Loss of Self in the Degrees of Humility in the Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter VII
[In the following essay, Davis summarizes the twelve degrees of humility in the Rule of St. Benedict, focusing on the state of selflessness required to achieve humility and realize the complete love of God.]
The God-Exemplar
'In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord.1 In the christian dimension, the loss of self through the attitude of humility has its ancient exemplar in the tender, compassionate, humble love of Yahweh for his people. Such an anthropomorphic revelation of divinity as this culminates in Jesus, the Son of God. Christ, the Revelation of God, styles himself as 'the least' in the kingdom2 because his love is a kenosis, a giving up of self in the lowly death on a cross.3 Our God is a humble, loving God.
The Self and Its Dynamic
Our existence, the self, is a gift whereby we participate in the life of this humble loving God.4 With this existence comes the divine command5 to know oneself, and to develop from an unrealized to a realized identification with the divine. Insight motivates the self from an identification with lower animal impulses, a narcissistic self, a selfish love, i.e., pride, vanity, passions, and other ego-centric desires,6 towards an identification with a personality formed by relationships with things, other persons, and God. By the gradual purification of these relationships through sincere love as taught in the Gospels, we discover a still greater self that can experience the fruits of true, sincere love, namely, 'powerlessness' and 'nothingness.' An authentic love experience is one of total surrender to another; one gives all and holds nothing back. One's identity will shift; it will no longer be formed by impulses or relationships but it will become an identity formed by union with God.
Union with God through the No-Self
Union with God is the beginning of an encounter we 'know not'; yet it is truly the place where our self belongs. We arrive here by a ruthless campaign against all forms of illusion and the desires that come from self-complacency and spiritual ambition. A total surrender of our life, a holocaust, leads to a discovery within ourselves of a no-self: of deep silence, humble detachment before everything that exists, and before God. Even our prayer is not to be the source of our identity; it can be a net ensnaring us in our own self-regard.7 Cassian teaches that prayer is not perfect if in it a monk is aware of himself or of the words he is praying.8 This no-self is monastic purity of heart.
Humility in the Rule of St Benedict
Chapter VII of the Rule of St Benedict 'Of Humility' in continuity with christian tradition views humility as a disposition basic to integrating human and divine life: God comes to us, we go to God through the kenosis of Christ. The ladder spoken of in the opening words of this chapter, 'a ladder set up by our ascending actions like the one Jacob saw in his vision,'9 is not then to be taken as suggestive of a method or technique. Rather, the ladder symbolizes our life: resting on a humbled heart, it is raised to heaven by the Lord himself. In other words, a humbled personality provides the disposition needed for removing any duplicity, any complexity; it prepares the self for the manifestation and presence of God.
The Twelve Degrees of Humility
The twelve degrees of humility are paradigmatic of very early christian teaching on contemplative prayer as the no-self. In order to see this connection, let us cite some examples from the early fathers at each of the twelve degrees.
The seventeenth homily attributed to Macarius the Great10 reveals the need to enter our darkened self and put to death the evil serpent existing deep in the abyss of our soul at the root of our thought. Death, forgetfulness of God, comes from having this serpent digging itself ever deeper into the chambers of our life. The first degree of humility is to flee this forgetfulness by being always mindful of all that God commands and exposing every part of our abyss to his divine presence. Facing squarely a life based on this forgetfulness within brings us a fear and dread of its consequences: negligence, falsity, unfaithfulness here, eternal damnation hereafter. This initial phase of fear and dread is not to be regarded as something pertaining to primitive religion. This fear is an initial means of understanding God's absolute sovereignty over self, a basic experience of the self as 'nothing' in comparison with a Being so totally other. This brings about the realization that self-manipulative control over one's life has to be broken through, if there is to be any attempt to destroy or change the usual mode of living and thinking, of choosing and willing, of awareness and consciousness. Without this breakthrough there is no departure from the world of illusion.
The second degree of humility is 'that a person love not his own will, seek not to fulfill his own desires but carry out in deed that word of the Lord, "I came not to do my own will but to do the will of him who sent me." '11 This places selfishness opposite selflessness, that loss of self which comes from doing what must be done.12 The Holy Spirit of repentance, accompanying the experience of God's sovereignty, makes us begin to exercise discernment about our life's activities, with the result that the relationship between body and soul is purified and healed. This discernment restores proper balance between body and soul and orientates the self towards its true identity in the loss of self. The self becomes 'reasonable' in the sense of very early desert spirituality:13 that is, a person who does what must be done under the influence of the Holy Spirit of God.
Obedience to any superior in imitation of Jesus, the Rule's third degree of humility, integrates the loss of self into the tradition of paschal transfiguration. Such an obedience, by rooting out addiction to desires stemming from the self, brings conscious and unconscious mental activity to peace. It enables the self to die to personal choice and brings the flexibility and readiness to be at the disposal of God.
The real shift of the center of gravity from self to God, causing every component of the self to disappear before the divine, is achieved by embracing patience with a quiet consciousness, tacita conscientia, in all the hard, contrary, and even unjust dimensions of life. This, humility's fourth degree, gives deep inner peace: apatheia. It literally allows the self to be supplanted by the sensitiveness of the Good Spirit of God, whose dwelling—the self—needs to be a spacious place free of all anger and sadness, as the Shepherd of Hermas teaches.14
Integral to patience with a quiet consciousness is a humble manifestation of one's evil thoughts and past secret sins to the abbot. This, for St Benedict, is the fifth degree of humility. The faith experience and the experience of having a life-giving father—the fruits of this degree—remove from self the deep tendency to sin and darkness, illusion, deception, pretence, and vainglory—all of which intercept the workings of divine mercy and distort our relationships. This experience of faith and of a lifegiving merciful father ought not be underestimated in the destruction of selfishness.15
Since the self is clever in avoiding the recognition of illusions, especially those cherished about itself, it is possible to grow old in spiritual endeavor without really being humble in self-knowledge. Instead of a gradual discovery of the no-self before God, there emerges from such spiritual discipline a kind of subtle presumption or delicate effrontery in our relationship to one another and to God. By contrast, in the sixth degree of humility, the disciple is asked to be content16 with what is poor and abject and to see himself a sinful and useless laborer. Macarius' twenty-sixth homily teaches that this attitude is the sign of an authentic Christian.17
'Happy the person who thinks himself no better than dirt!"18 This beatitude of Evagrius is a joyful echo of the seventh degree of humility: to believe with deep, intimate convication, intimo credat affectu, that one is lower and more vile than anything else, that one is a worm and not a man19 … just poor mountain dirt!20 Recognition of God comes in direct proportion to the depth of the recesses of self that our inner humbleness can plumb. When the self is without any desires, for the sake of the kingdom of God, it is actually led by a desire so great that it can comprehend no thing. The self becomes a no-self, for nothing can satisfy it save the Divine Presence. No previously determined conditions and limitations are given for this presence.21 The paradox that no-self is an incomprehensibly great desire means that you are not giving God a name along with the rest of creation,22 nor equating God with the name given him and thereby making the divine after your own personal image and likeness.
Responding to the Divine Presence as the principal formative influence in our life is the eighth degree of humility: to do only what the example of the seniors and the Rule authorizes. An authentic person cannot interpret his life apart from a wholeness reflected in and integrated by his spiritual and physical environment. For, like a spiritual master, people and things place an unexplicable burden on us and so enable us to know our own nothingness and our need to give and receive, to love and be loved.
The ninth degree of humility is to maintain silence until questioned. Talkativeness can be a subtle means of self-affirmation, self-assertiveness, arrogance, and consequently an indication that a person has not yet come to a proper self-knowledge and sincere compunction. Intelligent silence, that is, an esteem for and correct use of speaking with emphasis on silence and listening, is the matrix of authentic relationships with others and of contemplative prayer.23
The growing awareness of our illusory and distorted self through everything that hurts self-esteem reveals to us our inner repulsiveness, fragmentation, wounds. The temptation is to disguise or to flee from these areas by flattery, ostentation, being easily and readily moved to laughter or by a lack of seriousness.24 Not to give in to this urge to escape is the tenth degree of humility. This painful revelation is the beginning of penthos: an abiding and developing sense of separation of self from God. Weeping, the gift of tears, heralds a growth in apatheia, that deep inner stillness and peace, the loss of self before the Divine Presence.
The eleventh degree of humility: speaking with few and reasonable words, pauca et rationabilia, maintains the self as 'reasonable' in very early desert spirituality.25 But, in this instance, it guards against levity of mind and ignorance. By a verbal and mental silence, traces of self-will are dissipated and preparation is made to receive with freedom that wisdom and Spirit which cannot be seen, heard, or conceived.26
The self s curiosity about things, persons, or events must be eliminated so that it does not turn to them to indulge in some dissolute or disordered passion, emotion, thought, or desire. It also needs to be purified of its mental images, concepts, ideas of God and of every dimension of its relationship with him. This purification produces attitudes and activities of harmony between the inner person and his outward conduct. They produce hesychia, quies, serenity, a tranquility of the inner and outer person proper to a complete renunciation of self in an absolute surrender to God. This manifestation of serenity and tranquility in our daily life, a transfiguration coming from the paschal mysteries, is the twelveth degree of humility. A humble quietness is revealed not only in the inner heart but also in the body.
Loss of Self Identified with Pure Prayer
Chapter VII of the Rule and Chapter XX, 'Of Reverence in Prayer,' have a remarkable similarity. In Chapter XX, purity of heart, humility, compunction, and tears are equated with the pure prayer, oratio pura, which brings salvation from God. The twelve degrees of Chapter VII see the same elements, purity of heart, humility, compunction, tears, as true selflessness or loss of self. The important conclusion is: pure prayer is identified with loss of self. In this identification, the Rule is consistent with the tradition of Evagrius and Cassian.27
The experience of selflessness is an experience of darkness, emptiness, nothingness. Because the self is a gift from God, a created participation in his life, this experience of darkness, emptiness, nothingness is likewise an experience of God working in us. The Letter of Diognetus, one of the earliest teachings on contemplative and mystic imitation of the powerlessness and longsuffering of God,28 echos this in posing the question: Who really understood what God is before Jesus Christ came? Or, as Ignatius of Antioch expresses it in the circumstances of his own life: To be near the sword is to be near God.29
Love Casts Out Fear
The Rule of St Benedict makes available in its teaching of these twelve degrees the contemplative, mystic imitation of God. Fidelity to such an imitation of God and his Son, Jesus the Christ, brings one to that love which casts out fear. The Rule expresses this love by the Latin words charitas Dei, a phrase which carries the nuance that we identify with the divine love which is God, not that we love God in much the same way as we love another person.
The Man of the Spirit
The last sentence in Chapter VII of the Rule testifies that these twelve degrees of selflessness are the working of the Holy Spirit in us.30 This presence of the Holy Spirit is in accord with the Old and New Testaments. Scripture reveals that the outpouring of the Spirit is the definitive sign that God has visited his people. The place proper for this Spirit is our emptiness, nothingness, no-self.31 He spans the incomprehensibility both of our void and the total otherness of the divine. His presence means, first of all, that the nothingness, the no-self, of an authentic love experience proper to any complete surrender is far more total, radical and profound when given to God. Secondly, and here is the paradox, this gift to God of being a no-self is precisely the ability to receive the gift of being an authentic person, that is, one living with the life—the Holy Spirit—of God. We imitate Jesus as revealed in the Gospel of Mark: one who dies and gives up his spirit precisely because he was the Son of God.32
Notes
1 Is 54:8.
2 Mt 11:11.
3 Ph 2:1-12.
4 God is to the soul what the soul is to the body. This is a common patristic teaching.
5 This is the underlying theme of Mt 16:24-26 and other scriptural passages.
6 I.e., the illusory and/or empirical self.
7 Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967) pp. 20 ff.
8 Cassian, Conferences, 9:31 ('The First Conference of Abbot Isaac').
9Rule of St Benedict, Chapter VII.
10 Macarius the Great, Homilies, 17:15.
11Rule of St Benedict, Chapter VII.
12Necessitas is the word used in the second degree of humility.
13 See, for example, The Letters of St Antony the Great.
14Shepherd of Hermas, Fifth Mandate I & II.
15 Cassian, Conferences, No. 18 ('The Conference of Abbot Piamun').
16 Lk 3:14.
17 Macarius the Great, Homilies, 26:11.
18 Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer, No. 121.
19 Ps 21:7 (Vulgate); 22:6 (Hebrew).
20Life of Pachomius, Vita Prima Graeca, No. 110.
21 Refer to the teaching of John of Lycopolis, Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, PL 21:395-8.
22 Gn 2:19-20.
23 Climacus, Ladder, Step 11.
24Apophthegmata, Alphabetical Collection, John the Dwarf, No. 9; Poemen the Shepherd, No. 137.
25Letters of St Antony the Great; Letters of Ammonas, Nos. 12 & 13.
26 I Cor 2:9 and teaching of John of Lycopolis, Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, PL 21:395-8.
27 Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos, No. 23; Cassian, Conferences, 9:3.
28Letter to Diognetus, No. 8 ff.
29 Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, No. 4.
30Rule of St Benedict, Chapter VII.
31 Gn 1:2; Is 66:2.
32 Mk 51:39.
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