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Paths of Obedience: |
Anima's own inner be-wilderment becomes the ordeal which her external trials merely make explicit.
[Cont. from page 1] ... Surely, the stories of Snow White and of Psyche have a great deal of charm in common. But are there deeper connections between the two? On the very surface level of narrative already we detect remarkable parallels as soon as we look closely. This may surprise us, when we remember that one and a half millennia separate Apuleius from the Brothers Grimm. And yet, the similarities make sense as soon as we discover that in both stories the protagonist is the same: Anima. (The Jungian connotation is not misleading here, but we shall have to fill in nuances as we go along.)
Anima’s obstacle course starts with an obstacle. Neither Snow White nor Psyche is allowed a running start. A first and crucial testing stands at the very beginning of both stories. It is, in fact, the impact of collision with this initial obstacle which propels Anima into action. Not a bad beginning for a monastic vocation.
How can one tell that there is promise in a monastic candidate? Two answers given seem diametrically opposed, though each is cogent in its own reasoning. The one will have it that only a candidate who was a success in worldly matters is likely to make a go of it in the monastery, too. The other one argues from the opposition between worldly and monastic values that a candidate fit for the monastery must in worldly circles have been considered a misfit. Paradoxically, a genuine candidate proves both opinions right. Our stories bear out this paradox. As Snow White, and as Psyche as well, Anima is both success and misfit. And she is a misfit precisely because she is a success; because of her surpassing beauty.
By their beauty both Snow White and Psyche are singled out. That same beauty becomes for both of them the first great obstacle, the initial touchstone of their testing. A surpassing beauty, we have called it. There is something brand new in that beauty, something the old woman can’t match, be she stepmother queen or the jealous mother-goddess Aphrodite. Anima’s beauty is surpassing because it is something altogether new. But her being beautiful in an unheard-of way surpasses Anima’s own comprehension. And so, her own inner be-wilderment becomes the ordeal which her external trials merely make explicit.
As we follow the succession of events our two stories run perfectly parallel in their first, “pre-monastic” phase. The differences in narrative detail make the parallelism of the plots all the more striking. Out of jealousy, the old mother figure seeks to destroy Anima. Snow White is as much in the dark about this as Psyche is. By the time they catch on, their fate is sealed. Both are led into the wilderness: both are destined for death in the prime of life, but both are spared by the one whom the old woman had commissioned with their undoing and in both cases, he spares them because he looks at their beauty and is moved. One could hardly imagine two more different actors for this part than the old queen’s huntsman and Eros himself, but the plot is the same. Out in the wilderness Anima is totally alone. Mutterseehg allem it is said of Snow White; and Psyche, left alone on the summit of a crag, brings to mind Rilke’s lines “Exposed on the heart’s mountains…” Then among the trees of a forest (Dante’s “dark woods”) both find a meal ready, but they remain alone in these welcoming surroundings and in the end both go to bed alone and fall asleep. (What monk does not remember that first night on a monastic cot or mat, that last sigh before a deep sleep?)
This, then, is Anima’s flight from worldly ways, her fuga mundi. And it is Anima, to be sure, here at the threshold of monastic life. Be it in Bangkok or on Mt. Athos, at Chidambaram or Monte Cassino, the one who seeks admission at the monastery gate is always Anima. St. Benedict uses the feminine “anima” more than half a dozen times in speaking of monks, especially in the context of monastic apprenticeship and training. The Novice Master is to be aptus ad hurandas animas – skilled in winning souls. Souls only? Our word “soul” seems quite inadequate to translate “anima” in this and similar passages. What is meant is certainly not the soul as distinct from the body. “Anima,” as St. Benedict uses this term, has far more in common with the biblical nefesh than with Plato’s psyche: It stands for the whole human person. We might even say that it stands for the root of our wholeness, for our human potential to fall in love with Love as Psyche did. To be bride, that is the vocation of Anima.
The tribulations Anima must undergo in the wilderness begin for Snow White almost as soon as she has fled over those seven mountains and valleys and has been received by the brotherhood of the seven little ones. It was a common saying among the Desert Fathers, those forebears of Western monks: “Have you fled into the wilderness? Prepare yourself for battle!” Monastic struggles are not just evitable obstacles on the chosen path. A novice deliberately wants to be tested and tried on this narrow road without bypasses. Tribulations are painful, but welcome. The tribulum, from which the word “tribulation” is derived, is the Roman threshing sledge that separates wheat from chaff. And the Rule of St. Benedict offers the image of a fire by which silver is tested. "But in all this,” monks rejoice, “we more than overcome through the One who loves us.” It is for the sake of the great Lover that Anima finds herself in the wilderness, even though at first, she may be no more clearly aware of this deepest reason than Snow White or Psyche or any other novice.