Do the Heavenly-minded save the world by accident?

Did the rule of St Benedict really save the world? Which world was saved? And from what?

Part 25 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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Like so many of the hermits, Benedict is a rather obscure and mythic figure. The rule he fashioned out of so many Rules gone before, was one of even more Rules being written by many communities of the time, each seeking sensible patterns by which to organise themselves.

And yet, Benedict marks a threshold of transformation; a moment of reversal, almost. Over several centuries after Benedict’s day, the world up-ended itself completely, and his simple and moderate Rule became a Noah’s ark; a pattern of constancy and resilience floating atop of the choppy waters of change.

In this time the last vestiges of the Roman empire fell aside. The classical era faded into the past. Europe entered a time for which it had no map. The world would become fragmented, static and barbarous.

For the pattern of monasticism this marks a time of almost total reversal. What began in the 3rd Century as a movement of ulterior lives, reaching relentlessly outward to the margins of an increasingly Christian empire, became exactly the opposite. The monasteries were now centralised hubs of civic life carrying the glowing embers of civilisation around which the world would gather for centuries to come.

From the simple communal dwellings of Benedict’s day, the monastery developed into an elaborate complex. They were places of worship, keepers of relics and hubs of increasingly elaborate and ornate liturgical traditions. They were hospitals for the sick. They were places of education and learning, patrons of copyists and archivists of classical texts. The monks became sacred specialists whose prayer and worship functioned vicariously for the wider community. All this being so, they were less and less involved in manual labour of various kinds, which began to be outsourced.

Rene Girard once said that you should choose your enemies wisely, because you will become like them. Some will consider it a harsh resonance in various directions, but it’s true to say that fortunes of the monks and the “secular clergy” crossed over. Effectively, they overtook the priesthood and filled the void where the institutional hierarchy had become weak and thin. Once again they appear as a peculiar prototype the welfare state, and with some irony, as the new centres of political power.

After a few hundred years, the world had changed into something entirely different to the one Benedict knew. If his Rule had not been the ark of salvation we might reasonably guess that another among the countless monastic codes might have done the same job. But as it happens it was his Rule that became so ubiquitous that, according to Knowels, many believed the mythic Benedict to be the sole originator of monastic life.

In this tale we find the seeds of a discussion that must perplex us for a while; a question that hangs heavy in the air today: did the Rule of Saint Benedict really save the world? Which world was saved? And from what? And at what price did the monastic tradition save it; being, as it was, utterly reversed in the process? The “dark ages” are commonly and absurdly depicted as a world of constantly grey weather, toothless peasants and witches. What of the time that preceded it? Why were the days of Roman imperial violence and taxation the world’s golden era? For whom was it so golden?

“All history is praise of Rome,” said the poet Petrarch. He was poet laureate of Rome. The Hermits saw things quite differently. They saw it as a haunt of demons, and removed themselves accordingly to pursue a more creaturely pattern of life. They were not the guardians of civilisation, but the exorcists of its compulsive greed and violence. They may well have preferred a world that was more static and fragmented to civilisation’s bent toward homogenising progress. They prefigured such a world and might easily have been mistaken for barbarians in the process.

But the question is not easily settled. There are layers. What was it about the eccentric hermits and their bizarre form of life that made it the central form of stability in a time of flux? How do the oddballs of today end up being the architects of tomorrow? And what price does ulterior life pay when it is finally embraced into the bosom of civic life?

Follow more of David Benjamin Blower’s writings over at his own Substack.

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