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Rod Dreher and the “Benedict Option”
This past week, Rod posted a remarkable bleg over on the website of the American Conservative. Because Rod’s premise is so arresting–he believes we’ve about reached the point at which good and decent people need to drop out of American society to form their own counterculture–and because Rod himself is such a sweet writer, I thought I’d re-post his bleg right here.
To wit:
You who have been following my work for years know that I keep coming around to this idea of the “Benedict Option.” In short, it means this: At what point do the conditions of moral breakdown and atomization become such that people who want to live out the moral life in community realize that they have to secede from mainstream culture in a serious way? The idea comes from MacIntyre’s final paragraph in After Virtue:
“A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead…was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point…This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict.”
I’m working on a piece right now for the magazine [the American Conservative] on the feasibility of what I call the Benedict Option for our culture. That is, what “new forms of community” might we realistically construct for the purpose of living out our faith and moral values together, against a hostile culture? What I’m not looking for is any manifestation of radical separatism. Rather, I’m looking for real-life examples that conservatives, religious and otherwise, are doing, and that might be an option for others.
For example, I spoke yesterday to the abbot of the Clear Creek Abbey in rural eastern Oklahoma, and am going to make a visit there soon to talk to people in their community. Since that traditional Benedictine congregation started building its monastery in the late 1990s, a community of Catholic laity who wanted to settle in the monastery’s shadow and participate in its liturgical life have relocated there. I’m interested to learn how they’ve done. The abbot told me that many of them live in material poverty, but spiritual joy. I’d like to see for myself, and the abbot very kindly invited me to come for a visit.
I have other, non-Catholic examples in mind. Please send me your own suggestions.
What are we to make of this, Ricochetti? Do you accept Rod’s premise–that is, that it’s high time to consider the “Benedict Option?” And if you do, what suggestions would you offer to Rod?
Published in General
Yes.
Although as a measure to avoid confusion, here, I might have said “disestablishment” rather than “privatization”, only because religious icons–the 10 Commandments in public buildings, say–or public prayers would be fully in accord with the Founders’ vision here, as opposed to a fully ‘neutralist’ or militantly secular state a la Rawls. We need not even mention the obvious supports of public and civic morality the Founders also thought were perfectly legitimate.
Incidentally, because I think the subject can only be fruitfully reflected upon in the proper scope outside the bounds of a conversation like this, I cited Manent earlier. His World Beyond Politics? and Intellectual History of Liberalism contain excellent discussions of these theologico-political issues. For not dissimilar reasons from Jaffa’s, however, his does tend to be a more Euro-centric discussion.
Without for a moment disagreeing about the corrosive effects of modern feminism on the family, I might ask why you attribute its errors to Katie.
I cannot recall an occasion where she defended those views–perhaps you can cite the offending passage.
Edited 1 hour ago
You mean “voting with your feet.” And “voting with your wallet.” I too think these are extremely important tools for cultivating any cultural repair.9 hours ago
We can vote with our feet and our wallets to some degree, but how can we avoid federal taxes. They are, after all, what feeds the nanny state. Is there a way to create an underground economy, where trade in kind replaces trade with money? In an agrarian society, yes. In our society, I just can’t see it.
I don’t know if I have anything important to add here but I don’t think The Benedictine Option as described is workable. Perhaps it’s my protestant bias but I don’t even find a scriptural basis for monasticism anyway. As others have pointed out Jesus and his disciples were absolutely engaged with the culture and it was a culture that I would argue was even more alien and hostile than the one we find ourselves in. There may be a place for the preservation of knowledge of truth in closed cultures much like the monasteries of old. However it seems to me that those monasteries survived because of their geographical isolation as much as anything else. In the modern world are their any places left that are habitable and remote enough to establish such outposts? Even now such groups as the Amish (who may not be as untouched by the modern world as many believe) require a hosting culture that values conscience over state whenever possible.
October 13th is the anniversary of Fatima. Just saying. ·10 hours ago
I don’t know about the Fatima stuff, but I can’t disagree with him about his fears of the future of the Church (all the Church, not just Catholicism). Things seem to be going pretty much as he feared.
Without that Third Great Awakening, how can we have even a modicum of optimism about America’s future?
We HAD a third great awakening. It took place in the 70’s and 80’s. Jesus Christ Superstar became part of the popular culture, religious television and radio networks suddenly multiplied, and for the first time in recent memory, a majority of Americans self-identified as “Conservative” largely because their religious beliefs lined up with the coming Reagan Revolution.
It wasn’t enough.
October 13th is the anniversary of Fatima. Just saying.
Are you referring to this Sword of the Spirit? …And how does it work that if a community lacks vows, it ends up as a cult? The Sword of the Spirit had significant problems but this is the first time anyone said a lack of vows one of them. Or maybe you’re thinking of vows of a particular kind. Please elucidate.
I was too short and sloppy. I meant to express that a Benedictine Abbey is founded on the religious vocationand the divine graces that come with it. (It’s also fully incorporated into the larger edifice of the Church, with all its sacramental life, Canon Law, etc.) [snip]
Thanks, that’s much clearer.
It’s true that I see the privatizing of religious faith as the at the heart of the galloping secularism that’s destroying the moral foundation of the American Experiment.
I wouldn’t call it the fulcrum of that experiment, though. I see such things as recognition of the rights and dignity of the person; freedom of religion, checks and balances, and federalism as the heart of it—i.e., what made it work so well for so long—what made it great and lovable and worth dying for.
I deny that the separation of the Church and State is the privatizing of religion. It is, rather, a separating out of separat spheres of competence and authority.
The State is not competent to appoint bishops, say, or to articulate articles of dogma, or to forgive sins.
The Church is not competent to wage war, police streets, or set monetary policy, for instance.
If all Americans were to convert to Catholicism, I would still favor separation of Church and State.
Without for a moment disagreeing about the corrosive effects of modern feminism on the family, I might ask why you attribute its errors to Katie.
I cannot recall an occasion where she defended those views–perhaps you can cite the offending passage. ·6 hours ago
I oppose feminism’s rejection of sexual difference and complementarity. I oppose feminism’s support of abortion and no-fault divorce and libertine sexuality. I oppose feminism’s risible exaltation of career and money-making over motherhood and home-making.
But I am with them (and have said so more than once around here) in their rejection of the subordination of women (and wives) to men (and husbands). That seems to be the rub for Robert.
Are you referring to this Sword of the Spirit? …And how does it work that if a community lacks vows, it ends up as a cult? The Sword of the Spirit had significant problems but this is the first time anyone said a lack of vows one of them. Or maybe you’re thinking of vows of a particular kind. Please elucidate.
I was too short and sloppy. I meant to express that a Benedictine Abbey is founded on the religious vocation and the divine graces that come with it. (It’s also fully incorporated into the larger edifice of the Church, with all its sacramental life, Canon Law, etc.)
The lay vocation is very different in kind and mode. I think SotS and its offshoots failed because they failed to recognize and respect that basic difference. (I don’t say they were through and through bad. I was never a member, but owe them a great debt.)
Religious life works because it is, in a sense, given by God. When human beings try to design the perfect communal existence, we go wrong, just as we go wrong when we try to command the perfect economy.
Russell Hittinger spent 45 minutes explaining it pretty well.
A religiously neutral form of government won’t stand against_atheistic materialism
Katie, like Pomocons and EasternStraussians, you assume the Lockean possessive individualism of the Founding wasdestined to end up in materialism/hedonism, crystallized in smarmy finance capitalism of WallStreet (essentially money changers who don’t create anything).
But this is not capitalism or pursuing one’s rational self-interest according to the Founders. Rather it’s a man honorably providing for his family, standing on his own two feet, and making it. The Protestant work ethic is centered on manly honor or thumos — a spirit that goes back centuries to the Roman Republic and Greek polis. Your feminism — the denial men must be given a certain automatic pride of place — has actually done as much to undermine the family and prosperity as anything else.
Again, America was an impossibility from within a Catholic context: how do you know your dismissal of Jefferson’s wall of separation won’t corrupt the Church itself, manifestly the case throughout Europe/Quebec? (And Polish Catholicism is enmeshed in Polish nationalism. Read about the expulsion of German Catholic priests from Breslau/Silesia: so much for Catholic “universalism”).
“Neutrality”: read God_and_the_Founders — author is Opus_Dei.
Again, America was an impossibility from within a Catholic context: how do you know your dismissal of Jefferson’s wall of separation won’t corrupt the Church itself, manifestly the case throughout Europe/Quebec?
On this point, I might interject–if somewhat off-topic–that Pierre Manent’s latest book (just out), Metamorphoses of the City, has a fascinating discussion in its last chapter on the changing role of mediation at the time of the Reformation–specifically the manner in which the nation-state came to fulfill a certain sort of mediative role between the individual and the universal in Protestant nations, and the manner in which this played out at a different pace in Catholic nations due to the self-conception of the Church’s role as primarily mediative (and sacramental).
Worth reading/considering in this context.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
The “Benedict Option”. Is that like “going Galt” for Catholics? I must confess I always find Rod a bit prone to histrionics and solipsism. A lot depends on what situation you think we’re in. Is it a ‘frog in the pot’ situation, where one must recognize subtle but irreversible changes before it’s too late? Or are we drawing toward a crisis that will make the choices more stark and pressing? Worst case, I would say, would put us in the situation of English Catholics during the reign of the horrific Liza, going about our daily business while keeping our faith as secret as we can. Can Ricochet provide a virtual priest-hole I can hide my posts in?
For me, everything changed in 1970. I was 10. I had spent my first years in the American that my parents knew. Then the Woodstock generation appeared from nowhere. They were a terrifying group of people. I don’t think I ever got over it. The thought of going underground appeals to me greatly.
It shouldn’t be overlooked, though, that to enter a Benedictine Abby is not really to “opt out” of society. Rather, it’s a distinctive and highly potent mode of being in society.
We’ve just been traveling in England, where the gigantic cultural influence of the monasteries in earlier times is everywhere apparent. Staying for a bit in the Cotswolds, we learned that its enormous wealth and prosperity in the later middle ages came from the wool trade, which was first developed by Cistercian monks.
Because of their austere way of life and their vow of poverty, they would found their monasteries on worthless land, and then search out ways to support themselves. Sheep farming turned out to be the key way in that part of the world—the part that nurtured Shakespeare, among others.
But couldn’t you also reverse that formulation and say a woman “owns” her husband? We use the possessive in both directions: my wife, my husband. And if “the two become one flesh,” then in the same sense that we “own” our bodies, “my body, my arms, my legs, etc.” we would also “own” our spouse. Again the relation seems symmetric.
Robert, I don’t share your subjectivistic understanding of values. I hold, with many others, such as Dietrich von Hildebrand, that there is such a thing as objective value and such things as objective values, and that the civil society is grounded on such values as well as on truths.
A human being, for instance, has a value and dignity independent of his “use” to us, that calls for respect. Values, like truths, are discernible by Reason. They can be recognized apart from religious faith.
My term was subordination, not subjugation.
My view of the question is informed by my faith. So is my opposition to abortion. But I am in nowise trying to establish an article of faith as the rule of law.
I think the equal dignity of men and women as persons is rationally given.
Right. Because I find patriarchy manifestly unjust.
You seem to be blind to the fact that SSM could only have arisen with the complete breakdown in common understanding, the breakdown in civilized patriarchy…
You seem unable or unwilling to separate the wheat from the chaff in feminist claims.
I see the “point” of marriage as love. In the Catholic understanding, the “original sin” of Adam and Eve set loose in the world the master/slave dynamic that has menaced human relations ever since. It’s remedy is permanent, exclusive, mutual, procreative, self-giving love and service, i.e., marriage. Marriage restores the “original unity” between man and woman. Woman was designed by God to be man’s companion, not his subordinate.
I find such theological truths confirmed in ordinary moral experience and through rational reflection on the nature of persons, the nature of women, the nature of love, the nature of marriage, etc.
Nothing ennobles a man (or a woman for that matter) like self-sacrificing love.
To me the greatness of the Adams’ marriage (which I, too, admire) can be found in the way their exceptional mutual regard and mutual deference transcended the norms of the day.
My brand of feminism is very much grounded on a deep appreciation (thanks to wonderful teachers) of the beauty and dignity of femininity, as well as on the mysterious, life-giving complementarity between men and women.
Wojtyla’s ethical (not theological) work Love and Responsibility has a chapter on the different meanings of “belonging”.
And he shows, to my mind completely convincingly, that the marriage vows are an exchange of selves. I give myself to another, who gives himself to me. If that exchange were unequal, it would be unworthy of the dignity women have as persons. A husband doesn’t “own” his wife, rather the two are no longer two, but one flesh. They belong to each other.
The marriages I admire most all embody this deep moral truth.
Katie,
Political communities presuppose reason as their foundation. Reason and nature — ie, self-evident truths of the Declaration, not your beloved “values,” as values are not self-evident truths and “do not belong to [objects] essentially” — are the proper standards by which religious activities or suprarational claims are to be judged in the public realm.
Societies with faith as their foundation exist, but such societies are not properly political. Politics reflects what can be known apart from religious faith or belief. The common or political understanding does not depend upon shared idiosyncratic faith or belief.
Separation of church and state implies two crucial dimensions: the political need for religious freedom, and the moral need for religious belief. That’s the essence of George Washington’s “let us with caution indulge the supposition.” The American Founding accomplished this reconciliation of the moral with the political, extrapolating the particular from the universal, the universal becoming the spiritual or “Christian,” the temporal the political. So that becomes the separation of church and state. So when we are going to be political, we are not going to think of Christianity or religion directly. We are not going to turn to priests or
cont’d
popes to answer the question of rule.
And as I’ve explained before, the social contract can in be reconciled with what I call the political because, even though everyone (at the Founding) is a Christian, everyone is a Christian in relation to everyone else as being in a state of nature because Christianity is by definition not particular or political; it doesn’t have a form of rule.
My ideal marriage is that of John and Abigail Adams. So much for my advocacy of “subjugation” of women.
Which returns to the point: your JPII feminism is rooted in idiosyncratic faith or belief. Feminism is factually incorrect. It’s otherworldly religion. Whatever its varieties, feminism is a sublimely moral cult, producing orgies of great feeling for the sake of obscuring a fundamental reality: that women everywhere and always seek out men who have at least as much prestige/status (material or otherwise) as they do. It defies the reality that civilized patriarchy is the necessary mechanism by which women become the barometers of morality in order to avoid becoming subjugated by men. It’s self-evident, but not obvious, at least not to everyone, that the West is returning
continued…
to tribalistic society.
None of your arguments against same-sex marriage derive from argument for civilized patriarchy. The same problem plagues, undercuts, Robbie George and New Natural Law theorists. To assume it suffices to defend the family and argue against SSM with appeals to mere gender “complementarity,” as opposed to argument from civilized patriarchy, is to appeal to autonomy of the will. Kenneth Green of U Toronto zeros in on the point beautifully in criticism of George.
You seem to be blind to the fact that SSM could only have arisen with the complete breakdown in common understanding, the breakdown in civilized patriarchy, civilized patriarchy being the only basis on which the Adams marriage could have been an ideal, and why all marriages prior to feminism were ordered to such an ideal in radical contradistinction to today with marital breakdown, cohabitation, illegitimacy, incivility.
Common understanding? What you don’t understand: the pride of place for men. It’s odd, as you’re otherwise admirably alive to what defines our world today: the denial of the beautiful or noble. Our world is woldless.
When a society denies the ornamental quality of being a husband — denies that the
cont’d
whole point of marriage is actually to ennoble men by giving every man his own castle; when a society denies men some sort of outlet that they can call their own (my earlier point about manly thumos), hence “I may not be able to dominate other men, but at least I ‘own’ this woman and these children and I’ll defend them to the death;” when a society denies men be given an automatic pride of place: ie., as a man you are automatically given honor as a gentleman and a provider — then, yes, you get tribalistic society.
Feminism and same-sex marriage or sodomy go hand in hand. They are an explicit denial of anything beautiful or noble. What brings out the point: the whole argument for same-sex eroticism (or rather pederasty, precisely not homosexuality) in the ancient polis was on the basis of the noble. What’s underlying this? Answer: Why would you want to dominate a woman when they are an inferior creature to a man (or rather boy)? This is why there were actually no homosexuals in the ancient polis; and precisely because there were no homosexuals could there ever have been toleration
cont’d
(up to a point, de facto) of pederasty in the polis. This is why those who believe that “homosexuality” was somehow domesticated in the ancient polis, thus we can blithely adjust to same-sex marriage today, are aggressively ignorant. Nobody in the Platonic dialogues talks about his “sexuality” or sexual “identity,” though they abound with all kinds of talk about sex. All talk today about our “sexuality”– how it infects all our discourse — is idiotic. Sexuality and identity are words of modern ideology, projections of will. All arguments for feminism and sodomy in modernity must ultimately be Nietzschean. Read Harvey Mansfield’s “Womanly Nihilism” chapter in Manliness book for the goods on that, at least with respect to feminism.
He’s far too prudent — or Eastern Straussian — to link feminism to SSM, moreover to link feminism directly to our growth in tribalism. That’s far too radioactive for aHarvard prof. But he’s as aware as anyone of things I’ve said here.
But then he’s also notorious for claiming that self-evident truths of the founding are self-evident half-truths, which returns us right back to my original point: the question of the political.
And to the_thoroughly_apolitcal_nature_of_the_Benedict_Option.