In a sense, the Pope Emeritus lives as a monk in his own monastery, in the heart of the Vatican, in the heart of the city of Rome.

With regard to this new life, we do well to ask if Benedict is not exercising "the Benedict option."25 This term applies to those Christians who have chosen to separate themselves from modern secular culture. It ultimately derives from the closing lines of Alasdair McIntyre's seminal work After Virtue. There, at the end of his survey of the progressive breakdown of contemporary ethical discourse, he famously asks whether we are waiting for a new, though very different, St. Benedict. This new figure is to lead us back to communities where the virtues can flourish. Possessing a unifying narrative and common purpose, they will provide the context necessary to sustain the moral life. 26

In an address originally given to the Italian senate in 2004 and later published in Without Roots, Ratzinger speaks of two different philosophies of history: those of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Spengler claims that cultures follow the law of a natural life cycle through various stages from birth, to a rise and flourishing, then to a decline and death. In his view, not only is the West declining, but nothing can be done to prevent its extinction. Still, it could bequeath its heritage to a new culture. Toynbee argues harshly against Spengler. He contrasts scientific progress, which is material, with true progress, which is spiritual. He argues that the West is in a crisis because it has embraced "secularism" by abandoning religion for "the cult of technology, nationalism, and militarism" (WR, 68). Toynbee rejects Spengler's determinism and insists that the fate of any society lies with its creative minorities. Perhaps in his monastic retreat, Benedict, ratifying Toynbee, seeks to become a creative minority of one.

Much as every monk withdraws from the world to enter more profoundly into the mystery of faith, so too has Benedict XVI. In doing so, he continues to be the teacher and professor that he has always been, in so far as his newly chosen life instructs the larger Christian world, in a renewed and unusual way, about the role of contemplation and prayer in the Christian life. For the modern age, in which so many people have come to see the will to power as the

25 Rod Dreher, "Benedict Option," The American Conservative, December 13, 2013, accessed May 4, 2017, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/benedict-option.26 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 245.

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