The Rule of Benedict Read online

  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

  The Crossroad Publishing Company offers a 200-year global family tradition of publishing on spiritual living and religious thought. Offering books by authoritative and award-winning authors, our catalog includes original editions, monographs, commentary, reflections, prayers, guides, and spiritual fiction. We promote reading as a time-tested discipline for focus and enlightenment. We help authors shape, clarify, write, and effectively promote their ideas. We conceive, create, and distribute books. Our expertise and passion is to provide healthy spiritual nourishment in written form.

  Jade Music, the specialty division of Milan Records, has a proven dedication to releasing quality classical and spiritual music for more than 20 years. It established itself as the premiere record label of the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain. Jade Music’s catalog includes works by world-renowned choirs of Saint-Wandrille, Notre-Dame de Ganagobie, and Saint-Madeleine du Barroux, among others. In 2007, the record label distinguished itself by releasing the soundtrack to the highly acclaimed documentary film Into Great Silence by Philip Gröning. More recently, Jade Music released two Gregorian chant albums by the Norbertine Fathers of Orange County, California.

  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

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

  The compilation and composition of the artwork and music accompanying The Rule of Benedict is an original work owned by The Crossroad Publishing Company, and may not in any way be copied, used with other texts or excerpted.

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  In continuation of our 200-year tradition of independent publishing, The Crossroad Publishing Company proudly offers a variety of books with strong, original voices and diverse perspectives. The viewpoints expressed in our books are not necessarily those of The Crossroad Publishing Company, any of its imprints, or of its employees. No claims are made or responsibility assumed for any health or other benefit.

  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 [email protected].

  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.