Customer Reviews

The Life of Saint Benedict

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At first glance the choice of eminent American Benedictine commentator Fr Terrence Kardong as author for a new translation and commentary on the Life of St Benedict is an odd one.

He did after all, decline altogether to draw on the Life as means of illuminating the Rule in his own commentary on the Rule of St Benedict.

And in 2004 he authored an article in Cistercian Studies Quarterly endorsing the Francis Clark's conspiracy theory to the effect that the Life was in fact a fake.

Clark's work, to the extent that it ever had any credibility (which is doubtful), has now been comprehensively debunked, as Kardong acknowledges in this book. So is this work then, offered by way of atonement? Sadly, no.

Having tried first ignoring, and then dismissing altogether, the value of the Life, Fr Kardong now embarks on a third means of marginalizing the importance of what has traditionally been regarded as one of the foundational documents of the Benedictine Order.

The reasons for his dislike of the text are not hidden: as the introduction makes clear, he hates its miracles. And, also dislikes, one gathers from the commentary, the rather 'rigid' approach to the interpretation of the Rule that those miracles support.

Even while acknowledging in places that the historicity of the Life is hard to reject given St Gregory's careful citation of his sources and provision of corroborating detail, Kardong treats the work as literature, not history.

Take for example his discussion of St Benedict's decision to abandon his studies in Rome. Although Kardong mentions some of the recent studies on St Anthony's learning, he fails altogether to draw out the distinctions made at the time between the completion of the classical curriculum and choice of other less formal but more Christianized forms of learning. Neither does he make any mention of the decay in systems of study that Benedict's contemporaries Boethius and Cassiodorus both attempted to counter in different ways. Nor does he provide any context on the well documented moral decay of contemporary Rome that St Gregory tells us prompted the decision to leave the city.

Surely the greatest problem with this commentary though, is that Kardong fails altogether to see the providential dimension of St Benedict's life.

Instead of a symbolic move from the hidden cave and depths of the valley of Subiaco to the light shining out from Montecassino that St Gregory suggests for example (and the current Pope has also pointed to), the move is portrayed purely in terms of the moral and spiritual growth of the saint.

There is nothing unusual about Fr Kardong's approach to the Life. The miracles that dominate the Life of St Benedict by St Gregory the Great have been regarded with suspicion ever since rationalism and modernism became fashionable in the nineteenth century. And this work is entirely consistent with the marginalization of the person of St Benedict, in the context of a reductionist view of history that sees it as something altogether separate from God's plan for his Church, that has been a consistent feature of American Benedictine thought in particular over the last forty years.

Still, it is disappointing to see this hermeneutic of rupture and discontinuity continuing to be perpetuated at a time when Pope Benedict XVI is urging the recovery of the Church's patrimony.

Benedictine oblates and others committed to the hermeneutic of continuity in the Church would do well to look to the older biographies of St Benedict and translations of this work rather than to this one.

But if you too hate miracles, this is the version of the text for you...

Brief, lucid translation of Gregory the Great's biography of Benedict, to which the author adds many explanations that help cut through Gregory's hagiography.

This is the only information we have on St. Benedict. This work is an outstanding example of writing on Saints, in the early Church, by Fathers of the Church. The style aims to provide inspiration and this book does!