The Kinds of Monks

The first chapter of Benedict’s Rule makes clear who it was written for. It describes the four “kinds of monks” with an eye toward commending what a good monk looks like. Straightaway, though, one of the difficulties with the Rule – at least for me– presents itself. I am not a monk. I am a married layman. It would be contrary to my vocation to live monastically. 

So, what use is the Rule to me? 

Benedict divided the monks into four–two good kinds and two bad. A good monk is either a cenobite, one who belongs to a monastery with an abbot and a rule like Benedict’s; or he is an anchorite, one who, after years of endurance in a monastery, sets out to live and work and pray on their own. 

Most monks are cenobites, grinding out their years in community. The anchorites, on the other hand, are the characters they tell stories about – Julian of Norwich, Anthony the Great, the gnarled solitaries who pockmarked the Egyptian desert. 

I’d never heard of the bad monks: the sarabaites or gyrovagues. The sarabaites – “the most detestable kind of monks”– are monks who live without any rule at all (1.6). They rush into monastic life without guidance. “Their law,” Benedict said, “is what they like to do,whatever strikes their fancy” (1.8). In the end, they are “still loyal to the world” (1.7). 

Then there are the gyrovagues, the wastrel monks who “spend their entire lives drifting from region to region” as perennial guests (1.10). They stay three days here,four days there. They “never settle down” (1.12). They are“in every way worse than sarabaites” (1.11). 

Benedict didn't want us to dwell on the bad monks.“It is better,” he said,“to keep silent than to speak of… their disgraceful way of life” (1.12). And yet I can’t help but feel personally addressed, layman that I am, by the vices they embodied.

The sarabaites and gyrovagues fail because of their self-reliance. Rather than follow a superior or a rule or even a single monastery, they are guided by their own lights.

I am not a monk. And yet there is a badmonk in me. For Benedict, the bad monks are those who cannot submit, who cannot help but forget their own way. But this is also, at a deeper level, precisely what makes for a bad layman. Indeed, the great disease of my life is my self-reliance. I am sure that my ways are best, that my ideas are best, that my plans are best. I rely on my own lights, on my own skills, and on my own ambitions. It’s not an abbot or a rule that I’ve disregarded. It is the ways and ideas of another; it's the plans of providence that do not match my own. I am, as Benedict put it, “still loyal to the world.” And that makes for a bad layman just as much as it makes for a bad monk.