The Meaning of Chanting

    The most important issue raised in our previous class – for me – was the reconciliation of Benedict 1-10 with Benedict 11-20; that is, what was the relationship between the practices of the monastic community (the ‘rule’) and the chanting of psalms?
    We must begin by understanding that the psalms represented an overwhelming majority of all words that the monks ever spoke in the monastery. Benedict wrote that the monks should speak “gently and without laughter, humbly and seriously, in few and sensible words” (Benedict 7) and that “permission to speak should rarely be granted even to perfect disciples” (Benedict 6). Benedict believed that excess speech, even in ‘edifying conversation’, represented a source of sin (Benedict 6). It was therefore necessary for the monk to purify his speech of excesses and to reduce it only to the necessities of his religious obligations.
    We must then understand the importance of this practice for the monks’ spiritual cultivation; the central idea here is conforming the internal spirit to the will of God through external practice. For example, “if the disciple obeys with an ill will and murmurs, not necessarily with his lips but simply in his heart, then even though he fulfil the command yet his work will not be acceptable to God, who sees that his heart is murmuring” (Benedict 5). That is, external obedience to the rule, for example, would not be ‘acceptable to God’ unless it was accompanied by internal, spiritual obedience to God’s will. The monk must therefore learn not to ‘murmur’ in his acquiescence to the will of God internally by molding his spirit through external behavior, for example by resigning himself to not protest the commands of the abbot (externally, or ‘on the lips’).
    Similarly, Benedict developed an analogy between the abolition of the monk’s personal will with respect to the abbot, and the abolition of his personal will with respect to God. The monks, “not living according to their own choice nor obeying their own desires and pleasures but walking by another’s judgment and command, they dwell in monasteries and desire to have an Abbot over them” (Benedict 5). Similarly, they were expected to emulate the Lord’s proclamation that “I have come not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me”. Just as the monk was expected to abandon his external work in the monastery, ‘leaving it unfinished’, whenever summoned by the abbot to do his will, so he was expected to ‘forsake his own [internal] will’ whenever summoned by God to do his will.
    The psalms played a central role in this process, because the external purification of sin from speech was meant to cultivate the internal purification of sin from the mind, just as external humility by not ‘murmuring on the lips’ was meant to cultivate internal humility by not ‘murmuring in the heart’ (Benedict 5). This was achieved by molding the internal voice through constant repetition of the external voice. It seems, therefore, that Benedict 1-10 represents the literal rule of the monastic community, while Benedict 11-20 represents the rule of the psalms; or, the rule of the mind that constant repetition of the psalms was meant to install.
    Thus, the key idea of the rule in general was to form the mind according to the demands of religion through external practice. The act of external reconciliation with the will of the abbot would thereby inculcate an internal reconciliation with the will of God. The quintessential act of external obedience is silence, and the monks were almost entirely silent when they were not chanting the psalms, which would have thus formed their minds significantly in the mold of the psalms. Of course, the content of their chants was not chosen arbitrarily; it must have been meant to harmonize one’s external practice, and thereby assimilate one’s internal will, with the will of God.
    So, it is finally necessary to investigate how the specific content of the psalms must have been thought to achieve this end. Psalm 94, with which the monks always began their daily chants, offers such an insight. The speaker implores the singers, “To day if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts”. Likewise, “Come let us adore and fall down: and weep before the Lord that made us”, and “let us praise the Lord with joy”. The psalms call their singers to humility and obedience, and were thus an appropriate medium for the monks’ rare speech.
    There is also a curious interplay here between the first and second person pronouns: in some places, the psalm calls ‘us’; in other places, ‘you’. We might justifiably wonder how each individual monk conceptualized the speaker at any particular moment, and perhaps we can speculate on it here. Suppose that each call to obedience would have been spoken internally as well as externally: the monk, repeating these words day after day, would have had them stamped on his internal voice. The external repetition of the words would therefore not have precluded a simultaneous internal repetition. However, we should recall that the process of internal conformity to external practice was designed to assimilate the individual will of each monk to the will of God. Thus, as the psalms called each singer to obedience, as in ‘harden not your hearts’ or ‘let us praise the Lord’, the monk’s own internal voice (or will) was replaced by the voice (or will) of God. At the same time, the monk would have naturally assimilated the external words to his internal will. Obedience would therefore have become a nearly spontaneous act for the monk: given that his will was ultimately assimilated to the will of God and that his internal voice became indelibly stamped with the psalms, the call to obedience would have issued from within, and the monk would have become a speaker of the psalms both literally and spiritually. 

Henry Stratakis-Allen