FLG Needs To Learn More About The Benedictines

Both Berman, in Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, and Noble, in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention,, argue that the spread of Benedictine monasteries under the Carolingians was a seminal event in the birth of modern law and technology respectively.

FLG admits that he is pretty ignorant of Benedictine beliefs, but he always assumed that monks withdrew from the world because they deemed it too profane. If Berman, Noble, and FLG are all correct, then it is somewhat of a paradox that an order who withdrew from the material world to concentrate on salvation was so influential in the development of the means by which humanity increases its capacity to manipulate the material world, technology, and the means by which we enforce the rules that proscribe what is permitted with that capacity once it has been developed, law. Neither of these is concerned with the hereafter in the least.

The first way that popped into FLG's head to reconcile this apparent paradox was that the monks withdrew themselves from the material world while still holding out hope that it could regain its prelapsarian grace. A hope which the monks worked, perhaps inadvertently, to render manifest.

In any case, if the seeds of modern technology and law trace back to the monasteries, then there's probably still a deep-rooted Benedictine imprint upon them. FLG feels that a failure to recognize and understand this imprint, if it exists, is a massive oversight in his understanding of the world.

There are numerous ways to approach the analysis of the Benedictine order, but FLG always finds it best to take people at face value at the beginning. Therefore, since the monks are motivated by religion, one should analyze their spiritual beliefs first. See what influences they might have and the potential consequences thereof. Then, if that's insufficient, look at the institutional structure, but still keeping the theological basis of the structure in mind. Then, as a last resort, the politics and economics of the monasteries.

Or FLG will just read the Wikipedia page on the Rule of Saint Benedict and call it a day.