Chapter 2 - The Journey to God Through Meditation and Prayer According to Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Monastic Thinkers

Summary

IN THE ELEVENTH and twelfth centuries, monastic thinkers wrote about the processes of meditation and prayer in more depth and detail than Christians ever had before. Indeed, it was not really until the eleventh century that monks and nuns began to develop step-by-step guides for meditative ascent and contemplative prayer to God. With the professionalization of monasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries at places like the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, where there was a greater focus on building occasions for uninterrupted prayer, monks and nuns were able to really turn their attention to the ins and outs of their meditative practices.

But these central medieval monastic writers did not invent the proverbial wheel by themselves. They built their ideas upon several centuries of writing that had come before, piecing together prescriptions from earlier monastic writers to create full-fledged programs for meditation and prayerful ascent for their monastic brethren. Moreover, busily applying their minds “to seek knowledge of hidden truth,” the evermore routine monastic prayer practice also likely brought forth a better understanding of how generally to best perform meditation. Practice, in other words, made perfect, and it also generated ideas about ideal models for prayer practice in the medieval monastery. The “zealous attention of the mind,” Augustinian prior Richard of St. Victor believed, allowed one to “break through obstructions” and “penetrate into hidden things” in devotion; thus, the attention of praxis itself enabled the envisioning of the ideal process of meditative ascent for Christians.

In this chapter, we will examine these theories, recommendations, and prescriptions by monks and nuns of what the religious practitioner should ideally do while meditating and praying (as for what medieval practitioners actually experienced in prayer, see Chapter Three). In its most essential form, meditative monastic prayer practice in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was uplifting: it moved the practitioner from their lowly, sinful position upwards, towards divine, heavenly heights. Prayerful voices were “lifted,” “spiritual muscles” were “stretched,” sinners were “roused” from sloth. Meditation and prayer were moving and dynamic, not static, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; when they were successful, they ascended.