We Do Not Need a New, Very Different St. Benedict Part I: Europe is Benedictine

'The survival of the Christian West will require a revival of monasticism.' And a revival of classical education, a return to Christianity, and much more.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

The survival of the Christian West will require a revival of monasticism.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously ended his 1981 masterpiece After Virtue by noting that the civilisational crisis in which the West has found itself, which the book explored with hitherto unseen erudition, needed “a new—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” This observation inspired Rod Dreher, who went on to write the 2017 book The Benedict Option, a popular work that so captured the instincts of the awake minority about surviving in societies gripped by ideologies that seek to repudiate the whole Christian heritage, that his book became a bestseller and was translated into many languages. It’s a book that deservedly will continue to be discussed for decades to come, and many of the observations and suggestions I make below are at least motivated by some of its themes. I want to suggest, however, that what we likely need isn’t so new and different after all.

The appetite for a Benedictine-inspired response to the decay of late modernity is deeply attractive to me personally. My life has been bound up with the Benedictine charism since at least my mid-teens. The first Catholic church I ever visited was that of Buckfast Abbey, in the deep west country, near Dartmoor. I was 14 years old, and the experience changed me. It was the first time that I felt I was on ground that had not yet been desecrated. On that day, my father purchased for me an olive wood cross that one of the monks had hand-carved, which now hangs above my marital bed. I cannot count the number of times I have returned to Buckfast Abbey, which remains a kind of spiritual home to me, and where I delight in praying before a special relic that is kept there: the hairshirt of that exemplary Benedictine oblate, St. Thomas More.

Five years after I first visited Buckfast, I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church while residing on the south coast of India, after having spent months living in a Benedictine Ashram founded by Swami Dayananda, better known as Dom Bede Griffiths, the student of C.S. Lewis who became a heterodox but brilliant Christian guru in Tamil Nadu. Later still, I proposed to the woman who became my wife on the steps of a Benedictine monastery. Over the years, I have delivered lectures at abbeys such as Buckfast, Ampleforth, Norcia (a community especially close to Dreher’s heart), and Downside, the last of which generously paid me in jars of honey. I have visited the Baroque monasteries of Austria and the austere gothic monasteries of northern Europe. I have basked in the glory of the almost Greco temple-like monastery of Monte Cassino and I have vanished into the caves of St. Benedict’s original retreat in the cliff at Subiaco. When I lived in Rome, I would take every opportunity to visit the Benedictine-run St. Paul Outside the Walls, in what is one of the Eternal City’s grottiest districts; each time, it was as if I’d stumbled out of an alleyway in some American east-coast ‘ghetto’ and into Gregorian Rome. Visiting monasteries is my habit.

Whenever I step foot onto Benedictine grounds, I feel as if I have come home. The chanting of the psalms, the sacrifice offered on the altars, the way of life lived under a Rule that’s over a millennium and a half old—all the sacrality of these abbeys seems to have seeped into the stones themselves. Even after all the scandals, the collapse in vocations, and the ruination of the liturgy following that unhappy Vatican Council that baptised the fleeting fever of the 1960s—from which it will take many, many centuries for the Church to recover—the monasteries still appear as loci of divine grace, by which little parts of the diabolical principality we call the world has been captured and placed under Christ’s kingship.

Recently, my family and I made a Lenten pilgrimage to Mount St. Bernard in Leicestershire, the only Cistercian Abbey in England (before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, there were 45 Cistercian abbeys). Cistercians, being a reform of the Benedictines, follow the Holy Rule as faithfully as possible, and those at Mount St. Bernard bestow upon the faithful a great blessing by producing some of the very finest Trappist ale. Arriving at the Abbey, all the rush and hubbub of the modern world evaporates as one steps into a realm whose strict timetable of ‘prayer and labour’—as St. Benedict’s motto had it—appears to transcend time altogether. 

The modern European finds himself dropped into existence with no clear sense of what came before and what will come after. He has no conception of being a link in an historical chain. He is utterly adrift. Trying to speak to the average modern about European identity is almost impossible. But if you try to coax him out of his slumber, the point of information on which I think you should begin is that Europe is, in essence, a creation of the Benedictine Order. If you can get the modern mind to understand that, then you have got quite far. 

The Italian peninsula climbed out of the chaos of the Great Migration period in the early medieval age by the civilising effects of the Benedictine Order, which had been founded in Italy’s mountains. King Clovis of the Franks was converted to the faith by his wife, St. Clotilde, who was herself educated by Benedictines, for whom she and Clovis later built the Parisian abbey of St. Genevieve. After the eradication of the Romano-British Church—which had its holy centre at Glastonbury—by the incoming Northern European pagan tribes, England was re-evangelised by Benedictines under St. Augustine, the Benedictine Archbishop of Canterbury who was sent to these isles by the Benedictine pope, St. Gregory the Great. The Germanic tribes were then evangelised by the English Benedictine monk St. Boniface, a mission later taken up by another Benedictine, St. Ansgar, ‘the Apostle of the North.’ In the next generation, another Benedictine, Adalbert of Prague, evangelised the Hungarians and Prussians. The charism of the father of Western monasticism proceeded to spread across the whole of Europe, with the old lands of the Roman Empire soon pulsating with the sacred chanting of monks everywhere.

After seven centuries of Islamic occupation, Spain was liberated. The Christian social order that was established there developed under the Benedictines initially sent from the great Abbey of Cluny following the Reconquista, and those ‘black monks’ soon became the custodians of the Black Madonna at Montserrat. In the 10th century, after his baptism, Haakon the Good travelled from England to Scandinavia with the intention of converting the Norsemen to the True Faith, and for this purpose he took Benedictine monks with him.

For perhaps everything we associate with the great European tradition we must be grateful to the Benedictines. Gothic architecture is an invention of the Benedictines, beginning with Abbot Suger’s mesmerising initiative to incarnate his Neoplatonic ontology in stone and glass at St. Denis in Paris. Benedictine monks created the great libraries that preserved learning during the rampages of the Lombards, Goths, Saxons, Vandals, and all the other pagan barbarians who disdained humane learning quite as much as we do today. The universities grew out of the cathedral schools that were founded and led by Benedictines. And of course, the defence of Christendom—after two-thirds of the Christian world had been subdued by the forces of the crescent moon—was undertaken chiefly by the Knights Templar, the only equestrian order to adopt the Rule of St. Benedict, who ventured forth into the Holy Land against the Islamic foe.

There is almost nothing of our civilisation that cannot be in some way traced to the Benedictines. Indeed, the joys of my life—wine, beer, hunting, education (treasured in that order)—are all connected with the Benedictine charism. It was the Benedictine monks at the Abbey of St. Hubert in the Lowlands who bred the famous St. Hubert hound, an ancestor of probably all European scent hound breeds. Some, of course, may say that it is an exaggeration to claim that Europe was an invention of the Benedictine Order. Even if I were to concede that it’s an exaggeration—which I do not—it is certainly not an exaggeration to say this of Britain. The Benedictines gave to Britain in general, and certainly to England in particular, its unique spirituality. Many of our bishops and archbishops were Benedictines, from St. Dunstan who wrote the British coronation ceremony that captured the world’s attention recently with the anointing of King Charles III, to St. Anselm, the first scholastic. And as it happens, the English Congregation is the oldest branch of the Order of St. Benedict in the world. 

The traditional home of English Benedictine spirituality, and the ancient sanctuary of English Christianity, established by St. Joseph of Arimathea himself, is of course Glastonbury, where it is said that the abbey was one of the glories of all Christendom. Deep below those hallowed walls—now mere ruins—lay the unquiet grave of King Arthur, whose spectral presence continues to haunt the English as we await his second reign. The English have an especial attachment to their landscape, and they unknowingly listen out for the pounding canter thereon of Camelot’s knightly brotherhood. This attachment to the landscape may be the principal characteristic of Albion’s offspring, and it is likely inherited from the millennium of Benedictine spirituality that animated the religiosity of these isles. Benedictines, unlike Franciscans or Dominicans, do not take vows of chastity and poverty, even if there is an expectation that they live chastely and without possessions. Besides a vow of obedience to the Holy Rule and their superiors, Benedictine monks and nuns take two further vows of ‘stability’ and ‘the conversion of manners.’ They vow, then, to remain in a specific place, never to leave it for somewhere they might deem preferable, and to undergo the slow, incremental process of interior conversion of their habits in relation to others—their ‘manners’—for the sake of the spiritual transformation of their monastery and by extension, the world. England was covered in abbeys from north to south, east to west, of holy people promising to live in just this way. These abbeys completely changed the nature of this land, thus turning it into a home pleasing to God and man.

Today, the hundreds of abbey ruins scattered about the British landscape, and the polished descendants of rapacious thugs who live in grand houses called ‘Abbeys,’ testify to this astonishing monastic history and the sad end to which it arrived. Fitting it is, then, that nowadays there is a Benedictine convent at Tyburn, the site where so many sons and daughters of St. Benedict, alongside other British Catholics, were hanged for their love of the ancient Faith. The nuns at Tyburn, who moved to the site in 1903, are consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a theological mystery derived from the mysticism of the German Benedictine saints Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn (the imagery of which later became important symbols of counter-revolution during the age of so-called Enlightenment).

The reason why Europe cannot shake off its Christianity without losing a sense of its identity is because it was and still is covered in monasteries. This is also why the English could never wholly accept Protestantism, and they had to settle for a weird Catholic-Protestant hybrid called Anglicanism, forcing themselves to adopt an array of theological contradictions which together they charmingly called ‘religious moderation.’ Over the years, the English carefully avoided being troubled by such eccentricities as religious conviction by avoiding the topic of religion altogether. The problem, of course, is that one cannot live among monasteries for a thousand years and then successfully be secular. The English, in turn, remain intensely religious, but today they express their religiosity by their commitment to the petty secular causes and sentimental utopianism which has now left them jaded and unable to do anything except lie down and be colonised by foreign populations.

Not discounting its unique history, England is a kind of distilled example of what has happened across much of the West. A deeper dive into changes suffered by the Church and the culture it sacralised is necessary to understand how monasticism waned among Latin Christians, and why the survival of the Christian West will likely require a revival of monasticism. That will be the focus of Part II.