The topic for this evening's conference is humility. If there's one thing I could change in the Rule of St. Benedict, it would be the title to Chapter 7 of the Holy Rule. Instead of humility, I would propose having, have that mind in you which was also in Christ. It's that passage, of course, from Philippians 2. Have that mind in you which was also in Christ. Though he was divine, he emptied himself. Ex ino nobis et semitism, the canonic mystery. Because that's what really humility is about. But it's very important to understand it properly. Humility is the central linchpin of Benedict's spiritual teaching. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the Holy Rule are basically the heart of the spiritual teaching, obedience, silence, and humility. Now, in a way, Benedict didn't write essays like Cassian or Evagrius or Origen.

[01:02]

He didn't expose lengthy essays on the spiritual life. So that the rule, especially even these chapters, are just sort of like sketches on a canvas, and we have to fill it in. But he was a practical legislator, and his insights about humility, I think, come out of his own experience and with dealing with others. And there is a kind of gospel paradox in the chapter on humility. We ascend by descending. So it's by descending that we ascend. It's by losing ourself that we gain ourself. The poet William Butler Yeats has a wonderful line, I must lie down where all the laggers start, in the foul and rag-bone shop of the human heart. So that a true sense of humility begins with our own self-appropriation, self-knowledge, right in the thick of human existence.

[02:06]

It's not about up and away transcendence, away from reality. Again, another humorous comment about humility, Carl Jung was again writing to Freud and talking about the spiritual life and he said, for me, the spiritual life has been mostly falling off the spiritual ladder. And Father Damasis in the essay on humility says it's important to recognize, although many people don't just bypass it, that Benedict's sides of the ladder talks about the rungs and steps, but the sides of the ladder, the body and soul, are included so that Benedict is not agnostic. This is not just about spiritual ascent. It's about a total integrative ascent. Awe and reverence are the foundation of the spiritual ladder for Benedict. And in that beginning of Chapter 7, before he gets the first step, Fr.

[03:12]

Patrick Berry has this translation, at all times to have a sense of awe. At all times to have a sense of awe. You know, I think we need to educate ourselves in that because contemporary sensibility does not teach a sense of our technological culture and so forth. So Esther Duvall, I hear, takes people on retreats. and they go out into the countryside and she has a looking class, a magnifying class, and she'll go look at flowers to refine her sense of the beauty of nature and so forth. So we need to cultivate a sense of awe and reverence. St. Bernard's Ladder begins with self-knowledge, even of our limitations and our flaws. So it necessitates a realism about who we are before God. One of the finest insights or definitions of humility that I came across just recently is this new book by Bernard Bonowitz.

[04:20]

I know some of you went to Genesee to hear I know when he was novice master at Spencer and now he's at it in Brazil. And this little book that just came out from Cistercian Studies, it's called St. Bernard's Three-Course Banquet, Humility, Charity, and Contemplation in the Degradibus. And it's wonderful because so much of it is his own reflection on these things, his own insights into the subtleties of pride, for example. I mean, I read it and I thought, wow, I've got more pride there than I realized. Was it Francis de Sales that said, the ego dies 15 minutes after we do? We think it's pretty well subdued, but then it pops up. At any rate, it's a wonderful book. And the very last paragraph, he says, humility is how we stand before reality. I like that definition.

[05:21]

or description of humility. Humility is how we stand before reality. If we stand tied up in ourselves with a certain ego agenda, we're inattentive to the mystery that's out there. But if we can bow our head a little bit and realize with awe and gratitude all that we've received from God, that's humility. It's hard for contemporary people to deal with humility. They're very suspicious about it, and I think rightfully so. Because humility, before Vatican II, a lot of spirituality was influenced by Jansenism. A lot of the post-Reformation religious orders were very touched by Jansenism. So the idea was you create humility in people by humiliating them, which is, I think, a terrible violation of people.

[06:22]

St. Benedict does say that we have to be eager for humiliations, but what's the name of that German sister who's done so much on the wool? Equinata says about that line. To be eager for humiliations, what it really means is housework. That mean you'll work. It means mean you'll work. That's what it meant in that context, which helps us understand better. It's not about being ready to be a mat over which people can rub and so forth. OK. So there is a very great suspicion that anything that has to do with self-abnegation, self-destruction, is rooted in Jansenism. I taught the history of spirituality at St. Louis University, and when I got to the French School of Spirituality, there was some phrasing that made me very uncomfortable, because it was very much, I think, touched by Jansenism. I'll give you an example. When I was heading the Institute of Religious Formation at St.

[07:29]

Louis University, there was a sister in the program one year who said that her formation was so Jansenistic that she said, I survived formation, especially the novitiate, only by reading Don Columbus's Marmion. And I said, why was that the case? And she said, he had a better view of human nature, and it was solidly scripture. Interesting. Just on the side, I have a brother in the Institute of Religious Formation, a Christian brother from Australia. And when he was in the division, the only thing they were allowed to read was St. Francis Ligurian Visits to the Blessed Sacrament. And they had to have special permission to read scripture. Do you believe it? And then I met an American who had been, had entered a commodity in Italy. This was back probably in the 50s, since the older gentleman when I met him. And he said when he got commodity,

[08:30]

They immediately put him in a hermitage at the Aramal, you know, the cluster of hermitages, something commodely. And the only thing he had to read was St. Alphonsus and Gloria and a happy death. He said it was perfect because he thought he was going to die. For about 20 years in the 70s and 80s, if you go through the American Benedictine Review, there's hardly any article on humility, even though it's so central to Benedictine life. Things have improved since then. There's Michael Casey, and actually Terence Cardon has done some good things on humility. And he actually translated a book by, I think, a German scholar, pointing out that in Roman society, only slaves had humility. It was beneath typical Roman dignity to have humility.

[09:32]

Only slaves had humility. So for St. Benedict to put humility as the central key of the arch, so to speak, in the rule was rather an audacious thing to do, because it's not something that the secular culture of his time would understand. So true humility is not an assumed posture. I am so humble. It's not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps to be humble, to reduce ourself. There's a figure in Dickens' book, David Copperfield, called Uriah Heath. Remember that? Uriah Heath goes around with his hands over his chest saying, I'm so humble, I'm so humble. It's very repulsive. You know he's being very obsequious and false. That's not humility. In fact, it's a denigration of human nature. I think that true humility is definitely part of the Benedictine character.

[10:37]

We may have no particular program of creating humility. I think it's that attitude, that opius of heart, that sense of awe and reverence that creates humility. We are formed as Benedictines by liturgy and silence, community living, mutual service. All of this creates a kind of humility and I think it forms part of the Benedictine character. I'd like to do some writing on this sometime to kind of not define but describe the Benedictine character. There was a Swiss Orthodox nun, Mother Maria, who was a very well-educated philosopher, and she wanted to go to England to found, at that time back in the 70s, I believe it was, no Orthodox Convent of Women in England. So she asked Anthony Blum if she could come to England to do it, and he said, well, what I would tell you to do is go first live with the Anglican Benedictine nuns of West Moline.

[11:48]

to learn English and adapt to England's culture before you begin to set up a monastery. So she lived with the Anglicans at Westmoreland for two years. And in her journal she wrote, all the Benedictines, a tradition so wide, so welcoming. She had a tremendous appreciation for the Benedictine tradition. I think that Benedictine monks and nuns are humble. This does not mean they are wilting violets or faceless nerds. That's not what humility is. They have something which I think the Confucian tradition would call qing, which is reverent seriousness, reverent seriousness. not that monks don't laugh and have a good time and so forth and even have a lightheartedness, but a kind of reverent seriousness towards life, respect for others, respect for things, along with a quiet joy and a contentment and integration.

[12:56]

All of that, to me, I think, stems from that basic humility of heart and openness of heart. So I see humility as both a predisposition And it results also in greater humility and meekness and gentleness. Bernard Herring, the great moral theologian, has a little book on virtues. And he has some very interesting things to say about humility. Great insights, I think. He calls humility the moth-eaten virtue. It's something we kind of put to the side and we don't talk about very much, kind of stale. We need an unpacking of it and a new appreciation for it. We need to sort of amplify the sense of what humility is, because it's immediately not attractive to people.

[13:58]

Bernard Herring, in a later chapter in the book, calls humility the canonic virtue. And I think it's only Christology that makes sense of humility. Only Christology, because of Philippians 2. Have that mind in you which was also in Christ. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Here he says that humility is so important he called it the metto virtue, the basic foundational virtue of all virtues, what opens to all life of virtue. So I think we need to re-appreciate it and re-understand it. Teresa Vavla is often quoted as saying, humility is truth, which I think is true in the sense of it's recognizing the truth of ourselves and how we stand before God and so forth. Anton Vergaat, a psychologist from Louvain, had an article, I think in the American Benedictine Review, perhaps early 90s, where he talked about humility as authenticity.

[15:07]

which I think has something to say, but I think it's also deeper. It's that deeper theological sense of, you know, entering into the mystery of Christ, the self-emptying. But I'd like to share with you an enormously important insight that I got about humility from an article by Aidan Kavanaugh, the monk from St. Linwood's Suphate Liturgy at Yale. It helped me understand and amplify the sense of humility. It's from an article, and I don't remember the title, but it's here in the volume, which I think it may have been a conference here at Mount Savior, called The Gnosticism and the Arts. Or was that in Syracuse? Remember that? Timothy Barrington was the editor of that. Was that here or Syracuse University? Anyhow, it has something to do with Mount Savior. I forgot.

[16:08]

And anyhow, one essay is by Eden Cavanagh, and it's an excellent article, because what he says is that what Benedict did in trying to talk about humility, he was really replacing what Cashin talked about as purity of heart. So that, you know, on a stage, if you take a spotlight like this and a spotlight like this, and they go to the same point, It changes color, right? Okay, so that I think if you took Benedict's presentation of humility and Cassian's presentation of purity of heart, you can see greater amplification of what Benedict means by humility. So if you look back to Cashen and you read Cashen about purity of heart, and by the way, purity of heart is, I think, a more explicitly biblical concept, okay? Humility is certainly biblical in the sense of the Anoem of the Old Testament.

[17:13]

The humble will be exalted, you know, so it's biblical. But purity of heart is more clearly biblical. How blessed are the pure of heart. And of course, monks very much identified with that first of the Beatitudes. But Cashin says this when he's presenting about purity of heart. He says it's also charity. Purity of heart is also charity. And I remember reading that and thinking, what? So it shows how we have to amplify. It's also growth in love. Purity of heart is also growth in love. And if you look at purity of heart in Cassian, the predecessor to that, Cassian is really, when he's talking about his purity of heart, he's really influenced by Evagrius Conicus, who came out of the Christian desert, especially the Egyptian desert. What Evagrius talks about as apathia, as sort of the summit of ascetical struggle, is, I think, also a stumbling block to us, because if we define it too narrowly,

[18:28]

it seems harmful to human nature, you know, and anti-human. To define apathia, for example, as passionlessness. It means, you know, what do you have to be? Just devoid of human emotion and feeling and so forth. I think what's really meant, and I have a good reason for thanking us, When I was at St. Louis, I was teaching a course on the history of spirituality, and I had a married woman who was working on her Master's, and she wanted a good research topic, and I said, well, why don't you write on apatheia in Evagrius? She was fluent in French, so I sent her to the French Dictionary of Spirituality, and she read and studied and integrated the materials she found on apatheia. And what I think it comes down to is integration. It's about the integration of our feeling life. And it's about the re-education of our passions.

[19:36]

For example, anger can be changed to proper self-possession and so forth. So I see it as first cousin to what Augustine says, that we need to be reordered in charity, that the inner life needs to be reordered by it in Caritatum. That's one of the Augustinian mottos, to be reordered in charity, to be transfigured by grace. So to lay down, you know, Evagrius, Cassian, and Benedict on those central themes, apathia, purity of heart, and humility, I think is a way of amplifying our sense of humility, okay? Recovering the traditions, understanding of it, and relating it to Christ.

[20:40]

In fact, I don't think there's any real sense of true humility without understanding it in terms of Christology. For me, a really important key to the chapter on humility is the last three lines. Remember after the 12th step of humility? There's about three sentences that, well, Terence Carden calls it the little coda at the end, little coda. I think that little coda is a very great pointer to some very important things. And I'd like to recommend an article by Father Placide Desaix. He's a French Cistercian who became a Russian Orthodox and a Greek Orthodox, I guess. An article by him appeared in the American Benedictine Review in 2007, September issue, on humility. And he takes that little coda, those three sentences, and relates it to the tradition

[21:45]

both Cassian and Evagrius, and then throws it back on St. Benedict and relates St. Benedict's chapter on humility, chapter 73, the last chapter of the rule, where he talks about the flowering of monastic life in wisdom and love. And he relates it to the prologue. I've been meaning to write to Terence Cargong and thank him for publishing that article, but it's because it's precisely what I've seen, is that that little coda is like a pointer saying, you know, look back, look back to the earlier tradition. This is where you will find a deeper and healthier sense of humility. So the little coda at the end says this, all this, meaning everything that's talked about in Chapter 7, is the ongoing work of the Spirit. All this the Lord will by the Holy Spirit graciously manifest.

[22:50]

It'll show the transformed person. That's the height of humility, the following of the transfigured, transformed person. There are only two places in the Holy Rule where the Holy Spirit is mentioned, in this little coda at the end of Chapter 7, and in the chapter on Lent, the observance of Lent, where Saint Benedict says that Lent should be observed with the joy of the Holy Spirit. So let me read the whole little coda on Chapter 7. Now, therefore, after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God. That's the height. That this humility and all of this ascetic struggle and so forth, follows into perfect love, which casts out fear. And so, you know, we talk about the incremental steps, and I'll try to see a pattern and a rationale to it. There's really, in part, a trajectory from fear to love.

[23:56]

which of course reflects 1st John 4. Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort. I think that that has an Asian connection, not that Benedict saw that, but it's without effort is Chushi, the great Confucian The spiritual writer said that the sage is indicated by no effort. It's just automatically coming out of the person. As though naturally from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue. All this the Lord will by the Holy Spirit graciously manifest in his workmen. Remember St. Benedict calls the monastery the workplace, the laboratory. He will manifest it in his workmen cleansed of vices and sins.

[24:59]

And so it's about growth and perfect love, about ease and virtue, about the ancient monastic tradition talked about, steadfastness in the glade. Steadfastness in the glade, ease and virtue, and to be filled, to be spirit-filled, to be Nanatikos, as I've talked about. Rupert of Deutz, who was 11th century Benedictine, said, when the Holy Spirit sets Christians ablaze with the fervor of the Holy Spirit, he imparts the following, and I think this is really obviously influenced by the holy rule, strength to their love, constancy to their faith, clarity to their understanding, and ardor to their zeal. Then he baptizes with the Holy Spirit and finites. I'd like to end with a poem that I think describes what's appeared in America just about a year ago.

[26:09]

It's called Sushupe, but I think it's influenced by the Ignatian Sushupe, and take award my ability, my wealth. But I think we can read it in our own sense, too. It's called Sushupe by Mary Patrice Whaley. You know me and you love me, dark and light. It's humility, knowing the light and the gifts that we have and honoring our gifts and our talents, but also knowing our weakness and our flaws. You know my shadows and my meteors, eclipses, supernovas. All are yours. You know my good and evil. In my night, you blaze stars, take my fervor and my will, my comprehension and my memory. I beg you to enthrall my liberty. Please drain me so that you alone will fill my spirit. I know loving takes its toll. Relentless love had left me in despair, but harrowed in my hell, I saw you there.

[27:14]

Please take the threads that are my weary soul. Inspire with your breath this barren sod to bloom and glorify you, Chinese god. All right, tomorrow morning I'm going to talk about wisdom, especially Benedictine wisdom.

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