By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order edited by Mette Birkedal Brunn. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Xiii+321 pp. Rs 550/-.
It is easy to enact modernist and postmodernist readings of history because archive-fever gives access to materials from the 1900s onwards. As we research further back in time, we find that only a few can re-spect essential substrata of relevant knowledge which makes the present meaningful. Mette Birkedal Brunn’s edited anthology of essays’ expansiveness is illustrated through the Primary Sources (269-82) and the Further Reading (283-99) list at the end of the Companion. The first sub-section of this Further Reading list entitled Introduction: withdrawal and engagement (283-4) is a great summation of works done at Kalamazoo.
It is to be noted that Brian Patrick McGuire’s essay Constitutions and the General Chapter (87-99) in this anthology mentions Dom Jean Leclercq’s (1911-1993) “disgust” at the Cistercians’s “being bogged down with minutiae” (96) but McGuire or even Birkedal Brunn missed referring to the works of Dom Paul Dellate (1848-1937) in reforming monasticism in the last century.
The most significant lacuna of this anthology is that each contributor scrutinises only one aspect of Cistercian history while Birkedal Brunn should have been careful not to miss out on Fr. Dellate’s scholarly corpus which went on to revolutionize Catholic monasticism.
In Bernard of Clairvaux: work and self (186-98) M.B. Pranger talks of the trope of the monastic “cri de coeur” and “the so-called officium flendi, the office of weeping” since “it was the monk’s duty to lament the sinful state of the human condition regardless of the specifics of his own sinful behaviour” (190). Pranger’s construction of the ‘author’ in his essay’s section The Author as Abbot, Father and Brother (191-4) is a tour de force in the postmodernist scrutiny of the ‘auctor’ function.
Clairvaux as Pranger shows crosses over from “the sermonic genre” to “the genre of lament” in his works and thereby “Bernard’s authorship in his abbacy [produced] two seemingly contradictory results” which need to be assessed within the medieval liturgical backdrop and Clairvaux’s selfhood as an author with agency who “claim[ed] literary freedom and flexibility of movement for his devotional and literary self” (193). Thus, it is wrong to categorise this companion as a text on medievalism or monasticism. This is a trans-disciplinary modernist text which includes essays on architecture, Cistercian nuns and even agriculture and economics during the flourishing of the Cistercian Order.
One ought to read the book for the immense scholarship available to us at a reasonable price-point. Scholars of medievalism certainly need to have their own copies while all Catholic novitiates including the apostolic ones should make selected areas as crucial reading for their novices since only with learning is faith sustained. As Bernard McGinn rightly points out:
Their [early Cistercians including William of Saint Thierry and Aelred of Rievaulx’s] teaching (doctrina) about the saving truth includes correct knowledge (scientia) about faith, but [eventually] aims at the higher gift of wisdom (sapientia) …[which]…reforms, transforms and unites a person to God. (219)
The book under review aids a person to gain sapientia to never go astray from the “school of Christ” (218).
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is a blogger and an Assistant Professor in English (UG & PG Departments of English) at Narasinha Dutt College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He has additional qualifications in Biblical Studies and separately, Spiritual Psychology. He also studied the Minor Upanishads separately. He remains a staunch Hindu. He had written extensively for the Catholic Herald published from Calcutta. From 2010 he reviews books for the Ramakrishna Mission and his reviews have been showcased in Ivy League Press-websites.