Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740-1803. By Ulrich L. Lehner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. viii + 266. $99.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Enlightened Monks: The Benedictines 1740-1803 . By Ulrich L. Lehner . New York : Oxford University Press , 2011. viii + 266. $99.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThe author has indefatigably worked his way through mounds of archived eighteenth-century printed correspondence, books, and tracts to make available an impressive amount of information, including many very interesting anecdotes, for which one is immensely grateful. As a general explication of the influence of the Enlightenment among Benedictines, however, the book disappoints.Ulrich Lehner arranges his material under nine headings: history-writing, monastic daily life, and liberty within the monastery, new means of scholarly communication, monastery prisons, runaway monks, enlightened law, enlightened philosophy, and enlightened theology, arguing in each area for Enlightenment-inspired developments.Chapter 2 (history writing) begins with the German Maurists who continued conventional monastic history writing but, as it were, set the table for a new acceptance of change (that is, the Enlightenment). The third chapter, Challenge of a New Lifestyle, documents loosened strictures on individual stipends, use of tobacco, degrees of privacy in living arrangements, sartorial practices and so forth. Chapter 4, Challenge of a New Liberty, extends this to a loosening of stabilitas and claustration and the claiming of rights by monks vis-a-vis their superiors.Lehner should have more thoroughly examined just how monastically new all these things were. Some monks had always, over more than a millennium, come into conflict with superiors and appealed to canon law and monastic legislation for their rights. Trends toward laxity in dress, private stipends, living quarters, and so forth had waxed and waned over many centuries of monastic decadence and reform. For centuries monks led in the construction of scholarly networks, yet Lehner's chapter 5 considers it an Enlightenment innovation. How much of the documentary evidence Lehner has uncovered represents an Enlightenment-stimulated novum cannot be answered without setting the Bendictine eighteenth century into its millennial context, a task too large for one scholar and one book. But Lehner might have shown greater awareness of this issue.In many ways this book is a series of vignettes of intellectuals, favoring the radicals who moved well outside the Catholic tradition especially after 1750 and bookended with some more moderate examples of reformers who stayed within the tradition. The moderates serve also as foils to a handful of anti-Enlightener Benedictines--explained away as being under the influence of French anti-Enlightenment philosophes (6) and as reactionary insofar as they only defended old privileges and traditions but did not acknowledge the plurality of contemporary values and the necessity for society reforms (7, emphasis added). Aware of how dependent his thesis about a strong Enlightenment impulse in Benedictine circles is upon a handful of individual vignettes, Lehner urges his reader to assume a silent body of timid monks who agreed with the vignetted Enlighteners but were afraid to speak out (6).One of the anti-Enlighteners was Meinrad Widmann. Lehner first cites Protestant reviewers of Widmann's two-volume book--who dismissed it as an ignorant and sinister attack on any modernization of the Church--then quotes Widmann's own assertions that the Enlightenment was to be rejected because it fundamentally undermined Christian and Catholic beliefs and culture (7-8), implying that we all know that such a response has to have been exaggerated and reactionary, a sinister attack on the True Good of Modernization of the Church. …