Letter 1
Dear Sebastian,
My wife and I, both Benedictine oblates, read aloud last night your three essays on Benedictine monasticism[1] that you published in The European Conservative. Our views coincide to a very great extent. Norcia is the place in Europe I have visited the most—probably ten times by now. I attended a Benedictine high school and have worked in an academic capacity for Benedictine monasteries. I go on retreat in Gower, Missouri, with the Benedictines of Mary. We are birds of a feather.
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Like you, I see rationalism as the key issue, and your argument that the mobility and impermanence of the friars and the clericalism fostered by later clerical orders contributed to a certain kind of rationalism whereby Christianity was seen more as propositional assent than as a way of life is certainly compelling.
But it may be a little simplistic. The friars themselves, and later the clerical orders of the Counter-Reformation, promoted a grand liturgical life, built magnificent churches of their own, developed forms like the oratorio and the cantata; theirs was a creative outpouring and outreach such as few periods of the Church has ever seen. The monasteries were never meant to accomplish those goals, which seemed peculiarly suited to the rise of great cities where monasteries would usually not be at home. And certainly we owe the codification (I would prefer to say “canonization”) of the ancient Roman Rite in its medieval plenitude to a Dominican pope, Pius V.
I think you should give Urban Hannon’s recent (and helpfully compact) book, Thomistic Mystagogy, a close look. He makes a compelling case for St. Thomas as very much in line with the medieval allegorical-spiritual tradition of liturgy, making him far more monastic, on your account, than mendicant. Of course, Thomas was educated as a child oblate at Montecassino, so it makes sense. True, he did defend the mixed life, as you said, but there are tensions in Aquinas on that topic, just as there are tensions in Aristotle about whether the philosophical or the political life is higher; and Aquinas, in his more Augustinian moments, defends contemplation as the highest activity and telos simply speaking (certainly that is true in heaven!).
I have a book coming out later in 2024 called Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Excess and Transport in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas, in which I devote a good deal of time to exploring why it could never be said of Aquinas, at least, that a shift occurred from “liturgical person” to “person who accepts certain propositions.”
A more substantive disagreement concerns the modern opinion that St. Benedict was not a presbyter. Cardinal Schuster devotes many pages in his illuminating St. Benedict and His Times to explaining why all of the evidence points to the saint’s having been a priest. Moreover, it is not clear at all to me that the medieval trend toward ordaining “choir monks” as priests in order to perfect their daily offering of the sacrificium laudis through the so-called “private Mass“ (on which a most insightful piece by a French priest was just published at New Liturgical Movement) is necessarily to be seen as a negative “clericalization.” The Cluniac emphasis on the daily round of prayer, both communal and individual, long predated the mendicant orders and clerical orders that followed, and very much relied on a robust army of “lay brothers,” preserving that double complexion (clerical and lay) on which you rightly place emphasis.
I applaud the following crisp statement: “The clerics were to sanctify the laity and the laity were to sanctify the world.” That is almost a one-line summary of my book Ministers of Christ: Recovering the Roles of Clergy and Laity in an Age of Confusion. Well, to be accurate, I also spend a good deal of time defending the traditional minor orders as part of the ancient and necessary ecclesiastical hierarchy.
We are in agreement about the abuse of the term “vocation” (see here for an argument similar to yours). And your critique of churchly managerialism is the best I’ve ever seen, and your continued refrain that we need, not a very different Benedict, but the same one, doing the same kind of thing—obedientia, stabilitas loci, conversio morum—is rhetorically very effective, as the repetition subtly imitates the very ideas you are advocating: obedience to a rule, staying in one place and loving it and sacralizing it, and turning around one’s manners to conform to the model.
Do you know about the unfortunate Hilarion Heagy? He was first a Russian Orthodox priest, after that an Eastern Catholic priest—and then he left Christianity to embrace Islam. Reading him, I am put in mind of such figures as Frithjof Schuon, Rene Guenon, Titus Burkhardt, men who always seemed to end up with …Islam. While I can intellectually respect the theological and mystical writings of Islamic authors, I must admit that I find this extremely baffling, as giving up Christ, the Logos Incarnate, would be impossible for me, regardless of how bad things get in the Church.
In any event, I was struck by something he wrote a few days ago on his blog:
By their fruits you shall know them (Matthew 7:16). In many ways, this was my criteria. What are the fruits, as I see them first hand? Admittedly by 2022, I was thoroughly battered by much that I had experienced in the Church—even as I tried to give myself completely to the service of an institution that seemed increasingly disinterested in its own survival. Instead, it seemed to me like ‘the world’—the dunya—was the main focus of much of Christianity. Or simply politics. This, coupled with a loss of tradition—of objective tradition and of a deeper esoteric tradition—and an increasingly totalitarian stranglehold of the subjectivity in Christianity (i.e., “my truth,” “my belief,” “my ‘special’ relationship,” “my reality,” “my understanding” … etc.) Well … I saw everywhere I looked no real unity, but rather a cacophony of chaos.
This very much reminded me of some themes in your recent writing.
Thank you, as always, for your immensely stimulating work.
In Domino,
Peter
Letter 2
Dear Peter,
Thank you so much for your kind remarks and thoughtful criticisms of my recent three-part essay. I agree with you that there are aspects of the case that I develop therein which are somewhat simplistic, but in defence of my essay, I was attempting to introduce my readership to themes that would be better addressed in a 300-page book! And I certainly do not deny the advantages that you highlight regarding the development of religious life over the centuries in the Latin Church, but I do hold that such development entailed in the long run an obscuring of Catholic religious life and what religious consecration actually is. That development—from monasticism to the rise of the friars, and from the friars to the clerical institutes—has I think some important explanatory power for understanding how we ended up with the dominant culture we now have in the Catholic Church, namely a culture of clericalism.
Moreover, whilst I agree with you that the later orders were able to embark on ‘outreach’ that the monasteries could not, I believe that in many cases this led to a superficial evangelisation. Let us not forget that many Benedictines were very great missionaries, and their missions were lasting in ways otherwise unknown in Church history. Interestingly, in the Orthodox churches, they maintain a kind of monastic ‘outreach’ especially through the figure of the staretz. My wife tells me that in Transylvania, where members of her family live, almost every town has a staretz. These figures constantly give counsel and spiritual guidance to their people. Sadly, today, I am forced recurrently to counsel people to avoid relationships of ‘spiritual direction’ on account of the dangerous and abusive relationships which Catholic priests routinely seek to establish with vulnerable or dependent faithful, and the ecclesiastical culture of constant movement has led many clerics to think they can get away with such behaviour too.
Of course, as I have argued elsewhere, I also think the waning of the temporal power in the Church is a primary cause of this unfortunate clerical culture, but that ebbing of the temporal power alongside the clericalization of religious life formed, if you like, the perfect cocktail for the kind of clerical managerialism we have today, which almost exclusively characterises modern Catholicism. The effects of clericalism seem as much a problem among traditionalists as among the rest of the faithful. Not long ago, I delivered a course in philosophy to a group of traditional religious, and it alarmed me that the friars saw their communal religious life and even their vows as little more than just a path by which to become priests. The prophetic character of consecration was remarkably absent from their purview.
According to Andrew Louth, the predominant Orthodox theology on monastic life is that monasticism corresponds to the Israelite prophetic ministry in the same way as the Christian priesthood corresponds to the Levitical priesthood. Thus, in the New Covenant, we have two ministries that mirror those of the Old Covenant, but rather than being ordered towards the first coming of the Messiah, they are ordered towards the second coming of Christ in glory as Just Judge. Such a conception of religious life as essentially prophetic rings true and is found scattered throughout official documents of Rome, but practically speaking we Latins have lost sight of its truth and almost nowhere is it lived among us.
I read your piece on vocation to which you kindly included a link in your message to me. Interestingly, I think you and I have a small disagreement on the ‘naturality of marriage.’ That is to say, while I agree that—other than by some dramatic equivocation—one cannot have a ‘calling’ to marriage, a baptised member of the Church does not ordinarily enter mere marriage at all, but Holy Matrimony, which is not a natural institution but a sacrament of Christ (even if on being confected it assumes into itself the natural institution of marriage). And it seems to me that there is no ‘calling,’ properly speaking, to Holy Matrimony or to Holy Orders, as such sacraments are ordinary to the faithful—and therefore it is not necessary to be called into them. Indeed, one might say that such sacraments are natural to the baptised, whose nature has been re-created and regenerated by the waters of baptism. And hence, the fact that these sacraments are purely supernatural does not stop them from being natural to us, if indeed our nature is supernatural by virtue of being supernaturalised by the sacramental life beginning in baptism.
What is not merely natural to the sacramental life of the Christian, but requires a special supernatural calling directly from Christ, is the spousal mystery of religious life, which is not entered by way of any sacrament, but by an act of consecration. Hence, it seems to me, when we speak of what is normative to the Christian life, without qualification, by ‘calling’ we mean not Holy Matrimony, not Holy Orders, nor indeed anything else, but religious consecrated life alone.
I’m very grateful to you for recommending Hannon’s book, which I have now ordered, and I look forward to reading it. I also look forward to reading your forthcoming book on Anatomy of Transcendence. I wish to be clear: I do not accuse Aquinas of bringing about the cultural shift from understanding the Christian as a ‘liturgical person’ to a ‘person who accepts certain propositions’; nor do I accuse him of entrenching such a shift in his own works. But I do believe that over time such a shift happened in the Catholic Church, the evidence for which I see everywhere, and I deem this change a theological corruption that has warped our self-understanding as Christians and downgraded the primacy of holiness—dare I say, mystical transformation in Christ—in the lives of the baptised.
Thank you also for the wonderful Fortescue quotes; I consider Fr Adrian to have been one of the sanest clerics of his time. I think he was right not only to dive deep into his own liturgical tradition as the architects of revolution were quietly already plotting its destruction, but to take seriously the position of the Eastern Orthodox. I am absolutely sure that the crisis of authority among the Greeks and the crisis of tradition among the Latins will never find their respective solutions until we achieve the reunification of the whole Apostolic Church. In fact, these days I find myself praying for this intention above any other. Tell me, have you read Geoffrey Hull’s The Banished Heart? It is amazing to me how little that book is discussed, when it seems to address so many points relevant to us in the Church today.
I had never before heard of Hilarion Heagy, but I deeply sympathise with people like that. The Church, in its human aspect, is eating itself. The Church has become the great Ouroboros which She was established on earth to replace with the Holy Cross. Those who are scandalised out of the Church will, I am sure, receive some mercy in the end. Since I became a Roman Catholic fifteen years ago, and especially during the seven years I worked as a Church official in the UK, in the institutional Church I have met some of the most corrupt, psychopathic, and downright evil people I could ever imagine encountering. Were it not for my conviction that all meaning and purpose in this vale of tears flows directly from the heart of Christ, and that outside the maternal care of His Mother there is only the darkness of the diabolical realm, I would have left the Catholic fold a long time ago. Fortunately, by His grace, I know Him to be the Truth, and so with Him I remain.
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It is a great source of sorrow to see how the Church has grown so very alien to herself. Not long ago, I attended a lecture by a retired Harvard Professor of Vedic Studies. It was a lecture on the Rhineland Mystics. I learned more in that hour, in a talk delivered by a Hindu, about the mystical tradition of my own religion, than I have from all the homilies I’ve heard over the past decade and a half. That is truly a scandal. I have learned much about the deeper spirituality of my own tradition by attending talks at The Temenos Academy (of which I’m a member) and The King’s Foundation of Traditional Arts. It is almost as if one can only discover authentic Catholicism if one flees the official institution for those corners where people, by virtue of their disassociation with it, are free from the petty power-games and clericalism of the modern Church.
If the hierarchy spent only half the time on disseminating the mystical and liturgical tradition of the Church that it does on destroying our own liturgical inheritance, it could drag us out of the nihilism of the secular age in the flash of a moment. Hence, it surprises me not that people, still longing for a spiritual life and some induction into a living tradition, and seeing that the institutional Church cannot satiate their deepest desires, gravitate towards the works of the perennialists and the modern Sufi scholars. Those people who stumble in the dark and eventually find perennialism and Sufism are themselves orphans, and the Church is the parent that has abandoned them. For this reason, in the decades to come, the works of Jean Hani, Valentin Tomberg, Jean Borella, Robert Bolton, Wolfgang Smith, and others will be of the utmost importance for the re-evangelisation of the world. Those sophiological writers whom I name have held to the Church understood as a divine and living Being that does not shudder at Her own Mystery.
Forgive me for this long reply. Let us keep each other in prayer. I am forever grateful for your friendship.
Yours in the Lord, as ever,
Sebastian
