Article 5
That all religious and spiritual persons are bound above all to obedience.
ALL of divine Scripture, the pages of both Testaments, and the rules and teachings of all the holy Fathers praise holy obedience most excellently, above all in religious persons. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, King of kings and Prince of all things,1 commended it to us most plainly and most especially, commanded and taught it, and showed it by His examples: who (as the Apostle says), being in the form of God, that is, in the true nature of the Godhead, and true God, equal to God the Father, emptied Himself, becoming obedient to the Father unto death.2 Hence He also said: I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me;3 and again: My food is to do the will of Him who sent me.4
For what is so perverse, so impious and ungrateful, as for a rational creature to be rebellious, disobedient or resistant to its Creator or to His vicar? Was it not for this sin that our first parents were cast out of paradise beyond recovery, and with all their posterity stripped of original justice and deprived of the heavenly kingdom?5 And those highest angelic spirits too were hurled down and cast out of heaven for the disobedience of their pride.6 So also with Saul, the first king of Israel: when under the appearance of piety and divine worship he had transgressed God's command, God said to the prophet Samuel: It repents me that I have made Saul king, for he has despised me.7 And when Saul wished to excuse himself before Samuel, saying, We spared the best of the flocks, that they might be sacrificed to the Lord your God,8 holy Samuel at once answered: Does the Lord desire holocausts and victims, and not rather that His voice be obeyed?9 And Samuel added the reason: For obedience is better than sacrifices, and to hearken is better than to offer the fat of rams; because to rebel is like the sin of divination (that is, like the crime of soothsaying, which is an act of superstition or a deed of the magic art), and to refuse to obey is like the crime of idolatry.10 This authority alone, as the statutes of the Carthusian Order assert, holds a sufficient commendation of obedience and condemnation of disobedience: if obedience is lacking, all the other things we do are not only deprived of their eternal and beatific reward, but even incur damnation. Mark these things and tremble, O religious person: for if disobedience is so enormous a sin in a person in the world, who has not promised obedience, how much more in you, who have bound yourself to obedience by solemn vow?
Further, just as it is sacrilege to seize and steal a thing consecrated and offered to God, and far graver than stealing silver and gold or some other common goods; so to take back for oneself one's own will, offered to God by solemn vow into the hands of His vicar, to withdraw it from God and from His vicar, and to use it at one's own pleasure, is a sacrilegious theft.
Further, just as by obedience man pleases God most, so by disobedience he most displeases the supreme Judge. Is it not related in the book of Joshua that the holy man Joshua, because he was most obedient to God in all things,11 obtained this from God: that at his petition, or rather at his command, the sun and moon stood still in the middle of the sky for the space of one day?12 Behold how almighty God exalts those who for God's sake humble themselves freely and promptly by true obedience.
Moreover, it is told in the Lives of the Fathers that two Brothers were walking together, one of great abstinence, the other of great obedience; when they had found a dead man on the road and called on the Lord to raise him, and the dead man had at once risen, the Brother of great abstinence gloried in his heart, saying: By the merit of my abstinence this dead man has risen. But God revealed that this miracle had been done not for his abstinence but for the other's obedience. So too St. Maurus, while still a youth, obeying his most blessed abbot Benedict, ran over the waters without sinking. A disciple of the abbot Paul, too, obeying his abbot, bound a great serpent and led it to him. And another good man, obeying his abbot, threw his own son into a burning furnace, and the boy was not harmed by the fire. All these and many like things the glorious and blessed God did for the edification and consolation of those who obey faithfully, and for the shame and graver damnation of the disobedient, the stubborn and the rebellious.
Finally, the holy and most chosen Fathers Jerome, Basil, Augustine and others admonished the members of their religious families to holy obedience most fervently and most earnestly: their words I have cited many times in other little works and sermons. The teachings, exhortations and commands of them all are founded on what Christ said in the Gospel: If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.13 And on this too, which He spoke to His vicars: He who hears you hears me; and he who despises you despises me.14 For this reason the Apostle wrote: Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but from God; and those that are from God are ordained: therefore whoever resists the power resists the ordinance of God; and those who resist bring damnation on themselves.15 And again: Obey your superiors (he says) and be subject to them, for they keep watch as having to give an account of your souls, so that they may do this with joy and not with groaning.16
Footnotes
Chapter 6 of 8