Stages of a Discovery: Guéranger and Me, Part 1

Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) opens his fascinating conversion story, ‘Stages of a Pilgrimage’, with an expression of gratitude to ‘everyone who contributed to my human and spiritual education’. He writes:

Beginning with my family, I was shaped in the school of the Church’s great liturgical and patristic tradition. My grandmother and my two paternal aunts, who influenced me greatly, had as their bedside reading Dom Cabrol’s Book of Ancient Prayer, and Dom Guéranger’s Liturgical Year, books which contained a great many splendid texts from the ancient liturgies of West and East. [1]

Not ever having been Catholic, when I read Fr Placide’s account for the first time—back in 2001—it was the first I had heard of either of these writers. But I was interested because it sounded as though they might have some points of connection with Orthodoxy. While I never did follow up on ‘Dom Cabrol’, however, another reference to Guéranger in a completely different source ensured that I would do a bit more digging on him.

It was when I discovered the website of the eccentric Catholic monarchist, Charles Coulombe. In the midst of his ‘Ultra-Realism FAQ’—the merits of which I leave readers to decide for themselves—he begins his list of ‘famous ultra-realists and/or Christian Neoplatonists’ with a reference to—

St Dionysius the Areopagite, convert of St Paul, first Bishop of Athens, first Bishop of Paris, and author of The Divine Hierarchies and other works. (Yes, I am aware that people since Luther have declared that these four qualities belong to four separate Dionysii, and insist on calling the author the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’; I consider their pretensions exploded by the writings of such as Dom Guéranger and the martyred Archbishop Darboy).

That was all. No footnote or anything. Curious to see how these ‘pretensions’ had been ‘exploded by the writings of Dom Guéranger’, and assuming that the writings in question meant the Liturgical Year, I eventually went to great lengths to track down a copy of the portion of that work that dealt with St Dionysius.

I began of course by looking online. Google Books has a couple of volumes of the Liturgical Year, but neither contains material on St Dionysius. I found a blog chronicling a fellow’s reading of Guéranger, but with basically no excerpts from the books at all. I even tried going by the ‘Pastoral Center’ of the local RC Archdiocese and searching the library. The librarian there had no idea what I was talking about, and a long browse yielded lots of interesting books, but no Guéranger. I was getting desperate.

Finally, one summer I went to the library website of the nearest Benedictine college, St Gregory’s in Shawnee, Oklahoma. I searched the online catalogue, and at last, there it was! I wrote down the call number, grabbed a couple of friends for company, and headed off on the 45-minute drive to Shawnee. Although somewhat disappointing to someone whose imagination has been fed by Name of the Rose, St Gregory’s is one of the more mediæval things we have in Oklahoma. I was very excited as I entered the building, call number in hand, and walked into the mostly empty library to the shelves . . . only to find that it wasn’t there. I saw the book that came before it, and the one that came after it, but the entire 15-vol. or so set of the Liturgical Year was not there.

This librarian was more helpful. Although there was the obligatory walk back over to the shelf I had just examined, she spent some real time looking around in the computer system. At last, she told me that she was going to ask one of the monks, who worked in—I believe—the ‘archives’. Now I don’t remember the name of this monk, but it was ‘Brother Something-or-other’. Perhaps ‘Brother Theobald’? I don’t know. She called him on a phone, and after a little wait, she said he knew right where it was.

Then there was a longer wait. I looked around at the shelves a bit more to pass the time, when at last Brother Theobald appeared. A man of 45 or so, he was wearing his black Benedictine habit, and—get this—he was limping! He limped over to me, and held out a small, hardbound book of some 100 years saying, ‘Be careful with it. It’s very old.’ Although the library was carpeted and lit with fluorescent lights and was typical of a small college library built in the 1950s, we might as well have been in the vast Gothic labyrinth of Eco’s novel, the limping monk corresponding thrillingly with the blind Jorge stingily retrieving only the books that he has approved the monks to read, or at least poisoning the pages of the others. After that, I had the lady from the desk do the photocopying for me.

To be continued . . .


[1] Archim. Placide (Deseille), ‘Stages of a Pilgrimage’, The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain: Contemporary Voices from Mt Athos, ed. & tr. Hieromonk Alexander (Golitzin) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1995), p. 63.