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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
The modern urge to dig up one’s roots to inspect their state of health has not escaped the Benedictines, and the spirited winds of the Vatican Council no less than of the September 1966 Rome Council of Abbots have given the urge an added impetus. The issues are broad and ontological, ranging from liturgical adaptation to the question ‘what is a monk?’. But no issue exercises theorists and practitioners alike so vehemently as that of the tension, as old as the ages of man, between Mary and Martha, between the contemplative and the active vocation. Both schools of thought agree that nihil opere Dei praeponatur (RB XLIII); but where the contemplative school believes that laborare et orare embraces the essential Benedictine life, the active school insists on the wider formula orare et laborare et praedicare. The latter believes as a corollory that something of orare which the contemplatives allot to lectio divina (essentially a preparation for prayer, if not an indirect mode of prayer itself), should be allotted in part to the necessary preparation praedicare – i.e. that prayer and apostolic work feed on one another and are mutually supporting in the monk’s proper pursuit of the unum necessarium.
Both schools are returning to the fontes of monasticism, to Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, the Regula Magistri, the Regula Benedicti, S. Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to test and substantiate their case for the form of monastic life they favour.
1 Not Laborare EST orare, a persistent error which Prof. Knowles has many times refuted in print, even making it the subject of a letter to The Tablet.
2 discussed in Sec. I of the book under review.
3 S. Basil’s teaching in his two Rules, five ‘ascetical sermons’ and ten epistles is prosleptic in support of later active monachism. He declared against even the theoretical superiority of the eremitical life over the ceonobitic, and the fully contemplative over the partially active. To bring the apostolic life within reach of his monks, he built in or near towns, and undertook work concerned with orphanages (for girls as for boys), hospices, hospitals and education.
4 notably with his article, ‘The Rule of S. Benedict and the Contemplative Life’ in Cistercian Studies I.54-73 (1966).
5 ‘From Pachomius to Ignatius: a Study in the Constitutional History of the Religious Orders’, The Sarum Lectures 1964-5 Clarendon, Oxford.
6 Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique LXI No. I ‘La Règle du Matre et l a Dialogues de S. Grégoire’ Louvain 1966.
7 R. W. Southern, review of ‘The Religious Orders in England II, the End of the Middle Ages’ Journul of Theological Studies NS. VIII.190-4 (1957).
8 Details are taken from a study of the CATALOGUS O.S.B., 1965; they do not pretend to a scholar’s level of accuracy.
9 Aristotle, Politics III.13.14 (1284a). ‘For men of preeminent virtue there is no law: they are themselves the law.’
S. Bernard, de Praecepto et Dispensatione, PL 182.867: vota mea nec augeat (praelatus) sine mea volunate nec minual sine certa necessitate. Sarum Lec 78n2 requires correction to PL 182.868a. It echoes a medieval tag, necessitas legem non habet, which Bernard has been toying with earlier in the passage.
10 Western medieval political theory, moulded by churchmen, was an amalgam of Platonism, Paulinism and Roman jurisprudence. Its central concept was plenitudo potestatis exercised as superioritas emanating from the altitudo or maiestas. The monarch was king by the grace of God with all its overtones of noli tangere christos meos, from which flowed the doctrine, ‘no writ runs against the king’ or rex a nemine judicetur. When this rema1 sacerdotalism was sapped and replaced by the contrary doctrine of the sovereignty of the citizen people (in the hands of Marsilio and his succesors), a concept developed alongside that of the sovereignty of the individual in his private conscicnce, then great blood-baths of egalité et fraternité loomed on the horizon. Where these changes were effected by evolution, it was richly educative to society; where by revolution, it was destructive. These twin concepts ofsovereignty and obedience evolved together, with the same attendant dangers from each. cf. Professor W. Ullmann, Inaugural Address, 8 March, 1966, ‘The Relevance of Medieval Ecclesiastical History.’
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