Tuesday, March 26, 2024

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.
     That said, here's another, from 1862, six years earlier.  Karl Brandes, 1810-1867, was a Benedictine of Kloster Einsiedeln who also edited the 7-volume Die Mönche des Abendlandes vom H. Benedikt bis zum H. Bernard vom Grafen v. Montalembert, published between 1860 and 1878 (in which, by the way, the ora et labora does not appear):

     Thus, 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, Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the (former) Library of Latin Texts (both already searched extensively by Chirinos (83)), 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)?  Or take just the MDZ Digitale Bibliothek, which returned, on 27 April 2024, 2,469 hits on the phrase "Ora et labora," distributed through time as follows (a graph far more reliable for the years 1500 to, say, 1925 than for any after):


     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!):

Sœur 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 Sister 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).
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