Before I was a Catholic, I taught a history of Christianity course at a university in Lithuania. I am not a trained historian, so in preparing for the course I was in need of a way to frame it. A friend recommended Mark Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. The book was a life saver. Confessionally, Noll is an Evangelical, which added to my surprise not simply that he lists St. Benedict and the establishment of Western monasticism as a turning point but that he says that “the rise of monasticism was, after Christ’s commission to his disciples, the most important—and in many ways the most beneficial—institutional event in the history of Christianity.”¹ Why? Because it preserved, and in many ways continues to preserve, the truest ideals of the Gospel. As Constantine established the close connection between Church and empire, martyrdom lessened and worldliness increased. While decadence made its way into the Church, monasticism preserved the pure truth, goodness, and beauty of the faith. It is these transcendentals of the faith that were then eventually able to make their way back into society, forming European culture. I found and continue to find that Noll’s claim makes sense. However, in what follows I want to take a different line of inquiry and ask what Benedictines positively offer to culture today beyond the static preservation of faith and culture that has preceded us.

Static Rhythms

Interestingly, it is the idea of stability that is of importance, a word given in the thesaurus as a synonym of “static.” Stability can imply passivity or have connotations of defensiveness, but arguably there is also something forward moving and active about it. It can be thought of within the framework of temporality—time and history—or within a relational structure. Both can be helpful ways of thinking about and thinking through stability and its importance for culture. Before exploring this further, let’s look at the notion of culture.

Joseph Ratzinger defines culture as “the historically developed common form of expression of the insights and values which characterize the life of a community.”² It concerns knowledge and values but is not a pure theoretical attempt to understand the world and human existence. It is communal but at the same time it concerns the individual, and “in all known historical cultures, religion is the essential element of culture, indeed it is its determining core.”³ The very word itself includes cult, culture. The crisis of cultures occurs, so argues Ratzinger, when our “super-rational heritage” loses its connection to new knowledge. Arguably, we in the West are in such a crisis, a crisis of national and personal identity, a lack of a cohesive narrative, a cultural vacuum. How can there not be a cultural vacuum when cult, i.e., the liturgy, is no longer the foundation of culture? This brings us back to stability.

Rowan Williams, in his little book The Way of St Benedict, notes that “authentic culture needs rhythms of activity and retrieval, recovery of the self…. Culture has to be more than the round of producing and being entertained. It must be the context in which humanity is allowed to grow—that is, a context in which memory, intelligence and love are allowed to grow.”⁴ This is a rich quotation that gives various images related to stability seen through temporality—rhythms of retrieval and recovery, growth—and to relationality—memory, intelligence, and love. Rhythms is an interesting word, for it encompasses past and present. A drumbeat or the ticking metronome, like all music or speech, needs the past just as much as the present. There is no such thing as 4/4 rhythm if one cannot reach into the past. Speech without a past cannot form words but only single letters. In this sense music and speech—and there are many more examples—reveal a living past. The human experience of sound is akin to sight. The tempo of the drums is experienced similarly to how we see the base, trunk, and tip of a tree all at the same time. Thus, in this sense, retrieval, recovery, and growth are related.

Memory makes possible our present by providing the context of the past. Remembering is re-membering, putting things together, and this does not simply concern time but in the deepest sense is relational. That is, the highest form of re-membering happens at the altar: “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). We call this communion because it creates communio. Christ brings us together in him re-membering us into his body. Intelligence is relational in that all thinking involves analogy, putting things into relation to other things. No explanation is necessary for why love is relational except for love of self. To love is to will the good of the other for the other. It involves an other. With that in mind, I can only love myself in the fullest sense of the term love if I belong to an other. It is only the other who can accept me so that I can thereby accept myself. “Only when life is accepted and found accepted does it become acceptable. Man is that remarkable creature who needs not only physical birth but approval in order to exist.”⁵ The human person needs to be affirmed and is affirmed because he or she is loved into existence. Memory (remembering), intelligence, and love—as seen through the framework of relation—require stability, the stability of God himself, the stability of the Logos, the stability of his love.

Monasticism and Marriage

Growth, which is a directed movement, the process of increasing, involves a foundation, something to grow from. Culture cannot be without a past; culture cannot exist without stability; culture cannot exist without cult.⁶ St. Benedict models this for us. In chapter four of his Rule, he lists the instruments of good works. This begins with loving God with one’s whole heart, followed by obeying the Ten Commandments and then putting into practice various spiritual recommendations such as “console the sorrowing,” “prefer nothing to loving Christ,” “not to make a false peace,” and “not to be gluttonous.” This list is long and insightful, and it concludes with, “And the cloister of the monastery and stability in the community are the workshop wherein we may diligently effect all these works.” It would be easy to quickly skip by this last line as if it is unnecessary. It seems mundane compared to loving one’s enemies and loving Christ with one’s whole being. Yet, according to St. Benedict, stability is the workshop from which the good works flow.

The stability of persevered time—praying the Office, celebrating the Mass, tilling the fields, milking the cows day in and day out—and the consistency of relations is the place where one encounters otherness and thereby oneself. It is here that one comes face to face with beauty, truth, and goodness because there is nowhere to hide. In this sense monasticism, which, it is important to remember, is not a sacrament, reflects the primordial sacrament of marriage. What does the word “primordial” imply? St. John Paul II explains that “as the primordial sacrament, marriage constitutes, on the one hand, the figure (and thus the likeness, the analogy) according to which the underlying, weight-bearing structure of the new economy of salvation and the sacramental order is built, which springs from the spousal gracing that the Church receives from Christ.”⁷ The religious life, monasticism, is not a primordial reflection of reality; therefore, in order to be intelligible, it must be understood in relation to marriage (intelligence involves analogy…).

The stability of monasticism is key for culture because it institutionalizes and manifests in a unique form the bedrock of all cultures, i.e., marriage and the family. The indissolubility of marriage is the ultimate form of human stability. It symbolizes the absolute faithfulness of God’s love, a love that endures. The context of marriage is a place in which one cannot hide, where otherness is constantly in dialogue. It is also a space of affirmation: the lover says to the beloved, “It is good that you are here.” This is an echo of the Creator’s voice in Genesis: “And it was very good.” The stability of the Creator—that he does not change—is the ground of all affirmation and the foundation of hope. This affirmation, sacramentally present in marriage and lived out in monasteries, enables love of self and provides the soil for growth. Within this stability a richness of life, an open vista emerges.

Labor of Love

Thinking specifically about the Benedictine motto ora et labora, work finds its proper place by being put alongside liturgy and prayer. Work is set in the context of meaning, and in light of this it is recognized as important but not ultimate. Holding these two together, one can work and create culture with a sense of joy and in the freedom of knowing that all our activities are relativized and directed by the stability of God. It then should be no surprise that Benedictines have had a major impact on Western culture—from Guido of Arezzo who invented modern staff notation to Dom Pierre Pérignon who contributed to the development of champagne—and all the other contributions such as illuminated manuscripts, mechanical clocks, Carolingian minuscule (form of writing), agricultural techniques, and refinement of brewing (e.g., Trappist beer).

It is from stability that shared insights and values grow and culture is formed. If sacramental marriage is key to stability and monasticism reflects this stability, what does monasticism offer that is unique in this regard? To answer this question, let’s turn back to Williams. He writes, “Monasticism is… a significant defence against the absorption of the newness of the gospel into the familiarity of this or that cultural environment; and in this way, monasticism is a necessary part of any truly theological strategy of mission.”⁸ Bringing this notion to bear on what I’ve written, while marriage has a sort of primordial priority, its apparent ordinariness often makes it difficult to see its symbolic importance. We see married people everywhere, but how often do we engage with a monk or a monastic community? There is something shocking about monasticism. It is counter-cultural; it is a sign of contradiction. This is why, for example, it is vitally important for monastic communities to wear their religious habits in and out of their monastic enclosures (likewise, diocesan priests should wear their clerical collars in public and married couples should wear their wedding rings). The more a monastic community blends with society, the less it is a sign of contradiction, and its inherent stability is overlooked. Lastly, while a man and woman unite in marriage and become one flesh, there is no intimate sacramental union acting as the basis of stability within a monastic community. Rather, the monks’ stability comes from the liturgical life, vows, work, place, and The Rule. The stability it evinces, void of romance, is thereby more easily translated for certain aspects of culture and society than the stability of marriage (e.g., governmental structures and societal organizations).

The stability that monasticism reveals concerns truth, and this is specifically brought forth in the liturgy. Ratzinger insightfully notes that “the Christian liturgy is a cosmic liturgy precisely because it bends the knee before the crucified and exalted Lord. Here is the center of authentic culture—the culture of truth. The humble gesture by which we fall at the feet of the Lord inserts us into the true path of life of the cosmos.”⁹ There can be no culture without truth but only a dictatorship of relativism. It is only truth that will set us free, that enables a free society, that leads to culture because it grows out of cult and is aligned with the truth of the universe. Yet, as the quotation sets out, proper liturgical participation requires humility. To put it differently, it demands something of us. Neither monasticism nor liturgy (nor both together) automatically equates to the stability of truth without the Christian life of virtue, for it is the moral life that forms a person, making him or her capable of humility and thereby capable of truth. The most beautiful liturgy without beautiful souls is an empty show. Liturgy and life must coalesce. In the Benedictine sense, The Rule must sit alongside the liturgical rubrics. When it does, it becomes a word on fire, igniting culture.

(Re)Formed in Christ

Some concluding thoughts: the stability of God and his enduring love sacramentally given in marriage and uniquely expressed in monasticism are key for culture. There is a two-way road here between marriage and monasticism. Fundamentally, marriage, as a primordial sacrament, should inform monasticism. In turn, monasticism should reflect this image in its own unique form. In so doing, it reminds marriage of its primordial significance and challenges marriage to be all that it is meant to be. Together they are forming culture. One final tangential reflection: like the Church as a whole, monasticism is always in need of reform. Historically there are reform movements within the Benedictine tradition, e.g., Cistercians and Trappists. Perhaps in our era the movement of reform will come from outside the walls of the monasteries, from marriage. This makes sense in light of what I have said, and it fits within the trajectory of Vatican II and its emphasis on the importance of the laity, something that the Church is still coming to terms with. Along these lines, we can see how important and prescient St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is (lectures given between 1979 and 1984). Theology of the Body is an intelligent and articulate response to the gender and sexual ideologies of secularism and an answer to the crisis of marriage and family within our present culture. With its theological reflection on the nuptial mystery, embodied and symbolized in marriage, it is also a theological road map for reform, which can revivify and deepen Western monasticism at large.

1. Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 66.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, “Christ, Faith and the Challenges of Cultures. Meeting With the Doctrinal Commissions in Asia” (1993): accessed October 30, 2025, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/incontri/rc_con_cfaith_19930303_hong-kong-ratzinger_en.html.
3. Ratzinger, “Challenges of Cultures.”
4. Rowan Williams, The Way of St Benedict (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), 69.
5. My translation. ‘Erst indem das Leben angenommen wird und sich als angenommenes vorfindet, wird es annehmbar. Der Mensch ist das merkwürdige Wesen, das nicht nur der physischen Geburt, sondern der Gutheissung bedarf, um bestehen zu konnen’. Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Ist Der Glaube Wirklich “Frohe Botschaft”?’, in Libertatem Vocati Estis: Miscellanea Bernhard Häring Zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. H. Boelaars and R. Tremblay (Rome: StMor 15, 1977), 528.
6. Ratzinger writes “that ‘cult’, seen in its true breadth and depth, goes beyond the action of the liturgy. Ultimately, it embraces the ordering of the whole of human life in Irenaeus’ sense.” Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 34.
7. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 98:2.
8. Williams, Way of St Benedict, 49.
9. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 207.