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them, the rule calls them vigigalli, roosters who are always awake (“For with the
Lord there is great reward for those who do the waking for the Divine Office, and
it is to their honor that the Rule has called them vigilant roosters [ vigigallos]”; ibid., pp. 170/193). They must prepare clocks in such a way as to mark the hours
even in the absence of the sun, because the rule informs us that it is their task to
watch the clock ( horolegium, according to the medieval etymology; quod ibi horas legamus) at night no less than during the day ( in nocte et in die; ibid.).
1.9. Whatever the instruments for measuring the hours were, it is certain that
the whole life of the monk is modeled according to an implacable and incessant
temporal articulation. In charge of the Stoudion monastery in Constantinople,
Theodore the Studite describes the beginning of the monastic day in these words:
It should be known that after the second or third watch of the night has passed,
that is when the signal of the water clock strikes [piptei tou hydrologiou to
syssemon] at the sixth hour at the point where the seventh hour is beginning, at
this signal the waker [ aphypnistes] is roused. He goes around to the bed chambers
with a lantern summoning the brothers to raise up the morning doxology. Imme-
diately, the wooden semantra sound up and down the monastery. While all the
brothers assemble in the narthex of the main church and pray silently, the priest
takes the censer in his hands and censes first the holy sanctuary . . . (Theodore
the Studite, Descriptio constitutionis monasterii Studi, pp. 1703/98)
The cenobite is, in this sense, first of all a total hourly scansion of existence,
in which every moment has its corresponding Office or duty [ ufficio], either of
prayer and reading or manual labor. Certainly, the early Church had already
elaborated a liturgy of hours, and in continuity with the tradition of the syn-
agogue, the Didache required the faithful to meet for prayer three times a day.
The Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus (third century), developed and
articulated this custom by linking the hours of prayer to the episodes of the life of
Christ. To the prayer of the third hour (“at that hour Christ was displayed nailed
to the tree”; Hippolytus, pp. 90/165), the sixth, and the ninth (“at that hour
Christ, pierced in the side, poured forth water and blood”), Hippolytus adds the
prayer of midnight (“if you have a wife . . . [and] if she is not yet among the faith-
ful,” specifies the text, “take yourself into another room and pray”; pp. 92/165),
and at the cry of the rooster (“And likewise pray, getting up around cock-crow.
For at the hour when the cock crew the sons of Israel denied Christ”; pp. 96/166).
The novelty of cenoby is that, by taking literally the Pauline prescription of
unceasing prayer ( adialeiptōs proseuchesthe; 1 Thess. 5:17), it transforms the whole of life into an Office by way of temporal scansion. Confronted with this apostolic
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precept, the patristic tradition had drawn the consequence from it that Origen
sums up in his De oratione, namely, that the only possible way to understand this
precept is that “the entire life of the saint taken as a whole is a single great prayer,
[and] prayer in the ordinary sense ought to be made no less than three times each
day” (Origen, De oratione 12.1). The monastic interpretation is entirely different.
Cassian, describing the institutions of the Egyptian Fathers, writes:
The Offices that we are obliged to render to the Lord at different hours and at
intervals of time [ per distinctiones horarum et temporis intervalla], at the call of the summoner, are celebrated continuously [ iugiter] and spontaneously throughout
the course of the whole day. For they are constantly doing manual labor [ operatio
manuum] alone in their cells in such a way that they almost never omit meditating
on the psalms and on other parts of Scripture, and to this they add entreaties and
prayers at every moment, taking up the whole day in Offices that we celebrate at
fixed times [ statuto tempore celebramus]. (Cassian 1, pp. 92/59)
Even clearer is the dictation of the “conference” that he dedicates to prayer, in
which the continuity of prayer defines the monastic condition itself: “the whole
purpose of the monk and indeed the perfection of his heart amount to this—
total and uninterrupted dedication to prayer” (Cassian 2, pp. 40/101), and the
“sublime discipline” of the cenobite is that which “teaches us to cling to God
without interruption [ Deo iugiter inhaerere]” (ibid., pp. 83/130–31). In the Rule of the Master, the “holy art” that the monk learns must be exercised “continuously
day and night” ( die noctuque incessanter adinpleta; Vogüé 2, 1, pp. 372/117).
One could not more clearly express the fact that the monastic ideal is that
of a total mobilization of existence through time. While the ecclesiastical liturgy
divides the celebration of the Divine Office from labor and rest, the monastic
rule, as is evident in the passage cited from Cassian’s Institutions, considers the work of the hands as an indiscernible part of the opus Dei. Already Basil interprets the phrase of the apostle (“whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do,
do everything for the glory of God”; 1 Cor. 10:31) as implying a spiritualization of
the monk’s every activity. Not only is the whole life of the monk in this way pre-
sented as the execution of a “divine work,” but Basil takes care to multiply exam-
ples drawn from manual labor: like the blacksmith, while he is hammering the
metal, has in mind the will of the customer, so the monk carries out “his every
action, great or small” ( pasan energeian kai mikran kai meizona) with care, be-
cause he is conscious in every instant of doing the will of God (921–23/244). Even
in the passage of the Rule of the Master in which the Divine Offices are clearly
distinguished from manual labor ( opera corporalis; Vogüé 2, 2, pp. 224/209), this
latter must nevertheless be carried out with the same attention with which one
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carries out the former: while the brother carries out manual labor, he must fix
his attention on the work and occupy his mind ( dum oculis in laboris opere figit,
inde sensum occupat, “he fixes his eyes on his work and thereby occupies his at-
tention with what he is doing”; ibid., pp. 222/209). It is not surprising, then, that
the exercitia actuum, which alternate with the Divine Office, are defined a little further down as a “spiritual labor” ( spirituale opus; pp. 224/209). The spiritualization of the work of the hands that is accomplished in this way can be seen as
a significant precursor of the Protestant ascesis of labor, of which capitalism, ac-
cording to Max Weber, represents the secularization. And if the Christian liturgy,
which culminates in the creation of the liturgical year and the cursus horarum,
has been effectively defined as a “sanctification of time,” in which every day and
every hour is constituted as a “memorial of the works of God and the mysteries
of Christ” (Righetti, p. 1), the cenobitic project can on the contrary be defined
more precisely as a sanctification of life by means of time.
&
nbsp; The continuation of the temporal scansion, interiorized in the form of a
perpensatio horarum, a mental articulation of the passing of the hours, here be-
comes the element that permits it to act on the life of the individual and the
community with an incomparably greater efficacy than the Stoic and Epicurean
care of the self could achieve. And if we are perfectly accustomed to articulate
our existence according to times and hours and to consider even our interior life
as a linear and homogeneous course of time and not as an alternation of discrete
and heterogeneous unities to be measured according to ethical criteria and rites
of passage, we must not forget that it is in the cenobitic horologium vitae that
time and life were for the first time intimately superimposed to the point of
nearly coinciding.
1.10. In the monastic literature, the technical term for this mixture and
near hybridization between manual labor and prayer, between life and time, is
meditatio. Bacht has demonstrated that this term does not signify meditation in
the modern sense, but rather designates originally the (solitary or communal)
recitation by memory of the Scriptures, as distinct from reading ( lectio). In the
life of Pachomius, the abbot Palamon, to whom the future founder of cenoby
had turned himself over in order to be initiated into monasticism, mentions
constant meditation as a fundamental duty, like fasting: “I spend half the night
in prayer and in meditation on the word of God” (Bacht, p. 250). In the rules of
Pachomius’s successor, Horsiesius, meditation is defined as “a rich store of mem-
orized texts” (ibid., p. 249) and, if one has not meditated sufficiently during the
night, the “meditation” of at least ten psalms is prescribed (ibid.).
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It is well known how, beginning from the fourth century, the practice of
silent reading was spread, which Augustine observes with amazement in his
master Ambrose: “When he read,” writes Augustine ( Confessions, 6.3), “his eyes
scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent
and his tongue was still.” Meditatio is the continuation of this practice with-
out any further need for lectio, because by this point the text is available in the memory for an uninterrupted and in any case solitary recitation, which can thus
accompany and temporally articulate from the inside the entire day of the monk
and become inseparable from his every gesture and his every activity. “While
they work [ operantes],” reads the rule of Pachomius, “may they say nothing pro-
fane, but meditate on the holy words and keep silent” (Bacht, p. 98). “As soon
as the signal of the trumpet that calls them to the collecta sounds, he immedi-
ately comes out of his cell, meditating on some passage of Scripture [ de scripturis aliquid meditans] until he reaches the door of the meeting room” (ibid., p. 82). In the above-cited passage of Cassian, manual labor is never separated
from “meditatio on the Psalms and the other Scriptures” (Cassian 1, pp. 92/59).
In the same sense, the rules of Horsiesius specify that “when the monk leaves the
collecta, he must meditate while he walks to his habitation, even if he is doing
something that concerns the convent,” and adds that only in this way will “the
vital precepts” be observed (Bacht, p. 249).
The perpensatio horarum and the meditatio are the two apparatuses through
which—well before the Kantian discovery—time in fact became the form of
the internal sense: corresponding to the meticulous chronological regulation
of every exterior act is a temporal scansion of the interior discourse that is just
as punctilious.
1.11. The expression “vital precepts,” which is found for the first time in
Jerome’s translation of the rule of Pachomius ( haec sunt praecepta vitalia nobis
a maioribus tradita, “these are the vital precepts passed down to us by our superiors”; ibid., p. 83), acquires its most pregnant sense only if it is understood
that it refers to the rule insofar as—through the practice of meditation, temporal
scansion, and incessant prayer—it can coincide, not only with the observance
of individual precepts, but with the monk’s entire life (in this sense, it is tacitly
opposed to the praecepta legalia of Judaism). Meditation, which can accompany
any activity, is in this sense perhaps the apparatus that permits the accomplish-
ment of the totalitarian demands of the monastic institution.
It is decisive, however, that the rule enters in this way into a zone of undecid-
ability with respect to life. A norm that does not refer to single acts and events,
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but to the entire existence of an individual, to his forma vivendi, is no longer
easily recognizable as a law, just as a life that is founded in its totality in the form
of a rule is no longer truly life. About eight centuries later, Stephen of Tournay
can thus again take up and in some way paraphrase the Pachomian formula
praecepta vitalia. He writes that from the moment that the “little book” ( libellus) that contains Granmontani’s constitution “is not called by them a rule, but a life
[ non regula appellatur ab eis, sed vita],” the monks would therefore have to be
called “vital” ( vitales) to differentiate themselves from those who, insofar as they observe the rule, call themselves “regular” ( Epistle 71, p. 368). Just as precepts that are no longer separable from the monk’s life cease to be “legal,” so the monks
themselves are no longer “regular,” but “vital.”
א In the Scala claustralium of Bernard, the ladder “by which [monks] are lifted up from earth to heaven” involves four steps: reading ( lectio), which “as it were puts whole food into the mouth”; meditation, which “chews it and breaks it up” ( masticat et frangit); prayer ( oratio), which “extracts its flavor”; and contemplation, which “is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes” (chap. 1, pp. 475/208–9).
Günter Bader has shown how, at the beginnings of monasticism, reading appears
as the remedy par excellence for a terrible sickness that afflicts monks and anchorites:
acedia. With a curious circularity, this sort of anthropological catastrophe that menaced the homines religiosi at every instant was nevertheless also presented as that which rendered reading impossible. “When he reads,” declares the De octo spiritibus malitiae of St.
Niles ( Acedia §15), “the one afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he
stares at the wall and again goes back to reading for awhile; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of the texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number
of gatherings. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep, but
not a very deep sleep.”
In the anecdote of Antony reported by Evagrius, the overcoming of sloth is presented
as a stage in which nature itself appears as a book and the life of the monk as a condition of absolute and uninterrupted legibility: “A sage came to visit Antony and said, ‘Father,
how can you do without the comfort of books?’ He answered, “My book, O philosopher,
is the nature of things, and this is available to me whenever I want to read the words of
God” (qtd. in Bader, pp. 14–15). The perfect life coincide
s with the legibility of the world, sin with the impossibility of reading (with its becoming illegible).
2
Rule and Law
2.1. It is even more urgent, at this point, to pose the problem of the
more or less juridical nature of the monastic rules. Already the ju-
rists and canonists, who would also seem to take account of the precepts of the
monastic life in their collections, had asked themselves, in certain cases, if the
law could be applied to such a peculiar phenomenon. Thus, in his Liber minoriticarum, Bartolo, referring to the Franciscans—in the same gesture in which he recognizes that the sacri canones have taken an interest in them ( circa eos multa senserunt, but the Venetian edition of 1575 has sanxerunt, “sanctioned, legitimated”)—states without reserve that “so great is the novelty of their life [ cuius
vitae tanta est novitas] that the corpus iuris civilis does not seem capable of being applied to it [ quod de ea in corpore iuris civilis non reperitur authoritas]” (Bartolo, p. 190 verso). In the same sense, the Summa aurea of Hostiensis evokes the difficulty that the law has in including the monks’ status vitae in its own circle of application ( non posset de facili status vitae ipsorum a iure comprehendi). Even if the reasons for discomfort are different in the two cases—for Bartolo, it is the
Franciscan refusal of every right to property, for Hostiensis, the multiplicity and
variety of rules ( diversas habent institutiones)—the embarrassment of the jurists
betrays a difficulty that concerns the peculiarity of the monastic life in its voca-
tion to confuse itself with the rule.
Yan Thomas has shown that, in the tradition of Roman law, the juridical norm
never refers immediately to life as a complex biographical reality, but always to the
juridical person as an abstract center of imputation of individual acts and events.
The juridical personality “serves to mask concrete individuality beyond an abstract
identity, two modalities of the subject whose moments cannot be confused, since
the first is biographical and the second is statutory” (Thomas, p. 136). The blos-
soming of monastic rules beginning from the fifth century, with their meticulous
regulation of every detail of existence, which tends toward an undecidability of
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