According to the late Benedictine scholar Jean Leclercq, monks have always loved learning with intensities that matched their desire for God. I would surmise that monks love learning more. Scholarship, after all, offers the satisfactions of small but significant closures of understanding, whereas desiring God is an open-ended heart project, an experience of an elusive Presence that never fully discloses itself. Since God is at core hidden and transcendent, desiring God's presence is in the same genre of never to be completed human tasks as is ridding one's experience of evil. Whoever takes up either of these projects without being grounded in humility will have begun in delusion to reach an end in dismay.

Monks love learning. Willful ignorance of the world for the Christian monk is a sin against the Holy Spirit whose activities are everywhere. Yet speculation is not the primary monastic office. The monk seeks to ground theoretical reflection in experience. Any academic enterprise, all delicious toying with ideas, must for monks be embedded in practice and experiment. Any monk who elaborates theoria without a personal praxis is suspect. An unlived monastic theology is vain. Thus, Christian monks—ambiguously and not ideally since they are like us in all things—can provide a cautionary footnote for anyone tempted to discuss the mystery of evil only in the abstract, at arms-length from the necessity to acknowledge the mysterium iniquitatis securely nested in human hearts and behaviors.

I can speculate on the deeper meanings of Eucharist without ever giving myself the liberty to discover what could happen were I to celebrate it as my daily bread. I know the delight of reading book after book on meditation while ignoring the imperative to sit my behind down on a cushion. And, mea maxima culpa, I daily slide along a web of deceits about myself out of ignorance or conscious neglect of my mendacious tendency to ignore the contradictions between my private and my public behavior, between what it is I preach and what it is I do.