The monks played a critical role in the development of
Western civilization. But judging from Catholic monasticism’s
earliest practice, one would hardly have guessed
the enormous impact on the outside world that it would come to
exercise. This historical fact comes as less of a surprise when we
recall Christ’s words: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and
all these things shall be added unto you.” That, stated simply, is
the history of the monks.
Early forms of monastic life are evident by the third century.
By then, individual Catholic women committed themselves as
consecrated virgins to lives of prayer and sacrifice, looking after
the poor and the sick.1 Nuns come from these early traditions.
Another source of Christian monasticism is found in Saint Paul
of Thebes and more famously in Saint Anthony of Egypt (also
known as Saint Anthony of the Desert), whose life spanned the
mid-third century through the mid-fourth century. Saint
Anthony’s sister lived in a house of consecrated virgins. He
became a hermit, retreating to the deserts of Egypt for the sake of
Copyright © 2005 by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
his own spiritual perfection, though his great example led thousands
to flock to him.
The hermit’s characteristic feature was his retreat into remote
solitude, so that he might renounce worldly things and concentrate
intensely on his spiritual life. Hermits typically lived alone
or in groups of two or three, finding shelter in caves or simple
huts and supporting themselves on what they could produce in
their small fields or through such tasks as basket-making. The
lack of an authority to oversee their spiritual regimen led some of
them to pursue unusual spiritual and penitential practices.
According to Monsignor Philip Hughes, an accomplished historian
of the Catholic Church, “There were hermits who hardly
ever ate, or slept, others who stood without movement whole
weeks together, or who had themselves sealed up in tombs and
remained there for years, receiving only the least of poor nourishment
through crevices in the masonry.”2
Cenobitic monasticism (monks living together in monasteries),
the kind with which most people are familiar, developed in
part as a reaction against the life of the hermits and in recognition
that men ought to live in community. This was the position of
Saint Basil the Great, who played an important role in the development
of Eastern monasticism. Still, the hermit life never
entirely died out; a thousand years after Saint Paul of Thebes, a
hermit was elected pope, taking the name Celestine V.
Eastern monasticism influenced the West in a number of ways:
through the travels of Saint Athanasius, for example, and the
writings of Saint John Cassian—a man of the West who possessed
a wide knowledge of Eastern practice. But Western monasticism
is most deeply indebted to one of its own: Saint Benedict of Nursia.
Saint Benedict established twelve small communities of
monks at Subiaco, thirty-eight miles from Rome, before heading
fifty miles south to found Monte Cassino, the great monastery for
26 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
which he is remembered. It was here, around 529, that he composed
the famous Rule of Saint Benedict, the excellence of which
was reflected in its all but universal adoption throughout Western
Europe in the centuries that followed.
The moderation of Saint Benedict’s Rule, as well as the structure
and order it provided, facilitated its spread throughout
Europe. Unlike the Irish monasteries, which were known for their
extremes of self-denial (but which nevertheless attracted men in
considerable numbers), Benedictine monasteries took for granted
that the monk was to receive adequate food and sleep, even if during
penitential seasons his regimen might grow more austere. The
Benedictine monk typically lived at a material level comparable
to that of a contemporary Italian peasant.
Each Benedictine house was independent of every other, and
each had an abbot to oversee its affairs and good order. Monks
had previously been free to wander from one place to another, but
Saint Benedict envisioned a monastic lifestyle in which each
remained attached to his own monastery.3
Saint Benedict also negated the worldly status of the prospective
monk, whether his life had been one of great wealth or miserable
servitude, for all were equal in Christ. The Benedictine abbot “shall
make no distinction of persons in the monastery. . . .A freeborn man
shall not be preferred to one coming from servitude, unless there be
some other and reasonable cause. For whether we are bond or free,
we are all one in Christ. . . . God is no respecter of persons.”
A monk’s purpose in retiring to a monastery was to cultivate a
more disciplined spiritual life and, more specifically, to work out
his salvation in an environment and under a regimen suitable to
that purpose. His role in Western civilization would prove substantial.
The monks’ intention had not been to perform great tasks
for European civilization, yet as time went on, they came to appreciate
the task for which the times seemed to have called them.
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 27
During a period of great turmoil, the Benedictine tradition
endured, and its houses remained oases of order and peace. It has
been said of Monte Cassino, the motherhouse of the Benedictines,
that her own history reflected that permanence. Sacked
by the barbarian Lombards in 589, destroyed by the Saracens in
884, razed by an earthquake in 1349, pillaged by French troops in
1799, and wrecked by the bombs of World War II in 1944—
Monte Cassino refused to disappear, as each time her monks
returned to rebuild.4
Mere statistics can hardly do justice to the Benedictine
achievement, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the
order had supplied the Church with 24 popes, 200 cardinals,
7,000 archbishops, 15,000 bishops, and 1,500 canonized saints. At
its height, the Benedictine order could boast 37,000 monasteries.
And it was not merely their influence within the Church to which
the statistics point; so exalted had the monastic ideal become
throughout society that by the fourteenth century the order had
already enrolled some twenty emperors, ten empresses, fortyseven
kings, and fifty queens.5 Thus a great many of Europe’s
most powerful would come to pursue the humble life and spiritual
regimen of the Benedictine order. Even the various barbarian
groups were attracted to the monastic life, and such figures as
Carloman of the Franks and Rochis of the Lombards eventually
pursued it themselves.6
THE PRACTICAL ARTS
Although most educated people think of the medieval monasteries’
scholarly and cultural pursuits as their contribution to Western
civilization, we should not overlook the monks’ important
cultivation of what might be called the practical arts. Agriculture
28 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
is a particularly significant example. In the early twentieth century,
Henry Goodell, president of what was then the Massachusetts
Agricultural College, celebrated “the work of these grand
old monks during a period of fifteen hundred years. They saved
agriculture when nobody else could save it. They practiced it
under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared
undertake it.”7 Testimony on this point is considerable. “We owe
the agricultural restoration of a great part of Europe to the
monks,” observes another expert. “Wherever they came,” adds
still another, “they converted the wilderness into a cultivated
country; they pursued the breeding of cattle and agriculture,
labored with their own hands, drained morasses, and cleared
away forests. By them Germany was rendered a fruitful country.”
Another historian records that “every Benedictine monastery
was an agricultural college for the whole region in which it was
located.”8 Even the nineteenth-century French statesman and
historian François Guizot, who was not especially sympathetic to
the Catholic Church, observed: “The Benedictine monks were
the agriculturists of Europe; they cleared it on a large scale, associating
agriculture with preaching.”9
Manual labor, expressly called for in the Rule of Saint Benedict,
played a central role in the monastic life. Although the Rule
was known for its moderation and its aversion to exaggerated
penances, we often find the monks freely embracing work that
was difficult and unattractive, since for them such tasks were
channels of grace and opportunities for mortification of the flesh.
This was certainly true in the clearing and reclaiming of land. The
prevailing view of swamps was that they were sources of pestilence
utterly without value. But the monks thrived in such locations and
embraced the challenges that came with them. Before long, they
managed to dike and drain the swamp and turn what had once been
a source of disease and filth into fertile agricultural land.10
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 29
Montalembert, the great nineteenth-century historian of the
monks, paid tribute to their great agricultural work. “It is impossible
to forget,” he wrote, “the use they made of so many vast districts
(holding as they did one-fifth of all the land in England),
uncultivated and uninhabited, covered with forests or surrounded
by marshes.” That was indeed the character of much of the land
that the monks occupied, partly because they chose the most
secluded and inaccessible sites to reinforce the communal solitude
of their life and partly because this was land that lay donors could
more easily give the monks.11 Although they cleared forests that
stood in the way of human habitation and use, they were also
careful to plant trees and conserve forests when possible.12
A particularly vivid example of the monks’ salutary influence
on their physical surroundings comes from the fen district of
Southampton, England. An expert describes what the area would
have looked like in the seventh century, before the founding of
Thorney Abbey:
It was nothing but a vast morass. The fens in the seventh century
were probably like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi or
the swamp shores of the Carolinas. It was a labyrinth of black,
wandering streams; broad lagoons, morasses submerged every
spring-tide; vast beds of reed and sedge and fern; vast copses of
willow, alder and gray poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which
was swallowing up slowly, all-devouring, yet all-preserving, the
forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had
once grown in that low, rank soil. Trees torn down by flood and
storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back upon
the land. Streams bewildered in the forests changed their channels,
mingling silt and sand with the black soil of the peat.
Nature left to herself ran into wild riot and chaos more and more,
till the whole fen became one dismal swamp.13
30 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
Five centuries later, this is how William of Malmesbury
(c. 1096–1143) described the area:
It is a counterfeit of Paradise, where the gentleness and purity
of heaven appear already to be reflected. In the midst of the
fens rise groves of trees which seem to touch the stars with
their tall and slender tops; the charmed eye wanders over a sea
of verdant herbage, the foot which treads the wide meadows
meets with no obstacle in its path. Not an inch of land as far as
the eye can reach lies uncultivated. Here the soil is hidden by
fruit trees; there by vines stretched upon the ground or trailed
on trellises. Nature and art rival each other, the one supplying
all that the other forgets to produce. O deep and pleasant solitude!
Thou hast been given by God to the monks, so that their
mortal life may daily bring them nearer to heaven.14
Wherever they went, the monks introduced crops, industries, or
production methods with which the people had not been previously
familiar. Here they would introduce the rearing of cattle and
horses, there the brewing of beer or the raising of bees or fruit. In
Sweden, the corn trade owed its existence to the monks; in Parma,
it was cheese making; in Ireland, salmon fisheries—and, in a great
many places, the finest vineyards. Monks stored up the waters from
springs in order to distribute them in times of drought. In fact, it
was the monks of the monasteries of Saint Laurent and Saint Martin
who, spying the waters of springs that were distributing themselves
uselessly over the meadows of Saint Gervais and Belleville,
directed them to Paris. In Lombardy, the peasants learned irrigation
from the monks, which contributed mightily to making that
area so well known throughout Europe for its fertility and riches.
The monks were also the first to work toward improving cattle
breeds, rather than leaving the process to chance.15
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 31
In many cases, the monks’ good example inspired others, particularly
the great respect and honor they showed toward manual
labor in general and agriculture in particular. “Agriculture had
sunk to a low ebb,” according to one scholar. “Marshes covered
once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land
spurned the plow as degrading.” But when the monks emerged
from their cells to dig ditches and to plow fields, “the effort was
magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but despised
industry.”16 Pope Saint Gregory the Great (590–604) tells us a
revealing story about the abbot Equitius, a sixth-century missionary
of noted eloquence. When a papal envoy came to his
monastery looking for him, the envoy went immediately to the
scriptorium, expecting to find him among the copyists. But he
was not there. The calligraphers explained simply, “He is down
there in the valley, cutting hay.”17
The monks also pioneered in the production of wine, which
they used both for the celebration of Holy Mass and for ordinary
consumption, which the Rule of Saint Benedict expressly permitted.
In addition, the discovery of champagne can be traced to
Dom Perignon of Saint Peter’s Abbey, Hautvilliers-on-the-
Marne. He was appointed cellarer of the abbey in 1688, and
developed champagne through experimentation with blending
wines. The fundamental principles he established continue to
govern the manufacture of champagne even today.18
Although perhaps not as glamorous as some of the monks’ intellectual
contributions, these crucial tasks were very nearly as important
to building and preserving the civilization of the West. It
would be difficult to find any group anywhere in the world whose
contributions were as varied, as significant, and as indispensable
as those of the Catholic monks of the West during a time of general
turmoil and despair.
32 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 33
The monks were also important architects of medieval technology.
The Cistercians, a reform-minded Benedictine order
established at Cîteaux in 1098, are especially well known for their
technological sophistication. Thanks to the great network of
communication that existed between the various monasteries,
technological information was able to spread rapidly. Thus we
find very similar water-powered systems at monasteries that were
at great distances from each other, even thousands of miles away.19
“These monasteries,” a scholar writes, “were the most economically
effective units that had ever existed in Europe, and perhaps
in the world, before that time.”20
The Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in France leaves us a
twelfth-century report about its use of waterpower that reveals
the surprising extent to which machinery had become central to
European life. The Cistercian monastic community generally ran
its own factory. The monks used waterpower for crushing wheat,
sieving flour, fulling cloth, and tanning.21 And as Jean Gimpel
points out in his book The Medieval Machine, this twelfth-century
report could have been written 742 times, since that was the
number of Cistercian monasteries in Europe in the twelfth century.
The same level of technological achievement could have been
observed in practically all of them.22
Although the world of classical antiquity had not adopted
mechanization for industrial use on any considerable scale, the
medieval world did so on an enormous scale, a fact symbolized
and reflected in the Cistercians’ use of waterpower:
Entering the Abbey under the boundary wall [writes a twelfthcentury
source], which like a janitor allows it to pass, the stream
first hurls itself impetuously at the mill where in a welter of movement
it strains itself, first to crush the wheat beneath the weight
34 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
of the millstones, then to shake the fine sieve which separates
flour from bran. Already it has reached the next building; it
replenishes the vats and surrenders itself to the flames which heat
it up to prepare beer for the monks, their liquor when the vines
reward the wine-growers’ toil with a barren crop. The stream
does not yet consider itself discharged. The fullers established
near the mill beckon to it. In the mill it had been occupied in
preparing food for the brethren; it is therefore only right that it
should now look to their clothing. It never shrinks back or refuses
to do anything that is asked for. One by one it lifts and drops the
heavy pestles, the fullers’ great wooden hammers . . . and spares,
thus, the monks’ great fatigues. . . . How many horses would be
worn out, how many men would have weary arms if this graceful
river, to whom we owe our clothes and food, did not labor for us.
When it has spun the shaft as fast as any wheel can move, it disappears
in a foaming frenzy; one might say it had itself been
ground in the mill. Leaving it here it enters the tannery, where in
preparing the leather for the shoes of the monks it exercises as
much exertion as diligence; then it dissolves in a host of streamlets
and proceeds along its appointed course to the duties laid down
for it, looking out all the time for affairs requiring its attention
whatever they might be, such as cooking, sieving, turning, grinding,
watering, or washing, never refusing its assistance in any task.
At last, in case it receives any reward for work which it has not
done, it carries away the waste and leaves everywhere spotless.23
THE MONKS AS TECHNICAL ADVISERS
The Cistercians were also known for their skill in metallurgy. “In
their rapid expansion throughout Europe,” writes Jean Gimpel,
the Cistercians must have “played a role in the diffusion of new
techniques, for the high level of their agricultural technology was
matched by their industrial technology. Every monastery had a
model factory, often as large as the church and only several feet
away, and waterpower drove the machinery of the various industries
located on its floor.”24 At times iron ore deposits were
donated to the monks, nearly always along with the forges used
to extract the iron, and at other times they purchased the
deposits and forges. Although they needed iron for their own use,
Cistercian monasteries would come in time to offer their surplus
for sale; in fact, from the mid-thirteenth through the seventeenth
century, the Cistercians were the leading iron producers in the
Champagne region of France. Ever eager to increase the efficiency
of their monasteries, the Cistercians used the slag from
their furnaces as fertilizer, as its concentration of phosphates
made it particularly useful for this purpose.25
Such achievements were part of a broader phenomenon of
technological achievement on the part of the monks. As Gimpel
observes, “The Middle Ages introduced machinery into Europe
on a scale no civilization had previously known.”26 And the
monks, according to another study, were “the skillful and unpaid
technical advisers of the third world of their times—that is to say,
Europe after the invasion of the barbarians.”27 It goes on:
In effect, whether it be the mining of salt, lead, iron, alum, or
gypsum, or metallurgy, quarrying marble, running cutler’s
shops and glassworks, or forging metal plates, also known as
firebacks, there was no activity at all in which the monks did
not display creativity and a fertile spirit of research. Utilizing
their labor force, they instructed and trained it to perfection.
Monastic know-how [would] spread throughout Europe.28
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 35
Monastic accomplishments ranged from interesting curiosities
to the intensely practical. In the early eleventh century, for
instance, a monk named Eilmer flew more than 600 feet with a
glider; people remembered this feat for the next three centuries.29
Centuries later, Father Francesco Lana-Terzi, not a monk but a
Jesuit priest, pursued the subject of flight more systematically,
earning the honor of being called the father of aviation. His 1670
book Prodromo alla Arte Maestra was the first to describe the
geometry and physics of a flying vessel.30
The monks also counted skillful clock-makers among them.
The first clock of which we have any record was built by the
future Pope Sylvester II for the German town of Magdeburg,
around the year 996. Much more sophisticated clocks were built
by later monks. Peter Lightfoot, a fourteenth-century monk of
Glastonbury, built one of the oldest clocks still in existence,
which now sits, in excellent condition, in London’s Science
Museum.
Richard of Wallingford, a fourteenth-century abbot of the
Benedictine abbey of Saint Albans (and one of the initiators of
Western trigonometry), is well known for the large astronomical
clock he designed for that monastery. It has been said that a
clock that equaled it in technological sophistication did not
appear for at least two centuries. The magnificent clock, a marvel
for its time, no longer survives, perhaps having perished amid
Henry VIII’s sixteenth-century monastic confiscations. However,
Richard’s notes on the clock’s design have permitted scholars
to build a model and even a full-scale reconstruction. In
addition to timekeeping, the clock could accurately predict
lunar eclipses.
Archaeologists are still discovering the extent of monastic
skills and technological cleverness. In the late 1990s, University
of Bradford archeometallurgist Gerry McDonnell found evidence
36 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
near Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, England, of a degree of
technological sophistication that pointed ahead to the great
machines of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.
(Rievaulx Abbey was one of the monasteries that King Henry
VIII ordered closed in the 1530s as part of his confiscation of
Church properties.) In exploring the debris of Rievaulx and
Laskill (an outstation about four miles from the monastery),
McDonnell found that the monks had built a furnace to extract
iron from ore.
The typical such furnace of the sixteenth century had
advanced relatively little over its ancient counterpart and was
noticeably inefficient by modern standards. The slag, or byproduct,
of these primitive furnaces contained a substantial concentration
of iron, since the furnaces could not reach temperatures
high enough to extract all the iron from the ore. The slag that
McDonnell discovered at Laskill, however, was low in iron content,
similar to slag produced by a modern blast furnace.
McDonnell believes that the monks were on the verge of building
dedicated furnaces for the large-scale production of cast
iron—perhaps the key ingredient that ushered in the industrial
age—and that the furnace at Laskill had been a prototype of such
a furnace. “One of the key things is that the Cistercians had a regular
meeting of abbots every year and they had the means of sharing
technological advances across Europe,” he said. “The
break-up of the monasteries broke up this network of technology
transfer.” The monks “had the potential to move to blast furnaces
that produced nothing but cast iron. They were poised to do it on
a large scale, but by breaking up the virtual monopoly, Henry
VIII effectively broke up that potential.”31
Had it not been for a greedy king’s suppression of the English
monasteries, therefore, the monks appear to have been on the
verge of ushering in the industrial era and its related explosion in
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 37
wealth, population, and life expectancy figures. That development
would instead have to wait two and a half more centuries.
CHARITABLE WORKS
We shall look at the Church’s charitable works in more detail in
a separate chapter. For now we may simply note that Benedict’s
Rule called for the monks to dispense alms and hospitality.
According to the Rule, “All guests who come shall be received as
though they were Christ.” Monasteries served as gratuitous inns,
providing a safe and peaceful resting place for foreign travelers,
pilgrims, and the poor. An old historian of the Norman abbey of
Bec wrote: “Let them ask Spaniards or Burgundians, or any foreigners
whatever, how they have been received at Bec. They will
answer that the door of the monastery is always open to all, and
that its bread is free to the whole world.”32 Here was the spirit of
Christ at work, giving shelter and comfort to strangers of all kinds.
In some cases, the monks were even known to make efforts to
track down poor souls who, lost or alone after dark, found themselves
in need of emergency shelter. At Aubrac, for example,
where a monastic hospital had been established amid the mountains
of the Rouergue in the late sixteenth century, a special bell
rang every night to call to any wandering traveler or to anyone
overtaken by the intimidating forest darkness. The people
dubbed it “the bell of the wanderers.”33
In a similar vein, it was not unusual for monks living near the
sea to establish contrivances for warning sailors of perilous obstacles
or for nearby monasteries to make provision for shipwrecked
men in need of lodging. It has been said that the city of Copenhagen
owes its origin to a monastery established by its founder,
Bishop Absalon, which catered to the needs of the shipwrecked.
38 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
In Scotland, at Arbroath, the abbots fixed a floating bell on a
notoriously treacherous rock on the Forfarshire coast. Depending
on the tide, the rock could be scarcely visible, and many a sailor
had been frightened at the prospect of striking it. The waves
caused the bell to sound, thereby warning sailors of danger ahead.
To this day, the rock is known as “Bell Rock.”34 Such examples
constituted only a small part of the concern that monks showed
for the people who lived in their environs; they also contributed
to the building or repair of bridges, roads, and other such features
of the medieval infrastructure.
The monastic contribution with which many people are familiar
is the copying of manuscripts, both sacred and profane. This
task, and those who carried it out, were accorded special honor. A
Carthusian prior wrote, “Diligently labor at this work, this ought
to be the special work of enclosed Carthusians. . . . This work in a
certain sense is an immortal work, if one may say it, not passing
away, but ever remaining; a work, so to speak, that is not a work;
a work which above all others is most proper for educated religious
men.”35
THE WRITTEN WORD
Honored as it was, the copyist’s task was difficult and demanding.
Inscribed on one monastic manuscript are the words, “He
who does not know how to write imagines it to be no labor; but
though three fingers only hold the pen, the whole body grows
weary.” The monks often had to work through the most punishing
cold. A monastic copyist, imploring our sympathy upon completing
a copy of Saint Jerome’s commentary on the Book of
Daniel, wrote: “Good readers who may use this work, do not, I
pray you, forget him who copied it: it was a poor brother named
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 39
Louis, who, while he transcribed this volume, brought from a foreign
country, endured the cold, and was obliged to finish in the
night what he was not able to write by daylight. But Thou, Lord,
wilt be to him the full recompense of his labors.”36
In the sixth century, a retired Roman senator named Cassiodorus
had an early vision of the cultural role that the
monastery was to play. Sometime around the middle of the century,
he established the monastery of Vivarium in southern
Italy, providing it with a very fine library—indeed, the only
sixth-century library of which scholars are aware—and emphasizing
the importance of copying manuscripts. Some important
Christian manuscripts from Vivarium appear to have made their
way to the Lateran Library and into the possession of the
popes.37
Surprisingly, it is not to Vivarium, but to other monastic
libraries and scriptoria (the rooms set aside for the copying of
texts) that we owe the great bulk of ancient Latin literature that
survives today. When these works weren’t saved and transcribed
by the monks, we owe their survival to the libraries and schools
associated with the great medieval cathedrals.38 Thus, when the
Church was not making original contributions of her own, she
was preserving books and documents that were of seminal importance
to the civilization she was to save.
Describing the holdings at his library at York, the great
Alcuin—the polyglot theologian who worked closely with
Charlemagne to restore study and scholarship in west-central
Europe—mentioned works by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny,
Statius, Trogus Pompeius, and Virgil. In his correspondence he
quotes still other classical authors, including Ovid, Horace, and
Terence.39 Alcuin was far from alone in his familiarity with and
appreciation for the ancient writers. Lupus (c. 805–862), the
abbot of Ferrieres, can be found quoting Cicero, Horace, Martial,
40 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
Suetonius, and Virgil. Abbo of Fleury (c. 950–1004), who served
as abbot of the monastery of Fleury, demonstrates particular
familiarity with Horace, Sallust, Terence, and Virgil. Desiderius,
described as the greatest of the abbots of Monte Cassino after
Benedict himself and who became Pope (Blessed) Victor III in
1086, specifically oversaw the transcription of Horace and
Seneca, as well as Cicero’s De Natura Deorum and Ovid’s Fasti.40
His friend Archbishop Alfano, who had also been a monk of
Monte Cassino, possessed a similar fluency in the works of the
ancient writers, frequently quoting from Apuleius, Aristotle,
Cicero, Plato, Varro, and Virgil, and imitating Ovid and Horace
in his verse. Saint Anselm, while abbot of Bec, commended Virgil
and other classical writers to his students, though he wished them
to put aside morally objectionable passages.41
The great Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope
Sylvester II, did not confine himself to teaching logic; he also
brought to his students an appreciation of Horace, Juvenal,
Lucan, Persius, Terence, Statius, and Virgil. We hear of lectures
being delivered on the classical authors at places like Saint
Alban’s and Paderborne. A school exercise composed by Saint
Hildebert survives in which he had pieced together excerpts from
Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, Terence, and others;
John Henry Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth century’s great
convert from Anglicanism and an accomplished historian in his
own right, suggests that Saint Hildebert knew Horace practically
by heart.42 The fact is, the Church cherished, preserved, studied,
and taught the works of the ancients, which would otherwise
have been lost.
Certain monasteries might be known for their skill in particular
branches of knowledge. Thus, for example, lectures in medicine
were given by the monks of Saint Benignus at Dijon, the
monastery of Saint Gall had a school of painting and engraving,
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 41
and lectures in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic could be heard at certain
German monasteries.43
Monks often supplemented their education by attending one
or more of the monastic schools established during the Carolingian
Renaissance and beyond. Abbo of Fleury, having mastered
the disciplines taught at his own house, went to study philosophy
and astronomy at Paris and Rheims. We hear similar stories about
Archbishop Raban of Mainz, Saint Wolfgang, and Gerbert (Pope
Sylvester II).44
In the eleventh century, the mother monastery of the Benedictine
tradition, Monte Cassino, enjoyed a cultural revival, called
“the most dramatic single event in the history of Latin scholarship
in the eleventh century.”45 In addition to its outpouring of
artistic and intellectual endeavor, Monte Cassino renewed its
interest in the texts of classical antiquity:
At one swoop a number of texts were recovered which might
otherwise have been lost for ever; to this one monastery in this
one period we owe the preservation of the later Annals and
Histories of Tacitus (Plate XIV), the Golden Ass of Apuleius,
the Dialogues of Seneca, Varro’s De lingua latina, Frontinus’
De aquis, and thirty-odd lines of Juvenal’s sixth satire that are
not to be found in any other manuscript.46
In addition to their careful preservation of the works of the
classical world and of the Church fathers, both of which are central
to Western civilization, the monks performed another work
of immeasurable importance in their capacity as copyists: their
preservation of the Bible.47Without their devotion to this crucial
task and the numerous copies they produced, it is not clear how
the Bible would have survived the onslaught of the barbarians.
The monks often embellished the Gospels with beautiful artistic
42 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
decoration, as in the famous Lindau and Lindisfarne Gospels—
works of art as well as faith.
Throughout the history of monasticism we find abundant evidence
of the devotion of monks to their books. Saint Benedict
Biscop, for example, who established the monastery of Wearmouth
in England, searched far and wide for volumes for his
monastic library, embarking on five sea voyages for the purpose
(and coming back each time with a sizable cargo).48 Lupus asked
a fellow abbot for an opportunity to copy Suetonius’ Lives of the
Caesars, and implored another friend to bring him Sallust’s
accounts of the Catilinarian and Jugurthan Wars, the Verrines of
Cicero, and any other volume that might be of interest. He asked
to borrow Cicero’s De Rhetorica from another friend, and
appealed to the pope for a copy of Cicero’s De Oratore, Quintilian’s
Institutions, and other texts. Gerbert possessed a like
enthusiasm for books, offering to assist another abbot in completing
incomplete copies of Cicero and the philosopher Demosthenes,
and seeking copies of Cicero’s Verrines and De
Republica.49 We read that Saint Maieul of Cluny always had a
book in his hand when he traveled on horseback, so devoted was
he to reading. Likewise, Halinard, who served as abbot of Saint
Benignus at Dijon before becoming Archbishop of Lyons, followed
the same practice, recounting his particular fondness for
the philosophers of antiquity.50 “Without study and without
books,” said a monk of Muri, “the life of a monk is nothing.” Saint
Hugh of Lincoln, while prior at Witham, the first Carthusian
house in England, spoke similarly: “Our books are our delight
and our wealth in time of peace, our offensive and defensive arms
in time of war, our food when we are hungry, and our medicine
when we are sick.”51 Western civilization’s admiration for the
written word and for the classics comes to us from the Catholic
Church that preserved both through the barbarian invasions.
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 43
Although the extent of the practice varied over the centuries,
monks were teachers. Saint John Chrysostom tells us that already
in his day (c. 347–407) it was customary for people in Antioch to
send their sons to be educated by the monks. Saint Benedict
instructed the sons of Roman nobles.52 Saint Boniface established
a school in every monastery he founded in Germany, and in England
Saint Augustine and his monks set up schools wherever they
went.53 Saint Patrick is given credit for encouraging Irish scholarship,
and the Irish monasteries would develop into important
centers of learning, dispensing instruction to monks and laymen
alike.54
Most education for those who would not profess monastic
vows, however, would take place in other settings, and eventually
in the cathedral schools established under Charlemagne. But
even if the monasteries’ contribution to education had been
merely to teach their own how to read and write, that would have
been no small accomplishment. When the Mycenaean Greeks
suffered a catastrophe in the twelfth century B.C.—an invasion
by the Dorians, say some scholars—the result was three centuries
of complete illiteracy known as the Greek Dark Ages. Writing
simply disappeared amid the chaos and disorder. But the monks’
commitment to reading, writing, and education ensured that the
same terrible fate that had befallen the Mycenaean Greeks would
not be visited upon Europeans after the fall of the Roman Empire.
This time, thanks to the monks, literacy would survive political
and social catastrophe.
Monks did more than simply preserve literacy. Even an unsympathetic
scholar could write of monastic education: “They studied
the songs of heathen poets and the writings of historians and
philosophers. Monasteries and monastic schools blossomed forth,
and each settlement became a center of religious life as well as of
education.”55 Another unsympathetic chronicler wrote of the
44 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
monks, “They not only established the schools, and were the
schoolmasters in them, but also laid the foundations for the universities.
They were the thinkers and philosophers of the day and
shaped the political and religious thought. To them, both collectively
and individually, was due the continuity of thought and
civilization of the ancient world with the later Middle Ages and
with the modern period.”56
This treatment of the monks’ contributions barely scratches
the surface of an immense subject. In the 1860s and 1870s, when
the Comte de Montalembert wrote a six-volume history of the
monks of the West, he complained at times of his inability to provide
anything more than a cursory overview of great figures and
deeds, and could only refer his readers to the references in his
footnotes. The monastic contribution to Western civilization, as
we have seen, is immense. Among other things, the monks taught
metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved
literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved
the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe,
and looked after the lost and shipwrecked. Who else in the history
of Western civilization can boast such a record? The Church
that gave the West its monks also created the university, as we
will see in the next chapter.
HOW THE MONKS SAVED CIVILIZATION 45
Get your own copy of
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
For information, click or visit:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895260387/
ref=ase_regnerypublishin/103-4476520-6520607?v=glance&s=books