"Warriors of God" by Walter Nigg (a new "old" book from Angelico Press)
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Angelico Press has just announced the publication of a book I very highly recommend. The description and my Foreword to the volume are below.
Warriors of God: The Great Religious Orders and Their Founders
by Walter Nigg
Foreword by Addison Hodges Hart
About the Book
Warriors of God: The Great Religious Orders and Their Founders, by church historian Walter Nigg, is a detailed and lively account of eleven of the great Christian monastic and religious orders and the fascinatingly diverse figures who launched them. The author begins with St. Anthony and the desert fathers, and continues with St. Pachomius and the development of cenobitic monasticism, St. Basil, St. Augustine and the common life of the clergy, St. Benedict and the Rule, St. Bruno and the Carthusians, St. Bernard and the Cistercians, St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Teresa and Carmel, and St. Ignatius. In these accounts, Nigg maintains a fine sense of balance, highlighting not only the virtues and spiritual feats of these great saints, but also the potential pitfalls of monasticism and asceticism.
Ultimately, Nigg views the stories of these saints as an antidote to the horrors of the 20th century. He calls for a rejuvenation of the Church and her mission, which can only be achieved by following the example of the early fathers: "The fundamental and timeless virtues of the primitive Church find their purest expression in the founders of the great orders, and those monasteries whose primitive zeal has ebbed will be reinvigorated only by hearkening to their founders." In this book readers will find "friends of God" with whom they can beneficially become friends themselves. These are our fathers and mothers in the faith, whose stories can — and should — in-form and enrich our own lives, if we let them.
About the Author
Dr. Walter Nigg (1903-1988) was a Protestant minister, theologian, and professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Zurich. He wrote other volumes besides Warriors of God--a book about saints, another on heretics, a biography of St. Francis (all translated into English), and numerous articles in German.
398 pages, $22.95 paperback, $32 cloth
This is the link to the publisher's page.
Here is the link to the book on Amazon.
*****
Foreword
When I first read the 1959 English translation of Walter Nigg’s Warriors of God, the book was already twenty years old. I was a young man at the time, 23 years old, and I had – to my benefit – “discovered” monasticism. Thomas Merton’s books had been the catalyst and, with the added stimulus of religion and history courses at my university, I had begun to read more widely the primary sources. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I became “hooked” by the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, what was then available in translation of The Philokalia, Cassian, Benedict, Bernard, Climacus, and so on. While monastic culture and theory were affecting my intellect, piety, and aspirations, I was simultaneously privileged to see it lived faithfully firsthand through my acquaintance with the sisters of All Saints Convent in Maryland, near Baltimore. The nuns of All Saints were the American branch of an Anglican order, founded in London in the nineteenth century, and named for the famous Anglo-Catholic parish there, All Saints on Margaret Street. In the 1970s, the order was flourishing (today, it is reduced in numbers and has become Roman Catholic). My first “spiritual director” was, in fact, a “spiritual mother” – Sister (later Mother) Catherine Grace – who remained a dear friend of mine until her death in 2020. Why do I mention all this? Simply because it was right in the midst of this stimulating period in my life that I came across Nigg’s invigorating book. Its eleven revelatory delineations of the great monastic (contemplative) and religious (active) orders and the fascinatingly diverse characters who were the founders sowed living seeds in my soul – kernels that have grown and flourished there repeatedly through the intervening decades. I have never forgotten the volume’s initial impact on me.
I reread it last year, purchasing a copy online, in the same edition – indeed, its only edition in English until now – that I read back in 1979. I was a little surprised that, apparently, no one had ever thought to reprint it. In fact, its virtual disappearance was somewhat distressing for me to realize. True, some of its scholarship (although it displays an erudition on every page, made accessible by Nigg’s engaging style) is in a few places slightly dated, but those instances are few and far between. We can be thankful that many translations of monastic texts have become available in scholarly editions since the mid-1950s, when the book’s Swiss author wrote it in German. But even if there are a few passages in it that naturally reflect its own era, the text nonetheless holds up extraordinarily well in our day. I dare say it’s still got what it takes to inspire intelligent, seeking readers in the 2020s. In recent years, it should be noted, there has been something of a reigniting of interest among Christians of all sorts in the wisdom of monasticism and the religious orders. Walter Nigg’s book is tailor-made for those today who would most benefit from his sweeping overview of the pertinent history, in the form of well-crafted miniature biographies and judicious reflection. It is long overdue to have this work back in print. Hence, this past year, I resolved to try to make that happen if I could.
I thought it might involve a real sell-job, perhaps some sweat and tears, approaching a string of dubious publishers… But it didn’t take much effort on my part at all. My first stop was the last one. I arranged to have a copy sent to John Riess, president of Angelico Press, and he agreed almost immediately that the book should be republished. He acquired the rights and lo, here it is in a brand new, attractive, and affordable edition. I could not be more pleased. My wish is that it will go on to inspire and wield its influence on a new generation of disciples.
Dr. Walter Nigg (1903 – 1988) was a Protestant minister, theologian, and professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Zurich. He wrote other volumes besides Warriors of God – a book about saints, another on heretics, a biography of St. Francis (these were translated into English), and numerous articles in German. In Warriors of God, his thoroughgoing knowledge of his subjects, his keen insights into their aims and personal traits, as well as his understanding of the characteristics of each order as it evolved, is vibrantly on display. Nigg never makes a misstep (or, if he does, I certainly missed it). He knows his history and has the gift of putting us imaginatively in each biographical context. He appreciates, seemingly from the inside out, every one of the personalities he has chosen to portray, and likewise he understands their differing “charisms,” rationales, and what it is they actually established – from Anthony and the desert fathers’ flight from the world of Constantine’s empire into solitude, to Pachomius’s monastic regimentation and order, to Basil’s social worker-monks, to Augustine’s community of clergy, to Benedict’s Rule, Bruno’s off-the-map society of silent hermits, Bernard’s great continent-wide Cistercian revolution, Francis’s even greater one, Dominic’s order committed to preaching and study (and the mysticism of Eckhart, Tauler, and Catherine of Siena that it engendered), to those revered Carmelite “doctors” of the mystical life, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and finally to Ignatius Loyola and the missionary powerhouse that was the Society of Jesus. When one has surveyed the panorama Nigg lays out before us, we see that what began as a radical flight from the world with Anthony the Great and his contemporaries, in effect returned over the centuries to the world, and – at the same time – each order retained its distinctive character even as others arose. Nigg admires the various perspectives and charisms of each founder and order, never argues in favor of one’s vision over another’s (he is much too fine a historian for that), and along with the orders’ achievements he never hesitates to reveal their failures as well.
Although this is a book that tells the stories of men for the most part (he calls them “warriors,” after all), his one captivating portrait of a woman – St. Teresa of Avila – is a delight to read. Was there ever a more winsome, humorous, or astute figure in monastic and religious history, or a more earthy and pragmatically minded mystic? One would be hard put to find one.
Regarding the word “warriors” in the title, I am going to make here a brief apology. Not the sort of apology that asks pardon for its use, but an apologia in the true sense of the word: a defense. It has become something of a tired cliché to resist any idea that the spiritual life is “militant” in nature (there is equally a prejudicial tendency to equate masculinity – even of the godly sort – with “toxicity”; but that’s another, though somewhat related, matter). Well, to be blunt, Christian asceticism and spiritual striving is – and always has been – described metaphorically as “unseen warfare.” It’s already a standard description in the New Testament and other early Christian literature of what it is the disciple of Jesus Christ is engaged in from baptism on. As Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov wrote in his biography of St. Silouan, “The monk [and not just the monk, I might add] wages a strong, vigorous, obstinate war… a titanic battle (which the world does not know of) in order to slay the proud beast in himself and become a man, an authentic human being in the image of the perfect Man Christ – that is, to become meek and humble.” [1] In Walter Nigg’s treatment of St. Anthony below, one will find some pages devoted to the struggle with the devil within the soul. I commend these pages to the reader, to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” But let it here be noted that Warriors of God is an entirely apt title for this collection of bold figures, this cloud of witnesses “of whom the world was not worthy,” who serve as models for us – even those of us who are not monks or members of any religious order. We are all called to be “warriors” against the evils that plague us within.
In this book we will find “friends of God” with whom we can beneficially become friends ourselves. These are our fathers and mothers in the faith, whose stories can – and should – in-form and enrich our own lives, assuming we let them. I invite the reader to engage Walter Nigg’s book gratefully, seriously, and receptively. If you do, you’re in for quite a tour.
Addison Hodges Hart
Feast of St. Benedict (March 21), 2024
[1] Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), St Silouan the Athonite (Crestwood, 1999), p. 45.
