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“There are four kinds of monks,” Benedict says in the first of the seventy-three chapters in his Rule. There are hermits, who strive alone to find the meaning of God. There are societies of cohabiting monks with no rules. There are monks who are wanderers. But a fourth kind of monk lives under the rule of an abbot.⁹³ It is this kind of institutional sociability – of participation – that the Rule prescribes.

“To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King.”⁹⁴

The Rule is presented as speech transcribed into text. It is definitively communication, the traces of representation erased in abstract commands. The commandant – the ultimate speaker – is Christ-God, and the abbot an interlocutor. In the constitution of social meanings, the authority of God is communicated through the authority of the abbot. The abbot commands, however these commands are God’s, not his. Nowhere is there an account of God the dialogical deliberator. God just commands. God communicates without knowable representation. The communication comes down the line, and when the abbot communicates God’s commands, no scope is allowed for divergent re-representation, for interpretation.

“For it belongeth to the master to speak and to teach; it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen. If, therefore, anything must be asked of the Superior, let it be asked with all humility and respectful submission.”⁹⁵

These are habits we have developed in unequal societies with their bias towards communication, erasing deliberative agency in prior representation, and then, with communication, dialogue, and subsequent interpretation. This is how our theories of meaning have come to focus on communication as if that were the focal form of participation in meaning, at the expense of representation and interpretation.

Sometimes, this communication-as-command presents itself as gentle power, only exposing its more fundamental social conditions of participation in moments of potential or actual transgression. In Benedict’s Rule, the relation of master and disciple was made to seem perfectly reasonable, expressing hierarchy in ways that were also at times delicately cajoling. But when in other moments command is its fundamental purpose, the commandant must be direct in their communication and severe in their enforcement.

“For in his teaching the Abbot should … show the severity of the master and the loving affection of a father. He must sternly rebuke the undisciplined and restless; but he must exhort the obedient, meek, and patient to advance in virtue.” The monk, for his part, should adopt a demeanor of humility, so “if hard and distasteful things are commanded, nay, even though injuries are inflicted, he accept them with patience and even temper, and not grow weary or give up, but hold out.”⁹⁶

The Rule is the stuff of text, whose injunctions communicants must heed. It also prescribes certain forms of speech: listen silently to the speech of the master, and if speech is required, it must be submissive. These rules of text and speech are also framed by context, or what Giorgio Agamben calls, after Wittgenstein, ^§MS2.3.2a a form-of-life. This includes the architectonics of the monastery, its “total mobilization of existence” through the strict timing of prayers and work. The monk’s affectedly modest habit with its leather belt constitutes the monk as a “soldier of Christ.” The speaking master and the listening disciple cannot assume these positions except in embodied social behavior, in collocated space and simultaneous time. The meaning of the Rule is in the reciprocal relations of text and speech to its form-of-life. These are “constitutive norms.”⁹⁷

One such configuration of objects and bodies in time and space is the lectio – when the abbot speaks or reads aloud the Rule or the Gospel. This is a peculiar halfway practice, somewhere between reading and speaking. Functionally, it is an artifact of meaning where participation is reduced to communication, at the expense of representation and interpretation.

In the parallel development of global modernity, this is not just a Western form – Islam in its first centuries invents the same hierarchical relations of meaning: the “Qur’an” or Koran means recitation,^§MS3a from the Arabic verb qara’a; lectio derives from the Latin verb legere, to read out, read aloud, or recite.⁹⁸

In human history, this is a new configuration of meaning, where speech and action are constitutionally regulated by textual rule. It becomes not just the social relations of the “lecture,” but later becomes a central practice in the modern form of life that is institutionalized education. Or at least this is the case in its most didactic forms, where transmission via communication is emphasized at the expense of participation through representation and interpretation, where command is at the expense of agency, where epistemic replication is at the expense of creative thinking and rethinking, where repetition is at the expense of creative divergence, and where reproduction of meaning is at the expense of generative (re)design.

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⁹² F.A. Forbes, 1921, Saint Benedict, New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons, p. 71.

⁹³ St Benedict, c.530 [1949], The Holy Rule of St. Benedict, translated by Rev. Boniface Verheyen, Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Chapter 1.

⁹⁴ Ibid., Prologue.

⁹⁵ Ibid., Chapter 6.

⁹⁶ Ibid., Chapters 2, 7.

⁹⁷ Giorgio Agamben, 2011 [2013], The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, translated by A. Kotsko, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 23, 15, 61, 71–72.

⁹⁸ George Makdisi, 1981, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 242–43.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 54–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

The Rule of St Benedict §AS1.2.2a