Life through Liturgy

: transformations and tradition through Solesmes Benedictinism

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of what it might mean to live, learn and relate liturgically. It draws on nine months’ multi-sited fieldwork at several Catholic Benedictine monasteries belonging to the Solesmes Congregation, mainly the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes in France, Quarr Abbey in England, and Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma, USA.

Following the guidance of the 6th-century Rule of St Benedict, Benedictine monks take life-time vows of stability to a particular community, committing their lives to the worship of God through the traditional Catholic Liturgy. This is performed communally in seven daily “Divine Offices”, said or sung in Gregorian chant from texts comprising mainly psalms and passages from Scripture, with the daily Mass at the heart of the cycle. I describe the ways in which the Liturgy establishes relations of transcendence at the heart of the monks’ lives while forging and reiterating connections between individuals and communities, the monasteries of the Congregation, the wider Church and the world at large, spanning space and time.

Founded in France in 1832, the Solesmes Congregation places a special emphasis on the place of Liturgical worship in a modern, secular context. Across four chapters—Being and becoming, Eating, Praying, Returning home?—I show how the daily Liturgical cycle works to draw monks, guests (including, self-reflexively, anthropologists) and visitors alike, in various ways, into contact with an “enchanted” way of being (an “analogical imagination”—Norget et al. 2017). In an attempt to treat such claims seriously, I treat the monastery as pointing always beyond itself, a metaphor in various guises for the possibility of what Charles Taylor (2007) calls a “fullness of life” in contemporary secular contexts.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Richard Denis Gerard Irvine (Supervisor) & Adam Douglas Evelyn Reed (Supervisor)