Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T23:23:57.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Lectio Divina

The Symbolism of the Bible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In the Rule of St Benedict the monastic day is divided into three unequal periods. The longest is that which is given to manual work, which might amount to as much as seven hours. The others, which were roughly equal and amounted to about half that time, were given to prayer, or the ‘work of God', and to lectio divina or sacred reading. Each of these elements in the monastic life, as we hope to show, were intimately related to one another, but it is with the lectio divina that we are primarily concerned today. There is no doubt of the nature of this reading in the time of St Benedict and in the centuries which followed. It was confined at first to the study of the Bible and the Fathers, especially the Latin Fathers, and above all St Jerome and St Augustine. To these were added later, perhaps through the influence of Cassiodorus, some of the classical writers, but the typical Benedictine study has always remained the Bible and the Fathers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

The substance of a paper read to The Life of the Spirit Conference, 16th September, 1953.