“Building a cultural ark,” and the Benedict Option

Killing Deconstructionists, Raising Culture

By ROD DREHER

When I talk about “building a cultural ark,” and the Benedict Option, it never fails that people assume I’m advising heading for the hills before the barbarians descend. I’m not, though no Christian can ever rule that out without dismissing the Desert Fathers, who live at the heart of our tradition. On rare occasions, you really do have to run for the hills — think of the Assyrian Christians today, or the Jews of 1930s Germany — but we are not there today, nor are we close to that.

But we are living in a time and place where the spirit of the age is essentially nihilistic, though we have powerful reasons to deny it. The Benedict Option — or, if you prefer, the cultural ark — is a state of mind and way of life that enables us to ride out the flood, and to … well, here’s Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. 

None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. 

What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. 

If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. 

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. 

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. 

We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Emphasis mine. I do not believe it is feasible, or desirable, to create utopian settlements. I do not believe in utopia. What I believe is that we small-o orthodox Christians and other traditionalists have to find ways — there won’t be only one way — to sustain intellectual and moral life amid the unfolding catastrophe. Unless we are called to monasticism — a rare calling — we Christians don’t have the right to seal ourselves off from the world.

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