Maurists

A French Benedictine congregation of St Maur, founded in the early 17th-c. The monks were chiefly noted for their literary and historical work. Suspected of being influenced by Jansenism, they were eventually dissolved in 1818.

Maurists were a congregation of French Benedictines called after Saint Maurus (died 565), a disciple of St. Benedict and the legendary introducer of the Benedictine rule and life into Gaul.

At the end of the 16th century the Benedictine monasteries of France had fallen into a state of disorganization and relaxation. In the abbey of St. Vaune near Verdun a reform was initiated by Dom Didier de la Cour, which spread to other houses in Lorraine, and in 1604 the reformed congregation of St. Vaune was established, the most distinguished members of which were Ceillier and Calmet. Most of the Benedictine monasteries of France, except those belonging to Cluny, gradually joined the new congregation, which eventually embraced nearly two hundred houses.

His festival is kept on the 15th of January.

The primary idea of the movement was not the undertaking of literary and historical work, but the return to a strict monastic régime and the faithful carrying out of Benedictine life; and throughout the most glorious period of Maurist history the literary work was not allowed to interfere with the due performance of the choral office and the other duties of the monastic life.

The course of Maurist history and work was checkered by the ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the French Church during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It seems that towards the end of the 18th century a rationalistic and freethinking spirit invaded some of the houses. The present French congregation of Benedictines initiated by Dom Guranger in 1833 is a new creation and has no continuity with the congregation of St. Maur.

The great claim of the Maurists to the gratitude and admiration of posterity is their historical and critical school, which stands quite alone in history, and produced an extraordinary number of colossal works of erudition which still are of permanent value. The foundations of this school were laid by Dom Tarisse, the first superior-general, who in 1632 issued instructions to the superiors of the monasteries to train the young monks in the habits of research and of organized work.

The full Maurist bibliography contains the names of some 220 writers and more than 700 works. The lesser work in large measure cover the same fields as those in the list, but the number of works of purely religious character, of piety, devotion and edification, is very striking. Perhaps the most wonderful phenomenon of Maurist work is that what was produced was only a portion of what was contemplated and prepared for.

The French Revolution cut short many gigantic undertakings, the collected materials for which fill hundreds of manuscript volumes in the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris and other libraries of France.

When these figures were considered, and when one contemplates the vastness of the works in progress during any decade of the century 1680-1780; and still more, when not only the quantity but the quality of the work, and the abiding value of most of it is realized, it will be recognized that the output was prodigious and unique in the history of letters, as coming from a single society. The qualities that have made Maurist work proverbial for sound learning are its fine critical tact and its thoroughness.

The chief source of information on the Maurists and their work is Dom Tassin's Histoire litteraire de la Congregation de Saint-Maur (1770); The two works of de Broglie, Mabillon (2 vols., 1888) and Montfaucon (2 vols., 1891), give a charming picture of the inner life of the great Maurists of the earlier generation in the midst of their work and their friends.

Useful information about their literary undertakings will be found in Léopold Delisle's Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale; 3), the latter an interesting appreciation by the Protestant historian Otto Zückler of the spirit and the merits of the work of the Maurists.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.