St. Augustine of Hippo--August 28

     There are few saints whose lives have been considered from more angles than St. Augustine’s. I was reminded recently of one aspect of Augustine’s legacy—his enormous influence on Christian theology. I’ve been (very slowly) working my way through Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. (The title’s not a misprint, by the way—MacCulloch begins the story of Christianity with an exploration of Greek culture and of the story of the Jews, both of which are rooted in times long before the appearance of Jesus on the scene.)

      MacCulloch notes that beginning around 1490, the first scholarly edition of St. Augustine’s works was published in Basel. St. Augustine himself had died over a millennium before, but this was a time in which the combination of a new approach to learning (that we call humanism) and the development of printing led to widespread new consideration of ancient texts. In the decades that followed, theologians mined Augustine’s thought. The saint’s writings are so vast in scope, and his thought at times so paradoxical (if not self-contradictory) that the new thinkers tended not to be able to hold together all that Augustine seems to have held together in his own mind.

      MacCulloch quotes B. B. Warfield, a historian of theology: “The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.” Martin Luther and the reformers followed the bishop of Hippo’s insistence on God’s grace as the sole font of our salvation; Catholic theologians emphasized the need to be connected to the Church. “From one perspective,” MacCulloch concludes, “a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.”
                                                                             --Andy Bechman

St. Benedict of Nursia--July 11

      On Wednesday next week, we celebrate the feastday of St. Benedict of Nursia, brother of St. Scholastica.  The only source we have for either Benedict or Scholastica is the Dialogues of Pope St. Gregory the Great, written about sixty years after Benedict’s life.  In the Dialogues, Pope Gregory focused mainly on Benedict as a wonderworker, but reported other stories about his life.

      Benedict was born in central Italy around 480 a.d., studied in Rome, and took up the life of a hermit at Subiaco.  Others gathered around him and he began a career of experimentation in the monastic life.  His first attempt to lead a monastery reportedly ended with the other monks, put off by  his high standards, trying to poison him! In another experiment, he founded twelve small monasteries near Subiaco before finally founding a single large monastery at Monte Cassino near Naples. 

      A monastic rule attributed to him describes itself as a rule for beginners, a “school of the Lord’s service, in which we hope to order nothing harsh or rigorous.”  (Perhaps he had learned from his first attempt to lead a monastery!) The rule promoted a balanced life of common prayer, study and manual labor, lived in community under an abbot.  The number of monasteries living under the rule grew slowly during the centuries following Benedict, until centralizing efforts under Charlemagne made his rule the dominant one in Western Europe.  The Rule is still in use in many monasteries today, and Christians continue to mine it for spiritual insights.

      When Benedict died among his monks around the year 547, he was buried in the same grave as his sister Scholastica.

                                                 

Sources: 

“Benedict,” The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 3^rd ed., Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel John (Penguin, 1995)

“July 11: St. Benedict,” Saint of the Day, American Catholic, http://www.americancatholic.org/features/saints/saint.aspx?id=1441

"Rule of St. Benedict" and "St. Benedict of Nursia" in The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Richard P. McBrien, ed. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).