"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away."
"Sloth of disobedience" is a phrase so unique to St. Benedict that anyone using it invariably has the old abbot in mind. Few historical figures have coined such an exact phrase to transact a perrenial concept—one that binds our civilization's continuity by naming obedience as the very possibility of tradition itself!
Some explanation of the term is in order:
Sloth (acedia) is not mere physical laziness as commonly understood today. In the abbot of Nursia's century, it signified a lack of spiritual diligence, encompassing a wide range of psychological phenomena from depression to dissipation and everything in between.
While depression has physiological and genetic causes of which I will pass over, my focus here is ideational. Reaffirmed ideas carve vicious cycles into the mind. Driven by confirmation bias often conditioned by repetitive stimuli, mixed with ongoing frustrations over the lack of meaningful options and contrasts in this life, a dejected man mistakes his perception of reality for reality itself—becoming, in most instances, his own worst enemy.
Father Benedict recognizes this tendency, especially strong in wayward youth, and knows that a community of virtuous conduct alone rectifies all self-centered viciousness wherever vanity and ignorance conspire against the good of the soul.
As our excursion through the Holy Rule will show, its brutal truths-- and certainly, there are many!--serve to reshape our wills. This rule disciplines the body, subduing emotional impulses and petty creature comforts that distract the mind from its ultimate purposes. The Apostle says it most memorably when, comparing himself to an olympic athlete, vows to himself how "I will buffet my own body, and make it my slave..." (1 Corinthians 9:27).
St. Benedict frames this manly Christian tradition of self-discipline as a communal undertaking for his spiritual legionnaires: "To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King."
But is this not curious to the modern mind? Of all things, how is there strength in obedience? (More to come.).
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