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Saint Benedict
by
The Law of Diminishing Returns was what Oliver Wendell Holmes had in mind when he said, “Because I like a pinch of salt in my soup is no reason I wish to be immersed in brine.”
Churches, preachers and religious denominations are good things in their time and place, and up to a certain point. Whether for you the church has passed the Pivotal Point is for you yourself to decide. But remember this, because a thing is good up to a certain point, or has been good, is no reason why it should be perpetuated. The Law of Diminishing Returns is the natural refutation of the popular fallacy that because a thing is good you can not get too much of it.
It is this law that Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he said, “I object to that logic which seeks to imply that because I wish to make the negro free, I desire a black woman for a wife.”
Benedict had spent five years in resistance before it dawned upon him that Monasticism carried to a certain point was excellent and fraught with good results, but beyond that it rapidly degenerated.
To carry the plan of simplicity and asceticism to its summit and not go beyond was now his desire.
To withdraw from society he felt was a necessity, for the petty and selfish ambitions of Rome were revolting. But the religious life did not for him preclude the joys of the intellect. In his unshaven and unshorn condition, wearing a single garment of goatskin, he dared not go back to his home. So he proceeded to make himself acceptable to decent people. He made a white robe, bathed, shaved off his beard, had his hair cut, and putting on his garments, went back to his family. The life in the wilderness had improved his health. He had grown in size and strength and he now, in his own person, proved that a religious recluse was not necessarily unkempt and repulsive.
His people greeted him as one raised from the dead. Crowds followed him wherever he went. He began to preach to them and to explain his position.
Some of his old school associates came to him.
As he explained his position, it began more and more to justify itself in his mind. Things grow plain as we analyze them to others–by explaining to another the matter becomes luminous to ourselves.
To purify the monasteries and carry to them all that was good and beautiful in the classics, was the desire of Benedict. His wish was to reconcile the learning of the past with Christianity, which up to that time had been simply ascetic. It had consisted largely of repression, suppression and a killing-out of all spontaneous, happy, natural impulses.
Very naturally, he was harshly criticized, and when he went back to the cave where he had dwelt and tried to teach some of his old companions how to read and write, they flew first at him, and then from him. They declared that he was the devil in the guise of a monk; that he wished to live both as a monk and as a man of the world–that he wanted to eat his cake and still keep it. By a sort of divine right he took control of affairs, and insisted that his companions should go to work with him, and plant a garden and raise vegetables and fruits, instead of depending upon charity or going without.
The man who insists that all folks shall work, be they holy or secular, learned or illiterate, always has a hard road to travel. Benedict’s companions declared that he was trying to enslave them, and one of them brewed a poison and substituted it for the simple herb tea that Benedict drank. Being discovered, the man and his conspirators escaped, although Benedict offered to forgive and forget if they would go to work.
Benedict adhered to his new inspiration with a persistency that never relaxed–the voice of God had called to him that he must clear the soil of the brambles and plant gardens.