ABC in Rome: Let's all live under Benedict's Rule

In advocating submission to the rule of Benedict to solve the problems of multi-cultural Europe, Rowan Williams was of course referring to the Holy Rule of the sixth century St Benedict, founder of the monastery of Monte Cassino, and not to the present Pope Benedict XVI. This is our story. There is also a debate running on Times Online. Dr Williams said he believed the Rule of St Benedict could be a “beacon” to the wider modern world. He said he believed the Rule could help better inform both the personal and the economic and political culture of European society. For example, it could help guard against “inhuman” and “obsessive” forms of work and leisure which did not allow time for the reflection and the “recovery of the self.” He told his audience in Rome: “In the half-secularised, morally confused and culturally diverse continent we now inhabit, does the Holy Rule still provide a beacon for common life? I want to argue that it does - the Rule, after all, is not an archaeological document but something that is continually being reinterpreted in the life of the communities that are based upon it - like the Scriptures themselves.” (Pic here and below showing Cardinal Walter Kaspar and Dr Williams after prayers at the Sistine Chapel. Photo by Jim Rosenthal for Anglican World.)

Reading the Rule, it is not difficult to see how over-zealous Christian brothers and Magdalen laundry sisters might have misinterpreted the instructions of this venerated Catholic saint to the point of abuse. There is a lot in it about punishment. I don't suppose for one minute the Archbishop would endorse, say chapter 30, on how delinquent boys are to be corrected: "Whenever such as these are delinquent, let them be subjected to severe fasts or brought to terms by harsh beatings, that they may be cured." Chapter 23 advocates corporal punishment for disobedient monks and chapter 28, the "punishment of the rod" or even the "knife of amputation" for naughty nuns, although I think here the "knife" is being used in a metaphorical sense. It means cutting the sister out of the community.

What is important today is to focus on the positive aspects of the Rule. A Europe that is in danger of losing touch with its Christian roots is one that could usefully study again the virtues of obedience, humility and silence as spelled out by St Benedict and reiterated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his address at St Anselmo, a Benedictine institution in Rome.

For example, on silence. It is actually possible as a journalist today to spend the whole day in the office of The Times in Wapping in total silence, the only noise the pitter-patter of the multitude of keyboards. This is because almost all communications are now conducted electronically. Often, I will even email the people sitting next to and opposite me, rather than talking to them, especially if I want to limit the circle of communication to one or two people. In an open-plan office, that can be quite hard, if using the traditional method of "speech". Yet even after a whole day in silence, it is still possible to produce stories for the following day's paper, or that day's online edition, full of "he said's" or "she said's". This is the miracle of modern-day journalism. Yet even in the silence, the application of the following to my trade is self-evident:

Let us do what the Prophet says: "I said, 'I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I have set a guard to my mouth.' I was mute and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things" (Ps. 38:2-3).

And here St Benedict is on obedience:

But this very obedience will be acceptable to God and pleasing to all
only if what is commanded is done
without hesitation, delay, lukewarmness, grumbling, or objection.
For the obedience given to Superiors is given to God,
since He Himself has said,
"He who hears you, hears Me" (Luke 10:16).
And the disciples should offer their obedience with a good will,
for "God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Cor. 9:7).

But best of all, here is the section on humilty:

Holy Scripture, brethren, cries out to us, saying,
"Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled,
and he who humbles himself shall be exalted" (Luke 14:11).
In saying this it shows us
that all exaltation is a kind of pride...

Hence, brethren,
if we wish to reach the very highest point of humility
and to arrive speedily at that heavenly exaltation
to which ascent is made through the humility of this present life,
we must
by our ascending actions
erect the ladder Jacob saw in his dream,
on which Angels appeared to him descending and ascending.
By that descent and ascent
we must surely understand nothing else than this,
that we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility.
And the ladder thus set up is our life in the world,
which the Lord raises up to heaven if our heart is humbled.
For we call our body and soul the sides of the ladder,
and into these sides our divine vocation has inserted
the different steps of humility and discipline we must climb."

In his address, Dr Williams focuses on what the Rule has to say about time, obedience and participation. Keep an eye on Thinking Anglicans for this and more on the Rome trip. It is at times like this that I really love my job. Reading and writing all this today, and having to sit and really think about what the Archbishop wrote, I really do feel I've learned something.

Comments

[Martin]

Before anyone mentions the very few Anglican religious houses, I should point out that they a) were founded AFTER the restoration of Catholic monasticism in this country and were perhaps inspired by that restoration and b) they are often rather unconventional - houses such as Burford feature monks and nuns living together in a manner which until recently was not known in the Catholic Church. Although the phenomenon of "double houses" was known in the Middle Ages, in Anglo-Saxon times and in the Gilbertine order later on, this entailed separate houses sharing a church rather than the monks and nuns sharing a monastery.

[Martin]

"I am utterly shocked by Chris Gillibrand's obscure observation that "...never was more damage done to the observance of the Benedictine Rule then when the Church of England was established."..!"

It's quite true. The destruction of literally hundreds of monasteries, the removal of the spiritual and practical support they provided (they were, in effect, the medieval welfare state and education system as well as being places of prayer) and the martyrdom of numerous monastics, many of whom are commemorated in the windows of the modern-day Benedictine abbey at Belmont and of whom, therefore, I am reminded every Sunday, was one of the greatest crimes in history. Anglicanism cannot claim to be the heir of a tradition which had to be destroyed before it could come into being. In the Marches, where I live, we are surrounded by ruined monasteries. Only a very few of the greatest monastic churches survived under Anglicanism, and not in their monastic role. The others lie in ruins, their stones calling to us for restoration, as in places they have been, in modern form, where other monasteries have been founded - but not by Anglicanism.

[Martin]

"witness papal endorcement for the concelebrated Mass of Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican Benedictines"

Er, no, I don't think so. As the papacy does not, and has never, recognise the validity of the orders or sacraments of either Anglicans or Lutherans this is a manifest impossibility.

[Martin]

"Apart from the fact that the Church of England was established by St Augustine of Canterbury, as anyone with a grain of knowledge concerning church history will be able to tell us"

No, the English Church, that is Roman Catholicism in England, was established by St. Augustine of Canterbury. He was sent by the Pope. He would abhor Anglicanism as heresy. I am afraid that try as you might, you cannot claim him. The true heir of St. Augustine is not the heretic Rowan Williams, but the cardinal archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

[Obsculta]

I am utterly shocked by Chris Gillibrand's obscure observation that "...never was more damage done to the observance of the Benedictine Rule then when the Church of England was established."..! What dribble. As a Benedictine Associate and follower of the RB as expressed by Citeaux myself, I must protest! (Apart from the fact that the Church of England was established by St Augustine of Canterbury, as anyone with a grain of knowledge concerning church history will be able to tell us).

The Benedictine tradition dominated the spiritual landscape of pre-Reformation England, and had a profound influence on the development of Anglican Spirituality. Marked by moderation and good sense, Benedictines discouraged extremes of outlook and behaviour. With the Incarnation as its starting point, Benedictine spirituality seeks to draw out the invisible divine presence in the visible world and a deep, single-minded attachment to the person of Jesus Christ. Everything points to that figure of Christ asking to be received, listened to, loved, followed. “In the Rule [RB], St Benedict is giving us practical help towards creating space for the presence of Christ in our lives. He offers us the opportunity of finding Christ, of experiencing his love.”

Anglicans have inherited English spirituality, our roots are Benedictine, and we identify ourselves not through a doctrine or catechism but through worship. What most Anglicans believe, can be found in The Book of Common Prayer. The importance of worship to our Christian life is a Benedictine concept that was passed down to us over the centuries. Though the Rule itself is brief, Benedict explains, in meticulous detail, the order of worship, the psalms, the canticles, and the responses to be used in the Divine Office. This monastic tradition, also called the "Hours", “Divine Office”, or the "Daily Office," brought the monks together seven times a day for corporate prayer, beginning long before dawn and continuing into the evening. During the Reformation of the sixteenth century, many Reformed churches dismissed the idea of corporate prayer (also known as the "Daily Office") as too "papist." However, Thomas Cranmer restored the Daily Office to the people and to its place in the Church when he included Morning and Evening Prayer – “Matins" and "Evensong" – in the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. This tradition has continued in the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer in our own Common Worship – Daily Prayer today. This prayer book also provides "descendants" of the early Offices in the ‘Prayer during the Day’ as well as a late-evening service called Night Prayer (‘Compline’). Though these services were not in the early Anglican prayer books, they were restored in the twentieth century. These Offices provide ways of punctuating each day of the week with praise, prayer and attention to Scripture. Thus, as George Herbert put it, ‘seven whole days not one in seven’ will we praise God, pray for God’s world and allow ourselves to be formed and re-formed by God’s word.

Anglican liturgical prayer books are specifically Benedictine. Anglican writer Martin Thornton points out that the spirituality of the Rule is built on three key moments: the Eucharist, the Divine Office, and personal prayer – the very same priorities as our prayer book.

Peter Anson, a Roman Catholic, and A. W. Campbell, an Anglican, who studied religious communities in the Anglican Communion, note that the Anglican Church is a kind of generalised monastic community. Our Prayer Books has preserved the foundations of Christian monastic prayer, but simplifies it for contemporary use.

Community, so important in the Rule of Benedict, is also important in the Anglican tradition. In what Robert Hale calls a leitmotif (a dominant or recurring theme), "the church terms itself the Anglican Communion; its key liturgical text that unites the faithful is the Book of Common Prayer; and the traditional Anglican designation of the central, unifying sacrament is Holy Communion. To be in community is an essential part of Benedictine life and thought. It's easy to see why many Anglicans are so comfortable with the Rule of Benedict!

[Chris Gillibrand]

The Oblates of St Benedict are an excellent way in which the laity can participate in the work of the order and follow in some way the Rule, according to their state of life.

Therefore, as an Oblate of Ealing Abbey, it took me a few minutes to come to terms with the stretching of St Benedict’s injunctions on monastic hospitality in Chapter 53 of the Rule to immigration policy. The analogy simply does not work, not least because the guests are to be kept separate from the main body of the monastery, lest they cause a disturbance.

And never was more damage done to the observance of the Benedictine Rule than when the Church of England was established.

That said, the Archbishop of Canterbury is concurring with the John Henry later Cardinal Newman on the spiritualising, dignifying and above all civilising force of the contemplative prayer of the Benedictines and their educational institutions.

See The Mission of St Benedict and the Benedictine Schools.

One only has to look around in the United Kingdom today to see the consequences of the absence of the Rule’s place in national life.

This also applies in Brussels. It is a great irony that while there are Jesuits, Dominicans and even Franciscans located not too far from the EU institutions, there is no Benedictine foundation in close proximity. St Benedict together with Saints Cyril and Methodius are the male patron saints of Europe. St Bridget, St Catherine of Siena and St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) are the female patrons.

As often all that is presently offered by the Catholic Church to the EU institutions is a more beautiful form of social justice, a new foundation is long overdue.

The EU bureaucrats, having left their own homelands behind, pursue policies which balance opposing interests and which could so easily turn into a certain nihilism. They need again to find their true homeland (in both the political and spiritual senses!). All Benedictine monks and nuns believe a monastery is at the edge of paradise.

It is an example of the subtlety of the Rule that it styles itself “a little Rule for beginners”. I myself have made a start. Living not four hundred yards from the European Parliament, in my hallway, there is a large stained glass window of St Benedict.

[Chris Gillibrand]

"Globally, the Confraternity is the basis for a wider communion within our fractured Church in the West -- witness Papal endorcement for the concelebrated Mass of Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican Benedictines."

Where and when?

[Fr. C. Gregory Sherwood]

Would that the Communion would willingly heed Archbishop Rowen. Father Benedict's 'Little' Rule is as scalable as it is effective, as loving as it is disciplinary, as inclusive as it is scriptural. Its utility is clearly demonstrated as this fifteen hundred year-old rule effectively challenges the values/beliefs and the civil religion of our radically individualistic Western cultures.

Our parish adapts and uses the Rule to order our common life; and, especially as it instructs our servant/leadership.

Listening to the voice of the Master yields individual and corporate stability, amendment of life and obedience. The Rule is organic not mechanistic -- its focus is on God-with-us and on us with God and the other. Its brilliance is in its simplicity as an open system, a model that ensures homeostatic balance while promoting spiritual viability through spiritual growth.

Globally, the Confraternity is the basis for a wider communion within our fractured Church in the West -- witness papal endorcement for the concelebrated Mass of Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican Benedictines.

Finally, Benedictines are all about Jesus' hospitality, a spiritual gift and attribute that is in exceedingly short supply.

Peace be with you.
Gregory+

[Benedictine Baptist]

The ABC goes up even further in my estimations with this sound advice!

[Simon]

I think we sometimes forget how truly shocking Jesus words must have been to those around them sometimes. Jacobs dream from
Genesis 28 would have been more familiar to Jesus audience than Star Wars is to the modern audience. Imagine this reply Jesus gave (in John 1) when he gathering his disciples, in reply to Nathanael (seemingly bizarrely from the part of the story we get to hear) declaring him to be the "Son of God";

50 Jesus said, You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig-tree. You shall see greater things than that.

51 He then added, I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

The chapter ends there, one that started with the most profound creation story that exists in any scripture anywhere. Its difficult not to think of John sitting there in recollection, after decades of contemplating all that he had seen, remembering that slap in the face! The disciples were shown so much so quickly you can almost understand the episode of Peter and the cock crowing three times without any experience of intimidation. They had been told in human terms that they were spending time with the ladder between heaven and earth, but they had not yet realised that God had chosen to humble himself into our suffering - rather than glorify himself as we all would in his position!

Its great that you highlighted those sections from St Benedict Ruth. Not only do they clearly describe the fact that Jesus himself claimed to be the Holy One of God spoken of throughout the Old Testament, rather than some "good man" with worthy sentiments as the liberal wing of the Anglican Church seem to claim. It clearly identifies some of the passages that led to an hedonistic atheist like me deciding that the only way to be true to this 'thing' I had found in Jesus was to obediently accept the authority Jesus has placed in the Church.

You have no idea how contrary to my nature that is. Even now, having had many issues with the Church dissolved into the ether as I researched and contemplated, I still have new issues where the sceptic in me rebels against fundamental aspects of Church teaching. My latest one is the whole concept of original sin. I find it hard to believe that a baby is guilty of anything equivalent to the kind of sin that Jesus and the 10 commandments talk about. And of course that's where the concept itself came from - with Augustine clashing against Pelagius. I know enough of revelation to know that Pelagius was wrong, but it seems to me that Augustine (in his zeal to oppose this heresy) has confused human nature with its influence on the soul.

The soul is spiritual, made in the image of God who is spirit. As new babies we are all spirit, when something hurts we expect the whole world to feel our pain. Then we associate our-souls (ourselves) with our bodies - in order to interact with the world. What was previously input into the absolute reality of spirit, becomes twisted into this and that, something Buddhism tries to explain.

Its this equivalence of "original sin" with sin itself that I have a problem with. Its like the equivalence in relativity between an inertial force and the force of gravity. Einstein claimed they are equivalent but we have no real reason to accept that other than experimental evidence (which is a pretty good start!). In terms of original sin, we are left with some problems;

1) Why would God create a soul with 'defects' that innately deserves punishment ? Strangely enough I don't see this as a problem. God has created this awesome universe in which there are so many good things for us to experience - if only we took the time to look for the real hidden amongst the green grass where we are. He has the right as our creator to ask us to rise above a challenge in order to continue our existence with him. A search that combines "Silver" and "refine" in the OT may start to explain my position on this.

2) How does 'Original Sin' propagate ? This is one part where I do have a problem. It seems crazy to presume it can be via biological inheritance as some documents of the Church proclaim. The Bering Land Bridge was flooded long before Adam was born - so, along with loads of other evidence, we would seem to be a little crazy to accept that all living humans are descendants of Adam. Clearly, in my opinion anyway, the story of the the fall generated by Adam is equivalent spiritually to the way people who follow Jesus are reconciled. Jesus had no children, despite what Dan Brown and his fellow lunatics claim, and so his salvation is just as much spiritual as Adam's fall. The knowledge of good and evil represents our rising above primal instincts, a good thing and a bad thing in human terms. If the fall of Adam and Eve is spiritual, rather than biological, then science can be reconciled with revelation. There are some documents from the Vatican that claim biological descendancy from Adam as if all living humans are descended from him, but thankfully more recent documents show that the Vatican has realised that its simply not reasonable to claim that all living humans are descended from Adam, or that those who are not descended from Adam are not subject to "original sin". I have hope and faith that the Church will clarify its position in the light of new understanding. In the meantime some could call me a heretic. But I'll not leave the Church until I'm kicked out - because all my arguments are human, and the Churches authority is from God.

3) Were Mary and Jesus divinely excused from "original sin" ? I find it easy to accept the idea that both Jesus and Mary were in a very special way "immaculate". What I find difficult to accept is that "original sin" is any sign of guilt - its purely a label we attribute to the reality of being born in a fallen world. As such both Jesus and Mary (in my admittedly primitive and uneducated opinion) were born into this world and were thus subject to "original sin". The fact Jesus overcame the fallen world is partly a tribute to the fact of the immaculate conception, but mostly due to his noble and divine nature. Its nothing to do with the fact Mary and Jesus were somehow protected from sin by God! In this I find myself agreeing with Bernadette of Lourdes, but disagreeing with some elements of Church teaching.

That probably makes me anathema! However, next on my list to study is Thomas Aquinas. After I read his works I suspect I will understand why the Church proclaims what it does, and return to looking for some fault in the teaching of the Catholic Church. The funny thing is that I'm also interested in science. And I'm no longer even interested in looking for faults in science. They are all over the place and everywhere! Its a very messy subject for someone who likes to question things in an epistemological and ontological way. Right now they are pretty much all inventing billions upon billions of universes that no-one has ever seen even the slightest whiff of - purely so that they can reject the ideas that;

1) The universe is far from understood (Quantum Multiverse)
2) That God exists (Cosmological fine tuning)

In the big scheme of things, the Catholic Church and the revelations from Yaweh are far more consistent and reliable than anything in science. Even science knows that matter is basically empty space - but still continues to treat it as the foundation of reality. So it seems that science tries to be honest, scientism is the actual home of hypocrisy, the Catholic Church is the bride of God, and I'm still trying to work out what all the protestants are moaning about...