Benedict Option: back to the Middles Ages - for you, at least

In his latest post calling For a New Middle Age, Rod Dreher now identifies his chimerical Benedict Option with a return to the Middle Ages, citing a post-Bolshevik Russian from 1923 as the authority who guides him (you can sample other quotes from the mentor Rod would guide your life by here):

In his 1923 book The End of Our Time, the Russian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev says that modernity has spiritually exhausted mankind, and that the time is ripe for a return to interiority, to a world in which the spiritual was more important than the material. To enter into this “new middle age” requires, he says, a “revolution in spirit.”

The Benedict Option is the term I use to describe this rising movement for a new Middle Age, a spiritual revolution in a time of spiritual and cultural darkness. The monk was the ideal personality type of the Middle Ages. Few of us will be called to the monastery, but all of us who profess orthodox Christianity are called to rediscover a monastic temperament, putting the service of God before all things, and ordering our lives — our prayer and our work, and our communal existence — to that end. We are going to have to recover a sense of monastic asceticism, and do so in hope and joy, together.

Naturally, in Dreher's Benedict Option as in post-Bolshevik Revolution Russia, the "monastic asceticism" of "this new Middle Age" will be for thee, not for he: this post was set up to drop automatically because Rod and his male companion, the "hirsute Italian" Sordello, have better things to do than a pursue a monastically ascetic Benedict Option, having just launched their fabulous, female-free European eating vacation beginning in Lyon, France and ending in Sienna, Italy.

As in most inchoate revolutionary and pseudo-religious hustles, the intelligentsiya proposes, the proletariat - that would be you chumps buying into Dreher's scam - disposes in order to support the former's lifestyle fancies.

You will carry out the social withdrawals and other inconveniences to your life, including all that Internet and other culturally dark stuff necessary to fulfill Dreher's Benedict Option delusion's and, hopefully, land him another book deal.

He will continue, as always, to do whatever strikes his fancy at any given moment, including ditching the missus to chow down on some snails in France with a hairy Italian man.