On Monastic Interpretation

A junior colleague of mine stopped me in the hall after a class we teach together and wanted to get my advice on the history of New Testament interpretation. He’s in the usual graduate seminar that surveys such things. Now, my program is such that it actually gives an entire semester to the pre-Reformation history of interp. I don’t think most other programs do this, considering such “pre-critical” readings as not useful for modern NT scholars. Anyway, he’s been assigned to present on medieval monastic interp and want to pick my brain for a bit. His first question was essentially that which any NT scholar would ask: “They’re just reading the Fathers and using that, right?”

My answer was a classic yes–but no. It took a while…

In the aftermath, I was thinking through how I would go about teaching medieval monastic exegesis to try and communicate just what was going on. Here’re some initial thoughts:

• Give them a sense of monastic life as life within an intentional liturgical community.
• Yes, have the students read the section in the Rule on the Offices to give them a sense of Benedict’s concept of the monastic cursus.
• Then, have them read a corresponding section from the 10th century Regularis Concordia to show them how different and how much more complicated the monastic liturgical life was than Benedict had ever envisioned.
• Then give them some photocopies from the Breviary to reinforce that a) all liturgy is not just your Sunday morning liturgy; b) Scripture is constantly in juxtaposition with other Scripture and with non-Scriptural texts; c) this is far more complex in practice than it sounds.
• Give them a sense not just that the patristic authors were used but how and in what contexts
• Remind them about manuscript production costs, then emphasize and re-emphasize that the monastics didn’t have the Patrologia Latina at hand. Or even the Ante/Post Nicene Fathers. No–Paul the Deacon’s homiliary for the Night Office & Cassiodorus on the Psalms really were the sources for 90% of what 90% of medieval monks knew of the Fathers.
• Yes, some monks probably read the Fathers for study material but the paradigmatic encounter with them was in the liturgical setting. The sermons, homilies, or commentary extracts would be interrupted four times for responsaries thematically tying the third Nocturn back into the main biblical content of the first Nocturn as determined by the liturgical season… The main point being: their encounter with the patristic interpretation was in a far different setting than either ours or even the works’ original contexts–and that would effect how they would hear it.
• Have them read a homily by Bede or Gregory–then have them read the corresponding “adaptation” by somebody like Aelfric. Highlight, too, that what was on the page was not necessarily what was heard…
• Give them a sense that biblical interpretation in this setting is not fundamentally about data and information. Rather, it was about experiencing the text and its transformative potential through an elaborate and interconnected system designed for this purpose.
• This is underscored and reinforce by how the many lectionary cycles fit together. The way (as I was saying before) the Mass Epistle shows up in the versicles & responses for the Little Hours and verses from the Mass Gospel appear as the Canticle antiphons through the week…
• Guiding and directing a lot of this is the liturgical year. The seasons themselves are interpretations of biblical events and texts and the texts within the seasons were chosen to fit within them–but, at the same time, their actual content nuances the meaning of the seasons. Furthermore certain kinds of interpretive material either appear or disappear based on the season…

It’s complicated. And, in many ways, this is my chapter 3–to lay all of this out in a (more or less) comprehensible fashion.

One of the major themes that I see running through my pedagogical attempts is interpretation and appropriation through recontextualization. That is, yeah, they used patristic material–but in a different way from which it was intended which has the effect of altering its purpose so the same text is acting in a new way and producing a new result.

Another major theme I see is reinforcing the alien nature of the interpretive culture. This kind of interpretation is not about a guy at a desk with a book. Its about a communal experience and embodiment of the text. There’s a reason why so much of the monastic exegesis can be classified as “moral”–it’s because a major focus was not on “thinking thoughts” about the text but rather on how to put the text into practice. Maybe what we label the “moral sense” might be better labeled “the sense capable of being embodied”…

 

Conceptual Reframing

I think I leaped a big hurdle this morning in terms of how my sermon chapters will be structured. I’ve been wrestling with some related problems namely, 1) how do I treat Æ’s sermons as texts in their own right yet 2) honor their indebtedness to their sources without 3) perpetuating one of the views I want to avoid, that he and other early medieval preachers are just plagiarists. What I came to this morning is the realization of how the paradigms are functioning. We look at one of Æ’s sermons and see that he has heavily relied on Gregory the Great as a source. And therein lies the problem to my way of thinking… When we start considering Gregory as a “source” we are putting ourselves in an academic text-production paradigm. But that isn’t the most productive way to think about it at all.

The better way to think about it is one that finds Æ at home in his particular context. The question to begin is with is this one: When Æ sat down to produce an interpretation of biblical text X, how did he do it? What was his thought process? The answer is not that he reached for a source, rather, his mind went to his liturgical context and conditioning. When looking for a place to start, he’d head not to “Gregory” per se, but to “Paul”–Paul the Deacon–who had selected Gregory’s homily as the reading for the third Nocturn of the Night Office. The selection of Gregory is more a function of Æ’s liturgical context than the drive for a source. That is, Æ’s instinct was to go to the reading that had already liturgically interpreted the text and to use that as his main mode of entry into the text.

This isn’t necessarily a huge distinction but I do think it is an important one in terms of orientation and how we think through how the liturgical cycles influenced monastic authors. As a result, it also gives me a cleaner and clearer chapter shape so I can start by looking at Æ’s homily in its own right, then attend to the liturgical context which would include this kind of source material which almost invariably begins with the 3rd Nocturn homily (although he does sometimes supplement it from there–from other homiliaries) and also discuss how the liturgical texts of Mass and Office–hymns, collects, canticle antiphons, etc.–suggest or reinforce the interpretative tack he took.

Dissertation Work

Things have progressed to the point where I’ve been able to designate some brain cycles to dissertation work again. (I’ve had it–it *will* be finished by the end of the summer if it kills me. So far the odds are 50-50.)

Whereas before I started with more methodological stuff, I’ve dived into Æ’s sermons directly. What this has helped me see is that some of the stuff I pruned out before absolutely has to be put back into my re-formed chapters 2 and 3. Fr. Director thought that some of my work on patristic homilies was smoke-chasing; I’ve determined that it’s completely critical to the project.

Traditionally, early medieval homileticians have been accused of simple plagiarism. Indeed, Henri De Lubac’s only comment on Æ

is that he is a plagiarist of Gregory’s work. Rather, my work on the patristic material identifies not simply content but method and the purpose that derives from the method. What this let me do is to look at Æ’s sermons and to show that while, yes, he is recycling some content, he is using it in a very different way and with its own quite distinct method that throws light on what an early medieval preacher thought that he was creating.

My use of the Breviary has also been helpful. I now know I need to revisit some of my earlier liturgical work and look for some new evidence in different places.