"Towers of Solid Ivory"

When I first read the last lines of Alasdair MacIntyre's book, After Virtue, I was not quite sure what Professor MacIntyre meant by awaiting another St. Benedict. But I suspected that what he intended was somebody who would have the genius to create a new institution in the way Benedict had. That is, I thought that the reference to Benedict was intended to suggest neither withdrawal from the fields of law and politics nor a kind of spiritual focus on the arts or the theater or poetry, but the possibility of the creation of a new institutional power (or of the renewal of an existing institutional power) one of whose primary functions would be wise and temperate resistance to the dominant socio-cultural order. The institution of the Benedictine monastery, more than the figure of Benedict himself, was the point.

Patrick Leigh Fermor's description of life at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, in his short gem, A Time to Keep Silence, captures this institutional feature of monastic life. Two things in particular struck me in these passages: first, the rigor of the Benedictine life--its difficulty. This is not just "focusing on the family," so to speak, or expressing one's religious sensibilities through art rather than politics. It is, instead, a profoundly different way of life than most people lead. Second, the idea that a subsidiary, but still important, feature of Benedictine life was intellectual--the highest, purest, and most impregnable peak of the ivory tower.

After the first postulate of belief, without which the life of a monk would be farcical and intolerable, the dominating fact of monastic existence is a belief in the necessity and the efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle--a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought--to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism. This is especially true of the contemplative orders, like the Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites, Cistercians, Camaldulese and Sylvestrines; for the others, like the Franciscans, Dominicans or the Jesuits--are brotherhoods organised for action. They travel, teach, preach, convert, organise, plan, heal and nurse; and the material results they achieve make them, if not automatically admirable, at least comprehensible to the Time-Spirit. They get results; they deliver the goods. But what (the Time-Spirit asks) what good do the rest do, immured in monasteries far from contact with the world? The answer is--if the truth of the Christian religion and the efficacy of prayer are both dismissed as baseless--no more than any other human beings who lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours. But, should the two principles be admitted--particularly, for the purposes of this particular theme, the latter--their power for good is incalculable. Belief in this power, and in the necessity of worshipping God daily and hourly, is the mainspring of Benedictine life. It was this belief that, in the sixth century, drove St. Benedict into the solitude of a cave in the Sabine gorges and, after three years of private ascesis, prompted him to found the first Benedictine communities. His book, The Rule of St. Benedict--seventy-three short and sagacious chapters explaining the theory and codifying the practice of the cenobitic life--is aimed simply at securing for his monks protection against the world, so that nothing should interfere with the utmost exploitation of this enormous force. The vows embracing poverty, chastity and obedience were destined to smite from these men all fetters that chained them to the world, to free them for action, for the worship of God and the practice of prayer; for the pursuit, in short, of sanctity....

These values have remained stable while those of the world have passed through kaleidoscopic changes. It is curious to hear, from the outside world in the throes of its yearly metamorphoses, cries of derision leveled at the monastic life. How shallow, whatever views may be held concerning the fundamental truth or fallacy of the Christian religion, are these accusations of hypocrisy, sloth, selfishness and escapism! The life of monks passes in a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which there is never a holiday; and no living man is in a position, after all, to declare their premises true or false. They have foresworn the pleasures and rewards of a world whose values they consider meaningless; and they alone have as a body confronted the terrifying problem of eternity, abandoning everything to help their fellow-man and themselves to meet it.

Worship, then, and prayer are the raison d’être of the Benedictine order; and anything else, even their great achievements as scholars and architects and doctors of the church, is subsidiary. They were, however, for centuries the only guardians of literature, the classics, scholarship and the humanities in a world of which the confusion can best be compared to our own atomic era. For a long period, after the great epoch of Benedictine scholarship at Cluny, the Maurist Benedictine Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés was the most important residuary of learning and science in Europe. Only a few ivy-clad ruins remain, just visible between zazou suits and existentialist haircuts from the terrace of the Deux Magots. But in scores of abbeys all over Europe, the same liberal traditions survive and prosper. Other by-products of their life were the beautiful buildings in which I was living, and the unparalleled calm that prevailed there. At St. Wandrille I was inhabiting at last a tower of solid ivory, and I, not the monks, was the escapist. For my hosts, the Abbey was a springboard into eternity; for me a retiring place to write a book and spring more effectively back into the maelstrom. Strange that the same habitat should prove favourable to ambitions so glaringly opposed.