was worth, well, 4th century. Those are the very oldest. And a lot of others are not so old. But in them, there's a concentration, there's a density of meaning.

[26:07]

Now, in the translations of the prayers, the translations in the Misalet, or in the New Sacramentary, are pretty free. You've got two versions of the prayer there. One is shorter and the other is longer. This is the Sunday prayer. The long one is usually a kind of poetic elaboration of the theme of the prayer, which isn't very close to what it says in the original. The other one is a fairly straight translation, but which often misses a lot of the meaning. It glosses over things. The people who translated them sometimes didn't really fully digest the prayer before they translated it. This is a side issue, but what I'm pointing out is that a lot of, that the real school of spirituality for centuries is the liturgy itself, liturgical text. Now, that's so, and it's important to have them straight, to have the genuine text. Then he goes into the monastery. And he runs into Boyer, Boyer's book.

[27:08]

Boyer, as he says, is not a monk. He's an oratorian. He's a priest of the oratory. He's a first-class theologian. He's a convert, I think, from Calvinism to Catholicism. And I was joking before, he seems to have written a book that tells you what everything is. He's like that, he's the one who writes about astronomy and so on. Isaac Asimov. He's sort of the Isaac Asimov of the theological world. This book, The Meaning of the Monastic Life, is to tell monks what their life is about. It seems a little presumptuous. And it's a little dangerous for somebody who isn't a monk to be doing that, okay, because he writes it from a different experience. So the danger is a kind of romanticism of telling people to climb a tree that isn't there, or something like that. It's a very good book, it's an excellent book,

[28:09]

but it does have the danger of a certain radicalism, of emphasizing one aspect of the monastic life. Emphasizing the cross, really, of kind of making the monastic life seem so heroic that it seems unreachable, it seems. It just seems beyond one's... not only one's human powers. This quotation he's talking about comes from that chapter 5 on Lexa Divinis, on page 168. It might be said that such reading is the monastic practice. He's talking about the reading that's recommended by the Rule of St. Benedict. The final chapter of the Rule, 73rd, completed by the 42nd, and tells us precisely in what this reading consists. It's the reading of the Holy Scriptures commented by the Fathers, and more particularly by the lives and sayings of the first monks, such as, for instance, those cited by Cassian.

[29:09]

That's what's in chapter 73 of St. Lawrence Rules, the last chapter in the Philippian. It might be said that such reading is the monastic practice. It should be for the monk what the exercises are for the Jesuit, the methodical mental prayer for the Sulpician, contemplative prayer for the Carmelite, and so on. That's quite a thundering statement. A lot of people have confessed it. That's what Gluck is saying. Is it some sort of Protestant influence? Because the Protestants have been the ones who insisted more on the Word of God for some centuries. No, Gluck stands by it. Because this is where your nourishment comes from, in some way. There's a whole theology underneath this, a whole kind of world of thought, a way of seeing things, which doesn't come across

[30:10]

immediately when we talk about it. But it's connected with the way that we think about Christ. How do we think about Christ? Do I think about Christ as a person who relates to me? Of course I do. Perhaps that's the most important thing. I don't know. We think of it certainly as being both God and man. It's fundamental. That's the keystone of our faith. Then I think of him not just as Christ, but also not just as the Lord either, but as Jesus, someone who relates to me, someone in whom I am in kind of, shall I say, a dialogue. Is it important to think of him as being the Word? Or is it important to think of him as being the Bread of Life? No. What does the Bread of Life mean? Well, it means the Eucharist, for one thing. That's for sure. But it also means everything else. And to speak of him as being the Word

[31:11]

also means that everything else. It means he's God speaking to me, he's God's communication to me. But in that Word of God to me, he somehow is everything else. Because he's the Word in which all things are created. Now the closest thing to this is the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament. Is there a wisdom tradition in the New Testament? What happens to that? We've got our law in the New Testament temple. Like in St. Matthew, certainly not. That's the new law. We've got our prophets in the New Testament temple. Because Jesus is prophesying a lot in the Gospels, isn't he? Then you've got the Book of Revelation. You've got your prophets. What about the wisdom literature? Is there wisdom literature in the New Testament? The question is, what happens to that wisdom tradition? And there certainly is wisdom literature in the New Testament. Okay, but we forget it. We forget it. I don't know why we forget it. Well, that's... It does to Christians. That's the thing that we accent, okay? And because we do, we let the other thing get lost.

[32:12]

We think in some way that it's wrong to look at it in that other way. Well... Yeah. Okay, that's one... One movement is from, like... First of all, from the law. Because the thing usually is from fear to love, okay? From fear to love, and from law to spirit. And from law to freedom, okay? But there we're talking about law, not wisdom. If we move from wisdom, what would we move from as we move from wisdom to something? We might move from wisdom to love. Or wisdom... If you think of wisdom as a laborious thing. These old sages pouring over tomes, you know, writing all this stuff, and so on.

[33:14]

You read the Book of Proverbs, and there are a lot of things that seem kind of picky, or kind of petty axioms that we've seen. Or just practical. I think it's wisdom to wisdom, okay? But the wisdom in the New Testament is all in one word, as it were, okay? In other words, the wisdom in the New Testament is all in Jesus, it's all in Christ. Now, what we're inclined to do when we hear that is to say, okay, forget the wisdom and I'll take Christ, okay? But that's not... That's to forget Christ, in part, okay? It's not to take Him in His fullness, because in His fullness He has to be received as wisdom. Okay? Now, this is pretty important, and it doesn't get shouted at you very much, you're not going to hear it very much. But Christ is that wisdom, which is God's revelation of Himself, God's revelation of yourself, and of everything else. And so, if meditation is important in the monastic life,

[34:18]

or if we call the monastic life the contemplative life, that's what it's about. It's not just getting yourself into the disposition to have a contemplative experience of some kind, okay? A direct mystical experience of God. You may not even have it, you know? I mean, you could be a monk for your whole life and not have a mystical experience like St. Teresa has. Most monks don't. So, what are you here for, you know? What are you about? That's wisdom. We're afraid to talk about it because it sounds vain, and it sounds esoteric and elitist, but I think that's what it is. That's the thesis of Bouyer's book, by the way, The Meaning of a Monastic Life. You'll find that at the end he's got this chapter, a kind of epilogue, in which he says that monasticism is the heir to the ancient wisdom traditions, okay? Now, the two things about wisdom for a Christian, and a Christian, I won't even say a monk at this point, we don't need to yet, are that that wisdom is in the Word of God, and then that the Word of God is a man,

[35:21]

is Jesus Christ in the end. So that wisdom is in Jesus. So, then I can say, well then, all that matters is for me to relate to Jesus in a relationship of love, to give myself totally to Him in love. Is that right? It certainly is in a way. It's right, but it's not the whole of life, that's the trouble, okay? Because it's like setting aside one part of your being and saying, okay, I'm going to do my whole life with this other part of my being, like with one arm, or with one leg, or with one side of my body. I'm going to do it all with my will, okay? You mean the love is a totality? Yes. Okay, good, good. I won't dispute that. Have you ever seen anybody who

[36:26]

was completely dedicated and very narrow at the same time? Or have you ever seen people who kind of give themselves completely to God and they don't grow? Yeah, okay, but... ...includes the openness of everyone. So, by my definition of love, would we be explicit? Would we be narrow? That's okay, because we don't want to get into a contest about words here, okay? But a person needs his mind, first of all, even so that his love will not be the wrong love, or the kind of enslaving love, or the love that narrows instead of broadening,

[37:28]

that kind of thing. And that's what I'm talking about, is wisdom management. That means that the whole of the person has to be involved. It says in the Shammah, like, Love the Lord your God with your whole strength, with your whole heart, with your whole mind, too. It's important that the mind be awake in order that the love may be genuine. And if you don't love with your mind, too, then, you know, it gets narrow. If you love just with your will, we become all will. We become kind of thick-skinned creatures, narrow creatures that grow up. But as soon as we use the word love, obviously it contains everything. Another person could say, Well, the word wisdom contains everything. But if you read St. Paul and St. John, you'll find that love is the end and the start. That is the preferred term. There's no doubt about it. But very often, the monastic life, or the religious life, has been treated as a kind of machinery for learning how to love in such a way that neglecting that other aspect, that other dimension, which I like to call the dimension of wisdom,

[38:29]

the love itself goes around in circles. That's true. So it's not love. It's not love. And this is... Well, there's a whole complex of things that get connected there that causes this to happen. But when you get back to the word of God and let it enlarge, let it grow within you, in that sense of wisdom, the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament comes into Christ, and there it has to be opened up again in order to get from the surface into the depths and in order to get from the particular to the whole. And that's love and knowledge at the same time. It's supposed to be. If we ask whether there's wisdom literature in the New Testament, what would you think of it in the New Testament? I'd distinguish it from, say, law or prophecy or just historical writing, because the Gospels, basically, are a historical account of the life of Jesus.

[39:31]

Do you celebrate the wisdom in the New Testament? You can. Actually, in the Old Testament, there are two traditions that are pretty distinct. If you asked a biblical scholar that, he would say, yes, you've got these two traditions. Now, if we just take the words themselves, in general usage, perhaps they're just two facets of the same thing. In the Old Testament, you've got a wisdom tradition, which is connected, usually, with the kingdom, with the court, with the whole royal thing. And then you've got the prophetic tradition, which is outside, and which is a kind of critical counter-pull to the kingdom, to the establishment. It's likely to be out in the desert. Remember Elijah? Remember the prophets who come and confront the kings and tell them about their sins? Now, you've got two traditions. One is sort of inside there, in the royal book, the wisdom tradition, connected with the liturgy, too. And then when it's out in the desert, that's a very crude way of putting it. And also, we've got two classes of writing,

[40:35]

the prophetic writings, which are more dynamic, the wisdom writings, which are more intellectual, and which are more, in a way, universal. See, the wisdom writings in the Old Testament are the ones that tend to spread out and absorb other cultures, whereas the prophetic writings, very often, are taking you back to a kind of pure Judaism. Not always. There's a universalism in them, as you look towards the future. But very often they're recalling you to the purity of your own faith. The wisdom writings tend to spread. There's a wisdom element in the New Testament. Is there anything different, apart from Christ's wisdom element, in all other religions? Well, that's there, OK. But we can sort of distinguish a little further than that. We can analyze a little further than that. Because there's some literature, which is very, you can say, prophetic. Some literature, which is pretty straight history.

[41:36]

And some, where you really have the flavor of that wisdom tradition. If you hear Jesus saying, Well, this man, the merchant, went in search of pearls, or the treasure. That's wisdom talk. That connects with the wisdom tradition. Not only the Old Testament, but kind of universal in the world. Or if you hear him saying, Come to me, all you who are burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's wisdom language, too. The Beatitudes are a little special. They don't fit quite as simply into the wisdom category as that other language, OK? A little special. You find some in the Old Testament, but not straight in the wisdom books. They're special. I don't know how to classify them, in fact, in one of those categories. One of those categories I would mention. If we ask ourselves, What writings of the New Testament are wisdom writings?

[42:39]

The first thing you think of is the Gospel of John, which is a gospel, a historical account, written from a wisdom perspective. And, in fact, Jesus in the Gospel of John is presented as the wisdom of the Old Testament. Remember, John starts out by saying he's the Word of God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And then the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. But that Word is the same as the wisdom of the Old Testament. Remember, wisdom, it gets personified in the Book of Proverbs, in the Book of Wisdom, in the Book of Sirach. And it's personified as a feminine figure. Remember, before the world was made, I was with God. And then wisdom says, I came into the world, and so on, and I looked for a place to dwell, and I pitched my tavern at Zion, and so on. And it said, well, is it feminine, a woman, wisdom? And Mark, well, passages it. And there's a lot more than disclosed passages. Well, that's the way that Jesus is presented in the Gospel of John.

[43:41]

And you have to kind of go into it to become convinced of it. But if you do become convinced of it, it becomes very important. What about St. Paul? Certain of his letters, like Ephesians and Colossians, are in that tradition. That's what they're about. Only he talks about gnosis rather than wisdom. That's not why I thought about wisdom. Remember 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, also. 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, where he talks about all these smart guys that think that they have real knowledge of God. And he's telling them that the only knowledge of God he has is the, the only thing he knows, and preaches to, is Christ crucified. But then he goes on to say, well, there is a knowledge. There is a wisdom. There's a wisdom in the Spirit. And he goes on to brag about it in certain places. In Colossians and Ephesians, he prays that the Christians then may have that insight into the mystery that he knows.

[44:42]

And then there are places in the other Gospels which we can class as being wisdom or ritual. The point in the New Testament is that the whole thing is in Jesus Christ. And if it's all in Jesus Christ, we have to figure out, as it were, how to get it out. We have to figure out how to absorb it. How does it come into us? How is it communicated to us? Tell us then, you go beyond wisdom to the depth. Whether we can understand it or not, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, is a different thing. So, whether you can explain what you are still up to, what you are still doing in the New Testament, what is it that leads beyond wisdom, in our life, in our life? Okay, it becomes a center of wisdom. It becomes a center of wisdom. It becomes a center of knowledge, rather than being proven by something else. Remember in John's Gospel somewhere,

[45:46]

Jesus says, I am the light of the world. And he says, I don't need any other witness. The light itself doesn't need any other light to enlighten it. So he doesn't need any other proof. There's no wisdom that's necessary at that point. It's all in him. But then the fact is that it is wisdom. In other words, it comes into you and enlightens you in some way. When he says, I am light, that's what he means. We talk about faith being the fundamental thing in our life, okay? Faith in what is happening. That's what I'm talking about, for a start. And then everything that develops from that in your mind. So, my faith is the gift? Yeah, the gift. And faith is the belief in that event, right? Somehow, it's that event coming into you, the event of Christ, his life, his death, his Resurrection, his gift of the Spirit, coming into you in such a way that it becomes real for you and in you. And that's what we're talking about. So faith is the beginning of it. And it's always within faith.

[46:49]

It's always sort of inside the boundaries of faith. Okay, we got a little off the track, but not really. You'll find this chapter of Bouillée good, and also strong, if you want to read it. I'll read a little more of it. Nothing is more remarkable than the all-pervading, absorbing place of the Divine Word in the life of the early monks. It was in the liturgical reading of the Gospel that St. Anthony came to understand his vocation. Remember, he heard the Gospel being preached in church, saying, well, if you want to become my disciple, go and give a reading of that and come follow me. Actually, he heard two or three passages on successive Sundays. One of them was the Acts of the Apostles, where they gave up everything they had and put it all together. It was the words of Scripture that prompted all the steps he took and inspired the whole of his spirituality. It was the same for the very first monks in Egypt. They are depicted for us as always having the Scriptures in their hands,

[47:52]

never ceasing to meditate upon them, having them spontaneously on their lips when they come to formulate their own teaching. And then he talks about the centuries in between. Then the medieval monks in the West did not declare it by one iota from the path thus traced out. Okay. So his first step here is with Boyer.

[48:20]

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