The Practical and the Watered-down
Before the site is glutted with debate commentary, a word on Rod Dreher’s latest C11 column. Its title, and much of its substance, is taken from the last page of After Virtue, but a couple of Dreher’s comments on Benedictine monasticism are misleading.
The paragraphs I’m talking about (all emphases mine):
For some time now, Julie and I have been talking with our friends — other couples with young kids, mostly — about how our lives need to change, and change radically. We talk about what I call the “Benedict Option,” after the famous final paragraph of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1982 book After Virtue. MacIntyre wrote about how Western civilization is largely played out, and how the future will bring young people who have no longer vested themselves in the continuation of a bankrupt imperial order, as in the last days of Ancient Rome. “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. We are waiting…for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
Benedict of Nursia was a well-off young man who saw that the Roman world was falling to pieces, and lit out for the forest to pray and seek God. Eventually he gathered communities around him, and in time these would become monasteries. Throughout the dark ages, the monasteries were repositories of faith, learning and light.
. . . [SrdjaTrifkovic] is right to point out that material comfort has despoiled us spiritually and morally in many ways. But there’s not a lot to be said for poor, nasty, brutish and short, if you ask me, and we who despair of modernity must be careful not to overly romanticize the past, nor long for another Depression, however much our profligate, spendthrift living has set us up for a painful fall.
From phrases like “lit out for the forest to pray and seek God” and “gathered communities around him [that] would become monasteries,” the reader gets the impression that Benedict was Western monasticism’s unselfconscious prophet around whom structured communities grew organically; that Benedictine monasticism was radical but not intentionally so; that, mostly, it was the natural consequence of a sincere desire to know God.*
It’s important to acknowledge the extent to which Benedict developed his rule deliberately. It isn’t that he started gaining followers, built a house for everybody, and then wrote down how their community worked. He’d seen the rule of Pachomius and the rule of the Master, and designed his own variation. It isn’t that he went looking for God and happened to find him in the ascetic life. He set out to be a monk, because monasticism was something he’d heard of and he thought radical action was called for.
Dreher likes radical action, too, but is careful to clarify that “there’s not a lot to be said for poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Those adjectives describe the ascetic life pretty neatly, I think.) The real revolution will take place in our hearts and mind, he seems to be saying, and whatever material changes follow from that will follow in due course. However, in describing Benedict as a man whose radical lifestyle proceeded from his heroic piety, he gets the monastic prescription backwards.
As for romanticizing the past, the Christian monastic ideal was built on a lot of self-mythology. Even leaving aside the influential and inaccurate** Life of Anthony—you know how hagiographers are—there is still the generation of monks that wrote down the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: they regarded the monks of fifty years prior as legends and believed that the current generation would “struggle to achieve half their works.” Similarly, Western monks took very seriously the exaggerated stories of Egyptian piety that reached them through men like Athanasius and John Cassian.
Each new generation of monasticism expressed a desire (real or rhetorical, it doesn’t really matter which) to recapture a romanticized past—this is even true of generations that went on to be romanticized in turn—and then made real, concrete decisions about how to run their own communities based on these false-but-inspiring pictures. Such willingness to mythologize the past would be embarrassing if it hadn’t worked so well for them.
If Dreher is simply saying that not everyone needs to be a Benedictine monk he’ll get no argument from me, but he seems to be making the stronger claim that McIntyre’s new monasticism can be as easy as living in suburbia with the right attitudes and values, and, moreover, that romanticizing the past and being self-consciously radical are things to be avoided. Those claims would make sense if history bore out the idea that Benedict had and pure and searching heart and rest followed naturally, but that wasn’t the case. Changes in material circumstances are necessary, even if they seem affected. (This, incidentally, is why I won’t be surprised if we find our new Benedict among the deliberately under-achieving hipsters.) I hope Dreher’s right that the change in circumstances shouldn’t have to look like another Great Depression. I have equal hope for the “laymen” of crunchy conservatism who can only express solidarity with the lifestyles of its more decisively radical leaders. Still, I would caution Dreher against going to the opposite extreme and making the whole thing too easy.
*I don’t necessarily mean that this is the picture of monasticism Dreher has in his mind, only that his description—and the conclusion he draws from it at the end of the column—make it read that way.
**I say inaccurate based on what we know about the real St. Anthony from the historical record, which includes some of Anthony’s letters. He was as holy a man as Athanasius describes, but far more in touch with the real world and far less a hermit. The accuracy of flying demons I will not dispute.
Comments
How better for us all if we were to become monks and nuns.
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In the Benedictine way there is a place for lay people who want to live, to the best of their ability, as oblates. There are oblate groups attached to many or most Benedictine monasteries for men and women. Oblation is not some late watering down. It is what Chrysostom was speaking of when he said that the monk is someone who is merely (!) living the common Christian vocation to the fullest. I was once told that it was Chrysostom who ordained Benedict’s model Cassian to the diaconate. Paleos should be aware of H. Richard Neibuhr’s call for a revival of the Benedictine spirit in the 30s, in contrast to the (even then) neocon position of his brother Reinhold.
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I don’t know how much actual potential “under-achieving hipsters” carry. But otherwise this was a very sensible post. Thanks.
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We have a fellow in the office who pretends to be a deliberately under-achieving hipster. He makes getting up and going in to work everyday a drag.
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Each new generation of monasticism expressed a desire (real or rhetorical, it doesn’t really matter which) to recapture a romanticized past—
Pull the other one, sister.
You are welcome to your romanticised mythological reinterpretation of the past but I’ll stick with the facts.
While I was till a subscriber to “30 Days,” I remember an article by Thomas Molnar (I still have it, somewhere, in my stack of stuff) about The Rule of St. Benedict and how it contributed to the rise of Democracy.
I don’t recall the great man being so cavalierly dismissive of the eye witness accounts which formed the basis for an accounting for who St. Benedict was, what he did, and what motivated him.
I’ll try to find the Molnar article. In the meantime....
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02467b.htm
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Warren H. Carroll. The Building of Christendom</I) Vol 2, on page 148 writes:
And there is good reason to believe that during the period 520-523 Pope Hormisdas commissioned St. Benedict of Nursia, who had founded a monastery atop Monte Cassino in southern Italy about this time which he hoped would serve as a model of monasticism in the West, to write a rule for monks.
The footnote refers us to John Chapman’s, <I> St. Benedict and the Sixth Century,....Accrd to Carroll, “Chapman’s thesis of a commission from Pope Hormisdas to St. Benedict to write a rule for monks in the west, now almost ignored but brilliantly argued and solidly in accord with church tradition…
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Dear Helen,
I have to say that I’m a little puzzled by your piece. “Poor, nasty, brutish and short” is NOT a description of the monastic life. In fact, it only gets one of the adjectives right. Particularly in Benedict’s time, but in succeeding centuries as well, monasteries were islands of order, kindness, mercy, and peaceful communal living--often in the midst of chaos, invasion, civil disorder, and predatory feudalism. The monks lived in voluntary poverty--yet their hard and rationally ordered work (inspired and directed by St. Benedict’s Rule) made them more productive and innovative farmers and producers than their neighbors. This led to the problem of “poor” monasteries becoming extremely wealthy--which attracted things like lazy comfort-seeking novices, Vikings, and anti- clerical mobs.
I think the rule of Obedience made life in monasteries less “brutish” than it was in most lay households during the Dark Ages… and certainly than most families today.
“Short”? Monks had better health care, limited but healthy nutrition, and exemption from combat. Nuns who kept their vows avoided the leading cause of death for women right up through 1870 or so--childbirth, which claimed 1 mother in 3 before the rise of modern sanitation. They also avoided any number of communicable diseases, and benefited from the other monastic advantages.
I’ve had friends who lived in Benedictine communities, and apart from the occasional cattiness, there’s nothing Hobbsean about them.
ON THE OTHER HAND, it strikes me as perverse in the extreme to expect married laymen to adopt material poverty--more than is already their lot, if they have more than a child or two in our child-hostile society--and impose it on their kids. One may take up a certain simplicity, and a family will often benefit from that. But the result will bear very little resemblance to a monastic lifestyle… and rightly so. Marital chastity (faithfulness in word and thought) looks NOTHING like monastic chastity… and people who practice it shouldn’t feel bad if they don’t feel or seem like monks and nuns.
I’m writing my next Takimag column on the question of “intentional communities” such as Rod hopes to found. But I wanted to offer these clarifications by way of clearing away some brush. There, now I feel all presidential!
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Me and The Bride support this Monastery.
http://www.clearcreekmonks.org/
And it is clear it is a large factor in creating order outside of and around it. (There are a growing number of young Christian families moving in to the area).
If you build it (Monastery) He (Jesus) will come and make everything new again whereas Third Party candidates have no chance.
Put your money on a winner.
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Cpt Chaos, you’re a nut.
Go away.
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“What can I say, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. “
Please cite the apostolic authority that has adjudicated you claim of plenary inspiration. (i.e. Catholic or Orthodox bishop)
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Listen here, Captainchaos!
I would rather live among a thousand million racially non-European CATHOLICS than world of non-Catholic Euro-trash spouting off your racialist garbage.
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Ditto that “Poor, nasty, brutish and short” is not really that accurate to describe Monastic life.
I attended a Benedictine school (I sometimes joke that they are the hippies of the Catholic Church, interestingly enough - or maybe not).
The monks are entitled to a glass of wine with their dinner (we learned how to make wine in Biology class of our senior year - somewhat humourous to be drinking it out of second-hand “Altar Wine” bottles for our graduation dinner).
Beekeeping, gardening, cattleraising and dairy farming were all ongoing concerns (we used to get delicious unpasteurised milk until an unfortunate Bruscellocis (spelling?) scare.
They include scholars, architects, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, poets, writers and ecologists. They also have a policy that you can’t join until you have some experience of the world.
They are active in care for the less-well-off, and do have a vow of poverty - but that means that they give up the right to personal material accumulation while a member, not that they are wearing ash and sackcloth and whipping themselves or anything.
PS please forgive the male gender for producing those specimens who apparently don’t get to talk to real girls except via comment boards. They would not be considered Benedictine material, BTW.
PPS FYI, racial collectivists and euro-homogenisers—the two poles of Christian monasticism and illuminated manuscript production, which also preserved beacons of learning during “the dark ages” were: Ireland and… Ethiopia.
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I went to high school at a Benedictine abbey whose endowment is above $1 billion. Until 1917, the abbot was a Prince of the German Empire; some Habsburgers number among the alumni.
The monks lived a simple life, not rarely simpler than that of the boarders: Given that some of the teachers I go to visit are in their 70s and 80s, I am hard-pressed to describe their lives as “nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”
Perhaps Ms. Rittelmeyer is mistaken?
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Why just the other day I was saying “Gee, I wish I could read a critique of Rod Dreher’s latest column which is informed by a detailed knowledge of monastic history and literature of the early Middle Ages.”
And here it is.
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You go, Captain Chaos.
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Nasty brutish and short? Hobbs must be doing pilates in his tomb! The monasteries were centers for the preservation and elaboration of technology. Monasteries developed and spread advances in agriculture, selective plant and animal breeding, engineering, and much more all across the Christian world. In fact, the technical acumen of the monastic orders played a real part in spreading both Christian faith and civilization itself. For instance, the Czar of the Bulgars was so impressed by the orchards and produce of the Byzantine monks that he converted more or less on the spot.
Let us not forget that the abundance of the monasteries supported whole communities surrounding them. In this sense they were far from withdrawn from society.
So monastic life may have been simple but, depending on the order, it was far from backward.
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“Listen here, Captainchaos!
I would rather live among a thousand million racially non-European CATHOLICS than world of non-Catholic Euro-trash spouting off your racialist garbage.”
Posted by Liam the Oager.
That’s actually a pretty dumb thing to say and I think were it to ever happen your opinion would survive about 3 seconds of contact with reality.
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Captain Chaos, it is often necessary to look at cold hard facts.
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Capt. Chaos, what are you? Twelve, thirteen years old?
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Give me Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads anyday over the 1,001 spouting, frothing zealots who take over these conversations. And I am one of the guilty! I wish the whole “paleoconservative” brand would be retired. A neocon actually believes in something. A normal Republican is probably a normal guy in his everyday life. A self-identified “paleoconservative” could be any number of things, almost all of them incompatible with one another. The only thing the “paleocons” all agree on is hating the consarn, dagnab, doggone, dadburn, dadgum neocons—from any one of 75,000,000 perspectives. Please, please, retire the “paleocon” brand. Traditional Catholics, go to your corner. Evangelical prots, go to yours. Racialists, libertarians, functional pacifists, crunchy cons, neo-Confederates, partisans of Serbia, etc., find your own homes. But this “paleocon” thing is a pox on everyone, and leads to the comboxes being clogged with bickering of the most self-defeating variety. Who would ever want to become a “paleocon” after reading these stupid, stupid squabbles?
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Incidentally, Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt Leddihn, who wrote for the National Review, the Spectator in the UK, taught at Fordham and Georgetown and more, served on the board of Thomas Aquinas College etc. etc., wrote that monks had a higher standard of living than the laity in times gone past!
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Tobias. If’n’ya want ditto-heads, Free Republic is your place. The mind-numbingly tiny and tightly circumscribed area of “Debate” permitted there appeals to some - the average republican, for instance.
But that is not what you want.
The reason you come here is because you know you will find quality writing worth reading.
And quality attracts cranks like me, and thee.
Traditional Catholics err when they stay in their corner because it is Jesus, Holy Writ, Church, and Tradition which commands us to go out into the world as leaven.
BTW, Tobias. I like to see you go all purple prose on us. It shows you are at the right site for you.
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@I am Not Spartacus,
You contradict your earlier post where you suggest that third party candidates are useless and pick a winner but then suggest to Tobias that Jesus instructs us to go out in the wrold. Pick a third party candidate. Politically they would be more in line with Jesus’ teachings since Jesus was the original third party candidate. As far as third party candidates having not chance doesn’t Jesus teach us that it is not ours to despair?
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People who believe in the rapidly expiring mythology of capitalism should critique those who believe in the well-established success of monasticism.
Monasticism was not only a spiritual success, but an economic one as well. In fact, without ethics, a stable economic system is impossible. Blaming the poor will not address the rapacity of the rich.
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First of all, don’t assume that developing a self sufficient community is going to be a long term option, a sort of hobby. We are in the midst of the wholesale looting of the country by an unholy alliance of finance, organized crime, and rogue gov’t. What happened in the former USSR is now happening here. WaMu was seized & its assets stripped & sold for a penny on the dollar in a matter of hours. It is Just the beginning.
So I’m afraid that we will need self sufficient communities pretty soon. These will also need to be low profile, since the gov’t will become increasingly hostile to any entity that does not support it and submit to monitoring.
We already have the seeds of these communities in the local churches. We may have to go to home churches like in China.
Preserving civilization longterm? Print it out on acid free paper. Digital media are good for 20-30 years, max.
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Steven & John,
Yes, the monastic contribution is much ignored or maligned. The Enlightenment needed to portray the religious orders as evil and backward. I deeply respect the Anglo-Protestant history of our republic, but with that History came all the old tales of monks ravishing milk maides, The inquisition and of course the Pope swimming in gold taken from the poor.
One of the great contributions of Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt Leddihn was his correction of this image of Catholic Europe as cruel and technically backward.
We must get his works back in print.
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You contradict your earlier post where you suggest that third party candidates are useless and pick a winner but then suggest to Tobias that Jesus instructs us to go out in the wrold.
Mr. Nucci. Monasteries are built in the world.
Pick a third party candidate. Politically they would be more in line with Jesus’ teachings since Jesus was the original third party candidate.
And the people chose Barabbas (whose name, interestingly enough, means “ son of the father"). Politically, you just can’t beat The Establishment. It convinces people to chose the wrong son - every time
As far as third party candidates having not chance doesn’t Jesus teach us that it is not ours to despair?
2091 The first commandment is also concerned with sins against hope, namely, despair and presumption:
By despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins. Despair is contrary to God’s goodness, to his justice - for the Lord is faithful to his promises - and to his mercy.
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With guests staying with us, I haven’t had time to look for The 30 Days article- I got too much stuff - , but here is Pope Benedict on the Great St. Benedict of Norcia
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080409_en.html
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Thou who art not Spartacus,
Thanks for your message—I took in the right spirit, I think. I obviously am at home here,
and as much as I disagree with much that you write, I prefer reading it, and disagreeing, to
going where everyone is engaged in groupthink. Takimag is more fun to read than
(let’s say) Chronicles, where there is much greater conformity in the writebacks, seldom does anyone dispute the
fundamental claim of the author of a post, and the debates are all so “courteous” that real, substantive disputes
do not get their due.
The problem is that I regard most of the people who comment here, myself included, as cranks. By crank, I mean someone who complains, and complains, and complains, and talks some more, but whose complaints aren’t really constructive. Much chest-thumping and self-righteous declarations of how we know better than the guys in charge, not much to prove that we actually are experts or know whereof we speak. Maybe that’s just the nature of blogs. I don’t know any of you, and you don’t know me. I think Dr. Fleming once wrote that he wouldn’t want to chat at a dinner party with someone calling himself “I am not Spartacus,” so why would he want to engage in anonymous internet exchanges with the same guy. Maybe “paleocon” would make more sense as a moniker if we would agree that blogging is absolutely not a paleoconservative mode of communication, and we should abandon it. Maybe then the “movement” (or whatever) could be defined by more than the criteria of those who oppose the war and go to self-designated “palecon” blogs as opposed to leftist marches (though apparently some folks, like Raimondo, do both). I don’t think that many of the official writers are cranks (though some are, or can be), but the people who write back—they are absolutely doomed to “lose” in the real world. And I think that has as much to do with severe social and personality “issues” (which may be a function of the medium of blogging) as with the “decadence of the age,” etc.
Purple prose? More like purple-faced. Purple prose is unduly ornate or flowery stuff, “more complicated and formal than necessary” to use one dictionary definition. Maybe I was bombastic and overwrought, but purple? On the other hand, referring to the Pope as “Our Sweet Jesus on earth,” is without a doubt purple prose.
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I think Dr. Fleming once wrote that he wouldn’t want to chat at a dinner party with someone calling himself “I am not Spartacus,” so why would he want to engage in anonymous internet exchanges with the same guy.
Yeah. He did write that, after he had had a few exchanges with me. I called him out on his absurd charge the Palins were “proud” of their daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and he pitched a high dudgeon fit.
Fleming’s skin is way too thin.
On the other hand, referring to the Pope as “Our Sweet Jesus on earth,” is without a doubt purple prose.
Ain’t that cool? That is what St. Catherine of Sienna called the Pope. I am into rhetorical resurrection.
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P.S. Thou who art not Spartacus,
I was not saying that Catholics should retreat from the public forum. I am saying that they should not compromise
themselves by identifying with some hodge-podge “fusionist” ball of wax like paleoconservatism, where
functional pacifists, libertarians, neo-Confederates who would like to make miscegenation illegal, and Mencken-reading cynics like Russell Seitz all get an equal say. “Paleoconservativism” is like the Sillon. Catholics can
“dialogue” with those outside the Church, certainly, and they can subscribe to many of the positions paleocons
subscribe to, but fundamentally “paleoconservative” is a secular(istic) grouping. As following the Social Teachings
of the Church is not a hallmark of paleoconservatism, this house is just as much divided against itself/built on
sand (purple prose alert) as any other American political coalition. The Republican “tent” is both too big and
too small, and so too the paleoconservative tent. I guess I have come around to the position of Sid What’s-his-name, whom I used to taunt and urge to leave the site. Now I’m the squealer who wants some orthodoxy
imposed, and I should follow the advice I lobbed at him.
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Yes, I am aware that St. Catherine called him that. It just goes to show that one can write
purple prose and still get into Heaven. Dr. Fleming’s skin is far too thin, and he gets *alot* wrong. I am highly
critical of a number of things he’s said and written, by the way, and I’ve had much worse debates with him than
the one you had. You and I would probably be on the same side in a debate with him. But I think he had a point about the dangers of blogging.
Anyway, I have been my typical “troll” self and distracted attention away from the dispute at hand—Miss Rittelmeyer’s critique of Dreher. My apologies for drawing attention to myself. For what it’s worth, the postings of a certain malcontent named “captainchaos” inspired me to froth at the mouth. Fortunately, the worthy webmaster
has erased all those posts. I did not mean to criticize the debate about “brutish and short,” so sorry for the tangent.
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Tobias. I agree with almost everything you wrote.
I am a Christian Catholic first but much of what is written at this site I can identify with politically until such time as a polity forms around the political economy advanced by Heinrich Pesch, S.J.
I love The Oakland Raiders and politics and I treat both with the seriousness they deserve.
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For anyone interested, I recommend the seven volume history by the Count De Montalembert entitled The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard. Reading these volumes will show you what western monasticism is and how instrumental it was in the birth of what we called Christendom or Western Civilization.
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Charlotte Simmons? Is that you?
I still think you should have gone with Hoyt.
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“Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance between what one says or does, and what one means or what is generally understood.”
The best kind of humor.
I think the Wolfeman would concur.
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