The Monastic Life

Traditions

Monasticism is integral to historic Christianity. One of the oldest expressions of Christian life, in its earliest forms it pre-dates the Constantinian age, survived the rise of Islam and Byzantine iconoclasm in the East, and in the West was a key element in the emergence of medieval culture. Andrew Jotischky sets out in his new book to survey the rich variety and legacy of medieval monasticism in both the Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Monks and nuns are custodians of living traditions. From very early on large numbers were attracted to anchoritic and cenobitic ways of living out the Christian faith. The exemplars, founders, and codifiers were revered as saints. After St Pachomius and St Anthony in Egypt we have St Benedict as father of western monasticism and St Basil is a similar figure in the east. Monasticism helped to carry the Church sustaining the faith as it also transmitted the Classical inheritance to the future.  Historians may take much of this for granted, but how far that understanding spreads is not clear. Most books on monasticism in English concentrate on the different religious communities as they were in England after the Norman Conquest and until Henry VIII, pay insufficient attention to the Anglo-Saxon era or to parallel developments on the continent. Their concern is with organisation and buildings, much less with spirituality. The author of this new book pays warm tribute to the scholarship of Dom David Knowles, but beyond his books, unless you have access to an academic library, the choice of reading matter if you seek to go deeper into the topic or on a European basis, is limited.

Declining numbers

I suspect that many contemporary Catholics have little knowledge of the history of monasticism even when educated or served in parishes by monks. Declining numbers may be lamented, but are accepted.

Monasticism in Orthodox Christianity and the ancient churches of the East appears picturesque, if not exotic, the stuff of holiday snaps.

Breaking out of that self-imposed straight jacket is overdue, and Andrew Jotischky is to be congratulated on doing so, and doing it so well. One wonders why it has not been attempted before. Maybe the sheer range of material is daunting, the complex interplay of events so extensive, that others have maybe quailed at the challenge. Professor Jositschky has not, and displays a breadth and command of knowledge and understanding that makes his expertise very accessible. His calm and lucid work draws upon the latest research by other academics. He also indicates a sympathy for the aims and achievements of monasticism. He leads his readers out of the tidy categories they may be used to, to experience the vitality and spiritual quest of medieval monastics. Even though he has confined himself to enclosed communities, and not included the mendicants, his study is surely destined to become a standard work of reference for years to come, and a pointer to new lines of enquiry.

Early virgin martyrs

Monasticism is usually seen as originating in Egypt, although as the author points out that may simply reflect that less material survives to record the Syrian experience. Even before men and women retreated to hermitages and then the desert, he suggests the origin may well lie with those early Christians who elected to live a devout life in their own homes in detachment, as in the stories of early virgin martyrs.

It was in Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria that Christian monasticism began, initially as individual anchorites, adding to that the desert experience of combat with evil, leading others seeking to join them. From such informal communities began what became the earliest cenobitic houses. Yet the appeal of the desert - be it the Near East, the wilds of Ireland and Northumbria or the wooded areas of Western Europeremained, and has often been sought out and reinterpreted by later monastic idealists. What they sought and how they led their lives would, for all the differences of time and place, still be recognisable to a monastic in 1025 or 2025. As he suggests, those who lived an alternative lifestyle in troubled times have their equivalents in the modern world.

Spread west

The idea spread west to Constantinople and to Italy and thence to what eventually became France and Germany and to the British Isles. In all these lands, and in many diverse ways, asceticism similar to that of Egypt and Syria was practised, and the role of the holy man as mediator between heaven and earth and between earthly factions was important to society.

There emerged over time from St Benedict, St Basil, and St Augustine among others a series of guides for communal living. Alongside that there was also a constant return to the wellspring. The Carthusian claim to never have been reformed because they were never deformed is no idle boast. However, just as they were a conscious attempt to recreate the model of seven centuries earlier, so too there was an almost constant impulse among monks and nuns, and among patrons, to return to the essentials of asceticism, discipline and anticipating Heaven on earth. This might take different forms locally but appears as a common impulse to Catholic and Orthodox alike.

The division between east and west was appearing quite early in monasticism as elsewhere in the Church. It can perhaps be encapsulated in the career of Wulfilaicis. He was an Italian who established himself in the sixth century as a stylite near Trier, to the evident disapproval of local bishops, distrustful of such imported Syriac traditions. Summoned to a meeting with them he descended from his pillar, but on his return, he found it had been destroyed on their orders. Chastened, he then organised his followers on terrafirma as a monastery. In the East he would doubtless have simply moved away and returned to being a stylite. Episcopal oversight was often contentious in all regions.

The differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, between centralisation and devolution, between seeking uniformity and pursuing individualism - was shaping up well before 1054. In the Orthodox world the anchorite was to continue to play a much more significant - and sometimes eccentric - role than in the western Church. Nevertheless, individual hermits who attracted a band of followers were to be very important in the West as founders of new branches within the Benedictine tradition in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The legacy of early monasticism was more dynamic and powerful, as was the role of women founders and abbesses, than we might think if we only look at post 1066 developments in England. These were living, developing traditions, often looking back to the desert experience, rather than a rigid following of a specific rule. Equally, respect for foundational documents could be a spur to renewal and new foundations.

The Monastic World is not just however about the world of monks and nuns and the spirituality or organisation of communities: it is also about a time when the world itself had monasticism at its very heart. In tenth century England Benedictine monks led the reform of cathedrals and the wider ecclesial and lay community, and the  Regularis Concordia of 964 bound monastics and realm together in a partnership that survived until the 1530s.

The book firmly locates monasticism in that world and in so doing provides an understanding of the interaction of those who were enclosed and those who were outside. Inevitably the mores of the world beyond the cloister invaded sacred space with factionalism and occasional violence, and not a few communities had strained relations with adjoining towns. The presence of the relics or patronage of an esteemed saint gave prestige and power to abbeys like St Albans and Bury St Edmunds.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler said that as an archaeologist he was not digging up things but people and Andrew Jotischky does the same as a historian making medieval monastics come alive for his readers. He makes the development of great transnational communities like Cluniac and the Cistercians understandable as both a response to and as an invitation extended to an expanding society with a burgeoning economy, highlighting the latest academic discussion about how those two monastic families came into being.

The one slight disappointment is that a publication from Yale, noted for its high production values, has only a few illustrations, all monochrome, and no maps to help locate early monasteries.

This is a book that deserves to have a wide readership. It is much more than just a digest of the latest ideas but one that offers a wide vision of what monasticism was and what it entailed. Easy to read and rich in stories, but rooted in scholarly rigour, it is suitable for the general reader as well as the academic, for the student wishing to extend their academic horizons, or, dare one suggest it, the potential postulant. ......

Andrew Jotischky is professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway, University of London. An expert in medieval religion and culture, he is the author of  The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World, Crusading and the Crusader States, and  The Carmelites and Antiquity.

The Monastic World, RRP £25, is available to  Mass of Ages readers for £17.50 with free postage at yalebooks. co.uk.  Enter discount code: MONAS.  Offer ends 31 March.