My wife and I recently decided to read The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. It is a culturally relevant piece that has gotten considerable attention lately, and it is all the more intriguing to us as we prepare to welcome our first child, a daughter, in about a month. There have been reactions to it aplenty: in antagonism, in adulation, and everything in between. Count me as one of those in-betweeners, as one who appreciates the book but views its ultimate conclusions rather skeptically.
Gratitude and Skepticism
Now, there are different kinds of skepticism one can hold towards The Benedict Option. Mine is decidedly not a skepticism that insists things are not quite so bad as Dreher paints them. Western society, culture, and politics—and the Church in the West—are certainly facing a series of crises. Are these as grim as those enveloping an early sixth-century Roman Christian, such as St. Benedict? Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are somewhat worse; perhaps they are marginally better. While many factors complicate such comparisons, I think the two moments in history are indeed comparable. Broadly framed, in both eras an erstwhile, ostensible Christian hegemony was threatened by what (at least according it its terms) might be called barbarism. There are more particular similarities as well. As but one minor example, the initial truce that Theodoric—the Arian (i.e., heretical) Christian King of Italy during Benedict’s formative years—offered between Goth and Roman, Arian and Catholic, wore off towards the later years of Benedict’s lifetime; likewise the American détente between Church and State threatens to collapse as the State becomes more pervasive and demanding. There are, I would suggest, other such “truces” that have held Western dissolution at bay over the past generation or two and give signs of failing. However, I hesitate to believe that the conflicts of Benedict’s lifetime were the exception: the Roman Senate still stood; orthodox Christians still practiced in Roman and in the Eastern Empire; if there was a problem of licentiousness, social strife, and cultural dissolution, then this was no different than the lifetime of St. Augustine, the century before, or the era of the Lombardic invasion of Italy, the century following Benedict. Still, regardless of the right historical comparison for our current moment in history, signs of present troubles abound, and I do not take Dreher’s warnings as hyperbole. Nor are they abstract to me: an orthodox Christian legal organization I interned with was recently, and ludicrously, labeled a “hate group” by the radical, intolerant Southern Poverty Law Center; a short while before, the American Bar Association adopted a Model Rule purporting to make it professionally “unethical” to express disagreement with current dogma about issues of homosexuality and transgenderism. As a traditional Christian lawyer, I do not have to be convinced that the times, they are a changin’; as a student of history, I do not have to be convinced that the cultural “truce” of the recent past was but an illusion of a golden age. Dreher is absolutely right that faithful Christians should be alarmed at where we find ourselves, how we got here, and where we’re heading. I think he is also largely right where it comes to education.
Why, then, am I skeptical about Dreher’s “ultimate conclusions”? It is because while his diagnoses are perceptive, his prescription is lacking. Now, I do not want to make the mistake that many of Dreher’s detractors make—in his own words, mistaking his call as one for a “head-for-the-hills withdrawal.” Yet contrary to his own disavowal, I do think it fair to say that Dreher at the least tends towards that conclusion. He takes MacIntyre’s suggestion that “we await a new—and doubtless very different—St. Benedict” and arguably minimizes the stress on “very different.” In other words, he takes the Benedict Option in a decidedly monastic direction, although that direction may contain nuance. How Dreher opens his book—praising the Benedictine brothers at Norcia—signals this monastic bent. While he does not advocate that all Christians become monks (as some of his detractors seem to imply), the image of the monastic retreat colors his overall strategy. That strategy is shot through with much of practical and spiritual value; it has much to commend it. It is, however, incomplete due to the aesthetics of a writer who lauds the monastic life a bit too much. While he is right to stress community and discipline as vital, he presents the monk’s asceticism and seclusion as ideals to be aspired to. We may not be all monks, the argument might go, but we should all seek the path that the monk walks, though they may remain well ahead of us on it.
When threats surround Christian families, churches, communities, and individuals, it is a natural impulse to build walls…but that is not, I think, the right impulse. Ultimately, while Dreher is spot on about the dangers we face, he errs in charting the direction ahead. In midst of present turmoil, found in a land of darkness and deep shadow, we are not called to retreat, but to sound the advance.
Some may say that the above posits a caricature of Dreher. There is nothing defeatist about a tactical withdrawal, after all. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, progress sometimes demands returning to and correcting a previous error instead of advancing ever forward. We Western Christians have no short supply of errors in our past. It may be that Dreher’s strategy is in fact such an advance, retreat though it seems, and that alternative strategies offer only pyrrhic victories. Indeed, Dreher quotes one monk who states that “The best defense is offense. You defend by attacking … Let’s attack by expanding God’s kingdom – first in our hearts, then in our own families, and then in the world. Yes, you have to have borders, but our duty is not to let the borders stay there. We have to push outward, infinitely.” However, giving lip-service to an attack does not establish a convincing strategy for victory, which must depend in part on being sent out like shrewd and innocent sheep among wolves (knowing, however, that the gates of hell cannot withstand such an attack). So too, Dreher rightly acknowledges that we “cannot avoid the fight, either in [our] own church or in [our] own family. To avoid taking sides is to take a side—and that is not of the Bible.” Dreher says this specifically with regards to the biblical stance on sexuality, but it is a sentiment that applies to other of his topics. Yet his manner of fighting holds too dearly the strategy of withdrawal from the world—and from many of the richnesses of Christian life. He advises: “We should listen to the monks on sexuality for the same reason we should listen to them on wealth and poverty: because their asceticism is a testimony to the goodness of those divine gifts.” There are places for vows of chastity, of poverty, and of silence in the Christian life. But such are specific calls and not ideals. Yet Christian marriage is, in most traditions, a sacrament where chastity is not; wealth rightly stewarded is often better than its rejection; words spoken in truth and praise and compassion reveal the glory of God more fully than silence. We can indeed receive a testimony from asceticism, but we ought to take care lest such practices lead us to errors of Gnosticism or legalism or (more to the point here) disengagement.
A Call Into The World, Not Out Of It
An acknowledgement that expanding God’s kingdom remains the goal, or that we cannot avoid the fight, is obscured when so much space is given to stressing how woeful our position is and how best to insulate ourselves from the world. Although God’s economy is not that of this world (and we do not fight as this world fights) an attitude of withdrawal neutralizes those God means to send out. If Dreher is right about the “post-Christian” culture in which we find ourselves—that we are, so to speak, behind enemy lines—then the right impulse is not to bunker down. We ought to instead go out, for so are we sent. As observed by R.C. Sproul, “If Christ’s holiness did not require withdrawing from the world, then neither does ours. He came to seek and to save the lost, and the lost are gathered in the world—in our Father’s world. To stay out of the public sphere, away from sinners, is never a permanent option for the Christian.” There is a need for recovery and correction—and I am grateful for Dreher’s insights along those lines. Yet we must keep clear our vision of the advancing kingdom.
I firmly believe that on its own the attitude charged by The Benedict Option is lacking. Dreher is right that action and discipline (and repentance) are needed. Yet this is not so that we can carve diminished shires from our former lands and weather the coming storm. There are better options. I have introduced a few below—what I have called the Augustinian Option, the Alfredian Option, and the Gregorian Option. What they and like options have in common is the recognition that we fight an offensive war as Christians, not a defensive one. Any strategy needs to keep this in mind. Dreher’s retreat may be merely tactical, but he fails to chart the next phase of the conflict; there is little sense of taking back lost ground, but only of trying to maintain as much as we have left and hopefully tilling it into more productive shape. This is not, perhaps, a major failing: one book can only do so much, and The Benedict Option does a great deal. Yet while Dreher can mention the goal of “offense,” his advice seems more like withdrawing within the borders of the Shire, while neglecting the need for Rangers to defend those borders. We are not called to circle the wagons and wait for the cavalry to arrive. We are the cavalry. That truth is what The Benedict Option neglects.
Dreher’s suggestions are pieces of the puzzle, but we need to keep an eye on the box to remind ourselves of the whole picture. Monasteries may well have a function to play in God’s economy; but that function is, for the most part, in support of the front lines. They should not be viewed as the primary breaches through which God’s grace flows into the world or (worse still) as relics left behind by a receding Kingdom of God. What St. Benedict offered was a blessing to the Church, but it did not, on its own, “save” the Church. Expecting an updated version to offer such succor is doomed. It is a bit odd for an Eastern Orthodox writer, like Dreher, to ignore, for example, the part the Eastern Empire and Church played in the centuries following St. Benedict’s life (a couple of centuries when, for better or worse, Bishops of Rome required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor). Monasteries and other Christian retreats exist in the space claimed and defended by other arms of the Church. Monasticism may, as mentioned above, have a part to play in the story of the Church, but it is ever a minor note.
Insofar as Dreher suggests banding together so as to teach, train, protect, strengthen, sharpen, form, heal, rebuke, and encourage one another, it is all well and good. Sometimes (often) we must turn our collective gaze inward and seek reformation and recollection. Nevertheless, such suggestions should typically be paired with a reminder of what this “banding together” is for: not, in the main, to protect our own children and defend our traditions (good though those aims are), but to link shields and advance, inch by steady inch, in expanding the Kingdom. God’s glory is not satisfied by pockets of the faithful; there is not an inch of Creation upon which His claim does not fall. This reminder is present, but muted, in The Benedict Option.
Other Options
There are other options besides the Benedict Option that better reflect the call on the Church of Christ. If the Benedict Option has a place in the Church’s symphony (and I think it does), it needs to be paired with such instruments as the Augustinian Option, the Alfredian Option, the Gregorian Option, and others.
The Augustinian Option
The Augustinian Option is perhaps the most obvious: if there’s a patron saint of the West, it’s probably Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was not antagonistic to the idea of monastic retreats. He wrote his own Rule, after all, although the monastic culture was not quite so well developed in his day. Yet he, living into fraught times as he did, did not advance it as the ideal of Christian living. His City of God/City of Man dialectic cannot be properly mapped onto some monastic/secular binary. The “City of God” is not restricted to those who live by a monastic rule, and this City continually struggles, hopefully and resolutely, to expand its borders. Even when the worldly government faltered in Augustine’s day, and when worldly society challenged the Christian worldview and threatened to revive paganism (sound familiar?), he did not throw up in hands in exasperation or seek to build higher his walls. He sounded a note of triumph—not of political triumph, fleeting as such always is—but an eternal one. Yet it is not in City of God alone that the “Augustinian Option” is presented. James K.A. Smith discusses in his article “The Benediction Option or the Augustinian Call?” a letter from Augustine to Boniface, a military governor in North Africa. It is worth reading Smith’s article in its entirety; it revolves around this military leader’s letter to Augustine communicating his desire to abandon his military and political post and take up a more monastic life. Augustine’s response was to remain where he was: “Hence others fight invisible enemies by praying for you; you struggle against visible barbarians by fighting for them.” The Saint added that “we ought not to want to live ahead of time with only the saints and the righteous.” The Augustinian Option is elsewhere in the Bishop of Hippo’s writing, and it not a view that huddles behind walls. While it did not privilege worldly position as equal to spiritual commitment, it recognized the value of such worldly position under the aegis of God’s design. One senses in Augustine a man who took seriously Paul’s statement that those to whom God granted the sword of worldly authority were his servants. He was, in a word, pastoral towards the outside world, and understood that the Christian should be a supremely confident creature.
The Alfredian Option
The Alfredian Option is a slightly different creature—more applicable to the layperson, perhaps, than the churchman. It is, however, not dissimilar to the Augustinian Option. It is named, of course, after Alfred the Great, King of what more or less became England on his watch. Alfred of Wessex, like Augustine, Benedict, and us, lived in a time beset by perils. The Norsemen who, in his great-grandfather’s day, had made their initial brutal forays into the British Isle had renewed their viking ways with a vengeance. These raiders and invaders were not all that different from the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians who formed the incipient English people. They spoke a similar language, shared a similar historical and cultural heritage, and sought to arrive in Britain in much the same way the English had. What distinguished them was religion. It was not so much Norsemen vs. English, or Vikings vs. farmers, that marked the conflict. It was, in the languages of the time, the “heathens” (in English) or the “pagans” (in Latin) against the English Christians. That the Norsemen’s first spoil was that of Lindisfarne Abbey helped to bring this into relief. In the latter half of the ninth century, they conquered the better part of England, and seriously threatened the rest. It was into these circumstances that Alfred took the throne. He was a serious religious man—not an exception among early English kings, several of whom “opted out” of their rule and went on pilgrimage instead. In studying Alfred, one gets the sense of a man who wanted to follow that legacy. However, he had little choice: as in Augustine’s day, the barbarians were at the gate, and Wessex needed a warrior king. Of course, in all honesty he did have a choice, as we all do: nothing prevented him from opting out apart from his own sense of duty, his integrity, his commitment to the call of God (in much the same post as Boniface, he understood the Augustinian Option, I suppose, without a letter from the great Bishop). Alfred, against considerable odds, met with success in his battles against the Norse invaders and, after retaking much territory, brokered a peace. In these more peaceful years he was able to advance an impressive program of recovery and learning of the Christian tradition; it is perhaps the case that the foundations of the Alfredian program began before the earthly battles were won, but it is certain that it would not have continued with those victories. What, then, is the Alfredian Option? If the Augustinian Option consists of choosing to be faithful in the position God places you, the Alfredian Option is choosing to resist a false dichotomy between earthly struggles and eternal ones, while staying oriented towards the latter. It is worth stressing, of course, that the opposite error—equating earthly struggles with eternal ones—is equally bad. We may not wage war as the world does, but we do live in it. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, yet the schemes against which we stand are not trapped in a disembodied plane: they impact this very world around us. We cannot afford to look inward only, and lose sight of the time and place in which God has set us—God’s own Son was incarnate, and our own eternal struggles have an embodied form to them.
The Gregorian Option
Yet another “option” is the Gregorian Option. Gregory the Great, born a few years prior to Benedict’s death, is a man intimately connected to all of the other great men of the faith noted above: this pope lauded both Augustine and Benedict in his writings, and his sponsored evangelical mission to the “English” was critical to the Christian heritage of Alfred. He was also a former monk. As with Augustine and Alfred, what is said here will only scratch the surface of this man’s influence. Gregory might be seen as the flipside of Alfred, as the two relate to the Augustine Option: the one demonstrates the churchman’s faithfulness to the call of God in the position in which he has been placed, while the other demonstrates the layperson’s faithfulness in the position he has been placed. Yet the fact that Gregory was a churchman, and eventually the pope, should not be read as suggesting his focus was fixed on the life within the walls of the Church or monastery. He served for several years as ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople, largely in order to plead for military aid against the Germanic Lombards in Italy. He also was an able administrator, and engaged regularly with the influential people of his day. Yet he did not ignore his higher calling: he engaged in important theological debates, wrote spiritual texts, reformed the norms of Christian worship, sought to regain territory lost by the orthodox Church—including, most famously, that of the British Isles. He was made Pope in the face of a personal preference for a return to the monastic life…and proved to be among a handful of the most influential popes of the first millennium. Moreover, of particular interest to those of us who are indebted to the life of the English Church, Gregory gave distinctive advice to Augustine of Canterbury, when he sent Augustine on his mission to convert the Anglo-Saxon people. Instead of setting up his own churches to rival the pagan temples, Augustine was to take over the old pagan sites for his own churches. That way, the people’s habit of coming to that place to worship could be utilized—perhaps even sanctified—into habits of worshiping Christ. The Gregorian Option recognizes that, while quiet contemplation may be personally preferable, God may have other plans for us: the appeal of the monastery should not detract from the other works of God. It also recognizes that not all the habits and customs of the world are rubbish; some may serve the Kingdom’s purpose quite well if only we keep our eyes on what is important. This Option recognizes that, while prayer, worship, contemplation, and self-discipline are of incontrovertible worth for the Christian, such things do not need to occur within monastic walls. Sometimes, they may be more efficacious out amidst the worldly.
Other valid “options” are no doubt there for the plucking. What they will have in common is an element that demonstrates the following. Engagement with the world is not a distraction from the call of God: it is the charge of God. Only a caricature of The Benedict Option would claim it totally ignores engagement with the world. Yet its attitude of retreat is not, I think, the note that should be sounded loudest in this present (or any) era. Repentance is required, yes, and turning back to older ways; such re-orientation is, in the end, necessary because the world needs what we have—not because the world is too darkened for us right now. The Benedict Option—if adopted unreservedly and in isolation—does not offer blessing to either the optioning Christians or the world, but instead a farewell. This farewell is less to the world (which will find its way over or through the walls of the monastery, be assured) and more to fellow Christians who are storming the gates of hell as charged. The utility of the Benedict Option is real, but exists in supporting, succoring, praying for, and offering a place of temporary regrouping for those serving on the frontlines.
Uprooting Evil
J.R.R. Tolkien lived through a calamitous time or two. I think I know what his perspective on the Benedict Option would be. The Professor was not opposed to quiet retreats: the idyllic Rivendell shows as much. Yet he knew that the peace and comfort of such places did not remove it from the battle. Tolkien would not, I trust, counsel retreat, keeping one’s head low in order to hold out for better times. He would not be daunted by the scale of evil looming on the horizon, but instead echo the sentiment of his Wizard: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” There is a place in the Church for the Shire, or the Last Homely House of the West. But we must do what is in us to resist evil, starting with the inclinations and habits of our own hearts. It is not for us to seek insulation from it. When dangers press in from outside or appear within the bounds of our own fellowships, we must remember that we wage an offensive war and our lives are not our own. Our call is not to keep them safe. The walls of the monastery may offer temporary retreat, but they must not become our homes—even during our pilgrimage here on God’s good earth.
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