The Rule of Benedict
Page 1
The Crossroad Publishing Company and Jade Music are proud to present:
THE RULE OF BENEDICT
A Spirituality for the 21st Century
Joan Chittister, O.S.B.
A classic text with commentary, images, and sound.
To download the selection of accompanying Gregorian chants, please go to: www.milanrecords.com/crossroadruleofbenedict
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For this edition, numerous people have shared their talents and ideas, and we gratefully acknowledge Sr. Chittister and the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania who have been most gracious during the course of our cooperation. We thank especially:
John Farina, initial idea and acquisition of this book
George Foster, cover design
Eve Vaterlaus, layout and image composition
Scribe, Inc., copyediting, proofreading, and file management
Versa Press, Inc., book production
Concept and idea for this edition, art research and acquisition, and project management by The Crossroad Publishing Company.
This printing: December 2016
The Crossroad Publishing Company
www.CrossroadPublishing.com
Copyright © 1992, 2010 by Joan Chittister
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Originally published in 1992 in slightly different form and without art and music.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chittister, Joan.
The rule of Benedict : insights for the ages / Joan D. Chittister.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8245-2594-1 (alk. paper)
1. Benedict, Saint, Abbot of Monte Cassino. Regula. 2. Monasticism and religious orders—Rules. I. Title.
BX3004.Z5C35 2010
255’.106—dc2
2010019403
Printed in The United States of America
Books published by The Crossroad Publishing Company may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for classes and institutional use. For information, please e-mail info@CrossroadPublishing.com.
CONTENTS
AN INVITATION
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
1.THE KINDS OF MONASTICS
2.QUALITIES OF THE ABBOT OR PRIORESS
3.SUMMONING THE COMMUNITY FOR COUNSEL
4.THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS
5.OBEDIENCE
6.RESTRAINT OF SPEECH
7.HUMILITY
8.THE DIVINE OFFICE AT NIGHT
9.THE NUMBER OF PSALMS AT THE NIGHT OFFICE
10.THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE NIGHT OFFICE IN SUMMER
11.THE CELEBRATION OF VIGILS ON SUNDAY
12.THE CELEBRATION OF THE SOLEMNITY OF LAUDS
13.THE CELEBRATION OF LAUDS ON ORDINARY DAYS
14.THE CELEBRATION OF VIGILS ON THE ANNIVERSARIES OF SAINTS
15.THE TIMES FOR SAYING ALLELUIA
16.THE CELEBRATION OF THE DIVINE OFFICE DURING THE DAY
17.THE NUMBER OF PSALMS TO BE SUNG AT THESE HOURS
18.THE ORDER OF THE PSALMODY
19.THE DISCIPLINE OF PSALMODY
20.REVERENCE IN PRAYER
21.THE DEANS OF THE MONASTERY
22.THE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS OF MONASTICS
23.EXCOMMUNICATION FOR FAULTS
24.DEGREES OF EXCOMMUNICATION
25.SERIOUS FAULTS
26.UNAUTHORIZED ASSOCIATION WITH THE EXCOMMUNICATED
27.THE CONCERN OF THE ABBOT AND PRIORESS FOR THE EXCOMMUNICATED
28.THOSE WHO REFUSE TO AMEND AFTER FREQUENT REPROOFS
29.READMISSION OF MEMBERS WHO LEAVE THE MONASTERY
30.THE MANNER OF REPROVING THE YOUNG
31.QUALIFICATIONS OF THE MONASTERY CELLARER
32.THE TOOLS AND GOODS OF THE MONASTERY
33.MONASTICS AND PRIVATE OWNERSHIP
34.DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS ACCORDING TO NEED
35.KITCHEN SERVERS OF THE WEEK
36.THE SICK
37.THE ELDERLY AND THE YOUNG
38.THE READER FOR THE WEEK
39.THE PROPER AMOUNT OF FOOD
40.THE PROPER AMOUNT OF DRINK
41.THE TIMES FOR MEALS
42.SILENCE AFTER COMPLINE
43.TARDINESS AT THE OPUS DEI OR AT TABLE
44.SATISFACTION BY THE EXCOMMUNICATED
45.MISTAKES IN THE ORATORY
46.FAULTS COMMITTED IN OTHER MATTERS
47.ANNOUNCING THE HOURS FOR THE OPUS DEI
48.THE DAILY MANUAL LABOR
49.THE OBSERVANCE OF LENT
50.MEMBERS WORKING AT A DISTANCE OR TRAVELING
51.MEMBERS ON A SHORT JOURNEY
52.THE ORATORY OF THE MONASTERY
53.THE RECEPTION OF GUESTS
54.LETTERS OR GIFTS
55.CLOTHING AND FOOTWEAR
56.THE PRIORESS’S OR ABBOT’S TABLE
57.THE ARTISANS OF THE MONASTERY
58.THE PROCEDURE FOR RECEIVING MEMBERS
59.THE OFFERING OF CHILDREN BY NOBLES OR BY THE POOR
60.THE ADMISSION OF PRIESTS TO THE MONASTERY
61.THE RECEPTION OF VISITING MONASTICS
62.THE PRIESTS OF THE MONASTERY
63.COMMUNITY RANK
64.THE ELECTION OF A PRIORESS OR ABBOT
65.THE PRIOR AND SUBPRIORESS OF THE MONASTERY
66.THE PORTER OF THE MONASTERY
67.MEMBERS SENT ON A JOURNEY
68.ASSIGNMENT OF IMPOSSIBLE TASKS
69.THE PRESUMPTION OF DEFENDING ANOTHER IN THE MONASTERY
70.THE PRESUMPTION OF STRIKING ANOTHER MONASTIC AT WILL
71.MUTUAL OBEDIENCE
72.THE GOO
D ZEAL OF MONASTICS
73.THIS RULE ONLY A BEGINNING OF PERFECTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to all the past prioresses of my own community, who interpreted the Rule for us in every age of the community’s history, to Sister Phyllis Schleicher, the prioress of the community, whose insight and insistence make this work possible now, and in particular to those prioresses who made the Rule real and holy to me in the various periods of my own life:
Sister Sylvester Groner, O.S.B., 1946–1958
Sister Alice Schierberl, O.S.B., 1958–1964
Sister Mary Margaret Kraus, O.S.B., 1964–1978
AN INVITATION
The Rule of Benedict is a spiritual guide, rare by virtue of its ancient origins, valued for its continuing meaningfulness in every century since. It has weathered every period of Western history since the fall of the Roman Empire and been a dynamic source of light and energy to each. Surely someone ought to ask, How is it that anything can last that long and still be considered viable in ages so distant from its own? Someone ought to care why it is that this way of life has been found to be both holy and helpful, whatever the social changes of the era, whatever the pitfalls of the time. Someone ought to wonder, then, in what directions, if any, would this Rule point our own lives in a period in which every system in the Western world—government, economics, family, social values, and human relationships—is once again in flux?
On the one hand, this is a book about a document and a lifestyle that is over 1,500 years old but which in every era becomes increasingly more important as we fumble and stumble our way toward fullness of life in a world whose foundations are shaking.
On the other hand, this is also a book being written for a culture whose mantra is “progress” and whose character is change. We do not, as a people, often set out to preserve our past as have cultures before us.
Generations and cultures before us, for instance, made walls, houses, carriages and furniture to defy time forever. We have become a throwaway society. Everything our world creates, geared to maintaining a manufacturing economy, is timed to become useless: the tires on our cars, the heating elements in our microwaves, the motherboards in our televisions and phones and computers and MP3 players that connect us to the world around us. They all wear out on schedule; they are all made to run down in time for us to buy the next version of them. However much any of them cost, they live measured lives. They are built to be thrown away long before the equipment they power has outlived its usefulness.
We have, in fact, become a culture that conditions people to wait for what’s coming next. So we go through life, tiring easily both of what was and what is, living in expectation of what is to come. We think of what went before us as “old fashioned.”
Or to put it another way, this highly technological culture of ours has learned to look more to the future for answers to the great questions of life than it does to the past. The version to come, we know—we have been trained to expect—will be more vigorous, more effective than anything of its type that has gone before it, even though we know that it rarely ever is.
We forget that, new as the future may be, its value will depend entirely on what we bring to it ourselves. It will depend fundamentally for its character, its value, on what happens to us as we grow into it. Its quality will depend more on what is in us when we get there than on what is in it, however new.
In a consumer society, in a society whose economy is based on planned obsolescence for its financial stability, this movement from one continual “upgrade” of a thing to the next has managed to blur for us the difference between what is passing and what must perdure. Social systems may change, for instance, but the justice that cements them must endure. As mobility increases, the nature of personal relationships is changing but the ability to live well, to love rightly, must endure. Our knowledge of the cosmos and evolution is challenging some of our standard spiritual truisms but the search for God and the discernment of the Godly life must endure if society itself is to endure.
Which is where this book comes in.
The fact is that not everything has failed us over the centuries. There are things that remain from one culture to another with substance enough, with pith enough, to lead us through the dark days and difficult questions and questionable social systems of our own times. The insights of great thinkers, the model of great figures, the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions of all times root us in the marrow of the past while they go on pointing a way through the challenges of an evolving future.
This commentary, then, looks with respect and amazement at a document and a lifestyle that has been part of Western development for over 1,500 years and under which thousands of people around the world purport to live even now. It asks the question, What meaning, if any, can this Rule possibly have for average people of our own day who grapple daily with a culture awash in the transitory and the tenuous, in superficiality and confusion?
The answers to those questions are fairly simple ones: in the first place, the Rule of Benedict is not historical literature, it is wisdom literature. In the second place, it teaches what this world, what every culture, needs most. Especially, perhaps, in our own time.
Wisdom literature endures precisely because it is not the history of a particular people, it is not the codification of the ethical mores of a single culture, it is not the teachings of science, it is not, in fact, devoted to the presentation of any particular body of knowledge. Wisdom literature takes as its subject matter the meaning and manner of achieving the well-lived life. It deals with the spiritual, the ascetic, the Divine, and the nature of virtue. Its concerns lie in the meaning of holiness and the fundaments of happiness.
Wisdom literature is common to every great tradition. It lifts the spiritual life from the legal to the mystical, from theology to spirituality, from a study of the nature of religion to the depths of the personal spiritual life. In Hinduism, the basic outlines of the spiritual life are found in texts like the Upanishads; in Buddhism, in the Dhammapada; in Judaism, in the books of Proverbs and Job, of Ecclesiastes and Wisdom; in Islam, in the writings of the Sufis; and in Christianity, in the Apothegmata or the writings of the Desert Monastics. Out of wells of wisdom like these have sprung the teachings of the great mystics and spiritual directors of every age and every tradition. It will not be surprising, then, to find that there are bits of wisdom from all of these sources included in this commentary, in this presentation of the Rule of Benedict, a work of ancient Western wisdom literature, where the concerns of every tradition meet.
It is this concentration on meaning and purpose in life that—in those systems in which time proves true—endures, outlasts, lives on through the ages. It is this wisdom that drew people to Benedictinism in the sixth century when the Roman Empire had lost its center. It is this wisdom that drew people to monastic centers in the Dark Ages when Benedictine monasteries provided the only communal, civic, and social systems that existed. It is respect for this wisdom that made Benedictine monasteries the spiritual center of every village, every major city in medieval Europe. And it is this wisdom—this deep, heartful human presentation of the core of the spiritual life—that draws thousands upon thousands of people to this Rule yet today.
More than that, perhaps, the foundations of the Benedictine way of life that this Rule preserves are based on the very foundations that the modern world most lacks but, at the same time, most needs.
To a world fragmented by transience and distance, the Rule of Benedict stresses the need and nature of real community.
To a world dry to the core with secularism, the Rule of Benedict brings the rhythm and ointment of prayer. Prayer in the monastic tradition is always psalm centered—always the cry of the universal human soul down one age and up the other. It is also always in tune with the turning of the liturgical year and the tender, haunting, mystical chants of a praying church everywhere.
To a world that has, to the peril of both, severed human life from
the creation that sustains it, the Rule of Benedict brings a new respect for the seasons of life and the stewardship of the world.
To a world torn apart by random and state violence, the Rule of Benedict brings a life based on the equality and reverence that a world in search of peace requires.
To a world where arrogance separates the developed from the “underdeveloped” by assuming that one has the right to the basics of life while the other must exist on less, the Rule of Benedict requires the development of the kind of humility that makes none of us subject to the whims of the rest of us.
To a world where people work for money, the Rule of Benedict requires that we work to continue the will of God for all of creation.
To a world where leisure has been reduced to aimlessness, the Rule of Benedict provides a sense of contemplation, the fruits of which reflection enable us to see the world as God sees the world.
Indeed, Benedictine spirituality is the spirituality for the twenty-first century.
The basic contentions of this book, then, are clearly two: first, that Benedictine spirituality deals with the issues facing us now—stewardship, relationships, authority, community, balance, work, simplicity, prayer, and spiritual and psychological development. Its strength, therefore, is that it is both fresh and ancient, current and tried at the same time. Second, its currency lies in the fact that Benedictine spirituality offers more a way of life and an attitude of mind than it does a set of religious prescriptions. The Benedictine way of life, after all, is credited with having saved Christian Europe from the ravages of the Dark Ages. In an age bent again on its own destruction, the world could be well served by asking how so simple a system could possibly have contributed so complex a thing as that.
The Rule of Benedict is not a treatise in systematic theology. Its logic is the sagacity of daily life lived in Christ and lived well. This commentary simply takes the work as it is, a paragraph at a time, and attempts to discover under the crusts of language and time, the concept being treated there and its meaning to us now. It attempts to explain, for instance, why Benedict dealt with the role and functions of a porter or doorkeeper of a monastery at all and what that might have to say to the way we ourselves deal with the world outside us.