The Poetic Mode of Knowing

Academia, Monasticism, and Eros

John Henry Newman wrote of the monastic Benedictine life that “it sought employments as contrary as possible to the world’s employments,—employments, the end of which would be in themselves, in which each day, each hour, would have its own completeness.”¹ The “world’s employments” are what we typically consider to be practical and generally they pursue material or social ends. Monasticism, on the other hand, is intentionally impractical because its mission is otherworldly or transcendent.

Photo by Manuel Torres Garcia

The retreat afforded by monastery walls has for hundreds of years made them ideal sites for learning and the preservation of knowledge. So too the simple rhythms of monastic life and its orientation toward the eternal rather than toward the turmoil of temporal and political affairs. Since their inception, monasteries copied books, illuminated them, preserved them, and taught them to the young. It was from these cloisters that learning emanated in the late middle ages. And the cloister has provided ever since an almost irresistible model followed by the university.

Even today colleges and universities are often built, knowingly or not, in the image of the cloisters of western monasticism and of clerical training grounds like the medieval University of Paris. The quad at the center of many campuses derives from the cloister of its monastic forbears. Libraries, chapels, and refectories sustain the intellectual activity of the community and surround the monk or student with a cosmologically ordered architecture that points toward the enduring and transcendent.

But unlike their religious predecessors, no transcendent purpose animates the walls and halls of today’s universities. Instead, twin competing objects vie for primacy. On the one hand you find material practicality where the “education” is chiefly a pursuit of credentials aimed at securing the best material or social conditions upon graduation. On the other hand are the murky motives of the listless who attend college because that’s simply what one does. For these, college is a lightly curated luxury experience that delays the onset of regrettable responsibility. Whichever object brings you to college, you will find that the secular academic cloister insulates you from the real world in a cocoon of material ease, comfort, and security provided by the under-classes.

Contemporary academia differs from its monastic forbear in yet another way. The monks too sought insulation from the world within their cloisters, but chiefly in order to keep their focus trained on God, and they embraced hard labor and self-sufficiency within their walls. The motto of the Benedictines is ora et labora, prayer and work. And at least in the more traditional remnants of the order (like Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma), their way of life prizes the physically arduous. A majority of monks there engage in hard manual labor producing food for the monastery while nevertheless engaging in the ancient rhythm of prayer and contemplation.

But alongside their strenuous physical labor, the monks cultivate a rich interior life distinguished by desire for God. It is the combination of these two things, manual labor and desire for God, that provide us an insight into the poetic mode of knowing and distinguish it from the analytic and proscriptive activity of the intellect often found in the more academic pursuit of philosophy or politics.

The monastic retreat from the workaday world creates an attitude and environment of recollection, a quality essential to contemplating the divine. Contemplation, writes the monastic scholar Jean Leclercq, O.B. “is not, therefore, the end result of a discursive activity of the intelligence, it is not the reward of learning acquired through study, and it does not result in an increase of speculative knowledge.”² It is not practical even if we understand practicality to extend to purely intellectual activity. The monastic mission is not to uncover previously unknown truths about God through a rigorous academic discipline. Rather, the monks retreat into silence in order to contemplate and commune with God in the simple depths of their contemplative tradition. 

Their approach, distinguished by desire, is more interested in union with the object of desire than the ability to marshal it with the memory as a series of arguments or definitions. What knowledge they have of the divine, which is their object of study (and of life), is best understood as poetic knowledge. It is an immersive and experiential form of knowledge.

Poetic knowledge, even of secular things, proceeds in this manner. Its goal is not to increase one’s breadth of knowledge, but rather to give it depth and to hint at those things about which it is difficult to speak. It is a form of union or immersion. Poetry rarely accomplishes a practical end and proves frustrating to those who attempt using it as an active exercise in extracting information. Poetry and monasticism pursue a mystical or transcendent knowledge that Leclercq explains is better termed ‘love,’ which like the poppy, only blossoms in the direct sunlight of reflection.    

Philosophy is often discursive and dialectical—Plato’s dialogues are an excellent example in that they are the record of a conversation or an argument. The famous scholastic texts, of which St Thomas Aquinas’ are the best and most famous, are similarly recorded as a series of propositions, challenges, counterchallenges, and authoritative resolutions.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a language of indirection and compression. In Leclercq’s words, it is a language of desire. Like every lover, it sees the image of the beloved everywhere it looks. This is the source of simile and metaphor in our language: the yoking of two unlike things into a new relation where they shed light on one another. Poetry handles the transcendent as if it was too grand to be understood well as the conclusion of a syllogism. Much better simply to immerse oneself in it, to fall in love with it, and see it everywhere you look. 

So.

It probably does not need saying that poetic knowledge is hardly at home in academia. Poetic knowledge more closely resembles Biblical “knowing” with the erotic sense of the term than the kind of knowing we pursue and prize in academia. It requires time and experience, and a certain absence of practical ambition. And though it is not really suited to defending itself and keeping up with the fast-talking, argument-making intellectual partisans outside the cloister, poetic knowledge persists as the reward of those whose unimpeded desire makes them willing to labor and to contemplate.

1. "The Mission of St Benedict." Atlantis, 1858: 365-430.

2. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.