Monday, May 8, 2017

A Benedict Option for Laymen?

A recent short essay published by Crisis Magazine examines the problems that come with an "Abundance of Benedict Options," playing off the social engineering schema popularized by the ex-Catholic Rod Dreher:
The most famous [option] is certainly the Benedict option popularized by author Rod Dreher. But others have written about the Dominican option, the Dorothy option, the Escriva option, the Buckley option, the Boniface option, etc. I have no problems with these suggestions or reflection on this question. It is vital and important to prepare for the full flowering of western liberalism and its possible collapse under its own weight. However, most who are writing on this topic miss the contingency of this question, the participatory nature of the Church, and Ecclesial unity.
The essay by Dr. John Meinert is both short and good, basically trying to calm the contentious option-holders from beating on one another in public, in favor of admitting a variety of valid options within the Catholic sphere of moral orthodoxy.

I wonder if Dreher's repurposing of St. Benedict's name in naming his own social-religious philosophy is unnecessarily confusing. It seems that Dreher is constantly fighting off concerns that he wants laity with family to live like monks. Why invoke the Rule of the great Benedict if you are only going to abstract a few applicable ideas for the common layman? "I came up with the concept," Dreher says, "and I'm not sure what it means."

John Senior was more intentional with his invocation of the ancient Benedictine way of life. He argued that the larger Catholic culture (lay and clerical) can only find a revival if first the monasteries are purified by returning to a strict obedience to the Rule. Fix the monasteries, and the rest of the world will follow. Dr. Senior, I suspect, would accuse Mr. Dreher of putting the cart before the horse. Senior wrote in The Restoration of Christian Culture:
We are creatures of habit, as the nuns used to say. In the moral and spiritual order, we become what we wear as much as what we wear "becomes" us—and it is the same with how we eat and what we do. That is the secret of St. Benedict's Rule which in the strict sense regulated monasteries and in the wider sense, through the influence and example of monasteries, especially in their love of Our Blessed Mother, civilized Europe. The habits of the monks, the bells, the ordered life, the conversation, the music, gardens, prayer, hard work, and walls—all these accidental and incidental forms conformed the moral and spiritual life of Christians to the love of Mary and her Son. (130-31)
While Senior's vision demands a top-down purification of culture, Dreher's vision is born of an impatience with the failures of those in higher states of life in the Church. This is no surprise, considering that clerical corruption was the cause of his own schism. There is something unnatural about creating a "rule" for Catholic families that is divorced from the daily, weekly, and yearly life of a parish or monastery. It is the kind of thing one would expect in a place like pre-20th century Japan, where pockets of Catholic communities were forced to perpetuate themselves without the help of clergy of any kind after the expulsion of Western influences, not in the cybernetically connected 21st century.

Certainly, at times families need to keep themselves Catholic in spite of the local parochial influence. Dreher's vision of the family besieged on every side, even the ecclesiastical side, is not without merit. But it is dangerous to cultivate a lifestyle of seclusion, where the laity arrive at the church once a week for Sacraments, but otherwise refuse to engage with the life of the Church. I worry mostly that Dreher is implicitly recommending a kind of Protestant spirituality, wherein each family is an island that develops a habit of suspicion against all outside influence.

The health of the Church Catholic depends heavily on the holiness of her monasteries, and to a marginally lesser degree on the holiness of her priests and bishops. Any spirituality that places the natural family at its center I consider suspect, and I say this as one recently married and hopeful of a fruitful life, and who also regularly bemoans the disintegration of family life in the West. Our spiritual life revolves around the Household of Heaven, in which the Son is paradoxically greater than the Mother, in which our familial relations become mere metaphors for a more perfect life. Sacramental though our marriages be, they are not intrinsically paradigms for the life of Heaven, where we will neither marry nor be given in marriage.

I am not insensible to the need of securing the moral and traditional aspects of family life. It is an important problem, and one urgent enough that it will not simply wait for the hopeful Benedictine revival in the West. In this respect, I think families need to make peace with the fact that any moral corrections they make against the culture or against malign ecclesiastical influence are going to be limited, imperfect, and temporary. Whatever "option" we take, we should not think it to be a permanent or wholistic solution.

14 comments:

  1. I don't believe Dreher said or even implied this: "But it is dangerous to cultivate a lifestyle of seclusion, where the laity arrive at the church once a week for Sacraments, but otherwise refuse to engage with the life of the Church."
    What he actually said, "Strengthening families and communities, and thickening our ties to each other and to OUR CHURCHES [emphasis added]. . .
    You also might want to check out this website: http://www.everyhomeamonastery.com/category/lessons-from-a-monastery/. This family, to the extent they are able, style their lives after monastic life and are very involved with their church. This is what I believe Dreher is getting at.

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    1. Clearly even Dreher doesn't know exactly what he is getting at. I've seen attempts at making family life more monastic, and it usually ends in the children developing mental obsessions or just pushing away from religion. Let the monks be monks and the families be families.

      I do appreciate Dreher's repeated note about the need to restore a "narrative" to the culture, but that's as much a problem of bad preaching as it is the assault of secular anti-culture. When all of our sermons are about vaguely loving our neighbors (as in Novus Ordo land) or about the technical distinctions of moral theology (as in Traddy land), laity are still left without the larger context which is supposed to inspire us to care.

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    2. And you don't believe that assuming a lifestyle that draws you closer to God will bring you to care?

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    3. I don't think that imposing a quasi-monastic lifestyle on one's children will make them care, even if it helps the parents. Children already live under natural forms of obedience, chastity, and poverty. While parents ought to encourage the assumption of the spiritual counsels later in life, they cannot pretend that they are abbot and abbess, and their kiddos wee monks and nuns.

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    4. J., I suppose that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is giving them a different foundation on which to base their life: one that aligns them more closely to God and the Church. Besides, I hardly think Dreher means everyone to dress up in robes and chant and pray all day.

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    5. From page 125 of Dreher's book: "We are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery.... A monastery is a place of hierarchical order, but all members are valued and united in a bond of love." I don't think that Dreher wants us to run our homes strictly according to the Rule, but that's surely one way his Benedict Option will be misused. He is demanding far more subtlety of thought than most married couples are capable of achieving when he tries to appropriate the Rule for family life, and I'm not sure he's clear enough about that in his popular writing. (His calls for classical homeschooling will surely go ignored by most parents who have no classical training, as well.)

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    6. It's true that some people may abuse it, but that's true for anything. I recently read an article by Michael Novak which stated pro-choice women facing an unwanted pregnancy use God's forgiveness as a rationale for abortion: "Third, “these women feel that God will ultimately forgive the woman, because He is a forgiving God, because the woman did not intend to get pregnant, and because a woman in such crisis has no real choice."
      Because she chooses to abuse God's forgiveness does that mean it should have never been offered?

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    7. Sorry, forget to give you the link to the article I quoted: http://michaelnovak.net/why-they-hate-pro-lifers-so/

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  2. Here is a good critique of the "Benedict Option": https://opuspublicum.com/2017/04/04/201744my-last-word-on-this-benedict-option-business/

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    1. Dreher's continued use of the Roman Catholic spiritual tradition is an annoyance, but it might be the only way he could market his "option" to his former co-religionists. If he focused on the example of some obscure (to Americans) Orthodox monastic movement, very few of us would keep listening.

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  3. I believe that Mr. Dreher would more correctly be called a schismatic, than an apostate.

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    1. I admit that the technical distinctions of such things often escape me. I forget that "apostasy" is usually applied to those who have rejected Christian religion entirely. The post has been corrected.

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  4. The best way for families to "live the Benedict option" is by keeping the door to the monastic life open. From my limited, recently converted trad perspective, parents encourage either the priesthood or marriage. The monastic life is sort of shunted away or one simply doesn't hear of it. Of course we want (and need) more traditional priests but we also need many, many religious. There are plenty of traditional monastic communities, especially if you're willing to learn French. There are also wide open opportunities for trads to found charitable or itinerant orders. Most of the traditional monasteries are contemplative.

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    1. Agreed. Catholic parents need to encourage the religious life, even if they are only well-suited to train for marriage.

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