Benedict's Rule: The Rise of Ethnicity and the Fall of Rome by E. Michael Jones

Author:E. Michael Jones [Jones, E. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Fidelity Press
Published: 2012-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

NO HEROIC ASCETICISM

According to Gregory's Dialogues, Benedict could already have made contact with monasticism in the immediate surroundings of Nursia. If so, what he discovered was different than the institution he transformed by his rule. The monastic life had been in existence for hundreds of years before Benedict was born. But it was known more for its heroic asceticism than for its promotion of community. Men would go off into the deserts of Egypt or Syria inspired by the radical simplicity of the gospels and the idea that nothing else mattered. Once there, they more often than not lived a hermit's life and dealt with the temptations that came their way as a result in the spiritual version of single, hand-to-hand combat.

In the beginning of his spiritual quest, Benedict did much the same thing. After fleeing Rome, Benedict lived a hermit's life at both Enfide and Subiaco, feeling that the way to inner purification could be found only through strict solitude. At Subiaco, Benedict lived in strict solitude in a place remarkable for its natural beauty, its lake and the rocky slopes leading down to the river Anio. However, natural beauty and isolation did not figure in his plan for the monastic life. For whatever reason, around the year 529, Benedict moved again, this time to a mountain 90 miles south of Rome known as Monte Cassino.

After destroying an altar to Apollo on top of the mountain and erecting two oratories — one dedicated to St. John the Baptist and the other to St. Martin — in its place, Benedict set out to write his rule. Here he seems to have made a break with the monastic tradition as it had existed up to that time in both the West and the East. Moving away from Rome should not mean moving away from his fellow monks and fellow man. Scholars now feel that the Rule of the Master influenced Benedict in the writing of his own rule and note vice versa. Familiar with the Rule of the Master, Benedict wrote his own rule while at Monte Cassino, and in doing so, made a unique contribution to the monastic tradition which had existed, by then, for hundreds of years, a contribution which would have a far-reaching influence on Europe. In fact, it would create Europe out of all the tribes who were now marauding and plundering that piece of geography now that the guarantor of civil order, the Roman Empire, was no longer existent in any significant form in the lands west of the Adriatic Sea and north of the Alps.

Benedict may have given up on the academy as the vehicle of classical culture; he may have given up on the Roman Empire as well; but he had internalized the very thing he had relinquished by applying the Latin genius for order and law to a monastic tradition that had emphasized feats of individual asceticism. The monastic life of the people who admired the fact that Simon Stylites spent 50 years sitting on top of a pillar was only coincidentally social.

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