Benedict in the Midweek

Saint Benedict of Nursia’s Feast falls on July 11, this year on a Thursday. It’s a shame that so many feasts of the Church get overlooked nowadays, simply because most people have such a poor understanding of the Church’s calendar. Saint Benedict is a great example of this, one of the most important men in history, whose commemoration falls in the dog days of summer, in the middle of the week, likely to be ignored. Benedict received a resurgence of attention during the turn of the millenium, and especially with the election of Pope Benedict XVI. As we remember the sixth century monk in 2024, perhaps it would be helpful to revisit both his legacy, and also the status of the many initiatives undertaken in his name.

Joseph Pieper and Jacques Maritain, just to name two authors, when seeking to delimit the end of Classical Antiquity and the beginning of the ‘Middle Ages’, used the year 529 as a helpful guidepost, because it was the year of the foundation of the Monastery of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict himself. It was also the same year in which the famous Academy of Athens was shut down by the Emperor Justinian, and this in spite of the fact that many of the greatest Eastern theologians were still being educated there, like Saint Basil of Caesarea and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus had been. The fall of that ancient platonic center of learning was a severe blow to the intellectual and cultural life of what later historiographers would call Byzantium. In Monte Cassino, Saint Benedict truly founded something new, something that would form a cornerstone of a new civilization; indeed, of a new age of human history.

Saint Benedict founded a great many monasteries in his time, but probably his most enduring contribution to Western Civilization is his Regula, the Rule of Saint Benedict, which has been long recognized as outstanding for its versatility and deep spirituality. Readers of my work know how I have frequently used it for spiritual commentary. Devotees of the Great Saint often bear his blessed cross as a defense against evil, and indeed, it is a powerful sacramental. However, his cross is only a microcosm of his whole project: his whole adult life was spent, like so many men and women in the decline of the Western Roman Empire, holding back barbarism, and staking the cross as the new ‘guidestone’ of their world. I always love the practice in Europe of seeing parish boundaries marked by crosses, some simple, some ornate. In each case, they mark, in a very incarnate way, soil reclaimed from the devil. In a world in which the vines were reclaiming the old Roman baths, and the aquaducts were dismantled stone by stone, this sense of making a stand against disorder, violence and ruin must have felt like an imperative for a people committed to hope. It would only be too easy to fall into despair.

Pope Benedict XVI took the Throne of Peter in 2005 calling himself the “humble servant in the vineyard of the Lord”, and explicitly took the name Benedict, because Pope Paul VI had named the Italian Saint a patron saint of Europe in 1964. Pope Benedict, as is well known, made it a priority of his papacy to encourage Europe to rediscover and return to her roots, found in Christianity, but especially in Catholicism. He cautiously supported the European Union in the spirit of some of the older founders who signed the Treaty of Rome, who saw it as a means to maintain a semblance of a confederation of Christian societies. However, it does appear that as his Papacy unfolded, he realized how thoroughly secularized the project had become. He did, however, find allies, on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was only in 2017, four years after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, that Rod Dreher had written his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. In my estimation, this work is quite important, even if one disagrees with it. Yet even before this book crystallized a lot of thought on the matter, other thinkers were voicing similar strategies. The book opened the floodgates for a deluge of other works on “options” for Evangelization in a Post-Christian World. I even took a swing at it with the Salesian Option, since I believe that the core of the rot of modern civilization lies in the impoverishment of education. What all these approaches have in common is that they are trying to establish a new modus vivendi between a hostile secular world and the committed Christian. There seem to be three predominant reactions: strategic retreat, creative reengagement, and interior renewal.

The first strategy may be seen in the admonition of Saint Paul, “Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord” (2 Cor 6:17). The same sentiments are repeated in Saint John’s Apocalpyse on proclaiming the fall of heathen Babylon. The idea that holiness means to be in some way separate from the world is always correct and necessary. Led by the Holy Spirit, individuals and groups have practiced this method, to maintain their spiritual fervor and to protect their families and communities from dissolution in the face of external cultural pressures. We do this as individuals when we go on retreat, which is an excellent practice for any Christian. Yet at the same time, this approach is balanced, both in the Scritprues and in practice, by the Great Commission, which calls us out to proclaim the Gospel.

The second strategy, that of creative reengagement, can be seen in the inspiring amount of groups today dedicated to interfacing especially with young people on current issues. Groups like FOCUS, the Thomistic Institute, or the Culture Project, are all dedicated to reviving interest in the Gospel and in Judeo-Christian traditions in general, in order to recreate and sustain what St. John Paul II called the “Civilization of Love”. They have done a tremendous amount of work, and put out a great amount of accessible content, and are very savvy with social media and other means of communication. I would identify a two-fold weakness in their approach, and neither of these are their fault: first, many times the language they use, terms like ‘virtue’ and the like, are so outside of the norm of common speech, that they are both powerful (because they are not abused words), but also require more explanation. The strategy of creative reengagement tends to have a high ‘lower limit’ when it comes to education, for someone to understand what is being said. This is one reason why Word On Fire may have been so successful in its very beginnings; the then-Father Robert Barron’s movie reviews, which were so short and to the point, were watched by millions in their day, and engaged directly with movies and TV shows that millions of people were talking about. The second problem the creative reengagement strategy possesses is that favors, by its very nature, creatives and intellectuals. There is not much engagement of the blue collar or working class, which arguably would be more open to the message of the Gospel.

The third strategy, that of interior renewal, is that of looking more inward, especially toward our spirituality and our rites. In this approach, our Christianity has become decadent, and we have become mired in our sins. Therefore, we must focus first and foremost on our personal sanctity, and also to the quality of our public worship (liturgy). In this, the Church can possess the spiritual grace and power to fulfill her mission to save souls. As beautiful as this is, it also has some disadvantages, if it is taken to extremes. Holiness is the calling of every Christian, but at the same time, movements like this in times of distress tend to become very fractious. This was true with the 2nd century Marcionites, or the Caecilianists of Augustine’s time. Faced with unholy people and unholy times, extreme movements can develop which border on the cultic, and unnecessarily exclude not only those they should evangelize, but also people within the Church herself.

The genius of St. Benedict lies, like with most genius, in the power of synthesis of apparent contrary points. St. Benedict formed monasteries outside of the established cities, in order to be separate from existing and ostensibly corrupt centers of culture. He did this in order to create a new center of culture, centered around Christ and Christian values. His monasteries eventually, but even in part during his lifetime, became creative matrices for all sorts of people; and not only the theologian and the philosopher, but also the stonemason and the bricklayer. Finally, the culture which the rule and the monks encouraged taught the people that the interior world was important and that the soul mattered, and even if one were to fail, both the Rule of Saint Benedict and Christian Charity take the message of grace and redemption seriously: after all, it was the Irish Benedictines that gave us Private Confession. The “Benedict Option” is still quite viable today. Yet now, in 2024, there are a few points we may want to revisit before we close our midweek reflection on this venerable Saint.

One great challenge of the current time is what I would call the ‘disincarnation of everything’. This trend is social, economic, political, and even spiritual. Even good churchgoing people are practicing it. It is the belief and practice, even when it is unspoken, that time and space do not matter. Saint Benedict’s project worked in large part because of the limitations of transportation and communication of his day. Granted, it is true that this is why many people who support Benedict Options deliberately call these communitites ‘intentional’; that is, they require the explicit intention of those participating to be viable. In this, they seem more akin to a religious order than to a traditional culture. Culture is something which is part of the ‘social air’; we breathe it in whether we want to or not. Religious Orders, on the hand, require the commitment of vows or promises in order to engage the will of those who are part of it. Some families and individuals, to varying degrees of success, have tried to recreate the social conditions of a Benedictine foundation, by deciding to move to specific towns or neighborhoods. Yet it is a huge challenge, because these communities often struggle financially and have to re-tool and re-educate to form a functioning microeconomy. Discovering the power of incarnate community in the virtual age is a tremendous challenge.

Another hurdle the Benedictine Options face, in my humble opinion, is that far too few have seriously examined the inner logic of the Regula. The Rule of Saint Benedict may be oriented toward the monastic manner of life, but the lessons contained therein are universal. There are great tools found therein about things like conflict resolution, reconciliation, equal division of labor, relations between peers, superiors and their charges, and more. In many cases, I wish it were mandatory reading for all Diocesan Bishops! It is also important to know the Rule, because it would disabuse many people of “City on a Hill” visions of what the Benedictine Option would look like. Nothing here on earth is perfect, and the Rule of Saint Benedict is oriented as much around mitigating human weakness as it is encouraging human greatness, made possible by divine grace. As the late Richard John Neuhaus once quipped, “optimism is a matter of optics.” Hope is different, and a true virtue, because it ‘anchors’ us between two extremes. It helps us not to despair when things are bad (all the while not leading us into denial when they are), but also not to become unduly elated when things seem to be good, as there is always room for caution and improvement.

A final and cautious critique I would have of Benedict Option movements is that they focus far too much on the past, and not enough on the present and the future. Because of this, they have a tendency to slip into theological and social decadence and solipsism. Modern people are consummate neophiliacs. They also have some of the poorest attention spans in living memory. This is one reason I think the Church has a lot to contribute on the education front, but, barring that, we have an uphill battle in presenting the Church’s cultural and intellectual treasures, when the horizon of many young people is their TikTok feed, and each clip lasts up to a minute, generously. Jesus Christ, our greatest treasure, the “Pearl of Great Price” which we give anything to have, is the one we ultimately have to share. So while it may be stimulating to us intellectual types to want to talk about things like the newest scholarship in Neo-Thomism, we could be accused of being more interested in our faith as aesthetes or curators, rather than proper evangelists.

I would like to present some encouraging signs for the Benedict Option, but also some challenges. First, there are initial signs that Gen Z (Zoomers) are more technoskeptic than millenials, and although they experience far more social anxiety than any recorded generation in history, they also seem to be increasingly able to pinpoint the sources of that anxiety, part of which lie in dependency on technology, poor family dynamics, and impoverished socialization. This is especially true of those who experienced school while COVID-19 unfolded: for them, those are truly a sort of ‘lost years’, and many are spending time now trying to have the sorts of experiences they feel they missed.

Second, the dating culture in the West is in absolute dissarray. While it would seem that we should celebrate the fact that young people aren’t fornicating, we should also remember that the direct opposite of a vice is not a virtue, but also a vice. This vice has been traditionally been called ‘frigidity’, but it is extremely rare in human history. The statistics on the sexual and dating behavior of young people has led some analysts to conclude that Zoomers are becoming more asexual and frustrated, hence the increasing use of the pejorative ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate). However, the consumption of pornography, and moreover, the monetization of loneliness via ‘services’ like OnlyFans and other ‘FinDom’ grifters I think show us not asexuality, but monosexuality, is the prevailing sexual orientation. That is to say, people are, to quote C.S. Lewis, trapped in their heads with a “harem of imaginary brides”, which are provided through the internet and other artificial means. We are a society now where the primary sexual activity is not intercourse, but masturbation. This may seem like a very strange thing to say in the midst of an essay on the Benedict Option, but I think it is something we aren’t talking about enough: although it may feel strange at first, especially in a highly individualistic culture like ours, we can corner the market on matchmaking.

There is a true desire, especially among men, for women who will love them and not emasculate them. If ‘tradwife’ trends on TikTok are any indication, including the indignation on the Left in response, Zoomer men and women are finding traditional gender roles more attractive, not less. Women, on the other hand, are anxious for a calling in life that is not based solely upon how much money they can make; being a ‘homemaker’, once a bestia negra of first-wave feminism, may now be one of the ways by which women reclaim a true spectrum of ‘choice’ in a culture which is reducing men and women alike to mere producers and consumers of product. If a man wants to find a woman that reflects the values of fidelity, monogamy, mutual self-sacrifice and permanence, the Church is probably one of the best places to find such a partner. We still hold in our hands the keys to the reinvigoration of the nuclear family. And those who procreate, shall inherit the earth: the religiously commited always out-procreate the secular and irreligious, by at least two or three times. The Family is the Domestic Church, and if there is any Benedict Option which is immediate, before the intervention of the smartphone and the internet, it is what takes place under the roof of a family home.

In closing, it is my opinion that the Benedict Option(s) is not a closed book in 2024. Yet I think it will more approximate a subculture rather than something like the ‘Catholic Amish’. Maybe for some summer reading, grab the Rule of Saint Benedict (it can easily be found online) and read one chapter a day. Especially, I recommend the Prologue, Chapters One, Four, Seven, Fourty-Eight, and Fifty-Three. Many of the lessons contained there can be applied to daily life. Even though Benedict’s Feast Day may fall in the midweek this year, may he be at the forefront of our hearts, because as he was blessed by name, we are blessed, if we follow his example.