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AUGUSTINE BAKER, O.S.B. Towards a Re-Assessment

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AUGUSTINE BAKER, O.S.B. Towards a Re-Assessment J.P.H. CLARK AUGUSTINE BAKER, O.S.B. Towards a Re-Assessment Recent editorial work has opened the way to a new appreciation of a very sig- nificant figure in the English contemplative tradition, whose influence contin- ues not only through his writings, but through the living witness of the direct successors of the religious community for which in his life-time he provided guidance and inspiration. Augustine Baker, O.S.B. (1575-1641) is known above all through Holy Wis- dom (Sancta Sophia), the digest of his teaching published in 1657 by his con- frère Serenus Cressy under the authority of the General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation.1 The foundations for all modern studies of Fr. Baker were laid by Abbot Justin McCann, O.S.B., who not only provided editions of the biographical material, but also listed all the manuscripts of Fr. Baker’s unpublished works that were accessible to him, and is credited with being the only person in mod- ern times to have read them all through.2 Some thirty years ago Dom Placid Spearitt recognised the desirability of critical editions of Fr. Baker’s writings,3 but monastic duties prevented him from bringing this about. More recently, the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey have produced an edition of Fr. Baker’s Substance of 1 For the successive editions of Holy Wisdom, see Michael Woodward, ‘Bakerdata: An Anno- tated Bibliography of Published Tests and Secondary Sources’, in: M. Woodward (Ed.), That Mysterious Man: Essays on Augustine Baker, O.S.B., 1575-1641, Abergavenny-Salzburg 2001, 261 (Analecta Cartusiana 119:15). Hereafter Analecta Cartusiana will be referred to as AC. 2 Abbot McCann’s principal contributions are: The Confessions of Venerable Father Augustine Baker, O.S.B., London 1922 (autobiographical passages from Fr. Baker’s Secretum, edited and rearranged, with introduction); ‘Secretum sive Mysticum, being an exposition of certain notes upon the book called the Cloud’, in: The Cloud of Unknowing and other Treatises, London 1924 and subsequent editions; The Life of Father Augustine Baker, O.S.B. (by Fr. Peter Salvin & Fr. Serenus Cressy), London 1933; J. McCann & H. Connolly, Memorials of Father Augus- tine Baker and other documents relating to the English Benedictines, London 1933 (Publications of the Catholic Record Society 33). Other material by Abbott McCann on Fr. Baker is listed in Woodward, ‘Bakerdata’, 270-271. 3 Dom Placid Spearitt, ‘The Survival of Medieval Spirituality among the Exiled English Black Monks’, in: American Benedictine Review 25 (1974), 287-316; reprinted in That Mysterious Man, 19-41. 210 J.P.H. CLARK the Rule of St. Benedict,4 which is part of his larger Exposition of the Rule of St. Benedict. Since 1997, Professor James Hogg of Salzburg University has printed in the series Analecta Cartusiana, a series of editions of Fr. Baker’s unpublished writings, beginning with the Secretum, Fr. Baker’s commentary on the Cloud of Unknowing which includes also fundamental material for his spiritual autobi- ography; this series includes many of Fr. Baker’s key writings on contemplative prayer and related matters, as well as his Life of Dame Gertrude More.5 In 2001 an Augustine Baker symposium was held at Abergavenny, his home town. This was inter-disciplinary and inter-denominational, and opened up a number of new perspectives. Many of the papers from this symposium break fresh ground and offer a starting-point for further research.6 The publication of many of Fr. Baker’s original treatises enables us both to appreciate Fr. Cressy’s achievement more fully, and to gain a more direct picture of Fr. Baker and his teaching in its historical context. The seventeenth-century language should not detract from Fr. Baker’s actuality for us today, and the pres- ent writer hopes that some of these editions may serve as a basis for a mod- ernised presentation of Fr. Baker’s core-teaching.7 Fr. Cressy’s work in producing Holy Wisdom is a masterpiece of distillation. It has been calculated that Fr. Baker’s manuscript treatises amount to something 4 The Substance of the Rule of St. Bennet (Ed. by Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey), Worcester 1981. 5 Fr. Augustine Baker: Secretum. Text, Salzburg 1997 (AC 119:7); Fr. Augustine Baker: Secretum. Introduction and notes, Salzburg 2003 (AC 119:20); Fr. Augustine Baker: A Secure Stay in all Temptations, Salzburg 1998 (AC 119:8); Fr. Augustine Baker: Discretion, Salzburg 1999 (AC 119:9); Fr. Augustine Baker: Doubts and Calls, Salzburg 1999 (AC 119:10); Fr. Augustine Baker: Directions for Contemplation – Book D, Salzburg 1999 (AC 119:11); Fr. Augustine Baker: Directions for Contemplation – Book F, Salzburg 1999 (AC 119:12); Fr. Augustine Baker: Directions for Contemplation – Book G, Salzburg 2000 (AC 119:13); Fr. Augustine Baker: Directions for Contemplation – Book H, Salzburg 2000 (AC 119:14); Augustine Baker, O.S.B.: Alphabet and Order, Salzburg 2001 (AC 119:16); Augustine Baker, O.S.B.: A spiritual treatise…called A.B.C., Salzburg 2001 (AC 119:17); Augustine Baker, O.S.B.: Book E, Salzburg 2002 (AC 119:18), all works edited by J. Clark; and Augustine Baker: The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More (Ed. Ben Wekking), Salzburg 2002 (AC 119:19). There is also a survey of some of Fr. Baker’s translations: J. Clark, ‘Father Baker’s Translations from the Works of John Tauler in the Latin Version of Laurentius Surius’, with an Appendix: ‘Fr. Baker’s Translations from Blosius’, Salzburg 2003, 49-89 (AC 201). An edition of his Col- lections is at press with Analecta Cartusiana. 6 The papers were published in That Mysterious Man. 7 Dame Teresa Rodrigues, O.S.B., has published The Essence of ‘Holy Wisdom’, Worcester 2001, a modernised and abridged version of Holy Wisdom. The Anglican Benedictine sisters of Holy Cross, Rempstone, have produced a number of prayer-booklets based on Fr. Baker’s teachings and drawing on the editions published by James Hogg at Salzburg. AUGUSTINE BAKER, O.S.B. 211 over a million words, and that Fr. Cressy’s book is about two hundred thou- sand.8 Fr. Baker is often repetitive, and his style and presentation are conducive to a leisurely approach, although he has a clear mind and commonly enumer- ates the points that he is making. Abbot McCann considered that it would be impossible to identify all the various sources of Holy Wisdom;9 the present writer is rather more hopeful. Fr. Cressy is faithful to Fr. Baker’s teaching, but it is of the nature of the book that it should give a more ‘rounded’ picture than the original treatises do. Some of the rough edges are removed; so also are many of the homely examples with which Fr. Baker was wont to drive home his teaching, with proverbial sayings and mnemonic rhymes – no great poetry, but useful for instilling a point. Moreover, the treatises on prayer addressed to the nuns of the English Benedictine convent at Cambrai, where he was chaplain for nine years and where his most creative writing was done, are born out of the living experience of spiritual direction, and a more generally-addressed book must necessarily lose some of this immediacy and personal application. Augustine Baker, as he is known in religion, was baptised David Baker, the son of his Catholic mother Maud and of William Baker, steward of Lord Aber- gavenny in Monmouthshire, Wales.10 William conformed to the Anglican church but remained Catholic in sympathy. David was sent to Oxford univer- sity, but left without taking a degree. He was trained in law, and through his father’s influence succeeded his elder brother as Recorder of Abergavenny on the latter’s death. As a young man he lost any sense of religion, but following what he took to be a miraculous escape from drowning he resolved to turn to the God who had delivered him, and following a period of reading and reflec- tion he was received into the Catholic church in 1603. In 1605 he received the Benedictine habit at St. Justina’s, Padua, taking the name of Augustine in reli- gion from St. Augustine of Canterbury, on the eve of whose feast he was clothed. He was kindly received at Padua, but beyond a copy of the Rule of St. Bene- dict and the Jesuit de Puente’s Meditations he was not given any clear spiritual guidance. He attempted mental prayer, but in the face of aridity he gave this up after a few weeks, and limited himself to attending conventual worship and practising vocal prayer in his cell. After a period of ill-health – Augustine Baker 8 J. McCann, ‘Father Baker’s Tercentenary’, in: Downside Review 59 (1941), 359ff, cited by Gerard Sitwell in his edition of Holy Wisdom, London 1964, vi-vii. 9 Sitwell, Holy Wisdom, vii. 10 The biographical information which follows is found, with references to the primary sources, in Clark, Secretum. Introduction and notes. In this article references to primary sources for Fr. Baker’s biography are only given to highlight particular points. 212 J.P.H. CLARK had health problems intermittently throughout his life – he was given permis- sion to leave the abbey, with a testimonial from the abbot, and made his way back to England. In London, he learned that his father was gravely ill; he returned home, and was in time to assist in his father’s reception into the Catholic church before his death. Having set his family affairs in order, he returned to London. His legal experience was of service to the Benedictine Order; he became involved in the revival of the English Benedictine Congregation through the aggregation (in November 1607) of two English monks of the Italian Congregation in the pres- ence of the nonagenarian Sigebert Buckley, the last survivor of the Marian Benedictines.
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