The modern urge to dig up one’s roots to inspect their state of health has not escaped the Benedictines, and the spirited winds of the Vatican Council no less than of the September 1966 Rome Council of Abbots have given the urge an added impetus. The issues are broad and ontological, ranging from liturgical adaptation to the question ‘what is a monk?’. But no issue exercises theorists and practitioners alike so vehemently as that of the tension, as old as the ages of man, between Mary and Martha, between the contemplative and the active vocation. Both schools of thought agree that nihil opere Dei praeponatur (RB XLIII); but where the contemplative school believes that laborare et orare embraces the essential Benedictine life, the active school insists on the wider formula orare et laborare et praedicare. The latter believes as a corollory that something of orare which the contemplatives allot to lectio divina (essentially a preparation for prayer, if not an indirect mode of prayer itself), should be allotted in part to the necessary preparation praedicare – i.e. that prayer and apostolic work feed on one another and are mutually supporting in the monk’s proper pursuit of the unum necessarium.

Both schools are returning to the fontes of monasticism, to Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, the Regula Magistri, the Regula Benedicti, S. Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to test and substantiate their case for the form of monastic life they favour.