Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God by Lauren Mancia (review)

Reviewed by: Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God by Lauren Mancia Hugh Feiss O. S. B. Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God by Lauren Mancia. Spirituality and Monasticism East and West (Leeds, UK: ARC Humanities Press, 2023. Pp 101. Hardcover, 85. ISBN 978-1-641-89312-1). The author of this book is a young medievalist, teaching at Brooklyn College, who specializes in the affective side of Christian life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her earlier book, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester University Press, 2021) received high praise from reviewers. In this subsequent book she draws on the writings of monastic authors of the time like Anselm, William of Saint-Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of Saint-Victor and Pierre de Celle, and predecessors like Cassian and Pseudo-Dionysius, to offer a new way of thinking about medieval monastic prayer. In the recent past the study of medieval Christian prayer has centered on the great "mystics" of the later Middle Ages. The prayer of the early medieval monks has often been dismissed as ritualized and perfunctory. Mancia suggests that the prayer experience of these monks was anything but perfunctory. Their prayer was an anguished struggle to reach God that seldom and fleetingly succeeded but brought humility and inner maturity to the monks and nuns who engaged in it. After an introduction which situates and states her argument and topic and her credibility in contemporary medieval studies, she argues her case in four brief chapters. In the first chapter, she offers descriptions of "meditation, " "prayer, " and "contemplation" as these were understood by the monastics she is studying. The meaning of the terms was determined by practice and could vary, but the model bequeathed to the Middle Ages by the early church envisaged a continuum: meditation—prayer—contemplation. In the two centuries she considers, monasteries were seen as places suited to prayer, and monks considered prayer their primary task. They did not sharply distinguish between public and private prayer. They seemed to have had no trouble in praying for others, but they struggled to practice Cassian's fourth kind of prayer, intense and elusive "fiery prayer" that both requires and requests divine grace, a prayer both "all-consuming and never consuming enough" (p. 3). During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, monastics gave more attention to extra-liturgical prayer, End Page 103 and sought and provided tools, literary and artistic, to stir up the mind to devout meditation and prayer. The second chapter considers in more detail the meditative and prayerful ascent to God that was the primary concern of monastic life in this period. Practitioners divided the ascent into various steps, e. g. , outside–inside–upward, reading–meditation–prayer–contemplation, and purgation–illumination–union. The period produced prayerbooks that were meant to help in the ascent. One of them ends with a chart: hear God to know him, know God to love him, love God to follow him, follow God to reach him, reach him to enjoy the vision of him. One rarely reached the end of this process. The process required and resulted in humility, just as human salvation required the self-emptying of the Son of God. The models of ascent were more aspirational than achieved. How monks in these two centuries experienced the ascent is the subject of chapter 3. Their experience was "of God's absence, and an experience of feeble humanity, filled with doubt, strife, frailty, and inadequacy" (p. 36). Meditation is taking to heart, internalizing what has been learned and prescribed in holy reading. Peter of Celle wrote that this inner experience of God begins from fear, advances by submission and is perfected in love. The monk needed discipline to develop a habit of devotional ease, which seldom brought the sought-for union, but rather what Gregory the Great called "reverberatio, " a brief elevation toward union and then a falling back. The search for God was a journey of faith haunted by doubt, pondering, and struggling. The fourth chapter deals with the use of art in monastic meditation. The author offers. . .