By Julian Kwasniewski

Despite having been born in Egypt and falling in love with America in midlife, Hubert van Zeller is still a very English author. His life spanned both world wars, and the Second Vatican Council. Somehow, he managed to keep his head. Through all of that, he was either a schoolboy or (mostly) a monk of Downside Abbey. I’m not sure he enjoyed either very much, but he penned dozens of books on spirituality, gave many retreats, and served as chaplain for several communities of nuns.

His writing days spanned from the ’30s well into the ’70s, and the old Sheed and Ward hardbacks, with their characteristic cloth covers and now slightly mottled 1950s paper, have long been out of print—although regularly found in old priests’ libraries, or Catholic used bookstores.

Happily, Dom Hubert’s books have a new lease on life, thanks to the County Meath based Silverstream Priory’s publishing house “The Cenacle Press.” Over the past few years, the Irish Benedictines have republished eleven of his books in new editions, complete with new, clean typesetting and new covers. I even had the honor of giving one of them a new preface.

Van Zeller flourished at a time of the great Catholic literary revival in England: contemporaneous with Ronald Knox, Bede Jarret, Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, and others, his writing exhibits charm and vivaciousness, with a dash of Chestertonian paradox now and then. Interestingly, Dom Hubert was the least famous of a particularly special trio of writers: the other two were Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s friendship with Knox is perhaps better known, but Van Zeller was close to both.

As van Zeller recounts in his humorous autobiography One Foot in the Cradle, grade school Hubert made a pencil caricature of Knox when the latter visited his school. Ten years later, now as a monk and the monastery guestmaster, he formed a friendship with Knox “which was to last for thirty years and eleven months.”

Silverstream’s republications include what could loosely be called a “set”: We Work While the Light Lasts, We Die Standing Up, We Live with Our Eyes Open, and We Sing While There’s Voice Left. These are probably my favorite Dom Hubert books on the spiritual life. Aimed at laypeople, they insist, in short and punchy chapters, on the necessity of prayer, contemplation, and that we not search for happiness as something separate from life. Rather, it is part of life, and if looked for as an add-on, or as the part of life to be sought, happiness will not be found. No, Dom Hubert says, happiness and suffering are part of one thing—life—and you have to choose all of it. You rejoice in the one, and accept the other, doing your best to thrive in a life which contains suffering and joy all mixed together. Unity of life is a major theme in all four of these books.

In We Sing While There’s Voice Left, he writes of human love in a similar vein: “Look to the meaning of love, and leave its emotion to come over and above its right use. As happiness is to life, so pleasure is to love: each to be found in its proper element but not to be looked for as an entity by itself. The essential is the life: the essential is the love. Miss out the essential and the rest crumbles to dust in your hand.”

Another loose series are the “approach” titles: Approach to Spirituality, Approach to Prayer, Approach to Penance, Approach to Monasticism, and Approach to Christian Sculpture are all titles Silverstream’s Cenacle Press now boasts in their catalog. Of these, I believe the last two probably contain the most unique material. In the first, I especially appreciate Dom Hubert’s recognition and criticism of how superiors may misguide a novice or young professed to stay in the monastery under the pretext of “now that you are here, it is God’s will for you not to change your state,” a misapplication of the idea that one’s “state in life” is a clear indication of God’s will. The whole point of the novitiate and temporary profession is to see if this state is suitable for the rest of your life, not to be the indicator simply by the fact that you are in them.

I am a biased reviewer of Approach to Christian Sculpture given the fact that I wrote a new foreword for it. Published in 1959, it is an interesting window into the pre-Vatican II art scene, and van Zeller’s aphorism that “Before a piece of sculpture can be called Christian we must be sure that it can be called sculpture” cuts deeply at a lot of Catholic “art” which is really kitsch. He says that “religious carving is meant to be a plea for light and truth, not for charm,” and van Zeller’s own sculpture—for in addition to being a writer, he was a life-long sculptor—is certainly not “charming.” In fact, it tends to the brutalistic side of things. All in all, however, I’m rather partial to his blockish figures, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the semi-primitive and childlike features of many of his sculptures. Anyone interested in the question of what makes art good art, and then what makes good art Christian art, should read this book. I’m not saying he has the most complete or philosophically detailed argument: what he does have are thoughts on the topic very worth listening to, and an interesting historical overview of sculpture, both Christian and pagan.

The last I’ll comment on is the slim tome Letters to a Soul. The book is from 1975: Dom Hubert is corresponding with a new convert—an artist—who in the fervor of conversion attempts monastic life, leaves, and gets infatuated with a married woman. Dom Hubert gently tries to disentangle him while respecting his correspondent’s agency and independence. All turns out for the good in the end, but in the course of this fascinating book, the short letters reveal some of van Zeller’s finest wisdom on discernment, vocation, and prayer. They also reveal serious criticism and anecdotes of the state of the Church in England following Vatican II, and the fact that our author was a quiet (one might almost say “a closet”) Traditionalist. His words to the young man should resound with all of us laymen and women striving for holiness: “Your view of the world when you left it was jaundiced. You thought it had no other purpose than to seduce you. Now you seem to see there is something to be said for it after all—or anyway that there is much about it which can be saved and wants to be saved.” Thanks be to Dom Hubert for saying so—and to the monks of Silverstream for giving him the opportunity to say it again to a new generation of souls.