The ‘Black Monks’, known since the 14th century as the Order of St Benedict (OSB). The order consists of a large number of monastic communities and federations which follow the Rule of St Benedict (see Benedict of Nursia), but it is to be distinguished from monastic bodies such as the Cistercians which, while retaining the Rule, broke away from the mainstream of Benedictinism to form autonomous orders.
JAMES W. McKINNON
When Benedict composed his Rule (c530) for the monastery of Monte Cassino, he could hardly have foreseen that it would become the universal norm for Western monasticism; or indeed that Benedictine monasticism was to play so central a role in the development of European civilization that historians today refer to the period between the 8th and the 12th centuries as the ‘Benedictine centuries’.
The first of these historical triumphs was substantially complete by the time of Charlemagne (d 812), who recognized no other monastic rule within his realm. The process by which it took place is not traceable in every detail. For example, there is no evidence supporting the tradition that the Rule came to the Roman monasteries after the destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards in 577, and that it was brought from Rome to England when Pope Gregory sent Augustine of Canterbury (supposedly a Benedictine) there in 596 (see Brechter; Knowles, 2/1963, p.17). There is more substantial evidence for the parts played by later figures such as Benedict Biscop (d 690) and Boniface (d 754); in any event it is now generally assumed that the Rule, by virtue of its sheer quality, was gradually accepted as equal to the more venerable rules that it eventually superseded.
However, from the viewpoint of the Carolingian desire for uniformity the Rule had one defect: it was designed for Monte Cassino alone and had no provisions for assuring uniform observance among many monasteries. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious (d 840), who shared his father’s desire for unity, found an energetic ally in the monk Benedict of Aniane (d 821). In 817 Louis appointed him president of a council of abbots at Aachen which drew up legislation designed to supplement the Rule with numerous specific regulations and to provide for their observance.
Benedict’s grand scheme was not to be realized, owing to the chaotic conditions of his time which deteriorated further with the Scandinavian incursions of the later 9th century. However, reforms similar to his achieved spectacular success in the following centuries. Cluny, founded in 910, was ruled by a series of brilliant abbots and by the 11th century came to preside over a quasi-feudal network of nearly 1000 monastic houses. Similar ‘orders’ were organized under other abbeys, including Bec in Normandy and Gorze in the Rhineland.
Nearly all monasteries, whether federated or autonomous, adopted the Cluniac way of life. This was far removed from the simple monasticism of Benedict of Nursia, where a community of lay monks devoted their time to manual labour, the recitation of the Office, and very basic spiritual reading. The later monks were priests rather than lay brothers; they had abandoned the practice of manual labour and devoted themselves almost exclusively to the performance of an immensely elaborate Office. Their churches were no longer the simple oratories of Benedict's time but towering stone structures that inspired the early 12th-century Cluniac Raol Grabar to speak of ‘the white mantle of churches which the world put on’. Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture was in fact a Benedictine architecture, as can be witnessed today in countless churches ranging from the exquisite Ste Foy of Conques, France, to the mighty English cathedral of Durham. The portals, capitals and cloisters of churches like those at Autun, Moissac and Vézelay were adorned with sculpture of surpassing imagination, while the monks engaged in copying manuscripts developed their craft into a major art form.
The order counted among its ranks many of the most learned men of the time, for example, Lanfranc, Anselm and Abelard, who fulfilled the promise of Carolingian Benedictines like Alcuin and Hrabanus Maurus. It provided the Church with its most brilliant bishops and at the same time exercised great influence in secular affairs, both by furnishing advisers for rulers, and acting as a feudal authority by virtue of its extensive territorial holdings. In fact Europe in about 1100 could, without exaggeration, be regarded as a Benedictine civilization.
Among the first signs that this hegemony was at an end was the breaking away of reform groups in the 11th and 12th centuries. Some, like the Camaldolese and the Carthusians, sought a return to the pre-Benedictine eremitical life, while others like the Vallombrosans and Cistercians wished only to revert to a primitive observance of the Rule. During the 12th and 13th centuries the leadership of the Black Monks was successfully challenged in many areas: for example, intellectual leadership with the rise of the universities, and artistic leadership with the undertaking of book illumination by urban workshops of lay artists.
In the 14th and 15th centuries the process of decline continued in spite of reform efforts like the establishment of the Italian Cassinese Congregation (1424) and of the Bursfeld Union in Westphalia (1434). Perhaps the most serious aspect of the decline was an increase in the practice of commendam, whereby a secular prelate or even a layman might hold the office and benefices of abbot without participating in the regular life of his monastery. Thus deprived of internal leadership, monasticism offered little resistance to the Protestant Reformation; by 1560 it had entirely disappeared in England, Switzerland, Holland and western Germany, and was severely weakened in France and central Europe. Yet in the 17th century the institution’s remarkable resilience was manifested in a revival best exemplified by the French congregations of St Vanne (1604) and St Maur (1621). The latter produced a century of scholars including Jean Mabillon, Luc d'Achéry and Bernard de Montfaucon, whose vast output in patristic philology and medieval history and whose critical method still command respect.
The climate of 18th-century rationalism was unhealthy for monasticism, and the French Revolution, together with the movement towards secularization in other Catholic countries, dealt it what appeared to be a death blow. By 1830 there were but a handful of monasteries, barely maintaining themselves, mostly in southern German-speaking areas. Then came the most remarkable of all monastic revivals. Within a few decades vigorous foundations sprang up, including Solesmes in France (1837) and Beuron in Germany (1868); the first American monastery was founded at Beatty, Pennsylvania, in 1846, and monasticism in Britain, after its tentative beginning at Downside in 1814, was flourishing by mid-century. The 19th-century renaissance maintained its momentum until after World War II, and by about 1960 Benedictinism was at its most flourishing since the 12th century, both with respect to numbers and to the quality of observance. Then came a blow from an unexpected quarter. The modern reform movement in Roman Catholicism, given impetus by the Second Vatican Council (1962), has called, in effect, for a purge of the medieval elements in the Church. Benedictine monasticism, even taking into account its adaptability, is essentially a medieval institution; in the decades since Vatican II it has been forced to engage in an exercise of self-questioning about the relevance of its mode of life for the present and the future.
The fortunes of Benedictine music have consistently followed the fortunes of general Benedictine history. During the ‘Benedictine centuries’ the order was in the forefront of musical development; during the later medieval period of decline it receded into the background, and in the 19th-century revival it achieved a dramatic restoration of Gregorian chant.
Benedictine musical history begins with the Rule; chapters 8–19 are devoted to the earliest concise and comprehensive description of the Office, including its daily horarium, the weekly ordering of the 150 psalms, and the occasions at which the various antiphons, responsories, hymns (ambrosiana), lessons and versicles were to be sung. The horarium was based on the Roman system which divided the day and the night into 12 hours each; at the latitude of Monte Cassino a day hour varied in length from about 45 minutes on 21 December to 75 minutes on 21 June. The first service, vigiliae (the later Matins), began shortly after the eighth hour (between 1.50 and 2.30 a.m.) during the winter cycle (from 1 November to Easter); during the summer cycle it began about an hour before dawn. The second service, matutini (the later Lauds), began at dawn. The first of the shorter services, Prime, began at sunrise, Terce at the beginning of the third hour, Sext at midday and None in the early afternoon. Vespers was recited about half an hour before sunset, and Compline at dusk, after a break for supper in the summer or a simple collation in winter. A point that has long troubled historians is the omission from the Rule of daily Mass, but recent commentators have found a satisfactory explanation for this in the fact that Benedict and his fellow monks were not priests.
The Benedictine Office must have taken from three to four hours to perform, considerably less time than that of the later Carolingian and Cluniac liturgies. The relatively primitive nature of 6th-century Monte Cassino has caused some to question whether the Office was actually sung there or whether it was merely recited. Watkin, after examining both the language of the Rule and the contemporary state of the chant, has argued convincingly that it was sung. He conceded nevertheless that liturgical music was far from being as important for Benedict as it was for later monasticism. It is clear that Benedict’s famous phrase ‘nihil operi Dei praeponatur’ (‘nothing is to be put before the work of God’; chap.43) means simply that a monk must stop whatever he is doing at the appointed time for the Office, and not, as was later suggested, that the Office is the single essential function of the monastic life.
Music did, however, come to occupy a place of enormous importance within Benedictinism. Two historical developments help to explain this. First, since Benedictinism came to be virtually synonymous with Western ecclesiastical culture, new musical achievements were necessarily Benedictine. Thus Benedictine monks were crucial to the development of the so-called Gregorian chant, which took place in Frankish lands of the 9th century, and they were responsible for copying many of the earliest notated chant manuscripts.
The second was an internal development: the change from the lay monk to the clerical choir monk. By Carolingian times Benedictine monasticism had abandoned manual labour, had accepted that monks were normally priests, and had come to regard the singing of the liturgy as its central task. This process, which can be observed in the Capitularies of Benedict of Aniane, reached its climax two centuries later in monastic centres like Cluny. By that time the singing of the liturgy must have required about eight hours on a normal day and considerably longer on Sundays and feast days. There were massive accretions to the original Benedictine liturgy. The daily conventual Mass, sung at Terce, was to be expected within a clerical monasticism, but a second Mass, usually for the dead, was added after Prime, and eventually yet another in honour of the Blessed Virgin. Before Matins were sung the 15 ‘gradual psalms’; after Prime the seven penitential psalms and the litany; and after all the Hours psalmi familiares on behalf of monastic patrons. By the 9th century an Office of the Dead was added, consisting of Matins, Lauds and Vespers; by the late 10th century an Office of All Saints, comprising Lauds and Vespers; and this itself was then replaced by a full Office of the Blessed Virgin. Most of these accretions were confined to ferial days, while the liturgy of Sundays and feast days was expanded by the addition of tropes, verses, proses etc. rivalling in length the original chants.
The secular cathedrals and churches, which in general conformed to monastic usage, likewise accepted these liturgical additions. The popularity of the latter is indicated by their forming the basis of late medieval lay Offices such as are contained in the English Prymer, the French Book of Hours and the German Hortulus animae. Musically, many of them were comparatively insignificant, but certain of them, such as the Office and Mass of the Blessed Virgin, were of great importance for late medieval polyphony.
Apart from liturgical chant (in the restricted sense), there are several Benedictine musical achievements of central importance, most notably, the establishment of music theory, the development of ecclesiastical vocal polyphony, the introduction of the pipe organ into the church and the creation of liturgical drama. The music theory of late antiquity, even when expounded by Christian theorists such as Boethius and Cassiodorus, was a mathematical discipline, basically unconcerned with contemporary music. However, Benedictine theorists of the period from the 9th to the 11th centuries, like Aurelian, Hucbald of St Amand, Pseudo-Odo and Hermannus Contractus, while retaining a mathematical bias, took the crucial step of applying classical modes of thought to an analysis of their everyday musical experience – the chant – and worked out fundamental theoretical concerns such as the system of consonances and the eight ecclesiastical modes. The earliest efforts at notated polyphony also took place within Benedictinism and first flowered in the polyphony of the Winchester Troper and that of the Cluniac monasteries associated with St Martial of Limoges. The pipe organ, which after its reappearance in the West in 757 came to be employed by monastic teachers as a vivid illustration of the mathematical laws underlying pitch relationships, made its way into abbey churches with increasing frequency during the 10th century. The most noteworthy example of this was the introduction of the organ into English churches during the monastic revival of Dunstan, Oswald and Ethelwald (d 983), the last of whom oversaw the installation of the legendary organ in the Old Minster at Winchester. It was also under Ethelwald's aegis that the Regularis concordia (‘Monastic Agreement of Monks and Nuns of the English Nation’) was produced; this document contains the earliest preserved example of a fully rubricated liturgical drama, the Quem queritis dialogue.
In the second half of the 12th century, however, as general cultural leadership passed into the hands of groups other than the Black Monks, so too did liturgical leadership. Benedictine liturgy, with its accretions, became an obvious target for reform. The Cistercians, for example, eliminated tropes and excised long melismas from the chant. More important was the rite of the papal curia (see Van Dijk and Walker): in order to bring the liturgy into conformity with its active and mobile way of life, the curia shortened it by eliminating tropes and other accretions and by assigning the votive Offices to specific dates rather than having them sung daily. The Franciscans adopted the curial liturgy and promulgated it, creating a serious rival to the Benedictine observances and eventually exercising a crucial influence upon Pius V’s Breviary (1568) and Missal (1570). The Benedictines themselves in large measure adopted the principles underlying the curial liturgy: the 15th-century Bursfeld and Cassinese reforms, followed by the 1612 monastic breviary of Paul V, left the Benedictines with a Mass almost identical to the ‘Roman’ (i.e. curial) Mass and an Office differing only from the ‘Roman’ in certain peculiarities, such as Benedict’s original ordering of the psalms, and in vestiges of the votive Offices.
Closely tied to the surrendering of liturgical leadership is the loss of musical leadership; this is most decisively demonstrated in the development of modal and mensural polyphony within the sphere of the secular cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, and its exposition by scholastic theorists like Johannes de Garlandia and Franco of Cologne. From the remaining centuries of the Middle Ages and to modern times, Benedictinism remained largely outside the mainstream of musical progress, preserving the chant and occasionally incorporating contemporary trends. To cite an example of the latter, in late medieval England, where many of the great cathedrals like Canterbury, Durham and Winchester were also Benedictine abbeys, endowed chapels were constructed and secular musicians engaged to train choristers to perform polyphonic votive Masses and Offices. A more extraordinary adaptation took place in the splendid 17th- and 18th-century monastic churches of Bavaria and Austria: the choir screens were removed and orchestras were installed in the sanctuary to accompany the concerted music at Mass and Vespers. At the same time operas and oratorios were performed in the halls of the grander Benedictine establishments; Kremsmünster and Melk, to name but two, figured among the principle musical centres of the time, as is attested by their great collections of symphonies. Mozart himself played the organ on one occasion at Melk.
In the monastic renaissance of the 19th century, Benedictine musical conservatism was channelled into creative revival. The Liturgical Movement, which swept the church in the 19th and 20th centuries, and whose influence is still felt throughout the Western Church, was in its early stages primarily the product of new Benedictine foundations such as Solesmes and Maria Laach. In the USA the movement had its unofficial centre at St John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, the largest Benedictine community in the world. Central to the movement was the meticulous performance of Gregorian chant. The monk scholars of Solesmes did much to restore the chant, and while their rhythmic system was controversial, it enabled the chant to function both as practical church music and as an aesthetic experience for the musically cultivated. Pius X in his Motu proprio (1903) and Pius XII in Mediator Dei (1947) proclaimed it as the primary official music of the Church.
It is no small irony that in recent decades the very Liturgical Movement that was largely the creation of Benedictines has portrayed the singing of chant as a practice of dubious liturgical value.
HarrisonMMB
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