"From the very earliest accounts of monastic practice--dating back to the fourth century-- it is evident that a form of reading called lectio divina ("divine" or "spiritual reading") was essential to any deliberate spiritual life. This kind of reading is quite different from that of scanning a text for useful facts and bits of information, or advancing along an exciting plotline to a climax in the action. It is, rather, a meditative approach, by which the reader seeks to savor and taste the beauty and truth of every phase and passage. This process of contemplative reading has the effect of enkindling in the reader compunction for past behavior that has been less than beautiful and true. At the same time, it increases the desire to seek a realm where all that is lovely and unspoiled may be found. There are four steps in lectio divina:
first, to read, next to meditate, then to rest in the sense of God's nearness, and, ultimately, to resolve to govern one's actions in the light of new understanding. This kind of reading is itself an act of prayer. And, indeed, it is in prayer that God manifests His Presence to us."
"Augustine first glimpses his mentor Ambrose, bishop of Milan, reading alone, silently to himself, he describes the act in Book VI of The Confessions like a fascinated anthropologist writing a field note on an exotic tribal customs: 'his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.' "
(From the preface of the book: "The Confessions. Saint Augustine." Translated by Maria Boulding, OSB. Preface by Patricia Hampl)
