The Rule of Saint Benedict: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 4 (review)

In addition to the works that Thomas Merton intended for publication, many of the conferences that he gave to novices and newly ordained monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the final dozen years of his life are now becoming available. The volume here under review is the fourth of these to appear, all of them edited by Patrick O'Connell, a former president of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Although titled The Rule of Saint Benedict, this particular set of conferences is by no means an exhaustive commentary on all the chapters of the Rule. Instead, Merton gives an overview of the document; reflects on selected parts of Pope Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict; provides what he calls "a spiritual commentary" on fifteen chapters that deal with the abbot, other monastic officers, monastic work, and poverty; and concludes with an extensive commentary on chapter 7, "The Degrees of Humility," which Merton rightly considers "the supernatural heart of the Rule" (p. 160; emphasis in original). Throughout, he focuses on the basic principles of monastic life and the way the young monks under his tutelage could use those principles as a guide in their own lives.

Even though Merton did not intend to provide an academic commentary of the sort that Adalbert de Vogüé has written, he clearly kept abreast of the best scholarship about the Rule and urged the novices to make use of it in their personal interpretation of what Benedict wrote. For example, he shows that the textus receptus, the one most commonly used since the Middle Ages, deviates in some important respects from the earlier Monte Cassino text as represented in St. Gall Ms. 914, this latter being more reasonable and less rigid about certain points of monastic discipline. Merton warns his hearers that "the mentality which would prefer the rigidity and oversimplification of the textus receptus is also very likely to be the mentality which hates and distrusts scholarship . . . [and] leads to ossification and stupor in the spiritual life" (p. 46).

More than a quarter of Merton's text deals with the previously mentioned seventh chapter of the Rule. As part of his way of showing the ongoing relevance of Benedict's teaching about humility, Merton comments on the way in which the first degree of this virtue, which includes an awareness that God is always present to one's thoughts and actions, actually fosters societies that are vital and flourishing. By way of contrast, he claims, "Witness the dullness and stupidity of atheist-materialist society and culture: the culture of people with no inner life. The 'presence' of God brings life, light, meaning, to our interior life" (p. 176).

Other incisive remarks of that sort can be found throughout the work, which O'Connell has painstakingly edited. Among other things, he tracked down the original sources of many of Merton's references, and he provided in footnotes the complete text of scriptural passages that in Merton's typescript were indicated only by chapter and verse. O'Connell also included five appendices, including one that gives additional notes on the Rule that Merton inserted by hand after certain pages of his typescript and another that gives a useful list for further reading. In sum, this is a book that will be deeply appreciated by anyone interested in Merton's thought on basic principles of monastic life.