Incomensurabile perspectives

Wilfred M. McClay has a great article in the June/July issue of First Things celebrating the republication of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1957 account of monastic life, A Time to Keep Silence. "That such a book would emerge from Fermor," says McClay, "seems about as likely as Teddy Roosevelt's producing a cookbook for vegans." Fermor was a larger-than-life figure. He fought heroically against the Nazis, parachuting into occupied Crete in 1942 in order to work for two years as a resistance organizer, living in the mountains disguised as a shepherd. He is best remembered, says McClay, for masterminding the daring 1944 operation capturing the island's German military commander. Disguised in the uniform of a German corporal, he managed to abscond with his prisoner in a hijacked staff car through fourteen checkpoints before smuggling him by boat to Cairo.

Nothing about this background would suggest a remote interest in anything like monasticism. Fermor entered the Abbey of St. Wandrille, one of the oldest and most beautiful Benedictine abbeys in France, not as a pilgrim or because of any spiritual longing of which he was aware, but on the recommendation of a friend who thought it might be a quiet and inexpensive retreat for him to work on his book.

What follows are three paragraphs I've extracted from McClay's article that reveal two incommensurable perspectives upon Fermor's entry into the abbey:

At first, the plan appears to have been a bad idea. No sooner did he settle in than a mood of unbearable loneliness fell on him "like a hammer-stroke." The place seemed to him "an enormous tomb, a necropolis of which I was the only living inhabitant." Eyeing the monks as they glided into the cloisters for vespers, their bodies concealed beneath voluminous gowns and their faces nearly hidden in the tunnels of their pointed black hoods, Fermor thought they looked "desperately sad," their skin "preternaturally pale, some of them nearly green," their faces at once haggard and smooth, with never a smile or a frown crossing their lips, eyes always downcast, no emotion visible other than an occasional flash of what looked like melancholy. In their presence, he writes, "I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating." Back in his cell, overcome with gloom, he downed a flask of Calvados and brooded.

After some days, though, these feelings imperceptibly slipped away, gradually replaced by respect for what these monks were doing with their lives. Only someone who has lived in a monastery, Fermor argues, can grasp "its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead." The two ways of life "do not share a single attribute." The period of adjustment can be painful, but he soon came to see the abbey as "the reverse of a tomb," as his unnamed inner torments released their grip and the monks became real people to him -- lively and highly educated men who, far from being feeble and emaciated escapists, were living in "a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which their is never a holiday."

Their devotion to prayer and worship, their keen interest in science and humanistic learning, the graceful buildings and peaceful grounds they assiduously maintained: All of these, far from being signs of fearful withdrawal, were the distinguishing marks of civilization itself. In the end, he concluded, it was he and not the monks who was the escapist."

The incommensurability of these two perspectives on monastic life, which Fermor personally lived through, strike me as fascinatingly similar to the transformation of perspectives undergone in a religious conversion. Ludwig Wittgenstein liked to use the image of the "duck-rabbit" to show that the same data, viewed in two different ways, can yield completely different interpretations. All McClay says here is that after some days, Fermor's initial "feelings imperceptibly slipped away, gradually replaced by respect for what these monks were doing with their lives." This is the part that interests me: what happened during those few days when Fermor underwent this transformation. There is no algorithm for executing this transformation? It's a wonderfully mysterious process that requires a disposition of openness and receptivity, to see what is there (the data) with new eyes under the transforming influence of grace.