The Rule of St. Benedict

Justice and power are two things that do not sit well together and Marx was not the first or only person to see this. In the Middle Ages, egalitarian ideas embedded in the Gospels butted up against a feudal order founded on the raw expropriation of agricultural labor. This produced social revolts of various kinds and vigorous protests but no stable solution. Too few people have noticed that we have exactly the same problem today. We have a secular regime founded on a notion of universal human rights of which the values of ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomy’ are considered core examples. At the same time our economic institutions only embody autonomy in the abstract form of consumer choice. Behind the façade of the free market lies the same process of exploitation and expropriation as we can see with the panicked effort of corporations to force workers back into plague infested packing plants and warehouses. In Canada this basic contradiction has taken a slightly different form than on the European continent. In Europe, the regime of rights has been broadly enforced within the confines of the European continent while the more grossly oppressive demands of capitalism have largely (though by no means entirely) been shipped offshore first to colonies and then to the third world nation states that succeeded them.

In Canada the primary object of colonization is internal. We have imposed feudal style expropriation on indigenous people (primarily) for the purpose not of expropriating their labor (generally) but of expropriating their land for the purpose of resource exploitation and extraction. At the same time as we have exercised brute power over indigenous people we have also attempted to make indigenous persons ‘objects’ of paternalism and benevolent care. I need not say how that ended: one cannot exercise benevolence over people over whom one has a relation of dominance. This is clear with respect to slavery and it is to the credit of Harriett Beecher Stowe that she drove home this point so effectively in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No matter how well meaning and how kind and Christ-like in intention one is the fact of owning another human being will slowly but surely rot the soul. Benevolence will turn to cruelty as night follows day and if one is not a sadist to begin with (and some are) that is what one will become.  We cannot then care in a Christian way for those who are not free. The traditional way of saying this is that all are servants and that the master is the servant of the slave. We are all mutually bound in service to each other and if this language is now perhaps archaic sounding it did, in its original context, overturn and subvert a binary previous societies assumed as natural. This has lead, slowly and painfully it is true, to the modern movements for the abolition of slavery. Tragically, these have come nowhere near to fulfilling their promise.

As a student I devoted a considerable amount of attention to the thought and institutions of the Middle Ages. This ruined me as far as being a good citizen in a corporate university is concerned for it made me something less than an enthusiastic capitalist and completely uninterested in the kind of ‘research’ my masters think I should produce. There is, indeed, one book that is to blame above all others and that is the Rule of St. Benedict. This is not just because the community it envisages negates the principle of property though not, it should be noted, the idea of personal effects. Nor is it because it makes need the principle of distribution with the neediest given more and the stronger given less. It is rather because of the radical principle it is founded on: that of obedience. On the one hand the rule spells this out in a way that is very Roman and very legalistic: self-will is the enemy of community and is to subordinate itself to the monarchical principle of law embodied in the will of the abbot. This is backed up by corporal punishment (in extreme cases) and as a last resort even the threat of ostracism. The rule does not solve the problem of how to run a society without the implied threat of force but then again neither have we. We have taken the scourge from the abbot but have given the cops Tasers.

That said, the rule admits that this is order in a mere instrumental sense. The point is a freedom far more radical than mere subservience to the outer law. The point of overcoming self-will and all our ego-focused cravings is not to cringe before the abbot but to put ourselves radically at the disposal of the needs of the other. We rise by submitting ourselves and “climb the ladder of Jacob” by humility. The corporate ladder is a very different sort of ladder for, of course, one climbs it by competition and what the rule labels 'dissension' or splitting of the community into distinct and competing factions. To the extent I can get away with it I expropriate from others according to my wants and not their needs. There is an external check on this in the law but no internal check and if the laws put too onerous a burden on my competitive desires I must bribe politicians to alter them: the laws are not sacrosanct but malleable according to my inclinations and interests. If the law is not profiting my shareholders to the absolute limit possible I am obliged by my duties to them to rewrite it no matter how venerable its authors or how rational its intent. The rule though admits only emulation in service and devotion with all excellence and distinction attributed to the grace of God not the merits of individuals. If the discipline of the rule is harsh by our standards (our purported standards anyway) I think it also helps us to think about alternative kinds of community where production and exchange are organized on a principle of mutuality and obedience not self- aggrandizement and expropriation: the ladder of Jacob not the corporate ladder. All WE have ever managed is a kind of compromise where economic life is organized on one principle and political life is organized, less and less effectively, on another. The limits of this are becoming clearer daily.

Monasteries, of course, are in large measure bygone institutions though the odd private individual still may choose to live in one. A post-modern ‘radical’ community would doubtless be kinder to the natural will in its moments of spontaneity, creativity and play than the somber Roman Benedict. The Romans summoned forth a conception of the universality and majesty of law out of the opposition of a natural will assumed evil. There are pure villains in Roman literature but not in Greek. The rigor of the rule is meant to suppress the emergence of this natural will. We too struggle with the same problem for make no mistake, though ‘otherworldly’ the rule raises the political question in its essence: how can competitive individualism be subsumed under a common law and a common set of institutions and its destructive potential contained or transcended? The Rule of Benedict is far from the last word on this matter even for the Middle Ages which sought in turn more and more radical realizations of the monastic ideal including the merging of monastic values with ordinary secular society (as in the Brethren of the Common Life).

This brings us back to our beginning. History is not simply the story of power and domination though those two things have held tragic sway in the past as they continue to do today. There is revolt and resistance too though as Blake understood so well revolt and resistance that does not overturn the values of power and domination root and branch simply substitutes one tyranny for another. The much deeper ‘revolt’ is living according to an alternate set of rules than the one the world honors and the enduring interest of the Rule of Benedict is that it is among the most radical and successful of these not in an arbitrarily utopian sense (there are many internal challenges to monastic life and the need for reform, even radical reform, was constantly felt) but in the sense of pervading an entire epoch of European history with a radical ethic of service and communitarianism and a life lived in harmony with the order or ‘rule’ of nature as the cycle of prayer moves with the seasons and the rising and setting sun. The different past shows the possibility of a different future and different ways of life with different problems and different struggles may well form themselves from the wreckage of our own. Some of them might even look like Benedictine abbeys though philosophers are forbidden from speculating about the future.            

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