The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Pro Vita Monastica
PRO VITA MONASTICA
Pro Vita Monastica. By Henry Dwight Sedgwick. 8vo. 164 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $3.50.
THIS is a very significant book, but the reading of it is a pleasure apart from this, for it is a model of literary style, delicate, polished, reserved, while the format of the volume is perfectly consonant with its matter, a very masterpiece of book-making.
Perhaps, indeed certainly, the quality of significance reveals itself in these respects as well as in the major fact that the book itself is utterly out of key with all the dominant tendencies of the time wherein lies its significance. So far as the present generation is concerned—perfect style in the writing of English is not a common aim, and even good things come before us in slovenly, headlong shape, or disguised in the cheap trappings of a rough colloquialism. The beauty of English as such (and there is no language that offers greater opportunities or more noble precedents) is almost a lost art and a forsaken ideal, and the jargon of journalism or of the scientific treatise is, if not the model consciously chosen, at least the determining influence working through the sub-conscious mind. Few indeed are the contemporary books like Compton Leith's Sirenica or (for a different genre) Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, that are artistic triumphs of creative genius in the use of language, masterpieces of great style, and it is in this slender gathering that Mr Sedgwick belongs.
And again in the making of books, we have enough and to spare of "precious" and "distinctive" productions with their exaggerated effects in paper, typography, binding, but the volume that is in itself a work of art just because of its delicate composition of the tempting, subtle, but betraying elements in the printer's craft (some of Mr Updyke's publications for example) is rare, and therefore when so admirable a thing as this from the Atlantic Monthly Press comes before us, "as a stranger give it welcome."
Style, form, and matter are all harmonized here, and all work together to give the impression of escape, of refuge from a too insistent life that in its present estate has little to commend it except the bare and primal fact that it is. It is heartening that of late at least a score of books have been published, all assailing our present form of civilization with bitter irony, sarcasm, ridicule. The old serene satisfaction of the fifty years that assembled around the turn of the century, is gone, and in its place has come disillusionment, with scathing depreciation following after. It is in America that the attack is most fast and furious, but constructive vision does not match destructive criticism, such as there is coming rather from England. For this reason it is the more encouraging that a book such as this should be put forward at this time, for it is essentially constructive, and gets deep down to the roots of things.
What Mr Sedgwick has found is no more than that which was a commonplace during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian Era, lost altogether amongst those peoples that accepted Protestantism, yet nevertheless of the very essence of Christianity, as Catholics have always known and as Mr Sedgwick has discovered for himself. In his preface he puts it in few words, and thus:
"I merely wish to lay stress upon the fact that, for one reason and another, Christianity, at least among Protestants, has cast aside, or dropped out, a great part of the ancient practise that, during many centuries, helped it adapt itself to human needs, enabled it to produce heroic and radiant personalities, and shed over it a poetry which it now lacks. I refer to the practise of withdrawal from the world of ordinary life and from the usual occupations of men, into some solitary or sequestered place, where in hermitage or monastery they might give themselves up to contemplation, meditation or prayer, and to such labours in library or garden as should best fit the mind to be the dwelling-place of whatever thoughts might seem to them the highest, best and most beautiful.
"And as, to my way of thinking, such sequestered habits and practises are of the essence of Christianity, for without them it goes about its tasks, halt and maimed, in helpless inadequacy, so also I believe that the individual life, unless it takes advantage of those practises, withdrawing apart to think high thoughts, and to reconsider by the light of such thoughts its hopes, ambitions, and desires, is, and must be, imperfect.”
Through brief but penetrating studies of such as Saint Anthony, Saint Benedict, Saint Thomas à Kempis, Eugénie de Guérin, he leads on to a consideration of the spiritual energy that brings the clarifying of vision, to be derived by the solitary or the recluse from the garden, the library, the oratory, and shows with great sympathy, but equal force, how from these the recollected recluse has achieved, and always may, "that peace the world cannot give," that world "absorbed in animal existence" where "cowboys afoot might as well try to stop a stampede of maddened steers as the reasoning few to guide the course of the multitude." It is this cloistered life that reveals reality. "In the monastic system we shall find recorded a great part of whatever success men have achieved in their search for spiritual wisdom," for "faith and imagination are the two distinguishing habits of mind, the two factors of knowledge, the two primal conditions of human existence; without them the senses and reason would be the very shadow of vanity," and it is faith and imagination that are destroyed by life as it is lived now, but edified in hermitage or cloister.
All this was and is a commonplace of Catholicism—not to speak of the East whether Buddhist or Brahmin—but the significant thing is that one should achieve this truth by paths in no way Catholic and should give it forth in this day and generation. Nothing could be dreamed of less consonant with contemporary methods and motives than the life of withdrawal, meditation, prayer, and intercession. All we think of, conceive of as desirable and potent, is an everlasting doing of something, it really doesn't very much matter what, so long as it means efficiency and mass-production; commissions, conferences, committees, conventions, drives, campaigns, and legislation. The spiritual quest, the retreat into the wilderness unstained by radios, motor cars, advertising, newspapers, bond-salesmen, and insurance solicitors; the desirability of getting acquainted with one's soul, and through this, with God—these are the things that at the most moderate estimate are regarded with indifference by the world, which has gone its troubled way with far other goals in view and by immeasurably alien paths. That success has been the issue is a thesis hardly tenable, but in the chaos of failure there are few that envisage the right way. What happens, by some intractable fate, is paralleled by our political and social courses, where, in some nominal monarchy, a popularized parliamentary system breaks down in venality and incompetence, and a revolutionary progress is made into anarchy by way of a theoretical "republic," as in Portugal, China, Russia, and the tottering states of the dismembered "Central Empires." So, as modernism shatters, the cry goes up for increased production, greater "efficiency," more mechanical inventions; for publicity, mass-action, more laws, and increased activity of every kind, with Mr Ford and Mr Edison and Dr Steinmetz and the "efficiency expert" as the prophets of regeneration.
Here is the significance of Mr Sedgwick's book, that it should come at this time, when few indeed will understand, fewer still accept it; yet it is written, and this means that here and there light is showing in darkness, and when after storm the clouds once break, even for the moment, the break presages fairer weather, and the clearing for a new day.
The truth that shines through the Vita Monastica (be it printed book or way of life) is implicit in Christianity and still not inactive in the Catholic part thereof. There are signs that it is revealing itself once more, and when it is given full emphasis where it is retained, and recovered where it has been lost, then the world may go on well for another period. Every development of formal monasticism (of which there are so many to-day) is welcome, but far more so such an evidence as this that reveals the recovery of this truth where it had been altogether lost.
There is nothing more interesting to-day than the watching of that process whereby one man and another finds his way back to ultimate truth through study of some manifestation of the life of the Middle Ages. It may be philosophy, economics, sociology, politics, literature, architecture, or some other of a dozen different things, the end is the same; the realization that here was a sane and rounded and beautiful life in comparison with which ours is barbarous, or worse. One fancies that in the present case the path to enlightenment has been Dante, as with another it may have been St Thomas Aquinas, or Chartres Cathedral, or the Statutes of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is all curious and unexpected, but heartening to a degree; moreover it is cumulative, and in the end it may mean redemption.
There is a danger in the process, and that is the chance that the method may result in a certain over-intellectualizing of truths, the building up of a theory that may be right and yet not closely enough related to life itself to achieve vitality. The result is that self acquires too prominent a place, and questions are determined, courses laid, in accordance with the reactions of this personal equation. If anything of this appears in the book under consideration, it is of the slightest, and no more than a feeling that the author has gone far, but has not yet quite achieved the great and vitalizing element that through St Benedict entered into the practice of withdrawal from the world, and from then on was the great glory of Christian society. I mean fellowship in withdrawal, and the loss of all sense of personal gain or gratification through this companionship and in the helping and saving of others. As Mr Sedgwick says, "No man can save his own soul without necessarily helping his brother save his soul likewise," and it is equally true that no man can save his brother's soul, or any part of him, without helping to save his own soul. The greatness of the Christian monastic system was that it balanced these two things in just equilibrium, adding thereto the element of comradeship, which was the best protection against egotism and undue regard for one's own soul and one's own immediate spiritual happiness.