The Rule of St. Benedict was an interesting reading and I found myself disagreeing with a lot of it. I understand that it was not written for a college student to read. It was written to serve as a set of rules for monks (I think. We didn’t receive any background information on this text and I was too busy to spend my own time sifting through the internet to find some rare nugget of information that would help me understand this better). After reading, I concluded that I would make a bad monk. Nevertheless, the two major issues that I had were the authority of the Abbot and lack of individuality among the monks.
The Abbot is basically the leader and overseer of a monastery. He is responsible for “the welfare of the souls entrusted to him” (Benedict, 6). This shows the amount of responsibility and authority that comes with being the Abbot. Where I start to disagree with St. Benedict is when he writes on humility and obedience. He wrote that “As soon as anything hath been commanded by the Superior they permit no delay in the execution, as if the matter had been commanded by God Himself” (Benedict, 10). This seems dangerous to me. In Romans, it says that “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3: 10b (ESV). Man is naturally sinful. To blindly obey a man in authority as if what he commanded was from God seems like a bad idea. St. Benedict later explains that the Abbot is elected based on the “merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine” (Benedict, 72) but no man is perfect (except for Jesus, but he is not the Abbot). The amount of trust placed in the Abbot alone scares me a bit if I’m being honest.
The second part of the reading that left me feeling uneasy was the lack of individuality among the monks. St. Benedict writes against the monks doing what they have not been told to do, speaking without being spoken to, being quick to laughter, and many other things. There are even rules about what they can wear. I think that these rules strip the monks of their individuality. This doesn’t sit well with me. God has made every person different. There has never been anyone like me or you and there never will be. It reminds me of the show Veggie Tales when it would say, “God made you special, and He loves you very much”. We were never intended to be robotic God-worshiping machines. We are unique for a reason.
Overall, I disagreed with a lot of The Rule of St. Benedict, but I think that’s okay. Unlike the monks, I don’t think I should listen to and obey a man as if he were God. To me, it seems like a lot of the honors students are afraid to disagree with the readings that we go through. This makes me think of a quote by George S. Patton. He said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking”. This quote encouraged me to write about what I thought of the text, even if most other people disagree.
Landon, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the reading. I appreciated your honesty in sharing your opinions on the text. I did, however, remove 3 points from the “depth” category of the rubric as I felt you could have explored your points of disagreement with the Rule of St. Benedict on a deeper level.
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Depth: 17
Scholarship: 20
Polish: 10
Total points: 47/50
Landon: perusing the blog posts this week, I think it's safe to say that many of the students feel free to disagree with aspects of the readings. I certainly hope they're not afraid to disagree. Hopefully the structure of the discussion Tuesday, in which disagreement was a part of the exercise, helped to address any in-class hesitancy with disagreement. I think what I would say in response is that while our goal is certainly not consensus (we're obviously not hoping you agree with everything in the texts we read), I want to push students to analyse more deeply WHY they disagree and what this teaches them about the context and culture in which these texts were written. I think we do a pretty good job of disagreeing with ideas and holding up different ideas as a mirror to our own, but I don't think we do quiet as well trying to get inside the mind of other people, of other writers, and analyze what our disagreements can teach us about how other people see the world. WHY do you think Benedict (who obviously had a good handle on the Scripture) would have read it so differently than we do today? WHY do you think he would have emphasized obedience and downplayed individuality? WHAT does this illuminate about our own modern preoccupations with individuality, as mediated to us in the form of Veggie Tales and other cultural products?
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