You can’t go back to the past, but you can go to Norcia. And the glimpse of the Christian past a pilgrim gets there is also, I am confident, a glimpse of the Christian future.
Norcia—the modern name of Benedict of Nursia’s birthplace—is a walled town that sits on a broad plateau at the end of a road that winds for thirty-five miles through harsh mountain country. It is easy to imagine how isolated Norcia was in Benedict’s day—and why, to our knowledge, the saint went down the mountain, never to return.
One warm February morning I traveled to the Monastery of St. Benedict, the home of fifteen monks and their prior, Father Cassian Folsom. Father Cassian, a sixty-one-year-old American, reopened the monastery with a handful of brother Benedictines in December 2000, nearly two centuries after the state shut the tenth-century prayer citadel’s doors and dispersed its monks.
The suppression of the Norcia monastery happened in 1810 under laws imposed by Napoleon Bonaparte, then the ruler of northern Italy. Napoleon was a tyrant who inherited the anti-Christian legacy of the French Revolution and used it to devastate the Catholic Church in all territories under French imperial rule. Napoleon was the dictator of a French state so anticlerical that many in Europe speculated that he was the Antichrist.
Legend has it that in an argument with a cardinal, Napoleon pointed out that he had the power to destroy the church.
“Your majesty,” the cardinal replied, “we, the clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
Four years after sending the Benedictines away from their home of nearly a millennium, Napoleon’s empire was in ruins, and he was in exile. Today, the sound of Gregorian chants can once again be heard in the saint’s hometown, a melodious rebuke to the apostate emperor. Sometimes the past, as an American novelist famously said, is not even past.
The Monastery of St. Benedict is not the world’s first Benedictine monastery. Monks did not establish themselves in this town until the tenth century (or possibly earlier; written records only go back to the 900s). Most of the men who refounded the monastery are young Americans who have chosen to give their lives wholly to God as Benedictine monks—and not just as monks but as Benedictines committed to living out the fullness of their tradition.
As I settled into the quiet of my monastery guest room after a morning in Norcia, I reflected on how unlikely it was that from this small town high in the mountains came the spark that kept the light of faith alive in Europe through very hard times. That spark shone forth in a world when, in the words of the English lay Benedictine Esther de Waal, “life was an urgent struggle to make sense of what was happening.”1 Like today, I thought, then drifted off to sleep.
The next morning I met Father Cassian inside the monastery for a talk. He stands tall, his short hair and beard are steel-gray, and his demeanor is serious and, well, monklike. But when he speaks, in his gentle baritone, you feel as if you are talking to your own father. Father Cassian speaks warmly and powerfully of the integrity and joy of the Benedictine life, which is so different from that of our fragmented modern world.
Though the monks here have rejected the world, “there’s not just a no; there’s a yes too,” Father Cassian says. “It’s both that we reject what is not life-giving, and that we build something new. And we spend a lot of time in the rebuilding, and people see that too, which is why people flock to the monastery. We have so much involvement with guests and pilgrims that it’s exhausting. But that is what we do. We are rebuilding. That’s the yes that people have to hear about.”
Rebuilding what? I asked.
“To use Pope Benedict’s phrase, which he repeated many times, the Western world today lives as though God does not exist,” he says. “I think that’s true. Fragmentation, fear, disorientation, drifting—those are widely diffused characteristics of our society.”
Yes, I thought, this is exactly right. When we lost our Christian religion in modernity, we lost the thing that bound ourselves together and to our neighbors and anchored us in both the eternal and the temporal orders. We are adrift in liquid modernity, with no direction home.
And this monk was telling me that he and his brothers in the monastery saw themselves as working on the restoration of Christian belief and Christian culture. How very Benedictine. I leaned in to hear more.
This monastery, Father Cassian explained, and the life of prayer within it, exist as a sign of contradiction to the modern world. The guardrails have disappeared, and the world risks careering off a cliff, but we are so captured by the lights and motion of modern life that we don’t recognize the danger. The forces of dissolution from popular culture are too great for individuals or families to resist on their own. We need to embed ourselves in stable communities of faith.
Benedict’s Rule is a detailed set of instructions for how to organize and govern a monastic community, in which monks (and separately, nuns) live together in poverty and chastity.2 That is common to all monastic living, but Benedict’s Rule adds three distinct vows: obedience, stability (fidelity to the same monastic community until death), and conversion of life, which means dedicating oneself to the lifelong work of deepening repentance. The Rule also includes directions for dividing each day into periods of prayer, work, and reading of Scripture and other sacred texts. The saint taught his followers how to live apart from the world, but also how to treat pilgrims and strangers who come to the monastery.
Far from being a way of life for the strong and disciplined, Benedict’s Rule was for the ordinary and weak, to help them grow stronger in faith. When Benedict began forming his monasteries, it was common practice for monastics to adopt a written rule of life, and Benedict’s Rule was a simplified and (though it seems quite rigorous to us) softened version of an earlier rule. Benedict had a noteworthy sense of compassion for human frailty, saying in the prologue to the Rule that he hoped to introduce “nothing harsh and burdensome” but only to be strict enough to strengthen the hearts of the brothers “to run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness and love.” He instructed his abbots to govern as strong but compassionate fathers, and not to burden the brothers under his authority with things they are not strong enough to handle.
For example, in his chapter giving the order of manual labor, Benedict says, “Let all things be done with moderation, however, for the sake of the faint-hearted.” This is characteristic of Benedict’s wisdom. He did not want to break his spiritual sons; he wanted to build them up.
Despite the very specific instructions found in the Rule, it’s not a checklist for legalism. “The purpose of the Rule is to free you. That’s a paradox that people don’t grasp readily,” Father Cassian said.
If you have a field covered with water because of poor drainage, he explained, crops either won’t grow there, or they will rot. If you don’t drain it, you will have a swamp and disease. But if you can dig a drainage channel, the field will become healthy and useful. What’s more, once the water becomes contained within the walls of the channel, it will flow with force and can accomplish things.
“A Rule works that way, to channel your spiritual energy, your work, your activity, so that you’re able to accomplish something,” Father Cassian said.
“Monastic life is very plain,” he continued. “People from the outside perhaps have a romantic vision, perhaps what they see on television, of monks sort of floating around the cloister. There is that, and that’s attractive, but basically, monks get up in the morning, they pray, they do their work, they pray some more. They eat, they pray, they do some more work, they pray some more, and then they go to bed. It’s rather plain, just like most people. The genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.”
People who are anxious, confused, and looking for answers are quick to search for solutions in the pages of books or on the Internet, looking for that “killer app” that will make everything right again. The Rule tells us: No, it’s not like that. You can achieve the peace and order you seek only by making a place within your heart and within your daily life for the grace of God to take root. Divine grace is freely given, but God will not force us to receive it. It takes constant effort on our part to get out of God’s way and let His grace heal us and change us. To this end, what we think does not matter as much as what we do—and how faithfully we do it.
A man who wants to get in shape and has read the best bodybuilding books will get nowhere unless he applies that knowledge in eating healthy food and working out daily. That takes sustained willpower. In time, if he’s faithful to the practices necessary to achieve his goal, the man will start to love eating well and exercising so much that he is not pushed toward doing so by willpower but rather drawn to it by love. He will have trained his heart to desire the good.
So too with the spiritual life. Right belief (orthodoxy) is essential, but holding the correct doctrines in your mind does you little good if your heart—the seat of the will—remains unconverted. That requires putting those right beliefs into action through right practice (orthopraxy), which over time achieves the goal Paul set for Timothy when he commanded him to “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7).
The author of 2 Peter explains well the way the mind, the heart, and the body work in harmony for spiritual growth:
Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:5-8)
Though it quotes Scripture in nearly every one of its short chapters, the Rule is not the Gospel. It is a proven strategy for living the Gospel in an intensely Christian way. It is an instruction manual for how to form one’s life around the service of Jesus Christ, within a strong community. It is not a collection of theological maxims but a manual of practices through which believers can structure their lives around prayer, the Word of God, and the ever-deepening awareness that, as the saint says, “the divine presence is everywhere, and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and evil in every place’” (Proverbs 15:3).
The Rule is for monastics, obviously, but its teachings are plain enough to be adapted by lay Christians for their own use. It provides a guide to serious and sustained Christian living in a fashion that reorders us interiorly, bringing together what is scattered within our own hearts and orienting it to prayer. If applied effectively, it disciplines the life we share with others, breaking down barriers that keep the love of God from passing among us, and makes us more resilient without hardening our hearts.
In the Benedict Option, we are not trying to repeal seven hundred years of history, as if that were possible. Nor are we trying to save the West. We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity. We are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. The Rule, with its vision of an ordered life centered around Christ and the practices it prescribes to deepen our conversion, can help us achieve that goal.
If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order. If we don’t have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful outside forces who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity’s deep currents.
For the traditional Christian, establishing internal order is not mere discipline, nor is it simply an act of will. Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man’s efforts to “regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God.”3 This means the discovery of the order, the logos, that God has written into the nature of Creation and seeking to live in harmony with it. It also implies the realization of natural limits within Creation’s givenness, as opposed to believing that nature is something we can deny or refute, according to our own desires. Finally, it means disciplining one’s life to live a life to glorify God and help others.
Order is not simply a matter of law and its enforcement. In the classical Christian view, the law itself depends on a deeper conception of order, an idea of the way ultimate reality is constructed. This order may be unseen, but it is believed and internalized by those living within a community that professes it. The point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with that transcendent, eternal order.
To order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ. Chapter 19 of the Rule offers a succinct example of the connection between a disciplinary teaching and the unseen order. In it, Benedict instructs his monks to keep their minds focused on the presence of God and His Angels when they are engaged in chanting the Divine Office, called the opus Dei or “work of God.”
“We believe that the divine presence is everywhere, and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place’” (Proverbs 15:3), writes Benedict. “But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God.” He concludes with an admonition to remember that when they pray the Psalms together, they are standing before God and must pray “in such a way that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.”
Every monk’s life, and all his labors, must be directed to the service of God. The Rule teaches that God must be the beginning and the end of all our actions. To bound our spiritual passion by the rhythm of daily life and its disciplines, and to do so with others in our family and in our community, is to build a strong foundation of faith, within which one can become fully human and fully Christian.
As a result of their orientation toward Christ, the monks recognize that He is the Creator, the One in Whom all things consist, and that man is not the measure of all things. Unlike the secular successors to the nominalists, the Benedictine monk does not believe that things of the world have meaning only if people choose to give them meaning. The monk holds that meaning exists objectively, within the natural world created by God, and is there to be discovered by the person who has detached themselves from their own passions and who seeks to see as God sees.
“One cannot be attached to created things, because one will end up seeing them as ordered toward oneself,” said Brother Evagrius Hayden, age thirty-one. “This is wrong. We are not the ones who give things meaning. God gives things meaning.”
Finally, the monks go to great lengths to make sure each detail of their lives reflects Christ as the end and as the source of all meaning. Some of these lengths seem surprisingly unspiritual. In Chapter 22, for example, Benedict gives instructions for how monks are to sleep—“clothed and girded with belts or cords.”
Yet even these seemingly arbitrary rules serve a spiritual purpose. In some cases, this is because the rules free the monks for certain practical ends. For example, Benedict explains that the rules about clothing are to ensure that the monks are so dressed that they can arise in the middle of the night to pray the night offices, or scheduled prayers, without delay.
But what about rules whose rationale is less apparent? Does God really care what kind of bedding a monk uses? Or how many dishes of food are served at dinner? Why would anyone voluntarily submit to a way of life that is so regimented? Father Basil Nixen, age thirty-six, and the monastery’s cook, said the Rule and even its more unusual rules don’t exist for arbitrary reasons.
“The monk is deeply aware of the fact that in himself and in others, that order has been disturbed, has been disrupted by the Fall, by original sin, and by the personal sin of each person,” Father Basil said. “The monk enters the monastery knowing that finding that order doesn’t come easily. You have to fight for it, to work for it, and you have to be patient to achieve it. But it’s worth it, because that order gives us peace.”
Submitting to rules one doesn’t understand is difficult, but it’s a good way to counteract the carnal desire for personal independence. There may not be spiritual merit in choosing to eat two dishes instead of three at a meal, but the humility that comes with agreeing to submit to another’s decision that one do so is transformative.
The order of the monastery produces not only humility but also spiritual resilience. In one sense, the Benedictine monks of Norcia are like a Marine Corps of the religious life, constantly training for spiritual warfare.
“The structure of life in the monastery, the things you do every day, is not just pointless repetition,” said Brother Augustine Wilmeth, twenty-five, whose red Viking-like beard touches his chest. “It’s to train your heart and your spirit so that when you need it, when you don’t feel strong enough to will yourself to get through a difficult moment, you fall back on your training. You know that you wouldn’t be strong enough to do it if you hadn’t been kind of working at it and putting all the auxiliary things in place.”
In other words, ordering one’s actions is really about training one’s heart to love and to desire the right things, the things that are real, without having to think about it. It is acquiring virtue as a habit.
You never know how God will use the little things in a life ordered by His love, to His service, to speak evangelically to others, said Brother Ignatius Prakarsa, the monastery’s guest master. In the summertime, the monastery’s basilica church fills up with tourists, many of whom are lapsed Christians or unbelievers, who sit quietly to watch the monks chant their regular prayers in Latin.
When Brother Ignatius meets them on the church steps later, visitors often tell him that the chanting was so peaceful, so beautiful.
“I tell them we’re just praying to the Lord. We’re just opening our mouths to sing the beauty that’s already there in the music,” he said to me. “Everything is evangelical. Everything is directed to God. Everything has to be seen from the supernatural point of view. The radiance that comes through our lives is only a reflection of God. In ourselves, we are nothing.”
That radiance is a fruit of deep and constant prayer. The Apostle Paul told the church in Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Benedictines consider their entire lives to be an attempt to fulfill this command. Strictly speaking, prayer is communication, either privately or in community, with God. More broadly, prayer is maintaining an unfailing awareness of the divine presence and doing all things with Him in mind. In the Benedictine life, regular prayer is at the center of the community’s existence.
To pray is to engage in contemplation. The word has a particular meaning to monastics. It refers to what they believe is the highest state of the Christian life: to free oneself from the cares of the flesh to adore and praise God and to reflect on His truth. This is in opposition to the active life, which is to do good works in the world.
Think of the Gospel story of the sisters Martha and Mary. When Jesus came to their house, Martha busied herself with preparation, but Mary sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to what He had to say. When Martha complained to Jesus that Mary wasn’t helping her, the Lord responded that Mary had chosen the better path.
Why? Because as Jesus said when he rebuked Satan, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). It is important to do things for the Lord, but it is more important to know him with your heart and your mind. And that is why contemplation takes priority.
“Prayer is the life of the soul, it’s the life of each individual monk. It’s the reason why we’ve come to live here,” said Father Basil. “The goal of our life as monks is to deepen the life of prayer, to grow in prayer. Everything we do is structured to help favor that, to be conducive for that. Prayer puts us in communication with God.”
Benedictine monks have a lot of time with God. Seven times each day they gather around the altar in the basilica to chant the appointed prayers for the Divine Office, also known as the Liturgy of the Hours. These are specific prayers that Catholic monks (and others) have recited for centuries to mark off the hours of the day. These consist of psalms, hymns, Scripture readings, and prayers.
For the monks, prayer is not simply words they speak. Each monk spends several hours daily doing lectio divina, a Benedictine method of Scripture study that involves reading a Scripture passage, meditating on it, praying about it, and finally contemplating its meaning for the soul.
The idea is not to study the Bible as a scholar would but rather to encounter it as God speaking directly to the individual. In this sense, a monk immersing himself in Scripture, as directed by the Rule, is carrying out a form of prayer.
And it’s not the only one.
“We sing when we pray, we stand, we sit, we bow, we kneel, we prostrate,” said Father Cassian. “The body is very much involved in prayer. It’s not just some kind of intellectual meditation. That’s important.”
When one advances in prayer, said Father Basil, one comes to understand that prayer is not so much about asking God for things as about simply being in His presence.
I told the priest how, in response to a personal crisis, my own Orthodox priest back in Louisiana had assigned me a strict daily prayer rule, praying the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) for about an hour each day. It was dull and difficult at first, but I did it out of obedience. Every day, for a seemingly endless hour, silent prayer. In time, though, the hour seemed much shorter, and I discovered that the peace I had conspicuously lacked in my soul came forth.
After I was spiritually healed, my priest explained his reasoning for directing me to give myself over to that simple meditative prayer: “I had to get you out of your head.”
He meant that I was captive to an intellectual tendency to try to think my way out of my troubles—a strategy that always ended in failure for me. What I really needed to do was to quiet my mind and still my heart to open it to God’s grace. He was right.
“That’s it,” said Father Basil. “That’s what pure prayer is: being with God. That can come about in many different ways, but as you discovered with the Jesus Prayer, it takes time. You have to set aside time for it.”
Connecticut-born Father Benedict Nivakoff, thirty-eight, has spent nearly half his life in this monastic community. He says that “if one can accept that God’s will is made manifest in everything one does all day long, then one’s whole day becomes a prayer.”
If we spend all our time in activity, even when that activity serves Christ, and neglect prayer and contemplation, we put our faith in danger. The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan, a practicing Christian, once said that everyone he knew who lost his faith began by ceasing to pray. If we are to live rightly ordered Christian lives, then prayer must be the basis of everything we do.
This does not mean the active life is to be shunned. Rather, it should be integrated into a life ordered by prayer. Good work is a fruit of a healthy prayer life. If you know anything about the Benedictines, you will probably have heard that their motto is ora et labora—Latin for “prayer and work.” It’s not strictly true. Saint Benedict never said that, and though contemporary Benedictine monks have claimed the slogan as their own, it came into use only in the nineteenth century.
Still, it’s not a bad description of the general Benedictine approach to life. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” says Saint Benedict in Chapter 48 of the Rule. The idea is that to be idle is to open the door to slothfulness. But work is not simply something you do to stay out of trouble. The saint expected each of his monasteries to be self-sustaining and, unusually for a Roman of his era, taught that manual labor could be a sanctifying act.
Though they are contemplatives, monks must not complain about manual labor, directs Benedict. “For then they are truly monastics when they live by the labor of their hands, as did our Fathers and the Apostles.”
This is practical wisdom for us moderns, who tend to have a disordered relationship to our work. Some of us define ourselves by our work and devote ourselves to it immoderately, at the expense of contemplation. Others, though, see work as something we do to pay the bills, nothing more, regarding it as disconnected from the rest of life, especially our spiritual lives.
That’s a mistake, says the Rule. The work must serve not ourselves but God and God alone. In a chapter instructing monastic craftsmen, Benedict says that if they come to be proud of their work, the abbot must find something else for them to do. Christian humility is that important. And monks must be scrupulously honest in their business dealings, says the saint. The reason? Because in all things God must be glorified.
This is how we must approach our jobs: as opportunities to glorify God.
More deeply, Benedictines view their work as an expression of love and stewardship of the community and as a way of reordering the natural world in harmony with God’s will.
Remember that for the monk, everything is a gift from God and is meant to be treated as sacred. Every human thought and act is to be centered on and directed to God and to be united in Him and to Him. And we men and women are participants in God’s unfolding Creation, by ordering the world according to His will.
Seen this way, labor takes on a new dimension. For the Christian, work has sacramental value.
“Creation gives praise to God. We give praise to God through Creation, through the material world, and into our areas of work,” explained Father Martin Bernhard, thirty-two. “Any time we take something neutral, something material, and we make something out of it for the sake of giving glory to God, it becomes sacramental, it becomes a channel of grace.”
The monastery cook, Father Basil, described his labors preparing meals for the brethren as a form of purification, of perfection, on both a human and a supernatural level.
“By means of the work in the kitchen, I’m establishing order. I’m exercising my God-given governance of the creative world,” he said. “From a human perspective, work is so important because it helps us exercise that God-commanded dominance over the earth. And from a practical point of view, it provides for ourselves and others. It’s important for us to know that through our work, we are making an important contribution to the community.”
And on a supernatural level?
“Ultimately, work serves as an expression of charity, of love, and that is what all work really should be,” Father Basil explained. “This is a lesson we have to work all our lives to learn. Work is not something I do in order to get something. Doing it is good for me, it’s constitutive of my happiness, because in it and through it I show love for others.
“We are called to love,” he added. “Work is a concerted way of showing our love for others. In that sense, it can become very transformative—and very prayerful too.”
“Too often it’s seen as a burden, and it doesn’t have to be. If we approach work as a burden, something’s wrong in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “The problem needs to be fixed primarily here, in the heart.”
In the days to come, circumstances will compel Christians—particularly those in certain professions—to rethink our relationship to our work. We will be shown the door in some cases because of our beliefs. In others, the doors will never open in the first place—and if they do, men and women of conscience will not be able to walk through them. This is going to cost us money and prestige and perhaps vocational satisfaction. Reorienting the way we conceive of work in a more God-centered, Benedictine way will help us make the right decision when we are put to the test in the workplace and will strengthen us when we are forced to find another profession.
The closure of certain professions to faithful orthodox Christians will be difficult to accept. In fact, it’s hard for contemporary believers to imagine, in part because as Americans, we are unaccustomed to accepting limits on our ambitions. Yet the day is coming when the kind of thing that has happened to Christian bakers, florists, and wedding photographers will be much more widespread. And many of us are not prepared to suffer deprivation for our faith.
This is why asceticism—taking on physical rigors for the sake of a spiritual goal—is such an important part of the ordinary Christian life. Take fasting, the most common form of Christian asceticism. Jesus showed us by his own example, when he fasted for forty days in the desert after His baptism—this, to prepare Himself for His public ministry. It was during this fast that Satan appeared to the Lord and tempted Him to turn a stone into bread to satisfy his hunger. Jesus refused, asserting the primacy of the Word of God and showing that mastering bodily desires is critically important to spiritual growth.
Asceticism comes from the Greek word askesis, meaning “training.” The life prescribed by the Rule is thoroughly ascetic. Monks fast regularly, live simply, refuse comfort, and abide by the strict rules of the monastery. This is not a matter of earning spiritual merit. Rather, the monk knows the human heart and how its passions must be reined in through disciplined living. Asceticism is an antidote to the poison of self-centeredness common in our culture, which teaches us that satisfying our own desires is the key to the good life. The ascetic knows that true happiness can be found only by living in harmony with the will of God, and ascetical practices train body and soul to put God above self.
Asceticism, especially fasting according to the Church calendar, was for most of Christian history a normal part of every believer’s life. “But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew (6:17), indicating that periodically abstaining from food for religious reasons was standard practice. In the first century, Christians fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, in memory of Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion—an ascetical practice still observed today by Eastern Orthodox Christians.
A Christian who practices asceticism trains himself to say no to his desires and yes to God. That mentality has all but disappeared from the West in modern times. We have become a people oriented around comfort. We expect our religion to be comfortable. Suffering doesn’t make sense to us. And without fasting and other ascetic disciplines, we lose the ability to tell ourselves no to things our hearts desire.
To rediscover Christian asceticism is urgent for believers who want to train their hearts, and the hearts of their children, to resist the hedonism and consumerism at the core of contemporary culture. And it is necessary to teach us in our bones how God uses suffering to purify us for His purposes. Ascetical suffering is a method for avoiding becoming like those monks called “detestable” by Saint Benedict in the Rule—“the worst kind of monk,” namely those whose “law is the desire for self-gratification.”
In the teaching of the Desert Fathers, every Christian struggles to root out all desires within their hearts that do not harmonize with God’s will. Brother Augustine explained how this works.
“It’s like you’re strengthening your will,” he said. “You may be in a time of fasting, and your stomach is growling because you can’t eat until five-thirty. And then you think, ‘If I can’t handle not eating for a few hours, how can I expect to control my more spiritual passions, like anger, envy, and pride? How can I expect to have any spiritual and moral self-discipline if I don’t start with the more tangible, material desires first?’”
Besides, as Father Benedict put it, asceticism can be a wake-up call for the spiritually slothful. “We are often further away from God than we realize,” he said. “Asceticism serves as a healthy reminder of how things are. It’s not a punishment for being so far away.”
The overweight person diets not to punish him- or herself for being heavy but to become healthier. The athlete works out not because he feels guilty for sitting around watching TV but to train his body for competition. So it is with monks and their asceticism—and so it must be with us lay Christians. We practice self-denial to strengthen ourselves in the love and service of Christ and His people.
“Suffering is part of the pursuit of Jesus Christ, who suffered first before His glory,” said Brother Ignatius. “To encounter God, you too need to suffer, and to be willing to experience suffering.”
Relearning asceticism—that is, how to suffer for the faith—is critical training for Christians living in the world today and the world of the near future. “There is no greatness which is not grounded deep in self-conquest and self-denial,” said Romano Guardini, who explained that all forms of order must begin with mastering the self and its desires.4
“The Christian call is a paradox: We are called to be in the world but not of the world,” says Brother Evagrius. “That paradox was lived out in the early church, in the Roman Empire, where it was a pagan culture through and through, yet you had individuals and families feeling the call of Christ and abandoning everything to follow Him, even to be martyred.
“Until we actually return to that model,” he said, “nothing we do will ever bear fruit.”
Along those lines, a tree that is repeatedly uprooted and transplanted will be hard pressed to produce healthy fruit. So it is with people and their spiritual lives. Rootlessness is not a new problem. In the first chapter of the Rule, Saint Benedict denounced the kind of monk he called a “gyrovague.”
“They spend their whole lives tramping from province to province,” he wrote, adding that “they are always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills”—and are even worse, the saint said, than the hedonistic monks whose only law is desire.
If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of “stability”—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.
“This is where the Benedictine life is probably the most countercultural,” said Father Benedict. “It’s the life of Mary, not Martha: to stay put at the foot of Christ no matter what they say you’re not doing.”
The Bible shows us that God calls some people to pick up and move to achieve His purposes, Father Benedict acknowledged. “Still, in a culture like ours, where everyone is always on the move, the Benedictine calling to stay put no matter what can call forth new and important ways of serving God.”
Zygmunt Bauman says that liquid modernity compels us to refuse stability because it’s a fool’s game. “The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity building but avoidance of fixation,” he writes.5 In Bauman’s pitiless analysis, to succeed today, you need to be free of all commitments, unbound by the past or the future, living in an everlasting present. The world changes so quickly that the person who is loyal to anything, even to her own identity, takes an enormous risk.
Instead of believing that structure is good and that duties to home and family lead us to live rightly, people today have been tricked by liquid modernity into believing that maximizing individual happiness should be the goal of life. The gyrovague, the villain of Saint Benedict’s Rule, is the hero of postmodernity.
For most of my life, it would have been fair to call me a gyrovague. I moved from job to job, climbing the career ladder. In only twenty years of my adult life, I changed cities five times and denominations twice. My younger sister Ruthie, by contrast, remained in the small Louisiana town in which we were raised. She married her high school sweetheart, taught in the same school we attended as children, and brought up her kids in the same country church.
When she was stricken with terminal cancer in 2010, I saw the immense value of the stability she had chosen. Ruthie had a wide and deep network of friends and family to care for her and her husband and kids during her nineteen-month ordeal. The love Ruthie’s community showered on her and her family made the struggle bearable, both in her life and after her death. The witness to the power of stability in the life of my sister moved my heart so profoundly that my wife and I decided to leave Philadelphia and move to south Louisiana to be near them all.
Not everybody is called to return to their hometown, of course, but everybody should think deeply about the spiritual and emotional costs of the gyrovague’s liberty that we contemporary Americans take as our birthright. In a sense, what looks like freedom can really be a form of bondage.
Father Martin said that those who think stability is meant to hold you back, and to stifle personal and spiritual growth, are missing the hidden value in the commitment to stability. It anchors you and gives you the freedom that comes from not being subject to the wind, the waves, and the currents of daily life. It creates the ordered conditions in which the soul’s internal pilgrimage toward holiness becomes possible.
Or as Father Martin put it, “Stability give us the time and the structure to go deep into who we are as sons of God.”
The rootlessness of contemporary life has frayed community bonds. It is common now to find people who don’t know their neighbors and don’t really want to. To be part of a community is to share in its life. That inevitably makes demands on the individual that limits his freedom.
The church is not always a sign of contradiction to this modern lack of community. In the first decade of my life as an adult Christian, I left church as soon as services were over. Getting involved with the people there was not interesting. Just Jesus and me was all I wanted and all I needed, or so I thought. You might say that I wasn’t interested in joining their pilgrimage, that I preferred to be a tourist at church—and was too spiritually immature to understand how harmful this was.
That consumerist approach to the community of believers reproduces the fragmentation that is shattering Christianity in the contemporary world. In Benedictine monasteries, however, monks are always aware that they are not merely individuals who share living quarters with other individuals but are part of an organic whole—a spiritual family.
The Rule’s instructions concerning obedience are meant to foster mutual accountability. Everyone in the monastery depends on everyone else, and all decisions of importance must be made with others and consider their interests. To live in real community is to put the good of others ahead of our own desires, when doing so serves truth and righteousness.
Many of the Rule’s more stringent instructions are oriented toward protecting community life. Benedict devotes a chapter to prescribing penalties for monks who show up late to prayer services. The saint explains that if others see their bad example, they may be tempted to do evil. A school for the Lord’s service cannot accomplish its mission if its students are often tardy.
Benedict devotes several short chapters to punishments for other infractions. His method is to encourage monks who have done wrong to confess at once their fault to the abbot and receive a reprimand. If the fault comes to the abbot’s attention through the testimony of another, the punishment is to be greater. And if a monk’s transgressions are so great that he is excommunicated from the oratory or the common table, he can be restored only after lying prostrate before the community as an act of apology and humility, until the abbot accepts his repentance.
The point of exercises like this is not to embarrass errant monks but rather to discipline them for their own good and for the good of the entire community. To be a Christian, and to be a vowed member of a religious community, incurs certain obligations to others. Rules and discipline for those who break them wear down the sharp edges of individual selfishness that stand as jagged rocks across the pilgrim’s path to sanctity.
Like a wise and generous father, Saint Benedict understood that imposing rules and discipline on his spiritual children was an act not of domination but of love, one that helped them grow in charity. He ended the Rule by exhorting his followers to embrace love in community. In his penultimate chapter, the saint commanded the brethren to compete zealously to serve the others.
Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal which separates from vices and leads to God and to life everlasting. This zeal, therefore, the brothers should practice with the most fervent love. Thus they should anticipate one another in honor (Rom. 12:10); most patiently endure one another’s infirmities, whether of body or of character; vie in paying obedience one to another—no one following what he considers useful for himself, but rather what benefits another; tender the charity of brotherhood chastely; fear God in love; love their Abbot with a sincere and humble charity; prefer nothing whatever to Christ.
That extraordinary standard is hard to achieve in any family, much less in a community of strangers, many of whom come from very different backgrounds and even different nations. Yet only by setting this goal for individuals and the community as a whole will the monastery be able to form faithful servants of Christ.
Life in Christian community, whether in monastic or ordinary congregations, is about building the kind of fellowship that every one of us needs to complete our individual pilgrimage. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in Life Together, his own rule, of sorts, for living in faithful community:
A Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation.6
Community life, not a dreamy ideal, said Bonhoeffer, but an often difficult initiation into the “divine reality” that is the church. That is, the church exists as a brotherhood established by Christ, even if it doesn’t feel like it in a given moment. The martyred Lutheran pastor taught that struggles within the community are a gift of God’s grace, because they force its members to reckon with the reality of their kinship, despite their brokenness. A community that cannot face its faults and love each other through to healing is not truly Christian.
“It’s not easy,” conceded Father Martin. “It’s really doable only by grace, and this is the beauty of Christianity: that it can bring people of different blood relations, languages, and ethnicities together and give us a common culture.”
The Norcia monastic community contains brothers from the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Germany, and Canada. Life in common can be very difficult, the monks say, but it is essential to living out the Benedictine “conversion of life” vow.
And it teaches the individual monk more about himself. “When a man first comes to the monastery, the first thing he notices is everybody else’s quirks—that is, what’s wrong with everybody else,” said Father Martin. “But the longer you’re here, the more you begin to think: what’s wrong with me? You go deeper into yourself to learn your own strengths and weaknesses. And that leads you to acceptance of others.”
Father Basil says that in his years as a monk, he has come to have a much clearer understanding of what it means to live as the Body of Christ: the community as an organic whole, united in Christ, with each man committed in love to doing his own part to strengthen the whole.
“God has distributed his graces in such a way that we really need each other,” said the priest. “Certainly there’s the old man within me that craves individualism, but the more I live in community, the more I see that you can’t have it and be faithful, or fully human.”
In his travels tending to monastery affairs, Father Martin, who is its business manager, sees a vacancy in the faces of many people he encounters. They seem so anxious, so unsettled, so uncertain. The monk believes this is the result of loneliness, isolation, and the lack of deep and life-giving communal bonds. When the light in most people’s faces comes from the glow of the laptop, the smartphone, or the television screen, we are living in a Dark Age, he said.
“They are missing that fundamental light meant to shine forth in a human person through social interaction,” he said. “Love can only come from that. Without real contact with other human persons, there is no love. We’ve never seen a Dark Age like this one.”
The Benedictine approach to prayer, work, asceticism, stability, and community requires practices that knit the monastic community together tightly. The resulting closeness and cohesion are augmented by the monks’ separation from the world. But Benedict orders them in the Rule to be aware that they live not for themselves alone but also to serve outsiders.
According to the Rule, we must never turn away someone who needs our love. A church or other Benedict Option community must be open to the world, to share the bounty of God’s love with those who lack it.
The monks live mostly cloistered lives—that is, they stay behind their monastery’s walls and limit their contact with the outside world. The spiritual work they are called to do requires silence and separation. Our work does not require the same structures. As lay Christians living in the world, our calling is to seek holiness in more ordinary social conditions.
Yet even cloistered Benedictines practice Christian hospitality to the stranger. The Rule commands that all those who present themselves as pilgrims and visitors to the monastery “be received like Christ, for He is going to say, because He will say, ‘I was a stranger, and you took me in’” (Matt. 25:35). If you are invited to dine with the monks in the refectory, they greet you the first time with a hand-washing ceremony prescribed in the Rule.
Brother Francis Davoren, forty-four, the monastery’s brewmaster, used to be the refectorian, the monk charged with overseeing the dining room. He approached that task with sacramental imagination.
“Saint Benedict says that Christ is present in the brothers, and Christ is present in our guests. Every day I would think, ‘Christ is coming. I’m going to make this as pleasant for them as I can, because it showed them that we cared,’” he said. “That’s a good outreach to people: to respect them, to recognize their dignity, to show them that you can see Christ in them and want to bring them into your life.”
As guest master, Brother Ignatius is the point of contact between pilgrims and the monastic community. He explains why the monks take Christ’s words about receiving strangers so seriously: “It is kind of a warning: if you want to be welcome in heaven, you had better welcome people as Christ himself now, even if you don’t like it, even if you suffer because of those people,” he said. “If your life is to seek Christ, this is it. You will find redemption in serving these guests, because Christ is coming in them.”
Saint Benedict commands his monks to be open to the outside world—to a point. Hospitality must be dispensed according to prudence, so that visitors are not allowed to do things that disrupt the monastery’s way of life. For example, at table, silence is kept by visitors and monks alike. As Brother Augustine put it, “If we let visitors upset the rhythm of our life too much, then we can’t really welcome anyone.” The monastery receives visitors constantly who have all kinds of problems and are seeking advice, help, or just someone to listen to them, and it’s important that the monks maintain the order needed to allow them to offer this kind of hospitality.
Rather than erring on the side of caution, though, Father Benedict believes Christians should be as open to the world as they can be without compromise. “I think too many Christians have decided that the world is bad and should be avoided as much as possible. Well, it’s hard to convert people if that’s your stance,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to help people to see their own goodness and then bring them in than to point out how bad they are and bring them in.”
The power of popular culture is so overwhelming that faithful orthodox Christians often feel the need to retreat behind defensive lines. But Brother Ignatius, fifty-one, warned that Christians must not become so anxious and fearful that they cease to share the Good News, in word and deed, with a world held captive by hatred and darkness. It is prudent to draw reasonable boundaries, but we have to take care not to be like the unfaithful servant in the Parable of the Talents, who was punished by his master for his poor, fearful stewardship of the master’s property.
“The best defense is offense. You defend by attacking,” Brother Ignatius said. “Let’s attack by expanding God’s kingdom—first in our hearts, then in our own families, and then in the world. Yes, you have to have borders, but our duty is not to let the borders stay there. We have to push outward, infinitely.”
The Benedictine life is rigorous, but if lived according to the Rule, it is also free from fundamentalism and extremism. “We hope to ordain nothing that is harsh or burdensome,” wrote Benedict. The point of the Rule, he said—and indeed the point of their life—however, is that “our hearts expand, and we shall run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love.”
Said Father Basil: “Saint Benedict takes the image that Scripture uses to speak about Christ himself. ‘A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench.’ Humanity is already fragile. We need to treat it with care, with concern, with delicacy.”
This orientation toward community life stands in stark contrast to a number of other Christian intentional communities that have fallen apart or become cultlike because an authoritarian leader obsessed with purity abused power.
Brother Francis put it like this: If a community relaxes its discipline too much, it will dissolve. But if it is too rigid, it will make people crazy. “If you want to judge a community, you need to see what their fruit is,” he said. “Are they growing? Are they cheerful? Are they happy? Are they doing good and helping people? Look at what a community produces to see what kind of balance they have.”
Balance, then—or put another way, prudence, mercy, and good judgment—is key to governing the life of a Christian community. So too is keeping the necessities of daily monastic living—eating, sleeping, praying, working, reading—in harmonious relationship, so that none overtakes a monk’s life and all are integrated into a healthy whole.
But Father Benedict insisted that no one should think the Rule is about living a balanced life in the sense of satisfying oneself with half measures and spiritual mediocrity. The balance is not one between good and bad but between different kinds of good.
Benedict did not want to create wishy-washy monks. “He wants people to be saints. Saints are not usually very balanced people,” said Father Benedict, laughing. “He was creating a radical life: total detachment and emphasis on conversion. It’s giving everything to God, all the time.”
The laity can benefit from the Rule, he said, if they understand what is radical about Saint Benedict’s life: total abandonment of the self-will for the will of God. The method may require balance in its application, but the goal given to us by the Lord is extraordinary: to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect.
Because Jesus is one with the Father, those who seek perfection must try to imitate Him. It is heresy, of course, to believe that we can achieve this perfection on our own or on this side of heaven. It is a paradox of the Christian life that the holier one becomes, the more acutely aware one is of one’s lack, and therefore one’s total dependence on God’s mercy. That said, the ideal person is one who is Christ-like in all things, as she fulfills the Lord’s calling. Whether she is called to the monastery or to the world, to family or to the single life, to manual labor or to a desk job, to stay at home or to travel the world, she must strive to her utmost to be like Jesus. By methodically and practically ordering our bodies, souls, and minds to a harmonious life centered on the Christ who is everywhere present and filling all things, the Benedictine way offers a spirituality accessible to anyone. For the Christian who follows the way of Saint Benedict, everyday life becomes an unceasing prayer, both an offering to God and a gift from Him, one that transforms us bit by bit into the likeness of His son.
The Benedictine example is a sign of hope but also a warning: no matter what a Christian’s circumstances, he cannot live faithfully if God is only a part of his life, bracketed away from the rest. In the end, either Christ is at the center of our lives, or the Self and all its idolatries are. There is no middle ground. With His help, we can piece together the fragments of our lives and order them around Him, but it will not be easy, and we can’t do it alone. To strive for anything less, though, is to live out the saying of the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”7
As I was preparing to leave the Monastery of St. Benedict after my stay, I mentioned to Father Martin how unusual it is for a place like this to exist at all in the modern world. Young men taking up a tradition of prayer, liturgy, and ascetic communal life that dates back to the early church—and doing so with such evident joy? It’s not supposed to happen in these times.
But here they are: a sign of contradiction to modernity.
Father Martin flashed a broad grin from beneath his black beard and said that all Christians can have this if they are willing to do what it takes to mount the recovery, “to pick up what we have lost, and to make it real again.
“There’s something here that’s very ancient, but it’s also new,” Father Martin said. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to turn back the clock.’ That makes no sense. If you’re doing something right now, it means you’re doing it right now. It’s new, and it’s alive! And that’s a very powerful thing.”
Leaving Norcia and going back down the mountain, a pilgrim might envy the monks the simplicity of their lives in the quiet village. The serenity and solidity of Norcia and its Benedictines seem so far from the tumultuous world below, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you miss it before you’ve even reached the train station in Spoleto. But if you have received the gift of Norcia rightly, you do not leave empty-handed and unprepared for what lies ahead.
For the brothers and fathers there will have given you a glimpse of what life together in Christ can be. They will have shown you that traditional Christianity is not dead, and that Truth, Beauty, and Goodness can be found and brought to life again, though doing so will cost you nothing less than everything. And they will have shared their ancient teaching, tendered by the hands of monks and nuns from generations of generations for a millennium and a half—wisdom that can help ordinary believers, doing battle in the modern world, not only hold firm through the new Dark Age but actually to flourish in it.
How do we take Benedictine wisdom out of the monastery and apply it to the challenges of worldly life in the twenty-first century? It is to this question that we now turn. The way of Saint Benedict is not an escape from the real world but a way to see that world and dwell in it as it truly is. Benedictine spirituality teaches us to bear with the world in love and to transform it as the Holy Spirit transforms us. The Benedict Option draws on the virtues in the Rule to change the way Christians approach politics, church, family, community, education, our jobs, sexuality, and technology.
And it does so with urgency. When I first told Father Cassian about the Benedict Option, he mulled my words and replied gravely, “Those who don’t do some form of what you’re talking about, they’re not going to make it through what’s coming.”