The Biddings of Holy Obedience

Saint Benedict, Plato, and tarot's Chariot

Hi friends, 

June was a flurry of activity here. I’m writing this from Seattle, where my family is spending a few weeks after going to a family wedding in Victoria. It’s nice to have a change of scenery and for my kids to spend some time with their cousins. Summer is always a good time. With my kids out of school, I always prioritize my time with them. It means that I have no set time for work and so it gets done in whatever little pockets I can find throughout the week, but I like the shift in priorities.  

In book news, I got to see the final cover a few weeks ago, and it’s beautiful. The Contemplative Tarot also got a lovely review from Publisher’s Weekly. Truly, every single person who reads my book and likes it makes my heart sing. The book comes out in about 2.5 months (which feels like no time at all!) and you can pre-order here if you haven’t already.  

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““Now, brethren, that we have asked the Lord who it is that shall dwell in His tabernacle, we have heard the conditions for dwelling there; and if we fulfil the duties of tenants, we shall be heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Our hearts and our bodies must, therefore, be ready to do battle under the biddings of holy obedience; and let us ask the Lord that He supply by the help of His grace what is impossible to us by nature. And if, flying from the pains of hell, we desire to reach life everlasting, then, while there is yet time, and we are still in the flesh, and are able during the present life to fulfill all these things, we must make haste to do now what will profit us forever.” — The Rule of Saint Benedict

Saint Benedict is a saint I particularly love (he’s a saint a lot of folks love, truly a giant of both Catholic and Orthodox Christianity), and his feast day is coming up on the 11th. His life is fascinating. He was born in the late 5th century, the son of a Roman noble. Being the son of a Roman noble places certain expectations on a person, and, as a young man, Benedict was sent to Rome to study. He was deeply disappointed by the life he found there; he disliked both the greed he found among the Roman nobility and also the triviality of learning rhetoric for no other reason than to be superficially persuasive. So he left Rome. And when I write that he left, I mean he really left. He wound up living for three years as a hermit in a cave above a lake outside what is now the town of Affile. The monks of a monastery nearby were so inspired by his apparent holiness that they asked him to become their abbot. Benedict didn’t think it was a good idea but consented; he was right, though, and the monks eventually tried to poison him. Benedict, being a man of good sense, left the monastery and founded his own monasteries in the area, the most famous of which is the breathtaking abbey of Monte Cassino.

It’s here, as the Father of Monasticism, that Benedict shines. This is how we know him best, and this is the thing for which he is beloved, because the monasteries that Benedict founded were unlike any monasteries that came before. Benedict founded monasteries during a time in which monastic life had become extremely strict and ascetic, and his approach to monasticism was radically different. Benedict taught gentleness instead of rigidity, moderation instead of strict asceticism. (I like to think that the wild pendulum swings of his early life, from rich nobleman’s son to literal caveman, taught him something about temperance.) The monks under Benedict’s care had set times for work, for prayer, and for rest. Their lives were well-ordered, but they weren’t extreme. All of this is detailed in the Rule of Saint Benedict, his little book of precepts written for monks living in community. It’s a slim volume that’s worth reading, even if you don’t have a monk-ish personality. While it was written for monks, the monks under Benedict’s rule came from diverse backgrounds: rich nobles, poor slaves, Goths, Romans, pagans. As the prologue says, “My words are meant for you specifically, whoever and wherever you are, wanting to turn from your own self-will and join Christ, the Lord of all.” 

The other week I reread Phaedrus, a Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus. It’s sort of about love and also about rhetoric. It also contains Plato’s second-most-famous allegory, about a chariot. The allegory comes up about halfway through the dialogue, while Socrates is talking about the experiences and actions of divine and human souls, and he uses the allegory of the chariot to explain his view of the human soul. He gives us a picture of a winged team of horses, one white and one black, and their charioteer. “In the first place, our driver has charge of a pair; secondly, one of them he finds noble and good, and of similar stock, while the other is of the opposite stock, and opposite in its nature; so that the driving in our case is necessarily difficult and troublesome.” One horse represents the rational impulse and positive passions; the other represents our baser nature and irrational passions. The charioteer’s task is to competently steer the entire chariot, a difficult undertaking as “the horse that is partly bad weighs them down, inclining them towards the earth through its weight, if any of the charioteers has not trained him well.” All of this reminded me of Benedict’s Rule and how prudent it is, not too lax and not too rigid, like well-held reins to guide the horses of one’s passions. 

If Plato’s allegory of the Chariot reminds you of the tarot’s Chariot, with charioteer guiding both white horse and black, well, yes. (You can even buy this extremely niche hoodie about it.) I almost wrote about Phaedrus and Plato’s Chariot allegory for my meditation on the Chariot in my book, spinning out something about cultivating virtue and the benefit of constraint, but it felt too obvious. In writing the book, I tried to stick with the traditional meanings of the archetypes, simply viewing the meanings through a theological lens, but the Chariot’s meaning has been unfortunately flattened to simply mean “triumph” or “success,” which does the archetype a deep disservice and feels pretty soulless. What I did instead was borrow heavily from Tomberg’s ideas on the Chariot in Meditations on the Tarot, where he obviously gets a little more Christian than Plato and writes about triumph but also triumph’s dangers. In his own words: 

“[T]he arcanum ‘The Chariot’ has a twofold aspect. It represents, from one side, he who – having triumphed over the three temptations – remains faithful to the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity; and it represents, from another side, the danger of the fourth temptation, which is the most subtle and intimate temptation, and is the invisibile synthesis of the three temptations: the spiritual temptation of the victorious through his victory himself. It is the temptation to act ‘in one’s own name’, to act as master instead of as servant.”

The idea here is that we must master ourselves in terms of temptation, to be sure, but also in terms of achievement. If we want to steer our chariots well, we have to learn how to remain strong in the face of temptation and humble in the face of victory. Tarot’s Chariot is a triumph, but it is also a warning. 

In his essay on the Chariot, Tomberg moves through many diversions (as is his style), but the answer he eventually comes to is the same answer Saint Benedict came to: ora et labora. “Worship and work constitute the only curative as well as prophylactic remedy that I know against megalomaniacal illusions.” Tomberg tells us, “It is necessary to worship what is above us and it is necessary to participate in human effort in the domain of objective facts in order to be able to hold in check the illusions concerning what one is and what one is capable of.” In other words, If we worship God, we will not be tempted to worship ourselves. This is what I wrote about the Chariot for the book, how the Chariot seems like an easy golden victory at first glance, and reveals a deep humility when given a closer look. Like Plato and like Saint Benedict, I think there is benefit to restraint and order, at least in terms of cultivating virtue and treating one’s soul well. 

I do think it’s easy to read all this and think, well I’m not a monk or a Greek philosopher so how does this help me? Here’s what I think: I think it’s good and even necessary for a person to spend time thinking about the state of their soul. I think that Plato’s virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are virtues we’re all called to cultivate. I think that Saint Benedict’s virtues of chastity, poverty, and obedience are also virtues we’re all called to cultivate – they just might look different for those of us who don’t have vocations to religious life. One of the things I love about tarot is that it prompts us to spend time thinking about things like virtue. I love that every time I pull the Chariot I think about what the cultivation of virtue looks like in my life: What am I guiding myself by? Is it Saint Benedict’s ora et labora? Is it Plato’s cardinal virtues? Is it self-control and order or is it something else? Who is holding the reins here? Am I steering my soul well? Am I listening to the biddings of holy obedience?