Monasticism, Christianity, and Culture

Monasticism is the foundation of culture, and culture is ultimately Christian culture. Although there are a plurality of cultures as there are a plurality of worlds, any one element of these pluralities has the sense of a culture or a world, which indicates that their status is at best provisional and epiphenomenal. Though there are many cultures and many worlds, there is but one reality, and so cultures and worlds are provisional to the extent that they are disconnected from the reality which is made known in Christian revelation, and solely preserved and legitimately interpreted in the Roman Catholic Church guided from the time of Christ's Ascension by the Holy Spirit.

When we speak of culture today, what we inevitably refer to is one or other arbitrary assemblage of norms, conventions, and superstitions maintained and centered around some relatively fixed group of human beings. This group produces the culture, and the culture is about them. When a sufficiently large number of the members of such a culture suddenly discover new desires or ideals or temptations, there issue corresponding changes in the culture. Familiar examples of cultures in this sense include feminism, the gay culture, the aptly named "Culture of Death", and environmentalism.

Now the problem is not that women or homosexuals do not deserve respect, or that women pregnant with unwanted children should not be cared for, or that we should be indifferent to the treatment of the environment. The exercise of charity in these domains as in all domains of human existence is the first virtue of Christian life. So St. Paul: "If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal (1 Cor. 13.1)." The issue is that each of these cultures establishes a law unto itself; their insularity results in a functional self-deification. In other words, they have no concern for reality, for something outside themselves, and so they are not real. We cannot be something simply because we proclaim to be it.

Monasticism, which in our own age is only sparsely practiced in a few Benedictine, Cistercian, and Carthusian monasteries (mostly in France), is the necessary and singular antidote to the devastation of subjectivist cultures and the mythical worlds they inhabit. Because the regular life led in complete fidelity to the spirit and letter of the Rule of St. Benedict produces, by the power of God's transformative grace, Christian communities striving for perfection. That is, communities whose life expresses the unity of culture and reality. Since ordinary Christians, and here I include a great number of secular priests and apostolic religious, are continually facing the distortion wrought by a plurality of cultures floating on what is essentially a background of existentialist indifference (what we loosely term modernity), faithful monasteries are among the only temporal entities that preserve an authentic model of Christian life.

The Holy Father, Benedict XVI, has written that "The priest must be a believer, one who converses with God... when people sense that one is there who believes, who lives with God and from God, hope becomes a reality for them as well." This is even more the case for monks, whose entire lives are without remainder consecrated to the service and praise of God. In their labor and prayer, in their poverty, in the ascesis that sometimes grindingly forces them day by day and hour by hour to find Christ in their work and in each other, they model in an otherwise impossible way the true contours of Christian life, which is nothing more than the attempt of each man to conform himself to Our Divine Savior. And so we should look to the monasteries, and when we are not looking we should think about them, and not only that, but that we thank God for every authentic monastic vocation he raises up.