The Rule of St. Benedict

'Benedict envisioned a balanced life of prayer and work as the ideal. Monastics would spend time in prayer so as to discover why they're working, and would spend time in work so that good order and harmony would prevail in the monastery. Benedictines should not be consumed by work, nor should they spend so much time in prayer that responsibilities are neglected. According to Benedict, all things-eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, working, and praying-should be done in moderation. In Wisdom Distilled from the Daily , Sister Joan Chittister writes that in Benedict's Rule, "All must be given its due, but only its due. There should be something of everything and not too much of anything."'

Read more here

All Things Made New: The Mary Prayer

Over on Stratford Caldecott's blog:
All Things Made New: The Mary Prayer: Today being the Memorial of the Most Holy Name of Mary, it is appropriate to reflect on the Marian prayer that complements the Jesus Praye...
This is a beautiful meditation on the Hail Mary

Quiring to the young-eyed cherubim

 "...see how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim;
Such harmony is in immortal souls!
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in we cannot hear it."

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice Act V sc 1

The question of images

Where do we go from here? Today we are experiencing not just a crisis of sacred art, but a crisis of art in general of unprecedented proportions. The crisis of art for its part is a symptom of the crisis of man's very existence. The immense growth in man's mastery of the material world has left him blind to the questions of life's meaning that transcend the material world. We might almost call it a blindness of the spirit. The questions of how we ought to live, how we can overcome death, whether existence has a purpose and what it is - to all these questions there is no longer a common answer. Positivism, formulated in the name of scientific seriousness, narrows the horizon to what is verifiable, to what can be proved by experiment; it renders the world opaque. True, it still contains mathematics, but the logos that is the presupposition of this mathematics and its applicability is no longer evident. Thus our world of images no longer surpasses the bounds of sense and appearance, and the flood of images that surrounds us really means the end of the image. If something cannot be photographed, it cannot be seen. In this situation, the art of the icon, sacred art, depending as it does on a wider kind of seeing, becomes impossible. What is more, art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme possibilities of the sense of sight, becomes literally object-less. Art turns into experimenting with self-created worlds, empty "creativity", which no longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to take his place, and yet, in so doing, it manages to produce only what is arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role as creator.

From The Spirit of the Liturgy, part three, Art and Liturgy, by Joseph Ratzinger.

“The average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see!” wrote Josef Pieper in Learning How to See Again.

St. Augustine calls this desire to see without reflection on what is seen as 'concupiscence of the eyes'. Our technologies multiply the opportunities for mere luxuriation in the experience of seeing. Witness the obsession with HD, 3D, big screen hyper-real visual experience. This is one type of maximisation of visual concupiscence. Surfing the web can another, where the emphasis increasingly becomes focused on the digital device used to view diverse forms of  content, from ebooks to web browsing to streaming video. The temptation to be a 'visual magpie' and hop from one shiny new experience to another in search of a 'hit' of novelty can be powerful, and prevents any deep reflection on the thing seen. 

Obedience to the gods of new technology is almost standard amongst most of my generation. I am one of the worst offenders. As well as having a tablet I have a tablet phone, and spend most of my free time flicking through the different apps on them. I do however have some friends who are purposeful luddites, who only carry old brick phones, or none at all. I have an upgrade date approaching on my phone contract. Do I dare to reject it all? 

C S Lewis argues in the Abolition of Man that in modernity "there is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.”

There is much of this also in Tolkien, inevitably. The magic of Saruman is really technology, machinery, a worldview of nature-domination, even more, a denial that things have a nature of their own, that they have an end towards which they are made, and in the void that creates there is implanted the will of the magician. This inability to see things as they are in themselves, even the denial of this possibility, which comes about in a Post-Kantian rationalist age has an antidote, which I have talked about elsewhere (in particular here ). 

Via Pulchritudinis

"The Beauty of the Arts
If nature and the cosmos are the expression of the beauty of the Creator and bring us to the threshold of a contemplative silence, artistic creation possesses its own capacity to evoke the ineffable aspects of the mystery of God. The work of art is not "beauty" but its expression, and it possesses an intrinsic character of universality if it obeys the canons, which naturally fluctuate for all art is tied to a culture. Artistic beauty provokes interior emotion, it silently arouses astonishment and leads to an "exit from self," an ecstasy.
For the believer, beauty transcends the aesthetic and finds its archetype in God. The contemplation of Christ in the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption is the living source from which the Christian artist takes inspiration to speak of the mystery of God and the mystery of man saved in Jesus Christ. All Christian artwork has such a meaning: it is, by nature, a "symbol", a reality that refers beyond itself which leads along the path that reveals the meaning, origin and end of our terrestrial journey. Its beauty is characterised by a capacity to move from the interior "for self" to that of the "more than self." This passage becomes real in Jesus Christ, who is Himself "the way, the truth and the life," (Jn 14, 6) the "complete truth." (Jn 16, 13)"

CONCLUDING DOCUMENT OF THE PLENARY ASSEMBLY, The Via Pulchritudinis III 2

The picture that I am currently working on is an illustration for my story 'The Woe Water'. It features the narrator, a monk in his cell, working on an illuminated manuscript. The scene is framed by the Romanesque arch of the doorway, with a stained-glass rose window illuminating the cell and sunflowers and bees outside.
The symbolism of the scene draws on various ideas that are currently occupying me , and which I have been thinking about for some time. I wanted to include the stained glass rose window as a reference to Bonaventure's analogy of stained glass with creation, illuminated by the light of God, an image of the the way of illumination or cataphatic way, whereby the meditation upon created things leads like a ladder to the creator. Beauty is reached by the beautiful.
The rays coming through the window can also be an image of the Awen, the ancient bardic symbol for inspiration, which illuminated the pre-Christian seers of these isles at midsummer when the veil between the worlds was thin. It brought the sweetness of wisdom and enabled the bard to sing truth.
That is also why the bee is in the picture, as a link between these two manifestations of the same idea in pagan and Christian culture. For the Celts, the bee was able to travel between the worlds at midsummer, and in creating honey was a symbol of wisdom which is sweet. But the bee is also there because the Christian monks have long kept bees, and the association goes beyond the simple material one of providing beeswax and honey. Bees live together in community, diligently working for the greater good of the hive, yet working individually, carefully gathering pollen. The individual work of each monk in his cell also gains its meaning in relation to the whole monastery, work and prayer joining them together in their orientation to God.

St Augustine on Beauty and Desire

"Late have I loved you, O beauty, so old and so new, too late have I loved you! You were here and I sought elsewhere; I was deformed, drowning in those fair forms you made. […] You called. You shouted. You battered my deafness. You shone. You glistened. You shattered my blindness. You radiated and I breathed in your spirit, and I desired you. I tasted you and hungered, thirsted after you. You touched me and I burned for your peace"

Confessions, St. Augustine



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Chesterton on Postmodernism

"Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought."

From Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton