I spent 2 weeks in a benedictine monastery in Italy, about 2 months ago. I think these were some of the most influential weeks of my life. I really hope I can write something useful for others, but the more I digest the experience, the more I think people need to do that themselves and come to their own conclusions.
St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
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Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CHAPTER 4 > What Are the Instruments of Good Works > [...] > 63. To love chastity.
AFAIK, chastity most often refers to abstinence prior to marriage, not the exclusion of marriage.
Chastity refers to abstinence other than within the bounds of marriage, not just before marriage.
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#53Chapter 4 was used as the SQLite Code of Conduct until there was an uproar on social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273530
It seems it still is: https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#54Chapter 4 is great.
Visit the sick, bury the dead, and console the sorrowing.
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent some time discerning as a Trappist, and now have a family. I’ve found the lack of silence to be the biggest challenge. How is your prayer life as a parent?
Trappists make great beer right? It is strong beer and gets your head messed up. I've often wondered how such good religious folks would become producers of alcoholic drinks. I assume they didn't drink themselves, doesn't go well with meditation I assume. So are they more like thinking "Let the sinners drink this since they want, and it will pay for the rent of our meditation chambers?"
Catholics have no problem with drinking, so yes. The monks who brew also drink.
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#56Those rules help the Church preserve the ancient knowledge until Gutenberg. As a Catholic, I'm devout of St. Benedict because the creation of monasteries have a huge impact of the human knowledge.
This is a widely known but misleading "fact". The truth is much more complicated.
For one, an almost universally overlooked bit of history is how absolutely crucial muslim scholars were in preserving classical texts, in keeping an unbroken chain from the Classical Age until the Renaissance. Places like Al-Andalus -- muslim Iberia that is -- or Bagdhad, were the centres of knowledge in the world in their time, and also places of surprisingly high religious tolerance, where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars studied and discussed together. Many translators and schools of translators were founded and supported, and that's the path countless Greek and Roman tomes took until our days: translated to Arabic, later "rediscovered" by the West.
Among Christian monks, on the other hand, for centuries starting around 300-400CE the highest goal was asceticism, one of the corolaries of which was that one should waste no time studying or preserving pagan texts or indeed anything which were not: prayer books, missals, homilies, responsories, etc. An innumerable amount of works were lost during the centuries where Christian monasticism was most active. If indeed the monks preserved that ancient, pagan knowledge, then how can this be?
Not to mention the fact that Christians post-Constantine and Theodosious were engaged in brutal and relentless persecution and suppression of non-Christians, so called "pagans", and pagan art, pagan temples, pagan beliefs, and of course, pagan literature. They burned temples and all the art therein, they burned libraries, they suppressed academies and professors, either by force or by ending the state's patronage,
This paper is a great read, admittedly biased in its sources but not misleading (it cites contemporary opponents, rather than christians): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27899562.pdf
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent some time discerning as a Trappist, and now have a family. I’ve found the lack of silence to be the biggest challenge. How is your prayer life as a parent?
Trappists make great beer right? It is strong beer and gets your head messed up. I've often wondered how such good religious folks would become producers of alcoholic drinks. I assume they didn't drink themselves, doesn't go well with meditation I assume. So are they more like thinking "Let the sinners drink this since they want, and it will pay for the rent of our meditation chambers?"
They follow St Benedict's rule, the rule that OP linked to, but they understand "wine" to refer to alcoholic drinks in general.
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alcohol concentration would not be enough to kill cholera... Especially diluted. Strongest wines are usually in the 15-17% alcohol...
You have to boil the water which does in order to make beer and wine (and spirits).
Beer (wort, at this stage) is heated before fermentation, normally not boiled but enough to kill bacteria.
Wine is normally made from pure juice, and isn't heated at any point in the process. But again, it's made from pure juice: the inside of a grape is not a usual place to find dangerous bacteria, and on the outside one would normally find only the yeasts which produce the fermentation.
Modern wine-making washes the grapes thoroughly and adds yeast, the old-school method was simply to crush, and rely on the surface bloom and residual yeast in the vessel to do the work. Which lead to rather more vinegar than the modern vintner would tolerate.
Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#59I can't see anything about celibacy
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Re: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries (516)
#60The whole "unquestioning obedience" thing is what freaks me out the most. Truly people are right when they say that religion is fundamentally about control.
I think it's instructive to see some of the rules (such as this) as descriptive rather than prescriptive---after all, one cannot by force of will still the murmuring in the heart, but someone who is genuinely completely committed to service will have few causes to hesitate.
Many spiritual texts stress obedience to the master/abbot/what-have-you both because of the presumption that the senior knows more than the junior, but also because it reinforces that the service is offered to something greater and not for the (material) benefit of the one doing the service.
I haven't had time to go over everything but I would be surprised if it's truly unquestioning rather than just unhesitating. Something whose purpose is not understood should probably lead to contemplation and then discussion with the abbot to confirm the understanding.