Today’s Chapter: To Love God With All One’s Heart

Chapter 4: What are the Instruments of Good Works (vv. 1-21)

1. In the first place, to love the Lord God with all one’s heart, all one’s soul, and all one’s strength.
2. Then one’s neighbour as oneself.
3. Then not to kill.
4. Not to commit adultery.
5. Not to steal.
6. Not to covet.
7. Not to bear false witness.
8. To honour all men.
9. Not to do to another what one would not have done to oneself.
10. To deny oneself, in order to follow Christ.
11. To chastise the body.
12. Not to seek after delicate living.
13. To love fasting.
14. To relieve the poor.
15. To clothe the naked.
16. To visit the sick.
17. To bury the dead.
18. To help in affliction.
19. To console the sorrowing.
20. To keep aloof from worldly actions.
21. To prefer nothing to the love of Christ.

If the Holy Rule is, in the words of Bossuet, ‘a mysterious abridgment of the Gospel’, Chapter 4 is itself an abridgment of the entire Holy Rule. Every chapter of the Holy Rule can in some way be seen as an expansion of one or more of the Instruments of Good Works. Indeed, it is perhaps no accident as the catalogue contains (according to a traditional division) seventy-two instruments, so the Holy Rule contains seventy-two chapters, with the addition of the Prologue and of the epilogue in Chapter 73.

Furthermore, while Chapters 5-7, on obedience, silence, and humility, are rightly described as the spiritual core of the Holy Rule, in some way Chapter 4 is even more fundamental, for it gives the perspective in which the more specifically monastic virtues in those chapters are to be understood. For Chapter 4 begins and ends with the love of God, which will reappear at the end of Chapter 7 as the culmination of the ladder of humility. The list here begins with the Great Commandment of charity—love for God with all one’s heart, soul, and strength—and the command of fraternal charity which is allied to it. Today’s opening section, which proceeds to sum up the Commandments and the Works of Mercy, concludes with another summons to love, this time specifically love of the Word Incarnate: to prefer nothing to the love of Christ. After several dozen more instruments, near its end the list will return to the love of Christ, which is given in Instrument 70 as the motive for praying for one’s enemies. Finally (spoiler alert), Saint Benedict’s postscript to the list will promise us the reward which ‘hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive’, which God ‘hath prepared for them that love Him.’ (1 Cor 2:9)

The Instruments, then, have their foundation and their culmination in love—and in the heart. And as we have already seen in Our Lady the model of our listening and responding to God’s word in the Prologue, of the stability and obedience of the cenobite described in Chapter 1, and of the Christ-like love of the Abbot in Chapter 2, so now, as we are presented the tools of our spiritual craft, we have our exemplar in the love that burns in the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It would be the work of a much longer reflection to consider how each of the instruments is exemplified in some way in Mary’s life. But we know that all of them are summed up in the love which filled her soul from the moment of her conception, and which burned in her heart until the moment when, as the saints tell us, she died in an ecstasy of love, and was received forever into the embrace of her Son, to Whose love she had never preferred anything.