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The 1996 commentary on the Rule of the Master by Marcellina Bozzi, O.S.B., can only be termed a major work. Since Dom Adalbert de Vogue showed that this ancient monastic Rule is really the prototype of the Rule of Saint Benedict, scholarly and popular interest in the RM has greatly increased. This monumental commentary by Bozzi gives us for the first time a complete philological and historical analysis of the huge and complex Rule of the Master. Still, a close study of one of the Master's central themes, namely will and self-will, reveals that Bozzi has failed to come to grips with one of the basic problems of this text. Unfortunately, the Master believes that the route to perfect monastic obedience is the replacement of the will of the individual monk with the will of God as mediated through the abbot. Bozzi seems to accept this drastic solution and thereby acquiesces in a violation of human integrity.
Anyone who has stayed somewhat current with studies on the Rule of Saint Benedict (RB) knows that there has been a major breakthrough: we now assume that Benedict was using an earlier Rule known as the Rule of the Master (RM) as his main literary source. Consequently, we are now able to study the RB against a template with which it often agrees, but sometimes differs. That means that we now have a precious means of comparison, which is, after all, one of the main tools of analysis. This breakthrough came not because the RM was only recently discovered. In fact, we have known about it since the time of Benedict of Aniane, who included it in his Codex Regularum of the ninth century.1 But Benedict of Aniane and all who came after him assumed that the Master was copying from Benedict, not vice versa. For about sixty years now, scholars have become increasingly convinced that the priority belongs to the Master, not to Benedict.
That being the case, the researcher of RB has no choice but to "master the Master." To do so is not so easy, and that for several reasons. For one thing, the text of RM is long and often obscure. Second, the Latin can be difficult for someone who is classically...