“Monastic virtues and ecumenical hopes” was the title of an address by the Anglican
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams on Sunday at the Rome church of San Gregorio
al Celio. The Anglican leader is currently on a 3 day visit to Italy with a packed
programme that included a papal audience and the celebration of Vespers with Pope
Benedict on Saturday. On Monday Dr Williams travels down to the monastery of Montecassino,
south of Rome, where St Benedict lived and wrote his rule for monastic life. Philippa
Hitchen has been following the Archbishop’s ecumenical pilgrimage and reports on this
Sunday’s events…..
“One of the hardest yet most important lessons the different
Christian communities today must learn is that they cannot live without each other:
no single one of them in isolation possesses the entirety of the Gospel” of Christ.
That was how the Anglican leader Dr Rowan Williams introduced his reflection on how
the witness of monastic life can offer a key to overcoming the divisions between Christians
today. Life in the monastery, he said, seeks to hold together two apparent opposites:
a vocation to solitude and a community life of service to others. In a similar way,
he went on, the divided churches can learn much from the monastic reforms of the past
centuries as they try to reconcile the insights of their own tradition with the gifts
and experiences of their separated brothers and sisters. Speaking in particular
of the gifts of the Camaldoli Benedictine community, based at St Gregory’s on the
Caelian hill, archbishop Williams said the history of monasticism is a history of
rediscovery and continuous self-questioning as to whether the simplicity of the Word
of God has been overlaid and obscured by our self-centred structures and strategies.
Echoing the words of his sermon at the Episcopal Church of St Paul’s within the
Walls on Sunday morning, Dr Williams said just as Jesus drove the traders "selling
religion" out of the temple in Jerusalem, so the whole Church today must be challenged
by the monastic model to clear away the trappings of our self serving lives and rediscover
the reconciling Word of God in our Churches and in our wider societies.
Listen:
Read the full
text below:
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s address at San Gregorio al Celio 11
March 2012: Lent 3
Monastic Virtues and Ecumenical Hopes
Solitude and
Communion
The monastic reform movements of the eleventh century have in
common the strong commitment to a return to the gospel. Stephen of Muret’s simple
declaration that, for his community of ascetics, ‘our regula is the Gospel’ is typical
of the widespread sense in that era that the Church in general and the monastic institution
in particular needed to be refreshed from its primitive springs. In monastic terms
that meant a movement away from the intensely organized corporate life of the great
Benedictine houses, above all the family of Cluny, away from the close association
of monasteries with the needs or demands of the ruling elites, and towards simplicity
and solitude. It is significant that two of the most durable reforms that have their
origins in this period – Camaldoli and the Carthusians – have always sought in their
different ways to hold together the community life and the vocation to solitude.
This search to hold together what seem like opposites is of course grounded
in a deeply traditional Christian anthropology. Christian solitude is the way in
which we allow God to challenge and overcome our individualism; in solitude, we are
led to recognize the strength and resilience of our selfishness, and the need to let
God dissolve the fantasies with which we protect ourselves. In the desert there is
no-one to impress or persuade; there it is necessary to confront your own emptiness
or be consumed by it. But such solitude is framed by the common life in which we
have begun to learn the basic habits of selflessness through mutual service, and in
which we are enabled to serve more radically and completely, to be more profoundly
in the heart of common life in Christ’s Body, because we have had our private myths
and defensive strategies stripped away by God in silence.
Monastic
practice is, therefore, at its root, a living out of the fundamental Christian doctrine
of human nature as restored in Christ. And in the committed mutual service and mutual
listening that the Rule of St Benedict enjoins, we can see fleshed out the belief
that, in Tertullian’s words, ‘no Christian is a Christian alone’ (unus christianus
nullus christianus); that we are never healed without the healing of the neighbour
also. ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’ is one of the best known sayings
of St Antony, after all. And in this we begin to see something of how the monastic
life, especially as it includes solitude as a dimension of community, speaks to the
entire world of Christian diversity. One of the hardest yet most important lessons
the different Christian communities today have to learn is that they cannot live without
each other and that no single one of them in isolation possesses the entirety of the
Gospel. God has used the often tragic divisions of Christian history in such a way
that each community has been permitted to discover new depths in this or that particular
emphasis in doctrine or devotion. And the challenge of the Lord of the Church is
that we should recognize this diversity of providential discovery in one another.
The enforced ‘solitude’ of a Christian community, cut off from others by doctrinal
dispute, is from one point of view a disaster, in that it takes all Christians that
little bit further away from the fullness of truth. But God’s providence has also
ordered things so that diverse and separated communities are able to go deeper into
diverse aspects of discipleship and orthodoxy. Who could deny, for example, that
the historic ‘peace churches’ of the Anabaptist tradition have been for the older
ecclesial communions a sign of judgement, a way in which God has called all the churches
to recover their abhorrence of violence in his name?
A new creation:
the Community of the Word
The life of solitude and communion
together, then, is itself a matter of ecumenical significance. Thinking about our
divisions in the light of this allows us both to repent for whatever has divided the
churches as a result of sheer human pride or perversity, and also to thank God that
in our enforced ‘solitude’ we have been shown treasures that we now have to share
with one another. But there is another lesson that monastic practice has to show
to the ecumenical world by its attempt to return to the Gospel. It was once customary
to speak of the religious life as a response to the ‘evangelical counsels’; then,
in the light of the twentieth century renewal of the sense of the radical calling
of the whole people of God, such language became something of an embarrassment. Yet
it still has some real significance. The call that Jesus utters in the pages of the
Gospels is undoubtedly a call into a community in which other kinds of human belonging
together are cast into shadow. It is a call into a community that finds its deepest
unity in God, and not in the simple natural affinities of the world around. It stands
alongside all these forms of belonging – ethnic, political, linguistic, familial –
and says that the Body of Christ is a new nation, a new polis or city, a new language
taught by the spirit, a new family.
What would a church
life look like that saw itself as shaped primarily by the Word in such a way that
the relation to God’s call was the single determining factor in holding a community
together? It is possible to read the history of monasticism as a continuing wrestling
with this question. The monastic community did not depend on race, family, natural
affinity; it is striking how ‘international’ the monastic world of the fourth and
fifth centuries is, in the sense of the number of people who find their vocation in
settings alien to their class and upbringing. Think of the presence together in Scetis
of the Ethiopian peasant Moses and the cosmopolitan Arsenius or Evagrius. The language
of this new community is not simply one of the dialects of local society but the language
of the Word. It coheres around the divine Word, both in listening and in speaking.
The community listens to the Scriptures, but it also speaks Scripture. When monastic
communities recited the Psalter, they were not repeating texts form a human hymnbook,
but – on the prevailing understanding of the psalms – joining in the words that Christ
himself was speaking on behalf of his Body. It is a theme that finds its strongest
and most beautiful articulation in Augustine, but it is not unique to him: the psalms
are the place where Christ makes our speech his own; and so when we recite the psalms,
we are deliberately putting ourselves in the context of this speech that is both divine
and human, the dialect of the incarnation. In the psalms, our passion and questionings
are touched and lifted and transfigured by Christ.
To
be a community of the Word, then, is to be assembled by the authority of Christ’s
call and, in response, to speak Christ’s own language. This is what is utterly new
and distinct about the Church, and in this sense monasticism is a reminder of the
Church’s newness, its perpetual recovery of what makes it different from any other
human gathering. Of course the Church in history is frequently a body that slips
towards identification with kin and nation and class. St Teresa had to struggle in
sixteenth century Avila to prevent convents being flooded with indigent relatives
of the sisters in search of a comfortable life. Some monasteries have an ambiguous
record, not least in the twentieth century, of passionate identification with nationalist
causes, because of a long and often generous and positive sense of being at the heart
of local communities. Many houses have imperceptibly restricted themselves to a certain
class of postulant (Teresa has much to say about this too). Every serious monastic
reform has to tackle at least one of these issues.
And
the willingness to undertake such self-critical reform is one of the reasons for the
wider Church to celebrate the monastic life and to learn from it. Christian communions
can become wedded to nation, class and family (either literally, or in the shape of
a comfortable middle-class attitude to ‘family values’); they need to be recalled
to the truth that it is the Word—the free outpouring of God the Father in the eternal
reality of God the Son—that creates the Church: creatura verbi, in the old terminology.
We are sisters and brothers in the Church not because we naturally and instinctively
belong together, agree, or speak the same language; but because we are summoned to
be together in our strangeness to each other, and to be faithful to each other in
that strangeness – not because we naturally like one another and would be loyal to
one another anyway!
The monastic ideal is thus
something that stands in opposition to anything that looks like a ‘tribal’ Church.
It tells us that the hope of a truly universal reconciliation is only to be found
in a Church that is able to look beyond natural affinity and to sustain bonds that
are in their way as strong as those of kinship or marriage – a bold aspiration indeed.
How many or how few are the monastic communities which really embody this, the important
truth is that it is possible and that the Church at large needs monastic community
life as almost a sacrament of its dependence on the Word. If we want to speak about
the ecumenical significance of monasticism, this, I believe, is the heart of the matter:
the monastery shows a Church that is unified simply in the divine Word, spoken and
heard.
But this ecumenical significance is not, therefore,
a question of monasticism somehow being able to resolve conflicts by sheer human charity
or fraternity; it is in its plain appeal to the roots of distinctively Christian identity
in the summons that Jesus addresses to every human identity – city, nation or family.
Natural affinities are not by any means evil or to be destroyed; they may well be
used positively in their diversity, as are the diversities of Christian belonging.
But they do not themselves embody the newness of the Gospel, which is seen in the
holding together, in one language of prayer and praise, of different identities, Jew
and Greek, slave and free, male and female. Whenever we are tempted to take refuge
in confessionalism, in an over-seriousness about our particular historic identity
over against other Christian communities, we are going to need communities, whether
conventional monastic communities or the less conventional communities that have arisen
in recent decades as well (Iona, Sant’ Egidio and so on). to hold us to the radicality
of the Gospel’s promise to make a holy nation, a new city and a universal kindred
out of strangers.
Prayer, hospitality and simplicity
Enzo
Bianchi, in a seminal meditation on ‘Monastic Life and the Ecumenical Dialogue’ (Monasterio
di Bose, 2000, p.15), speaks of monastic life as ‘truly an epiclesis in action’, an
invoking of the Holy Spirit who creates unity in plurality at Pentecost. One of the
aspects of the way the New Testament talks about the Holy Spirit is that this Spirit
is both the power that creates the explosion of diversity at Pentecost and the power
that creates in us the one devastatingly simple utterance in which we express our
identity in Christ – ‘Abba, Father’. That prayer, as it is understood by St Paul
in Romans and Galatians, is about both maturity and absolute dependence; it speaks
of our growing out of fear and out of the state of mindless servitude, and equally
of our sense of a new identity that is simply given by grace. Praying such a prayer,
we are at one and the same time as totally dependent as a newborn child and as authoritatively
free as an adult. The prayer tells us that a kinship is now established with the
eternal Word, who enables us to say what he says to the Father; and that this kinship
is open to all, capable of being shared with all. This is the heart of our belonging
together – the Spirit’s gift of saying what the eternal Word says.
And so a community living out this ‘epiclesis in action’ is bound to be
a hospitable community. Faced with the stranger, its first instinct is to listen
for the Word spoken in them, because there is no ready-made assumption that we know
what kind of person, what kind of visitor, will be more or less likely to speak God’s
Word. The historic indiscriminateness of monastic hospitality reflects this listening
expectancy. It is put with memorable and typical directness by Madleleine Delbrel
in one of the aphorisms in her Alcide (translated as The Little Monk, New York, Crossroads,
2005, p.11); ‘When the phone rings, expect a call from God. (The little monk, upon
receiving a phone call at 11.30 p.m.)’. And when it happens that a community or family
of communities deliberately dedicates itself to engagement with the imaginative and
intellectual life of a society, this is an extension of hospitality; the history of
Camaldoli up to the present day shows many examples of what this might mean. We have
seen many instances also of what may happen when this hospitality is extended to those
of other faiths; it would need another full-length discussion to explore the importance
of monastic families in interfaith encounter, but it is perhaps enough to recall that
Thomas Merton’s last address was given in just such a context. Once again, this is
about the readiness to listen for the Word in the stranger, even if they have no familiar
vocabulary for articulating that Word. Always, the stripping and simplicity of authentic
monastic life makes the monastic alert to the simplicity of the Word’s utterance –
those plain words of intimacy, dependence and confidence, ‘Abba, Father.’
The
whole People of God
Perhaps this is indeed what monastic asceticism
is ultimately all about – a simplification of life and language, so that this one
utterance can be spoken and heard as clearly as possible, the taking away of both
chatter and rhetoric, both in life and in liturgy, so that no-one should be prevented
from recognizing the Word either by any indulgent elaboration, or any borrowing of
the ways in which the world at large (or for that matter the Church at large) declares
the presence of power or advantage. This is not to say that something like early
Cistercian Puritanism is the only aesthetic for a true monastic environment, only
that there needs to be a basic simplicity of structure in building, art and liturgy
so that the plain centrality of the Word spoken and heard can be seen to shape the
whole community enterprise. This connects with the ancient insistence that monasticism
is first and foremost a lay movement, and that those whom Benedict calls ‘the priests
of the community’ are simply the servants of the brothers or sisters, not automatically
a group with privileges or powers within the community. And the importance of the
lay character of monasticism is another significant contribution to the ecumenical
encounter. So much of the detail of ecumenical debate seems to focus compulsively
on issues that affect the understanding of ordained ministry. These are not trivial,
by any means, and we are not absolved from thinking them through. But the Church
is the whole People of God, the assembly convened by the Word; the clergy are there
to repeat—in some sense to embody—that call, but the common experience of the laity
in every Christian community is to be called. To the extent that the monastic community
steps aside from simply replicating clerical modes of power or privilege it is at
once recognizable as a place where the Word is heard, as it is by laypeople of every
confession.
Conclusion
The importance of monastic
life to the ecumenical conversation is thus not simply in the undoubted fact that
monks and nuns of different confession are able to relate to one another freely and
appreciatively, significant and creative as that undoubtedly is. I have been suggesting
that there are aspects of monasticism as such that enable us to understand more fully
some things about ecumenism, and that make monastic communities crucial partners in
all ecumenical encounter.
The first point is to do
with the general understanding of Christian personhood: there is no solitary self-definition
for the Christian person, and so there cannot be for the Christian confessional group.
If we are divided, if we live in a sort of imposed ‘solitude’ and separation from
each other, we must ask what gifts God has allowed us to develop in that ‘solitude’
so that we may learn to give them afresh to each other. In this respect, the experience
especially of those communities that seek to balance solitude and community life is
of special interest.
The second point is about how
the monastic community models the Christian life as one in which the ultimate determining
agency is the Word of God. Decisively, what makes the Church the Church is not any
kind of contingent affinity or planned strategy of alliance but the single fact of
the Word, heard in worship and echoed in worship (in a very particular sense in the
psalms understood as the prayer of Christ, our language being taken up into his).
Since the Church always needs signs and reminders of its nature when it is tempted
to slip into the tribalism of race or class or ‘agenda’, the dependence of the monastic
community simply on the Word is a gift to the Church’s self-critical energy.
And third, the understanding of the monastic life as epiclesis means that
it prays for the Spirit not only to create diversity in plurality but to focus life
and prayer on the one ‘word’ in which we express our growing-up into Christ and our
dependence on his indwelling. Monastic simplicity is one of the ways in which we
are recalled to this central reality. And when we begin again from there, we are
liberated for hospitality at a profound level. Standing ‘at an angle’ to the Christian
conventions of hierarchy, the monastic community represents straightforwardly the
people of God, the laos, in a way that allows a real commonalty of experience to create
unexpected relationships of understanding and sympathy.
Of
course monastic communities will embody all this in very uneven ways. The rich dialectic
of solitude and community can break down into a polarity of conformist and regimented
common life and the longing to escape from it. Read Thomas Merton’s journals, and
you can see how hard it is (how hard it was for him) to discern what was a matter
of an authentic vocation to solitude and what was conditioned by reaction to just
such a regimented common life. Again, as we noted earlier, monastic reform happens
because even monastic families are liable to ‘tribalize’ community life in one way
or another and to obscure the basic singleness of the call of God’s Word. Monastic
communities like all other Christian families may become defensive and anxious, surrounding
the essence of their life with various more or less elaborate ‘subcultures’, or reproducing
power relations that belong elsewhere. But the history of monasticism is a history
of rediscovery and reconstruction, of continuous self-questioning as to whether the
simplicity of the Word’s calling has been overlaid. From Romuald, Bruno and Bernard
to Teresa to Roger Schutz the same impetus has been at work. And in that constant
return to poverty, the refusal of anything that suggests we depend on anything but
the Word, there is a word of profound challenge to the whole Church.
In its struggle for fidelity to this vision, the monastic community always
calls the church to reformation; and one thing we have discovered in the last century
is how deeply that re-formation demands of us a re-discovery of one another in our
confessional diversity and a search for how we may become able to serve one another
more freely in Christ’s Body – in the profound hope that we shall be together once
more at Christ’s table, where he ‘speaks himself’ into our lives in the speaking of
his words over us, and his gifts of bread and wine, and where we become, by his Spirit,
a new creation.