Bernard of Clairvaux (1090/91–1153), a Cistercian abbot from Burgundy, wrote these words to a learned correspondent, Henry Murdach. A reader might expect him to support his advice by citing an especially distinguished authority. Instead he asks Henry to take the word of someone who has tried the thing himself. What he has in mind will require Henry to get up from his accustomed place of study.
Believe one who has tried: you shall find a fuller satisfaction in the woods than in books. The trees and the rocks will teach you that which you cannot hear from masters.
– Bernhard von Clairvaux, Epistolae, o. J., p. 353.[1]
Bernard sends his reader to teachers from whom he will never hear a single word. A tree cannot explain a difficult passage. A rock will never dictate an answer to a question that has defeated him. How would anyone coming home from such teachers know what he had learned? Bernard sets his friend no exercise whose results he can display at the end of the day. He offers him a different way of spending that day and trusts him to discover the difference for himself.
A little further on Bernard asks whether one might suck honey from a rock and draw oil from the hardest stone. These biblical images lead back to the books his reader has just left. Familiar words can take on fresh force out of doors. To the touch the rock is hard and unyielding, yet someone thinking of honey and oil is asked to imagine a gift there. In the letter this confidence belongs to the spiritual life Bernard hopes his friend will choose. The walk into the woods is a personal invitation from one teacher to another.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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