Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740-1803.
Gregory, Brad S.
ENLIGHTENED MONKS: THE GERMAN BENEDICTINES, 1740-1803. By Ulrich L.
Lehner. New York: Oxford University, 2011. Pp. viii + 266. $99.
This erudite book, the winner of the 2011 John Gilmary Shea Prize
of the American Catholic Historical Association, makes a valuable
contribution to the burgeoning historiography on religion and the
Enlightenment in Europe. More specifically it adds to the growing
scholarship on the Catholic Enlightenment, a historiographical topic and
historical reality once largely regarded as all but oxymoronic. Lehner
offers a synthetic social, cultural, and intellectual overview of
Benedictine monks in southern and central Germany, Switzerland, and
Austria in the three generations before the end of the Reichskirche and
confiscation of monastic property in 1803, as they differentially
adopted and adapted new ideas and social behaviors during decades marked
by both vitality and multiple challenges. Through patient
reconstructions and descriptive case studies, L. understatedly
demolishes largely unexamined assumptions about alleged antitheses
between Benedictine monasticism and Enlightenment ideas, practices, and
institutions. Based on a vast range of printed primary sources in German
and Latin and on archival research in more than 20 different archives
and libraries, the book also synthesizes a great many specialized
studies (mostly in German) about 18th-century Benedictines. No scholar
interested in early modern monasticism or Catholicism, the Catholic or
German enlightenments, or religion and the Enlightenment can afford to
overlook this book. A brief review cannot do it justice.
By the 18th century, Benedictine establishments had existed in
central Europe for a millennium. In contrast to the mendicant orders and
the Jesuits, the Benedictines' decentralized organization and
openness to different theological traditions meant that Enlightenment
influences could and did affect monastic life depending on the policies
of individual abbots in the approximately 150 monasteries of the regions
covered in L.'s study. Enlightened ideas also influenced the
University of Salzburg, which had been established by a confederation of
Benedictine abbeys in 1618, and in the 18th century became "the
first German university to include experimental physics in its
curriculum" (176). Seven of the book's nine chapters address
ways men vowed to a deeply traditional way of religious life, one
renewed in significant respects in the wake of the Council of Trent
(1545-1563), responded to different yet related "challenges."
The self-conscious Benedictine reaction to these challenges varied
monastery by monastery and was subject to multiple contingencies. The
book makes clear that by the 1780s and 1790s more and more houses were
being affected.
L. devotes four chapters to challenges posed by new conceptions of
history and historical research, "lifestyle," individual
freedom and autonomy, and forms of communication, and three chapters to
intellectual challenges arising from law, philosophy, and theology.
Finally he concludes with a chapter on monastic prisons and another on
case studies of "runaway monks," including runaway Abbot Anton
Boehm.
This book deeply contextualizes intellectual and religious history.
One of its great virtues is the way it combines monastic responses to
new historical, legal, philosophical, and theological ideas with
concrete attention to monastic material culture, social practices, and
institutional innovations. L.'s anecdotes about, e.g., changes in
monastic dress, diet, routines of prayer, recreation, travel, social
interactions with those outside the monastic community (including
women), and living accommodations give the impression of a virtual
cultural revolution in multiple Benedictine houses in the second half of
the 18th century. L. is alert to the ways the increasing exchange of
ideas, books, and monks themselves in central Europe and beyond affected
inherited commitments to stabilitas and routines of prayer:
"Enlightenment communication challenged the traditional way of
Benedictine life because the monks' participation marginalized not
only the silence of the cloister (instead it emphasized communication as
a virtue) but also introduced a new emphasis on individual achievements
and new patterns of self-presentation" (80-81).
German Benedictines established major historical-critical projects
(inspired by the French Maurists), participated in learned societies,
contributed to (and in some cases founded) academic journals, conducted
scientific experiments, expressed disdain for Scholasticism and
enthusiasm for the ideas of Locke, Wolff, and Kant, and embarked on
theological experiments in ecumenism (Beda Mayr) and religious
toleration (Benedict Werkmeister). Throughout, L. commendably provides
many individual examples and descriptive stories to illustrate his
points.
The book ends rather abruptly with the forced dissolution of German
monastic life in 1803 and a three-page conclusion, a third of which
summarizes the book's chapters. It perhaps seems intellectually
greedy to have hoped for more at the end of this original and important
book, just as one might have hoped for more substantive conclusions at
the end of individual chapters, some of which lack even a summary
paragraph. But the desire for more is a function of the extraordinary,
enlightening materials that L. presents. More analysis throughout and in
a longer conclusion would only have enhanced his reconstructive
descriptions and wide-ranging synthesis.
BRAD S. GREGORY
University of Notre Dame
