The
religious life (meaning the vowed life of poverty, chastity and
obedience) is forever producing commentary, both from secular
quarters and Catholic ones. Three weeks ago, Br. Justin Hannegan, a
Benedictine, published an article in Crisis
Magazine
explaining why the religious life was imploding in numbers, which can
effectively be summarised in the title “Sacrificing
Religious Life on the Altar of Egalitarianism.” The essence of
his argument comes from an analysis of a paper published by the
secular sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (here),
which shows with an impressive amount of data that the cause was the
end of the Second Vatican Council, in particular, the emphasis on the
universal call to holiness. Hannegan argues that an perverted spirit
of egalitarianism that emerged after the council has effectively made
religious life into masochism, obscuring the highway to holiness that
it represents. He writes:
“Religious
life, in itself, is not a desirable good. Religious life is a
renunciation. It is a kind of death. It involves turning one’s back
on what is humanly good and desirable. Consider the life of a
Trappist. A Trappist monk deprives himself of sleep, deprives himself
of food, gives up a wife and children, puts aside the joys of
conversation, gives up his personal property, rises at 4:00 in the
morning every day to chant interminable psalms in a cold church,
loses the opportunity to travel, and even relinquishes his own will.
The thought of being a Trappist is not an appealing thought. It
instills a kind of dread—the sort of dread that we feel when we
contemplate a skull, or when we stand over a precipice, or when we
look across a barren landscape. All forms of religious life have this
repulsive effect. All forms of religious life, at their very core,
consist of three vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—and each
of these vows is repulsive. The vow of poverty means giving up money
and property; the vow of chastity means giving up a spouse and
children; and the vow of obedience means giving up one’s own will.
No one has an innate desire to sever himself from property, family,
and his own will. No one has an innate desire to uproot three of
life’s greatest goods. Such a desire would be mere perversion.”
Hannegan
goes on, however, to point out why religious life exists at all by
quoting various saints:
“Instead
of asking people whether they desire religious life, we should ask
them whether they desire salvation—whether they desire to become
saints. If sanctity is the goal, then religious life and all its
harrowing renunciations begin to make sense. Although religious life
is the hardest, most fearsome way to live, it is also the most
spiritually secure, most fruitful, and most meritorious. Saint
Bernard of Clairvaux tells us that because they renounce property,
family, and their own wills, religious “live more purely, they fall
more rarely, they rise more speedily, they are aided more powerfully,
they live more peacefully, they die more securely, and they are
rewarded more abundantly.” According to Saint Athanasius, “if a
man embraces the holy and unearthly way, even though as compared with
[married life] it be rugged and hard to accomplish, nonetheless it
has the more wonderful gifts: for it grows the perfect fruit, namely
a hundredfold.” Saint Theresa of Ávila even tells us that she
became a nun, against her own desires, because she “saw that the
religious state was the best and safest.”
Now,
as Sister Theresa Noble, in responding
to the article over at Ignitium Today, points out, the
Benedictine seems to be suggesting an excellent way to Pelagianism,
the heresy memorably combated by St Augustine of Hippo, the idea that
people can earn their way to salvation. Still, if he subbed in
sanctity for his mention of salvation, he does have a point: very few
people spontaneously wake up with a desire to be obedient to someone
else, renounce marriage and sexuality, and not own anything.
Preaching desire for the vows as a way to vocation will almost
inevitably lead to married life.1
If
I was being overly cynical, or more likely, I was completely ignorant
of the way the Church understands the evangelical counsels of
poverty, chastity and obedience, I would be inclined to think that
they were either a way for a power-hungry Church to dominate people,
or an exercise is pointless asceticism. Both are ignorant, and for
those who know where they come from, absurd. The vows, at least as I
see them, have at least three closely related purposes: they are
evangelical, they are eschatological and they are practical.
Before
I explain why I think the vows are central to the Church's mission, I
should probably note that my perspective is different to those from
other religious orders' traditions: I am not seeking to be a
Trappist, or a Benedictine, or a Franciscan, etc. Each of these great
orders will have a view on why the vows are taken. Instead, I will
present a view that is at least moderately within the Ignatian or
(broadly) Jesuit tradition. Since I am not (yet) a Jesuit, perhaps
this is a bit presumptuous of me, but I will do so nonetheless.
The
evangelical counsels are named so because they are, in fact,
evangelical. That is to say, they foster the conditions which are
most suitable for evangelism, for mission, for the proclamation of
the Gospel. Obedience makes a person versatile to their superiors (in
particular, note the Jesuit fourth vow of obedience to the Pope in
matters of mission), poverty means they will be less attached to a
particular place (as someone with a mortgaged house, for instance)
and chastity also increases versatility. Historically speaking, the
Order of Preachers (commonly known as the Dominicans) adopted the
evangelical counsels as part of their own ministry, particularly in
the context of the Albigensian heresy, where the monastic orders were
limited in their ability to counter the heresy because of their
monasticism.
The
vows are also profoundly eschatological for two related reasons: they
mirror the ministry of Jesus and they point to something other than
this world. In mirroring the life of Jesus, those who take the vows
show in exemplary fashion an aspect of Christ – they are like the
poor preacher who had no-where to rest his head, they are like the
chaste man who laid down his life for the Church, a theological
marriage only to be consummated in the parousia,
and they are like the obedient Son of God, obedient even unto death
on a cross. This leads to the question, why?
If
one seeks to find the answer in purely worldly terms, the task will
be in vain – because the vows, just as the life of Christ, point to
something beyond the grave. Poverty leads to riches, as Paul says
“For you know
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for
your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become
rich.”
(2 Corinthians 8:9). Though he gives himself bodily to nobody, in
doing so, he is able to give himself bodily to everyone. The the
obedience of Christ on the cross points to, and indeed, is a
precondition of, the resurrection. Hence, the vows are not only
centred on the Gospel, but point to its truth, and point to the life
of the world to come.
Finally,
they are intensely practical: both in the common sense pragmatic way
and in the “practical
way to holiness”
type way that Br. Hannegan, the saints, and John Paul II (cf. Vita
Consecrata)
pointed to. They are pragmatic because they allow greater freedom –
one is more free when less attached to material possessions, more
versatile when not committed to the married life and children, and in
a strange way which most religious can attest to,2
more free with the vow of obedience. An explanation of why that is
the case would take a while, so I recommend Fr. James Martin, SJ's
discussion of the issue in “The
Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.”
When
things are practical, however, it is not for the sake of being
practical – pragmatism is, by its very nature, instrumental, a tool
in the hand of the user. Practical for what?
One answer might be, “for whatever you want to do”, and to a
great extent, this is true. For this reason, these vows, particularly
the vow of chastity (understood as vowing not to marry, ie as
celibacy) can be abused for selfishness, at least when not professed
for some other purpose (as religious vows are made). For the Society
of Jesus, the vows are made for the purposes of mission and service
to others, in recent times, particularly the poor. For other orders,
the purpose might be slightly different, though the vows are still
helpful in those pursuits.
Finally,
they are indeed paths to holiness. One should not quote the saints as
proof-texts on this point, but the witness of the holy people of
times past is broad and has a degree of unanimity: religious life is
excellence in the path to sanctity. Some of the reasons are like the
ones above – the religious life is the life of Christ, not just in
the vows, but in the community, contemplative and prayerful aspects
of it. Probably the clearest, second to the example of Jesus, is the
eschatological reason: in living a life that points to the Kingdom of
God, it serves not as a pointer to others, but as preparation in
itself. If C.S. Lewis was right in saying that the Christian path is
such that we may become little Christs, then living like Christ,
imitating Christ, is sure to be the fastest path to being transformed
into Christs.
Still,
the Second Vatican Council is not incorrect when it teaches that, in
the words of its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen
Gentium):
“All
Christians in any state of life are called to the fullness of
Christian life and to the perfection of love.”
This universal calls are universal, by virtue of baptism, and even
further than that. But whilst it says that it is the essence of the
Christian vocation to grow in the fullness of Christian life and the
perfection of love, it does not say that any particular way of
following Jesus is the same. I think religious life probably is
an easier path to holiness, which implies that the married saints
really are heroic. This view might sound clericalist (though most, or
at least many, religious are not ordained, and hence not clerics),
but it is actually surprisingly obvious: a life of prayer, immersion
in saintly spiritualities, liturgy and various expressions of Gospel
centred life is seems evidently
going to lead to greater holiness, and not even in a Pelagian
standing way, but because religious life is clearly and simply a
response to Jesus' call to leave everything and follow him. The issue
is, how does one incorporate the same embodiment of the ministry of
Jesus into married life? That difficulty is why religious life is an
easier way to holiness.
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1. I
must emphasize the “almost” - because I was drawn first to the
vows, then to the Society of Jesus where they were expressed in a
way I found expressed what I thought they meant the best. I have
never met anyone like me, however.
2. Whilst
it is certainly freedom in a very real sense, if one takes freedom
to be the mere absence of structures in life that guide one's path,
of course one will not find it more free. The tales of people who
have left religious life and written as if it were awful that
whoever the superior is in the order would tell them to actually
do something, did not
understand the meaning of the term “obedience.” If they did not
want to be obedient, they should not have vowed to do so.
