The “Benedict Option” is Not Optional
After attending a Faith & Law lecture by Rod Dreher (senior editor for the American Conservative) a few months ago on the Benedict Option, I had wanted to add my thoughts on this matter. It seems to have thrown the entire DC orthodoxy scene into a big hullabaloo. Some love it, some hate it.
Thankfully, my brother-in-law “The Bad Catholic” (or Marc Barnes) took on Dreher’s theory elegantly and left me with little to do but quote his take and perhaps simplify and expand with my own thoughts.
(All the quotes moving forward are from “The Other Benedict Option.”)
The Benedict Option boils down to this: Christians must band together, build community and spiritually retreat from the secular world in order to preserve the Church — much like Benedict of Nursia who founded monasticism. Dreher’s thesis is derived from a quote from Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue.
The problem is not a practical one. Of course we’re supposed to form small communities in moral and spiritual resistance to the dominant and banal forms of culture that have reduced a relatively educated and interesting community into a mechanized, consumer society with utilitarian ethics, crappy music, and the protection of our Rights as Individuals to deprive Other Individuals of food, shelter, dignity, and life.
Like Dreher and Marc, I admire MacIntyre and agree with the problem. I imagine we all agree with the problem: modern secular society is actively attempting to undo Christianity using the very tenets that brought it about.
No one is confused about this. Well, maybe some are:
“In the world you will have trouble.” That was our Leader’s promise. Yet here we are, sipping lattes in the worldliest of worlds, shocked to find that the center is not holding, and that the Catholic faith appears to be a tumor in the body of liberal capitalism and a snake in the woodpile of secular democracy.
“I don’t like to call it “wrong,” because its basic tenets are what the Catholic Church has always been saying.”
I completely agree with Dreher’s desperation to return to the good days of small towns, close families, intimate Churches and other actions that inspire a spiritual revival and a daily retreat to Christ. However, nothing I heard in the lecture that day from Dreher was brilliant or new. As a Catholic, this is all central to who we are.
The Benedict Option fairly articulates the problem, and its solutions, when you really dig, hardly seem controversial…
To me, the “Benedict Option” is not an option. Nothing I have since learned or read about the “Benedict Option” has seemed optional to me, but part of our greater catechism. The Benedictine principles, for instance: order, prayer, stability, community. These are all inherent to who we are as Christians and do not stand as separate virtues to some “other” lifestyle or option.
The only part that seems radically different from what we believe as Catholics is the fundamental difference in our attitude towards the world.
The problem is one of attitude. Approached with the problem of the Christian in the world, BenOppers turn in, declaring the America a new Pagan society and advocating for a new St. Benedict — a new spirit of monasticism and rejection of the world in and through the development of Christian communities.
Like a “How To Finally Stop Smoking” book , the Benedict Option offers a unique and easily attainable solution to a thousand year old problem but, in reality, posits the same old teachings (not that they are bad) as if they are new or the problem is new. And like a self-help book, the Benedict Option selfishly focuses on the individual instead of putting trust and hope in others.
Furthermore, the Benedict Option identifies the wrong adversary. We are not defending against a new terrorism of the secular but an insurgency that began within Christianity.
“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” as C.S. Lewis put it, and he’s right: Our cultural stink doesn’t waft from newly sprouted ideologies, but from a rotten Christianity. We are “post-Christian” in the specific sense of being from Christianity — always referred to a Christian past, in thought as in history.
I feel as if perhaps Dreher’s own spiritual journey may have more to do with this solution than our actual need for it. There were more than a handful of stories during his one lecture in which I noted regret in his voice over leaving the Catholic for the Orthodox Church.
Perhaps Dreher’s Orthodoxy pushes him otherwise, but the vocation of the Catholic laity has been well expressed by the Holy Church. The laity are to “seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven.” (Lumen Gentium 31)
We are by no means perfect, but I find that almost all Dreher’s traits of the Benedict Option are widely taught and available in the Roman Catholic Church. The interconnectedness, the retreat, the community — all of it there for those who want to develop their spiritual lives. And we go one step further. We are called to be for others, not just for the preservation of ourselves. Again, this may be a confusion in the Orthodox Church:
If being-Catholic is simply being-saved, then The Benedict Option makes sense: Establish communities that ensure the easiest possible access to our salvation. If being-Catholic is being-saved-for, then it makes less sense: It ignores the other-orientated nature of Catholicity in its fundamental attitude of us-and-them rather than us-for-them, a particularly dangerous attitude when “they” are post-Christians. I don’t believe that any particular practice advocated by Benedict Option folk is necessarily contrary to this this radical being-for, but I worry that the dominant attitude inspiring these practices is.
The danger in my mind is two-fold:
- If the Benedict Option is an actual option, it implies not only that our faith fundamentally lacks these principles (without said option) but that the Option is entirely greater than the whole of our faith.
- That this inwards movement will make expedient the decline of Christianity and hurry up a secular reformation that is already accelerating at an intense pace.
Read all of Marc’s piece: The Other Benedict Option. It is well worth it.
My sincere prayer to Rod Dreher & those who admire the Benedict Option:
Focus less on the monastic aspects of seclusion and preservation, and work hardest at creating communities everywhere that facilitate good works and promote the Word. The Church constantly lives in end times and each of us should strive to devote ourselves completely to others, not just “Christians” since we are all Christians, one way or another. We have assurance from Christ that the Holy Spirit will not fail His Church on earth. She is our Mother and there is no need to fear our death. Let the monks preserve us.
Salvation, then, like everything Christ does, is not a finish-line, but a new beginning, the ordination of a particular man into a being-for-others, the breaking-open and turning-out of the soul to the world. If God has called me to the Christian life, it is not because he is flexing his arbitrary power to save “whomsoever he will.” He chooses me for my neighbor. To be saved is to be for. The answer to the question why I am Catholic and not another is already written into the meaning of the word Catholic — universal. The universal donor can give to all blood types, the universal antidote counteracts all poisons, and the universal human being, that is, the Catholic human being, must be “all things to all people” — a being-for every other being, a being in a relationship of love to everything not-Catholic.
