LOVE OF LEARNING

This article continues our series entitled “The Reading List,” which seeks to capture some of the reading the monks of the community have done or are doing in their ongoing pursuit of the “Love of Learning.”
 

Fr. Chris Davis, O.S.B.

Father Christopher Davis, a monk of our abbey now in residence at the Grand Islander Center in Middletown, Rhode Island, remains, in his nineties, a conversationalist without peer. One cannot fail to be impressed with his cultural and historical fluency, his irrepressible positivity, and his well-crafted sense of humor. A visit to the Grand Islander will typically elicit from the receptionist, “We love Father Chris!” The visitor is lucky to catch him in his room, as whatever the social gathering that may be in the works, it will draw him like the proverbial moth to a flame. He is indeed the cenobite, whether in his beloved monastery, or “in exile” as “a political prisoner” at the Grand Islander. Always at the ready for any inkling of news from the Abbey, he is also an endless source of historical insight into its history. These tidbits he often frames humorously, punctuated with a ready and recognizable laugh.

Enjoying Trollope’s Barteshire Series.

Anthony Trollope

It may not be a surprise, then, that when I asked him about books and reading, the favorite author of novels that came immediately to his mind was Anthony Trollope. In particular, he loves the Chronicles of Barteshire series – beating his breast with a humble confession that he is still “intending to read” the author’s Palliser series. He loves Trollope’s depiction of upper-class society and its clergymen and their politics. “The famous novel there is The Warden, an old English term for a church pastor... These novels are, well, the gentleman’s Charles Dickens.” He notes the “huge size of London” when Dickens wrote, and that his work covered that society, “from top to bottom... He put in everybody, those that ran the country to those in the gutter. But Trollope,” he laughs, “he stuck to the upper class, so they are much easier to read.”*

Encountering Paul Beauchamp

When our conversation turned to theology, there was no question in Father Chris’ mind that “the best teacher I ever had” was a theology professor at the University of San Francisco. When looking into further theological study in the 1970’s, he had been in fact been prompted by an oblate of Portsmouth to inquire at Fordham about graduate programs and was directed there to USF. His academic advisor in San Francisco then directed him to a course by Paul Beauchamp, the French exegete, excusing Fr. Chris for not knowing who Beauchamp was, “since you have lately only been serving as a chaplain to sisters.” Fr. Chris would soon find out who Beauchamp was and be deeply impressed with the manner in which the professor made the material accessible to students, while displaying an astounding breadth of knowledge and intellectual ability. Fr. Chris noted Beauchamp’s wide linguistic skills, including his expert knowledge of various languages of the Ancient Near East, as well as his fluent English: Beauchamp told him he had taught himself English – “Who does that?!” - and had done so primarily by reading Mark Twain. As Father Chris was one of the older graduate students, already a Benedictine and experienced as a chaplain, he was able to get to the professor and his Jesuit community outside the classroom. He laughs, “Just walking the streets of San Francisco with the man was in itself an education.”

Translation of Beauchamp: Psalms: Night and Day

Some of Beauchamp’s work is only recently available in English. America magazine included in its February 23, 2016 issue a review of Beauchamp’s Psalms, Night and Day, translated by Peter Rogers, S.J. (Marquette University Press, originally published as Psaumes nuit et jour, 1979). It notes: “This volume is well worth the wait of 36 years for a translator.” Beauchamp’s writing reveals, “a significant scholar in touch with nonscholarly audiences... Beauchamp has an intriguing way of introducing the questions that might concern us (e.g., imprecatory, cursing psalms) in a conversational way that builds on his view of the human issues in these texts... Beauchamp also demonstrates a healthy way of reading psalm texts in the light of Christ. Jesus defines himself as one who has done the will of the Father, and that ‘will’ for him was ‘discovered’ in the Psalms that he himself knew, dictated to him through other people... Finally, it seemed that reading his text resembles spiritual reading, perhaps a lectio style, more than academic reading. The end result will be a deeper perception of Psalms and their power in our lives.” Another work of Beauchamp to consider is 50 Biblical Portraits (translated by Peter Rogers, et al.). A reviewer (see Abe Books) notes: “...From Adam and Eve to Abraham and Moses, from Samson and Samuel to Job and Judith, Paul Beauchamp, S.J., presents, through the translation of Peter Rogers, S.J., fifty brief yet patient reflections on the stories of these and other figures whose lives helped shape the history of biblical Israel. Accompanied by the drawings of Pierre Grassignoux, which are themselves renditions of art works of these figures, each meditation or reflection is a portrait in word and image. Fifty Biblical Portraits is thus a unique way to enter into and reflect upon the rich life and history that is the life and history of biblical Israel.”

Discovering a book on Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Fr. Chris was willing to identify himself as “a reader” (unlike myself), and he misses easy access to books. The first recollection that came quickly to his mind when asked about spiritual reading was a book on monasticism, particularly on the life of Saint Bernard: “I just found it in the monastery library.” The book presented Bernard as the “man of his century... really like the John Paul II of his century.” It “makes it clear why Bernard became so important.” The Cistercians, Fr. Chris notes, became with the popularity of Thomas Merton somewhat confused in the public mind with the Trappists. The discovery of the book, “taught me things I had never known.” Perhaps most importantly, he remembered reading of the monks who had been sent out as missionaries, and their pleading with Bernard to return to their home monastery. “A monk is supposed to fall in love with his monastery,” he states, and the letters of Bernard’s missionaries proved to be a “tribute to what monastic life is about, in their affection for their monastery.”

Fr. Chris at Conventual Mass

One still finds in the monastic library a volume, dedicated “with his permission” to Thomas Carlyle, by James Cotter Morison. Its language mirrors the vision of Bernard that captivated Fr. Chris: “To us, looking back on Bernard through a vista of seven centuries, he appears as one of the great active minds of his age – commanding kings, compelling nations, influencing and directing the men and things among which he lived; – in a word, one of the statesmen of history. And in truth he was all this. The twelfth century would have had another aspect if he had never lived. But it must not be forgotten that this external, mundane activity was an accident, and appendix, as it were, to his true career, to the career which he had chosen for himself. The central impulse of his being, the springhead from which flowed the manifold streams of his public acts, had no necessary connection with the outer world of men and events. He was, by intention and inclination, a prayerful monk, doubtful and anxious about the state of his soul, striving to work out his salvation with fear and trembling here on earth. The highest good he knew of, the ideal of Christian faith as he had been taught it – this was what inflamed his heart, nerves as well, and braced his energies of mind and body to the extremist tension. To him and to his contemporaries this ideal was realized in the life of a pious monk.” The Life and Times of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, James Cotter Morison (London: Macmillan and Company, 1901)

These varied recollections led Fr. Chris to reflect on his own vocation, with Dom Hilary Martin being one of the monks he had spoken with initially about entering the monastery. This discussion about monastic life had been part of a ”humane, smooth, well thought-out process,” he recalls, enabling him as a postulant to truly realize what he was getting into. Such preparation is rooted in the Rule of St Benedict, which requires that newcomers repeatedly be read the Rule to have clarity on the expectations. Fr. Chris also notes the importance of a continued reading of the Rule, seen in the well-used edition maintained in the refectory, with dates in the margins mapping out when passages should be read. “I am so grateful” he says of his monastic experience. He also highlights the influence Dom Aelred Wall, his headmaster and his housemaster during his time as a student at Portsmouth. In his references to Bernard’s homesick missionaries, one cannot fail to see Fr. Chris’ steady disappointment and sorrow at having to remain away from his beloved monastery. Even there, he maintains some humor: “I miss the food, the grounds, and the monks – in that order.” In light of the question of reading, he laments, “I’d love to go back to Portsmouth to have a library at my disposal.” Still, in conversation with Fr. Chris, one senses he indeed does have a library at his disposal, of books and memories, as he readily draws on his experiences with reading, as with the people that have shaped his own life, to carry on the most engaging of conversations.

* See the blog: https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/anthony-trollope-clergymen-we-love for an interesting and informative discussion of Trollope’s balanced and human treatment of the clergy in the series.