Chapter I: The Monastic Vocation: Wisdom or Folly?
[Benedict is] reminding us that it’s very problematic to try to be too spiritual too soon.
Rowan Williams1
A promise not always kept
“Let whoever is inexperienced turn in here” (Prov 9:4, 16, my translation). In the book of Proverbs, we find this invitation on the lips of both Wisdom and Folly.2 Their invitations are similar, presented in the same words, though the outcomes are diametrically opposed—life in one case, death in the other. So the key questions are how to distinguish wisdom and folly from each other and how free we actually are in making our choice.
The choices that determine our lives are inevitably conditioned. Absolute freedom, unbound by any constraint, remains a prerogative of God alone. We do not get to view our lives from an elevated tower, from which we can serenely contemplate all possible options and then make the best choices with utter detachment, complete neutrality, and total objectivity. Contingency plays a role in most of our life choices.
This observation is not incompatible with belief in YHWH. Certainly such faith makes us aware of a God who “probe[s] me” and “know[s] me,” who has “knit me in my mother’s womb,” and in whose book all our days are written (Ps 139:1, 13, 16). This God has a plan of salvation and desires life for each of us. This is a God who calls us. But this is also a God who takes history utterly seriously, through and through, a God who lets us take full responsibility as protagonists of our own lives and who therefore accepts that we will sometimes become tripped up by our own mistakes or negligence. This is a God who is great enough to be able to integrate completely—never pretending—our historicity, our fallibility, and even our sin.
If the call of wisdom were easily distinguishable from that of folly, there would be no problem. But the disquieting warning of the book of Proverbs is that sometimes the calls of wisdom and of folly resemble each other, to the point of being offered with identical words: “Let whoever is inexperienced turn in here.”
Leaving aside dishonest appeals from those who might try deliberately to deceive us, let us limit ourselves to considering for a moment those who claim to call in the name of wisdom. We can begin by observing that just because the one issuing the invitation says it’s offered in the name of God, that doesn’t mean it guarantees access to wisdom. Visitors to Harlem in New York City pass by buildings of many Christian churches with colorful names—First Corinthian Church, Canaan Church, New Mount Zion Baptist Church—one after another, each competing with the other. Each of them claims to offer the most authentic version of the Gospel message; each is sure it offers the genuine invitation: “Let whoever is inexperienced come here!” How can one discern which of them calls in the name of wisdom and which in the name of folly?
The boundary between wisdom and folly can become even thinner in the case of the monastic vocation. Monastic life is a response to a call. A monastery’s setting on a mountain or in a valley, its beauty, and the lifestyle that is led there all exert a charm, an attraction, a summons, and a call. A monastery grows only if new people continue to become part of it. Furthermore, it is not enough for a person to respond to this appeal once and for all. The dynamism of monastic life depends on a daily call that requires a continual response. It is a call to which one must incline one’s ear (as the prologue of the Rule of Benedict puts it) uninterruptedly: “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience” (RB Prol. 1-2).
One enters a monastery to search for God—Deum quaerere—to seek life, and to make one’s days happy: “Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: ‘Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?’ If you hear this and your answer is ‘I do,’ God then directs these words to you” (RB Prol. 14-16).
This is the promise made to a young person who knocks on the doors of a monastery. The monastic life is offered as the way of wisdom mentioned in Proverbs 9:1-6.
The truth, unfortunately, is often different. Many monasteries claim to offer wisdom but then fail to keep this promise. Anyone who knows monastic realities up close has witnessed this tragedy. How many young people enter a monastery to look for God and instead find pettiness, misery, worldliness? How many who are thirsting for meaning, guidance, and experience find themselves at the mercy of formators or guides who are incompetent, disillusioned, and sometimes even dissolute? How many seek wisdom but are unfortunately unaware of (as Proverbs 9:18 puts it) the dark aspects of the monasteries they enter? The boundary between wisdom and folly is often unclear, and the switch from one to the other can happen almost unnoticed.
So what is the meaning of such a scandal? How to reconcile such a paradox? We will proceed in stages and begin with a description of an ideal situation in which wisdom would be all on one side and folly on the other.
The school built by Wisdom
Benedictine monasticism is different from the many forms of religious life established in the early Middle Ages, which are more or less centralized and characterized by great mobility and specialization. Benedict of Nursia did not establish an order: rather, he gathered a set of principles about living an evangelical and ascetic life, the fruit of his decades of experience, into a short summary that has passed through the centuries as the Rule of Benedict. All those communities that have drawn inspiration from this Rule in various forms of life, often without any institutional link between them, have been known as “Benedictine.”
Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), in his Dialogues, presents Benedict as the heir of Jacob, Joseph, Elijah, and Elisha—friends of God formed by Wisdom who “passing into holy souls from age to age … produces friends of God and prophets” (Wis 7:27). A friend of Wisdom, Benedict set up “seven columns” (cf. Prov 9:1), not in a stone building, but by shaping the hearts of monastics according to the seven gifts of the Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (cf. Isa 11:2, Vulgate). He also literally “prepare[d] a table,” baking bread, pressing wine, cutting beef. Benedictine wisdom, summarized as “ora et labora” (“prayer and work”), manifests itself not only in the ordering of common prayer but also in that of food, sleep, manual work, and clothing. These aspects occupy most of the Rule. Everything in a monastery must speak of God—architecture, the garden, the good taste of food and wine, professionalism in work. All these aspects of life are an integral part of the pedagogy through which the monk “forsake[s] foolishness,” “lives,” and follows “the way of understanding” (Prov 9:6).
The Benedictine monastery is therefore one of the many houses built by Wisdom throughout history for the “inexperienced” and the ignorant, according to the pattern of YHWH’s characteristic way of acting: pitching a tent in the midst of a people in order to gather them in a place of refreshment, without taking them out of the world, without interrupting their pilgrimage, but offering them rest and inspiration thanks to which they can take the road again with renewed enthusiasm. The Gospel of John says that in Christ, God “made his dwelling [literally, pitched his tent] among us” (John 1:14).
More particularly, the form assumed by this tent, by the house built by Wisdom through Benedict’s ministry, is the dominici schola servitii, the “school for the Lord’s service” announced at the end of his Rule’s prologue: “Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome” (RB Prol. 45-46).
The use of the word service to indicate what is learned in this school is rich in meaning from the biblical point of view. The liturgical worship of God is sometimes called “serving” God in the Scripture (for example, 2 Sam 15:8), and the Rule in fact prescribes that “nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God”—that is, to the community’s liturgical prayer (RB 43.3). But more profoundly, God’s servant is the one whom the Lord calls to collaborate in his plan of salvation. It is a title given to Moses (Exod 14:31), David (2 Sam 7:8), the patriarchs, the prophets, the priests, and finally to the Servant par excellence of Isaiah 49–55, whose ear is opened by the Lord to make him a privileged instrument in his work of salvation (Isa 50:4-5).
The parable of monastic life embodies the whole history of salvation: in Adam we have disobeyed, and in the obedience of Christ we find the way back to the Father. “Attend to [the master’s instructions] with the ear of your heart… . The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience” (RB Prol. 1-2).
The response to God’s call is personal, but the call embraces the whole history of humanity.
That Benedict would establish a school of this service is good news, because it means that performing such service is not spontaneous or innate, but something that has to be learned. This is why we need a school—we need time, and above all we need a teacher. It is not the best and the perfect who are called to this school, but the inexperienced and the ignorant, those who need to learn.
The pedagogy of this school is that of Proverbs 9:1-6. Wisdom prepares the table, and she invites us to eat the bread and drink the wine that she has prepared. To those who are inexperienced and ignorant, she says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:9). In fact, the first thing that one is invited to discover at the home of Wisdom—that is, in the school for the Lord’s service— is precisely this: the taste for the things of God. Then there is another moment in this transition from inexperience and ignorance to wisdom: access to understanding—that is, to a new perception of oneself and the world that comes through the widening of the heart that happens when one is nourished at the table of wisdom. This self-knowledge is a keystone of Benedictine asceticism—not just any self-knowledge, but that which unfolds in the light of God’s mercy.
We can, then, summarize the strategy of wisdom as Benedict took it up: (1) to establish a school for the Lord’s service that (2) awakens one’s taste for the things of God, helps one experience the goodness of God, and in this way (3) opens up a more authentic understandi...