St. Augustine's Church (Bronx)

Transcription

Thomas: Perhaps nowhere on earth has ther e ever been a gr oup of people more versatile than the monks of Eur ope. They were physicians and scholars and agriculturists and inventors. And they, perhaps mor e than any other gr oup, are responsible for helping to save Western civilization. Let's talk about that today on The Catholic Chur ch: Builder of Civilization. (music) Welcome once again to The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization. I'm Thomas Woods. Today, it's the monks, the monks who helped to save Western civilization. Now, there's a small publishing industry out ther e of books called "How So and So Saved Civilization," and this group saved it and that group saved it. The monks deserve this title, ladies and gentlemen, the monks. Even the Irish, who are sometimes cr edited with saving civilization, did so in large part because of their monks. Who wer e these people, after all, these monks? Well, I don't want to assume any prior knowledge. Who are the monks and what are they doing and how did they save Western civilization? We already see in the 3rd century a tradition wher eby women religious, we would call them, began to live together and share the same spiritual and prayer life and dedicated themselves to the care of the poor and the sick so it's very easy to see in that the tradition of convents and the life of the nun. Also in the 3rd century, we see a tradition among men to be hermits. The hermits were people who forsook everything, who pursed absolute solitude in order better to commune with God and to hear Him and to pray to Him. St. Anthony of the Desert, in the mid-third century, was a classic example of this. He lived to be over 100 years old and he went out to the deserts of Egypt. The hermits, typically, lived completely alone. They would gather on Sundays to worship God but otherwise, they kept to themselves. They tended small vegetable gardens to support themselves or they made baskets, but otherwise, theirs was a life of extreme solitude. Now, in a certain sense, this is all well and good and the Chur ch has never altogether repudiated the tradition of hermit life. In fact, She has had a Pope who was a hermit... in the 1290s, Pope Celestine V. But right away, ther e were critics of the hermit's life, because the hermit, who lived apart from anyone who could provide him spiritual guidance, sometimes engaged in spiritual practices that were, well, rather questionable. Some of them engaged in, shall we say, penances that were exaggerated. Or some of them would go out of their way to wait until food rotted before they would eat. This type of thing would go on. And a good many Catholics began to argue that this is not a healthy thing, this is not what God intends, this is not what Christ is calling you to. For example, in the Christian East, St. Basil the Great r epeatedly said that the life of the hermit is not the Christian one, ideally, because what we should be doing is living among our fellow human beings, ideally. That would be the best solution. The monks should live in solitude, but in a sense, a kind of communal solitude with other monks, with other people who have, in effect, retreated fr om the world. Now, it's important to understand the monks ar e not saying that the world is evil, therefore, we retreat fr om it. Or that, spaghetti and meatballs and an ice cr eam sundaes ar e all evil, so ther efore, I want to deprive myself of them and eat more simply. To the contrary! Because Catholics believe in the goodness of the cr eated world, what the monks are saying is that the world is wonderful! It's a great thing! It's filled with a great many delights, and that's why it's such a sacrifice for us to give them up, to show how much we love God. One of my friends has sometimes explained it this way. "It's one thing to bring flowers for your wife. "It's quite another to bring her flowers on a rainy, miserable day when she knows it was just an unbelievable ordeal for you to get those flowers and get back in the car and keep the vase from spilling over in the car." I've had plenty of experience with this, folks! This is exactly why the monks made sacrifices... to show how much they loved God. In the West, it was a man named St. Benedict who argued that we need to have monks who live in a single place and they live together and they have the same spiritual r egimen and they live under the authority of an abbot. St. Benedict composed something called The Rule of St. Benedict which was, in effect, an outline for how a monastery should be run. He wrote this around 529. And with the passage of time, this became the model for organizing monasteries. A monastery, of course, is where the monks live. St. Benedict argued that the monks should live penitential lives, it's true - but not lives that ar e so penitential that it would disrupt their spiritual lives. We don't want that. We want them to live at the material level of about the average Italian peasant... that would be acceptable. They should get adequate sleep; they shouldn't do too much physical labor. They should be moderate in all things... physical labor, at prayer and study... nothing out of moderation. The monasteries in Ireland were quite another story. There, the model, in effect, was working 14 hours a day doing back-breaking labor and then coming in and praying all the psalms. This, it seemed to St. Benedict, was too much... that you couldn't live a healthy spiritual life if you were being that rigorous with your physical body. Now, it should be mentioned, by the way, that the Irish monasteries attracted people fr om all over. They couldn't house them all. So they must have been doing something right. But it was St. Benedict's model. It was flexible and it seemed to understand human natures very well. It turns out that St. Benedict and his monks played an essential r ole in saving Western civilization at a critical moment and building up important parts of it. And yet I will never forget, in my days as a professor in New York, after telling my class all about the monks and all the things they had done, I actually had a student say to me, "That's very interesting. Are there any monks today?" Well, that's just depressing, right, that she did n't even know there were still monks today. So of course, I told her, "Not only ar e ther e monks, I've got a million friends who are monks. "I realize that is perhaps somewhat unusual but I have a gr eat many friends who are monks!" And let me tell you something... living in Manhattan as I did while I was getting my doctorate, you find that just about anything can go on in Manhattan and nobody car es. Nobody's looking at you. You can have a weird haircut and nobody cares. You can be on fire and nobody cares. But I had a friend of mine who was on his way to becoming a monk... he hadn't taken his vows yet... and he came and visited me in his habit. We went out for nachos at a local place. I'll tell you, people will look away at anything but if you'r e having nachos with a monk, they cannot take their eyes off it, apparently. This is just a bizarre sight, even for Manhattan. So unfortunately, the monks don't have the high profile they once did. But deserve our respect, because, after all, what did the monks accomplish? Well, for one thing, apart fr om just copying texts... which we all know they did, they did that laboriously... but they did also a lot of physical labor. For example, they cleared and reclaimed all kinds of land in Western Eur ope. Because what often happened is that people wanted to donate land to the monks as a good work! "That's wonderful! Look at what I'm doing for the monks!" But people would typically give the monks really crummy land. They'd want to help them, but they didn't want to help them that much! So the monks often found themselves having to deal with land nobody wanted. A lot times it was swamp land. In those days, I mean, obvious, a swamp has no value. It's just a source of pestilence. The monks would dike and drain the swamp and make it into fertile land. A great many experts on the history of agriculture in Western Europe, for example have said, "We owe agricultural restoration of a gr eat part of Europe to the monks." Another one said... And finally, every Benedictine monastery was an agricultural college for the whole r egion in which it was located. The monks intr oduced crops and industries and pr oduction methods that people had n't known before and they weren't afraid to work with their hands at a time when manual labor was looked down upon and despised. The monks wer e inspired to engage in physical labor because they knew, for one thing, that when you engage in hard, physical labor, this can be a great form of penance and an opportunity for the mortification of the flesh. So sure, they wer e thrilled to work with the swamp that nobody else wanted to do. So at a time when you were despised for doing physical labor, the monks, in effect, made it something honorable. At a time when agriculture was collapsing, the monks' labor helped to bring it back. The monks wer e involved in rearing cattle and horses, br ewing beer, raising bees and fruit. All over Europe, they introduced essential aspects of local economies. For example, in Sweden, it was the corn trade that owed its existence to the monks; in Parma, cheese making; in Ireland, salmon fisheries; and in a gr eat many place, the finest vineyards. The monks wer e also intensely practical in that they stored up the waters fr om springs in order that they could distribute them if a drought ever struck. In Lombardy, the peasants learned irrigation from the monks. The monks have also been credited with being the first to work toward impr oving breeds of cattle instead of just leaving the pr ocess to chance. So there's agricultural labor from the monks at a critical time in European history. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the monks show up and do all this critical work. Beyond that, the monks pioneered in machinery and mechanization. The ancient world of Greece and Rome was not particularly heavily mechanized. But Europe of the Middle Ages changed all that. Particularly the Cistercians - which ar e a reform-minded group of monks from the late 11 th century... they build water-powered factories at hundr eds of their 742 monasteries around by the 12th century. They used water power for all kinds of purposes... for crushing wheat and fulling cloth and tanning-far mor e mechanized wer e they than anything that had ever been seen in Eur ope up to that time. They were also great metallurgists. They used the slag from their furnaces as fertilizer. So they were constantly thinking of practical things they could do for the life of Eur ope. And they instructed Europeans as to how they themselves could do these things. They were also technologically advanced in practical things like clocks. The first clock we have any record of was built by the futur e Pope Sylvester II in 996. But much more sophisticated clocks were built in the 14th century. But it's not just clocks and it's not just agriculture. It's charity and education and inventiveness... all things we're going to look as soon as we come back from the break. So join me after the break and let's talk mor e about these monks. (music) (music) Welcome back to The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization. I'm Thomas Woods and we're talking about the monks today, and their unsung heroism in helping to build and even save Western civilization at critical moments. Let me give you a little quotation from a Fr ench scholar writing about the achievements of the monks, because this sums it up in terms of their practical contributions. He writes... In fact, even today, we're still only beginning to appreciate fully the extent of monastic technological cleverness. In the late 1990's an archeo-metallurgist at the University of Bradford, named Jerry McDonald, found evidence in North Yorkshire, England of a degree of technological sophistication that pointed ahead to the great machines of the 18th century Industrial Revolution. He found that the monks had built a furnace to extract ir on from or e. Now, in the 16th century, which is the period that McDonald is looking at, 16th century England, the typical one of these furnaces in the 16th century had not advanced very far over its ancient counterpart. It was very inefficient. The slag... another word for the by-prod uct of these primitive furnaces... had a very substantial concentration of iron in it because they couldn't get to high enough temperatures to get all of the iron out of the or e. So the left-over still had a lot of iron in it. But McDonald found that what he was investigating was that in fact, the monks in England had in fact built a furnace where the slag was low in ir on content. They were somehow able to get to high enough temperatures to get mor e and mor e of the ir on out of it... very similar to a modern blast furnace today. So McDonald says that monks were on the verge of building dedicated furnaces for the large-scale pr oduction of cast iron. This is the key ingr edient, perhaps, that ushered in the Industrial Age. And he says that the furnace that he investigated in England was a prototype of such a furnace. Now, what ended up happening to that? Why didn't they develop all these big furnaces? Why do we just see this one prototype? Well, remember this is the 16th century in England. What's King Henry VIII up to? Well, he's closing down monasteries and confiscating their property so as to reward his well-connected friends. And so Henry VIII helped to destroy this outstanding example of cr eativity on the part of the monks. Thank you very much, Henry VIII! We'll have time to talk about you in a futur e episode. But we also now have charitable work. Now, charitable work we're going to spend a whole episode on but I want to at least pause and say something about the monks' specific contributions to charity. The Rule of St. Benedict called for the monastery to dispense alms and hospitality to whatever extent its means permitted. Specifically, it instructed monasteries that all guests who come shall be received as though they were Christ. Now, the monasteries served as free inns where foreign travelers and pilgrims and the poor could find a safe resting place. I love this quotation fr om an old historian of the Norman abbey of Bec. He says... In some cases, the monks were even known to make efforts to track down poor souls who, being lost or alone after dark, found themselves in need of emergency shelter. They established contrivances for warning sailors of perilous obstacles. Or in fact, near-by monasteries often made pr ovision for shipwr ecked men in need of lodging. All these were typical contributions of the monks. They also built up the medieval infrastructure... built and r epaired roads and bridges. But as part of their charitable work, they wer e also gr eat physicians for their day. In fact, it was the Church that helped to create the hospital in the first place. But the monks went even further because ther e weren't hospitals everywhere but there were a lot of monasteries. Initially, the monks pr ovided medical care to their fellow monks. But as time went on, they realized that they possessed a critical skill that local townspeople also needed. So oftentimes they would go out into the local towns and seek out sick people who were in need of their medical care. Again, I would say that is a fairly unsung aspect of the monastic contribution. But in addition to being great physicians and agriculturists and inventors, they wer e also great educators. St. John Chrysostom tells us it was already in his day... around the 4th century... it was alr eady customary for people in Antioch to send their sons to be educated by the monks. St. Boniface established a school in every monastery he founded in Germany. In England, St. Augustine - and here we're talking not about St. Augustine of Hippo but St. Augustine of Canterbury... St. Augustine and his monks set up schools wherever they went. St. Patrick is given credit for encouraging Irish scholarship. And of course, the Irish monasteries developed into very important centers of learning and they dispensed instruction to monks and laymen alike. Now, sometimes it's been said that the monks did engage in some education but they wer e really only educating their fellow monks. Well, that's, as we've seen, not entirely true. There are plenty of cases we have on record of the monks pr oviding education to people in the local area. But let us say that accusation is true. Let's even grant it, for the sake of argument. Let's say the monastery's contribution had simply been to teach other monks how to read and write... that's all it was. Well, even if that had been their only contribution, that would have been no small accomplishment, because consider what happened in the Gr eek Dark Ages. Now, people have typically forgotten about this but it's very important. Fr om about 1100-800 B.C., we had something called the Greek Dark Ages. What happened here was that they Mycenaean Gr eeks had some kind of a terrible disaster befall them. The nature of that disaster is still debated. But something terrible happened to these people and when the smoke had cleared, for the next 300 years we find that in effect, the ancient Greeks, the Mycenaean Greeks had lost literacy. They had lost the ability to read and write. You wonder, "How could you lose the ability to read and write? How could you forget that?" Well, partly it happened because people wer e scattered following whatever disaster it was that befell and they had to think solely of their own survival. Learning how to read and write was not exactly critical when you just needed food and sustenance. Secondly, it's been speculated that maybe whatever disaster struck the Mycenaean Greeks, struck in particular the educated classes so that those who would have remembered literacy were, in fact, wiped out. Well, whatever the explanation, the fact is they lost literacy at a time of general civilizational collapse. Well, let's r emember that the monks were functioning and carrying out all these wonderful tasks I've described at a time in Western European history that is very similar. There was general collapse, ther e was political disorder, there was an abandonment of education by and large, there was an abandonment of urban life. That was the environment in which the monks functioned. And so even if all they had done was to keep literacy alive, well, that's very important, because that means they prevented a repeat of the Greek Dark Ages, when literacy was lost. Thanks to the monasteries, literacy was not lost but Western Europe managed to hang to it. That's no small contribution, is it? In fact, the contributions of the monks have been so great that even scholars who are inclined to be unsympathetic to them have conceded it. I've always tried to go out of my way when I've written about Catholic history to cite not only non-Catholics, but anti-Catholics when possible, so that people won't come back and say that I'm just picking and choosing among my sour ces. When people who don't even like the Catholic Church are saying, "Okay, okay, the monks did a lot," that says something. So for example, one unsympathetic scholar said... That's no small compliment. A century ago, another historian said, "It was the monks and they alone who carried to a successful issue the tremendous undertaking of mollifying the rampant invader, softening the rudeness of his manners and the harshness of his spirit, familiarizing him with the restraints of Christian morality and bringing home to him with convincing power the necessity of observing the fundamental principles of law and order, instructing him in the use of arts and industry and social progress. "In a word, of assimilating, civilizing and Christianizing 20-odd Barbarian tribes," many of which, by the way, were very impr essed with the morality and the conviction of the monks. They were very moved by their witness. A Protestant historian says... Now, these ar e critics of the monks. You can only imagine what their friends have to say. These are their critics. Here is the monastic contribution. And you'll notice that in this brief overview, I've not even mentioned... or at least hardly so... the contributions they made to the literatur e of the Western world by preserving ancient classics and indeed the Bible itself, thr ough laborious copy. Because that is the one thing that is conceded to us - the monks did this. But I wanted to show is they did so much else in so many areas, one can hardly even believe it. Now, today we touched briefly on the subject of charity because we saw the monks as great dispensers of charity. "Guests are to be treated as if they are Christ Himself." Well, that is a small part of the story of Catholic charity, which will occupy next time. Catholic charity is one of these areas in which people will concede the Catholic Church has done wonderful things. But what I want to suggest to you is that even we Catholics don't realize just how great Catholic charity is. It's a far more extraordinary story than even we believe. So join me next time on The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization. See you then. (music)