The Church and Charity are two realities which are intimately connected with one another: the community (koinonia) which is the Church is grounded in a loving union (agape) and the union which is charity (agape) is in turn based on a communion (koinonia). To state more precisely the relationship existing between the Church and charity will be our concern in what follows.

Of the many references in Holy Scripture to the bond which exists between the Church and charity the most notable is that of Ephesians 4, 15-16: ‘Rather we should hold the truth in charity, and grow in all things into him who is the head, Christ. From him the whole body, welded and compacted together by means of every joint of the system, part working in harmony with part—from him the body deriveth its increase, unto the building up of itself in charity.’

This is simply an attempt to suggest some of the main ideas inspiring the common life of early Christians. There are several difficulties in the way of such an attempt. There is, for example, the common temptation to paint a sharp contrast between a golden age of the primitive Church and a cold and dismal present. Such a contrast is unreal. The virtues found in primitive Christian communities can be found in any of our modern parishes. The faults which appear in the modern community have their parallel in our Lord's own days. There were pride and jealousy, lying and treachery, among the Apostles; schism and heresy were a problem before the New Testament was all written. A romantic view is, therefore, unfounded, although we may recognise that pressure of hostile forces probably eliminated from the earliest Christian communities considerable numbers of people who would have existed in more peaceful times as a large body of lukewarm, conventional Christians.

The theme of the whole conference is the Common Life of Christians; the theme of this paper is the Monastic Ideal of the Common Life. The monastic life exists in two forms, the eremitical and the cenobitical. It would be interesting to show how the common life of Christians is realised also in the eremitical monastic life, but for several reasons this paper will consider only the Christian common life as it is envisaged in cenobitical monasticism. And in the West, the Rule of St Benedict remains the norm of cenobitical monastic life, so that the monastic ideal described will be that of the Rule of St Benedict.

Even with this limitation of scope, the subject is not an easy one to treat. During the 1,400 years of Benedictine history, and also in contemporary monastic life, the ideal of the Rule has been realised in a great variety of ways.

I Think good Catholics want the common Christian life of prayer as much as ever. They know that Christians should love one another, and live and pray as a body, but they do not know how to set about it. Other Christians would want it, and thereby become better Christians, if they saw before them an example of the Christian common life of prayer.

From one point of view the big difficulty seems to be that our Christianity is heart without head; from another it seems to be head without heart.

It is heart without head in so far as in this twentieth century of Christianity, hundreds of Catholics seem to be insufficiently instructed in what it means. It is head without heart in so far as Christianity has become for many people a mere matter of creed and catechism without sufficient of the practical common action which bring creed and catechism to life. Religion is worship, common religion and common worship; and it can never be a mere creed.

The great need is for a fully common life, within the family, which will make the family of use to the world around it. In past ages the monastic community was the spearhead. Today I feel it is the family, the Catholic family, which is to be the spearhead for Catholic penetration of a pagan world.

To make common life within the family a reality it is necessary to treat the children of the family as persons. I disagree with the saying, ‘Give me a child until it is seven …'. Apart from the mythical child of five who, on being told he had committed a mortal sin, replied: ‘Oh, but I cannot commit a mortal sin yet because I have not got the use of reason', one trains rather than teaches a child of under seven.