O Taste & See! The Sweetness of Scripture Is Not Just for Beekeeping Monks
“O Taste & See! The Sweetness of Scripture Is Not Just for Beekeeping Monks.” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 36/3 (May/June 2023): 29–33.
Abstract
Monastic writers, especially those within the Cistercian tradition, delighted in the sweetness of honey as the aim of divine reading. Trained in the practices both of beekeeping and of spiritual reading, medieval monks came to see the former as symbolic of the latter: bees offered instruction on how meditative reading deepens one’s participation in the sweetness and the wisdom of God himself. The ancients regarded lectio divina’s deliberative, ponderous reading of Scripture as akin to eating—specifically, the eating of honey from the comb.
