I was working on the rule of St. Benedict for some time. He was used to spare time as editor of the American Benedictine. coming to us today to have a great experience on the wall. I think probably it'd be best to say a few words of autobiography before I start. I've had a monk since I was just a young guy, since 1956. And we were a typical Benedictine monastery, American Benedictine monastery, up until 1971 or so when we had to close our school.

[01:17]

And we're the only monastery in our congregation now without a school, which caused... you know, quite a bit of disruption in the community, I suppose. For some people, it was the end of their life, and for me, it was the beginning of my life, because I found schoolwork rather constricting. I couldn't make trips to upper New York State. And at that time, I was able to... get away to school in Europe and to specialize in monastic studies. I had the good fortune of working with people like Vauguay and Gribamont and Leroy and so forth at San Anselmo. Since that time, well, since 1982, I've been the editor of the reviewer.

[02:21]

That takes about a third of my time, I suppose. I spend about another third of my time picking potatoes and sweeping stairs and stuff like that, and trying to be a monk. Now, I'm not sure that it's well known, but all of these talks are going to be on the subject of humility. And my confers thought that was pretty funny. The very idea of me talking about humility was a pretty good joke all the way around. Most of my material will be on the Rule of Benedict, specifically chapter 7 on humility. But I'd like to spend some time here at the beginning laying down some background from antiquity, especially from the Scriptures, on this question.

[03:24]

I've got some stuff that's not original, but it has got the advantage that it's not very well known, and it's probably going to come to most of you as something new. It did to me. Quite a bit of what I've got to say here is from a book called Humility, The Solidarity of the Humiliated. It's by a German scholar named Klaus Wengst. The book is about 10 years old. It was written in the eastern half of Germany. He is a Marxist scholar, and that comes through to some extent in his material. It's a fairly angry book, I would say. But I think that, you know, to me, it seems like it's pretty accurate.

[04:29]

Also, there's material in here from this big article in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité by P. Adnes. That's one of those huge, endless articles in the Dictionnaire on humility. And this is the part on the Bible. I don't suppose too many of you spend your days and nights reading the Dictionary. I imagine you've got it. Looking at your library, you think you've got everything. It's really one of the nicest monastic libraries I've ever seen. I mean, the whole ambiance, and I can see from the collection that it's first class. But this question of humility, to me, in regard to ancient times, is quite interesting because I think it's an example of a Christian value, Judeo-Christian value, which really does not come from the Greco-Roman world at all.

[05:44]

make a big deal about this about you know that there was a clear demarcation it was a kind of Protestant idea I think that look the Bible is not Platonism the Bible is a different world it's the world of Jewish thought and you don't want to confuse these two things however I think that a lot of recent research has shown that Greek ideas had quite a bit of influence on Palestine. The line between these two worlds is not nearly as clear as we thought. There is a lot of Greek thought in the New Testament. One of the things that I think is most interesting, the archaeologists are now shown that Jesus lived within five miles of Sepphoris, a Greek town of about 15 or 20,000 people.

[06:53]

And they are excavating Sepphoris every summer. It's very possible that Joseph and Jesus were construction workers at Sepphoris. Probably everybody in the whole area was involved in building that place. It was a... a Greek town, and that indicates that probably Jesus spoke some Greek, and that Greek thinking was not all that alien in Galilee. Okay. However, getting back to my point, when you look in, for example, a Greek dictionary, or even any Greek dictionary, a classical Greek dictionary, If you look for the word humility, you won't find it. Or at least you won't find any single adjective or noun that corresponds to our Christian idea.

[07:57]

And that right away I think is a good clue that the idea as a concept is simply not present in their minds. The Greeks it's true, have ideas that are close, but they are not unitary. What do I mean? The ordinary Greek term for humility, tapinos, T-A-P-E-I-M-O-S, tapinos, is a... is not complementary if you applied that word to somebody it was uh normally not considered to be complementary that if a person was top heinous uh that could be used as a slur it was pejorative all right if you were called top heinous you were basically being labeled

[09:10]

as a slave. To have tepinosis was to have the mentality of a slave. Now, granted, 80% of the population were slaves. In ancient Athens, for example, which we sometimes look at as an example of democracy and freedom, it was free, all right, and democratic for about 5% or 10% of the male population. who did the voting and ran the place. The rest were either women or slaves. To have a humble mind was to think like a slave. And the opposite was arete, and that was to think like a free man. The attitude of a free aristocratic Greek And sometimes in Greek literature, it is said that so-and-so has fallen into a state of topinosis.

[10:25]

In other words, he has fallen, his mentality has changed from that of a free man to a slave. He thinks like a slave. And... That is why they avoided such things as manual labor. Because if you were involved in manual labor, eventually you would wind up thinking like a slave, because slaves did manual labor. Now, we're in a world of privilege and obviously a world in which ordinary people are not taken much into account. Of course, we have to remember that we're getting these ideas from Greek literature, and it is written by the elite. It's certainly not written by the slaves. So it's all been filtered through the mind of a very small sliver of society, and we get their idea about the common herd.

[11:34]

A tiny, affluent minority who controlled the whole society. And according to Venst, what you really have is a society, a system of mass humiliation where the tiny minority controls the huge majority who does all the work. And their attitude is not humility. true humility but it is humiliation because frankly uh they have no wish to be in this condition they may be not a seething mass they may be not spending all their time being angry but if you ask them i mean if you put the question to them whether they actually like being gray horses they would tap to say no and

[12:43]

And just in case we're not fully conscious of what it was like to be a slave, I don't think it was quite as bad as being a slave in Georgia or Alabama. I think probably that slavery was the worst that the world ever conceived. However, to be a slave in ancient times was no picnic. We know, for example, that the bones of slaves... that have been unearthed at Herculaneum show systematic, their legs and the back and so forth are bent. Now these experts in pathology, you know, they can study bones and they can show how the bones are bent. These people have been carrying enormous weights. They are carrying weights that no human being should have to carry. They're animals. They're being treated like animals.

[13:44]

So it was no picnic. However, we could also admit that even though the aristocracy had little sympathy for the slaves, they were not completely hard-hearted. Aristotle urges that the nobility maintain an attitude toward the slaves, which he calls praus. We could translate it gentleness, P-R-A-U-S, praus. He says it is not right for a nobleman to despise his slaves. One ought to have a certain amount of tender care for his slaves.

[14:49]

And one ought not to be hard-hearted and cruel. Of course, there's quite a difference, though, between... having this tenderness for them and thinking like they do that's out of the question uh and so what you find here is this uh this split uh on the one side are the humiliated on the other side are the aristocracy who who ought to be uh gentle toward the humiliated And we can say, well, that's paternalistic and all of that. However, we have got little to complain about. It seems to me in our society, what's happening with us is we're slipping even lower than we have been. We are descending from a kind of liberal condescension toward the poor to a kind of hard-hearted...

[16:04]

ferocious, unconcern, as we simply abandon our whole populations now. What prevented these people from true compassion? According to Adnes, it was a lack of a sense of preacherhood. That is, since the Greek aristocracy, and I guess he's saying this about all Greeks, since they had no idea of a transcendent God and therefore of their own creatureliness, they don't understand that this is a fellow creature that they're dealing with, that they really are the equals of every other creature. And consequently, the aristocracy thinks of itself as demigods, not really creatures.

[17:14]

But they have a sense, of course, that this can go too far, and that's called hubris. That's overweening pride. But they never really class themselves with the unwashed masses. And according to Adnes, the basic problem is a lack of a creator God, and therefore no sense of common humanity. By the way, there was a fine article written about five years ago. It appeared, I think, in the Atlantic Monthly by Glenn Tinder. I think the title, a very provocative title, Why should we be good? And the thesis of it was that really the basic humanitarian impulse of people in our society has come from Christianity.

[18:21]

That all of our institutions, hospitals, and so forth are all really a consequence of the Christian attitude of common creatureliness, and that we're all brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. And, says Tinder, since it appears that the Western world is being de-Christianized, his question is, what will be our reason for being humane in the future? If we cease to be Christian, if the West ceases to be Christian, why... Why will we care for each other? What will be the reason to not simply say, let the poor starve? Who cares? It's a provocative article. Okay.

[19:23]

Looking at the Bible, at the Hebrew Bible, links, points to a text, in the prophet Zephaniah, that needle in a haystack here, the prophet Zephaniah, chapter 3 and verse 12. I'll start reading at verse 11. On that day you need not be ashamed of all your deeds, your rebellious actions against me. For then I will remove from your midst the proud braggarts, and you shall no longer exalt yourself on my holy mountain. But I will leave as a remnant in your midst a people humble and lonely who shall take refuge in the name of the Lord. And the reason it points to this text is because it combines, in the Septuagint translation,

[20:31]

It combines tapainos and praous. Humble and lowly takes these two terms and uses them to translate the two Hebrew terms describing the remnant, the remnant of the Lord. So here we find these two ideas brought together in a way that never occurs in Greek literature at all. That means that, in his mind anyway, he thinks there's a very significant conjunction. Why is it significant? He says that what happens in this text is that the poor are urged not to take on the attitudes of the oppressor. The oppressed are urged not to take on the attitudes of the oppressor.

[21:39]

Even though they are ani, Hebrew term ani, A-N-I, which really means beaten down, crushed, trampled on, they are not to aspire to revenge, but to become anau, gentle. Two close Hebrew terms, ani, bintun, humiliated, and anal, humble. That is to have internalized and accepted one's lowness. I mean, that's a very significant idea. That's something that, that's the key argument against revolutions. that revolutions are really regularly just simply constitute a transfer of attitudes, of power, so that the oppressed become the oppressors.

[22:49]

They just take on the attitudes of those that have beaten them down. According to Venkst, that is what this text is warning against, and therefore, that somehow the Hebrews understood that this had to be internalized. Marx, of course, would probably fume with indignation at this undercutting of the legitimate rage of the masses. So maybe Venkst was not a very convinced Marxist. Why did the Hebrews have a more profound insight into humility than the Greeks. Chesterton thought that their security as a covenanted people freed them to be humble. Since they believed, at least at their finest moments, that every member of the covenant was equal, there you have the basis for true compassion.

[24:00]

humble gentleness toward your neighbor because you and her are both members of the same covenanted people in socio-economic terms and when you translate that that kind of spirituality into everyday life The idea is to have enough, but no more. This is the mentality of the small farmer who does not begrudge his neighbor her land and does not covet it. Boy, that's an ideal that's really hard to maintain. My God. The earliest writing prophet, Amos, who we've been reading in choir, already is fuming and railing out against those who add feel to feel to feel.

[25:15]

Gosh, that's what's happening all over the world. In our area now, the average farm is at least 2,000 acres. I mean, that's three square miles. farmers tend to be envious and tend to want to add field to field. The Hebrews already understood that that's a good way to destroy the community. There is no idea here of neediness. Ani. Let Franciscan wish to be completely dispossessed. They are not naive. They know that the poor can be terribly bitter, which is no virtue. However, the ideal is to be anaw, A-N-A-W, satisfied with what comes from God.

[26:24]

If you have enough, that's plenty. Radically, creaturely, you will be based on the covenant. I belong to a farm organization, environmental farmers and so forth. We started out basically working on questions like strip mining of coal and so forth, which everybody hated and everybody was afraid of and all that. But at a certain point, the farm crisis came about 1983 or something like that. We said, well, we'll have to start working on that. Some of the farmers said, oh, no. These guys that are losing their farms, it's because they're bad managers. Lousy farmers. Let them go. Let them lose them. You could see right there that, you know, among the farmers, this is envy and this is jealousy, and they start mutually condemning each other, and they don't really think of each other as brothers and sisters.

[27:35]

This ideal of creaturely humility crops up all over the Old Testament, if we are sensitive. Especially, I mean, even in regard to the Messiah. The aristocratic writer Isaiah nevertheless has real compassion for the little people. In Isaiah 11, 2, he says that the Messiah will not be condescending, who will not judge by appearances. That is to say, he will understand and even share the mentality of the poor. And according to Zechariah 9, 9, a text that we read on Palm Sunday, which I'll read.

[28:50]

Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion. Shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem. See, your king shall come to you. A just savior is he, meek and riding on an ass on a cold sea. full of an ounce. And Venk says this Messiah will not just be a rich aristocrat condescending to the poor but will actually be poor because only the poor rode donkeys. Now whether Venk knows what they rode or not I don't know. Some of these German professors they never ride donkeys. I mean, they don't... Just to give you an example, I thought it was really a great joke. You know, Orin de Baldré, this is an Irish Cistercian writer and so on. He's from Bolton Abbey. He was supposed to give a paper a couple weeks ago at Oxford.

[30:04]

I was at this meeting at Patristic Scholars. And there's hundreds of papers given, and sometimes people can't come. Orin de Baldré sent regrets. Why couldn't he come? Because the Cavs had scholars. And that was what was said, isn't he? The calves have scowlers. I thought, God, these professors, they've never seen a calf, much less scowlers. They don't know what scowlers are. Oh, that was a great joke. This guy, the calves have scowlers. Oh, that was one of the best things I heard in a whole week at Oxford. You know, I mean, the guy is actually walking on the earth. He's in touch with reality. You ever seen calves with scours, you know what I mean? We have a cattle operation, so I don't go into calves. It is not accurate to suggest that Israel was a socialist utopia where humanity before God produced universal compassion.

[31:16]

and a total lack of aggression and acquisitiveness. I said that Amos already in eighth or ninth century B.C. ranges against the rich for oppressing the poor, and especially of reducing small landowners to slavery. And in a way, that's what's going on today. All these farmers are having to leave the land. I don't say they become slaves, but they wind up in Seattle pushing a broom or something like that. It is hard to suppress tears for the current situation in Israel. Who are these thousands of refugees packed into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank?

[32:19]

They are the Palestinian peasants who once cultivated the land in peace. Most of them were not small landowners but hard hands on the land of large Palestinian farmers. And when the Israelis bought those farms in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, bought them legitimately. They didn't take them. There wasn't any illegality or immorality involved, but the problem was that all of these poor landowners had nowhere to go. And so we have this ongoing tragedy in Palestine. a running sore, and I don't know how it'll ever be solved.

[33:20]

The Bible shows how ancient Israel also degenerated in ideals and practice. In the wisdom literature, without any sense of shame, we find abundant signs that the old covenant mentality was being destroyed or had been destroyed. The title anau, and you know, that's the singular for anawim. I guess everybody's heard of anawim. But that title, which once referred to a simple peasant who knew that she received everything from God, now, had been co-opted by the rich, pious, rich person. The rich had bestowed that title on themselves, okay?

[34:25]

It's a little bit like when we were in the relationship. And at Christmas time, the vintage packages came in the mail for us novices. The novice master said, oh, they're for the poor. And then on Christmas Day, he brought all the packages in and said, wait until her. Wait until her. That was great. We had moved up the social ladder, or moved down the social ladder. And then the big thing was we got the packages. You see? And that was a pretty good example right there of just simply taking these names and playing around with them and giving them to yourself. Title. The problem is that the pious rich often are not particularly convinced that everything they have has come from God.

[35:35]

The Bible is often enough. points out that it's a perilous condition to be rich. And I said, using a book like Wengst, you have to take into account the Marxist tendency to hate the rich, class, warfare, and so on, but I think we have to be realistic. And when you start dealing with rich people, you find out that they like to get their way. They're used to getting their way. And they know how to push and shove. And if you're a monk and you're begging and so forth, they'll let you know pretty quick what they want. There's always a price, always a price tag. It seems to me that at least usually there's a price tag.

[36:37]

We ought not to be naive anyway. Okay. Sirach and Ecclesiastes, wisdom books, counsel the rich. Here we are right back in the Greek order, folks. The rich ought to be proud, gentle to the poor. Otherwise, they'll rise up in revolt. So it is a strategy that the Greeks had, see? Best not to be too hard on the poor because, God, no, there's a lot of them. And if they ever really got their gander up, whew. In fact, it is a strategy for rich people of all time. And this, I guess, this comment, this lad's comment, the affluent, alienated Essene.

[37:37]

From the Dead Sea Scrolls, that group, they call themselves Anarim. But, says Wanks, in fact, they're already persecuted in their own paranoid imagination. Yeah, I think that in many ways the Essenes are paranoid. Well, yeah, I mean, they imagine everybody's against them. Well, it's not surprising since they're against everybody. You know, they're against the temple priests, and they're against the Pharisees, and they're against this and that. Nobody's good enough. So why be surprised if you're unpopular? Any club, said Groucho Marx, that would have me, I wouldn't join the darn thing. So, words are being misused.

[38:40]

You know, words are being co-opted. And we have to be careful about that. I think the Hebrew Bible considers the word anawim as a very high compliment. And it ought only to be bestowed on those who are truly, truly humble. And we ought to be not too quick, maybe us monks ought not to be too quick to apply it to ourselves. Because you're well aware that in some ways we are affluent and we can't help it. A friend of mine, Benedictine's sister, was just offered the opportunity to spend a month in Rome. at the study program. And she was saying, oh gosh, you know, the poor can't afford to go to work.

[39:42]

I said, look, please don't pretend you're poor. You are educated. And by that very fact, you are not cool. So, you know, you have to, there has to be some, we have to be, we can't be simple minded in these categories and so forth, but at least words do have their own value and a word like humble in the Greek world was pejorative in the Hebrew world it was an honorable term and I think that that's really worth knowing okay sir do we have a little time for some feedback or some questions if anybody wants to do that yeah Thank you.

[40:42]

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