Bücher der Reihe Cistercian Studies

In the early part of the fourth century, a few Christians, mostly men and some women, began to withdraw from "the world" to retreat into the desert, there to practice their new religion more seriously. The person who aspired to "renounce the world" first had to find an "elder," a person who would accept him as a disciple and apprentice. To his elder (whom he would address as abba-father) the neophyte owed complete obedience; from his abba, he would receive provisions (as it were) for the road to virtue. In addition to the abba's own example of living, there was the verbal teaching of the elders in sayings and tales, setting out the theory and practice of the eremitic life.In due course, these sayings (or apophthegmata) were written down and, later, collected and codified. The earliest attempts to codify tales and sayings are now lost. As the collection grew, they were first organized alphabetically, according to the name of the abba who spoke them, in a major collection known as the Apophthegmata Patrum Alphabetica. A supplementary collection, the Anonymous Apophthegmata, followed. Later, both collections were combined and arranged systematically rather than alphabetically. This collection was created sometime between 500 and 575 and later went through a couple of major revisions, the second of which appeared sometime before 970.This second revision was published in an excellent new critical edition, with a French translation, in 1993. Now, in The Book of the Elders, John Wortley offers an English translation of this collection, based entirely on the Greek of that text.

An Introduction to Lectio Divina

There were two Bernards of Clairvaux. The first was the genuine Bernard who lived from 1090 to 1153, and wrote letters, sermons, and treatises that are of major consequence in the history of the twelfth century. The second is a host of writers, most of whom have not been identified, who wrote treatises attributed to the genuine Bernard, but that were not from his pen. This volume, the first complete translation in more than three hundred years, presents one of the most important texts in the history of medieval Latin spirituality. Written between 1170 and 1190 by an unidentified Cistercian monk-priest, Meditationes piisimae, "Very Devout Meditations," became one of the most popular and widely distributed pieces of spiritual literature in the whole of the Middle Ages. The work survives in at least 670 manuscripts, with the complete English translation of the treatise published in 1701.

The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers offers a new translation of the Greek alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. For the first time in an English translation, this volume provides: extensive background and contextual notes significant variant readings in the alphabetical manuscripts and textual differences vis-à-vis the systematic and anonymous Apophthegmata reference notes to both quotations from Scriptures and the many allusions to Scripture in the sayings and stories. In addition, there is an extensive glossary that offers information and further resources on people, places, and significant monastic vocabulary. Perfect for students and enthusiasts of the desert tradition.

The Evolving Practice of Lectio Divina

A Benedictine Reader shares the treasures of the Benedictine traditionthrough the collaboration of a dozen scholars. It provides a broad and deep sense of the reality of Benedictine monasticism using primary sources in English translation. The texts included are drawn from many different genres and originally written in six different languages. The introduction to each of the chapters aims to situate each author and text and to make connections with other texts and studies within and outside the Reader. This second volume of A Benedictine Reader looks at Benedictine monks and nuns from many angles, as founders, reformers, missionaries, teachers, spiritual writers and guides, playwrights, scholars, and archivists. In four centuries, they went from Bavaria to North America and Africa, from England and Spain to Australia, adapting to new environments. Committed to the liturgy by their profession, they played an important role in the liturgical renewal that culminated at Vatican II. Rooted in God, church, and their surroundings, they showed remarkable resilience in the face of wars, confiscations, suppression, and exile. Their impact has been deep and stabilizing, and their story is a microcosm of the history of the church in modern times.

This study follows the transmission and reception of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum (1219-1223), one of the most compelling and successful Cistercian collections of miracles and memorable events, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It ranges across different media and within different interpretive communities and includes brief summaries of a number of the exempla.

Mystagogy: A Monastic Reading of Dionysius Areopagita proposes an interpretation of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus in light of the liturgical and ascetic tradition that defined the author and his audience. Characterized by both striking originality and remarkable fidelity to the patristic and late neoplatonic traditions, the Dionysian corpus is a coherent and unified structure, whose core and pivot is the treatise known as the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Given Pseudo-Dionysius' fundamental continuity with earlier Christian theology and spirituality, it is not surprising that the church, and in particular the ascetic community, recognized that this theological synthesis articulated its own fundamental experience and aspirations.

Defining spirituality as 'the dynamic unity between the content of a faith and the way in which it is lived by historically determined human beings', Vauchez steps outside the clerical world usually studied to trace the religious mentality of the laity, the ordinary and often illiterate majority of Christians.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 '1179) describes the virtue of Fortitude teaching the other virtues in the fire of the Holy Spirit. Like Fortitude, Hildegard was enkindled by the Holy Spirit and edified many with her teaching. Hildegard of Bingen's Homilies on the Gospels are here translated for the first time from Latin into English. Hildegard's sisters recorded and preserved her informal preaching in this collection of homilies on twenty-seven gospel pericopes. As teacher and superior to her sisters, Hildegard probably spoke to them in the chapter house, with the scriptural text either before her or recited from memory, according to Benedictine liturgical practice. The Homilies on the Gospels prove essential for comprehending the coherent theological Vision that Hildegard constructs throughout her works, including the themes of salvation history, the drama of the individual soul, the struggle of virtues against vices, and the life-giving and animating force of greenness (uiriditas). Moreover, the Homilies on the Gospels establish Hildegard as the only known female systematic exegete of the Middle Ages.

In the theological skies of both the Greek and the Latin Church between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries usually know as the Middle Ages, a number of remarkable men appeared. They centered their lives in Christ and searched for an understanding of the faith which they shared and which their forebears had carefully explained over the first five centuries of Christianity. Yet in the process of trying to understand christian doctrine, the two great halves of Christendom grew apart. Differences in language and events led to differences of emphasis, teaching and practice, and sometimes to conflict. Written for readers with no background in theology or medieval history, Many Mansions brings to life this colorful and exciting period in the history of the Church. Understandings and misunderstandings which continue into the present day are carefully treated in easily understood terms. Illustrations taken from the periods and places under discussion provide visual reinforcement to the narrative.

The monk Grimlaicus (ca. 900) wrote a rule for those who, like himself, pursued the solitary life within a monastic community. Never leaving their cell yet participating in the liturgical life of the monastery through a window into the church, these enclosed sought to serve God alone. Beyond the details of horarium, reception of newcomers, diet, and clothing, Grimlaicus details practical measures for maintaining spiritual, psychological, and physical health, and for giving counsel to others. Scripture, the Rule of St. Benedict, and the teachings of early ecclesial and monastic writers form the kernel of Grimlaicus's wise and balanced rule, presented here for the first time in English translation.

Nil Sorsky (1433/34-1508), founder of the Sora Hermitage and initiator of 'scete ' life in among Russian Christians, is closely identified with the Orthodox contemplative prayer known as hesychasm, 'stillness. ' In these translations, Nil's own voice speaks across five hundred years to modern readers. The introduction and notes accurately place him within the Russian monastic tradition and identify the Slavic sources on which he drew. This introduction to the life and works of pre-modern Russia's outstanding teacher and writer allows English readers to share in celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Nil's death, to be marked in Russia by a symposium in the cloister of first his tonsure, by special seminars, and learned conferences.

From the rich tradition of the Anglo-Saxon Church of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, Benedicta Ward has selected prayers and passages for meditation from both Latin and Anglo-Saxon sources. The mixture of Latin and Celtic Christian cultures, distilled and appropriated by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, produced a distinctive English spiritual tradition which embraced kings and princesses, abbesses and monks, cowherds and poets, soldiers and beggars, and birds and animals. `It is possible through these passages to walk with these men and women as friends and see how their lives became filled with the life of Christ, in pain and desolation as well as in wonder, love, and praise. '

A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary

Prior of the Charterhouse

The Maronite Church is one of twenty-two Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with the Pope of Rome. Her patriarch is in Lebanon. Forty-three bishops and approximately five million faithful make up her presence throughout the world.The story of Maron, a fifth-century hermit-priest, and the community gathered around him, later called the Maronites, tells another fascinating story of the monastic and missionary movements of the Church. Marons story takes place in the context of Syrian monasticism, which was a combination of both solitary and communal life, and is a narrative of Christians of the Middle East as they navigated the rough seas of political divisions and ecclesiastical controversies from the fourth to the ninth centuries.Abbot Paul Naaman, a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks, wisely places the study of the origins of the Maronite Church squarely in the midst of the history of the Church. His book, The Maronites: The Origins of an Antiochene Church, published during the sixteenth centenary of Marons death, offers plausible insights into her formation and early development, grounding the Maronite Church in her Catholic, Antiochian, Syriac, and monastic roots.Abbot Paul Naaman is a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks.

Translation compiled from a variety of sources.

Solutions to Thirty-Eight Questions

"Examines how the writings of the thirteenth-century nun Gertrude the Great of Helfta articulate an innovative relationship between a person's eucharistic devotion and her body"--