Earlier, I spoke of meditation, as it can be practised and as it can't - of its disappearance at prayer, because we are tired of it and there is nothing new for us in it. It is insufficient. We don't want to just think of God, but to be with Him. This is the beginning of the ‘Night of the Senses’. St. John of the Cross says that the Night of the Senses naturally follows on from meditation. But I hope you will keep in mind that we can never dispense with meditation. If we can't use it in prayer, we are bound to do so at other times.

The reason why we can't use it in prayer, is because of the beginning of what is known as obscure contemplation. St John of the Cross says that there is in us an 'Obscure Contemplation' - obscure, because it is going on imperceptibly. But when a humble soul can't meditate as it used to, it tends to become anxious and inclined to think it is going wrong. When consolation is absent, when we find no pleasure in Holy Communion, when we feel we cannot pray and are full of distractions, then we say ‘it must be my fault – for lack of fervour’. We all go through this. If the soul were conscious of its contemplation, it would be satisfied. However if we are anxious about this situation, it is a sign that all is well with us. St. John of the Cross explains fervour, as consisting in anxiety to serve God. Therefore if we are anxious because we think we are not serving God, we are in fact fervent. On the other hand, if we are satisfied and even complacent that we are going well, we must be lukewarm and in a state of timidity.

When the soul does not feel God and feels dry - this is aridity, real dryness, which is a sign of prayer - a state in which we have not got any feeling of fervour but we wish we had. ‘My soul is thirsting for God’. Where shall we find Him? St. Bernard says ‘To seek God is to have God’. This dryness comes to souls when they first enter the Night of the Senses. It lasts not only for half an hour of prayer, but sometimes for long periods of time. Three signs of 'fervour' are when - we have no feeling of desire, we feel how miserable we are and we want God.

Anxiety and the desire for God - the thought returns again and again. The soul would not be anxious if it did not desire more of God. This 'want of God' does not come from meditation but is the result of obscure contemplation which is going on without our knowing it. All feelings of devotion have gone, yet the will is still turned to God. What then does St. John of the Cross mean by ‘night’? In ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel,’ he speaks of the 'active night of the senses’ and the 'active night of the spirit'. 'The obscure night' refers to the 'passive night of the senses and of the spirit'. (The active night is what we do, our acts of mortification, whereas the passive night is what God does to us, taking away from us what keeps us from Him and also what we are trying to give Him).

The night of the senses is the purification of the lower part of the soul, ie the senses of the body, the imagination and emotions. The night of the spirit is the purification of the higher part of the soul, ie the intellect and will. Then we are ready for the completest union with God possible in this world.

But why should obscure contemplation prevent our meditating? St John explains this by saying that we cannot do two things at once. Thus union occurs when no part of the soul can do any of its actions and even the body cannot move - this is ecstasy,

How do ecstacies come? St Augustine thought it impossible to see God clearly in this life unless one were rapt from lower things, unless one’s eyes were shut to them and one’s senses removed from lower uses. He thought God does this to let us see Him more clearly. St. Thomas wishes to follow St. Augustine as far as possible and accepts his view that St. Paul and Moses both had the beatific vision. Yet if Paul says ‘whether out of the body or in the body, I know not’, how could St. Thomas know? He holds too that ecstasy is highest prayer.

The other view is that of St John of the Cross, who looks on ecstasies as a result of a weakness of the body and the effect of a tremendous grace given by God which shocks our nature into quiescence, just as a person faints through fear or joy. God pours into the higher part of the soul such wonderful light that the lower part is blinded, the body gets rigid and the will is so held that it cannot move - that is its extreme form.

Lesser states are observable however. In the ‘prayer of recollection’ there is practically no effect, whereas in the 'prayer of quiet' the will is taken up with God and we cannot think of anything else. When St. Teresa speaks of the 'prayer of union' she means union of the faculties fixed on God, but it has no effect on the body. All this seems to show that all the light and love God gives us overflows on to the emotions and none of them can do anything but think of God.

When the will is fixed on God, sometimes the other faculties act as in a dream. St John of the Cross is right in saying that as the saints advance in the spiritual life, the purification of the higher parts of the soul goes on. God acts on the soul and the senses and the body gets used to His action, being then able to bear it without showing anything of it externally. Therefore as St. Teresa tells us, when she got beyond the 'spiritual marriage', her ecstacies became fewer in number because she was better able to bear the effects of grace. A strong mind can bear more. Again, God may give grace suddenly and then it will have a more violent effect.

What happens in ordinary prayer when we get carried away? The will is fixed on God, the imagination is full of distractions because the will cannot do two things at once and does not want to go after the imagination to keep it in order. The 'prayer of quiet’ is when there is an overflow of the will into the lower nature to give it peace and quiet, this being the result of contemplation. All these different states of prayer are what are given to particular persons at particular times.

It is the pure ray of grace, without the lower part of the soul being touched and this is important to remember. A person may be receiving great grace from God without any external effect on the lower part of the soul. The purer the ray of contemplation, the less it is perceived. It is impure when visions or images come and we ought not to pay any attention to them. Locutions etc, are only effects, not the essence, of contemplation. They are not to be sought, in fact they are rather dangerous to our self-conceit. Union with God is what we want and the less perceptible the union with God in contemplation, the purer it is.

What is contemplation? The direction of our intellect to God. As we cannot translate God into mental images, we don't know what is going on. We cannot put God into words, or make images of Him. All visions and pictures which God gives are a very long way from Himself. Even to have a vision or revelation does not unite us to God. Visions are generally given for the sake of others. We might have visions, locutions, etc. and not be in a state of grace. We are not to desire them. What we must desire is faith, hope and charity, union with God in prayer - a real, solid gift of God's grace.

(Adapted from a retreat given In 1921 by Dom John Chapman, later Abbot of Downside.)

Every year, especially during the summer months, hundreds of thousands of visitors get into their cars and coaches and drive into the countryside to see the ruined abbeys of England. They must often ask themselves in their simple way - how did it all happen? Did Henry VIII turn the monks out? What did he do that for? Where did they go? Why were these beautiful buildings left in ruins? Was it desirable that they should go or was it a shame? It is to answer questions like this, that the book ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’ by David Knowles was published. Encouraged by the Cambridge University Press, he prepared the third volume of his famous work on the monastic order in England, leaving out the vast display of erudition (footnotes, appendices, lists of source material and bibliography) and adding a foreword just before he died. It would be untrue to call this a rehash or a vulgarisation of Knowles' work on the Suppression. The idea was to bring the best part of it within the reach of students and others who have little access to public libraries and cannot purchase the bulk of the great historian's ‘Opera Omnia’. It is a book complete in itself, still full of erudition and very valuable in its own right.

Before the royal commissioners set out in 1535 to suppress the monasteries, the rhythm of monastic life had continued in some 800 abbeys and priories unbroken since it was introduced into these islands nine centuries before, accumulating in more elaborate liturgy, music, art, literature, farming and industry, as time went on down the ages through wars and peace, dark days and fair. When the commissioners had finished their work in 1540, nearly all the monasteries except the cathedrals were in ruins, the wealth of their shrines despoiled, several thousand monks and nuns accepting secular life with pensions or stipends and the very walls of their homes destroyed by order - 'lest the birds return to their nest'. Nettles and ivy were soon to grow around and cover their shame. This destruction in the space of four years was a major episode in English history and we ought to learn some lessons from it. Some historians in the past have viewed the suppression with sympathy for the monks, while others thought it a necessary riddance. Gairdner and Gasquet were sympathetic, the English antiquarians were romantic, while Coulton and Baskerville did not show the same sympathy or romance. We really had to wait for David Knowles to take the helm and steer us through these troubled seas with a cool mind and an even keel.

History is the teacher of life, as Pope John said in his discourse at the opening of the Council. We do not read history simply to gather knowledge of facts into the limited capacity of our cranium. We read history to learn some wisdom. What lessons can we learn from the history of the suppression of the monasteries? When Knowles had finished his labours after thirty years of hard work, he put away his books and documents and turned round to teach us a few lessons. In the first place he thought that monks and nuns should keep the spirit of their Rule pure and inviolable. They should be primarily spiritual men and women, seeking first the kingdom of God, loving Him with all their heart and soul and letting this love within them overflow in divine worship and charity. Secondly, they should watch their economy. They should not live above their income. They should not build more than is necessary, nor more than their resources can maintain, since the maintenance of large buildings is as costly in the long run as the actual cost of the building itself. Thirdly, he thought that a centralised system would have been a more economic way of regulating the income and expenditure of the monastery. One official and his staff would have seen to it that there was no waste or duplication of overheads and this one official would have been able to co-ordinate all the departments with a better chance of keeping them economically viable. Here Knowles picks out for special mention the abuse of the ‘mensa abbatis’, which consumed a fifth or a quarter of the monastery's income. But Abbots in those days became Barons as soon as they were elected and were caught up immediately into the feudal system, just as today the administrators of a modern institution find themselves involved willy-nilly in the capitalist system. The abuse of the Abbot's separate income, apartments, manors, and retinue was a deep-rooted abuse long before the Suppression and no one but a Reformer could possibly have changed it. Knowles thought it one of the chief reasons why the monastic communities had a tendency to drift away from their primitive observance and slide down the primrose path. A resident Abbot in constant contact with his monks could have helped them to sustain their spiritual fervour. He blames the Abbots once again towards the end, for not giving their communities the lead they required to resist the spoliation and suppression of their houses. A united and wholesale non-violent resistance to tyranny would have changed history. But the penalty for resistance in those days was terrible. It was a case of surrender or else. Few had the courage to oppose so terrible a Prince, so they walked out like sheep. Knowles comes back again to finance. The sums of money spent on food and clothes he found to be excessive and he thought they could have cut down both on the quantity and quality of what they ate and wore, even though the poor benefited much from broken meats and cast off clothing. A vast amount of money could also have been saved by less employment. Drastic sumptuary measures and a reduction of staff could have been effected by better administration without interfering at all with the health and happiness of the community.

Now we face the controversial question of the motive for the Suppression. The way had been made easier by Wolsey's earlier suppression of the lesser monasteries. But why did Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell plunder and destroy the greater ones? Simply because they were nests of decadence and superstition and encumbering the ground? Not at all. Knowles thought that the primary motive of Cromwell was to get money for the Crown and Henry was not unwilling to receive it. 'Suppression for Cromwell was neither a measure of reform nor a move in religious warfare, it was a matter of revenue, the suppression of wealthy corporations'. This seems to be the recurring thesis in the book. Cromwell wanted cash - Henry took it and after the pensions were allotted to the dispersed religious, the money was spent mainly in Henry's war against France and Scotland. Whether this thesis will hold water indefinitely remains to be seen. History never stays the same for long without criticism, but the future historian who challenges Knowles will have to be a very clever man.

It has sometimes been imagined that monastic lands were given away lavishly to noble families and Henry's courtiers. This was by no means the case. Cromwell wanted cash and practically everything was sold. The cathedrals of course were saved and some abbeys that were intended to become cathedrals in the new episcopal sees, but with rare exceptions the rest went. First of all, the shrines were looted, legally of course, the King getting some of the plums and the rest going to augmentations. Then everything of any value was sold, from the lead on the roofs to the pavements. There was an unholy rush for objects, auctioned in the cloisters or chapter house and knocked down to the highest bidder - vestments for bedspreads, parchment for patching and a holy water stoup for a kitchen sink. People descended upon the spoil like vultures. Even the stones were quarried for building. We would have thought that after all was over, the Crown would have been immensely rich in land and endowments, but the irony of it is that Cromwell was beheaded by Henry and before the end of the reign the capital of land and valuables was sifted away for needs that were impermanent, not endowing the Crown with increased revenue or the country with religious, educational or social assets.

Knowles is often at his best when he lifts his eyes from his books and becomes as lyrical as a poet - 'Visible beauty of form and line and hue is as nothing in comparison with the eternal beauty of things unseen, but those who wantonly destroy the one will not readily be supposed to value the other. The country and its Church were deprived in the space of two or three years of a multitude of monuments of architectural beauty and of innumerable masterpieces of every smaller art and craft. The loss to what may be called the aesthetic capital of the land was very great. Certainly it was the greatest single blow of the kind that England, secure till yesterday from hostile shocks, has ever sustained'.

I would like to share some of the sights and experiences from a week's visit to Cappadocia in Turkey last May. Next to Egypt and Palestine, this part of present day Turkey is probably the most important site of ancient desert monasticism for Christianity. It is truly a ‘must-see’ for any pilgrim or serious student of the Desert Fathers and early Church monasticism!

To begin with, it is very easy to travel to Cappadocia. From Istanbul, there are several flights a day to Kayseri, formerly known as Caesarea, home of St. Basil the Great and many other saints of the early Church. Once in Kayseri, a 75-minute bus ride takes you to the town of Goreme, situated in the heart of the Cappadocian valleys. Once ensconced in Goreme, it is an easy fifteen-minute walk to the ‘Open Air Museum’ where the best and most famous churches of Cappadocia are located, or day hikes can be made throughout the region to explore churches, monasteries, and kellia on one's own.

The Cappadocian region was formed originally by volcanic eruptions that spread lava, ash and boulders throughout the area many millions of years ago. As the ash and lava flowed through the area, large boulders settled into the mix, dispersed at random throughout the flow. Over time, wind and water erosion wore down the soft ‘tufa,’ leaving cones standing where a hard rock above protected the tufa underneath from the elements. Thousands of these cones stand today, giving the land an eerie ‘moonscape’ appearance that does not look at all inviting or hospitable.

Into this environment, thousands of monks and lay Christians moved during the early persecutions seeking safety and solitude. When they arrived in Cappadocia however, they found that they were not the first to live in that region, but rather the last in a succession of peoples who sought protection and security in the soft, easily carved rock.

Over the centuries, continued erosion and earthquakes broke many of the cones and cliff faces open, exposing thousands of rooms and churches to the elements. The result today is a ‘Swiss-cheese’ landscape with rooms, stairways, chapels, and other carved spaces exposed to the outside, some of them no longer accessible because the entries and stairways have long since crumbled into the valley floor below. As this process of decay progressed, many people moved into villages with normal structures above ground and the cave dwellings were gradually abandoned.

Christians occupied this area right up until 1924, a period of some 1700 years. In 1924, as a result of the Treaty of Lusanne, a ‘population exchange’ between Turkey and Greece took place, with the result that 1.5 million Orthodox left Turkey for Greece while about 500,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. The result today is a Cappadocia devoid of any active Christian presence, but whose Christian monuments are preserved and available to all who wish to come and visit them.

Without question, the best way to explore the valleys is on foot. Organized tours are okay for a quick, easy overview, but sooner or later you need to hit the trails and explore the splendid silence and isolation of the countless nooks, crannies, valleys and hideaways found in the vicinity of Goreme. There are over a thousand carved churches throughout the region and literally thousands of dwellings cut out of the stone. Many of these churches are small, obviously carved for the use of just one or two hermits, while others are large enough to hold several dozen people. I will briefly describe two of my personal favourites, one a large communal church, the other a small hermit chapel, as well as an exquisite enclosed monastery cut out of a mountain's interior.

The Durmus Church

The large church, called the ‘Durmus Church,’ is located on the outskirts of Goreme. Carved around the 7th century, it was not painted, but was really beautifully carved inside with columns, a pulpit for preaching, arches over the altar, a baptismal place, tombs for priests and monks, etc.

Entry to the church is through the broken wall of the rear section, an area where priests and monks from an earlier time were buried. The open tombs are visible in the floor and in the walls, although the relics are no longer there (Note: in some churches in Cappadocia, the relics are still in the tombs and are visible). Upon entry into the main body of the church, one is immediately struck by the amazing work that was done to carve this church out of the side of the mountain. Measuring approximately 30 feet long and 15 feet across, with a ceiling that is probably 20 feet high, the church is divided into three sections, each with an altar on the east end, the main one sitting behind a carved iconostasis that is replete with columns, arches and crosses cut in relief in the flat faces. Around the inside of the altar are benches cut into the wall for the clergy and a large altar stone completes the arrangement.

The three sections of the church are divided by rows of columns supporting arches with windows cut into the cliff face on the south side of the church. A beautiful, small, round baptistery at the back of the church, decorated with crosses and symbols, is tucked into the northwest corner. Finally, a beautiful pulpit, standing about four feet tall, is left standing in the middle of the church, with a stairway going up the front and back sides and a round area at the top where the priest or bishop stood.

What is especially interesting about this church is that nothing in it is ‘built!’ These early desert fathers looked at a mountain and saw a church. They visualized how this church would look and how it would fit into the mountain that would contain it and then proceeded carefully to cut away rock until the vision became reality.

A Tiny Hermit Chapel

As impressive as this church was however, I was most moved by a tiny chapel near the peak of a tufa cone that is partially broken off and exposed to the weather. This little church was only big enough for perhaps two or three people, its floor space measuring no more than perhaps 20 or 25 square feet (two square metres plus). A small altar is cut into the east end, with a small window above it and an icon niche into the south wall. The ceiling is arched and painted and the bits of surviving fresco show that it was skilfully painted. This little chapel must have belonged to a hermit who prayed alone in its confines or was perhaps joined in prayer with another one or two like-minded brethren from time to time. Most of the monasteries found in Cappadocia (and there are many) are of the ‘refectory’ type, having very limited living quarters, but a common church and refectory. In a monastery of this type, monks lived scattered about the area (generally throughout a clearly defined valley) and came together for Liturgy and the ‘agape’ meal on Sundays. This early form of monastic life preceded the later ‘coenobitic’ communities in which the brethren lived together as a community with living quarters inside the monastery. These communities were generally of the ‘courtyard’ type, in which the monastic community was organized around a central courtyard, living and working in the enclosed complex.

The Eski Gumus Monastery

One such coenobitic monastery is the exquisite ‘Eski Gumus’ monastery located near the town of Nigde, some 90 kilometres from Goreme. Discovered in 1965, the approach to this monastery does not betray its presence at all, as it is hidden within the mountain. All around the base of the mountain are dozens of carved out dwellings, much like those you will find everywhere in Cappadocia, but nothing to indicate this was a monastic community.

To enter the church, you walk through a little tunnel in the side of a big rock hill and suddenly you are inside the monastery! It is about 30 feet on each side in the open area, with a tree growing in the middle and the top of the hill is about 45 feet up! If you go up on top of the hill, you do not even know there is a monastery there until suddenly you're standing on the edge of a cliff with a large deep square hole cut out of it! All over the faces of the walls are carvings of crosses and other designs.

There were also two churches in it, both of them quite beautiful and even the graves of many monks in the floors of the churches and around the monastery. Also, there is an underground ‘city’ under the monastery that you enter through a tunnel so that if the monks were attacked, they could retreat underground, roll a huge stone across the tunnel and stay there for months! Furthermore, all around the hill were cave houses cut into the stone – 100’s of them - so this area was obviously a large monastic community with a large number of monks living there, many many centuries ago. One of the graves even still had ancient bones in it - no doubt one of the original monks.

Scouting the Hermitages

Along the many miles of trails I hiked during my time in Cappadocia, I stopped in a number of hermitages to spend some time, trying to get a feel for how they lived, what their way of life was like, what their world must have been like as they passed their lives in the empty vastness of Cappadocia. One such hermitage was near the Zelve Valley, an amazing area in which four valleys converge on a common opening, with each of those valleys containing many hermitages and churches, while the main churches were at the junction of the four valleys. Less than a mile away from that place is the cave of ‘Simon the Hermit,’ an anchorite who lived in an indeterminate period, but whose cave is a three-room ‘suite’ carved out of the rock, with shelves, a closet and sleeping space, also niches cut into the walls of the rooms, perhaps to hold icons or other objects. At the top of the cliff above his hermitage, Simon cut a beautiful little church that measures about 6 by 12 feet, accessible only by taking a roundabout path around the back of his mountain to a barely visible entrance above.

What makes this church especially interesting - and there are many such churches in Cappadocia - is that it was decorated in the iconoclast period, when frescoes depicting religious figures were banned. As a result, the church is decorated with crosses, other Christian symbols and graphic designs, but not a single fresco of a saint, the Theotokos, or the Saviour. There are many such churches throughout Cappadocia and the designs, surprisingly, were very interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their simplicity. Somehow, they seemed to fit the harsh environment of Cappadocia, but they could hardly compare to the fully and elaborately painted churches that were done after the period of Iconoclasm and some of the finest examples of early iconography are found to this day in this region.

These few examples I have shared, only hint at what any pilgrim to Cappadocia will experience. There is nothing quite as moving as sitting in the home of an ancient Desert Father, a home that was undoubtedly used over the centuries by a succession of hermits seeking God and considering their lives and their motives as they left the world to find God in the emptiness of the Cappadocian desert. It is also exceptionally touching to visit these tiny churches, lovingly carved by hand from the rock and decorated simply, yet elegantly and to consider the countless hours that hermits of yesteryear passed in prayer known only to God. These men and women (they were mostly men in Cappadocia even if there were certainly some women among them in small communities) were not seeking fame, they did not leave records of themselves, they seldom signed their artwork and they almost never left any written record of their presence. It is truly almost impossible to ‘feel’ their lives and their asceticism without going to their places of struggle and experiencing their environment firsthand.

If you are ever blessed with the opportunity to go to Cappadocia, by all means do so. It will be well worth whatever sacrifices of time and money you have to make to go and you will enjoy the rewards of the experience as long as you live. It is truly an experience I will never forget, but it was a very different experience from visiting the holy places in Egypt and Palestine where the early Desert Fathers lived and struggled.

The Benedictine Oblate

Newsletter of St. Gregory’s Chapter

MEETING PLACE

PRAYER LIST

ITEMS OF INTEREST

THE NIGHT OF THE SENSES

AMONG THE RUINS OF THE ABBEYS

The Durmus Church

A Tiny Hermit Chapel

The Eski Gumus Monastery

Scouting the Hermitages