The Abbot and the Priest

A further look into the Rule of St Benedict reveals both an idealistic and wary stance towards authority and the figures who wield it.

Part 24 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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The Rule of Benedict dismantles itself as a code of law and hierarchy is by its common sense and moderation. It very often reads as if in two minds about something: one should never do this… unless of course the circumstances are like that… but in that case, at the very least, one should not over-do it… in any case remember not to do to another as you would not be done by… and so on. This humble Rule, which describes itself not as an ends but as a mere beginning, reads more like guidelines than legislation.

This spirit of human good sense extends to the figure of the superior, the abbot or abbess, who is described in this rather beautiful idealised sketch:

“He must always consider the burden he has undertaken and to whom he will have to ‘give an account of his stewardship’ (Luke 16;2). He must be aware that it is his duty to benefit others rather than to control them.

It is his duty to be learned in the divine law so that he many be knowledgeable and have a store from which he can ‘take out new things and old’ (Matt. 13;52); He must also be pure, sensible and merciful. He must always ‘put mercy before judgement’ (James 2:13), so that he himself may also be shown mercy.

He must hate wrongdoing and love the brothers. When punishing he must act sensibly and not be excessive, in case should damage the pot while trying to scrub away the dirt. He must always distrust his own fragility and remember not to ‘crush the bruised reed’ (Isa. 42.3). By this we do not mean that he should allow wrongdoings to grow rampant but should eradicate them sensible and with love, in accordance with what seems beneficial to each, as we have mentioned. He should strive to be loved rather than feared.

He must not be inconsistent or anxious, not extreme in his behaviour or obstinate, not jealous or excessively suspicious, for then he will never rest [...] he should be discrete and restrained, remembering the discretion of holy Jacob who said, ‘If I drive my flocks too hard, they will all die on a single day’ (Gen.33.13). Taking these and other examples of discretion, the mother of all virtues, let him be moderate in all things…”

While Augustine’s Rule warns not to offend God in the person of the Abbot, Benedict’s abbot is described as a “fellow servant”. The only person in Benedict’s Rule who is to be regarded as a visitation of God’s self, would be the poor who are to be offered unreserved hospitality.

Those twin spectres of the western political imagination, the law and the sovereign who upholds it, are both certainly present in the Rule of St Benedict, as they are in the Rule of Augustine and the Rule of Pachomius. But in Benedict they are diluted by his deference to good sense and moderation. Here, the Rule has, perhaps, the genuine possibility of being a container for the kind of small anarchist political economy the hermits had once accidentally formed.

The plot thickens curiously when we read Benedict’s protocols for visiting priests; when the hierarchy of the clerical institution crosses over into the ulterior space of the monastery:

“If anyone who has been ordained a priest asks to be received into the monastery, he should not be granted permission too readily, but if he persists in his request, he needs to be aware that he will have to observe the full discipline of the rule and that he will be allowed no relaxation of the rules, for as it says in the scripture, ‘My friend, what have you come for?’ (Matt. 26:50).

Yes, that is, astonishingly, a citation of the gospel story where Judas arrives to betray Jesus. Why this deep suspicion of the Priest? For Benedict, the Priest is a tricky character who must be handled with care, at the end of a fairly long stick. If you really must, it’s better to ordain one of your own than have one riding in on his clerical horse.

“If an abbot wishes to have a priest or deacon ordained, he should choose one of the brothers whom he considers worthy to perform the duties of the priesthood. When this brother has been ordained, he must take care to avoid self satisfaction or pride and must not presume to do anything apart from what the abbot has told him to do, knowing that he must be all the more subject to the discipline of the rule.”

And finally comes the warning:

“If he presumes to act otherwise, he will not be regarded as a priest but a rebel, and if after repeated warnings he does not correct his behaviour, the bishop should be brought in as a witness, If he still does not improve and still has glaring faults, he must be expelled…”

I would guess that Benedict was speaking from some withering experience. The sort of power this pernicious priest tends to assume upon arrival undermines everything the monastery is about. He carries within himself something that must be broken down if he is to become part of the community, which is fascinating, because what he embodies is the institution of the church in its clerical order.

Predictably, there is no such wariness of titles in Augustine’s Rule, where the priest is considered perhaps even more important than the superior. Augustine is urban and politically wired.

In Pachomius’ Rule, on the other hand, there is simply no mention of any priest. The world of the desert hermits was entirely and somewhat intentionally removed from the clerical order of their day. At a time when the young institution was caught up in the often absurd intrigues of working out of its relationship to the state, the hermits were seeking a faithful pattern on entirely different terms. As Christopher Donaldson says of the first hermit, Anthony the Great: “it is doubtful even if for years at a time he ever attended church or received the sacraments.”

Agamben notes this dissonance also in another Rule of Benedict’s day known as the Rule of the Master. Agamben sees that, like Benedict’s Rule, there is a long and elaborate description of the office: the liturgy of psalms, prayers and readings to be kept at set hours and days. However:

“The Rule of the Master, so meticulous in its description of the former, hardly mentions the mass in connection with the psalmody of the feast days and, curiously, discusses communion in the section dedicated to the weekly service of monks in the kitchen. Hence also the firm distinction between the monk and the priest, who can be hosted in the convent under the title of pilgrim, but cannot live there permanently or pretend to any form of power within it.”

The rub here lies with the mass, the eucharist. It was obviously central to Christian life and identity, and by convention or rule it could only be administered by a priest. It is certainly the case that the early monastic movement preferred to decentralise this sacramental culture than be drawn by it back into the politics of late Roman Christianity.

This awkward fissure in the complex body of western Christianity would wax and wane at different times and places. At some points the two worlds draw close, with the monastic orders becoming clericalised and blurred into the institution. At other points the differentiation becomes pronounced. And yet, monasticism has tended to pass by the path of the demagogues, iconoclasts and rebels, generally carrying itself with a strange and unnervingly quiet energy. Even so, the ulterior lives of the monastic movement have tended to exist in varying degrees of pronounced otherness, not only to the world but also to the hierarchy of the institution.

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

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