words, which I wrote out longhand, complete with the accents. As soon as he laid eyes on the paper, Jules began shouting sbaglio, sbaglio, sbaglio (mistake, mistake, mistake) as he slashed away with his red pencil. According to him, I had all the accents wrong. I had carefully copied them out of the book, but they were still wrong. Furthermore, every Greek word I pronounced he would correct, since I did not use the modern Greek pronunciation. Never mind that Evagrius wrote in the fourth century A.D.
At the end of the semester, Jules did not give us an exam. He had not taught us anything, so how could he? He also did not give me a grade. The next fall the registrar’s office warned me that it was my duty to go to him and get the grade put in my booklet. If I did not do that, I would lose the entire course. So I went to his room in trepidation, knocked on the door and took my life in my hands. Jules acted as if he had never seen me in his life; he could not remember having taught me. Finally, he grabbed the booklet and disgustedly wrote down an “8.” I later found out that the other student got a “9.”
But Jules was not done with me yet. For various reasons, I myself wound up giving a course that fall called “Introduction to Monastic Literature.” As soon as he heard about that, Jules protested vehemently to the Dean that I was unqualified, since I knew no Greek. But in fact, I have a minor in Greek from Catholic University, so that shut him up. Worse yet, he was made to teach an Italian version of the same course! But he got even anyway. He would watch the library cards and as soon as I would check out a book for my lectures, he would demand it from the librarian! As a professor, he had first rights. Finally, the Dean himself came to my door one day positively quivering. “For God’s sake give Jules the books he wants!” he pleaded.
At that point, I decided I had had enough. I told the Dean that I thought it was pitiful for the Dean of the University to be functioning as an errand boy for a lunatic professor like Jules. Furthermore, if this harassment did not cease at once, I would simply go home and spend the rest of my life advising people not to go to Sant’ Anselmo. It stopped.
Actually, I did not despise Jules as a scholar. He was indeed fluent in Greek and spent his summers at a famous monastery on the island of Patmos, studying Greek manuscripts. He knew Greek monasticism very well, and has written some good things. Perhaps his neurotic behavior stemmed from the time he spent in a German concentration camp as a member of the French Resistance. Maybe he saw me as just another German. At any rate, he was an example of the type of monastic misfit who could wash up on the shore of Sant’ Anselmo at times. They needed professors and they could not afford to play only aces.
Of course, not all the profs at Sant’ Anselmo were ogres. Fr. Benedetto Calati, the abbot general of the Camaldolese, for example, was extremely genial and radiated holiness. If we could only have understood what he was saying it would have helped, but it was still a privilege to be in the same room with him. Moreover, I cannot judge the other students by my own command of Italian. After a day straining to understand every word, I was quite exhausted.
Another very congenial professor was Fr. Jean Gribomont. He was a monk of Clairvaux, Luxembourg, and member of the Solesmes Congregation. Gribomont was not the typical prim French monk; he was a huge, rollicking giant, given to great gales of laughter and full of jokes. Once we took him to a restaurant after class and he was quite capable of polishing off a big dinner plus the ubiquitous Italian wine. A little Filipino monk sat at his right hand, filling his glass. I recall Gribomont’s response: “Ho ho ho, Eddie, your grade keeps going up and up!”
One day I happened to mention to Gribomont that Jules was trying to block my appointment to teach a class because he said I knew no Greek. At that Gribomont roared: “Don’t feel so bad, he says I don’t know Greek either!” The joke was that Gribomont was one of the world’s leading experts on Greek monasticism and a master of the vast literature of that movement. To say he knew no Greek was like saying that Michael Jordan could not play basketball.
In my second year at the Collegio, “Fr. Aubrey” came from the U.S.A. to teach in our department. It was a treat to have an American on the staff, and one that knew how to teach. In addition, it was he who had suggested to me that I come to Rome to study. Nevertheless, I soon found myself in hot water with this irascible man. It seems that he had been assigned to be the second reader of my Master’s thesis. But the first reader was Fr. Anselm himself, and that posed a serious problem. For these two heavyweights disagreed about virtually everything in the field of monastic studies.
Since I had to write my thesis under Anselm, I knew I had to please him. I also knew that he would brook no opposition to his firm ideas about the Rule of Benedict. I reasoned that the only way to get the degree was to tell him what he wanted to hear. So I sat down and read all he had written about RB 48 on lectio divina. Then I fed it back to him in other words. When Aubrey saw this, he was apoplectic. How could I perpetrate such garbage? How could I prostitute myself like that? I agreed with him that it was shameless, but I wasn’t going to change it. But I did compromise by writing some footnotes to please Aubrey. The result was one of the most schizoid theses ever produced in Sant’ Anselmo.
As a footnote, I might mention that things did not end here. I went home and reworked that thesis into two articles—in which I argued against everything I had written in the original. These two articles were then published. If Anselm ever read them, he must have suffered a bit of heartburn.
But of course school itself was far from the main attraction of Rome. The main attraction of Rome is Rome itself, an inexhaustible treasure trove of delights for the lover of art and history. It is hard to convey to someone who has never been there, and spent months and years roaming the back streets, what the place is like. The main attractions such as St. Peter’s and the Spanish Steps are world famous. But they are but the tip of a vast iceberg of marvelous antiquities and cultural relics from all ages. Indeed, part of the wonder of the place is that it is all piled together and waiting for the patient student to sort it out.
I got an inkling of what to expect the first morning I ventured out of Sant’ Anselmo for a walk. Just down the street was a squat brown brick church that almost looked like a modern warehouse. I wandered into the vestibule and noticed a huge wooden door mounted on the wall behind glass. This door was covered with small carved bas-reliefs from the life of Christ. When I glanced at the explanatory plaque, I did a double-take. “Carved cypress doors from 435 A.D.” 435 A.D.? But that’s impossible, I thought, it’s a hundred years before St. Benedict!
But sure enough, Santa Sabina is indeed that old. In fact, a huge mosaic on the back wall explains that it was built out of gratitude for the recovery of the city after it was sacked by the first wave of Goths in 410 A.D. Of course, it has been much rebuilt and refurbished over the ages. Today it is the generalate of the Dominicans. That casual discovery prepared me for many, many happy days of roaming the city with my trusty guidebook by Georgina Masson in hand. In two years, I never exhausted the list of things to be seen.
For tourism, Sant’ Anselmo is ideally located. All the antiquities are located in the historic center of the city, and most are within walking distance from the Benedictine College. For the less athletic, Rome has a good bus system that used to be dirt cheap (about a dime!) and went everywhere. It is even better now that the subway system has been enlarged. But in those days I thought nothing of walking two or three miles to see things. In fact, walking was part of the pleasure.
At first, the traffic was somewhat frightening, but my big city background enabled me to learn the system very quickly. The Italians appear to be reckless drivers, but in fact they are very good drivers. Furthermore, those little cars can stop on a dime. I found that the trick was to be sure to make eye contact when you step out onto the pedestrian zebra. If they can’t stop, they will touch the horn, but normally they will stop for anyone who looks them in the eye. I found I could walk across town almost without stopping. Stoplights do not mean much to them, but they are basically kind to pedestrians.
That does not mean that the Romans are particularly gentle or courteous as a people. They are like the inhabitants of all big cities: brash, rude, loud, aggressive and so on. They will trample you in crowds, push you back in stores, crush you in buses—if you let them. The only way to survive is to push back. Some Americans at the Collegio never would do that, and they were always angry at the Italians. I read somewhere that life is a game for the Italians. Either you play it with them or you are going to be unhappy in Italy. I decided not to be unhappy.
But you have to have a sense of humor. For example, to buy tickets to the opera you go to a window in the piazza at the front of the building. At opening time, there is a large crowd of people milling about the square. They are not queuing up, because Italians hate lines. So when the window opens, they all press toward it in a mass. That means that those who get there first and buy tickets then cannot get out. And so they have a sort of low-grade riot on their hands for no reason. Faced with this, you can either get angry or laugh yourself sick.
Speaking of the opera, I did manage to take in several of them. I have never been a big fan of that art form, but the tickets were very cheap (for seats far up in the last balcony) and the time was right: on Saturday afternoon, there was a 4 p.m. performance that got you home for supper at 8 p.m. I also attended the opera at San Carlo in Naples, which is a much fancier venue. I never got to La Scala in Milan. In fact, I went to a lot of concerts and films in Rome, more than I ever had before or since. I wasn’t over there to waste my life in the library. Plenty of time for that back in North Dakota.
At that time, Sant’ Anselmo had loosened up to the point where such things were possible. Up until the 1970s, it had been a sort of German boot camp, but after the Council it no longer seemed wise or even possible to lock people up in the midst of such culture. Of course, I was 40 years old in 1976, so nobody was going to lock me up under any circumstances. This meant that a person could pretty much make his own way over there, as long as you were responsible about it. Some of the younger monks did not seem to understand that.
The other side of the coin is that Sant’ Anselmo is also a community, and somebody has to take responsibility for that community. That means that people have to be regular for liturgical functions, meals and so forth if these exercises are to be done right. It is not a monastery in the usual sense with clear lines of authority and strict rules. But neither is it just a boarding house for scholars. Some of the monks abused this freedom, but most of them did not.
This was especially notable in the liturgy groups divided among the various languages. For morning prayer and Mass, we functioned in vernacular groups. So for example there were about 25-30 English speakers who formed that group. There were German, French, Italian and Spanish groups as well. Each group had to arrange its own modus operandi. Some of these groups had a difficult time, but the English-speakers did not, because we had a lot of experience at home with liturgical experimentation.
One of the strongest points of Sant’ Anselmo, of course, is the fact that it is an international college. You meet monks from all over the world there, and it should broaden your outlook. But the other side of the coin is that this motley crew has to learn to live together. Sometimes the cultural differences are almost too much to bridge, but generally the common monastic culture is enough to hold the place together.
Given this state of affairs, the superiors are not too anxious to hold to a tight ship and even fairly serious problems are not tackled the way they would be in one’s home monastery. In my second year there, I lived across the hall from a notorious carouser who often held late-night drinking parties. The crash of falling furniture woke me up more than one night, but though I admonished him things did not change. Since I was the English-language “socius,” who was supposed to have some care for the life of that group, I told the Prior that I felt this man heading for a life of alcoholism. The reply was: “Just keep out of it.”
Part of the fun of living in Rome was some participation in the cultural life of the city. It was especially pleasant to attend a late afternoon film or concert and then have “cena” (dinner) in one of the multitude of cafés. These places are somehow more humane than American restaurants. The pace is less rushed and the food is generally excellent. It is nice to observe the many Italian families who spend the entire evening in the restaurant. Of course, the Roman evening meal is quite late, never earlier than 8 p.m., so that means you leave the café to go straight to bed.
