Now and again I run across something in the press that catches my attention both because of its information and ideas and because of its congruence with issues concerning which I actually do or at least should know quite a lot. Recently Molly Worthen, an historian of American religion at Chapel Hill, published a Times op ed essay entitled “Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries.”* It is a very interesting essay in and of itself, and it stimulated interesting letters from Times readers. Concerning Professor Worthen I know nothing more than what I find on her Wikipedia page, but that was pretty arresting. The final sentence of her brief biography is “She recently converted to Christianity.” I’m guessing that is a pretty unusual event in the history department at UNC, but who knows? I have never converted to anything. I’m just got put a rut in stayed there. According to a piece of paper to which I have access I became a Christian at a baptismal font in 1936, but I have to take that—how does the phrase go?--on faith. I was about six weeks old. These days I have difficulty remembering what happened when I was sixty years old, let alone six weeks.
Prof. Worthen is dealing with a variety of topics, and she brings them together in an elegant fashion. One topic, a pretty familiar one these days, is slavery to electronic screens. Though this is particularly a crisis of youth, most of us are more or less indentured to “streaming” communication and (mis)information, a good deal of it vapid, to some degree or another. A second strand of the essay has to do with the initiative of a religion professor at Penn, Justin McDaniel, who teaches an unusual but highly subscribed class commonly called the “Monk Course.” In it the students study various forms of the monastic life as practiced among the world’s contemporary religions. They actually commit to imitate their different monastic practices for a period of time. I presume in all instances this requires ditching electronic devices entirely, but that is only for starters; students apparently go considerably farther, adopting protracted periods of monastic silence, for instance. Though I have some difficulty crediting the reports of the fidelity with which this is done, the concept of the course strikes me as brilliant. The way these two strands come together, their “intersection” as we now say, is in the idea of education as a contemplative pursuit of truth. Many institutions have some such phrase in a mission statement, but that is about as far as it goes.
All this interests me personally, since I have spent most of my career studying the cultural products of Christian asceticism, among which is the unique institution of the Western university. One needs to stress the uniqueness. All of the world’s major religions are important for the development of what can loosely be called educational institutions, but the modern university descends explicitly and uniquely from Christian spiritual practice. It is not going too far, indeed, to say that the university’s origins begin in a single biblical book—the Psalter. I shall attempt to explain this cryptic remark in a moment.
One must first acknowledge that the monastic contribution to the history of education is a disputed topic. A wonderful book no longer adequately appreciated is The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) by the Anglo-Irish historian William H. Lecky. This brilliant author, a graduate of Trinity, Dublin, probably represents as well as any other Victorian scholar the northern European ideals of classical humanism. This is what Lecky has to say about Saint Anthony of Egypt, the legendary founder of Christian monasticism, and the old guy with the tau-stick in last week’s post: “A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato.” Not what you might call a ringing endorsement of the monastic cultural contribution. If you don’t like that one, though, you can read one of the (literally) million copies of How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995) by the Irish American, all-but Jesuit historian Thomas Cahill (1940-2022). There you may find that we owe it all to the monks.
But there is a Goldylockian mean. Not all monks could be emaciated maniac lone wolves, so to speak, and such types became pretty scarce. Benedictine monasticism, as it developed after the sixth century, was a populous, highly social institution. A huge number of men and a large number of women, segregated by sex, lived a communal life in which literally hours of each day were devoted to the performance of the “office" (duty) of singing the Latin psalms, all 150 of which were recited during the week. That is upwards of 50,000 words, about the length of The Great Gatsby or Fahrenheit 451. Try singing: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since...” A slightly weird exercise perhaps, but at least you can read the words. Few novices (beginning monks) would have known Latin, so one of the first tasks was learning to read it. Thus in all the vernacular languages of Europe the very earliest surviving vernacular records are glossed Latin psalters in which interlinear English, French, German or (whatever) cribs tell the learner what the Latin word means. The Book of Psalms is for the same reason the most commented upon of medieval books, because even if you can sound out the word nycticorax, and figure out it must be some kind of bird, it is a word that needs to be explained. Like Bellini, you might need one day to paint one (also last week’s post). The search for moral perfection for our ancestors was largely a literary matter—reading, meditating upon, inwardly digesting, and then writing about biblical texts, especially the psalms. For many centuries the meaning of theology was “study of the sacred page,” i.e., the Bible.
The origins of our humanities curriculum are to be found in the monastic schools established to train young monks. In the fifth century Augustine, in a very influential introduction to biblical studies, had stressed the learning and hard work required to penetrate the meaning of the Scriptures. Your job was to know the Bible, but to know that you needed to know so much else. This was particularly true of the Psalms. They were full of unfamiliar words and things, reflecting the time and topography of their composition. He also insisted that the pages of the pre-Christian writers we now call classical—though lacking biblical inspiration and at times grossly errant--were useful in the seeker’s task of understanding scriptural passages. The old writers’ works were full of gold and silver, the “gold” being their wisdom, the “silver” being the elegant language in which the wisdom was enshrined. The attitude toward the “humane” texts of Antiquity was practical and functional, utilitarian really. They were aids in approaching the “sacred” page. But the monks read and preserved them. Ovid’s books were in many monastic libraries. A religion centered in a written revelation necessarily encouraged literacy, grammatical analysis, and interpretation. The elementary “three roads” of the Seven Liberal Arts—the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—remain in large measure the foundations of education until this day. The elementary nature of the trivium is revealed in the etymology of the English word trivial. The crisis in American primary education is thus “trivial” as well as life-threatening.
*https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html
