The Glorious Purpose of Monastic Life
In the 53rd chapter of his Rule for his monks St. Benedict explains how they are to receive guests. One detail has always stayed with me. On arrival, the Abbot and some monks are to pray with the visitor, "We have received Your mercy, O God, in the midst of Your temple” (Ps 47:10). As one commentator, Fr. Hubert van Zeller, notes, this reminds the monks that they are, first of all, guests of God. The vocation of the monk, one might say, is to become a living temple of God's merciful hospitality for us, i.e. of the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom our whole humanity is welcomed and restored to its original glory.
This was both the reason and theme of our annual retreat last July. Each summer the monks go on retreat together to be renewed in our vocation through listening to conferences and time in personal prayer. This year we were delighted to welcome Bishop Erik Varden as our retreat master. Pope Francis named Varden bishop of Trondheim, Norway in 2019, before which he was a monk and abbot of the English Trappist monastery, Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. A noted author, in print and online at coramfratribus.com, Bishop Varden recently published Alight with Hidden Glory, which collects his 2026 Lenten retreat conferences for Pope Leo and the Roman Curia.
To begin our retreat Bishop Varden invited us to reaffirm "the glorious purpose of monastic life." This is especially necessary in a time of civilizational crisis, in which we seem to increasingly find ourselves. Such moments, not unique to our own age, are often characterized by crippling fear and acedia, that "noonday demon" of hopeless futility and boredom the early monastics wrote about. The result is an anxious and contracted spirit, without a foundation or desire to build anything. Varden noted that today it is exceptionally difficult to gather people together for a positive purpose, beyond a sterile reactivity which chips away at the soul’s true longing. In such a climate we should resist the “temptation to instrumentalize faith to defend a ‘product’ of faith," such as a Christian civilization. To ‘use’ Christ for some other end is to open the path of idolatry or blasphemy.
Instead, when we look at Benedict, born 480 AD into a time of crisis, a generation after Attila the Hun invaded northern Italy, we see a man whose mission was not to create a “movement that was civilizing," though it did have that effect, but one that was "evangelical and Christocentric." He was "building on wholly other terms [than the world]: the manifestation of the holiness of God… that it was possible to construct societies in which God's life may be instantiated.” That this was a sign of hope for all of humanity is a conviction later echoed by Vatican II in Lumen Gentium (Ch 2).
It is our Catholic task, Varden said, "to uphold the purposefulness of things, history, persons, and articulate it credibly." In the monastery we have "pledged ourselves to Christ's love, building a civilization of love, ever keeping before our eyes the presence of Christ as the morning star, which is the only light that can illuminate our present darkness." How? By allowing ourselves to be healed by the mercy of Christ, and by demonstrating in our lives the efficacy of sacrifice. What is offered to Christ is transformed and renewed. This is why St. Benedict exhorts us to "prefer nothing whatsoever to the love of Christ" (RB 4:21). It is the love and truth revealed in Christ for which every heart and age thirsts. And, Varden continued, "How necessary to have true monks and nuns who can testify that a life lived according to God's promise is possible, and that it can satisfy the deepest longings of the heart, and make us new women and men."
So concluded the opening conference of a retreat that would proceed to put before us two great figures who both credibly taught and demonstrated that this promise is real: St. Athanasius and St. Antony of the Desert. St. Athanasius is remembered as the great bishop of Alexandria, faithfully defending, amid great persecution, the orthodox teaching of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was truly God, “consubstantial with the Father,” as we still profess in the Creed every Sunday.
Athanasius’ timeless work De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (On the Incarnation of the Word of God), unfolded the implications of this great mystery. As Varden noted, “Whether or not we recognize Christ as truly God, and therefore that human nature is infused with Divinity, is vital for our self understanding... then human nature can become ‘partakers in Divinity’ (2 Peter 1:4).” If we have been created in the image of the Logos (God’s Word, Jesus Christ), “then the promise of our flesh is extraordinary.” In fact, sin is unreasonable (un-Logos-like), as it turns us from the fulfilment of our “logical”— i.e. infused-with-Logos— nature. We forget our origin and the promise of our being and “we start thinking we are only what we are now." In contrast, the grace of Christ given at baptism, and knocking at our hearts each day, "reawakens our memory, where we are from, and where we are going, giving us hope." As Varden put it, since we yearn for the eternal, we become “natural” when we are “oriented to eternity which is God himself.” Thus, the Word became flesh because “Man needs to be ‘rebooted’ by the original source of our longing.”
Athanasius not only provided a tremendous work of theological reflection on the implications of Nicaea, he also provided an example that this Logos-infused life was possible by writing the Vita Sancti Antonii, The Life of St. Antony, the great father of Christian monasticism, to be taken up in the next newsletter.
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Br. Angelus joined St. Benedict's Abbey in 2018. He is currently studying for the priesthood at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary (St. Louis, MO).