Vow of Stability

In the "Conservatives, and conservatives" thread below, a reader named Mark comments:

Very well put. But it begs the question/paradox: to what extent are virtue and freedom compatible? This, as you allude, is why traditionalists differ on the issue of authority on the part of the state. Though we certainly don't advocate compulsory virtue or an authoritarian state. But the fact is, that in order for the preferred, organic virtue to thrive (one that is the result of social norms and community values and not government regulations), there must be laws in place to discourage or prevent the progressive impulses of parts of society to erode these institutions and mores.

Which prompted a left-liberal reader to e-mail me:

My sense is that despite the doomsday scenarios favored by American liberals, the Republican Party's commitment to the (near) absolute freedom of the marketplace means that social conservatives will, absent the creation of that Christian Democratic Party of yours, always choose Republicans because of abortion and always be largely disappointed except in the matter of the courts (and even then with Giuliani or McCain...). That said, the question for people like you or Mark who wrote the comment is to what extent what real conservatives do indeed call organic virtue, or, for that matter, even community values can survive anywhere but in the remotest places in an age of 500 channels, the globalized market in goods, services, and, indeed, cultural norms, and mass migration? What does it even mean to be a traditionalist in the United States today as traditions crumble and vanish (even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, these basic facts would not have changed a whit).

What a great and important point. Trying to live out an answer to that question is, for me, the entire point of my politics, and the "Crunchy Con" project, such as it is. When I was in Istanbul, I had a spirited conversation with a very smart and public-minded Christian who believes passionately that my idea of the Benedict Option -- traditionalists hiving ourselves off somewhere -- is misguided. She argued that Christians were always in the middle of things, working to help and to be salt and light.

My response to her was basically that a) I'm not arguing that Christians and other traditionalist virtuecrats (so to speak) need to head for the hills, but rather that we need to in some tangible and consequential sense set ourselves apart from the mainstream, for the sake of raising our children in moral community. I live in the city and work in a thoroughly secular, even secularist, vocation, and I don't intend to leave. This is where I feel called. That said, it's my view that our culture is pretty messed up in some fundamental ways, and I know that my wife and I can't raise our children without community. We are learning how to creatively resist the consumerist values of mainstream culture. I am not confident that this can be done successfully, but I am utterly confident of my obligation to try, and to try as hard as I can.

Broadly speaking, the best ways we've found to do it is to form communities of like-minded people -- who are usually Christian, but I know quite a few Jews (and I've even recently met some Muslims) who I consider fellow travelers/fellow dissenters from our consumerist paradise. I've also found it important to turn off the television, and not only to protect them from the usual pop-cult crap, but also to teach them to love good books, good art, good culture. Our mission is not to produce robots, but to produce happy children who love God, love others, love truth and goodness, and who have hope. Hope is not optimism; hope is the conviction that even if things turn out badly, one's tragedies are not in vain -- that they have ultimate meaning.

We have a strong ally in this mission in our son's school, where parents and educators who share our basic countercultural values band together to create an institution to propagate those virtues. And this, I believe, is the only reasonable way any of us might hold on to tradition amid the chaos of the present moment.

I am becoming more impressed by the virtue -- and even the necessity -- of staying in one place, which is what Caleb Stegall so strongly advocates for, both in my book and in his writing. As I've wrote here the other day, St. Anthony the Great, one of the first Christian monks, said that in order to be saved, one must always have God before one's eyes, live according to Scripture, and "in whatever place you live, do not easily leave it." Similarly,
St. Benedict of Nursia instituted the "vow of stability," which requires a monk to remain in the monastery which he entered when he professed his vows. Nowadays, it seems, committing to staying in one place, come what may, is the most anti-modern thing you can do. Prof. Gerald Schlabach, a Benedictine oblate who calls himself a "Catholic Mennonite," explains why. Excerpt:

Benedict's rule requires a "vow of stability" -- the uniquely Benedictine commitment to live in a particular monastic community for life. At first, this may seem to apply least of all amid other ways of life. Yet precisely because it contrasts so sharply with the fragility of most commitments in our hypermodern society, the Benedictine vow of stability may speak more directly to our age and churches than anything else in the Rule. Application must be by analogy; my academic dean knows that I have yet to take a vow of stability, in anything like the technical Benedictine sense! And one cannot understand the vow of stability apart from the Benedictines' two other vows -- conversion of life and obedience, which in turn requires us to face questions of authority. Still, what I wish to argue is this:

It is no use rediscovering any of our church's roots, nor discerning innovative ways to be faithful to our church's calling, if we won't slow down, stay longer even if we can't stay put indefinitely, and take something like a vow of stability. Slow down -- because postmodernism may really be hypermodernism. Stay longer -- because there is no way to discern God's will together without commitment to sit long together in the first place. A vow of stability -- because it is no use discerning appropriate ways to be Christian disciples in our age if we do not embody them through time, testing, and the patience with one another that our good ideas and great ideals need, in order to prove their worth as communal practices.

As one Mennonite church leader remarked to me concerning the impact of constant mobility on our congregations: "It's getting so the Abrahamic thing to do is to stay put."

Prof. Schlabach's essay really does merit your attention. More:

Throughout his many essays, the farmer-poet-environmentalist Wendell Berry has been arguing tenaciously that our very humanity may depend on local communities that sustain a relationship with the land. In "The Work of Local Culture," for example, Berry laments that we have come to accept as a norm that our resources and our children will move away and never return home. Education systems prepare youth for an indeterminate career anywhere (and probably elsewhere) rather than to return home and be of use to a place and community. Berry recognizes that cycles of adolescent rebellion are necessary, but unless adolescents have viable economic opportunities for returning to their parents and meeting them as fellow sufferers and friends, whole generations become locked into the permanent adolescence of rebellion and mere critique, untethered by a corresponding responsibility for reconstruction. Contemporary scholarship itself reflects this permanent adolescence, he observes.

If Berry's plea for a return to rural community seems too much of a stretch, then perhaps we can hear the arguments of academic city-dweller Scott Russell Sanders of Indiana University in Bloomington. Sanders challenges those who urge us "to deal with difficulties by pulling up stakes and heading for new territory." The national culture is wrong when it tells us that "the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamourous marriage or played-out game." "People who root themselves in places are likelier to know and care for those places," he insists, "than are people who root themselves in ideas."

These are hard sayings for me, as I've spent my entire life in peregrination for the sake of work and pleasure. When I was in Istanbul, someone asked me how I liked Dallas. "I don't really," I responded. "It's hot, it's flat and it's modern. But I enjoy my work there, we have a good church there, Matthew's in a good school, and we have good friends. It's where I live, and I'm learning to love it instead of looking for the Next Place that might better suit my desires.

I apologize for quoting the good professor at length, but here, in his analysis of the vow of stability in Benedict's rule, is the heart of why learning to stay in one place offers, I think, the greatest hope for the virtues, and the communities in which they must live, to survive in postmodernity. Notice how much we postmoderns have in common with the two worst kinds of monks -- worst, because their spiritual strivings will amount to nothing absent their rootedness and binding submission to something higher than themselves:

The third and fourth categories of monks in his typology were another matter. "Sarabaites" (RB 1.6-9) were "the most detestable kind of monks" who thought they could form small communities of two or three without the aid of either an experienced master or a rule to order their life over time.11 They were sheep trying to construct their own sheepfolds not the Lord's, without the aid of a shepherd.12 Their law was their own fancy: "Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden." Yet a fourth kind of monk was even worse, the "gyrovagues" (RB 1.10-11), who drifted all their lives from monastery to monastery, staying only a few days. "Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites." The sarabaites were "detestable," but the gyrovagues were "in every way ... worse." We might say that the sarabaites were trying to form "intentional communities" on the strength of intention alone, without accepting the need for some structure based on time-tested experience to even out the peaks and troughs of whim, passion, and mere enthusiasm for the idea of community. If the gyrovagues were worse, it was precisely because they were even more hyper. Think monks on MTV!

So what Benedict meant by stability, along with the other Benedictine vows of obedience and conversion of life, is quite clear already in chapter 1. Of course there may have been good historical reasons for insisting on stability in the unstable sixth century that do not apply to our own. But his reasons for stability may pertain more to our own century than we like to recognize. In the closing paragraph of the first edition of his book After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre baited his readers famously by suggesting that we await "another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict."13 According to MacIntyre, "the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time" -- polling, managing, manipulating, and creating our consumer preferences through corporate and governmental bureaucracies alike. Meanwhile, theorists of modern democracy fail to account for the moral life as anything more than emotivism, thus reducing moral action itself to consumeristic choice. According to MacIntyre, our hope then is in new and localized forms of community life, constituting traditions of virtue wherein Aristotelian apprenticeship not Kantian autonomy shapes the moral life. Such communities must divest their hope in empire, and shape their lives through narratives capable of countering its illusions. Only within such communities and traditions -- which pass on their virtues through narratives and the heros or mentors who embody them -- will intellectual, civil, and moral life survive the competing wills-to-power that are preying upon us.

We all need to be Benedictine now. For me, and I suspect for most of us, learning to stay in one place is one of the most difficult things imaginable. But also perhaps the most necessary.

Anyway, what else is there?