Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 5

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Monastic Origins of Prayer

Lesson Transcript

One of the privileges I had when I first went to Oxford was to stay with the leader of the Orthodox community, Nicholas Zernov. And we began to have very interesting visitors that were total strangers to my culture: monks from Athos, monks from Russia. And I discovered to my surprise that they were ordinary human beings. And I think many of us who in an evangelical culture have grown up have thought it rather strange to ever visit a monastery, but I would recommend that you should do so because you’ll discover brothers in Christ, or sisters in Christ if you go to a convent, that really have a much deeper awareness of prayer life than any of us have. And so it’s introducing you into that world of the monastic origins of prayer that you’ll find that this address I hope is very rich and insightful in very practical ways for our prayer life today. And so I make no apology for starting by looking at two of the great monastic saints, as we will look later at Bernard and his colleague William of St Thierry: Benedict and Anselm.

As you realise, Benedict was, of course, the founder of the Benedictine Order. His name was Benedict of Nursia and he lived about 480 and dying at 547AD. We don’t know exactly his dates. And he is in fact a faithless saint for we know nothing about him except what Gregory the Great is going to tell us in his Dialogues. So 28 chapters of his life are provided for us by Gregory’s Dialogues and what Benedict tells us is that he was born in Central Italy in the Umbrian Province, that is to say, in the centre of the Apennines of Nursia. He came from an aristocratic family. He was well-educated as he studied in Rome in the liberal arts. And then, in search for God, he went for three years into solitude. He lived in a cave with some other solitary figures in the forests of the Apennines. And so it was these would-be disciples, a mere handful of them, that moved with him to the great mountain of Monte Cassino, that, for those who know about the history of World War II, was where there was a terrible series of strategic fighting between the retreating German Army up the peninsula with the Allied Forces.

It was there that about 528/529 he did a symbolic act: he destroyed a pagan temple. And like so many of the early Christians, in destroying a pagan temple it was to erect a Christian church on top of it. He put his first monastery on top of this ruined temple and coming from a godly family, it appears that his sister had the same kind of desires as he had to be a devout Christian, so she moved out to be nearby and have a convent of nuns gathering around her. And so in his gradual family way with his friends and her friends, Benedict began to establish what has become the Rule of Benedict. The essential significance of the Benedictine rule is that it’s the via media—it’s moderation in all things. It’s what we called balance as being beauty. It’s really that Benedict is the great synthesiser of how we can live between an active life and a contemplative life. It’s like saying that we live between immanence and transcendence, between Earth and Heaven.

[00:05:14] And so one of the things that I think we’re beginning to recognise in our postmodern generation, is that it’s also the essence of the Christian life to live dialogically. If you live, as I do or have done, with a strong-minded wife who’s always contradicting what you say, we’re always living in dialogue. We never have monologue. And I’ve discovered when I’ve been consulted by Chinese churches that are often dysfunctional to give them some support or help, I’ve always said well, on one condition and that is you allow to attend the sermon on the Sunday morning from a position where I can see the wife of the pastor’s face. If she is in sublime bliss at everything he’s saying, you know it’s very dysfunctional. If she’s alive with her face and saying what nonsense is he talking about, you know it’s a healthy community. So that’s very mischievous, but we live much more in reality when we live in dialogue with the other.

Too much of our preaching from the pulpit is what the preacher tells you what you have to do. And sometimes you wonder can’t I have a word in? Can I not enter into this discourse? Because it takes more than one to be a Christian. And so this is the essence really of the Benedictine model: that you have on the one hand people of extremity like John Cassian, the great father of the desert, who’s collating all the experience of living in different kinds of semi-arid conditions like in Asia Minor or in the harshness of the Egyptian desert and the milder deserts, more like wilderness, in Syria. There was a range of ascetic models with these different environments. And so extremity of asceticism is not healthy. And so the model that Basil in Asia Minor had was much more Greek. It was more contemplative. It was more a matter of the mind being reflective. It wasn’t punishing the body like the Egyptian model. And these models, of course, clashed with each other. And so learning from all the experience of these experiments in the Eastern Mediterranean, now Basil, in Italy, is creating a new model. You might call it being a monk in the city, in contrast to being a monk in the desert.

[00:08:29]

So when you’re living as a business person or in a secular profession, you can’t be too ascetic in your Christian contemplative life. The value of the Benedictine model and why it became so sustainable and universal in the West is because of its moderation. We have to learn the same thing in our own life that we can have great passion as a young man for Christ and it somehow wears off in the years that follow because we weren’t moderate. And the adage that we find with the Benedictine model is that you have to work, but then you also pray. How do you mix Martha and Mary or Leah and Rachel, which became models later in various monastic experiments? So this is the value of Benedict. He says the way you do it is to realise that all actions require prayer, that whatever you do all the time requires the redeeming grace of prayer. We’re going to hear Bonhoeffer saying something very similar later on. So we pray Lord, what I’m doing today, help me not to botch it. Whatever I’m doing today, help me to complete it. Lord, whatever I do today, help me to do it in your name.

So what we have to realise is that the more active we are in our life, the more prayerful we should be in our life. It’s because of the fallenness of our condition as sinners that the smarter and the cleverer we are, the less prayer we think we need. That’s why when you focus upon your natural abilities, the more dangerous it is for you to operate as a Christian. In fact, if you are smart and intelligent, you need more prayer not less. And so essentially that’s the Benedictine model: what it means to work and to pray; that the illusion of autonomy is always the mark of sin, which is a great peril, of course, for American evangelicalism today. We’re living in a technological society and so all this programmatic energies and entrepreneurial spirit, as it were Entrepreneurs for Christ incorporated, is all really of the flesh. And so the more we enter into technology, the more dangerous is our Christian credibility. That’s why I think that the continuing erosion of a great deal of public evangelical testament in the years to come is going to collapse within itself for its lack of credibility. It’s too clever. It’s too efficient. It’s too harnessed with techniques. And so this is where, surprisingly you may think, the model of Benedictine spirituality will help us.

[00:12:00]

As I’ve said, we have to consider the importance of Gregory the Great alongside of Benedict because they were living at the same time. And it’s thanks to Gregory the Great that we have any knowledge really about Benedict himself. Gregory the Great was born about 540 and became Pope on 3rd September 590 and we know specifically that he died on 12th March in 604. We call him Gregory the Great because sometimes greatness is when somebody is able to live within the shadows of someone greater than themselves. The greatness of Gregory is that he lived under the dominating shadow of Augustine and yet was his own man. He lived within the shadows of Johan Cassian, but yes, he was also his own man. And so one of the things that should encourage us in a desire for godliness is to know that one of the marks of being godly is being more individuated, that you’re able to express more uniquely who you really are by God’s grace. It’s God’s gift that we’re given uniqueness, but it’s also God’s grace that we need to sustain our uniqueness. As I’ve often remarked in other classes, we make a botched job of being unique because either we can say arrogantly thank God I’m not you, or poor me, I’m alone without you in my anxiety. So we oscillate in the handling of our uniqueness between arrogance and anxiety.

[00:14:08]

But there’s a real distinctive mark of pursuing godliness and pursuing to be more individuated and this is the great, remarkable thing that Gregory the Great has contributed to the Church. Standing between these giants, he’s his own man. And he too blends the active and the contemplative life in an original way. And the reason why he sees that the mixed life is the synthesis that we need to have is because he’s the kind of Myers-Briggs expert of late antiquity. He understands personalities and his great work that he wrote for the pastoral life, especially in his Dialogues is that he’s able to sharply perceive the differing personalities and temperaments of other people. He’s able to give a message for each temperament and he’s remarkable. He’s unique in that regard in the ancient world. His personalising of faith is that God makes His grace to suit every personality. The mark of a good mentor is that he never gives the same advice to anybody else: the advice is specifically for that one person. And so he lived to be a very wise Pope, even though he rather reluctantly took on this office because it was never his ambition to be a Pope.

[00:15:42]

It’s like what it is to be a good judge, as I had the chief justice of Oregon on one occasion… no, it was actually Washington State, Bob Utter. He came to speak to a group of young law students in Vancouver and one of them, very ambitious, said, Judge Utter, what is the first qualification that I should seek to be a judge? Oh, he said, I can tell you very readily what the first qualification is—that you have no desire to be a judge. And so this is what we find that he had no desire to the Pope. And yet for that reason, having been called to do so, was dragged into office, he really became such a distinguished Pope. Now, of course, in his classical background, he knew the long tradition of classical scholarship. He had read the works of Plutarch’s Lives where Plutarch gives profile to each of his great life, Suetonius on Cicero, and then, of course later, the Gospel portraits, are all individuating the life of an individual. So this quality is a quality that is so remarkable in Gregory.

Now let’s look at what were the traits of the Benedictine spirituality that was later to affect others like Anselm. These traits of Benedictine spirituality are well described by Esther de Waal. She’s a lovely Anglican writer as a lay woman and her interpretations of Benedictine spirituality are well worth reading. She’s written at least two popular books getting into the heart of what is the character of the Benedictine tradition. So what I’m summarising are some of the traits that she has herself depicted. The first trait of being a Benedictine monk is that your posture, your primary posture, is you’re a listener. It was very moving in my own experience with Klaus Bockmuehl that when he was dying of cancer and he looked through all his manuscripts wondering what energy he might have to finish—his magnum opus was on the Ten Commandments and Christian ethics—it was too heavy for him to do. And so as he lay on his bed wondering what can I write, he decided that it was simply a book that he called Listening to the God Who Speaks. It’s a lovely classic for our time and I hope that you will read it some time, Listening to the God Who Speaks. He never finished the last chapter and his wife and I, in the last week of his life, wrote it for him, knowing, of course, his sentiment. We presented it to him on a Tuesday. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘That’s what I wanted to say.’ And on the Saturday he passed to be in the presence of the Lord. I have always been powerfully affected as a result of that experience that he was listening to the God who speaks.

[00:19:45]

What Benedict means by listening is, to us a Latin word, obsculta. That is to say, it’s not just listening casually, but attentively. And so with the injunction of James 1:22, Benedict starts with the injunction, ‘Do not merely listen to the word and deceive yourselves. Do what it says.’ And of course, that’s the other side of listening. The word oboedire in Latin, which is to obey, is literally to listen. It’s as you listen you obey. And so you can’t separate in the Benedictine spirituality this dynamic of listening and of action. And obedience is emphatic in the Benedictine Order. That’s why the abbot has had such authority. He represents Christ and the obedience of Christ that we’re all subject to. And so what is so central to Benedict’s understanding of the spiritual life is that you’re obedient. It’s holistic listening. You don’t only listen with the ear, but you act with the arm and the foot. You carry out with your hands and your feet all that is commanded of you in the ear.

Another trait that’s Benedictine is that if you’re going to listen and obey in this kind of way, you need, thirdly, to have silence. You need to give space to listen and silence is space for that listening. And also recognising that the reason why we don’t restrain ourselves to listen is when the tongue is allowed to be a cause of sin in our lives. So it’s not only absolute silence, but there’s a silence of the restraint of speech. As Proverbs 10:19 puts it, ‘In much speaking you will not escape sin.’ So let there be this ascetic restraint of what one is saying. We have to hold our tongue, as we sometimes say, or bite our tongue. And all of us know at times in our lives that we regret when we speak out and we destroy a relationship or upset somebody that took a long time to overcome. The Irish are great fighters, but I remember a friend of mine, when he was asked what do you hold on baptism, he says I hold my tongue. And sometimes that’s a very good thing that we need to have. So the monastery was a place of silence.

But then fourthly, there is the significance of public office: not just the public office that we think of, but the public office of the community of worshippers that the monastery was. And so when you work and pray, you don’t only work in the fields or work at your study, but you work in the public liturgical life of the community. That’s why they’ve called it the public office, which was the recitation of the different hours of prayer and of the readings that formed the liturgical structure of the monastery. It’s what is being called Opus Dei—it’s the work of God. And of course, I remember meeting in Catalonia one of the early founders of a movement after the war among renewed Catholics called Opus Dei. They were Catholics who were saying we bring God into the marketplace. We bring God into our professions. We bring God into our business life. This is the work of God.

[00:24:20]

But in the monastic reading of scriptures, in the repetition of responsory Psalms, in the actual memorising of scripture and especially of the whole Psalter, this was a sense of it being for the monks the Opus Dei. Can you imagine how different your consciousness and my consciousness would be if say all 30/40 years of your life in a monastery every week you recited the whole Psalter? Can you imagine what kind of consciousness you have when you have this rich, Psalmodic consciousness: the rich memory that has stored up all the phrases of the Psalms in your heart? That, for the monks, was Opus Dei. Fifthly, another trait was holy reading: Lectio Divina, divine reading. And we’ll say more about that later. But Lectio Divina is, of course, this encountering Christ in the text just as we find that the New Testament writers, and as Augustine does, encounter Christ in the Psalms.

A sixth trait is perseverance: how we need to overcome all sorts of psychological or indeed physical obstacles. As Bonhoeffer later is to remind us, there’s no cheap grace. The Christian life has to be a disciplined life. It requires habit. It requires ascetic practices of some kind or other. And there certainly needs at my time of life not to be weary of well-doing and to give up and then go and play golf and stir up your life with coffee spoons. No. You have to persevere to the end, even when your body is weak. In season and out of season, you have to be persistent. But then another thing that is very crucial about the Benedictine community as a seventh trait is how vital is reverence. What do we mean by reverence? We mean a sobriety of spirit that stems from the fact that we’re always living in the presence of the Lord. You’re always aware that you’re not holy, but you’re in the presence of the Holy One. This experience of othering is that you’re not preoccupied with yourself, but when you’re reverent, you’re actually aware of the presence of God, of the fullness of His reality.

[00:27:23]

In our culture today, we have lost so much reverence as the young generation have no reverence for the old. I’m reminded of one student that came to see us in our home and he was wearing his hat and the first thing my wife did was to take his hat off. It’s a mark of respect. I’m outraged when I see somebody wearing a cap coming into church. There’s no mark of respect that we’re in the presence of the Lord. And where does reverence begin? It begins with politeness, that you are polite for the other. You’re recognising that you’re not just the only one on the stage, but there’s somebody else there, too. And if we have to be polite to live in a civilised culture, how much more do we need reverence to live in the Christian life and especially in the light of the reverence of God?

And then there was another trait that we see later in Anselm, but was so characteristic of Benedictine life and monastic life generally. It’s compunction. This word ‘compunction’ is not recognised today, but actually it was a medical term that was used in Late Antiquity and it implied that you’ve been pierced with a thorn. You’ve been cut in your flesh. And especially when it was being a piercing of your heart. It was this Paul’s thorn in the flesh. It’s painful. And so to have compunctio is to be in pain and inflamed by the pain. But this is a spiritual pain. It’s the pain of contrition. It’s the pain of repentance. It’s the attitude of Mary Magdalene crying and washing the feet of her master with her tears. That’s compunctio. It’s contrition. It’s being penitential in one’s spirit.

[00:30:05]

Already in the Early Church, intensifying in the Celtic Church, and even more so in the Carolingian Church in the European continent there was an incremental intensity of penitence. And so the High Middle Ages was a period of, again, revival of the penitential. If you want to examine the profound significance of how penitential the culture of Christianity was in the Middle Ages, you can refer to the book that Dr Waltke and I wrote on Psalms of praise and worship in which we trace so strongly the whole penitential movement that the Psalms had throughout the Middle Ages. You’re not destroyed by compunctio any more than the rebuke of the glance of Jesus as he looks as Peter in his betrayal was to destroy Peter. It actually was to restore Peter why Jesus looked at him and that Peter then suffered as he wept with compunctio. It’s really to restore a passionate relationship with God. That’s what it’s all about.

[00:31:43]

So as we reflect on the Benedictine movement, we realise what a remarkable movement it was, though like every movement, as we will see later, it needs renewal. We each have to relive the Christian life in our own generation. We can’t depend on a tradition. We have to relive what others have pioneered before us.

And so we now come to another remarkable figure after Benedict and Gregory. Now we come to Anselm. He’s again a very remarkable man. He’s been called the Father of Scholasticism because he was one of the great pioneers in giving a new brilliance of mind to the understanding of the Christian faith. But his mind and his heart are far more united, so we might equally call him the father of a new understanding of prayer. The remarkable thing about Anselm’s prayer life is that he takes the discernment of Gregory the Great about personalising your teaching or recognising different people so you know the kind of people you’re relating to and fitting the prayer life to that personality. For our prayer life is a kind of summary of our biography before God, so that all the needs that we have that arise from our temperament are all therefore being corrected by the way we appropriate intimacy and union with God.

So he really is a very remarkable person and he forms a bridge between the late Classical world and the medieval world and indeed he’s still a remarkable person for us to be inspired with in our world today. And certainly, he’s one of the most brilliant minds that the Church has ever had. He was born in the Italian Alps at Aosta in 1033 and he died in 1109. One of the remarkable things that we have in our contemporary life, in spite of all the decadence of our culture, is that there’s a remarkable renaissance of biography and so there are wonderful biographies today. And Sir Richard Southern, who was a professor of history at Oxford and was knighted by the Queen in recognition of his distinctive historical achievements, is the man who has given us two remarkable books on the distinctives of the life of Anselm.

[00:35:07]

One of the things that was to benefit him later was that Aosta should have belonged to the Duchy of Lombardy on the southern flank of the Alps, but by happenstance it belonged to Burgundy in France. It was within the French realm and not the Italian realm and later this was to be the reason why he became so significant in Western Europe instead of remaining an Italian. In his case, his parents, especially his father, was like Augustine: having merely provincial ambitions for him perhaps to become a lawyer, like Calvin’s father, in order to rescue the family fortunes, which were in rather dire straits. But like any precocious, very clever child, while the family were looking to their future in the boy, he was thinking elsewhere. In 1059, his dear mother that he loved very deeply and was very close to died when he was 26 years. He never got on with his father. He was estranged from him because he was a father who never understood his son and tried to keep him from having his own heart’s desire.

Earlier, in his teenage years, he had desired to join a monastery because what it meant to join a monastery was to say that God has the priority in my life. I want to have union with God above everything else: my union with God is my primary ambition for life. This is what Anselm was communicating to his father, who wasn’t listening, and indeed to us today. And all his life, if you’d asked Anselm what above all do you want in life, the answer would have been union with God. Sadly, it’s not a common ambition that many of us have, but he had it so strongly that it dominated from beginning to end his whole narrative, his whole biography. It’s like the passion of Paul saying I only have only ambition: that I might know Christ. This was the one desire that he had. And to know Christ means you embrace his fellowship of his sufferings.

I don’t think Anselm thought too much about suffering, though he did in fact suffer a great deal; rather, he was thinking that his whole being was destined to be in the being of God, that the human being is most markedly human when it’s most deeply godly. That’s the pulse beat of Anselm. That’s why we can speak of him as the great humanist because he is so godly.

[00:38:55]

For us today that all seems so paradoxical, but it’s so vitally true. And later, of course, when we come to the Renaissance, humanism was no longer tied to godliness, it was tied to human prowess, to human independence of spirit. But he anticipates in some ways the Renaissance with the polemic—as we need the same polemic—and that is that we should profoundly seek to use all our mind as well as all our skills on behalf of God. He was so passionate about this that one of the things that puzzled him most was the unbelief of other people. He couldn’t understand why people were so unbelieving. He was puzzled that Christians should compromise and seek temporal advantages and to do this before having any priority for the work of God. He thought this was absolutely shocking. And so, tragically, he despised his father. He saw that his father was just simply looking after number one. He wasn’t looking at Heaven. So he found it difficult to say that they were Christians when they were breaking faith for temporary gain.

Nowadays, we don’t talk about being 100% a Christian, but for Anselm if you’re not 100%, you’re not a Christian. And thank God we have young people who come to our colleges who are devout and who have a passion. And I’ve often said that the reputation of a college is not in its faculty, but in the passion of its students. They’re the ones who are often showing us up because the faculty are too professional and the students are not there for professional reasons. So that was Anselm: you have to be 100%. In 1056, his mother died and this released him from the family. Now he was able to get away from his father and he crossed the Alps via the Mont Cenis pass. He had relatives on his mother’s side in Lyons, so he went to visit them and then proceeded to Vienne. And then he wandered on, not knowing quite where he was going, until he reached the shores of France and Normandy. And there he heard there was a famous scholar called Lanfranc, bishop of a new monastery at Bec, who had become the Abbot of Bec in 1042. This man was teaching in a very remarkable way as a new scholar, as the monk of his monastery. So Lanfranc had been a notable scholar for some 30 years before Anselm met him.

[00:42:35]

The first year he stood in the class as a student, he realised this is where I belong. Here I’m going to invest my whole life. And that’s when he became a monk in the Benedictine movement that we’ve been describing. And being so precocious, like Augustine, within four years he was promoted from being one of the ordinary monks to being the abbot in succession to his master, Lanfranc, for Lanfranc had now become the Archbishop of Canterbury. You never know when you’re pursuing the things of God how He puts your feet in a way that you could never have planned. It would have been just as easy when he was in Aosta, and more natural in terms of the geography of the country, for him to go from Aosta into Lombardy and wander down to Rome. By going North, he was actually going against the cultural tide for prowess and fame. He was going into remoteness and obscurity. And so often this is how God so wonderfully works that what is obscure in one generation becomes the new stage for God’s purposes of another generation.

[00:44:18]

And so eventually, after William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in the middle of that century, he now finds there’s a new orbit of power. It’s not in Rome; it’s in Canterbury. And so because he had followed Lanfranc, who was a protégé of William the Conqueror, Anselm himself becoming spiritual advisor to the daughter of William the Conqueror, Adelaide, this connection with royalty led him eventually to become the Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the century. He had fallen on his feet in terms of a political career, but it was all apparently happenstance. Of course, it wasn’t. God was using him. Although he had been so overstretched in his own duties, Lanfranc quickly found that Anselm was a brilliant scholar, that he was smarter than he was. And while Anselm submitted himself to the Rule of Benedict with humility, he used all that time he was there to become a remarkable scholar indeed. But the pulse beat of Anselm was not to be the Father of Scholasticism; the pulse beat was to be in union with God.

It’s Anselm who gives a remarkable revival of the teaching of the Incarnation that was to follow in the works of the Cistercians like Bernard of Clairvaux. He writes a remarkable treatise called Why God Became Man, in which he’s trying to do this by indicating that God, in creating man in His image and likeness, had Himself to become man. Even in that generation, God seemed so inaccessible and it seemed a mockery that God should call us to be intimate with Him and yet we have no intimacy or union in the deepest of ways. And this is what Anselm is pioneering. So he sees that rather than believing in the frustrations that keep us from God, simply believe that you’re most human and in being most human you’re following God’s creative purpose by celebrating your humanity with God in your union with Him. The key is the exercise of prayer. And so he sees that it is the fulfilment of our creation; it’s restoration from the fallen condition of Adam; that God has called us to enter into prayer. While others emphasise that redemption is a new creation, rather Anselm calls it a restoration. It’s a restoration to the original purpose of God. That’s all it is.

[00:48:06]

So the most important aim in Anselm’s life was union with God. And for a period between 1063 and 1070, when he was doing some of his most fruitful writings in the Monologion and the Proslogion and in Why God Became Man, in this flourishing period of his life, he’s really saying this is something for our minds to grapple with as well as for our hearts to desire. But if you’d asked Anselm was this the most significant thing he was doing, his scholarly work? No. He would have said much more important are the prayers and meditations that I’m engaged in. It was this that made him a kind of C.S. Lewis of the Middle Ages. And so you’ll find in the Penguin Classics the Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm with the Proslogion, which itself is one long prayer. Yes, it’s a theological monograph, but like the Confessions, it is written on your knees. It’s prayer. We’re reminded of how it was Evagrius Ponticus in the desert that said that to do theology is to pray. To be a theologian is to be a pray-er, that a theological text should be a prayer.

No one had ever written a theological treatise, like Anselm, as prayer, so this was a remarkable new distinctive. And what he’s innovative about he’s like a kind of Kierkegaard of the 11th century. He says prayer is where the human person is united with the person of God. And so he combines the ideas of Gregory the Great on understanding different people’s personality by saying prayer is intrinsically personal. And so it’s the deepening of your own personality in the presence of God that will provide union with God. Of course, it’s His spirit that does it, but what Anselm is saying is that everything about you as a person has to be therefore in a way that is a composition of prayer.

[00:51:05]

Benedicta Ward, who later became the spiritual advisor for C.S. Lewis, edited these prayers and she did it under the encouragement of her tutor at Oxford, who was Sir Richard Southern. So the three are very much connected together: Lewis, Benedicta Ward and Sir Richard Southern. In all the publicity that we give to Lewis, many of us have never heard of Richard Southern, but he was much more of an inspirer for Lewis than many of us realise. And so a wonderful book that you should read is Richard Southern’s book on Anselm called St Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. What Southern was doing was writing a landscape of a life. And so therefore you’re writing with a broad sweep of the whole context of the narrative and environment and culture in which Anselm was living. As we’ve said, biography has reached a high peak in the late 20th century. But I think that it’s no exaggeration to say that one of the most remarkable books on biography you’ll ever read is Southern’s portrait of Anselm—just to read it is so enriching. And as a great scholar like Anselm, Southern writes so devoutly.

Well, as I’ve said, Southern was a friend of Benedicta Ward living in an Anglican order just outside of Oxford at Wallingford. And this is an aside, but one of the amusing faux pas that you can make in translation is that when C.S. Lewis’s science novel Perelandra was dedicated to Our Ladies of Wantage, that was this community, the Portuguese translator hadn’t a clue who the Ladies of Wantage were, so he called them the Wanton Ladies. In other words, it was dedicated to prostitutes. So this is one of the risks in the publishing world. You have to make quite sure you know what you’re translating.

Anselm, in the preface of his writing, is saying that the purpose of prayer and meditation is to stir up the mind of the reader to the love and fear of God in self-examination. In other words, Anselm is giving you the echo of Augustine’s double knowledge. You only know God, by loving and fearing Him and you only know yourself through self-examination and contrition. So that’s the purpose of meditation and prayer. It’s not to be skimmed and hurried through, but to have a time of deep and thoughtful meditation.

[00:54:51]

It was one of the marks of that period that there were some remarkable women. Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a contemporary in France, was an example of the elevation of femininity that makes her the archetype of a woman that’s free, even though she had herself a rough life. The way to avoid being raped in that generation was, of course, to take the monastic opportunity to escape to the convent. There you could have high education, as she did, in Latin and even perhaps in Greek, and at the same time, in that sequestered life, to be free from the naked sexual ambitions of power-hungry men. So there was a new kind of opportunity for a new kind of spiritual devotion.

And so the daughter of William the Conqueror Princess Adelaide asks Anselm I need guidance as to how I’m going to set up my household as a kind of semi-monastery, so that’s why I’m asking you to teach me to pray. It really is much more than that. It’s really teach me to live a Benedictine life without being a Benedictine nun. She’s a precursor of what was to happen in the Netherlands in the movement called Devotio Moderna later. You don’t have to be in a convent. You can live at home. So he personalises her request by writing a whole series of prayers, prayers that we can appropriate and personalise because they have an archetype. And so, of course, what’s archetypal is as I pray, I want to be like one of the Apostles. I want to be like the Virgin Mary. I want to be like one of the saints, like Benedict himself. So as you read these prayers, you begin to realise that each prayer is expressing the personality traits of, say, the Apostle Paul, or of Peter, or of Stephen the Martyr, or indeed of Benedict in his Rule. So we think that when we ask the saints to pray for us, we’ve misunderstood the original objective. It was not that they were interceding for us in the place of Christ as our mediator. But it was saying help me to pray like Benedict; help me to pray like some of the other saints. In other words, the saints are not intercessors. They’re archetypes of a kind of spirituality that you want to follow because you admire them. So when we as Protestants say we don’t believe in this kind of approach of the intercession of the saints, we’re totally missing the original purpose of what it was all about. It was really saying I admire your way of life. I want to be like you, so guide me and teach me about it.

[00:58:58]

And if you’re wanting to exercise compunction then the best way of exercising compunction is to read the prayer of Mary Magdalene because you’re a sinner as she is. She knows she’s a sinner. She helps to make you cry as she cried. In contrition, she wants to kiss the feet of Jesus. And so later, Bernard, as we will see, takes the three kisses of Mary Magdalene in a wonderful way. The kiss of the feet is weeping and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ In other words, the kiss of the feet is redirect my paths in a new direction. And then we kiss his hands because we’re saying we want to be obedient to the will of God. We want to do the Opus Dei and so the kiss of the hand is the kiss of mission, of service for God. And the kiss of the lips is the kiss of communion and union with the beloved. All this highly symbolic language is appropriate and it’s all expressed in the thinking of Anselm that then is further elaborated by Bernard.

[01:00:41]

When you read these prayers, as, for example, the prayer that Anselm attributes to Benedict, you realise that what he’s doing is saying oh, Benedict, I want to be like you. So for example, he prays to Peter because he realises that when we pray as Peter, we’re praying that in spite of our weaknesses and our impulse and yet our denial of the Lord, that the Lord knows our heart. In other words, each of these prayers is really biographically outlining the way that our Lord related to that particular Apostle or saint. And the prayer, of course, through Mary the mother of our Lord is a prayer that we need to recover within our own life. We are saying you know, Mary, the wonderful thing about you is that you allowed God’s Word to actually reside in your womb and it was the birthing of the Word of God that gave us life that is so amazing: the life of the Son of God. So in praying to Mary, what we’re really saying is that kind of Anselmian context Lord, make me like Mary. Let me have that Marian stance of recognising that your Word resides within my being. In other words, we’re not impregnated with sperm, but with the Word and that that Word resides in our being with such amazing, incredible consequences.

[01:02:29]

How remote this is from our understanding of Biblical inerrancy today. Think about it. And so when we pray with Mary Magdalene, who he declares is a spring of tears, you come to the spring of mercy, Christ, from whom your burning thirst is so abundantly refreshed, through whom your sins are forgiven, by whom your bitter sorrow has received joyful consolation. And so he says my dearest lady, through your own experience you know how a sinner can be reconciled to it’s Creator. You know all about it. So that’s why this prayer is framed in this way. In other words, you’ll be wonderfully inspired to read these prayers of Anselm.

And so, as we close, the prayer of St Benedict, which is one of the shortest prayers in an anthology, is a pledge to the author of the Rule by which Benedict sought to live himself. And so, after listing his own failures, Anselm approaches Benedict personally. He says I profess to lead a life of ongoing conversion, as I did promise when I took the name and habit of a monk, but so far I am removed from this life that Holy Father Benedict be with me. Do not, I beg you, be distraught by my many failings and lies, so that both you, because we are your disciples, and we, because you are our spiritual master, may together glory in the presence of God who lives and reigns forever. I’m not saying that the later corruptions of intercessions of the saints had any understanding of what Anselm was originally doing, but Anselm is such a significant key in our dialogue with the Catholic Church today because this is an understanding that has been so later abused and distorted in the life of the Church.

As we close, let me reflect how you might do some discussion on some topics of these great men. The first one is have you ever reflected that in accepting your uniqueness, you are accepting the greatest gift of life, but just as the giver is God, so it’s only God that will help us to know how to handle our uniqueness? And that’s why you can spend time reflecting on Gregory the Great. Secondly, one of the great tragedies of the 20th century was the distortion of obedience that so marked the mentality of the German people. And they had forgotten that it’s not that kind of obedience that the corporal receives from the sergeant major and is passed down to the rest of the military force. Godly obedience is simply listening to the God who speaks, so perhaps you may reflect on Klaus’ little book to help you to understand Benedictine spirituality.

[01:07:21]

And perhaps the encouragement that Anselm gives us is as you discuss the third question. Do not be afraid of the rigours of scholarship because the purpose of true scholarship is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your might. It’s a three-fold intensity in the pursuit of God.