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The St. Benedict Option
[Rod Dreher 03/27 02:06 PM]Today begins the final week of the Crunchy Con blog. This week we’ll be talking about where to go from here. The title of this chapter, “Waiting for Benedict,” comes from the final words in “After Virtue,” an influential work of moral philosophy by Notre Dame’s Alasdair MacIntyre: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age ... and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. ... A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict. Why St. Benedict? Because Benedict of Nursia left the dying city of empire in disgust with its dissolute ways, retreating to the countryside seeking God. He would in time draw around him a group of men who shared his moral concerns. Later he would write a Rule upon which Western monastic life would be founded. This Rule became one of the most important documents in the history of Western civilization — and indeed is a prime reason we even have something called Western civilization. The monasteries that would observe Benedict’s rule kept the faith and the virtues alive during the Dark Ages, and served as seedbeds of cultural and religious renewal.
MacIntyre’s book argues that we have reached a decisive point of moral and cultural fragmentation in the West, having pushed radical individualism and moral relativism to the point where it is difficult to appeal to shared moral norms as a way of deciding public policy. Our moral language is increasingly empty, as we haven’t kept the communities and traditions that gave meaning to our moral language. He argues that we are at the point where the only sensible thing for traditionalists to do is to withdraw into smaller groupings and to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained.”
If traditionalist/crunchy conservatives were to take the St. Benedict Option today, what would it look like? Would doing so amount to giving up on the culture in despair … or would it mean retreating behind defensible borders? Thoughts?
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