Ora et labora (Pray and work): that supposedly "ancient" and supposedly "Benedictine" formula "that . . . is scarcely more than a century old"

Dom Marty; I can't find
a picture of Dom Frieß

N.B.:  Though that headline remains valid, Meeuws (below) has since been updated by

• Paul G. Monson, "Ora et labora:  a Benedictine motto born in America?", in God has begun a great work in us:  embodied love in consecrated life and ecclesial movements, ed. Jason King and Shannon Schrein, OSF, Annual publication of the College Theology Society 60 (2014) =(Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2015), pp. 66-83.

Monson provides archival evidence that the saying had actually surfaced qua Benedictine motto "four years before Wolter's work [(below)] and almost a quarter of a century before Sauter's application" of it to the Benedictine Order specifically, in a letter from first abbot of St. Meinrad Abbey Martin Marty to Frowin Conrad dated 20 November 1876; and thus evidence that it could have emerged in the late-19th-century American context before it first emerged in the late-19th-century European.  Monson's translation from the German is as follows:

. . . the family life of a true Benedictine house of worship, encompassing material as well as spiritual progress, is the model and ideal of family life, upon which rests the welfare of the individual and society.  Ora et labora is still today the only formula for curing the children of Adam, and both cannot be taught with words.

     Yet Monson himself cites the Austrian Benedictine monk, priest (Ordenspriester; Monson says only "German Catholic"), librarian, and teacher (Kaiserlich-Königliches Obergymnasium der Benediktiner zu Seitenstetten) Gottfried Edmund Frieß/Friess, 1836-1904, and says that he (Frieß) used "the phrase for the Benedictines".  Yet to follow up on that is to realize not just that Frieß was himself a Benedictine monk-and-priest, but that—on p. 8 of the first Abteilung of his Studien über das wirken der Benediktiner in Oesterreich für Kultur, Wissenschaft und Kunst, usually dated to 1868, but surely certainly not later than 1872, the actually-specified publication date of Abteilung 5 (dates as late as 1868 appear in Abteilung 1, dates as late as 1869 in Abteilungen 2 and 3)—he spoke (while, again, discussing the Rule of St. Benedict (7)) of the "motto" or "devise" [(Wahlspruch)] of the Order [of] St. Benedict:  'Ora et Labora'" (8), "Gebet und Arbeit" (7).  And that 1872 would be four, and (more likely) 1868 eight, years before 1876, but back in Europe.  In a note to me dated 22 April 2022, Monson very graciously acknowledged that, focused elsewhere, he had overlooked this, a fact that should not detract from the advance represented by his discovery of this earlier-than-Wolter American (and more or less invisibly archive-based) usage in Marty.
     Still, full-text searching has come into its own, so someone should now run patient and careful but exhaustive (and exhaustively researched) searches in full-text databases ranging from (for example) the Hathi Trust Digital Library, the Internet Archive, Google Books, Gallica, and Europeana all the way back to Early English Books Online, the (former) Library of Latin Texts, and maybe even Patrologia Latina (plus all of the specialized databases, like, for St. Augustine, the CAG).  Take just the Hathi Trust Digital Library, for example.  In the HTDL it is extraordinarily easy to take the hits (if no Benedictine hits) back well before 1876 or even 1868 (at present there are, in the HTDL, more than 800 before 1850), such that the question should now be twofold:  1) Are none of those in some sense authentically Benedictine in nature?, and, even if demonstrably not, then 2) What fascinating story might they still tell about the history of the motto long before it was appropriated by the Benedictines from c. 1868/1876, and Does that story include, nonetheless, a vague and distant Benedictine influence way back in the mists of time originally (Where, for example, do the in-some-cases-presumably-long-standing family crest-mottos come from conceptually)?  Here are just a couple of examples, grabbed out of the HTDL (and other databases) just quickly (note that, though I can't promise to have read around in context, how very divergent is the sense in so many of these!):

• 1549/60 (no occurrence of the Ora et labora):  Melanchthon, Homily on Lk 5 (not 15!):1 ff. for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity, CR 25, 140.  "Nullius est felix conatus et utilis unquam: | Consilium si non detque, iuvetque Deus."  Cf. under 1563 and 1600 or later below, where the Ora et labora is added.  For the date range, go to p. 272n8 here, where it is said that "Melanchthon uses this poem in his writings in the same way repeatedly [(gleich mehrfach)]."
  
• 1551 (non-Benedictine), pub. 1560:  Melanchthon, Explicatio sententiarum Theognidis =CR 19, col. 166:  "Vss. 1115 sq.  Χρήματ' [('With possessions of thy own thou upbraidest my penury; yet some things I have, and others with prayer to Heaven, I shall win')]]  Congruit cum dicto Salomonis [in Prov 22:2]:  Pauper et dives habitant simul, Deus fecit utrumque.  Huc pertinet et versus:  Irus et est subito, qui modo Croesus [(Ovid, Trist. III, 7, 42)].  Divitias habens non exprobres aliis paupertatem, scilicet quia lubrica et instabilis est possessio talium bonorum.  Habeo vero aliquid et aliud acquiram laborando, simul Deos invocans iuxta illud:  Ora et labora", "[This] corresponds to the dictum of Solomon, 'The rich and poor have met one another: the Lord is the maker of them both' [(Prov 22:2 Douay-Rheims)].  To this [passage] pertains also the line, '[assuredly fortune gives and takes away whatever she pleases, and] he becomes suddenly an Irus who was but now a Croesus' [(Ovid, Trist. III.7.42, as trans. Wheeler, LCL (1939 [1924]), 130-131)].  Having riches, you do not reproach others for [their] poverty, if only because [(sciliciet quia)] slippery and unstable is the possession of goods of this sort.  In truth I have acquired this and that by working [(laborando) while] simultaneously invoking the gods, according to that [saying], Ora et labora" (translation mine).
  
• 1563 (non-Benedictine):  Thomas Krüger, Portrait of Melanchthon after Lucas Cranach the Elder (British Museum 1867,0713.115):  inscription similar to the one below, dated 1600 or later.
  
• 
  1600 or later (non-Benedictine):  Portrait of Melanchthon, after Lucas Cranach the Elder:  NVLIVS EST FOELIX CONATVS ET VTILIS | VNQVAM.CONSILIVM SI NON DETQ[VE] | IVVETQ[VE] DEVS ORA ET LABORA ="Nullius est foelix conatus et utilis unquam, | Consilium si non detque iuvetque Deus" (CR 10, col. 652), plus the "Ora et labora" taken from 1551, above (there being no other occurrences in the Melanchthonis Opera Database; on the other hand, I haven't checked, say, the correspondence):  "No effort/undertaking is ever successful and profitable if God does not both give counsel and assist.  Ora et labora" (translation mine).
  
• 1710 (non-Benedictine):  Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. Huggard, ed. Farrer (1952), p. 382:  "In voluntary actions, on the contrary, and in what depends upon them, precepts, armed with power to punish and to reward, very often serve, and are included in the order of causes that make action exist. Thus it comes about that not only pains and effort but also prayers are effective, God having had even these prayers in mind before he ordered things, and having made due allowance for them. That is why the precept Ora et labora (Pray and work) remains intact."
• 1764- (non-Benedictine):  Motto, George Lord Ramsey, Eighth Earl of Dalhousie.
• 1850 (non-Benedictine (Protestant)):   Ottmar F. H. (Friedrich Heinrich) Schönhut(h), Chronik der Klosters Schönthal aus urkundlichen Quellen (Mergentheim: Thomm'schen Buchhandlung, 1850), 181:  "und da, wo einst Männer wandelten, die der Welt entsagt haben, bilden sich unter der Leitung treuer Lehrer Jünglinge heran, auf welche die Eltern freudig hinblicken, und die Kirche des Vaterlandes ihre Hoffnung setzt.  Eine neue, nicht minder edle Pflanzschule für den Glauben, ist aus der alten hervorgegangen—moge sie so lange blühen, wie die ältere, moge Gottes Segen auf ihr ruhen, und ihre Jünglinge das Wort nie vergessen, das der heilige Benedikt, wie seinen früheren Schülern, auch ihnen zurust:  ora et labora!":  "and there, where at one time men who had renounced the world walked, young people are educated under the guidance of faithful teachers, upon which [their] parents look with joy, and the Church of the Fatherland sets its hope.  A new, not-less-noble seminary of [(Pflanzschule für den)] faith has come forth out of the old—may it blossom as long as the old one; may God’s blessing rest upon it, and [may] its young people never forget the exhortation [(Wort, saying)] that St. Benedict addresses, as to his earlier students, also to them:  ora et labora!" (translation mine).  According to Wikipedia, the Abbey was founded in 1153 but had been "secularized" by the time of this writing back in 1802, and "From 1810 to 1975, . . . was one of the buildings used for the Evangelical [(i.e. Protestant)] Theological Seminary (Evangelisch-theologisches Seminar[y] or Seminar[y] Maulbronn), now the Evangelical [(i.e. Protestant)] Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren."  On Schönhut(h), a Protestant pastor, see (despite the "S.") this article in Deutsche Biographie.
  
• 1854 (non-Benedictine):  Wilhelm Friedrich Gustav Carus, Ueber Neubelebung des evangelischen Cultus (Halle: Verlag von Richard Mühlmann, 1854), 89:  "as [it says] in the Summa:  Ora et labora, pray and work!  Let us pray as if no [amount of] work will help [(kein Arbeiten hülfe)], and work as if no [amount of] prayer will help [(kein Beten mehr hülfe)]" (translation mine).

Marie-Benoît Meeuws, OSB, "«Ora et labora»: devise bénédictine?," Collectanea Cisterciensia 54 (1992/93): 193-219 (Oliver J. Kaften, OSB, "Ora et labora: (k)ein benediktinishes Motto: eine Spurensuche," Erbe und Auftrag 90 (2014): 415-421 is mostly just a re-presentation in German of the findings of Meeuws):

All the while acknowledging that the question of the "the relation between prayer and work [(travail, usually manual labor)] arose for the [(s’est posée aux)] monks from the first generation" (194; cf., for the High Middle Ages, 201 and 205), and has persisted throughout the history of monasticism; and that her investigations could not possibly be exhaustive; and, so, allowing for the possibility of further discoveries (193, 194, 209, 215, etc., but especially 203 and 216), Meeuws attempts to answer two questions:

• the question of the origin of the motto (and, yes, she does mean specifically the device, tessura, jumelage, banalité, apophtegme, stique, sentence, proverbe, couple verbale, junction, expression, rapprochement, cliché, maxime, marque de fabrique, racourci, formule, plaquette, etiquette, mot, jeu de mots, adage, somme, etc.) alone; and
• the question of the origin of its association with [St. Benedict and] the Benedictine Order specifically.

Her findings she summarizes on p. 216 as follows (though I’ve drawn on the rest of the article as well):

• "the brief formula Ora et Labora" "has not been found in all of its simplicity before the Praecipua ordinis monastici elementa of Dom Maur Wolter [OSB], [published] in 1880" (216), in which "the capital text" ("vetus clarrissimaque illa monachorum tessera: Ora et Labora! Opus Dei atque opus laboris") appears "finally for the first time" (213), but among whose "imposing list of references . . . ([to] Fathers of the Church, mystics, conciliar and episcopal documents, ancient monastic statutes, [and] authors of every sort) . . . one finds no testimony to this [supposedly] 'ancient' text, save that of the [11th-century] Carthusians" (214), below, according to ODCC4 (2022) "the only monastic order in the W[est] which does not follow the rule of St Benedict" (italics mine)! (For Meeuws' own typology of Western monasticism, see pp. 202-203.)
• "Dom Wolter concocted [(a créée)] it in one of those vigorous abridgements [(raccourcis)] for which he had sometimes the genius, by synthesizing an apophthegm known in the 11th century among the Carthusians," as quoted (claimed Wolter) in their in some sense non-Benedictine (203) Statutes for Novices, but actually "in the text that follows the Statutes," the Quidam tractatus statutorum ordinis Carthusiensis pro novitii (203n11): "Nunc lege, nunc ora, nunc cum fervore labora." "The latter is still not exactly the text but" one is "finally" (203) getting "for the first time" "very close" (209). Yet that in some sense non-Benedictine (203) Carthusian text had an "explicitly different import" (216, the import or sense (or conception?) of a given formulation being crucial for Meeuws (193 and passim)). The Vitae patrum in which the Carthusians mistakenly claimed to have found it are discussed by Meeuws on pp. 194-197, and St. Benedict of Nursia himself, in three points on pp. 201-202. In the sections on the Late Middle Ages (201, 206-209) and Modernity (209-212) some additional quotations of interest are considered, but ultimately dismissed. Indeed, by the earlier 19th century the Ora et labora "had still not seen the light of day under that brief and imperative form in which the emphasis [(ictus)] can be placed, in accordance with the [various] conceptions [so crucial to the judgment of equivalence or the lack of it?], on each of the three words or . . . [(en toccata)] on [all] three [at once [(sur les trois)]" (212).
• Meant by Dom Wolter to be descriptive of monasticism more generally (Meeuws closes with the observation that it is actually more "simply Christian" than uniquely Benedictine (219; Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB, had said back in 1961 that though "the motto [(devise)] composed of the play-on-words Ora et labora is of recent vintage [(est d'époque récente)]," "it has, in the texts of the Middle Ages, antecedents that give us [(font voir)] the sense that it must take on [(doit révêtir)] in the light of the tradition" (Études sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen âge, Studia Anselmiana 48 (Rome:  Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi; Orbis Catholicus, Herder, 1961), 142), e.g. "the work [(labeur)] of ascesis" (144, italics mine))), it was first said to be characteristic of the Benedictine Order specifically by Dom Sauter in 1899 (214), such that "From that time [(which is to say 1899)] its fortune was secured and the Benedictine Order appropriated to itself [(entra en droit de possession)] a [supposedly] 'ancient' formula that, unless I’ve missed something [(sauf erreur)], [was in 1992/93] scarcely more than a century old" (215). And by the time Dom Herwegen claimed—to the retrospective and prospective chagrin of many Benedictines both early and late, for whom so many "other elements could [also] be called just as 'fundamental'" to the description of "a son of St. Benedict"; and for whom the Ora et labora is therefore "a label [(etiquette)] all] too abbreviated" (219, but more importantly passim, the actual complexity of proposed characteristics being one of the major themes of the article)—that it "summed up the whole of [(totalisait)] Benedictine monasticism," it was "no longer an approximation [(? moyen)], an enumeration of [all of the relevant] activities"; it was considered to be "a definition, a 'trademark [(marque de fabrique)]'," to encapsulate "the whole [(l’integralité)] of Benedictine monasticism" (216).