The Benedictine Option | Dr. Randall B. Smith | Catholic World Report
Making Catholic hospitals and schools widely available again in a society in desperate need of both is how Catholics can once again become a cultural force.
Rod Dreher has suggested something he calls “The Benedict Option” as a response to the decline in religious faith and practice — and in the face of the increasing hostility toward them — in contemporary culture. The question he believes Christians must ask themselves in our current setting is, “What must the church do in order to live and witness faithfully as a minority in a culture in which we were once the majority?”
“As we try to determine which forms of community, which institutions and which ways of life can answer that question,” writes Dreher, “we should draw on the wisdom of St. Benedict and his Rule. We should innovate ways to adapt it to forms of non-monastic living in the world.” Among the Benedictine principles he believes should help inform this recovery-of-the-old-in-the-new way of life he is suggesting would be things like order, prayer and work, community, stability, balance, and hospitality.
Dreher has insisted repeatedly that he is not advocating a strategy of “retreat” or “disengagement” with the world. Rather, the term “Benedict Option” symbolizes what he describes as “a historically-conscious, antimodernist return to roots, an undertaking that occurs with the awareness that Christians have to cultivate a sense of separation, of living as ... ‘resident aliens’ in a ‘Christian colony,’ in order to be faithful to our calling.”
C. S. Lewis once described something similar in Mere Christianity when he called upon Christians to realize that they live in “Enemy-occupied territory.” “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” The “Enemy,” however, as Lewis makes clear by capitalizing the title, is on his view the Devil, not primarily the culture-at-large, nor (God help us) our non-Christian neighbors.
The story of salvation history is the story of a fallen people in a fallen world to whom a Savior has come to redeem both them and through them all of creation. We are called to be instruments of God’s grace and a leaven in society, not enemies of our neighbors and instruments of their condemnation.
The Question and a Suggestion
A question that has bedeviled Christians from the very beginning is how to be in the world but not of it. So too, how to distinguish “the world” as the very good thing God created for us from “the world” that we have “subjected to vanity” and in whose pattern St. Paul warns us we are not to be conformed? How can Christians serve as a leaven in society without merely becoming one with it — without becoming salt that has lost its flavor, worth nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot?
Dreher’s answer is that we must pay greater attention to forming Christians prepared to live out Christianity in this alien cultural territory, and doing that requires embedding them within communities and institutions dedicated to that sort of formation. “The Benedict Option,” he says, “is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.”
I have no problem with any of this — in fact I’m rather a fan, in much the same way I’ve always been a fan of monasticism ever since I discovered the great Catholic tradition in college. So I have no criticisms to offer — although I would sound a warning gleaned from the history of monasticism about “intentional communities,” including (perhaps especially) “religious” ones that, while preserving their own autonomy, do not remain firmly tethered to the Church and the authority of the successors of the apostles, the bishops. The history of monasticism suggests that, without an anchor to something firm, most of these institutions lose their way rather quickly. It is not without reason that there is an old historian’s dictum that says: “The history of monasticism is the history of the reform of monasticism.” The monastic life looks pleasant enough, and it was never meant to be overly burdensome, like the life of the anchorites in the desert. But as professor of mine once remarked about the Benedictine Rule: “No, it’s not hard — unless you actually do it.”
So I have no criticisms — really — but I do have a suggestion, one gleaned from the history of monasticism.
If those proposing “the Benedict Option” are not advocating a “retreat” or “disengagement from” the culture, as I take them at their word they are not, then perhaps they might take another bit of guidance from medieval Benedictine practice about how as an institution (and not merely as individuals) a group can serve as a powerful leaven in society.
If we look back at history, two things that characterized monasteries changed European society perhaps more than any others: monasteries were centers of learning and centers of hospitality.
Comments