“Idleness is an enemy of the soul.”
One of the key elements of monastic life is contained within this metaphor. Discipline is paramount as part of this life and a key to success requires a precise ritual of habit and application. It is within the empty spaces of work when the mind is left to idle thoughts that temptation arrives.
“If the faithless one depart, let him depart, lest one diseased sheep should infect the whole flock.”
Today, this proverbial metaphor has the ring of another familiar phrase about a rotten apple. The same principle holds true; it’s just that more people were familiar with this quote from scripture. Benedict here turns to the metaphorical power of the Bible for a specific reason. He has just spend a number of words outlining how to deal with monks who don’t adhere to the rules, among them being corrected “by stripes” which is an incredibly nice way of saying they should be flogged. His final word on the subject addresses the last resort of getting rid of the bad apple in the bunch.
Scaling the Summit of Humility
Benedict engages a metaphor to reveal the significance of a key cornerstone of monastic life, humility. The full quote is actually ripe with metaphor based upon the underlying idea of humility a concept requiring effort and paying off in reward:
“Wherefore, brethren, if we would scale the summit of humility, and swiftly gain the heavenly height which is reached by our lowliness in this present life, we must set up a ladder of climbing deeds like that which Jacob saw in his dream, whereon angels were descending and ascending.”
Worth noting is that there is a certain element of irony in the directive to act with humility. Rather than adopting it for its own sake, here the metaphor framed within the idea of getting paid off with a heavenly reward. Whether that implicit irony was intended as a temptation or not is open to question.
The Eye of God
Benedict refers to the “the eye of God” metaphorically as a kind of medieval Big Brother always watching over the monks. This is a directive specifically in response to acting with humility. Monks should at all times act as though the eye of God is watching over them as a way to pound home the theme that even when alone, acting without humility is never done in secret.
The Leaden Quality of the Sarabites
One of the missions undertaken by Benedict to write his rules was what he saw as the need for a set of guidelines to ensure faithfulness and veracity. Part of his justification lies with a particular school of monks known as the Sarabites whom Benedict identifies as the worst kind of monks because of their known habit of lying to God. This failure in turn arrived precisely because they not schooled in their discipline by a trained master. Benedict engages a metaphor from Proverbs to illuminate how lack of training is connected to their failure: “as gold is proved in the furnace, but soft as is lead.”
