Chapter 52 - again

My "not coping" (with people talking to me in church) is not the only reason I have been reflecting on Chapter 52 of the Rule of St Benedict. I was in fact led to it by thinking about the monastery, as described by St Benedict, being a model of the political process. Chapter 3, for example, talks about how the Abbot should call together the brothers when an important decision has to be made and listen to their advice before he chooses a course of action. One might think of this as a kind of parliamentary democracy, or perhaps a referendum. The election and duties of an Abbot described in Chapter 64 might also be considered as models of the democratic process, and of the duties of political office.

But I still came back to Chapter 52, and reflected on it in the context of the political process.

Chapter 52 On the Oratory of the Monastery

Let the oratory be what it is called, a place of prayer; and let nothing else be done there or kept there. When the Work of God is ended, let all go out in perfect silence, and let reverence for God be observed, so that any brother who may wish to pray privately will not be hindered by another's misconduct.

"Let reverence for God be observed". Even when a politician does not have a religious faith, is an atheist or agnostic, this seems to me a pre-requisite for a politics that is for the common good. For the believer, that reverence for God is represented in the world by the dedication of the physical building of the church solely and exclusively to the worship of - and, indeed, the presence of - God. For the non-believer this reverence for God is not a profession of belief in a supreme being, deity of some form, or a religious practice. It is instead a recognition that there is something more, something beyond ourselves and our immediate environments, something to which we owe respect and against which we rebel only at our cost.
 
This is expressed very ably by Vaclav Havel in the opening section of his lecture Politics and Conscience. The text can be found by going here, and clicking on the title Politics and Conscience. Do read the whole of the first section, and not just my extract below. The text is also published in the collection of writings, and appreciations, of Vaclav Havel "Living in the Truth". Vaclav Havel was himself a non-believer but one who possessed at the same time a respect for things of religion, a respect that in part came from his encounter with believers in the dissident movements of Communist era Czechoslovakia.

To me, personally, the smokestack soiling the heavens is not just a regrettable lapse of a technology that failed to include "the ecological factor" in its calculation, one which can be easily corrected with the appropriate filter. To me it is more, the symbol of an age which seeks to transcend the boundaries of the natural world and its norms and to make it into a merely private concern, a matter of subjective preference and private feeling, of the illusions, prejudices, and whims of a "mere" individual. It is a symbol of an epoch which denies the binding importance of personal experience including the experience of mystery and of the absolute and displaces the personally experienced absolute as the measure of the world with a new, man-made absolute, devoid of mystery, free of the "whims" of subjectivity and, as such, impersonal and inhuman. It is the absolute of so-called objectivity: the objective, rational cognition of the scientific model of the world....

Lest you misunderstand: I am not proposing that humans abolish smokestacks or prohibit science or generally return to the Middle Ages. Besides, it is not by accident that some of the most profound discoveries of modern science render the myth of objectivity surprisingly problematic and, via a remarkable detour, return us to the human subject and his world. I wish no more than to consider, in a most general and admittedly schematic outline, the spiritual framework of modern civilization and the source of its present crisis. And though the primary focus of these reflections will be the political rather than ecological aspect of this crisis, I might, perhaps, clarify my starting point with one more ecological example....