NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

Monasticism:
Through manual labor, culture and briotherhood,
a few men created an entire civilization
Interview by Andrea Beneggi
Translated from

Nov. 19, 2008


The more one reads Benedict XVI's address at the College des Bernardins in Paris last Sept. 12, the more it reveals key aspects and possibilities for further examination in depth.

Il Sussidiario asked Giorgio Picasso, former professor of Medieval History at the Catholic University of Milan and a great scholar on the Benedictine order, to examine some of these aspects with us.

The Pope had cited Western monasticism and its monasteries as the place where a new civilization took shape even as Europe was living through the devastation and confusion following the spread of the barbarian Germanic tribes and the resulting new national orders.


Benedict XVI pointed out that the monks did not set out to 'create' a culture, but that, in the midst of changes against which it seemed nothing of the old could resist, they wanted to do the essential thing: "to commit themselves to finding that which is valid and lasts for always, to find Life itself." Can you help us understand how this was realized and how it had material consequences that were so fundamental for the rebirth of Europe in the Middle Ages?
The Pope said, "I wish to speak of the origins of Western theology and the roots of European culture", i.e., what was the role of monasticism in the origins of Western theology and in the birth of European culture.

The Pope clearly described the problem resulting from the dissolution of the ancient world. The ancient world had a very high cultural level in the field of letters - Greek and Latin. But with the decline of the Roman Empire, even this culture fell into ruins. It was a patrimony that had to be saved, but that the institutions of the classical world, including schools, were no longer able to sustain.

So what did monasticism do - with St. Benedict as the model? it understood the values in that classical culture that had to be revived. That is why even dom Leclercq in his book cited by the Holy Father on that occasion - Humanistic culture and the desire for God - says that the monks evangelized Europe with grammar and the Gospel.

Why grammar? Because a literary revival had to come from that classic culture that had been stripped of its context, without the very institutions that nurtured them but were no longer valid, and now this revival had to come with the Gospel.

But the monks were not really concerned with saving classical culture, rather in the search for God, above all in the Word, the Bible, the Gospel.

However, to access that knowledge, it was necessary to know the language, grammar, the rhetorical structures necessary to understand what God said through Scriptures. And so, the immediate objective was not the content of classical culture itself, but its method - grammar, applied to the Gospel.

And so, the monks, even having chosen to devote their lives to the search for God, quaerere Deum - they had left their families and the world to search for God, not to search for culture - realized that to do that, grammar was a useful tool.

And that is how monasticism saved the philosophic, literary and philologic patrimony of the ancient world. The monks revived, relived and re-proposed that classical culture to people who had come from a world without culture.

Classical culture no longer had the vitality it had under the Roman Empire. But even if the barbarian tribes were not completely alien to some culture - in fact, the Goths had the Bible translated to their language - they obviously were not in a position to take over the classical tradition in its entirety.

But monasticism was able to save this patrimony and to re-propose it with Christian content. The works of these medieval monks are famous - they learned history, they learned to recognize the literary genres, they learned music and a form of singing, etc.

What they saved are the bases of what became European civilization. Without this bases - recognition of which has often remained quite opaque to contemporary culture - we could not have had the development of Western civilization. Yes, it has Christian content, but its expressive forms are those of classical culture, applied to the Gospel.

These forms were then developed in terms and concepts which saved classical culture and became the basis for medieval culture. Obviously, the consequences were great since there is no civilization without culture.


In another part of his address, Benedict XVI pointed out the work of the monks - manual work as a constitutive aspect, he said, of man's likeness with God. Following the example of Christ, who said, "My Father is always at work, and so do I." This idea of a God who works - which was a novelty compared to the Greco-Roman mentality - a God who was 'willing to soil his hands with material creation', enormously influenced the monastic experience.

Without this culture of work, the Pope said, "he development of Europe, its ethos and its formation the world, are unthinkable". How did this work ideal develop in the monastic experience, and how did it influence men in the first centuries of the Middle Ages?
First, we must think of what work meant in the ancient world, because this will help us understand what happened later. In the ancient world, manual work was considered as something negative, something unworthy that was reserved only for slaves.

For us, the word 'ozio' [otium in Latin, meaning leisure, rest, repose, but also idleness] is certainly negative, but in the classic world, it was positive. What was negative was neg-otium - the negation of idleness - to mean busy-ness, or business.

And so, manual labor was something slaves did. The higher classes were meant to contemplate, reflect, think.

Monasticism was confronted with this ancient concept and had to react. In his famous Rule, St. Benedict - and after him, all monks - elevated the concept of labor to the level of prayer.

Initially, labor was thought of as another tool, a way for maintaining intimacy with God. It was said that the monks worked with their hands and then undid what they had done so they could do it again. A myth, obviously. But it is true that little by little, but above all through the Rule of St. Benedict, they understood that work had a positive value - so they devoted a time for work and a time for prayer.

"Monks are genuinely monks when they live from the work of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did", St. Benedict was most clear about this.

In his address, Benedict XVI refers specifically to the concept of labor that Jesus expresses in the Gospel: "My father works". Certainly. Creation itself is a concept that implies, as the Pope pointed out, a God who works, who can be said to have 'soiled his hands' in a way, to form man his creature, which then became truly his creature when he 'inspired' (breathed into) it with the spiritual principle of the soul.

In monastic rules, this was expressed with the idea that everyone should work, that manual labor was not reserved only for some. Of course, each one also had his specific monastic tasks, but in the monastic tradition, manual labor - as it still is in the great monasteries today - was the lot of every monk. Tilling the soil or draining marshlands is perhaps a too romantic view of monasticism, but in fact, when they had to do work on the land, the monks did.

St. Bernard, to mention the great saint after whom the College des Bernardins was named - said he learned more under the oaks in the dog days of summer, than he did from books. What did he mean? That manual work was ennobled into an instrument useful for one's own spiritual uplift, for the contemplation of God.

This was very important for the construction of Europe because now we had a positive concept of work, which was absent earlier - a concept that was even theological. If we open the Bible, we read that God worked for six days to create the world then rested on the seventh.

What did he do in those six days? According to the Bible account, he separated water from land, he created the stars, he created the plants, animals, men - and he saw that it was good. And on the seventh day, he rested.

He worked. Creation is work. The monks who read the Bible, who learned to live from the work of their own hands, following this example, evidently could only have a very very positive concept of work.

Which later had enormous developments in modern and contemporary culture. It was the monks who first placed work on the binary of civilization. For them, work was not something to be avoided, but something to be sought in order to mature, indeed, to realize oneself truly.

St. Benedict's rule has other criteria, other aspects of manual work that are underscored. For example, it says that such work must be 'profitable', not only meant to occupy one's time. Work whose products could even be sold but, the rule says, below market price, though not so much as to cause unfair competition.

Beyond manual work, the monks also undertook, of course - as the Pope recalled. citing Leclercq again - significant cultural work. What were the characteristics of this work?
In the Paris speech, one sees Benedict XVI's own true culture. He has a vision of monasticism and cites the most 'classic' work that modern culture has produced on medieval monastic civilization.

The title has been translated to Italian as Cultura umanistica e desiderio di Dio, which says what is essential, but it is not as beautiful as the original French title, L'amour des lettres (because the monks loved letters, the classic authors, Virgil) et le desire de Dieu (because they were inspired by their desire for God).

Love of letters and desire of God: this is the essence of Benedictine culture which the Pope certainly assimilated in his native Bavaria, where there are so many famous Benedictine monasteries which he learned to know and to visit frequently.

Here he reveals his own monastic sensibility: through his own study and culture, he learned what medieval monasticism was. And this has also happened to many laymen, as, for instance, Giorgio Falco, a Jew, whose most beautiful chapter in his book Santa Romana Repubblica is that dedicated to Western monasticism.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Pope recurred often to Leclercq's text in his Bernardins speech. And the synthesis of Leclercq's message is this: the monks loved letters as a function of God.


So what was the cultural work that they did?
The work of a monk who copied out an old codex - a work of great cultural value, certainly - was considered very much like that of the monk who cooked the meals or who went out to gather fruits and vegetables. In St. Benedict's Rule, they have the same value.

"In the monastery, we are all equal - " wrote Benedict, "freemen and serfs, Goths and Latins - because we serve the one Lord." To the Gothic monk who had lost his scythe, which Benedict recovered from a lake, he said, "Here, take this, work and don't be sad".

The monks undertook a great cultural labor as part of a plan to 'carry on' God's creation. In the eyes of God, according to the Rule, all work - material or otherwise - is equally meritorious. The characteristics of this work, under the most diverse of circumstances, are precisely the equality of everyone, the need to live from the work of one's hands, and the search for God.

The monk is above all a witness to the faith. The fact itself that there existed monasteries was in the Middle Ages a testimonial that amounted to preaching. The population of the countryside, seeing a monastery where people lived 'in another world', with other values, faced a new kind of preaching. They called it 'mute preaching'.

They considered that the monks, even if they did not speak, were preaching, because they offered the example of a peaceable life, at peace with God, even in times of turmoil, of wars, of conflicts, which marked the Middle Ages.

The monastery was a vision of peace. At the entrance of most - even now - is written the word PAX - a place of silence, in which man finds himself reconciled with God. Not in theory, but in practice.