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Volume 33, Number 1 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
January 2005 |
Care of the Sick in the
Rule of Saint Benedict: II
by Terrence Kardongm O.S.B.
B. A Limiting Case: The Unappreciative Sick (36.4)
We have already noted that the message of Matthew 25 is surprising and difficult
for the care-
We recall Eulogius, who picked up a cripple without hands or feet in the marketplace
and cared for him for more than fifteen years. Later, it was as if the devil were
riding the cripple the way he abused his care-
Someone who is sharp may have noticed that the theology here is slightly different than what preceded. Here it is not that Eulogius is serving Christ in the cripple, but that Christ is serving the cripple through Eulogius. At any rate, Antony berates the cripple for failing to honor the Christ who is serving him so selflessly. Apparently he makes an impression on even this hard case, because the story ends happily.
It seems to me that another factor in all these texts is the claim that the sick must strive to be deserving of the love and care shown them. St. Benedict also says this implicitly in 36:4. Basil actually makes a great point of this in his Longer Rules 55. But Jesus says nothing about it in Mt 25! He does not say: “As long as you did it to one of these deserving little ones, you did it unto me.” So the monks are tailoring the Gospel text to the practical realities they know, but they are also blunting its radicalism.
Still, there are a lot of facets here that can bear pondering. For example, Basil has another little Rule that discusses a deeper dimension of health care, namely, the sick must accept it.
Question: With what kind of humility ought one accept service from the brothers?
Answer: As a servant from his lord and as the Apostle Peter when the Lord ministered to him. At the same time, he shows the danger of those who do not wish to receive the service of the brothers. (Basil, Latin Rule 37)
This may seem like a fairly obvious point, but it is not. Basil is able to base his teaching on the example of Peter at the Last Supper, who at first rejected Jesus’ attempt to wash his feet. He brought down on himself a blistering rebuke: “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me!”
Why this outburst on the part of Jesus, especially in a context where he is obviously functioning as a servant? No doubt, the basic theological message is that salvation must be received from Another, it cannot be won for oneself. When strong, successful people end up flat on their backs, they are not in the habit of begging for help, and not even of accepting it. The first step is to admit that now all I can do is to let people take care of me. At that point, it is perhaps a sign of very high spiritual maturity.
With verse 5, Benedict ends his advice to the sick and turns back to the healthy.
No matter how the sick behave, they must be treated with patience. This seems to
move back closer to the ethic of Jesus, which implies that the main burden of responsibility
lies on the strong, not the weak. We don’t blame the victim, no matter how much we
might feel like it. Beyond this matter of elementary psychology, however, we can
add that the vocabulary here points to the Christian idea of vicarious suffering.
If the care-
If we think that it is a stretch to associate our sufferings with those of Christ,
we might ponder this saying in the New Testament: “It is now my joy to suffer for
you; for the sake of Christ’s body, the church, I am completing what still remains
for Christ to suffer in my own person” (Col. 1:24). Of course, this cannot mean that
Christ’s redemptive death was lacking in any theological sense, for it was all-
The last verse in this part forms a nice frame with the first: be careful of the sick! But now the directive is aimed at one person, the abbot, and not the whole brotherhood. And in fact the idea of the ultimate responsibility falling on the abbot is repeated in ever stronger terms in the final verse (10). Even if we are aware that the abbot is responsible for virtually everything in the Benedictine system, we may wonder how he can be answerable in such minor matters.
II. The Practicalities of Care of the Sick (36.7-
A. The Infirmary and the Infirmarian (36.7)
In this second part of the chapter, Benedict descends from the general to the particular.
Now he deals with certain practicalities that seem to need attention. It could be
that these verses were added to the main body (36.1-
Verse 7 sets up a proper infirmary in that it sets aside a special room or building
(cella) for the sick, and it also designates a given person as the full-
Indeed, later medieval infirmaries became quite elaborate, with their own chapel, dining room and herb garden. They were quite large, out of all proportion to actual illness, because they were used for regular bleeding of the whole community. In retrospect, we can say that this was their form of vacation, including a richer diet and time for recreation. A few of these medieval infirmaries still exist in the ruins of monasteries.
When we turn to the nurse, we have to say again that Benedict is not alone, since St. Augustine had one before him. But by combining a separate room and a special person, Benedict created the most complete arrangement for ancient monastic health care found in any Rule. Moreover, most commentators consider his chapter on the care of the sick as one of his better efforts at legislating an aspect of monastic life.
What Benedict says about the nurse is, I think, very significant. Notice, first of
all, that he does not call him nurse, or infirmarian, or anything else that we might
recognize as a medical title. He calls him servitor, servant. This seems to lack
cachet, and it may even imply menial labor, but is alright, since sick care involves
plenty of humble labor. But we should also consider the possibility that Benedict
is making a subtle reference to the servanthood of Jesus. It is, after all, one of
his most glorious titles, directly connected to his cross in Phil. 2:7. And it could
amount to a complete Christ mysticism: in sick-
Benedict has more to say about the servant of the sick. He says she should be God-
To call the servant “careful” (sollicitus) is repetitious, since he says the same
thing in vss. 1, 6 and 10. From the standpoint of structural criticism, however,
it is very significant since it ties the chapter together into a tight package. It
suggests that no part of this chapter is extraneous or just tacked on. Finally, Benedict
wants the servant to be “devoted.” The Latin is diligens, and we should note that
this word contains the root for “loving.” It should not be necessary to say that
if there is no element of love in sick-
B. Two Monastic Worries: Bathing and Eating of Meat
1. Bathing
Next we come to two items that have probably caught your eye already, namely, bathing and eating of meat. I do not want to get too caught up in these discussions as do some of the traditional commentators on the Rule, but we can still learn a few things from them.
Probably the verse on bathing seems very odd to us. You and I live in culture where most people bathe every day. And yet Benedict makes it seem like a very unusual concession to the sick. What are we to make of this? Well, in order to keep a little perspective, it might be well to remember that fifty years ago in this country people bathed once a week, whether they needed it or not. So these things can change.
In fact, in ancient Greco-
When the old monks came along, however, they rejected public bathing. Here is what Athanasius says about Antony, the father of monks: “He did not wash his body with water to remove the dirt, he did not bathe his feet or allow them to touch water without direct necessity. No one ever saw him naked, and above all, no one saw the body of Antony completely naked” (Vita 47). No doubt this seems to us unhealthy, and we should probably not take it literally. The basic idea was to break with the public culture, which was thought decadent. And we can be sure that it was not easy for urbanites to leave behind this part of their culture. And certainly some of the Church Fathers thought bathing stimulates the passions.
One of the most balanced approaches to the baths was that of Augustine. His monastery was in the North African city of Hippo, so there were public baths to go to. Furthermore, at least some of Augustine’s monks and nuns were from aristocratic backgrounds that certainly included public bathing. But Augustine is still cautious on the subject. He wants people to go there for therapeutic reasons, not just for pleasure. Moreover, he wants them to go under obedience when so ordered by the monastic superior or doctor. So he has a realistic view of bathing.
2. Eating of Meat
Another aspect of this rigorism has to do with what you put in your mouth. To put
it succinctly, many Christians did not eat meat. Today that does not look nearly
so odd to us as not bathing, but fifty years ago in this country it looked very strange
indeed. Benedict allows the very sick to eat meat, but when they get well, they must
revert back to a non-
Overall, we can say that eating of meat was far more controversial among the old
monks than the question of bathing. For example, does Benedict’s prohibition against
eating of meat include chicken? In RB 39.11, he says explicitly that they are to
avoid the flesh of “four-
The earliest monastic Rule, that of Pachomius in the far south of Egypt, does not allow eating of meat. And yet it is clear that the sick were allowed, even encouraged, to do so. This dramatic story from the Life of Pachomius illustrates this very well:
At another time Pachomius was again ill to the point of being in danger of death because of his excessive ascesis. So then they brought him to the place where the sick brothers lay, in order to get him to take a few vegetables there. A brother was likewise lying sick there. He had been ill for so long that his body was mere bones. He had asked the brothers who were doing the service to be given a little meat to eat, but they refused to give him any, saying, “Such a thing is not customary among us.” Seeing that they would not give him any, he said to the brothers who were doing the service, “Take me and carry me to our father.” They did, and when Pachomius saw him he was surprised at how his flesh had wasted away. Looking at him all the while he remained astonished. Just then they brought him a few vegetables to eat. He gave a sign and said, “O, you who are respecters of persons, where now is the fear of God? You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Do you not see that this brother is like a corpse? Why do you not give him what he asks for?
It is obvious that legalism conflicts with compassion and common sense in this story. Or to put it another way, ideology is running over the ethics of Jesus, that we love and care for the sick. Still, we have to respect these people for taking their monastic ideals seriously. Clearly, they were not playing games. Very likely they were not just following objective rules, but had internalized these matters. They must have had some philosophical convictions about what they ate. People like St. Jerome believed that eating of meat, like bathing, aroused the sexual passions. In our own time, many people are vegetarians, but for different reasons. One meets people who believe eating of meat feeds into a culture of violence. Others think that red meat is bad for the heart. One can only respect them for this, even if one disagrees.
Finally, it is good to note that eating of meat was not an issue for most common people in traditional culture, simply because meat was so scarce. Meat was for great feasts, and you ate as much as you could to build up your scarce reserve of protein. Secondly, I have noticed that the members of modern monastic orders who do not eat meat, such as the Trappists, ordinarily will cheerfully eat meat in a restaurant. Apparently they have little personal loyalty to vegetarianism.
The final verse is a repeated warning to the abbot that he must not neglect the care
of the sick. Of course, it is taken for granted that he will have to delegate the
actual, hands-
Another way of looking at this is from the standpoint of anthropology. Even though Christian teaching sometimes seems to emphasize the care of the soul to the detriment of the body, that is not the message here. Of course, the abbot is the chief pastor of the souls of the monks, but that does not imply any neglect of the physical. In Greek monasticism, they sometimes have two superiors: the hegumen, in charge of practicalities, and the spiritual father, in charge of spiritual matters. With Benedict, these two things are kept firmly bound into one whole.
To make the abbot’s responsibility as palpable as possible, Benedict ends with a rather startling demand: “He is responsible for whatever faults the disciples commit.” It is more reasonable to say that he is responsible for the overall care of the sick, not for isolated incidents. This is a rather harsh ending, but at least it shows that Benedict takes the care of the sick very seriously.
Br. Mark Carmer is one of many monks who have completed their lives at Assumption Abbey under the care of fellow monks.