The American Benedictine Review. T. 49-3 (1998)

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Benedictine Review
49:3 Sept. 1998
233—Jean Leclercq and the Concept of

Monastic Tradition
Gregorio Penco, O.S.B.
256—Under the Spell of Lorca:

An Important Influence on Thomas
Merton’s Early Poetry
Patrick F. O’Connell
287—La Tradicién Benedictina 1-11
A Feature Review
Terrence G. Kardong, O.S.B.
299—Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus:

The Text Vs. The Scholarly Tradition
Kenneth C. Russell
316—The Pneumatology of Odo Casel’s

Mysterientheologie
Harriet Luckman
(ISSN:0002-7650)
ABR CONTRIBUTORS FOR 1998
FOUND ER S
Assum tion Abbey Congregation of Sisters St. Mary's Abbey St. Vincent Archabbey
Richa ton, ND of PerpetualAdoration Morristown, NJ Latrobe, PA
St" MO
Belmont Abbey Lolus’ St. Meinrad Archabbey Subiaco Abbey
Belmont, NC Marmwn Abbey St. Meinrad ’ IN Subiaco, AR
Aurora, IL _
Conception Abbey St P rocopms Abbe y
St. John’s Abbe .'
Conception, MO
Collegeville, L‘SIe' IL
PATR O N S
Christ the King Priory St Andrew's Abbey St. Bede Abbey St. Martin’s Abbey
Schuyler, NE Cleveland, OH Peru, IL Lacey, WA
Mary Mother of the St. Anselm Abbey St. Benedict’s Abbey
Church Abbey Manchester, NH Atchison, KS
Richmond, VA
8 PO N S O R S
Blue Cloud Abbey San Benito Monastery St. Abbey St. Scholastica
Marvin, SD Dayton, WY Gregoryl , RI
Portsmout Monaste
Fort Smi , AR
Immaculate Conception St. Benedict's Monastery St. Joseph Abbey
Monastery, St. Joseph, MN St. Benedict, LA St. Walburg Monastery,
Ferdinand, IN Covington, KY
St. Gertrude Monastery
Newark Abbey Ridgely, MD
Newark, NJ
DO N ORS
Abbe of St. Mary Immaculate Convent Our Lady of Sorrows San Antonio Abad
and t. Louis Norfolk, NE rio Humacao, Puerto Rico
St. Louis, MO
Immaculate Heart Oak oresb IL Santa Familia
Ascension Priory Hermita e Our Lady of Peace Monastery
Jerome, Big Sur, A Monastery Belize, C.A.
Benedictine Priory Monasterio Paz Commbla- MO Sisters of St. Benedict
Savannah, GA de la Cruz Prince of Peace Abbey Coban, Guatemala
Benet Hill Monaste Peru, S.A. Oceanside, CA Spirit of Life Monastery
Colorado Springs, CO Monastery of the Priorato de San Jose Lakewood, CO
Good She herd
Covenant Monastery St. Bede’s Priory
Harlan, IA Rio Gran e City, TX guetzaltenango,
uatemala Eau Claire, WI
Mosteiro de Sao Bento Priorato de Tibati
Emmanuel Monastery St. Benedict Abbey
Lutherville, MD Vinhedo, Brazil Bogota, Colombia Still River, MA
Mosteiro San Jose Queen of Angels
E i han Monaste St. Benedict Monastery
0313mm; Falls, Mi;y Mineiros Goias, Brazil Monaste Bristow, VA
Mother of God Liberty, 0
Glastonbu Abbey St. Benedict Monastery
Monastery Queen of Angels
Hingham, MA Watertown, SD Madison, WI
Monastery
Holy S irit Monastery Mount Saviour Mount Angel, OR St. Benedict Monastery
Grand errace, CA Pittsburgh, PA
Monastery of Heaven
Holy Angels Convent Pine City, NY fiueen St Benedict’s Monastery
Jonesboro, AR Winnipeg, MB Canada
Mount St. Benedict onaste8' H
Warren,
Holy Cross Abbey Convent Red Plains Monastery St. Benedict’s Priory
Canon City, CO Erie, PA Canyon, TX
Oklahoma City, OK
Ho] Name Priory Mt. Saint Benedict Resurrection Priory St Bernard Abbey
St Leo, FL Monastery Coban, Guatemala Cullman, AL
Hol 'l‘rinit Monaste ry Crookston, MN
Sacred Heart Convent St. Emma Monastery
But er, PAy Mount St. Michael Cullman, AL Greensburg, PA
Trinit Monastery Abbey
H01
Elkhorn, NE Sacred Heart Monastery St Gertrude Monastery
St avid,XZ Lisle, IL Cottonwood, ID
House of Bread
Mount St. Scholastica
Convent Sacred Heart Monastery St. Gregory’s Abbey
Monastery Richardton, ND Shawnee, OK
Atchison, KS
Nanaimo, BC Canada
Continued
The American
Benedictine Review
233—Jean Leclercq and the Concept of

Monastic Tradition
256—Under the Spell of Lorca:

An Important Influence on Thomas
Merton’s Early Poetry
287—La Tradicién Benedictina 1-11

A Feature Review
299—Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus:

The Text Vs. The Scholarly Tradition
Kenneth C. Russell
316—The Pneumatology of Odo Casel’s
Mysterientheologie
Harriet Luckman
(ISSN:0002-7650)
THE AMERICAN BENEDICTINE REVIEW, INC.
Board of Directors: President, Rt. Rev. Gregory Polan, O.S.B., Conception Abbey,
Conception, MO; Secretary-Treasurer, Rt. Rev. Vincent Bataille, O.S.B., Marmion
Abbey, Aurora, IL; Past-President, Rt. Rev. Jerome Kodell, O.S.B., Subiaco Abbey,
Subiaco, AR; Rt. Rev. Thomas Frerking, St. Mary and St. Louis Abbey, St.Louis,
MO; Rt. Rev. Kenneth Hein, O.S.B., Holy Cross Abbey, Canon City, CO; Rt. Rev.
Gerard Lair, O.S.B., St. Mary‘s Abbey, Morristown, NJ; Rt. Rev. Joel Macul,
O.S.B., St. Paul’s Abbey, Newton, NJ; Rt. Rev. Douglas Now-icki, O.S.B., St. Vin
cent Archabbey, Latrobe, PA; Rt. Rev. Neal Roth, O.S.B., St. Martin's Abbey, Lacey,
WA; Rt. Rev. Barnabas Senecal, O.S.B., St. Benedict's Abbey, Atchison, KS; Rt.
Rev. Aidan Shea, O.S.B., St. Anselm’s Abbey, Washington, DO.
THE AMERICAN BENEDICTINE REVIEW

Editor: Terrence Kardong, O.S.B., Assumption Abbey, Richardton, ND
Editorial Assistant: Renée Branigan, O.S.B., Sacred Heart Monastery, Richard
ton, ND
Editorial Board: Kurt Belsole, O.S.B., St. Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, PA;
Marianne Burkhard, O.S.B., St. Mary’s Monastery, Nauvoo, IL; Hugh Feiss,
O.S.B., Ascension Priory, Jerome, ID; James Flint, O.S.B., St. Procopius Abbey,
Lisle, IL; Mary Forman, O.S.B., St. Gertrude’s Monastery, Cottonwood, lD; Eu
gene Hensell, O.S.B., St. Meinrad Archabbey, St. Meinrad, IN; Ephrem Holler
mann, O.S.B., St. Benedict's Monastery, St. Joseph, MN; Valerian Odermann,
O.S.B., Assumption Abbey, Richardton, ND; Jeanne Ranek, O.S.B., Sacred Heart
Monastery, Yankton, SD; Joel Rippinger, O.S.B., Marmion Abbey, Aurora, IL;
Miriam Schmitt, O.S.B., Annunciation Priory, Bismarck, ND; Placid Solari, Bel
mont Abbey, Belmont, NC; Thomas Sullivan, O.S.B., Conception Abbey, Concep
tion, MO; Judith Sutera, O.S.B., Mount St. Scholastica Convent, Atchison, KS;
Philip Timko, O.S.B., St. Procopius Abbey, Lisle, IL; Simeon Thole, O.S.B., St. Leo
Abbey, St. Leo, FL; Andrew Thornton, O.S.B., St. Anselm Abbey, Manchester, NH.
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EDITORIAL
BOOK REVIEWS
A few years ago, the editor wrote a book. He thought it was

a serious book, so he expected that it would be widely reviewed.
He did not seem to understand that reviewing takes time, and the
bigger the book, the longer the time-lapse. This was a big book.
But even after a considerable wait, no reviews. One monastic
journal promised one in years 1999 or 2000.
Those are apocalyptic numbers, and the editor was on the
verge of apoplexy. Then the thought crossed his mind: Who could
be expected to review such a technical book on monasticism?
Journals such as ABR, of course, but there are few such journals,
and besides, ABR does not review books. That last thought had a
marvelously cooling effect on the editor’s wrath. In fact, it soon
changed to regret and shame, which lead to a resolve to do some
thing about it: We would begin a regular book review department!
Why does ABR not have a book review section? In fact, it did
for the first issues in 1950, but then it disappeared, never to reap
pear. Who knows why? Perhaps the first editor got tired of the
bothersome detail of dealing with many publishers and review
ers. Perhaps ABR had plenty of material without adding more.
Whatever the cause, book reviews have been conspicuous here by
their absence.
Nowadays, however, ABR does not have a superabundance
of material. The flow of spontaneous contributions has dropped
ominously in the past two years, so we have plenty of room com
ing up. Besides, this editor does not mind details. In fact, he
thrives on them; likes nothing better than getting numerous
books and letters in the mail each day. Other journals have a spe
cial book review editor, but that won’t be our case.
But the root cause for the new policy is simply this: I like
book reviews. Indeed, I often turn to them first when opening a
journal. For one thing, they are short and can fill the odd interval
with interesting reading. Then again, they usually summarize
new books, so they help to keep one current with what is being
written. Moreover, book reviews are like editorials in that they
are personal reactions, with all the quirks that can involve.
Sometimes they are outrageous, but at least they are interesting.
Finally, book reviews are an important auxiliary function of
231
literature itself. They are a living proof that books are being read
and evaluated. Without reviews, a writer wonders whether any
body out there has read the book and/or cares about it. There is
nothing quite so devastating as no reaction to one’s book. It is like
dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon. Any reaction, even a
hostile reaction, is preferable to that silence.
Book reviews can also be a guide for book buyers. Books cost
a lot of money nowadays, so one doesn’t want to waste it on a
lemon. It is helpful to know in advance whether a book is worth
the paper upon which it is printed. Not all books are, and that in
cludes some of the best-intentioned, pious monastic books. We
need to be warned about such books by reliable critics. ABR will
not deal in anodyne, make-nice reviews.
That being the case, there is potential here for unhappiness.
No author likes to be panned, and publishers do not like to see
one of their books torpedoed. Religious book publishing is tough
enough without that. A rave review can trigger a good sale, but if
all reviews are rave reviews, then nobody will pay any attention.
Personally, I avoid book review sections that are predictably
laudatory.
Even in a country as large as this one, the monastic family is
small. There are only a few monastic publishers and not many
more authors. A monk who writes a negative review of another
monk is likely to meet that monk soon enough in the flesh. But we
repeat that without the possibility of thumbs down, thumbs up do
not mean much. At any rate, we intend to tell the truth in all
charity.
232 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

JEAN LECLERCQ AND THE CONCEPT OF
MONASTIC TRADITION
The recent death (October 27, 1993) in the Abbey of Clervaux,

Luxembourg, of Dom Jean Leclercq, the very prolific author and
student of monasticism and its spirituality, brought to an end an
immense and variegated activity. This activity continued for half
a century, and posterity will be able to draw from it inexhaustible
material for study and reflection.1 Above all, his was a case of
tremendous production, which was made possible by a wise orga
nization of the work and the help of numerous collaborators. En
dowed with a genial and penetrating mind, he knew how to sort
out problems clearly, to collect around them a rich and up-to-date
documentation and furnish the most suggestive and persuasive
solutions.
Dom Leclercq dedicated himself primarily to original research
into controverted issues, to the renewal of fields of inquiry, meth
ods employed or the results obtained. He had an ability to pass
easily from erudite research to graceful popularization. Along
with his technical efl'orts, especially in the field of textual criti
Dom Gregorio Penco is a monk of Finalpia Abbey, Italy, who has taught
monastic studies at Sant’ Anselmo (Rome) for many years. For almost fifty
years he has been one of the most prolific writers on monasticism in Eu
rope. A recent bibliography for him listed no less than 350 items, but none
of them have been translated into English. With our translation of the fol
lowing article, which first appeared in Benedictina in 1994, we have decided
to remedy this situation. Forthcoming issues of ABR will contain more arti
cles of Penco. The translator from the Italian is Terrence Kardong.
1For the writings of Dom Leclercq, see R. Grégoire, “Bibliographic de
Dom Jean leclercq” in Studia Monastica 10 (1968); Idem., 20 (1978) 409-23;
A. M. Altermatt, SM 30 (1988) 417-40. The same review has plans for a fi
nal edition of this bibliography, that will also include posthumous writings.
For a life-framework for this activity, see his autobiography: Di grazia in
grazia. Memorie (Milan 1993). For a first summation of his work, see G.
Penco, “Ricardo di Dom Jean Leclercq" in Aevum 60 (1994).
233
cism and literary history, were panoramic and general pieces in
encyclopedias and dictionaries. They were, however, always full
of original and genial remarks, achieving at times the stature of
authentic monographs because of their extent and the novelty of
their argumentation.
This gave rise to a truly encyclopedic knowledge of monasti
cism. It was in great part due to the fecundity of the author, but
also to continual requests from institutions, cultural entities or
interested communities for collaboration—to which the French
scholar was unable to say no. He took on innumerable themes
and his contributions appeared in the most varied places; they
ranged from traditional themes to those suggested by the implan
tation of the monastic life in the young churches. From his sixti
eth year onward, Dom Leclercq turned his attention mostly to
this last phenomenon. Thus arose an encounter and confronta
tion between the old and the new which is the subject of the pre
sent paper.
Among the various themes studied by Dom Leclercq, it is not
difficult to pick out some main threads that run through all his
work, such as monastic theology, the contemplative life, the con
nection between monastic life and culture. And among all these
themes, perhaps the most frequent one, from the systematic point
of view, is that of the monastic tradition. This is seen in the innu
merable research monographs and in more general reflections de
voted to problems mostly raised by the post-conciliar aggiorna
mento. One might even say that this theme constituted the back
ground of the whole historical and literary production of this fa
mous French monk and scholar. It was the stimulus that drove
him to undertake research in such depth and extent into monas
ticism and its spirituality.
THE MONASTIC TRADITION

As an historian of monasticism, more than of single institu
tions, Dom Leclercq had to deal with a theme such as the monas
tic tradition. And in fact he amply contributed to its rehabilita
tion and made it known, illustrating its basic themes, and in
some cases showing the layers of incrustation with which the cen
turies have covered it. He recovered it from all the particular tra
ditions (a distinction that was fundamental to his writing) that
had held it tightly bound. The monastic authors he dealt with
234 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

(and especially St. Bernard) are interrogated above all as wit
nesses to the tradition as well as in consideration of their partic
ular qualities and contribution to that same tradition. By reason
of his towering competence, Dom Leclercq was able to distinguish
that which is tributary to the tradition and that which is proper
to each epoch, each region, each mentality.
Once he had isolated and recovered the fundamental ingredi
ents of the tradition, especially in the doctrinal and spiritual
field, he was skilled in noting its presence and incidence in cur
rents, movement and single authors. But these authors were
studied also in connection with other aspects of the tradition, for
example the literary and the cultural, which could involve their
fidelity to definite styles and literary schemes where these had
become an almost integral part of the monastic tradition itself.2
In this way, the concept of tradition was enlarged and at the same
time sharpened by including aspects previously little known or
considered.
Certainly St. Bernard remained in this regard a privileged wit
ness, the author with whom the name of Dom Leclercq will re
main inseparably united both because of the critical edition of his
works and because of the huge quantity of studies he dedicated to
him. But because he had the most complete possible concept of
tradition, the attention of the French scholar also extended to the
lesser and the least, to the little known and the anonymous, to
those who could only express themselves in a brief or very brief
manner by means of a few pages. It extended to those monks who
could express the tradition in a very personal tone or those who
simply repeated it. To establish what was the common platform
2This is seen in St. Bernard in particular. The saint shows himself faith
ful to the tradition even by using two different styles, depending on
whether he is writing on his own or whether he is entrusting the writing to
another: J. Leclercq, “Sur le caractere littéraire des Sermons de S. Bernard”
in Recueil d'études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits III (Rome 1969) 164. He
was careful to fix his name to a masterpiece: “The Sermons on the Canticle
are presented as the opus magnum of St. Bernard in conformity with a well
known tradition": “La doctrine des Sermons sur le Cantique" in Recueil
d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits V (Rome 1992) 101. For the literary
genre of the Exempla, see “Le portrait de Saint Bernard dans la littérature
des ‘Exempla’ du bas Moyen Age,” ibid., 458. The writings of Dom Leclercq
will be cited from now on, wherever possible, in their last place of publica
tion.
GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 235

and what was the later personal variant, it was necessary to un
dertake and deepen particular research projects on the history of
spiritual doctrine. Often these had hardly been begun, but he was
able to carry them out with new and unforeseen results.
Sometimes in the writings of Dom Leclercq we find the claim
that the work is provisory, and therefore that some results are
precarious. He urges that the research be carried further, even if
it requires the use of new and better disciplines. If, as we will see,
the great part of Dom Leclercq’s effort went into the discovery
and study of spiritual themes, it was especially lexicography
which furnished the French scholar with the most abundant and
original material for his research or for his dictionary entries,
and particularly those which appeared in the Dictionnaire de
Spiritualité. This had been neglected by historians of spirituality,
who were usually not particularly interested in philology. In this
way, it was possible to follow the semantic evolution of words and
expressions which were of remote classical or Christian origins
but had a special meaning in the monastic world. They were like
many other lively words of the religious tradition that were redis
covered and learned in their contribution to the tradition of
monasticism.
The doctrines also were expressed in texts and in vocabulary,
in themes and in literary genres, and in this way life was given to
the monastic culture in its most typical and peculiar forms. It is
to such forms, then, that we have to turn our attention if we wish
to remain on the same plane on which the doctrine was nurtured
and where it fed the tradition of monasticism. If the history of
spirituality was a recent discipline, developed in fact in the pe
riod between the two world wars, still newer was the study of the
spiritual terminology of monasticism; and it was an area in which
the weight of the ascetic tradition of monasticism turned out to be
truly preponderant. Dom Leclercq devoted two whole volumes to
these matters.3
3Etudes sur le vocabulaire monastique du Moyen Age (Studia Anselmi

ana 48; Rome 1961); Otia monastica. Etudes sur le vocabulaire de la con
templation au Moyen Age (Studia Anselmiana 51; Rome 1963). Add to this
the following articles: “Spiritualitas” in Studi Medievali 3 (1962) 279-96;
“‘Umbratilis,’ Pour l’histoire du theme de la vie cachée” in Revue d’Ascé
tique et de Mystique 46 (1963) 491-504; “‘Lectulus.‘ Variazioni su un tema
biblico nella tradizione monastica” in Bibbia e spiritualita (Rome 1967) 417
36.
236 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

These words, which on superficial examination seem to have
only a generic or strange meaning, are in the fullness of their true
meaning authentic and precious witnesses of the tradition. They
are the heritage of early monasticism and of antique Christian
literature, as was pointed out in particular by Christine
Mohrmann of Nijmegen. Therefore, in the research of Dom
Leclercq, spirituality has to be the most characteristic and effec
tive element of the monastic tradition; all of the various methods
of research must focus on that. In fact, Dom Leclercq’s research
on the monastic tradition remains strictly tied to doctrinal reflec
tion on the same, so much so that the two aspects must be kept in
view at the same time, illuminating one another.
THE SITUATION OF MONASTIC STUDIES IN 1950
To fully understand the meaning of such a contribution and es

pecially its novelty, it is necessary to remember the general situa
tion at the time Dom Leclercq began his activity as an historian
of monasticism and of spirituality. Up until the middle 1950s, the
texts of monastic formation and culture circulating in the monas
tic world were mostly commentaries on the Rule of Benedict,
some of which had authors of great prestige, important represen
tatives of the monastic revival of the nineteenth and twentieth
century.4 For the rest, awareness remained rather uncertain and
spotty, for there were still no works that exercised an effective
function of cultural mediation. Only a small nucleus of specialists
could dedicate themselves to the monastic tradition by way of di
rect knowledge and study in the truly scientific sense. From these
circles of specialists emerged a figure such as Dom André
Wilmart of the Abbey of Solesmes (+1941),5 but their main inter
est was in erudition and textual criticism.
4See Commentaria in S. Regulam I, ed. J. Gribomont (Studia Anselmi

ana 84; Rome 1982
5J. Bisnami Odier - L. Brou - A. Vernet, Bibliographie sommaire des
travaux du pére André Wilmart O.S.B., 1876-1941 (Rome 1953); G. Penco,
“Spirito e caratteri degli studi monastici tra Ottocento e Novecento" in
Benedictina 29 (1982) 145-74; reproduced in Spiritualita monastica. Aspetti
e momenti (Praglia 1988) 375-410; Ibid., “Iniziative culturali e fermenti
spirituali nel mondo monastico contemporaneo” in Cultura e spiritualia
nella tradizione monastica (Studia Anselmiana 103; Rome 1990) 177-95; re
produced in Il monachesimo fra spiritualia e cultura (Milan 1991) 321-36.

Erudition and spirituality remained for the most part sepa
rate, with evident harm to each, thus prolonging the distance be
tween spirituality and culture that had complex and remote
roots. The very commentaries on the Rule of Benedict, despite
their authoritative prestige, tended to contribute to the absoluti
zation of the Rule itself. They were isolated from the whole cul
tural and doctrinal context of the Rule, which was little known at
that time. That was evident from the eruption of polemic (1938)
in the case of the Regula Magistri, which had to contribute in a
decisive manner to the growth of knowledge in this sector. There
was very limited and vague knowledge of the tradition, based on
the statements of the various Benedictine congregations and
used to justify those statements. This produced a plethora of com
monplaces, not too different from that which circulated in cul
tural currents. Even the work of monks and monasteries in the
liturgical movement could come to conclusions that were a bit
one-sided. For example they considered medieval monastic au
thors and St. Bernard himself simply as proofs of a “new sensibil
ity” in the sacramental life that developed after the Millenium,
and therefore as little more than sentimental and devout au
thors.6
Tradition was simply the past, or rather a certain idea of the
past; it was too far removed to be tackled without adequate in
struments of research, too complex to be reduced to a simple for
mula, too full of spiritual content to be used to bolster contingent
preferences and situations. Moreover, the tradition was the sum
of traditions by which each monastery and monastic movement
lived and which was considered something absolute and un
changeable. In the historical monastic research of the time there
were lacking specific studies on the “intentions of the founders.”
This was because many texts were still unedited or little known
(such as with the ancient Cistercian legislation). Or it was be
cause there was inadequate knowledge of the connections be
tween the different monastic currents, and therefore of their con
cepts of tradition.
The fragmentary knowledge of the respective sources was due
to the situation and the fragility of some monastic movements. In
6Leclercq himself was able to oppose this idea with a conference held at
Maria Laach and later reported in Recueil d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses
écrits V (note 2) 151-79: “Imitation du Christ et sacrements chez Saint
Bernard."
238 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

a few cases they amounted to only a few dozen members. This led
to the tendency to emphasize certain marginal elements of the
tradition to the loss of more sustantial, but complex and problem
atic, elements. And it is understandable that in the nineteenth
century restoration one aimed at the most effective possible use
of the past rather than at the subtle precision of historical and
doctrinal points. Sometimes the result was hybrid or outdated
forms—or to confirm them! Above all, there was a lack of sensi
tivity to these matters, something that may already have been
lost by the last years of the ancien régime.
A similar uncertainty is also notable up until 1950 in regard to
the variety of interpretations given to the concept of “Benedictine
spirituality." 7 One cannot say that the ecclesiology of the time,
with its emphasis on juridic and normative elements, favored di
verse concepts and orientations. The idea of tradition was condi
tioned by a fixed concept, by an immobilism typical of the
Catholic mentality when faced with situations such as the mod
ernist crisis. In this way, there arose some decades ago, or even
some centuries ago, the thinking that one’s own interpretation of
the Rule of St. Benedict was undoubtedly the best, or even the
only one possible.8
It is also true that between 1940 and 1950 there appeared the
considerable Histoire de l’Ordre de S. Benoit of Dom Philibert
Schmitz, which furnished a rather vast picture of the develop
ment of Benedictine monasticism through the centuries and in di
verse movements. But his emphasis on the institutional element
did not permit him, for example, to take into consideration the
Cistercian movement and its influence on the spiritual tradition
7G. Penco, “Il concetto di ‘spiritualita benedettina’ nelle riflessioni

storico-dottrinali dell’epoca contemporanea" in La Scuola cattolica 109
(1981) 191-209; reproduced in Spiritualita monastica. Aspetti e momenti,
(note 5) 424-52.
8Even in 1988, the Abbot President of the Subiaco Congregation, Denis
Huerre, in a talk to the General Chapter, noted that the modifications of ob
servance in the Congregation were becoming very strong. He added that the
cause of this was excessive insistence on the particulars of observance
“rather than asking for the strong tradition of monasticism that demands of
every monk and every monastery continual prayer, recollection, fasting and
above all a life that is really communal and joyful": Curial Archives of S.
Ambrogio, Cap. Gen. 1988, Enclosures, reproduced in G. Tamburrino, Rin
novamenta legislative della Congregazione Sublacense O.S.B. 1946-1988.
Degree thesis in Theology (Rome: S. Anselmo 1994) 308.

of monasticism. Moreover, differentiation between the various
monastic movements was accented by the impulse given to the
study of legislative texts, that is, the Consuetudines Monasticae.
That is what the Corpus set out to accomplish.9
Also regarding the contents of this tradition there existed a no
table uncertainty whether to begin with the contemplative foun
dation (or less) of the life to be restored. On the other hand, after
the suppressions of the contemporary era (nineteenth-twentieth
century), the study of the monastic tradition became an unavoid
able task if there was to be a recovery of conceptual continuity.
And this seemed to be esssential if the life were to be fiilly recov
ered.10 What was needed was the recovery of an illustrious tradi
tion like the Maurist that would renew appreciation for the task
of historical and doctrinal reconstruction.
LECLERCQ RECOVERS THE TRADITION

It is in this context that we must place the work of Dom
Leclercq on the monastic tradition, and especially the medieval
period where he played a crucial role in unearthing sources,
themes, contents and connections among the various movements
and epochs. On the basis of a knowledge of texts and authors that
he had gained from the time of his first research, already in his
1948 work La Vie Parfaite, Dom Leclercq claimed for the monas
tic life an image that was little known. Themes such as the an
gelic life, the prophetic life, the apostolic life, the ideal of the mar
tyr, all served to expand a rather narrow idea of the monastic life
which was generally limited to the object of the religious vows.
Leclercq did not approach this task in a scholastic or abstract way
but by means of continuous and abundant reference to texts
drawn precisely from the monastic tradition.11 The result was the
broadening of the mentality that limited the tradition mostly to
the Benedictine Rule. But Leclercq occupied himself with the
Rule only marginally, and not only the Rule but its influence on
posterity and on hermeneutical problems raised by that docu
ment for modern religious mentality and culture.
9?. Engelbert, “Bericht iiber den Stand des Corpus Consuetudinum
Monasticarum (CCM)" in Studien und Mitteilungen 102 (1991) 19-24.
10The problem was common to all religious orders, and especially to the
oldest ones: G. Penco, “Il recupero della propria tradizione nella vita reli
giosa contemporanea” in Vita Consacrata 30 (1994).
11La Vie Parfaite (Tumhout 1948).
240 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Certainly Dom Leclercq was always careful to distinguish the
tradition from the past pure and simple, while recognizing the
close connections that exist between the two elements.12 Further,
the tradition was shown by Dom Leclercq to be not a closed thing
but that which is “open to the present” 13 understanding and re
sponding to its legitimate needs. The French scholar added that
history teaches us, among other things, patience in carrying out
the various initiatives that gradually present themselves, as well
as their relativity; and finally, liberation from the past. And it is
significant that these general observations were made on the oc
casion of the appearance of a completely new phenomenon,
namely, the birth of African monasticism.
Without doubt, said Dom Leclercq, “it is difficult to say exactly
what the tradition is, because of the very richness of this real
ity,” 1‘ and he continued on by saying what the tradition is not: it
is not history, not the worship of the past, not traditions (which
are only its partial and temporary manifestations),15 not the prej
udice or lament that creates the picture of “the good old days.”
The tradition is “an event of living transmission,” and “the past
12“If the past is not confused with the tradition—which is transmission

to the present—it helps to shed light on the present. For not only does it
provide its material, so to speak, but it indicates that which is helpful and
that which is less so; that which is tied to passing circumstances and that
which is permanent; and that which therefore ought to be maintained and
that which should be abandoned.” Vita religiosa e vita contemplativa (Ital
ian translation of the French: Assisi 1972) 6-7; See also “'h'aduzione ed
evoluzione nella vita religiosa” ibid., 398-420.
13“De la traditon comme ouverture au présent” in Rythmes du monde 39
(1965) 5-15, reprinted in Chances de la spiritualité occidentale (Paris 1966)
67-85.
14117111.,69.
15Concerning “our traditions” to which Abbot Guéranger refers, Leclercq

notes: “Such a formula can cover all that one wants to mean by it. The
Benedictine ‘traditions’ are all that has happened, all that one could accom
plish during the long history of fourteen centuries—of course, we know
nothing of the first four!”: “Le renouveau solesmien et le renouveau re
ligieux du XlXe siecle” in Studia Monastica 18 (1976) 175-76. However, as
the first Cistercians had done, “We must know how to break with the past,
go back to the intentions behind the facts, find the spiritual tradition be
yond the historic traditions”: “Les intentions des fondateurs de L’Ordre cis
tercian" in Collectanea Cisterciensia 30 (1968) 267. On the distinction be
tween “The tradition and traditions,” Leclercq also commented in a course
of retreat exercises given in 1966 in an Italian monastic community: “Rif
lessioni cristologiche sulla vita monastica” rnimeographed, pp. 19-21.

living in the present.” 16 Tradition is a complex reality, therefore,
that must involve the understanding and interpretation of the
living subject in various epochs and cultures. The tradition is
that which can endure, and therefore it is a little outside of
time.17 It is, however, a collective past, a spiritual and moral con
tinuity.18 The problem is all the more important and relevant
given the fact that there is now present in the monastic world, for
the young churches, the question of “monastic implantation,” of
putting down roots so as to produce new flowers and fruits.19 The
historian recognizes the complexity of the changes that have
taken place in the course of religious and monastic life. He or she
knows how to show “the semantics created for this purpose, and
according to which one can distinguish tradition in the singular,
traditions in the plural, change, evolution, revolution, renewal, re
storation,reform,innovation,survival,recurrence,deviation. . . .” 2°
16Chances de la spiritualite' occidentale (note 13) 71. In monasticism, for

mation is meant to “initiate the person into the knowledge and practice of a
kind oflife, and to guide them to it, thanks to a living tradition that trans
mits and manifests it”: “Formazione” in Dizionario degli Istituti di per
fezione IV. 132.
17In this way, Dom Leclercq recognizes that certain images used by St.
Bernard are at the same time biblical, medieval and transcultural: “There
is in St. Bernard a whole imagery that possesses a transhistoric, and even
transcultural, value”: “S. Bernard de Clairvaux, les combats de Dieu” in Re
cueil d’etudes sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits V402 (note 2); “The biblical in
terpretation of the monks of the 12th century, as well as that of the Fathers
of the Church of whom they are the last representatives, retain their per
manent value, despite their non-scientific character”: “Ecriture sainte et vie
spirituelle. Saint Bernard et le 12e siécle monastique" in Dictionnaire de
Spiritualité IV.1.194.
18“The reason why the history of ideas and ideals takes interest in ha
giography is that it gives us access to the persistence and the development
of certain models in the collective consciousness of people marked by a cer
tain cultural and religious tradition: in the Middle Ages, the Christian tra
dition. . . . In the Christian tradition, as in others, these texts ‘live’ so to
speak, they are amplified and modified when new socio-cultural occasions
offer an occasion to reinterpret them”: I monaci e il matrimonio.
Un’indagine sul 2H1 secolo (Turin 1984) 86.
19Chances de la spiritualité occidentale (note 13) 82.
20“Diversification et identité dans le monachisme au XIIe siecle” in Stu
dia Monastica 28 (1986) 51. According to Leclercq, we should apply the
term “renewal” to the Carolingian era, “reform” to the Gregorian era, “re
birth” to the flowering of the twelfth century, “revival” to the monastic
movement of the tenth century: “La réforme bénédictine anglaise du Xe sie
cle vue du continent” in Studio Monastica 24 (1982) 106-07.
242 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

On the otherphand, a student of monastic history like Dom
Leclercq inevitably has to take account of the innumerable as
cetic practices and observances produced through its long history.
In the first half of our century, they were in good part discovered
and studied by Dom Louis Gougaud, even in their most radical
form.21 However, even in regard to these practices, which are ap
parently so diverse if not positively contrasting, Dom Leclercq
knew how to discover the common spirit that enlivened them. He
considered them as different expressions of a single tradition, and
he restored to it its common ascetical and doctrinal presupposi
tions. This was the case in particular with the connection be
tween stabilitas and peregrinatio,22 cenobitism and eremitism,23
Cluniacs and Cistercians,24 adoration for reparation and Christo
logical doctrine,25 or more generally, the connection between the
gospel and culture,26 restoration and renewal,27 liturgy and popu
21G. Oury, “Gougaud, Louis” in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité V1.607-08.

22“Monachisme et pérégrinatio du XIe au XIIe siecle” in Studia Monas
tica 3 (1961) 33-52.
23Of the latter, Dom Leclercq has repeatedly noted the traditional char
acter: “Deux opuscules médiévaux sur le vie solitaire" in Studia Monastica
5 (1963) 202.
2“Four une histoire de la vie a Cluny” in Revue d’Histoire eccle'siastique
57 (1962) 385-400, esp. 386: “Myths, contrasts and commonplaces." In not
ing that the Cistercians gave a particular value to manual labor, Dom
Leclercq wrote: “At Citeaux one finds, as elsewhere, a spirituality along the
lines of the whole monastic tradition, but with shading proper to the 12th
century. . . . S. Bernard has enriched the homogeneous progress of some
strictly traditional themes": The Spirituality of the Middle Ages 11 (French
original, 1961; ET New York: Desclee 1968).
25“At the center of the whole piety of M. Mechtilde, we find a Christology
that merits to be studied in its entirety. Its essential components belong to
the whole tradition”: “Lumiéres nouvelle sur Catherine de Bar," in Studio
Monastica 20 (1978) 399-400. For M. Catherine Lavizzari, see “L’Eucaris
tia, centro del mistero cristiano e della storia: Madre Caterina Lavizzari, la
tradizioné et la teologia di oggi" in Momenti e figure di storia monastica ital
iana, ed. V. Cattana (ltalia benedettina XIV: Cesena 1993) 138-47.
26“Evangile et culture dans la tradition béne'dictine” in Nouvelle Revue
Théologique 104 (1972) 171-82.
27"They are not opposed; they succeed one another as two moments of
the same tradition. Now tradition must always be a transmission; it is in
evitably limited, but also relevant, and therefore the source of hope and
joy”: “Le renouveau solesmien et le renouveau religieux du XIXe” (note 15)
195.

lar piety,28 cult and personal prayer,29 and between the love of
learning and the desire for God.30
SPIRITUAL UNITY
The theories of some modern scholars like P. Kassius
Hallinger31 have indicated drastic challenges or unbearable ten
sions; Leclercq only pointed to diverse emphases of the single tra
dition. For the rest, the idea of continuity seems to be very much
rooted in the historiographical awareness of the twentieth cen
tury.32 And, fundamentally, even the study of the monastic Con
suetudines has led to a result not too different, as in the case of
the customs of Citeaux and the preceding Benedictine tradition.”
On the other side, there are diverging dynamics already among
the first exponents of the Cistercian tradition.34 And something of
28“Dévotion privée, piété populaire et liturgie au moyen age" in Etudes

de pastorale liturgique (Paris 1944) 149-83. More recently, noting how his
torians of the liturgy have spoken of texts of “private devotion,” distin
guishing them from the liturgy, he said: “To say that is to take for granted
that there existed in a given period a clear distinction admitted by all be
tween that which is ‘liturgical’ and that which is not. But have not those
historians, who have themselves claimed such a distinction, or received it
from recent tradition, perhaps projected it back on ancient times in which it
did not exist?”: “Celebrazioni eucaristiche senza sacerdote nel Medioevo” in
Momenti et figure di storia monastica italiana (note 25) 298.
29“Culte liturgique et priere intime dans le monachisme au moyen age”
in La Maison-Died 69 (1962) 39-55.
30As we know, this is the title of the well-known work (Paris 1957) that
has gone through various editions, even in Italian. But see also “L’umanes
imo dei monaci nel medioevo” in Umanesimo e cultura monastica (Milano
1989) 17-63.
31P. Engelbert, “Kassius Hallinger (1911-91) and die Erforschung des
hochmittelalterlichen Monchtums” in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fu'r
Rechtgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 79 (1993) 278-94.
32G. Penco, “L'idea di ‘continuita’ nella storiografia del Novecento" in
Humanitas 48 (1993) 533-43.
33Br. Schneider, “Citeaux und die benediktinische Tradition” in Analecta
S.Ordinis Cisterciensis 16 (1960) 169-254; 17 (1961) 73-114 and the review
by Dom Leclercq in Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum 24
(1962) 358-62.
34J.B. Auberger, L’unanimité cistercienne primitive: mythe ou realité?
(Citeaux: Studia et documenta; Achel 1986).
244 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

this sort is beginning to happen to the connections between
monastic and scholastic theology.35
As regards Dom Leclercq, that was possible because he, as
with almost all Benedictine scholars, began with medieval
monasticism, but gradually worked his way up to more recent
times, to modern and contemporaneous monastic history. And it
was also due to the fact that he had contact with new monastic
experiences in countries of the Third World. In this way, different
observances, once so much emphasized, faded away just as so
many dividing walls were breached on the plane of historical re
search. And what else is the special task of “monastic theology”
than to detect, in the course of epochs and cultures, an uninter
rupted thread between eras such as the patristic and the me
dieval'F‘6 The figure of St. Bernard was the most evident proof of
the soundness of such a perspective: he is not the sentimental
and devout author, mellifluous in the pejorative sense of the
word, presented by a certain modern mentality (in a positive or
negative light). No, he is really the last of the Fathers, fully in
serted, even on the plane of sacramental doctrine, in the main
stream of patristic thought. He is the exponent of a theological
concept that could even remind us of the doctrine of St. Leo.37
The same thing could be said for Marian doctrine, which has
often been marked by a recourse to apocryphal texts; Leclercq,
however, has often led it back to the more sober and essential
lines of tradition.38 With Bernard, too, the French scholar notes
that one must procede with a rigorous historical sense, for exam
ple, in his rare allusions to the doctrine of spiritual paternity.39
35“The rhetorico-sapiential tradition so authoritatively described for us

by Davy and Leclercq conti iued also into the new era of the thirteenth cen
tury, the golden age of the Scholastics, just as the twelfth was for ‘philo
sophical’ monasticism": H. Bardour, “Tra ‘lectio’ e ‘disputatio’ negli studi
monastici del XIII secolo” in Angelicum 71 (1994) 74.
36For one of the last contributions of Dom Leclercq to this discussion, see
“Une doctrine spirituelle pour n6tre temps?” in La dottrina della vita spiri
tuale nelle opere di San Bernardo di Clairvaux = Analecta Cisterciansia 46
(1990) 397-410. From the general point of view, see I. Biffi, “Teologia monas
tica” in Thologia 18 (1993) 64-71.
37“Imitation du Christ et sacraments chez Saint Bernard” (note 6) 168
69.
38“ Saint Bernard et la dévotion médiévale envers Marie" in Revue d’As
ce'tique et de Mystique 30 (1954) 361-75.
39“One must avoid projecting on it ideas that come from later times":

Leclercq’s interest in Bernard’s position in the whole range of the
monastic tradition increased as he slowly passed from research
on the manuscript tradition to the doctrine of the Abbot of Clair
vaux. In fact, once he had established the reliability of a text and
its redactional history, he was more interested in examining its
doctrine in the specific field of spirituality. And the same thing
happened on a more general plane with the progress of his under
standing of all the components and aspects of the tradition it
self.40
The very connection between the monastic life and culture
which occupies a central position in the output of Leclercq found
an ideal place in the idea of tradition that he proposed. By means
of this idea, for example, he was able to define Thomas Merton as
the greatest Cistercian writer since St. Bernard.41 But the
monastic life in itself, by reason of its contents and its purpose,
must be kept united to culture and all that to which it refers.42
This explains not only his great attention to this aspect of tradi
‘3;
tion in the framework of “the literary tradition of the Church”
but also explains some particular judgments, for example the
it
insistence with which he defended certain mental attitudes of

medieval monastic authors. They may be bit disconcerting, but
a
he claimed that they are shaped by whole literary and doctrinal

a
tradition.44
We can say the same thing for the doctrinal field proper. We
find in the work of Leclercq the desire to discover a link between
monastic zones located very far apart. For example, he tried to
trace, on the basis of precise terminological evidence, a form of
hesychasm even in the Western monastic tradition.45 The same
“Conseil spirituel et conseillers selon S. Bernard” in Recueil d’études sur

Saint Bernard et ses écrits (note 6) V.299.
“From the extrinsic point of view as well, similar evolution percep
is
a
tible in the fact that Dom Leclercq, with the constant increase of his literary
production, noticed the need to collect in volumes his studies of similar top
ics. This is even more clear in the “collections” of studies on Bernard.
41Presentazione Goffredo di Auxerre, Super Apocalypsim ed.
F.
a
Gastaldelli (Rome 1970)

7.
42“There no Benedictine life without literature,” L’amour des lettres et

is
désir de Dieu (Paris 1957) 23.

le
43“La tradizione letteraria della Chiesa” in Umanesimo cultura monas

e
tica (note 30) 1-6.

““Caelestinus de caritate" in Citeaux 14 (1963) 216.
45“‘Sedere.’ propos de l’hésichasme en Occident” in Le millénaire du
A
246 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

thing happened with the connections and contacts formed by the
journeys of monks which connected the East and West.46
Finally, it was no longer the institutional element, with all the
polemics to which that gave place in the past century, that drew
the interest of the French scholar, but the spiritual element, to
the point that he eventually undervalued the external influence
of monasticism on society.47 More than single monastic centers
and their individual pecularities or their economic or legal histo
ries, Dom Leclerq was interested in that which united them on
the spiritual level. For him, this was more important than their
numerical success; thus he could say of the little Cluniac priories
in Lombardy that they had “fidelity without prosperity.” ‘8
It was not external accomplishments or institutional differ
ences that interested our author, but the sharing of the same
spirit, adherence to the same life-orientation, that because of
which St. Bernard could be called a “monk of all orders.”49 This
orientation was one separated from the world and turned toward
contemplation, what the monastic tradition (and St. Thomas)50
called the vita contemplativa. And the French scholar made sure
to point out that this whole teaching of the tradition was fully ac
cepted in the documents of Vatican II51 and in the discourses of
Paul VI to monks.52
Dom Leclercq occupied himself with all literary genres of the
monastic tradition. And from normative texts such the medieval
Mont-Athos, 963-1963 I (Chevetogne 1963) 253-64.

Les relations entre le monachisme oriental et le monachisme occiden
46“
tale dans le haut moyen age” in Le Millénaire du Mont-Athos 963-1963 ll

(Chevetogne 1965) 49-80.
47“
Regola benedettina e presenze nel mondo” in La bonifica benedettina
(Rome 1963) 17-25.
48“ Pontida e la vita nei monasteri cluniacensi di Lombardia" in Momenti
e figure di storia monastica italiana (note 25) 434.

49San Bernardo. La Vita (translation of the French: Milan 1989) 55-59.
5°“La ‘vie contemplative dans S. Thomas et dans la tradition" in
Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 28 (1961) 251-68; “Tradition
‘ patristique et monastique dans l’enseignment de la Somme théologique sur
le vie contemplative” in S. Tbmmaso. Fonti et reflessi del suo pensier (Roma
1974) 129-53.
51“ La vie contemplative et le monachisme d’apres Vatican II" in Gregori
anum 47 (1966) 495-516.
52“Paolo VI e il monachesimo” in Momenti e figure di storia monastica
italiana (note 25 above) 619-634.

Consuetudines, the extensive ramifications of which are well
known, he knew how to gather up the points of contact. He
claimed there was a consuetudo miacta53 that joined apparently di
verse texts and policies. The same thing was true in the field of
spirituality, and with even greater reason. Thus at a conference
on Ludovico Barbo someone drastically opposed his spiritual doc
trine to that of St. Gregory the Great, and claimed that it was a
deviation from the monastic tradition. But Dom Leclercq asserted
its ties with the whole spiritual and artistic current that, espe
cially in the field of wood-engraving, had been an extraordinary
impulse to the religious imagination.54
The same positive evaluation was repeated toward the spiritu
ality of the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration. It was not only
the “Benedictine tradition” that exerted an influence on them but
also the Franciscan School of the seventeenth century and the
mystical ideal of reparation. Leclercq also insisted that there does
not exist a “pure Benedictinism,” for in the flow and interweave of
historical contingencies, it always has to enter into contact with
many other doctrinal and spiritual components.55 This interven
tion, to which one could add many others, clearly shows how pre
occupied the French savant was to see the monastic tradition in
the most positive and broad light possible. He always minimized
or interpreted with great care elements of division or even of con
trast.
LECLERCQ’S MIDDLE AGES

Dom Leclercq began his studies on the monastic tradition by
examining certain representatives of ancient Benedictine monas
ticism in the eleventh and twelth centuries, including a mono
53“Mérites d’un réformateur et limites d’une réforme” in Revue Bénédic

tine '70 (1960) 237.
5“Ludovico Barbo e la storia del’immaginario" in Momenti e figure di
storia monastic italiana (note 25 above) 529-42.
55“Un école de spiritualité datant du XVIIe siecle: les Bénédictines de
l'Adoration perpetuelle” in Studio Monastica 18 (1974) 433-52; esp. 447-52.
As for the theme of reparation, which was to have such a remarkable devel
opment in modern spirituality, Dom Leclercq showed that it had roots in
early Christian spirituality: “For this biblical and traditional concept, one
could point out many instances in the medieval monastic tradition.” And it
was present in the beginnings of Cluny: “Réparation et adoration dans la
tradition monastique’ in Studia Monastica 26 (1984) 16.
248 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

graph on Peter the Venerable. But after the volume dedicated to
St. Bernard the Mystic,56 and his commission by the Cistercian
Order of the Common Observance to produce a critical edition,
most of his interest was in the Mellifiuous Doctor and Cistercian
authors. Thus he was able to derive the most adequate and com
prehensive image of the monastic order in order to produce a har
monious consideration of all its principal components. This was
the best preparation Leclercq could have had for writing The
Spirituality of the Middle Ages 57 some years later. St. Gregory
and the Early Middle Ages, SS. Romuald and Peter Damian,
Chartreuse and the Regular Canons, Cluny and Citeaux, all
these were now presented in their most authentic light.
He shows them in their really distinctive characteristics, but
also in their undeniably common foundation, namely, their yearn
ing for contemplation, which is valid for all the “cloistered,” be
yond all their various and legitimate observances. This explains
how the Middle Ages studied by Dom Leclercq is the monastic
Middle Ages and not that of the Scholastics, even though in his
first years he had included a Scholastic author (John of Paris) in
his research on that period. It was precisely the distinction from
the world of the Scholastics that conferred an ideal unity on the
spiritual world of the monks, the sharing of a common sapiential
spirit. The orientation of their whole existence was in a contem
plative direction.
It was a very significant fact for the full recovery of the concept
of the monastic tradition that Dom Leclercq, along with many
monks who belong to the new Benedictine congregations of the
nineteenth century that lack their own historical and archival
patrimony, never concentrated on any single monastic center.
Rather he studied movements and tendencies, authors and
works, themes and doctrines. It was this same interest in the
field of spirituality that enabled him to go beyond a limited con
sideration of the history of monasteries—which nevertheless can
claim a solid tradition in every country and in many Benedictine
56$ee above note 49. For the significance of this work for Bemardine
studies, see C.D. Fonseca, “La storiografia bernardina da Vacandard a
Leclercq” in Bernardo Cistercense. Atti del XXVI Convegno storio inter
nazionale. Todi, 8-11 ottobre 1989 (Spoleto 1990) 1-18. In general, see G.
Penco, “S. Bernardo tra due centenari: 1890-1990” in Citeaux e il monaches
imo del suo tempo (Milan 1994) 203-15.
57See note 24 above.

congregations. But he was able to apprehend in a fuller sense the
history of monasticism and to take in the widest possible sweep of
the tradition. Thus he could plunge deeply into that which consti
tuted a “permanent acquisition.”
The forms could vary, the Observances and juridic structures
could rise and set, the movements could undergo the most diverse
influences; nonetheless, an invariable central thread persisted:
the tradition. Separation from the world can be maximized or
minimized,58 discipline can be more or less rigorous, the liturgy
can be more or less solemn, but monasticism remains the same
since it is connected to its deeper tradition that is made up of its
fathers, its doctrines and its ideals. All this emerges in a clear
manner, although accompanied by what could be called “varia
tions” on the principal theme, from every writing of Dom
Leclercq, and from the thousands and thousands of pages that he
continued to write from his first works to his final hour.
From this point of view, we can say that there was in him no
evolution, much less retraction. The same principles that he
stated in his most rigorous doctrinal analyses are repeated in his
most popular writings and in his contributions to the modest bul
letins of the various monasteries—which he never refused. We
spoke above of the connections between the Cluniacs and the Cis
tercians: Well, the same Leclercq, an eminent scholar of both
monastic movements, added to the dossier of the old controversy
some further elements by publishing a “new response of ancient
monasticism to the criticisms of the Cistercians.” 59 He also was
able to show the positive aspects and the fruits of “the crisis of
monasticism” of the eleventh and twelfth century for the future of
monasticism itself.60 Despite his constant concern to affirm the
basic solidarity of the various monastic currents, Dom Leclercq
pointed out that St. Bernard, who is so anxious to defend the lit
eral observance of the Rule of St. Benedict, does not refer to the
531n regard to enclosure, for example, Dom Leclercq could distinguish

between contingent discipinary norms and ideal motivations. See
“Clausura” in Dizionario degli Istituti di perfezione 3.1173.
59“Nouvelle réponse de l’ancien monachisme aux critiques des Cister
ciens” in Revueil d’ études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits 2 (Rome, n.d.) 69
85.
60’La crise du monachisme au XIe et XIIe siécle” in Bulletino dell’Istituto
storico italiano per it Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano 70 (1958) 19-41
250 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

disciplinary norms from that Rule, but only to texts of an ascetic
and spiritual character.61
Furthermore, the years in which Leclercq worked as a re
searcher and popularizer of the contents of the monastic tradition
were also the years in which the concept of tradition was debated
in the field of theology and especially of ecclesiology. The work of
Congar is well-known in this regard, and it was especially strong
in its documentation.62 The work of Dom Leclercq relative to the
tradition was obviously situated on another level, not on the dog
matic plane properly speaking. But the French savant, who was
so careful to distinguish tradition from traditions, also devoted
himself in one of his first works, on the idea of theology in the
Middle Ages,63 to these same issues.“ More or less in the same
period Dom Leclercq also examined the problem of the connec
tions between the tradition of the Church and its historical docu
mentation, taking care to distinguish the two levels and their dif
ferent significance.65 In this way he opened up a consideration of
tradition as a living fact, independent of the literary texts in
which it expresses itself.66
The analogy with tradition in the theological sense can also be
extended by the fact that the monastic tradition studied by Dom
Leclercq, being substantially a spiritual tradition, was a prolon
61“S. Bernard et la Regle de S. Benoit” in Recueil d’ études sur Saint

Bernard et ses écrits 5 (note 2 above) 181-94; Italian translation in Vita Con
secrata 27 (1991) 764-75.
62Y.M.J. Congar, La tradition et les traditions I: Essai historique (Paris
1960);Essai théologique (Paris 1963).
63“ L' idéal du théologien au moyen age. Textes inédits" in Revue des sci
ences religieuses 21 (1947) 121-48.
64Congar, 170.
65“Tradition does not extol history: just as its catholicity does not depend
on statistics that permit it to state the universality of the Church, tradition
does not depend on the written documents that it has left in the past”:
“Catholica Unitas” in Cahiers de la Vie spirituelle, “La Communion des
Saints” (Paris 1946) 44; Congar 2.207 and 328.
66The phenomenon was recalled by Dom Leclercq also, for example, re
garding the sources of a monastic author such as Baldwin of Ford, of whom
he said that “he perhaps owes more to a living tradition than to bookish
erudition . . . he is open to the traditional sources, that is to say, the Bible,
the liturgy and the Fathers.” Introduction a Baudouin de Ford, Le sacre
ment de l'autel I (Sources chrétiennes 93; Paris 1963) 4445. But observa
tions of this kind are frequent, especially in regard to St. Bernard, for ex
ample, “He did not create everything: he depended on the past. The more

gation of biblical themes relative to life of the soul (theology of the
image, the Exodus, the spousal union, heavenly Jerusalem).
These are the very themes that monasticism has so effectively
and, by the mouth of its most prestigious exponents, so brilliantly
explored. Thus for example from Origen to St. Bernard the com
mentary on the Canticle of Canticles became almost the exclusive
patrimony of the monastic world.67 The last of the Fathers (St.
Bernard) was also the last of the great monks capable of sum
ming up in himself an entire era, and the last of the great mystics
to come out of the ranks of the monastic Order.
Sometimes Dom Leclercq had occasion to affirm that this or
that aspect of the monastic doctrine and mentality was fully tra
ditional. From monastic formation68 to contemplation,69 from the
sense of death7° to the concept the monks had of matrimony,71
there is continual reference to tradition as something generally
accepted and universally shared. In this way, the tradition is
shown to be a common patrimony, a common way of thinking and
expression, even over centuries and varieties of institutions and
one studies him, the more it looks as if he belongs to the line of the tradi
tionalists rather than the innovators”: “Aspects littéraires de l’oeuvre de S.
Bernard" in Recueil d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits 3 (note 2 above)
67-68.
67“ Saint Bernard et Origene d’ apres un manuscrit de Madrid” in Recueil
d’ études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits 2 (note 59 above) 373-85.

63“The whole monastic tradition here echoes this very dense formula of
"
St. Gregory the Great: ‘The life of the good is a living lectio.’ “La commu
nauté formatrice selon S. Bernard de Clairvaux" in Recueil d’ études sur
Saint Bernard et ses écrits 5 (note 67 above).
69“De 1’ étude contemplative au service ardent de l’Eglise, selon S.
Bernard,” ibid. 280.
70Notwithstanding the evolution in the concept of death at the end of the
Middle Ages, “In monasticism, at least, the fundamental attitude remained
that of the ancient tradition and from the early Middle Ages, as is wit
nessed by the accounts of the deaths of monks”: “Morte” in Dizionario degli
Istituti di perfezione 6.167. In this matter, St. Bernard is also “rooted in a
spiritual and cultural tradition, that of monasticism": “La joie de mourir
selon Saint Bernard de Clairvaux” in Recueil d’ études sur Saint Bernard et
ses écrits 5 (note 2 above) 429. On this point, however, Petrarch departs
from the tradition, being “much influenced by new forms of sentimental
piety of his time rather than the constant spiritual tradition of all the pre
ceding centuries”: “Temi monastici nell’opera del Petrarca” in Momen ti e fig
ure di storia monastica italiana (note 25 above) 526.
71This reference to tradition appears already in the first pages of the vol
ume dedicated to this subject: “A fundamental concept: the affection be
252 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

observances. The vehicle of traditions that is the religious vocab
ulary itself participated in a similar kind of continuity.72 The con
tribution of individuals depended, then, on that particular touch
of sensibility and geniality that was their own, but based on a
patrimony that no one called into discussion. Do we not perhaps
see here the difference between the “mind-set” (forma mentis) of a
St. Bernard and an Abelard?
DISCERNMENT OF TRADITION
Precisely because he devoted his attention to such diverse au
thors and movements, and also because he acceded to continuous
requests for collaboration at conventions and on encyclopedias,
Dom Leclercq was very well placed to have a holistic, harmonious
and balanced view of the whole monastic tradition. He was care
ful to warn people, especially in the turbulent post-conciliar pe
riod, against “one of the temptations of our time, that is, to be
lieve that we have discovered everything for the first time and
forever,” while everything that went before was mistaken. He
added: “That is in no way true: the modern renewal is not the
first, and it will not be the last. It is part of a series of experi
ments that will all be limited and provisory.” 73
There was also a tendency to take up again the usages and
mentality inherited from the nineteenth century.74 As important
and praiseworthy as they were, they were certainly absolutized to
tween spouses. There will be a departure from this realty, since it was alto
gether traditional and universally accepted in the 12th century”: “I monaci
e il matrimonio. Un’indagine sul XII secolo” (Turin 1984) 17.
72For example in regard to the term disciplina, Dom Leclercq noted: “In
the Christian spiritual tradition, the term ‘disciplina’ had various senses . .
. but all these meanings remained in continuity with the fundamental
meanings that the word had in its remote origins in the classical language":
“Disciplina” in Dictionaire de Spiritualité 3.1302, even though he recog
nized that St. Basil used the term a bit differently (1285).
73“l:’osition de la vie religieuse” in Moines et moniales ont-ils un avenir?
(Brussels 1971) 22. The same concept was stated in the essay “Un renou
veau apres bien d’autres” in Le de'fi de la vie contemplative (Gembloux-Paris
1970) 15-22.
74“Comment etre moine aujourd’hui de demain?” in Moines et moniales
ont-ils un avenir? (note 73 above) 30. On this theme, Dom Leclercq was
more expansive in his article “Le renouveau solesmien et le renouveau re
ligieux du XXe siecle” (note 15 above).
GREGORIO PEN CO, O.S.B. 253

the point of being considered as the essential ingredients of
monasticism. Now the nineteenth century renewal did not take
into consideration the possibility of an urban monasticism and of
the forms of the eremitical life, but there were good reasons for
considering them in that revival from the ashes.75
From a more general point of view, it was necessary to refrain
from trying to justify, even by means of erudition, the present by
recourse to the past. That was the case with the assumption of
ever more demanding pastoral duties on the part of the Austrian
monasteries, including the Cistercian ones, in the modern age.76
To sum up, the study of the tradition should only be done with
discernment, without falling into those preconceived positions
and those commonplaces which Dom Leclercq so oflaen opposed.
Only then can the tradition be recovered in its authenticity and
its perennial relevance. But this was possible because, through
the use of various disciplines, the tradition had become the object
of a critical study that had examined it in its fullness and in
tegrity.”
CONCLUSION
For Dom Leclercq, the core of the monastic tradition, that
which in substance remains valid and lasting beyond changeable
historical forms and institutions, was the spirituality.7B And
75As to urban monasticism, the reason for this lack of interest was evi
dentally to be sought in the need to affirm distance from the world. On the
contrary, the innumerable orders that took their origins from the nine
teenth century were committed to the world. Moreover, it was also neces
sary to concentrate forces (still limited) by bringing forth large communi
ties. They threw all their efforts into attempts to recover the tradition by
means of a serious work in the intellectual field.
76“Comment etre moine aujourd’hui et demain?" (note 75 above) 56.
77Precisely on the basis of the broadest possible study of the tradition,
Dom Leclercq was able, for example, to wish for the return of the figure of
the non-ordained monk. By this means, “we will thus return to the lengthi
est state of the tradition, the one closest to the origins, and the one best con
formed to the deepest needs of monasticism as well as the priesthood.” “Le
sacerdoce des moines" in Irénikon 36 (1963) 39-40. The “traditional” concept
of the monastic priesthood (non-ministerial as well as non-missionary) was
later repeated in the article “Monachisme, sacerdoce et missions au Moyen
Age. Travaux et résultats recents" in Studio Monastica 23 (1981) 307-23.
73“Caratteristiche della spiritualita” in C. Vagaggini et al., Problemi e
orientamenti di spiritualita monastica, biblico et liturgica (Roma 1961) 327
36.
254 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

monastic spirituality was in great part made up of the spiritual
exegesis of Scripture.79 This last element could be better clarified
since it was such a significant theme in contemporary theology.
Especially in the work of Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou,
spiritual exegesis was again given its full value, and its connec
tions with the liturgical tradition on the typological plane were
pointed out and deepened. “Medieval exegesis,” which was so
fully examined by de Lubac,80 was in great part monastic exege
sis, the support and expression of the spirituality of monasticism,
the perennial source of its tradition.
With that there was overcome the importance assigned to the
institutional factor in the study of monasticism. And this also in
validated the idea that there was no monastic theology; and that
one had to wait until the thirteenth century for Scholastic
thought. Moreover, the concept of the contemplative life was
sharpened}31 which certain religious currents of the modern era
have restricted, reducing it to some isolated and privileged ex
pressions of the life of prayer. It is, however, really the contem
plative life in the fullness and breadth of its meaning that makes
up the fulcrum and essence of the monastic tradition. It is the en
during life that persists beyond all the passing historical mani
festations, no matter how important and prestigious.
To be able to arrive at such conclusions it was necessary to
complete a long road, to overcome ambiguities and common
places, to make use of various disciplines, from the history of the
ology to that of the religious life. However, in their turn they
opened new horizons to researchers but, above all, new living
prospects for the renewal of monasticism itself in the furrow of its
tradition.
79Again in one of his last writings, Dom Leclercq remarked: “In patristic
and monastic tradition, all biblical interpretation happens by means of a
process of transposition that moves from one level of reality to another.”
“San Bernardo ‘cuciniere di Dio'” in Bernardo Cistercense (n.p., n.d.) 336.
80H. de Lubac, Exégése Médiévale, 4. vols. (Paris 1959-63). It is not true
that this work was dedicated to Dom Leclercq. See F. Bolgiani, “Henri de
Lubac e l’esegesi spirituale" in Annali di storia dell'esegesi 10 (1993) 283
300; M. Pesce, “Un ‘bruit absurde’? Henri de Lubac di fronte alla dis
tinzione tra esegesi storica e esegesi spirituale,” ibid., 301-53.
31“La vie monastique est-elle une vie contemplative?” in Collectanea Cis
terciensia 27 (1965) 108-20.

UNDER THE SPELL OF LORCA:
AN IMPORTANT INFLUENCE ON THOMAS
MERTON’S EARLY POETRY
June 5, 1998 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the

birth of Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet and
dramatist executed by Nationalist forces in the early days of the
Spanish Civil War. Lorca was a major influence on the early po
etry of Thomas Merton, and the subject of one of the finest of his
premonastic poems, the elegy “In Memory of the Spanish Poet
Federico Garcia Lorca.”1 In a letter to Stefan Baciu on May 21,
1965, Merton wrote, “In my formative years I came under the
spell of F. Garcia Lorca and have never recovered. He remains
one of my favorite poets and one to whom I respond most com
pletely.”2 With the publication of Merton’s premonastic journals
it is now possible to trace the development of Merton’s acquain
tance with and attraction to Lorca and his work.
It is not surprising that Merton should have been fascinated by
a poet who had himself come to New York from Europe in June,
1929, only eight years before Merton settled permanently in
America, and who had lived at Columbia University for eight
Patrick F. O'Connell is an associate professor in the Departments of English
and Theology at Gannon University, Erie PA. He served as the fifih presi
dent of the International Thomas Merton Society, and has published widely
on Merton and other topics in spirituality and in literature.
1The poem is found in Thomas Merton, Thirty Poems (New York 1944)
14-15 (subsequently referred to in text as “TP”) and in The Collected Poems
of Thomas Merton (New York 1977) 44-45 (subsequently referred to in text
as “Merton, CP”). In Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet (New York 1978),
critic George Woodcock called the Lorca elegy one of the two best poems
Merton wrote before entering the monastery (37). For a detailed analysis,
see Patrick F. O’Connell, “Remembering Lorca: Merton's Tribute to a Poetic
Master,” The Merton Seasonal 21.2 (1996) 13-18.
2Thomas Merton, The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, ed. Christine
M. Bochen (New York 1993) 241 (subsequently referred to in text as
“Courage”); other references to Lorca and his influence can be found in let
ters to “My Dear Friend” (a form letter to students requesting information
on Merton, ca. 1963), to Mario Falsina (March 25, 1967), and to Nancy Fly
Bredenberg (December 11, 1967), in Thomas Merton, The Road to Joy: Let
ters to New and Old Friends, ed. Robert E. Daggy (New York 1989) 90, 349,
256 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

months before returning to Spain by way of Cuba—first in Room
617, Furnald Hall, the same building where Merton’s friends
Robert Lax and Seymour Freedgood would room a few years later,
and then in Room 1231 of John Jay Hall, which also housed the
publications offices where Merton was to spend so much time.a
During his New York sojourn, Lorca (like Merton) enjoyed jazz in
tensely, and responded with compassion and outrage to his obser
vation of racial oppression in Harlem, as evidenced by perhaps
his greatest single book of verse, Poeta in Nueva York (Poet in
New York), published posthumously in 1940. Michael Mott’s em
phasis on the influence of this work on Merton’s poetry in partic
ular and on his perceptions of Harlem in general (Mott 189, 225,
597), might give a reader the impression that it was as the author
of Poet in New York that Merton first encountered Lorca, but in
fact his enthusiasm for the Spanish poet predated the appearance
of that work. Indeed, the evidence of the journals, as well as of the
poems themselves, suggests that Lorca’s Romancero gitano
(Gypsy Ballads) of 1928 and other poetry of the 1920s, rather
than the New York poems, were the principal influence on Mer
ton’s own verse.4
I
Four phases of Merton’s encounter with Lorca’s work can be
traced in his journals of 1939-41. On December 14, 1939, while
living on Perry Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, he
361 (subsequently referred to in text as “Road”); Merton also cites Lorca as
an influence in the biographical note he wrote for inclusion inA Controversy
of Poets, ed. Paris Leary and Robert Kelly (Garden City, NY 1965) 542.
3For Lorca’s residences, see Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life
(New York 1989) 248, 267, 279 (subsequently referred to in text as “Gibson,
Life"). For Merton and John Jay Hall, see Michael Mott, The Seven Moun
tains of Thomas Merton (Boston 1984) 99 (subsequently referred to in text
as “Mott”); for Furnald Hall, see Mott 112-14.
4Merton’s only mention of Lorca’s stay in New York occurs in a journal
J
entry for December 21, 1939: “Peter Munro ack's story about the Spaniard
here in the Village somewhere: the Spaniard owns a siamese tomcat and he
rents it out to Jack for his two siamese females: this Spaniard has a whole
lot of Lorca papers dating from the time Lorca was in New York. Something
he was writing for a ballet, it appears. Not such a story. But the guy has pa
pers": Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, The
Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume I: 1939-1941, ed. Patrick Hart, OCSO
(San Francisco 1995) 120 (subsequently referred to in text as “Run”; a num
ber of mistranscriptions, particularly of Spanish words, in this text are
PATRICK F. O'CONNELL 257

writes: “The books on my bed are Grierson’s Metaphysical Poets,
Bossuet (whom I haven’t read a line of yet), Saroyan, the New
Yorker and F. Garcia Lorca. Lorca is fine. A swell poet. For that
reason I stop writing this and go back to reading him. Flamenco
poetry. Very fine stuff” (Run 104). He then goes on to list “Some
splendid words in Spanish,” ten in all: the first four words on the
list are all found in Lorca’s poem “Muerte de Antofiito el Cambo—
rio,” one of the eighteen poems of Lorca’s Romancero gitano,5
while the last three are found in “Reyerta,”6 another poem in the
collection; the remaining three words are also used in the bal
lads.7 Three days later he confirms that he is indeed reading the
Romancero gitano, which has been called “the most widely read,
most often recited, most studied and most celebrated book of po
ems in the whole of Spanish literature” (Gibson, Life 136)5; he
quotes lines 14, 9- 16, 39-46 of one of the ballads, “Prendimiento
de Antor'rito el Camborio en el camino de Sevilla” (Obras IV.41-43;
CP 551-53), comparing the style to “the primitive and formal atti
silently corrected on the basis of comparison with the original handwritten
journals, now housed in the Friedsam Memorial Library of St. Bonaventure
University).
5Cf. “marfil” (l. 30); “cojin” (l. 46); “carmesi” (properly “carmesi”; l. 10);
“pur'ial”(l. 11 [pur'iales]): Federico Garcia Lorca, Obras completas, IV: Ro
mancero gitano, Poema del cante jondo, Llanto por Ignacio Sa'nchez Mejias
(Buenos Aires 1938) 44-46 (subsequently referred to in text as “Obras” with
volume number); and Federico Garcia Lorca, Collected Poems, ed. Christo
pher Maurer (New York 1991) 553-55 (subsequently referred to in text as
“Lorca, CP"; page numbers to this edition will be to the English translation,
though line numbers will key to the original Spanish). References to Lorca's
poetry will be cited according to both these editions: Merton himself owned
the first; the second is the most accessible and complete bilingual edition,
including all Lorca's poetry except some pieces from his first book, Libro de
poemas, and all of Poeta in Nueva York (which is published in a companion
text also edited by Christopher Maurer [New York 1988]); all English trans
lations of Lorca’s poems will be taken from this edition, unless otherwise
noted.
6Cf. “reyerta” (title, I. 11); “naipe”(l. 5); “lirio” (l. 19 [lirios]): Obras N18
19; CP 525.
7For “girasoles,” cf. “La monja gitana" 13 [girasol]), and “San Miguel”
(l.
(l. 4) (Obras IV.24-25, 31-33; CP 531-33, 539-43); for “madrugada,” cf. “Ro
mance sonambulo” (l. 60), and “Romance de la pena negra”
(l.
46) (Obras
IV.20-23, 2930; CP 527-31, 537-39); for “yerbaluisa,” cf. “La monja gitana”
28), and “Burla de Don Pedro Caballo” 29) (Obras IV.24-25, 63-66; CP
(l.
(I.
531-33, 575-79).
3Among the helpful commentaries on this work available in English may
be mentioned Carl W. Cobb, Lorca’s Romancero gitano: A Ballad Transla
258 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

tudes of figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting,” and mentions
two other ballads: “The more you read the better he is: San
Gabriel is tremendous and fine. Preciosa y el Aire may be one of
the most fascinating things I ever read in my life.9 Best Spanish
poetry for my money since the early Villancios and old Romances”
(Run 106-07).10
The fourth volume of Lorca’s Obras completas, owned by Mer
ton, also includes the Poema del cante jondo (Poem of Deep Song),
a collection not published until 1931 but written a decade earlier;
the title refers to the folk music of the Andalusian Gypsies, “the
primitive form of our modern flamenco” (Gibson, Life 32).11 Mer
ton mentions reading this work in Miami Beach while on his way
to Cuba in April, 1940:
“I admit freely that I looked at a couple of Garcia Lorca's poems, from

the Poema del Cante Jondo, on the beach, and saw even more clearly
than before how good he is and how many of the Spanish words I don’t
know. That is not just a gag, either. That before I had only realized
both these things confusedly is a sign that I had read him, then, with
a less clear apprehension” (Run 166).
tion and Critical Study (Jackson, MI 1983); Andrew P. Debicki, “Metonymy,

Metaphor, and Myth in the Romancero gitano,” in C. Brian Morris, ed.,
“Cuando yo me muera . . .”: Essays in Memory of Federico Garcia Lorca
(Lanham, MD 1988) 57-72 (subsequently referred to in text as “Mon-is");
Juan Lopez-Morillas, “Lyrical Primitivism: Garcia Lorca’s Romancero gi
tano,” in Manuel Duran, ed., Lorca: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engle
wood Cliffs, NJ 1962) 130-39 (subsequently referred to in text as “Duran”);
H. Ramsden, Lorca’s Romancero Gitano: Eighteen Commentaries (Manch
ester, GB 1988) (subsequently referred to in text as “Ramsden, Ro
mancero”); and Ramsden, “Round Perspective and Lyric Tension in R0
mancero gitano," in Morris, 89-104.
9In Merton’s copy of the fourth volume of Obras, he has marked three
“x”s next to thetitle of “Preciosa y el Aire" on p. 15.
10Merton lists twenty-two more Spanish words in this entry; eleven of
these are found in “San Gabriel” (Obras IV.37-40; CP 547-49): “manzana” (l.
3), “piel” (l. 3), “nervio” 5), “charol” (l. 7), “emperador” 13), “ribera”
(l.
(l.
(l.
11), “lucero” 14), “maravilla” 44), “domador” (l. 21), “tibio” 58 [tibia]),
(l.
(l.
(l.
“almendra” (l. 65); two more are found in “Romance del emplazado” (Obras
IV.50-52; CP 559-63): “sabana” 54) and “amortajar” 41 [amortajado]);
(l.
(l.
of the remaining words, “luciérnaga” not found in the Romancero gitano

is
but is in the poem “Noche” 10) from Poema del cante jondo (Obras IV.94;
(l.
CP 119). The rest are not found in Lorca’s poetry.

11For an analysis, see Norman C. Miller, Garcia Lorca's Poema del cante
jondo (London 1978) (subsequently referred to in text as “Miller"), and Ed
ward Stanton, The Ti-agic Myth: Lorca and Cante ondo (Lexington, KY
F.
1978) (subsequently referred to in text as “Stanton”).
PATRICK O’CONNELL 259

F.
Though the journal includes no further mention of reading this
work,12 on November 13, 1940, he includes the refrain from one of
the poems in this collection, “Muerte de la Petenera,” among the
“snatches of verse” he could remember (Run 258-59).13
There is surprisingly little notice taken of Poet in New Ybrk“ in
Merton’s journal. One might have expected, for example, some
comment on the title of the opening section of the work, “Poemas
de la soledad en Columbia University” (“Poems of Solitude [or
Loneliness] at Columbia University”), or on the Harlem poems
that follow immediately; but in fact the only poem from the vol
ume that Merton mentions is the “Ode to Walt Whitman,” dis
cussed in a journal entry of May 9, 1941:
I still think Valéry is a fine poet. Better than ever. And Lorca, too. For
the first time I read the Ode to Walt Whitman and it is a real fine
poem; in fact for a single big poem, it is maybe the best that’s been
written in thirty—well, one hundred years. Or since "The Wreck of the
Deutschland” maybe? Maybe. It has a whole lot to say, and it is a very
clean poem, its indignation is very beautiful and very nice. Lorca is a
fine guy, a real clean, nice guy, and the poem is the only poem written
to defend anybody from filth that I ever read in this age. Everybody
else is scared to write such a good poem for such a good reason: and, if
they were not, the poems they would write would probably be shock
ing anyway. But Lorca’s poem is all full of moral goodness, too. It is a
nice poem, innocent and just and full of love (Run 363-64).
Merton refers to the same poem in a letter to Robert Lax:

“Lorca got a nice poem called ‘Ode to Walt Whitman.’ Because I
12In a letter to Mark Van Doren on June 16, 1940, after returning to
New York from Cuba, Merton writes, “I haven't even been reading anything
much except a few snatches of The City of God and the Vulgate and Lorca’s
poetry” (Road 8), but whether this refers to the Poema del cante jondo or
other work by Lorca is impossible to determine. Merton also owned the sec
ond volume of the Argentine edition of the Obras completas (Buenos Aires
1938), which contained four collections of Lorca’s lyrics: Libro de poemas;
Primeras canciones; Canciones; Seis poemas gallegos; as Merton owned the
first edition of this volume, and the second edition was published in Febru
ary, 1940, presumably Merton had purchased his c0py before this time.
13The lines are “Cien jacas caracolean. / Sus jinetes estan muertos” (cf.
Obras IV.106; CP 129); in Run, these lines are preceded by the opening four
lines from a completely different Spanish poem, the anonymous “Romance
del prisionero,” with the space between the two entries omitted, giving the
impression that all the lines come from the same poem.
14For analyses of the New York poems, see Betty Jean Craige, Lorca’s
Poet in New York: The Fall into Consciousness (Lexington, KY 1977 ) (sub
sequently referred to in text as “Craige”); Derek Harris, Garcia Lorca: P0
260 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

always thought walt wigsby was crazy, I never read the poem.
Whatever he was, Lorca is one nice guy, and this is one nice poem,
and it also happens to be about Wig Wigsby, and not about some
thing else, which you might have thought, from my saying it was
a nice poem” (Road 160).15 One might wonder, in fact, if Merton
actually read Poet in New York, as the “Ode to Walt Whitman”
was also included, in an incomplete version. in the translation of
Lorca’s poetry by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili, published in
1939,16 but his references to the poet’s defending Whitman from
filth make it clear that he was familiar with the lines in which
Lorca repudiates the claims of corrupt, and corrupting, homosex
ual predators that Whitman was one of their own; as these lines
are omitted in the Spender-Gili translation, Merton must have
read the poem in a volume of Poet in New York. Still, his reticence
about the rest of the New York pieces remains puzzling.17
Merton’s final references to Lorca in his journals, from late
June and early July, 1941, refer to material found in Volume VI of
eta en Nueva York (London l978) (subsequently referred to in text as “Har

ris"); F. AllenJosephs, “Lorcafs Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse,” Garcia Lorca Re
view 4 (1976) 75-90 (subsequently referred to in text as “Josephs”); Richard
L. Predmore, Lorca’s New York Poetry: Social Injustice, Dark Love, Lost
Faith (Durham, NC 1980) (subsequently referred to in text as “Predmore”);
Richard Saez, “The Ritual Sacrifice in Lorca’s Poet in New York,” in Duran
108-29; John K. Walsh, “The Social and Sexual Geography of Poeta in
Nueva York,” in Morris 105-27.
15This letter is conjecturally dated March, 1941, though the reference to
reading the ode suggests it may have been written closer to the date of the
journal entry, May 9; both the journal and the letter imply that Merton was
acquainted with the poer“ for some time before reading it.
16F. Garcia Lorca, Poems, trans. Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili (New
York 1939) 76-81; the only other New York poem included in this bilingual
edition is “Ode to the King of Harlem” [sic], 66-75.
17Merton presumably read Poet in New York in the bilingual edition pub
lished by_Norton in 1940 with a translation by Rolfe Humphries, The Poet
in New York and Other Poems, rather than in the less accessible Mexican
edition of the same year (note that in both the journal and the letter to Lax
he refers to the English title of the Whitman ode, the only case in which a
Lorca poem is so designated); all references to the volume will be to the
Humphries edition, cited as PNY in the text (page numbers to this edition
will be to the English translation, though line numbers will key to the orig
inal Spanish). The seventh volume of the Argentine Obras completas, which
included Poeta in Nueva York, did not appear until after Merton had en
tered Gethsemani.
PATRICK F. O’CONNELL 261

the Obras completas, which he bought some time in 1941.18 On
June 26, he writes,
“I was happy to find out in Lorca a version of the song which La N ifia
de los Peines sang on one of my records—for her, it was a Sombrerito
de Hule. Lorca called it ‘Los Tres Pelegrinitos’ and I finally found out
what it was all about. Some poem! Also, Lorca's ‘Oda a Salvador Dali’
which I had heard about long before I met Latouche and Calas in—the
Golden Horn Restnt. It is one of Lorca’s very best poems—very neat
and elevated, like Garcilaso de la Vega. Classical" (Run 377)}9
In addition to poetry, this volume also contains two plays, one of

which Merton refers to on July 6:
“I also like Lorca’s ‘Asi que Pasen Cinco Aflos.’ The rugby player, the
child and the eat (some scene) the mannequin and the young man:
some scenes. That is the first of his plays I have read. . . . Now to read
maybe Bodas de Sangre, maybe Cantico Espiritual, probably the Can
tico. I haven’t yet touched the cheap Chilean edition of Bodas de San
gre, which has been waiting for more than a year—year and a half—to
be cut” (Run 379).20
18Merton owned the second edition of this volume, published in Decem

ber, 1940; on the first recto page after the double fiyleaf is the signature “T.
Merton, 1941.”; this is the only one of the volumes that is signed.
1E'For the Dali ode, see Obras V1.149-53; CP 589-95. For the first poem,
see Obras V1.191-92. (CP does not include this poem as by Lorca; in the
manuscript journal, it does look as if Merton wrote “Ti-es” [though the word
is not completely legible], but it is not clear why he would refer to three pil
grims, since the title of the poem is “Romance de los pelegrinitos,” and there
are only two of them, boyfriend and girlfriend, cousins who journey to Rome
to see the pope to get permission to marry one another.) Merton had earlier
expressed his hope that La nir'ia de los Peines would record material by
Lorca (Run 107). In his book The Wind Cried: An American’s Discovery of
the World of Flamenco (New York 1968), Paul Hecht calls Pastora Pavon,
“La Nifia de los Peines,” “the greatest female [flamenco] singer of the cen
tury” (77). Lorca himself, in his 1933 lecture “Play and Theory of the
Duende,” had described the Andalusian Pavon as a “dark Hispanic genius
whose powers of fantasy are equal to those of Goya or Rafael el Gallo," and
had related an incident when, after singing to an initially unresponsive au
dience, she drew on the dark force of “duende” so that “Her voice was no
longer playing, it was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity, and
it opened like a ten-fingered hand around the nailed but stormy feet of a
Christ by Juan de Juni” (Federico Garcia Lorca, Deep Song and Other
Prose, ed. and trans. Christopher Maurer [New York 1980] 45, 46).
20The play is in Obras V1.11-110; for a long, generally convincing Jun
gian analysis of this work, see Rupert C. Allen, The Symbolic World of Fed
erico Garcia Lorca (Albuquerque 1972) 61-157 (subsequently referred to in
text as “Allen”).
262 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

There is no indication, in the journal or elsewhere, that Merton
did in fact go on to read Lorca’s famous play (Blood Wedding); the
“cheap Chilean edition” has disappeared, while the three volumes
of the Obras completas containing Lorca’s poetry were donated
along with dozens of Merton’s other books to the St. Bonaventure
College Library, where they can be found today.
II
What was it about Garcia Lorca that so captivated the young
Thomas Merton? The initial appeal was evidently bound up with
the Spanish language itself, as the first journal entries on Lorca
indicate. After his first list of words taken from the Romancero gi
tano, he writes, “Every individual word in Spanish is very inter
esting all by itself. Interesting—provoking, fascinating by itself.
Maybe I have been seeing a lot of good words, since I have been
reading Lorca. But compare not naipe and ‘playing card’ but, say
lily and lirio. Lirio is a fascinating word” (Run 104-05).21 Though
his lists are presumably less fascinating to the reader of his jour
nal, they do give the impression that Merton was attracted by the
sheer sensuousness of Lorca’s verse, the sound of the language,
its music. He calls it “Flamenco poetry” (Run 104), a verbal equiv
alent to the Hispanic music he already found exciting and deeply
moving.
His enthusiasm for the language was part of a broader immer
sion in things Spanish, which would bring him to Cuba the fol
lowing spring.22 Mott comments of this period,
“As 1939 became 1940, however, most things had been pulling Merton
toward Latin America: the flamenco dancers at the World’s Fair, his
own dancing, the poetry of Garcia Lorca, and, perhaps, most strongly
21“Lirio” actually should generally be translated “iris,” though in certain

circumstances “lily” is appropriate; for a detailed discussion of Lorca’s use
of this word, see Predmore 12-17.
22It was of course in Spanish that the children in the Church of San
Francisco in Havana cried out, “Creo in Dios” (“I believe in God"), bringing
to Merton the revelation, “Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven,
Heaven!" as related in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (New
York 1948) 284-85 (subsequently referred to in text as SSM); see also Run
217-19. Lorca, of course, had been to Cuba, as Merton was probably aware,
almost exactly a decade earlier (March 7-June 12, 1930); for his quite dif
ferent experience there, which did however include a visit to the shrine of
Our Lady of Cobre (cf. Merton’s “Song for Our Lady of Cobre"), see Gibson,
Life 282-302.

of all, his feeling for the ‘Little Spain' close to Perry Street. The center
of the community was the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where he
took communion most mornings" (Mott 147).
It is as though Merton were seeking an alternative, non-Anglo

Saxon culture, a continental, Catholic tradition, in which to
ground not only his newly adopted faith, but his literary efforts as
well. His elevation of Lorca is in stark contrast to generally de
preciating remarks about poets such as Eliot and Auden.23 The
only contemporary English-language poet to whom he responds
at this time with the same unqualified enthusiasm is the Welsh
man Dylan Thomas, who resembles Lorca in his less cerebral,
more intuitive, even ecstatic, approach to poetry.24 This identifi
cation with the Hispanic poetic tradition would continue for the
rest of his life, or at least revive during its final decade. In his
1965 letter to Stefan Baciu he remarks, “though I write in En
glish, my idiom (poetic idiom at least) is much more that of Latin
America than that of the United States” (Courage 241), and Mott
comments of his activities in the late 19505, “Translating the
Spanish of Paz, Vallejo, Parra and others reminded him of the
spell Garcia Lorca had cast over him in 1938-39 [sic], and for long
afterward” (Mott 307).25
23See Run 19, 144, 301, 305-06; Merton’s opinion, of Eliot in particular,
was to become much more positive in later years: on April 1, 1948, he wrote
to Robert Lax, “I was reading T. S. Eliot—‘East Coker,’ etc. & this time I
liked him a lot" (Road 170); he includes Eliot along with Lorca among im
portant infiuences in his 1967 letters to Falsina and Bredenberg (Road 349,
361) and in his biographical notice in A Controversy of Poets (542), and both
Eliot and Auden, along with Spender, Rilke, Pasternak, Dylan Thomas and
Lorca, in a list of “good poets of [one’s] own time" in his 1958 essay “Poetry
and Contemplation: A Reappraisal" (The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton
[New York 1981] 346 [subsequently referred to in text as LE]; the corre
sponding passage in the original version of this essay, “Poetry and the Con
templative Life,” published in Figures for an Apocalypse [New York 1948]
has no list of contemporary poets [see page 101]).
24See Run 288, 305-07; Howard T. Young notices the “very apt” parallel
between Lorca and Thomas in The Victorious Expression: A Study of Four
Contemporary Spanish Poets (Madison, WI 1964) 139 (subsequently re
ferred to in text as “Young”); see also R. G. Havard, “The symbolic ambiva
lence of ‘green’ in Garcia Lorca and Dylan Thomas,” Modern Language Re
view 67 (1972) 810-19.
25Many of these translations appeared in Emblems of a Season of Fury
(New York 1963), and all are in the Collected Poems (833-36, 841-55, 943
58, 972-81, 999-1002). Though he translated the “Roman Nocturnes" of
264 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

It is particularly as a religious poet that Merton appraises
Lorca. He writes on December 17, 1939, “Lorca is easily the best
religious poet of this century. . . . He is a ‘flamenco’ poet. Fla
menco music is terribly religious: Lorca’s poetry is very very
deeply religious” (Run 106).26 This is not a judgment with which
most commentators, on Lorca or on religious poetry, would read
ily concur.27 It seems evident that Merton is reading Lorca
through the lenses of his own interests and preoccupations.
Though filled with Christian images and ideas, Lorca’s poetry,
like his life, is far from conventional, or even unconventional, 0r
thodoxy.28 One wonders what Merton made of the religious ele
ments in the various ballads of the Romancero gitano, which he
was reading so enthusiastically at this time: of the parody of the
Annunciation, for example, in “San Gabriel” (Obras IV.37-40; CP
547-49), which Merton calls “tremendous and fine” (Run 107), in
which the angel appears to a pregnant gypsy named Anunciacion
(D to tell her about the future of her child—not, presumably, vir
ginally conceived; or the frustrated sensuality of “The Gypsy
Nun” (Obras IV.24-25; CP 531-33); or the heavily sexualized de
scription of “The Martyrde of St. Eulalia” (Obras IV.59-62; CP
Lorca’s friend Rafael Alberti (CP 833-36) there is no record of any transla
tions of Lorca himself; in an essay on Alberti first published in 1967, Mer
ton reveals his continuing interest in the “Generation of 1927,” and calls Al
berti’s poetic sequence Concerning the Angels (the subject of the essay)
“More somber, more austere and arresting than Lorca’s The Poet in New
Ybrk” (LE 313). For Merton’s Latin American connections, see Stefan Baciu,
“Latin America and Spain in the Poetic World of Thomas Merton," The Mer
ton Annual 2 (1989) 13-26, and Robert E. Daggy, “‘A Man of the Whole
Hemisphere’: Thomas Merton and Latin America," American Benedictine
Review 42.2 (1991) 122-39.
26Ramsden notes (Romancero 2) in connection with Lorca’s “Ballad of the
Moon, Moon” the poet’s own statement that he wished to depict an “An
dalucia concentrada y religiosa” and adds, “Traditional Andalusian dancing
operates from within a framework of ritual, like oriental dancing, and it is
the ritualistic aspect that Lorca emphasises in his poem”; Stanton notes
that “Lorca’s poetry displays a preference for a concrete expression of reli
gion, true to the spirit of the people he considered to be the most represen
tative inhabitants of his native land” (87), the gypsies.
27One critic who might not dismiss the idea out of hand is Ramsden, who
does a superb job at highlighting the Christian resonances in the R0
mancero gitano, many of them dependent upon specific Spanish or even An
dalusian associations.
28For Lorca’s early rebellion against the Christian God, coexisting with
“a strong tendency . . . to identify with Christ,” see Gibson, Life 65-67; for

571-75);29 or even the identification of the lascivious wind with St.
Christopher in “Preciosa y el Aire” (Obras IV.15-17; CP 521-23),30
which Merton had singled out for special praise (Run 107). One
may be tempted to interpret his later comment (in April, 1940)
about how many of the Spanish words in Lorca he did not know
and the consequence “that I had read him, then, with a less clear
apprehension” (Run 166) as evidence that he frequently missed
the point of some of the ballads, but one should not jump too
quickly to that conclusion.
Merton seemed to respond more immediately to “the primitive
and formal attitudes” (Run 106) he found in the Gypsy Ballads
than to the complexity of the poet’s response to the materials he
was using and to his own psyche, what one critic has called his
“spiral path . . . oscillating from right to left, from left to right,
from a mystical pole to an erotic one, his soul torn between an ir
resistible tendency both towards the most diaphanous spiritual
ity and towards carnal appetites as irrepressible as they were
heterodox” (Eutimio Martin, quoted in Gibson, Life 204). Cer
tainly Merton, like virtually everyone at the time except some of
those who knew Lorca personally, would have been unaware of
the extent to which his conflicted relationship with his religious
his rejection of a church aligned with the powerful against the poor, see the
prose passage quoted by Maurer in his Introduction to the Collected Poems
xi; for the circumstances of Lorca’s composition of the “Ode to the Most Holy
Sacrament,” when “the poet, racked by emotional disturbances, returned,
albeit briefly, to the faith of his childhood, which, moreover, he had never
actually left," see Gibson, Life 223-24, also 232-33, describing the 1928 Holy
Week procession in Granada, in which Lorca carried the cross; Gibson notes
that the poet felt “profoundly Catholic” in Protestant New York (Life 254),
though Predmore finds in the New York poetry itself evidence of lost faith
and an indictment of Christianity (99-102, 106-07). Carl W. Cobb writes,
“Certainly Garcia Lorca at the time of his death was hesitating between a
more open approach to the problem [of homosexuality] and a return to his
Spanish Catholic heritage” in Federico Garcia Lorca (New York 1967) 146.
29Arturo Barea discusses this eroticized religion and its antecedents in
Spanish culture in Lorca: The Poet and His People (New York 1949) 56-72
(subsequently referred to in text as “Barea”); Ramsden, however, points out
the traditional iconographic background of, for example, the saint’s severed
breasts (Romancero 103).
30Allen suggests that this identification points to a basically positive role
for the wind as “a numinous projection proceeding out of the unconscious of
Preciosa” (31); Ramsden reads it as an ironic metamorphosis of the tradi
tional patron saint of travellers (Romancero 11-12).
266 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

tradition was due to his homosexuality (which nevertheless did
not alienate him from “the loving, crucified Jesus, friend of sin
ners, the halt and the lame. And also, in the poet’s conception, of
the sexually tormented” [Gibson, Life 223]). Merton’s evaluation
of the Whitman ode as “a very clean poem, . . . full of moral good
ness, . . . a nice poem, innocent and just and full of love” (Run 363
64) is oblivious to the deep ambivalence that marks this poem.
Whereas Merton calls the ode “the only poem written to defend
anybody from filth that I ever read in this age” (Run 364), Lorca’s
biographer finds that it “suggests strongly that, despite his ef
forts, Lorca had not yet come to terms with his sexuality,” and
adds, “one is bound to wonder if the poet has not fallen prey to
some sort of defense mechanism whereby he deprecates in others
what he fears in himself” (Gibson, Life 298). Merton’s characteri
zation of Lorca as “a fine guy, a real clean, nice guy” (Run 364) is
certainly an oversimplified, highly idealized depiction of a compli
cated, at times agonized, artist, who wrote of his Gypsy Ballads,
“there is just one protagonist, Anguish, great and dark as a sum
mer’s sky, which filters into the marrow of the bones and the sap
of the trees . . .” (quoted in Gibson, Life 135).
But if Merton’s is a partial reading of Lorca, one oriented by
his own concerns, and certainly limited by the almost total lack of
biographical and critical studies at the time, it is not thereby to
be simply dismissed as an inaccurate one. After all, Salvador
Dali, who perhaps knew Lorca better than anyone, called Lorca
“a strange, religious spirit” and “a Christian tempest” (and there
fore in need of Dali’s paganism) (quoted in Gibson, Life 176, 213).
If his religious temperament expressed itself in struggle rather
than serenity, in images of darkness rather than of light, it was
no less religious for that: such an outlook could explain his deep
admiration for John of the Cross (cf. Gibson, Life 420). Certainly
Lorca’s challenge to a sterile rationalism, his incessant wrestling
with the inescapable fact of human mortality, has a profoundly
spiritual, religious, dimension. He is an exemplary representa
tive of “The Spaniard” as described by Howard Young, one who
“constantly thinks in terms of final things. This outlook makes
him a basically religious individual, even though he may not ac
cept the dogma of the church that rules his world. Being religious
means that he broods in a way that the humanist or rationalist
would not, on the insult of death” (xxiii). “In the Cante Jondo,”
another critic remarks, “we are sometimes reminded of

Rouault,”31 a comparison even more apt for Merton’s purposes
than his own reference to the Douanier Rousseau: a “primitive”
charged with all the anxiety of modern consciousness, yet cer
tainly, in Merton’s words, “very very deeply religious.” Indeed, in
Lorca’s pervasive sense of the numinous “one finds ‘a religion, or,
more exactly, a type of religiosity’ akin to that of primitive, natu
ralistic man.” 32 Yet at the same time, his awareness of the prob
lem, and the mystery, of the self, is indisputably modern: accord
ing to Allen, “the inner world of nonego was Lorca’s vocation”
(175), a statement that could also be made, in a rather different
sense, of the life-project of Thomas Merton. It is perhaps this in
tersection of primitive and modern, of equivocal cosmos and
lonely self, to which the aspiring young poet responded so intu
itively and so wholeheartedly.
III
Lorca’s poetry inspired in Merton not only admiration but em
ulation. Certainly there are other influences discernible in Mer
ton’s early verse, including the English Metaphysicals, William
Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, even T. S. Eliot.33
But when he writes in The Seven Storey Mountain about the sud
den facility in writing verse that he experienced in the spring of
1941, it is Lorca who is specifically mentioned:
31Louis Parrot, “A Poet Crazy About Color,” in Duran 59.

3iiMaurer, quoting Spanish historian of religion Angel Alvarez de Mi
randa, in his Introduction to the Collected Poems (lxi).
33Page references to Merton’s poetry will be given both according to the
individual volume and the Collected Poems. The pieces included in Thirty
Poems were selected from a larger group written between 1939 and 1944;
most of the rest appeared, together with a reprint of the first volume, in A
Man in the Divided Sea (New York 1946) (subsequently referred to in text
as MDS), though a few remained unpublished until the appearance of Early
Poems: 1940-1942 (Len'ngton, KY 1971), or are included in the uncollected
poems section of Collected Poems. For the influence of the metaphysicals,
see for example Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart” and Merton’s “The Com
munion” (TP [11]; CP 40-41), or his use of Marvell’s tetrameter line in “An
Argument: Of the Passion of Christ” (TP [20-21]; CP 51-54); for Blake, see
the quotation from “The Divine Image” in lines 32-34 of “The Holy Sacra
ment ofthe Altar” (TP [19]; CP 50-51); for Hopkins, see the final line of“The
Sponge Full of Vinegar” (TP [24]; CP 57) and the title of “The Blessed Virgin
Mary Compared to a Window” (TP [16-1'7]; CP 46-48) vis-a-vis Hopkins’
“The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”: for Thomas, com
268 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Meanwhile, suddenly, one day, towards the beginning of Lent, I began
to write poems. I cannot assign any special cause for the ideas that be
gan to crowd on me from every side. I had been reading the Spanish
poet, Lorca, with whose poetic vein I felt in the greatest sympathy: but
that was not enough, in itself, to account for all the things I now began
to write. In the first weeks of Lent, the fasting I took on myself—which
was not much, but at least it came up to the standard required by the
Church for an ordinary Christian, and did not evade its obligations
under some privilege to which I was not entitled—instead of cramping
my mind, freed it, and seemed to let loose the string of my tongue
(SSM 310).
This is of course a somewhat telescoped account: by this time

Merton had been reading Lorca for well over a year, and he had
been writing verse at least sporadically since his Columbia days.
In fact his June 16, 1940, letter to Mark Van Doren associates the
two, if not precisely in a cause-effect relationship; immediately af
ter mentioning that he was reading Lorca, he continues: “But
anyway, that reminds me, I did write a couple of poems this
month. I send them, along with a couple of others, . . .” (Road 8).
But 1941 did bring a substantial increase in productivity: the
passage in the autobiography continues, “Sometimes I would go
several days at a time, writing a new poem every day” (SSM 310),
as compared to “a couple of poems this month” in June, 1940.
Whereas only three poems from 1939 and four poems from 1940
are included in Merton’s first two collections, nineteen of the
Thirty Poems and twenty-seven poems (of a total of fifty-six) in A
Man in the Divided Sea date from 1941.“‘1 On the basis of Mer
ton’s note opening the latter volume that the “poems are printed
more or less in the order in which they were written” (MDS 11), at
least thirteen poems from that collection can plausibly be as
signed to Lent, 1941 (from “Ash Wednesday” [23; CP 67] through
“The Ohio River—Louisville” [38; OF 79-80] [see Mott 176]), as
excerpt quoted by Merton in his journal (Run 306)

pare the “eucharistic”
with poems such The City" (TP [10-11]; CP 39-40)
as “Holy Communion:
and “The Communion” (TP [11]; CP 40-41); for Eliot, see “Preludes” and
Merton's “Aubade—The City" (MDS 48-49; CP 85-87).
34See Ross Labrie, “The Ordering of Thomas Merton’s Early Poems,” Re
sources for American Literary Study 8 (1979) 115-17 (subsequently referred
”),
to in text as “Labrie, ‘Ordering’ which draws on 1951 letter, written by

a
Merton’s secretary, providing the year of composition for almost all the po
ems in Merton’s first three collections.

F.
well as at least three, probably more, of the Thirty Poems.35 As
Ross Labrie has commented, 1941 was certainly “the high point of
Merton’s poetic activity” (Labrie, “Ordering” 116), at least until
the final years of his life.
It is reasonable to assume that it was a restored spiritual and
psychological equilibrium, after the shock and disappointment of
being rejected for admission to the Franciscans in the summer of
1940 (see Mott 155-58), that was in large part responsible for this
burst of creativity; by this time, moreover, he had also weathered
his first semester of full-time teaching, and had settled into a
fairly stable routine of study, work and prayer. The discipline and
liturgical rhythms of Lent then provided an environment of at
tentiveness and heightened awareness enabling his energy to be
channelled into composing. But the fact that he mentions Lorca
in this context, even though the enthusiasm of first encounter
had long since given way to familiarity, indicates that in retro
spect Merton considered the experience of reading the Spanish
poet to have had a substantial impact on his own writing.
Lorca's major influence on Merton's early poetry seems to have
been as a stimulus, a catalyst for Merton’s own creative urges,
rather than as a direct source for themes or subject matter. Cer
tainly there is little evidence of slavish imitation or wholesale
borrowing. Even in those instances where a plausible case can be
made for a reminiscence of a Lorcan image or phrase in a Merton
poem, it has typically been transformed and used in a different
context. For example, Lorca’s reference to “the long strings of the
wind” (1. 10) in “The Scream” (Obras IV.78; CP 101) seems to be
echoed by “the harpstrings of the rain” (I. 11) in Merton’s poem
“The Pride of the Dead” (MDS 33; CP 75), where the substitution
of rain for wind produces an image incorporating not only an au
ditory but a visual sensation, as the rainfall’s lines of descent sug
gest the multiple strings of the harp. (Lorca’s strings were for a
viola [cf. 1. 8].) In the same poem, the description of dead emper
ors looking “as black as leather” 9) recalls the famous opening
(1.
lines of the “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard” (Obras IV.53-58;
35l.e., “Lent in Year of War” (TP [1]; CP 27) and two poems known to
a
have been written during Holy Week at Gethsemani, “The Communion” (TP
[11]; CP 40-41) (see Labrie, “Ordering” 116) and “The Vine” (TP [12-13]; CP
42-43) (see Mott 176); “The Trappist Abbey: Matins" (TP [15]; CP 45-46)
was written either at Gethsemani or shortly afterwards.
270 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

CP 563-69) with their black horses, black capes, and “souls of
patent leather” 7), but for Merton is the mummified bodies,
(1.
it
rather than the emperors’ “paper souls” (ll. 19), that are black.
3,
Merton’s image of “the eyeless ruins of the houses” 7) in his
(1.
poem on Lorca (TP [14]; CP 34) recalls the “land of. . . . . . death
/
without eyes” from the first “Poem of the Solea” (Obras IV.83; CP
107),36 but now suggests the context of the Spanish Civil War
with its pervasive destruction both of buildings and their inhabi
tants.
In the Gypsy ballad “El emplazado” (Obras IV.50-52; CP 559
63), the protagonist told to prepare for death, “for nettle and
is
hemlock will grow from your side” (11. 28-29); an expanded ver
/
sion of this same idea found in Merton’s “The Bombarded City”

is
(MDS 34-36; OF 75-78), where predicted that “field flowers
it
is
shall spring Out of the Leader’s lips, and open eyes, . . when
/
/
.
the grass grows in his groin, And golden-rod works in his rib,
/
/
And in his teeth the ragweed grins” (11. 36-37, 42-44).37 What
functions as warning of fate in Lorca’s poem has become for
a
Merton promise of the triumph of natural vitality over tyranny

a a
(albeit promise modified by recognition that the voices of mur

dered innocents will not thereby be stilled). In “La Solea” from
the Poema del cante jondo (Obras IV.89; CP 113), “the scream”
that is said to “disappear on currents of the wind” (11. 6-7) is
/
echoed in Merton’s “The Night Train” (TP [3-4]; CP 30-31), where

“we hear38 the jugulars of the country Fly in the wind, and van
/
ish with cry” (11. 1617); here the word “jugulars” (which may it
a
36Young identifies the opposition between sight and sightlessness as

a a
major theme in Lorca's poetry, and comments, Sin ojos [without eyes] is
fearful state, the loss of contact with reality, and therefore death” 149); see
(
also Miller 155. For other examples, see “Alba” [“Dawn”], (Obras H.57
1.
7
58; not included in CF); “November,” 20 (Obras II.72-73; CP 89-91); “Noc

1.
turnes for the Window,” (Obras II.162-64; CP 429-33); “Juan Ramon

3,
it
7
l.
Jiménez,” (Obras II.178-179; CP 455); “Death’s Lament,” (Obras

l.
7
4
l.
IV.116-17; CP 139-41).
37See also similar passage in “Dirge for the Proud World” (TP [18]; CP
a
49-50): “Where he lies dead, the quiet earth unpacks him /And wind wav
is
ing in the earth’s revenge: Fields of barley, oats and rye. . . . His heart
/
/
/
lies open like treasury, Filled up with grass, and generous flowers" (ll.
4
a
13-14).
6,
38In both Thirty Poems andA Man in the Divided Sea (118), the reading
“head”—obviously misprint; in Collected Poems corrected to “hear”
is
is
it
a
though “heard” also possibility.

is
PATRICK O’CONN ELL 271

F.
self be borrowed from Lorca)39 suggests that not only the death
scream but the life blood itself is carried away on the wind. The
pregnant gypsy girl Anunciacion de los Reyes, who is visited by
the Archangel Gabriel after she “opens the door to the star / that
was shining [lit. coming] down the street” (11. 29-30) in “San
Gabriel” (Obras IV.37-40; CP 547-49), may well have been the
somewhat incongruous predecessor of the children in Merton's
“The Winter’s Night” (TP [9]; CP 38), who “call out in whispers to
their guardian angels” 21) after being awakened by the ringing
(l.
of moonlight “upon the ice” and the clink of starlight “upon the
dooryard stone” (11. 18-19). Lorca’s advice to Dali in the final lines
of the ode to his friend (Obras VI.149-53; CP 589-95) not to
“watch the water clock” 110), not to be concerned with the pas
sage of time, (1.
probably the source of Merton’s comparison in “A
is
Song” (MDS 28-29; CP 71-72) of the steps of evening walkers on

the stones to “the precise, loud Ominous talk of fretful water
/
clocks” (11. 19-20): the steps are said to “wear away the waning
light” (1. 21) as the regular drip of the water would wear away
stone.
As these examples suggest, any borrowings from Lorca have
undergone considerable transmutation before making their ap
pearance in Merton’s verse. It is nevertheless remarkable how
many of Lorca’s “master images” recur frequently in Merton’s
premonastic poetry. The moon, for example, sort of presiding de
a
ity in the Romancero gitano and elsewhere in Lorca’s work, is reg

ularly personified, and often apostrophized, in Merton’s verse as
well. But what one critic calls the “baleful queen of lust and
death, . . generally an augur of doom” (Young 166)40 in Lorca
.
gives way to the “wise queen” (l. 2) of “The Evening of the Visita
tion” (TP [13-14]; CP 43-44), celestial analogue to the Virgin
a
Mary (she plays the same role in “Advent” [MDS 51; CP 88]); the
“pilgrim moon” 3) of “The Trappist Abbey: Matins" (TP [15]; CP
(1.
45-46) who “pours over the solemn darkness Her waterfalls of

si
/
lence” (11. 3-4); the “bride” (l. 11) perceived by the children of
“Evening” (TP [12]; CP 41-42), who speaks clearly to the hill”
39See “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar,” 135 (Obras
l.
VI.154-56; CP 599-609), and “Cow,” 14 (PNY 81).

l.
40Young calls his section on the Ballads “Gypsy Moon" (164-80); other
critics see the moon as more polyvalent symbol: see for example Predmore
a
21-23, and Ramsden, Romancero vii.
272 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

(1.2), the same moon whose light “rings . . . as sudden as a foot
step” (1. 18) in "The Winter’s Night” (TP [9]; CP 38).
In his discussion of “The Horse in the Work of Garcia Lorca,”
his friend Rafael Martinez Nadal suggests that “no other contem
porary poet or novelist makes use of this animal with the insis
tence and variety found in Lorca.”41 While Merton is certainly no
threat to this preeminence, horses, generally figurative rather
than literal, make surprisingly frequent appearances in his first
two collections, especially for a poet with a mainly urban back
ground—presumably due at least in part to the example of Lorca.
The most striking instance, appropriately, is found in the opening
lines of Merton’s elegy on Iorca: “Where the white bridge rears
up its stampling arches / Proud as a colt across the clatter of the
shallow river” (TP [14]; CP 44); identified with the horse, a sym
bol of power and energy throughout Lorca’s poetry, the bridge
here is an image of transcendence, its arches suggesting the tra
jectory of the colt’s leap over the stream. The horse is often asso
ciated by Merton with another central Lorcan symbol, the sea,42
as in “Poem” (TP [6]; CP 34), in which the poet’s thoughts turn to
“The horses of Poseidon, the lifting seas” 6); or “Ariadne” (MDS
(l.
18-19; OF 63-64), where the ship carrying Theseus to Crete “skips

like colt, paws the foam . . . And whinnies at the jetty” (ll. 16,
a
18); or even “Crusoe” (MDS 26; CP 69-70), with its “hard, horse
play of shipwreck in the drench of Magellan” 11). Elsewhere,
(l.
“The Man in the Wind” (MDS 17; CP 62-63) “fancies Arab ponies”
(l. 1); in “The Oracle” (MDS 20; CP 64-65), “Horses, loose on a
plain, drum /The secret dance their thought does now!” (ll. 8-9)“;
the traveller in “Ash Wednesday” (MDS 23; CP 67) described as
is
“Proud as the mane of the whinnying air” (I. 8)“; “The Greek
Women” (MDS 31; CP 73-74) awaiting the return of their menfolk
from Troy, allow their “looks” to “run down the land like colts,
/
41Rafael Martinez Nada], Federico Garcia Lorca and The Public:

A
Study of an Unfinished Play and of Love and Death in Lorca’s Work (New
York 1974) 185.
42See Allen’s discussion of “The Ocean-symbol” (174-87).
43These lines are almost certainly dependent on lines 21-22 of “Ballad of
the Moon, Moon” (Obras IV.13-14; CP 519-21): “Closer comes the horseman,
drumming on the plain.”
/
44See the “quick equestrian breeze” that “leaps the hills of lead” (ll. 23
24) in “The Taking of Little Tony Camborio . . (Obras IV.41-43; CP 551
."
53).

F.
Race with the wind (the mares, their mothers’, lover) / Down to
the empty harbor” (11. 4-6); in “Aubade—The Annunciation"
(MDS 44-45; OF 83-84), “the lovely woods begin to toss their
manes” (l. 14), while in “Dirge” (MDS 27; CP 70-71) even “the bu
gle” is said to “neigh” 1). In virtually all these examples, the
(l.
equine imagery carries connotations of vitality, energy and dy
namism, as so often does for Lorca as well.
it
Characteristic Lorcan flora also dot the premonastic poems, es
pecially those with classical or mythological theme that enables
a
Merton to draw on Lorca’s Mediterranean environment. Thus
“Poem” (TP [6]; CP 34), which features “the horses of Poseidon”
(l.
6) and “the Greek acropoli” (l. 9), mentions as well the “burning
olive gardens” (1. 20), while in “The Greek Women” (MDS 31; CP
73-74), the air itself is filled with “the olive-light of clouds and
windows” 9); the woman’s song in “In Memory of . . . Lorca”
(I.
is
described as “music the color of olives” (l. 10)45 and later becomes
“the color of carnations” (l. 18)46 (TP [14-15]; CP 44-45). “Ca
lypso’s Island” (MDS 32; CP 74) features both “flirting oleanders”
2)47 and “the red red wound Of the sweet pomegranate” (ll. 17
(l.
45Olives and olive groves are of course omnipresent in Lorca’s verse: see
for example, in the Romancero gitano, “Through the olive grove came the
/
gypsies, dream and bronze” (ll. 25-26), from “Ballad of the Moon, Moon”
(Obras IV. 13-14; CP 519-21); or “The olive trees turn pale” 34), from “Pre
(l.
ciosa and the Wind” (Obras IV. 15-17; CP 521-23); in Poema del cantejondo,
the “olives and orange blossoms” 29) of “Ballad of the Three Rivers”
(l.
(Obras IV.73-74; CP 97-99); the “ancient olive trees” 4) of “Village” (Obras

(1.
IV.84; CP 107); the “green olive trees” 6) of Cordoba in “De Profundis”

(1.
(Obras IV.108; CP 131). The examples could be multiplied almost indefi

nitely. Miller notes that “The alive often utilized by Lorca as symbol for
is
tragic human destiny, and its color verde can be symbolic of mystery, dan
ger, the desperation of human life, bitter fatality, and death” (94).
“Is there hidden pun here? The Spanish word for “carnation” is
a
“clavel,” while for “nail” “clavo”; at least subconsciously the connection

is
it
may well have been made. See the juxtaposition of “clavel” and “clavé”
(“pierced”) in lines 4-5 of “The Death of Little Tony Camborio” (Obras W44
46; CP 553-55), in which the poet speaks of the dying Antor'iito's “voice of
a
virile carnation” (ll. 22). See also the poem “Saeta” from Poema del cante
4,
jondo, which begins: “Dark-skinned Christ, /once udea’s lily, now Spain’s
J
carnation” (Obras IV.99; CP 123; for analyses, see Miller 198-203 and Stan
ton 107-08, 110).
47See the message of doom for El Amargo in the Gypsy Ballad “El em
plazado” (Obras IV.50-52; CP 559-63): “The time has come to cut the ole
/
anders in your courtyard” (11. 24-25); the increasingly threatening refrain,

6), “O oleander black” (I. 9) in
(1.
“O oleander white” 3), “O oleander red"

(1.
274 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

18) (a particularly significant fruit for Lorca, as the Spanish word
granada is the same as that of his home town).48 This image also
exemplifies the “chromatic imagery” that Sr. Thérese Lentfoehr
points out as “an unmistakable Lorcan influence“9 in Merton’s
early volumes. (For other examples, see “the white ship/ . . . on
the purple water” [11. 7-8] earlier in this poem; “the betrayer/ . . .
Ringing his tongue in the red bell of his head” [11. 4, 6] in “Dirge”
[MDS 27; OF 70-71]; the “small, red cry” of the sleepers in
6]
[1.
“Ash Wednesday” [MDS 23; CP 67]).
Often, familiar Lorcan images are used in novel combinations.
For example, arrows and guitars, both frequently appearing in
Lorca’s poems,50 are combined synesthetically by Merton at the
“Little Backwater” (Obras II.141-42; CP 193-95); the “moon-dark rosebay

[oleander]” (l. and “the bitterness of the rosebay [oleander]” (l. 6) in “Nu”
1)
(Obras H.195; CP 481), and “your sorrow of rosebay [oleander] and lime” in
“Passage of the Siguiriya” (Obras IV.80; CP 103). Merton may also have
known that the English-language version of Bodas de sangre performed in
New York in 1935 had been entitled Bitter Oleander, from verse of the
a
concluding chorus (see Gibson, Life 400, and Angel del Rio, “Lorca’s The
ater,” in Duran [151]). Gerald Brenan describes the oleander as “the most
striking of south Mediterranean plants” but one whose beauty seems
“mocking and sinister” as its leaves are poisonous; he notes the proverbial
expression “Bitter as the oleander” to describe the experience of unrequited
love, and comments, “no image could be juster” (quoted in CP [821]). See
also the reference to the wounds of the crucifixion, “red as oleanders” (p.
138), in My Argument with the Gestapo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1969),
the novel Merton was writing in the summer of 1941.
48See especially the “Cancion oriental” [“Song of the East”] (Obras
II.102-05; not included in CF), in which the pomegranate successively
is
compared to crystallized sky (11. 1-2), an old, dried up breast (11. 7-8), a
a
tiny beehive (l. 11), heart lying in the field (11. 17-18), an old gnome’s trea
a
sure (ll. 25-26), blood of the sacred heavens, of the wounded earth, of the
wind and the sea (ll. 59-72), and the light oflife (l. 81); see also the opening
lines of “Madrigal: October,1920” (Obras II.80; CP 85-87): “My kiss was
a
pomegranate, open and deep” (11. 1-2), and of “Brief Madrigal” (Obras
/
H.204; CP 495): “Four pomegranate trees grow in your garden” (ll. 1-2).
/
Lorca connects pomegranates with wounds in the Gypsy Ballad “The Dis
pute” (Obras IV. 18-19; CP 525-27), where the dead body of Juan Antonio
is
described as having “a pomegranate in his head" 20). (Ramsden notes the

(1.
irony of this last reference to the head wound, since “the granada [is] tra
a
ditional symbol of life” [Romancero 20].)

49Sr. Thérése Lentfoehr, Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas
Merton (New York 1979) see Parrot, “A Poet Crazy About Color," in Du
7;
ran (57-64), for the importance of chromatic imagery in Lorca.

50The guitar appears particularly frequently in the Poema del cante

F.
conclusion of “Ariadne” (MDS 18-19; CP 63-64) to describe the im
pact the first sight of Theseus has on the Cretan princess: “Ar
rows of light, in every direction, / Leap from the armor of the
black-eyed captain. /Arrows of light/ Resound within her like the
strings of a guitar” (ll. 26-29). A similar, though darker, synthesis
of images is found in the Lorca elegy (TP [14-15]; CP 44-45) when
Merton speaks of “sharp guitars” 3), “the swordspeech of the
(l.
cruel strings” (I. 5), and “the swordplay of the fierce guitar” (I.
22)51 that accompanies the words of the woman’s lament, “Each
with meaning like sheaf of seven blades” (1. 14).52 In the open
a
a
ing lines of “The Bombarded City” (MDS 34-36; CP 75-78), the
key Lorcan symbols of moon, blood, wood, dream,53 and sea are
combined to create an ominous, preternatural setting: “Now let
no man abide In the lunar wood The place of blood. Let no
/
/
man abide here, Not even in dream, Not in the lunar forest of
a
/
/
this undersea” (11. 1-6).
These lines also exemplify an instance of Merton’s adoption of
frequently used formal arrangement in Lorca’s verse, the repe
a
tition of poem’s opening lines, either exactly or with slight vari

a
jondo: see, for example, “The Guitar” (Obras IV.76-77; CP 99-101; see Miller
70-72 and Stanton 37-39 for analyses); “Six Strings” (Obras IV. 104; CP 127;
see Miller 203-06 and Stanton 39-40 for analyses); “Riddle of the Guitar”
(Obras IV. 123; CP 147; see Stanton 40-41 for analysis); Ramsden notes that
in the Poema del cante jondo, “the guitar plays an important part and is
much associated with dreams and yearning and lamentation” (Romancero
109). For arrows, see “Dawn” (Obras IV.101; CP 125), and the entire se
quence “Poema de la Saeta” (Obras IV.93-101; CP 117-25) of which this is
the concluding poem: the “Saeta” song sung as part of Holy Week pro
is
a
cessions, but literally means “arrow” or “dart” (see CP 797) because “pen
it
etrate[s] the precinct of the divine . . . directly, in straight line, on the

a
wings of its melody” (Stanton 92). Lorca actually linked arrow and guitar
himself in line of “The Guitar,” where the instrument is called “arrow
a
without target” 21); this figure, which Miller interprets as meaning “a

(1.
life without any discernible goal or purpose” (71), is of course radically dif
ferent from Merton's combination of the two images.
511n the closing lines of “The Guitar” (Obras IV.76-77; CP 99-101), Lorca
writes, “Guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords” (ll. 25-27).
/
Though unlikely that Merton could have been aware of it, Lorca also
is
it
wrote in 1926 letter to his friend Jorge Guillén, “The poem has still not
a
been made that pierces the heart like sword" (quoted in Young [205]).
a
52Ramsden notes that the number seven “recalls the traditional seven
sorrows of the Virgin [commonly depicted as seven daggers in the heart,
with red flowers to represent the blood]” (Romancero 88).
53See Lopez-Morillas’ discussion of blood imagery in Duran (138-39); see
276 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

ation, as its conclusion. See for example the famous “Rider’s
Song” (Obras II.173-74; CP 447), which begins and ends, “Cor
doba. / Distant and lonely” (11. 1-2, 15-16), or “Encounter” (Obras
IV.91; CP 115), which begins and ends, “We’ll never find each
other: / neither of us / is so disposed” (11. 1-3, 16-18; only an initial
“que” in l. 16 differs from the opening lines). In Merton’s “The
Bombarded City,” the closing lines are slightly altered: “Oh let no
man abide / In the lunar wood, / The place of blood. / Let no man
abide there, no, / Not even in a dream.” (11. 75-79). Other poems in
the first two collections that use this pattern include “Prophet”
(TP [2]; CP 28-29); “Poem” (TP [6]; CP 34); “The Holy Child’s
Song” (TP [23-24]; CP 55-56); “The Dreaming Trader” (MDS 39;
CP 80-81); “Aubade—Harlem” (MDS 42-43; CP 82-83); “The Dark
Encounter” (MDS 84-85; CP 112-13). Another characteristic Lor
can technique also adopted by Merton is the use of parentheses to
set off refrains or counterpointed lines:54 in the Lorca elegy (TP
[14-15]; OF 44-45), as in a poem such as “Madrigal” (Obras II.111;
CP 29-31), the identical lines are repeated as a refrain: “(Under
what crossless Calvary lie your lost bones, Garcia Lorca? / What
white Sierra hid your murder in a rocky valley?) (ll. 19-20, 25-26);
in “Poem” (TP [6]; CP 34), as in Lorca’s “Cave” (Obras IV.90; CP
113-115), the parenthesized refrain changes as the poem devel
ops: from “(Sing, wind, too tuneless in the slender trees)" (1. 2) to
“(Sing, winds, more clearly on the Greek acropoli)” (l. 9) to “(Play,
winds, in this too voiceless choir of columns)” (1. 17) before re
turning to the original form (now without parentheses) to con
clude the poem (I. 24).
IV
It isjust what images are used, but how they are used, that
not
signals the presence of Lorca in Merton’s verse. Ross Labrie
speaks of “the pyrotechnics of surrealism, inspired by the Span
Allen’s discussion of the symbolism of the wood in Ast' que pasen cinco ar'ios
(the play Merton read in June or July, 1941) 106-09; on dreams in Lorca,
see, for example,Young’s comment in his discussion of the “Sleepwalking
Ballad”: “The now-familiar mechanism of dreams—the condensation of
meaning and displacement of accent—is clearly apparent in much of Lorca”
(179).
54For a discussion of Lorca’s use of this pattern, see Miller 79, 81, 170
74.

ish poet Lorca” 55 as evident in the premonastic poetry. Strictly
speaking, neither Lorca nor Merton are surrealists. Though well
acquainted with the movement, particularly through his close re
lationship with Salvador Dali, and favorably impressed by it, for
a time at least, Lorca is careful to distinguish his own creative
process from the “automatism,” the complete surrender to the
power of the subconscious, advocated by the surrealists. Even his
most abstruse pieces, he maintained, were written with “a
tremendous poetic logic,” adding, “It's not surrealism, however—
the sharpest consciousness illumines them.” 56 This commitment
to clarity of expression is linked by Lorca to the Spanish temper
ament: “We Spaniards want profiles and visible mystery, form
and sensuality. Surrealism can take hold in the north . . . but
Spain, with her history, defends us from the strong liquor of
dream.”57 Even in a poem where a dreamlike state is deliberately
evoked, as in the “Sleepwalking Ballad” (Obras IV.20-23; CP 527
31), the poet has not relinquished rational control, even when his
meaning cannot be totally explained rationally: the incantatory
opening lines (which are also the concluding lines, a good exam
ple of this Lorcan technique) may seem to bypass the mind and
appeal directly to the emotions: “Green oh how I love you green. /
Green wind. Green boughs. / Ship on the sea, / horse on the moun
tain” (11. 1-4). But as Howard Young points out, the setting is that
of a gypsy girl awaiting her lover, a smuggler, and “ship and horse
are implements of the smuggler’s trade”; as for the green, on one
55Ross Labrie, The Art of Thomas Merton (Fort Worth 1979) 113.
56Letter of September, 1928, to Sebastia Gasch, quoted in Gibson, Life
(217); see Miller’s discussion of the “visionary metaphor,” in which “no
physical similarity necessarily unites the plane of reality with the imagi
nary plane,” and the “only real connection between the two is the subjec
tive, emotional response that they elicit from the poet. . . . However, it is
frequently possible to perceive the intellectual basis for the comparison, but
only after a subtle analysis, whereas in the traditional metaphor this ratio
nal basis is more readily apparent” (138-39). In his 1967 Alberti essay, Mer
ton himself comments on the imagery of the “Generation of 1927”: “Critics
are divided on the point whether the result can be called ‘Surrealism.’ The
point is academic. In any case one can say that the peculiar chaotic inten
sity of this verse results from a rich profusion of unconscious images jarring
against one anotherin creative dissonances and dreamlike shock effects . . .”
(LE 313).
57Lecture on “Inspiration, Imagination, Evasion” (1928), quoted by Mau
rer in his Introduction to CF (lix).
278 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

level at least it seems to represent “the spell of the moon as it
bathes everything in a green and silver glow” (173-74) (the silver
appears in line 8: “and her eyes, cold silver”). While such an in
terpretation does not explain away the power these lines, among
the most celebrated in Lorca, have on the reader, it does provide a
context for responding to them, and for recognizing how the “du
ality of dream and reality is adroitly balanced” by Lorca (173).
Similarly, another famous passage from the Romancero gitano,
the advice the poet gives to Soledad Montoya in the “Ballad of
Black Pain” (Obras IV.29-30; CP 537-39) to “go bathe your body /
in the water of the larks” (ll. 35-36) works by synesthesia:58 the
water, perhaps the morning dew (Ramsden, Romancero 49), is to
be as soothing and restorative as the song of skylarks, likewise
associated with the dawn. Yet in these examples as throughout
his poetry, the evocative power of Lorca’s language is not limited
to the conscious mind but penetrates to deeper levels of the psy
che: he has adapted some of the tenets of surrealism to his own
principles and practices.
Merton, with his reliance, or overreliance, on simile in his
early poems, is much less daring than Lorca in this regard, but
quasi-surrealist images, undoubtedly influenced by Lorca, are
abundant in his first two collections. One has only to look at the
opening lines of “Lent in a Year of War” (TP [1]; CP 27), the first
poem in Merton’s first published book, to encounter “a major,
made of cord and catskin,” who “never dreams his eyes may come
to life and thread / The needle-light of famine in a waterglass” (11.
1-3). Certainly we are “beyond the realistic” here, though as typi
cally with Lorca the highly compressed metaphor is not without
its own “poetic logic”: “cord and catskin” suggest a stuffed “hollow
man,” tied together with string, having the appearance of life but
in fact empty (the “catskin” may be intended to recall a cat’s nine
lives, all now gone, with merely the skin remaining); his eyes are
dead, incapable of perceiving reality, though they could be
brought back to life by means of a “waterglass,” evidently an im
age of Lenten asceticism here; “The needle-light of famine” sug
gests that Lenten fasting is a means of being pierced by insight, a
sharpening of awareness enabling one to empathize with the suf
ferings of those facing real starvation in war; at the same time, to
53$ee Miller (183-84) for a discussion of Lorca’s use of this figure of

speech.

“thread / The needle-light” implies that the light is to be identi
fied not only with the needle but with the thread, a sort of Don
nean “eyebeam” able to pass through the eye of the needle and
thus an image of redemption, recalling the gospel saying on the
salvation of the rich (Mk 10:25), a group with which the major
can easily be identified. It is perhaps significant that the poem
which opens with this remarkable image was presumably written
during Lent of 1941, the very period highlighted by Merton in his
autobiography as marked by a prolific output of verse, in conjunc
tion with his reading of Lorca.
As with Lorca’s “Sleepwalking Ballad,” Merton sometimes uses
this type of image in the context of dreams (even, inversely, in the
lines just discussed, where the major “never dreams” he can re
turn to full life). For example, in “Fugitive” (MDS 22; CP 66), the
eyes of the “mad half-Spaniard” title character 1), “Planted,
(1.
like bulbs, in the wet earth of sleep . . had started to sprout” (ll.
/.
5-6). In “Dirge for Town in France” (MDS 46-47; CP 84-85), “The
a
women dream of bread and chocolate In their aquariums Of
/
/
traceries, and lace, and cherubim” (11. 28-30). In “The Night
Train” (TP [3-4]; CP 30-31), “In the unreason of rainy midnight”
a
1), probably a reference both to the dreamscape in which the
(l.
poem set and to the apparent triumph of irrationality during

is
the Second World War, the speaker says that “Escape drawn
is
straight through my dream /And shines to Paris, clean as violin
a
string” (ll. 5-6): the peculiar comparison of the escape route to
a
violin string suggests not only the straightness of the tracks but
the clarity of the impression of approaching freedom, contrasted
with the “commotion” of the “third-class pianos” (11. 7-8) that soon
disrupts the speaker’s serenity and shatters his dream of escape:
in poem written in 1941, the irony of escape leading to Paris,
a
which had fallen to the Nazis in June, 1940, would be both obvi
ous and poignant.
While in many of the poems this “surrealistic” element re
is
stricted to certain figures of speech, on occasion governs the

it
structure of an entire poem, as for example in “Ash Wednesday”

(MDS 23; CP-67), another product, we may assume, of Lent,
1941. It presents bleak landscape traversed by “naked trav
a
a
eller” (l. 1), first seen “Stretching, against the iron dawn, the bow
strings of his eyes” 2), evocative not only of piercing look to
(1.
ward the sunrise but also of hostility toward the pitiless tropical
sun, presaging battle that the human antagonist is doomed to
a
280 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

lose: he “Starves on the mad sierra” (Lorca country!) and “Is
nailed to the hill by the light of March’s razor” (ll. 3, 11).59 In con
trast to the traveller are “the sleepers” (ll. 4, 15), inert and pas
sive, “Prisoners in a lovely world of weeds” (1. 5). Both the trav
eller, who confronts the desert, which “barks, in a rage of love /
For the noon of the eclipse” (11. 12-13), and the sleepers, “Prison
ers of a moonward power of tides” 16), are destroyed, but in dif
(l.
ferent ways and for different reasons: the individual, who con
tests the power of the elements, finally “lies with his throat cut, in
frozen crater” 14); the collective sleepers, already dead in
(l.
a
their insensibility (“Slain by the stillness of their own reflections”

17]), are briefly revived only once more to “die of terror at the
[l.
traveller’s murder” 19). The enigmatic quality of the poem
is
(1.
only increased by its title, which seems to have- little connection

to the poem itself, beyond its exemplification of the traditional ad
monition accompanying the signing with ashes: “Remember,
man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” But
the two ways of encountering mortality do have Lenten dimen
a
sion to them: the sleepers undergo pseudo-resurrection, pas
a
a
sage from death to death, because they refuse to face reality, re

main imprisoned in their own illusions; the traveller does make
the traditional Lenten journey into the desert, but tries, unsuc
cessfully, to survive on his own resources: he a model of failed
is
asceticism. Together, the poem’s characters represent the two

poles to be avoided if one to bear the rigors of Lenten discipline,
is
or more generally, of the Christian life. In this phantasmagoric

scenario, Merton has applied lessons learned from lorca to ex
press his own quite different religious and artistic sensibility.
V
Virtually all the examples from Lorca cited thus far have been
taken from the Romancero gitano and the Poema del cante jondo,
59The razor may have been borrowed from the second, “World,” section of
Lorca’s “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar” (Obras V1.154-56; CP
599-609); this part of the poem, in which images of violence are countered
by the “Sacrament of balanced light” 61), “Changeless Sacrament of love
(1.
and discipline” (1. 76), includes the lines: “The razor rested on the dressing
tables, waiting impatiently to section necks” (ll. 41-42); see also the be
/
headed sailor (ll. 19) who metamorphoses into the poet himself with “the
2,
36) in “Christmas Day on the Hudson,” in Poet in New

(1.
new-cut neck”
York (59-61).
PATRICK O'CONNELL 281

F.
works Merton is known to have read from late 1939 through mid
1940. But what of Poet in New York, the work in which the surre
alistic element is generally acknowledged to be at its most in
tense?60 Michael Mott claims that “Merton’s pages on Harlem in
The Seven Storey Mountain, in his journals, and especially his po
ems about Harlem seem now to have been observed through a
special lens and the influence of Garcia Lorca’s ‘The Poet in New
York’” (189). But an examination of the relevant texts suggests
that Mott is somewhat overstating his case. There is certainly not
the least hint of Lorca in the matter-of-fact, and rather sparse,
journal entries Merton actually wrote during his two-week stay
at the Baroness de Hueck’s Friendship House (Run 384-86); and
when he looks back on his experience in the entry for November
30 (Run 464-65), he particularly recalls the holiness of a woman
dying of cancer in the tenements (a figure also central to the ac
count in The Seven Storey Mountain [348]) and reflects, “Harlem
is full of saints”—definitely not the perspective of “Poet in New
York,” which focuses on victimization, and possible retribution,
but not sanctity. In the autobiography as well, Merton seems to
see Harlem much more through the eyes of Catherine de Hueck
than those of Garcia Lorca: he shares and conveys her vision of a
Christian presence that would “transfigure the face of Harlem”
(SSM 348) through the power of the gospel. The title of this chap
ter, “The Sleeping Volcano,” may have been suggested by the ref
erence to volcanoes (l. 41)61 in “The King of Harlem” (PNY 35—43),
and his indictment of “the citizens of that fat metropolis with its
mighty buildings and its veins bursting with dollars” (SSM 347
48) is generally, though not specifically, similar to the denuncia
60See for example Christopher Maurer’s Introduction to his edition of

Poet in New York, in which he summarizes Lorca’s notion of “inspired po
etry,” in which “the traditional metaphor yields to the hecho poético, the ‘po
etic fact,’ an image which seems as inexplicable as a miracle, for it is devoid
of any analogical meaning. . . . This is one of Lorca’s aesthetic ideals in Poet
in New York, a work which has often been described as surrealistic” (xvi);
see also Craige (45-46), and Harris (9-23), particularly his suggestion that
“the book is an amalgam of surrealist techniques and expressionist themes”
(15).
61Craige suggests that “the image of the volcano is central to Lorca’s vi
sion of the black civilization of Harlem, which is boiling inside with the hot
blood of outrage and sexual passion ready to erupt” (57 ), though in fact vol
canoes appear only here and in “Blind Panorama of New York,” 1. 41 (PNY
65-67).
282 ABR 49:3— SEPT. 1998

tion of the rich in such poems as “New York (Office and Arraign
ment)” (PNY 105-109).62 But Merton’s repeated image of the caul
dron (SSM 345, 348), while not particularly original, is not found
in Lorca, and his presentation of Harlem as a revelatory mirror
image of the more “polite” vices “of the rich and of the cultured
and the educated and the white” (SSM 345-46) is his own as well.
Without excluding all Lorcan influence from Merton’s description
of his experience of Harlem, we may regard it as rather less than
the “special lens” through which Merton himself viewed that ex
perience.
A similar conclusion may be reached with regard to the poetry.
Mott notes “echoes of Garcia Lorca” in “Aubade—Harlem” (MDS
42-43; CP 82-83) in particular (Mott 225), but only as “one exam
ple out of many” (597). In fact, however, Merton only wrote two
poems about Harlem, the aubade and “Holy Communion: The
City” (TP [10-11]; CP 39-40); the list could be expanded slightly
by adding a couple of New York poems not specifically focused on
Harlem, “Aubade—The City” (MDS 48-49; CP 85-87), and “Hymn
of Not Much Praise for New York City,” which did not appear un
til the posthumously published Early Poems: 1940-1942 (CP 19
21). “Holy Communion: The City” is developed from (or at least
parallels) the November 30 journal observation that “Harlem—or
Gethsemani—are the stables of Bethlehem where Christ is born
among the outcast and the poor” (Run 464), and shows no influ
ence of Lorca, unless the promise in the final line “To burn down
Harlem with the glad Word of Our Savior” to be regarded
(l.
21)
is
as spiritualized version of the apocalyptic destruction predicted

a
in much of Lorca’s New York poetry. In “Aubade—The City" and

“Hymn of Not Much Praise . . poems with more “secular” fo
.,”
cus, traces of Lorca are somewhat more apparent: the clouds

which “have come like cattle To the cold waters of the city’s
/
river” in the opening lines of the former poem may have meta
morphosed from the “Sleepwalking camels of the idle clouds” (l.
24) of “Pattern and Paradise of the Negroes” (PNY 33-35), and the
“tin dazzle” 4) of the tide couple of lines later draws on fa
(l.
miliar Lorcan adjective;63 the windows closing “Like figures in

a
62The image of “veins” characteristic of Lorca (see “Christmas Day on

is
the Hudson,” 29 [PNY 59-61]; “Unsleeping City,” 19 [PNY 61-65l),

1.
1.
though not in connection with money.

63Note the moon’s tin breasts in “Ballad of the Moon, Moon,” (Obras
1.
8
IV.13-14; CP 519-21).
283
long division” (I. 21) may owe something to references to “multi
plication,” “division,” and “sums” (ll. 1, 3, 5) “In the false dawn of
New York” 9) from “New York (Office and Arraignment)” (PNY
(1.
105-108). In the “Hymn,” New York’s “big face like shining bank
a
. . . full of dimes” (11. 13-14) somewhat resembles Lorca’s refer
/
ence in “The King of Harlem” (PNY 35-43) to “American girls”

who “Bore in their bellies children and money bags” (11. 37-38),
and other references to coins. But in both Merton poems the per
spective clearly that of resident familiar with the details of
is
a
New York City life, not that of a stranger appalled by an unfamil
iar, threatening environment. Merton’s poems show none of the
disorientation, the sense of fragmentation and lack of coherent
a
framework, which marks the nightmarish vision of Lorca’s poet.
As for “Aubade—Harlem,” the poem does suggest the presence
of Lorca even in its form, in which the opening lines reappear as
the conclusion (ll. 1-4, 21-24). The “unbelievable moon”
is
7)
(1.
quite probably borrowed from the “lying moon” 11) of “Pattern
(1.
and Paradise of the Negroes” (PNY 33-35); “the sterile jungles of
the waterpipes and ladders” (l. 5) may have been suggested by
the quite different image of the jungle (arising in the aftermath of
apocalyptic destruction) in “Dance of Death” (PNY 47-53); and
“the white halls of the clinics and the hospitals” (1. 17) may owe
something to the reference to doctors and hospitals in “Jewish
Cemetery” (PNY 109-13, 11. 15-18). But the most obvious Lorcan
image, the “Four flowers of blood” appearing where Christ
is
nailed to the walls of Harlem 16), comes not from Poet in New
(l.
York but from the Romancero gitano, recalling the wounds of

Juan Antonio in “The Dispute” (Obras IV.18-19; CP 525-27), de
scribed as “irises across his body” 19), or the “Three hundred
(1.
brown roses” (1. 41) on the white shirt of the wounded smuggler in
“Sleepwalking Ballad” (Obras IV.20-23; CP 527-31).64 The passion
imagery, the references to Pilate and Judas (ll. 12, 18-19), has no
parallel in Lorca’s New York poetry.65 As in “Holy Communion:
64Merton also draws on this imagery in the central section of the Lorca
elegy: “The spires and high Giraldas, still as nails Nailed in the four cross
/
roads, Watch where the song becomes the color of carnations, /And flowers
/
like wounds in the white dust of Spain” (ll. 15-19) (TP [14-15]; CP 44-45).
65It should be noted that the poem “Crucifixion” from Part VII of Poet in
New York was not available to Humphries (see PNY l7) and therefore did
not appear in the edition Merton read. In any case, the imagery of that
poem much more esoteric than that found in “Aubade—Harlem.” There
is
is
284 ABR 49:3- SEPT. 1998

The City,” the principal lens through which Merton sees Harlem
is liturgical and scriptural. When these elements appear in Poet
in New York, it is to highlight their inadequacy, their utter failure
to redeem or transform. As more than one critic has noted, the
most characteristic line in Poet in New York may well be that
from “Christmas Day on the Hudson” (PNY 59-61): “El mundo
solo por el cielo solo”—“Lonely world and lonely sky” (11. 13, 16).66
The tone of Merton’s early poems is quite different from that of
Poet in New York. The at times excruciatingly intimate, if cryptic,
subjective focus“; the “state of extreme alienation” (Craige 2); the
sense of frustration exemplified by the juxtaposition of unrelated
or clashing images“; the repeated focus on emptiness“; the fail
ure of religious faith70 the primitivism of Harlem’s African
roots"; the extensive animal imagery”; the prediction of violent,
apocalyptic upheaval”: none of these central strands of Poet in
New York is present in Merton’s poems. While internal evidence
from the poems themselves suggests, though it does not defini
tively prove, that Merton was familiar with other poems from the
New York cycle in addition to the one poem mentioned explicitly
in the journal, the Whitman ode, it is impossible to be certain
that he read the entire volume, or to know how he responded to
its perspective of alienation and spiritual emptiness. It is appar
ent that he did not read the work straight through, as his com
a single line in “The King of Harlem” (PNY 35-43) with a paschal image in
it: “y los muchachos se desmayaban en la cruz del desperezo” (l. 39), but in
the context, paralleled with the “muchachas americanas” with money in
their wombs, it appears not to refer to crucified blacks but to whites simply
stretching their arms: Humphries translates the line, “And the boys hung
swooning / Outstretched on the rack of the waking yawn.”
66See for example Craige 50, Predmore 106.
67See Craige 2, 15-20; Harris 25-29, 35; Josephs 75; Predmore 39. Mau
rer in his Introduction warns against an overly simplistic equation of the
persona of the poetry with the author (xviii-xix), though he acknowledges
that the connection is a close one.
68See Craige 11-15.
69See Craige 33—45; Harris 42, 49-50; Predmore 52-53.
7°See Harris 39, 46-59; Predmore 89-102.
71See Harris 37; Walsh, in Morris (109).
72See Craige 55; Harris 15, 19, 32, 37; Predmore 52.
73See Craige 55-57, 62, 66; Harris 33-34, 38; Josephs 78-82, Predmore
39, 61-62.

ments on the ode indicate he had put off reading it for some time.
The lack of any reference to the other New York poems might sug
gest puzzlement, or ambivalence, or might simply be a fortuitous
omission having no particular significance. The evidence of the
poems themselves suggests that while Lorca’s poems on New
York may have had a role in prompting Merton to record in verse
some of his own experience of Harlem, and of the city in general,
and may have provided occasional images, they did not have an
extensive effect in shaping Merton’s perspective on his material.
It is at least safe to conclude that Lorca had already made a sig
nificant impact on Merton as reader and writer prior to the ap
pearance of Poet in New York, and that his acquaintance, however
extensive it may have been, with that volume did not radically al
ter the nature of that impact.“
Though the period of extended direct contact with Lorca’s
work, and therefore of strong influence on his own verse, came to
an end when he entered the monastery in December, 1941, Mer
ton’s appreciation for Lorca was to continue until the end of his
life. When he returned to Lorca’s poetry in 1960, his enthusiasm
was undiminished, as evidenced by a journal entry from Septem
ber 25 of that year: “Reading Lorca again—what a marvelous
poet, so alive, so much strength and vividness and sound. . . .
Wholeness. Primitive and modern. Beauty. Toughness. Music.
Substance. Variety. Originality. Character. Color. Andalusian
weather.” This is a catalogue of poetic virtues that could equally
will have been written twenty years earlier; so also could the ap
preciative statement that accompanies it, which sums up Mer
ton’s sense of the profound effect that Lorca’s verse had on him
from his earliest encounter with it as an aspiring young “poet in
New York” himself: “I can think of no modern poet that gives me
more genuine poetic satisfaction."75 Lorca’s “spell” continued to
suggest to Merton the magic possibilities of language to reveal,
through its beauty, glimpses of a truth hidden both within and be
yond ordinary experience.
74It is possible that Merton may have had Poet in New Ybrk in his mind
as a model when he wrote his own denunciation of modern civilization and
prediction of eschatological catastrophe some years later in the eight-part
title poem of Figures for an Apocalypse; but it is highly unlikely that he had
the volume in front of him as he wrote.
75Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Hears, The
Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume IV: 1960-1963, ed. Victor A. Kramer
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco 1996) 52.
286 ABR 48:3 - SEPT. 1997

LA TRADICION BENEDICTINA I-II
A FEATURE REVIEW
The prolific Spanish monastic historian and theologian Garcia

M. Colombas, O.S.B., has climaxed his life’s work with a six-vol
ume history of the Benedictine movement (La Ti'adicion Bene
dictina I-VI, Zamora, Spain: Ediciones Monte Casino, 1989-1995,
about $150). Colombas began his publishing career with a life of
St. Benedict in 1954, so he has been productive for forty years
(The Catalogus lists his birth year as 1920). Probably his best
known work is El Monacato Primitivo (2 vols., Madrid, 1974
1975). This review covers only Volume One of the series, which is
entitled “Las Raices,” “the roots” (of the Benedictine tradition)
and Volume Two, the sixth and seventh centuries in the West.
VOLUME ONE
Volume One (431 pp.) begins with a chapter on “Universal
Monasticism,” covering mostly the monastic movements of India
(Hindu, Jain, Buddhist). Colombas spends the rest of the volume
outlining early Christian asceticism and monasticism up to the
year AD 500 or the time of St. Benedict of N ursia.
Rather than catalogue what he has to say about the various
countries such as Egypt, Syria and Gaul, it would probably be
more worthwhile to talk about the Author’s sources and his gen
eral perspective on early monasticism. Apparently Colombas is
aiming at a non-scholarly public, for he omits all but essential
documentation and does not provide a bibliography for further
study. The notes show that the Author has read continental re
search up to about 1980, and, in my opinion, he has followed most
of the best scholarship. Many of his discussions are drawn from
the relevant articles in the excellent Dictionnaire de Spiritualité
and Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione. The names that appear
most often in the notes are Gribomont, Guillaumont, Bacht,
Vogiié—in other words, the best Catholic scholars of monasticism
in France and Germany before 1980.
Yet a great deal has been done since that time, and particu
larly in the universities of the United States. The absence of that
287
research seriously dates the book, but it has to be admitted that
would be difficult as yet to create a synthesis of the mountain of
new material—even if one could afford the astronomical prices
being charged for books of this type. Nor does Colombas draw on
any of the current feminist studies. Given his general openness,
though, I feel sure he would find them interesting and perhaps
revolutionary. Colombas is not prejudiced against things Ameri
can: he reads English and has taught in this country. It is just
that his work stops short of the current renaissance in monastic
studies in this country
In some cases, this new material would alter his perspective.
For example, some monastic historians now believe that the fa
mous simplicity and illiteracy of the earliest anchorites, and es
pecially Antony, is largely a myth. Samuel Rubenson thinks that
Athanasius fabricated Antony’s ignorance as a theological topos
in order to counteract gnostic, esoteric heretical sects. James
Goehring believes that the early monks were not nearly as fussy
about doctrinal orthodoxy as the bishops. The primary texts such
as the vitae of various monks often present them as ferocious
warriors against heresy, but it is well to remember that these
texts were often written, or at least heavily influenced, by the
bishops. For his part, Colombas shows little awareness of some of
these controversies.
This, of course, does not mean that he is poorly informed. In
fact, his survey is about as well-informed as one could be before
1980. In some cases, such as the chapters on Syria and Augus
tine, he is extremely competent. Regarding Egypt, however, I
think that his chapters on Evagrius and Cassian are not particu
larly helpful. He has no pity on Evagrius, for he concurs com
pletely with the councils that condemned him (AD 553 and fol
lowing). Perhaps if Colombas had been able to take into account
the current research of scholars like G. Bunge and J. Driscoll, he
would have been less negative. He is probably right that Cassian
was orthodox but not brilliant, but can he really be taken seri
ously when he says that Jerome and Augustine had more influ
ence onLatin monasticism than did Cassian?
Regarding his report on Syria, it seems to me that Colombas is
somewhat more indulgent than he is with Egypt. Although he is
well aware of the tendency toward wild extremism among the
Syrian monks, he can never bring himself to question their ortho
288 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

doxy, or at least their rootage in the New Testament. He seems
convinced that the whole Syrian church sprang from Palestinian
Christianity, rather than from heretical sources such as
Manicheism. But that in itself does not condone the anti-material
bias that seemed endemic in Syria.
One could go through the various chapters and give the Author
high or low grades for them, but it probably would be more help
ful to talk more about his general approach to monastic history.
Before I do, let me say that I am in hearty agreement with it, and
it is always good to find a kindred spirit! To put it succinctly,
Colombas always emphasizes the first word in the word-pair
“Christian Monasticism.” Practically speaking, he judges a Chris
tian monastic movement by how true it remains to the Bible. But
the Bible is a huge book, containing many different theologies.
The biblical doctrine that Colombas identifies as the central
theme of Jesus is precisely the unitive message: We are to love
one another and live in communion just as Jesus and the Father
do.
Given his communal orientation, Colombas has a hard time
appreciating any movement, such as anchoritism, that seems to
regard community life as secondary to solitary contemplation, or
merely a preparation for it. Since the teaching of Evagrius and
Cassian has this general tendency, it is not surprising that he un
dervalues them. Yet he does note that hardly any of the an
chorites actually lived in complete solitude. In fact, their lives
were probably as communal as that of many modern monks,
given our current predilection for privacy and social space.
Conversely, Colombas is sure to favor any monastic movement
that places community high on its list of values. Consequently, he
has nothing but good to say about Basil, Pachomius and Augus
tine. I would agree that these three cenobitic “founders” have to
be taken seriously, but I would consider Pachomius more impor
tant than the other two. Of course, Basil and Augustine were
great bishops, great theologians and great writers, but neither of
them spent more than a few years actually living in community.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether the groups they were
writing for were actually living what we would call cenobitic life.
They have wonderful things to say about community because
they know the biblical sources and they are able to fashion con
vincing arguments. Yet one wonders whether either of them had
much personal cenobitic experience.
TERRENCE G. KARDONG, O.S.B. 289

The very opposite was true of Pachomius. He wrote very little,
but the stories that we have about his life and the life of his com
munities are very impressive indeed. Even though Colombas
knows this, I do not think he makes a very strong case for Pa
chomius’ greatness. Although he does refer to Armand Veilleux’
wonderful Pachomian Koinonia I-III (Cistercian Publications
1980-82), one gets the impression he had not spent much time
with it before he wrote this chapter. In his conclusion, Colombas
admits that we are faced with a fairly difficult theoretical prob
lem when we study early monasticism: the very nature of monas
ticism is centrifugal, that is, a flight from human institutions
such as marriage, wealth and power. The quintessential monk as
a “Universal Archetype” (R. Pannikkar) is a person who leaves
aside all earthly, ephemeral things to search for the Absolute, and
this search depends heavily on solitary meditation.
On the other hand, the Bible, and particularly the New Testa
ment, does not teach the need to abandon human community and
an active social life in order to seek the Kingdom of God. Indeed,
the fundamental ethic of the Bible is the practical love of neigh
bor: no one can claim to love the invisible God without loving the
visible, palpable neighbor. So it is quite accurate to say, with
Colombas, that the basic ethic of the Bible is unitive: to form a
community of love in imitation of Jesus and for the honor and
glory of the Father.
How then does one get these two things together? It is not en
tirely a theoretical problem, for the New Testament itself gives us
examples of a sort of monastic ascesis on behalf of the Kingdom.
For one thing, the disciples left their families and villages to fol
low Jesus. Several times Colombas points to this little fraternity
as the first monastic community. Whether it makes sense to do so
is not so clear to me. When John Cassian claims in Conf 18.5 that
the first Christians were really cenobites, he is usually dismissed
as historically impaired.
Nevertheless, it is a plain fact that there were Christian celi
bates in the earliest days of the new Church. Both male and fe
male ascetics chose to forego marriage on behalf of the gospel (see
1 Cor 7). Unlike the later monks, they did not flee to the desert or
close themselves off in self-contained community, but continued
to live in their home villages and parishes. The New Testament
saw no conflict between this asceticism and the pursuit of the
Kingdom.
290 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Unlike St. Benedict (RB 1) and some of the later writers,
Colombas does not disdain these earlier ascetics as “sarabaites”
or “gyrovagues.” Benedict is talking about sixth century aberra
tions, but Colombas recognizes that “private monks” were often
the very heart and soul of the local church. Certainly they were
the most radical followers of Jesus’ gospel. Nevertheless, radical
ism was also a serious problem in the early Church. Often enough
these ascetics lapsed into confused and heretical sects that typi
cally tended to consider all things physical as shameful, including
marriage, work, certain kinds of food and so on. It was only the ef
forts of strong bishops like Basil and Athanasius who kept the
whole ascetic movement from bolting the Church. Colombas real
izes this and is thankful for it.
At any rate, even in India, the monastic impulse in itself has
not always resulted in eremitical dispersal. While it is true that
the basic thrust of Hinduism, and especially Jainism, seems to be
toward solitary contemplation, the Buddhist monastic movement
has more often resulted in community life. While the communal
side of monasticism is what most interests Colombas, he recog
nizes that community life in itself does not make monasticism.
The intense search for the Absolute (God) that seems inseparable
from all true monasticism requires a good deal of time alone and
also withdrawal from ordinary human commerce.
This need for serious attention to God alone within community
seems to be what attracts Colombas to St. Augustine. Although
he wrote only a short, rather fragmentary, Rule for Monks (and
Nuns), nevertheless the Author gives him top marks. He points to
a passage at the beginning of that Rule as a key to understanding
Augustine’s theology of monastic life: “The first reason why you
have been joined together in one community is so that you [learn
to] live harmoniously in one house, and become one heart and
mind in your journey toward God.”
Since this is virtually the first sentence in Augustine’s Rule, it
stands as a powerful first principle for that whole document. In
deed, the rest of that short Rule can be regarded as an extended
commentary on this one principle. Everything he says in his little
Rule is calculated to promote the unity of the social body that is
the community. But in itself that could be seen as a basic formula
for the success of any community, Christian, monastic or not.
That makes the last few words so important: “in your journey to
ward God.” For Colombas, these five words (two in Latin: in

Deum) show that Augustine does not conceive Christian commu
nity as an absolute end in itself, but as a process that brings the
whole group ever closer to God and eventually results in commu
nion in God.
Likewise, Colombas recognizes that Augustine is a powerful
proponent of both the community and the individual. On the one
hand, all through his long life, Augustine acknowledged the need
for friends and companions. And he took the New Testament
rather literally in its call for common life, which he always de
manded of the clergy of Hippo. On the other hand, Augustine
never submerged the individual in the mass. Indeed, his famous
Confessions are one of the most profound probes into the depths
of the soul ever written. Colombas quotes Ortega y Gasset to the
effect that Augustine was the first ancient writer to fully under
stand the grandeur of individual conscience.
There is one serious omission in this study, and that concerns
Palestine. By the year 500, there were many important monastic
foundations in the Judaean Desert and at Gaza as well. Not a
word is said about these places, nor the great saints who inhab
ited them. Of course, the pioneering archeological work of Yitzar
Hirschfeld had not been published (or done!) by 1980, but surely
Colombas must have heard of the famous book (The Desert a City,
Oxford UP 1966) by Derwas Chitty that deals so well with Pales
tinian monasticism.
Of course, Chitty himself wrote long before Hirschfeld had
published his findings in The Judean Desert Monasteries in the
Byzantine Period (Yale UP 1992). A thorough search of the desert
east of Jerusalem by this Israeli team located the ruins of no less
than sixty monasteries, only a few of which are still inhabited.
Hirschfeld’s wonderfully illustrated book shows how it was possi
ble for both hermits and cenobites to live in one of the world’s
least hospitable landscapes.
In sum, then, we can say that Colombas has written a fine sur
vey of pre-Benedictine monasticism. He has not solved all the
problems, but at least he has recognized them. And if the quest
for God through solitary contemplation is the specific difference
between monastic existence and non-monastic existence, Colom
bas recognizes that it is not the heart of Christianity. The New
Testament demands the same of all Christians: love of neighbor
leading into God.
292 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

VOLUME TWO
In the second volume of his six-volume work La Tradicion
Benedictina, Dom Colombas covers monasticism in the Latin
West during the sixth and seventh centuries. Since these were
the darkest of the so-called Dark Ages, we might expect that the
monastic scene would be barren. We are well aware that Saints
Benedict and Gregory lived in those troubled times, but we know
little about the rest of the monastic scene. Colombas sets out to
fill that gap in our knowledge, and he succeeds.
Yet he spends the first 275 pages of this 513-page book on the
heroes. Regarding the Benedictine Rule, Colombas thinks mod
ern research has put far too much emphasis on the sources. He is
especially critical of those who concentrate on Benedict’s depen
dence on the Rule of the Master, which Colombas heartily dis
likes. Although he does not engage in sustained polemics, he aims
most of his critical darts at Adalbert de Vogué, who spent the first
hundred pages of his spiritual commentary on RB (Volume VII,
English translation Cistercian Studies Publications 1983) dis
cussing RM!
Colombas is right when he says that Benedict is his own man
and knows how to correct the Master, and he is also right to com
plain that Vog'iié tries too hard to show how the two agree. But for
some parts of the RB, it is hard to see exactly what Benedict is do
ing unless one first examines the material in the RM that he is
modifying. It does not help, of course, that Colombas cannot abide
the Master. Granted, he is a hard writer to love, but we simply
cannot ignore the Master if want to understand Benedict. Vogué
struck back at Colombas recently with an article dramatically en
titled “Faut-il mettre le Maitre en Enfer?” (“Must we send the
Master to hell?” Collectanea Cisterciensia 57 [1995] 132-45).
Even though I myself was mildly chastised in the footnotes of
that article for the same sins, I think that Colombas deserved
what he got. After all, he calls Vogiié the “ideal disciple” of the
Master (p. 318)!
But having said that, I would hasten to add that I agree with
his overall assessment of the Rule of Benedict as a Rule that
cares more for communal charity than for individual asceticism.
Although his rather plodding trek through the text of the Rule
does not seem to me to add anything to our understanding of the
document, I appreciate his emphasis on the biblical and the com
munal elements in the RB.

In dealing with the Life of Benedict as presented in the Dia
logues of Gregory the Great, Colombas does somewhat better. It
seems to me that he wends his way through this scholarly mine
field with a sure tread, somehow managing to sort out bewilder
ing material to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. What is the
problem? Simply that the spiritual hero presented by Gregory
seems to have little to do with the person who wrote the Rule of
Benedict.
Along with most modern scholars, Colombas has little doubt
that Gregory has largely manufactured the figure of Benedict in
Dialogue II. According to the Spanish savant, Gregory was a sick,
beleaguered man when he wrote this material, and be aimed to
encourage his dispirited Italian audience with the deeds of a mir
acle worker. But he also notices how Gregory prefers moral mira
cles to physical ones. Moreover, Gregory shows how Benedict
grew in power, love and contemplation.
Contemplation was a major concern for Pope Gregory, and not
merely as a theory. In his extensive chapters on this figure of tow
ering importance for all aspects of Christian history, Colombas
makes a strong point that Gregory’s teaching is so effective be
cause it flows out of genuine spiritual experience. Even though he
was burdened with the government of the whole Church, and
even with the civil administration of a country submerged in the
chaos of the Lombard invasion, Gregory nevertheless maintained
a vibrant interior life. Moreover, he was not reluctant to let others
into that life in his preaching. In that sense, he is one of the most
accessible of all spiritual writers among the Church Fathers.
Gregory, of course, was a monk. He had been mayor of Rome
before he became a monk, and he was again taken out of a
monastery to be made pope. In his writings, he often laments the
loss of his beloved monastic peace and silence for contemplation,
sometimes to the point that one wishes he would quit complain
ing. But it would be wrong to suspect that Gregory was funda
mentally selfish and unwilling to serve the Church and society.
In fact, he was strongly critical of those monks who refuse to
share the fruit of their contemplation through preaching.
In this sense, Gregory seems to be a writer for our own times.
He is particularly anxious that monastic values be made accessi
ble to the general Christian population. Colombas remarks that
even in his writings for monks, such as the commentaries on Job
and Ezechiel, Gregory seems to avoid monastic vocabulary pre
294 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

cisely for the reason that this element would close out the lay lis
tener. Although we used to hear it said that the Church needs to
rid itself of monastic influence, nowadays a lot of people seem in
terested in monastic values. For such people, Gregory can be es
pecially helpful.
But Colombas is aware that Gregory can at first glance seem
anything but helpful to the modern reader. For one thing, he
seems inordinately pessimistic about the world around him. Of
course, Rome was surrounded by besieging armies through much
of his pontificate, and Gregory was chronically ill—probably from
excessive fasting. Indeed, he ran the Church from his bed for the
last years of his pontificate (590-604). Colombas recognizes that
profound pessimism can be a sign of a lack of true faith, but he in
sists that Gregory only turns his back on earth to increase antici
pation for the joys of heaven.
Besides, Gregory did not neglect earth for heaven. He was one
of the finest administrators in the history of the papacy, as is wit
nessed by his correspondence and the record of his accomplish
ments. Colombas remarks that in an age when Roman civiliza
tion was collapsing, Gregory managed to raise standards in every
aspect of Church life. It seems to me that Colombas understands
and appreciates Gregory to the point that he has written one of
the best studies of him up to this time.
Even though Benedict and Gregory would become major influ
ences on the medieval Church, Colombas does not think that this
happened quickly or directly. It as not as if the Rule of Benedict
were simply handed on to the rest of the Church by its greatest
protagonist, namely, Pope Gregory. In fact, there is little indica
tion that the Rule had any impact on the Latin West for a long
time (until about AD 800). But that does not mean that monasti
cism was dormant or decadent during the interval. In fact, there
were flourishing monastic movements all over the Latin West
during the sixth and seventh centuries, and one of the great con
tributions of Colombas’ second volume is to describe this little
known scene to us.
Colombas is mightily impressed by the harshness of life in this
period of the early Middle Ages. He stresses again and again the
rather crude and violent personalities who made up not only gen
eral society, but also the monastic ranks at that time. This en
ables him to answer some of our questions about the way the
monastic Rules of this time seem to concentrate on the passive

virtues of obedience and humility. They also considered that
monks and nuns of that time were so undisciplined that they
needed to be threatened against all sorts of faults and crimes.
The picture is not pretty, but it is realistic.
Of course, not all the monastic Rules written during this time
were so draconian. Most of them strike a balance between the
rigor of the Desert Fathers and the more humane vision of St.
Augustine. Indeed, Colombas is especially fond of the monastic
Rules written in the region of Arles, and among these he likes
that of Ferriolus most of all, calling it the “pearl of the Arles fam
ily” (p. 310; actually quoting G. Holzherr). The reason is simple:
Ferriolus makes much of community life, biblical prayer and
study, and his abbot models humble service. Those are Colombas
favorite monastic values, and I am not one to disagree with him.
Yet some of the monastic Rules written in this period can
hardly be called “humane” at all. Certainly St. Caesarius’ enclo
sure of his nuns in absolute cloister does not look too balanced to
day. Nor does St. Columbanus’ ferocious penalties for what can
seem like minor faults. In Spain, Fructuosus of Braga is called
(by Colombas) a harsh but mystical Goth. At least he shows here
that one can be both things, but it seems to me that he ascribes
too much to racial characteristics. It is one thing to explain Cae
sarius’ enclosure of women as a safety precaution in a society
where northern invaders roamed the roads. But to fall back on
the “Gothic card” whenever a Rule becomes harsh seems too easy.
How does Benedict fit into all of this? Colombas thinks that his
Rule appealed to some people especially for its orderliness. Since
it provides a solid framework for everyday life in a monastery, it
was particularly useful in situations where a lack of order was
seen as a serious problem in monasteries. We know that Charle
magne and Benedict of Aniane thought that was the case in the
Carolingian Empire of the ninth century. Hence the RB was
fetched from Italy and imposed on all the transalpine monaster
ies, willy-nilly.
Colombas, however, thinks that this same process was well un
derway long before the Synod of Aachen in 819-20. Indeed, he
claims that the Merovingian court, the very people who are often
accused of creating chaos in the Frankish Church of the sixth and
seventh centuries, were the ones who favored the RB. This is a
point of view that I have not seen before, but that does not mean
it is new since I am no expert on the Middle Ages. Moreover,
296 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Colombas makes it in a way that does not shed too much honor on
the RB.
In his chapter on Irish monasticism, he stresses the profound
asceticism and mysticism of many of those monks. This was espe
cially true of those who voluntarily left the Emerald Isle to sym
bolize their wish to do penance in this world so as to gain heaven.
The place where many of them went to do penance was continen
tal Europe, and the specific context was the decadent Frankish
church.
The most famous example of this momentous Irish invasion
was St. Columbanus, a man who was as intrepid as he was fer
vent. Like many of the Irish hermits, he considered it his duty to
convert the pagans, and the nobility of northeast Gaul were in his
opinion far from thoroughly christianized. The Merovingian king
gave him the ruined fortress of Luxeuil for his first monastery,
but after twenty years he ran afoul of the nobility with his fiery
preaching against their vices.
Spiritual fire is the element of Irish monasticism that Colom
has admires, which tells us as much about him as it does about
them. He says that it was the element that was lacking in conti
nental Christianity, and in fact is the heart of all religion. Actu
ally, Colombas appreciates the mystical element in Celtic monas
ticism more than the moralistic turn it often took. Granted, Irish
monasticism could be rather disorganized. That is why many ab
bots in the sixth and seventh centuries used the Rule of Benedict
as a framework to structure the more intensely spiritual content
of the Rule of Columbanus. An example of this process can be
seen in the Rule of Waldebert, who was abbot of Luxeuil from
629-70. It is a good combination of law and spirit.
But in Colombas’ view the Rule of Benedict won out in France
and Germany because the monasteries were essentially co-opted
by the nobility. The great families were more interested in cul
tural advancement than religion, so they made the abbeys into
virtual cities where the arts and learning could flourish. That was
accomplished by endowing the abbeys with immense riches, and
also by filling them with their sons and daughters.
According to Colombas, their use of the RB to structure these
royal abbeys was a distortion of its original purpose. Written for a
small, familial monastic group living a communal life closely
based on the gospel, the Rule was later claimed as the ideal
framework for vast, complicated monastic cities that would flour

ish throughout the Middle Ages. One might argue with certain
aspects of that thesis, but I think it is essentially accurate. There
are elements, such as the prominence of the abbot, that lend
themselves to this kind of elaboration, but by and large RB was
misused. One has only to think of the proliferation of the priest
hood in the early medieval period, despite Benedict’s reservations
about clericalism. Nor does the Rule promote the “learned monk”
so dear to later monastic ages.
But to return to Colombas, he has accomplished a great work
with this second volume. If the section on the RB is a bit flat, the
part on Gregory more than makes up for it.
However, his unique accomplishment in this book, in my opin
ion, is in surveying the many Western monastic Rules of the sixth
and seventh centuries. After he has followed certain themes, like
manual labor, through all the Rules, he then proceeds to study
each region for itself. In doing so, he arrives at some surprising
conclusions. For example, he declares that Cassiodorus’ “think
tank” at Vivarium was nevertheless a real monastery, but he has
nothing good to say about the “family-monasteries” of Spain. As
we have seen, he loves the Irish for their spiritual intensity, and
also because they managed to combine high culture with asceti
cism. He gives the Anglo-Saxon nuns their full due as some of the
most powerful and effective religious leaders of the day. He recog
nizes that Lérins produced bishops because most of the monks
were Gallo-Roman aristocrats with excellent education.
In general, Colombas seems to maintain a healthy respect for
desert asceticism, cenobitic communalism, biblical culture and
the need to participate in the Church’s mission. This is certainly
a worthwhile book, as good a survey as we have of the obscure
monastic beginnings of the Latin West.
298 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

PETER DAMIAN’S LIBER GOMORRHIANU S:
THE TEXT VS. THE SCHOLARLY TRADITION
Kenneth C. Russell
The negative reaction of scholars to the only extended me

dieval treatment of homosexuality, the Liber Gomorrhianus, has
badly sullied the reputation of its author, St. Peter Damian
(1007-72).1 To make matters worse, their response is based, in
fact, on the slightly bowdlerized version of the Book of Gomorrah
found in Migne’s, Patrologia Latina.2 One specialist in sexual
ethics, André Guindon, goes so far as to doubt that a man who
would write such a book could really be a saint.El Even Owen J.
Blum, who generally maintains a positive attitude toward the
eleventh-century hermit in his 1947 thesis on Damian’s spiritual
teaching, notes that in 1894 C. Mirbt found the work so alarm
ingly frank that he thought I‘one could doubt the good intentions
of the author were it not known to be Damian’s.”4 John Boswell,
whose history of the reaction of Christianity to homosexuality re
ceived extraordinary scholarly and popular attention when it ap
peared in 1980, claims that Peter “described in lurid detail sev
Dr. Kenneth C. Russell is an independent scholar who specializes in the as

cetical and contemplative traditions of early and medieval monasticism.
His address: 1505-40 Landry St., Vanier, Canada, KlL8K4. E-mail:
I(Russ84373@aol.com.
1Peter Damian, Letters 31-60, trans. by Owen J. Blum, (The Fathers of
the Church: Medieval Continuation, 2) (Washington, DC: Catholic U of
America P 1990). Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Liber Gom
orrhianus are from this text which is henceforth given as MC. MGH refers
to the critical edition of the Latin text of Letter 31 (Liber Gomorrhianus ) in
Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 1, ed. by Kurt Reindel (Munich: Monumenta
Germaniae Historica 1983) 286-330.
2PL 145. 161-190. This was the basis for the first English version of the
Liber Gomorrhianus : Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Cen
tury Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices, trans. with Introduc
tion and Notes by Pierre J. Payer (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier U P 1982).
3André Guindon, The Sexual Creators: An Ethical Proposal for Can
cerned Christians (Lanham, MD: University P of America 1986) 178. He
refers to him as “‘Saint' Peter Damian.”
4Owen J. Blum, St. Peter Damian: His Teaching on the Spiritual Life
(Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P 1947) 187.
299
eral varieties of homosexual intercourse and charged that they
were extremely common.”5
Some scholars who are shocked by Peter Damian’s vehement
opposition to homosexual practices, take a psychological ap
proach to his text. In effect, this enables them to bypass the argu
ments of the book and go directly to an ad hominem attack on the
author. If the man himself, who was the prior of the hermit colony
of Fonte Avellana and, after 1067, the reluctant Cardinal-Bishop
of Ostia, was unbalanced, then we are free to read the work as an
explosion of the personal pressures pent up within him.6 The
claim—based on the presumption that Freudian analysis enables
us to understand Peter Damian better than he did himself—is
that the text tells us more about what was wrong with Peter
Damian than it does about the situation of his time.
Michael Goodich, for example, remarks that “the particular
venom with which Peter was to tackle the problem of clerical
sodomy suggests a personal experience of traumatic impact.”7 In
deed, Goodich traces Peter’s stance against homosexuality and
what he refers to as Peter’s “antisexual campaign” back to his
childhood: he “is himself a classic case of the abandoned and bru
talized child whose early deprivations drove him to penitential
extremes in later life.”8 In this respect Goodich, like F. Little in
his influential essay on Peter Damian’s personal development,9
follows the account of Peter Damian’s life written by his younger
contemporary, John of Lodi.10 André Guindon also chooses to take
John of Lodi’s historically unreliable account of Peter Damian’s
childhood as solid fact.11 Peter Damian was, Guindon claims, “a
5John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay

People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1980) 211.
6For the life and career of Peter Damian, see Jean Leclercq, Saint Pierre
Damien; ermite et homme d’Eglise (Rome: Edizioni di Storia letturatura
1960).
7Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later
Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio 1979) 19.
31bid. 18.
9K. Little, “The Personal Development of Peter Damian,” in Order and
Innovation in Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. by
William C. Jordan et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P 1976) 317-41.
1°John of Lodi, “Vita B. Petri Damiani,” PL 144. 113-46. See esp. 116-17.
11Benedetto Calati, “Pierre Damien,” D8 122. 1552 remarks that “la
période de l’enfance ne nous est connue que par la Vita de Jean de Lodi;
300 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

battered child, rejected by his mother, beaten constantly, and
treated as a slave by an older brother and his cruel wife during
the first twelve years of his life.”12 Others condemn the austere
hermit for using crude language13 or being violent.14
THE SCHOLARLY TRADITION

“Lurid,” “prurient,” “shocking”! Readers who come to the text
with these judgments ringing in their ears are in for a disap
pointment. There are no sensational descriptions of homosexual
couplings, no repressed, sniggering delight in what goes on in the
dark, and nothing shocking beyond Peter Damian’s readiness to
dismiss ruthlessly all those guilty of homosexual practices from
the clerical ranks.
The references to the Book of Gormorrah, in fact, are more tit
illating than the book itself. What we seem to have here is the
snowball effect of a scholarly reference to a book frequently re
ferred, to but seldom read. In the transmission from one sec
ondary source to another, an accumulation of misinformation has
become respectable by virtue of the act of repetition. A contempo
rary scholar who wants to make a passing reference to the work
naturally concludes that what he or she reads about the Book of
Gomorrah must be true since one scholar after another says the
same thing.
Actually, compared to the scholarly myth about the work, the
Book of Gomorrah makes rather bland reading. Its description of
the four categories of homosexual acts Peter Damian discusses
are exact but hardly lurid.15 A literal translation of the expur
divers auteurs modernes se sont montrés réservés a son égard, voyant dans
son texte un récit ‘largement fictif' (Lucchesi, Per una vita, t. 1, n. 4), un ‘pe
tit roman.’ (J. Leclercq, S. Pierre Damien, p. 17).”
12Guindon, Sexual Creators, 178-79. Guindon’s description inadvertently
brings out the “Cinderella,” survival-against-all-odds” aspect which may
have motivated Peter Damian's biographer to fabricate this story of his
hero’s early life.
13Carlo Mazzotti, “I1 Celibato e la Castita del Clero in S. Pier Damiano,"
in Studi su san Pier Damiano in onore del cardinale Amleto Giovanni Ci
cognani (Faenza: Venerabile-Seminario vescovile Pio XII 1961) 125.
14Albert Gauthier, “La sodomie dans le droit canonique médiéval,” in
Bruno Rey, ed., L’érotisme au Moyen Age: Etudes présentée au 3e colloque de
l’lnstitut d’études médiévales (Montreal: Editions de l'Aurore 1977) 118.
15Lec1ercq, Saint Pierre Damien, p. 70, in fact, maintains that “sur un
sujet délicat, le Liber Gomorrhianus avait tout dit, avec précision et clarté,
KENNETH C. RUSSELL 301

gated text in Migne would read: “Some sin alone, some by the
hands of another, some between the thighs, some finally, by a con
summated act against nature.”16 Owen J. Blum translates the
fuller, more precise passage in the critical edition of the Latin
text: “There are some who pollute themselves; there are others
who befoul one another by mutually handling their genitals; oth
ers still who fornicate between the thighs; and others who do so
from the rear.”17 Given the possibilities for vulgarity the descrip
tion of anal intercourse offers, even Peter Damian’s unexpur
gated account seems objective and methodical.18 It is frank but
hardly crude.19
Nor does the work itself support the impression some authors
give that Peter Damian thought that homosexual practices were
common throughout the Church. He says, in fact, that this de
grading vice has sprung up in his region and that there will be
grave consequences if immediate action to stop its spread is not
taken.20
sans aucune vulgarité. Pierre Damien avait su décrire et distinguer les dif
féréntes formes du vice en évitant l’obscénité.”(Leclercq is referring to the
text as it appears in Migne.) Peter Damian’s conception of homosexuality,
which extends to all illicit sexual practices which remain focused, in one
way or another, on the same sex, is obviously wider than our contemporary
usage. He justifies this broad understanding of sodomy in MC 41-44; MGH
319-21.
16My translation. See Payer, Book of Gomorrah p. 29, n.3.
17MC 6-7; MGH 287.
18Obviously, once whoever produced the bowdlerized version of the Liber
Gormorrhianus found in Migne had modified the initial passage defining
homosexual acts, he was obliged to remove or revise similar or identical
passages in the book. He also toned down the language here and there.
Thus Peter Damian’s sodomitae frequently become carnales homines in
Migne.
19'I‘he language is also frank and direct in Leo IX's response to Peter
Damian’s text (MC 3-5; MGH 285-86; PL 145. 160; Mansi 19, 685-86): Leo
speaks of those “qui vel propriis manibus, vel invicem inter se egerunt se
men, vel etiam inter femora profuderunt . . . vel . . . in terga prolapsi sunt.”
While John Boswell finds the almost identical terminology of Peter Damian
lurid, he does not take offence at this passage in the pope’s reply because he
believes it must be interpreted in such a way as to conform with what he
claims is the euphemistic tone of the whole letter (Christianity, Social Tbl
erance, and Homosexuality, p. 366, note 29). This allows him to point to Pe
ter Damian’s language as something unique and reprehensible. The fact of
the matter is that the papal letter is polite but not in the least euphemistic.
20MC 6; MGH 287.
302 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

The tradition of scholarly references to the Book of Gomorrah
has turned Peter Damian into a monstrous strawman with the
appropriate horns and evil intent. A purely negative impression
of the Liber Gomorrhianus, bolstered by a Freudian interpreta
tion of its author’s intentions, has, as a result, become normative.
This scholarly portrait of Peter Damian as a violent, homophobic
figure has been constructed, in the main, in the process of trying
to present a more positive view of homosexuality and in arguing
for the recognition of gay rights. In this context—which is not at
issue here—-Peter Damian becomes the enemy, “the most vocal
spokesman of the antigay campaign in the history of the
Church.”21
THE WORK IN OUTLINE

But what did he actually say and why did he say it? Or, to es
cape the Freudian trap, why did he say he said it? What happens
if we analyze the work instead of the author?
The Book of Gomorrah falls into two sections. In the first, Peter
Damian presents his arguments for a strict interpretation of the
laws against clerics who engage in homosexual acts directly to
Pope Leo IX (1048-54), much as a trial lawyer might address the
bench.22 But then, at a certain point, he turns, as a prosecutor
might, to face the accused: “How I weep for you, unhappy soul. . .
.”23 Finally, some pages later, Peter Damian returns to the con
cerns of the first section and repeats his plea for a papal ruling:
“And now, most holy Father, I return to you at the end of this
work. . . 3’“ The first section is clearly canonical, the second pas
toral.
In the first section Peter Damian assumes the stance of some
one seeking an interpretation of the law from the highest court,
as it were. As he reiterates several times, an individual cannot
make law. But the rigor of his argument makes it evident that he
has no real doubt about what the law should be and how it should
be interpreted. Nonetheless, he submits his case to the supreme
authority and asks for a definitive judgment.
21Guindon, Sexual Creators 178

22MC 3-32; MGH 286-311.
23MC 33; MGH 311. This section runs from MC 33-52; MGH 311-29. It
also includes some words addressed to the wider readership.
24MC 52; MGH 329.

We should note that in his written response to Peter Damian,
Leo IX praises him for the cogency of his argument and fine style,
but backs away from his harsh interpretation of the law. Leo con
cedes that ideally Peter is right—clerics who engage in homosex
ual acts should be reduced to the lay state but he decides,
nonetheless, to take a “more humane” (sed nos humanius
agentes25) approach. This, in fact, can be read as a subtle tap on
the wrist because Peter had specifically rebuked superiors who
take a “more humane stance” than is expedient (humaniores for
sitan, quam expediatzs). The Pope, in effect, is saying that this is,
in general, the right approach.
Despite its notoriety in the modern world, the book does not
seem to have had any significant influence in the Middle Ages. In
fact, there is no evidence that the work was ever used by subse
quent authors.” I do not intend, therefore, to take time to con
sider Peter Damian’s canonical arguments. Others have esti
mated their worth and considered why he included this bit of ma
terial and omitted that.28 Part of his text is taken up establishing
the validity of certain laws and explaining why other more com
monly referred-to canons should be rejected. It is the type of ar
gument any skilled lawyer might make in the process of laying
the foundation of his case.
VERSUS HOMOSEXUAL PRACTICES

I want to focus instead on why he argues so vigorously against
homosexual practices in the first place. Given that Peter
Damian’s purpose is to get the pope to legislate against clerics en
gaged in homosexual acts along the lines of his own strict inter
pretation of the law, a certain degree of exaggeration is to be ex
pected. If Peter Damian wants the pope to act, he must convince
him that a very great evil requires his immediate attention.
Peter Damian accordingly compares the spread of homosexual
practices among the clergy to a cancerous growth29 and a fester
25MGH 286.
26lbid. 288.
27Payer, “Introduction,” Book of Gomorrah, 22.
2{*Ibid, 15-19. Also see A. Gauthier, “La sodomie dans le droit canonique
médiéval,” 116-119.
29MC 6; MGH 287.
304 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

ing disease.30 He goes further and states: “It is not without cause
that this shameful deed is considered to be the worst of crimes.”1
It is, finally, the vice which“surpasses the enormity of all others.” 32
Why? Because, in Peter Damian’s opinion, it gives great scan
dal and interferes with the Church's pastoral mission. In terms of
the priestly transmission of the sacraments, it poisons the chan
nel of grace by corrupting the relationship between one priest and
another, between members of the hierarchy and their clerical
subjects, and between priests and monks.
The most striking example he gives of this is the case of a
bishop having sexual intercourse with those he has ordained.33
For Peter Damian, this violation of the bishop’s “spiritual sons”
amounts to a kind of spiritual incest. It is in this context that he
expresses the opinion that bestiality is a more tolerable sin than
homosexual intercourse.“ The man who abuses an animal does
not take another man down to Hell with him.
Peter Damian is likewise horrified by priests who mutually en
gage in homosexual acts and then absolve one another of their
sins. They, of course, let one another off with a light penance so
it follows, then, that they have become penitents involved in great

crimes, and still their lips are not pale from fasting nor are their bod
ies wasted by self-denial. Moreover, since they do not hesitate to gorge
themselves, their passions are basely aroused to their usual lust. Thus
it happens that he who has yet to weep for the sins he has committed,
is guilty of still more lamentable crimes.35
The pastoral responsibility to guide a sinner to repentance is

frustrated by the darkness the two priests share. It is a case of
the blind leading the blind.
30MC 8; MGH 289.
31Ibid.
32MC 30; MGH 309.
33MC 15-16; MGH 294-97. As O. Blum points out (MC p.16, n. 32), the
omission of the following lines from the Migne text of the Liber Gomorrhi
anus has kept commentators from realizing that Peter Damian’s allusion to
“spiritual begetting” in this passage refers to the bishop-cleric relationship:
“Indeed, there is scarcely any difference between receiving a person from
the lay state into the clerical order and thus begetting a spiritual son to
God, and baptizing or standing as godfather to one baptized. To be sure, the
canonical institution of orders is a renunciation of the world and as such is,
in some way, a second baptism.” (MC 15-16; MGH 295.)
34MC 16; MGH 296.
35MC 17; MGH 297.

Peter Damian thinks clerics involved in homosexual practices
are especially worthy of dismissal from the clerical ranks when
their actions cause scandal to others. His comment that even cler
ics who are known to have had intercourse with eight or ten men
retain their offices, indicates that he is convinced that their ho
mosexual activities in the shadows do, in fact, become common
knowledge.36 Obviously, those on the prowl for an illicit sexual
partner would have to solicit a number of men to find the eight to
ten who are, as Peter Damian puts it, “equally foul.” It is hard to
see how scandal could be avoided.
Peter Damian, therefore, challenges the excuse that, given the
needs of the church, it is pastorally inexpedient to dismiss clerics
engaged in homosexual practices, by arguing that more harm is
done by keeping these lapsed clerics in their positions. The fact of
the matter is that their example invites others to sin. If those in
leadership positions can commit this sin and continue on as be
fore, the impression is given that the sin is less serious than it ac
tually is.37
As far as Peter Damian is concerned, the sin is extremely seri
ous. “It defiles all things, sullies all things, pollutes all things.”38
This vice,
this utterly diseased queen of Sodom . . . humiliates her slave in the
church and condemns him in court; she defiles him in secret and dis
honors him in public; she gnaws at his conscience like a worm and
consumes his flesh like fire. He yearns to glut his appetite, but fears,
on the other hand, to be seen in public, to draw attention, or to be
known by people.39
In effect, lust falsifies and corrupts the sinner’s interaction

with others. While his lust continues to drive him, he is tortured
by the fear that what he does will be discovered. He is well aware
that he is not, in fact, the man people take him to be.
OBLIGATORY PENAN CE
In the second, pastoral section of the Book of Gomorrah Peter
Damian will consider how a priest’s relatively hidden homosexual
36MC 7; MGH 288.

37MC 10-12; MGH 291.
38MC 31; MGH 310.
39Ibid.
306 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

life affects his ministry. In the first, canonical part of his text he
argues that homosexual practices among the clergy cause others
to sin. Therefore, clerics involved in such things should be dis
missed from office. He also argues that a strict interpretation of
the law against homosexual acts requires culprits to do at least
ten years of penance.‘0 Therefore he argues that “whoever is com
pelled by canonical censure to undergo public penance is surely
adjudged by the Fathers to be clearly unworthy of ecclesiastical
office.”41 Since laity doing penance for homosexual practices are
kept from the Lord’s table, how can a priest, guilty of the same
sins, fulfill his functions?
Lengthy penances could be shortened by substituting a
shorter-term but more severe means of satisfaction.42 But Peter
Damian leaves this issue aside in his push to have delinquent
clergy cut off altogether. His point, in any case, is very important
from the pastoral point of view—those required to make satisfac
tion for sins must complete that task in this life or suffer long and
horrendous misery in the next. The debt may be settled in various
ways but there is no getting around the fact that it must be
paid.“3
The Prior of Fonte Avellana took this very seriously. He was
horrified to discover that a monk who owed seventy years of
penance from his premonastic days had been led to think that
taking the habit had cancelled his debt. Peter Damian, who did
not believe that entering religious life wiped the penitential slate
clean, laments that the monk had not even started on the
penance which he might well have completed in his seven years
in religion.“4
When Peter Damian looks at the law regarding homosexual
acts he sees a clear discrepancy between a man’s role as ordained
40MC 21; MGH 301.

41MC 30; MGH 309.
42At Fonte Avellana, for example, three thousand lashes of the discipline
accompanied by the recitation of psalms equalled a year’s penance. (PL
144.1015C).
43Even someone who shares in another’s penitential burden is held re
sponsible for the unpaid portion of the debt in the afterlife. See Reindel, Die
Briefe des Petrus Damiani, MGH 3, 1989, Nr. 150, pp. 555-57. Commented
on in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. by A. Goldhammer
(Chicago: U Chicago P 1984) 179-80.
44Peter Damian, “De Perfectione Monachi,” PL 145.7, 301.

minister and his status as a sinner obliged to stand at a distance
from the altar and do serious penance. The man’s public function
puts his personal salvation at risk because he cannot do the re
quired penance and fulfill his priestly office. Peter Damian in
sists, therefore, that he be dismissed from the priestly ranks.
This is certainly a harsh position. But Peter Damian, who was
well aware that the clerics of his time feared reduction to the lay
state above everything else, was convinced that this would be a
most effective means to stop the spread of homosexual practices.
Get rid of those in the priestly ranks who were guilty of homosex
ual acts of any kind whatsoever and keep anyone who had en
gaged in homosexual acts in the past from moving forward and,
in Peter Damian’s opinion, the problem would be solved.
GOOD LIVES VITIATED
Since homosexual behavior is such a great depravity in the

eyes of the author of the Book of Gomorrah, it is not surprising
that he describes it as opening the floodgates to all the evils that
warp and twist the spiritual life.“5 But, oddly enough, this is not
borne out by his references to people who masturbate or engage
in homosexual acts. Some of them were clearly living what
seemed to be good lives or he would have had no need to remind
them that even their good acts were without merit as long as they
continued their illicit sexual practices. “Neither monastic obser
vance, nor mortification, nor a life of perfection has any value in
the eyes of the supreme judge if it is stained by the shameful filth
of impurity.” ‘6
Peter Damian offers a demonstration of a virtuous life vitiated
by one of the categories of what he calls irrational sexual acts in
his story of a hermit who masturbates whenever the urge comes
upon him. The man does not seem to realize that what he is doing
is sinful. He gets rid of his stored up semen as easily as he blows
his nose when it feels stuffed.“7
45MC 32; MGH 310.

46MC 42; MGH 320.
“
47MC 41; MGH 319: This . . . thought entered his mind: that whenever
he should be excited by passion, that he should eject semen by handling his
organ, just as if he were blowing his nose.” This expressive metaphor is as
close as Peter Damian gets to being vulgar.
308 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

When he dies, a fellow solitary, who was unaware of his col
league’s habit of masturbation, sees the man being handed over
to the demons. Knowing how virtuous the deceased was, his
friend wonders how anyone can be saved, if this man can be
damned. He is rescued from despair by an angel who tells him
that though the dead man did much good, it was all polluted by
his impurity.48
The masturbating hermit stands as proof that it is, indeed, “a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb 10:31)."9
There is no place to hide, no refuge offering shelter from the guilt
of this sin.
Surely, if one were to show any leniency with this destructive vice,
whom would we more likely pardon than the poor hermit who sinned
through ignorance and fell through simple inexperience, thinking that
this was allowed him as an ordinary natural function?50
Peter Damian, who credits the original idea to the devil, obvi
ously thinks that the hermit’s ignorance is inexcusable and cul
pable. His rhetoric does, however, bring us close to a material
conception of sin, punished by a distant, judging God, who me
chanically avenges wrongdoing without a hint of mercy for hu
man frailty.
CALL TO REPENTANCE
This harsh image of God as a stern judge must be counterbal
anced, however, by the call to repentance Peter Damian ad
dresses to fallen priests in the second part of the Book of Gomor
rah, particularly in chapter 23: “If you hear Christ who restores
life, why do you feel uncertain of your restoration? Listen to his
own words: ‘If any one believes in me’ he says, ‘even though he
dies he will live.”’51 He invites them to regain their strength like
the fallen Samson and “to perform great deeds” so that they
might triumph over their enemies by the mercy of God.52 Above
all, they must not despair of Christ’s power to raise them up.
“Ibid.
49MC 42; MGH 320.
5°Ibid.
51MC 45; MGH 322.
521bid.

But this restoration comes with a price: unless the fallen indi
vidual “has purged himself through effective penance, he can
never obtain the grace of God, will never be worthy of the Body
and Blood of Christ, will never cross the threshold of the heavenly
fatherland.”53 In Peter Damian’s strict interpretation of the law,
clergy who have engaged in any of the four categories of sodomy
enumerated at the beginning of his book must undertake a long
period of penance which, as we have already noted, was incom
patible with their liturgical role in the Church. In any case, they
have shown themselves unworthy of the high offices they hold or,
if they are still in minor orders, are insensitive to the dignity to
which they aspire. Peter Damian therefore wonders: “Why should
you be disturbed at stepping down from the eminence of priestly
rank to bury yourself in penance and eagerly to accept yourself as
a dead man amidst the living?”54
The author of the Book of Gomorrah knew full well that he was
going to be criticized for bringing this unpleasant business for
ward. He defends himself by arguing that it was not hate but a
desire for his brothers’ salvation that motivated him.55 We have
no reason to doubt his sincerity. The truth, however, is that what
starts out as a plea to the fallen clerics to open their eyes and
take stock of the seriousness of their situation quickly turns into
a finger-shaking harangue on just how unworthy of the priest
hood these “damnable sodomites”56 really are.
UNACCEPTABLE INTERCESSORS
How, he wonders, can they venture to intercede for the people
of God when they themselves are alienated from him? He sug
gests, in fact, that their prayers and pleadings may worsen the
situation of the people they pray for by increasing God’s anger.
“Forbear, I beg you, and dread to inflame the inextinguishable
fury of God against you, lest by your prayers you more sharply
provoke him whom your wicked life so obviously offends! If you
are willing to accept your own destruction, beware of being re
sponsible for the damnation of others.” 57
531140 44; MGH 321.

541140 37; MGH 315.
55MC 4952; MGH 325-29.
56MC 38; MGH 316.
57MC 38; MGH 316-317.
310 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

It is important to note that what is at issue here is the priest's
subjective fitness to act as a link between the faithful and God. A
priest who is separated from God by his personal sin makes a
poor link. Peter Damian therefore bluntly states that God dis
dains to accept sacrifice (sacrificium) from the hands of such indi
viduals. Having said this, he immediately turns to God’s rejection
of the festivals and innumerable sacrifices in Isaiah 1: 10-16 in
which the leaders of Israel and their people are addressed as the
princes of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah.58
Peter Damian’s use of the term sacrificium and his reference to
God scorning their sacrifices (vestra sacrificia respuentem)59 ap
ply the condemnation of Isaiah to clergy involved in homosexual
practices. But the point is not that these priests, inasmuch as
they act by virtue of their ordination, cannot be channels of God’s
grace, i.e., that they cannot administer valid sacraments. The
point is rather that, on their own, they lack the relationship with
God which would enable them to act as effective intercessors for
others. They are not the holy men they should be.
The immediate context says nothing about the distribution of
grace through priestly means. We should not, then, read sacrifi
cium as the Sacrifice of the Mass and conclude, accordingly, that
Peter Damian held that sinful priests could not administer valid
sacraments.“ Not only does such a conclusion go beyond the con
text of the Book of Gomorrah (1049) but it is contrary to the posi
tion Peter Damian developed in the Liber Gratissimus of 1052. In
his contribution to the controversy which had flared-up in the
mid-1040s over whether priests who had been ordained without
charge by simoniac bishops were validly ordained, Peter Damian
carefully distinguishes the power of the sacrament from the sanc
tity of the one impowered to bestow it. He emphasizes in a letter
he wrote in 1067 that a priest is a channel of grace, as it were, not
its source: “A priest does, indeed, invoke the Lord over an individ
ual but the Lord himself effectively produces the blessing. The
blessing’s effectiveness does not depend on the merit of the priest.
. . . Frequently the divine power truly effects a sacrament
58MC 39; MGH 317.

59Ibid.
60Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice, 31, accuses Peter Damian of using
“arguments that approach the heresy of the Donatists and Patarenes, who
held that sinful priests could not perform the sacraments. . . ."

through the ministry of someone unworthy.”611t is also well to
keep in mind that Peter Damian himself was ordained by a simo
niac bishop.62
SEXUAL COMPLEMENTARITY
Peter Damian borrows a bountiful stock of texts from the Old
Testament to depict masturbation and homosexual acts as the
worst sins imaginable. But his condemnation of these practices
rests ultimately on their unnaturalness. “For it is the function of
the natural appetite that each should seek outside himself what
he cannot find within his own capacity.”63 He considers these acts
to be irrational because they arise from a mad lust which blinds
its victims to the God-given order of things. “Ponder, O miserable
man, the darkness that oppresses your heart and the dense fog of
blindness that surrounds you.”64
He seems genuinely puzzled about why those who engage in
homosexual acts reject the normal rules of sexual attraction.
“What,” he asks, “do you seek in another male that you cannot
find in yourself?” 65 What becomes of the principle of complemen
tarity? Where is the appealing difi'erence? “What varied features
of the body? What tenderness; what sofiness of sensual charm?
What smooth and delightfiil face?” 66
Peter Damian underlines the irrationality of homosexual prac
tices by pointing out that even the animals, who are, of course,
without reason, do not do such things.“'7 In another section of the
Book of Gomorrah he thinks it appropriate that the Council of
Ancyra (314) decreed that those “who, contrary to natural law
and right reason, hand over their flesh to demons by such foul
practices” should sit among the “daemoniacs.”68 In Peter
Damian’s view, this follows logically from the irrational way in
which these “lepers” who have infected others have lived. They
61My translation: MGH 3, 1989, Nr 146, p. 537.

62Kennerly M. Woody, “Peter Damian, St.,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages
9, ed. by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribner’s 1989) 508.
63MC 35; MGH 313.
64MC 34; MGH 313.
65MC 35; MGH 313.
66111121.
67MC 3435; MGH 313.

68MC 28; MGH 307.
312 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

have, after all, not followed “a natural urging of the flesh but only
an incitement of diabolical origin.”69
CONCLUSION
The Book of Gomorrah is neither sensationalist, vulgar, nor
slyly prurient. Nor is the work an attack on homosexuality and
homosexuals in general. In the eleventh century Peter Damian
obviously had no conception of the content contemporary moral
ists give these two terms. He is concerned, instead, with a vice he
sees spreading in his district and with a point of law that has ec
clesiastical and pastoral consequences.
He does, indeed, regard “sodomy” as a great evil and he does
want those involved in any of the four forms of homosexuality he
describes banished from the ranks of the clergy. But he has rea
sons for this and he presents them in a cogent, compelling man
ner. The Book of Gomorrah is not simply a wild explosion of mad
passion.
The Prior of Fonte Avellana wanted a legal ruling and he got
one. Leo IX gently told this ardent reformer that he was wrong.
The pope’s own use of the adverb humaniter indicates that what
was lacking in Peter Damian’s relentless logic was the humanity
prudence requires. However, it is only when the hermit’s state
ments against homosexual acts are lifted out of the specific con
text in which he made them that they become, in the eyes of his
critics, purely subjective expressions of a perverted and repressed
passion.
The scholarly tradition has treated Peter Damian badly by dis
connecting what he says from why he says it. Consequently, sub
jective and Freudian arguments have been conjured up to fill the
vacuum created by the scholars’ disregard for Peter Damian’s le
gal and pastoral concerns
Nonetheless, I concede that there is something disturbing
about the Book of Gomorrah. I would go further—there is some
thing disquieting about Peter Damian’s works in general. They
are marked, it seems to me, by a kind of stubborn, wrongheaded
logic in which some stirring argument in the context of his ora
tion takes on a value of its own. By sheer force it becomes true
contrary to the limits of commonsense and experience. This is
what leads him to maintain that bestiality is less repulsive than
691bid.
KENNETH C. RUSSELL 3 13
homosexuality70 or to argue in his defense of the discipline that, if
beating yourself a little is good, beating yourself a lot is better.71
Peter Damian is ready to go wherever the fury of his argument
and his determination to carry the day will take him. He gets so
worked up that the argument becomes self-sufficient, and reality
outside it, an inconvenience to be pushed aside. He can maintain
then, that all who have masturbated alone or with others or who
have performed homosexual acts should be laicized or kept from
ordination. We have no way of knowing how widespread these
practices were at this time, but it is obvious that Peter Damian
fails to seriously weigh the practical consequences of his strict in
terpretation of the law.
He always argues, indeed, with a kind of no-holds-barred fe
rocity. Those who opposed him could expect to be treated very
roughly indeed. Benedictines who failed to be enthusiastic about
baring their backs to the thongs of the discipline were denigrated
just as vehemently as those “damnable sodomites” who were in
volved in homosexual practices.72 When Cardinal Stephen, who
was opposed to the discipline, died suddenly after speaking
against it, Peter Damian, who was promoting it, was quite ready
to interpret the young prelate’s death as divine proof that the car
dinal was wrong and he, Peter Damian, was right.73
His absolute conviction of being right seems, in fact, to have
played a far more important role in his thinking than any need to
be reasonable in the normal sense of the word. Once he had
reached a conclusion, he was ready to use any argument at hand
as a weapon to make his point. The Queensberry Rules were not
observed.
Peter Damian’s vehemence leads him to portray sodomy as the
worst of vices. Modern scholars take him to task for this. But,
when what he says is looked at in the context in which he says it
and why, he does not stand out as a wild, homophobic madman
perverser obsessed with homosexual sex. He was anxious to get
those involved in it to do the penance they had to do if they were
70MC 16; MGH 296.

71Peter Damian, Reindel, Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, MGH 2, 1988,
56, 158.
72Peter Damian, "De Laude Flagellorum et, ut loquuntur, Disciplinae,"
PL 145.4,682D. On the discipline see my article, “Peter Damian’s Whip,"
American Benedictine Review 41 (1990) 20-35.
73Peter Damian, “De Laude Flagellorum,” PL 145.6818.
314 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

to avoid a long, terrifying period of suffering in the afterlife, and
he certainly wanted the spread of homosexual practices among
the clergy brought to a halt. He therefore dealt with the problem
in his usual, “full speed ahead and damn the consequences” man
ner. However, contrary to what the scholarly tradition may lead
us to believe, St. Peter Damian was not obsessed with homosexu
ality. Stamping it out was not his main mission in life. He sought
a ruling in law. He got it and went on to other things.
KENNETH C. RUSSELL 3 15
THE PNEUMATOLOGY OF ODO CASEL’S
MY STERIENTHEOLOGIE
Harriet Luckman
INTRODUCTION
The liturgical movement has been one of the more profound

movements within the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth
century. Among the great theologians of this movement, the name
of Odo Casel, O.S.B., remains prominent.1 Odo Casel’s special 7
contribution to this movement was to bring out the meaning of

the liturgy as a celebration of the mysteries of Christ and the
church. This meaning Casel would see as the making present of
Christ’s act of salvation through the ritual and sacramental deed
of the church. In more than one hundred articles, letters, and
works from 1918 to 1941, Casel never ceased to develop, clarify,
and defend a doctrine that he deemed adequate to express the
teachings of the Fathers and the most ancient liturgies upon
which he based his notion of mysterium. This paper will concern
itself with Casel’s theology of mystery, some considerations of the
theological climate under which Casel worked, and the role pneu
matology played in his doctrine.
Harriet Luckman is presently a doctoral candidate in historical theology at

Marquette, WI. Her address is 729 N. 11th St. #501, Milwaukee, WI 53233
2306. She expresses gratitude to Dr. Paul Misner of Marquette University,
as well as Frs. Godfrey Diekmann and Paschal Botz of St. John’s Abbey,
Collegeville, MN, for invaluable and often lively discussions concerning Odo
Casel’s theology and the liturgical renewal during the early part of this cen
tury.
1Born September 27, 1886, in Koblenz-Liizel, Odo Casel entered the
Benedictine Abbey of Maria Laach in 1905 after six months of classical
study in Bonn. In 1911 he was ordained a priest, and sent to the Benedic
tine college of Sant’ Anselmo in Rome for further studies. Three years later
he defended and published his doctoral dissertation, The Eucharistic Teach
ing ofSt. Justin Martyr. Returning to Maria Laach, Casel intended to con
tinue his studies within the quiet of his monastery, but was instead sent to
Bonn to complete another doctoral degree. This second doctorate was the
completion of his previous studies in philosophy which Casel began prior to
entering Maria Laach. Eight years later he completed his second disserta
tion, De philosophorum Graecorum silentio mystico.
316 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

LIFE AND WORK
In the early morning of Easter, on March 28, 1948, Odo Casel,
O.S.B., died in the Benedictine Abbey “Vom heiligen Kreutz” in
Herstelle an der Weser.2 The night before, at the beginning of the
great Paschal Vigil, he had confessed with a clear voice the Light
of Christ (Lumen Christi). This was the end of the earthly life of a
man who had dedicated his entire attention and study around
one word: mysterium.
Casel was a quiet man who loved the solitude and the silence
of the monastery, experiencing in its daily rhythms the church’s
sacred calendar. He would write to a Flemish friend,
“The first intuition of the Mysterienlehre occurred to me in the liturgy

duringthe celebration of the High Mass; for life can come forth only
from life. Thereupon this first perception was confirmed by the study
of St. Justin Martyr; and in addition to these studies of the Fathers I
started to occupy myself in Bonn particularly with the ancient mys
teries, but only as a help to understanding the Christian mysteries.
The ancient mysteries were for me always only a help. The true
“Heilige Bronnen” was the celebration of the liturgy itself. . . . Not the
mere study, but the living life with Christ in mysterio is the last source
of all true gnosis.3
Odo Casel’s sudden and unexpected death brought an end to

the great theological work he had carried out for his monastic
community, for the academic world, and indeed for the entire
church. It was a work of bold, sweeping vision, serious scholarly
research and interpretation. It was also a work which provoked
no little criticism and for which Casel devoted no little defense.4
2In 1922, at the request of Prioress Margareta Manché, Casel was as

signed chaplain of the Benedictine abbey of nuns in Herstelle by his abbot,
Ildephons Herwegen. Here he lived and worked until the end of his life, de
veloping through scholarly studies and reflection his Mysterienlehre. For an
account of Casel's life in the abbey of Herstelle and his spiritual teachings
given and developed among the nuns of that abbey, see Corona Bamburg
O.S.B., “Leben aus dem Pneuma” in Liturgisches Jahrbuch 36 (1986) 67-74.
3Quoted in Herbstbrief der Abtei uom Heiligen Kreuz zu Herstelle (1948).
I am indebted to Joost van Rossum in his article “Dom Odo Casel O.S.B.
(+1948)," St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 22 (1978) 142, for this cita
tion.
4For an interesting and disinterested account of the whole discussion of
the Mysterion idea in Casel and the controversy it sparked among the Je
suits of his day, see Theodore Filthaut, Die Kontrouerse fiber die Mysterien
lehre Odo Casels (Warendorf: 1947). Case] gave the book his full approval.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 3 17
Casel’s vision of mystery, which for him summed up the whole of
Christian faith and experience, is preserved above all in the fif
teen volumes of the Jahrbuch fiir Liturgiewissenschaft5 which he
edited, and in the practical fruit of the growth of liturgical life, to
which his work gave such great impetus. Some opponents have
rejected the whole of Casel’s work, while advocates have wished
for fresh examinations of individual elements; indeed some have
felt such an examination of paramount necessity. The latter is
suggested by the encyclical Mediator Dei, which appeared in
1947. Casel saw in this encyclical of Pius XII nothing but ap
proval and confirmation for his work. However, a more exhaus
tive consideration of the encyclical, particularly of its section on
the church’s year6 and of the letter which the Holy Ofiice issued
rejecting an interpretation of this section rather one-sidely favor
able to Casel, showed that an examination of the whole position,
of its foundations and various aspects, was needed.7
In the first phase of the examination, taking place roughly
within the decade following Casel’s death, issues discussed con
cerning his theology of mystery were primarily the interpretation
of St. Paul’s theology of baptism in Romans 6,8 and the support
Casel finds in John Chrysostom and in most other Fathers before
Ephesus (431AD). The earliest works concerning Casel’s theology
moved in a specifically theological and speculative direction. One
example is a work by the abbot of Neresheim, Bernhart Durst.9
5Jahrbuch fiir Liturgiewissenschaft Vol I-XV, (1921-41) herausgegeben

von Odo Casel, O.S.B. (Munster Verlag: Abtei Maria Laach).
BSee Burkhard Neunheuser O.S.B., “Der positive Sinn der papstlichen
Grenzsetzung in der Enzyklika Mediator Dei’ in Vom Christlichen Mys
terium (Miinster Verlag:1951) 344-63.
7See Burkhard Neunheuser, O.S.B., “Mysteriengegenwart, ein Theolo
goumenon inmitten des Gespriichs.” Archiu fiir Liturgiewissenschaft
(A.L.W.) III/I (1953) especially 106-10. See also Arno Schilson, Theologie als
Sakramenten theologie: Die Mysterientheologie Odo Casels (Mainz:
Matthias-Grfinewald-Verlag 1982) 27-44.
BThe first stimulus was given by Rudolf Schnackenburg in his book Das
Heilsgeschehen bei der Taufe nach dem Apostel Paulus (1950). An answer to
these criticisms has been made in the name of Odo Casel by Victor Warnach
in two papers: l‘Taufe und Christusgeschehen nach Romer VI” in A.L.W.
III/2(1954) 282-366, and “Tauflehre des Romerbriefs in der neueren theolo
gischen Diskussion” A.L.W. V/2 (1958) 274-332.
9Das Wesen der Eucharistiefeier and des christlichen Priestertums (As
chendorf: 1953).
318 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Another is the work of a monk of Maria Laach, Polycarp Wege
naer, who examined Casel’s theology in order to form a specula
tive structure for the mystery conception of Casel in the tradition
of St. Thomas.10 The questions surrounding the theological inter
pretation of the word mysterium, which was central to Casel’s
thought, and to the meaning of which he gave such impetus, have
fallen somewhat into the background since the 1950s. Another
area of interest for historians of religions is Casel’s position on
the relationship between Christian and Hellenistic mysteries.“
While these matters may not be of outstanding importance for
the theological problem of Casel’s work proper, they nonetheless
should not be neglected or forgotten.
The work which had been done up to 1950 on Casel’s theology
shows that the editors of the first memorial volume of studies
dedicated to Casel were correct when they wrote in their preface
that “historical and theological work is still necessary for a final,
valid and systematic view of the work of Casel, before the whole
content of his vision will be understood and given firm shape, be
fore all its lines and contours will be seen in their clearest light,
and all it has to offer be realized and brought to fruition.” 12 The
editors of this early volume were not unaware of the fact that
Casel’s work had been challenged, nor that Casel himself was al
ways seeking to obtain a deeper grasp of his material as the con
troversy surrounding his theology progressed. Later authors
would concentrate more on Casel’s contributions to the renewal of
the liturgical life of the church, his pneumatology , as well as the
political implications of Casel’s theology.13
10Heilsgegenwart‘: Das Heilsgegenwart Christi und die Virtus Diuina in

den Sakramententen unter besonderer Beru'cksichtigung von Eucharistic
und Taufe. Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen. Heft 33
(Aschendorf:1958).
11There is a critical work in this sense by Rudolf Padberg which nonethe
less regards with good will Casel's main intention in the comparision and
contrast of Christianity with Hellenistic mystery religions. See “Verkiindi
gung und Religionsgeschichte,” Theologische Quartalschrifl 131 (1951) 272
87. More recent study on the issue has been done by Arno Schilson, Theolo
gie als Sakramenten theologie, as well as in Gottes Weisheit im Mysterium:
Vergessene Wege Spiritualitiit (Mainz: Matthias-Griinewald-Verlag 1989).
12More up-to-date views on his theology can be found in the 1986 vol
umes of Archiv fu'r Liturgiewissenschafl.
13See Schilson, note 11 above. Maria Judith Krahe, a Benedictine nun of
Herstelle, published her dissertation on Casel‘s pneumatology as a two-vol
HARRIET LUCKMAN 3 19
Odo Casel was a man who combined monastic remoteness from
the world with a remarkable awareness of the signs of the times
and the charismatic gilt of being able to convey his ideas to others
in an infectious manner.14 This paper will be an attempt to look
more closely at Casel’s small work Das Christliche Kultmys
terium,15 published in 1932, which explains perhaps most clearly
and succinctly his theology of mystery. The last part of the paper
will address the relatively neglected contribution of Casel’s theol
ogy on pneumatology, which I would like to argue is in effect the
goal of Casel’s entire theological synthesis.16
THEOLOGICAL CLIMATE AND BACKGROUND

In 1932, after approximately ten years of preparatory study,
Casel published his synthesis of the Christian cult-mystery, in
which he provided a theology rooted in the experience of the litur
gical event. He devoted his efforts primarily to the Paschal Mys
tery, developing a theology in the light of Scripture and the early
Fathers, in which he interpreted the liturgy as a renewed pres
ence of Christ’s saving action. With the passage of time, this idea
was seen to contain unexpected riches for the experience of the
liturgy and the theology of the church and the sacraments, espe
cially the Eucharist. It is clear from the Constitution on the
Liturgy formulated by the Second Vatican Council that the basic
ume work, Der Herr ist der Geist: Studien zur Theologie Odo Casels (Erz
abtei St. Ottilien: 1986). Thomas Ruster has published a recent work deal
ing not only with theological issues, but political and cultural movements
during the early part of the twentieth century. It takes note of the political
views of Casel’s abbot, Ildephons Herwegen, as well as possible political im
plications within Casel’s own work. See Thomas Ruster, Die verlorene Natz
lichkeit der Religion: Katlwlizismus and Moderne in der Weimarer Republik
(Paderborn: Schoningh 1994) especially pages 247-68. For an excellent
study on the question of the social aspects of Catholism in Europe during
these years see Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe (New York:
Crossroads 1991) 262-87.
1‘*See Mark Schoof, OR, A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800-1970,
translated by N.D. Smith (New York: Paulist 1970) 89-90.
15First published in the original German edition by Verlag Friedrich
Pustet of Regensburg in 1932.
16I will depend for the most part on the dissertation of Maria Judith
Krahe, O.S.B: Der Herr ist der Geist, published in two volumes (hereafter
Der Herr) Das Mysterium Christi and Das Mysterium vom Pneuma Christi
(St. Ottilien: 1986).
320 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

outline of his ideas has survived the various attacks Casel en
dured against his theology during his lifetime.17
The notion of “mystery” was not held in much esteem at the
time of Casel’s writings. Most ofizen the notion of “mystery”
seemed to be associated with a school of thought which identified
mystical experience with a religious experience conceived subjec
tively and emotionally.18 Casel’s response to the prevalent notions
in theology during the early twentieth century was to devote him
self to an intensive study of patristic theology and the mystery
cults of the classical world.19 Casel returned from Rome to Maria
Laach and continued his studies, concerning himself especially
with the liturgy and its mystery character. In the following years
he developed the idea of ritual as the sacramental presence of
Christ’s saving work. Casel saw in the esoteric mystery cults of
the Hellenistic world a certain preparation for the coming of
Christ. He would write:
All that these mysteries offered, is fulfilled in Christ. They offered
knowledge (gnosis); in him all the treasures of wisdom are concluded.
They brought union with the Godhead and hope of a blessed Other
Life; now it is said: Christ in you, the hope of glory. They promised the
fulness of the divine in-dwelling in the Christian sense that in Christ
the fulness of the divinity dwells bodily and in him and through him
the Christian is also filled with God. As for their rites and laws of cult,
they only a shadow, which the rising figure of Christ cast in ad
vance.wzelre
This idea had already been hinted at by Casel in his dissertation

on Justin, and in a small book which had appeared in 1919, Das
Geda'chtnis des Herrn in der altchristlichen Liturgie, and pre
sented in full form for the first time in his book Die Liturgie als
Mysterienfeier in 1922. The scientific groundwork and defense of
the thesis was carried on particularly in the Jahrbuch fu‘r
1"'Schoof, Survey 89.

18For an excellent study on the question of religious experience and the
J
theology of the early 1900s, see Gerald A. McCool, S. ., From Unity to Plu
ralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham UP 1992).
19Casel took his theological doctoral degree from Rome 1913 with a the
sis on the eucharistic teaching of Justin Martyr and the doctorate in philos
ophy from the University of Bonn with the dissertation, De philosophorum
Graecorum silentio mystico, published by Verlag von Alfred Topelmann in
Giessen in 1919.
20Casel, Die Liturgie als Mysterienfeier (Freiburg im Bresgau: 1922) 2.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 321

Liturgiewissenschafl from 1921 to 1941, edited by Casel himself.
In these works Casel attempted to re-articulate for his time the
early Christian notions of liturgical theology and its understand
ing of mystery.21
MYSTERIENTHEOLOGIE
Responding to the theological climate of his time, Casel would
write that the “mystery of God has become a burden to modern
man, a burden of which he would be gladly quit in order to go his
own way unhindered.” To Casel, modern rational scientific
thought had made the realm of nature nothing more or less than
another realm for the human intellect to “master,” and to subject
to rational, scientific investigations. Casel would complain that
there is no longer any world of the “irrational,” no “other” to
whom humankind must answer. It was for this very reason hu
manity has lost its sense of “mystery,” and nature has lost its
power of symbol and its ability to be a transparency of higher re
alities.22
Not only the outer world of nature and human liturgical wor
ship, but also the inner realm of the person, the unsearchable
depths of the human soul have been probed and subjected to the
searchlight of psychoanalysis. The results of this “search” reveal
that the inner world of the human psyche “has been revealed as a
confused mass of half-suppressed, sensual desires and wishes,
more inspiring of repulsion and fear than any other reaction.
Love, religion, friendships, ideals—have all been exposed as mere
nervous twitchings. With this, reverence for the mystery of the
other person, or for the community, disappears.” 23
Casel’s vision for the future of a people caught in this sort of ra
tional scientific analysis was not bright. He would write that
21One weakness in Casel's approach should be noted at this point. Thor

oughly trained in the classics as he was, and immersed in the theology of
the patristic era, Casel nonetheless seems to have agreed with Adolf von
Harnack that in the early Church there existed in some form or other a
“purer” Christianity than we have hitherto known. This notion colors
Casel's work from beginning to end. While Casel’s assumptions in this area
are no longer considered credible by historians of theology, his re-appropri
ation of patristic teaching nevertheless deserves respectful consideration
and attention.
22Das Christliche Kultmysterium 10-11.
23Ibid.
322 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

modern man thought he had finally driven out the darkness of
the mystery of the created world and was standing at last on the
threshold of the clear light of sober reason and self-conscious, au
tonomous will, being for the first time truly the master of the
world. But Casel saw instead that humanity had rather gone
back to the “dawn of history” and the sin of our first parents sim
ply repeated itself again and again as humanity tried ever anew
to obtain divinity by its own powers of understanding, and so rec
ognize good and evil.24 Casel saw this type of freedom as merely
pseudo-freedom, and a slavery worse than any yet experienced by
the human race. The last road to freedom, which in antiquity was
even opened to the slave, modern man has closed up to himself:
the road to God.25
Casel would take issue with the ideas concerning the essence
of Christianity dominant during his youth before the First World
War. His response to the prevailing notions of dogmatic truths,
embodied in the manuals of dogmatic theology of his day, was
nothing less than an outright denial of their assumption of auto
matically knowable and acceptable truths. He would write in
Christliche Kultmysterium:
Christianity is not a “religion” or a confession in the way the last three
hundred years would have understood the word: a system of more or
less dogmatically certain truths to be accepted and confessed, and of
moral commands to be observed or at least accorded recognition. Both
elements belong, of course, to Christianity, intellectual structure and
moral law; but neither exhausts its essence. Still less is Christianity a
matter of religious sentiment, a more or less emotionally toned atti
tude toward “the divine,” which binds itself to no dogmatic or moral
system whatsoever. Rather, Christianity is “a mystery”, a mysterium
which means first of all a deed of God’s, the execution of an everlasting
plan of his through an act which proceeds from his eternity, realized in
time and the world, and returning once more back to him, its goal, in
eternity.26
For Casel, the content of the mystery could be expressed in the

word Christ, meaning the Savior’s person and work, together
with his mystical body the church. This mysterium is a “revela
tion,” an “uncovering” in the highest and ultimate sense?7 The
24Ibid.
251bid.
26lbid.
27Ibid.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 323

primary “mystery” therefore is Christ, the person of the God-man
and his saving deeds for the church and the world. The church in
turn enters the mystery through this deed. According to Casel,
the heart of the faith for Paul, Peter, and John, is not the teach
ings of Christ, nor the deeds of his ministry, but the acts by which
he saves us.28
Casel derived much of his theology of mystery from the Fa
thers and from his view of ancient Hellenistic mystery cults. He
found their corollary and “Christianization” in the Pauline cor
pus, especially in the Letter to the Romans. In the Letters of St.
Paul the word mysterion means the “pro-temporal council of God
which is hidden from the world but revealed to the spiritual.”29 In
his letter to the Romans the Apostle speaks of “the revelation of
the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now dis
closed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all
nations. . . .”30
Here, as in other similar texts,31 is meant the basic and central
“dogma” of Christianity, viz., the Incarnation of Christ. In other
words, the “mystery of God” is Christ, or rather Christ and his re
demptive work.32 The mystery of Christ which was completely in
Jesus in all reality in time is, therefore, fulfilled in us first of all in
representative, symbolic form. This form is not purely external,
but rather consists of images filled with the reality of the new life
which is communicated to us through Christ. This special sharing
in the life of Christ, both symbolically and in actuality, is what
the ancients called “mystical.” It is something, according to
Casel, which is midway between a merely outward symbol and
the purely real.33
28Ibid.
29See G. Bornkamm in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament ed.
G. Kittel. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1967) 4.817-27.
3°R0m 16:25f.
311 Cor 2:6ff.; Eph 1:8-10, 3:3-12, 6:19; Col 1:26-28, 2:2-3, 4:3.
32See Joost van Rossum, “Dom Odo Casel, O.S.B.” St. Vladimir's Theo
logical Quarterly 22 (1978) 143-47, for a fuller treatment of this theme.
33To determine more precisely the degree of reality which this midway
point has between the outward symbol and the purely real was one of the
thomier questions of theology in the period of Casel’s writing. The first fully
scientific labor, under Casel’s stimulus, was Gottlieb Sohngen’s Symbol and
Wirklichkeit im Kultmysterium (1937). It was followed by Victor Warnach’s
article in Liturgisches Leben 5 (1938), “Zum Problem der Mysteriengegen
324 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Casel understood Paul’s notion of mystery as being that reality
beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Mysteries are not
merely, as Casel would argue against Priimmf"1 mysteries for so
long as they are unknown. Rather, they are realities of a sphere
into which the human mind cannot break with reason alone; real
ities which can only be grasped in function of revelation. In other
words, Casel understood that the realities of the mysteries can
only be grasped by the human mind when God gives the human
person the light of understanding. It is God, then, who first gives
the capacity for knowing or “understanding” the mystery, not by
reason, but by faith.
Here Casel takes one step beyond that of the prevalent theol
ogy of faith during his day. He goes on to state that the Christian
faith is not a noesis of truth and a compliance with law. Nor is it
something which is purely of the will and mind. Rather faith is an
exaltation of the entire human being and all of creation into God’s
sphere. Casel felt Christianity was in its very essence a mystery
religion, and mystery language is its own most rightful posses
sion. He recognized that the ancient church lived in mystery, and
needed to construct no theory about it, as seemed to have been
the apparent necessity of theologians since the Middle Ages. This
is an important notion to keep in mind. The all-embracing fact re
mained for Casel that Christianity is a mystery religion by virtue
wart”, and Casel’s own articles in J.L.W., particularly volume 15 (1941)

253-69. The latter works are critical of Sohngen. In the last-named article,
Casel formulated his point of view in these words: “In the knowledge born of
faith we see in the sacramental image its origin, the saving work of Christ.
We see it in faith and gnosis, that is to say, we touch our own, are
it,
make
it
conformed to through participation and re-formed after the likeness of

it
the crucified and risen Christ. . . . Sacrament and original saving act are not
two separated things, but one; the image so filled with the reality of the
a is
original deed that may rightly be called presence of it,” .L.W. 268.
J
it
Also interesting in this regard the relationship, or lack thereof, be

is
tween Casel’s theology and Karl Rahner’s Realsymbol. For an interesting

and objective account of some fundamental disagreements between Casel
and Rahner in this matter see Theodor Maas-Ewerd, “Odo Casel O.S.B. und
Karl Rahner, S.J.: Disput fiber das Wiener Memorandum ‘Theologische und
philosophische Zeitfragen im katholischen deutschen Raum.’ Zwei unverof
fentlichte Dokumente aus dem ahre 1943” Archiv fiir Liturgiewissenschaft
J
28.2 (1986) 193-234.

34See Karl Priimm, Der Christliche Glaube und die altheidnische Welt,
a
work which was reviewed by Casel in J.L.W. 14 (1935) 187-224.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 325

of its very nature, and the liturgy of mysteries is the central and
essential activity of this religion.35
Casel saw the Christianity of the ancient world as the fulfill
ment and glorification of what hellenistic religion in antiquity
was in its highest form. Yet something happened to this Chris
tianity once it came into the world of the Germanic peoples.
Casel’s view of the Germanic appropriation of Christianity was
not positive, and he expresses a certain distrust of this appropri
ation. Casel appears to be the first theologian to make such a
comparative statement and while no research seems to exists to
date as to why or how he came to associate Christianity’s appar
ent downfall to the Germanic peoples, the question in itself re
mains very curious.36 In Casel’s estimation, a new kind of think
ing arose when the Germanic tribes received the culture of antiq
uity. Casel claimed that in this Germanic milieu, the human per
son was a “lone individual” cut loose from the divine wholeness,
consistently moving toward making himself or herself their own
midpoint, constructing their own law and reality, with no God
outside themselves as an overlord, no God with whom the crea
ture enters into real relations.37
This statement of Casel’s may be correct in that the heart of
the Christian Middle Ages, with its new Northern peoples and
35The question of the concrete manner in which the mystery terminology

was brought into the Church, particularly the development from Hellenistic
mysterion to Latin mysterium in profane and Christian use, is a matter of
special and continuing study and not a closed question. Interesting in view
of Casel’s theology and the notion of mystery in John Chrysostom is a re
view on Fittkau’s book on mystery and Chrysostom by Adolf Kolping in The
ologische Revue 51 (1955) 24-28.
It is also worth noting at this point with Ruster and Schilson that Casel
considered the Judaism of the Old Testament only an “episode” in God’s
plan of salvation. For Casel, everything from the Old Covenant was super
seded and now obsolete, and hence Judaism has little relevance for Chris
tianity. Casel’s interests rested instead with the Hellenistic cults. See
Ruster, Die verlorene (note 13 above) 262. And Schilson, Theologie (note 11
above) 265-71.
36Das Christliche Kultmysterium 67. Thomas Ruster (249-50, note 13
above) makes an interesting analysis of Casel's worldview by noting the fact
that the only “world” Casel ever really knew as an adult was the world of
the monastic cloister. For the influence exercised upon Casel by his abbot,
Ildephons Herwegen, theologically, politically, and culturally, see an inter
esting analysis by Schilson, Theologie (note 11 above) 58-81.
37Das Christliche Kultmysterium 68.
326 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

their formative influence upon that age, provided the atmosphere
for a new climate of thought to arise. But whatever negative in
fluences may have been appropriated, they were largely taken in
hand by the great figures of the golden age of the universities and
placed at the service of the new and different, but nonetheless
truly Christian, synthesis. The negative consequences which
Casel names here and on the following pages of his work are phe
nomenon of a markedly later age, in which the synthesis had bro
ken down. To the extent that the attitudes of more modern an
thropocentric thought remained within the church’s circle of in
fluence, one can suggest that they do constitute a real value, even
in these forms of piety which Casel decries. If Casel were consis
tent, he perhaps would have suggested that where the church is,
there is the mystery as well. One must suggest at this point that
Casel’s judgment on this development within the Germanic peo
ples, especially with regard to the Germanic tribes which first re
ceived the Christian faith from the Anglo-Saxon missionaries in
the 700s and who already had a natural form of worship very de
voted to mystery and a strong sense of community among them
selves, is far too negative.
Casel stressed that his nation of mystery and the liturgical re
newal he was advocating was nothing more than a rebuilding of
what had been destroyed by what he considered the negative in
fluences of individualism, or old-fashioned liberalism and Marx
ist socialism.38 In Casel’s mind, the Catholic Church had done
something miraculous by holding fast to the cosmos of God’s val
ues in the midst of this general chaos and by keeping, in the mys
tery of worship, symbols of God’s true power and presence. The
liturgical renewal was nothing more than a new recognition and
stress upon these values in the church, and an attempt to make
them once again the common and prized property of all the faith
ful.39
There was no doubt in Casel’s mind that something of “human
centered” ideas had crept into the minds of many Christians of
his day. This had gradually shown itself in the life of faith as ra
tionalism, and in the life of piety as a tendency to introspective
381bid.
39Ruster notes that Herwegen was not slow to appropriate the liturgical
reform for political motives, and would in fact speak of the “spiritual basis
of the national movement.” See Ruster, Die verlorene, 105-06.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 327

self-indulgence. Prayer had been moving away from conscious
ness of the mystical body of Christ and falling into isolated feel
ings and thoughts of the “God-seeking” individual. Sacrifice had
become nothing more than a mental attitude, one with a certain
“ascetical” value, if not completely subordinated to external activ
ity. The mystery itself, with its objective ordering of things ac
cording to God and in real union with God, disappeared beneath a
mass of more or less personal devotional exercises which lefl:
more freedom to individual “feeling.” Casel saw that in the course
of the Middle Ages the term devotio, which meant to the ancients
the church’s worship, became the devotion of a purely interior
state of individual consciousness. This spirit pushed its way into
the domain of theology, despite dogmatic safeguards, and showed
itself in a weakening of the great, deep thinking of the older the
ology, emphasizing individual reason and autonomy, to the detri
ment of God, Christ, church, and sacrament.40
Casel was well aware of the criticisms directed toward his
work and the notion of “mystery” in the theological context of his
day. He saw it as quite understandable that the mystery teaching
which he advocated, as the logical outcome (in the sphere of wor
ship and its mystical insight) of the old notions of faith, should be
considered by many theologians of his day to be a foolish, un
founded, and even a dangerous doctrine. He accepted the fact
that many theologians of his day rejected and fought his notions
as deceitful illusions. Casel also argued, however, that his theo
ries were championed by the followers of the old theology who
would take the Fathers and Aquinas as their models.41
One theologian in particular challenged Casel’s work, the Je
suit Johannes Baptist Umberg.42 Casel answered these accusa
tions in a footnote in Das Christliche Kultmysterium, claiming
that Umberg's operational base for his criticisms is what presents
the difficulty, in the mystery teaching, of conceiving how Christ’s
past saving act should become present. This is supposed to be, ac
cording to the staunch Thomist Umberg, philosophically impossi
40Das Christliche Kultmysterium 68-69.

41Ibid.
42Umberg wrote an article hostile to Casel’s Mysterientheologie, assem
bling his doubts and the doubts of many other like-minded theologians in
his articles on “Mystery-piety” in Zeitschrift fur Askese and Mystik I (1926)
351-66 and “Mystery-Presence” in Zeitschrifl fu'r katholischen Theologie 52
(1928) 357-400. It is to these articles Casel refers.
323 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

ble. Casel insisted the difficulty was ill-conceived, because Um
berg did not understand that the presence brought into existence
here is not a natural and historical presence—as Umberg wanted
to believe—but a sacramental presence.“3 Casel responded fur
ther to Umberg in both Bonner Zeitschrift fu'r Theologie und
Seelsorge“ and in his own Jahrbuch fu'r Liturgiewissenschaj‘t,45
seeking to show the propriety of the mystery idea from Scripture,
patristic tradition, and dogmatic theology. Most encouraging per
haps for Casel was the encyclical of Pius XII, Mediator Dei. In
this document Casel saw his own ideas of the liturgy and the
mystery officially recognized.46 Further development and accep
tance of Casel’s theology of mystery would find voice in the Sec
ond Vatican Council’s documents on the liturgy, an acceptance
and a critical reception that Casel would not have envisioned dur
ing his long and often intense debates during the first decades of
his work.
MYSTERIENTHEOLOGIE AND PNEUMATOLOGY

It is at this point I would like
to address what I would argue is
the essential feature of Casel’s work which has not only been
generally neglected to date, but also in contemporary concerns
with pneumatology; it remains one of the more unique and far
reaching aspects of his thought. It is the notion of the role of the
pneuma within the framework of mysterium theologie.47 Not sur
prisingly, his most developed pneumatology finds voice within his
work on the monastic life and the liturgy.“8 Nevertheless, Casel
43See Das Christlicke Kultmysterium 69, footnote #2.

44Volume 4 (1927) 101-17.
“Volume 6, pages 113-204 and volume 8, pages 145-224.
46Casel would write in Das Christliche Kultmysterium, 71-72: “The re
cent popes have called once more for active sharing in the mysteries of wor
ship. There the flowing spring of Christ’s life is to be found. This active
sharing will only then be really and truly fulfilled when the Liturgy is
known again for what it is at the deepest level: the mystery of Christ and
the Church.” See also Romano Guardini, “Papst Pius XII und die Liturgie,”
Liturgisches Jahrbuch 6 (1956) 125-39.
47The notable exception to this, and the work upon which I depend in
this section, is the two volume work by Maria Judith Krahe, O.S.B., Der
Herr ist der Geist: Studien zur Theologie Odo Casels, I 0 II (St. Ottilien:
1986).
48See especially Casel's article, “Die Monchsweihe,” Jahrbuch fur
HARRIET LUCKMAN 329

does touch upon the role of the Holy Spirit and Christ in Das
Christliche Kultmysterium. Casel states that by his death and
resurrection the Lord became pneuma, and accordingly we too
have been filled with pneuma through the mystical passion in
baptism and the spiritual resurrection which flowed from it. We
have in effect become “spiritual people.” ‘9
Pneuma means the inner life of the Godhead, which the Lord
gives us now that he is risen and himself become pneuma.
Pneuma also means the air in motion and the power of life in na
ture, particularly in the animal and human body. It is employed
in the religious language of the Greeks for the life power of dae
monic or divine beings. In connection with this last use it came to
mean the share in the life of God which is given by incorporation
into Christ, which first takes place in baptism. God himself is
pneuma. Within the Trinity the pneuma is the life which the Fa
ther and the Son share, and which goes forth from them as the
third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The man Jesus Christ
is Spirit as God, and after his resurrection as man also; this
means he shares in the life of God. The risen Christ gives this life
to the faithful. This life is pneuma. It is a share in the life of the
Trinity. Possession of the pneuma is in effect the very mark of the
Christian. Through the pneuma, the Christian is made like
Christ, into another Christ. Casel’s notion of the Christ as the one
anointed by and with the Holy Spirit, comes from the mystery of
the redemption. As Christ is by his nature Spirit (“the Lord is
pneuma”) and has revealed himself in glory since the resurrec
tion, so too, the Christian, risen in baptism, has a real share in
the divine Spirit by grace.
Casel saw the Spirit, the pneuma, as that force which had bro
ken into history through the saving act of Christ, and the true
Liturgiewissenschaft 5 (1925) 1-47, and his work dedicated to the Abbot of

Maria Laach, Heilige Uberlieferung: Ausschnitte aus der Geschichte des
Mo‘nchtums und des heiligen Kultes. Dem Hochwiirdigsten Herrn. Abt von
Maria Laach (Ashendorff: 1938). Also Corona Bamburg, O.S.B., “Leben aus
Pneuma: Zu Odo Casel's Spiritualith anlaBlich seines 100 Geburtstages,”
Liturgisches Jahrbuch 2 (1986) 67-74. Pneumatology has always played a
dominant role in ascetical literature, and, as Casel’s 1925 article on monas
tic consecration shows, pneumatology is particulary strong in the monastic
vocation. Casel’s interests and treatments of the theme here suggests this
article as a possible springboard for his later pneumatology and liturgical
theology.
49Das Christliche Kulturmysterium 33-35.
330 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

founding power of the new age. The Spirit is the power of God, the
dynamis of God, which had been made free at the resurrection.
The Spirit is also the seal of community between the Father and
the Son. According to Casel, in the bond of eternal generation
both the Father and the Son breathe forth the Spirit as the bond
of their community with one another, one in essence with them.
The Spirit is this seal of unity, the gift the Son has sent us.
Maria Judith Krahe notes in her two-volume work that Casel
based his pneumatology firmly within the Church’s teaching on
the Trinity, which in Casel’s mind made the Holy Spirit the bond
of unity between the Father and the Son, and represents the full
ness of the Divine Life. However, the background of New Testa
ment teaching on salvation opened the door for Casel to the state
ments of the New Testament concerning the Spirit of God, who in
the different writings of the New Testament, was seen in various
theological perspectives. For Casel, the Spirit (pneuma), is the
perfection of redemption.50 The fruit of the crucifixion is the
Spirit and the glorified humanity of Christ is as a “kernel and
starting point of a christological pneumatology.” 51 Casel’s adapta
tion of the Pauline “the Lord is the Spirit,” Krahe believes, is the
very core of Casel’s pneumatology.52
One can discern four uses of the term pneuma in Casel’s work:
1) The pneuma as the fulness of divinity; 2) the pneuma as the
perfection of the redemption; 3) the pneuma as the gift of trans
formation and glorification in the church; 4) the pneuma as a par
ticipation in God’s definitive salvation in Christ, and as the
source and foundation of our Christian existence.53 Each of these
categories deserves a closer look. All of these categories use the
term pneuma interchangeably with that of Holy Spirit. It also
seems clear Casel intended the term pneuma to refer primarily, if
not exclusively, to the Third Person of the Trinity.
50Krahe, Der Herr II. 50.

51This notion seems to bear quite a resemblance to what has become
known in contemporary scholarship as “Spirit-Christology.” For an excel
lent study on this subject see Ralph Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit: Spirit
Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (New York: Oxford 1994).
52Krahe, Der Herr 11.104.
53Ibid.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 331

THE PNEUMA AS THE FULNESS OF DIVINITY—THE HOLY SPIRIT
Casel believed that God’s very being is pneuma. God is life, ac
tive, energetic (ta'tiges) life, the breath and fire of love.“ This love
is pneuma in the sense (Sinn) of divine being and of the Third Hy
postasis of the Trinity. Casel would speak fondly of a “new
covenant as the revelation of the Trinity.” 55 This Trinity is the in
ter-divine life of the Father and the Son, united by the Holy
Spirit. Just as the Word of God issues from the inner life of the
'hinity, so the pneuma exists as the interpersonal life of the Fa
ther and the Son, and not merely as some power or “impersonal
Being” or impersonal life. This personal life of God comes to us as
the Father, who in his eternal being (Scho/3e), begot the Son. This
personal life within the Trinity is revealed to us as one Being in
Three Persons who are so much one that they are only one sub
stance, though subsisting as Three Persons. This one substance is
life, is pneuma, is Spirit, is tri-personal.56
Krahe wishes to interpret Casel’s view of the unity of the Trini
tarian God as not entirely within the Latin-Augustinian tradition
with that tradition’s “Neo-Platonic notions of unity.” Rather,
Krahe wishes to stress that Casel’s theology is grounded more in
an economic notion, as the living God of the Scriptures. She ar
gues that Casel’s theology of God is not a philosophical construc
tion but rather based on revelation and the “economy of salva
tion.”57 For Casel, the Holy Spirit is the inner-divine love, dy
namic and personal, which holds the Divine Trinity together, and
which comes to us through the salvific actions of Christ making
54Ibid II.13.
55Ibid II.14.
561bid.
57This understanding of Latin-Augustinian Trinitarian theology as es
sentially Neo-Platonic and “non-economic” is no longer as viable a paradigm
as Krahe, writing in the early 1980s, would like it to be. In this matter her
focus on the “Western tradition” and her emphasis on a “God for us” theol
ogy is somewhat dated. That Casel himself held an essentially Augustinian
notion of the Trinity seems clear from his works. However, Krah’s wish to
focus upon “economic” vs. “immanent” trinitarianism in this regard is no
longer viable. For the most helpful articles concerning this issue in contem
porary scholarship see Johannes Arnold, “Begriff und heilsiikonomische Be
deutung der gottlichen Sendungen in Augustinus’ De Trinitate,” in
Recherches Augustiniennes XXV (Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes:Paris
1991) 3-69, and Michel R. Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary 'Irinitarian
Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995) 237-50.
332 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

us pneumatic people as Christ himself became Spirit.‘58 This
brings us to the second point, the pneuma as the perfection of the
redemption.
THE PNEUMA AS THE FULNESS OF THE REDEMPTION

Casel sees the Spirit as overcoming the boundaries of time and
space. What is meant by this is not the dissolving of time and
space, but rather allowing the redeemed, the “pneumatic person,”
to live beyond or transcend those very boundaries. What Casel
says about time and space is not philosophy but revelation.59 The
Mysteriengegenwart for Casel then is to see a special function of
the pneuma, wherein the notion of pneuma has two meanings.
The Holy Spirit, which is the divine life of God, is given to us at
the same moment as in the salvific act of Christ on the Cross. He
it is who at the same time, creating in the person the interior dis
position, makes that very person into a “spiritual person,” a
“pneumatic person,” where the transcendent divine presence of
the immanent Trinity becomes immanent in time in the historical
human person.
The pneuma enters the “pneumatic person” and makes him or
her into a “divine space.” Through the Holy Spirit, the person as
“spirit-bearer” understands God as being his or her “past, pre
sent, and future” and raises the person to the level of a new di
mension, into a “new creation.” 6° In this regard, Casel speaks of a
new age, a new Aeon, into which the “spirit-bearer” has broken.61
For Casel, the pneuma is not only the intra-divine life of the Trin
ity, but our very life as well. We take part in this threefold inner
divine life through the Divine Son and glorified Kyrios, Jesus
Christ. This link, or bond, of the Spirit with the Lord, who be
came Spirit, is crucial for Casel’s pneumatology.
THE PNEUMA AS GIFT OF TRANSFORMATION AND GLORIFICATION

OF THE CHURCH
For Casel, the church was nothing more or less than an instru
ment of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the presence of divine salva
58Krahe, Der Herr 11.47.
591bid.
60Ibicl.
61See N. A. Nissiotis, Die Theologie der Ostkirche im o'kurnenischen Dia
log: Kirche and Welt in orthodoxer Sicht (Stuttgart: 1968) 109.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 333

tion in the church, in its mysteries, in its one faith, through the
power of the Spirit of Christ. For Casel, the Spirit of Christ
means the working and active presence of glory/transformation
in the church in all times and places, a presence possessing cer
tain signs and symbols both for the church as a whole as well as
for the individual believer. The church, which receives its being
from the body of Christ, is truly the “Church of the pneuma,” with
the Spirit living and vivifying it from deep within.
In and through the Mysterien the church becomes the sign of
the presence of the Spirit of Christ. By saying the “church is
Spirit,” Casel in effect meant and understood the “Spirit of
Christ.” That the Holy Spirit has a special function in this union
from the glorified Lord, is an important aspect of Casel’s theol
ogy.62 For Casel there was first and foremost the Trinitarian as
pect united with the Christological understanding, and only in
this manner could the ecclesiological context be developed and
deepened. Again, Krahe stresses that Casel’s pneumatology is
founded first on Christology, in the sense then of a “Spirit-Chris
tology,” both given to the church and through the church.63
THE PNEUMA AS A PARTICIPATION IN GOD’S DEFINITIVE SALVA

TION
Whoever considers Casel’s teaching of the mystery of Christ
and his ecclesiology as teaching about the pneumatic body of
Christ within the space of his entire theological conception, will
not be surprised that Casel’s eschatology in his Mysterientheolo
gie is not left only for the last things. That Christ already lives in
the new age (Aeon) is for him the eschata in that through his
death and resurrection Jesus has “broken through” into time and
is present in the Kultmysterien of the Church at all times and in
all places. The existence of the Risen Lord is in effect a “realized
eschatology.”
To the divine glory belongs the glory and Lordship of the Mes
siah, who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In his resur
rection Jesus inaugurated the revelation of his kingdom, his
kingdom being within us and among us. Casel understands this
as meaning that Christ works in and through his Church by
means of his spiritual (pneumatic) presence.
62Krahe, Der Herr H.200.

631bid.
334 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

The goal of the person, the Christian, is to become another
Christ, hence to become another “Spirit-bearer.” In this Casel
means that one must center one’s entire existence in and toward
God as the fulness of life. It was with this notion in mind—the
“Spirit-bearer” as the person totally turned toward God and in a
sense “possessed” by God, having been emptied of the negative
aspects of the self and filled with the gifi of God’s indwelling pres
ence, life, and spirit—that Casel based his notion of monastic con
secrationfi4 Casel saw in the renunciations of the monastic voca
tion not a negative “doing without,” but rather a very positive act,
a pneumatological act, whereby the monk or nun became in effect
a “Spirit-bearer” who had indeed been crucified and had risen
with Christ. This was not an ordination by episcopal standards,
but rather a “pneumatic act,” much in line with the Orthodox no
tion of the monk as a “Spirit-bearer,” equal to, if not more honor
able in the eyes of God, than the ordained clergy in the sense of
being “filled with the Spirit.” 65
To Casel’s mind, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit
(pneuma), not only the monastic but all baptised Christians as
well, received a new “principle of life,” a supernatural, divine dy
namis through which they became other Christs, other “Spirit
bearers.” By participating in the living, dying, and rising with
Christ in the Church’s liturgy, the faithful Christian would travel
the road laid open by Christ and so become with Christ a “spiri
tual,” “pneumatic” person, participating even now in the kingdom
of God.66
CONCLUSION
The modern spirit has strongly influenced theology, and in
Casel’s mind what the Church needed, what individual Chris
tians needed, was a return to the pneumatic-Christocentric spirit
of the Mysterion. Theology for Casel was not consideration or ra
tionalization of the truths of the faith, nor some philosophical il
lumination or enlightenment of the deposit of faith. Rather his
64Casel’s theology of the rhonastic vocation can be read in his article,

“Die Monchsweihe,” Jahrbuch flir Liturgiewissenschaft 5 (1925) 1-47. It is
perhaps in this article his pneumatology first found strong voice and hence
influenced his subsequent theology.
65Casel, “Die Monchsweihe,” J.L.W. 5 (1925) 21.
HARRIET LUCKMAN _ 335

thought consisted of a systematic witness from an all-embracing
vision, such that only through taking part in the Kultmysterium
could one begin to grasp it. The aim of theology for Casel was not
the systematic outline of the rational truths of revelation, but
rather the illumination, or intuition, of a revealed reality: the
mysterium Christi that is present in the Kultmysterium in a
sacramental manner. Ruster notes that Casel’s theology took as
its foundation the Scriptures and the Fathers, wishing perhaps to
return to a “primitive,” “pre-scientific” theology. Theology for
Casel was “vision” or “gnosis,” that which above all found voice in
the liturgy.67
Casel gained from the patristic tradition an unsurpassed depth
of insight into the meaning of the liturgy, and his work is of
greater doctrinal significance than has hitherto been widely ac
knowledged. He gave the liturgical movement a theological seri
ousness that has done more than anything else to ensure its abid
ing influence in the church. But Casel lacked the breadth of out
look necessary to appreciate the concrete problems of the liturgy
in the life of the church, a lack that would need to be taken up by
subsequent theologians and liturgists in the succeeding genera
tions, especially following Vatican II. Casel also showed a marked
indifference to the contributions of Judaism in Christianity, an
indifference not unusual for his time, but nonetheless one of the
more unfortunate oversights of his work. Nevertheless, Casel’s
Mysterientheologie reminded the church of the importance of the
interior experience and life of the Christian to the mystery and
presence of God found especially in the liturgy in contrast to an
over-formalized and blind notion of hierarchical obedience preva
lent in the church of his time. Casel’s theology of cult implies a
liturgical sociology, a sociology that need not be the political so
cialism of Marx or the Third Reich, but rather that of an authen
tic Christian community not unlike the monastic communities
with which Casel was familiar.
In conclusion we can say Casel’s theology is a pneumatology
which remains always a Christology, the two being inseparable in
his mind. The work of the Spirit remains always the work of the
Son. This pneumatological reflection, which Casel developed in
his Mysterientheologie, found its central themes in the mystery of
Christ. Such a notion in the life of the faithful of the pneumatical
6'lSee Ruster, Die verlorene Nu'tzlichkeit (note 13 above) 252.
336 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

element stands firmly in the center of Casel’s work, ordering the
individual—through the liturgy—to the resurrected life in Christ.
Casel’s theology understands the power of the Cross and resur
rection, through which Jesus has become present to us as
pneuma. For Casel, in Christ humanity is assumed and taken up
into the divinity as deeply as would be possible for a created be
ing. This notion is grounded for Casel in inner-Trinitarian and
Christological contexts. What the pneuma is in the ’I‘riune God,
namely the bond and life, so this bond of unity and unending
blessedness of life is given to the created world through the
pneuma of Christ.68 Casel’s pneumatological views are best seen
together with “Spirit-Christology,” the point of departure and
center of his pneumatology being the Paschal Mystery.
Casel’s theology must not be regarded purely in the terms of
rational, scientific systems, but rather, as Casel himself thought,
must be considered as the power of the Spirit. It was the Spirit
whom the resurrected One sent at such a price, and it is the
Spirit who reveals to us the presence of the Saving Christ among
us.
Much work is still left to be done in areas of Casel’s theology,
not only a more contemporary exploration of his notion of “mys
tery,” but also a deeper look into his pneumatology and his use of
patristic sources, as well as what appears to be an apparent de
gree of dualism in his thought.69 Whatever the outcome of such
study, it remains without doubt that his contribution remains
unique and unparalleled in the study of the liturgy for the twen
tieth century.

69Ruster notes that Casel’s eschatology was definitely dualistic, between
God and the world, between spirit and matter, etc. Whether Casel is as du
alistic as Ruster would like to show, is perhaps debatable. Nevertheless,
Ruster is correct in citing one of the main components of Casel’s theology,
influenced perhaps by certain Middle-Platonic notions in the early Fathers.
See Ruster, Die verlorene (note 13 above) 261.
HARRIET LUCKMAN 337

Lauds: The Monastic Struggle
The word from the street at truth time

is the bribe we lay at the feet of the King
with songs of printed gaiety and psalms
of prescription joy: Sun and moon,
mountains and the distant hills,
winter cold (. . “and then he said” . The birds of the air
.).
and all that moves in the waters call out glory;
only we are mute and must be taught.
In this moment of manufactured ultimacy
we hurl doxologies across the choir
. “I should have said” . .)and bow before the splendor
(.
we cannot see, fall to the knees, move

beyond the canned words, the other side
of prefabricated praise “It’s unfair” to the throne
(.
.)
.
.
of light, high and lified up, with the train
of majesty filling the temple court
. “loud!” . and the stupified seraphim
(.
.)
veil their eyes before the wonder we cannot speak,

stutter one to another “Holy, holy, holy
is the Great Am,” bending purity of faithfulness
I
to the steadfast betrayals.

“The whole earth full of God’s glory.”
is
At the voice of this thunder

the hinges of the temple portals groan,
the foundations of the threshold to the sanctuary shake.
“Late have we loved thee, Lord.”

Late we turn toward the face
from always turned toward us.
Kilian McDonnell
April 30, 1998
Matins on Monday
Numbness is not yet gravitas

as we rouse the dawn, falling upward in stalls,
spilling praises on the day’s beginnings,
dragging the bag of our ancestors’ bones
and praying their history; with Moses we pass free
through the sea, and smite Sihon, King of the Amorites,
and Og, King of Bashan, who abides
in Astaroth; with Deborah we shout
“Up! The Lord has given Sisera into our hands.”
With Thy mighty arm we gather them to their fathers;
“Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes their heads against a rock.”
(Do Thy wonders again in our day!)
We recognize our songs in their tainted psalms,

where true election lies down with delusions
that Yahweh would do transcendental violence
and blood the hand to clear the land
for their possession. Yet God leads them.
To the praise of God’s glory we again cut down the groves

of Baal in high places and salt the earth
(No Dagan is neigh unto the Lord!)
to fornicate with other gods and discover
Yahweh is our enemy.
'Ibday we stumble toward God,

singing the stormy songs of their ascent,
carrying the fury of our psalmed past
upon our backs, still the self-righteous chosen,
uppity as a house slave’s tribal scorn
for the field boy’s noon-day sweat,
as we see darkly that the mystery of our sly iniquity
cannot be separated out.
These, the mud cakes of our years, we place

before you as our morning offering.
Kilian McDonnell
April, 1998
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The American Benedictine Review. T. 49-3 (1998)

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V

233—Jean Leclercq and the Concept of

256—Under the Spell of Lorca:

287—La Tradicién Benedictina 1-11

299—Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus:

316—The Pneumatology of Odo Casel’s

233—Jean Leclercq and the Concept of

256—Under the Spell of Lorca:

287—La Tradicién Benedictina 1-11

299—Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus:

THE AMERICAN BENEDICTINE REVIEW

The American Benedictine Review (ISSN:0002-7650) is published

Address all correspondence to: The American Benedictine Review,

A few years ago, the editor wrote a book. He thought it was

232 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

The recent death (October 27, 1993) in the Abbey of Clervaux,

THE MONASTIC TRADITION

234 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 235

3Etudes sur le vocabulaire monastique du Moyen Age (Studia Anselmi

236 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

THE SITUATION OF MONASTIC STUDIES IN 1950

To fully understand the meaning of such a contribution and es

4See Commentaria in S. Regulam I, ed. J. Gribomont (Studia Anselmi

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 237

238 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

7G. Penco, “Il concetto di ‘spiritualita benedettina’ nelle riﬂessioni

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 239

LECLERCQ RECOVERS THE TRADITION

240 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

12“If the past is not confused with the tradition—which is transmission

15Concerning “our traditions” to which Abbot Guéranger refers, Leclercq

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 241

16Chances de la spiritualite' occidentale (note 13) 71. In monasticism, for

242 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

21G. Oury, “Gougaud, Louis” in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité V1.607-08.

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 243

28“Dévotion privée, piété populaire et liturgie au moyen age" in Etudes

244 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

35“The rhetorico-sapiential tradition so authoritatively described for us

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 245

insistence with which he defended certain mental attitudes of

he claimed that they are shaped by whole literary and doctrinal

“Conseil spirituel et conseillers selon S. Bernard” in Recueil d’études sur

Gastaldelli (Rome 1970)

42“There no Benedictine life without literature,” L’amour des lettres et

désir de Dieu (Paris 1957) 23.

43“La tradizione letteraria della Chiesa” in Umanesimo cultura monas

tica (note 30) 1-6.

246 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

Mont-Athos, 963-1963 I (Chevetogne 1963) 253-64.

tale dans le haut moyen age” in Le Millénaire du Mont-Athos 963-1963 ll

e ﬁgure di storia monastica italiana (note 25) 434.

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 247

LECLERCQ’S MIDDLE AGES

53“Mérites d’un réformateur et limites d’une réforme” in Revue Bénédic

248 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 249

531n regard to enclosure, for example, Dom Leclercq could distinguish

250 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998

61“S. Bernard et la Regle de S. Benoit” in Recueil d’ études sur Saint

GREGORIO PENCO, O.S.B. 251

d’ études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits 2 (note 59 above) 373-85.

252 ABR 49:3 - SEPT. 1998