St Benedict and "the renewal of European civilisation"

On the feast of St Benedict, +Rowan on Benedict of Nursia, patron of Europe, echoing the conclusion to MacIntyre's After Virtue:

The Benedictine Rule did not set out to 'save civilisation'; what it did was to define in itself the components of a certain kind of civilisation. You may recall Thomas Merton's exclamation on his first visit to the abbey of Gethsemani, that he had discovered the only real city in America. The way in which the Benedictine contribution to Europe has sometimes been discussed is in terms of a kind of withdrawal into enclaves where the memory of civilisation was preserved, not always fully understood - a sort of archive of cultural treasures. But, while this is not completely wrong, it misses out the positive contribution of Benedictinism as a model of active Christian life in itself; Benedict's monks were creators of community before they were librarians, and the vision of human possibility and dignity contained in Benedictine witness was at least as important as the conservation of classical letters - or rather, it gave to the heritage of classical letters a clear and practical application, animated by faith. If the Rule is to be one of the sources for the conservation and renewal of European civilisation in the centuries to come - granted that these centuries may be every bit as brutally anti-humanist as the so-called Dark Ages - it will be because of this sketch of political virtue, not because of any merely conservatory role.