This conference is entitled Humility Together with Christ. In our comparative study, of Benedict with his sources for humility, we have noted some ways in which he changes things for the better or for the worst. One of the more important ways in which both the Master and Benedict change Cassian's ten signs of humility is to inject a strong Christological note In this regard, I think that they have significantly improved the treatise.

[01:04]

Of course, I have to admit that in Cassian it's not a treatise at all. It's just a small little section in the middle of an institute, whereas with the Master and Benedict, the material has been expanded into a huge chapter. So maybe they felt, you know, once you build a building that size, you better get Christ into it. Although I have to admit that Cashin can go along page after page and never mention Christ. And Evagrius too. So, I mean, there is that tendency, that sort of ethical monasticism, which is not Well, I don't say you have to mention Christ every other sentence, but when it goes page after page after page without any reference, I worry sometimes. At any rate, this change, this Christological emphasis occurs in degrees three and four, as well as at the end.

[02:19]

I've already mentioned that Cassian simply ends up, that humility will result in a love for the good in itself, and Benedict and the masters say, a love for Christ. That's at the end. But here in verse, degrees three and four, we have to do with the question of obedience. This also was Cassian's point in those, The point is we should put aside our own will in order to do the will of our superior. And through the will of our superior, the will of God, of course. We should not be surprised if this submission becomes sometimes very difficult. For we live in a sinful world. And since our superiors are also sinners, surprise, surprise, we can expect, as a matter of course, that sometimes they will use us badly.

[03:32]

The way I put it is, if you hang around the monastery long enough, you will get a shot in the chops. If you join the monastery because you love the abbot and the abbot loves you and so forth, I'll assure you there shall come a pharaoh who will know it's not Joseph." And I sometimes also say, look, I've had four abbots, three of them loved me, one hated me. I'm batting 750. Nobody does any better than that. To this basic teaching of Cassian, Benedict has provided a strong foundation based on Christ himself. In step three, Benedict says, and he's following the master verbatim, we are to obey the superior because Christ himself became obedient even unto death.

[04:44]

And, of course, the quotation is from Philippians 2.8. At this same step, the Master gives seven biblical quotes for this degree. The Master never says anything simply. If he can use ten words to say something, instead of one, he will use ten. He's extremely prolix. Benedict keeps only one biblical quote, but it is the best one. It is the perfect one, says our dear Father DeVoe Goyt. Notice here, we're not told to obey Christ. Even though Benedict usually thinks of Christ as a mighty Lord to be adored and obeyed, that's not the point here. It's not the theological angle. Christ, the Christ invoked here is the obedient Christ, the one who was and is totally dependent on the will of his Father.

[05:58]

So we are told to relate to our superior the same way that Christ relates to his Father. Will Gray has a nice distinction. Instead of obeying to Christ, we obey with Christ. So my title. At this point, we may feel we are a bit uneasy. Is it really the same thing for us as it is for him? For example, the obedience that Paul mentions in Philippians 2.8, the obedience of Christ, is surely not a reference to specific commands, you go down to Jerusalem, get killed. but to Christ's whole earthly life, especially with saving death and resurrection.

[07:10]

In other words, the obedience of Christ, which Paul, I mean, that's a key word, Christ's obedience, refers to his whole career, his whole paschal existence. Secondly, The will of God is infallibly right and good. It is the very definition of right and good. The will of our superior, alas, is not always right and good. I mean, if the superior is a sinner, that's saying the same thing. So, superiors can, at least theoretically, make mistakes. The monastic fathers were well enough aware of this.

[08:13]

Cassian, in his fourth sign, says that our humble obedience must be patient. That is, it will often be trying and difficult, and especially over the long haul. It doesn't necessarily get any easier. You know, we may find it quite a bit more difficult to be truly obedient as old monks than we were as novices. I am, I am. I'm sure that I am proud and recalcitrant in some ways that I didn't used to be. In his fifth sign, Cashen acknowledges But disobedience will sometimes involve bearing injustice from others. Now, for his part, the Master, and remember, I'm working with this three-layered universe, Keshin, and the Master, and Benedict.

[09:24]

The Master faithfully reproduces these points of Keshin. It must have been hard for the master to swallow this because he usually seems to think of the abbot as a perfect Christian, a perfect master from whom one can expect only wisdom and justice. He rarely will admit even the possibility that the abbot could be wrong. Perhaps he thought of himself as such a guru. The Master, see, has got a... I think it's one of his main flaws. He's got a very sharp cleavage between the spiritually perfect Christian, basically the abbot, and all the rest.

[10:30]

And so, you know, if you're going to set up that kind of universe, your abbot's got to be perfect. On the other hand, in order to elaborate Cashen's point about bearing injustice, I think that the Master, perhaps he forgets that it is a question of unjust authority. But perhaps he soon realizes that he has set a trap for himself, and so he switches over to the idea of the monk as a martyr. Yeah, in that degree, the Master gets into that whole question of the monk as a martyr. You know, there's a whole book written on that called, Monk as Martyr. It's by Father Edward Malone. And it was written in 1950 or so.

[11:36]

I think it was a doctoral thesis at Catholic U. It's pretty interesting. The Master does not hesitate to use this loaded word, martyr, in regard to the hardships to be born in a cenobitic life. For myself, I would say that anybody who would have to live under the rule of the master wouldn't automatically be a martyr worthy of universal veneration. Benedict has backed away from this questionable theology of monastic martyrdom. In other words, he's dropped the term. It's one of those characteristic little businesses. He's copying along faithfully, word by word, all at once.

[12:39]

Oh! Skip over that word and go on. You can see these nice little additions and omissions and remodelings, and they're significant. You know, when you're copying, you don't just leave a word out for no reason. I think this is probably due to Benedict's saner notion of the abbot. Although he copies the Master in many places, he's careful often to omit those passages which make egregious claims for the abbot. He seems to realize that it puts an impossible burden on the abbot to claim that everything he says or does is right and good. And you know, when we are going to elect an abbot, we have these preliminary discussions, and you listen to, oh, this is all we want in an abbot, and you get done and you say, well, all the monks want is an archangel.

[13:47]

They won't find anybody like that. So they're just setting themselves up for disappointment. Then they're going to cram the rest of their lives about this guy because they've set up an impossible job description. And then they say, well, of course he doesn't fit the bill. No. So that's just one way of subverting authority and proving you really don't want it to happen at all. Therefore, I think that the idea of unjust authority is not so difficult for Saint Benedict to deal with. It is simply to be expected. And not just from the abbot. To be a celibate is to be, by definition, subject to others. To be vulnerable to the decisions and ideas of other people. Sometimes this will be very satisfying and comforting.

[14:52]

Sometimes it will be hell. This is what Sartre said about other people. Other people, hell, they're hell. There we have a nice existentialist saying of Abba Jean-Paul Sartre. Humility means bearing patiently with this treatment as ordinary experience in a sinful world. We shouldn't be shocked by it. Everybody could probably talk about this, my life and hard times, but my crucifixion comes from choir masters. I guess I have a kind of voice that infuriates choir masters. On the one hand they can't get along without me, but on the other hand they can't get along with me. And so all at once I'll go along just singing like usual in the choir, and probably the rest of the choir is collapsing, and I'm going on singing, singing, singing, and all at once I'm called aside and saying,

[16:07]

You are a terrible problem. And you must stop doing such and such. Oh, Jesus, help me. But I mean, I know it's going to come about every six weeks. So OK. You know, all right. So that's the way that works. And so even all of us have got these situations. And so let's not get dramatic. I mean, let's not say I'm a martyr and all of this stuff. Okay. I want to spend, however, well, this stuff here is going to probably go beyond this period. So I'm, you know, we'll continue it this afternoon. It's going to be a kind of complex, long discussion. So, All right. I think a term that comes up in this regard is patience.

[17:17]

Humility means bearing patiently with this treatment as ordinary experience in a sinful world. I told somebody a story yesterday, a little story. We talk about unjust authority. Well, it works the other way around. Everybody realizes that abbots get beat on a lot. We were going to the general chapter. All the delegates get a letter in the mail from some monk who's berating us about some darn thing. And he says, you better change this or that. He's obviously a crank. So we come to the general chapter, and I looked up his abbot, and I said, you know, I said, what kind of guy is Father Bernard? The abbot looked at me and said, well, you know, the fathers of the desert, some of the old monks, they used to pay guys to walk around all day and insult them.

[18:19]

Well, Father Bernard does it for me free. Okay, patience. The first point to be noted about the humble patience that is called for in degree four is that it is completely based on the humble patience of Christ himself. There are many quotes given here in degree four, but the one that I think that stands out, and that is certainly the most important theologically, is from Romans 8.37. But in all of this, we overcome because of him who so greatly loved us.

[19:23]

We note here a reference to God's love, perhaps the only reference to God's love in this whole huge chapter on humility that occurs before the last verse. It's one of my, I have a whole lecture in here about the question about love. Because remember, humility is moving from fear to love. So love only comes at the end, and I think that in some ways that's a theological problem. However, here in the fourth degree he does mention the love of God. However, it is not just a kind of vague general reference. What we have here is what I think is sometimes called the Christological heiress. When the New Testament refers to what Christ has done for us, it really means that he has died for our sins.

[20:38]

See, so to say what God has done, God who loved us, it's a concrete statement about a precise historical event, namely the crucifixion of Christ. Now, that may be pushing it too hard, but the whole atmosphere here in stages three and four is about Christ's kenosis. Theologically speaking, this is extremely significant. It means that humility And the most difficult kind of humility is grounded not only in God's love for us, it is grounded in the concrete manifestation of God's love, which was Jesus Christ, who offered his life for the life of the world.

[21:41]

And apart from this, all talk of suffering humility, I think, is on shaky ground. Because it's too prone to get into self-pity and masochism and all kinds of strange stuff. What? Oh, my God, I suffer. I really have it rough. Now, I want to start zeroing in on one sentence, and I'm going to spend the rest of this talk, and then this afternoon probably, on this one sentence, and I want to read it. The fourth step of humility is that in disobedience under difficult, unfavorable, and even unjust conditions,

[22:45]

His heart quietly embraces suffering and endures it without weakening or seeking escape." Now, I'm going to press this verse very hard. I'm going to take every word and dissect it and worry it to death. I'm going to push it to the wall and make it cry, By the way, a lot of this stuff now is from my new commentary, because I have to say that this was, I think, in the whole RB, the hardest verse to translate, this 735, because, and the darn, the problem is I didn't bring along my translation, so I don't know exactly how I, in English, how it runs.

[23:47]

By the way, that translation will be out early 96, says the publisher. So, you know, you can't trust publishers. They're no good. You'll never know. His heart quietly embraces suffering. That's the translation given in RB 1980. What are we to make of this? Somewhere, sometime, probably in the novitiate, I have seen this point interpreted to mean that the person has arrived at a point where she does not even rebel interiorly at unjust treatment, never mind external resistance. In other words, that somehow this means that you will be so obedient, so humble, so patient, that you will construe unjust treatment as just treatment.

[25:04]

I say bologna. No, I do believe that that is a very problematic kind of interpretation. Because that means that you are seeing black as white. And that is, that's very dangerous, because black's still black, and white's still white. And even a kind of censorship of prior, you know, sort of internalized pre-censorship is very bad business. Because then we find ourselves only thinking acceptable thoughts. Because, you know, if you can't say certain things, then you won't think them, and so on. And so you start getting this kind of stuff, until you've got what we now have in Eastern Europe. People who can't think and who can't act. A real mess. 70 years of repression, and it has taken a terrible toll.

[26:14]

Now, I have to admit that this exegesis has got a lot to commend it. That is this business about simply changing your mind, you know, somehow, internalizing this business. The term consciencia does seem to point to internal acceptance. which seems to be corroborated by the verb embrace. You see, to internally embrace this treatment. There's no question that, I mean, I can see the possibilities here. One is not just putting up with what cannot be avoided. You know, the whole business about grin and bear it, grit your teeth, so on. There is here, I think, full internal willingness to suffer the unjust treatment that is being endured.

[27:25]

I'm not just smiling and having an ulcer. I have to say that. That's why this is a very, very difficult verse to deal with, or to know how to cut it. You've got to cut it right. It's one of those places, I think, where we must translate as accurately as we possibly can. Except that I have to admit that all translations are traitors. All translators are traitors. Same word in Latin, traditor. And you always bring your prejudices, and all translations are subjective. It's just a great joke these fundamentalists talk about. I only want the exact translation. I only want the fact or the truth.

[28:27]

Oh, wow. This idea of that is suffering unjust treatment gladly is so difficult and profound that I don't think you can deal with it in a few minutes. That's why I'm going to continue dealing with it. But I would say at least this, and because we're gonna have a little discussion here, that's gonna be a problem, because I may just wind up giving you all my material from this afternoon. It doesn't matter. I would say this, that we're dealing here with a very, very important question that has to do with the question of resisting evil. How do I relate to evil?

[29:30]

Because we're really, I mean, we're not just talking, I don't think we're just talking here about what you perceive to be evil, but which is objectively good. There's that possibility, all right. Because I've already mentioned, there's some places in the rule, you've got to understand that he's sort of seeing things through the eyes of a monk who's perceiving something, For example, an impossible job, which is not impossible, objectively. No, but I think he's talking here about that which is evil, seeing unjust. I mean, it's unjust. If we say that people should passively allow evil to be done to them with no complaint, This could be a form of cooperation. Perhaps you have seen the saying, for evil to flourish, it is enough for good people to do nothing.

[30:39]

That's a pretty pungent little saying, you know. Just don't do anything and you'll find out that, okay. And of course, that's always the problem with this business of pacifism. We say, well, you want to be a doormat? You want to let evil flourish? It seems to me that if we're going to invoke the example of Jesus, he was not at all passive in the face of evil. He came into violent conflict with evil because he refused to deviate from a path he knew he must walk, obedient unto death. And when he was warned off, he said, no, no, I go, this is my route. You do what you gotta do, I do what I gotta do. When it crushed him, he did not cry out at the injustice, which he knew well.

[31:44]

He didn't fight back. I mean, there was no returning violence for violence. He was perfectly patient, and by this patience, he saved the world. Maybe we could just stop at this point, and I won't go into the detailed exegesis that I want to do on this verse, but I do want to just stop at this point, just talking about this business about nonviolent resistance. If that's acceptable, I don't know. To talk about a monk being obedient to unjust injustice, but non-violently resisting it, maybe that's pushing it pretty far. Yes? No, no, it isn't.

[33:03]

He becomes convinced, in his conscience, that he has to do something that is managed by the campaign, or by the General Secretary, or by the Community Agreement. That's where he is conscious, on the front of a cohesive group, not very many, who are, I think, people who really want to shuffle decisions. One has to respect that, you know, for people in certain states, what's the point of your own country, Susan, if you think they're wrong? You have to be honest with them, that it is when others in the community who are with you are just as scared as I am. And they'll think that Susan's scared enough today, when you've been here a couple of years. Linda Abbott's in between.

[34:29]

Yes. A rock and a hard place. But I think that also happens to someone else. They're not particularly good people, but during an invasion, women shouldn't follow, and they don't want to be rebelled, and the others are It seems to be the fact of the situation that they're taking mind, I guess. And for many of you, I've seen many of you, which we all, in theory and in reality, we've learned to question ourselves and to look again at our perceptions and our interpretations. And I've taught, in theory and in practice, steps where When I was walking in the corner, there was a group of people.

[35:30]

It was very peaceful. At least that's how I explained it. Are we dangerous for approaching this with another understanding of form and conscience? Does that make it allowable? Well, I think that there we can, it's interesting, we have a sharp difference between the Benedict and the Rule of the Master. The Rule of the Master makes an outrageous statement someplace that if the monk has done everything he's told, in the judgment he will have nothing to fear. You know, and I don't remember exactly how he says this, but it's quite clear that he means there that no matter what it is, if you've done what you're told, you are in the clear.

[36:36]

You don't have to make any judgments. I mean, I'm pretty sure that the Master does not let the monk judge at all. Now, in other words, you check your brains at the door when you enter this place, that kind of idea. Ah, Benedict has... Chapter 5 is pretty strong, you know. You look at Chapter 5 by itself, it doesn't seem to permit any more judgment, personal judgment. However, I noticed that For one thing, he has carefully omitted that sentence from the Master that talks about, and I think it's in this very step four, but I should remember where that is, but he's left that out, simply omitted that. No, I guess it's in the chapter on obedience, RM5, RM7 and RB5, on obedience, okay. However, and see with the Master, there's no semblance in that rule of persons other than the abbot who have any discretion, who have any sort of seniority in the sense of wisdom, you know, that's acknowledged.

[38:02]

The seniors, there are no seniors in the rule of the Master. You take like RB46, where he talks about opening your conscience to a spiritual senior, you know? How do you get to be a spiritual senior if you have no judgment? You know, those are obviously people who have developed a very rich and acute conscience, you know, their interior, their ability to judge is highly developed. So you see with the RB, at least some people who are acknowledged as more, their consciencia, they are more acute spiritually. So there must be growth. Then there must be judgment. I think Vogue Way has just got his head stuck in the sand on this question.

[39:10]

He gets to that verse in RB 72 where it talks about doing not what one judges better for oneself, but what one judges better for another. He says, a monk can't judge. His judgment's been taken away completely, and then he refers to RB-5. Well, all right, you'll see some stuff in RB-5 that's pretty severe about that, but we can recognize the terrible danger of producing robots, of somehow judgment being knocked out of people or something. You see, judgment is something that has to be exercised. For example, you can select a leadership. If you don't allow any leadership to be functioning in the monastery, when it comes time to find a leader, you won't have any, because you have to practice.

[40:18]

So, yes. Absolutely. And rejected by the court. I didn't have anything to say about that. I just did what I was being told. To the gallows. You know, that's great. And precisely that's what we have now in Russia and so forth. People who are sort of told, for God's sake, do something, figure out something, make some money, have a business. They don't want to, because it's risky to have to make choices, and then you make mistakes, and they want to huddle to meditation and be told what to do, just like babies. They're all babies now. In a minute, they say we're helpless. Well, that's fine, but you know, the rule talks about choosing deans, and it talks about choosing priors, and it talks, you know, you have to have, it's an articulated community.

[41:38]

There's got to be subsidiarity of leadership in that community, and beginners can't be deans, you know. You need people who have got judgment. He talks about who the deans should be. They're people that know how to judge spiritually. So, yes? The question of leading justice, is it that I'm being put out? Well, that's a good point, sure. Sure, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Very nice point. Now, I guess, Spooze, I'll be getting into some of that. Sure, you know, you can, I mean, when you start confusing my wants with what is needed, you know, objectively in the community, that's a mess. And that is one of the bad situations with consumerism that we have in this country right now.

[42:47]

People have confused their wants with their needs. So whatever my whims dictate is what's right. Crazy. Yeah. Sure. So, you rarely get to have anything you have to ask for. It seems to me that each one, fortunately, we don't have to fight, you know. We don't have to force them to do anything. Any harm to both the body and mind, that's it. And then, ultimately, you know, the end result is has to give space to that. If somebody's doing things like this, it's a process of dialogue, trying to see if it's going well.

[43:58]

But in the meantime, I think you have to respect that. You can treat it in my opinion, and it's all non-experimental. You don't have to have a vocation, you just have to have good conscience. I've only come into this, I think, once in a big way, I think, in the monastery, and this is what happened. It was a tough situation, and there was lots of unhappiness in the community, and there was a truly, I believe, unjust move by the abbot, to move, build players. In other words, he took the head of our school in South America, and he switched him with the head of our school in the United States. We had two schools. We had two schools. Now, these schools are, you know, they're big operations. The one in Latin America, 1,200 students, and these guys were, those were extremely responsible jobs.

[45:02]

It took a certain kind of person to do them, and so forth. Well, for one thing, there was apparently a double cross involved. They have it telling the guy in South America that Monk A wants to come down there, therefore, would you please come home. Telling Monk A, so and so wants to come home, would you please, you know, neither one of them wanted to move. They traded notes and they found out they'd both been lied to. Not good. Okay, but still, still. All right, you could still say, well, okay. However, there were quite a few of us who were absolutely convinced that the one guy would be the death of our school. Because of his temperament, and his way of functioning and all that, we pointed this out to him, we said, this is the way you are, and this is what's needed, and we think it's gonna be a disaster.

[46:05]

And we think that you probably should simply say, uh-uh, nothing doing. I'll come home, but I won't be head of the school because of this and that. He said, no, no, that's not my religion. That's not what I vowed. I vowed to do what I'm told. And, well, he did, and I have to admit that it worked out fine. However, I do believe, I mean, in my opinion, he was walking blindly into, you know, it's a very complicated business, but at least I would say, in my judgment, You can never simply say, I have to do what I'm told. On that level, we're talking about the lives of hundreds of people here. big institutions, thousands and millions of dollars involved, all this kind of stuff.

[47:07]

It's high stakes. So anyway, conscience is still... For the Catholic Church, you never, ever, ever give up your conscience. That is an absolute axiom, ethically. And then there's many other things. There is the Scriptures, which is an authority beside the Abbot. There is the Church. the church, the tradition, the bishop, all these, these are all legitimate sources of authority. And the complicated thing is listening to, and there's my confreres, the community, listening and taking seriously all these legitimate voices of authority. And then I can say I'm obedient. Oh, we're quitting. We'll go on an hour, that's enough. We're gonna go on with this this afternoon, you understand? You might want to stew about this all day, okay?

[48:06]

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