Community is an essential part of cenobitic monastic life because without a community, obviously, there is no coenobium no monastery!

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1 CONFERENCE 3 Community is an essential part of cenobitic monastic life because without a community, obviously, there is no coenobium no monastery! But without the other two legs, a tripod doesn t stand either. Without two other legs to the tripod Benedictine character, one might say, no authentic religious identity would pertain to such a community the other two other legs of the Monastic Tripod are Abbot and Rule. What gives a religious community its essentially Benedictine character is its RULE the Rule of St. Benedict in this case but a sine qua non, or necessary element, of the Benedictine way of life (and for that matter, any truly monastic way of life), as we learned in the first conference is OBEDIENCE and if obedience is so vital, the first virtue for the monk or nun, and so integral to the monastic way, then its correlative object, authority, must also be necessary: and it is what I call the third leg of the cenobitic monastic tripod: in this case an ABBOT or ABBESS. The Three Legs of the Monastic Tripod: Community, Rule, Abbot - a tripod doesn t stand up unless all three legs are present. In a sense one can t speak about COMMUNITY without in having the Rule comes into play throughout, and the Abbot as the holding the place of Christ expresses the role of authority but for the sake of this conference I am going to focus primarily on community per se. What is the purpose of COMMUNITY what does it provides and how does it serve the monastic life? To live as a member of an established community is to live out the essentially baptismal character of the Christian monastic vocation. o We live our lives in Christ even as Christ lives in and through the faithful a vision St. Paul has of the Christian character of his own life and of all the baptized. (cf. Gal. 2:20 - Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.) o All who are united to Christ by faith and love, sealed by his Spirit in baptism, are UNITED in the Spirit of adoption we are a BODY writes St. Paul in Romans (12:5) - so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. 1

2 o The ideal scriptural portrait of the Christian community is found in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (2:42): They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. Although Benedict doesn t quote this passage directly he makes reference to it in the prologue to his Rule - it comes at verse 50, the very end, as a summary statement to the Prologue: Never swerving from his instructions, then but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom. (Prol. 50) The passage from The Book of Acts was heavily relied upon by monastic authors as scriptural sanction and religious justification for setting up intentional communities along the lines of what St. Luke describes the nascent church in Jerusalem was like. For St. Basil ( CE), who wrote two monastic rules as well, and with whom Benedict is quite familiar - Benedict directs his monastic disciples to study Basil s rules for a more complete doctrine of righteousness (RB 73.5) for Basil the community was first even before there is an abbot or a rule. o For St. Basil, the monastic community was above all a Christian community, and was more of an attempt on his part to reform the whole church and the world - rather than to create a special way of life within the Church. o Monastic communities were leaven for the transformation of society. Monastics were to be serving the poor and needy of the area in which they found themselves located running hospices and shelters for the homeless, and providing food for the hungry. o Gradually however, as Timothy Fry points out, it developed more and more into what we today would call a religious community. (RB1980, p. 344). 2

3 It s interesting to see how monasticism moves gradually from a way of life rooted in a highly individualized ascetical discipline to a community-centered, communally rooted, way of Christian discipleship - a way of being Church, which is really what a religious community is today. Timothy Fry in his commentary on the RB, writes that Cassian sees in the Jerusalem community both the prototype and origin of cenobitic monasticism. (Footnote on Prol. 50) Cassian travels the desert of Scete in Egypt speaking with the abbas who are solitaries (anchorites) to learn first-hand from them the main principles of ascetical discipline, and after founding his own cenobitic communities in the Roman-Gallic city of Marseille (southern France) around 415 CE, he will write in his Conferences that the monastic community, is a kind of school a training ground for the second stage of the monastic way of life, the anchorite s life of solitude (cf. Conf. 18.XVI:15; and 19.XI). In Conf. 19, Cassian lays out the purpose and benefits of the monastic community, the coenobium, as it was called, in a kind of negative fashion. o For Cassian the society of a community of brothers or sisters provides training in the form of annoyances, disturbances, duties and responsibilities, interruptions, conflict, and the many idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes carried by personalities of all sorts. These help the monastics to: o Acquire a constant and undistracted mind (learn how to deal with distractions) o Learn unchanging and firm patience (self-restraint) o Learn long-suffering (tolerance) of other s weaknesses and our own o Develop properly one s conscience, understanding the virtues and the vices properly (i.e. one s lack of virtues ) o Learn the art of discretion (or discernment) and how to properly judge situations or interior movements o Avoid self-delusion 3

4 In short, Cassian believes that spiritual freedom, so much a part of the monastic ideal of spiritual growth and development, is hardly possible outside of community. This attitude is reflected in RB - in his chapter on The Kinds of Monks (RB 1) Benedict writes: It is well known that there are four kinds of monks. The first kind is that of Cenobites, that is, the monastics who live under a rule and an Abbot. The second kind is that of Anchorites, or Hermits, that is, of those who, no longer in the first fervor of their conversion, but taught by long monastic practice and the help of many brethren, have already learned to fight against the devil; and going forth from the rank of their brethren well trained for single combat in the desert, they are able, with the help of God, to cope single-handed without the help of others, against the vices of the flesh and evil thoughts. And the second half of the chapter which speaks of the bad kinds of monks, serves to underscore the importance of community and its support for learning obedience (especially understood as renouncing self-will) And Benedict concludes his first chapter with a strong statement in support of COMMUNITY: Therefore, passing these over, let us go on with the help of God to lay down a rule for that most valiant kind of monks, the Cenobites (monks that live in communities). Mutuality the positive dimension of monastic community in RB Benedict seems to hold these two approaches to community as expressed by Basil and Cassian, in tension and the term for doing that is his number one virtue, Obedience. Benedict believes to be the number one virtue because it s the best way to imitate Christ and therefore, to love God, is broadened further, near the end of the Rule, to include not only obedience to formal authority (one s superiors in the community), but also one another. o RB 71 entitled: That they be obedient one to the other Vs. 1-2: The good thing that obedience is shall be shown by all not only to the abbot, but also let the brethren similarly obey each other mutually, knowing it si by this way of obedience that they will go to God. 4

5 At the beginning of the RB, Benedict s take on obedience is essentially ascetical that is, it is a discipline for the sake of learning, or training (which is what ascesis means) in the art of dying-to-self, or surrendering one s self-will. Obedience is, in this sense, a labor, a work and in chapter 71, which I quoted above, it is essentially a work of service. But at the end of the RB, Benedict tweaks that a bit, by adding value to the concept of obedience referring to it as a BLESSING, is how Fry translates it, but more accurately, it is a good. The Latin bonum means, literally, a good thing; but this has to be understood in its ecclesial sense, harkening back to his vision of the monastic community as an ecclesia (church). o Mutual Obedience becomes for Benedict a spiritual good shared among the holy ones as a communio sancti, the communion of holy things, which, as the church teaches is the first definition of the concept commonly referred to in English as The Communion of Saints. COMMUNITY then, as Benedict sees it positively, is a sea of obedience into which the individual members are immersed so as to become more like God through generous sharing in the common goods of the community both spiritual and material for the sake of the Body, which is to say, for the sake of Christ. The Monastic or Christian Community is where we share outselves for the sake of the Common Good so that the community itself, collectively, will be more what it too is made to be, the Body of Christ. 5