Draft of the planned volume of collected essays:

 

�Gehorsam im Religiosentum�

 

Obedience in Religious Life.

 

[Special Research Unit 537, Section C: Institutional Structures of Religious Orders in the Middle Ages,

and W: The Culture of City and Cloister in medieval Lombardy: The Institutional Interaction of two political and social fields.

Technical University Dresden and the Catholic University of Milan and Brescia.]

 

To be edited by Giancarlo Andenna, S�bastien Barret, and Gert Melville.

 

For the vita religiosa, obedience has fundamental meaning. As one of the three evangelical counsels and, indeed, the one from which there is no dispensation, it is part of the vow of each religious and the standard of both individual and corporate behavior that is absolutely binding. To obey means not only the fulfillment of a social virtue but also represents, for the religious, value of central spiritual worth, since obedience towards God is a fundamental attitude of religious sensibility.

 

Another norm of behavior in the religious life is always bound with obedience: humility, the virtue which, according to Bernard of Clairvaux, serves as the source for all others. Humility is the complementary category for only a humble person is ready for true obedience. �True obedience� is to be understood as an �inner� love for God, and not an obedience resulting from fear or compulsion.

 

Also bound up with obedience is the category of power (and indeed also of force).This category is also to be understood as spiritually one. It is a form of power that continually leads back to God Himself, to the power of God, and thus is found among men in only a delegated form. Only in this reference to God is power legitimized in the vita religiosa.

 

Located between power and humility, obedience emphasizes/focuses on a bipolarity of spiritually grounded precedence and submission characteristic for religious communities. The stability of a religious community thus can be judged by how well the structure of such orders of precedence and submission functions or, in other words, how far obedience is being practiced both in the acceptance of the power derived from God and in acceptance of humility as the fundamental virtue.

 

In actuality, a religious community is hardly an �island of souls�; it is rather, as Chenu said, a �cellule terrestre�. This means that it is always subjected to its very core to the influences, demands, expectations, and norms of the outside world. Thus a religious community, be it a single cloister or an entire order, is woven into the institutional structures of precedence and submission, above all those of the church (by bishops and by the papacy), but also those in the world of laity, for example in the matter of proprietary churches and patronage. Likewise,� a religious community can be exposed to the external interests of power which, for example, aim at making it economic dependent, open to outside infiltration, achieving influence over its internal decisions, etc. The agents of these external interests were, in equal measure, ecclesiastical officials, nobles, cities, or even other, competing, ecclesiastical communities. No less can a religious community itself try to erect structures of obedience in its own environment/surroundings and thus obtain power over the surrounding region with its people and institutions.

 

Here structures of obedience appear one after another, structures which either are not of the same ethical/religious fundaments - as can be the case with encounters with the lay world or with the expansion of power throughout the surrounding region/environment - or at least do not have to conform with the specific interests of the religious community, as, for example, with actions by the hierarchical offices of the Church.

 

Thus, how do such structures of obedience function within a religious community and how does an encounter between internal and external structures of obedience function, structures where one has an absolute claim on its dependence/derivation from God, the other very often possessing the better argument for greater strength and power? To what extent does each side influence the other? Does a conflict of norms occur?

 

Proceeding from these fundamental aspects, contributions for the planned book on Obedience in Religion can only be accepted that treat:

 

a)�������� The structures of obedience within a religious community (cloister, orders) and/or

 

b)                  The structures of obedience of religious communities under the influence of claims or efforts by subordinants on behalf of external powers or with structures of obedience of the environment/surroundings with regard to a religious community.

 

Here attention must be paid to the fact that both these aspects are not to be understood in isolation from each other. If case studies are submitted, what is exemplary in them should be recognized, that is what refers to the principal theme.

 

Especially to be emphasized is that obedience is to be understood in both its dimension as a spiritual foundation of religiosity and its functionality. Accordingly, light is to be shed on constructions of ideal and practical norms (leading ideas, objectifications) and their achievement in the building of functioning social (sub) systems. Here it concerns obedience as evangelical counsel and �building block of an institution, as moral demand and element of concrete structures of power. In this connection, comparative treatments of a cloister, orders, and the outside world should prove to be especially fruitful.

 

Under a systemic point of view, the following, fundamental aspects present themselves, whereby the heuristic and, indeed also to a certain degree the factual, differences of a religious community both internally and its position towards the outside world must be continually considered.

 

 

The order of the contributions to the volume could be as follows (with the following, guiding considerations):

 

Are structural comparisons possible between phenomena of subordination� in monastic or religious spheres (on the one hand) and subordination of religious communities under other social forms?

 

I.� Obedience/Subordination within cloisters and orders

 

Here research must consider how one concretely created obedience and how, conversely, one is able to organize obedience and also react against it.

 

1.    Obedience as an element of religious/regular life: the moral commands and functional roles within a cloister or an order; the legitimization of obedience.

 

2.    The objective and conditions of obedience (non ex metu, sed ex amore) as well as the methods by which it is accomplished, the learning of obedience (novices), the enforcement of obedience.

 

3.    The hierarchical links as functions and concomitant phenomena of the existence of an association or an order: the personal and institutional subordinations, which also includes the offices and houses of the order.

 

4.    Rebellion and obedience: the abrogation of a particular obedience or the appearance of another? Does rebellion fundamentally question obedience or is disobedience, in many cases, only a byproduct of conflict?

 

II.� The Community and Others

 

Here obedience would come up as an element (and perhaps even in many places) a principle which defines or accompanies relations and opposing claims.

 

1.    Obedience in relations and the interactive claims of religious communities and their surroundings, for example conflicts with spiritual and secular powers such as urban or episcopal, the feudal nobility of the countryside, the papacy, etc.

 

2.    The encroachment of the outside world in the cloister or orders: how can� the internal structures of obedience be influenced or destroyed from the outside? (For example through external means of compulsion, by means of the cloister�s infiltration by suitable persons, through the assumption of leadership like the phenomenon of the lay or commendatory abbots, etc.

 

III. Representations

 

Here arise the questions of the ideal objectifications, depiction, and socialization, and the formation of the subject.

 

1.    Subordination and obedience as subject of the �ideal objectifications� of contemporary institutions (texts, images)

 

2.    Ways of representation: the hierarchical as element of text or image productions which serve other purposes in instruction or transmission of knowledge, in these, above all, the symbolic aspects of functional complexes (text, image)

 

3.    The emblems of power which expect obedience.

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