Medieval Monasticisms

Forms and Experiences of the Monastic Life in the Latin West

Steven Vanderputten

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110543773
• eBook ISBN: 9783110543964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

From the deserts of Egypt to the emergence of the great monastic orders, the story of late antique and medieval monasticism in the West used to be straightforward. But today we see the story as far 'messier' - less linear, less unified, and more historicized. In the first part of this book, the reader is introduced to the astonishing variety of forms and experiences of the monastic life, their continuous transformation, and their embedding in physical, socio-economic, and even personal settings. The second part surveys and discusses the extensive international scholarship on which the first part is built. The third part, a research tool, rounds off the volume with a carefully representative bibliography of literature and primary sources.

I Historical Survey

1 Introductory Comments

Traditional narratives

Origins of cenobitism

The story of monastic life in the Latin West used to have a straightforward narrative logic. As a social and spiritual phenomenon, it was said to have emerged in the desert wilderness of third-century Egypt and Palestine. Fleeing persecution and looking to escape from worldly distractions, Christian hermits withdrew there in search of communion with God through a life of austerity and self-abnegation. Over time, their example drew such large numbers of followers that it became necessary for leading individuals to establish the earliest organized communities. Cenobitism, the nature and purpose of which was first described in a rule by the Desert Father Pachomius (d. 348), shifted the focus from the spontaneous withdrawal of solitary ascetics to the deliberately structured experience of life in a monastery. Over the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries, the number of desert monasteries grew explosively, and soon the phenomenon also spread across the Mediterranean region and further into Gaul and the British Isles. In all of these places, founders established different strands of cenobitism whilst continuing to look for inspiration to the eastern cradle of monastic life. This process of expansion was driven forward by the creation of numerous written rules, each of which represented an attempt to balance the individual’s quest for perfection with the needs and challenges of community life.

‘Triumph’ of Benedictinism

Emergence of orders and congregations

From this phase of intense experimentation and mutual influences emerged the pinnacle of early monastic rule-making, the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict. The Rule’s rise to dominance was consolidated by the Carolingian reforms of the eighth and early ninth centuries, which presented that text as the ultimate account of monastic community life. Successive ‘waves’ of reform in the next two and a half centuries corroborated the authority of that tradition, until various eremitical and apostolic movements post-1000 broke its normative monopoly. The charismatic founders of these movements criticized monastic prayer service as overly formalistic and insufficiently focused on the apostolic legacies of the early Church, and the lifestyle of practitioners as insufficiently committed to the ascetic ideal. They also challenged lay and clerical interference in monastic affairs, and found the unit of the single monastery lacking as an efficient organizational paradigm for the various difficulties facing the cenobitic phenomenon at that time. In order to make their ideal of a return to the authentic spirit of desert monasticism and the primitive focus of the apostolic Church a realistic prospect, this leadership gradually developed a range of supra-institutional procedures for legislation and governance: from these experiments emerged the earliest monastic orders.

Mendicant and lay movements

Reform and decline

By the late twelfth century, these new orders, too, faced criticism for their wealth and privileged status, and for being out of touch with the laity’s then-current attitudes and expectations. They were in turn replaced at the forefront of monastic life by various mendicant orders focusing on poverty and pastoral actions. Also emerging in this period were semi-religious movements that hosted men and women who wished to pursue the monastic ideal without taking vows or becoming part of a cloistered community. Later medieval developments led to major ideological, legal, institutional, and economic difficulties in nearly all strands of monastic life. Various reform endeavours and the rise of Humanism gave some of these orders and movements a new lease of life in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: but their charismatic appeal as ascetic movements was irrevocably lost. Observers sensed that they were witnessing the closing stage of a glorious epoch – correctly, so it turned out. Dissolution, Reformation, and the drastic interventions of the Catholic Church would soon fundamentally transform the monastic landscape of Europe.

New perspectives

This, in a nutshell, is how the history of Western monastic life was taught to generations of students, and how it continues to be recounted in major surveys and handbooks. Admittedly it makes for a gripping account of the resourcefulness of men and women in both their quest to achieve an ascetic identity and also to establish the modes of organization that would turn monasticism into a major institutional, socio-economic, and cultural force. Another aspect of its appeal lies in the description of the heroic, almost Sisyphean nature of these endeavours. It charts the various obstacles that made achieving the abovementioned goals difficult, the solutions charismatic reformers came up with imperfect, and the longevity of their renewal efforts doubtful. However, the sheer attractiveness of that narrative should not divert us from the fact that it is problematic as a representation of historical realities. Besides treating non-institutional and non-collective forms of monastic life as marginal phenomena, it also brings specific modes of observance and governance in and out of focus depending on later commentators’ estimation of their success, at a given point in their existence, in realizing the ‘authentic’ spirit of the monastic ideal. To justify this mode of storytelling, the traditional account does two things. One is to define a sequence of dominant models or movements and then to fit the history of each of these into a narrative cycle of charismatic origins, blossoming, and decline. The second is to represent each of these models and movements as homogeneous in terms of their ideology, governance, and observance.

Historicization of the field

‘Monasticisms’

Against this approach, recently scholars have argued that the monastic past should not be studied as a continuous chain of coordinated attempts to realize a single, ahistorical ideal, but rather as a situation in which there simultaneously existed many such ideals, and many different attempts to realize them. As the study of monastic forms and experiences in late antiquity and the Middle Ages is becoming fully historicized (meaning that all aspects of monastic life are considered in terms of their historical situatedness), the awareness is growing among experts that it makes no sense to argue that the practitioners of these different ideals and realizations belonged to one and the same ideological and behavioural phenomenon, or to describe their history as consisting of a single, forward-looking movement. Through its use of the plural monasticisms, the title of this book explicitly acknowledges this trend.

New perspectives

Deconstruction of the great master story has been useful and necessary. Besides other things, it has encouraged specialists to re-open case files they had long thought of as closed, and consider them from a less prejudiced standpoint. Some are trying out new methodologies and approaches, and exploring long-ignored sources and typologies. Others are making a case for bottom-up study of forms and experiences of the monastic life in order to capture its intrinsic diversity and make a more realistic estimation of common patterns. And others still are integrating previous research into the broader study of identity formation and historical culture in the medieval and early modern West. All of this has helped us gain a detailed understanding of how our previous story of the monastic past was formed through the prism of medieval and early modern conceptions of private and organized religion, human organization, and (ethnic, gendered, social,…) identity.

New challenges

But the disintegration of the master story has also shown that the field currently faces a narrative crisis. While most experts admit that the standard account of monasticism’s first fifteen hundred years does not match with the current scholarly understanding of the phenomenon, so far there has been no indication that the academic community is ready to substitute a new global narrative for the old one. Studies published over the last few decades have provided ample indications of not only the immense diversity of monastic forms and experiences, but also the substantial difficulties of reconstructing them adequately –let alone fitting them into a synthetic account that is suitable for use in classroom contexts and in handbooks. Meanwhile, research has also shifted from a chronological focus to a thematic one, a development many experts see as placing a new overarching narrative even further out of reach. Nonetheless, somehow we still need to integrate these recent approaches and findings into a chronological discussion that will give readers a first impression of the current state of knowledge on the subject.

Focus of this handbook

‘Messy’ realities and experiences

The present handbook is not an attempt to provide readers with comprehensive thematic discussions of monastic institutions, economies, spirituality, artistic and cultural life, societal impact, and so on. Rather, its aim is to focus on monasticism from a viewpoint that is inspired by sociological and anthropological perspectives, and to highlight two key features of early twenty-first century scholarship. One is the justified preoccupation of many specialists with the way in which narratives of the monastic past have been constructed over the last millennium and a half and how these have distorted our understanding of late antique and medieval realities. And the second key aspect is the abovementioned focus on the diversity of monastic forms and experiences, their continuous state of transformation, and their embedding in specific physical, socio-economic, even personal realities and experiences. Together these features explain why the story of medieval monasticism is shaping to become far ‘messier’ (in the sense of diverse, non-linear, and historically situated) – and arguably also a good deal more interesting – than it used to be.

Note: The references (preceded by S) in Part 1 of this book are to the primary sources listed in Part 3, Chapter 1.4.

2 The Beginnings of Monasticism(s)

2.1 Earliest Monasticisms

Earliest inspirations

Christian monasticism in its broadest meaning of ascetic withdrawal and self-abnegation manifested itself not long after the earliest faith communities emerged. Multiple traditions set a range of precedents. Educated Christians could refer to Stoic and Neo-Platonist traditions in Greco-Roman philosophy that celebrated the figure of the ascetic sage and advised that those seeking wisdom did best both to withdraw from ordinary social interactions and to practise chastity. They might also have had some knowledge of Jewish traditions of eremitism and other forms of ascetic life as evidenced through the Essenes and the Qumram community, and the taking of temporary vows to abstain from impure activities and contacts. More broadly familiar to early Christians would have been the New Testament tales of John the Baptist’s eremitism and Jesus’s forty-day retreat in the desert. Furthermore, on a metaphorical level there were numerous clues in the accounts of Jesus’s teaching that provided apparent endorsement of this lifestyle. By abandoning all that is worldly, rejecting all passions, and practising strenuous self-abnegation and mortification, the individual – so such teaching was thought to suggest – would be led to spiritual wisdom and insight into the very essence of divine being. As Jesus says in Luke 18:22, “Go, sell all that you have… and come and follow me”.

Earliest testimonies

Ascetic lifestyles

Eschatological motives

Early accounts by Christian commentators celebrated those faithful who willingly renounced their former situation in life and sacrificed their personal comfort and physical safety to find union with God. Alongside those who perished at the hands of Roman persecutors, others sought out an alternative, less violent form of martyrdom. By withdrawing from the immediate demands of family life and society in general, they pursued an existence marked by drastically reduced social interactions, sexual purity, and physical and psychological self-denial: they were the earliest monastics. For the first two and a half centuries of Christian history, we find scattered references in contemporary sources to men and women living in a state of poverty and chastity, observing silence and strenuously fasting, and devoting their existence to the imitation of Christ’s ideals. The chronographer Eusebius of Cesarea (d. 339/340) paints a picture that seems plausible in general terms when he describes how members of the early Church of Jerusalem had abstained from consuming alcoholic drinks and luxurious foodstuffs, never used ointments, and never took baths. According to his testimony, they had prostrated so often to venerate God and ask pardon for his people, that the skin on their knees had become raw “like those of camels”. Such practices may also have been a feature of community life in first-century Corinth and Smyrna, and also in other urban contexts where Christianity gained an early foothold. For these first generations of believers, the ambition to ‘leave the world’ probably had an urgency that transcended personal feelings of unease over how to reconcile one’s faith with one’s role in society, and related instead to the question of how to prepare for Christ’s imminent second coming.

‘Ascetic specialists’

Eremitism

Other ascetics

Even though eschatological concerns would periodically re-emerge over the next millennium and a half, over time their relevance as a primary focus in the faith practices of Christian communities declined. Presumably the realization set in that members had families to provide for and a role to play in public life, and that extreme practices of ascetic self-abnegation by all members would in the long term cripple a community’s worship and social cohesion. Although local Churches continued to collectively practise certain ascetic behaviours (fasting, sexual abstinence, and purity rituals) at specifi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• I Historical Survey
• II State of the Art
• III Bibliography
• Index of People
• Index of Authors
• Index of Places and Concepts