"The Sanity of Saint Benedict" --Whittaker Chambers

In response to a silver medal given to him by his long-time Catholic friend Anne Ford, a medal blessed by Father Louis (Thomas Merton) of Gethsemani, Whittaker Chambers wrote an article on Saint Benedict. The main point of the article is the deep ignorance of the West.

"[I]sn't it clear that the Dark Ages are of a piece with our age of light, that our civilization is by origin Catholic, that, in fact, we cannot understand what we have become without understanding what we came from?"

"I was in my twenties, a young intellectual savage in college (Columbia College) with thousands of others, before the fact slowly dawned upon me that, for a youth always under the spell of history, the history I knew was practically no history at all. It consisted of two disjointed parts..." 259

In his curious search for Saint Benedict Dr. Chambers found a column of giant Catholic pioneer Saints regarding of which he realized he had been kept in the dark his entire life:

"...St. Benedict was one among ranges of human height that reached away from him in time in both directions, past and future, but of which, with one or two obvious exceptions, one was as ignorant as of Benedict: St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, Pope St. Leo the Great, Pope St. Gregory the Great, St. Francis of Assisi, Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII)." 261

"Clearly, a cleft cut across the body of Christendom itself, and raised an overwhelming question: What, in fact, was the civilization of the West? If it was Christendom, why had it turned its back on half its roots and meanings and become cheerfully ignorant of those who had embodied them?... Did the failure of the Western World to know what it was lie at the root of its spiritual despondency, its intellectual confusion, its moral chaos, the dissolving bonds of faith and loyalty within itself, its swift political decline in barely four decades from hegemony of the world to a demoralized rump of Europe little larger than it had been in the crash of the Roman West, and an America still disputing the nature of the crisis, its gravity, whether it existed at all, or what to do about it?"

Chambers indicates three great alienations of the spirit from which Saint Benedict saved the men of his day, which laid the ground for the civilization called Christendom.

"The same alienations, I...suspect, can be seen at their work of dissolution among ourselves, and are perhaps among the little-noticed reason why men turn to Communism. They are: the alienation of the spirit of man from traditional authority; his alienation from the idea of traditional order; and a crippling alienation that he feels at the point where civilization has deprived him of the joy of simple productive labor. 263

"These alienations St. Benedict fused into a new surge of the human spirit by directing the frustrations that informed them into the disciplined service of God...

"...St. Benedict's Rule brought a saving and creative sanity. Its temper was that of moderation as against excesses of zeal, of fruitful labor as against austerities pushed to the point of fruitlessness, of discipline as against enthusiasm, of continence of spirit and conduct as against incontinence."

"The Sanity of St. Benedict" (Commonweal, September 19, 1952) in Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959, ed. Teachout, Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Gateway, 1989.