“All Has Been Transferred to Inner Space”: Juan Mateos, Robert Taft, and the Early Egyptian Monastic Office from a Jesuit Perspective

This paper explores the tendency of two great modern Jesuit liturgical scholars—Robert Taft and Juan Mateos—to describe the early Egyptian monastic office as deficiently or insufficiently liturgical, as merely common Scriptural meditation rather than liturgical ceremony properly speaking. It analyzes this view in the context of their wider accounts of the cathedral/monastic office distinction. It offers an argument for one possible source of their scholarly assessment: viz., that early Egyptian monastic practice serves for both Jesuits as a proxy or stand-in for the liturgical/prayer practice of the Society of Jesus. It suggests that in their judgment of early Egypt and in their zeal for a restored cathedral-style office, Taft and Mateos both recapitulate Liturgical Movement arguments against certain Ignatian methods of prayer and criticize the sources that would have shaped their own Jesuit formation, arguing for an emphasis on the social and communal over the (merely) individual and interior.