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The Benedictine Intellectual Tradition:
an Overview

by Rev. Joel Rippinger, OSB, Marmion Abbey

(Continued from Part I)

Jean Mabillon

Gertrude More died prematurely at Cambrai in 1632. In that same year in the French province of Champagne, Jean Mabillon was born into a family of peasant stock. Mabillon was drawn to the monastery of Saint-Remi near Rheims, which he entered in 1653. The monastery had been established only 25 years earlier as a house of the Maurist Congregation. Under the guidance of Gregory Tarisse, this new congregation took on the intellectual enterprise of finding historical resources that could be employed in writing a history of the Benedictine Order, as well as of its principal monasteries and saints.

Mabillon entered the congregation mindful of this work. After spending time at the abbeys of Nogent and Corbie, he was sent in 1660 to the abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. There he was placed in charge of the abbey museum and he began on his own the work of editing manuscripts of the writings of St. Bernard.¹¹  While doing this, he came under the eye of the esteemed Maurist scholar Luc d'Achery, who was then residing at Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris.

When Mabillon arrived at the abbey in 1664, the aging d'Achery assigned him the arduous work of finishing the six volumes of the Benedictine Acta Sanctorum. This was in addition to the labor of finishing his work on St. Bernard and what many intellectual historians consider to be Mabillon's masterpiece, the most significant modern work on historical method, the De Re Diplomatica. It was a work that made the name of Mabillon famous throughout Europe.¹² His contributions to a historical method of scientific criticism and his legacy to scholarship in liturgical studies and the authenticity of written sources became legendary as a result. This work alone would have consigned the Maurist monk to the first rank of Benedictine scholars. But it was another subject matter and a different work that draw our attention to Mabillon today with a more pressing relevance.

A controversy that had become heated in the French monastic world of the late seventeenth century was that of the suitability of serious study as work for monks. On the one side of this dispute stood the outsized personality of the Trappist abbot Armand de Rancé. In the 1680s Rancé had published two works that, in the penetratingly descriptive words of monastic historian David Knowles, "constituted a polemic against any kind of intellectual occupation for the monk."¹³

In response Mabillon wrote his Traité des Etudes Monastiques, a meticulous and reasoned justification of the revered place that the love of learning had always had in monastic life.¹⁴ Its temperate and prudent tone was all that Rancé's fulminations were not and it met with wide approval in monastic circles throughout Europe. Yet its appearance provoked Rancé to a polemical retort.

The ensuing debate took on dimensions of a contemporary clash whose intellectual fault lines could be comparable to the tabloid press confronting the stylistic equanimity and intellectual high ground of either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Ultimately it was the urging of a mutual female friend, a dowager duchess, and the passage of Mabillon close by the abbey of La Trappe that allowed for the visit of the two monastic controversialists.

In consequence, the "tempestuous abbot" (as Rancé was nicknamed) was won over by the courtesy, holiness and humble comportment of the visiting scholar. The transparent simplicity and dignity of Mabillon had trumped the impetuous fervor of his rival. Mabillon was to have still more disputes in his day, but by the time of his death on December 27, 1707, his patronal feast day, he had created an entirely new model of the monk as intellectual. As Knowles puts it ever so persuasively: "When he takes up a problem, great or small, he shakes it out and holds it up, and then applies to it tests of every kind from every angle. Whether it is Augustine's teaching on grace, the meaning of a word in the Rule [of Benedict], the Eucharistic practice of the early Church, the order of succession of bishops and abbots, or the date of a charter, Mabillon brings to bear upon it the same acuteness of observation, the same wealth of information, the same sanity of judgment, the same lucidity of exposition. When he has done with it, the matter is, in four cases out of five, settled for good."¹⁵ 

In the Maurist Congegation, Mabillon also served as an intellectual mentor of such notable scholars as Martene, Montfaucon and Ruinart. Less externally notable was the example of community life and personal observance that Mabillon maintained to the last. He was one who never believed that the regular monastic round need be pushed aside by the heavy demands of scholarship. The sad fact is that if more of his monastic generation had absorbed this lesson the ravages of the French Revolution and the implosion of monastic life at the end of the 18th century would have been attenuated considerably.

If Mabillon was the exemplar of a new type of intellectual on the monastic scene, it is worth viewing the landscape of the monastic reform that began in the nineteenth century to see if there are any emerging individuals and currents that can direct the observer to make judgments on the vitality of Benedictine intellectual life in our own era.

One characteristic that bears mentioning is a return to the sources. This can too easily be presented as nostalgia for a golden age of monasticism or an antiquarian retrieval of symbols selected for the purpose of confronting the rampant secularism and anti-religious skepticism of the age. But the reforms of Solesmes and Beuron in particular laid emphasis upon a newly vigorous attempt to explore the sources and history of monastic life. In selecting a figure to illustrate the vigor and depth of intellectual life that accompanied the nineteenth-century monastic revival I am ready to return once again to England and the person of Cuthbert Butler.

Cuthbert Butler

Butler's life and work invite choice, among other things, because it was so solidly Benedictine. He entered the school of Downside Abbey in 1869 and received in his six years there a firm grounding in the classics and liberal arts. After a year or so on his own, he decided to test a vocation to the monastic life and entered the common novitiate of the English Benedictine Congregation at Belmont Abbey. It was there he encountered some foundational and fateful works that sparked his own intellectual gifts.

The first of these was nothing less than the previously mentioned Sancta Sophia of Augustine Baker. It was Baker who also led him to take up the Desert Fathers and Cassian and eventually the arguments of Mabillon and Rancé on the suitability of monastic studies. When Butler returned to Downside from Belmont after four years in 1880, his own ideal of monastic life was already well shaped. It would confront the reality of the English Benedictine Congregation and the still small community of Downside at that time, a reality grounded in what was known as the English mission and the regular labor of parish supply work and a monastic life that placed more emphasis on the ascetical than on learning.

Butler's ideal, suffused with a fascination for early monasticism and monastic studies, was of a more contemplative existence and governance that respected the autonomy of the individual monastery. It was a far cry from the missionary-oriented, intellectually sterile and highly centralized life of the restored English Benedictine Congregation. Butler's initial monastic years at Downside were also intersected by a number of major intellectual influences. His prior was the future abbot and renowned Church historian, Aidan Gasquet, then in his thirties and already giving hints of a different direction for the Downside community.

During Lent of 1882 the community retreat at Downside was given by Laurence Shepherd, the chaplain at Stanbrook and a main proponent of monastic observance. It was Shepherd who introduced for Butler and Downside the legacy of Baker and Gertrude More, as well as his unique experience of visiting reformed Italian monasteries and, not least, Shepherd's friendship with Prosper Guèranger, founder of Solesmes.

A last influence was an apostolic visitator appointed by Pope Leo XIII in 1881. The man chosen for this job, Boniface Krug, then prior and later abbot of Monte Cassino Abbey, was a spearhead of reform and intellectual life of the revival, and one who thus listened to the proposals of many young monks like Butler with a sympathetic ear. Shortly afterward, the literary flagship, The Downside Review, was founded-and continues today. Butler was fortunate enough to have another prior, Edmund Ford, who recognized his intellectual gifts, and provided a place for them to prosper.

That place was Cambridge, where Butler was resident from 1896 to 1904. To be given the luxury of ample hours of study and writing, the facilities of a great library, and the opportunity to form a new network of friendships, says much about how the upper echelons of English intellectual life had changed by the end of the nineteenth century with respect to their reception of monastic scholars. Reading today a vintage Encyclopaedia Britannica with Butler's many articles on monastic and religious history is testimony to the contributions Butler's extended intellectual idyll were to bring.

However in the line of Gregory the Great, Anselm and Bernard, Butler was called out of his ivory tower to the role of superior of his community when he was elected abbot of Downside in November of 1906. He was to continue as abbot until 1923 and to serve as abbot president of the congregation for four of those years. Amazingly enough, Butler continued to write during his time as abbot. His landmark Benedictine Monachism,¹⁶ a compendium of his studies on Benedictine life, was published in 1919.

Three years later he published Western Mysticism,¹⁷ an effort to tie the Benedictine centuries with contemplative prayer. It introduced subject matter that shortly after its release was to be refined still more by Garrigou-Lagrange. A year later, Butler somewhat unexpectedly announced his retirement as abbot of Downside. More interesting for our point of view, he then set a precedent for a retired superior when, after his resignation as abbot in 1923, he began a retirement fully engaged in an even wider array of monastic activity. Using the monastery of Ealing near London as his base, he engaged in open-air preaching for the Catholic Evidence Guild, led the daily round of observance with the Ealing monks, heard confessions, celebrated Mass and preached in a variety of parishes, did spiritual direction, and maintained his ties with the sisters of Stanbrook. His writing in this period concentrated on historical works, The Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne and The History of the Vatican Council. These were his last substantive works before an illness brought death in 1933.

Perhaps the best way of calculating the impact of Butler is to compare the desultory intellectual landscape of Downside and the English Congregation in 1876 with the vibrant and expansive culture of the 1930s. Just as this life of the mind flourished with Butler's peers at Downside, Aidan Gasquet and Edmund Ford, it was to continue in subsequent generations with the names of John Chapman, David Knowles, Christopher Butler and Basil Hume.

(Continue)

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Notes