The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism

347 Pages·2003·10.271 MB·English

by  M.B. Pranger

THE ARTIFICIALITY OF
CHRISTIANITY
ESSAYS ON THE POETICS
OF MONASTICISM
M. B. Pranger
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2003
Publication was made possible in pan by the suppon of
the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
Stanford University Press
Stanford. California
© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
Pranger. XL B.
The anindality of Christianity: essays on the poetics of monasticism /
XL B. Pranger.
p. cm. — (Figurae)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 0-8047-4524-2 (alk paper)
1. Monastic and religious life. 2. Christianity and literature. I. Title.
II. Series: Figurae (Stanford, Calif..
BX2435.P635 2002
255—dc2i 2002012602
Typeset at Stanford University Press in n/14 Garamond
Original printing 2003
Last figure below indicates the year of this printing:
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
I
TO PETER CRAMER
GENTLEMAN, SCHOLAR
■
Acknowledgments
Chapter 5, “Killing Time: Some Remarks about the Monastic Concept of
Speed,” is reproduced by permission of Brill NV from Carolyn Muessig,
ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 90
(Leiden: Brill, 1998). Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Dialectics: Reason, Image,
Word,” is reproduced by permission of Sheffield University Press from
D. E. Luscombe and G. R. Evans, eds., Anselm: Aosta, Bee and Canterbury:
Papers in Commemoration of the Nine-Hundredth Anniversary of Anselm’s
Enthronement as Archbishop (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
Chapter 12, “Text and Soul,” is a revised version of the article “Normative
Centering as a Textual Process: Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart,” in R. Suntrup
and J. Veenstra, eds., Medieval to Early Modem Culture, vol. 2 (Frankfurt:
Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2002).
J
Contents
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
Parti:
VIOLENCE
I. The Artifice of Eternity 17
. Monastic Cruelty: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Staging of the Past 39
3. Andre Malraux, Charles de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux
on Action and Contemplation 39
4. Violent Embraces: Monastic Representations
of the Old Testament 69
5. Killing Time: Some Remarks about the
Monastic Concept of Speed 84
Part II:
DENSITY
6. Anselm of Canterbury and the Art of Despair 107
7. The Mirror of Dialectics: Reason, Image, Word 136
8. Anselms Brevity 151
9. Reading Anselm 162
10. Death and Pleasure: The Poetics of Cur deus homo 177
Contents xii
Part III:
EXILE
11. Narrative Superiority:
Peter the Venerable and the Miracle of the Bees 199
11. Text and Soul: Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart 212
13. The Scholastic Lyricism of John of the Cross 233
14. Baroque Devouon: Aspects of Perspective and Constraint
in the Work of Pierre de Berulle 261
15. Images of Iron: Ignatius of Loyola and Joyce 278
Notes 297
Bibliography 323
J
Preface
The monastic soul is governed by hope and despair. In order to achieve the
first, one has to specialize in the second; thus also the author who aims to
give an account of his reading of monastic texts. Ever since I wrote my doc­
toral thesis on Anselm of Canterbury many years ago, I have been fasci­
nated by the sheer genius, hovering between desperation and joy, with
which he succeeded in blending beauty of style with rigor of argumenta­
tion. Just as one rereads and rediscovers the great narratives of civilization
without ever striking rock bottom, so the basic moods of joy and despair,
artfully manipulated by Anselm and other great medieval thinkers, appear
to be inexhaustible in eloquence and expressiveness.
From a more modern point of view, talking about “moods” would seem
to be mainly about feeling and experience. And indeed it must be ac­
knowledged that much of the directness and authenticity of the stirrings of
the modern psyche derives from the way in which Western devotion has
developed since the late Middle Ages. As the core of my book, which deals
with an earlier period (the flourishing of monastic literature between 1000
and 1200), demonstrates, it is clear that, instead of being concerned with
authentic emotions, the monastic author focuses on the artificiality of a
technical process in which emotions are being established and handled as
part of performative exercises rather than as feelings that are present and
accessible as such.
One of the ways to write about this complex body of literature is to
turn to the rhetorical techniques at hand and analyze their historical func­
tion in medieval (monastic) sources. This is the approach of the great Swiss
scholar Peter von Moos, to whose immensely learned work I owe much. In
Preface xiv
my effort to read and represent monastic writings in their entirety—in the
unity of their technical and emotive aspects—my inspiration has always
been drawn from modernist literature, in particular Robert Musil’s The
Man without Qualities. His focus on Genauigkeit und die Seele (precision
and the soul) seems eminently applicable to Anselm and to other monastic
thinkers, as does his playful and ironic use of technical, scientific language.
The subde shades that can be discovered in Romanesque literary “sculp­
ture with the help of Musil and others are, in my view, proofs of the fact
that the discipline of (literary) history could profit from more recent
specimens of literature if only to break the great chain of (deceitful) his­
torical continuity. It was not, therefore, fear of anachronism that kept
Musil and the likes of him out of my earlier writings on Anselm, but the
economy of focus: Genauigkeit/precision. Both aspects, the economy of
focus and the possibility of a historical assessment of intensity and preci­
sion, are expressed most wonderfully in Ernst Bloch’s Musil-like character­
ization of his friend, the conductor Otto Klemperer: nirgends brennen u>ir
genauer (“nowhere do we burn with greater precision”). Bloch’s adage
seems quite suitable for describing Klemperer’s career, haunted and almost
destroyed by recurring periods of manic depressive moods. It was not the
great man’s moodiness in itself that made his conducting so intense and
precise; rather, moodiness, however aggressive and unsettling, was to be
seen as the side effect of the focus, precision, and intensity of his art. This,
to my mind, is exacdy the way the monastic mind operates. Joy and de­
spair do not cease to be linked to a burning place, the paradisus claustralis,
whose depths, both horrible and blissful, are unfathomable.
In the course of years I have built up a considerable debt to a number of
scholars and friends. Ever since our first meeting in 1974, Arjo Vanderjagt
has been my loyal companion in matters Anselmian and beyond. The sec­
retary of the International Anselm Committee, Helmut Kohlenberger, has
been indefatigable in organizing Anselm conferences all over the globe,
from which many chapters in this book have sprung. I appreciate his
friendship over the years and our conversations about academia, religion,
and culture. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jules Vuillemin, whose rigor
of argumentation, stylistic elegance, and wit are not without Anselmian
overtones.