Is Somewhat Peculiar That the Benedictine Monks Did Not Continue With Their Own Press
*Originally published on May 6, 2022.
From the Balkans to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, Father Columba Stewart has spent the last two decades photographing and digitally preserving some of the most precious religious texts from around the world.
"Even though manuscripts — handwritten books — are at least a couple of technological stages behind the ways we access information today, we still rely on them for access to the past," said Fr. Columba, a scholar of early religions.
"To know what is most important to such communities, to understand the questions they asked and what gave them purpose and identity, we need to read their manuscripts."
Father Columba is a Benedictine monk based in Collegeville, Minnesota and the executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John's University. In October 2019, he delivered the last Jefferson Lecture to be held before the pandemic at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. The series is run by the National Endowment for the Humanities to honour the most distinguished intellectual achievements in the humanities.
"The discipline of listening is now an endangered art. Equally endangered are the stores of wisdom contained in the manuscripts of the world, targeted by those fearful of difference or threatened by imaginations broader than their own. Those old books become caught in the indiscriminate destruction of war and left behind by the displacement of their owner," he said in his lecture,Cultural Heritage Present and Future: A Benedictine Monk's Long View.
"The wisdom contained in them is eroded by the forgetting that besets a diaspora community severed from its roots, resettled in a strange place and often undergoing the slow but inexorable loss of its language and distinctive ways."
After delivering his Jefferson lecture, Father Columba spoke to IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about his work and the value of preserving manuscripts.
Here is an excerpt of their conversation.
NA: I want to talk about this phrase, 'the discipline of listening'. Could you explain what makes listening something other than just being courteous and having good manners?
FC: True listening requires attention. And I think the ability to pay attention and to focus is one of the many endangered things in our present-day and our modern culture. I'm aware of it myself because of my use of digital media and research online and... what it has done to my own attention span. And so the ability to just sit quietly with somebody, or in a larger group, and actually to pay attention to what they're saying, it's very difficult not to retreat into our own thoughts.
And so that ability that counsellors and psychotherapists have had to cultivate — spiritual directors more in my kind of wheelhouse — of being able to really listen, not only to the words of the person but to the things that are unspoken but nonetheless are being communicated in the encounter, I think that's tremendously important. Whether it's a spiritual conversation, working on some kind of emotional issue or a psychological issue or functioning in a political context.
In your lecture, you mentioned that familiar trope of a monk, hunched over a desk as you put it, quill in hand, writing texts on reams of parchment. I'm wondering, as someone who is part of this religious tradition, what it is that drives that deep connection to the written word? Where does it come from?
One of the key monastic spiritual practices and this is certainly Christian monastic spiritual practice, but you can find analogues in different religious traditions, is the idea of the slow and prayerful rereading. It's not reading for us because we've read this so many times but rereading of the Bible. We do this communally in our church services where we chant psalms and listen to readings. We do it daily in our own review of these texts, which are so familiar in some ways, and yet have retained an extraordinary capacity to say new things to us.
And I think the reality of a monastic lifetime, as, again, you can compare this with these other religious traditions, is that when you read it again, you're not the same person you were when you read it the previous time. And therefore, there really is a voice coming at you that you were incapable of even hearing earlier.
You've helped digitally preserve some of the world's most precious religious antiquities, many of them that have been facing destruction. Could you take us to the moment when you decided that this was something you, individually wanted to learn about, wanted to pursue?
Life is often full of accidents. You know, in a religious framework, we talk about providence. But providence is one of those things that says it's looking forward — but from a human perspective, it's looking back. I did not set out to do this work. It was an existing project started by our monastery in university in the 1960s. But there was a critical point in the evolution of the organization, and they thought I might have some skills to bring to bear.
I had some experience in the Middle East. We were moving in to work in Lebanon. We were making a digital transition and there was a bit of turmoil in the organization. And then suddenly they said, 'we'd like you to lead this short term, so go in there, you know, kind of get people calmed down, make sure everything's going to be all right, and then we'll figure it out from there.' That was almost 20 years ago. So the wonder of it is I did not plan on doing this. But the longer I've been in this, the more I realized all these weird little skills and bits of knowledge and bits of languages that I'd picked up over the years.
At the base of it, I'm really a dilettante. I'm interested in all kinds of things. This is probably the one job in the world where all that could come together. So my life as a scholar, my life as somebody who's travelled, interested in history, interested in languages, and suddenly I'm using all of that stuff all the time.
What is it that manuscripts specifically can offer us that other, newer means of accessing historical, historical or cultural information can't?
I think there are two reasons why it's important for us to preserve manuscripts.
One is there are a lot of texts that have not been made available in modern formats. They've not been edited and printed. They haven't been put online. You can't Google them. They exist only in handwritten form because for whatever reason, people haven't come across them and transferred them to that modern media. So we in a way do that by sharing the digital images online.
The second thing that's important about manuscripts and why the study of manuscripts greatly enriches scholars' work is that too few people, I think, understand that when you're reading a manuscript, you're not simply reading a vehicle for text. A printed book is conveying the text, and you have many, many copies of the same text. If you download something on your tablet or Kindle or whatever, it's the same thing as delivering the text to you.
A manuscript has the text, but it has it, first of all, in a unique form, because no two manuscripts have exactly the same version of the text. And it may be simple errors, but there may also be kind of elegant variations that a particular scribe or editor added or edits when they remove something, which then becomes the interesting question of why did they leave it out?
But manuscripts also have marks of the hands through which they pass. And sometimes there's actually a fingerprint. So it is indeed a mark of the hand. A little bit of wax got on there or, you know, somebody was messing with something that was a little dirty and they lost their fingerprint. The modern era, of course, was not obsessed with hygiene and sanitation in the way that we are. So manuscripts often reflect that. But people also wrote their notes, the scribe — him or herself — would write their name and where and when they wrote it. Owners would record their names in the flyleaf because manuscripts were passed on, but they weren't disposable in the way that even printed books can be. And they often add to their notes and the manuscripts things of importance.
Watch Father Columba Stewart's 2019 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Tayo Bero.
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Source: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/benedictine-monk-on-why-preserving-ancient-religious-texts-is-vital-1.6441778
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