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A New Benedict to Help Re-Christianize the West?

by George Weigel
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Benedict XVI: The Name Is the Program
04/26/05

St. Benedict was born in 480, in a small Umbrian village. In 529, as a monastic town was being built for Benedict and his monks on the brow of Monte Cassino, Plato's Academy closed in Athens.

The timing nicely illustrated a conviction of the late John Paul II: "In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences." As a great embodiment of classical culture shut its doors, the "academy of Christianity," as the new pope once called it, was being established.

And a good thing, too. The Roman empire was in rapid decline, beset by wars, economic dislocation, and social disorder. The civilizational achievement represented by Plato's Academy could have been lost; classical culture might have gone the way of the Mayans. That it didn't had a lot to do with Benedict. His monks not only preserved crucial elements of the civilization of Athens and Rome during the Dark Ages; they transformed that civilization by infusing a biblical understanding of the human — person, community, origins and destiny — into the classical culture they preserved for future generations in their scriptoria and libraries.

The result of that fusion of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome was what we know as "Europe," or, more broadly, "the West." It was a colossal, indeed world-historical achievement. And the achievement was entirely consistent with what Pope Benedict XVI remembered in a recent interview as "a Benedictine motto: Succisa virescit — pruned, it grows again." Thanks to St. Benedict and Western monasticism, the demise of classical civilization was the occasion for a new beginning — and, eventually, a nobler civilizational accomplishment.

Benedict XVI once described that accomplishment through another Benedictine motto: Ora et labora, pray and work. "Turning the earth into a garden," he told the German journalist Peter Seewald in 2000, "and the service of God [were] fused together and became a whole.... Worshiping God always takes priority.... But at the same time, it's a matter of cultivating and renewing the earth in an ethos of worship. This also involves overcoming the ancient prejudice against manual labor.... Manual labor now becomes something noble...an imitation of the Creator's work. [And] along with the new attitude toward work comes a change in our ideas about the dignity of man." Thus the culture of the classical world was not only preserved; it was transformed into a culture of freedom.

Benedict XVI has long been concerned that the West risks the possibility of a new Dark Age. What he described in a sermon on the day before his election as a new "dictatorship of relativism" is one dimension of the problem. If there is only "your truth" and "my truth" and nothing that we understand as "the truth," then on what principled basis is the West to defend its greatest accomplishments: equality before the law, tolerance and civility, religious freedom and the rights of conscience, democratic self-governance?

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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 1:40 PM