I'm very skeptical about triumphalist views of Christianity, especially of Catholicism, which is the kind of Christianity I'm interested in because I believe it to be true. The Benedict Option started from a very realistic consideration: that Christians in the West aren't reproducing. Their children are leaving the Church, and new converts are few. Catholicism is only growing in Asia and Africa. Rod concludes that faithful, orthodox communities, with a well-defined identity, are much more likely to transmit the faith to the future generations than atomized Christians. And I think he's completely right. As for Rod's civilizational pessimism, I think he's right too. But I take a Gramscian view about that: "pessimism of the reason, optimism of the will".
Rachel - I’m really enjoying your thoughts and looking forward to the book! Like you, I’ve long been worried about the direction some have interpreted or taken The Benedict Option. To the extent it is about inspiring or encouraging building and evangelism, I’m in favor, but I worry a lot about the impulse to retreat from the outside world.
Or, to re-engage with it... in a less-than-constructive way.
Dreher doesn't encourage that, which I appreciate, but it's a natural move if you reach a sufficiently dark place. You could see a figure like Andrew Isker accepting Dreher's broader diagnosis, but sharing my concern about "cowering" and... now you have the Boniface Option.
So I like this take, and it's good to balance out Dreher's catastrophism; this "thousand year flood" framing is silly. But you're a bit off track with this:
"The Benedictines were great. But the Gospel was also being spread far and wide in this era, and not primarily by Benedictines. As Dreher repeatedly notes, their charism was to stay put. That’s not great for teaching, preaching, and evangelizing..."
I get your logic there! You can't be out preaching the Gospel if you're cloistered in a monastery, right? But actually, no, you can. You can commit your life to Christ and get cloistered in a monastery for a while, and then be on hand to be sent somewhere to preach the Gospel. Or curious people come to you and both your words and the setting evangelize them. Or you found a new monastery in the midst of a wilderness and lots of heathens, and convert them.
"The vanguard of the missionary effort included Anglo-Saxon institutionalists like St. Boniface,"
*... who was a Benedictine!*
"... ethereal wandering Celts like St. Columba,"
who was also a monastic, and in general, a big reason why Benedictine monastics don't get all the glory for evangelizing Dark Age Europe was that the Irish monastics did a lot of it, but that really supports Dreher's point.
"... and of course the Franks and Carolingians who conquered Gaul and Christianized it (unfortunately sometimes at sword-point)."
... which was denounced by Alcuin of York, an eminent royal counselor *and a Benedictine abbot.*
"... The latter also precipitated the famous “Carolingian Renaissance,” without which the Benedictines would have had considerably less success in their own efforts at cultural preservation."
Well, maybe. We don't know the counterfactual. But the Benedictines were doing their Christianizing and civilizing work before the Carolingians and kept doing it afterwards. And the great philosophical advances of the High Middle Ages owed far more to monastic orders and papal protection than to any secular ruler.
You're seeing a contradiction between "the Benedict Option" and "Christendom reborn" that isn't really there-- even if you're right that Dreher's own vision of it is weirdly distorted.
I've long thought that *The Benedict Option* was a much-needed book and I'm glad someone wrote it, but I wish it hadn't been Rod Dreher.
You're right, a lot of missionaries came out of Benedictine monasteries (including St. Boniface), so I shouldn't have drawn that contrast quite so sharply. Apologies. Thanks for pointing that out.
Of course I don't want to trash the Benedictines anyway. They were amazing, I have no wish to deny it, but they also worked in cooperation with a lot of others, and insofar as "staying put and preserving little centers of culture" was the right approach, what they preserved against the storm was pieces of Western Civilization (like texts from antiquity), not Christianity as such, which was already a massive force and continuing to spread. The Dark Ages were not particularly dark for Christianity, is the point.
I'm basically taking it that The Benedict Option *is* Dreher's vision; it was his book and he's never been particularly open to others adapting it for their purposes. So I'm contrasting my project to that. But of course I'm also acknowledging that I do very much approve of... something in a similar space, without all the catastrophism. Hence "a pretty good book except for the thesis."
I'm very skeptical about triumphalist views of Christianity, especially of Catholicism, which is the kind of Christianity I'm interested in because I believe it to be true. The Benedict Option started from a very realistic consideration: that Christians in the West aren't reproducing. Their children are leaving the Church, and new converts are few. Catholicism is only growing in Asia and Africa. Rod concludes that faithful, orthodox communities, with a well-defined identity, are much more likely to transmit the faith to the future generations than atomized Christians. And I think he's completely right. As for Rod's civilizational pessimism, I think he's right too. But I take a Gramscian view about that: "pessimism of the reason, optimism of the will".
I will try to convince you to have more optimism about the future! But we are all in agreement about the value of cohesive Christian communities.
Rachel - I’m really enjoying your thoughts and looking forward to the book! Like you, I’ve long been worried about the direction some have interpreted or taken The Benedict Option. To the extent it is about inspiring or encouraging building and evangelism, I’m in favor, but I worry a lot about the impulse to retreat from the outside world.
Or, to re-engage with it... in a less-than-constructive way.
Dreher doesn't encourage that, which I appreciate, but it's a natural move if you reach a sufficiently dark place. You could see a figure like Andrew Isker accepting Dreher's broader diagnosis, but sharing my concern about "cowering" and... now you have the Boniface Option.
By the way, have you ever read my take on the Benedict Option? https://substack.com/@lancelotfinn/p-147491250
It might interest you.
Will try to read later, on the sidelines of kid baseball games...
So I like this take, and it's good to balance out Dreher's catastrophism; this "thousand year flood" framing is silly. But you're a bit off track with this:
"The Benedictines were great. But the Gospel was also being spread far and wide in this era, and not primarily by Benedictines. As Dreher repeatedly notes, their charism was to stay put. That’s not great for teaching, preaching, and evangelizing..."
I get your logic there! You can't be out preaching the Gospel if you're cloistered in a monastery, right? But actually, no, you can. You can commit your life to Christ and get cloistered in a monastery for a while, and then be on hand to be sent somewhere to preach the Gospel. Or curious people come to you and both your words and the setting evangelize them. Or you found a new monastery in the midst of a wilderness and lots of heathens, and convert them.
"The vanguard of the missionary effort included Anglo-Saxon institutionalists like St. Boniface,"
*... who was a Benedictine!*
"... ethereal wandering Celts like St. Columba,"
who was also a monastic, and in general, a big reason why Benedictine monastics don't get all the glory for evangelizing Dark Age Europe was that the Irish monastics did a lot of it, but that really supports Dreher's point.
"... and of course the Franks and Carolingians who conquered Gaul and Christianized it (unfortunately sometimes at sword-point)."
... which was denounced by Alcuin of York, an eminent royal counselor *and a Benedictine abbot.*
"... The latter also precipitated the famous “Carolingian Renaissance,” without which the Benedictines would have had considerably less success in their own efforts at cultural preservation."
Well, maybe. We don't know the counterfactual. But the Benedictines were doing their Christianizing and civilizing work before the Carolingians and kept doing it afterwards. And the great philosophical advances of the High Middle Ages owed far more to monastic orders and papal protection than to any secular ruler.
You're seeing a contradiction between "the Benedict Option" and "Christendom reborn" that isn't really there-- even if you're right that Dreher's own vision of it is weirdly distorted.
I've long thought that *The Benedict Option* was a much-needed book and I'm glad someone wrote it, but I wish it hadn't been Rod Dreher.
You're right, a lot of missionaries came out of Benedictine monasteries (including St. Boniface), so I shouldn't have drawn that contrast quite so sharply. Apologies. Thanks for pointing that out.
Of course I don't want to trash the Benedictines anyway. They were amazing, I have no wish to deny it, but they also worked in cooperation with a lot of others, and insofar as "staying put and preserving little centers of culture" was the right approach, what they preserved against the storm was pieces of Western Civilization (like texts from antiquity), not Christianity as such, which was already a massive force and continuing to spread. The Dark Ages were not particularly dark for Christianity, is the point.
I'm basically taking it that The Benedict Option *is* Dreher's vision; it was his book and he's never been particularly open to others adapting it for their purposes. So I'm contrasting my project to that. But of course I'm also acknowledging that I do very much approve of... something in a similar space, without all the catastrophism. Hence "a pretty good book except for the thesis."