The Rule of Benedict

by Joan Chittister

  Benedict of Nursia emerges from that rare stream of thinkers who lived out of a single tradition but from the perspective of universal and fundamental insights into life. In the Rule we profit from all of them.

  The real function of the book is to make an ancient document accessible to a modern reading public who are searching, often in vain, for some spiritual framework around which to organize their own lives in a period when regular public devotions are largely a thing of the past and the overarching questions of life are more pressing than ever. I was particularly concerned that women find a welcome in this text, since they have lived the Rule for as many centuries as men. Thus, I have edited the Rule to read in universal language rather than in the usual male form. The purpose is to demonstrate clearly not only that spirituality is neither a male prerogative nor the norm of its existence but rather that the Rule has guided the lives of both women and men from its inception. The subject matter of the book is Benedictine spirituality, a spirituality for all humankind.

  Benedict of Nursia was born in the year 480. As a student in Rome, he tired of the decadent culture around him and left it to live a simple spiritual life as a hermit in the countryside of Subiaco, about thirty miles away. It wasn’t long, however, before he was discovered both by the people of the area and disciples who were themselves looking for a more meaningful way of life. Out of these associations sprang the monastic life that would eventually cover Europe.

  We do not know much more than that about the life of Benedict of Nursia but we know enough about the history of the times to know in what ways his Rule departed from it, gave the world fresh eyes and called people to live life with a new heart. The Dialogues of Gregory, in the biographical style of the day, give us, in a set of monastic parables about Benedict, an outline of his spiritual qualities and a look into his personality and leadership gifts. Other than that, it is the perdurance of his Rule itself and the contributions of Benedictinism to all the periods of Western history that speak most clearly to us about the purpose and impact of the life outlined here in the midst of a superficial world.

  In our own day there are over 1,500 communities of roughly 30,000 Benedictine and Cistercian men and women around the world who live under this Rule. In addition to the professed monastics who follow the Benedictine way of life, however, there are innumerable laypersons around the globe who also find in the Rule a guide and a ground for their own lives in the middle of a chaotic and challenging world. With that in mind, the text is divided into dated reading segments to allow for the three readings that Benedict prescribes for students of the Rule in chapter 58. It is for these people, primarily, and for people like them that this book has been written in order to keep accessible a text that has been a lifeline for many across the ages.

  Clearly, this is a life we do not dare to throw away with all the other disposables we have been trained to discard in our time if life as we know it is to be as rich in the future as it has been in the past.

  These reflections, in fact, come out of more than fifty years of my own personal experience of monastic life, twelve of which I spent as prioress of a Benedictine monastery and eight as president of a Benedictine federation of twenty-three autonomous communities.

  Thanks to the quality of this Rule, that life has had both dynamism and depth for me. It has plumbed both my humanity and my spirituality. It has brought both psychological growth and spiritual insight. It is as worth living now as it was those long years ago when, at a very early age, I began the living of it. It is a life I would not only recommend to others but would beg women and men everywhere to consider in all its forms, both ancient and new, not only as life giving to the individuals who choose it, but also as gift to the culture wise enough to seek it.

  My hope is that those who read this book, and use “this little Rule for beginners,” may also find new hope and new meaning in this century and so themselves become a light to centuries to come.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Rule of Benedict, ancient as it is, has a very subtle power and a very serious problem, as well: it is extremely simple to read. There is nothing convoluted about it, nothing metaphysical. On the contrary. The Rule of Benedict is direct; it is clear; it is a relatively uncomplicated text that uses simple language to make simple references to simple things that have meaning even now after 1,500 years. As a result, it is difficult to miss what is being said in it. There is little wonder it has lasted so long.

  At the same time, because it is so unvarnished, so uncomplicated in its structure, so simple in its concepts, it is also fairly easy to discount its concern for early sixth-century agendas and fairly difficult to recognize its continuing value. It’s an essentially straightforward, clean-spoken document, true, but not always very relevant, it seems, to twenty-first century culture and lifestyles. To readers who have inherited the mysticism of the Middle Ages, the treatises of the scholastic philosophers, and the theology texts of centuries of church life, it is almost incomprehensible that this brief document, almost 1,500-years old, is now enshrined as one of the greatest spiritual handbooks of all time. Volumes have been written about it but the small, unassuming text itself is almost bound to be disappointing to a culture that likes things to sound impressive and to look slick.

  What is it, then, that the Rule of Benedict says to the sixth century that gives it not only the right but the need to be heard by the twenty-first century as well? What is it about the Rule of Benedict that stays both authentic and necessary century after century after century in culture after culture after culture?

  The answer surely lies more in the ideas with which it concerns itself and the attitudes it sets out to form than in the particulars it prescribed for the people who were reading it in early Europe.

  The Rule of Benedict is not concerned with a single time and place, a single view of church, a single set of devotions or a single ministry. The Rule of Benedict is concerned with life: what it’s about, what it demands, how to live it. And it has not failed a single generation.

  The Prologue to the rule is its cornerstone and its gauntlet. Read this, the rule says, and if this is not what you’re about, do not read on.

  PROLOGUE

  Jan. 1 – May 2 – Sept. 1

  Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from one who loves you; welcome it and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to God from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for Jesus, the Christ.

  Life is a teacher of universal truths. That may be the reason why the religious readings of so many nations speak of the same situations and fasten on the same insights. The Rule of Benedict, too, is a wisdom literature that sounds life’s themes. It deals with answers to the great questions of the human condition: the presence of God, the foundation of relationships, the nature of self-development, the place of purpose. To the wise, it seems, life is not a series of events to be controlled. Life is a way of walking through the universe whole and holy.

  This first paragraph of the Rule of Benedict brings into instant focus the basis for being able to do that.

  Benedict says, “Listen.” Pay attention to the instructions in this Rule and attend to the important things in life. Let nothing go by without being open to being nourished by the inner meaning of that event in life. There is an Oriental proverb that teaches, “Take from death before it takes from thee.” If we do not live life consciously, in other words, we may not be living at all.

  The Prologue is asking us to do the same thing. If we want to have a spiritual life, we will have to concentrate on doing so. Spirituality does not come by breathing. It comes by listening to this Rule and to its insights into life “with the ear of the heart,” with feeling, with more than an academic interest.

  One part of spiritu
ality, then, is learning to be aware of what is going on around us and allowing ourselves to feel its effects. If we live in an environment of corporate greed or personal violence, we can’t grow from it spiritually until we allow ourselves to recognize it. The other part of spirituality, the Prologue makes quite clear, is learning to hear what God wants in any given situation and being quick to respond to that, to “welcome it and faithfully put it into practice.” To see the greed or sense the violence without asking what the Gospel expects in such a situation is not spirituality. It is piety at best.

  Most important of all, perhaps, is the Prologue’s insistence that this Rule is not being written by a spiritual taskmaster who will bully us or beat us down in a counterfeit claim to growing us up but by someone who loves us and will, if we allow it, carry us along to fullness of life. It is an announcement of profound importance. No one grows simply by doing what someone else forces us to do. We begin to grow when we finally want to grow. All the rigid fathers and demanding mothers and disapproving teachers in the world cannot make up for our own decision to become what we can by doing what we must.

  In this very first paragraph of the Rule, Benedict is setting out the importance of not allowing ourselves to become our own guides, our own gods. Obedience, Benedict says—the willingness to listen for the voice of God in life—is what will wrench us out of the limitations of our own landscape. We are being called to something outside of ourselves, something greater than ourselves, something beyond ourselves. We will need someone to show us the way: the Christ, a loving spiritual model, this Rule.

  First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to God most earnestly to bring it to perfection. In God’s goodness, we are already counted as God’s own, and therefore we should never grieve the Holy One by our evil actions. With the good gifts which are in us, we must obey God at all times, that God may never become the angry parent who disinherits us, nor the dreaded one, enraged by our sins, who punishes us forever as worthless servants for refusing to follow the way to glory.

  The person who prays for the presence of God is, ironically, already in the presence of God. The person who seeks God has already found God to some extent. “We are already counted as God’s own,” the Rule reminds us. Benedict knows this and clearly wants us to know it as well. A dull, mundane life stays a dull, mundane life, no matter how intent we become on developing spiritually. No amount of churchgoing will change that. What attention to the spiritual life does change is our appreciation for the presence of God in our dull, mundane lives. We come to realize that we did not find God; God finally got our attention. The spiritual life is a grace with which we must cooperate, not a prize to be captured or a trophy to be won.

  But, the Rule implies, we have been given a grace that is volatile. To feel it and ignore it, to receive it but reject it, the paragraph suggests, is to be in a worse situation than if we had never paid any attention to the spiritual life at all. For disregard of God’s good gifts, Benedict says, for refusing to use the resources we have for the upbuilding of the reign of God, for beginning what we do not intend to complete, the price is high. We are disinherited. We lose what is ours for the taking. We miss out on the life we are meant to have. We are dealt with, not as children of the owner who know instinctively that they are meant to grow into new and deeper levels of relationship here, but as hired help in the house, as people who look like they are part of the family but who never reap its real benefits or know its real nature. In failing to respond to God everywhere God is around us, we may lose the power of God that is in us.

  The words were not idle metaphors in sixth-century Italy.

  To be a member of a Roman family, the family whose structures Benedict understood, was to be under the religious, financial, and disciplinary power of the father until he died, whatever the age of the children. To be disinherited by the father was to be stranded in a culture in which paid employment was looked down upon. To be punished by him was to lose the security of family, outside of which there was no security at all. To lose relationship with the father was then, literally, to lose one’s life.

  And who has not known the truth of it? Who of us has not been failed by all the other things besides God—money, status, security, work, people—that we have clung to and been disappointed by in our cleaving? Whose life has not been warped by a series of twisted hopes, the roots of which were sunk in the shale of false promises and empty treasures that could not satisfy? Benedict is begging us here to realize that God is the only lifeline that life guarantees us. We have been loved to life by God, and now we must love God back with our whole lives or forever live a living death.

  Jan. 2 – May 3 – Sept. 2

  Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say, “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” (Rom. 13:11). Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from the heavens that every day calls out this charge: “If you hear God’s voice today, do not harden your hearts” (Ps. 95:8). And again: “You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 2:7). And what does the Spirit say? “Come and listen to me; I will teach you to reverence God” (Ps. 34:12). “Run while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you” (John 12:35).

  The paragraph is an insistent one, full of intensity, full of urgency. We put off so much in life—visiting relatives, writing letters, going back to school, finding a new job. But one thing stays with us always, present whether pursued or not, and that is the call to the center of ourselves where the God we are seeking is seeking us. Benedict says, Listen today. Start now. Begin immediately to direct your life to that small, clear voice within.

  In this paragraph Benedict makes his first of the multiple allusions to Scripture that emerge in the Rule time and time again to the point that a reader gets the idea that the Rule is simply a chain of scriptural quotations. The particular passages cited are important, of course, and give emphasis to the point of the excerpt. In these first references, for instance, Benedict reminds us that life is short, that we don’t have time to waste time, that some things are significant in life and some things are not. We all have to ask ourselves what time it is in our own lives. We each have to begin to consider the eternal weight of what we are spending life doing. We have to start someday to wonder if we have spent our lives on gold or dross.

  But as important as the content of the scriptural quotations themselves is the very message of their presence: the life laid out in this Rule is a life based on the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not the prescriptions of a private guru. It is an immersion in the gospel life so intense that we never forget for a moment what we are really about. We don’t just stumble through life from one pious exercise to another, hoping that in the end everything will be all right. We don’t surfeit on this life, even the spiritual systems of it, and forget the life to come. No, we run toward the light, not with our hair shirts in hand but with the Scriptures in hand, responsible to the presence of God in every moment and sure that life is only beginning when it ends.

  Jan. 3 – May 4 – Sept. 3

  Seeking workers in a multitude of people, God calls out and says again: “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?” (Ps. 34:13). If you hear this and your answer is “I do,” God then directs these words to you: if you desire true and eternal life, “keep your tongue free from vicious talk and your lips from all deceit; turn away from evil and do good; let peace be your quest and aim” (Ps. 34:14–15). Once you have done this, my “eyes will be upon you and my ears will listen for your prayers; and even before you ask me, I will say” to you: “Here I am” (Isa. 58:9). What is more delightful than this voice of the Holy One calling to us? See how God’s love shows us the way of life. Clothed then with faith and the performance of good works, let us set out on this way, with the gospel for our guide, that we may deserve to see the Holy One “who has called us to the eternal presence” (1 Thess
. 2:12).

  In Benedict’s mind, apparently, the spiritual life is not a collection of asceticisms; it is a way of being in the world that is open to God and open to others. We struggle, of course, with temptations to separate the two. It is so easy to tell ourselves that we overlooked the needs of others because we were attending to the needs of God. It is so easy to go to church instead of going to a friend whose depression depresses us. It is so easy to want silence rather than the demands of the children. It is so much easier to read a book about religion than it is to listen to a husband talk about his job or a wife talk about her loneliness. It is so much easier to practice the privatized religion of prayers and penances than it is to make fools out of ourselves for the Christian religion of globalism and peace. Deep, deep spiritual traditions everywhere, however, reject those rationalizations: “Is there life after death?” a disciple once asked a Holy One. And the Holy One answered, “The great spiritual question of life is not, ‘Is there life after death?’ The great spiritual question is, ‘Is there life before death?’” Benedict obviously believes that life lived fully is life lived on two planes: attention to God and attention to the good of the other.

  The godly are those, this paragraph says, who never talk destructively about another person—in anger, in spite, in vengefulness—and who can be counted on to bring an open heart to a closed and clawing world.

  The godly know when the world they live in has them on a slippery slope away from the good, the true, and the holy, and they refuse to be part of the decline. What’s more striking, they set out to counter it. It is not enough, Benedict implies, simply to distance ourselves from the bad. It is not enough, for instance, to refuse to slander others; we must rebuild their reputations. It is not enough to disapprove of toxic waste; we must do something to save the globe. It is not enough to care for the poor; we must do something to stop the poverty. We must be people who bring creation to life. “Once you have done this,” the Rule reminds us, “my eyes will be upon you and my ears will listen for your prayers.” Once you have done these things, you will be in the presence of God.