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BOOKS WORTH PEDDLING
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture
Jean Leclercq, O.S.B.
A luminous account of monastic culture in which literature, learning, prayer, memory, and the desire for God belong to one integrated life.
About This Book
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture Translated by Catharine Misrahi. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982.
Originally presented as lectures to Benedictine novices in Rome in 1955–56, this book still possesses a remarkable immediacy. Leclercq draws us into the intellectual and spiritual world of medieval monasticism, where reading, meditation, compunction, tears, biblical exegesis, grammar, and the “fellowship of the angels” belong to one coherent way of life.
Modern readers often separate intellectual work from spiritual formation. Leclercq shows that the monks did not. Their love of literature and learning was ordered toward prayer and the desire for God. Books were not merely sources of information but instruments of formation, received within a life of worship, discipline, memory, and contemplation.
More than a history of monastic scholarship, this is an indispensable guide to recovering an education directed toward the transformation of the whole human person.
What This Book Forms
This book forms the kind of reader Podvig hopes to cultivate: attentive, receptive, patient, and unwilling to separate serious learning from prayer and the work of becoming human.
From Dr. Doom's Shelf
I discovered this book early in my employment at Eighth Day Books. Its title captivated me because it seemed to name the vision for a gap-year program that was already, somewhat unwittingly, developing into what I would eventually call the Catechetical Academy.
Leclercq’s treatment of St. Gregory the Great became important during my studies at WSU under Dr. Gythiel. For one of the florilegia I prepared for him, I immersed myself in Gregory through two books by R. A. Markus: The End of Ancient Christianity and Gregory the Great and His World. Both remain on my bookshelves and will eventually find their way into Books Worth Peddling. I may even recover those florilegia from nearly three decades ago.
A brief discussion of Peter Lombard in Leclercq’s introduction also anticipated a later independent study with Dr. Gythiel in which I translated a substantial portion of Lombard’s then-untranslated Sentences.
But most of all, Leclercq’s account of the sources of monastic culture helped shape my renewed vision for the Academy under the influence of Eighth Day Books: learning ordered toward prayer, formation, and the desire for God.
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