David Knowles (1)

This book is by a scholar and perhaps other scholars are his main audience. The author delves into the other people around Becket. To be honest I felt like I learned more about Becket and his story in the biography I finished reading recently on Queen Eleanor by Alison Wier but this added some background that the other book did not have.

I consider this a must read for anyone interested in an historical look at Medieval Europe and Britain and the culture of that time. Knowles is able to portray how fundamental the dictates of the Catholic Church was to everything that everyone who lived at that time believed.

This was very interesting in showing how severely monastcism had declined in the
18th-19th centuries in Europe and how strikingly it had recovered in the 20th century
until the new decline following the 1960s.

Word for word, perhaps the best description of Benedictine monastic life. Like the Rule of St. Benedict, “The Benedictines” sets out Benedictine ways in broad lines, but with precise detail where needed to illuminate both the Benedictine balance and its uniqueness.

All of the following is a quote and summary from the book:

"Benedictine monachism presents an objective form of life, sane, strong, unchanging from year to year, a life of work and liturgical prayer which can be seen and heard, show more lived in conditions which aim at representing all that is best in the basic family life of Christianity, aided by all human courtesies, reverences, and affections.

"It is nothing secret or esoteric, nor an impossibility, but an ordered form of ordinary life. It is a religious life which is free from all that is doctrinaire or experimental. It is the Christian life writ large for all to see, with all the non-Christian elements removed that are normally interwoven with the devout life as lived in the world.

"The message of Saint Benedict is simple and direct. Work, obey, keep silent, praise God in common, and if you wish to pray to Him alone, enter the Church and pray.

"It is for Benedictines to see to it that they are a living commentary on the Rule, remembering that just as they hope to save their own souls by living the regular life, so by their example they may, in what small measure soever it may be, have something of the same influence over their contemporaries of today that their predecessors had over a chaotic and pagan Europe." show less