The Humanism of Benedict of Nursia, Pt. II of II

The second time Benedict employs the term "human" occurs in his chapter on the reception of guests. We have already seen that he has a completely different attitude toward guests and strangers than did the Master. If anything, Benedict seems to worry that the monks might annoy or burden guests, so he warns them not to become familiar with them (RB 53.23-24) This is a hard matter to understand today, but at least it shows that Benedict is not xenophobic: he does not fear the stranger. Perhaps we could add that it shows that he has a wide view of human nature. He does not limit his hospitality to his own tribe and clan. If our students learn something like this from us, we can say we have been good Benedictine educators.

But I want to zero in on something else here. The text in question reads as follows: "Let the Divine Law be read to the guest for edification, and after that he should be shown every sort of kindness" (RB 53.9). In translation, this passage seems pretty obvious and raises no eyebrows. Yet I can point out that the word "kindness" is a translation of the Latin original humanitas, and another one of the possible meanings of humanitas is "a meal."¹⁶ In the context of Benedict's chapter on hospitality, this is well worth knowing.

When Benedict describes how guests are to be received at the gate, he goes into great detail: The monks are to hurry out, salute the guest with bows, give them the kiss of peace, pray with them, read the Bible to them and so on. All this is edifying, but a typical guest might be excused if she wonders: when do we eat? To know that humanitas could mean a meal and not just "kindness" helps very much, for it balances up the monastic reception of guests. Guests do not live on kisses alone, nor even on prayers. They need something to eat.

It is interesting to know that the Egyptian monks, those Desert Fathers and Mothers who long preceded Benedict, also called a meal for guests humanitas.¹⁷ It could be broader than just food, but it always included care for the physical needs of the guest. A traveler in the desert might be almost dying of thirst and starvation, so the matter was urgent. But surely anyone traveling at the time of Benedict, when paved roads and air-conditioned cars were unknown, was also tired and hungry. They needed physical as well as spiritual refreshment. They were human beings, composed of both body and soul. It was inhumane to neglect to take care of all their immediate needs.

What I want to emphasize here is balance. Benedict seems to have an instinct for the whole picture. He always takes the whole person into account. Rarely does he fly off on a tangent that exaggerates one or the other aspect of the complex composite that is human nature. He is famous for this, and he is often praised for his moderation, his prudence and so on. This this may also make him seem boring, but it seems to me that this quality of balance is very difficult to maintain in regard to a human life-style. It is no easier to do so today than it was in his time so long ago. Indeed, it seems to me that it is much harder.

I have been struck by the numbers of people who now need serious therapy to get their lives back into some kind of working order. From what I gather, this therapy, which is long and very costly, involves such basic things as learning how to eat properly, how to exercise, how to sleep, how to interact with others and so on. When I first heard about this, I was amazed that people could not know such basic things. Don't families teach such things any more? Yet some Benedictines also need such therapy, so one might also ask: "Don't monasteries teach such things any more?"

Well, if they don't, they are not being true to Benedict. Because if there is anything he emphasizes, it is a healthy life-style. Sometimes when we read him, we may get the impression that he is a sort of boring old school master, harping on what everybody already knows: Don't eat too much, don't eat too little! Don't work too much, don't read too much, don't pray too much: there's a time for everything! He is great for schedules and also for matters of diet, clothing, hygiene and so on. It may seem that this just over-regulates life. Why not just let people find their own equilibrium, their own schedule, their own diet?

Apparently, because a lot of people don't know what is good for them! This may seem to contradict my first point, namely, that Benedict basically trusts people, but I don't think it does. He seems to think that people will do better if they are provided with a healthy framework in which to live. It can be liberating not to have to make a lot of decisions about life-style. It can also retard maturity, but that's another question. Benedict is willing to give people some guidelines about life-style. He does not want them to end up in therapy.

I do not know exactly what this might mean for a school trying to instill some Benedictine values in its students. We know that not all of our students are well-equipped to find a healthy life-style. Those who insist on binge-drinking are getting off to a disastrous start that could well end in alcoholism. There are some who spend far too much time in the gym, and others who never move a muscle unless they absolutely have to. We have people with eating disorders, sleeping disorders. And most of all, we have people who live passive lives as TV or internet addicts. These are the stark realities of everyday American life. We are not a balanced society.

You often cannot notice some of the imbalance in your own culture until you gets away for a while to another one. When you come back home, you are forced to asked some basic questions. How come Americans never walk when they can ride, even two blocks to the C-Store? Why don't Americans take siestas when it seems such a natural thing to do? How come our diet is so saturated with sugar that when we live in a foreign country for a few weeks, we wind up with the shakes? Of course, other cultures also have their imbalances.

If Benedictine balance is a value that we actually accept, we might ask how we can make sure it finds some kind of emphasis in our curriculum. Obviously, it is not our job to teach students how to eat or sleep. We are not in loco parentis, nor are we novice-masters. But we should remember that all the theoretical knowledge we can cram into people is not going to do them much good if they do not know how to live. Our task cannot be simply to equip people to get a good job. We must have some kind of responsibility to impart wisdom about the art of living. I would guess that the coaches and the dorm counselors and such folk have the best opportunity in this regard: let them know that they can be transmitters of Benedictine balance.

The third and last place where St. Benedict uses the word "human" occurs in his last chapter, which is not part of the main body of the Rule but rather an epilogue or summary. In this wrap-up, Benedict modestly admits that what he has laid down as a Rule for monks is only a minimum; someone who wants to progress to a higher level of spiritual advancement should pursue the wisdom of other Christian writers. Of course, Benedict puts the Bible itself in the first place in a monk's library: "For what page or even what word of the heavenly inspired Old and New Testaments is not a completely reliable guidepost for human life?" He then goes on to recommend certain other important early Christian texts to the zealous monastic reader. But the Bible has pride of place.

To find Benedict recommending the Bible is certainly no great shock. After all, his Rule is fairly saturated with biblical quotations and allusions, as are almost all the early Christian documents.¹⁸ What is more, he requires his monks to spend two or three hours a day in what he calls lectio divina, which could mean "holy reading," but mostly refers to study and meditation of the Bible itself.¹⁹ In fact, it would not be far from true to claim that Benedictine life is totally organized around the word of God as found in the Bible.

To look at this passage more closely, Benedict calls the Bible the rectissima norma of human life. Now a norma is some kind of measuring stick, so he calls the Bible the "straightest measuring stick" for human life. Since the imagery of this last chapter is about human life as a journey, perhaps the rectissima norma is the straightest or shortest road to arrive at the goal of human life. In Benedict's mind, of course, this is heaven, so the Bible may be called the straightest road to heaven. But to him the road to heaven did not involve avoiding human life but fulfilling it. In other words, in the thought of this Christian humanist, you attain heaven by means of human fulfillment, not in spite of it.²⁰ And the Bible is where we learn to be a complete human being.

While someone may agree that it is fine and good for Benedict to point to the Bible as the guidepost of his monastery, it is far from clear how this same norm might apply to a modern Catholic university. This, after all, is no Bible college. By and large, people do not come here to learn how to apply the Bible to every aspect of their lives. That might be a feasible goal for a Catholic seminary, but even that would be problematic.

Even if we could agree that the Bible should somehow be the central norm of a Catholic university, that would immediately lead us to questions about biblical interpretation. The Bible is a vast, complex ancient library of texts that is open to the most diverse interpretation and appropriation. For example, the Pope has recently been condemning capital punishment. I am not sure which biblical texts he is relying on, but surely he thinks the Bible, or at least the New Testament, forbids executing criminals. On the other hand, the Southern Baptist convention recently strongly affirmed capital punishment, and they explicitly said they did so on the basis of the Bible. So the Bible may be the "surest guidepost," but it all depends on who is interpreting it.

In addition to that, when Benedict talks about the Bible as rectissima norma, he means the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church, not as interpreted by any private individual. Recently the Church has expressed a general desire to become more involved in its schools of higher education. The local bishops have been instructed to pay closer attention to who is teaching and what they are teaching. Of course, this applies mainly to religion, and so there is apprehension in the theology departments of the large Catholic universities. People wonder how such surveillance is compatible with academic freedom.

So there are many questions surrounding the religious issue in our schools. But I would contend that none of them is as serious as this one: Is it possible to have any religious impact on most of our students? That may sound like a cynical or pessimistic question, but I think it is only realistic. For example, in terms of the curriculum, it is quite possible for a student to pass through our doors with little or no contact with the Bible, much less with Catholic doctrine. We are well aware that many of our students are not Catholic, and perhaps have no religious belief at all. In this pluralistic society, and in this particular situation, we can hardly demand that they study religion very seriously during their time here.

What am I suggesting? Certainly not that we embark on some kind of program of indoctrination! Even though I think it would be very valuable for all of our students to encounter the Bible and develop a sophisticated, adult understanding of it, I don't think we can make biblical scholars out of them. As regards Catholic doctrine, I also think it would be very helpful if every student that went to this school came out with some basic ideas of what the Catholic Church teaches about life's most important questions. But again, I don't think you can make this mandatory. Still, I think it would be a crying shame for a student to look back and say: "I went to the University of Mary, but I learned little or nothing about religion there."

Mind you, I don't look at this issue from the standpoint of proselytism. We don't invite people here in order to lure them into the Catholic Church. If that ever was the purpose of Catholic colleges, it surely isn't today. Nevertheless, I do think there is an urgency about our religious mission, and it has to do with secularism. To put it bluntly, we are living in an age when religious practice is waning, at least in the post-industrial west. Church attendance is way down, major denominations are threatened with extinction, religious questions are increasingly ignored or banned from public debate and so on. Andrew Greeley says that people still believe but are losing interest in religious institutions. That is a valid distinction, but I think the two things must be linked.

About ten years ago, an article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly with the intriguing title "Can we be good without God?"²¹ In it, the philosopher Glenn Tinder contends that religious faith is declining in the western world. Secularization has advanced very far, he says. That being the case, he wonders about the future of ethics. As I claimed at the beginning of this talk, Tinder says that since so many of our western attitudes and social policies were shaped by Christianity, what will maintain those standards if Christianity goes down? In other words, why should we be good? Of course, we will still need laws to protect ourselves from chaos, but even laws need underpinning in basic beliefs. Will secular humanism be enough to maintain a civilized society?

This is the kind of world we are sending our student into. How will they cope with it? It is a world in which each man and woman will be faced with new ethical issues. What will our students have to fall back on? Will basic religious attitudes be a part of their equipment for such a world? Will they even know what religion might have to say to such and such an issue? If not, aren't we partly to blame? Granted, a lot of their education is over before we ever lay eyes on them, but if everybody is passing the ethical buck, then we are all to blame. We cannot console ourselves that we prepare them to prosper in the job market, if we give them no help in forming their consciences.

Again, this is no plea for advanced catechism or Sunday school. Our job is not indoctrination. And I doubt if St. Benedict would be much interested in that either. There is little to be gained from thought control of any kind, especially in a university. In fact, we should promote a free exchange of opinions on all the important issues of life. We should not be banning speakers or warning them in advance what they cannot discuss. On the other hand, there should be no reticence in a place like this about the religious point of view on these issues. It should be perfectly good form to say in public: The Bible says, The Church says, and so on.

Obviously, this is no simple matter. Often enough, it is not so clear what the Bible really says, or what the Church really says. But that is nothing to worry about either. Indeed, a Catholic university is a perfect place to discuss controversial matters and even to help clarify them. High-powered scholars have that function in the Church, and they usually work in university departments. But even on the undergrad level, it is also important to share with students the hard business of sorting through these questions. Our job is not to arm them with religious doctrines that will enable them to go through life without doubts; we need to teach them how to think clearly about these matters and how to exercise discernment.

And so to sum up, I think that St. Benedict can contribute at least three qualities to Catholic education.

First, he has a healthy respect for human nature. He is realistic enough to know that people need discipline to realize their best selves, but he is no pessimist.

Second, Benedict takes a holistic approach to life. Even though he wrote a Rule for monks, who put aside some basic human values such as family and wealth, he nevertheless is very interested in promoting a balanced lifestyle. He no doubt agrees with Thomas Aquinas that grace builds on nature. Or with the old philosopher who said "A healthy mind in a healthy body."

Finally, Benedict may be a humanist, but there is nothing secular about him. He thinks the Bible is the "surest guidepost" for human life. He does not think we can be good without God.

Notes

¹⁶ A. Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin-Français des Auteurs Chrétiennes (Turnhout, 1954) s.v.

¹⁷ Cassian, for example, clearly means a meal when he uses humanitas in Conference 20,2.1. In his article entitied "'En toute humanité': L'entour d'un mot de saint Benoît," (Collectanea Cisterciensia 53 [1991] 57-74), A. Fracheboud says that it encompasses all that is truly human, including the spiritual.

¹⁸ See Mary Forman, "Benedict's Use of Scripture in the Rule," forthcoming in ABR (September, 2001).

¹⁹ For some background on early monastic lectio divina, see A. Wathen, "Monastic Lectio: Some Clues from Terminology" Monastic Studies 12 (1976) 207-215; T. Kardong, "The Vocabulary of Monastic Lectio in RB 48" Cistercian Studies 16 (1981) 171-181.

²⁰ See my comments on spiritual progress in regard to Benedict's Prologue 49 in Benedict's Rule (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1996) 32-33.

²¹ December, 1989.

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