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three score and ten is reduced symbolically
to something much smaller—a few months of walking or a stroll around the
cloister’s four-sided garden. Both have a beginning, middle, and end. Both
force upon the visitor a number of encounters— on the road, these are random
events; in the cloister, these are sculpture. And both offer a finale of
redemption. On the road, it is the physical exhilaration of arrival. At the
cloister, it’s the walk into the direct center, a place the monks called paradeisos. So I thought a visit to a monastery cloister would be appropriate.
    The idea of a monastery grew
out of the thinking of a hermit named Benedict who lived in the sixth century
during the declining days of the Roman Empire. He had committed himself to the
reigning idea of his day—a life of utter solitude in the wilderness. This idea
had been imported from the Holy Land, where hermits pursued different fashions
of isolation. The stylites sat on the top of a pole. The dendrites carved a
hole in a tree and lived inside. For his effort, Benedict isolated himself in Italy at the mouth of a cave not far from Nero’s summer house. He clothed himself in animal
skins, which his biographer reports frightened the local shepherds. He ate
berries.
    But the call of the hermit’s
life was not attracting too many Europeans. It was a bad time to be alone in the
woods. The sixth century saw the continuing collapse of Roman order, opening
the door to the invading Huns, Visigoths, and Longobards. From time to time,
the barbarians would drop down to cut the tongues from women and disembowel the
men. This was the era when the famously airy architecture of Roman atriums and
columned porticoes closed up. Castles were built, moats were dug, drawbridges
were engineered. It would not be long before the religious orders sought a
similar kind of protection. Benedict is credited with solving these problems.
His innovation offered isolated monks a sliver of companionship and physical
protection: a monastery.
    Like all good ideas,
Benedict’s was not immediately embraced. His first collective of monks didn’t
appreciate his harsh rules and tried to murder him. But others liked the idea,
and eventually Benedict wrote a strict code of monastic living called Benedict’s
Rule, which is still observed today. Reading Benedict’s Rule, though, one can sense a yearning for utter solitude—not the minimal society of
the monastery, but the pure singularity of the desert, far from the corruption
of man, alone in nature. To stand in a cloister, even skylighted in plastic and
teeming with riotous schoolchildren, is to feel the architectural memory of
Benedict’s original idea. The cloister is a patch of that wilderness, imported
and modified to the demands of society. It is a bit of desert, open directly to
the original skyward view of the hermit, secreted away in the center of the
monastery. The cloister is not the perfection of an idea, but rather a constant
reminder of its compromise. The cloister is nostalgia. It is an original plan
fallen short, a vestige of an older and purer sense of purpose. Like my own
effort, the cloister is somewhat corrupt, an acknowledgment of failure.
    As I began to read up on
these particular cloisters in New York, I marveled at how perfect they were for
my beginning. The reason they’re in Manhattan and not on the road to Santiago is because of a desperate American sculptor. At the turn of the century, Robert
Barnard made his rent money by buying medieval artworks from guileless French
rustics and selling them for impressive profits. He began with small statues
but eventually was buying entire monasteries. When the French government found
out that the nation’s patrimony was being shipped off to serve as lawn
ornaments in the front yards of American millionaires, a huzzah went up in Paris. Just days before December 31, 1913—when the French parliament outlawed Barnard’s
hobby —he packed 116 crates of his precious cargo,