Today’s Chapter: The Tools for the Ascetical Life

Chapter 4: What are the Instruments of Good Works (vv. 22-43)

22. Not to give way to anger.
23. Not to harbour a desire of revenge.
24. Not to foster guile in one’s heart.
25. Not to make a feigned peace.
26. Not to forsake charity.
27. Not to swear, lest perchance one forswear oneself.
28. To utter truth from heart and mouth.
29. Not to render evil for evil.
30. To do no wrong to anyone yea, to bear patiently wrong done to oneself.
31. To love one’s enemies.
32. Not to render cursing for cursing, but rather blessing.
33. To bear persecution for justice’s sake.
34. Not to be proud.
35. Not given to wine.
36. Not a glutton.
37. Not drowsy.
38. Not slothful.
39. Not a murmurer.
40. Not a detractor.
41. To put one’s hope in God.
42. To attribute any good that one sees in oneself to God, and not to oneself.
43. But to recognise and always impute to oneself the evil that one doth.

Most of us, I think, struggle with how to organize our work. There seems always so much to do: what should have priority? The chapter we are currently reading is in fact Saint Benedict’s answer: he tells us where the true work priorities of the monk ought to lie. Madre Cànopi comments that, for the monk,

Life truly becomes a holy pilgrimage, pursued faithfully, day after day, between prayer and work. And since, for the monk, prayer itself is work—opus Dei—and work is prayer, so then, while he toils, using in the opus manuum, in work, all the instruments which Saint Benedict has placed at our disposition, at the same time, in his heart these instruments become a continual prayer which accompanies his work and guards him in so many activities as if he were in choir; even more, it keeps him mindful of God, ever under His gaze and, naturally, also under the maternal gaze of Mary.

One who insists much on the importance of this continual ‘memory’, on this necessary hiddenness and recollection of the monk, is Abbot Marmion, who, in his ever timely text Christ the Ideal of the Monk, returns to it several times. I recall to you here some brief passages from it. ‘Let us look’, he writes, ‘at how God acted with His divine Son when He became man. The Father willed that the Son, in imitation of Him and as an example for us, should be a workman; and Christ Jesus accepted and realised this programme. Is He not called in the Gospel the son of the carpenter (Mt 13:55)? Although conscious of His own divinity and of the greatness of the work which He comes to carry out on earth, He passes thirty years of His existence in the obscure toil of a poor shop. His apostolic journeys during His public life, what are they but a tireless and continual labour, offered for the glory of the Father and the salvation of souls? Now, the monk ought to realise to perfection the programme of life which he finds in Christ.’

And again: ‘Faith, which handed us over to Christ on the day of making our vows, should continue to be every day a principle of action in us; in order to be perfect, it should blossom in love. Thus does our blessed Father conceive the cenobitic life. The first vow which he makes us pronounce is that of stability, which binds us to the monastic family and fixes us persevering in the monastery even until death (cf Prologue v. 50). But under what light does he present the monastery? Under that of a spiritual laboratory (Ch. 4) which is also a school of the Lord’s service (Prologue). In this laboratory, in such a school, the holy lawgiver arranges what he calls the instruments of the spiritual art. Let us seek to understand the profound doctrine hidden in these expressions.’ (Blessed Columba Marmion, Christ the Ideal of the Monk. Spiritual Conferences, Ch. 7)

Why does Saint Benedict compare the monastic life to a spiritual art? What instruments does he place in our hands to help us navigate it, and how should we employ them? Mary herself, who used them assiduously, teaches us very well. Certain ones were certainly particularly dear to her, and they are precisely those which ought to be dearest also to the monk, those which ought to mark him out.

First of all, however, if the entire spiritual art has as its end to bring us to keep our gaze fixed on Jesus in order to be conformed fully to Him, it is necessary for us to renounce sin by practicing a certain asceticism of body and spirit, so as to rein in the instinctive motions of our nature. There are therefore certain instruments which we could call propedeutic, truly useful to educate us in a sound discipline (cf. v. 11) and to purify our heart. In the list, we find them scattered as in a toolbox; we must know how to take the right one at the right moment. ‘Not to seek pleasures eagerly; to love fasting; not to put into effect the motions of anger; not to reserve for oneself a time for unleashing anger; not to render evil for evil; not to be proud; not to give oneself to the vice of wine; not to be a glutton; not to give oneself to sleeping too much; not to be lazy; not to murmur; not to defame one’s neighbour; to watch constantly over the conduct of one’s life; not to follow the desires of the flesh; to put into practice every day the commandments of the Lord; to love chastity; not to hold feelings of jealousy in one’s heart; not to act out of envy; not to have a spirit of contestation; to flee from pride’ (v. 12-13; 22-23;29;34-40;48;59;63-64;66-69). (Anna Maria Cànopi, Nel ‘Sì’ di Maria, translation by a Benedictine monk, pp. 30-33)

The instruments we have just heard in today’s chapter pertain largely to this propedeutic stage. They must not be neglected; at the same time, they are not an end in themselves. The long series of ‘no’s’ that Saint Benedict gives us here is at the service of a great ‘yes’: ‘yes’ to the love of God and of our neighbour for His sake, and hence ‘no’ to all that could stand in the way of our love for God, and thus of our true happiness.