St Benedict's Three Ingredients

St Benedict may be relatively well-known, in theory, for a historical figure of his ilk; but what does his Rule of Life actually contain?

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Dec 05, 2025

Part 22 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

Benedict’s Rule is not as short as Augustine’s, but it is just as neat. It can be divided into three sections, which might perhaps give us the three basic ingredients for a Rule of Life.

1: Virtue

Chapters 1—7, roughly speaking, concern what might sound rather like rather vague pious ramblings to modern ears. But they are not. They are exhortations to virtue.

What kind of person lives under a vow of this sort? What kind of behaviours create the possibility of a healthy common life? What qualities of character must the abbot have, to assume that dubious role as the community’s superior? What kind of person am I choosing to become, if I submit to life under this Rule? Or, to use the Rule’s own turn of phrase, what are “the tools for good works?”

Here, Benedict reads like a litany of moral exhortations. Something akin to chapter twelve of Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he falls into a poesis of ideals: “Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection…” Benedicts Rule is indeed strewn with many fragments of the New Testament’s code of virtues:

“Do not act in anger or harbour a grudge. Do not allow deceit to lurk in your heart, and do not make peace if it is not genuine. Do not abandon love. Do not swear, in case you perjure yourself. Speak the truth from heart and mouth. ‘Do not repay one wrong with another’ (1 Thess. 5:15; 1 Pet. 3:9)
[...] As soon as a wicked thought springs into your heart, dash it against Christ. Guard your mouth from all wicked or warped words. Do not take pleasure in talking a lot [...]
Carry out God’s commandments in what you do every day. Embrace chastity. Hate no one. Do not be jealous or give in to feelings of envy. Do not take pleasure in disputes. Avoid pride, respect your elders and care for those younger than yourself. Pray for your enemies in the love of Christ…”

We should note here the stark difference between a Rule of Life and any juristic form of law. The law of the state is not concerned with the heart of life, but rather polices its edges. It formally tells us what we cannot do without legal consequences. We do not expect moralising rhetoric from the law. It is functional: amoral, even.

The law cannot speak with any moral integrity because it is, itself, intrinsically violent. It maintains the state’s monopoly on violence, and it polices by threat. It can appeal to no higher vision than itself as executor of cold hard consequences. It doesn’t care what kind of people we are, it only cares that we remain within its legislated bounds. Apart from this, it leaves us alone.

A Rule of Life, however, will nearly always involve a code of virtues. Messianic virtue saturates the ulterior life, forming it into a creature to whom law and policing are absolutely irrelevant. Homo-economicus cannot be exorcised by law, but only by virtue. On the contrary, law is itself an agent of homo-economicus, keeping guard over an order in which self-interest can function as the sole driver of social and economic life.

Modern socialist aspirations toward wealth redistribution tend to reach for the tied and trusted tools of law, just as right-wing political sensibilities do. Both will use force to differently manage their respective visions of private property. The hermits forsook law and built a political economy rooted in virtue, or voluntary personal discipline, if you like. And so law and virtue run in opposing directions. Virtue makes law irrelevant, and vice-versa. Virtue is the only basis for any anarchist vision that doesn’t wish to live, hypocritically, under the patronage of law.

2: The Practice of Awe

The second and the shortest part of Benedict’s Rule, running from Chapters 8—20, concerns the divine office. These chapters outline the hours of prayer, the times of the year, the holy days, the conventions of who speaks when, when to sit and when to stand, when to say the alleluia and when not to say it, call and response, the length of prayers, and so on.

Here is a thin cross-section from chapter eighteen, on which psalms are to be sung and when:

“At Terse, Sext and None on Mondays, let the remaining nine sections of Psalm 119 be said, three at each of these hours. When Psalm119 has been said over two days, that is Sunday and Monday, three psalms should be said at Terse, Sext and None on Tuesdays from Psalm 120 to 128, in other words nine psalms in all. They should always repeat these Psalms at the same hours every day until Sunday, while the order of the hymns , readings and verses should be the same every day. In this way Psalm 119 will always begin on Sundays.
Every day four psalms should be sung during Vespers. These should start with Psalm 110 and go on to Psalm 147, leaving out those that are reserved for the special hours, in other words Psalms 118 to 128, 134, and 143; all the other psalms should be said at Vespers. And since there are three Psalms too few, those from this sequence that seem rather long should be divided, in other words Psalm 139, 144 and 145. But because Psalm 117 is short it should be joined to Psalm 116.”

The rather arduously elaborate instructions continue. Leaving, as he always does, room for common sense and improvisation, Benedict concludes:

“We strongly recommend that if anyone finds this arrangement unacceptable, he should rearrange them if he can think of a better order, as long as he makes sure that every week the whole psalter with its 150 psalms is recited in full and that the whole sequence always starts from the beginning at the night office on Sundays. For it is clear that the monks are too lazy in the service of their devotion if they sing less than the whole psalter with the customary canticles in the course of a week: afterall, we read that our holy predecessors had the energy to perform in a single day what we in our lukewarm faith, aspire to carry out in the course of a whole week.”

The chapters are a little bewildering from the outside. I am a child of iconoclastic anti-tradition. But Benedict is able to describe matters knowing that his readers will know what he is talking about, since the conventions of prayer and chanting and the keeping of agreed hours had been in development for some generations.

We note once again that the Rule is something quite distinct from the law. This pattern of sacred practice, like the virtues, doesn’t exist to police the outer limits of life but to transfigure its heart and to saturate it. Giorgio Agamben describes this as an art: a kind of theatre performed on the stage of the ordinary day, re-interpreting life in real time. It is a discipline that gradually re-shapes the human, from despot to creature, by habitually turning the gaze outward beyond itself in awe. By designating God as constant referent — eternal, astonishing and other — the human is resituated: joyously small, creature among creatures.

The word office comes from the Latin opus, meaning “work.” Likewise, the word liturgy comes from the Greek leitos and ergos, meaning “public work.” There was much work to do in a monastic community of the sixth century, as there always will be, but the sacred work of awe and love was considered the first and most important work of the community.

3: Community Guidelines

The third section of Benedict’s rule is the longest. We might describe it as protocols or guidelines for a well organised community. From chapters 21—73 the Rule covers various matters of good order, such as: sleeping arrangements, protocols for misbehaviour, who should look after the cellar, how to keep an orderly set of common handtools, care for the ill, concessions for the young and the elderly, how much wine is about right, welcoming guests, working hours, books, visits, excursions, footwear, and what to do if the community’s craftsman excels himself in such a way that he becomes conceited about his own importance.

Two things gradually become obvious while reading the Rule of Benedict. One is its characteristic reasonableness and moderation. Benedict was well aware that the right thing to do in any given situation might be best decided by the person who is there at the time. Overbearing legislation and rigid rules should often enough give way to common sense.

“We read that wine is not a suitable drink for monks, but since monks these days cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree to drink sparingly [...] we think that half a bottle of wine a day is enough for each person.”

“Brothers who are weak or delicate should be given a task or a craft that prevents them being idle but does not cause them to feel oppressed by the difficulty of the task…”

On the other hand, Benedict’s flexibility sometimes falls into rather troubling realms of ambiguity. For example, it says:

“In the appointment of an abbot, the guiding principle should always be that the person appointed should be the one chosen unanimously by the whole congregation in the fear of God…”

This rule, which seems to me both clear and agreeable, runs directly into the following:

“...or even by a minority, however small, of the community if they will make a more sensible decision.”

These two entirely contradictory statements are not even separated by a full stop. They are one and the same sentence. As a political constitution, this leaves a rather striking grey area.

There are numerous passages that tip back and forth with various caveats and qualifications, often landing in a general sentiment of ...or whatever seems best.

There are, as ever, protocols and sentiments that would be objectionable to me, on both personal and moral grounds. I make allowances for the changing times, but perhaps one of the reasons the Rule of St Benedict has stood the test of time is that so much of it defers to the ground and experience of the reader. We are expected to use our own sense of discretion, often as not. Legislation gives its power over to the community itself, in all its oddness and particularity.

Perhaps between these three disciplines — virtue, awe and good order — we have a blueprint for how a Rule of Life might not necessarily be subsumed by the spectres of law and hierarchy that dominate the Western political imagination. Perhaps between these three lies a frame in which ulterior life might take shape as an authentically alternative political economy.