'The eyes of the Lord' - Scripture, Rule, Florilegium

I had an interesting confluence of readings Saturday morning (21/8 May). My Old Testament reading (from the Authorised Version) was II Chronicles 13-16. As I read it early in the morning by candlelight, I was struck by the words of Hanani the seer to Asa king of Judah: ‘For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him’ (II Chron. 16:9).

But then, the same day’s reading from the Rule of St Benedict, from Chapter 4, Quae sunt instrumenta bonroum operum, included the oft-repeated Benedictine maxim, In omni loco Deum se respicere, pro certo scire (Prov. V. 21), ‘To know for certain that God sees one everywhere’ [1]. As Dom Paul Delatte says of this passage, ‘This advice must be very important since St Benedict is constantly repeating it’ [2] He goes on to write:

For us this is no fiction of the imagination, but a living reality; nor have we a mere witness, but a Being who is at once spectator and actor, no man but God. And we Christians say: Nemo peccat videns Deum, ‘No one seeing God sins.’ The impeccability of the elect is due to their being for ever rooted in good by the uninterrupted contemplation of beauty. Now we by faith may share in this privilege of vision, and the ‘exercise of the presence of God’ may become something assiduous and constant, like our consciousness of ourselves. [3]

So while the words of Hanani and those of St Benedict serve different purposes—the one emphasizing God’s solicitude on our behalf, the other His watchfulness over our actions—the starting point of God as Witness of human acts is the same.

Finally, however, I turned to that day’s reading in a florilegium I’m reading through for the year: Day by Day with the Early Church Fathers. Each day pairs a Scriptural verse with a short passage from one of the Fathers, and the verse for that day was precisely II Chronicles 16:9! While the accompanying patristic passage, from Tertullian (not actually a ‘Father’ in the Orthodox sense, I know), does not explicitly refer to or comment on it, his words could be seen as an application of the second part of the verse to a specific kind of situation—that of persecution. Thus, he writes, ‘If suffering is completely in God’s hands, don’t we just leave it up to His will?...Why, when witnessing, don’t you be consistent, trust God, and say, “I will do my part. I won’t run away. God, if He chooses, will be my Protector”?’ [4] Placing Tertullian’s words in proximity to those of Hanani makes the latter relevant to Christians in the same way that King David’s Psalms often are. Furthermore, both Hanani and Tertullian find a complimentary development of the idea of God’s watchfulness in St Benedict and his commentator, Dom Paul Delatte.

[1] The Rule of Saint Benedict in English and Latin, tr. & ed. Abbot Justin McCann, OSB (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, N.D.), p. 29.

[2] Dom Paul Delatte, OSB, A Commentary on the Holy Rule of St Benedict, tr. & ed. Dom Justin McCann, OSB (Latrobe, PA: The Archabbey Press, 1959),p. 75. Dom Paul points out, ‘He gives it in the Prologue, in the first and last degrees of humility, in the chapter “Of the discipline of saying the Divine Office”’ (ibid., p. 75).

[3] Ibid., p. 75.

[4] Christopher D. Hudson, J. Alan Sharrer, & Lindsay Vanker, comp. & ed., Day by Day with the Early Church Fathers (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000), p. 129.

'The Light that Makes Us Like God'—RB Prol 9

An expression in the Prologue of St Benedict’s Rule struck me as interesting today. I had looked for my usual reading copy—Abbot Justin McCann’s bilingual edition—but not finding it and being in a hurry this morning, I brought along my little pocket-sized edition of Leonard Doyle’s translation. There I read a translation of RB Prologue 9 that I don’t believe I’d seen before: 

Let us open our eyes to the deifying light, let us hear with attentive ears the warning which the divine voice cries daily to us... [1] 

I had never before noticed the use of the word ‘deifying’ in any translation of this passage that I recalled, and of course, as an Orthodox Christian I immediately took notice. At school I found McCann’s edition, and looked up the passage in question. In the Latin, I saw that the passage read: 

Et apertis oculis nostris ad deificum lumen, attonitis auribus audiamus divina cotidie clamans quid nos admonet vox... [2] 

It certainly seemed to me, a rank amateur I admit, that deificum warranted the translation as ‘deifying’. But McCann had rendered the same words: 

Let us open our eyes to the divine light, and let us hear with attentive ears the warning that the divine voice crieth daily to us... [3] 

Furthermore, McCann had already defended his translation in an endnote on the passage in question. Of the words deificum and attonitis, he wrote: 

It is characteristic of Late Latin that strong words have less than their full value. Thus these words are equivalennt respectively to divinus and attentus, and we must resist the temptation to translate ‘divinizing’ and ‘astonished’, or ‘deifying’ and ‘astounded’. We might find a parallel in our own language in the colloquial depreciation of such words as ‘awful’ and ‘terrible’. [4] 

But an Internet search for the phrase deificum lumen yielded an argument opposed to McCann’s. Abbot Patrick Barry, formerly of the famous Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire, UK, has written in the introduction to his own translation of the RB: 

St Benedict wrote ‘apertis oculis nostris ad deificum lumen.’ Most modern scholars play down the meaning of deificum lumen as though the dramatic word deificum means for St Benedict no more than ‘divine’, and so they translate the phrase as ‘with our eyes open to the divine light.’ Others give it a more literal meaning, ‘the light that makes us like God.’ I think the latter translation is right. It may shock us into perceiving the astonishing, exhilarating meaning of our baptism into Christ. 

The ‘shock value’, however, is not the only reason Barry advocates the more literal translation: 

If we remember how through lectio St Benedict’s mind was saturated with Scripture, it is evident that he was referring to a passage from 2 Corinthians: ‘All of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory; this is the working of the Lord who is in the Spirit.’ Then a little later Paul sums up in this way: ‘It is God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” that has shone into our hearts to enlighten them with the knowledge of God’s glory, the glory on the face of Christ.’ (II Corinthians 3:18 and 4:6) [5] 

Accordingly, Barry renders the passage in question, giving a citation of II Cor. 3:18 in a footnote to suggest the allusion: 

Let us open our eyes to the light that can change us into the likeness of God. Let our ears be alert to the stirring call of his voice crying to us every day... [6] 

Unfortunately, consulting the other commentaries I possess does little to help either way. The infallible Adalbert de Vogüé does not seem to mention it in his magisterial Doctrinal & Spiritual Commentary, [7] and in his Reflections on the Rule written for novices, he identifies the deificum lumen with Scripture in a very brief reference: ‘Scripture thus enters the stage both explicitly and massively. Its importance is paramount in the monk’s life. It is both “light from God” and “voice from heaven”—one and the same element through which the Lord touches all our spiritual senses.’ [8] While shedding no light on whether the light is ‘deifying’ or merely ‘divine’, Dom Paul Delatte makes the same identification in his commentary but then goes further: 

We must open our eyes; for it is thus that one begins to shake off sleep and recover consciousness. We must open them to ‘the deifying light’, which phrase may be understood of the Scriptures, ‘Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my paths’ (Ps. cxviii. 105), or of faith, or better of Our Lord Himself, the true Light who walks before us and guides us: ‘He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life’ (John viii. 12). [9] 

Note, however, the translation of the phrase. Surprisingly, the English translation of Dom Delatte's commentary was made by Abbot Justin McCann! While I do not know what French phrase Delatte himself used, however, ‘deifying’ here is the rendering of a much younger Justin McCann than the one who later (1951) translated the RB himself and gave us ‘divine light’ with such insistence. According to McCann’s preface to the Delatte commentary, the translation was made in 1920 at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. [10] At that time, it seems, McCann was largely content to rely for the translation of the RB itself on the authority of what he calls ‘the excellent Rule of St Benedict of Abbot Hunter-Blair’, [11] the latter being Dom Oswald Hunter-Blair of Fort Augustus Abbey, Scotland, who published his translation in 1886. Dom Hunter-Blair renders our passage: 

And our eyes being open to the deifying light, let us hear with wondering ears what the Divine Voice admonisheth us, daily crying out... [12] 

I for one find Barry’s defence of the more ‘shocking’ translation by means of the comparison with II Corinthians rather persuasive. Certainly, it strikes me as a valid move to note that the ‘divine light’ is spoken of by St Paul as transforming us ‘into the image that we reflect’, and the use of the stronger word deificum rather than merely divinum seems to me to suggest that St Benedict wanted to at least hint at this fuller understanding of God’s light. 

[1] Leonard J. Doyle, tr., St Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1948), pp. 1-2. 

[2] Abbot Justin McCann, OSB, tr. & ed., The Rule of Saint Benedict in English & Latin (Ft Collins, CO: Roman Catholic, n.d.), p. 6. 

[3] Ibid., p. 7. 

[4] Ibid., 165, n. 3. I do not know firsthand whether this generalisation about Late Latin is correct, but C.S. Lewis has suggested that it is a common occurrence in language generally. He calls it ‘inflation’, and considers it ‘one of the commonest’ species of ‘verbicide’—‘those who taught us to say awfully for “very”, tremendous for “great”, sadism for “cruelty”, and unthinkable for “undesirable” were verbicides’ (Studies in Words, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002], p. 7). Vizzini’s ‘inconceivable’ is of course a particularly famous example.

[5] Patrick Barry, OSB, Saint Benedict’s Rule, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2004), p. 15. 

Barry refers to St Benedict’s mind being ‘saturated’ in lectio divina. The latter is a subject I have addressed a limited way on one or two occasions, but I would like to say more at some point in the near future. In the meantime, I highly recommend the transcription of Armand Veilleux’s talk, ‘Lectio Divina as a school of prayer among the Fathers of the Desert’, here. 

[6] Ibid., p. 46. 

[7] See the chapter on the Prologue in Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB, The Rule of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal & Spiritual Commentary, tr. John Baptist Hasbrouck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1983), pp. 9-43. 

[8] Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB, Reading Saint Benedict: Reflections on the Rule, tr. Colette Friedlander, OCSO (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1994), p. 25. 

Sr Friedlander’s translation of this commentary uses the RB 1980 translation prepared by a committee of Benedictines, where the phrase in question is ‘the light that comes from God’—a choice seemingly reflected in her rendering of Pere Adalbert’s comments. See RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry, OSB, et al. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1982), p. 16. 

[9] Dom Paul Delatte, OSB, A Commentary on the Holy Rule of St Benedict, tr. & ed. Dom Justin McCann, OSB (Latrobe, PA: The Archabbey Press, 1959), p. 8. 

[10] Ibid., p. vii. 

[11] Ibid., p. vii. 

[12] See the complete text here.

RB 4, the 'Unexpected' Chapter

My friend, the infamous dissident blogger known as ‘the Ochlophobist’, posted the following comment on Facebook a few weeks ago: ‘I've pretty much decided that chapter 4 of the Rule of St Benedict [see some texts and translations here] is the best and most accessible summation of the Christian life to be found.’ There’s certainly something to this. As Bossuet has written, the Rule itself is ‘...an epitome of Christianity, a learned and mysterious abridgement of all the doctrines of the Gospel, all the institutions of the Fathers, and all the counsels of perfection’. [1] What is true of the Rule as a whole is certainly, in this instance, true of the part. Anyway, the comment made me want to post something on this chapter, preferably to coincide with the Orthodox feast of the great monastic legislator on Wednesday of this last week. The last was not to be, but better late than never, right?

Part of the interest of Chapter IV is that the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé (writing in the year of my birth, 1977) called it ‘without doubt the most unexpected part of the Rule’. Père Adalbert explains:

At first glance it astonishes the reader by its unusual make-up—a list of maxims—and by its lack of connection with the surrounding treatises. Upon further examination the reader is disappointed to find in this succession of little phrases little or no order. Moreover, if it is a program of good works to accomplish with an eye to eternal life, one would expect a different choice. Why is the important side by side with the secondary; ‘To love God and the neighbor’ with’Not to love laughter’; the solemn commandments of the decalogue with ‘Not to be a great eater’ or ‘Not to be sleepy’? A list of seventy-four maxims is either too many or too few. Why not an infinity of others, neither more nor less useful? Finally, this collection of maxims astonishes us by its indecisive coloring, its uncertain relationship with monastic reality. To whom and of what is the author speaking? To seculars who are married and exposed ‘to committing adultery’, or to monks who have made a vow ‘to obey their abbot’? [2]

Last December I finally acquired a lovely old hardcover copy of Dom Justin McCann’s [3] translation of Dom Paul Delatte’s Commentary on the Holy Rule of St Benedict (the commentary recommended to me during a school trip by one of the senior monks at the Benedictine abbey, Our Lady of Clear Creek, in eastern Oklahoma). [4] Although Dom Delatte confesses his uncertainty about what precisely instrumenta bonorum operum means, he doesn’t seem the least bit perplexed by the chapter itself. From his perspective the chapter seems to fit right into the overall structure of the Rule unproblematically:

We remember with what insistence our Holy Father declared in the Prologue that progress in the Christian life is effected by the practice of good works and the constant exercise of all the virtues; he now describes this well-regulated activity. This chapter gives a long list of the principal forms in which it is displayed; immediately after come separate chapters devoted to the fundamental dispositions of the soul, to obedience, recollection, and humility. [5]

For Dom Delatte, the chapter is merely St Benedict’s own foray into the genre of gnomic literature:

A word on the sources of this fourth chapter. Almost the entire series of instruments is to be found in the second part of the first Decretal Epistle of St Clement; but it has long been recognized that this second part is spurious and the work of Isidorus Mercator. There are certainly analogies between St Benedict’s chapter and the beginning of the Teaching of the Apostles (reproduced in the seventh book of the Apostolic Constitutions); both, for example, commence with the statement of the twofold precept of charity; Dom Butler, however, holds that it is impossible to give certain proof of borrowing. One may also compare the passage of the Holy Rule with the forty-nine sentences published by Cardinal Pitra under the title: Doctrina Hosii episcopi (+ AD 397); or with the Monita of Porcarius, Abbot of Lerins (at the end of the fifth century); or again with the Doctrina of a certain Bishop Severinus, who has not been identified yet so far as I know. We find analogous collections of sentences in the pagan philosophers themselves; see, for example, the Sentences attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece, the prose Sentences which precede the Disticha Catonis, and the Sentences of Sextus, a fragment of which St Benedict cites in Chapter VII. All civilizations have left us with specimens of this gnomic literature; the Books of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus belong to this class. We are naturally led to express our morality in mottoes, to embody it in practical axioms; it seems to us to make virtue much easier when we achieve a short, pity, and well-turned phrase, which in its very perfection has a gracious charm. The old monastic rules were generally composed in this short, sententious style. And it is from them, from Holy Scripture, and to some degree from all sources, that our Holy Father seems to have gleaned his seventy-two instruments of good works; it is not yet proved that he has only copied, with greater or lesser modifications, one or several previous collections. [6]

Of course, in Père Adalbert’s view, addressing the unexpectedness of Chapter IV in the context of the RB is not unconnected with this question of whether St Benedict has ‘copied, with greater or lesser modifications, one or several previous collections’. He takes it for granted—and I am not sufficiently acquainted with scholarship on the question to explain on what grounds—that St Benedict’s is later than, and largely a reworking of, the so-called ‘Rule of the Master’ (RM), a text of which Dom Delatte in 1913 makes no mention at all with regard to Chapter IV. Dom McCann, writing around 1950 or 1951, treats the RM briefly in the preface to his translation of the RB, giving his opinion that the latter is the prior work but leaving the question open. [7]

But while Père Adalbert too draws the connections to other parts of the RB that Dom Delatte does, it is first and foremost the relationship of the RB to the RM that enables Père Adalbert to resolve the problem of Chapter IV’s place in the former. Thus:

The literary genre of these maxims seems much less unusual [in context] when we have read in the Master such various sections as the mysterious parable of the spring, the commentary on the Lord’s prayer in the form of a sermon, the picturesque satire on gyrovagues, and the majestic presentation of the doctors. The reader who has become used to changes of scenery discovers this new stage setting without astonishment. [77.]

I would like to do at least one or two more posts on RB4, perhaps before Pascha, continuing to compare the commentaries of Père Adalbert and Dom Delatte and hopefully drawing other connections as well. But for now, I will let this suffice.

[1] I’m not yet sure of the original source of the quote, used famously in the old Catholic Encyclopedia. Sabine Baring Gould gives the following sentence as well: ‘Here prudence and simplicity, humility and courage, severity and gentleness, freedom and dependence, eminently appear’ [here].

[2] Adalbert de Vogüé, The Rule of St Benedict: A Doctrinal & Spiritual Commentary, tr. John Baptist Hasbrouck, OSB (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1983), p. 77.

[3] Himself a translator and editor of a fine bilingual edition of the Rule—Abbot Justin McCann, OSB, tr. & ed., The Rule of Saint Benedict in English & Latin, (Ft Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, n.d.).

[4] I can’t remember which monk it was, but he said that Dom Delatte’s commentary was the one that the Clear Creek monks themselves read, in part because as the former abbot of Solesmes, the author was part of the same Benedictine congregation and tradition that Clear Creek belongs to. Paperback reprints were available in the monastery giftshop, and I would have bought one immediately but for the cover price. As it turned out, it was a wise decision—I later found a used hardcover edition of 1959, highly reminiscent of an old Faber publication, for less than the new pb’s at the monastery.

Incidentally, and I know this will stretch the reader’s credulity to the limit, the monk did not know immediately who the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé was! Well, what can one expect of papists?

[5] Dom Paul Delatte, OSB, A Commentary on the Holy Rule of St Benedict, tr. & ed. Dom Justin McCann, OSB (Latrobe, PA: The Archabbey Press, 1959), p. 61.

[6] Ibid., pp. 61-2.

[7] McCann, pp. xix-xxi.

'A School for the Lord's Service': St Benedict's Rule & Classical Education

This was an article I wrote for our school newsletter, Remarkable Providences. I have corrected a passage which got seriously distorted in the print edition thanks to my own hasty perusal of the proofs, and also added notes and links.

In his profound critique of modern ethics, After Virtue, University of Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously wrote, ‘We are waiting, not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.’ [1] The reason for these words is that St Benedict, traditionally known as the ‘Father of Western monasticism’, was responsible for the formation of small communities committed to the cultivation and teaching of virtue even as the world around them lost all cohesion. They are communities to which we would do well to look for inspiration today.

Indeed, civilisation as a whole owes a very great debt to these monks. Benedictine monasticism, that is, monasteries which were organised and lived according to St Benedict’s Rule, were the ark in which all of the classical culture of the Latin world was preserved from the flood of barbarism and the seedbed in which germinated many of the great monuments of mediæval culture. In the words of Dom Jean Leclercq, ‘education’ in the sense of instruction in grammar, of reading and writing, ‘is not separated from spiritual effort’ in the Benedictine vision. [2] The mediæval Western theologian par excellence, Thomas Aquinas, was raised and educated in St Benedict's own monastery of Monte Cassino, [3] and in his Divine Comedy, the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, has an important exchange with St Benedict in the heavenly sphere of the contemplatives. [4] But to produce Aquinas and Dante, Latin-speaking Christendom had to begin from the ruins of Roman civilisation. John Henry Newman emphasises the gradual nature of the great Abbot’s achievement:

St Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and city. [5]

St Benedict’s Rule was a powerful agent in the civilisation of Europe, a project which, for the Rule’s author as well as its followers through the centuries, was explicitly educational. In his Prologue to the Rule, St Benedict quotes extensively from the Scriptures on the importance of holy living and concludes, ‘Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord's service [dominici schola servitii].’ [6] This reference to the monastery as a ‘school’ should not of course surprise us, however, since already in the opening words of the Rule, St Benedict has addressed his readers, ‘Listen, my son, to the lessons [praecepta] of the teacher [magistri].’ [7] Indeed, the Rule assumes throughout that the monks are discipuli, or ‘students’, and that the abbot is their magister, or ‘teacher’. In the words of the late Dom Adalbert de Vogüé, ‘the task of the monastic school is to educate us in the life of perfection according to the Gospel.’ [8]

But to this end, the monastic ‘school’ has need of a handbook, curriculum, and curriculum objectives, which are contained primarily in the Holy Scriptures, but also in the Rule itself and in the various writings of the Church Fathers which it recommends ‘for anyone hastening on to the perfection of the monastic life’. [9] In the Rule St Benedict lays out in painstaking detail how the ‘school’ is to be organised, even down to the exact daily schedule and arrangement of the services to be carried out and Psalms to be chanted in the church. The times for prayer, work, and individual study of Scripture, all summarised in the famous motto Ora et labora (‘Pray & work’), [9] are delineated. There are exact prescriptions of punishment for various offenses. The way in which meals are to be taken is described at length, with allowance for the different fasts of the Christian year.

This strict organisation of life as a ‘school for the Lord's service’ suggests obvious parallels to the efforts of those of us involved in classical Christian education today. In the opening lines of the Prologue, we find a beautiful distillation of what classical Christian education must assume at the outset. The late John Senior, one of the founders of the renowned [and sadly long defunct] Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, has taken each of the four imperative verbs of these opening sentences in the Latin text and shown clearly how relevant and challenging they are for both students and faculty.

The very first word, ausculta, means ‘listen’. Senior points out that this reminds us that education begins with quietly listening, for—

it is only to the just, gazing in rapt silence like a lover on his beloved at the art or thing, it is only to the patient, silent receptive listener, that the meaning of the poem, or the mystery of the number, star, chemical, plant—whatever subject the science sits at the feet of—is revealed... [10]

The next imperative is inclina—‘attend with' or ‘incline the ear of your heart’. Perhaps the most foreign concept to modern education, according to Senior:

This means students must love their teachers and teachers must be worthy of such love. Learning is a motion of the heart and not a mercenary contract in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ where the natural desires of youth to reach the stars are distracted from their aim by catalogues, orientation sessions and academic advising impelling them to marketable skills and government grants. [11]

The third imperative is excipe, that is, ‘accept’ or ‘welcome the admonition of a loving father freely’. In other words, the student must freely accept—

not just the precepts and the counsels but accept the correction and rebuke of the teacher who stands in loco parentis as the strong, gentle, pious father. Humility is a necessary condition of learning. The relationship of student to teacher is not one of equality, nor even of quantitative inequality as between those advanced and less advanced on the same plane; it is the relationship of disciple to master in which docility is an analogue of the love of man and God, from Whom all paternity in Heaven and on earth derives. [12]

Finally, the last of the four imperatives is efficaciter comple—‘faithfully put it into practice’. According to Senior, ‘The student must not only receive the knowledge, counsel and correction of the teacher, he must fulfill them . . .’ [13] To do this, the student must ultimately move beyond merely parroting or complying to truly understand what he is taught, ‘and by learning, become assimilated to the spiritual, intellectual and moral model of the teacher. . . . [Faculty and students] according to this rule should be better than the rest of the community, not only in intelligence but in manners, morals and taste as well.’ [14]

We at Providence Hall would do well to heed the teaching of St Benedict's Rule if we too wish to be ‘a school for the Lord's service’.

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 263. I have written a post on MacIntyre's reference to St Benedict called ‘Waiting for St Benedict: MacIntyre, Monasticism, & the New Dark Ages’.

[2] Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB, The Love of Learning & the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, tr. Catharine Misrahi (NY: Fordham, 1961), p. 24.

[3] This was first called to my attention by James Taylor in Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998), pp. 39-40: ‘It was, then, into a society, a culture, built on centuries of slow Benedictine influence so eloquently described by Newman [see above], that Aquinas was born in the thirteenth century. . . . Certainly to be considered is the fact that Thomas was placed with the Benedictines of Monte Cassino at an early age.’ But I later discovered that Taylor's teacher, John Senior, emphasises the point much more strongly: ‘St Benedict, Patron of Europe, founded Monte Cassino in 529. St Thomas as a little boy of five entered there to go to school around 1229—seven hundred years in the womb of Benedictine work and prayer and then you have St Thomas! The seedbed of theology is the Benedictine life, without which no one has the prerequisites’ (The Restoration of Christian Culture [Norfolk, VA: IHS, 2008], p. 87).

[4] Paradiso XXII. Dante’s choice of words in l. 98 to describe St Benedict rejoining the other contemplatives—Cosi mi disse, e indi si raccolse / al suo collegio, e ’l collegio si strinse (‘Thus he concluded and the voice was stilled. / Collegiate to collegium withdrew’)—seems to highlight in a fortuitous way the connection between St Benedict and education. The Italian I’ve taken from Dante, Paradise, tr. & ed. Anthony Esolen, illust. Gustave Dore (NY: Modern Library, 2007), p. 240; the translation is Dorothy L. Sayers & Barbara Reynolds, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 252.

[5] John Henry Newman, ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, {410}.

[6] Here I quote RB1980, but throughout the article I have in some cases given my own translation to emphasise the point I want to make, or I have offered alternatives from various translators. For the Latin text, I have used Abbot Justin McCann, OSB, tr. & ed., The Rule of Saint Benedict in English & Latin (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, n.d.).

[7] My own translation.

[8] Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB, Reading St Benedict: Reflections on the Rule, tr. Colette Friedlander, OCSO (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1994), p. 34.

[9] I have written on this motto in the post, ‘Ora et Labora?’

[10] Senior, p. 93.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 94.

[13] Ibid., p. 95.

[14] Ibid.

'The Largest & Most Lightsome Jewel'—St Benedict of Nursia

Today, 11 July on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Benedict of Nursia (480-547), Father of Western Monasticism. (See the opening paragraph of this post for an explanation of the date.) In the words of Frederick Artz, ‘Benedict is by no means the founder of monasticism, but he is its great legislator and is easily the most important figure in the monasticism of the West.’ [1] Alban Butler writes:

Being chosen by God, like another Moses, to conduct faithful souls into the true promised land, the kingdom of heaven, he was enriched with eminent supernatural gifts, even those of miracles and prophecy. He seemed like another Eliseus, endued by God with an extraordinary power, commanding all nature, and, like the ancient prophets, foreseeing future events. [2]

Finally, according to Basil Hume, OSB, ‘St Benedict, like all great saints of every age and culture, can still speak to us today, for his life and teaching are an illustration and an expression of the principles and doctrines of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’ [3]

I have posted extensively on St Benedict before (see the ‘St Benedict’ label at the bottom of this post or on the sidebar), including a two-part post based on St Gregory the Great’s famous Vita last year (here and here). Consequently, some of my best material has already been used. But I will go ahead and post one or two things here owing to the importance of this feastday for me and my parish. First, here is the account of St Benedict’s life in the Prologue:

Born in Nursia in Italy in 480, of rich and eminent parents, he did not persevere long with his schooling, for he realised himself that he could, through book-learning, lose ‘the great understanding of my soul’. And he left school ‘an untaught sage and an understanding ignoramus’. He fled to a monastery where a monk, Romanus, gave him the habit, after which he withdrew to a craggy mountain, where he lived for more than three years in a cave in great struggles with his soul. Romanus brought him bread and dropped it over the wall of the crag on a rope to the mouth of the cave. When he became known in the neighbourhood, he, to flee the praise of men, moved away from that cave. He was very brutal with himself. Once, when an impure rage of fleshly lust fell on him, he stripped bare and rolled among nettles and thorns until he had driven out of himself every thought of a woman. God endowed him with many spiritual gifts: insight, healing and the driving out of evil spirits, the raising of the dead and the ability to appear to others from a distance in a dream or vision. He once discerned that he had been given a glass of poisoned wine. He made the sign of the Cross over the glass and it broke into pieces. He founded twelve monasteries, each having twelve monks at first. He later compiled the specifically ‘Benedictine’ rule, which is today followed in the Roman Church. On the sixth day before his death he commanded that his grave, already prepared as the saint had foreseen that his end was near, should be opened. He gathered all the monks together, gave them counsel and gave his soul to the Lord whom he had faithfully served in poverty and purity. His sister, Scholastica, lived in a women’s monastery, where, guided by her brother and herself practising great asceticism, she came to great spiritual perfection. When St Benedict set his soul free, two monks, one on the road and one at prayer in a distant cell, had at the same moment the same vision: a path from earth to heaven, curtained with precious cloth and illuminated at the sides by ranks of people. At the top of that path stood a man of indescribable beauty and light, who told them that the
path was prepared for Benedict, the beloved of God. After that vision, the two brethren discovered that their beloved abbot had gone from this world. He died peacefully in about 550 and went to the eternal Kingdom of Christ the King. [4]

Of course, much of St Benedict’s enduring importance is tied up with the Rule he bequeathed to the Church. In the words of St Gregory the Great, Dialogues II.36, ‘However I would not wish it to be unknown to you that the man of God who became famous in the world by so many miracles was also very well-known for his words of doctrine. For he wrote a rule for monks, remarkable for its discretion [5] and elegant in its language.’ [6] Charles Williams has aptly summarised the wisdom of St Benedict’s Rule in his unique ecclesiastical history, The Descent of the Dove:

He modified the extreme austerities [of Eastern monasticism]; he reconciled even the monk to a life in time; he discouraged fantasies; he taught peace. He pledged his brethren to remain in the abbey of their situations, and he pledged the half-saveage emulation of individual eccentricity to the decent obedience of holy order. He too taught the rule of co-inherence after a particular manner; the brethren were to know none but Christ in each other and in all. The Rule spread; it met and overcame the harsher Rule of Columban, and the most dedicated of lives rooted themselves in localities and quiet. It was the frontier of Christendom which held most stable through all the terrible centuries. [7]

Similarly, Christopher Dawson writes, ‘Thus, in an age of insecurity and disorder and barbarism, the Benedictine Rule embodied an ideal of spiritual order and disciplined moral activity which made the monastery an oasis of peace in the world of war.’ [8] It is for this reason that philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has famously observed of our own day, ‘We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict’ (see my thoughts on this comment in this post). [9]

Finally, it is interesting to note that St Benedict has had the good fortune to appear in one of the greatest works of imaginative literature of all time—Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante describes him as ‘the largest and most lightsome jewel’ of the sphere of Saturn, and the Saint begins addressing the Pilgrim as follows:

. . . ‘If you could see the flame
of charity we burn in, as I do,
you’d have expressed your thoughts and felt no shame.

I would not have your pilgrimage be slow:
that waiting may not hold you from the goal,
I’ll reply to the thought you’ve guarded so.

That mountain with Cassino on its spur
was thronged with worshipers in pagan time,
people disposed to evil and deceived

By cheating gods. I am he, first to climb
that peak to bring His name who brought the earth
the truth that raises us to the sublime;

With radiant grace so far above my worth,
I drew each of the villages around
from the impious cult that had seduced

The whole world. All these other flames were bound
in contemplation, kindled by the heat
engendering the flowers and holy fruit:

Romualdus and Macarius are here,
and my good brothers who, within the close,
held their hearts steadfast where they held their feet.’ [10]

[1] Frederick B. Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages: An Historical Survey, AD 200-1500, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1980), p. 185.

[2] Qtd. in Henry Wadsworth Longellow, tr., The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, n.d.), p. 302, n. 40.

[3] Cardinal Basil Hume, OSB, In Praise of Benedict: 480-1980 AD (Petersham, MA: St Bede’s, 1981), p. 78. Hume adds, ‘There are, as we know, ancient spiritual values of fundamental importance which are always new and always contemporary in any age.’

[4] St Nicholas (Velimirović), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, tr. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1985), pp. 283-4.

[5] It is interesting to note that concerning the word discretio, rendered here by its English derivative, the infallible Adalbert de Vogüé has suggested that ‘discernment’ might be a better translation. Based on St Gregory’s reference to RB 58 in his Commentary on Kings, de Vogüé believes that this famous recommendation of the Rule in Dialogues II ‘is less concerned with the moderation of the Rule—as it is usually understood—than with its rigor’ (St Gregory the Great, The Life of St Benedict, tr. Hilary Costello & Eoin de Bhaldraithe, commentary by Adalbert de Vogüé (Petersham, MA: St Bede’s, 1993), p. 177).

[6] St Gregory, p. 174.

[7] Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (Vancouver: Regent College, 2002), p. 91.

[8] Christopher Dawson, Religion & the Rise of Western Culture (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh, 1948-1949) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), p. 48.

[9] Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 263.

[10] Dante Alighieri, Paradise, tr. & ed. Anthony Esolen, illust. Gustave Doré (NY: Modern Library, 2007), p. 237.

'La Regola Mia Rimasa'—St Benedict of Nursia

Today, 14 March on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of our Holy Father Benedict of Nursia (480-547), Abbot of Monte Cassino and Father of Western Monasticism. I will not, however, be doing one of my usual hagiographical posts today for two reasons. First, my parish—St Benedict (ROCOR)—celebrates its feastday on the feast of the translation of St Benedict’s relics rather than today, so that is the day I prefer to do my St Benedict post. Second, it’s a Saturday, and people don’t seem to pay as much attention to my blog on Saturdays. For these reasons, I’m just going to post an interesting note. This is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s note to line 74 of Canto XXII of Dante’s Paradiso, where St Benedict says—

. . . e la regola mia
rimasa è per danno de le carte. [1]

. . . now my Rule
Below remaineth for mere waste of paper. [2]

I have blogged before on the appearance of St Benedict in this Canto, but acquired Longfellow’s translation only since that time. I will post more of Longfellow’s notes on St Benedict this summer for the parish feastday, but for now, this will have to suffice.

74. So neglected, that is is mere waste of paper to transcribe it. In commenting upon this line, Benvenuto [Rambaldi da Imola] gives an interesting description of Boccaccio’s visit to the library of Monte Cassino, which he had from his own lips. ‘To the clearer understanding of this passage,’ he says, ‘I will repeat what my venerable preceptor, Boccaccio of Certaldo, pleasantly narrated to me. He said, that when he was in Apulia, being attracted by the fame of the place, he went to the noble monastery of Monte Cassino, of which we are speaking. And being eager to see the library, which he had heard was very noble, he humbly—gentle creature that he was!—besought a monk to do him the favour to open it. Pointing to a lofty staircase, he answered stiffly, ‘Go up; it is open.’ Joyfully ascending, he found the place of so great a treasure without door or fastening; and having entered, he saw the grass growing upon the windows, and all the books and shelves covered with dust. And, wondering, he began to open and turn over, now this book and now that, and found there many and various volumes of ancient and rare works. From some of them whole sheets had been torn out, in others the margins of the leaves were clipped, and thus they were greatly defaced. At length, full of pity that the labours and studies of so many illustrious minds should have fallen into the hands of such profligate men, grieving and weeping he withdrew. And coming into the cloister, he asked a monk whom he met, why those most precious books were so vilely mutilated. He replied, that some of the monks, wishing to gain a few ducats, cut out a handful of leaves, and made psalters which they sold to boys; and likewise of the margins they made breviaries which they sold to women. Now, therefore, O scholar, rack thy brains in the making of books!’ [3]

If you must have more on St Benedict, see this post and this one.


[1] The Italian text is taken from the Modern Library edition—Dante Alighieri, Paradise, tr. & ed. Anthony Esolen, illust. Gustave Doré (NY: Modern Library, 2007), p. 238.

[2] Longfellow’s translation—The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, n.d.), p. 95.

[3] Ibid., p. 305-6, n. 74.

The Study of Death

Among the instrumenta bonorum operum, or ‘tools of good works’, listed in Chapter 4 of St Benedict’s Rule, we read, Mortem cotidie ante oculos suspectam habere. [1] The RB 1980 renders this as ‘Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die’, [2] while Justin McCann, OSB, is a bit more literal: ‘To keep death daily before one’s eyes.’ [3]

It is of course a common theme in ascetic literature. Today, I read in St Ephraim the Syrian, ‘Blessed is he who ceaselessly remembers the day of his departure and strives to be ready and fearless in that hour.’ [4] Just yesterday, in the Ladder, I reread Step 6, the chapter on ‘remembrance of death’. [5] There, St John Climacus writes:

4. As of all foods, bread is the most essential, so the thought of death is the most necessary of all works. The remembrance of death amongst those in the midst of society gives birth to distress and meditation, and even more, to despondency. But amongst those who are free from noise, it produces the putting aside of cares and constant prayer and guarding of the mind. But these same virtues both produce the remembrance of death, and are also produced by it. [6]

Although St John uses the phrase μνήμη θανάτου, ‘remembrance of death’, throughout this chapter, when he is alluding to the teachings of Plato at the end, he uses the philosopher’s phrase, μελέτη θανάτου, ‘study of’ or ‘meditation on death’:

It is impossible, someone says, impossible to spend the present day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our whole life. And it is truly astonishing how even the Greeks [that is, the pagans] have said something of the sort, since they define philosophy as meditation on death [μελέτη θανάτου]. [7]

St John Damascene too uses the latter phrase in the third definition of philosophy in the ‘Philosophical Chapters’ of his Treasury of Knowledge:

Philosophy, again, is a study of death [μελέτη θανάτου], whether this be voluntary or natural. For life is of two kinds, there being the natural life by which we live and the voluntary one by which we cling lovingly to this present life. Death, also, is of two kinds: the one being natural, which is the separation of soul from body, whereas the other is the voluntary one by which we disdain this present life and aspire to that which is to come. [8]

Several years ago I chose the second of these phrases as the more poetic, when I wrote some lines in the midst of intense grief for the sudden death of good friend whom I was to have sponsored in Baptism:

The study of death has become a cool garden.
I visit it in the shade of dusk,
I sit there under the stars before sleep,
I rise before dawn and am drawn to that still place,
And in the repose of late morning and afternoon
I watch the sunlight on the flowers and pray.

I’m not at all sure that I was speaking then of the conscience of one’s own mortality that the Fathers teach, but certainly, the prolonged experience of grief afforded me a kind of objectivity. After a week or so, it was as though I was able cooly to reflect on what I was going through, and I found a peace there for which a garden seemed the fittest metaphor.

For more on the memento mori theme, including a translation of the inscription on the fresco above, see this very early post (originally written for the presumably less educated audience of my old MySpace blog), as well as this one on a poem by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), from Helen Gardner’s charming anthology of The Metaphysical Poets for the Penguins Classics. John Sanidopoulos has also blogged on the subject (here), including a lengthy passage or two from the Phaedo.

I close with the opening lines of the famous sequence formerly attributed to Notker of St Gall, with Cranmer’s translation from the Book of Common Prayer:

Media vita in morte sumus
Quem quærimus adjutorem nisi te, Domine?
Qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris.

In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

[1] St Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of St Benedict in Latin & English, tr. Abbot Justin McCann, OSB (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic, n.d.), p. 28.

[2] St Benedict, RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry, OSB, et al. (Collegeville, MN: 1982), p. 28.

[3] St Benedict, McCann, p. 29.

[4] St Ephraim the Syrian, A Spiritual Psalter, or Reflections on God, ed. St Theophan the Recluse, tr. Antonina Janda (Libertyville, TN: SJOKP, 1997), p. 164.

[5] I have been rereading the Ladder for Lent in accordance with this useful schedule, posted here by Esteban Vázquez (who is apparently too attractive for his own good).

[6] St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, rev. ed., tr. Archim. Lazarus (Moore) (Boston: HTM, 1991), p. 66.

[7] St John, p. 69; cf. the Greek in Κλῖμαξ, 9th ed., ed. & tr. Archim. Ignatios (Oropos, Greece: Holy Monastery of the Paraclete, 2002), p. 139.

[8] St John Damascene, Writings, tr. Frederick H. Chase, Jr., Vol. 37 in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington, DC: Catholic U of America, 1999), p. 11; cf. the Greek in Άπαντα τα Έργα, ed. Ignatios Sakales, Vol. 109 in Greek Fathers of the Church (Thessaloniki: ‘Gregory Palamas’ Patristic Publications, 1991), p. 32.