Monasteries


 


There have been a number of periods in my life, especially when beset by pesky details of failed commercial enterprises, car explosions, and roofs leaking, that I've moaned half-aloud that I wish there were such a thing as a secular monastery, with stone pillows, cold cells, a good library and broadband Internet, where I could give up earthly ambition and just write and think. The problem, of course, is that there are plenty of such places, except they usually require you to agree with their religions. There are secular institutions, but they tend to be universities and artists' colonies, and tend to be awarded to folks of distinction, and in some ways are not all that different from the first kind.
It's a strange impulse. I mean, isn't a monastery a place where you submit to a discipline in order to get into heaven? So then why would anyone but a masochist (or, you know, one of those secret albino assassins) give it all up for, well, nothing at all?
Well, it may be that I'm just nuts, that in times of trouble, I'd want a safe hole where to curl up in has its appeal, or that I'd sincerely like the rest of the world to just SHUT UP so I can WORK--in other words, mistaking a monastic cell for my childhood bedroom, or for a quiet nook at the Joseph Regenstein Library--but i've never been quite that desperate or that tightly coiled.

Monasteries are a strange institution in Christianity. From a managerial standpoint they're a redundancy of effort, and a diversion: it increases the number of the faithful, but not necessarily their usefulness. They've provided convenient repositories for inconvenient women and embarrassing younger sons--but they tended to live in the annexes and not become monks and nuns themselves.
No, the monasteries are an accommodation made by the Church to an impulse they cannot control but only manage. For all the hamfisted endeavors to beat piety into the general populace, they've also had to deal with religious impulses greater than they can handle. For all the complications that have arisen from this extra institution, it tamed a powerful force and allowed for a richer spiritual life than the Church would have had without it.
This ascetic, monastic impulse has not arisen from weariness, or fear, or even schizophrenia. Women, that the Church had excluded wholesale from power and authority in the secular hierarchy, came to be part of a place where they were still denied spiritual or temporal power--only the chance to give themselves up--and they came, thousands upon thousands, century after century, clear of mind and with a smile on their lips--and much more often than not, without floating angel in a baby-spot and saturated backlighting saying in dulcet tones, "Get thee to a nunnery, go!"

And as I've realized, it doesn't even take a belief in God.

What, then, is going on?

Conventional wisdom (loosely derived from Freud) is that religious enthusiasm is simply sublimated sexual impulse. Of course, so is everything, according to them--and today is not the day for an assault on Freud. But it has filtered down to the idea that the pleasure that arises from religious dedication--or, more anemic, intellectual pleasure--is only for people who don't get laid regularly, and that the guy tapping his fingers delightedly to Haydn would be much better off with a blow job, and nuns are nuns only do to an insufficient application of Dr. Johnson's hot beef injection. Even without the vulgarity, it's a given in most circles that intellectual pleasure is thin and wan compared to good old sweating, screaming orgasm or a good $150* hit of cocaine. (*suggested manufacturers retail price.)
Now, in this life of mine, I've not had as much sex as I would have liked (everybody! raise your hands!) and I've never freebased or shot heroin, but I have gotten closer to white-out pleasure than the 1812 Overture. And I think this relegation is wrong.

Whatever the sensual or neurological origin of conscious pleasure, there are, I think, three kinds of conscious affirmations that go with it:
1) I am happy.
This is the simplest and most basically powerful. It's very obviously tied into neural circuitry and bodily states, as in I am warm, I am sated, and Oh! Oh! Oh! Zowie!. Wonderful though this is, (especially as one grows older) its temporary and contingent qualities become more and more obvious. The pleasure wears off, and the affirmation is insupportable.
2). I am powerful.
Achieving things, owning things, being loved, being liked, winning, being admired, being admirable--more complex and abstract, but far longer-lasting and a far more potent thought: it contains the more basic thought I am safe, but is more than that. While less immediate than I am happy, it's far more seductive than that hit of blow or that slap'n'tickle, being independent of it. One hit of this can, unfortunately, last a lifetime.

And then there's number 3, the pleasure that comes from a problem solved, an insight, a clearer picture, a new shining thread connecting many disparate elements--a clarity of meaning and of purpose. It's the pleasure of finding things out, as Richard Feynman had it. It's also the sudden awareness of what you should do with your life, which causes people to knock on the doors of monasteries.
The description of it is
3) I am more than what I was.
When Archimedes leapt up out of his bath crying Εὕρηκα! (I have found it), where he found it was inside his own head. The satisfying click of a puzzle piece is a completion in and of the mind; the picture lifts mist from the inner landscape, and the joy, while just as immediate as warmth or chocolate, is independent of a heat source or the all-too-temporary presence of chocolate. There is an assurance to this affirmation that is both longer-lasting and less contingent than I am powerful.
It's not for everybody: you do have to value understanding, and not everybody does: not everyone believes understanding is an important part of who they are. For them, it's back to heroin and dominance.

But that light, that click, that resolution on many levels may not be the roar of sexual pleasure, but the affirmation transforms your very being.
I am more than what I was.
That pleasure, even if it's only a better understanding of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, is so wonderful, giving the lie to the thought that we are what we are and nothing more, and that all pleasures pass away, that it brings myriads of feet running eagerly to the doors of monasteries throughout history, and knocking on the door with joyous expectation of rendering up one's life for more of the same.

Posted: Friday - February 02, 2007 at 11:39 AM        

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