Who Will Arrive? (Prologue 4)
PROLOGUE OF OUR MOST HOLY FATHER SAINT BENEDICT TO HIS RULE
4 Jan. 5 May. 4 Sept.
Having our loins, therefore, girded with faith and the performance of good works, let us walk in His paths by the guidance of the Gospel, that we may deserve to see Him Who hath called us to His kingdom. And if we wish to dwell in the tabernacle of His kingdom, we shall by no means reach it unless we run thither by our good deeds. But let us ask the Lord with the Prophet, saying to Him: “Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle, or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill?” After this question, brethren, let us hear the Lord answering, and shewing to us the way to His tabernacle, and saying: “He that walketh without stain and worketh justice: he that speaketh truth in his heart, that hath not done guile with his tongue: he that hath done no evil to his neighbour, and hath not taken up a reproach against his neighbour:” he that hath brought the malignant evil one to naught, casting him out of his heart with all his suggestions, and hath taken his bad thoughts, while they were yet young, and dashed them down upon the (Rock) Christ. These are they, who fearing the Lord, are not puffed up with their own good works, but knowing that the good which is in them cometh not from themselves but from the Lord, magnify the Lord Who worketh in them, saying with the Prophet: “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name give the glory.” So the Apostle Paul imputed nothing of his preaching to himself, but said: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” And again he saith: “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”
4 January 2026
Prologue vv. 21-32
Yesterday we heard the words of Psalm 33, asking us who desires life and to see good days, and then telling us what we must do if we desire true and everlasting life. Today Saint Benedict presents a similar question and a similar practical response, also coming from a psalm, this time Psalm 14. The question is who will dwell in the Lord’s Tabernacle; the answer is quite simply the one who practices justice in all his dealings and rejects the temptations of the enemy. Here again, the focus is on action: we will not arrive, Saint Benedict says, except by good deeds.
Such an admonition, as we recalled yesterday, is taken from Our Lord Himself, Who tells us that love means keeping His commandments. Yet such is our human propensity to pride that the insistence on good works very easily leads to Pelagianism: the denial of the need for divine grace in order for man to do any supernatural good. Indeed, history shows that Pelagianism is a heresy to which monks are particularly prone. Pelagius himself was a monk, and his doctrines often found their defenders in monastic circles in Rome, in North Africa, in Gaul, and in Britain. In the East, where Origen had written strongly in defense of free will against the determinism of the Gnostics, this same assertion of the power of man’s will also easily led monks to sympathy with the doctrine of Pelagius, or at least with what would come to be called Semi-Pelagianism. Even Saint John Cassian, so beloved of the Latin ascetical tradition, has had something of a cloud over his name on account of the passages in his thirteenth Conference which seem, with the Semi-Pelagians, to assert that the beginning of our conversion comes from us and not from God.
Saint Benedict was aware of these errors, to which the Church had vigorously responded both in local synods under the influence of Saint Augustine and his disciples, and then through the confirmation of these synods by the Apostolic See. Thus, in both of the sections of the Prologue which list the good deeds needed in order to have life and dwell in the Lord’s Tabernacle, stress is laid on the primacy of God’s grace. Yesterday, we heard the Lord’s voice seeking His workman: that is, the invitation comes from Him. The Christian life is not first about man’s search for God, but about God’s search for man. Then, after the quotation of Psalm 33, Saint Benedict quoted the promises made in Isaias 58:9, but with a twist, instead of saying, ‘You will call and He shall answer, Behold, I am here’, he slightly alters the verse in light of Isaias 65:24, so that now it says, ‘Before you call on Me, I will answer, Behold I am here.’ The initiative is God’s.
Today’s recapitulation of this section, with another list of requirements taken from Psalm 14, likewise stresses the primacy of God’s grace. The Psalm as we say it says of the just man, Timentes autem Dominum glorificat, ‘He glorifies those fearing the Lord.’ But the Prologue, putting the verb in the plural, renders the verse a bit differently: the phrase ‘fearing the Lord’ is taken as referring to the subject, and leads into an excursus on the need not to be puffed up with one’s good works. The verb magnificant (rather than the glorificat in our Psalter) then takes the Lord as its object: ‘Fearing, they magnify the Lord’, and Saint Benedict adds, by way of explanation, ‘Who worketh in them’. As if to drive home the point, he adds a catena of additional Scripture verses on the same theme: Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, from Psalm 113, followed by two quotations from Saint Paul on the grace of God and the need to glory only in the Lord.
Thus, Saint Benedict unites a demanding and practical call for good works as the indispensable condition for salvation, worthy of the Apostle James and the Desert Fathers, with a thoroughly Pauline and Augustinian insistence on the grace of God as the cause which initiates, sustains, and brings to perfection all of the good that we might do. As we honour today the Holy Name of Jesus in Which alone is our salvation, let us ask Him for the grace to rely solely on His Holy Name, so that drawn by His love, we may carry out the good works which He has prepared in advance for us, in order that, as today’s Collect asks, we may come to enjoy in Heaven the sight of Him Whose Holy Name we worship on earth.