Ratzinger, Hesse, and St. Benedict

We try not to hammer on the same points that can be found on numerous other web sites (you didn't see any discussion of the Wendy's finger incident here), but we were obliged to join in the Ratzinger/Benedict celebration. We let it die down on this site, but then we found this essay at Godspy from the Telegraph. Link. It provided a slightly different angle than what we've been reading and (self-laudatory moment here) dovetails with our initial impressions as set forth Tuesday evening in the Weekly Features Post. Here are some excerpts:

But I would suggest a historically more distant inspiration as well: St Benedict, the man who had given birth to monasticism in the twilight of the Roman Empire. His "rule" - his instructions to monks - laid the foundations, Ratzinger believes, for the methods of democracy. His spiritual spark kept the light of Christianity alive through centuries of darkness.

"Think of late antiquity," Ratzinger once told an interviewer. "Where St Benedict probably wasn't noted at all. He was also a dropout who came from noble Roman society and did something bizarre, something that later turned out to be the 'ark on which the West survived'. "

This, I suspect, is Ratzinger's model...

He is fascinated by Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, with its portrait of the self-isolating man. Because today egotism is exalted rather than the love of God, "this destruction of the capacity to live gives birth to deadly boredom. It is the poisoning of man. If it carried the day, man, and with him also the world, would be destroyed".

And so his favoured images are of survival, preservation of treasure, and of the regrowth of the Church from a tiny grain of mustard seed. He admires Englishmen such as Thomas More and Cardinal Newman - "a man who listens to his conscience and for whom the truth that he has recognised... is above approval and acceptance, is really an ideal and a model for me".