The Origins and Fate of Monasticism

Abstract

The Origins and Fate of Monasticism Columba Stewart OSB (bio) For many centuries of Christian history, monasteries were the laboratories of Christian spirituality. Virtually all of the famous mystics had monastic ties, and the literature shaping the great traditions of Christian spirituality has been remarkably monastic in both origin and orientation. Today many of the most popular spiritual writings in the western world are again monastic, a trend begun in the early twentieth century with the writings of Abbot Columba Marmion and then massively accelerated by Thomas Merton's move onto bestseller lists. More recently there has been the rediscovery of the sayings and other literature of the early monks, and a new interest in Benedictine life and spirituality, especially among laity seeking a form of spiritual affiliation to monasteries. In the Christian East, the monastic lock on spiritual expertise has been maintained with little challenge. The monasteries of Egypt, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere are filling up again with educated men and women eager to take up a traditional form of life. Droves of pilgrims visit monasteries on major feasts. Modern media serve up sophisticated websites from unlikely Mount Athos, where Wimax now blankets the Holy Mountain. As a Benedictine monk who was drawn to monastic life by this rich spiritual tradition, I have to be delighted by this upsurge of interest. As an historian and scholar of some of the key spiritual figures and texts of the early monastic movement, I know the extraordinary richness they have to offer and the uncanny freshness that much of the literature still brings to our understanding of prayer and the inner workings of the human heart. My most recent research project began last year as an effort to trace the essential monastic ideas and practices as they developed in particular cultures in the formative centuries of the monastic movement. I had been teasing out elements of this grander undertaking for some years, looking at prayer, biblical interpretation, ascetic practices in both eastern and western traditions. When I sat down to do this more systematically, however, I became convinced that there was more work to be done in clarifying just how monasticism as we know it emerged from the more variegated ascetic landscape of the fourth and fifth centuries. That process of monastic differentiation from other kinds of ascetic practice, which some now call the "invention of monasticism,"1 had many motives and impulses. All of [End Page 257] them shaped the classic monastic culture that resulted. This process was not, however, the story we normally think of as the history of monasticism. Understanding the differences between the real history and the received version, why parts of the story have been privileged and others left out entirely, is a pressing issue for those of us interested not only in the past, but also in how monasticism may yet develop. Because of the central role monasticism has played in the development of Christian spirituality, even in the spiritual marketplace of the twenty-first century, my exploration has implications for how we understand spiritual movements of all kinds and their relationship to standard accounts of Christian faith and practice. First, however, we must begin with the traditional account of where monasticism came from and how it grew. For centuries, histories of monasticism have started in Egypt with a hermit called Antony. He attracted so many disciples that, in the words of his biographer Athanasius, "the desert became a city." Another Egyptian, Pachomius, started off as a hermit like Antony but then created a communal form of monastic life. Their examples spread across Palestine, Syria, and the rest of the Byzantine world, and moved swiftly to Italy, Gaul, and the whole of the Latin west. Great leaders arose to hone the monastic edge when it got dull: Sabas, Benedict, Theodore the Studite, Athanasius the Athonite, Bernard of Clairvaux, Theresa of Avila. In the west we evangelized much of savage northern Europe and saved civilization during the Dark Ages. In the East we invented alphabets in the Caucasus and for the Slavs, were the spiritual heart of Byzantine culture, and converted Russia. We survived the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the USSR. And, yes, there...