St. Benedict and the Fear of the Lord<\/p>\n
Throughout the ancient world the God\u2019s were something that people loved and hated. They did have a certain fear from their gods, but it wasn\u2019t like that kind of fear of the Middle Ages. With Christianity coming into full stride, the mentality of the time was that God was something to be feared. This is something of importance, the middle ages are riddled with the fear of god and people spend their whole lives in that constant shadow.<\/p>\n
This is noticeable in our first reading. In The Rule of St. Benedict he goes about on how to live a monastic life, and what the proper procedures are. The main goal that I feel is, is to not make God angry. Humility and obedience, the building blocks for anyone\u2019s life. This amount of fear and the practice of fear is very visible in the reading, from following the words of the apostle that says, \u201cReprove, rebuke, exhort\u201d to the daily life of a monk and the rules to which a monk needs to follow.<\/p>\n
The two main rules that a monk has to follow truly show the \u201csigns of the times\u201d Obedience and Humility. Obedience being the first grade of humility, the part that we are interested in is the part of \u201cif you don\u2019t obey then you should burn in hell\u2026\u201d for someone today this excerpt, I feel, wouldn\u2019t affect them as much as if did back then. Some main reasons for this being, the fall of the Roman Empire, people were sick and tired of being pushed around by tyrants and idiot kings; they were ready for a change. But this change was only going to come around if they obey fully to what this new god had to say.<\/p>\n
The Humility, well now that just gives it all away. Just reading the first sentence, \u201c\u2026keeping ever before one\u2019s eyes the feat of the lord\u2026\u201d and it goes on to talk about people talking back and burning in hell. We now see just how scared the people really were, so it comes down to, talk back to God and you will burn in hell. Will people really fall for this? It so happens that people do, they believe that with this newfound king they will HAVE to obey the rules no matter what. Now remember these rules are for monks, but if we look into the daily lives of people they too follow the same procedures.<\/p>\n
So the transition from the Ancient world to the Middle Ages becomes a transformation of not just loving your god, but fearing him with all you\u2019ve got. The main reason that this is contributed to is, now people don\u2019t have a \u201cking\u201d to refer to. The Empire has fallen and they must look towards the heavens. But the new goal for life is not to increase the land, or get riches, it becomes, \u201cI must not do anything to make my God angry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
St. Benedict and the Fear of the Lord Throughout the ancient world the God\u2019s were something that people loved and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n