Today, in the Catholic and Anglican Liturgical calendar, is the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of the main monastic order in the medieval Catholic Church. As I searched for connections with him and Celtic Spirituality, I found mostly a lot of rancorous academic debate about what the Celtic church was or is. I am not much interested in this debate, as the Celtic church and this form of Christianity is true for me, and I am more interested and concerned with its meaning for today than the origins of it or historiographical discussions about its origins.
That being said, my search for wisdom on the early Celtic church and monasticism elicited an interesting discussion from Fr. Robert Hale, a Benedictine monk in Big Sur, California. Writing on the "Benedictine Spirit in Anglicanism, he states regarding the medieval efforts of the church to Christianize the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain:
A new monastic missionary endeavour was called for, and with rare acumen Pope Gregory the Great
responded. The Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill in his thoughtful History of Christian Missions notes that Gregory's endeavour 'was fresh and remarkable since, in contrast to the haphazard way in which Churches had generally grown up, this was almost the first example since the days of Paul of a carefully planned and calculated mission.' Bishop Neill also underlines the specifically monastic character of the mission since 'Gregory, himself a monk, had seen the vital part that the monk could play in missionary work among the new nations.'
Augustine not only brought the spiritual teachings of his monastic father to England but also followed Gregory's pastoral directives after the first monks had settled in Canterbury. Gregory wrote to a perplexed Augustine who had asked what he should do about all the pagan usages of the Anglo-Saxons:
The temples of the idols among that people should on no account be destroyed... it is a good idea to detach them from the service of the devil, and dedicate them to the service of the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted ... so that they may learn to slay their cattle in honour of God and for their own feasting . . . If they are allowed some worldly pleasures in this way, they are more likely to find their way to the true inner joys. For it is doubtless impossible to eradicate all errors at one stroke . . . just as the man who sets out to climb a high mountain does not advance by leaps and bounds, but goes upward step by step and pace by pace. It is in this way that the Lord revealed himself to the Israelite people.
One wonders if the roots of the Anglican spirit of tolerance, reasonableness and comprehensiveness cannot already be detected here. These are monastic virtues also, it might be noted. Gregory in his Vita Benedicti (written just two years before the mission of Augustine) praises St Benedict's Rule for its balance and lucidity, two qualities that characterize his own pastoral and spiritual theology.
Augustine had also written to Rome about his perplexity at the variety of liturgical forms and customs: 'Since we hold the same faith, why do customs vary in different Churches, why does the method of saying Mass differ in the holy Roman Church and in the Churches of Gaul?' Gregory's response, not what one might expect from Rome, is almost Anglican in its serene insistence on ecclesial pluralism:
My brother, you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church in which you were brought up. But if you have found customs, whether in the Church of Rome or of Gaul or of any other that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them, and teach the Church of the English whatever you have been able to learn with profit from the various Churches... For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things.'
Anglican ecclesiology, with its biblical and Patristic cast, and nourished by its own experience as an international communion of autonomous Churches, tends 'to favour very strongly the recovery of the old vision of sister Churches within a single family.' If there is such a thing as a characteristically monastic ecclesiology, it certainly tends in a similar way to stress the importance of local and regional Churches. The above text of the monk and pope who was so little concerned with centralization and Romanitas reflects this monastic-Anglican ecclesial perspective.
Augustine and his fellow missionary monks, following the directives of Gregory, not only founded monasteries and schools, but established parishes, dioceses and provinces, laying the very foundations of the Ecclesia Anglicana of the middle ages and of the post-Reform period.
In other words, Fr. Hale believes that a fundamental teaching of the Anglican-Celtic tradition is tolerance of local tradition , "reasonableness" and "serene insistence on ecclesiastical pluralism." Sounds like a loving Christian tradition to me. I"m in!
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