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The twenty-year correspondence between Jean Leclercq, a French Benedictine monk and scholar, and Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, provides a fascinating record of their common yearnings. What is a monk?" is the question at the center of their exchange, and they answer it with great aplomb, touching on the role of ancient texts and modern conveniences, the advantage of hermit life and community life, the fierce Catholicism of the monastic past and a new openness to the approaches of other traditions. These letters 'full of learning, human insight, and self-deprecating humor 'capture the excitement of the Catholic Church in the era of the Second Vatican Council.
Introduction by Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland. Two monks in conversation about the meaning of life and the nature of solitude. Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, spent his entire literary career (1948- 68) in a cloistered monastery in Kentucky. His great counterpart, the French Benedictine monk Jean Leclercq, spent those years traveling relentlessly to and from monasteries worldwide, trying to bring about a long-needed reform and renewal of Catholic religious life. Their correspondence over twenty years is a fascinating record of the common yearnings of two ambitious, holy men. "What is a monk?" is the question at the center of their correspondenc...
Jean Leclercq was born in Avesnes, France in 1911. In 1928 he entered the Benedictine Abbey of Clervaux in Luxembourg. He studied at Sant' Anselmo in Rome and then in Paris at the Institut Catholique, the Ecole des Chartres, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and the College de France. He was a member of the Ecole Francaise in Rome. Beginning in 1946, he was assigned to search through libraries in Europe in order to produce a critical edition of the works of St. Bernard; the ninth and final volume appeared in 1977. Father Jean was also occupied by various assignments for the renewal of monasticism and for its introduction into non-western cultures in Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America and the South Pacific. He received honorary doctorates from the Catholic Universities in Milan and Louvain, as well as from Western Michigan University. He was a corresponding member of various academies such as the American Medieval Academy, the British Academy, and the Academies of Macon, Metz and Spoleto, among others. He died at Clervaux in 1993. Book jacket.
Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readers The Love of Learning and the Desire for God is composed of a series of lectures given to young monks at the Institute of Monastic Studies at Sant'Anselmo in Rome during the winter of 1955-56.
These conferences, presented by Thomas Merton to the novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1963–1964, focus mainly on the life and writings of his great Cistercian predecessor, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Guiding his students through Bernard’s Marian sermons, his treatise On the Love of God, his controversy with Peter Abelard, and above all his great series of sermons on the Song of Songs, Merton reveals why Bernard was the major religious and cultural figure in Europe during the first half of the twelfth century and why he has remained one of the most influential spiritual theologians of Western Christianity from his own day until the present. As James Finley writes in his preface to this volume, “Merton is teaching us in these notes how to be grateful and amazed that the ancient wisdom that shimmers and shines in the eloquent and beautiful things that mystics say is now flowing in our sincere desire to learn from God how to find our way to God.”
Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Ci...