By The Very Rev. William O. Daniel, Jr., Ph.D., ’11

—author of Christ the Liturgy (Angelico Press), and Inhabited by Grace (Church Publishing, Inc.)

Much of life flies under the radar of our perception. We are surrounded by signs and symbols that command our unconscious response, but we are rarely aware that they do so or how they came to order our movements and affections. Just think about driving down the road in your car. When you come upon a red, octagonal sign at an intersection, you do not need to know how to read in order to know what the sign says. And it is unlikely that you learned the appropriate response from reading a book. We live in a society of automobiles. Most of us experienced riding down the road as children and the vehicle coming to a halt whenever this red octagon was present. This would have happened with such regularity that it is doubtful anyone ever thought to tell us what to do when we approached a stop sign, or any other sign for that matter. Why? Because they didn’t need to. We already knew what to do. We knew this because the sign’s meaning was inscribed on our imaginations through the embodied habit of the car stopping every time a sign was there.

While much learning occurs in academic classrooms, perhaps the most effective learning is that which goes unnoticed, like learning to stop at stop signs. Sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) describes this form of learning as a habitus. According to Mauss, our habitus is “the practical reason of a social body, acquired by the individual by an education in the techniques of embodied movement at work in the social body.” In other words, what we think, believe, and how we behave are inseparable from the communities in which we live and the social practices constantly at work on our imaginations. Habitus not only names a cultural effectiveness, it also refuses any separation of thought and action, as well as conditioning social structures.

While Mauss uses habitus to describe the indivisibility of human nature and human action from a social body, its use has a long history. At least since the time of John Cassian (c. 360-435), and perhaps most clearly with Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-c. 543), monasticism has existed as a central witness to this interwoven fabric of human life. In The Rule, Benedict describes the life of the cenobite as one whose very life is a rule—the monk himself is an opus Dei—a liturgical work of God. Bringing opus Dei into liturgical focus, Benedict presents an understanding of liturgical action that is indiscernible from the daily life of the monk.

It is tempting to read The Rule of Saint Benedict as a set of provisions by which the monk, if he follows each with vigor, will attain the sanctity of Christ. The nature of The Rule, however, as with most every monastic rule ever written, is descriptive. It concerns the forma vitae—the form of life, and it recognizes that the form does not flow out of the rule but vice versa. It is the rule that is derivative, not the life. The Rule is biographical; it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Returning to our analogy, we did not begin driving cars about the country because we had placed stop signs everywhere and needed something to bring to a halt.  A sign does not search for something to signify. And, following Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), “To think that you are following a rule is not to follow a rule.”

It is for this reason that mimesis is central to Benedict. Imitating Christ—whose life (vitae) is the rule (regula)—is its focus. The Rule is the way of one who follows Christ. In other words, it is The Rule of Saint Benedict and not Saint Benedict of the Rule. It is at this point we can hear Benedict whisper to us, “The habit does not make the monk.” Nevertheless, the habit donned by the monk is intertwined with the habitus that is the monastery. We might say that the liturgical habits of imitating Christ in the spiritual elders of the monastery are the ways in which the monk learns to inhabit the habit—the ways he learns to wear the habit well, which is nothing short of demanding. As Cassian says in the Conferences, “One does not come to resemble those whose hard work and whose zeal one declines to imitate.”

Our habitus conditions us to perceive our relation to all things. Accordingly, to understand the things of God demands an understanding through a liturgical habitus—the practice of imitating, whereby the wisdom of God is inscribed on our hearts through the disciplining of our bodies. As Saint Paul writes in his first letter to the church at Corinth, “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2.1). Benedict would tell us that the habitus is the monastery, not a prescription for understanding the gifts of the Spirit of God. The habitus is the Spirit of God coming to inhabit the practitioner.

It is for this reason that much of which has come to govern human sensibilities in the modern world needs to be brought to our conscious awareness. Worldly systems of thought and action have conditioned how we live and move in no less penetrating ways than stop signs on our streets. This doesn’t mean that we need to tear down all the signs and symbols, but it does mean, perhaps now more than ever, that we need to interrogate our habitats and how they have conditioned and are conditioning our habits, so that the thoughts, words, and deeds of transcendent liturgy come to dominate how we perceive others and the world we inhabit.

This is the challenge of faithfulness in any age. We know that human nature is recapitulated in, by, and through the habitus of Christ. Yet it is the degree to which we deliberately participate in Christ’s cruciform way of love—the Liturgy Christ is—that we will spiritually discern, experience, and perceive all things as they are being created and re-created—recapitulated—by God in Christ.

William Daniel (Ph.D. University of Nottingham) is the rector of St. Michael’s Church, Dean for Liturgy and Formation in the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, and adjunct professor of humanities at SUNY Geneseo, in Geneseo, New York. He is the author of Christ the Liturgy, (Angelico Press, 2020) Inhabited by Grace (Church Publishing, Inc., 2019), various works of poetry and social commentary, and is a roaster of coffee. You can follow Fr. Daniel at www.williamdaniel.info.