Dr. Ron Thomas
Welcome to today’s Conversation podcast. I’m Dr. Ron Thomas, associate professor of theology at Belmont Abbey College. Welcome today. And also I would like to welcome our special guest, Father Robert Nixon, from the New Norcia Monastery in Western Australia. He’s with us to give us a concert and lecture this evening. And we thought we would begin that whole process of learning with this conversation today.

Dr. Ron Thomas
So, Father Nixon, very glad to have you with us here at the Abbey. Welcome.

Father Robert Nixon
Thank you very much, Rod. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Before we started taping, we were talking about our common interest in Benedict and education the connection between the love of God and the love of learning. And I was finding out more about the specific charism or the specific activity of your monastery, but I’d love to hear more about that.

Father Robert Nixon
Well, run Benedictine monasteries have been since a very inception centers of learning. One of the key phrases which Saint Benedict uses in his rule to describe monastic life is a school of the Lord’s service added using disturbed school. He’s harking back to the philosophical schools of the day of the classical world. A school was an academy, a gathering of like-minded people to share ideas to enrich their mental and spiritual life.

Father Robert Nixon
And this is very much the model which he used for his own Benedictine monasteries. These are schools of the Lord’s service, underpinned by Christian spirituality. How did the rule of Benedict? There are a couple of hours every day which are to be dedicated to sacred reading, and this included study in its broadest sense, So Benedictine monasteries functioned as centers of learning throughout the entire Middle Ages.

Father Robert Nixon
One of the made roles of Benedictine monasteries was the transmission of literature. Before the invention of the printing press, monasteries were occupied with copies of books, manuscripts, by hand. If a family wanted their son or daughter to learn to read and write, they would generally send them to a Benedictine monastery for a few years. To master this skill.

Father Robert Nixon
It, of course, throughout the Middle Ages, reading and writing, bed reading and writing in the Latin language. So this underpins our Benedictine spirituality, and it manifests itself in schools and universities within our contemporary world. And I’ve often been struck as a person whose current life is but asceticism, whose previous life was in the academic world, that the greatest scholars often have something of the mark about them, and conversely about bucks scholarship study.

Father Robert Nixon
The love of learning is a vital part of our carries and our own particular artistry was established by Spanish monks in the Western Australian outback back in 1846. This was very early. It makes us the oldest continuously existing religious community in Australia and we were founded only about 15 years after the foundation of the quality of Western Australia itself.

Father Robert Nixon
So our founding bug, Rosendo Salvadore, he, he came from Spain, he found his own monastery closed out by the revolutionary governments in Spain at that time. He had an ambition to transmit the Catholic faith. But in a way this wasn’t his, although this was his kind of ultimate imperative on a practical level, his first step was to try to teach the Indigenous people the skills they needed to adapt to Western civilization, which, which he realized was inevitably going to encroach upon the traditional lives at that stage.

Father Robert Nixon
So from the very, very beginning, what history has focused on the education of particularly the indigenous people of teaching them what they needed to know and reading, writing above all, giving them entrance into Western culture. So this educational imperative was something very important and one of the distinctive features of our field of Rosendo. So Salvadore was he didn’t see it as a matter of stamping out the indigenous culture and language as many did.

Father Robert Nixon
In fact, he took the greatest care to record the riches and treasures of the native culture to compile a dictionary of their language and so forth, to make sure that they continued to follow as many of their traditional laws and customs as possible. At the same time, he was teaching the English language, the Spanish language, the Latin leg, which with a remarkable degree of success so I think which perhaps was unique in the Australian missionary experience.

Father Robert Nixon
One of the things which he greatly believed it was the power of music to transmit culture and knowledge. And many of the earliest settlers back in the 19th century were absolutely astonished to find that there were indigenous string and brass ensembles, something which most of the other missionaries had had. It even tried. They received it would be completely impossible to do anything like that.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Oh, that’s a fascinating story. And impressed by the early founding of your community to you were founded, I think, about 30 years before Belmont Abbey was we were founded in 1876, and we think that we’re old. But you reach earlier than we do. And also the particular foresight of your founder to want to preserve those customs of the people, sort of an anthropology its theologian.

Father Robert Nixon
He was very much an anthropologist. So he compiled the earliest dictionary of the US language, which is the date of people of that area. He also made the very first transcriptions into Western musical donation of the traditional Aboriginal music and these things are still in existence. So he was quite a quite a remarkable character and very highly esteemed by the Indigenous people of the area.

Dr. Ron Thomas
That’s a lovely story. It really is. And music of course reaches past language right into the very soul. And so opening up the soul for all kinds of truth through the use of music is a brilliant, brilliant strategy and one that seems to unite anyone and everyone.

Father Robert Nixon
It is indeed drawn because it’s something which, which trade sends particularities of, of language to some degree culture and brings people together. And of course, the most important truth said lessons, which we have to learn are precisely those words which transcend all words.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes, indeed. Well, it is an amazing thing as you were expressing that education and the Benedictine spirituality seemed to go very naturally together. I mean, it is just a providential thing that out of Saint Benedict’s charism comes that our entire Western tradition of scholarship and intellectual life. And I’d be interested also to hear a little bit about your pilgrimage.

Dr. Ron Thomas
You mentioned that you were in academics and before even going into the monastery and you’ve carried on a lively intellectual and academic trade since going to the monastery and have some artifacts to witness to that. I’d love to hear more about that.

Father Robert Nixon
Yes, right. Well, by prior life, since I was a fairly young child, I felt a deep calling to the service of the church. But I had in my life this other great passion, which was music. So when I finished school, I, you know, I wasn’t ready to go into the service of the church at that stage.

Father Robert Nixon
I wanted to pursue my career as a musician, which I did for a number of years, first as a performer and a composer, and then increasingly as as a teacher, both in universities and schools. And, you know, this performance of music as well as the study of it the analysis was something which I really loved, and I did this for a number of years, but at a certain point in my life I felt that I had achieved everything, which I was really wanting to in the world.

Father Robert Nixon
And this was what I about reached my third year and at this point I realized that I’ve basically lived for myself for as long as Christ lived to save the world. And I thought, well, what am I going to do for the rest of my life? It was an important turning point. And at this stage, by my early sentiment, my early desire to commit myself to the service of the church was reawakened.

Father Robert Nixon
My first step, though, wasn’t to joy to Benedictine. What history? My first step was to enter a diocesan seminary because I knew a lot of diocesan priests and I knew the ministry. They did it. I knew how greatly diocesan priests were needed, particularly in Australia, where there’s something of a vocations crisis in the Catholic Church. But after a few years, towards the end of the studies for the priesthood, I felt called to go for a retreat to a Benedictine water street.

Father Robert Nixon
I went to Du Dozier, which was geographically about the furthest place away from where I was in Australia. And I was instantly struck by it, by, you know, by the antiquity of the place, by the beauty of the Spanish architecture, by the by the wonderful way the liturgy was done, in particular the preservation of, of so many of the traditional elements of Buddhist liturgy, the Gregorian hymns, the dead folds and so forth.

Father Robert Nixon
And I also felt a very strong sympathy for the founder, Rosendo Salvatore. And I mentioned before that my own background was as a musician, as a pianist. In fact, he was also a very accomplished pianist and composer, and I felt called by God to join this monastery. But it was a difficult decision because it involved saying goodbye to my home diocese.

Father Robert Nixon
But after a long discernment, I decided to join, which is what brought me there. And since I’ve become about you know, I’ve taken very seriously Benedict’s emphasis on sacred reading within the room. And sometimes this sacred reading is interpreted in a, you know, somewhat narrow sense, says AE. Davida, people don’t realize that this phrase Vico Davida, is actually something which only came into popular use in the 20th century.

Father Robert Nixon
Say Benedict’s own understanding of sacred reading was study in its broadest sense. So education and literary education are, you know, intrinsically linked. You could say almost that all education is at a certain point, literary education, even if it’s mathematical or scientific, because it involves learning a language, learning the grammar of this particular discourse. Well, for me, I was I was struck by the library, which we had at you do see it, it has over 80,000 volumes that has been being collected since the 1840s.

Father Robert Nixon
Our earliest books go back to about 1500. So it’s a really remarkable collection. And so much of it of course was in the Latin leg, which I was very fortunate that I had a fairly secure grounding in Latin for by seabed readings this was under the pontificate of Benedict the 16th when he had encouraged that or reinforced what the Church’s teaching of that was all along that it was an important part of priestly formation.

Father Robert Nixon
So I, I immersed myself in the writings of the Saints, in particular the breadsticks I’d say I took such a great pleasure in this and I realized that there are so many treasures within this immense corpus of literature that I felt called to share them with the contemporary reading public. I so I worked through a number of translations that came across Ted Publishing here in North Carolina.

Father Robert Nixon
And I was very delighted that they were they were happy very enthusiastic about cooperating with this project of bringing to light these undiscovered treasures, which now for the TED Resurrection Book series.

Dr. Ron Thomas
That is a lovely idea. So these are books that really have not seen English translation before.

Father Robert Nixon
That’s absolutely correct, Ron. And this surprises some people. They when they hear that works by saints like Saint Ambrose, Saint Ed. So and so forth have never been translated. But in fact, this works even by Thomas Aquinas, said Saint Bonaventure, which have still to be translated into English so there really is a huge corpus of Latin literature and the imperative to translate it didn’t really exist until about a hundred years.

Father Robert Nixon
Ago, because in previous centuries of educated readers, the kind of readers who would want to read this type of thing generally could read Latin.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes, yes. Well, it’s a different world, and in one sense it’s good that you might have a wider reading public with these translations than was, you know, present when everybody was simply reading Latin. It’s a kind of democratization, I guess, but let’s hope it’s a good one. Sounds like you really have an amazing future ahead of you because I suspect there are more works from where these came from, right?

Father Robert Nixon
Very much so. Very much so. There’s almost wouldn’t say not. Of course, not. Literally an infinite about but there’s much more that a single person could work their way through in their lifetime. So yes, a very interesting things coming forth in the future through TED Books.

Dr. Ron Thomas
When you were translating, let’s just take, for instance, someone like Saint Anselm. What did you what new did you discover about your old friend and some from the particular works that you’ve translated now into English? Well.

Father Robert Nixon
I was familiar with and so has I guess a lot of people are from his bordello did Prostrated, which are his principal theological works in which he presents, among other things, his famous ontological argument, a classic proof for the existence of God and who I was familiar also with some of his other theological writings, good day or so about why God became bad and so forth.

Father Robert Nixon
But I never actually read his purely devotional works. And one thing a lot of people don’t realize about Saint Ed, so is that he used his theology while it studied a very disciplined type of way, very logical and clear way. It’s underpinned by this very fiery and ardent mysticism, particularly very odd mysticism. But what of the works which I’ve translated by him, is a dialog between himself and the Virgin Mary concerning The Passion of Christ.

Father Robert Nixon
And this really puts a whole new perspective, I think, God for most readers of Ed. So.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yeah, I can well imagine that’s always been my impression of Saint Anselm, that he was a marvelous pastor and spiritual presence, you know, while he was Archbishop of Canterbury and.

Father Robert Nixon
Very much.

Dr. Ron Thomas
So, and indeed Beck as well. And so it’s really exciting to think that we would have some access to that spiritual heart of the man, you know, beyond the stories of his career and so forth.

Father Robert Nixon
Yes. Yes. And he wrote a lot of his spirituality is married. He wrote her a buried soul to a number of collection of hymns and popes to the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he’s absolutely fantastic author. Another work of his, which is which is out at the moment, is entitled The Glories of Heaven. The original Latin title was The Beatitude of the Celestial Homeland but that’s obviously a little bit cumbersome.

 

Father Robert Nixon
And in this, what he talks about what it’s going to be like in heaven. He begins by giving the traditional idea that it’s beyond anything we could conceive. But then he’s asked for more details and they say, well, let’s systematically think about everything which the human heart desires and considers to be good and extrapolated to its greatest possible degree to get a sense of what it’s going to be like in the kingdom of heaven.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s absolutely beautiful. Yeah. I mean, for a lot of us, and you rightly said this hour view of Anselm has been kind of overly academic. You know, it’s very much the intellectual precursor to Saint Thomas Aquinas that’s usually how Anselm is presented. But this gives us a particularly different, different view on his on his soul, rich as it appears to be what other spiritual classics have you translated besides Anselm’s?

Father Robert Nixon
Well, another one which I have done is, is a book called The Crown of the Virgin by Saint Ildefonso of Toledo, who is not a particularly well, I would say to do my encounter with him came about because at our word, modesty, we have a college called St Ildefonso College, and no one seemed to know really anything about this, say depart from his name.

Father Robert Nixon
So I was curious. I looked him up, had explored his writing. He was a seventh century saint in Spain, and he was a great champion of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity. And according to tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him and presented him with a casual to celebrate all of her feasts in the work which I translated of his is a work called The Crown of the Virgin.

Father Robert Nixon
And in this he imaginatively fashions this crown consisting of gemstone stars and flowers and uses these as images to reflect upon the different aspects of the beauty and sanctity of the Queen of Heaven.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Oh, that’s fascinating. As well. And so did he have a directly Benedictine connection or not?

Father Robert Nixon
Well, a yes, we classify him as a Benedictine saint. Before he became the archbishop of Toledo, he was he was an ad he was an abbot there of a monastery. One of the interesting things about the Benedictine order, which a lot of people don’t realize, is the Benedictine order isn’t actually like the Fred Sysco foods or the Jesuits.

Father Robert Nixon
It was never kind of canonically formed as an order. So basically all Western monks are more or less classified as Benedictines, although they might not actually have been working with the rule of Saint Benedict. So, for example, in Spain, there were other monastic rules floating around and there were rules, different rules floating around Island and so forth. It wasn’t until a little bit later, until the time of Charlemagne that the rule of Benedict was he attempted to mandate that as the as the rule for all monasteries in Europe until then.

Father Robert Nixon
So the distinction between who is actually a Benedictine and who isn’t is a little bit blurred so is somewhat like Isadore of Seville, a Benedictine. Some sources will say, yes, he is. Other sources, you know, will say no. Well, someone like Gregory the Great we count him as one of our Benedictine saints, but he certainly wouldn’t have put OSB after his name.

Father Robert Nixon
So it was it was a concept which he merged only to a certain extent in emulation of the mendicant orders. The idea that there is a uniform order of, say, Benedict and even today the order of Saint Benedict is not a single juridical entity. There are congregations of different monasteries and each monastery is to a certain degree autonomous.

Dr. Ron Thomas
That’s fascinating. So I mean, Benedictine is, as Benedictine does essentially.

Father Robert Nixon
Exactly where Benedict is in the sense that we follow the principles of the rule of Saint Benedict. And from one Benedictine monastery to another, there is there’s a huge diversity of different observances.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Mm hmm. How close to your monastery are the observances here at Belmont Abbey?

Father Robert Nixon
Well, you know, I’m struck both by similarities and by differences. So you had a very different situation to which we are. You were here surrounded by these beautiful college, quite close to a twin urban center. We, on the other hand, are very isolated we’re out in the middle of nowhere. The closest big city is about a hundred miles away.

Father Robert Nixon
And we don’t have anything like a schools or universities operating there at the moment. And of course, the way we live, there are still remnants of the Spanish influence although our last Spanish monk passed by away about ten years ago. So there I mean, there’s a certain a spiritual communion that we’re all endeavoring to live the same vocation.

Father Robert Nixon
But of course, the details of the way we do things are a little bit different here and there.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yeah.

Father Robert Nixon
So these differences are actually very enlightening because it’s how communities grow and develop.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yeah. Of course, you know that in the United States there was a good deal of reliance on Benedictine communities to provide the education right for Catholic, especially immigrants and so forth. And that’s been part of our distinctive history and sort of explains, as you notated the college built around our monastery, I often wonder in contradistinction to your monastery whether our monks sometimes find that they don’t have the silence and the solitude that they might desire in order to pursue their monastic vocation.

Father Robert Nixon
Yeah, very much. And I think that’s wrong. That’s an experience of a lot of monks because people often they feel called to the monastic vocation with this desire for silence and solitude. And then they find that there are ministerial calls upon them. And this actually was the experience of a lot of great Benedictine saints throughout history. One of the things which Saint Gregory the Great often complained about, that after he’d been elected pope, he lost his opportunities for personal prayer, for meditation.

Father Robert Nixon
And certainly Boniface, the apostle of the Germans, was a Benedictine Margaret was thrust into missionary activity. The same with our own founder. He found himself in the part of the world where he wouldn’t expect. So I would suggest that this is actually quite a healthy tension to have because it is a case of God calling us to these ministries and it’s always good if our desire to pray exceeds the amount of time we actually do pray.

Father Robert Nixon
So if when we finish praying, we feel, you know, I wish I had more of this, that’s actually a good thing because it represents ultimately our desire for the for our celestial homeland, which is never perfectly fulfilled in this world. So the balance between ministerial work and the contemplative life, I think is by its nature, one which never sits quite perfectly.

Father Robert Nixon
But then in this fallen world, nothing really ever sits quite perfectly. And that really is the way it should be because it’s a reminder that we’re only pilgrims here.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yeah, terrific point. Yeah. So the whole tension of those things provides one with a constant reminder.

Father Robert Nixon
That, yeah, and we find it in the life of Christ himself often when he would go off into the solitude and then he would be find himself that the crowds had followed, and he was called to the Ministry of Evangelization instead.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Absolutely right. Well, that is, of course, I think one of the hidden charism of the Benedictine way is evangelization. As I’ve often said to my students, you know, the Benedictines didn’t find others. Others found them. But it was always like a magnet, right, for people’s attention. And the Benedictines were able to do a kind of situated, powerful evangelization to populations around them everywhere they went.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yeah.

Father Robert Nixon
And that’s reflected in their charism of stability. I think that that is the case with Benedictine schools and universities, which spring up around monasteries and hopefully that spirituality of stability can be infused into the educational institutions which they which they administer or which they serve. I think I mentioned before that a lot of the best scholars have something of the monk about them.

Father Robert Nixon
And I think this is something which is particularly important for students, particularly students who are who are residential, living in college, to think, well, here I am living in an intentional community, a community which basically has the same goals, the advancement of knowledge and the glorification of God and the student timetable that everything has so much in common with a plastic timetable.

Father Robert Nixon
So you know, I would really encourage students to think about which that in the past parents would send their sons and daughters to Benedictine monasteries to learn to read and write, but also to benefit from the discipline of this stability and regularity of life for a few years. And I think ideally, college life should be should have a lot of lot in common with the elastic life.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes, it intrinsically does. Just on another note, I often try to stress to the students the position of leisure, right and privilege that they enjoy by being here at Belmont Abbey College. Because they have this opportunity to pursue, but their soul is hungry for.

 

Father Robert Nixon
Yes and wrong. And so, unfortunately, this privilege of leisure is something which we only realized we had in retrospect, you know, that we look back in our future lives where they become busy with either family or work and so forth. And you long for the days when you had no free would eggs free afternoons to do nothing but browse through a library to do some really good reflection or artwork or whatever it is.

Father Robert Nixon
And you know, this is so important. I think so much of our learning happens not only when we’re in classrooms or doing assignments and things we’re required to do, but, you know, in our casual browsing through libraries, through books, throughout, throughout taking our time over things which we’re not going to be assessed for, which you we’re not going to get any credit for.

Father Robert Nixon
And I think what we learned those times is, is often what really stays with us and what can enrich us the most.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes, I agree with you. And it’s also the case that here at every college, they have beautiful environs to be leisurely in and.

Father Robert Nixon
Think, oh, yes, yes, I, I was able to spend a little bit of time strolling around the campus here and it was absolutely struck by the great beauty of the grounds, by the lovely climate here and also by the, the wonderful buildings the wonderful layout of the place was a lovely atmosphere for learning. Yeah. Very conducive, I think, to spiritual and human growth.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes. And I think architecture is one of the most unheralded sources of education, because buildings can be ennobling, can’t they? Just the way they’re structured.

Father Robert Nixon
They can do they can and I think there’s something particularly lovely about older buildings because we live in a society in which so much is transient and ephemeral. And you do that by you get this institution, you study, it’s something which goes back a tradition which goes back generations and generations both locally, then on a deeper level, goes back hundreds of thousands of years to be part of that.

Father Robert Nixon
And to see that in context, the work which we do of one day is a part of this eternal story.

Dr. Ron Thomas
Yes, our time is hastening on, but I wanted to bring up one other issue, and that is the issue of beauty. Beauty is a transcendental. It’s sort of laced around all the things we’ve been talking about today. I’d be interested to have your thoughts about beauty, either with relationship to music or to any other aspect of Benedictine consciousness.

Father Robert Nixon
Yes. So beauty is a concept which everyone recognizes and desires. But when we try to define precisely what it is, it becomes very difficult because we use the adjective beautiful in so many different contexts and applied to so many different objects in different ways. But ultimately, beauty, I think, is what raises our mind up to the transcendent, either through some through some vision of harmony or proportion or combination of colors, accommodation of salads and so forth.

Father Robert Nixon
So it’s something we could recognize but not necessarily define. And I think.