Medieval Monastic Ghost Stories for Modern Minds?

According to this History First article by Mark Bridge, "Dr. Michael Carter, senior properties historian at English Heritage, a specialist in medieval monasteries and leader of the tours", thinks one way to help modern non-believers appreciate the lives of monks and nuns in England's pre-Reformation monasteries and convents is through ghost stories and tales of the afterlife, including souls in Purgatory and Devils in the dormitory:

How do you help 21st century “post-Christian” audiences to get inside the heads of the monks, nuns and devout laypeople who created England’s great medieval monasteries? The answer, according to the custodian of sites such as Rievaulx Abbey, lies with ghosts and gore.

This October and November, English Heritage will offer free expert-led tours of five ruined monasteries in Yorkshire and Cumbria, telling of spectres such as the priest who rose from the grave to gouge out his concubine’s eyeball. The tours, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, are the first of their kind from the conservation charity and may be extended to other regions. They use dark tales from monastic manuscripts as a lens for understanding religious communities that flourished for hundreds of years before the Reformation.

Bridge quotes Carter:

“There’s this question of how do we engage people and make these belief systems understandable for an increasingly secular and, to some extent, post-Christian, audience? How do you get across concepts of death, damnation and, especially, the redemption of souls in purgatory? The role these monasteries played in the salvation of souls was so important — it was the whole purpose. One way of getting that across is through the ghost stories written by the Byland monk and at other monasteries.”

Please read the rest there. My first reaction was negative, especially because of the headline: "Ghosts of sinful monks and nuns illuminate England's monastic history". I thought that played into the view of religious people as being hypocrites, saying they want to be holy and dedicated to a rule of life and yet sinning and failing. So, what's the problem? Isn't that part of the human condition? 

But that's not really Dr. Carter's view of these stories and the way he wants to present them to his non-believing audiences, at least as evidenced by his comments in the article. 

I'm still not sure that this appeal to ghost stories of the past will move non-believers to gain more understanding of what the monks and nuns were trying to achieve as they followed their order's rule and fulfilled their vocations as monastics. 

Does the mere recognition that the monks and nuns believed there was life after death and that the way your soul (and later your body) existed after death depended how you'd lived help the non-believer? It is a good first step to gaining some understanding of these medieval lives?

Would a visit to a monastery or convent open now, with monks and nuns living by the same Rule, be a better way? This way of life is not gone, even though the glorious ruins of these monasteries may fool one into thinking it is.

I'm just not sure.

Of course, I'm believer. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor's elegy to the monastic ruins of England in A Time to Keep Silence resonates with my mind and heart just fine:

But, for us in the West, because of all such relics they are the most compelling mementos of the life that once animated them, the ruined abbeys of England that have remained desolate since the Reformation will always be the most moving and tragic. For there is no riddle here. We know the function and purpose of every fragment and the exact details of the holy life that should be sheltering there. We know, too, the miserable and wanton story of their destruction and their dereliction, and have only to close our eyes for a second for the imagination to rebuild the towers and the pinnacles and summon to our ears the quiet rumour of monkish activity and the sounds of bells melted long ago. They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of the aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blueberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree-tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant has been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

What do you think? Please let me know.

"The Function and Purpose of Every Fragment"

On a not so recent visit to Eighth Day Books, I noticed stacks of books by Patrick Leigh Fermor and picked up this one about his visits to monasteries, especially to the Abbey of Saint Wandrille de Fontenelle, and La Trappe Abbey (aka La Grande Trappe). Fermor is renowned as a travel writer and the New York Review of Books publishes excellent editions of his works:

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was an intrepid traveler and a heroic soldier who is widely considered to be one of the finest travel writers of the twentieth century. After his stormy school days, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and The Broken Road (published posthumously in 2013), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek archipelago. His books A Time to Keep Silence (1957), Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. Leigh Fermor lived partly in Greece—in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani—and partly in Worcestershire. In 2004 he was knighted for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations. Artemis Cooper’s biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was published by New York Review Books in 2013. Author photo: Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Warren Farha's recommendation notwithstanding, what really convinced me to buy the book was this section, quoted in the author's original Introduction to the 1957 edition of A Time to Keep Silence (reissued in 1987). He was referring to the impressions made on a traveler by the ruins of monasteries in Cappadocia and then he comments:

But, for us in the West, because of all such relics they are the most compelling mementos of the life that once animated them, the ruined abbeys of England that have remained desolate since the Reformation will always be the most moving and tragic. For there is no riddle here. We know the function and purpose of every fragment and the exact details of the holy life that should be sheltering there. We know, too, the miserable and wanton story of their destruction and their dereliction, and have only to close our eyes for a second for the imagination to rebuild the towers and the pinnacles and summon to our ears the quiet rumour of monkish activity and the sounds of bells melted long ago. They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of the aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blueberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree-tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant has been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

The grounds of the abbeys, through the efforts of the National Trust and other organizations, are all cleaned up now. Fermor's evocative, alliterative prose depicts a more unkempt vision of the ruins, more like these vintage images of Byland and Fountains abbeys.

In the chapters on the Benedictine Abbey of  Saint Wandrille de Fontenelle, and the Trappist La Trappe Abbey in France, Fermor demonstrates great sympathy and admiration of the monks. He stays as a guest in both houses for some time and gets used to the rhythm of the Rule through his observation and limited participation. While he is astonished by the strictness of the Trappist rule, he accepts the consolations that those monks allowed to converse with him describe. He enjoys the silence and the freedom he experiences in Saint Wandrille and Solesmes (which he barely describes because he found staying there so much like staying at Saint Wandrille); after having a hard time at the beginning getting used to the silence and the solitude, when he leaves and rejoins the busy modern world of Paris, he misses the monastery peace.

He manages to seem something more than a visitor or a mere observer. Through his contacts with the monks who interact with guests he goes beyond curiosity to acceptance. Therefore he defends the monks against the charges of uselessness and seeking escape from the world. In fact, Fermor almost seems to contradict the statement that Chesterton made in his essay "Why I am a Catholic"; at least in the monastic orders the Catholic Church has developed and approved, Fermor is "just to the Catholic Church" without feeling "a tug toward it":

"It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it, they feel a tug toward it. The moment they cease to shout it down, they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it, they begin to be fond of it."

He admires those who personify the monastic ideal and honors them through his admiration, but he does not imitate them. He goes to Paris and checks into the Hotel La Louisiane on the Rue de la Seine and soon gets used to the noise and distractions.

He also visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, Turkey, commenting on the mysteries of their origins and their abandonment, their sculptured architecture and the remains of frescoes and signs of monastic life and worship.

Then Fermor concludes with a appreciation of the new monasteries in England, established after the French Revolution and Catholic Emancipation, and finally with the "humanity and simplicity" of St. Basil of Caesarea.

Some of those phrases from his description of abbey ruins in England echo in my heart: 

--the miserable and wanton story of their destruction and their dereliction

--the sounds of bells melted long ago

--like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep

--the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in the rook-haunted sky

--some tremendous Gregorian chant has been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

When I read that last line it reminded me of the Unfinished Vespers of St. Thomas a Becket almost 370 years before the last monasteries were suppressed and dispersed, cut off as the soldiers attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury.