The Monastic Ideal

Writing at the end of his life, Bede noted how young men were being drawn into the monastic life away from studying the arts of war: 'What the results of this will be the future will show.' Within less than a century the Danish raids had changed the picture drastically; but not just the raids. Asser pointed out in his life of Alfred that the monasteries had brought some of this decline on themselves with their 'too great abundance of wealth.'

Here, at its beginning, we already see the problem that beset mediaeval monasticism. In its very success lay the seeds of its failure. The history of the four and a half centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution is a history of successive attempts to remedy this. And in the course of this, astonishing individuals made their indelible mark on European history with ideals of Christian living that would be an inspiration for all time. It would be easy to write this account in terms of these individuals: Benedict, Odo, Hugh, Bernard, Dominic, Francis - all saints, all inspirers of monastic movements which changed the face of church history. But these movements operated within a political context which like an ocean undertow was often pulling in the opposite direction. It was this political current which finally overwhelmed the whole movement.

Monasticism's origins lay in Egypt. St Anthony, a third-century farmer, fled civilisation for the life of a desert hermit. He was emulated by his friends and the movement grew. Three centuries later Benedict of Nursia similarly escaped Rome, set up a community with twelve followers, and later expanded it to other groups. The Rule Benedict wrote for them was his response to the eternal question, how to follow the spiritual life in a wicked world. It was not the first such Rule but it was the one that took root; and when successive reformers tried to bring the movement back to its first principles it was to this Rule that they looked. It was accepted later that adjustments had to be made - after all, life in mediaeval society was a far cry from sixth-century rural Italy. But therein lay the rub: what adjustments and how far?

The prologue of the Rule enjoined absolute obedience: only by the 'labour of obedience' could man's first disobedience, the source of original sin, be redeemed. Poverty, absolute in personal terms ('naked we follow the naked Christ,' said St Bernard, echoed later by St Francis), humility, chastity - these were the cardinal principles that underlay monastic life. Monks were not to leave the monastery. Prayer, the Opus Dei - the six divine services prescribed - manual labour, reading, sleep (eight hours in winter, six in summer) - this was their life, a regime of intensely organised activity. 'Idleness is the enemy of the soul,' said the Rule. So the dormitory, the cloister, the field, the refectory, its simple fare and silence (most of the day) became the monks' world. They were not to be ordained; they were foot-soldiers rather than officers of Christ and as such humble symbols of the promise of salvation. The abbot's role was that of loving parent, guardian of their souls for which he would be answerable on the day of judgement; but unlike a parent he was to be elected by the monks.

The transition from bare survival to large-scale land owning was slow but inexorable. The wool trade was taking off, the population growing, towns and trade expanding. St Bernard had lived in what a contemporary had likened to a leper's hut. But such days were over. With the new wealth came more complex finances; and debts. Withal their huge incomes most abbeys, supporting inflated populations of lay brethren and hired labourers, lived beyond their means. Standards of living inevitably went up - as Giraldus Cambrensis noticed when he sat down to a six-course meal with the monks of Christ Church Canterbury in the 1180s. Increasingly the old rules (and Rule) were having to be rethought.

Christ Church is a good example of how impossible it was to keep worldly affairs out of the monastery. From the 10th century on it had been one of several cathedral priories, taking the place of the chapter of secular clergy. Successive kings had fought for this change; Lanfranc at first resisted then accepted it, but at least two later archbishops tried to set up colleges for secular clergy (one attempt was at Hackington), only to be thwarted by their monks. Like its sister house, St Augustine's, Christ Church was a major centre of learning, supplying books to clergy and laity. Education - literacy - was seen as an important adjunct to the monastic ideal. Lanfranc had stipulated monks should read one book a year, and he granted a charter to St Gregory's priory to set up a school for grammar and music for local citizens. Meanwhile, Christ Church, like St Augustine's, was a major landowner: by the 12th century it owned nearly half the houses in and around the town. But property could bring lawsuits; endowments, obligations - some benefactors looked on the priory as a future retirement home. At no point, though, did the outside world intrude more brutally onto the monastic than on that grim December afternoon in 1170 when armed knights stormed in on the terrified monks and their archbishop. Becket's martyrdom then brought the priory still more wealth.

Each of the eleven religious orders that set up houses in England during the 12th century sought its own way of dealing with the pressures of the world. While the Carthusians retreated further into the contemplative life of the cloister, the Augustinian canons and the Premonstratensians (taking their Rule from St Augustine of Hippo) embraced pastoral work as well as poverty and labour as the basis of the Apostolic life. The Gilbertines, founded by Gilbert of Sempringham, set up double houses for men (Augustinians) and women (Benedictines), the latter meeting a social need for a women's establishment which did not carry the aristocratic overtones of the old Benedictine nunneries. The Cistercians too unwittingly contributed to greater social mobility by bringing new classes of workmen and women into their domains. These changes were reflected in the gradually shifting emphasis in monastic culture that helped pave the way for the most radical of the new Orders, the mendicant friars.

Backed by that most powerful of mediaeval popes, Innocent III, the Dominicans and the Franciscans opened a new phase in the monastic movement. The life of Christ could only be lived in the world, in absolute poverty: this was their message, their method to proselytise. The first friars arrived in 1224 and were welcomed by Archbishop Langton. After spending two days in Canterbury they went on to London, establishing missions in those cities and Oxford - centres where more friar teachers would be trained. The infant university was already awash with the intellectual tidal wave from 12th century France where St Bernard had clashed with Abelard's philosophy: 'by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.' The mendicants too were to challenge existing thinking in many ways, whether in the form of barefoot monks walking through the snow in Canterbury ('all who saw it shuddered to see them go,' wrote a contemporary) or of controversial thinkers like the great Franciscan teacher Roger Bacon who went to jail.

The convulsions of the 14th century - the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt - added to the undermining of the old order. Monastic populations never recovered after those plague years. The schism in the Papacy, now based in Avignon on the borders of unpopular France, weakened religious loyalties (see Piers Plowman's derision of 'the robber Pope of France'). By the time of Chaucer the unravelling had gone far. His pilgrims may be caricatures but they were surely recognisable to contemporaries - the prioress with her little dogs and golden 'Amor vincit omnia' brooch, the fat amiable friar and the hunting monk; and it is the monk who sounds the death-knell of monasticism with his dismissive phrase: 'Lat Austyn have his swynk to him reserved.' So much for the 'obedience of labour,' he's saying, so much for Rules.

The monastic ideal which had cemented society, kept learning and literacy alive and acted as spiritual safeguard for generations of believers was in decline. To someone like the 15th century Thomas a Kempis, quoted above, it had lost none of its redemptive power, but in England the groundswell against it was gathering.

The impulse which gave rise to monasticism finds curious expression in the 21st century. Those Protestant sects which emphasise separation from the world, as well as later-day Roman and Anglican coenobites join company with less disciplined escapists of every hue who look for reality away from Life as it is lived. Keble's 'trivial round' and 'common task.'

E. Cairns.

Bibliography

• Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, Clarendon Press 2000
• G.C. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, Cambridge University Press 1923
• D. Knowles, Christian Monasticism, Weidenfeld 1969
• C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, Longmans 1984