A letter from a Benedictine monk

A Letter from a Benedictine monk the weapons of obedience i: prudence

Calx Mariae is pleased to publish the third in a series of letters from a Benedictine monk. Each letter discusses one of the most important virtues and principles in the Rule of St. Benedict – the rule on which the Western monastic tradition and Christian civilisation in Europe were founded.

In the Prologue of his Rule, St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe writes: “We have therefore to establish a school of the Lord’s service, in the institution of which we hope we are going to establish nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. But if, prompted by the desire to attain to equity, anything be set forth somewhat strictly for the correction of vice or the preservation of charity, do not therefore in fear and terror flee back from the way of salvation of which the beginning cannot but be a narrow entrance. For it is by progressing in the life of conversion and faith that, with heart enlarged and in ineffable sweetness of love, one runs in the way of God’s commandments, so that never deserting His discipleship but persevering until death in His doctrine within the monastery, we may partake by patience in the suffering of Christ and become worthy inheritors of His kingdom.”

After looking at humility and obedience in the Rule of St. Benedict, in this edition we continue with the virtue of prudence. May these reflections help us to fulfil the duties of our state in life.

ST. BENEDICT SENDING MAURO TO FRANCE AND PLACIDO TO SICILY (1540). BARTOLOMEO NERONI. FRESCO FROM THE LIFE OF ST. BENEDICT IN THE GREAT CLOISTER OF THE BENEDICTINE MONASTERY OF MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE IN TUSCANY.

In my last letter I spoke about the virtue of obedience and its importance in the teaching of St. Benedict. Our holy father sees the whole of monastic life as an exercise in obedience to God, so that we may return to Him through that very obedience. He recognises, however, that such intense and lifelong obedience is no easy task for fallen man who has become acquainted with disobedience; indeed, who has solidly befriended this enemy through long and extensive familiarity. To be separated from this disobedience, and, moreover, to vanquish it as a sworn foe, will require a pronounced war, and thus St. Benedict admonishes the monk to take up the mighty and marvelous weapons of obedience.

Let us reflect on the nature of these weapons of obedience. What is clear is that they help us succeed in being obedient, and that without them we easily fall into disobedience. The disobedience of our first parents is thus instructive for us in this regard. In Genesis we read that prior to Eve’s sin she was deceived by the serpent: “And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Upon hearing and accepting this lie of the devil, this pernicious manipulation of the truth, “the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat.”

We see three things that concurred in this disobedience. First, the woman’s intellect was deceived; second, her bodily desire was kindled; third (a point which is not explicitly mentioned by Sacred Writ but which can easily be deduced), she lacked the necessary strength to repel the temptation so as to be faithful to God. The cause of her disobedience, therefore, as well as that of her husband, was threefold: an incorrect and deceived understanding, an inordinate desire, and a sluggish will whose dynamism had been sapped by sloth. We can surmise that she would have been obedient had she rather had an accurate understanding of the truth and a will that was both free from inordinate desires and sufficiently strong enough to overcome the threat the serpent’s temptation posed to her blessedness, which consisted in friendship with God.

The foregoing analysis helps us to understand the human soul. It is, indeed, endowed with three capacities or aspects: the intellectual, the desiring, and the spirited. The intellectual part exercises the blessed gift

DETAIL FROM ADAM AND EVE (1526). LUCAS CRANACH THE ELDER. COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF ART, LONDON. PUBLIC DOMAIN

of reason; it determines what is to be done or sought and thus should steer the other two parts of the soul, as Plato and other philosophers taught long ago. The desiring part of the soul is the seat of the wants and yearnings that arise from the God-given instinct for preservation of self and species as well as the desire for personal fulfilment and happiness. The spirited part of the soul, finally, is the seat of the vitality, energy and drive that impel a person to overcome the obstacles that either impede the acquisition of some good or threaten its own well-being. When these parts of the soul are properly ordered – when they work well and in harmony with each other so as to favour the health and happiness of the person – then such a person is virtuous. Each part of the soul, furthermore, has a particular virtue that corresponds to it; these are known as the cardinal virtues since they are the hinges (cardo in Latin means hinge) upon which our whole moral activity turns. Thus, the virtue that orders the intellectual part of the soul is prudence, the virtue that orders the desiring part of the soul is temperance and the virtue that orders the spirited part of the soul is fortitude. And since no man is an island, as the saying goes, but lives in relation to others, the virtue that orders our relationships with others is called justice. These virtues, then, can rightfully be called those mighty and marvelous weapons that enable us to succeed in our endeavor to obey God.

Let us now focus on the first, and most important, of these virtues, that of prudence. The Latin adjective prudens is actually a contraction of the longer word providens, which means far-seeing, and thus the very word for prudence, prudentia, is linked with providentia, with providence. It is therefore a virtue that gives us a birds-eye, or better, God’s-eye view of reality, allowing us to deduce and intuit the effects of various actions. St. Benedict mentions this virtue by name in Chapter 61 when discussing the reception of visiting monks. It sometimes occurs that a monk from another monastery may notice problems or difficulties that he may be able to help with; in the case that he should “with all humility and love make some reasonable criticisms or observations”, St. Benedict admonishes the abbot to “prudently consider” (tractet prudenter) the monk’s advice, for God may have sent him for this very purpose. We see how an essential element of prudence consists in listening to and learning from others, in seeing all men as potential channels of God’s wisdom, a point St. Benedict underlines in Chapter 3 when he says that “often the Lord reveals what is better to the younger” members of the community.

Later in Chapter 64, when discussing the kind of man the Abbot should be, he says, “He must hate faults but love the brothers. When he must punish them, he should use prudence (prudenter agat) and avoid extremes; otherwise, by rubbing too hard to remove the rust, he may break the vessel. He is to distrust his own frailty and remember not to crush the bruised reed (Is. 42:3). But this we do not mean that he should allow faults to flourish, but rather, as we have already said, he should prune them away with prudence and love (prudenter et cum caritate) as he sees best for each individual.” The emphasis here is that prudence is essentially the mean between extremes, and that this mean, this right measure, will change from person to person and from situation to situation.

But the importance of the virtue of prudence in the Rule of St. Benedict can best be gleaned by considering the two virtues that are inseparably connected and, indeed, synonymous with it: discretion and wisdom. The Latin word discretio comes from the verb discerno, which means to separate, distinguish or judge; discretion is thus that aspect of prudence that makes the necessary distinctions that enable us to judge rightly, and it is under this name, i.e. discretion, that the monastic tradition has most zealously promoted the virtue of prudence. St. Benedict is an heir of this tradition, and he sets forth his precious inheritance most clearly in the same Chapter 64 that we have already visited. When speaking of the Abbot he says, “whether the task he assigns concerns God or the world, he should be discerning and moderate (discernat et temperet), bearing in mind the discretion of holy Jacob, who said: If I drive my flocks too hard, they will all die in a single day (Gen. 33:13). Therefore, drawing on this and other examples of discretion, the mother of virtues, he must so arrange everything that the strong have something to yearn for and the weak nothing to run from.”

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this passage. In it St. Benedict has distilled, and passed on, some of the most essential of all monastic insights. The immediate source for this passage is the second conference of St. John Cassian, which is entirely dedicated to discretion. The monastic authority on whose teaching this conference bases itself is none other than St. Anthony the Great, the first and father of all monks. We are told that on one occasion all

DETAIL FROM ST. ANTHONY ABBOT TEMPTED BY A HEAP OF GOLD (C.1435), BY MASTER OF THE OSSERVANZA. METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK. PUBLIC DOMAIN

the fathers of the desert were gathered together to discuss monastic perfection, and the virtue that most conferred this perfection; some considered the chief virtue to be fasting, others solitude, others thought it consisted in silence, while yet others hospitality. At length Anthony himself stood up and said:

“All these things which you have mentioned are indeed needful, and helpful to those who are thirsting for God, and desirous to approach Him. But countless accidents and the experience of many people will not allow us to make the most important of gifts consist in them. For often when men are most strict in fasting or in vigils, and nobly withdraw into solitude, and aim at depriving themselves of all their goods so absolutely that they do not suffer even a day's allowance of food or a single penny to remain to them, and when they fulfil all the duties of kindness with the utmost devotion, yet still we have seen them suddenly deceived, so that they could not bring the work they had entered upon to a suitable close, but brought their exalted fervor and praiseworthy manner of life to a terrible end. Wherefore we shall be able clearly to recognise what it is which mainly leads to God, if we trace out with greater care the reason of their downfall and deception. For when the works of the above-mentioned virtues were abounding in them, discretion alone was wanting, and allowed them not to continue even to the end. Nor can any other reason for their falling off be discovered except that as they were not sufficiently instructed by their elders they could not obtain judgment and discretion, which passing by excess on either side, teaches a monk always to walk along the royal road, and does not allow him to be puffed up on the right hand of virtue, i.e., from excess of zeal to transgress the bounds of due moderation in foolish presumption, nor allows him to be enamored of slackness and turn aside to the vices on the left hand, i.e., under pretext of controlling the body, to grow slack with the opposite spirit of luke-warmness. For this is discretion, which is termed in the gospel the eye, and light of the body, according to the Savior’s saying: The light of your body is your eye: but if your eye be single, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye be evil, your whole body will be full of darkness (Mt. 6:22-23): because as it discerns all the thoughts and actions of men, it sees and overlooks all things which should be done…”

St. John Cassian concludes:

“And so by the judgment of the blessed Anthony as well as of all others it has been laid down that it is discretion which leads a fearless monk by fixed stages to God, and preserves the virtues mentioned above continually intact, by means of which one may ascend with less weariness to the extreme summit of perfection, and without which even those who toil most willingly cannot reach the heights of perfection. For discretion is the mother of all virtues, as well as their guardian and regulator.”

Discretion, as we have seen, is that virtue by which we avoid excess and extremes and judge things aright; as a man practices discretion over time and acquires experience, his discretion matures and becomes wisdom, which is the knowledge that comes from experience and years, a knowledge that is less discursive and more intuitive, less theoretical and more connatural. It is this virtue, wisdom, the mature and refined expression of prudence, that St. Benedict desires to see in his monks, above all in the Abbot. The monk who listens to and obeys the detailed advice St. Benedict gives in the Prologue is thus compared to the wise man of the Gospel who built his house on the rock; in the eleventh step of humility we are encouraged to be brief in our speech, for “a wise man is known by his few words”; as we attend to God in the Divine Office we are admonished to “sing wisely”, i.e. so that the thoughts of our mind are in harmony with what we sing;1 the Abbot

is to deal with brothers who are spiritually sick as a “wise physician”;2 and finally, wisdom must animate the officials of the monastery, especially the cellarer and the porter (who must be a senex sapiens – a wise elder), for “the house of God should be in the care of wise men who will manage it wisely.”3

If wisdom, as a perfected form of prudence and discretion, is such a powerful virtue, how can we acquire and grow in it? The fathers’ response is twofold. First of all, it is not something we can acquire on our own merits; it a gift of God, indeed, it is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, and in its train follow understanding, counsel and knowledge, those other gifts of divine grace that raise merely human prudence to the level of a supernatural habitusor aptitude. But we can prepare ourselves to receive this gift, and since we are dealing with the virtue that discerns what is true and correct, we must first prepare ourselves for it by learning the truth about ourselves, that is, by an accurate self-knowledge, which is nothing other than humility. We are thus brought full-circle to chapter 7 of the Rule and the steps of humility. Moreover, the fathers are unanimous in their view that nothing so thwarts the acquisition of wisdom as do pride and vainglory, those perennial enemies of truth which, because of their insatiable desire for exalted personal excellence or uninterrupted human praise, blind one’s eyes to the reality about oneself, and consequently, about reality itself.

Pray earnestly for the gift of prudence! Flee from pride and vainglory so that you may be found worth of receiving such a gift! I leave you with the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who has given us a beautiful prayer to Christ, the Wisdom of God, in order to obtain the gift of Wisdom. ENDNOTES:

1. Rule of St. Benedict, n.19 2. Rule of St. Benedict, n.27-28 3. Rule of St. Benedict, n.53

CONCLUDING PRAYER OF SERMON 50 ON THE CANTICLE OF CANTICLES

by ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

O Wisdom, who powerfully encompass Thy creation by establishing and containing all things and sweetly arrange all beings by fulfilling and ordering their desires; so direct our actions that we may faithfully carry out what our temporal circumstances demand, and so dispose our affections that we may love as your eternal truth requires, so that each one of us may securely glory in Thee and say, “He set in order charity in me”. For truly, O Christ, Thou art the power and the wisdom of God, the Bridegroom of the Church, our Lord and God blessed forever and ever. Amen.

O Sapiéntia, quae attíngis a fine usque ad finem fórtiter in instituéndis et continéndis rebus et dispónis ómnia suáviter in beándis et ordinándis afféctibus: dírige actus nostros prout nostra temporalis necéssitas poscit, et dispone afféctus nostros, prout tua véritas aetérna requírit, ut possit unusquísque nostrum secúre in te gloriári et dícere: quia ordinávit in me caritátem. Tu es enim Dei virtus et sapiéntia, Christus Sponsus Ecclésiae, Dóminus noster, Deus benedíctus in saécula. Amen.