Ruizhe Huang
St Benedict was a well respected saint in the church that founded many monasteries near Rome. But it was his monastery that made him famous, but rather his writing. The Benedict Rule was written by Benedict to organize and govern his monks, but it spread to much of Europe that it had became the official guide book for the monks in monasteries. It outlines the rules monks needed to follow to be effective God's soldiers. The book was organized into chapters and subjects. The rules varies as big as the qualification of monks and abbots to as small as how much food is proper to have for meals.
The Benedict rule was very important to a monk's daily life. It outlined what a monk should do in everyday setting and how they should do it. The rule was adopted into every monastery that monks were expected to follow; and it was the reason why monks in the early and mid-Middle Age were so disciplined and well respected. Such book was not only a guide book for the doing, but also serve as a guide book for the morality among the monks, which helped purify the monks' minds and help guarding their spiritual life. Benedict indicated that "no one may presume to give, receive or retain anything as his own, nothing at all" (32). Not retaining anything own as a resistance to the material temptation to the world, which such action was thought as the moral for the clergy class.
The Benedict was the Constitution for the monasteries of the Catholic Church, it played an important role to discipline the monks and to further promote God's kingdom. But it also its weak point, for one that it is only written to the male monks, but nuns were not the subject it was intended to inform. The nuns would had difficult time finding the right rule to govern the nun's community until the 11th and 12th century.
St Benedict was a well respected saint in the church that founded many monasteries near Rome. But it was his monastery that made him famous, but rather his writing. The Benedict Rule was written by Benedict to organize and govern his monks, but it spread to much of Europe that it had became the official guide book for the monks in monasteries. It outlines the rules monks needed to follow to be effective God's soldiers. The book was organized into chapters and subjects. The rules varies as big as the qualification of monks and abbots to as small as how much food is proper to have for meals.
The Benedict rule was very important to a monk's daily life. It outlined what a monk should do in everyday setting and how they should do it. The rule was adopted into every monastery that monks were expected to follow; and it was the reason why monks in the early and mid-Middle Age were so disciplined and well respected. Such book was not only a guide book for the doing, but also serve as a guide book for the morality among the monks, which helped purify the monks' minds and help guarding their spiritual life. Benedict indicated that "no one may presume to give, receive or retain anything as his own, nothing at all" (32). Not retaining anything own as a resistance to the material temptation to the world, which such action was thought as the moral for the clergy class.
The Benedict was the Constitution for the monasteries of the Catholic Church, it played an important role to discipline the monks and to further promote God's kingdom. But it also its weak point, for one that it is only written to the male monks, but nuns were not the subject it was intended to inform. The nuns would had difficult time finding the right rule to govern the nun's community until the 11th and 12th century.