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Notes

The idea of describing the Rule as an ark comes from an article by the Rev. Prof. Gordon Rupp, ‘St Benedict, Patron of Europe’, Church Quarterly Review, July 1968, Vol. 1, No 1, pp. 13 – 21, to which I am indebted for this and for other comments in the opening sections of this chapter.

There are a number of editions of the Second Book of the Dialogues. I used a translation by Myra L. Uhlfelder, published by the Boob-Merrill Company Inc., New York, 1967. This interpretation of St Gregory’s Life owes much to the introduction to the Collegeville text of the Rule, ‘St Benedict of Nursia’ pp. 73 – 9, and to Ambrose Wathen ‘Benedict of Nursia: Patron of Europe, 480 – 1980’, Part II, ‘The Vir Dei Depicted by Gregory the Great’, Cistercian Studies, 1980, XV, pp. 229 – 38.

The point on page 4 about the consummate wisdom which the Rule reflects is further discussed in a chapter by Claude J. Peifer O.S.B. ‘The Rule of St Benedict – Present State of the Question’, The Continuing Quest for God, ed. William Skudlarek, O.S.B., Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 1980.

A useful article on the present state of scholarship on the Rule is Sir Richard Southern, ‘St Benedict and his Rule’, Ampleforth Journal, Summer 1982, LXXXVII. l, pp. 16 – 28.

In The Making of the Benedictine Ideal, the Thomas Verner Moore Memorial Lecture for 1980, published by St Anselm’s Abbey, Washington D.C., 1981, the Rev. Prof. Owen Chadwick makes a most illuminating comparison of the Rule of the Master and the Rule of St Benedict. I made particular use of what he had to say on pages 4 – 5.

It is an impossible task to condense the history of the Benedictine Order in the Middle Ages into one or two paragraphs. There are endless excellent studies which will fill out the story. Two of the best short accounts are David Knowles Christian Monasticism, World University Library, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, and George Zarnecki The Monastic Achievement, Thames & Hudson, 1972. The best book on the English Benedictines remains David Knowles The Monastic Order in England, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1963.

Robert Hale’s book Canterbury and Rome: Sister Churches, Darton Longman & Todd, 1982, devotes one chapter to a discussion of the Benedictine roots of Anglicanism, ‘Discovering Consanguinity: the Monastic Benedictine Spirit of Anglicanism’, and he also has much of interest to say on how much he finds in common between Benedictine balance and moderation and the Anglican via media.

In ‘Thoughts and Prayers’, the Staretz Silouan quotation comes from The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958.

St Anselm’s prayer is taken from The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, translated by Sister Benedicta Ward S.L.G., Penguin, 1973, and the extract by M. Raymond is from the introduction to The Family that overtook Christ, Clonmore and Reynolds, Dublin, 1944.

The final prayer is the collect of an abbot in the Alternative Service Book.