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The Benedictine Intellectual Tradition:
an Overview

by Rev. Joel Rippinger, OSB, Marmion Abbey

The life of the mind is not an easy thing to pin down. Whether we attach it to an intellectual movement or to people who have changed history by their ideas and writing, the very nature of the intellectual defies convenient description. Still, there is a case to be made for at least tracing the features of such a tradition within the millennium and a half sprawl of the Christian monastic movement. Firstly, because the sources of that movement are for the most part readily accessible. Secondly, we are the inheritors of that movement, not only as monastics of the third millennium, but as believers whose newly arrived global consciousness requires us all the more to be attentive to the lessons that are still to be learned from the intellectual tradition passed on by monastic forebears.

With Benedictines we are talking about not so much the life of the mind as the life of the soul. We are also talking about a monastic culture, one that is characterized by a biblical world of references and language, a poetic world of symbols and song, as well as an eschatological world to come.

Gregory the Great

I think we can speak of a first or seminal generation of monastic minds that arrived in the wake of St. Benedict. That is not to discount the richness of the monastic contributions of Basil and Evagrius, Augustine and Jerome. But one cannot help be struck by the tributaries that flowed directly from Benedict's sixth-century Italy. The headwaters of that flow are represented by Gregory the Great, who embraced not only the budding monastic culture of that time but the abundant resources of its texts. Irene Nowell will offer Gregory to us as a model of the biblical exegete. He certainly stands tall in the monastic tradition in that respect. But he also represents the aristocratic learned man, well traveled and enveloped in a world of power and diplomacy. Within this profile, Gregory saw secular learning only as an instrument of embracing his biblical world of miracles, spiritual heroism and muscular holiness. His Book of Pastoral Care combined the best elements of Steven Covey and Rich Warren and maybe that is why it was a best-seller among the working clergy for well over a millennia.

Gregory, whether as traveling diplomat, urban prefect or pope, seems the quintessential intellectual manqué, always looking back with nostalgia at his quiet monastic remove on Rome's Coelian Hill. A complement to this busy monastic model is a contemporary of Gregory, Cassiodorus at Vivarium, writing The Institutes of Divine and Human Learning.¹ He becomes in his rural Italian retreat, producing manuscripts that would find their way to some of the best libraries of Europe, a counter to Gregory in civilization's epicenter at Rome, trying to hold off barbarians and the chaos of a city without administration, even as he pens homilies and commentaries.

Bede

The natural segue from the Italy of Gregory and Cassiodorus is to the Anglo-Saxon world of Bede. Their world was one that shared a love of books and a love of miracles.² The filter of Bede in popular understanding is his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.³ No doubt I bare my own bias as amateur historian by selecting Bede as exemplifying a monastic intellectual tradition that always has given a pride of place to the historical record. But Bede's history was somehow different than all others up to his time. From a very restricted geographical circle of northern England, he was able to put himself in contact with resources far beyond his confined monastic sites of Wearmouth and Jarrow -- and this at a time when centralized archival sources, to say nothing of globalized electronic access, was in the far future.

In the words of a fellow Anglo-Saxon monk of the 20th century, "What comes forth [from Bede] beyond all technique is his capacity to absorb and retransmit the atmosphere and implications of all he gathered up. He was the first Englishman to understand the past . . . [He] brought intelligibility to it all."⁴ Yet Bede's intellectual horizon was far from limited to history. Most of his writings are commentaries upon Scripture. That should come as no surprise for someone who was weaned on the Word of God. Nor should we be surprised that the writings were in such demand in Bede's lifetime that many copies were made by Jarrow's monastic scribes. Neither should we be surprised that some of these are used today in the Church's Liturgy of the Hours for the Office of Readings.

Moreover the penetrating insights one finds in these commentaries remind one of how knowledge of God's Word led one to knowledge of the world in which that Word was received. In the case of Bede and his monks the intellectual activity that was part of that enterprise was always connected with the spread of the Word and the salvation of one's soul. Striking as Bede is in the landscape of Benedictine England in the early 8th century, he is not alone.

One noteworthy aspect of Bede's life that will recur down through the Benedictine centuries is that he is well connected. He was mentored from his youth by the monks of Jarrow who provided him with the best education of his day. But he also was able to be introduced to other monks and bishops who opened to him a wider world of thought and possibility, analogous to the task of a university in any age. Bede was networking before that term came into vogue.

Not unlike a veteran journalist with his sources, Bede had won the confidence of bishops and abbots who were able to supply him with information and resources. These were the ones who could go to Rome to collect documents for him even as he became the model of a stable monk and never strayed far from his own monastic precincts and Northumbrian home. Bede in turn mentored others and through them influenced subsequent generations of monastic scholars.

Alcuin of York

The person identified as the central figure in the Carolingian Renaissance of learning, Alcuin of York, claimed Bede as his model and mentor. Perhaps the last word on Bede should be reserved for a contemporary English scholar Benedicta Ward. "If the term 'Christian thinker' can be expanded to include those who exercise their minds with great intellectual power upon the many aspects of the work of God, then this was Bede's life's work and in every sphere about which he wrote he made a lasting contribution to Christian understanding."⁵ 

To go from Bede in the remote Anglo-Saxon preserve of the Dark Ages to the European Continent almost four centuries later is to enter into the monastic centuries and the zenith of a culture that created the famous phrase of Jean Leclercq, "The Love of Learning and the Desire for God." I would like to touch upon two well known but quite distinct figures in order to highlight some of the qualities that a Benedictine intellectual tradition was acquiring at this time.

Hildegard of Bingen

One mentions the name of Hildegard of Bingen today with some caution. A generation ago she was still comfortably ensconced in the backwaters of only the most remote academic circles. With the English translation and publication of her Scivias by the Paulist Press in 1990,⁶ the famous Hildegard CDs of the same decade and her being claimed as a patronal saint by everyone from New Age advocates of holistic medicine to environmental activists, Hildegard has acquired a niche in popular culture. That should not in any way, however, detract from the remarkable and well deserved place she has in the development of the Catholic Church's spiritual and intellectual tradition. In fact, Irene Nowell will consider Hildegard as an interpreter of Scripture.

In Hildegard we are given the profile of a woman emblematic of the best mind that the Benedictine life of twelfth century Europe could produce. Hildegard was afforded an education by Blessed Jutta of Spanheim that mirrored the finest quality of monastic mentoring of its day. She also was singular in being able to have the connection of a Benedictine monastery of men and a monk, Volmar, who helped to transmit her message in an age when there was little if any alternate avenue for a woman to write and propagate her ideas.

Scivias, the Liber Vitae Meritorum, Liber Divinorum Operum and Ordo Virtutum, constitute as rich and varied an assortment of intellectual creativity and depth as one is likely to find in the medieval period. Perhaps the most striking of Hildegard's intellectual gifts was the wide compass of her learning. She was accomplished as a musical composer, a medical expert (see her Causae et Curae and Physica) an artist and a poet. Finally, the well known narrative of Hildegard's conflict with Church authority accentuates one more hazard of those whose writings tested the prevailing wisdom of the time.

Anselm of Bec

Hildegard's representative position as prophetic voice and provocateur in the intellectual landscape is clarified by contrast when one looks at a contemporary, Anselm of Bec. St. Anselm was blessed with an educational pedigree that placed him as the pupil of the great Lanfranc. In Anselm we see today a renowned churchman and philosopher, an intellect who towered over the already formidable minds of the high middle ages. But what I find most distinctive about Anselm's intellectual equipage is that it had its origin and real growth within the monastic confines of Bec.

It was at Bec that he became a teacher and in this Normandy monastery that he was asked by his fellow monks to write. Apart from dissertations and letters of recommendation, when was the last time a member of your Benedictine community or school faculty was asked to write? His earliest writings on logic, his Monologion and Proslogion, all were written at the behest of his fellow monks. Even the famous Cur Deus Homo was written in the form of a dialogue to one of the Bec monks, visiting Anselm when he was in Canterbury.

Anselm also serves as a prime example of the monk-scholar who, once called to the episcopate, finds his intellectual talents eclipsed by demands of office. In many ways, Anselm was a benchmark of his times. He shows us monastic theology at its zenith, combined with a model of monastic observance and devotion (see his Prayers and Meditations) that are timeless.⁷

One could linger over this golden age of Benedictine writing and compare Gertrude of Helfta with Hildegard, measure the wide reading audience and resonant monastic vocabulary of Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx and the Cistercians. But I would prefer to head to a more troubled time in the Church, the Counter Reformation, to see a newer type of Benedictine writing.

Dame Gertrude More

As a first example of this time frame I would like to return to the England (and France) of the early 17th century and the daughter of Thomas More's great grandson, Helen More. My reason for selecting Helen (known in religion as Dame Gertrude) More is because she encapsulates the model of intellectual as exile and the process of being mentored by a series of monastic elders. No doubt today's home schoolers would be impressed at how Helen received an education not unlike her relative and only daughter of Thomas More, Margaret. She also had a Benedictine confessor and he recommended that Helen be sent to the Continent where there was a plan to found a house of Benedictine women, in reaction to the penal laws then in place against Catholics in England.

The elder in question was Father Augustine Baker, a trained lawyer and historian, who represented the best of the English Benedictine intellectual tradition. Augustine Baker's position as chaplain for the community of Benedictine women at the community of Cambrai allowed the intersection of Baker's mystical tradition and two remarkable spiritual souls, Gertrude More and Catherine Gascoigne. The latter was a spiritual convert of Baker's teachings before Gertrude and was Gertrude's immediate superior.

Augustine Baker

In a few short years (Gertrude died tragically at the age of 27) she was to undergo a spiritual and intellectual transformation. Baker himself wrote a life of Gertrude⁸ that was to provide the impetus for the robust spiritual and intellectual tradition that was carried to Stanbrook years later and served generations of English Benedictine women. There is a treatise of seventy short sections on contemplative life bearing the stamp of Baker's teaching that he wrote before her death.⁹ In the case of both More and Baker, their writings and ideas were put under a cloud.

When More died in 1632 and Baker in 1638 many believed their distinct brand of Benedictine contemplative spirit would die with them. But in the face of pressure from the English Benedictine Congregation of monks to have the sisters of Cambrai expunge all of the written manuscripts of Augustine Baker, Abbess Catherine stood firm. As a result, they were able to publish two years later, Sancta Sophia, Holy Wisdom,¹⁰ a compendium of Baker's teachings that soon became a spiritual classic.

(Continue)

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Notes