Monte Cassino

...But the Masons threatened a revolution within twenty-four hours...

...For these he wrote his celebrated rule, which he had already outlined at Subiaco...

...Its abbot was known as the "abbot of abbots," the vice-chancel- or of the Holy Roman Empire in Italy and chancel- or of the king of Sicily...

...A young monk, Enrico Gattola, knelt on the threshold of the library to conjure them to spare the precious manuscripts and documents of the archives: as an answer a stroke of a sword at his neck killed him...

...At Cambridge, they hired a common barn and opened it as a school of the high sciences...

...What made Russian writers so fascinating in the past was their power of analyzing human sensations and the fluctuations of human mentality...

...King Humbert I accepted the proposals...

...After a period of decay, durJune I2, I929 THE COMMONWEAL I49 ing which the pristine Benedictine spirit seemed to have migrated to Cluny, it arose once more in Io58 as a result of the efforts of Desiderius under whom it was richly embellished by artists from Amalfi and Constantinople...

...Also the monastic school founded by Saint Benedict at Monte Cassino was the model after which the first English schools (and French as well) were organ- ized...

...These cloistral schools gradually developed into the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge...

...Marshes were re-claimed, roads laid, bridges built and wild forests be-came the sites of thriving One of these devastated towns, Cassinum, situated on the road between Naples and Rome, and once the home of the pagan Varro, drew the saint's attention, because, surrounded by an amphitheatre of green hills and surmounted by a rocky mountain, it seemed to offer the peace he sought...

...The abbey was restored only in 717 by a wealthy citizen of Brescia, Petronatus...

...The precious auto-graphic rule was rescued once more, but for the last time...

...Tosti was also abbot of Monte Cassino, and, because of his learning became ac-quainted with Premier Crispi and tried with him a solution of the Roman question...

...Saint Maurus, the beloved disciple of the founder, introduced monasti- cism into France, while others laid foundations in Germany and England...

...A new interest is being aroused in the classic works dealing with this cradle of the Benedictine family, as, for instance, the Dia- logues of Saint Gregory...

...A few weeks before his death, he asked me to translate this rare pamphlet enlarged for the present circumstances...

...Such was the beginning of many a university: a good result from the first attempts of Sublaco and Monte Cassino...

...Rich in intellectual and spiritual goods, the monas- tery owned many material possessions as well...

...They had studied man as a whole, tried to get to the bottom of his struggles, even attempted to discover in him the sources out of which he had gathered the energy to sin and the strength to repent...

...With the famous Benedictine motto, "Ora et labora," the monks assembled, copied and orna-mented thousands of manuscripts and thus preserved the classical masterpieces for posterity...

...towns, towering churches and flourishing monastic schools...

...Startling as the assertion may seem to be to some, there can be no question as to this fact: that Roman instincts of order and justice, upon which we pride our- selves as Englishmen, were first fostered by the apostle of our race, the Roman monk imbued with the principles of Saint Benedict's legislation...

...It drifts from right to left, and from left to right, ac-cording to the impressions which events have--not engraved, but simply photographed, on the Russian mind, and to a certain extent on the Russian concep- tion of right and wrong...

...And this time the abbey revived at the hands of another Benedictine Pope, Plus VII...

...Theology, philosophy, music, poetry, law, medicine were taught...

...But it is a rule of the Benedictine order to rebuild over and over again...

...They have talent, great talent in some instances, but talent like everything else requires certain conditions of well-being to give its real value, and to ensure its development...

...And it was from England that missionaries went forth to convert the nations of Denmark, Nor- way, Sweden...

...Was it not that devoted son of Saint Benedict, Saint Gregory the Great, who, seeing two Anglo-Saxon boys in Rome, found them as beautiful as angels, and resolved to convert their kinsmen in Britain...

...Up to the present time this number has been doubled in many instances: the number of Benedictines, for example, who have ascended the papal throne is now fifty...

...Having com-pleted their plunder the drunken soldiers, dressed in sacerdotal garments, simulated a religious procession, singing the while obscene refrains with The Marseil-laise...

...The Abbot Aligernus is considered the third founder of the abbey...

...On the occasion of the fourteenth centenary of Saint Benedict's birth, in I88o, hiding behind a pseudonym--A Monk of Saint Gregory's Priory--he published a clear and scholarly sketch of the life and mission of Saint Benedict...

...I5o THE COMMONWEAL June 12, I929 The author of The Making of England has seen something of this when he says that the spot which witnessed the landing of Romans became better known as the landing place of Augustine...

...First the Lombards of Benevento sacked the abbey, in 589, as Saint Benedict had foreseen...

...Attracted by this new John the Baptist many soon flocked to Monte Cassino to place themselves under Benedict's direction...

...It was not the masterful description of the character of Raskolnikov, in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punish-ment, which made him so unforgettable, but the fact that everyone who closed the volume in which his story was related felt that there might be circum-stances capable of making others do as he had done, sin as he had sinned, kill as he had killed...

...His Roman sense taught him that the work of building up a Chris- tian people had to proceed pari passu with the spread of civilization...

...The dynamic organization which he founded soon spread all over the world and lasted through many centuries and cycles of civilization--an institu- tion that, after the Church, is the most ancient and glorious in the western world...

...Cardinal Gasquet wanted to remem- ber them in the fourteenth centenary of the mother abbey: then he died...

...By the second year the number of the hearers was so great from the town and country that not the biggest house and barn that was, says Wood, "nor any church whatever sufficed to hold them...

...From the remains of a ruined tower he built a monastery overlooking the valley of Liri, where he saw the Greek troops of Belisarius and the Gothic hordes of Totila pass on their way to plunder Rome...

...In 787 Charlemagne visited Monte Cassino and admired the school added to the cloister...

...At one o'clock Brother Wil- liam read a lecture on Tully's Rhetoric and Quintilian Flores...

...They accordingly divided off into several schools and began an arrangement of classes, some of which are enumerated...

...They taught daily...

...They all move in a real world, not in a universe created by their own imagination, and this is what constituted the power of Russian pre-war literature...

...When I met him the last time, he looked as pale as a shadow...

...so the attempt was still-born...

...a magnificent abode was built for the 2oo monks, and it was consecrated in Io7I by Pope Alexander II, accompanied by other famous Benedictines, such as Saint Peter Damian and Hildebrand, who as Gregory VII was to renew the glory of the Papacy...

...Leo XIII appointed him prefect of the Vatican archives and allowed him to approach the Italian government...

...This spring witnessed the beginning of the four-teenth centenary celebration of Monte Cassino: an event in which all the civilized world should be inter- ested...

...Better days came with the renaissance, when it was beautified by such artists as Bramante, Luca Giordano, Solimene, and again took its place as a centre of culture...

...The progress of this army of intellectual workers and manual laborers was for many years the progress of western civilization...

...Whole nations were changed from barbaric hordes to orderly states...

...This wealth was a continual temptation for the plunderer, and it is not surprising that in the thirteenth century the monastery was again pillaged...

...So having overturned an altar to Apollo which he found in a grove, he built two chapels, one in honor of Saint John the Baptist and the other under the patronage of Saint Martin, and set to work converting the peasants of the neigh- borhood...

...Betimes in the morning Brother Odo read grammar to the boys...

...The centenary of Monte Cassino forms one of the most important entries in the year's program of com-memorations...

...Canter- bury was a little Rome...

...and, as the Abbot Bernard I Aygherius complained, Monte Cassino had been con- verted into a bandits' den...

...Monte Cassino was the source of all this marvelous enthusiastic energy...

...It was pillaged for the last time by Championnet, a general of the French Revolution, in I799, when Raphael's Holy Family was stolen...

...Saint Placid, son of the Senator Tertullus, was sent to Messina and others were commissioned to establish a monastery at Ter- racina...

...this time by the troops of Frederick II, led by the father and the brothers of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who some years later refused to accede to the greedy ambitions of his kinsmen by declining to become abbot of Monte Cassino...

...It was an honor for me...

...Their books were always humanly true, which explains the great influence so many of them have exercised over the people who read them...

...There can be no real literary movement in a country and among people who have seen only one side of the picture, who have looked only upon one of the pages of the book unfolded before their eyes, and who have not even done that thoroughly...

...Augus-tine, a Roman at the heart's core, set himself to con- verting the people of Kent according to the manner in which old Rome conquered the world...

...Nothing of this kind exists in the writings of the post-war Russian writers...

...Crispi was well disposed, since he wished to crown himself with the "Napoleonic laurel" which he considered the due of the minister who would solve this vexed problem...

...but his brain was lively and he joked with me about the difficulty of pronunciation in the English language--one spells Constantinople and reads Byzantium...

...Cardinal Gasquet looks on Saint Benedict as a father of nations, but particularly of the English nation...

...Ozanam's studies...

...Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the missionaries fronted the king...

...Another very important work to be republished is due to another distinguished son of Saint Benedict-- Cardinal Gasquet...

...Fourteen hundred years ago, 8alnt Bene- dict made his home in the hills above Cassinum and began that great work of monastic culture which so profoundly modified the history of the western world...

...Count Giordani introduces personal reminiscences of Cardinal Gasquet, the great Benedictine scholar who died recently.--The Editors...

...In the case of the heroes of Turgenlev's novels, there is not one whose deeds or thoughts are not understandable, even by those whose mentality is absolutely different from theirs...

...The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn litany was in a sense a return of the Roman legionaries who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric...

...Cardinal Gasquet lays emphasis on the Roman character of Augustine's mission in England...

...MODERN RUSSIAN LITERATURE By CATHERINE RADZIWILL R USSIAN literature, which twenty-five years ago took a leading part in the intellectual life of the entire world, has now utterly changed...

...From thence to this day it remained resplendent in its traditional learning, sanctity and hospitality...

...Paul the Deacon attests that in this time the greatest care was taken of the manuscripts...

...After the death of Gregory VII, Desiderius himself ascended the chair of Saint Peter as Victor III...

...Benedict, now in his forty-eighth year, decided to make this crag his new home...

...thence he came to Lincolnshire and became abbot of Croyland...

...Duchesne has written: The English Church is clearly a colony of the Roman Church...

...But the history of Monte Cassino is not an uninter- rupted story of peace: the murderer and plunderer also appear on the scene...

...It is impossible for human beings to go through an unbroken period of moral and physical suffering without becoming callous and even cruel in their appreciations of this eternal gamble with life to which they have been subjected...

...148 THE COMMONWEAL June 12, 1929 MONTE CASSINO By IGINO GIORDANI I T WAS fourteen cen-turies ago, in S29, that Saint Benedict left Subi- aco, where his life had been made unbearable by the hatred of the priest Floren- tius, and journeyed south-ward through a wilderness of deserted villages that had experienced the ravages of famine, pestilence and war...

...Above...

...Cardinal Newman thus relates the origin of Cambridge: Jeoffred, or Goisfred, had studied at Orl6ans...

...and again it took its place as the mother abbey of the order...

...From its venerable portals hosts of missionaries and scholars issued forth to remake the world...

...Statistics show that, up to the death of Pope John XXII in the fourteenth cen-tury, the order of Saint Benedict could boast of no less than twenty-four Popes, nearly two hundred cardi- nals, 7,ooo archbishops, I5,OOO bishops, i5,ooo abbots of renown, 4,ooo saints, 15,7oo authors, twenty emperors, ten empresses, forty-six kings, fifty queens and more than 37,ooo monasteries...

...Without his work, the Anglo-Saxon race would have passed from the knowledge of future generations more completely than people who set up inscribed stones and graven images in the tropical forests of Yucatan...

...and it was not without emo-tion that I had the cardinal's personal copy in which a letter of Cardinal Newman praising the work was inserted...

...But the Saraeens laid it waste with fire and sword in 884 and killed the monks...

...But the second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal of the first...

...and the monks with difficulty saved the manuscript rule and fled to Rome, where Gelasius II gave them a monastery near the papal palace of the Lateran...

...The Italian govern- ment intends building a huge stadium at Cassino and restoring many monuments...

...More assaults followed...

...Monte Cassino remains one of the most impressive of Christian shrines, and much has been planned in honor of the occasion...

...The community began to spread...

...The Holy Father has appointed Cardinal Gasparri, his secretary, as his delegate at the cere-monies which are to take place...

...It had grown into a large fief, including two princedoms, 44o villas, 25o castles, towns and harbors...

...Master Gislebert, upon every Sunday, preached the Word of God to the People...

...In that time many classic books were copied: Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, etc., with Origen, Saint Jerome, Saint John Chrisostom, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, Saint Beda, etc., as well as Bibles, antiphonaries, evangelaries, written in the beautiful lombard-cassinensis characters and finely illuminated...

...Luigi Tosti's History of Monte Cassino...

...To the keen spirit of observation displayed in analyzing the things which they saw, they added much of that divine pity for the poor, the helpless and even the criminal, which has always been one of the distinctive features of the Russian character...

...From his monastery on the Caelian he sent Augustine who, with forty companions, set foot on English soil in 596 , "and from this time Saint Benedict seems to have taken possession of England as his own...

...and when he went back to Gaul, begged the Abbot Theodemar to send him a group of monks with the rule and some books to rekindle learning among Franks...

...Some forty years before the emperor's visit, Saint Boniface, the apostle of Germany, had sent to Monte Cassino his friend Sturm to learn the rule as it was applied around the grave of the patriarch of monks, in order to transplant it to Fulda...

...Two great scholars of this period are worthy of mention: Alfanus, a poet who wrote both in Greek and Latin, and Peter the Deacon, a librarian and historian...

...In 543 Saint Benedict died, but his work lived after him...

...This relation is evident even in the material distribution of the buildings and their names...

...whence he sent to his manor of Cotenham, near Cam- bridge, four of his French fellow-students and monks-- one of them to be professor of sacred learning, the rest teachers in philosophy...

...We can easily understand why this mountain should have been a place of pilgrimage throughout the centuries, for Popes, emperors, kings, scholars, saints and sinners, great and small: for Rachis and Desiderius, kings of the Lombards, for Charlemagne, for Wilivald of England, for Henry II of Germany, for Saint Odilo of Cluny, for Boccaccio, Columbus, Galileo...

...Monta-lembert's Monks of the West...