Dom Cuthbert Butler’s Benedictine Monachism begins by quoting Viollet-le-Duc’s statement that, “[r]egarded merely from the philosophical point of view, the Rule of St. Benedict is perhaps the greatest historical fact of the Middle Ages.” Pius XII, in his Fulgens radiatur, praises Benedict’s monastic law as an “outstanding monument of Roman and Christian prudence.” While St. Benedict’s Rule is first and foremost a document governing common monastic life, it is, as Viollet-le-Duc, Butler, and Pius XII recognize, an example of the classical tradition and applicable more broadly. One particular area where the Rule offers great insight is penal law. St. Benedict offers a vision of the penal law that has significant value even today.
In particular, it provides an example of the best parts of the Roman spirit blended with Christian piety. Butler rejects the legend that St. Benedict came from a patrician or senatorial family, translating the relevant passage of St. Gregory’s Dialogues as something more akin to “the wealthy country gentry of the provinces.” But it is certainly the case that Benedict went to Rome to study, and what he found in Rome disgusted him. Indeed, there was much to be disgusted by. Not only was the populace of Rome hardly virtuous at the time, but the whole Roman world was crumbling down around their ears. It is an old story: a young man of a good family from the country goes to the city and finds the city disillusioning. Of course, few young men respond like Benedict did.
The Roman world was in a sorry state. The old Roman virtue of sobriety and the old Roman labor of honest agriculture had more or less faded away. (Whether there was ever much virtue in Rome, St. Augustine controverted at great length in his De civitate Dei.) Italy itself had become a plaything of marauding armies, each one bringing new catastrophe and new suffering. But the barbarians were not all bad compared to the Romans. Butler quotes Salvian’s De gubernatione Dei, where he asks whether it is any surprise that God would take the iniquitous Romans’ empire away and give it to the barbarians who, after all, had some virtues. Indeed, the whole of the fourth book of De gubernatione Dei is a condemnation of Roman, Christian vice compared to the rough virtues of the barbarians.
Out of Benedict’s hermitage at Subiaco emerged, not without some difficulty, the old Roman virtues of sobriety, austerity, piety, and moderation. One can find other rules and other ideas in the history of monachism before Benedict. By and large, one finds individuals striving toward holiness through astounding feats of asceticism and prayer. Even when Pachomius established his cenobitic monastery in Egypt, there was still much of the individual spirit at work, founded upon a common basis of observance. Benedict’s Rule represents the application of Roman virtue to Christian piety to back away from the individualistic spirit that had animated prior monastic life.
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St. Benedict’s Rule anticipates and regulates all aspects of monastic life. Necessarily, therefore, it anticipates the problem of those who break the law. Benedict prefers that offenders admit their faults and make satisfaction (cf. cc. 45, 46). But he recognizes that some may require sterner punishment. He establishes a detailed system of private admonitions, public rebuke, excommunication (of two kinds: from meals and from meals and choir), and finally corporal punishment and expulsion from the abbey.
St. Benedict particularly abhors a perverse will. The crimes that merit excommunication are contumacy, disobedience, pride, murmuring, and contemptuous disregard for the Rule (c.23). Dom Paul Delatte, in his indispensable commentary on the Rule, notes that St. Benedict does not prescribe severe treatment for merely formal faults or faults of “thoughtlessness, ignorance, or impulse.” For example, if a monk comes late to choir or to table, he is separated and made to take part alone until he does penance (c.43). But in all things, Benedict leaves to the judgment of the abbot the measure of punishment, enjoining merely that, in the best tradition, the punishment fit the crime (c.24). Here, Delatte reminds us that Roman common sense and prudence held the same view as St. Benedict, quoting a Satire of Horace.
Aquinas reminds us that the law is a rule or measure of human acts, framed for the multitude of men, most of whom are not perfectly virtuous (ST I-II q.90 a.4 co.; I-II q.96 a.2 co.). The law, therefore, does not restrain all the vices from which the virtuous abstain, but only those vices from which the majority abstains (ST I-II q.96 a.2 co.). And it does this gradually (ST I-II q.96 a.2 ad 2). St. Benedict’s Rule is a wonderful example of this approach. No doubt formed by his knowledge of other rules and long contemplation at Subiaco, Benedict identified the most serious vices afflicting monastic life and enjoined the monks under his Rule to treat those vices most stringently.
The capstone of the disciplinary chapters of the Rule is chapter 27: “Qualiter debeat esse sollicitus Abbas circa excommunicatos”—“How careful the abbot should be of the excommunicate.” The saint commands the abbot to take care of the excommunicate, “with all solicitude,” quoting Matthew 9:12: “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” Indeed, the abbot should conduct himself as a “wise physician.” Just as Benedict’s abhorrence of a perverse will is the basis for the delicts under the Rule, so too is his conviction that the abbot must act as a wise physician the basis for the punishment for those delicts.
St. Benedict proposes several means by which the abbot can restore the excommunicate monk to health. First of all, he sends elder monks to the excommunicate to console him and urge him to make satisfaction for his offense. Second, he has to remember his own grave responsibility: “Noverit enim se infirmarum curam suscepisse animarum, non super sanas tyrannidem”—“He must know that he has undertaken the care of weak souls, and not a tyranny over the healthy” (c.27 v.6). To the same end, St. Benedict quotes Ezekiel: “Et metuat prophetae comminationem, per quam dicit Deus: Quod crassum videbatis, adsumebatis, et quod debile erat, proiciebatus.”—“And let him fear the warning of the prophet, through whom God says, ‘What you saw to be fat, you took to yourselves, and what was infirm you cast away.’” St. Benedict concludes the passage by recalling the example of the Good Shepherd (cf. Matthew 18:12–14; Luke 15:3–7; John 10).
Benedict connects even the more serious punishments in the Rule—corporal punishment and expulsion from the abbey—to the conduct of his wise physician (c.28): “si exhibuit fomenta, si unguenta adhortationem, si medicamenta Scripturarum divinarum, si ad ultimum ustionem excommunicationis vel plagas virgarum…”—“if he has applied compresses, the unction of admonitions, the medicament of Holy Writ, and the ultimate cauterizing of excommunication or corporal punishment.” What remains for him is first to pray that God cure the sick monk and then, if that does not avail, to expel him from the monastery.
Here again, we recall Aquinas: we are called to love sinners, and loving sinners means hating their sin (ST II-II q.25 a.6 co.). To put it slightly differently: loving the sinner means willing his good (ST I-II q.26 a.4 co.). We ought, therefore, to see that the sin be destroyed and the man live—without the sin (ST II-II q.25 a.6 ad 3). One of Aquinas’s favorite arguments is the connection between peace in the state and health in the body. One finds it over and over (E.g., Cont. Gent. III, c. 146; In III Ethic. L.8, no. 474; Super Matt. C. 12, L. 2, no. 1011). The wise physician does not deliberate about his end—he does not wonder whether he should cure his patient—and the leader of a state does not deliberate whether he ought to achieve peace.
One also recalls Cicero. In his De re publica, with which Benedict may well have been familiar as a student in the Roman schools, he outlines the ideal statesman: the rector rei publicae, the moderator rei publicae (5.4.6). Earlier, Cicero’s Scipio had praised the single leader of the state. While the Romans in times of peace preferred to appeal from one magistrate to another and from magistrates to the people, in times of catastrophe, they obeyed their rulers as kings and indeed handed over supreme power to one man. (cf. De re publica 1.35.54–55; 1.39.61–40.63; 1.45.69). St. Benedict’s abbot is no less a sole ruler than the rector rei publicae of Cicero and Cicero’s Scipio, but Benedict emphasizes the terrible responsibility of the abbot. He is to take care to restore to health the erring monk, taking every possible pain to heal the spiritual illness with which he is afflicted, in no small part because he himself stands responsible before God for his monks.
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One sees therefore in this “outstanding monument of Roman and Christian prudence” a model of penal justice that recognizes not merely the need to correct serious faults but also the responsibility of those correcting the faults. To be sure, there are serious crimes that must be addressed under St. Benedict’s Rule. He was concerned particularly with those crimes that afflicted the very essence of common life: a perverse will, a refusal to submit to authority, murmuring against authority. And he enjoined the abbot to punish such crimes according to their severity.
But he also connected fundamentally mercy and the penal law. Ultimately the abbot bears a grave responsibility for his monks, and this responsibility is expressed by acting as a good physician. No less responsible is the lawgiver of a state. There is a deep connection, expressed by Aquinas and others, between the health of a body and the peace of a state. The lawgiver no less than the abbot must carry out his responsibilities as a good physician, aiming not at mere vengeance but at healing sick citizens.
Pat Smith
