Preview: Saint J.H. Newman on St. Benedict of Nursia

On Monday, July 11, Matt Swaim, or Anna Mitchell (back from maternity leave it was announced before the long July 4/Independence shutdown at the Son Rise Morning Show), and I will talk about what Saint John Henry Newman has to say about Saint Benedict of Nursia. July 11 is Saint Benedict's feast day.

As you know by now, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern time. Please listen live on EWTN Radio.

While Newman establishing the Catholic University of Ireland, he wrote a series of articles about the history of education from the Academies of Ancient Greece, to Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, published as the Rise and Progress of Universities. He also wrote two "Benedictine Essays", which were published in the Atlantis of January, 1859. The University of Notre Dame has a single volume edition of these works, edited and introduced by Mary Katherine Tilman.

In the first of the "Benedictine Essays", "The Mission of St. Benedict", Newman examines the founder of Monasticism in the West in the context of education in general:

Education follows the same law: it has its history in Christianity, and its doctors or masters in that history. It has had three periods:—the ancient, the medieval, and the modern; and there are three Religious Orders in those periods respectively, which succeed, one the other, on its public stage, and represent the teaching {366} given by the Catholic Church during the time of their ascendancy. The first period is that long series of centuries, during which society was breaking or had broken up, and then slowly attempted its own re-construction; the second may be called the period of re-construction; and the third dates from the Reformation, when that peculiar movement of mind commenced, the issue of which is still to come. Now, St. Benedict has had the training of the ancient intellect, St. Dominic of the medieval; and St. Ignatius of the modern. And in saying this, I am in no degree disrespectful to the Augustinians, Carmelites, Franciscans, and other great religious families, which might be named, or to the holy Patriarchs who founded them; for I am not reviewing the whole history of Christianity, but selecting a particular aspect of it.

Perhaps as much as this will be granted to me without great hesitation. Next, I proceed to contrast these three great masters of Christian teaching with each other. To St. Benedict, then, who may fairly be taken to represent the various families of monks before his time and those which sprang from him (for they are all pretty much of one school), to this great Saint let me assign, for his discriminating badge, the element of Poetry; to St. Dominic, the Scientific element; and to St. Ignatius, the Practical.

These characteristics, which belong respectively to the schools of the three great Teachers, grow out of the circumstances under which they respectively entered upon their work. Benedict, entrusted with his mission almost as a boy, infused into it the romance and simplicity of boyhood. Dominic, a man of forty-five, a graduate in theology, a priest and a Canon, brought with him into religion that maturity and completeness of learning which {367} he had acquired in the schools. Ignatius, a man of the world before his conversion, transmitted as a legacy to his disciples that knowledge of mankind which cannot be learned in cloisters. And thus the three several Orders were (so to say), the births of Poetry, of Science, and Practical Sense.

Poetry and St. Benedict may not be the combination you think of right away! Newman argues that the Benedictine goal was to leave the secular world behind:

The troubled, jaded, weary heart, the stricken, laden conscience, sought a life free from corruption in its daily work, free from distraction in its daily worship; and it sought employments as contrary as possible to the world's employments,—employments, the end of which would be in themselves, in which each day, each hour, would have its own completeness;—no elaborate undertakings, no difficult aims, no anxious ventures, no uncertainties to make the heart beat, or the temples throb, no painful combination of efforts, no extended plan of operations, no multiplicity of details, no deep calculations, no sustained machinations, no suspense, no vicissitudes, no moments of crisis or catastrophe;—nor again any subtle investigations, nor perplexities of proof, nor conflicts of rival intellects, to agitate, harass, depress, stimulate, weary, or intoxicate the soul.

Although he does admit that the monks read, and studied, and developed agricultural and other technological innovations, Newman believes that they were poets because they were not scientists. They did not seek to investigate, analyze, and systematize. Instead, they sought mystery and wonder in their prayer and work. Their poetry

implies that we understand [our surroundings] to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one. Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love. The vague, the uncertain, the irregular, the sudden, are among its attributes or sources. Hence it is that a child's mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide. . . .

Newman believes St. Benedict and his monks wanted "the sweet soothing presence of earth, sky, and sea, the hospitable cave, the bright running stream" and most of all, quiet, so that one day was "just like another except that it was one step nearer than the day just gone to that great Day, which would swallow up all days, the day of everlasting rest."

Isn't that why we want to go to monasteries on retreat? To be silent, still, and simple?

Newman does not neglect the great work of the monks as chroniclers, transcribers of ancient texts, etc. And he certainly pays tribute to St. Benedict as the great founder of many monastic orders, as The Rule has been adapted to the Cluniac, Cistercian, Camadolese, and other orders:

St. Benedict, then, like the great Hebrew Patriarch, was the "Father of many nations." He has been styled "the Patriarch of the West," a title which there are many reasons for ascribing to him. Not only was he the first to establish a perpetual Order of Regulars in {371} Western Christendom; not only, as coming first, has he had an ampler course of centuries for the multiplication of his children; but his Rule, as that of St. Basil in the East, is the normal rule of the first age of the Church, and was in time generally received even in communities which in no sense owed their origin to him. Moreover, out of his Order rose, in process of time, various new monastic families, which have established themselves as independent institutions, and are able in their turn to boast of the number of their houses, and the sanctity and historical celebrity of their members. He is the representative of Latin monachism [monasticism] for the long extent of six centuries, while monachism was one; and even when at length varieties arose, and distinct titles were given to them, the change grew out of him;—not the act of strangers who were his rivals, but of his own children, who did but make a new beginning in all devotion and loyalty to him.

But the suggestion that St. Benedict brought "romance and simplicity" and poetry to Western civilization, education, and culture is something to think about for awhile--perhaps on retreat at a monastery.

Saint Benedict of Nursia, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

By the way, Newman intended to write articles on the Dominican contributions to education, but the periodical he was writing for, The Atlantis, disappeared . . .