A series of seemingly unconnected events converged recently to produce this article. First, my own transition from a space called “The Loft” to a space in the Science Building triggered thoughts of Leo van Winkle. Not only was I moving from one of the oldest classroom buildings on campus to its newest, I was moving from the oldest “science building” to the newest. While “The Loft” – so-named in 1998 by an English teacher temporarily stationed there, Mary Trautman, who was also a sailor – had gone through various incarnations, it had served earlier as a laboratory space, evidenced in the massive lab table that once stood there, as well as the old sink still there, now running only cold water. In my twenty years in the space, I often imagined Fr. Leo at work. And as I had now become an unscientific intruder in our new temple of Science, I started to search some of our archives about Fr. Leo. Simultaneously, I received a beautiful note from Mother Mary Elizabeth, O.C.D., prioress of a Carmelite convent in New Jersey whose superior for many years had been Mother Teresa van Winkle, Dom Leo’s sister. The note made mention of her, as of their mother, Ellen van Winkle, who had become an oblate of Portsmouth. And then, it so happened, Brother Sixtus spoke to me enthusiastically of a 1963 lecture by Fr. Leo that he had just discovered, found to be inspiring, and had passed on to those involved in strategic planning for the monastery and school. It was a lecture, it turns out, I had also recently rediscovered in the 2012 Portsmouth Review, and had been planning to use as the centerpiece for an article.

So, who was this man, Leo van Winkle, so intriguingly interwoven in these events? Our own paths crossed only briefly, as he was the headmaster when I first began to teach at the School, in 1987. He had been my older brother’s headmaster, and I had heard stories: stories of his work on the Manhattan Project; stories of his reputation as an outstanding intellect; stories of my brother’s having to write a letter to him before his sixth form, to explain to him why he should be allowed to return to the school. Perhaps needless to say, I was somewhat intimidated to encounter the man. But his second tenure as headmaster ended quickly, as he was dying of cancer, and dutifully and heroically continued in the demanding position as head of school for as long as he could. I have, therefore, little personal information to go on, and, in fact, unfortunately little archival information to utilize in this task, excepting perhaps several of his professional writings that an additional decade of studying would leave me incapable of understanding. Dom Damian Kearney produced a brief biographical sketch of Fr. Leo for the School’s Bulletin, and I will turn to him for some of that information. But it occurred to me that I might perhaps let Fr. Leo speak for himself, or at least turn to his own voice, and let the lecture he gave in 1963 serve as an indicator of who he was, what he hoped to do, what his vision and his faith were about.

Fr. Damian Kearney’s biographical notes on Dom Leo, published in the School’s Bulletin of the summer of 2012, identify Leo van Winkle as “Monk and Scientist.” The doublet would seem to capture with a simple but compelling clarity the two defining aspects of his identity. Indeed, Thomas van Winkle was from a family whose own character reflects those two traits. His father and mother, Cortlandt J. and Ellen Stager van Winkle, were both converts to Catholicism in the early twentieth century, and their devotion to the faith is clear. Ellen van Winkle became an active member of the monastery’s oblate community. Cortlandt van Winkle was a Princeton product, from undergraduate to doctoral thesis, and taught at the university, albeit in English rather than in the sciences. Fr. Damian notes that Cortlandt van Winkle encountered Dom Leonard Sargent in 1919 while at the Newman School in New Jersey, as Fr. Leonard was seeking to advance his plans to create a monastery at Portsmouth. Professor van Winkle would later send his son to Leonard’s monastery’s school, interested in an excellent education within the context of a religiously dedicated community, two crucial parameters that will come to shape the life of his son. Thomas graduated in the thirteenth year of the school’s existence. It was a monastic community and school populated by the likes of John Hugh Diman, Leonard Sargent, Wilfred Bayne – an impressive, foundational crew, devout, dedicated, and existing in close proximity to the powerful founding inspiration. It is clear that not only their intellectual prowess, but their Benedictine practice left its mark on Thomas van Winkle, leading him, after the intervention of the Second World War, to pursue the monastic life in their community.

His scientific achievements had already been extraordinary. Famously connected to the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb, Thomas van Winkle was an outstanding chemist and physicist, ultimately obtaining his doctorate in chemical engineering from Yale. Exempted from direct military service because of his expertise, he set to work in the early 1940’s enhancing the technology in nuclear submarines. He was later tapped to join the massive scientific effort to develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in April of 1945. Years later, after his long tenure as headmaster, he returned to Yale in the mid-1970’s as visiting fellow and lecturer in engineering, and subsequently went on to work at the Catholic University of America, teaching chemical engineering and eventually serving as department chair. Then, he was, despite himself – paralleling his initial tenure – called again to serve as head of school, and again dutifully obliged.

William F. Buckley with Dom Leo van Winkle

These two tenures are perhaps the clearest evidence of his commitment to obedience, and proof that accompanying this intellectual and professional journey was a spiritual journey deeply embedded in the community of Portsmouth Priory. The 1963 McBrien Lecture, given by Fr. Leo at Delbarton School, offers important detail into the personal vision of this “monk and scientist.” “The Character of the Alumnus of the Benedictine School,” delivered in his sixth year as the headmaster at Portsmouth Priory, outlines his vision of critical elements in a Benedictine education. But it indeed provides much more than that. As Thomas van Winkle himself was himself just such an “Alumnus,” later joining his school’s monastery and at that moment even serving as head of its school, one cannot but read the lecture as having autobiographical implications. And aware of Fr. Leo’s personal humility, one may detect that the desirable character portrayed in his lecture was also for him aspirational. One sees him seeking to structure a viable link between the life of the intellect and the life of the spirit, a link that had served as his own rudder. One finds a respectful engagement in the world through reason and evidence, yet one that also listens “with the ear of the heart,” and remains responsibly committed to community life. It is a statement powerfully embodied in the witness offered in his own life.

His vision of the intellectual life, and of the relationship of science to faith, is informed by John Henry Newman. Indeed, he exhorts the alumnus of Benedictine schooling to join his college’s Newman Society – “immediately.” Following Newman, Fr. Leo sees a distinctive aspect of Benedictine character as endurance, stability, patience. And it is grounded in humility. This serves a church which at critical moments calls for not only “the vision of a St. Francis or the fire of a St. Ignatius” but also “the peace of St. Benedict which builds for the ages.” A monk must have “learned the art of patience”; he realizes that, “quick action and drastic reforms are needed at times in the Church, but it is not the task of the Benedictine genius to supply them” (118). Dom Leo sees the rightly-formed “scientific” persona as shaped by a love of learning, through an education designed, “to help the student acquire knowledge and to teach him logic, which is the science of thought.” This produces “an open and unbiased mind well trained in the principles of logic, so essential to real understanding.” He is, however, keen to affix scientific understanding within its proper limits: the facts and knowledge flowing from science “do not necessarily lead us to ultimate Truth.” Drawing on Sir Hugh Taylor, a scientist and devout Catholic who helped establish Princeton’s Catholic chaplaincy in 1928, he sees the wise scientist as one looking beyond his own discipline, recognizing “beauty in art and literature, in form and expression,” and embracing as critical issues questions about “values, ends, and purpose of life.” But such an awareness must impress on the scientist a humility and an awareness of “the limitations of his science.” Leo seeks to cultivate, in others and in himself, the character of the “wise scientist,” not the (foolish) scientist ready to overstep the limitations which he should realize his own method imposes. It is a path that is “not an easy one,” by which the student of science “necessarily becomes a philosopher.” The love of learning shaping a scientific character forms the student of history as well. Leo sees the awareness of history as crucial to the spirit and the historical value of monasteries. The openness to authentic science finds an echo in attention to an authentic sense of history. This too, like science, needs to recognize its limits and find its proper equilibrium. He is critical of a contemporary “historical method” clinging to its own conclusions and wrongly expanding the scope of its conclusions. Here he draws on Herbert Butterfield, also a Christian, and a historian, who developed a critical view of historians of the age as offering overreaching and self-serving historical claims.

At the heart of the “character” he seeks to delineate, one finds a “wisdom” that carries an instinct for orthodoxy, as that reasoned middle path between extremes, to claim not too much but neither too little, and to check prideful claims with a self-aware humility. Do we not find in the character he advocates here also character traits he himself possessed? – “openness of mind to the reception of facts”; acceptance of truth claims “as valid awaiting the exercise of reason”; approaching the pursuit of truth with “objectivity and detachment.” Indeed, this sort of detachment elicits within the scientist, the historian, and the monk a call pointing to Benedict: “the quiet seeking of God through detachment from the world.” It is a personal asceticism that also refrains from ideological absolutism or pompous self-affirmation. This brings peace amidst “contradictions,” and does not “force a solution.” The kind of thoughtful and serious-minded character, which he hopes will be the product of Benedictine schooling, does not look for “pat answers,” nor is it afraid to admit to being “aware that problems exist” between secular study and the religious faith. For the precious closely held views of the ideologue or dogmatist “will collapse like a house of cards.”

The balance, patience, and authentic reasoned acceptance that Father Leo outlines in the wise scientist or historian also informs his view of personal character and of the right view of oneself and of the world. He calls our attention to Thomas Merton’s simple reminder of the centrality of “one’s daily work, the petty business of getting along peacefully with other people” (The Waters of Siloe) Body and soul, existing in a balance, needing to be both tended to, are wisely shaped in “obedience to the teaching of the Gospel and to the word of the Abbot.” Such obedience will generate a balanced sense of self and a right relationship to the world. Following Benedict, Fr. Leo criticizes a “pampering” of the body, while cautioning against a Platonic discounting of the body. Benedict indeed provides a road map to improve character and to address a “lack of manners among youth today” (1963!), particularly in Chapter 4 of the Rule, “The Tools of Good Works.” Benedict’s obedient and disciplined approach to body and soul serve as the path of freedom of spirit and of the health of the whole person. Such a discipline should not be seen as puritanical. He notes here that the monastic recitation of the psalms finds its lifeblood in prayers that are, “filled with the wonder and glory of creation,” and which foster a “deep appreciation of and love for the beauty of God’s handiwork.” This connects us physically to our world in our living environment, a relation surely valued by Benedict, when one considers the “rugged grandeur of Subiaco and Monte Cassino,” or in later Benedictines, the beauties of the Gothic cathedral and other works of architecture – and one thinks here also of the Portsmouth Priory monastery and campus, much of which was developed under his tenure as head of school. Such an attitude to self and world produces a “lasting impression” on students – i.e., shapes their character. And it enables each to “live in peace and charity with his fellow men.” It is the fruit and evidence of the “good zeal that monks are to have.”

Having addressed the intellectual life as well as life in the world, Leo turns to question of a character living properly in relation to God and the Church. He identifies as desirable an identity as being a “man of the Church.” This flows from a lived emphasis on praying together: “it might even be that the love of the liturgy of the Church, so easily imparted to the students, is a distinguishing mark of the Benedictine alumnus.” Drawing on Etienne Gilson, who praises Thomas Aquinas, he believes that the life of the spirit can, despite our contemporary difficulties and hazards, “leave open every door through which minds of all kinds may reach the same truth” (from E. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales). This portrait of a desirable Catholic character is well in tune with the contemporaneous developments of the Vatican Council, still at that time under the leadership of John XXIII, which strove to express faith, “in terms that can be understood in the present day.” Fr. Leo emphasizes the need to carry the faith into the modern world, promoting the active engagement of the Catholic secondary school graduates in their college chaplaincy, to carry further the “responsibility to grow in the knowledge of (his) faith.” This engagement is to be thoughtful, sincere, and also dialogical, and Leo warns against becoming, “the belligerent Catholic who leaps to his feet in class or lecture hall to defend the Church every time he hears any real or imagined attack.” Again, the patient and reasoned approach must win out, respecting an opposing or challenging view as being honestly held, while perhaps seeking out advice from the chaplaincy or the Catholic faculty, or “perhaps even one of his former Benedictine school teachers,” to properly understand and address the issue. The fundamental baseline of this engagement is to continue in life as “a community man,” for whom “it will not be a question of ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather, ‘How can I help my brother?’”

Those of us who encountered Leo van Winkle, if only for a small portion of his time with us at Portsmouth, would certainly have found reflected in his own character the virtues to which he exhorts his audience in the 1963 McBrien Lecture. One could start with his “emphasis on humility and obedience.” And one could finish with his exhortation to his audience, calling us all to be people who, “by the influence of their learning and the example of their lives quietly and unobtrusively renew the face of the earth.” In this, he clearly himself led by example. His was a life that seemed to dispense with none of the twelve rungs of Benedict’s ladder of humility, but held them closely, so that “after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear. Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue.” (Chapter 7, RB) This humility informed his paths both as scientist and as monk. And his hope in the fruitfulness of this journey remained firm. At the beginning of his McBrien Lecture, he makes reference to Gregory the Great, who reported a kind of mystical moment in the life of Benedict: “a marvelous strange thing” in which “the whole world, gathered as it were together under one beam of sun”; “a light, which banished away the darkness of the night.” For Dom Leo, this narrative tells us, in sum, “St. Benedict’s outlook on the world and all it contains.” And one wonders if this same light does not also illuminate the two apparently divergent paths of “monk” and “scientist” that defined Leo van Winkle’s own life and character, his journey intellectual and spiritual, and so shine on the hope inspiring his own Christian faith.