So then the rest of the lectures in this series will be on Chapter 7 of the Rule of Benedict on humility. I will read a passage which runs from verse 5 to verse 9, so that we all are on the same page, and you know what I'm driving at, because this is a very large chapter. I mean, it's 70 verses long, so. Accordingly, if you... Exaltation in heaven... to which we climb by the humility of this present life, then by our ascending actions, we must set up that ladder on which Jacob in a dream saw angels descending and ascending.

[01:11]

Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility. Now, the ladder erected in our life on earth is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts, the Lord will raise it to heaven. We may call our body and soul the sides of this ladder, into which our divine vocation has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend. They call this talk Up the Down Staircase.

[02:15]

There was a little book written by a Brooklyn school teacher or somebody like that back I think about in the 60s called Up the Down Staircase. The basic source, literary source, of the ladder of humility is a passage in John Cashin, Institute 4 and Section 39, which speaks of ten signs of humanity, in vices, he calls them. These signs are not presented by Cashin as successive steps in a program of spiritual progress. They are interchangeable.

[03:18]

They could be added to. It seems as if they are just sort of ten out of hundreds that he could have mentioned. The implication of Cassian's remark at this point is as follows. if I understand it correctly. If you notice these kinds of things happening in your life, happening to you, and if you find yourself behaving or reacting in these ways, you may be making some progress in humility. So these are experiential signposts. Now, from this set of signs, Benedict, copying the rule of the Master almost verbatim, substitutes a twelve-rung ladder.

[04:36]

Cassian's elements are utilized with a few alterations, but now they are transformed into an instrument of definite progression. A ladder, after all, is something that you cannot use without hard effort. If you're recovering from a coronary or something, they don't recommend you climb ladders. Each step transcends the preceding one. The image of a ladder or staircase is much stronger, I think, than Cassian's vague signs, but it also brings with it some liabilities. And I think that the problem, the problems start with the biblical source itself.

[05:51]

Now, when I speak of problems, I mean, I either want to say that I know better than Benedict, or I could have written a better rule, or something like that. But anyway, I think it's interesting, though, to follow these things through the... sort of winding pathways that they take. And the biblical reference is, of course, Jacob's Ladder in Genesis 28-12. In fact, the original text Jacob's ladder in Genesis says something quite different from what we find claimed in RB 7 and 5 to 9, as I just read. Benedict wants monks to climb this ladder, but Jacob sees angels going up and down.

[07:01]

They are heavenly beings, messengers of God. and we can say probably God himself. You know, you have this reluctance to speak of God, and so they tend to speak in euphemisms or, you know, heavenly intermediaries and so on. But the point is that in Genesis, clearly the one going up and down is not human. And it's certainly not a ladder to heaven in the way we speak because the early Jews did not believe in heaven or an afterlife, at least not in the ordinary sense. That does appear, of course, in the later part of, you know, as we get toward Christ.

[08:08]

early Judaism, but not in the book of Genesis. Dubugwe, in a little book that he has published recently called Benedict Speaks, I don't know what the English is, secti sandawa, makes this comment. Dubugwe's remark is, To give us an unhoped-for hope of going to God required nothing less than the ascension of the Son of God made man. So, okay, that's a pious thought at this point. I think that we ought to be sensitive to the fact that Jacob's ladder has been transformed into something else.

[09:09]

I think, though, that the confusion, perhaps, of Benedict's Ladder is not just in its use of the Bible, because, after all, the church fathers feel free to use the Bible rather creatively, and so on. So that's not anything unusual. I mean, I think that when we inspect Benedict's staircase or his ladder, we find out that it doesn't go anywhere. There are things about this ladder that would, if you run an earthly ladder this way, it would be a problem. The steps are of rather unequal importance and weight.

[10:13]

Step one is enormous. It's about 30 verses out of 70, you see. So that's a huge step. And then four is also highly developed step. Twelve is also highly developed. So those three steps are by far the greatest steps. in development. Some of the steps are only one or two verses. In other words, what I'm questioning is whether or not there is any kind of clear progression in the latter. Now, some people certainly think there is. I mean, there have been extensive treatises written based on a certain idea. This is the kind of progression that we have in the ladder. I know Father Coleman from St.

[11:19]

Minard had a whole series of lectures in which, you know, he made nice use of psychiatry or psychology and so forth, and he worked this ladder out in terms of human development and so on. However, I think, I don't believe it I know it's a tremendous beautiful house that is designed but I don't think you can live in it the gray says he cannot he cannot see the progression either and if he can't see it so there is that that problem if you look at the steps and what they actually teach each one You wonder, where is this going? What is the logic? I can tell you that it appears that the steps lead from interior to exterior.

[12:21]

In other words, the last steps are more about exterior comportment and the earlier ones are more attitudinal. So what's the progress there? For Cashin, that would certainly be regress, because Cashin, I think, one of Cashin's great projects is to spiritualize religion, and especially monastic religion. Still, I can also have to admit that Jacob's ladder is a fitting ladder symbol here, precisely because it is not a one-way street. The angels, after all, are moving up and down, not a one-way ladder, not an escalator.

[13:26]

Benedict needs this dual movement because he's trying to illustrate a gospel passage. He's commenting basically on Luke 14, 11. The man who humbles self shall be exalted. You get that paradoxical idea. and the one who exalts self shall be humbled. So you need a two-wheel ladder for that. To grow up, you must go down, he says. The spiritual life is not like ordinary models of linear progress. So he does himself relativize this model this does not however mean in Benedict's mind that there is no progress in the spiritual life in fact I think at least my reading of Kashim and Benedict is that they did indeed conceive of the spiritual life as

[15:00]

an ascent, that's A-S-C-E-N-T, not A-S-S-E-N-T. English is a terrible language, isn't it? So it's an uphill progression that I think there's that idea in both of those writers Of course, this ascent idea, which, after all, really goes back to Greek spirituality and especially to Alexandria, to Clement and Origen, it can refer to a kind of platonic escape from the physical or the earth to the heavenly or to the spiritual.

[16:01]

There's perhaps that problem, you know, that's kind of Neoplatonic spirituality, and so that's one consideration. But here, all I want to say is that to me it's interesting that there is movement. It is not a question of stasis. It is not even just maintenance of the status quo, sort of hanging on for dear life to a rung on the ladder, you know, and if you can just hang on to that darn ladder, you'll be saved. Perhaps in your mind, you have got the ladder of John Clemican and some of the, perhaps the pictures, the wonderful, Greek icon of this 30-step ladder with these monks crawling up and down, and some of them are falling off right down into hell.

[17:08]

There's flames that are coming up. It's a wild ladder that Climacus has got. His whole treatise is based on this idea. I've already commented that passion signs do not seem to go anywhere and are not meant to do so. His basic idea, at least in this passage, is that the monastic life ought to move us from fear to love. Well, I don't know, I sort of contradict myself at this point, don't I? Yeah, I'll have to, that's not very logical, what I just said. Yeah, the basic movement in that part of Kashin is from fear to love.

[18:17]

The signs themselves in that section are not a progression, but they're just one unit, see? But there is progression from unit to unit. And here's the way it goes. He says, number one, the fear of the Lord can cause us to abandon our possessions and knock on the monastery door. Okay, so that the fear of the Lord causes us to come to the monastery. The monastic life itself should be a life of humility characterized by certain signs. And it should produce a person who spontaneously loves the good for itself. So there's already three stages. Fear of the Lord, monastic humility, and the love of the good for itself.

[19:22]

Now, Cashin will use different vocabulary for these stages. When he does think in stages, so I don't want to present him as any kind of a static thinker. But again, the The steps of humility and caution are not a progression. This grr or this ending, arrival at the good for itself, is a curious thing and I think a kind of terrible anti-climax, perhaps not in the context of Cassian's writing at that point in the Institute.

[20:22]

But, you know, to talk about the Christian monastic life culminating in a love for the good in itself is strange. Benedict and the master fear that they must revise this. They have to change this. We are certainly grateful to Benedict for introducing at this point Christ. You see, we're not just arriving at some kind of philosophic goal, the good in itself, but Christ. We can argue a lot, perhaps, over Cashin's ideas about fear and love, and I will be doing that in subsequent conferences. Or we could argue about his strategy for movement from one to the other.

[21:23]

But nevertheless, I think that we should be grateful to Cashin and the whole Alexandrian school of spirituality for the idea that the spiritual life... in itself, I mean, ought to be dynamic. If it's working, if it's healthy, there ought to be dynamism. Really, that's one of the things I do believe that makes Cashin attractive to a Western mind and a modern person. Because dynamism and progress It's one of the key ideas of life in modern time. Change. Progress. You know, we've got good reasons to question that.

[22:36]

Things are not getting better and better every day. Science has not brought us utopia. But I don't think that a modern person... I think it's very hard for us to live without some kind of sense of progress. I might mention that that's one of the curious quirks in this progression of Cashin, the Master, and Benedict. Because... The master, at least as I read, the rule of the master, really lacks that sense at all. He does not hold out much of a hope for the ordinary person in terms of progress in this world. I mean, he thinks in terms of eschatology.

[23:39]

You know, you will... move on to another stage if you mind your P's and Q's but as far as this light goes don't expect to make any progress at all now he doesn't say that flat out but the master if you look there's certain key texts where he he makes disparaging remarks about ordinary monks and basically they are nerds there's nothing to hope for it's just except if they will put themselves in the hands of a guru and do whatever he says then they've got some hope but if they sort of fall back on their own capabilities they're lost and that goes for all of us so the master is really a static thinker as far as I can see

[24:40]

And then Benedict, you see, seems to pick up again on Cassian's dynamism. He sort of leapfrogs backward and picks up that Alexandrian dynamism. I've done quite a bit of writing and thinking about this point recently. I think that in the rule of Benedict, it even gets worked out in rather concrete terms. with ideas like running actually the verb curare occurs quite a bit in Benedict's rule and in some surprising places and I notice the translators have backed off from some of those in some of those passages where they will talk about hustling or running they will just talk about you know they will use sort of euphemisms, because it seems a little embarrassing to have these monks running around all over the place.

[25:51]

We were told, you know, in the novitiate, when the master would catch us racing down a hall or something, or whatever he said, festina lente, brother, meaning hurry slowly, and we couldn't quite figure out how to do that. And it was a very subtle idea. But in the R.B., there's quite a bit of this talk about rush to do this and let him hurry and run over here to do this. Even the abbot is shown in a couple of places running. And we think abbot shouldn't run because they're never late. How can the abbot be late? We can't start until he shows up. So, okay. All right. I think that this atmosphere, though, is more pervasive in the rule of Benedict than we might have noticed.

[26:55]

One of the things that I tried to do with my new translation is to bring out some of that. It's always a question for a translator as to how literal you should be with some of these things, because clearly... there's transferred sense or metaphorical language and so forth has to be taken into account but I've tried to make it pretty concrete it seems to me that this business of dynamic spirituality is one area where we have got a rather considerable difference with the Protestants, at least some Protestants. I have spent quite a bit of my time, or I used to, doing theology with the Lutherans, because the upper Midwest is extremely Lutheran.

[28:09]

And the Lutherans, I have a lot of trouble with the notion of spiritual growth. As soon as you mention even spirituality, a lot of the clergy, their hair starts to stand on end like they're an electric storm. They've got a built-in fear of this idea. I think their attitude comes from the reformers who, after all, emphasize mainly the primacy of grace and the radical insufficiency of human effort. All of that is true enough, but if the result is to undercut any idea of spiritual progress for

[29:12]

for the person, I think that it's very problematic. And I've asked them, frankly, you know, really how they can approach modern congregations and modern people who certainly must think in terms of progress. and what kind of hope they hold out for people. It's been a hard thing. It's been a disappointment for me because I taught for 22 years in a program for the continued education of the Lutheran clergy, and I tried to read the Greek fathers and some of these texts with them, and they were very resistant at some of these ideas.

[30:25]

Frankly, Gregory of Nyssa, whose very dynamic spirituality. And even though on the highest level, the Lutheran and Catholic theologians have come to some meeting of minds about grace and free will and so on. I find that the ordinary clergy, who by the way are very well educated, have got that attitude that there's really not much we can do in the terms of progress. On the other hand, I think that we have to admit that sometimes Catholics have made it sound like there is some kind of clear progression, that the route is clear and the steps are obvious and all we've got to do is keep climbing and you're okay.

[31:36]

I think we have to admit that the process is deeply mysterious. and not at all easy to track. That is the progression of the Spirit. When Cashin and Benedict and the Master list some of these awful experiences, such as serious persecution, disgrace, rejection, failure, anonymity, as stages on the way, I wonder if they aren't warning us, they're never really sure of what God is doing with you. Because these ideas are so paradoxical, you know,

[32:38]

And so, even though the modern mind loves this progression, when you see the progressions, the stages in the RB7, they're scandalous, some of them. We never really know what God is doing with us. It might be latrine duty. It might be utter bliss. It might be the Red Sox, winning the first series since 1918. It's hard to know exactly where we're at. I mean, Boston would be ecstatic. It would definitely have the greatest religious experience, you know. But, what's it all mean, you know? what it seems like, God has got a plan for me and for us. I assume that God is hard at work serving me, and if I am open to whatever form it may take, then there is growth, then there is growth.

[34:00]

So, anyway, this conference was mainly about that issue, that there is growth held out to us, but it's not clear what it is.

[34:16]

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