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MONASTERIES


Today we probably think of monasteries as distant, rather grand and beautiful reminders of the Middle Ages – as far removed from any of the concerns of our modern lives as it is possible to get. However, in their heyday, monasteries were doing something that retains a universal relevance even for those of a secular disposition. They were highly engineered machines for helping their inhabitants to think. They were begun because certain people wanted to think very carefully about a range of vital questions: what is the nature of God and what does God want from me? What is the Divine and what is Grace? What is owed to Jesus and what is owed to Caesar? These believers realised that the human mind is an extremely flighty and easily distracted organ. The prospect of a party at the end of the week, the chatter of a few people out in the street, the sight of an exciting book – all these can derail our attempts to focus our minds. So the founders of monasteries went to immense efforts to create environments that could positively assist their members to think fruitfully. They situated their buildings far from cities; they built high walls around their estates; they laid out highly symmetrical gardens and walkways; they made sure their food was nutritious but plain. They encouraged only quiet conversation over meals. They went to bed early and rose at dawn. They did moderate exercise every other day. Today, we probably don’t want to think so much about the particular questions that monks and nuns once focused on. However, we still have a lot of thinking to do. We have equally important thinking tasks to perform around relationships, work and the meaning of our lives. For these challenges, monasteries retain some important lessons for us. We can be inspired by their ambition to go beyond ordinary expectations and set up ideal conditions where a person might think as well as possible. This contrasts with a more Romantic attitude that sees thinking as mainly influenced by other thoughts – particularly by books – and doesn’t quite accept that an organ as elevated as the mind may be assisted by something as ostensibly trivial as going for a walk or having only a light salad for lunch. In the Utopia, we should learn to design our own highly engineered machines for thinking – institutions geared to the task of deftly extracting our best thoughts from our squeamish and recalcitrant minds.

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