Hermeneutics of the desert (and Nicholas Nickleby)

Another short extract (the previous one here) from a translation of a talk by Dom David Bird OSB given in Rome in 1995 and entitled Lectio Divina as school of prayer among the Fathers of the Desert. The full version (highly recommended) can be read here on his Monks and Mermaids blog.

According to the modern method of lectio divina, one should read slowly and stop at a verse long enough for it to nourish the heart or the spirit, if not the emotions, and pass to the following verse when the feelings have cooled or when the attention is lost.

The first monks, for their part, stayed with a verse as long as they had not put it into practice.

Someone comes to abba Pambo asking him to teach him a psalm. Pambo begins to teach him psalm 38: but hardly has he pronounced the first verse: "I said: 'I will be watchful of my ways, for fear I should sin with my tongue?..." the brother does not wish to hear any more.

He tells Pambo, "this verse is enough for me; please God I may have the strength to learn it and put it into practice". Nineteen years later he was still trying....

Likewise, someone asked abba Abraham, who was an excellent scribe as well as a man of prayer, to copy psalm 33.

He copied only verse 15: "Turn away from evil and do good; seek after peace and pursue it", saying to the brother: "Put this into practice first, and then I will write the rest..."

The Bible, for the Fathers, is not something that one knows with the intellect, or even with the heart, as we like to say these days, (often enough, however, confusing the biblical concept of heart with a notion of "heart" more recent and somewhat sentimental).

For the Fathers, one knows the bible by assimilating it to the point of translating it into life. All other knowledge that does not lead to this is useless.

(While reading the above I was irresistibly reminded of the following passage from Nicholas Nickleby; the hermeneutics of the desert requires the touch of an Abba Pambo rather than that of a Wackford Squeers...)

‘This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,’ said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. ‘We’ll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where’s the first boy?’

‘Please, sir, he’s cleaning the back-parlour window,’ said the temporary head of the philosophical class.

‘So he is, to be sure,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it....That’s our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?’

‘It’s very useful one, at any rate,’ answered Nicholas.