Benedictine Obedience Defined: Obedience Part II

In my previous post I attempted to give enough of a positive picture of obedience to at least get the idea a hearing.

To continue recussitating the idea of obedience - to try to get it up on its own two feet so we can get it doing some real work - we need to flesh out a bit more of a definition.

For this work I'm turning again to the tradition of Benedictine monasticism. Where better to explore the real implications of a practice than with the supposed experts?

First, many authors point out the significance of the term's etymology. Contemporary Benedictine Esther De Waal is typical here in describing her prior assumptions and how they came to be challenged. She writes that the idea of obedience "used to present me with difficulties until I realized that it came from the word obaudiens, to listen intently, to listen to the voice of God, to hear God's voice and follow it-so that we are led along the path of God's will rather than our own." [1]

Grammatically the word is an intensification of the root word audir, to hear. So we have the word obedience meaning something like: to listen intently or perhaps intentionally. This might initially seem like a cop-out, a kind of saving interpretation. None of us think of merely listening to someone as constituting obeying them. But this objection is based on a misunderstanding. First of all, we do use the word 'listen' as a kind of synonym for 'obey' as in when children are told that they have to listen to their parents. What is meant is obviously more than that the child hear what is spoken. The parents want response; they expect obedience.

The misunderstanding, and the strong negative connotation to the idea of obedience comes from the same mistaken conflation I wrote about before where authority is equated with power. Here we see that when most people react to the idea of obedience, they are reacting to the idea of mere compliance. Instead of complying with a power under threat of force, I am differentiating here a willing obedience to a respected authority.

I remember hearing that phrase 'willing obedience' in a hymn a while back as if for the first time. It was a kind of forehead-slap moment for me. "Of course!" I remember thinking, "Obedience can still be willing!" Perhaps obedience can only be willing. Why is it that we always tend to assume obeying someone can only be in order to avoid punishment?

But while obedience is not fearful submission to power, it also is not just doing what another asks of us when we happened to want to do it anyway. The wind does not obey the voice that commands it to blow the direction it is already headed.

The reason that the mere coincident overlapping of wills is not obedience is that the whole point of obedience is growth. "Real obedience depends on wanting to listen to the voice of God in the human community, not wanting to be forced to do what we refuse to grow from." [2] If we want to grow through obedience - and if we want to grow, we must be capable of obedience - we will have to do things we don't want to do. There is no getting around this. Some things we are asked to obey and that we should obey will be distasteful. Some will of course turn out in the long run to have not been the best course of action.

Monks in the Benedictine order, the biggest and most influential in the West, do not make the vows most are familiar with: poverty, chastity and obedience. Benedictine monks are chaste and do give up owning much in the way of personal property, but their vows are: obedience, stability and conversion of life. And I think it's safe to say that the first two are aimed at the third. The point is to live in closer communion with God. Benedictines believe the way to do that is to commit to one community in one place and submit to the wisdom of that community.

But this seeming self-limitation must not be seen as oppressive but rather liberating. The first work of liberation is the liberation from the tyranny of the self to its own desires.

Another contemporary commentator makes this point well describing this first work of liberation as "the cracking of the thick crust around my 'I' and the orienting of myself to who or what has something to say to me." [3]

I think the dangers of obedience are obvious to everyone. We do not need to rehearse them here. The point to me is that it is clear where the pendulum has swung in the 21st century western world. Most of us as adults are really in no danger of willingly submitting to dangerous authorities. The very air we breathe is that of anti-authoritarianism. (The authorities now co-opt our insurection by marketing to it. The new standard of conformity is to be non-conformist. It is demanded of us that we be our own person. The only truly revolutionary stance is one of submission to an-Other who is not just any other.)

I say this is the case for adults. Where to draw the line in children is wholly another matter. We all know how the natural trust of children and their being taught to respect any adult authority can be tragically taken advantage of. Here too though it is possible to go too far. We could go so far in protecting our children from any possibility of danger that we would have damaged their ability to trust anyone. How much risk-avoidance is worth living a life of relative fear and mistrust? Part of the blame here is on the sensationalizing of the media of what really amount to very rare occurrences. The 'never talk to strangers' stuff we all had drilled into us endlessly is aimed at avoiding a vanishingly small possibility. Kids are almost never abducted by strangers but we're all afraid of it because we've all heard of the few cases where it has happened. [4]

The other serious problem is that with children a lot of what we often expect is just simple compliance. And we do often try to get this any way we can. (If you don't have kids you can't talk.) This is a thorny issue I can't solve here but let me just say that I think there is some room for growing into the willing part of true obedience. Perhaps in children the place of a fully-developed will and the rational mind capable of deciding to submit it, is filled by the loving attachment of trust and respect for the parent. I'm trying to think through my own theories of parenting so I'll have to return to this later.

Finally, it should also be obvious that willing obedience to an authority is not giving up the freedom of the will and the freedom to voice and act upon dissent. Also clear is that any Christian who is in the position of exercising authority would only do so with an eye to fostering the growth and development in freedom of the individual willing to be obedient. Exercising authority requires maturity and great self-discipline.

"The self-giving of real obedience is very clear to Benedict. When we follow the voice of the ones who call us to higher service, we put down our own concerns, allow ourselves to be led by the sights of another, treat our own best interest with a relaxed grasp. We empty ourselves out so that the presence of God can come in, tangible and present and divinely human." [5]

Being able to treat my own best interests (especially when I'm not sure of them) with a more relaxed grasp would sound many days like a little slice of heaven. Would that they were a little easier to actually lay down.


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1. De Waal, Esther. Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict p. 13

2. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p. 59

3. Derkse, Wil. The Rule of Benedict for Beginners p. 28

4. Daniel Gardner makes the case for how many of our most prevalant fears are not only irrational but downright dangerous in his book The Science of Fear. Fear of child abduction is just one example where we choose to avoid a tiny risk of a horrible event in favor of taking a much higher probability of fairly serious negative consequences like child obesity for example, because our kids aren't allowed to walk to school alone or play outside unmonitored as much as they were in the past. I heard him make his case in an exceptional interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

5. Chittister, Joan. The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages p.57

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Maximus on Money & its Relative Dangers

I remember musing in a conversation with my wife a year or two ago that there were two different ways of caring too much about money: wanting to have it in order to spend it, and wanting to have it in order to keep it. In my mind the difference was between hedonism and an obsession with security. It turns out that a 6th century Saint, Maximus the Confessor, bested me by one.

He writes that "there are three reasons for the love of money: pleasure-seeking, vainglory, and lack of faith. And more serious than the other two is lack of faith." [1]

If I remember correctly, our conversation was about the tendencies regarding the use of money encouraged in mine and my wife's respective upbringings and the relative dangers represented by each. I think most people assume that the misuse of money always equates with hedonism (and really, Maximus' category of vain-glory can be seen as a certain species of hedonism). At least this was the case for me.

It's too easy though to just look at the spendthrifts, the indulgers in decadance, the celebrities living extravagant lifestyles, and judge. I think Maximus is exactly right here. If we want to look for the most dangerous effects of money, we would do well to look at the old, retired couple, with every penny they've ever been able to pinch in the bank and well-invested, insured to the hilt, practically on death's door, but still unable to part with any of their treasure. This picture, usually deemed a respectable position to end up in, really shows a Gollum-like obsession with wealth. As the Good Book says: "where your treasure is...."

Now this is not to say that hedonism and vain-glory are not serious dangers. They are. But perhaps just because everyone agrees on this and because involvement in these vices is much more obvious, they are the relatively less dangerous tendencies to exhibit.

An excessive focus on pleasure-seeking can be a distraction from the life of faith but an over-reliance on material wealth and resources for our security goes directly to the heart of the life of faith, undermining the trust we should have in none but God.


1. Quoted in: The Monastic Way edited: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, Eerdmans 2006

Original source: Maximus the Confessor, from The Four Hundred Chapters on Love, Third Century 16-19, trans. George C. Berthold in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 63.

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Kierkegaard on Monasticism

Soren Kierkegaard is quoted as the epigraph of Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours, as saying:

"Of this there is not doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. The 'monastery' is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need..."



I love reading Kierkegaard. He's not always the easiest on his readers, but the reward is always well worth the work. He is also one of the few philosophers that regularly makes me laugh out loud. I was surprised though to read him with anything like the above positive appraisal of monasticism in the light of his emphasis on the individual's conversion experience and his trenchant critique of Christendom.

Monasticism can be two different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, things. On the one hand it can be an individual's path of intense devotion and zealous attempt at attaining perfection. This is the only thing most people picture when they imagine the life of a monk. On the other hand, at least in its oldest, largest and most influential form, the Benedictine tradition practices communal sanctification and communal salvation. It emphasizes what is true of Christian teaching in general: that there is no salvation for any individual apart from the body of believers.

I'm not sure which conception of the monastic Kierkegaard would have had in mind, but I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment on its continued necessity to those within and without its cloisters.

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Benedictine Authority Defined: Authority Part II

This is the second of a multi-installment 'series' on the idea of authority, both in general and as it relates specifically to theology and the Church. Call it, if you will, an attempt at conceptual rehabilitation.

Having begun to chew over a sense of religious authority, and reactions to it, in the last post by looking at the person of Pope Benedict XVI, I turn now to a reflection on authority as it is viewed within the community still responding to the authority of the first Benedict, the one called Saint, whose voice echoes down to us from the 6th century. In his book, Saint Benedict for the Laity, Eric Dean, a lay monastic associate writes that:

"Much of the domination we resent in our society is associated with power rather than authority. Clearly, we have largely lost our comprehension of the distinction, common to writers of the Middle Ages, that stands as one of the authentic achievements of the natural law tradition: the distinction between authority and power. Power is the simple exercise of force or the credible threat of force." (p. 14) Then, after some discussion of concrete examples of the exercise of authority vs power, Dean concludes, "It would seem that the authority persons have is inversely proportional to the amount of force they need to achieve compliance with their desires. Real authority needs no force." (p.16)

I'm not sure what the background to my thinking on the matter of authority is. Perhaps one could say that my interest in a rehabilitation of the concept is merely a psychological manifestation; a resurfacing of my relatively strict upbringing, especially as I am trying to stake out the right way to raise my own family. Be that as it may, two things have seemed relatively clear to me as long as I have been trying to wrap my head around the theological issues surrounding authority and obedience, freedom and submission.

One is that the path of a Christian life becomes almost unintelligible without some sense of both authority and its implicit companion, obedience. And two, that what people typically react to when they reject or repudiate these notions are at the very least caricatures of the concepts, or at most something different all together. It is on this second point that I find the above distinction helpful.

While Dean here doesn't provide us with a positive definition for what authority properly should be, by distinguishing authority from power, un-defining the former in terms of the latter, he does open up a lot of space, and brings us worlds closer to developing a proper positive sense of authority. (Dean further reflects on what the conflation of the two terms means in practice for everything from politics to parenting in a very illuminating fashion.) Registering the above distinction was kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I always felt there was something missing from the conversation whenever the topic of authority reared its head. Dean puts his finger on precisely the problem. Sometimes a little argument over semantics isn't such a bad place to start.

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