St. Benedict knew what we forget

The world is changing—and no, this isn't just another cyclical shift that history textbooks placidly record. The change we're experiencing today is deeper, more systematic, more structural. The words we once reserved for the declines of the past—decadence, collapse, twilight—are returning to common vocabulary. We speak of an anxious generation, the infantilization of humanity, the crisis of democracies, chaos, and cultural drift.

This isn't the first time this has happened. St. Benedict lived in a similar time. The Western Roman Empire had fallen. Unprecedented migratory flows were reshaping the territory. Present-day Italy, his birthplace, was being assaulted by massive military waves. And even within the Church, great tensions led to a split between Rome and Byzantium.

At the time, his role was fundamental. Benedict would ultimately propose a model that, at the time, stabilized society and later gave rise to Europe as we understand it today.

So much so that its influence is not merely historical. It is structural. And it survives, almost invisibly, in the way we organize ourselves. The division of the day into time blocks—work, rest, meals—comes directly from monastic discipline. The existence of central squares in cities and towns, around which social and institutional life is articulated, replicates the monastery model, with the cloister as its vital core. Even modern hospitals, universities, and hotels, in their ideas of hospitality and comprehensive education, follow models that were created in Benedictine monasteries.

But perhaps most remarkable is this: what Saint Benedict offers is not just a method, it is an anthropology. A vision of the human being.

When we look to the past today for references to understand the present—from Thucydides to Machiavelli, from Plato to Tocqueville—we are almost always missing the one who understood the deepest problem.

For Bento, political imbalances, cultural crises, and social drift were symptoms, not causes. For him, problems with structures and power were secondary to another, greater problem: the problem of God. And this led him to realize that it is not enough to listen to minimally healthy reflections, doctrines, or opinions. That, even with them, human beings desire an experience; it is not enough to be right or to think decently. Between sound discourses with relaxed practices and incomplete discourses with effective practices, we will tend, sooner or later, to opt for the latter.

In the fragmented world he lived in, Bento also understood that community needs structure, a purpose outside of itself, that human life itself requires routine. That closeness and affection are not enough. And that this life also needs predictability and stability.

It's curious that so many books today propose "atomic habits" or promises of productivity, as if they were discovering what the Benedictines already knew 1,500 years ago: that freedom requires discipline, that autonomy only exists when there is inner order, that if a community wants to live longer, a balance between proximity and distance, between presence and isolation, is necessary, otherwise the monastery and society will be transformed into a state of narcissistic and infantile dependence.

Over time, almost all of us end up becoming people with high expectations of society, but with difficulty facing the responsibilities we have to ourselves and the world. St. Benedict struggled with this mindset.

Faced with the idolatry of innovation and technology, he asked the monks to hand-copy the works of great thinkers. Faced with a society of weariness, Benedict taught that weariness is necessary and beneficial when it conveys a satisfied and committed life. Faced with identitarian tendencies, he demanded a love of place and the present. Faced with the "anxious generation," he spoke of the pleasure of living, breaking with the unilateral fixation on guilt and suffering. Faced with toxic and traumatic relationships, he asserted that we must undo the illusions we build about ourselves and recognize that no person or circumstance is our redemption. Because, after all, "love is a disease, when we hope to see our cure in it."

Today, we seek urgent, effective, technological solutions. But some crises cannot be overcome with reforms. St. Benedict knew what we have forgotten.