Introduction
Listen.
The first word of The Rule of St. Benedict is the hardest.
We live in a world filled with constant noise and a multitude of competing voices. Hearing someone is hard enough, but listening—really listening—is a very difficult thing to do.
When I teach the Rule in my university classes, I tell the students that they can learn a lot about how to live a good life from listening to an old monk who died almost fifteen hundred years ago. When some object that he lived in a different age or that they aren’t religious, I say it doesn’t matter, because Benedict’s words are timeless, and he speaks to the human heart, whatever one’s beliefs might be.
Like us, Benedict lived in an age of tremendous uncertainty about the future. Empires were collapsing around him, social values that had held the world together for centuries were vanishing, and many were losing faith in religion, whether the worship of the old gods or the new faith of Christianity.
Benedict’s answer was not power or money, but spiritual renewal.
His Rule is a short, practical guide on how to be a monk—but look deeper and you can discover much more. He asks crucial questions about what really matters in life and how we can discover something more in and beyond ourselves.
Benedict’s Rule is above all a handbook for living a deliberate life. It emphasizes the importance of looking outside yourself, of seeking something greater, of living as more than just surviving another day. It teaches the importance of contemplation, silence, and solitude, but is also a book about caring for others, forgiveness, and community, for no one can make it through life alone.
It is, in short, a book for all of us.
The Life of Benedict of Nursia
Compared to many early Christian authors, we know relatively little about the life of Benedict. No one during his lifetime bothered to mention him, and no contemporary historical documents record his deeds. He seemed destined to be forgotten by the world—a fate which would surely have pleased a man so devoted to giving glory to God alone.
But there was someone in the generation after Benedict who was determined he wouldn’t be forgotten. This was Gregory the Great, as he would be known to future ages, who became bishop of Rome and pope in the year 590. Gregory was born into a wealthy Roman family and received an excellent secular education, but chose the monastic life and service to the church instead of fortune or fame. Among his priorities after becoming pope was to promote the stories of Italian saints as equal to those of the celebrated holy men from Egypt and Gaul. Gregory admits that he never knew Benedict, who died when the future pope was still a boy, but he drew on accounts of the monastic founder from several of Benedict’s own disciples. A few years into his papacy he composed the Dialogues, an imaginary conversation between himself and a young deacon named Peter. The second chapter of this book is devoted entirely to discussing the life of Benedict.
The story which Gregory presents is entirely within the tradition of earlier Christian hagiography—writings about the lives of holy men and women—showing Benedict as a man of profound devotion to God who worked astonishing miracles. Hagiography was not biography or scientific history in the modern sense, but was instead meant to provide inspiration and an ideal model of the Christian life to readers. Yet among the miraculous and fanciful stories are some revealing details about the life of this remarkable man.
From Gregory we learn that Benedict was born around the year 480—four years after the last Roman emperor was deposed in the West—in the small Italian town of Nursia (modern Norcia) in the hills northeast of Rome. As Gregory stresses, Benedict came from a free-born family with enough wealth to send their son to Rome for a fine education. But the young man abandoned his studies for fear that literature would lead him away from God.
Benedict renounced the world and moved to a church dedicated to St. Peter in the town of Effide (modern Affile) east of Rome, accompanied only by a devoted old nurse. While there he reportedly performed his first miracle, repairing a sieve, used to sift grain, that the nurse had broken.
From Effide, Benedict, seeking to be only with God, fled alone to a nearby cave in a remote place called Subiaco, where there were springs of cool, clear water. He was met on the way by a monk named Romanus who sympathized with the young man’s desire for solitude and would regularly lower bread from his own meager rations on a long rope to Benedict’s inaccessible cave. There Benedict remained content for three years, devoting himself to prayer and—in common with other ascetic holy men of the age—battling against the temptations of the devil.
One story from this time in his life relates how young Benedict was overwhelmed by sexual desire and almost abandoned his calling as a chaste hermit after the devil placed in his mind the image of a beautiful young woman. But by heaven’s grace he was inspired to strip naked and throw himself onto sharp thorns and stinging nettles, rolling around in them until he extinguished the flames of sinful passion. After this, as he later told his disciples, the temptations of the flesh never troubled him again.
Despite his isolation, Benedict’s dedication to God began to attract the notice of neighbors, including a group of monks at a nearby monastery who begged him to become their leader. After refusing repeatedly he at last agreed, but warned the brothers that his austere way of life and strict adherence to a rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience might not suit them. He was right. When Benedict forced them to give up their wayward lifestyle and unvirtuous activities, they decided to murder him. But the poison they put in his wine shattered the cup after Benedict made the sign of the cross over it. He then told them to find some other abbot more suited to their ungodly desires and left them to return to his life of solitude in the forest.
But eventually, according to Gregory, Benedict left his hermitage and founded twelve monasteries, each with twelve monks in imitation of the twelve disciples who followed Jesus. Men of all backgrounds came to him to seek the monastic life, including wealthy noblemen from Rome and even a poor Goth from one of the Germanic tribes that had invaded Italy in the previous century. But Benedict’s success provoked jealousy among other Christian leaders, including a priest of a neighboring church who tried, again in vain, to poison him. When this failed, the priest supposedly sent seven beautiful young women to dance naked before Benedict’s young disciples and tempt them from the path of virtue, prompting the holy man to move his followers to a new monastery high on a mountain between Rome and Naples.
This was Casinum, today’s Monte Cassino, an ancient holy place dedicated to Apollo, where in the summit grove of trees country folk still danced in Benedict’s day to honor the old gods. In that place Benedict built a church dedicated to the memory of St. Martin of Tours, along with a shrine to St. John the Baptist. There he received visitors, reportedly including the Gothic King Totila, who tried to test Benedict’s power but repented when the holy man chastised him.
For the rest of his life Benedict worked to establish his monastery and performed many miracles, according to Gregory, including raising a young man from the dead, casting out demons, and driving off an invisible dragon
One final story Gregory relates is of Benedict’s sister Scolastica, who would come to visit him in a hut outside the monastery walls once a year. Being a holy woman, she spent the day in joyous conversation with her brother about things divine. When evening drew near and Benedict said he needed to return to the monastery, his sister begged him to stay and keep talking. He refused, so she tearfully prayed to God for a powerful rainstorm, which trapped Benedict there for the whole night.
Before his death and burial at Monte Cassino, Gregory says that Benedict wrote a rule for his monastic brothers to follow which was remarkable for its discretion and clarity of language. Gregory then recommended the Rule to anyone who wished to learn more about the character of Benedict.
The Rule of Benedict, while lacking biographical detail, can indeed tell us something of its author. He was clearly a devoted and dedicated Christian determined to establish a monastic system that was both aspirational and practical. He believed firmly in order, like any good parent setting strict rules, but always with an eye to the weakness of human nature and patient in forgiveness. His description of bickering monks and the endless challenges of monastery life show a man speaking from long and often frustrating experience as an abbot. But his good nature and humor in admitting the failings of both his fellow monks and himself make Benedict an appealing figure in the glimpses we can see of him in his Rule.
Come and Follow Me: The Beginnings of Christian Monasticism
The idea of withdrawing from the world to draw closer to God was not something Benedict invented. A chosen life of spiritual separation had existed in many parts of the world for centuries and had prompted others before Benedict to create instructions for such a calling. The genius of Benedict was to set down guidelines that were so simple and yet profound that they became the standard for ages to come.
Hindu and Buddhist monks and nuns existed long before Christianity. Since there was considerable traffic between India and the Mediterranean world since at least the days of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, it is possible that the founders of Christian monasticism were influenced by stories they had heard of the Buddha and others from the east. Greek philosophers in the western world such as the mathematician Pythagoras had also established religious communities of a monastic nature from at least the sixth century BCE. Even in Judaism, with its consistent emphasis on family and marriage, there were precedents among the Essenes of Qumran near the Dead Sea and others for withdrawal from the world to draw closer to God.
What Christians knew of any of these groups is hard to say, but it’s clear that the ascetic tradition and celibacy have foundations in the New Testament, with such stories as the withdrawal of Jesus into the desert for forty days to face the temptations of the devil and the encouragement of Paul in his letters to prefer the single life to marriage. Christians took up this challenge from the beginning, as we know from occasional references to men and women dedicating themselves to celibate service to God. Some must have sought this path alone in isolated places, but many lived with their families or in small communities, avoiding marriage and the burdens of raising children. For women this could be a radical rejection of their traditional and expected role in ancient society as wife and mother. We should not doubt their religious devotion, but for many celibacy and a spiritual embrace of the single life must have also been an escape from the dominating authority of a husband and the potential dangers of pregnancy in an age when women often died in childbirth.
The beginning of organized Christian monasticism as we think of it today was in Egypt with a man named Antony who was born into a prosperous family in the middle of the third century. One day when he was about twenty years old, he was in church and heard the words of Jesus read from the Gospel: “If you wish to be perfect, sell all that you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.” Antony took these words seriously, sold his belongings, and headed out into the desert to seek a life alone following God. In time his reputation grew and he attracted imitators who followed his model of a solitary, monastic (from Greek monos “alone”) lifestyle.
A contemporary of Antony named Pachomius also sought God in the desert, but instead of living alone founded a community of monks. Pachomius was the first to set down guidelines for the spiritual and practical lives of his followers. Other influential monastic rules were composed in the following century such as those written by Basil of Caesarea, John Cassian, and Augustine. But one document striking in its similarity to the guidelines of Benedict is a longer anonymous book known as The Rule of the Master. Benedict was certainly influenced by this work, especially in the spiritual aspects of monastic life, but The Rule of the Master regularly goes into tedious detail that Benedict avoids.
It is important to note that from the beginning women were a central part of the Christian monastic movement, even if their role has largely been ignored. The surviving stories of these women are unfortunately few and told by male authors who often had a disdain for females as innately less spiritual beings, but there are enough women mentioned to show they were important players in monastic life. The few stories about desert monastic ammas (“mothers”) such as Theodora, Sarah, and Syncletica are fascinating to read, including the grudging admiration monks show for them. These records of monastic women, including Mary the sister of Pachomius and Melania the Elder in Jerusalem, show us that women in the years before Benedict were seeking the spiritual life as eagerly as, and often more successfully than, their male counterparts.
Darkness and Light: The Early Medieval World of Benedict
Benedict was born in the last decades of the fifth century, an age in which much of western Europe was in turmoil after the collapse of Roman power. The Roman Empire had almost fallen in the third century CE from a combination of outside threats, internal disorder, and economic chaos, but beginning in 284, the emperor Diocletian reorganized imperial affairs and gave some stability to the state. Part of his plan was a return to the ancient Roman religion, which he believed had made the Empire great. He launched a persecution against new sects such as Christianity, which he felt threatened Rome. But this was a brief persecution that ended when Constantine took the throne and declared Christianity an accepted faith across the Roman world.
With Constantine, Christianity began to flourish and spread, though many people, especially in the west, still followed the old ways for many years to come. Constantine also moved the capital of the Roman Empire far to the east in Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), adding to what was already a notable decline in population and importance of the west, including Italy and the city of Rome. Emperors for the next century paid scant attention to the western part of the Empire, since most of the people, wealth, and political power lay in the east.
The Germanic tribes who moved into the western Roman lands were, for the most part, surprisingly civilized. Many of their leaders had served as mercenary officers in the Roman army and spoke at least some Latin. Some were also Christians, though inclined to the Arian form of the faith that orthodox Christians rejected. The Goths in Italy, the Vandals in North Africa, and the Franks in Gaul caused plenty of trouble for the Romans, but the invaders were generally more interested in taxes and tribute than slaughter. They were often happy to use the old Roman administration to run their new kingdoms, and some even maintained Roman law. Theodoric, the Ostrogothic and Arian Christian king of much of Italy during Benedict’s life, had been raised and educated in Constantinople as a hostage and was a fairly reasonable leader, though he wasn’t opposed to violence when it served his purposes. Other Germanic tribes, such as the Lombards who invaded Italy, were more destructive. Justinian, the Roman emperor of the east and a contemporary of Benedict, spent much of his time, his money, and the blood of his soldiers trying to reconquer Italy and the western provinces, all of which created an almost constant state of war on the peninsula during Benedict’s lifetime.
In addition to the political changes to Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries, the psychological and spiritual shift was profound. The Roman Empire that had ruled for a thousand years was gone, and the old gods who had guided the Romans to countless victories had fallen silent. Men and women were searching for answers, with many, like Benedict, turning to the Christian faith. A small minority among these embraced the more extreme form of religious devotion found in monasticism.
But life could be as harsh for the Christians of early medieval Italy as anyone else. Famine and plague swept across the land more than once with devastating effect. Raids from foreign armies were a constant threat, as were lawlessness, banditry, and slave raids. Slavery was in fact as common and brutal in Benedict’s day as it had ever been under the Caesars, with Christians having no particular objection to buying slaves for their own use. Women were without effective legal rights, and abuse was common. Marriages among those of any faith were almost always arranged by parents, with love or the happiness of the young bride not a deciding factor. Parents, in fact, had almost complete control over their children, and harsh corporal punishment was taken for granted. Sickness and disease were commonplace among the young and old alike, with infant and child mortality especially high. Illiteracy and a lack of any education were normal for most people of the day. Homelessness caused by war or the loss of livelihood was widespread. Violence was everywhere, poverty was the normal state for most, and starvation not unusual in any village or farm.
To be sure, life in Benedict’s day was not always brutal and short, but it was a difficult and dangerous time to be alive. Knowing this as we read the Rule can help us to appreciate the value of the community that Benedict was attempting to create—a place in which everyone had enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, access to education and books, and not least of all, a sense of belonging, friendship, and purpose.
How to Be a Monk: The Prayerful and Practical Rule of Benedict
Benedict divides his Rule into several dozen short chapters, each on a particular monastic topic. Some themes may not at first seem relevant to the lives most of us live, but all the chapters merit a careful reading. Benedict’s first chapter, for example, on the four types of monks is a primer for everyone on the need for community and direction in life and the dangers of spiritual narcissism.
Benedict then discusses the role of the abbot (“father”), who inside the monastery has a degree of authority that can be uncomfortable and even frightening for many readers. But Benedict wants us to learn a powerful and painful lesson about bending our own will to someone greater. Learning to obey the abbot is the first step in submitting to God. The most important rule of the monastery is that life is not about you—a message that fights against everything we cherish about individualism and the importance of self in the modern world. But the abbot also bears an enormous responsibility and the harshest judgment of anyone in the monastery. Benedict knows well the corrupting nature of power and holds the abbot to fierce accountability before the eyes of God.
Part of the check on the powers of the abbot is that he is chosen by the brothers from among themselves, not appointed by a distant bishop or king. The abbot is also required to call all the monks together for their opinion on any important decision the monastery faces, with Benedict making a point that everyone, even the youngest, will have an equal chance to be heard.
The Rule is rich with advice for a deeper spiritual life. It includes a simple but moving list of tools that that the brothers should use in pursuing good works such as: Help the poor, Love your enemies, and Do not give up on love. Benedict also includes a justly famous chapter on the twelve steps of learning humility and a moving section on the importance of silence.
In the Rule we learn about many aspects of monastic life, such as welcoming guests with joy, caring for the sick, elderly, and children, taking care of garden tools, dressing simply, dining together on tasty vegetarian meals, and embracing the liberation that comes from living in a community that has no private property. Notable also for the early medieval period is the Rule’s insistence that rank, wealth, and social standing in the outside world mean nothing inside the monastery. Princes and slaves are equal in the eyes of God.
A full quarter of the Rule focuses on organizing the eight worship services of the monastic day—a topic that may not fascinate every reader but has its own charm as we watch Benedict grapple with the practical difficulties of long winter nights and sleepy monks arriving late to services. He also spends several chapters on discipline, some of which may seem harsh to modern sensibilities, but are remarkable for the time in their forgiveness and encouragement of second (or third or fourth) chances.
Readers will discover the parts of TheRule of Benedict that speak most to them, but the whole work is a treasure trove of lessons on spiritual transformation. It is a book of humanism and liberation in the truest sense that presents life as a journey of love as we care for each other and find our way home to God.
Sing, Work, Pray: A Day in the Life of a Monk
As any visitor to a Benedictine monastery knows, the daily life of a monk or nun has a beautiful rhythm and balance to it. The day begins in darkness long before sunrise and starts with song. Before going to bed that evening, the brothers or sisters will have eaten simple meals, worked with their hands, welcomed guests, studied scripture, and—most important—gathered for praise and prayer in the monastery chapel.
For as Benedict says, the worship of God comes first.
The life of a monk in Benedict’s monastery was centered on coming together in the oratory (“place of prayer”) each day for seven worship services, in addition to a prayer vigil in the dark hours of the night. Benedict adapts this schedule from earlier monastic rules but justifies it from scripture: Psalm 119:164 (“Seven times a day have I praised you”) and verse 62 from the same psalm (“In the middle of the night I rose to praise you”).
Benedict calls these services opus Dei—“the work of God”—sometimes translated as divine office (from Latin officium “duty, task”), though I have generally used the term worship service for clarity and familiarity.
As we see in the Rule, the times of the services varied slightly throughout the year, since summer nights are shorter than those of winter, but these eight services remained a constant fixture in a monk’s daily life:
The services consist almost entirely of songs, with the reading of a few passages from the Bible and an occasional brief word from the abbot. The songs are mostly from the psalms of the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament in the Christian tradition. There are additional hymns from the New Testament and early church fathers, but the vast majority of worship in Benedict’s Rule is singing the Book of Psalms. These psalms are still important in much of Christianity today, but the focus on them to the exclusion of almost everything else in worship is quite unlike most modern church services.
And yet, when you listen closely to the psalms, you can see why Benedict chose them to be the center of monastic life and worship. The Book of Psalms consists of one hundred and fifty songs, short and long, that capture the vastness of the human experience like nothing else in literature. There are psalms of unbounded joy, abject sorrow, eternal hope, bitter despair, heartwarming community, aching loneliness, unbounded faith, spine-chilling fear, pure love, passionate hatred, heartfelt thankfulness to heaven, and fierce anger at God. In short, every emotion we might feel in our lives.
But the life of a monk was not just worship. What Benedict calls lectio divina or “divine reading” was also crucial both for a brother’s intellectual development and as a means of spiritual growth. Books were read aloud to the whole gathering at mealtimes, but private reading was an important part of every monk’s day. Much of the reading would be from the Bible—a collection of books in itself full of everything from history and theology to adventure tales and erotic poetry—but also other religious works, including biblical commentaries and writings from the first centuries of Christianity, especially books on the joys and challenges of the monastic life.
This reading gave monks a rich understanding of their faith and calling. It also made the monastery a center of literacy in an age when the ability to read and write was not as widespread as modern times. Every monk who took his vows learned to read if he wasn’t already literate when he entered the monastery. For many young men from poor families raised in a world without books, it was an unimagined opportunity that must have opened a whole new world to them.
During the forty days of Lent before Easter, each brother was given his own book from the monastery library to take with him around the monastery and read on his own—a precious gift in the days when all books were laboriously written by hand. He could even read his book in bed during quite hours as long as he didn’t disturb others, since reading in the ancient world was almost always done aloud. This emphasis on books and reading in Benedict’s Rule would give rise to the monastery scriptorium (“writing place”) of medieval centuries where books were copied and produced, a central feature in the preservation of knowledge in Europe for almost a thousand years until the invention of printing.
Aside from worship and reading, manual labor was also a central feature of monastic life. In part this was a simple necessity, as it was for anyone at the time. Monks needed to grow food to eat, a task which must have been the primary form of labor at any monastery. But there were many other jobs for the brothers to do. There were cooks and kitchen helpers, craftsmen and caretakers, teachers and those who cared for the sick and elderly among the brothers, and other jobs as well, most of which rotated among the monks on a regular basis.
Aside from the practicality of work in the monastery, an equally important aspect of a monk’s physical labor was spiritual. Benedict declares that idleness is the enemy of the soul. For as the Rule warns, a monk with nothing to do will often drift into grumbling and unproductive behavior. Useful work provided a necessary focus for the brothers. For Benedict, labor was a way to find balance and meaning in life. Mindful work was not to be mindless drudgery, but an act of meditation and of praising God.
The Lasting Influence of Benedict’s Rule
Benedict wrote his Rule at Monte Cassino, a place that was almost the end of the little book, since the monastery was destroyed by invading Lombards a few years after Benedict’s death, with the monks there barely escaping with their lives. But among the few items they managed to take with them as they fled for refuge in Rome was Benedict’s hand-written copy of his Rule.
Most of the monasteries of Italy were soon destroyed by the Lombards, so that it seemed Benedict’s dream of a community of Christians bound together by faith would die as well. But the same Pope Gregory who wrote the story of Benedict was a great believer in spreading the Gospel even while the world was falling apart around him. He sent clergy to Canterbury in England in 597 to preach to the Anglo-Saxons, probably with a copy of the Rule for the monastery they established there.
The missionaries from Rome who worked trying to convert the Anglo-Saxons encountered another group of Christians with their own monastic agenda. The Irish had been turning to the Christian faith since before St. Patrick in the fifth century, with leaders such as Brigid establishing monasteries for both men and women throughout the island. By the sixth century, the Irish were sending their own missionaries to Iona in Scotland and to England and Europe as far as Gaul, the Alps, and even into Italy.
The Irish monastic traditions were gradually replaced by the Rule of Benedict, especially after Charlemagne and his sons decided to support the Roman interpretation of Christianity over the competing Celtic version. Charlemagne even sent scribes to Rome to carefully copy the original manuscript of the Rule written by Benedict over two centuries earlier so that it might be published throughout his empire as the standard for monasteries under his patronage. A copy made from Charlemagne’s text survives today in the monastery library at St. Gall in Switzerland and is the Latin original I used in this translation.
With the sudden arrival of the Vikings, monasteries throughout Europe suffered a crushing blow, as many were destroyed and their monks killed. But in time some revived and prospered, often becoming rich with the income from surrounding property and drifting far from the austerity that Benedict preached. Reform movements, such as those of the Cistercians, brought much-needed renewal to monastic life in the Middle Ages, but the Protestant Reformation dealt a crippling blow to monasteries in northern Europe, and the rationalist emphasis of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution reduced the number of active monasteries in much of Europe to a handful.
But the light of Benedict was never extinguished. For almost fifteen hundred years, small groups of men and women have continued to follow the spiritual path laid out by their founder, though always adapting the Rule for their particular needs. Today thousands of monks and nuns around the world still hold the Rule as their primary guide to a life of prayer and spiritual growth. Every morning, through peace and war, famine and plenty, the brothers and sisters still rise early to sing the psalms and pray for guidance. Whether you come from a background of faith or not, the monasteries that follow the Rule of Benedict welcome visitors to come and join them in their song.
The Quiet Life: Ways to Read the Rule of Benedict
There are many useful approaches to The Rule of Benedict. I’ve included some excellent books featuring several of these paths in the bibliography, but a few ways stand out to me as particularly relevant and interesting.
First, of course, the Rule can be used as a guide for how to live as a Christian monk or nun in the Benedictine tradition, as it has been for centuries. Benedict himself said that any part of his guide should be changed if someone found a better way to do things, though it has stood the test of time well. Perhaps no monastery has ever followed the Rule exactly as written, but the flexibility of Benedict is part of his genius.
The Rule is also a frequent guide in churches today, Catholic and otherwise, in study sessions and retreats. Some Christian authors have used Benedict as a modern call to withdraw from what they see as an increasingly secular world threatening to people of faith, but others have taken the opposite approach and viewed Benedict as a tool for evangelism and outreach.
Benedict has found many readers in the last few decades among various religious traditions. Buddhists, notably, have read the Rule and found much in common with the teachings of the different branches of Buddhism, from Theravada to Zen. Christians in turn have used Benedict as a bridge to learn about Buddhist teachings in a dialogue in which both traditions have much to gain from each other.
But one does not need to hold any religious beliefs to profit from Benedict’s wise words. For those who would study effective business leadership or the psychology of achieving goals, the Rule is a surprisingly useful tool. But it is as a guide for anyone who seeks a quiet life of spiritual growth that Benedict shines brightest. The wisdom of silence, the joy of community, the rewards of meditation, and the transformative power of the contemplative life are waiting in Benedict for all of us.
All we need to do is listen.
Translation and Introduction copyright © 2020 by Philip Freeman
