CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
My immediate reaction on reaching this chapter is one of bewilderment. I have been following Benedict as he writes of the role of the abbot and the community, at once sensitive and practical, and now I am faced with what appears to be a random catalog of maxims of an ethical and moralizing nature. They seem to be basic elements in any Christian life, and it is difficult to see why they should appear here. I am reminded of those pious expectations with which I was presented in my childhood and which I have been trying to escape from in adult life. In the face of an apparent hodge-podge, it is tempting either to decide that they represent a completely random listing or else to try to impose some sort of convincing pattern that would organize them into bundles or clusters and so make the chapter more mangeable. Instead of either of these alternatives, I like what Michael
Casey has to say. He argues for the value of paying attention to the literary structures of the text and shows that the structural analysis of the chapter produces significant coincidences, with a number of minor groupings within the whole:
These minor groupings may not represent an explicit, reasoned progression, but they can be the result of an intuitive association of ideas, which causes one bloc to be laid beside another and perhaps a number of blocs put in orbit around a central item. It is an unconscious process, and perhaps all the more valuable for being so since it enables us to see the whole person at work, rather than merely his head and pen.
I like this suggestion of an intuitive association of ideas that allows us to see something of Benedict's mind at work. This is not a list of virtues to be nourished and vices to be eradicated,
a simple ethical code to be followed, but rather a challenge to the » process of discernment as the prerequisite of the life that he is € is encouraging me to follow. Once again his concern is not with externals, but with interiority. In the preceding two chapters he has been concerned to remind the abbot, and also each one of us, not to forget the day of judgment. He has been helping us to try to discern whether or not we are trying to find and follow
God's will in all that we think and do. If not, then we shall have to answer for that on the day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts will be revealed. His concern is with the inner disposition and attitude, with the disposition of the heart, and in this chapter we are being given a practical yardstick that we can apply i in our daily lives. He puts this here, at this juncture in the Rule, since he knows that unless we get this right at this point, all that follows, whether on prayer or obedience or humility or day-toto-day routine, will lack its essential and necessary foundation.
So I am here being equipped, in the most basic and practical way possible, with the tools essential for my spiritual life. When
'Bishop Fox of Winchester was writing on the Rule for the nuns of his diocese in the sixteenth century, he prefaced this chapter by reminding them that just as ''worldely artificers have materyuall instrumentes apte for the accomplysshement of their worldely werkes'' so we too must have instruments ready for the "'crafte of religiose living.'' The concept of handling tools is totally down to earth and practical. Since Benedict sees me as a workman in a workshop (78), I must collect a supply of tools ready at hand to use when and how they are needed in my spiritual life. At the end of the chapter, the use of the tools will be explained. They are the thoughts and actions with which to fill my days in God's service. They cannot be imposed by any external authority, for they concern interior understanding.
Again there is this insistence that it is by willingness or unwillingness, humility or pride, loving zeal or the spirit of competition, that actions are to be judged.
Only on the day of judgment will the workman's task be over and the tool-box handed back to God.
Discernment therefore remains the underlying concern. How am I to distinguish between good and evil at every step of my life; and at every moment of my day? How can I be totally clearsighted so that I avoid illusion and am free of inner deception?
Benedict sees through any dissimulation. Verse 24 puts it bluntly, pA]
not in any biblical quotation but in his own voice, ''Rid your heart of all deceit.'' The externals in my life, my outward behavior, reflect my inner disposition. Benedict knows a great deal about the" innermost self, that world of my deepest thoughts and intentions, where much lies buried that I would not like to see the light of day. If I am to grow into a whole and free person then there must be a harmonious relationship between the inner and the outer. Without it there comes that crippling disunity within myself that will lead to ill-health, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual. External conformity is not good enough. The out- 'wardly good behavior that is without interior motivation becomes automatic, deadening. It is therefore with questions of my own
¢ interior attitude in mind that I must read this chapter.
The opening verse presents me with the essential law of the Gospel. I am forced to ask: Do I love God with my whole heart and my neighbor as myself? If I am going to look on each of these successive verses as an aid to discernment, then Benedict is facing me here with the foundational questions on which the whole of the rest will be built. These two precepts sum up the whole purpose of the Benedictine li life, as of any Christian life, and I feel that Benedict is placing them here so that they are the keystone of the chapter. They present me with the yardstick to judge every thought, word, and action: Is what I am thinking or doing contributing to the fulfilment of this commandment? Verses 3-8 give six articles of the Decalogue in the words of the New Testament. Verse 9 is the golden rule; it is a call to love. We are to. v see the other as Christ, treat the other as Christ.
The call is to follow Christ, which is simply the scriptural invitation that had been so vivid in the prologue. Now Benedict is reminding us that this asks for restraint, abnegation, discipline.
He is showing us the renunciation that is necessary if we are to be free to love. Verses 10-13 spell this out. It will never be pos- — sible to follow Christ while I put myself and my own | pleasures first. The contemporary interest in dieting and weight-watching, and the popular search for a more disciplined way of life as a reaction from the tyranny of the pleasure principle, once again demonstrate the wisdom of the Rule. To /ove fasting suggests a good, positive attitude. Philip Jebb writes of how fasting has become part of his life. '*You are given a new freedom."' He tells how much he learned from it; the cutting down of one's sense of independence, pride, and self-sufficiency; the clarity of per-
ception it brought; and the discovery of the interdependence of the body and the material universe.
The ''you did it to me'' passage in chapter 25 of Matthew's Gospel is the inspiration for verses 14-19, which list what are familiarly known as the corporal 'works of mercy, or what might be rendered in more modern language service to the needy. ''Here gang we have a principle which is as destructive of selfishness as the practice of renunciation and mortification. By offering ourselves
| in service, by putting ourselves out for others, we are freed from the domination of our own immature need for comfort.'' It is not enough to be a successful ascetic if it means that I neglect
— the needs of my brothers and sisters. The familiarity of these maxims must not be allowed to blunt their message. I have an obligation to those in need, and I cannot pretend that I do not know how much suffering there is in today's world. Even if it is perhaps further away, or more hidden than the encounter with the poor or naked or sick would have been in the past, that is no excuse.
Verses 20-21 bring a restatement of what holds this chapter together: the absolute priority of our love of Christ. This, and the seven verses that follow, are no longer that mosaic of biblical quotation. Here we have Benedict's own voice. Verse 20 is totally a reflection of the man himself, in the world and yet not of the world, accepting the material and yet not bound by it. Again
'Michael Casey summarizes the significance of what is being said here.
Separation from the world is not primarily an act of distancing or detachment, but an act of joining oneself to Christ and to the holy community: an act of attachment.
. .
. No Christian can Scorn the world for which Christ died; he can however refuse to accept its unevangelical standards of behavior.
If I were looking for one single, simple phrase to sum_up..
Benedict' s whole way of life, I would find it in verse 21: "The _ Tove of Christ must come before all else.'' It will be said again in 72,11, the chapter that is a great lyrical outpouring about love and to which Benedict returns at the end of the Rule when he has shown us how his way of living will enable us to incarnate that Tove. This Christlove is the center of the whole Rule and the center
'of our lives. If there is any one thing that is characteristic of Benedict, it is that he makes the love of Christ the focal point to which
everything must lead. One should really not talk about a verse like this, but just stop and meditate on it.
In verses 22-28 Benedict is looking at personal wholeness, showing me how I can so easily fail through anger, carrying grudges, nursing resentments, and being deceitful. We are not given a quotation, but short comments from Benedict himself, the fruit perhaps of his own experience of community at Cassino.
''Rid your heart of all deceit.
. Speak the truth with heart and tongue.'' Again we are brought back to the dangers of being untruthful, whether inwardly or outwardly.
Then follows a section on peaceful living and the making of peace. Nonviolence means that I do not repay injuries or return curses, that I absorb the hurt in a Ghandian fashion. These are verses on the subject of forgiveness to which Benedict will return later.
Verses 34-40 run through a list of fairly obvious failings: too much drink, too much sleep, grumbling, laziness. But nonetheless we should not despise this and think that we have grown far beyond it. In verses 41-43 there comes another of these breathing spaces that gives Benedict the opportunity for the wider perspective. Any of this will be impossible if I am going to be self-reliant.
I am being asked to put my trust in God and admit my total dependence on him. The decision is mine whether to accept or to reject the graces that are offered to me. An ascetical life will be unprofitable unless my gaze is fixed all the time on God, just as surely as Benedict's own life of denial in the cave at Subiaco was totally God-ward oriented. Without that point of reference, without that love, these will become negative practices.
I must take responsibility for myself since, at the end of my life, I will be called to account. Benedict will not let us forget the last things, the day of judgment, and he returns to it again in verses
44-47. He helps me to live responsibly by telling me to think daily » of my own death. If read in isolation, ''Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die'' (47), it could appear that death is to be dreaded. But the sequence here is important. Benedict does not separate death and eternal life (46). Death is the passage to eternal life, the beginning of the everlasting encounter with Christ. In The Dialogues St. Gregory tells us that Benedict said:
'"'Death which nearly everyone regards as punishment, I cherish as the entry to life and the reward for labor.'' The holding together of dying and new life, the paschal mystery, runs through-
out the Rule. In chapter 49 we are told that while our life should be a perpetual Lent, we should also daily look forward to Easter with ''joy and spiritual longing'' (49,7).
This makes me ask myself if I think sufficiently about preparation for death during life. I cannot escape awareness of death, for I am surrounded daily by the most horrific reminders of killings and disasters brought to my attention by the media. But to think of my own death is a very different thing. Yet Benedict reminded me in the prologue that to follow his way means perseverance until the day of my death, a journey to the very end.
In that moment, although my family and friends may be present, I shall ultimately be utterly alone with Christ, and in death
I shall really reach him, see him, return to him. I can bury the thought of this moment or deny it or run away from it, but I shall not in the end escape it. To think of my life objectively in the light of death will bring a very different perspective to the way in which I live now. If death is the gateway to life with Christ, then daily I want to rejoice in that prospect. ''Yearn'' and ''desire' in verse 46 are strong, passionate words, as are ''joy and spiritual longing'' (49,7); words of love and rejoicing, not fear and dread. We are not prepared to die unless we are first prepared to live.
Once again I feel that Benedict is reminding me of ultimate values, and these reflections on the last things are to help me to see my life in perspective. So the verses on mindfulness and awareness (48-49) follow naturally here. I am not going to drift through life half awake, unaware. The prologue had attempted to instil the sense of urgency that life is not to be wasted through being
, half-alive, half-awake. God's gaze upon me all the time is the gaze of a compassionate love searching out the corners of my heart, knowing all my secret thoughts and intentions. When the wrongful thoughts come creeping in, as they inevitably are going to do, he tells me to dash them against the rock that is Christ, picking up something that had come in the prologue: ''While these temptations were still young, he caught hold of them and dashed them against Christ'' (Prol., 28). The idea of God as rock runs throughout the psalms, and a rock is a wonderful image for what is strong, irremovable, dependable. It feels quite natural to find that Benedict applies the term to Christ. The specific reference is to that phrase in Psalm 136 (137) about smashing the Babylonian babies against the rocks. While that appalls me, it is nonetheless salu-
tary to visualize that scene in order to grasp what is being asked of me: that these wrongful thoughts are dashed against Christ while they are still in their infancy, before they have time to grow any further. There is the danger that I might harbor malicious or destructive thoughts that might escape and do damage. It is to prevent this that Benedict speaks in the following four verses about the need to keep guard over my tongue. It is here that those remarks about laughter come, remarks that have so often been held against him. I do not believe that he has no sense of humor, + or that he disapproved of laughter as such, but laughter can some_
'times be cruel, and it can be used in a negative way to cut a person down.
The purpose of controlling mindless chatter and incessant_ noise, whether it is external or internal, is to make room for an inner silence and space to be filled with God. Silence is a working tool for Benedict since the love of silence opens up the capacity to hear. In verse 55 Benedict again uses the word "'listen"' and reminds me that the whole purpose of my life is to listen to God. One of the tools for that is the reading, or /ectio, that turns the Scriptures into prayer. Verses 57-58 deal with penitence and penance as part of that prayer, and as looking toward the future.
This is not guilt or remorse, which far too often leave me caught in the coils of the past, but that true sorrow and contrition which ~~ leads me on to a desire for change. A twelfth-century Irish poem asks for the gift of tears, ''a well of tears'': ''Grant me, O great
God.
. . fierce floods of tears.'' It is also a good prayer for me.
I pray for a softening of the heart that brings me to tears, or close to tears, for then I am not hard-hearted or half-hearted, but have a heart open to the workings of God. The change or conversion of verse 58 is a demand that I live in accordance not with my own will, but with the will of God, which is simply another way of describing obedience. Since obedience is ultimately listening to the Word and responding to it, the natural conclusion of this particular cluster of verses is to emphasize again the role of obedience in my life.
In verse 62 Benedict returns to the importance of the inner reality rather than the external appearance. He is never deceived by appearances, and he is only too aware of the self-deception that he warned against earlier on and what it can do. Just in case
I might begin to feel rather good about myself and my progress, at this stage in this chapter he is careful to take me down a peg
or two by putting his finger once more on this point. We are to live the truth. It is a matter of discernment again: What are my real motives here? That I gain the applause of the world because
I appear to be so deeply spiritual, living such a committed Christian life?
~~ A miscellaneous collection of texts follows in verses 63-73, and at first it is difficult to see any underlying coherence. They are pretty basic virtues and vices: chastity is good, hatred and jealousy, quarrelling and arrogance, are not. Reverence for both old and young, praying for our enemies, trying to keep the peace— these are all instruments for survival in community life. But as I read them time and again, I find that ''treasure chastity' in 64 sets the key note. It is asking me to respect and revere the other, for a sense of restraint by which I hold myself back from intruding on them, for so often what lies behind my quarrelling and contentiousness is this desire to impose myself, my ideas, my demands upon the other.
In verse 74, at the end of this long list, Benedict hands me his final tool. I am never to lose hope in God's mercy. I cannot do any of this on my own. I know that in this life I will never arrive. I am sure that in this life I will continue to struggle. My one certainty is that I do not have to go it alone.
The coda is Benedict at his most practical and down to earth.
These tools for my spiritual life are not so very different from the tools for my day-to-day life at work in the garden or kitchen.
They have been issued to me. I am responsible for using them properly, and on the day of judgment I will return them and render account. It is good to read verse 76 and then look at 35,10 where the same verb is used, and so find a parallel: that tools are handed out and should be returned washed, which I take to mean in good order. Then comes the moment when the good workman claims his wages. But they are not wages that the world might chalk up, based on any outward achievement. What the eye hath not seen nor the ear heard surely brings me back to the disposition of the heart, to the secret intention of the heart known to God alone. And as to the workshop—in this case it is the place in which I find myself, and the people who surround me. I do not run away or try to escape from the reality of this, for this is where I shall find God and find my true self.