The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

by Rod Dreher

“Art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith,” said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Why? Because seeing examples of great beauty and extraordinary goodness bypasses our rational faculties and strikes the heart. We immediately respond to beauty and goodness and desire what they reveal. As philosopher Matthew Crawford puts it, “Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.”11

“The point of monasticism was not simply to retreat from a corrupt world to survive, though in various iterations that might have been a dimension of it,” he continues. “But at the heart of it was a quest for God. It was that quest that mandated the preservation of classical learning and the pagan tradition by the monks, because they loved what was true and what was beautiful wherever they found it.”

In the Benedictine tradition, learning is wholly integrated into the life of prayer and work. Being a faithful monk required being able to read, obviously, but the ability to write was critical to the monastic life. Monasteries became places in which countless monks undertook the painstaking work of copying by hand Holy Scripture, prayer books, patristic writings, and literature of the classical world. These men of God laid the foundation for a new civilization, and they did it because they loved God.

we see one’s work not as chosen as much as received from God, for the benefit of all. A person’s labor is, in ways sometimes mysterious, part of a greater undertaking, in the economy both secular and divine.

A monk learns to do the task given to him for the greater glory of God and for the support of the community of believers. In the Benedictine tradition, our labor is one way we participate in God’s creative work of ordering Creation and bringing forth good fruit from it. When undertaken in the right spirit, our labor is also a means God uses to order us inwardly.

Balance is key. There’s a reason why the Rule prescribes labor for only certain hours of the day. Work is a good thing, even a holy thing, but it must not be allowed to dominate one’s life. If it does, our vocation could become an idol.

a Christian must carry out work, and all other things he does, as a gift to God—as participation in His ordering of Creation. This is as true of the carpenter and the accountant as it is of the minister and the schoolteacher.

a Christianity that reduces life in Christ to a moral and ethical code may be in one respect better than nothing—but it is not the Christian faith.

The contemporary Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément says that the spiritual secret of Christianity is that the love of God comes through the human body and flows throughout the universe to which it is joined. In Christianity, the individual’s desire (eros) is purified and transformed into agape—unconditional, selfless love.

Christians having lost our own grand story about eros, cosmos, and theosis, the Greek word for “union with God,” the ultimate end of the Christian pilgrimage.

“Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business,” says Wendell Berry.15 As with so many other things in contemporary society, we modern Americans see sex as wholly a private matter, one of individual rights. But this is false. The rules, rituals, and traditions of a community pertaining to sexuality, says Berry, intend “to preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.” Berry goes on to say that “if the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing—and our time is proving it so.”

We think our many technologies give us more control over our destinies. In fact, they have come to control us. And this opens the door to the more fundamental point about technology: it is an ideology that conditions how we humans understand reality. To use technology is to participate in a cultural liturgy that, if we aren’t mindful, trains us to accept the core truth claim of modernity: that the only meaning there is in the world is what we choose to assign it in our endless quest to master nature.

Technology itself is a kind of liturgy that teaches us to frame our experiences in the world in certain ways and that, if we aren’t careful, profoundly distorts our relationship to God, to other people, and to the material world—and even our self-understanding.

Both contemplation and action are necessary to human flourishing. The Middle Ages prized contemplation, which is why medieval societies, including products of their technological knowledge, were ordered to God. The icon, thought to be a symbolic window into divine reality, is an apt symbol of that age. Contemplation is alien to the modern mode of life. The iPhone, a luminous portal promising to show us the world, but really a mirror of the world inside our heads, is the icon of our own age.

The source of all disorder is loving finite things more than the infinite God. Even loving good things, like family and country, can be a source of damnation if one loves them more than one loves God and seeks fulfillment in those things rather than in the Creator of those things.

Untold billions of dollars have been spent by advertisers over the past century to convince people that we can know our true identities only through fulfilling our desires. Say the advertisers, buy this object or experience, and you will know yourself—the self you want to be, not the self you are. It doesn’t work. Everything returns to the mean of everydayness. So we try something new, thinking this, finally, will be what makes us happy. On and on we go, flitting and darting our way through life, running from God and ourselves, terrified of quiet, of stillness, of our own thoughts. We are like the wandering monks Saint Benedict condemned in his Rule as the worst sort of monastic, led only by their own restless wills. “Of the miserable conduct of all such, it is better to be silent than to speak,” wrote the saint.

Monks find true liberty by submitting to a rule of life, which is to say by ordering themselves to God in a structured way. And not only monks: almost anyone who lives by his own choice in a sustained, disciplined way will find true freedom. The woodworker who has given himself over to learning the traditions of his craft has far more liberty to exercise his creativity within the craft than the foolish amateur who thinks he can make it up as he goes along.

When we abstain from practices that disorder our loves, and in that time of fasting redouble our contemplation of God and the good things of Creation, we recenter our minds on the inner stability we need to create a coherent, meaningful self. The Internet is a scattering phenomenon, one that encourages surrender to passionate impulses. If we fail to push back against the Internet as hard as it pushes against us, we cannot help but lose our footing. And if we lose our footing, we ultimately lose the straight path through life. Christians have known this from generation to generation since the early church.

“We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.”

the Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like. “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines,” writes Wendell Berry. Let’s take our stand on the side of creatures, and the Creator.

“The moment the Benedict Option becomes about anything other than communion with Christ and dwelling with our neighbors in love, it ceases to be Benedictine,” he said. “It can’t be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.”

The church, then, is both Ark and Wellspring—and Christians must live in both realities. God gave us the Ark of the church to keep us from drowning in the raging flood. But He also gave us the church as a place to drown our old selves symbolically in the water of baptism, and to grow in new life, nourished by the never-ending torrent of His grace. You cannot live the Benedict Option without seeing both visions simultaneously.

“I know from the olive trees that some years we will have a big harvest, and other years we will take few,” he said. “The monks, when they brought agriculture to this place a thousand years ago, they taught our ancestors that there are times when we have to save seed. That’s why I think we have to walk on this road of Saint Benedict, in this Benedict Option. This is a season for saving the seed. If we don’t save the seed now, we won’t have a harvest in the years to come.”

“In Italy, we have a saying: ‘When there is no horse, a donkey can do good work.’ I consider myself a little donkey,” he said. “There are so many purebred horses that run nowhere, but this old donkey is getting the job done. You and me, let’s go on doing this job like little donkeys. Don’t forget, it was a donkey that brought Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.”

Grande! So we little donkeys go on, walking the pilgrim path in the way of Benedict, out of the ruined imperial city, to a place of peace where we can be still and learn to hear the voice of our Master. We find others like us and build communities, schools for the service of the Lord. We do this not to save the world but for no other reason than we love Him and know that we need a community and an ordered way of life to serve Him fully.

We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible, and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West. We work, we pray, we confess our sins, we show mercy, we welcome the stranger, and we keep the commandments. When we suffer, especially for Christ’s sake, we give thanks, because that is what Christians do. Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness? It is not for us to say. Our command is, in the words of the Christian poet W. H. Auden, to “stagger onward rejoicing.”

There is no place on this Earth entirely safe from catastrophe. When the earth moved, the Basilica of St. Benedict, which had stood firm for many centuries, tumbled to the ground. Only the facade, the mere semblance of a church, remains. But notice this: because the monks headed for the hills after the August earthquake, they survived. God preserved them in the holy poverty of their canvas-covered Bethlehem, where they continued to live the Rule in the ancient way, including chanting the Old Mass. Now they can begin rebuilding amid the ruins, their resilient Benedictine faith teaching them to receive this catastrophe as a call to deeper holiness and sacrifice. God willing, new life will one day spring forth from the rubble. Because they lived the Benedict Option in the good times, they built within themselves the stability and resilience to endure the worst time—and to begin again, in God’s time. “We pray and watch from the mountainside, thinking of the long three years Saint Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world,” wrote Father Benedict. “Fiat. Fiat.” Let it be. Let it be. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.