Another Benedict Option Post

From Rod Dreher:

A Secularist Sees The Benedict Option:
I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but a few years ago, in my book “Crunchy Cons,” I suggested that traditionalists should consider what I called “the Benedict Option” — living in variations of monastic communities for the sake of preserving certain countercultural values in an increasingly dark age. The name comes from the Benedictine monks of Western Europe, whose monasteries were oases of faith, order, and light during the Dark Ages, and eventually helped midwife the rebirth of civilization.
Cultural historian Morris Berman thinks this might be necessary. From a review of his new book “Why America Failed”; the reviewer is George Scialabba:

As a former medievalist, Berman finds contemporary parallels to the fall of Rome compelling. By the end of the empire, he points out, economic inequality was drastic and increasing, the legitimacy and efficacy of the state was waning, popular culture was debased, civic virtue among elites was practically nonexistent, and imperial military commitments were hopelessly unsustainable. As these volumes abundantly illustrate, this is 21st century America in a nutshell. The capstone of Berman’s demonstration is a sequence of three long, brilliant chapters in Dark Ages America on the Cold War, the Pax Americana, CIA and military interventions in the Third World, and in particular U.S. policy in the Middle East, where racism and rapacity have combined to produce a stunning debacle. Our hysterical national response to 9/11 — our inability even to make an effort to comprehend the long-festering consequences of our imperial predations — portended, as clearly as anything could, the demise of American global supremacy.
What will become of us? After Rome’s fall, wolves wandered through the cities and Europe largely went to sleep for six centuries. That will not happen again; too many transitions — demographic, ecological, technological, cybernetic — have intervened. The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. Still, if most humans are shallow and conformist, some are not. There is reason to hope that the ever fragile but somehow perennial traditions and virtues of solidarity, curiosity, self-reliance, courtesy, voluntary simplicity, and an instinct for beauty will survive, even if underground for long periods. And cultural rebirths do occur, or at any rate have occurred.
Berman offers little comfort, but he does note a possible role for those who perceive the inevitability of our civilization’s decline. He calls it the “monastic option.” Our eclipse may, after all, not be permanent; and meanwhile individuals and small groups may preserve the best of our culture by living against the grain, within the interstices, by “creating ‘zones of intelligence’ in a private, local way, and then deliberately keeping them out of the public eye.” Even if one’s ideals ultimately perish, this may be the best way to live while they are dying.

On his blog, Berman discusses Pitirim Sorokin, the Harvard sociologist who, 75 years ago, predicted the crisis of culture that has only deepened in our own time. Longtime readers will remember that we talked a lot about Sorokin in this space a few years ago. It might be worth revisiting Sorokin’s work, which is stunning in its prescience.
Before you go out and buy the Berman book, be aware that Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it in the NYTimes, denounced his previous volume thus: “This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.”
(Via Sullivan).

New Benedict Option Stuff

Rod Dreher has published several posts on the Benedict Option lately, which I will link here for future reference:

Tomorrow’s Christianity Today:
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove gets all Benedict Option-y:

By the end of the fifth century, when a middle-class, young Italian named Benedict left his home in Nursia to go to school in Rome, the Empire that had been centered there was in total disarray. The church whose faith had become the official religion of that Empire was in turmoil. It was in every way a time of transition. In short, it was a moment not unlike our own. Everyone knew that a new future was being born, but no one was sure just what it would look like.
In a moment of clarity, Benedict saw that the system of education that had been designed to prepare him for a world that was passing away could only lead to a dead end. While it could teach him what had worked in the past, the system did not have the resources to present a way forward. A different kind of school was needed. Benedict had a hunch that the Desert Mothers and Fathers were creating it. He went to a cave, built himself a prayer cell, and so matriculated in the “university” of the world-to-come.
We started School for Conversion out of a conviction that the challenges we face today demand an alternative form of theological education. With kids in the neighborhood, with folks inside of prisons, and with people in radical faith communities, we’ve been carving out spaces to imagine a new society in the shell of the old. Our experiments are small, but they’ve taught me something important: people are hungry—starving, even—for spaces to imagine the world-to-come. Even if they’ve never heard of him, folks today resonate with Benedict.

JWH has a new paraphrase of the Rule of St. Benedict out, so contemporary Christians can learn more easily from it. Looks pretty interesting.

Craig Bartholomew on Place

This interview has a lot of affinities with a Benedict Option future for the Church. A sample:

In your book, you not only provide a biblical and theological discussion of the concept of place, but do so in a way that addresses the crisis of place in contemporary culture. What's the nature of the crisis?

What we are experiencing in our world is a wide sense of displacement, which does not lead to human flourishing. Outside Christian circles, the literature on the crisis of place is huge, but within Christianity, it's only starting to get attention.Contemporary life roots against this deep implacement through the speed of culture, technology, the automobile, and the state of economics. The middle class is always on the go through places and are not generally deeply rooted in a particular place.When I travel I have opportunities to see new places, but many are all the same corporate chain stores that we have here in Hamilton. Everything is monochrome. All the houses look the same, and houses are not viewed as homes but as assets. Wendell Berry wrote that "a house for sale is not a home." It is not wrong to move, but if we want to flourish as humans, the house must become a home, not an economic asset.I want to wake Christians up to the crisis and have them take off their blinders. We are out of touch with what is going on. Christians haven't led the way on this issue. Non-Christians are capable of enormous insight and in a sense, we have to catch up. 

What contributes to Christians' blinders? 

The diagnosis is that we have lost a robust doctrine of creation. Place is rooted in the doctrine of creation. If we recover that doctrine of creation and see the wonderful redemption in Christ as God recovering his purposes for his whole creation, then suddenly all these issues—like city, home, gardening, and farming—are spiritual and thus not second-rate.Of the several hundred thousand churches in the United States, many are property owners. Just imagine if each of these churches attended closely to their property as a place and develop it in healthy—not necessarily expensive—ways. This would make a major contribution to the commons of our culture and bear plausible witness to Christ. Just as the creation constantly declares God's goodness and power (Psalm 19), so too our places would continually bear witness to this extraordinary God who has come to us in Christ.

If my wild idea for moving to a certain place and in effect "colonizing" it does not work, the next best thing is to flourish where we are at and sink deep roots into a place, rather than forever longing to be somewhere else - Florida, Arizona, or wherever.

Theoretical Words via Leithart

Theoretical words:

Eric Gregory offers this wise counsel: “Words do not work the same way in normative theorizing as they do in historical inquiry. It is enough that ‘Donatist,’ ‘Pelagian,’ and “Manichean’ exist as live options in moral, political, and religious discourse – even if Augustine or later storytellers invented them in order to coordinate doctrine with their experience of God in Christian faith and practice.  These words, and the narrative scripts they signify, provide broad classifications for a range of commitments.”

Historical study has an important role in helping “dislodge settled grooves of thought and make us skeptical of the stories we tell.  They can show the normative consequences of how we construct intellectual histories. They can also challenge us with an Augustine we thought we already knew by helping us understand the world behind the texts.”  But also those uses don’t rob terms like “Stoic,” “Platonic” or “Augustinian” of their conceptual usefulness, especially in “normative theorizing.”

Dreher Follows up on the Crunchy Cons

The article is here.

As Pope Benedict XVI has said about believing Catholics in secularized Europe: “I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.” So it must be with us crunchy cons. What else is there?

R.V. Young on the Benedict Option

My friend Scott passed along this article to me. The conclusion of the article says:

At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre remarks that the world is waiting not for Godot but for a new St. Benedict. When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict upon his election to the papacy, an important motive may well have been to inspire a renewal of the civilizing work of Benedictine monasteries amidst societies in cultural decline during the anarchy of the Dark Ages of the first millennium. Perhaps a new “Benedictine moment” is already at work during our current era of cultural decline, carried out quietly and modestly by dozens of small liberal arts colleges, many of them Catholic or Protestant, by private preparatory schools and high schools, by institutes and foundations dedicated to nurturing the Western tradition, and by home-schooling parents and associations. The monks inspired by St. Benedict withdrew from a corrupt, chaotic world to do their work of restoration; the small traditional centers of liberal learning in our time are regarded with disdain—if noticed at all—by the progressive elites who dominate the decadence and disorder that we observe all around us. Nevertheless, the seeds planted in obscure corners may one day flourish, and the meek may indeed inherit the earth, as modernity at length completes its slow disintegration, displaced by a renewal of tradition.

This fits in well with a lot of our thinking on this blog. In other words, small pockets of people preserve the classical Christian heritage through dark times. I must confess however, that my own thoughts on the Benedict Option and the way I envisioned it (moving to one location and 'taking over' a town culturally) have moved into a bit of despair.

I would like to believe that a move towards an intentional parish with a vision of the Benedict Option is possible, but it runs into the realities of everyday life that frustrate it. Jobs, family, commutes, and so on militate against establishing a new community like this. What is ultimately required is a critical mass of people with the same vision who are willing to make big sacrifices to make something happen, and I don't know that such a vision is necessary. Perhaps we do better to flourish where we are and attempt to build institutions that will last.

Thoughts on Christian Community

. . .from Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author and activist in the 'new monasticism' movement:

Christian Community w/Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.