Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Formation

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First Precaution Against the World

(Here is the introduction to this series.)

I have already noted that the world, which shows itself an enemy through the middle part of the soul, especially afflicts the will.  This is our ability to choose goods based not on immediate desire, but on an apprehension of a future benefit or danger. The will is also the faculty that loves—love being a choice rather than a rational thought or a base desire.

And indeed, in his short work The Precautions, Saint John of the Cross immediately identifies love as the arena of the combat with the world. His first question to those who would do battle with the world is, “Whom shall we love?”

John recommends loving no one person more than another, and forgetfulness of all particular affections or hatreds. Do not think about others, neither good things nor bad.

This is sound monastic doctrine, though difficult in practice. Let’s begin with the very challenging teaching that we should not love one person more than another. This derives directly from the gospel. Jesus says that if we do not approach Him without hating father and mother, we cannot be His disciples. So John is channeling one of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.

Part of the difficulty is that there are relationships whose very nature incurs a certain debt, often mutual, but sometimes in one direction. For example, children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers. This must be done whether one loves one’s parents or not. We show honor not because we love our parents more than others (though that may be the case), but because honor is the correct disposition toward a parent. This discipline of honor allows us to follow the teaching of Saint Peter, who says in his First Letter that we should honor all. By practicing honor toward certain persons, we can learn to transfer that honor to all persons.

This opens a way to understand what it might mean to love everyone with the same intensity. Loving a specific person is not necessarily the obstacle that it at first appears to be. The question is: will this love I feel and then exercise toward this person, who is God’s gift to me, will this love instruct me on how to treat everyone else? When I have discovered what it means to love one person, can I discipline myself to treat others as if I loved them? When I interact with someone whom I find disagreeable, I can ask, “How would I treat this person if I loved him or her the way I love my best friend?”

I believe that parenthood has a built in pedagogy here. Parents know that it is impossible to love every child the same way. But one must love each child in some sense equally. This requires a deep interest in knowing their nascent personhood, the specific needs of each child. In other words, parents must learn how to love the correct way for each child.

When we begin to open up this love toward others, I want to offer one of my own precautions. We are not talking about letting other persons determine us, and certainly not toxic persons. Love for someone making very poor choices can take the form of “tough love,” letting the person experience the pain that comes from poor choices. Even the incarceration of a criminal can be seen, if done properly, as an act of love, for it prevents the criminal from committing further acts that damage the soul. In any case, I am advocating for a clear-eyed love, not enmeshment with everyone else’s failings. This is why John also says that we must have equal forgetfulness of all persons. We must know where our feelings end and theirs begin, where we can reasonably be expected to help, and where our help means getting drawn into responsibility for unhealthy behavior.

It is interesting that we are commanded to honor our parents rather than to love them. On the other hand, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus famously reinterprets the idea of a neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor is a person who incurs a certain type of debt, actually a kind of “reverse debt,” something owed to another who is the one in need, and who happens to be near me. In such a circumstance, I am invited to become the tangible mercy and compassion of God toward the poor, the sick, and the abandoned, simply because God put me there.

Let’s note in completing this meditation that every person we meet each day has experienced hurt, disappointment, injury—the list could go on and on. We can’t really know the extent to which that person needs compassion, a kind word, maybe just forbearance. And so he is my neighbor, the one to whom I owe love.

In what sense is the world the enemy in these expressions of honor and love? The world has fallen under the domination of the devil, the diabolos, the one who divides. Particular love and honor, as I have hinted, is given to us by God as a part of His pedagogy. It is when we want to hold onto that love and use it for our own purposes of comfort, pleasure, safety, or whatever, that it causes us to become possessive and to separate. We can attempt to build up a world centered on ourselves, based on our preferences. This is the hostile face of “the world”:  when we seek division based on our own judgments and not God’s.

The second part of John’s exhortation tells us not to think about others. Do we not again need to do this sometimes? Doesn’t a novice master or a teacher need to think about the character of the novice or student in order best to love him and serve his needs for conversion and growth? Do we not need to think about others any time we engage in a cooperative action?

Here is where John’s exhortation to think neither good nor bad comes in. He is exhorting us to evaluate the person not in a moral sense. Any such judgment will be ill-informed and biased. Rather, there are situations where love indeed requires us to make prudential judgments about the best way to interact with specific persons. Here’s the rub: it is extremely difficult to parse the difference between the moral judgment and the practical judgment.

I believe that the distinction arises from how the thought affects me. Does the thought of the other person’s character and assumed motivations move me to change my own approach and dispositions to adapt myself to that person? Or is my first thought to demand that the other person change?

Saint Benedict confirms this approach when he teaches that the abbot must adapt himself to each monk’s character and intelligence. An abbot is someone who really must think about others, as any father must think about his children. But the result of this thought, in the case of an abbot, is not first of all a demand that the monk change, but rather is a discovery of inadequacy in oneself. Or if we put this positively, it is an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge and wisdom.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction

Saint Paul writes to the Ephesians:

“You [Christ] made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lives in the passions of our flesh.”

This is the most immediate scriptural citation behind the traditional formulation of the three enemies of the soul, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This is one of the traditional means of distinguishing between the spirits opposed to God and the Holy Spirit, and by the High Middle Ages, we see this triad quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something widely known and accepted in Catholic moral theology.

Saint Paul says that we once walked in the course of this world, the first enemy. The second, the prince of the power of the air, refers to a belief that demons inhabited the air between earth and heaven, and prevented our ascent there. We see this in icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, where monks are attempted to climb to heaven, but are being pulled at, and even at times pulled down by flying demons.

Finally, Paul mentions the passions of the flesh.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will be meditating on these three enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh, and the devil. I will be making use of the thinking of Saint John of the Cross, who does a brief exposition of them in a short work called The Precautions. This is written for cloistered religious, and I plan to follow it pretty carefully, making some suggestions about how we might adapt it to the lay state, and I hope that our later discussion can be an opportunity to flesh out how best to make this adaptation.

In this work, he says that the world is the enemy least difficult to conquer, and so we will happily begin our reflection there. But by way of introduction, I will say a bit more in general about the three enemies.

John of the Cross goes on say that the devil is the hardest to understand, and the flesh is the most tenacious.

In his formulation, we can see that defeating the devil requires purification of the intellect, and battling the flesh the purification of the lower appetites, which leaves the higher appetite of the will as the field of combat against the world.

In traditional monastic spiritual theology, which follows on that of Plato and Aristotle, the soul is divided into three parts. The highest is the rational, and the lowest is called the concupiscible. In the middle is the irascible. If we work our way up, we discover that the concupiscible appetites are those of pleasure and a sort of mindless self-preservation, the interior physical needs of the body. The thoughts connected with this part of the soul are primarily gluttony and lust, though avarice is partly connected to this lower part of the soul.

The middle part of the soul regards our relationships to persons and to good and evil. This irascible part used anger to fend off danger and sadness to remind us of previous mistakes and losses. Under the power of sin, we mistakenly use anger against other persons and sadness against others who we feel deprive us in some way. It culminated in sloth or accedia, a kind of abandonment of any spiritual ideal. This is the area we will be looking at in the next post.

Finally, the rational part manifests itself in pride and vainglory.

Natural contemplation, the meaning of creatures, and the end of the virtues

When I initially read Cassian’s first Conference, I found the discussion there of the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monk to be interesting but not particular engaging on a personal level. Over the years, as I re-read it, it occurred to me that the problem was the entire worldview that formed me. This worldview sees no goals to anything in the cosmos, depicting it as the open-ended development of initial conditions and inputs of force and motion. That matter and energy happened to produce human beings, gemstones, scorpions and tornadoes is a quirky and ultimately inexplicable part of this random development.

It was through reading Dante, Charles Williams, Chesterton and MacIntyre that I gradually came to understand the perfections of creatures, first on an intellectual level of assent, and eventually at the level of the heart, of appreciation and gratitude. This helped to open up for me what Evagrius calls natural contemplation: the graced ability to see creatures from the spiritual perspective, the perspective of God and the angels, the perspective of eternity.

Natural contemplation means accepting that creatures have meaning. They have ways of flourishing and ways of failing to flourish. We participate in God’s life-giving grace when we work towards this flourishing—or even simply allow it to happen, take note of it, and give God glory.

An example that I have frequently used to illustrate this is that knives are meant for cutting things, and they work best when we understand the type of knife that we are holding. When we use a serrated knife with the right pressure, allowing the blade to gain purchase on the bread crust, we can gently guide it, according to its nature, through the bread. But when we use it like a guillotine, pressing straight down until the piece of food pops apart, the knife, as if objecting to being handled incorrectly, issues a loud report from the plate (which is perhaps also objecting to our misuse of its nature).

We go a step further when we use a knife as if it were a screwdriver or prybar. Sadly, this is a common mistake, to judge by the number of knives in our kitchen that are missing tips. But it is an outgrowth, even if a somewhat trivial one, of a worldview that gives objects no meaning, no goal, no nature. Since they have no inherent telos, we are free to make use of them as our wills desire. And so a knife becomes a screwdriver, and in secular culture men become women and women men.

If we lack the ability to be receptive to the goal or end of other creatures, is it really a surprise that we struggle to see our own lives as goal-driven? Human beings flourish in predictable ways. We will move toward this type of flourishing life not by examining our inner movements, but by attending to objective standards like the virtues.

All of the activities of the monastery gain their worth from what they contribute to a growth in virtue and an awareness of our final destination. At the judgement, God will not ask us if we got our work done on such and such a date, but if we labored to serve our neighbor in love, or if we sacrificed ourselves for the poor. We will not be asked if we were true to ourselves, because who we are in Christ is something beyond our ability to discern at the moment.

Fr. Timothy recently mentioned a reading from Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She says that, at the end times, God will reveal our proper name to us: we won’t understand fully who we are until then. But virtue will help offer us glimpses along the way. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to understand creatures from a proper theological perspective. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to be asked to step out of our present comfort zone and take up a task that will stretch us, perhaps quite a lot. But if we lack virtue, others will be reluctant to give us those opportunities to learn whether we have the skill to serve the community and the Church at a new level.

Conference on the Priority of Persons over Rules

Tonight, I would like to follow up on a topic that I spoke about during Chapter last week, and that is the priority of persons over rules. I asked Br. Anthony to look up some examples of this contrast in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Some of the examples I will use tonight are the ones he found.

It occurred to me that a major source of the appeal of the Desert Fathers as spiritual teachers is precisely that they refuse to formulate rules. In fact, they seem to be better known for finding all kinds of exceptions to rules. Here’s an example:

A directive was once issued at Scete: “Fast this week.” It came about that some brothers from Egypt visited Abba Moses and he cooked them a little gruel. Seeing the smoke, his neighbors told the clergy: “Here, Moses has broken the directive of the fathers and cooked himself some gruel.” “We ourselves will speak to him when he comes,” they said. When Saturday came round, the clergy, well aware of the great discipline of Abba Moses, said to him before the company: “Oh Abba Moses, you have broken men’s directive but fulfilled God’s.”

The priority of persons is often very explicitly taught by the Fathers. Here is a saying of Antony the Great:

Life and death depend on our neighbor: for if we win over our brother, we win over God, but if we offend our brother, we sin against Christ.

Here, I will note that we do not typically win someone over by quoting the rule book to him. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes an act of charity for someone to state the Church’s teaching clearly. Among the spiritual works of mercy are instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner. Saint Benedict clearly wants the abbot to intervene when a brother is acting disobediently or contrary to the community’s customs.

But notice that here, it depends in another way upon persons: the abbot is the one who determines when and how to intervene, and this can’t be predicted ahead of time by rules. Our current Abbot Visitor, Abbot Cuthbert, once quoted another abbot, I believe an abbot of Solesmes, saying that in a monastery there should be many strict rules, and many dispensations from those rules. But there are not rules for when to grant a dispensation. That depends on the abbot’s personal judgment.

The abbot according to Saint Benedict is a master of virtue. And we know that the virtuous action cannot be legislated ahead of time and out of context. I believe that Alasdair Maclntyre, in the book Dependent Rational Animals, has also demonstrated that we cannot learn virtue apart from the concrete situations that involve us in the lives of others, and involve them in our lives.

What this means in practice is that virtue can only be learned by faith. In other words, we learn the virtuous action by imitating the one who already possesses virtue, which means that we trust that person’s example, and we act without fully knowing what we are to learn by that action. And then, one hopes, through consenting to that action by an act of trust, observing the consequences of that action, and sympathetically observing how it affects others, we gain insight into what is truly virtuous.

So again, the Desert Fathers embody this principle very strictly. We have example after example of virtuous actions and the responses of the other monks, usually edified, but occasionally scandalized. Typically those who are scandalized are so either because they insist on a rule, or because they insist on the action fitting their understanding of the situation, rather than trusting in the example of a wiser monk.

The garden of the heart

Spring in Chicago has been unusually chilly this year, and this means that we are only now planting our garden. Last year, we made an effort to include more brothers in the work of cultivating our very small, urban plot. I am of the opinion that this kind of work is very important for monks, especially young monks. We are expecting one postulant in July, and I would very much like for him to be able to spend several hours a week weeding and watering the garden. Not only is it good, honest labor that puts one in touch with the solid realities of material creation, it is work that helps the monk to understand his most important work, the purification of his heart.

For our hearts are very much like gardens: capable of producing many good fruits, but, alas, often overgrown with all kinds of weeds! And our many resolutions to pull up these infestations often make things appear tidy for a short time. Soon enough, however, the stubborn tares spring right back up and start crowding out the wheat. A garden needs tending everyday, and so do our hearts.

Jesus has sown His Word in the soil of our innermost being. Will we cooperate with him each day to keep the yield from being choked by thorns? That is the drama of our lives.

Conference: The Common Good

I will begin with three quotes.

In illo Uno unum (“in that One, one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV)

Pope Leo XIV is widely understood to be a peacemaker and bridgebuilder, who aspires to build up the unity of the Church. He does this by pointing us to our final end and the true common good that we all seek to enjoy: Christ Himself. Because of the Incarnation, we experience this unity first of all in creatures. This is the common world that God gave us, and it is a check on singularity and idiosyncrasy.

A monk is one who is both separated from all and yet united with all. (Evagrius of Pontus)

Our withdrawal from the world does not mean that we monks do not continue to find Christ in our neighbor. It is a recognition that there are other forms of unity which are corrupted by sin. Today, the Church even speaks of “structures of sin”. These give us a false sense of unity. Our true unity in Christ is a transcendent goal that goes beyond what our senses can perceive. It requires a purification of sense and a purification of our relationships by a certain planned abstention from speech, fraternization, and the like.

The anchoritic life is somewhat rare, perhaps more so today than at other periods of the Church’s history. Saint Benedict offers us the pedagogy of the cenobium. I will focus on this reality in the second half of my conference.

Where brothers live in unity, they give glory to God, for there the Lord gives His blessing. (Magnificat antiphon, Memorial of Saint Pachomius)

Our prayer in the liturgy will be all the more efficacious and sanctifying to the extent that we come to Mass and the office reconciled to each other through our daily acts of self-denial and patient forgiveness of each of our brothers. We will experience God’s blessings to the extent that we seek this unity. It is not a result of our work, but a gift offered us to be sought out in its fullness. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Our Lord. Saint Benedict would have us seek and strive after this very Pax as our way of seeking God and seeking what is above.

To be in Christ is to be united to all the baptized, and, in some sense, to all creatures infused by the Logos. But I wish to focus on a few specific aspects of the cenobitic life and the common good to be found there as foundational to our sanctification.

The common good is the good that each of us enjoys precisely with the other members of the community. It is our common flourishing. It is a good, which means that we can enjoy it like any other good—to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much we desire it and seek it.

I once visited Gloucester cathedral in Great Britain with a monk of our province who is also an artist. Fr. Stephen could enjoy the stone in a way that I could not. It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy the beauty and holiness of the cathedral, nor that I lacked any ability at all to learn to see the specific beauty and goodness of the stone. But truly coming to enjoy the stone as he did would have required me to want this and then to take steps to educate myself in its appreciation.

Furthermore, as an artist, Fr. Stephen was able to reproduce the goodness of stone in watercolor. Although I couldn’t do this either, I could enjoy his work at its completion, and even enjoy his enjoyment of painting.

So, too, with the common good of the monastic community. Some of us will be better at seeing it, enjoying it, and contributing to it. This doesn’t mean that others do not enjoy the actual common good and do not contribute to it. But the more we seek it—again by self-denial and preferring what is good for my brother, rather than what is good for myself—the more we will enjoy it.

The common good requires that each of us be our true selves in Christ. This is to say that the common good is in no way detrimental to my personal good. In fact, human beings can’t fully flourish unless they belong to communities of some kind, and contribute to the common good of these communities. Nor can communities truly flourish except when the brothers within flourish as themselves. So there is no competition between my good and that of the community.

Similarly, our community will flourish to the extent that we become our corporate selves within the larger communities of our neighborhood, our Province and Congregation, and the Archdiocese.

St. Benedict’s Lenten fare

Here in the monastery, our Lenten observance is relatively austere. We abstain from meat and fish, dairy products, olive oil, eggs, and alcohol, with a few exceptions. We also undertake individual mortifications. In spite of this, I can say with some certainty that the brothers look forward to Lent. In some ways, it is when we are most ourselves as monks. Saint Benedict says that every day for a monk is meant to be Lent. Moreover, he mentions joy twice in his short chapter on Lent, which gives a good insight into the meaning of mortification. It is done in the expectation of the glory of Easter and a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ, Who leads us by way of the Cross.

Another aspect of Lent for Benedictine monks is special reading. In his Lenten schedule, Saint Benedict allots an extra hour each day for reading. He instructs the superior to assign to each monk a book which is to be read straight through. In his day, reading would have meant primarily Scripture and some Church Fathers. In our day, I assign books from more contemporary writers, but the intent is the same: that we apply ourselves to a six-week dialogue with a master who will challenge us with new insights into the gospel that we wouldn’t have arrived at ourselves.

Vocation and Expertise: Homily on Luke 5:1-11

All four gospels tell us the story of the calling of the first apostles. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus walks along the shore and calls, first Peter and Andrew, and then James and John. They immediately leave their nets and follow him. In these cases, we see Jesus, the Son of God, commanding, and others simply dropping everything and following Him, as is proper for One Who is God. Even so, already in the early Church, there were concerns that this seemed unrealistic. Perhaps John and Luke were aware of those concerns, since they fill in quite a few details.

In Luke’s gospel, we’ve already met Simon by the time of the calling of the apostles. After Jesus is rejected by the people of Nazareth, he goes to Capernaum, the city where Simon and Andrew live. He stays for a time at Simon’s house, curing his mother-in-law. Simon has already seen Him work a sign. So it’s interesting that, when Jesus goes to the seashore to preach, He ends up asking Simon for the use of his boat. That morning’s fishing was finished, and the results hadn’t been good. When Jesus tells Simon to put out into the deep and let down the nets, Simon’s first reaction is perhaps typical of an expert whose expertise is being challenged a bit. Aren’t you a carpenter? We’re the fishermen, and we’ve already been out there! No fish, I assure you. But…if you say so!

It’s a bit impudent on Simon’s part. He’s already seen Jesus work a sign of healing on his mother-in-law, but he doesn’t seem to believe that Jesus can just as easily work a miracle in the sea.

So here we have a lesson. It’s often in the places of our own comfort where we are most apt to lose sight of Jesus. Where we are the experts, we don’t see the need for God to interfere and upend our predictions and forecasts. Even when our own efforts produce no fish! We are only fruitful in what matters most when we are obedient to Jesus’s commands and seeking to do His will. The fruits of our labors may be quite unexpected. So while we can be a bit critical of Simon for his resistance, we should ask ourselves, where am I resistant to Jesus’s commands? In what area of my life do I think, “Well, I’ve already tried that, and nothing came of it; so even though I know it’s what God is asking me, I don’t see the point”?

Now Simon’s reaction is quite telling. When he witnesses the sign, he’s completely overcome with a sense of shame and guilt. He sees in a moment just how worldly his thoughts are, how limited is his sense of what is possible with God. So he falls to his knees and asks Jesus to depart. Jesus will have none of it: this sign is about Simon’s true vocation, not to be a fisherman catching fish, but to catch men and women in the nets of the gospel!

And from this vantage point, I want to enter the story and say to Simon, “Hey, stand up! This isn’t about you! Stop focusing on yourself, and listen to what Jesus is saying!”

In relating the call of the first apostles, the gospels give us the pattern of all vocation in the Church. Every one of the baptized has a vocation. This was one of the great teachings of Vatican II that we haven’t internalized enough. The laity have an indispensable vocation to spread the gospel in the workplace. We need this more than ever as work gets more and more specialized. We need the expertise of the various professions to understand what is compatible with the gospel and what needs purification. The priests and religious are partners in this work, needed to help work through some of the more challenging situations of the modern world, but the vocation of the laity is surely of grave importance.

So watching Simon Peter being called today, let’s review what this story tells us about vocation. The first point is that we may already feel like we know the Lord: He’s been to our house, He preached from our boat. But then we may sense that He is asking something a little more difficult, something that perhaps calls into question our expertise. Will we at least go along with it, simply out of obedience, as Simon did, or will we delay, resisting because of the threat to our comfort and know-how?

When we, or even more, the Church, comes to the conclusion that we are being asked to put out to the deep, to rely on God alone, will we focus on ourselves? “Oh, I could never do that. I’m too weak, I have no training, and maybe, at heart, I’m just afraid.” Well, our vocation is not about us; it’s about Jesus Christ and His mission. And if He is calling us, He knows best why and how it’s going to work. Our job is fidelity and trust. As Saint Paul reminded us in the second reading, “Not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Let us call to mind all that God has done for us, and seek to go deeper in our personal vocations.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Benedict

Put on the armor of God. 

This is the language of battle, even of war.  Saint Paul writes about spiritual armor and spiritual warfare in several of his letters.  But here, in today’s second reading from Ephesians, he is referring to the “panoply,” the full armor of a professional soldier.  He explains why this is necessary:  we must be ready to ward off attacks by principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, evil spirits in the heavens.

If you were to read the accounts of the early monks, you would see that this language was common among the fathers of Christian monasticism.  The biography of Saint Antony the Great, who, together with Saint Benedict, is depicted in the deesis above our altar, is filled with all kinds of spiritual battles between Antony and a host of demons.  Saint Benedict, writing almost two hundred years later, alludes to the great hermits like Antony in the first chapter of his Rule, where he says that hermits fight hand-to-hand with the Devil.  Saint Benedict’s own biography, written by Saint Gregory the Great, also has several stories of Benedict going toe-to-toe with the Devil and his underlings.  He shows that the power of Jesus Christ in his saints is far greater than the power of evil.

But the Lord still wants us to fight, to enter the lists of this spiritual warfare.  Over the course of the centuries, the common teaching drifted away from a realistic depiction of demons as having visible bodies and doing physical harm to monks.  Writers came to the realization—or perhaps just preferred to believe—that spiritual warfare happens primarily in the realm of the mind.  Demons test us by means of thoughts.  The principal thoughts include lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, sadness, vainglory and pride.

You might recognize this list as being very similar to the more contemporary list of the seven capital sins.  That represents the latest development in the tradition, bringing us up to the present day.  Perhaps on the feast of Saint Benedict we can take stock of what has been lost amidst these changes.  Perhaps we can ask whether monks and nuns might not have a significant contribution to make to today’s Church in recalling the dynamic of spiritual warfare.

When we talk about battling against vices, I suspect that we tend to think that we are battling ourselves.  But all human action begins with thought.  Often, we simply are not aware of the thought that precedes the action, because we aren’t attentive to our thoughts.  They can seem to have a persuasive force from habit, from social custom, and so on.

In fact, once we start paying attention to thoughts, we might start wondering where they come from.  Do they come from us or from somewhere else, or both?  So it is that monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative orders, have a special role to play in this spiritual battle.

In the best-case scenario, such monks and nuns are on the front lines.  We withdraw from the world and practice self-silencing to clarify what is going on in our minds:  to notice the fact that actions follow thoughts, and to catch thoughts before they become actions.  Then we can ask the question:  does this thought come from God? Or does it come from the Devil, from Principalities, from powers, or from other lower-ranking demons?

Saint Benedict is the patron of Western Europe, which is probably the last distinction he would have anticipated.  Like ourselves, he lived at a time of complete political upheaval.  Ten years before his birth, the last of the Western Roman Emperors abdicated.  This was followed by the terrible Gothic Wars, as the Eastern Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried to take back the Italian peninsula and reunite it with what was left of the old Roman world.  The end result was widespread destruction all around Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino and the beginning of a period of cultural hibernation.

Saint Benedict did not seek a political solution to the grave disorders of his day.  Rather he sought, in all simplicity, a life of solitude where he could focus on his own fidelity to the witness of Jesus Christ.  Where he could meditate day and night on God’s word and put it into practice in the most radical way possible.  Where he could watch his thoughts, purify his actions, and enter into real spiritual struggle by saying “no” to all kinds of temptation.

The first result was that others noticed his holiness and wanted to imitate him.  This led him to write his Rule for monks, but also to take up the work of caring for others, of bringing Christ to the world.  Eventually his way of life became so popular, and his Rule so widely recognized for its practical wisdom and fidelity to the gospel, that by the year 1100, all of Europe was dotted with Benedictine monasteries.

Under their influence, the European Middle Ages as we now know them came to be.  There arose new gospel institutions like the Truce of God, chivalry—which is the knightly warrior code civilized into service of the poor and weak—devotion to our Lady, and prayers for the dead.  All these practices, pervaded by the spirit and rhythms of the liturgy, flourished under the influence of Saint Benedict and his decision to arm himself and do battle for the one True King.

By withdrawing from the world, Saint Benedict and his disciples were able to replace the founding assumption of the previous world, the old Roman world founded in paganism and a drive for power, with a new vision of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

May God help us to be worthy disciples of this great man.  And may his example light a fire in the hearts of many young men and women, who might choose to fight the ills of this age not by becoming internet influencers or political operatives, but by humbly submitting all thoughts to Jesus Christ.

How to Keep from Being a Cult

My blog isn’t particularly about the Benedict Option, but I have paid attention to the discussion that blogger and journalist Rod Dreher has occasioned by his efforts to unpack the last page of Alasdair MacIntyre’s important book After Virtue. He’s linked to me again (thank you!), and so I need to put out some more product. Years ago, I resisted reading MacIntyre, mostly because I didn’t have a lot of confidence in cultural conservatives to instigate a genuine moral reform of society, much as I felt that we needed it. And I figured that MacIntyre’s book was part of the conservative virtue brigade, a la William Bennett (it’s not). I’ve never been keen to the liberal/conservative divide that is woven into the general fabric of the modern world since the French Revolution. I’ve often felt about conservatism as I do about classical music (much as I like it). Whatever the merits of Mozart–and there are many, many of these–repeating Mozart over and over again will not revive the ancien regime. We may even distort our minds and waste valuable time pining for something totally imaginary, and not all that desirable in the end.

The social world that made Mozart possible is gone, and this is not entirely a bad thing. The social world that made the composition of Gregorian chant possible is almost gone, and this is definitely not a good thing.

How to revive monasteries? This is the question that Benedictines and others have been scrambling to answer since the suppressions of the Reformation and the Revolution. Just as we seemed to have answered it, as vocations were pouring into monasteries in the 1950’s, we discovered that the Western social milieu, that seemed so open to deep religious sentiment and observance, turned out not to have the goods after all. Large proportions of those vocations left the monasteries once the glow wore off and the 70’s got going.

The two options usually held out for religious life parrot the conservative/liberal divide: either return to strong, traditional observances (usually ones from the 1950’s, which were the same ones that failed to win the hearts of the droves who left in the 1970’s), or figure out ways to accommodate to a new cultural situation. Let me examine each option using the tools that Mary Douglas offers us in Natural Symbols.

First, let’s dismiss the accommodation possibility. Accommodate to what? Douglas begins her book with a withering review of the attempts of English bishops after the Second Vatican Council to update Friday abstinence and replace its dense symbolism (participation in the Passion, clear social demarcation from non-Catholics) with something more internal, “moral,”–perhaps we might say “sincere.” I will have a lot more to say about the social conditions that determined the bishops’ preferences for dumbing-down ritual and hyping up “heart religion.” Let me just note here that Dame Mary misses no opportunity gently to chide those who imagine that this heart religion is more advanced and progressive than the magical world of the lower-class “Bog Irish” for whom Friday abstinence was a matter of fidelity to a beleaguered homeland and the grandeur that was Rome. Anthropologists of the 1950’s could provide myriad examples of “primitive” African pygmy societies whose religion played more or less the same tune as the highly educated clerics who imagined themselves on the cutting edge.

What accommodation amounts to, If Prof. Douglas is correct, is the willing, albeit unwitting, suicide of the sacramental cosmic worldview of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy. So it’s not a road we can take if we are serious about belonging to a Mystical Body that includes Saint Paul, St. Basil, St. Benedict, St. Gertrude the Great, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, St. Symeon the New Theologian, etc.

But what does non-accommodation look like? Critics of the Benedict Option challenge advocates to demonstrate that communities opting out will not become ingrown and cultish. Dame Mary has advice on this score, too.

In social arrangements that she calls “small group,” we see just these characteristics: strong boundaries separating the group from the external world, and fear of contamination by a world dominated by maleficent forces lurking everywhere outside and threatening to infect the group. She doesn’t spend a lot of time on these groups, but what she has to say contains more than enough information to know how to avoid becoming a cult (or, for that matter, how to become one, if that’s what you’re gunning for).

The small group is one in which the numbers are genuinely low. More importantly, authority is weak, and therefore internal structure is confused. Because authority is weak and structure is confused, the group is in constant danger of disintegrating, and generates for itself a fear of evil influences and a high premium on internal purity (both in terms of the group and the individual). This is a congregation of the saved, and they are saved by their own efforts of purification and prophylactic measures against a corrupted world.

I’ve pointed out to the brothers that the Rule of the Master gives us a perfect description of “small group.” And it is part of Saint Benedict’s great genius and sanctity that he corrects these tendencies of the Master in order to produce a community structure that it clear, articulated by ritual and symbol, discerningly open to the world, flexible and sure of itself (because based in Christ, the Logos, whose ordering principles are seen to inhere in the cosmos daily redeemed in the Holy Eucharist and Divine Office). Here is an example of the counter-intuitive fruits of taking Mary Douglas seriously: when a brother is struggling with thoughts, his first attempts to deal with them often involves an attempt to purify himself inwardly by an effort of will, coupled with a feeling of shame and guilt for having this inward impurity. My advice: definitely work against the thought, but often enough these troubling thoughts are a product of an unwillingness to observe clear roles within community life, to confuse structure and therefore to act inadvertantly as if we were a cult obsessed with internal purity. We desire internal purity, but we achieve it by accepting joyfully the roles that Providence has given us through the medium of the Church. So: keep your place in rank, honor those senior to you, love those junior to you, show up for things on time, follow Benedict’s Rule as literally as you can. This takes the heat off of the spiritual battle and involves the whole structure of the Church in the fight, and it offers the brothers the confidence of having a special place within the Church, a confidence that our spiritual foes really can be overcome by the power of Christ animating His Body.

Mary Douglas offered this advice to millennial movements: learn to organize! She died before she could watch movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street get undermined because of their steadfast refusal to organize. Benedictine Option pioneers should work to avoid the related fate of the irrelevant sectarian movements by learning to organize. There is a direct connection between the kind of social body we live in and the beliefs that we hold and behaviors that we legitimate. The connections between these three levels of 1) mind, 2) body, and 3) society I hope to explore in the next post on Natural Symbols.

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