Growth, dependence, transformation and preparation

Last June, St. John’s Abbey invited Abbot Mauritius Wilde of Maria Laach, a Benedictine abbey in Germany, to lead our annual retreat. Abbot Mauritius based his retreat conferences on Gregory the Great’s story about St. Benedict. When Benedict was studying the liberal arts in Rome, he became horrified by the immoral atmosphere he encountered. He left and chose a life of solitude in a cave. Abbot Mauritius contends that the cave allowed Benedict to “detach” from the broader culture. I would argue that Benedict’s retreat into the cave can also be understood as a gestational period of nourishment, preparation and formation for truthful and life-giving ministry.

Centuries before Benedict, Plato used the image of a cave in his political and philosophical dialogue, the “Republic.” Plato’s cave, however, features humans who are in chains and only see shadows cast on a wall by objects passing before a fire. The humans mistake these shadows for reality. In the “Republic,” the sun—not opinion or shadows—symbolizes the highest object of knowledge, often associated with the Form of the Good.

Luce Irigaray—philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst—in “Speculum of the Other Woman” (section titled “Plato’s Hystera”) argues that Plato’s account of enlightenment presents the movement away from the cave—and therefore away from maternal origins as she views it as a womb (hence the Greek word “hystera”)—as the movement toward genuine knowledge. She critiques Plato for his refusal of the value of our maternal and bodily origins.

Irigaray’s interpretation invites a further question about Benedict’s cave. If the cave need not signify ignorance, might it also be understood as a place of sheltered formation? Gregory recounts that Benedict was accompanied in this period by his nurse. Without making a historical claim beyond the text, one might see her presence as suggestive: the future abbot’s solitude was not isolation, but a period of gestational nourishment before the task of ministry and community building that would follow. Benedict’s cave, in other words, can be thought of as womb-like.

Benedict, Plato and Irigaray use the cave differently, but placing their images beside each other allows us to ask whether withdrawal from the world must mean the denial of embodied, relational life.

We should reject perspectives that denigrate women’s bodies. St. John Paul II in his Letter to Women (29 June 1995) said this: “Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God’s own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child’s first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life” (¶ 2). A womb, however, is not a symbol of passive shelter. It is a site of growth, dependence, transformation and preparation. Such qualities complicate the fiction of self-sufficiency.

The Blessed Virgin Mary’s womb offers another image of sheltered formation, where Christ received the bodily nourishment and preparation that preceded his public ministry.

College can also be viewed as a period of gestation. We are being prepared to become bearers of truth and life in the communities we will one day serve (see my Record articles from Sept. 26 and Oct. 1, 2024, both dealing with universities and formation). Men might benefit from becoming more comfortable with maternal images to describe this formation. Such images remind us that we are not self-made. Before we could speak, think or act, we were sheltered and nourished within another body. Remembering that origin may help us resist the temptation to treat dependence as weakness.