The Work of God:

The Divine Office and Interior Prayer

The chapters of Benedict’s Rule covered so far deal with the inner virtues that form the Christian life. These are tools of the heart. Benedict consistently portrays these inner virtues as dynamic movements that culminate in right actions. Terence Kardong points out that the three “essentially passive” virtues: obedience, silence, and humility demand an attitude of “ready, attentive listening before the word and will of God.” Throughout the rest of the Rule, Benedict focuses on the things we must do in order to cultivate these inner virtues, even as these inner virtues, spur us on to these actions. And yet these are gentle virtues. They give the chapters on monastic practices a “contemplative tone.” Esther De Waal adds that the preceding chapters have helped to form in us “the attitude that is to underlie the art of praying: the fear of the Lord, the total dependence on God, the constant awareness of God’s presence and patience, and, above all, the motivation of love.”

The Divine Office, what Benedict calls the opus Dei, “the Work of God,” is the most important of all practices. It is the first practice that he discusses, and he discusses it at greater length than any other. In English, the word “work” gives the strongest indication of the exertion that worship requires. We often think of an office as a place where one sits at a desk. A service is a church service where nothing much happens. It shows us how easily we slacken our efforts by forgetting that the term “service” means just that: serving. And serving is what the Latin work officium means. The Work of God is the activity by which we serve God. Benedict impresses upon us the prime importance of this practice by telling us that “nothing should be put ahead of the Work of God” (RB 43:3).

The Divine Office grew out of the early Church’s practice of praying at set times of the day. In the monastic tradition, this practice mushroomed into an elaborate structure of seven canonical hours plus a night office that forms the backbone of a monastic’s day. Benedict quotes the psalm verse: “Seven times a day I have praised you” (RB 16:3, Ps. 119:64) to justify the sevenfold office, but Kardong thinks it likely that the practice came first and the biblical justification second. These hours, as they became known in the liturgical tradition, are: Lauds (praise, done at sunrise), Prime, Terce, Sext, and None (the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day), Vespers (evening prayer), and Compline (prayer at bedtime.) Since “the Prophet likewise says regarding the night Vigils: ‘In the middle of the night I rose to praise you’” (RB 16: 4, Ps. 119:62), Benedict prescribes this office, also known today as Matins, to be done before sunrise. The office of Prime has been dropped almost everywhere, even in monasteries that keep the rest of these canonical hours. Monasteries with large apostolates, such as running a school, usually have three to five offices a day. Many non-monastics today have rediscovered the value of the Divine Office and do anywhere from two to seven offices a day, depending on the circumstances in life. The important thing is that prayer be a fabric woven into the whole day, to make the whole day prayerful.

The Office is scriptural. Most of the text comes straight out of the Bible with the Psalter holding pride of place. In Benedict’s scheme for the Divine Office, all 150 psalms are performed at least once in a week, while a few are done every day. Although Benedict allowed other abbots to arrange the psalmody for the Divine Office differently, he insisted that, “despite our tepidity,” we should perform the whole psalter in the course of a week. (This in contrast to early monks who prayed the whole psalter every day!) At first glance, Benedict’s chapters on the Divine Office look like little more than laundry lists of what psalms to perform at which offices. These lists are interesting for liturgical historians, but not for anybody else. But we also will find, buried in these chapters, concise, but powerful statements about prayer where Benedict has planted small explosive seeds that generate endless reflection.

Cultivating the constant remembrance of God, the first step of humility, does not happen automatically; it has to be nurtured by disciplined practices. Praying the Divine Office at set times is the most important practice to this most important step of humility. When we examine ourselves, we realize that it is not likely that we will think of God very often if we do not attend to God during times of worship. Benedict tells us that “God is present everywhere,” but we should “be totally convinced that this is so when we are present at the Divine Office” (RB 19:1-2). Although God can’t really be present in one place more in than another, God is particularly present when we are gathered for worship. Not only is God present, but Benedict quotes from Psalm 138 to remind us that we sing in the presence of the angels as well! It is these same angels who also report to God everything that God already knows about us (RB 7:28). By widening the worshiping body to include the angels, Benedict adds solemnity to the importance of worship and reminds us that the invisible presence around us when we pray is at least as significant as the presence of other people whom we do see.

Esther De Waal writes perceptively that, in the Divine Office, “prayer is never taken out of the natural flow of life itself. It is firmly inserted with the rhythm of the changing seasons, of winter and summer, of day and night, and not least of the rhythm of my own body.” With today’s technology, we are likely to overlook the ways Benedict dovetails the office with the times of day and the seasons. Since most of us are not dependent on natural light, we can more easily use the same timetable all year. The daily rhythm of the body, however is still the same, and here Benedict shows himself to be startlingly practical. Allowing his monastics to rest “a little more than half the night” is more lenient than it seems when we remember that the community retired for the night at sundown (RB 8:2), thus allowing for roughly eight to twelve hours of sleep, depending on the time of year. This leniency is in strong contrast with St. Columban who demanded “that his monks ‘come tired to bed, asleep on their feet, and be forced to get up before their sleep is complete.’” All this presupposes that monastics don’t spend their evenings in night clubs or at the bowling alley. Benedict goes on to say that, after sleeping for this generous amount of time, they should “rise with their food digested” (RB 8:2). During the winter, monastics are expected to learn the psalms, most likely by heart. (Lenses for presbyopia were not available in Benedict’s day and, by about the age of forty, many people could no longer read the liturgical texts.) During the warmer months when the days are longer, the morning office of Lauds should follow the night office immediately, but “with a very short interval in between, when the brothers can go out for the demands of nature” (RB 8:4). This verse is a prime example of Benedict’s awareness of the need to provide for our physiological needs as well as our spiritual needs. Esther De Waal observes: “Benedict respects our total humanity—body, mind, and spirit—and recognizes that balance here: praying is disassociated neither from a gentle handling of bodily needs, nor from intellectual demand.”

Benedict insists that a monastic respond to the signal for the Divine Office with the same alacrity as to the call of a superior. In both instances, this alacrity is tantamount to responding to Christ. Benedict says that when the signal is given, we should drop whatever we are doing and rush to the church “with the greatest haste,” although with dignity “so as not to provide occasion for silliness” (RB 43:1-2). Likewise, upon rising for early morning worship, monastics should “hasten to beat one another to the Work of God—of course with all decorum and modesty” (RB 22:6). Here, Benedict notes both the competitive edge that encourages the members of the community to arrive for worship ahead of the others and the restraint needed to curb any such competition. What should motivate monastics to hasten to worship is the desire to be with God. Moreover, the desire to respond to the call of worship should also be accompanied with concern for the others so that, early in the morning, monastics will “gently encourage each other to offset the excuses of the drowsy” (RB 22: 8).

In other ways Benedict relies on social pressure to give us an incentive to be punctual at the Divine Office. Benedict show his typical awareness of human weakness when he humorously gives potential latecomers a little bit of slack before he lowers the boom. A monastic is not late for the Night Office until the Gloria of Psalm 95 has been concluded, for which reason, he says this psalm should be “said very slowly and with pauses” (43:4). Benedict prescribes similar allowances for the Day Hours as well. However, those who are late in spite of this leniency become the objects of serious displeasure and public embarrassment. The penalty for tardiness is to lose one’s normal place in choir and take, instead, the last place, or a place set apart “for those who err in this way” (RB 43:5). This may not seem like much of a punishment, but when one has an assigned place, it is unpleasant to have to give it up through one’s own carelessness. Moreover, through this process, the latecomer is made conspicuous, “seen by . . . everyone.” Benedict goes on to express the hope that latecomers “will change their ways under the shame of being seen by all” (43: 5-7). Benedict insists that latecomers should still come into the church as otherwise they might return to bed or gossip outside with a second latecomer, in which case they would lose all of the office instead of just the beginning of it, and on top of that, would be “giving the devil an opening” (RB 43:8, Eph. 4:27). Joan Chittester notes how something is lost through tardiness by reminding us that “tardiness, the attempt to cut corners on everything in life, denies the soul the full experience of anything.”

In fussing about punctuality at the “Work of God” as he does, Benedict is challenging us to show a greater concern for the communal activity of prayer than for our private projects. It is often easier to be absorbed in an individual task than in a group activity. This is just as true of work that benefits the whole community as it is of our pet projects. No matter how devoted to prayer we are, it seems easier to leave the church when the office is ended to return to our work and pet projects than it is to leave these individual activities for the sake of corporate worship. One of the reasons that this is so is because, although solitary tasks do not necessarily give us a competitive edge over other members of the community, there is always the chance that they could. Moreover, tasks that we do for the common good can easily become a personal power base, even if it is nothing more than a well-mopped floor. Any personal accomplishment, no matter how modest, is something that we can hold over/against the rest of the community. The Divine Office, on the other hand, is a cooperative work by the community. There is no way any one of us can appropriate this corporate activity for ourselves. Any hint of competitiveness during worship destroys the Office.

So it is that a monastic timetable punctuates the day with interruptions of our personal activities. Of course, if we are already mindful of God and are caring primarily about that, then a signal to go and be mindful of God is not an interruption after all. But when our mindfulness of God falters, our work can slip into idolatry where we think we are the work we do. The signal to the Work of God, however, tells us loud and clear that we are not the work we do. We are children of God and we should stop what we are doing from time to time to remember that. This is why Benedict admonishes us to put nothing “ahead of the Work of God” (RB 43:3). Nothing. Do not prefer to finish a letter that will make somebody see the light. Do not prefer to cut another slice of bread for the next meal. Don’t linger to add a bit more to a book on Benedictine spirituality. All of our activities that can tempt us to place ourselves in a higher place than is rightfully ours must be put aside several times a day for the sake of a communal activity in which we are each parts of a greater whole. Joan Chittester tells us:

There is nothing more important in our own list of important things to do in life than to stop at regular times, in regular ways to remember what life is really about, where it came from, why we have it, what we are to do with it, and for whom we are to live it. No matter how tired we are or how busy we are or how impossible we think it is to do it, Benedictine spirituality says, Stop. Now. A spiritual life without a regular prayer life and an integrated community consciousness is pure illusion.

Not surprisingly, Benedict insists that we continue to give the Divine Office top priority once we are there by giving it our best attention. Benedict knows that, even with our best efforts, mistakes happen, but when they do, the person who makes the mistake must “make humble satisfaction right then and there before all” (RB 45: 1). Again, Benedict is relying on social pressure to motivate us to do our best. We don’t know what specific act Benedict required for “humble satisfaction.” The traditional act in monastic practice is to genuflect, but this practice has become rather rare. Even if there is not a public gesture of apology, it is quite embarrassing to cause a breakdown in the Office by committing a serious error like coming in on the wrong psalm verse. On the other hand, it is important that we not allow ourselves to get unduly upset over mistakes committed during the Office. The smallest show of temper, frustration or embarrassment will seriously upset the spirit of prayer that the Office is meant to foster. We need to be patient with ourselves and with others.

To do the Divine Office well and give it our top priority, we have to exert ourselves to ward off distractions. Some distractions are innocent in the sense that they are not malicious thoughts. But when these distractions consist of idle thoughts about our pet projects, we are letting our private projects take priority over our lives just as much as if we had ignored the signal for worship or come late for the Office because of them. More serious are the distracting thoughts that dwell on how we can get the better of somebody else in an argument, or figure out the best way to reform somebody else’s life. Most serious are distracting thoughts of lust and anger that ensnare in obsessive fantasies of harmful dominance over other people. These more dangerous distractions seduce us into playing God and making ourselves the object of worship. It is no wonder that a monastery can be a breeding ground for quite a tangle of mutual grudges and resentments if attention to prayer collapses in this way. These are the same logismoi that destroy silence and humility and embroil us in the mimetic rivalry that God would relieve us from. Since God is beyond the world, yet the sustainer of the world, God is not part of the mimetic webs in which catch ourselves. That is why prayer provides a space where we can move, free of the petty tensions we humans are addicted to. What a relief this prayer space should be for us! Unfortunately, we keep slipping out of this space. Somehow, we often prefer to go over the same quarrels in our minds that plagued us before the signal for worship was given than to pray the Office. When we try, even half-heartedly, to resist these distractions and concentrate on worship, we discover how deeply ingrained these mimetic tensions are. This discovery is half the battle. When we have a better idea of what we are up against, we are better equipped to handle these tensions with God’s help. The other half of the battle is learning to persevere in redirecting our attention back to on God when we become distracted.

Attention to the Divine Office is essential for doing it well, but attention, of itself, is not enough. Competence is also necessary. “As regards singing and reading, no one should presume to carry out these functions unless he is capable of edifying the listeners” (RB 47:3). Note that Benedict is not setting impossibly high standards for us. Rather, Benedict urges us to accept realistically both our strengths and weaknesses in our ability to edify the listeners. In short, we should do what we can and not what we can’t. For example, we should not try to sing liturgical music that is beyond its capabilities. On the other hand, competence is an acquired trait. Surely we should stretch ourselves so that we sing and read as well as we possibly can.

Benedict’s glowing advocacy of the Divine Office is a strong contrast to the role of ritual in the primitive sacred as René Girard sees it. For Girard, ritual is one of the three pillars of culture, along with myth and prohibition, that is founded on collective violence:

I believe that the key to the mystery [of the function of ritual] lies in the decisive reordering that occurs at the end of the ritual performance, normally through the mediation of sacrifice. Sacrifice stand in the same relationship to the ritual crisis that precedes it as the death or expulsion of the hero to the undifferentiated chaos that prevails at the beginning of many myths. Real or symbolic, sacrifice is primarily a collective action of the entire community, which purifies itself of its own disorder through the unanimous immolation of a victim, but this can happen only at the paroxysm of the ritual crisis.

So far, I have not found any liturgist who shows any awareness of this dark side of ritual. Liturgists who say anything at all about primitive worship make vague remarks to the effect that these rituals were a benign tuning in to the Absolute. But the well-documented world-wide phenomenon of human sacrifice should be enough to tip us off that the real roots of ritual lie in sacrificial violence as Girard suggests. We need to remember that ritual in the primitive sacred did have the virtue of binding a community together in such a way as to minimize the amount of violence required to sustain this binding. Benedict also sees ritual as a means of holding a community together, but in a way that does not require even the minimal violence of the primitive sacred. We can best grasp Benedict’s vision of the Divine Office as a constructive practice by looking further into the contrast with ritual in the primitive sacred. What I have already said about distractions and how they can fuel mimetic passions should be enough to give warning that the primitive sacred retains a shadowy presence when we pray the Divine Office, much as the Divine Office moves us in the opposite direction.

For Girard, ritual is an ordering imposed on the chaos that overwhelms a society when the prohibitions that normally prevent mimetic disturbances fail. When a mimetic crisis comes to a boil, people ask one another: “How can our society be saved the way it was saved the last time this happened?” Girard says, in this kind of situation, the community reverses its tactic. “Instead of trying to roll back mimetic violence, it tries to get rid of it by encouraging it and by bringing it to a climax that triggers the happy solution of ritual sacrifice with the help of a substitute victim.” Afterwards, as the people reflect on the strange events that saved them, they suggest to one another that “if the whole process unfolded as it did, it was without doubt because the mysterious victim wanted it that way.” If the deified victim wanted it once, the deified victim will want it again under the same circumstances. So it is that the same collective violence is repeated when the same crisis occurs again. At a later stage of development, the community regularizes this process with rituals comprised of repetitious sacrificial acts that are universally believed to have been taught by the deity who is honored, even nourished by the rituals. In order to do everything “right,” “the communities proceed to copy their experience of violent unanimity in a fashion as exact and complete as possible. In the case of uncertainty, better to do too much than not enough.” Girard goes on to explain how primitive ritual flirts with danger because it has to. That is, the ritual must draw on the mimetic contagion of violence so as to achieve the unanimity without which the ritual will fail and the community will be destroyed. “This is the source of the idea, universal in origin, that ritual activity is extremely dangerous. To diminish the risk, the community would try to reproduce the model as exactly and meticulously as possible.” It is like trying to swallow poison in just the right amounts to build up an immunity to it. Girard then rebukes the psychoanalysts who make fun of the “neurotic” behavior of primitive people. These psychologists fail to understand “the real action that the people offering sacrifice reproduced: the violence that is reconciling because it is spontaneously unanimous.” This reconciliation, however, is necessarily unstable because it is poisoned by the death of the victim. There is need for a cure that won’t kill a society with every overdose.

Jacques Attali, drawing on René Girard, argues that the function of music in primitive societies was sacrificial. This codification “gives music a meaning, an operationality beyond its own syntax, because it inscribes music within the very power that produces society.” In its ritual function, music “creates political order because it is a minor form of sacrifice . . . it symbolically signifies the channeling of violence and the imaginary, the ritualization of a murder substituted for the general violence, the affirmation that a society is possible if the imaginary of individuals is sublimated.” The trajectory that Attali outlines for music is precisely the trajectory that Girard outlines for sacrificial ritual. Just as the sacrificial ritual seeks to take control of violence and channel it into an order that restores peace, albeit at the expense of the victim, so music “constitutes communication with this primordial, threatening noise—prayer. In addition, it has the explicit function of reassuring: the whole of traditional musicology analyzes music as the organization of controlled panic, the transformation of anxiety into joy, and of dissonance into harmony.” The sweeping musicological claims are debatable to say the least, but there is no question that some music does precisely what Attali says it does. When these qualities are narrowed into a funnel by the sacrificial social structure, it “rebounds in the field of sound like an echo of the sacrificial channelization of violence: dissonances are eliminated from it to keep noise from spreading. It mimics, in this way, the space of sound, the ritualization of murder.” In light of Attali’s remarks, the third chapter of Daniel is an interesting example of how music can be made a channel of sacrifice. Nebuchadnezzar demands that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego bow before the golden statue at “the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum and entire musical ensemble” (Dan. 3:15). Attali goes on to argue that in the subsequent social stages of music’s societal function, music continued to be caught in society’s power structure until the present, which is sufficiently chaotic to allow music to free itself from these shackles. Music lovers, myself included, who have experienced many wonders in music will rightly protest the reductionism of Attali’s thesis. Even so, it is important to realize that music has been hijacked by sacrificial structures and it can happen again.

A major aspect of ritual is the synchronized movement that takes place among the worshipers. In light of mimetic theory, one would think that this mimetic behavior in ritual would be of great importance for understanding both Girard and Benedict. Curiously, I can’t find anything in any book on liturgy and ritual that notes this phenomenon. It has been left to the fine historian William McNeill to examine anthropologically the mimetic process that takes place in corporate worship. In his stimulating book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in human History, McNeill analyzes a mimetic phenomenon that he calls “muscular bonding.” “Muscular bonding” takes place in such events as military parades, dances, football games, and worship. McNeill recounts how the Prussians discovered that military drills were a practical way of making an army act as a unit so as to increase its effectiveness in battle, given the practical difficulties at the time of loading and firing muskets. Even more important, the Prussians realized that “the emotional resonance of daily and prolonged close-order drill created such a lively esprit de corps among the poverty-stricken peasant recruits and urban outcasts . . . that other social ties faded to insignificance among them.”

Then McNeill brings his analysis of “muscular bonding” to our topic in his chapter “Religious Ceremonies.” After noting that “words define religious meanings,” McNeill notes that “public worship always involves muscular gestures and ritualized performances as well.” First, McNeill discusses “muscular bonding” in various instances of corporate religious enthusiasm. Among the ecstatics are Saul. He came across a group of prophets engaged in a group ecstasy and joined them in to their mimetic activity (1 Sam. 10: 9-13). At approximately the same time that Saul was made king of Israel, ecstatic Dionysian celebrations were sweeping across the Hellenistic world. In his play The Bacchae, Euripides portrayed the out-of-control sacrificial violence this cult engendered. The Dionysian ritual noted by McNeill would be an example of a late development of this phenomenon where the borderline between ordered ritual and spontaneous violence tended to be blurred. McNeill goes on to say that both ecstatic groups evolved into literary traditions where the verbal embodiment of spontaneous ecstasy came to dominate. The literary results of this process have come down to posterity in the form of the Greek plays and the Hebrew books of the prophets. McNeill explains that “both descend from religious inspiration generated by keeping together in time. In both instances, moreover, it is worth pointing out that the supersession of muscular by literary inspiration recapitulated the way I believe that muscularly generated emotional bonding had been superseded by linguistic communication in the evolution of humanity.”

For McNeill, it is “literary inspiration” that directs “muscular bonding” in a constructive direction away from “religious enthusiasm,” the kind of frenzy that Girard sees in sacred violence. The Hebrew Bible offers many examples of this phenomenon. The narrative of Saul deconstructs the king’s ecstatic prophesying by showing it to be of no religious or moral value whatever. Furthermore, although Samuel seems to claim that Saul’s prophetic frenzy was a sign that God was with him, the narrative casts doubt on this claim by showing how this ecstatic king constantly embroiled himself in intense, even murderous, mimetic rivalry with Samuel, David, and even his son Jonathan. Saul isn’t the only bad guy in this story. Both Samuel and David, though considered prophets by Benedict, were at least as rivalrous as Saul. Samuel put Saul in double-bind situations and David committed worse crimes than Saul ever did. Only Jonathan comes off well, but not only did he not inherit the crown. he was never considered by the biblical narrator to be a “man after God’s own heart.” Neither has church tradition designated Jonathan as a figure of Christ, and yet he was more Christ-like than either his father Saul or his friend David. In contrast to the enthusiastic prophetic bands of which Saul was a member, the “literary inspiration” in the Hebrew Bible forged a prophetic tradition sharply honed to social and ethical issues, beginning with Nathan’s denunciation of David’s adultery and continuing on through the teachings of Isaiah, Jeremiah and the other late prophets. This prophetic tradition is then given an even sharper focus in the teaching and life of Jesus of Nazareth. In Girard’s view, it is this “literary tradition” of the prophets, culminating in the passion narratives that clears away the mystification of sacrificial rituals that were fueled by myths that obscured the truth of collective violence.

When McNeill discusses the tension between enthusiastic “muscular bonding” and the more restrained liturgical worship in the early Christian centuries that were heavily subjected to “literary inspiration,” he throws out some tantalizing hints from early Christian literature that suggest that in early Christian worship, dancing was a widespread activity. The monastic writer St. Basil of Caesarea “approved of imitating the dance of Heaven by dancing in circles on earth.” Likewise, Ambrose of Milan “believed that suitably holy dancing in church helped to carry souls to Heaven, since ‘one who dances in the spirit with a burning faith and uplifted him to the stars.’” It seems, though, that the mimetic power of dance raised anxieties among the bishops, including Ambrose himself. They feared that the enthusiasm dance can foster could become detached from the “literary inspiration” on which Christian worship depends. The unregulated enthusiasm of some early monks and hermits raised similar anxieties.

To remedy this problem, the Church’s leadership turned to communal monasticism as a means of controlling the individual enthusiasm of the early monks. “Eventually, duly constituted authorities constrained nearly all Christian monks to live together in monasteries and conform to rules, thus ending public outbreaks of the sort that had occasionally turned Egyptian hermits into leaders of riotous crowds.” It was in order to control the frenetic group activity of ecstatic prophets and dancing congregations that the Emperor Theodosius decreed that church leaders “standardize their chant and song, together with processionals and other ritual gestures.” Ecstatic worship, however, could not be stifled so easily as the numerous examples that McNeill traces through the Christian centuries attest.

McNeill’s reference to “riotous crowds” shows that the problem of over-enthusiastic behavior was not limited to unbridled liturgical dance. The problematic Egyptian monks often stirred up mob action in favor of one side or the other in doctrinal disputes. These incidents show how frenzied mob violence and “literary inspiration” can be tangled up with each other in destructive ways. On the one hand, the bishops were seeking to articulate the Church’s “literary inspiration” so as to witness to fundamental truths about the Trinity and the Personhood of Christ. These articulations were, in turn, drawn from the “literary inspiration of the Church’s liturgy. At the same time, there was constant wrangling for prominence between the most powerful cities in the Roman world, with the result that theological truths were obscured by disputants who, in their behavior, had become indistinguishable mimetic doubles.

The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a particularly interesting study of various instances of “muscular bonding” that can help us further examine the relationship between “enthusiasm” and “literary inspiration.” From start to finish, the three escaped convicts experience music and ritual as embedded in mimetic processes. In the film’s central episode, these three men make a record with a black guitarist they met on the road. Unknown to the escaped convicts, who were busy fleeing the sheriff and his men, this record touched off a mimetic reaction throughout the state by becoming a smash hit. The act of making music together is, in itself, a constructive activity, one that helps make the three fugitives more sympathetic characters than the lawmen who chase them. Moreover, unknown even to the racist blind man in the studio, not to mention the wider public enmeshed in racist hatred, the ensemble included a black man.

The two moral extremes of musical ritual are shown in the baptism in the river and a conclave of the Ku Klux Klan. At the river baptism, two of the convicts, Pete and Delmar, suddenly jump into the river to join the congregation and receive baptism. They seem to have done this impulsive act just because the other people are doing it; that is, they are mindlessly caught up in the mimetic process of the ritual. Their understanding of baptism doesn’t seem to get much past the notion that their deliverance from sin means they shouldn’t have to go back to prison. The “literary inspiration” that informed the baptismal liturgy to the other worshipers has not yet reached these two men. The “liturgy” of the Ku Klux Klan is a reversion to sacred violence, but with a difference. Ironically, the members of the Klan seem to be more aware of what they are doing than Pete and Delmar were when they plunged into the water to be baptized. The centerpiece of the Klan’s “ritual” is to hang Tommy Johnson, the guitar player who helped make the record. Fortunately, Tommy is rescued by his companions, and the sacrificial liturgy is spoiled.

At the end of the movie, the song sung by the three escaped convicts and their guitar player is used by the corrupt governor to swing a mimetic process away from his reforming challenger, who was unmasked as equally corrupt. The “literary inspiration” of the song “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” was lost on its listeners, however. There is no sign that anybody in the movie became more socially sensitive from buying the record or listening to it on the radio, although the “literary inspiration” of the song’s lyrics proclaim freedom from the sacrificial restraints society places on the poor. The escaped prisoners never seem to understand the political use that is made of them, not even when they are “pardoned” by the governor, who, nevertheless, fails to protect them from the lawmen who still haven’t given up the chase.

This movie helps us to see that the moral and constructive uses of “muscular bonding” do not fall neatly in McNeill’s categories of enthusiasm and “literary inspiration.” The “liturgy” of the Ku Klux Klan, in perverting the Christian symbol of the cross shows about as much “literary inspiration” as the baptizing congregation at the river. The chanting of the Klan is cold and deliberate in contrast to the ecstatic singing of the baptizing congregation. These examples indicate that the level of intensity does not necessarily determine the direction that “muscular bonding” takes. Although the literary prophets are credited by McNeill with giving “muscular bonding” a “literary inspiration,” most of them were about as wild as the ecstatic band that attracted Saul, but in their case, their raving had moral content. They articulated a challenge to the people to move away from sacred violence and redirect the mimetic process of worship toward a vision where the wolf lives peacefully with the lamb and Lady Wisdom hosts a banquet that she feeds all comers (Is. 11: 6, 55: 1-5). McNeill held up Teresa of Avila, who danced while keeping time with a tambourine, as an example of a Dionysian mystic. What McNeill missed is the clear focus of “literary inspiration” grounded on Christ that guided the fervor of this great mystic. The drilling techniques of the Prussian army had as much “literary inspiration” behind them as the prayer of monastics, and they were just as disciplined as monastic chanting. Neither activity can be considered “enthusiastic.” Yet the directions of these two mimetic processes are very different. One is directed toward killing human beings efficiently while the other is directed toward praying to God.

Although “literary inspiration” does not automatically give a mimetic process of “muscular bonding” a constructive direction as McNeill thinks, Girard’s theory of collective violence suggests that without “literary inspiration,” ritual is doomed to perpetuating the cycle of periodic cleansing of a society via sacrificial re-enactments of the original collective violence. The mimetic process that leads to collective violence that is then institutionalized in repetitive sacrificial rituals, is an unconscious process. It has to be, or it will not “work” to re-establish peace. Rituals deriving from sacred violence depend on “muscular bonding,” both for their sustenance and for keeping the reality of sacred violence below a conscious level. Girard has demonstrated how the myths that accompany sacrificial rites obscure the truth behind them so that they serve instead to keep the participants in these rituals unconscious of what they are really doing. That is why myths fail to serve as “literary inspiration” for these rituals. Girard also says that it is no longer possible to perform sacrificial rituals in a culture that has been the least bit touched by the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The “literary inspiration” of the Bible makes it impossible to be sufficiently unconscious of what one is doing. The examples in the movie Brother, Where art Thou? bear this out. The ritual of the Ku Klux Klan is just as inconceivable to the primitive sacred as the baptism at the river.

Although the Divine Office as prescribed by Benedict fosters “muscular bonding,” “literary inspiration” predominates. As far as I know, there is nothing remotely like Divine Office in the primitive sacred. If Girard is right about the primitive sacred, there could not have been. It is telling that not only did the “literary inspiration” of the Hebrew Bible combat the sacrificial rites of the surrounding nations, but it not could not help but undermine the sacrificial rites Judaism itself. So it was that synagogue worship became the backbone of Jewish piety after the Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem. So powerful is the “literary inspiration” of the Hebrew Bible and the Psalter in particular, that most of the content of the Benedictine office is furnished by this tradition. It is significant that devotional practices similar to the Divine Office have developed in other religious traditions precisely insofar as they eschew sacrifice. Islamic worship is centered on recitation of the Koran and Buddhist monastics chant sutras.

The Eucharist, on the other hand, may appear to be a throwback to a sacrificial ritual, but a closer look at it shows it to be as contrary to sacrificial rites as the Gospels are to mythology. That is to say, the “literary inspiration” of the Gospels transforms what would have been a sacrificial rite to something radically different. To begin with, “literary inspiration” plays an important part in the Eucharist in that the actions at the altar are preceded by the liturgy of the Word which tells the anti-mythical Story that the ritual at the altar acts out. The Eucharistic prayer is itself shaped by the “literary inspiration” of Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection. Although sacrificial language has at times been used of the Eucharist, the sacramental presence of Christ precludes the Eucharist from being a sacrifice in the sense of presenting fresh victims of any kind. The Rite focuses on the sacrifice Christ made of himself by his own free will and his subsequent resurrection. The Risen Victim has put an end to all sacrifices.

The Eucharist did not play a major role in early monastic worship, including that in Benedict’s monastery. Monasticism’s origins as primarily a lay movement is one factor in this tendency. Another factor, though, is that the Eucharist was not normally a daily ritual in the early Christian centuries. Rather, Sunday, the day of Resurrection, was the day for this celebration. There was, however, among some Christians, a daily reception of the Eucharist as it was usual for the head of a household to take consecrated elements home after Sunday worship to distribute to his household each day. In line with this practice, The Rule of the Master describes a daily reception of pre-consecrated bread and wine that the abbot distributed from the reserved sacrament. As he did so often, the Master expressed his Eucharistic piety in a negative way by concentrating on the brother who is haughty about receiving Communion. “And if afterwards he wants to receive Communion, let him not be permitted to do so for a time. As long as he is puffed up without reason, so long will the abbot or the dean be angry with him for good reason.” The Rule of Benedict gives one hint, and a vague one at that, of a possible daily reception of Communion at his monastery when he allows the reader at table to “receive some doctored wine before he reads” because of the Holy Communion (RB 38:10). Since the Master gives many more details of daily life in his Rule than does Benedict, it is very possible that Benedict’s monastery followed the same practice. As with many things in the Rule, Benedict’s reticence hides a profound reverence for what the Eucharist represents. We have already seen examples of Benedict’s Christological understanding of the psalms and the sacramental dimension of his spirituality. We shall see further examples of these traits below. Benedict’s Eucharistic sentiments have long since led to the establishment of a daily Eucharist as a major part of worship in Benedictine communities.

With the stress on “literary inspiration” in the Divine Office, one would expect that the “muscular bonding” in this form of worship would be as much on the restrained side as church legislators hoped it would be. That indeed is the case, but the restraint in the monastic office has more to do with the internal needs of monastics than the agendas of emperors and bishops. When monastic communities spend two to four hours a day in worship, a low temperature of decorum is required. Otherwise, monastics could easily burnout from overdoses of overwrought prayer. It is liturgical restraint that keeps the flame of the Spirit alive and strong in a community over a long period of time. Even so, much “muscular bonding” occurs through the common recitation and chanting as well as such gestures as standing and bowing in unison. Given the power of the mimetic behavior that René Girard has analyzed, it is quite important that the large doses of mimetic behavior involved in monastic liturgical prayer be maintained at a calm level.

Plainchant is particularly well-suited for fostering “muscular bonding” at a low but ardent level. In his historical survey of hymns, Erik Routley pointed out that plainchant was developed primarily in monastic communities because its fluidity of musical line made it suitable for a small group of people who were used to singing together over a long period of time. In the absence of a beat that drives later Western music, plainchant requires that all singers listen carefully to each other to stay together and develop an instinctive feel for what the whole choir is doing. Everybody has to both lead and follow the choir at the same time. It is perhaps these very qualities that has made plainchant surprisingly popular in the present era when neither monastics nor their spirituality are known or valued. Other styles of singing the psalms have emerged in recent years to accommodate the change from a Latin office to a community’s local language. The liturgical music of monastic communities has shown over the centuries that “muscular bonding” through music can, contrary to Jacques Attali’s strictures, bring people together without need of a sacrifice.

One effect of the fairly low temperatures of “muscular bonding” in the Divine Office is that the “literary inspiration” receives prime importance. Benedict makes it clear that the Divine Office is intended to teach us about ourselves, God, and our relationship with God. There is a very particular direction in which Benedict wishes the “muscular bonding” in the Divine Office to go. It is important to remember, however, that this didactic element does not make the Divine Office an intellectual exercise. One is taught not only by the words, but by the corporate gestures and the practice of saying or chanting the words with others. That is, the “muscular bonding” is part of the teaching of the Divine Office.

Since the bulk of the Divine Office consists of the Psalter, with each of the psalms being done at least once a week, the psalms are the prime vehicle of the “literary inspiration” in the Office. The psalms encapsulate spontaneous responses to God that guide us in understanding our relationship with God and how we should live. The quotes from the psalms in the Rule highlight certain verses that Benedict considers especially important. Benedict established the custom, still followed today, of reading the Rule three times a year. These readings constantly remind its listeners of these highlighted psalm verses. Then, when these verses come up during the Office, the monastics are reminded of the passage in the Rule where the verse was quoted. This back-and-forth movement between Rule and Psalter greatly enhances the teaching function of the Office and clarifies the direction in which the mimetic process of “muscular bonding” should go.

In his call to conversion in the Prologue, Benedict poses this fundamental question from Psalm 34: “Which of you desires life and longs to see good days?” (RB Pr. 15). This verse causes us to ask ourselves: Do we desire life, or do we prefer death? Do we long for good days? Do we even have any idea of what “good days” really are? Benedict’s call to conversion is most powerfully expressed in Psalm 95: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (RB Pr. 10, Ps. 95:7-8). We have already noted how this verse recalls the people’s murmuring against Moses and against God in the desert. This urgent daily call to turn away from hardening our hearts is intensified when we recall that the peoples’ murmuring led to threats of collective violence against Moses. With Benedict’s repeated warnings against murmuring in the Rule, it is clear that he intends that this psalm reinforce his teaching on this insidious vice.

The frequent complaints of collective violence voiced in the Psalter make this phenomenon a nearly ubiquitous presence in the Divine Office. Schwager estimates that roughly one hundred of the 150 psalms explicitly complain of collective attacks from enemies. Psalm 3, which is coupled with Psalm 95 to form the introduction to the office on a daily basis, starts the morning with a cry for help: “How many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of me; there is no help for him in God.” The distraught psalmist goes on to ask God to “break the teeth of the wicked” (Ps. 3:7). To get some idea of what curses such as this meant to Benedict and his monastics, we have to note the tendency in Benedict’s day and long afterward to give these problematically violent verses figurative interpretations that yield edifying lessons in spirituality. A particularly telling examples is the final verse of Psalm 137 where the psalmist blesses those who take the “little ones” of the Babylonians and “dash them against the rock” (Ps. 137:9). Twice in his Rule, Benedict invokes the stock interpretation of his time that the “little ones” are “incipient thoughts,” i.e. bad thoughts in their infancy, that must be smashed against the “rock” which is “Christ” (RB Pr. 28, 4:50). The rock of Psalm 137 is identified with Christ via Paul’s identification of the rock that yielded water in the desert with Christ (1 Cor. 10:4). Such figurative interpretations were a salutary development in that they were motivated by a desire to follow the New Testament teachings on nonviolence, but mimetic theory encourages us not to lose sight of the real violence boiling over in these psalms. The amount violence in the texts of the psalms gives one more reason for balancing this violence with a restrained manner of “muscular bonding.”

We noted earlier that Benedict, in his chapter on humility, quotes from the persecution psalms to help us understand the need to deal constructively with victimization. Here, we will take a closer look at Benedict’s use of the Psalter in that chapter to examine how the Divine Office interacts with the teachings in the Rule. In the fourth step of humility, on the need to embrace harsh and unjust treatment, Benedict tells us to “bear such tings without flagging or fleeing, as Scripture says: Let your heart be strengthened and endure the trials of the Lord” (RB 7:36, Ps. 27: 14). Worse, “To show that the faithful person ought to endure all adversities for the Lord’s sake, the Prophet says on behalf of the suffering: All day long we are put to death on your account; we are considered as sheep for the slaughter” (RB 7: 38, Ps. 44:22). In the seventh step, where we are expected to consider ourselves the lowest of the low, Benedict quotes the “Passion” Psalm: “I, though, am a worm, not a man. I am the object of curses and rejection (Ps. 22: 7), and then plunges to the darkest of psalms: “I was raised up, but now I am humiliated and covered with confusion” (Ps. 88: 16). These psalms, however, do not leave us in the depths of despair, neither do they remain stuck in their cries for vengeance, blood-curdling as some of them are. With very few exceptions, the psalmist moves from a complaint about persecution to an expression of confidence in God’s deliverance. Even the “Passion” Psalm moves from its heart-rending outcries to joyous outcries of thanksgiving: “The poor shall eat and be satisfied; whose who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts lives forever” (Ps. 22: 26). That is to say, the psalms prefigure not only the suffering of Christ but also Christ’s vindication through his Resurrection. Benedict captures this same rhythm when, in the fourth step of humility, he follows the chilling quote from Psalm 44 by encouraging his monastics to be “so hopeful of divine vindication that they joyfully stay their course, saying: In all these things we triumph because of him who loved us” (RB 7:39, Rom. 8:37).

The “literary inspiration” of the psalms, particularly when they are recited or sung in light of the Gospel, maps out quite clearly the collective violence towards which “muscular bonding” inevitably moves when it is not accompanied by a “literary inspiration” that firmly leads in the opposite direction. By demonstrating the mimetic process gone bad time after time, the psalms increase our consciousness of this process and the part we play in it. The “muscular bonding” in the mimetic activity of corporate prayer guides us by texts that follow the mimetic process through collective violence to God’s deliverance of both victims and perpetrators from this violence. We must remember that the consciousness fostered by the Divine Office is not automatic. The mimetic process that leads to violence is. Every morning, we must renew our repentance from grumbling as the Israelites did in the desert and turn back to God. If we do not consciously reorient ourselves to God time and time again, we will inevitably slip back into unconscious mimetic processes by default. Benedict’s use of the “persecution” psalms in his chapter on humility with his own progression from pain to praise makes it clear that, for all of the explosive fury uttered in the psalms, it is Benedict’s intention that we follow Christ through the pain Christ suffered so that we may reach, with Christ, God’s vindication as proclaimed in these psalms and fulfilled in the Resurrection of Christ.

Two biblical texts that hold prominent places in the Divine Office on a daily basis are the Benedictus at Lauds and the Magnificat at Vespers. Benedict never quotes either of these canticles in the Rule, so we don’t have any of his reflections on them as we do with key texts such as Psalm 95. However, it is inconceivable that they could have failed to influence Benedict’s outlook on spirituality. Both texts look forward to the New Covenant in Christ with hope, first with the Forerunner John the Baptist and then Jesus’ birth of Mary. That in itself puts the preceding psalms into a Christian context. I also can’t help but think that the exaltation of the lowly in the Magnificat inspired Benedict’s constant concern for the weak and the poor. These same lines would almost certainly have been coupled in Benedict’s mind with the words he quoted from Luke at the beginning of his chapter on humility: “Whoever is self-promoting will be humbled, and whoever is humble will be promoted” (Lk. 14:11; Lk. 18: 14). Regardless of what crossed Benedict’s mind while chanting this canticle, we can readily see its formative value for increasing sympathy for society’s victims and linking that sympathy with our deepest hopes in Christ.

Benedict’s most powerful statement on the pedagogical thrust of the Divine Office through “literary inspiration” comes in Chapter 13 where he tells us that “the celebration of Matins and Vespers must certainly never transpire without the superior concluding with the complete Lord’s Prayer while all the rest listen” (RB 13:12). Benedict’s use of the phrase “certainly never” suggests a strongly held opinion. Terence Kardong thinks that the “curious custom” of the superior saying the prayer aloud except for the conclusion might be explained by Augustine’s remark that some people seem to think that omitting the petition for forgiveness relieves them of the obligation to forgive! To prevent people from taking themselves off the hook, everyone is required to say these words. In any case, it is precisely this petition that Benedict underscores as supremely important. He says that the reason the whole prayer should be said aloud is “because of the thorns of quarreling that often spring up” (13:12).

The Latin phrase translated here as “thorns of quarreling” is scandalorum spinas, that is: “thorns of scandal,” that is, stumbling blocks. This expression, straight from the heart of Girardian theory, suggests that members of a community can easily become mimetic doubles, stumbling blocks to each other. Kardong notes that the word means “obstacle,” but it could mean “quarreling,” which he thinks is likely in this instance. Kardong goes on to comment on how effective this image is because “it puts emphasis on the constant potential for strife in a small, closed community, and the need for quick reconciliation.” Scandalorum is not a word native to Latin; it is a direct import from the Greek New Testament. Benedict would have known the word well from its use in key places in the New Testament, most emphatically the instance Jesus calls Peter a skandalon when Peter protests Jesus’ prediction of his imminent death (Mat. 16: 23), and also when Jesus laments the woeful fate of those who scandalize any of his “little ones” (Mat. 18:6). This latter verse especially notes how skandala are obstacles to faith. In various other places in his Rule as well as here, Benedict shows that he was well aware that when we quarrel, we become stumbling blocks to each other, and so become obstacles that hinder the spiritual growth of one another.

The image invoked by the phrase “thorns of scandal” is deeply suggestive. People who are quarreling become entangled in the same way that thorn branches are entangled with each other. The end result of our “thorns of scandal” is the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head. Girard notes that, just before his Passion, Jesus had warned his followers that he was “about to become a scandal to them.” Girard goes on to note that although the disciples’ participation in the Passion is mainly passive, this word applies to them nonetheless. “Now we see that the word also applies to the participation in the mimetic consensus against Jesus.” It is precisely this mimetic contagion that caused the disciples to quarrel among themselves and that causes Jesus’ monastic followers to do the same. Benedict shows that he clearly wishes the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer to redirect the mimetic entanglements of the “thorns of quarreling” when he goes on he says: “When [we] “respond to the prayer: ‘Forgive as we forgive,’ [we] make a solemn pact to purge this vice from [ourselves]” (RB 13:13).

For Benedict, “muscular bonding” and “literary inspiration” are one indivisible package. The gestures help us internalize the words that we speak. Benedict sums up his underlying attitude to liturgical prayer by telling us: “Let us be careful how we behave in the sight of God and his angels. And let us “stand to sing in such a way that our mind is in harmony with our voices” (RB 19:7). Joan Chittester says that prayer “is not an exercise done for the sake of quantity or penance or the garnering of spiritual merit,” neither is it “an excursion into a prayer-wheel spirituality.” Rather, “if done in the spirit of these chapters,” prayer “becomes a furnace in which every act of our lives is submitted to the heat and purifying process of the smelter’s fire so that our minds and our hearts, our ideas and our lives, come to be sync so that we are what we say we are, so that the prayers that pass our lips change our lives, so that God’s presence becomes palpable to us.” Words alone do not move the heart in the right direction, but the words spoken during worship put us in a position to let God soften our hearts until we embody “great humility and total devotion” (RB 20:2). It is hard to say words such as those in the Our Father without realizing the claim they make on our lives. They force us to take personal responsibility both for forgiving and accepting forgiveness, a responsibility that De Waal says entails “admitting that things have gone wrong and that I am involved in all the muddle and mess.” De Waal goes on to return to the image of the Prodigal Son hinted at in the Prologue, assuring us that if the return of the Prodigal to a loving father is “the way of Benedict,” then the father awaits us “with unconditional love and unconditional forgiveness.”

Other brief comments interspersed in the chapters on the Divine Office indicate that the external actions in corporate worship should cultivate a deep inner respect for God. When the Gloria is sung, Benedict tells us to “rise from [our] seats out of respect and reverence for the Holy Trinity” (RB 9:7). Although Benedict does not state it explicitly, Kardong believes that the custom of bowing for the Gloria after standing was almost certainly followed in Benedict’s day. Here we have an energetic gesture done in common that builds up “muscular bonding,” but this gesture is done while words are recited that direct it to the Triune God. This act of standing and bowing both embodies and fosters the attitude of reverence. Kardong warns us that simplifying the liturgy to the point of leaving no role for our bodies can turn us into “talking heads, as sometimes happens on the TV screen.” Near the end of Sunday Vigils, Benedict prescribes that the abbot should read from the Gospel while everybody stands “out of respect and reverential awe” (RB 11:9). Again, the posture of standing for the Gospel reminds us of the importance of this text. This posture also increases the chances that we will pay attention to what is read. The outward gesture is not a substitute for the inward disposition, but it helps make it happen. Likewise, the reader of scripture should edify the hearers, not through self-centered histrionics, but through reading with “humility, sobriety, and reverence” (RB 47:4).

In his brief chapter on interior prayer, Benedict uses even stronger language to enjoin reverence and respect toward God: “When we wish to propose something to powerful people, we do not presume to do so without humility and reverence” (RB 20:1). The continuum from deference to a human being to deference to God could hardly be more explicit. Kardong says that this attitude of respect “excludes all attempts by the suppliant to lecture, cajole or manipulate the superior.” “How much more,” Benedict goes on to say, “should we approach the Lord God of the universe with great humility and total devotion” (20: 2). In our more egalitarian society, we resent being expected to grovel before one who presumes to have authority over us. As mimetic theory so powerfully show us, however, if we knock those in authority off their pedestals, we set off a mimetic chain reaction where authority figures become indistinguishable from one another as they knock each other off the pedestal. In this scenario, the bond of respect between human beings dissolves and society falls apart. Respect, however, is not meant to be a one way street. As the chapters on the abbot of the monastery show, an abbot should show all the respect for the those under his authority as these people should show to him. In the end, Benedict would have every person show equal respect for every other person.

Even so, the image of approaching an oriental potentate is a daunting analogy for prayer. Should we not seek more intimacy with God than that when we pray? Jesus himself said that he calls us servants no longer, but friends (Jn. 15: 12). But Benedict goes on to balance this daunting perspective. He says that it is not because of our many words that God hears our prayer, but because of our “purity of heart and tearful compunction” (RB 20:3). Purity of heart is a particularly important phrase in monastic tradition. In a Girardian approach, we would strive for the purity of heart that directs our desires away from our mimetic entanglements and directs them toward God. “Compunction of tears” has nothing to do with clinging to a bad self-image. Kardong says that the literal meaning of compunctio is “a sharp jab at arousing a torpid animal or person.” That is to say, compunction should awaken us from the “inertia of disobedience” cited in the Prologue and prod us into running to “accomplish now what will profit us for eternity” (Pr. 44). When we direct our desires to God, the hardness in our hearts caused by our mimetic desires softens. Softening the heart brings on tears, sometimes interiorly, sometimes in our eyes. Prayer is not a meek petition to an aloof ruler; prayer is a heart-felt reaching out to the radically transcendent God who is closer to us than our heartbeats. Benedict says further that the monastic who goes into the church to pray alone should “pray, not in a loud voice but with tears and full attention of heart” (RB 52:4). Not only is this inward prayer deeper than ostentatious prayer that makes a commotion, but exterior quiet allows another person to pray without being disturbed. When we bear in mind the steps of humility urge us to eschew loud and boisterous laughter, we realize that making a loud display of ourselves in prayer could be a sign of pride rather than the work of the Holy Spirit.

We find in Benedict’s few words echoes of what John Cassian wrote on interior prayer. About the deepest levels of compunction, Cassian writes:

For frequently the fruit of a very beneficial compunction emerges from an ineffable joy and gladness of spirit, such that it even breaks forth into shouts of joy that is too vast to be repressed, and the heart’s delight and the great exultation reach the cell of one’s neighbor. But sometimes the mind is hidden by such silence within the bounds of a profound speechlessness that the stupor brought on by a sudden illumination completely prevents the forming of words, and the stunned spirit either keeps every expression within or releases and pours out its desires to God in unutterable groans. Sometimes, however, it is filled with such an abundance of compunction and with such sorrow that it cannot deal with it except by an outpouring of tears.

The possibility that compunction might cause the outcries of a praying monastic to reach what would have been a distant cell of a neighbor would not have amused Benedict, but what Benedict, like Cassian, most cared about was authenticity in prayer, so maybe Benedict would have been understanding of an occasional shout. However, again like Cassian, Benedict expects either a profound silence or tears to be the more likely outcome of deep prayer. Cassian says that it is occasionally possible that the understanding be suspended so that “it gushes forth as from a most abundant fountain and speaks ineffably to God, producing more in that very brief moment than the self-conscious mind is able to articulate easily or reflect upon.”

The relationship between this level of deep prayer and mimetic theory is still largely unexplored territory. We can see readily enough that prayer, from the recitation of the Divine Office to silent “purity of heart and tearful compunction” is the primary means of living out the first step of humility where we ground ourselves in the awareness of God. In their essays in Violence Renounced, Willard Swartley and Jim Fodor break much of the same kind of new ground as Rebecca Adams in conceptualizing a deep positive mimesis grounded in God’s generous love. Swartley analyzes the “imitation” texts in the New Testament to demonstrate the various levels of imitation that Christian discipleship calls for. Not only must the disciple imitate the virtues of Jesus and the apostles in exterior actions, but this imitation must sink deeply into interior levels as well. After noting how the lists of vices and virtues in the Pauline letters are corroborated by Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, Swartley goes on to say that “not only is the believer’s life to be modeled ethically after virtues that flow from the new life in Christ, but the destiny of believers in interconnected to a process of change.” Swartley illustrates his point with a quote from 2 Cor. 3:18: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Swartley says of this verse: “Here the image that functions as the object of desire is the exalted Lord Jesus who significantly (see 1 Cor. 4) is never unhooked from the suffering Jesus Christ. But this also means that the model of mimetic desire in the new creation is not only the Jesus of suffering, forgiving, and humble service, but also the exalted, vindicated Jesus, victorious over the powers of evil.” This is precisely what John Cassian and Benedict are talking about when they urge us to pray with “purity of heart and tearful compunction.” Such prayer internalizes the Paschal Mystery so that it sinks into the depths of each person who turns to Christ with this level of commitment. Swartley says that “if there is mysticism here, it is moral and mimetic at its core. It is linked to desire and assumes that thought, conduct and aspiration are governed by new desires.” Here we have an important corrective to any notion that mysticism is amoral and detached from the real responsibilities of life.

In his response to Swartley’s essay, Jim Fodor elaborates these points further. While expressing amazement that we are called to be friends with God (John 15:12), Fodor says that our lives “must mirror the self-dispossessive features which characterize the Trinitarians relations of the Godhead.” Fodor calls for an “epiphanic quality” of discipleship that, in the end, is “not about obedience or submission but rather about manifestation and witness—disclosing, making visible, making palpable, making present the purposes of God in the world.” Fodor calls this visible embodying of Christ’s desires “participative imitation.” It is by “participative imitation” that our smallest gestures and our smallest words truly reflect God in the ways Benedict describes in the twelfth step of humility. The words and the gestures of corporate worship coupled with the quiet moments spent in tears and compunction are the path to “participative imitation.” A story I heard about René Girard suggests that the vision of spirituality called for here by Swartley and Fodor and Benedict and John Cassian is very close to Girard’s heart. When asked, after a presentation of his ideas, how one could live out his theory, Girard paused, then said: “We should begin with personal sanctity.”

A small chapter that is easily overlooked gives us one last powerful indication that, for all the restraint Benedict prefers in the performance of the Divine Office, he expects that it will lead to fervent prayer that breaks open in praise. Today we take the exclamation: “Alleluia” so much for granted that we think nothing of it when we come across Chapter 15, which is called “The Seasons for Alleluia.” This little chapter does nothing but specify the times when the word should be said or sung. Terence Kardong tells us, however, that the liturgical use of “Alleluia” outside the Easter Season seems not to have been a universal custom in the Western Church in Benedict’s time. For that reason, Benedict had to go out of his way to impress on his monastics the importance of this word of praise. Since this word is used in the celestial liturgy in Revelation 19, use of it in the Divine Office reminds worshipers that praying together on earth is meant to be an anticipation of praying together in Heaven. Many psalms take us through our mimetic struggles and the pain that these struggles cause. The climax of the psalter, however, is the final triad of Psalms 148-150. They are called the Laudate Psalms because they are filled with praise. These three psalms are done every day in Benedict’s arrangement at the climax of the morning office of Lauds (which thus gets its name from these three psalms.) Praise of God is well on the far side of our mimetic entanglements. When we praise God there is no room in our hearts for “the thorns of quarreling.” This word, then, springs from the human heart to the depths of God where the “thorns of quarreling” are dissolved.