Because we have completed half of our classroom sessions together, we must revise the expectations for your seminar paper. Originally I had envisioned each paper to consider all four interpretative keys present in a specific ritual action celebrated in a designated church. Because we were not able to discuss all four of the interpretative keys, the participant is encouraged to read the following material in order to consider all four of the interpretative keys and then to choose to consider either one key, a combination of two or three keys or all four keys in the seminar paper. Students who choose to consider only one interpretative key such as anamnesis or epiclesis will not be penalised for not including all four keys, but the presentation of the chosen key or keys would naturally be more comprehensive than if a student considered all four keys in a paper of the same length.
The term Order as here applied to the spiritual family of St. Benedict is used in a sense differing somewhat from that in which it is applied to other religious orders. In its ordinary meaning the term implies one complete religious family, made up of a number of monasteries, all of which are subject to a common superior or "general" who usually resides either in Rome or in the mother-house of the order, if there be one. It may be divided into various provinces, according to the countries over which it is spread, each provincial head being immediately subject to the general, just as the superior of each house is subject to his own provincial. This system of centralized authority has never entered into the organization of the Benedictine Order. There is no general or common superior over the whole order other than the pope himself, and the order consists, so to speak, of what are practically a number of orders, called "congregations", each of which is autonomous; all are united, not under the obedience to one general superior, but only by the spiritual bond of allegiance to the same Rule, which may be modified according to the circumstances of each particular house or congregation. It is in this latter sense that the term Order is applied in this article to all monasteries professing to observe St. Benedict's Rule.
The Benedictine Order in the United States: An Interpretative History
St. Augustine and his monks established the first English Benedictine monastery at Canterbury soon after their arrival in 597. Other foundations quickly followed as the Benedictine missionaries carried the light of the Gospel with them throughout the length and breadth of the land. It was said that St. Benedict seemed to have taken possession of the country as his own, and the history of his order in England is the history of the English Church. Nowhere did the order link itself so intimately with people and institutions, secular as well as religious, as in England. Through the influence of saintly men, Wilfrid, Benedict Biscop, and Dunstan, the Benedictine Rule spread with extraordinary rapidity, and in the North, when once the Easter controversy had been settled and the Roman supremacy acknowledged (Synod of Whitby, 664), it was adopted in most of the monasteries that had been founded by the Celtic missionaries from Iona. Many of the episcopal sees of England were founded and governed by the Benedictines, and no less than nine of the old cathedrals were served by the black monks of the priories attached to them. Even when the bishop was not himself a monk, he held the place of titular abbot, and the community formed his chapter.
A system which comprised many hundreds of monasteries and many thousands of monks, spread over a number of different countries, without any unity of organization; which was exposed, moreover, to all the dangers and disturbances inseparable from those troublous times of kingdom-making; such a system was inevitably unable to keep worldliness, and even worse vices, wholly out of its midst. Hence it cannot be denied that the monks often failed to live up to the monastic ideal and sometimes even fell short of the Christian and moral standards. There were failures and scandals in Benedictine history, just as there were declensions from the right path outside the cloister, for monks are, after all, but men. But there does not seem ever to have been a period of widespread and general corruption in the order. Here and there the members of some particular house allowed abuses and relaxations of rule to creep in, so that they seemed to be falling away from the true spirit of their state, but whenever such did occur they soon called forth efforts for a restoration of primitive austerity; and these constantly recurring reform movements form one of the surest evidences of the vitality which has pervaded the Benedictine Institute throughout its entire history. It is important to note, moreover, that all such reforms as ever achieved any measure of success came invariably from within, and were not the result of pressure from outside the order.
Notwithstanding all these reform movements and unions of monasteries, a large number of Benedictine abbeys in different countries retained to the end of the twelfth century, and even later, their original independence, and this state of things was only terminated by the regulations of the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, which were to change materially the whole trend of Benedictine polity and history. By the twelfth canon of this council it was decreed that all the monasteries of each ecclesiastical province were to unite into a congregation. The abbots of each province or congregation were to meet in chapter every third year, with power to pass laws binding on all, and to appoint from amongst their own number "visitors" who were to make canonical visitation of the monasteries and to report upon their condition to the ensuing chapter. In each congregation one of the abbots was to be elected president, and the one so chosen presided over the triennial chapter and exercised a certain limited and well-defined authority over the houses of his congregation, in such a way as not to interfere with the independent authority of each abbot in his own monastery. England was the first and for some time the only country to give this new arrangement a fair trial. It was not until after the issue of the Bull "Benedictina" by Benedict XII, in 1336, that other countries, somewhat tardily, organized their national congregation in conformity with the designs of the Lateran Council. Some of these have continued to the present day, and this congregational system is now, with very few exceptions and some slight variations in matters of detail, the normal form of government throughout the order.
At the time of this important change in the constitution of the order, the black monks of St. Benedict were to be found in almost every country of Western Europe, including Iceland, where they had two abbeys, founded in the twelfth century, and from which missionaries had penetrated even into Greenland and the lands of the Eskimo. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the order is estimated to have comprised the enormous number of 37,000 monasteries. It had up to that time given to the Church no less than 24 popes, 200 cardinals, 7,000 archbishops, 15,000 bishops, and over 1,500 canonized saints. It had enrolled amongst its members 20 emperors, 10 empresses, 47 kings, and 50 queens. And these numbers continued to increase by reason of the additional strength which accrued to the order form its consolidation under the new system. In the sixteenth century the Reformation and the religious wars spread havoc amongst its monasteries and reduced their number to about 5,000. In Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, where several houses had joined the German (Bursfeld) Union, the order was entirely obliterated by the Lutherans about 1551 and its property confiscated by the crown. The arbitrary rule of Joseph II of Austria (1765-90) and the French Revolution and its consequences completed the work of destruction, so that in the early part of the nineteenth century, the order numbered scarcely more than fifty monasteries all told. The last seventy years, however, have witnessed a remarkable series of revivals and an accession of missionary enterprise, with the result that there are now over one hundred and fifty monasteries of black monks, or, including affiliated congregations and convents of nuns, a total of nearly seven hundred. These revivals and examples of expansion will now be treated in detail under the headings of the various congregations, which will bring the history of the order down to the present day.
Hélyot enumerates several military orders as having been based upon that of St. Benedict or in some way originating from it. Though founded especially for military objects, as for instance the defence of the holy places at Jerusalem, when not so engaged, these knights lived a kind of a religious life in commanderies or preceptories, established on the estates belonging to their order. They were not in any sense clerics, but they usually took vows of poverty and obedience, and sometimes also of chastity. In some of the Spanish orders, permission to marry was granted in the seventeenth century. The knights practised many of the customary monastic austerities, such as fasting and silence, and they adopted a religious habit with the tunic shortened somewhat for convenience on horseback. Each order was governed by a Grand Master who had jurisdiction over the whole order, and under him were the commanders who ruled over the various houses. The following were the military orders connected with the Benedictine Order, but for fuller details the reader is referred to separate articles. (a) The Knights Templars, founded in 1118. St. Bernard of Clairvaux drew up their rule, and they always regarded the Cistercians as their brethren. For this reason they adopted a white dress, to which they added a red cross. The order was suppressed in 1312. In Spain there were: (b) The Knights of Calatrava founded in 1158 to assist in protecting Spain against the Moorish invasions. The Knights of Calatrava owed their origin to the abbot and monks of the Cistercian monastery of Fitero. The general chapter of Cîteaux drew up a rule of life and exercised a general supervision over them. The black hood and short scapular which they wore denoted their connexion with Cîteaux. The order possessed fifty-six commanderies, chiefly in Andalusia. The Nuns of Calatrava were established c. 1219. They were cloistered, observing the rule of the Cistercian nuns and wearing a similar habit, but they were under the jurisdiction of the Grand Master of the knights. (c) Knights of Alcantara, or of San Julian del Pereyro, in Castille, founded about the same time and for the same purpose as the Knights of Calatrava. They adopted a mitigated form of St. Benedict's Rule, to which certain observances borrowed from Calatrava were added. They also used the black hood and abbreviated scapular. It was at one time proposed to unite this order with that of Calatrava, but the scheme failed of execution. They possessed thirty-seven commanderies. (d) Knights of Montesa, founded 1316, an offshoot from Calatrava, instituted by ten knights of that order who placed themselves under the abbot of Cîteaux instead of their own Grand Master. (e) Knights of St. George of Alfama, founded in 1201; united to the Order of Montesa in 1399. 2ff7e9595c
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