Ascending the Mountain: The Carmelite Rule Today/The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and Their Pasts in the Middle Ages

Spiritual Life, Summer 2006 by Payne, Fr Steven

Ascending the Mountain: The Carmelite Rule Today. Eltin Griffin, ed. Dublin: Columba Press, 2004. Distributed by Dufour Editions, PO Box 7, Chester Springs, PA 19425. Pp. 138. Paper. $15.95.

The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and Their Pasts in the Middle Ages. By Andrew Jotischky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x 370. Cloth. $140.

For some time, the number of reliable modern studies on St. Teresa of Avila and her historical setting has far exceeded what was available in English on the early history of the Order that she entered and helped renew. Much of the best contemporary material on Carmelite origins was privately published or accessible only in other languages, which is perhaps why popular devotional writing in English on the first Carmelites so often tends to recycle discredited historical legends. Fortunately, the tide is turning with works like the two books reviewed here. Both greatly enrich our appreciation of the first Carmelites, their aspirations, and their spiritual legacy.

Ascending the Mountain is an anthology of papers from a joint Carmelite and Discalced Carmelite conference held in Ireland in 2002. The conference dealt with the "formula of life" that Albert, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, gave to the original thirteenth-century hermits on Mount Carmel, which thereby established them as an officially recognized body within the Church. The "Rule of St. Albert" is the Carmelite family's foundational document. As the conference speakers note, its spirituality has shaped all succeeding generations of Carmelites and their numerous saints and blesseds: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, Edith Stein, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Titus Brandsma, and many others. In this volume, Carmelite scholars and authors, such as Pat Mullins, James and Eugene McCaffrey, and Christopher O'Donnell, offer major papers on the historical and biblical background of Albert's Rule, its influence on Teresa, its relation to Eastern Christian traditions, and other important topics.

I question the repeated references (e.g., on pages 31 and 34) to the first Carmelites as including ex-crusaders, something other historians claim has not been established. What is clear, however, is that any Latin hermits living in the crusader kingdoms would certainly have been familiar with the crusader mentality.

The book also contains shorter and more informal notes from the conference workshops, introduced by various friars and nuns and incorporating shared reflections of the participants on such themes as the cell, lectio divina, work, hospitality, and silence according to the Rule. This leads to some inconsistencies of style from one section to another but offers the reader a richer fare of both popular and scholarly reflections on a text so fundamental to contemporary Carmelite identity. For me, Christopher O'Donnell's introduction to, and translation of, the first commentary on Albert's Rule, by the great medieval theologian John Baconthorpe-hard to find anywhere else in English-would alone have been worth the cost of the book. My only suggestion is that the conference might have been improved by incorporating insights from the Lay and Secular Carmelites, who face the challenge of faithfully living the spirit of this medieval rule in today's secular world.

The second work is a more formidable academic volume on how the medieval Carmelites' explanation of their origins developed in the face of criticisms and the ever-looming threat of suppression by Church authorities. Jotischky's earlier treatment of Carmelite origins in The Perfection of Solitude (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), a study of religious life in the crusader states, was criticized in some circles for not taking adequate account of recent Carmelite scholarship in this field. In The Carmelites and Antiquity, the author has responded to such criticisms by consulting Carmelite experts and drawing upon a much broader range of both Carmelite and non-Carmelite sources.

Like other contemporary historians of religious life, Jotischky takes it for granted that the historical claims of the medieval Carmelite Order to have been actually founded by the prophet Elijah are best viewed as myths. But he is interested in what these and other myths and legends tell us about the early Carmelites' understanding of themselves and their role in the Church. He explains the difficulties facing groups like the Carmelites at that time and the need to affirm legitimacy by insisting on the antiquity of one's way of life and its association with revered monastic figures of the past. In nine dense chapters, Jotischky traces the long evolution of the legendary narrative that Carmelites developed to link themselves back to the prophet Ehjah, whom some Church fathers had characterized as the "father of monks," and he compares it with analogous processes at work in other Orders of the time, noting both similarities and differences.

A whole chapter is devoted to the significance of the Carmelites' early substitution of a white mantle for the former striped cloak by which they were already known: because habits were so closely tied to one's identity as a religious, Carmelite writers had to reconcile the need for different clothing in the European context with the concern that a "change in habit" might represent a "change in the Order." It has been sometimes said that the problem with a striped cloak in Europe was that it too closely resembled the "fool's motley" worn by court jesters. Jotischky indicates that the problem lay rather in the inevitable inconsistency of appearance among striped cloaks because of difficulties in their manufacture and the popular perception that such clothes were costly and inappropriate for poor religious-though he adds somewhat confusingly that in fact the cloaks would not have been particularly expensive (p. 49).