Those Radical Benedictines

11 July 2026  Isaiah 6:1-8

Memorial of St. Benedict, Abbot

“‘Here I am,’ I said; “‘send me.’”  (Isaiah 6:8) 

St. Benedict did not set out to create a monastic order, or a new monastic order, or a new monastic order to save the civilization of Europe. St. Benedict’s genius was rather in synthesizing earlier monastic traditions into a single, moderate, and highly reproduceable system, and that system was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. That is why it rescued the civilization of Europe.  

And it all started with the radical hospitality of the Benedictines, who never promised that they would adopt every idea that knocked on their door; but they did commit to listen to each one, to see where it went, and hold on to it if it was good. They could do this because they beheld the world that the Lord God had made, and saw that it was very good.

The Benedictines arose in the 6th century A.D., not long after the collapse of the western Roman Empire. St. Benedict wrote his famous Rule around 535-540 A.D, and Benedictine communities came to be founded on the principle of radical hospitality – the monks would welcome any visitor as they would welcome Christ Himself.

It didn’t mean that they would adopt the ideas of whoever came along, but they would listen to them all, think about them in a rigorous fashion, and keep anything that was helpful. It was this above all that led the Benedictines to copy down manuscripts of Greek and Roman antiquity. Today, all the documents from ancient Greece and Rome that we have were preserved because Benedictine monks wrote them down. This was particularly true of religious texts, but it included legal, scientific, agricultural, and mathematical texts as well. Benedictine communties became repositories of literacy, agriculture, and civic order. It was Benedictines who rebuilt Europe’s agricultural base by clearing forests, draining swamps, introducing crop rotation, animal husbandry and pest management, and becoming, in short, oases of education and technological innovation.

By the 13th century it was Benedictines, along with Dominicans, Augustinians, and Franciscans, who built the first universities. They became even larger centers of education and innovation because, unlike other ancient societies, they believed that creation is good, and the closer you look at it, the more good you will find. In our time, computer scientists, quantum physicists, and increasingly evolutionary biologists, believe they are finding encoded information in the very smallest bits of the material universe, information that has been built in since the Big Bang. What is most remarkable to many of these scientists is that we have minds capable of seeing and comprehending the nanosphere, the informational structure of unimaginably small places, and can see how it is ordered to a beneficial purpose. Many scientists are beginning to see that there is no place where you can find encoded information in very tiny places apart from the agency of a very large, supremely powerful Mind. In 1983 this led the distinguished observational astronomer Allan Sandage to abandon his lifelong agnosticism and convert to Christianity. Anthony Flew, who had been not just an atheist, but the leading atheist philosopher of his time, converted to theism in 2004 because he could see the footprints of this superintelligent Mind everywhere. It is the best explanation for the universe we have, and the science that explains it. These are just two of many celebrated cases of scientists and philosophers following where the evidence has been leading for centuries.

And it all started with the radical hospitality of the Benedictines, who never promised that they would adopt every idea that knocked on their door; but they did commit to listen to each one, to see where it went, and hold on to it if it was good. They could do this because they beheld the world that the Lord God had made, and saw that it was very good (Genesis 1:31).

St. Benedict of Nursia, pray for us.