By JUDE DOUGHERTY
The fall issue of Modern Age bears the title of “Christianity and Politics From the Reformation to the Benedict Option.” The term “Benedict option” entered the vocabulary of academic discourse when Alasdair MacIntyre in 1981 ended his book, After Virtue, with the judgment, [Given the moral condition of Europe], “we are not waiting for Godot but for – doubtless — a very different St. Benedict.”
No one questions the fundamental contribution of the Benedictines to the preservation of classical learning nor questions the order’s contribution to the civilization characteristic of the West. The distinguished Renaissance scholar, Paul Oskar Kristeller, in an essay, “The Contribution of Religious Orders to Renaissance Thought and Learning,” expressed it this way: “If we were to take away the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, not only the theology but nearly the entire intellectual movement of the Carolingian age and centuries following would seem to disappear.”
Benedict is more than a symbol. His Regula Monasticism, created in the spirit of Cicero’s De Officiis and Augustine’s De Opere Monarch, by enjoining a life of intellectual and manual labor, spoke to the dignity of labor when manual labor was thought to be the lot of the slave. Lynn White Jr. has said of the Benedictines that they were the first intellectuals in the history of the West to get dirt under their fingernails, implying that the monasteries were the first institutions in the West to bring theory and practice, science and technology, under one roof, to the advancement of the servile arts.
A very different form of leadership may be needed now, one may say, in the spirit of Pope Urban II (1035-1099). Born Odo of Chatillon-sur-Marne, France, the future Urban studied at Soissons and Reims, became a Benedictine, subsequently a Carthusian, then prior of Cluny, and before his election, bishop of Ostia. Following the brief reign of Victor III (1085-1087), he devoted his papacy to the continuation of the structural Church reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII.
Significantly, he provided papal support to those forces dedicated to driving the Moors out of Spain and at the Council of Claremont (1095), he preached the First Crusade which successfully retook the City of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Islamic control.
Today a state of cultural and political disorder exists within the European Union, so much so that it seems incapable of defending itself against an Islamic invasion from the East and North Africa. “Migration” is the word used to describe the influx, but the better word may be “invasion” because those seeking residence are of an alien culture, and prefer to retain their own ways rather than become absorbed into what was formerly called “Christendom.”
It may be in the words of Charles Murray, “Europe’s run is over,” that Europe has surrendered to the demands of an international cosmopolitan elite and surrendered its identity. But perhaps not, given recent election returns in Bavaria, Poland, and Hungary, among other nations. One statesman stands out in the mold of Urban, namely Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.
In his Christmas Address of December 27, 2017, Orban began with the judgment, “Whether or not we admit it or realize it, we Europeans exist in a culture centered in line with the teachings of Christ. We Hungarians rightly regard ourselves as a Christian nation . . . . [F]or a thousand years our Christian essence and our living faith has kept us in the heart of Europe. . . . When we draw the boundaries of our identity, we mark out Christian culture as the source of our pride and sustaining strength. Christianity is a culture and a civilization. It is within this that we live.”
“The fundamental elements of European life are now under attack,” he goes on to say. “There is now a threat to the self-evident character of European life: those things one should not think deeply about, but on which one only has to act. . . . Those who promise a beautiful, new mixed world do not want us to be what we are; they want us to become something which we do not want to be. They want us to mix together with peoples from another world, and so the process will be smooth, they want us to change.”
Prime Minister Orban does not provide a full description of the “they,” but Julien Benda nearly a century ago provided a lasting one. In La trahison des clercs, he makes the case that the most serious form of anarchy is the treason of the intellectuals. Benda uses the term “clerc” to designate as a class, writers, men of learning, artists, moralists, and churchmen. They are by vocation the officiants of time transcendent standards relevant to their calling. They become traitors when they abandon objectivity, or display a special affinity for the group with which they identify.
Benda does not emphasize the point, but it is evident that intellectuals are as vulnerable to irrationality and sentimentality as the most ignorant. All this is well known.
Europe apart, what does the future portend for the United States? If anti-Christian forces are not to totally prevail, a strong defense of the nation’s founding principles will have to take hold. The nation is not without its clear voices raised on behalf of the common good and in defense of biblical morality, but they are dampened to the status of a feeble whisper by a hostile media.
The story of how the major organs of communication in this country have fallen into the hands of an anti-Christian left, and how a progressive deep state has been put into place, has yet to reach public consciousness. Amplifying the voice of common sense will not be easy, given the corporate control of major media.
Even so, one is prompted to ask, is the public educated enough to understand what is at stake as the nation abandons the principles upon which its culture, indeed, its civilization has been built? In Hungary, Viktor Orban may count on a sufficient segment of the populace to respect the sources of its native culture, but it is not clear that the building blocks are in place on this side of the Atlantic for a statesman of similar oratorical skill, let alone an Urban II, to emerge.
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