Chapter 4
the houses of all religious provide regular and periodical visitations also for the cloister of St. Benedict.
The Pursuit of Monastic Virtue (chaps, iv to vii)
FOURTH CHAPTER
The Instruments of Good Works1 The Chief Commandment:
1. To love the Lord God with a whole heart, a whole soul and with all one's strength (cf. Deut. vi, 5;
Matt, xxii, 39).
2. Then, one's neighbor as oneself (cf. Matt, xii, 39).
The Other Commandments:
3. Then, not to kill (cf. Exod. xx, 13).
4. Not to commit adultery (cf. Matt, xix, 18).
5. Not to steal (cf. Luke xviii, 20).1
6. Not to covet (cf. Rom. xiii, 9).
7. Not to bear false witness (cf. Mark x, 19).
1 The meaning and aim of the monastic pursuit of virtue is the perfect fulfillment of the Christian ideal of living. And for this reason the Decalogue forms the in dispensable basis for a life of virtue in the cloister, in conformity with its unique character, the Holy Rule dispenses with the conventional treatises of oriental monachism on the virtues and vices and places before us a modest assortment of 74
"instruments." In these (the Latin word can also be made to mean "instructions),
St. Benedict gives us a summary of the duties the observance of which will surely lead the monk to his final destination. It is possible, though there is no evidence to support it, that in the fourth chapter we have in outline an early Christian in struction for catechumens before baptism; furthermore, that this fourth chapter represents the condensed content of what the monk promises at his profession, that is, the pursuit of monastic virtue (cf. chap, lviii, Excursus I). It may seem strange that St. Benedict does not explicitly mention the "eight principal vices," a theme close to the heart of the old monachism. still surviving today in our catechisms as the "seven capital sins." Abbot Cassian devoted eight books of his Institutes (5-12) and the fifth of his "Conferences" to the subject. There he dealt with their origin, their peculiar character, and the conquering of them. One of the first exponents of the doctrine of the "eight principal vices" was the monk-mystik, Evagrius Ponticus (f 399).
* As a child Macarius, together with other children, herded the family kine. On one occasion the children stole some figs. Macarius picked up one of the figs that had fallen and ate it. "1 weep when I think of it," he said. St. Augustine, in his "Confessions," tells how bitterly he repented of a theft of pears as a child
(II, iv.).
I he Other Commandments (cont.):
8. To honor all men (cf. 1 Peter ii, 17).
9. Not to do to another what one would not have happen to oneself (cf. Tob. iv, 16).
Self-renunciation:
10. To renounce self unto oneself in order to follow Christ (cf. Luke ix, 23).
11. To keep the body in subjection (cf. 1 Cor. ix. 27).
12. Not to foster luxury.
13. To love fasting.
Works of Mercy:
14. To relieve the poor.2
15. To clothe the naked (cf. Matt. xxv. 21).
16. To visit the sick (cf. Ibid.).
17. To bury the dead (cf. Tob. i, 21).
18. To come to (another's) aid in time of affliction.
19. To console the sorrowing.
One's Profession:
20. To shun the affairs of the world.* 21. To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.
Meekness and righteousness:
22. Not to yield to the passion of anger.
23. Not to give way to violent fits of temper (Jaltzorn).
24. Not to harbor guile in one's heart.
25. Not to give a deceitful kiss of peace.
26. Not to forsake charity.
27. Not to swear lest one perjure oneself.
28. To speak the truth from the heart as well as from the mouth.
29. Not to requite evil with evil (1 Peter iii, 9).
30. Not to inflict injury, but to suffer injuries inflicted patiently.
31. To love one's enemies (Luke vi, 27).
2 The hermit had a personal obligation to perform works of mercy, while in the case of the cenobites, as St. Basil remarks, the duty devolved upon the cloister
(Shorter Rules 87 to 91). There is still an office of almoner among our modern monastic offices. As a general rule, the porters (sometime the procurators) in our houses distribute alms to pilgrims and vagrants.
"■'(Literally, to alienate oneself from the world's activities).
32. Not to revile those who revile us, but rather to bless them (cf. Peter iii, 9).
33. To bear persecution for justice's sake (Matt, v, 10).
Predominant Faults:
34. Not to be proud.
35. Not to over-fond of drink (cf. Titus i, 7).
36. Not to be gluttonous.
37. Not to be over-fond of sleep.
38. Not to be slothful.
39. Not to be murmurous.
40. Not to slander.
Preeminence of Divine Grace:
41. To place one's hope in God.
42. To attribute to God and not to oneself the good one sees in himself.
43. Ever to recognize and attribute to oneself the evil in one's life.1
The Four Last Things:
44. To fear the day of judgment.
45. To tremble at (the thought of) hell.
46. To long for everlasting life with all spiritual de sire.
47. To keep the danger of imminent death daily be fore one's eyes.2
Self-Restraint:
48. To watch over the conduct of one's life at all ' This instrument is to be evaluated as an expression of genuine monastic humility rather than as an evidence of any direct Augustinian influence. Something very similar occurs in the reputed "Writings of Macarius" (c. 400: "Say of the good that you have: 'Another gave it to me, and he can take it away again, for it is alien to my nature.' But of the evil that you find in you say: T am a sinner, who has made the Lord angry.' "
2 In a great address, St. Antony said to his monks: "In order not to grow care less, it is useful for us to to take to heart these words of St. Paul: 'I die daily' (1
Cor. xv, 31); for if we live as we were to die any day, we shall never sin. These words were spoken to us so that we, when we awaken, may believe that we shall not live till sundown, and again when we go to sleep, we may think that we shall never awaken; for by nature our life is uncertain, and is being doled out to us daily by Providence. If we think thus and live accordingly, we shall not sin; we
hours.
49. To hold as certain that God sees us in every place.
50. To dash the evil thoughts that come into the heart against Christ and to manifest them to one's spiritual father.1
Recollection:
51. To guard one's lips against evil and depraved talk.
52. Not to love much speaking.
53. Not to speak idle and laughter-provoking words.
54. Not to love excessive and boisterous laughter.2
Reading and Prayer:
55. To listen gladly to holy reading.
56. To apply oneself often to prayer.
57. Daily to confess one's past sins with tears and sighs to God in prayer.
58. Thereupon to better oneself respecting these sins.
Subjugation of Body and Soul:
59. Not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh (Gal. v, 16).
60. To hate one's own will.
61. To obey the orders of the abbot in all things, even though he himself—which heaven forbid— should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's pre shall covet nothing, anger nobody, and heap up no wealth on earth. We shall live without possessions and forgive everyone, just as if we were waiting to die any day soon . . . ever eager for the struggle and with an eye on the day of judgment.
For it is ever thus that our dread of the worst evils and our struggle with the hard ships (of life) weaken the lure of our lusts and raise up our stumbling souls" (Life
19).
1 Cf. HR., chap, xvi, Excursus III and chap, xxiii. Excursus II.
2 The Holy Rule condemns loud, unrestrained laughter, not, however, "the gentle, joyous laughter of the soul," as St. Basil calls it (Longer Rules 17). It was said of the hermit Pambo that he had never laughed. One day the demons wanted to provoke him to laughter. Accordingly, they tied wings to a stick of wood, made a great commotion while carrying it about, and cried out to it : "Up and away!
Up and away!" When Pambo saw them, he laughed. The imps immediately let out a shout of hellish glee, thinking they had caused him to do so. But he said: "I did not really laugh. I could not help myself. 1 was so overcome by surprise to see your stupidity; so many of you it took to lug around a block of wood." It was considered altogether unbecoming to laugh at table or during conferences
(Rule of Pachomius. 31).
Subjugation of Body and Soul (cont.): cept: "What they say, do ye; but what they do, do ye not" (Matt, xxiii, 3).
62. Not to wish to be called holy before one is holy, but rather to be so beforehand, in order that one may with better reason be called holy.
63. To fulfill the commandments of God daily by one's deeds.
64. To love chastity.1
Brotherly Love:
65. To hate no one.
66. Not to harbor jealousy.
67. Not to yield to envy.
68. Not to love strife.
69. To shun arrogance.
70. To honor one's elders.
71. To love one's juniors.
72. To pray for one's enemies for the love of Christ (Matt, v, 44).
73. After a quarrel, to make peace with one's adver sary before sundown.
The Virtue of Hope:
74. And never to despair of the mercy of God.
Behold, these are the tools of the spiritual craft! If we have kept them near at hand unceasingly day and night and have de livered them up only on the day of judgment, we shall be com pensated by the Lord with the reward he himself has promised us: "That no eye hath seen or ear heard, what the Lord hath prepared for them that love him" (cf. 1 Cor. ii, 9).
But the workshop wherein we must work all this out is the en closure of the monastery and stability in the community.
1 The early Christians were unanimous in their high regard and praise for the virtue of virginity. In the midst of a world that was rotten to the core and given to the pursuit of sensual pleasures, it was something new and altogether unheard of.
Virginity for these Christians was the very essence of heroic perfection. It had to do not only with the renunciation of fleshly lusts, but it was also a downright ex pression of a complete renunciation of the world and of an unreserved oblation of self to Christ. It was also an expression of the highest sanctity, sinlessness, and freedom from passion, indicating a quasi-return to the glorious status of paradise.
Excursus.
The Virtue of Hope.—Abbot Cassian recognized three motives that should help to deter the monk from sin: fear of temporal and eternal punish ment, the yearning after the kingdom of heaven, the hope of reaching it, and, finally, the inclination towards goodness for its own sake; in a word, the love of virtue. Although these three motives work to produce the same results, their relative worth is quite different. Fear grows from a lively faith in God's judgment. Accordingly, a man practices virtue not so much from inner con viction as under some degree of duress, because he realizes that punishment will inevitably follow if he fails to do so. Hope rises out of yearning for ever lasting life, promised to those who strive to be virtuous. On the lowest step of perfection, that is, fear, the monk is not much different from a slave who trembles before a stern master (cf. chap, vii, Excursus 1). On the next step, hope, he is somewhat like a wage-earner looking forward to his wages (In stitutes xi, 6-7). If the Holy Rule places an unusually strong emphasis on fear and gives it such prominence, it remains none the less true to its simple and humble task of being a Rule for cenobites, or beginners. Less strongly do we find brought out in it the motive of hope. But we do see it put with more emphasis as an eternal reward at the end of the fourth chapter, in which are enumerated the instruments of good works. Hope rides along whenever there is talk of eternal life. Hope perseveres in that expectation, because it means
God. Like fear and love, it is one of the primal "affections of the human race." It is the virtue that best answers the needs of the wayfarer "who is still on the way," and of the traveler "who has not yet reached his destina tion."
Christ is the embodiment of hope: "In thee, O Lord, I have hoped, let me never be put to confusion . . . Thou, O Lord, art my hope" (cf. Ps. lxx, 1 &
5)! At the oblation he makes of himself during the ceremony of profession, the monk chants and voices his hope in the words of the psalmist: "Uphold me,
O Lord, according to thy word, and 1 shall live: and confound me not in my expectation" (Ps. cxviii, 116; cf. HR. chap, lviii). One might be able to say that hope is a kind of imperfect love. It loves the Lord because its future welfare and bliss are grounded in him. As members of the mystical body, what wc hope for is the promise which we see already fulfilled in the Lord, our
Head. Prayer itself never leaves hope out of consideration. Lor it is the out ward manifestation of hope. Hope operates in and through it. The monk chants the psalms in Christian hope, and there is a certain youthfulness in the action. The prayerful monk is not senile, discouraged, or weary of life, but whatever his age, he is a man lovable in his intrinsic youth. At least so thought
We can understand why the powers of hell employed all their wiles to lead a monk towards a fall through impurity (Cassian, Conferences 16). Christ is our proto type of virginity. "The joy of the virgins of Christ is over Christ, in Christ, with Christ, after Christ, through Christ, and on account of Christ" (Augustine, On the Virtue of Virginity).
the prophet: "But they that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint" (Isa. xl. 31). What wings are to the bird and feet to the traveler hope is for the monk.
There are two kinds of hopelessness: despair and presumption. Despair is the anticipation of failure; presumption is the unwarranted anticipation of success or fulfillment. The particular agony of despair lies in this that it negates the existence of any way to fulfillment, towards which the very nature of the despairing man still tends. But in his own despite the miserable man shuts the door to heaven and to everlasting life upon himself. The most tragic result of despair is an "indolent melancholy," that awful monastic disease called acedia, or weariness of soul, to which Abbot Cassian devoted the entire tenth book of the "Institutes." The monk who has become afflicted with this dread malady of the soul actually wishes in effect that the Lord would leave him strictly alone and not bother to raise him up. Joyless, soured, bored with life, and in dolent, he renounces his noble duty-laden status as a child of God. He does not want to be what Christ wills that he be, in a word, he does not want to be what he actually still is. In consequence of his soul's sickness, he finds himself in a state of errant disquietude of spirit, loquacity, insatiable curiosity, inner restlessness and outward indolence, instability of place as of resolution, dull indifference, pusillanimity, and irritable rebellion, in short, in a state of formal wickedness, that is, hatred of everything divine.
In contrast to the virtue of hope, despair is disfigured by something that is old and decrepit, while to presumption there clings some taint that is quite in fantile. Adult infantilism and childish senility are both caricatures of youthful ness. And in opposition to the deep and humble piety that is borne on the wings of hope, there rises up that puerile presumptuous type of piety, which, by reason of its multifarious devotional practices, would lay claim to ever lasting life as a right. In this kind of hope, the divine attributes of justice and mercy, according to a merely natural way of thinking, seem to counteract and thus cancel each other out. He who keeps only God's justice before his eyes easily falls into despair. "If thou, O Lord, wilt mark our iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it" (Ps. cxxix, 3)? On the other hand, he who considers only God's mercy falls an easy prey to presumption. The uncertainty of salvation, under which also the monk finds himself, can be "overcome" only through the virtue of hope. By grace of this virtue, the monk places himself with childlike trust in the hands of a just but merciful God, to whom he offered himself without reservation on the day of his profession.
The Holy Rule really did not need to hold up before the eyes of the monk the decisive significance of this virtue in a separate chapter. However, our holy Patriarch did provide that at Compline there should be chanted the 90th psalm, in which there occur those two eloquent verses: the 9th, in which the monk prays: "Because thou, O Lord, art my hope: thou hast made the Most
High thy refuge;" and the 14th, in which the Lord answers: "Because he hoped in me I will deliver him: I will protect him because he hath known my name."