It is an impossible task to condense the history of the Benedictine Order in the Middle Ages into one or two paragraphs. There are endless excellent studies which will fill out the story. Two of the best short accounts are David Knowles Christian Monasticism, World University Library, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, and George Zarnecki The Monastic Achievement, Thames & Hudson, 1972. The best book on the English Benedictines remains David Knowles The Monastic Order in England, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1963.
Robert Hale’s book Canterbury and Rome: Sister Churches, Darton Longman & Todd, 1982, devotes one chapter to a discussion of the Benedictine roots of Anglicanism, ‘Discovering Consanguinity: the Monastic Benedictine Spirit of Anglicanism’, and he also has much of interest to say on how much he finds in common between Benedictine balance and moderation and the Anglican via media.
In ‘Thoughts and Prayers’, the Staretz Silouan quotation comes from The Undistorted Image, Faith Press, 1958.
St Anselm’s prayer is taken from The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, translated by Sister Benedicta Ward S.L.G., Penguin, 1973, and the extract by M. Raymond is from the introduction to The Family that overtook Christ, Clonmore and Reynolds, Dublin, 1944.
The final prayer is the collect of an abbot in the Alternative Service Book.
II
THE INVITATION
‘Let us set out on this way, with the Gospel for our guide.’
‘Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep . . . let us open our eyes . . . let us hear with attentive ears . . . run while you have the light of life.’ That urgent call to awake, to listen, to take action, was addressed to the sixth-century monks of Monte Cassino, the monastic community established by St Benedict in the Apennine hills of central Italy. The phrase is taken from the Rule, that brief working document which in no more than nine thousand words sets out the aims and practice of the monastic life as St Benedict presented it. It is clearly set out, divided into seventy-three chapters, which look in turn at all the essentials of worship, work, study, hospitality, authority, possessions demanded by a life lived out in community following the three Benedictine vows of obedience, stability and conversatio morum. Fifteen hundred years on it has lost nothing of its freshness or immediacy. It speaks to all of us. Right at the very start of that Prologue its approach is wide open: ‘Whoever you may be . . . he that has ears to hear.’ A variety of images comes tumbling out as in his excitement St Benedict addresses his listeners at one moment as recruits for the army, and the next as workmen in God’s workshop, then as pilgrims on the road, then as disciples at school. Each of us is to hear the call in different ways; it will strike one chord in one person and another in the next. But one thing we all share in common. The message is to be heard now, we must rouse ourselves, shake ourselves out of our apathy. The Rule questions the assumptions by which we live and looks at some of the most basic questions that we must all face. How do we grow and fulfil our true selves? Where can we find healing and grow into wholeness? How do we relate to those around us? to the physical world? to God? If we think of all the alienations that we must resolve – those alienations that we find in the story of Genesis and of the fall – from one another, from the natural environment, from God himself – the alienations within ourselves remain the starting point. So the familiar words of the western world, which can be heard all the time in conferences and consultations, in sermons and discussions, are also the theme words of the Rule: roots, belonging, community, fulfilment, sharing, space, listening, silence. The sense that men and women need to love and be loved if they are to become fully human; that they need a place in which to belong, and that not merely in a geographical sense; that they need freedom and yet they must accept authority. The Rule knows much about the continuing paradox that all of us need to be both in the market-place and yet in the desert; that if we join in common worship yet we have also to be able to pray alone; that if commitment to stability is vital so also is openness to change. There is no evasion here of the complexity of life, and yet the final paradox is that running the way to God appears modest and manageable while at the same time it is total. These are the demands of extreme simplicity which cost everything.
All of us need help if we are to face up to the realities demanded of us if we are to make our way to God as whole and full people. There is nothing unfamiliar in that appeal of the Prologue, nothing new. It is ancient wisdom and yet it is contemporary. It is an appeal to the divine spark in everyone, never totally extinguished but in need of rekindling. In an age of extreme complexity men and women look for vision even more desperately, since without vision there is no hope. That is why the Rule of St Benedict speaks to all of us – it answers a deep need.
The connotations of restriction, restraint, control, even of bureaucracy, which the word ‘rule’ carries with it today do not, however, encourage most of us to look very warmly on such a guide, such an approach. Even St Benedict’s modest claim that it is no more than ‘a little rule for beginners’ does not reassure us. Yet the Rule of St Benedict is neither rule-book nor code. It does not dictate; it points a way. It is a piece of creative writing which combines a firm grasp of essentials with a confident flexibility about their practical application. For the past fifteen centuries men and women living out the Benedictine monastic life have come back to it as the spring and source of their personal renewal and their community reform, finding it still relevant, apposite, inspiring. So too those of us on the outside of the monastic enclosure, in whatever walk of life, if we let it speak to us will also find that it answers our needs with its immediate, practical, vivid wisdom.
Nowhere does St Benedict suggest that he is interested in encouraging unusual people to perform spectacular feats. His monks are ordinary people and he will lead them in ways that are accessible to ordinary people. In fact the importance of the weak and the ordinary is one of the great guiding principles of the Rule, one which ‘makes it possible for ordinary folk to live lives of quite extraordinary value,’ as Cardinal Basil Hume puts it. Time and again the Rule makes allowances for human weakness. ‘In drawing up its regulations we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome’ (Prol. 46). The essence of the Benedictine approach is distilled in a small phrase of Thomas Merton’s, written in 1945 right at the start of his monastic life in the Cistercian abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky when he wrote of ‘that concern with doing ordinary things quietly and perfectly for the glory of God which is the beauty of the pure Benedictine life.’
Perhaps on the first reading much of the Rule might appear rather prosaic, with chapters on such mundane affairs as food and sleep and clothing, the duties of porter or cellarer or server. It is indeed mundane, of the world, and all the more important for that reason. But then on re-reading it, what had seemed rather dry becomes vibrant and vital because in exploring the Rule we find that this is a description of day-to-day living which revolves around Christ, both individually and corporately. For essentially the intention is to heighten an awareness of Christ himself, that Christ who has seen us in the crowd and called out to us, and who is at once the start of our journey and also the goal. ‘Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts up his voice again: Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days? (Psalm 33 (34): 13). If you hear this and your answer is “I do” . . . See how the Lord in his love shows us the way of life’ (Prol. 14–16, 20). And that way is essentially our own highly individualistic way. Chapter 40, which deals with a most practical matter, the measure of drink, opens with a quotation from 1 Corinthians: ‘Each man has his special gift from God, one of one kind, another of another.’ This really says something very important about the Rule. It is offering a basis on which each individual is to grow and develop. St Benedict was not concerned to stifle the spirit with over-legislating. He was far more interested in educating the individual to recognize the need of the moment and to respond to it appropriately than in laying down clear-cut directives for every conceivable contingency. This is of course the secret of its power. Dom David Knowles, himself a Benedictine, wrote of this with characteristic warmth and simplicity.