Heart in the Rule of St. Benedict

Abstract

T he intent of the following paper is to examine one of the most often used yet barely discussed terms in The Rule of St. Benedict (henceforth The Rule ). St. Benedict opens The Rule with a sentence that contains cor (heart): “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” To obey this imperative, one has to understand the phrase ‘ear of your heart.’ Despite the intriguing coupling of ‘ear’ and ‘heart’ and the questions it inevitably leads to, the editors of RB 1980 : The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes fail to adequately discuss the term cor and its capacity to “hear” and “obey” ‘the master’s instructions.’ Terrence Kardong, the first American to write a complete line-by-line commentary on The Rule , is content to state that cor “always refers to the spiritual center of the person, and is synonymous with mind or soul, but not the physical muscle that pumps blood.” 1 While the term cor is used around thirty times in The Rule , main-line studies and commentaries have all but ignored the specific meanings expressed by this term.