Review of Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of Saint Benedict

[I had to write this for class, but figured discussing monasticism is always good.]

A book like Esther de Waal’s Seeking God is difficult to summarize precisely because it is not so much an argument as an introduction to the Rule of Saint Benedict and Benedictine practice. If deWaal does have a thesis she is pressing it is to show through a tour of the Rule that it and the monastic life have many things to say to and many critiques to level against the insanity of life in a modern industrial state. So I will take a bit of liberty with my assignment and, instead of racing through an inadequate summary, offer in turn a tour of this little book with the aim of providing both a view of the gist of her project and a modest assessment thereof.


The book is often brilliant and even prophetic in its interpretation to us of the (sometimes) strange life of the monastery. At these times de Waal’s strength is an appreciation of the way that we have lost the ability to make monkish virtues intelligible in a culture that will tolerate just about anything but the austere and one-minded. In this sense she cracks open to view the deep way that St. Benedict’s Rule holds forth a remedy for which many Christians today are longing, but for which they have been taught only to reach for ever more and more when what they really needed was less and less. Thus she makes a necessary first step to beginning to “translate” the language of this strange old world of stability, conversion, obedience, austerity, denial, humility, silence, virtue and vice for a world that speaks only in terms of impulsiveness, authenticity, self-determination, satisfaction, comfort, self-esteem, entertainment, rules and requirements.

De Waal is perhaps at her best in her chapter on the Benedictine vow of stability. This may not be surprising since such a vow goes to the heart of a fundamental characteristic of the cloister, and that is its commitment to place. In a world where people shop around for the city in which they want to live, not to mention the church where they want to worship God, it is no wonder that Christians are uncommitted to their communities in the face of disagreement or difficulty (to say nothing of the parish-system). But such a commitment to place and people is the presumption of so much that to us seems un-realistic about the Gospel. Why is it so important to forgive my neighbor and to deal with it quickly when I don’t know her very well, only see her once a week and at any rate can always go to the church down the road? DeWaal’s answer is that Benedict says very simply that this not the way God wants us to live. The Rule shows that “monastic stability means accepting this particular community, this place and these people, this and no other, as the way to God” (57, my italics). In other words, part of where we have to get to in the church is being able to say “I’m not going anywhere. You can hurt me, I can hurt you. We can laugh and cry, forgive, yell, hope, live and die, even dislike each other, but we will do this together, loving each other, and we’ll both be here for it all.” We have to say that “there is no need to seek God elsewhere since, if I can’t find God here, I shan’t find him anywhere” (62).

Part of being in one place is a willingness to be one of the flock, and this is in fact essential for meeting God. Thus deWall tells us that at one point Henri Nouwen “knew that he wanted to be different, to attract attention, to do something special, to make some new contribution. Yet the monastic situation was calling him to be same, and more of the same. Only after we have given up the desire to be different and admit that we deserve no special attention is there space to encounter God” (61). What she so incisively has put her finger on is Benedict’s proscription of our contemporary obsession with cultivating personal identity. However valuable such cultivation may be in its place, says the Rule, the vow of stability means that it will always be defined, and decisively so, in relation to this place and these people.

And so, only in relation to stability, to this place and these people, and only as I am a member of them and not something over and against them, does it really makes Christian sense to talk of change. Thus deWaal places her chapter on the vow of conversatio morum directly after that on stability. She gives the vow a biting characterization as “a recognition of God’s unpredictability, which confronts our own love of coziness or safety. It means that we have to live provisionally, ready to respond to whatever and however that might appear. There is no security here, no clinging to past certainties. Rather we must expect to see our chosen idols successively broken” (70). This, I take it, is the vow of saying “be it unto me according to they word” when faced with the prospect of the total reconfiguration of our plans for our selves, our lives, our careers, and what is often harder: our days, our afternoons, our lunch breaks.

There are some things to quibble about in the book.

The first worry is about the status of monasticism in the divine economy. Is it a more faithful life or just a different one? At times deWaal seems to speak of what is “realistic” to expect, but from what vantage does she make this judgment? (I almost get the impression the middle-class English life is what is really “reasonable.”) And she even appears to imply here and there that it would be bad for all Christians to live like this. But this does not deal with the (at least implicit) claim of something like the Rule itself that it holds out a better and higher way to live than the ordinary parish Christian. This is, after all, why the first monks wandered off into the desert. Such a claim is especially unpopular today in the face what Charles Taylor has famously called “affirmation of ordinary life.” Part and parcel of such a phenomenon is in fact the rejection (at first mostly by the reformers) of the monkish higher vocation and the here is often implied a negative evaluation of “heroism” in general. The latter concern is certainly shared by deWaal, as she associates it variously with unsustainability of lifestyle and guilt (105) and even a sort of Pelagian tendency (in terms what God “demands”; ibid). Rather, the Rule “is mundane...day-to-day living that revolves around Christ” (30-1), and we find in it “the stark reality of the humdrum” (99).

In one sense of course this is just a good reading of the Rule, and it attests to a (I suspect) relatively new affiliation of monasticism and ordinary life: what we can call the heroism of the ordinary (prime example is someone like St. Teresa of Lisieux). But here we must be cautious because it is all too tempting to conflate our humdrum and Benedict’s and say that we can all be monks in or out of the monastery. DeWaal is by turns on guard against this move (“[The Rule] will not be impossibly tough but it will without doubt be tough...there is humanity here but there is nothing tepid…there can be no doubt about the rigorous demands on those who enter the monastic life” (34, 41 )), but it is her lack of a definitive evaluation of the sanctity of the religious compared to the lay that leaves open the domestication of the radicalism of Benedict’s call to us all.

This is closely related to a second point that involves de Waal’s hermeneutical appropriation of the Rule for the laity. She says that “the Rule of St. Benedict is neither rule book nor code; it points a way” (30). Again, one of the things I worry about in this sort of “metaphorical” reading of the Rule is that it can lose its convicting force for us. It is of course completely valid to look to the Rule for Benedict’s wisdom and for the Gospel therein; but the temptation is that once we have decided that we are not going to follow the rule literally, we forget that Benedict’s implicit claim is that it takes something like this rule to live faithfully. The function of a Christian Rule of life is to say concretely and literally how one is going act out the Gospel (so deWaal: “The Rule is simply an aid for us to live by the Scriptures” (32)), however literally or metaphorically we take the latter’s various claims. But to make then a Rule itself something further to be interpreted not as a code but by the way it points, is to risk sliding into an ever-deferred response to the Gospel. The Rule tells us to do things that have their value in the doing, not in the “principle’ behind them. I am skeptical of being able to abstract such principles from the Rule’s concrete prescriptions. Indeed the latter are merely instrumental to the end of virtue and salvation, but we must not be too quick to think that we can find other things to do the same trick. Fasting is indeed merely a means to temperance, but one who only fasts metaphorically risks having no temperance at all.

In this regard we can take her treatment of poverty in her chapter on “material things.” She says that for Benedictines “[n]either poverty nor affluence are desirable” (100). DeWaal in this chapter unfortunately gives the impression of wanting to show from the Rule why poverty is not necessary for Christian faithfulness. In this she is of course going to have issues with most other forms of religious life (including some Benedictines!). Her dismissal of St. Francis betrays her otherwise prophetic voice: “St. Benedict equips his monk with all that is needed for a decent standard of living….Poverty is not undertaken as one of the Benedictine vows, and there is nothing here of the ideal of absolute poverty as the friars present it. Instead we find an attitude toward possessions which speaks more realistically to many of us as we try to face of the question of destitution and poverty in the world today. For most of us the Franciscan way is not a practicable starting point.” But she is not playing altogether fairly here. She has said already that poverty is not desirable, not that it is not a practicable starting point. The latter is entirely understandable. But to deny that poverty (not destitution) in its various guises is part of what it means to follow Christ appears to me to be too blatant a denial of the Scriptures, the tradition, and broadly the monasticism which she elsewhere so elegantly affirms. As with fasting so with poverty: it is but a means to the goal is indeed spiritual poverty, but those who have only spiritual poverty risk having no poverty at all.

Finally, there is an individualism in this book that needs to be corrected. DeWaal at one point says that the rule of Benedict seeks to answer the question of how “we grow and fulfill our true selves” (29), which is hardly a question that Benedict could even have fathomed (not least because there is no word in his Latin that corresponds to the grammar of our word “self”). The Rule, moreover, is the “basis on which each individual is to grow and develop” (31). This means, apparently, that Benedict “does not confuse ends and means. The good order and stability of the community is the means: the end is that the individual must have space and time to enter into dialogue with God.” She says again that “the community exists for the sake of the individual, and not visa-versa” (116).

My claim would be that this is exactly the opposite of the truth the Gospel holds out for us, and the opposite of the ethical priorities the ancient world held out as a whole. Aristotle’s polis, Cicero’s Res Publica, St. Paul’s soma Christou, and Augustine’s Civitas Dei was the end about which all activity and all virtue was to be ordered. This was Benedict’s theology, and this was Benedict’s world. When personal development becomes an end in itself that is not ordered to a divine end beyond oneself then it becomes self-absorbed and paralyzing. It is only when the ultimate end of the beautific vision is intended through (and only through!) the proximate end of the edification of the church, and this by losing one “self” in service and giving that the nature of the person as created (Augustine’s natura) is gracefully completed.

This does not mean of course that we are allowed then to treat people as means in a sort of utilitarian calculus. But the path between such a thing and individualism is exactly the sort of “Christian personalism” that the Rule actually spells out: each person is Christ (especially the stranger) (120). DeWaal herself clearly realizes this, even if she does not integrate it into a holistic picture of the Rule: “St. Benedict would probably have appreciated Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s aphorism ‘He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community’. So he begins with the brethren, with people as people, and there is no distinction of persons” (139). Only when community itself, in the abstract, becomes the focus with principles like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” do people start to be treated as means instead of ends. I think de Waal would agree that such a radical mysticism of the other as Christ is close to the heart of Benedict’s vision. Without it, there is little left of enduring value. But with it, a door opens to a strange but wonder-filled new world which, far from being rose-colored, slowly but surely, teaches us to see ourselves and others the way we really are.