These two recent books by Ulrich Lehner, Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Religious History at Marquette University, admirably fill a lacuna in monastic studies and make German scholarship accessible to English-speaking readers. In his introduction, Lehner rightly acknowledges two important historical works related to his own: Derek Beales’ Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (2003) and Geoffrey Scott's Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (1992). While Lehner's focus is certainly narrower than Beales’ s wide-ranging study, it is also somewhat broader than Scott's. According to Lehner, whereas Scott ‘investigated predominantly the institutional and intellectual history of the English Benedictines’, his book ‘attempts to give an insight into the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Benedictine monks in the German-speaking lands’.
As a result of this avoidance of institutional history, which is understandable given the estimated 150 monasteries comprising 3500-4000 monks, Enlightened Monks takes a thematic rather than chronological approach. This can sometimes leave the (false) impression of unity of belief and practice across the period studied.
Judging Enlightened Monks solely on Lehner's own stated intention to explain ‘why the Benedictines produced more Catholic enlighteners than any other order’, his book must be counted a failure. Above all, it seldom draws comparisons with other orders, but focuses almost exclusively on Benedictines without putting them into a wider context. Neither has any attempt been made to estimate numbers of enlighteners by order. Moreover, many of the topics Lehner explores, especially those on runaway monks and monastic prisons, do little if anything to support his argument. Instead, they serve more to undermine it by showing a lack of enlightenment. Elsewhere he hints at the anti-scholastic underpinnings of Enlightenment thought. A more fruitful line of approach might have been to show the lack of, or tenuous attachment of, Benedictines to scholasticism, in contrast to the Jesuits and Dominicans. Two running themes throughout Enlightened Monks are friendly Benedictine relations with Protestants and enmity towards the Jesuits. In respect of the latter, the German monks were no different than their English counterparts.
As a book describing the experience of German-speaking Benedictines in the eighteenth century, Enlightened Monks is far more successful. It describes not only those monks who endorsed Enlightenment ideas, but also those who actively opposed them, as well as the more ambivalent. Such differences of opinion could lead to discord and disobedience, sometimes resulting in years of litigation, monks running away or being imprisoned, or even the complete breakdown of community life. In Chapter 4, ‘The Challenge of a New Liberty’, Lehner singles out three ‘rundown monasteries’ for investigation: Bamberg-Michaelsberg, Weihenstephan, and Neumarkt-St. Veit. After decades of turbulence involving contested elections, accusations of drunkenness and debauchery, the monks of Neumarkt-St. Veit finally voted for dissolution in 1802. Despite the illegality of this proposal (under canon law) and the protests of the abbot and archbishop, the community's decision was upheld by the secular authorities. A more general secularization of monasteries would soon follow.
Enlightened Monks follows a somewhat disjointed pattern that begins and ends with intellectual history (first historiography, then law, philosophy and theology), but contains an extended middle section covering social and cultural history (lifestyle, liberty, communication, prisons, runaways). The chapter on historiography has little do with Enlightenment thought, but everything to do with Jean Mabillon and the Maurist school, with which Lehner prefaces his investigation. Obviously inspired by David Knowles's Great Historical Enterprises (1963), it examines closely the two centres of German Benedictine historical scholarship, St. Blasien and St. Emmeram; the unfinished Germania Sacra, an attempted encyclopaedic history of the German church; and Magnoald Ziegelbauer's bio-bibliographical literary history of the Benedictine order.
The chapter on new theories of law examines the careers of Benedict Oberhauser of Lambach, court canonist Abbot Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch of Braunau-Břevnov in Bohemia, and Anselm Diesing of Ensdorf. Their enlightenment largely consisted of criticizing natural law theory and asserting the supremacy of civil law over canon law, especially in relation to marriage and monasteries. In relation to philosophy and theology, Lehner includes substantial discussions of the reception of Immanuel Kant's philosophy among Benedictines. Many monks could be found in academic positions, especially at the Benedictine University of Salzburg. As professor of philosophy, Augustin Schelle (1742-1805) composed a two-volume work entitled Praktische Philosophie (1785) that revealed his admiration for a wide variety of English and German philosophers, but especially Wolff and Kant. One of his successors, Bernhard Stöger (1757-1815), argued that German (and other vernacular languages) should displace Latin as the language of scholarship and teaching at the university. Although Lehner argues that Benedictine philosophical works ‘were rarely as original as those of Protestant thinkers’, he does find more originality among theologians. He describes Beda Mayr (1741-1797) of Donauwörth as ‘developing the first ecumenical theology in Germany’. Benedikt Werkmeister (1745-1823) of Neresheim, a member of the original Bavarian Illuminati and early proponent of religious tolerance, authored Über die christliche Toleranz (1784), which rejected the ‘church's right to persecute heretics…[as] a violation of natural law’. He avoided ecclesiastical scrutiny by accepting a position as court chaplain and preacher to the Duke of Baden in 1784.
Scottish monks make regular appearances in Enlightened Monks. They resided primarily in three Scottish Benedictine abbeys in Germany: Regensburg, Erfurt and Würzburg. Andrew Gordon of Regensburg taught natural philosophy at the University of Erfurt and conducted early experiments in electricity. His confrère Ildephons Kennedy (1722-1804) showed considerable intellectual promise and administrative assiduity, serving as secretary of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences for a lengthy four decades, as well as official censor and ecclesiastical councillor of the electorate. After the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, Kennedy also became involved in the effort to reorganise Bavarian schools. A more unsavoury story is that of Marianus Gordon of Würzburg. Just as he completed his doctorate and prepared to return to Scotland as a missionary priest, he was denounced by one of his fellow monks as a heretic. Gordon was duly tried and convicted, lost his mind in prison, and hanged himself.
Lehner's chapters on social and cultural history are easily the most readable chapters of Enlightened Monks, and to this reader, at least, the most fascinating. They reveal the introduction of all sorts of novelties now typical of monastic life, including tobacco, coffee and tea; billiards and card-playing; secular clothing; and even tourism. It's difficult to know how widespread these novelties were, however, as Lehner notes that monastic constitutions and customaries remained largely unchanged; what did change was the mentality of the monks. In place of renunciation, penance and asceticism, Benedictines of the eighteenth century were eager to experience the pleasures and luxuries of secular life.
The chapters on prisons and runaway monks take a largely biographical approach that focuses on individuals rather than on patterns or statistics. Among his four examples of runaway monks is the curious story of Michael Winckelmann of Trier. After a disagreement with his abbot over the distribution of alms, for which he was subsequently imprisoned, Winckelmann escaped and unsuccessfully sought refuge in a number of monasteries in France, including that of the English Benedictines in Paris. He eventually settled in England, married the Earl of Leicester's daughter, and was raised to the nobility by Frederick the Great.
Lehner's Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers builds upon and expands the chapter on monastery prisons in Enlightened Monks to include other orders, especially those of the mendicants. The Franciscans, in particular, had a highly developed theory of criminal law and punishment. In contrast, the Jesuits and other post-Tridentine orders did not have prisons. Lehner surmises that the primary difference lies in stricter standards for admission. He confesses that writing the book ‘was a personal challenge and an unpleasant experience’. Nevertheless, he felt that it was an aspect of religious history that needed to be brought to light, even if it does make the Capuchins out to be the worst offenders. (Two of the author's uncles are Capuchins).
The central and longest chapter ‘Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers’ consists of a detailed description of Franciscan criminal trials, based largely on the anonymous Criminalprocess der Franciscaner (1769) and the Practica Criminalis (1693) of the aptly named Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari de Ameno. An anthology of original sources, the Criminalprocess der Franciscaner includes a section on judicial torture that describes, for example, how many times and for how long thumb screws can be applied to the accused. Further short chapters cover such topics as violence in female convents, fornication, and child abuse. Despite the often gruesome material, there are some more amusing passages, such as Lehner's description of the Carthusian Johann Nepomuk Mayr who was caught sneaking out at night to eat pork sausages.
Taken together, these two volumes, one substantial and one slender, by Ulrich Lehner are a welcome and courageous contribution to monastic studies. While neither makes a particularly compelling argument vis-à-vis the Enlightenment, both do shed light on monastic life as it was lived in the period leading up to the French Revolution and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. They also provide a necessary perspective on the troubles of the Church in our own time. Much the same way that Aidan Nichols's Looking at the Liturgy (1997) found the origins of the liturgical movement in the Enlightenment, so it is easy to discover parallels between the Enlightenment and the Second Vatican Council in their effects on religious life, especially the questioning of authority, the abandonment of the religious habit for secular dress, and apostasy from religious life. Similarly, as described in Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers, the cover-up of monastic incarceration so as to avoid scandal, even to the extent of lying to secular authorities and destroying documentation, finds parallels in the ongoing investigations of child sexual abuse by clergy. Thus, an understanding of the eighteenth century is vital for understanding the present state of the Church today.
