The I.B.Tauris History of Monasticism: The Western Tradition 9780755625451, 9781848853768

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St Benedict has had the training of the ancient intellect, St Dominic of the medieval; and St Ignatius of the modern. And in saying this, I am in no degree disrespectful to the Augustinians, Carmelites, Franciscans, and other great religious families, which might be named, or to the holy Patriarchs who founded them; for I am not reviewing the whole history of Christianity, but selecting a particular aspect of it. John Henry Newman, ‘The mission of St Benedict’, Atlantis, January 1858, Historical Sketches, Vol. II, 377.

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List of Illustrations

Maps   1. Early monasteries.

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  2. Cluniac and Cistercian monasteries in the West from the tenth century. xx   3. Dissolution of the monasteries: the impact all over England and Wales. xxi Plates   1. Anthony of Egypt (c.251–356). (Public domain.)   2. Jerome (c.347–420). (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, V0032294.)   3. Martin of Tours. (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, M0013953.)   4. Benedict of Nursia (c.480–543/7). (Shutterstock/Zvonimir Atletic, 204014011.)   5. Monte Cassino. (Shutterstock/Anthony Ricci, 2364857.)   6. John Cassian (c.360–435). (Public domain.)   7. Illuminated manuscript of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert. (British Library, c.1180.)

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list of illustr ations   8. Illuminated page with Chi Rho monogram from the Gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels. (Public domain.)   9. Monastic tonsure. (Public domain.) 10. An ancient coracle boat. (Shutterstock/Awe Inspiring Images, 19098424.) 11. Augustine of Canterbury (d. c.604). (Wikipedia.) 12. The Venerable Bede (672/3–735). (The Trustees of the British Museum, London.) 13. The monastery of St Denys on the northern outskirts of modern Paris. (Shutterstock/Zvonimir Atletic, 203637277; Shutterstock/ fdimeo, 28502548.) 14. Cluny Abbey. (iStockphoto/albec, 48674326.) 15. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, V0031718.) 16. The Virgin appearing to Bernard. (Public domain.) 17. Cistercians busy with manual labour. (Public domain.) 18. Dominic (1170–1221). (Library of Congress, 4a2630r.) 19. Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226). (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, V0032044.) 20. Franciscan monk, Peru. (Library of Congress.) 21. Genealogical tree of the Dominicans, 1473. (Trustees of the British Museum, London.) 22, 23, 24.  Chaucerian characters. (The Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108, EL 26 C 9 f.) 25. Glastonbury Abbey. (iStockphoto/chrisdorney, 26567863.) 26. The Spanish nobleman Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). (The Trustees of the British Museum, London.) 27. Jesuit Church in Lucerne, Switzerland. (Shutterstock/konstantinks, 170340740.)

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list of illustr ations 28. The Rila monastery. (iStockphoto/vinzo, 16146815.) 29. Whitby Abbey in 1780. (British Library, London.) 30. Girls at St Margaret’s Convent School, East Grinstead. (Public domain.) 31. The Sisters of the Holy Family. (Library of Congress, Washington DC, 3b01479r.) 32. St Boniface (c.675?–754). (iStockphoto/ZU_09, 17386749.) 33. Monks working at various labours. (Shutterstock/Bocman1973, 87201829.) 34. A nun in modern dress. (iStockphoto/diego_cervo, 24564377.) 35. Lewis’s The Monk. (British Library, London.) 36. Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Archbishop of Canterbury. (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, V0041610.) 37. Heretics being burned at the stake. (Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London, V0041641.) 38, 39.  Two depictions of friars preaching. (The Trustees of the British Museum; Public domain.) 40. Clairvaux layout.

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Preface

The Gospels describe the founding of a religion of love, in which forgiveness and freedom were hallmarks. The question whether that relieved Christ’s followers of the obligations of the laws of Old Testament Judaism was early raised, though not speedily resolved. The ‘Council of Jerusalem’ (Acts 15) made some key decisions about the requirement that converts should be circumcised, but the arguments continued. The consensus in the end was that, for Christians, a liberating New Testament ‘grace’ had been substituted for – or rather somehow fulfilled and completed – Old Testament ‘law’ with its detailed requirements. Why, then, did the hermits who first embraced their hard solitary life in the discomforts of the deserts of North Africa and the Near East, see themselves as surrounded by demons intent on distracting them and dragging them down? Why did they believe so fiercely that heaven was to be entered only after years of striving and self-imposed suffering? Why did a life of deprivation and struggle as a monk or nun come to have such strong attractions for Christians down the centuries? This book begins with that paradox, but it is chiefly about another puzzle which emerges from this first one. How did this ‘fringe’ way of life become so comfortably embedded in so many societies, its adherents acquiring wealth and power? The extremist ideas about how to live a holy life which took root in early Christian Egypt and Palestine spread across North Africa and Europe and attracted interest in the Latin-speaking west of Roman Europe, where numbers of monastic houses were being established by the sixth century. Monks and nuns, and later canons and friars, began to develop a version of this dedicated and demanding way of life adapted to the society of Western Europe. For a thousand xi

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preface years, the region embraced them, offered them money and lands, regarded them as a spiritual asset to the whole of society. The central chapters of this book explore this great age of monasticism in the West and its modern legacy. The widening division of Europe’s Christians from late antiquity into Orthodox and Roman Catholic, East and West – which became formal with the schism of 1054 – has never been fully mended. This is partly because the cultural separation of the Greek and Latin Christian communities which began so many centuries earlier had brought about divergences too profound to be mended by an agreement over a limited number of specific doctrinal differences. The full story of Eastern monasticism from that time of losing touch must be told elsewhere, though the first chapters of this book are set on the common ground which the early Christians shared. Nor can this exploration include forms of monasticism in other world religions, for example in Buddhism, though there has been some exchange of influence in very recent times. In the Orthodox East monasticism has tended to cling firmly to its early forms and its first relationships with society. There remains the mystery of the long-term survival of the less fixed monastic way of life in the West, through enormous political and social change for nearly two thousand years. Each generation in a monastic community or order thinks about what it is doing in the terms of its Rule or what it understands to be the special vision of its founder. But these have had to be re-expressed in each generation in the terminology and with the assumptions of later ages. Balancing the continuity of a way of life against its contemporary relevance and viability is no small task, intellectually or practically. Monasteries were widely suppressed in Protestant Europe at the Reformation, but the call to this way of life continued to be felt. New experiments are still being tried, in a ‘West’ which has now expanded vastly in a geographical sense and includes the New World of the Americas, discovered by Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and further expanded as the world was explored in succeeding generations. The author of a book on monasticism who has never lived the monastic life should approach the task with humility. This is a manner of life not to be undertaken lightly, a life of self-sacrifice and obedience now peculiarly out of tune with the expectations of modern Western life. It demands one’s all. It involves a practice of humility going far beyond the courtesy of an admitted outsider writing as an interested observer. But an outsider may perhaps venture to criticise some of what has happened down the centuries as well as to applaud the heroic spiritual intentions. xii

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Abbreviations

Augustine, Confessions: Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1998) Bede, EH: Bede, Ecclesiastical History, eds. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969) Bernard of Clairvaux, LTR:  Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera Omnia, eds. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot and H. Rochais (Rome, 1957–74), 8 vols Calvin, Institutes: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1845–6) Cassian, Institutes: Cassian, Institutes, ed. Boniface Ramsay (New York, 2000) CCCM:  Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis CCSL:  Corpus Christianorum Series Latina CSEL:  Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Eusebius, EH: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. Zimmerman:  Gregory the Great, Dialogues, ed. O. J. Zimmermann (Washington, 1959) Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua:  Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, ed. G. Bourgin (Paris, 1907) and Guibert of Nogent, Self and Society in Medieval France, trans. J. F. Benton (Toronto, 1984) I Leap Over the Wall:  Baldwin, Monica, I Leap Over the Wall (London, 1949) Lawless:  George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule (Oxford, 1991) MGH:  Monumenta Germaniae Historica PG:  Patrologia Graeca PL:  Patrologia Latina xiii

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abbreviations Ralph Glaber, Histories:  Ralph Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, ed. N. Bulst, trans. John France and Paul Reynolds (Oxford, 1989). RB: Benedict, Rule, ed. and trans. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN, 1982) S:  Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Rome/Edinburgh 1938–68), 6 vols Tertullian, Apologeticus: Tertullian, Apology, ed. and trans. A. H. Woodham (Cambridge, 1843)

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Introduction

A history is not a handbook. This cannot and should not pretend to be a book on how to be a monk or nun in the Western world. A history ought to be written with a degree of detachment, though readers who have themselves chosen the monastic life may not agree. Outsiders have ways of glimpsing what the life means, by reading about it in the writings of those who have lived it, and talking – at least to those whose commitment as professed religious permits them to hold conversations with those still in the world. This ‘getting inside’ in imagination cannot be the same as ‘entering’ to live the life in reality. On the other hand, the successful religious who wanted to write about the life for outsiders would also face a difficulty of translation into words intelligible to those who have not experienced it, in rendering profundities understood on the pulses. The history of monasticim in the West has its narrative, but it also has its themes. Several of these have thrust themselves into controversies century by century. A guide may be helpful to the reader who wants to be able to position such topics in the emerging story, so these first chapters offer a snapshot view of the way these concerns have reappeared at different times. Is monastic life a foreign country? You are interested in joining a religious order? You may read a variety of invitations online.1 But that may not be enough to take you inside the reality of the life. ‘When I entered at the age of twenty-nine, both my abbot and novice master thought that I already knew most things about monastic life because I had earned xv

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introduction a doctorate in theology.’ The highly educated modern ‘postulant’ who wrote this found he did not know anything about the life’s ‘implicit rules, rhythms and techniques’.2 There has been a further shift, which he also notes, away from the understanding that monastic life is traditionally ‘for life’, and not a mere phase in a person’s self-development. A decline in ‘vocations’ in most parts of the world, and a greater tendency for recruits to leave, means that many long-established houses now consist of a tiny number of very elderly members. Dom Bernhard, the Austrian Benedictine just quoted, took stock of some implications late in 2013:3 At Kremsmünster Abbey we have become strangers in our own place. A monk that

guided tourists in our observatory was once asked, ‘Do all tour guides wear these black uniforms?’ Other lay tour guides are sometimes asked, ‘Does someone still live in this castle?’4

It seems to Dom Bernhard that this loss of a general understanding of the purpose and value of the monastic life can easily extend to the monks themselves. ‘We have also become strangers to ourselves.’5 This affects the process of ‘formation’, the technical term for the training and ‘shaping’ of a monk or nun. No longer does his abbey receive a steady stream of boys from its school, clear about what they are taking on when they become postulants.6 The last monk who had entered Kremsmünster Abbey through the school – and remained – had begun his life as a monk twentyfive years earlier. Few, if any, candidates seeking to become monks or nuns now have never lived ‘in the world’. Indeed, they are encouraged to have done so. Is monastic life a special calling? The consecrated life was conceived when it began in the first centuries as a special call to certain individuals to live a particularly ‘radical’ Christian life.7 Can monks and nuns expect to find themselves on a fast track to heaven? When they take their vows, do they place themselves in a special category, not shared by those who are merely baptised? In the later Middle Ages any suggestion being a monk or nun is a special calling roused the indignation of John Wyclif and others. He said it was as though monks and nuns laid claim to a second ‘baptism’, and thought themselves superior to other Christians. This challenge later underlay much of the hostility to monks and friars during the Reformation. xvi

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introduction In one respect the monastic life is different from any other. It offers a route for withdrawal from distraction in order to concentrate fully on God. Early monastic writers speak of anachoresis (withdrawal) and renunciation as a help to spiritual concentration. A favourite theme of medieval monastic writers seeking to teach prayer was the idea of ‘entering into the chamber of your mind, emptying it of distractions and closing the door’ (cf. Matthew 6.6, Vulgate).8 William of St Thierry (d. 1148) taught that a monk’s spiritual reading should be equally concentrated. Merely dipping into a book, he says, is not very edifying. It teaches nothing of lasting value. It makes the mind capricious and what is read does not stick in the memory. A favourite metaphor was that of chewing and digestion, indeed digesting as the stomachs of cattle perform it, for what is in the mind’s stomach should be brought up for frequent further ‘rumination’ as a prompter to prayer.9 Do monks and nuns do any useful work for the world? The Gospel story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10.38–42) has become the archetype of a fundamental dilemma. Should the good Christian concentrate on the inward and spiritual life of the contemplation of God or the active, practical life of doing good? Jesus said Mary had chosen the ‘better part’ in sitting and listening to him and not scurrying about like her sister attending to the domestic details of entertaining their guest. Thomas Merton (1915–68) pointed out that those who say that monastic life should be active, because that benefits others, forget that ‘Mary has indeed chosen the best part. It would be a disgrace for her to look with jealous eyes upon the activity of Martha and seek a part in the troubled life of her busy sister’. 10 On the other hand, Jesus did not condemn Martha’s choice. He merely reproved her for her indignation that Mary had chosen to sit and listen to him rather than help her sister. Religious communities in the West have always understood themselves as doing useful work for the world. For nearly a millenium and a half society accepted contemplatives as giving the time and attention to prayer that busy soldiers and rulers could not, or hard-working peasants, craftsmen and tradespeople either. So the spiritual life of the people could safely be left in the hands of the professionals, while other professionals dealt with defence and government, making and selling things and growing crops. Vita Consecrata notes a risk, familiar from earlier centuries, that the ‘religious’ will suffer from spiritual pride. ‘The possibility of a deeper spiritual formation might lead consecrated persons to feel somehow superior to other members of the faithful.’11 x v ii

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introduction Even in the Middle Ages ‘contemplative’ orders provided some medical support for the local community and did some teaching, but it was not until the ‘active’ orders emerged that it was possible to point to monks and nuns as ‘doing good’ in more practical ways. The modern West speaks of a ‘work–life balance’. A similar struggle to strike a balance preoccupied commentators on the monastic life in earlier centuries. It was especially challenging for those in late antiquity who had to do ‘work in the world’ in the society of their day, but felt a call to separate themselves from it. Such busy people, frequently prominent in public life, often expressed weariness and longing for retreat or retirement to monastic life. That was the first thing Augustine of Hippo (354–430) chose to do when he was converted to Christianity. He went off to spend some time thinking things through with a few friends, in a makeshift ‘community’ near Lake Como in northern Italy. ‘Burn-out’ was experienced by public servants such as Cassiodorus (c.485–c.585), busy Senator and public official.12 He retired to attend to his spiritual life and eventually become a monk. Fulgentius of Ruspe, born in the 460s, had been a tax collector; then he became a monk; then a bishop. The anonymous Vita which tells the story of his life records that the ‘burden of this world’s business began to weight heavily on him and its vain happiness to be displeasing’. He turned to monastic life where there are not to be found ‘the joys of this world but neither is there boredom’.13 Monks ‘are not weary from the journeys involved in public service […] they live in peace among themselves, lives that are sober, meek, humble and harmonious’.14 The English Church historian Bede (672/3–735) was struck by the implications of the way that the future Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) had given up his secular life as an imperial administrator and entered a monastery.15 Gregory himself says he felt the need of time to study and reflect. He describes how he seized what moments of leisure he could in a busy life of public service, and then dictated his reflections when he had more time.16 (Dictating to a secretary was common practice at this time.) His purpose was twofold, to practise that ‘ascent’ which contemplation makes possible and to learn to live better.17 He chose the book of Job because it contains a record of Job’s own spiritual battles and his ultimate victory.18 Members of today’s ‘active’ orders may be missionaries, teachers, doctors and nurses and those activities are obviously socially useful. Vita Consecrata also approved of the new secular orders of the modern world, describing them as ‘seeking to live out their consecration to God in the world through the profession of the evangelical counsels in the midst of temporal realities’ which ‘help to ensure that the Church has an effective presence in society’.19 x v iii

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500

 1. Early monasteries.

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Christianized areas, c. AD 600

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Major churches (Patriarchates)

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 2. Cluniac and Cistercian monasteries in the West from the tenth century.

Cistercian monasteries

Cluniac monasteries

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Newstead Creak Walsingham Croyland West Dereham Thorney Wymondham Peterborough Bungay Ramsey Ely Cambridge Bury St Edmunds Spalding

Burton-on Shrewsbury Trent

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Leicester

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Strata Florida

Kenilworth Evesham

Dunstable Dunmow Colchester

Tewkesbury Gloucester

Whitland

Cirencester Kingswood Abingdon Malmesbury Dorchester

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St Albans

Coggeshall Waltham Barking

Westminster

Reading Bruton Glastonbury Hartland

Sherborne Beaulieu Christchurch

Tavistock Buckland Truro

Amesbury Netley

Waverley Lewes

Faversham Canterbury Battle

Abbotsbury Torre

 3. Dissolution of the monasteries: the impact all over England and Wales.

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chapter i

How it all began

i. Was the monastic life ‘apostolic’? The New Testament picture There were no monks among the disciples of Jesus. Jesus taught a way of love and forgiveness in freedom from the ritual constraints of traditional Judaism. He said he himself was the ‘way’ ( John 14.6) and promised that his yoke would be easy and the burden light (Matthew 11.30). So why did a way of life requiring individuals to submit themselves to extreme ascetic deprivations; to deny themselves marriage and children; to live either together or separately according to a set of demanding rules or requirements, prove so popular and so long-lasting among early Christians and continue to draw in recruits until today? Jesus sent out his apostles to preach the Gospel, not to retreat from the world so as to seek closer communion with the divine in a life of extreme selfdenial. It is true that he said that his followers should be willing to leave home and family to follow him (Luke 18.29), but that did not meant that he did not warmly approve of family life. The New Testament contains a number of family episodes: the wedding at Cana, the meal at the home of Martha and Mary, and affectionate encounters with children. Jesus’ disciples and the early Christians did not require the abandonment of family life as a condition of membership of the Christian community. But that was what was expected in response to the ‘call’ to become a hermit and the later call in the West to join a monastic ‘community’ with a particular set of rules the new member must solemnly vow to keep. 1

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Monasticism was always going to be not an ‘ordinary’ but a ‘special’ mode of Christian life. It was never thought to be a way for everyone. But it was going to remain a question whether Jesus’ teachings established a foundation for this extraordinary way of life. Was the quest for personal holiness conducted in an extreme separation from the world a recognisable form of the ‘apostolic life’ for which New Testament warrant can be seen it would be asked? Could a life of monastic self-denial be a true ‘imitation of Christ’? And did it confer advantage in getting to heaven and if so, could that accord with a Gospel preaching a common life in Christ, in which such privilege seemed to have no place?1 Luke’s Gospel has been seen as more ‘ascetic’ in its tendencies than the other Gospels,2 but even if that is true it does not prescribe a life lived at the extreme of personal self-denial in the way it was being lived in the deserts of Syria and Egypt within a generation or two of Christ’s death and resurrection. A ‘Bible-based’ monasticism could be argued for only by hindsight, some time after the monastic life had already begun to be lived. Those who began it did not do so because they had read their Bibles and found clear instructions there. Hellenized Jews certainly brought Christianity to Egypt in the second and third centuries and it was adopted by local people.3 But how far books of Scripture were available in the Egyptian desert and what conception of ‘Scripture’ these local Christians are likely to have had, it is not easy to say.4 Tatian (c.120–80) was a pupil of Justin Martyr (c.100–65) who died for the faith.5 Tatian made one of the first surviving attempts to reconcile the narratives of the four Gospels in his Diatessaron. He was able to point to passages concerning requirements of self-denial, in mentions of wealth and marriage and food.6 And what Bible? The emergence and acceptance of the texts which eventually became the New Testament was gradual. For some generations, much variety and confusion prevented the development of an exegesis which could stay close to an agreed text.7 Even by the fourth century there was no settled New Testament canon yet – a body of Scripture which could be pointed to as agreed by the Church. For the more or less ‘accepted’ Scriptures there was no definitive version in any vernacular, and especially not in Coptic and the local dialects of Egypt. Books which became part of the Scriptures were translated into Coptic fairly early, but there are parallels with the ‘Old Latin’ problem of the existence of many versions, making it difficult to establish which was authoritative. Various versions were in use, including early ones in pre-classical Sahidic. An attempt at an official version was made but it did not supersede all these and in any case in the fourth century, in a period of missionary expansion after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, a variety of fresh versions appeared in local dialects. So tracing the 2

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how it all began influence of Scripture on the development of theology or practice, especially in remote places in these early generations, is not straightforward. Western-style monasteries in the form of organised communities with ‘Rules’ came later than the experiments of Egypt and the Eastern Empire, but when they did, they could perhaps claim to be modelled on the life described in Acts 2.32–47. There the early Christians are to be seen devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship (koinonia); to sharing property in common and giving up personal wealth; to the breaking of bread and to prayer: Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would

sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at

home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having

the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.8

Yet this was not a life of extremes. Voluntary poverty and a life of prayer were certainly central to both the eremitical and the monastic life from their beginnings, but the Christian community life as described in Acts is a long way in its cheerful sharing from the life of agonising spiritual struggle and self-denial on which a hermit or a monk set out. And the earliest monastic experiments seem to have been personal rather than communal. In any case, it was not directly from the study of the Bible that the notion of living such a life arose. It had its origins in the wider culture of the time. In the medieval period monks again thought it important to see themselves as living the vita apostolica.9 This call to continue the Christian life as it was delivered to the apostles emerged as another thread which has held out monastic life as a form of ‘Bible-based’ Christianity. ii. Practical philosophical living Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy concerned itself with how to live as much as with what to think. It was a moral as well as an intellectual system. ‘Schools of thought’ were open to mergings and overlaps and not normally ‘exclusive’ or ‘sectarian’. By the beginning of Christianity the threads which began as loosely 3

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition ‘Aristotelian’, ‘Platonic’, ‘Stoic’, ‘Epicurean’ were becoming blended in quite complex ways. Educated people and serious philosophers drew more or less at will on the approaches and arguments they favoured. Philosophers sometimes chose to live ‘out of the world’, dedicating their time to thought, alone or with companions. This was a natural aspiration, for the retired classical politician Cicero (106–43 bc) as much as for a young Augustine (354–430), future Bishop of Hippo, who was beginning a career as a lecturer in oratory towards the end of the fourth century. Thinking along these lines, people might choose on philosophical principles to live lives very like those of hermits or monks, subduing their bodies and physical desires so as to free themselves for pure thought and the pursuit of higher things. One of the characteristic features of late antiquity is the pervasiveness of certain ideas in its culture, ideas which were found all over the enormous Empire which ancient Rome had acquired. In the end, Imperial ambition overstretched itself and became easy meat for invading ‘barbarians’ on its borders, but the decay of Empire did not remove these ideas from the consciousness of its people, especially the educated. Christianity, as it won more educated converts, found it absorbed a good deal of this secular philosophy where it did not apparently conflict with Christian doctrine. For example, the idea that the body and the soul are at war, as described in Galatians 5.17ff., was a philosophical commonplace. Monasticism began in a soup of such philosophical theories and assumptions. Some of these ideas seem to have found their way and persisted among the uneducated too, for the first Christian hermits included Egyptian fellahin or peasants. Some philosophers actively objected to Christian teaching. The secondcentury philosopher Celsus wrote what is probably the first serious attack on Christianity. The Christian Origen (184/5–253/4), himself holding some views other Christians thought unorthodox, wrote a response to it in the mid-third century.10 Porphyry (234–c.305), a Neoplatonist thinker, wrote ‘Against the Christians’11 on the grounds that they had abandoned the conclusions of generations of thinkers in favour of an ‘atheism’, for did they not reject the divinity of the pagan gods? The problem of ungovernable thoughts and physical desires: Devils or wrong thinking? Early experimenters with the hermit or monastic life seem to have spent a good deal of time and effort struggling with their unruly thoughts. One area 4

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how it all began of particular importance was the interaction with Stoicism. Stoic philosophers cultivated tranquillity. They tried to avoid getting upset. They did this by seeking not to care too much about anything which might prove disturbing. They wrote with distaste of propatheiai, ungovernable thoughts, prompters to emotional discomfort. Christian hermits commonly complained that they suffered from propatheiai. There are accounts of their being plagued by ‘bad’ thoughts which they could not control. Christians tended to see these as temptations of the Devil.12 Hermits famously struggled with demons and rarely say they attained lasting calm. Apatheia (calm, freedom from upset), as Evagrius Ponticus envisages, is the Christian counterpart of Stoic tranquillity.13 For him too the ‘demons’ are temptations preventing the would-be holy from preserving spiritual peace.14 The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80) was himself a Stoic and the author in the 170s of a book of Meditations, which he wrote while on a military campaign. Marcus Aurelius began by reviewing (gratefully) the things he had learned from his parents and tutors and philosophers. He has had his moments of sexual excess but has mended his ways (Book I). Each day the man of affairs will meet people who are arrogant, deceitful, busybodies, spiteful. Those who have understood the beauty of the Good and the sheer ugliness of what is bad will recognise these behaviours for what they are. So such people cannot hurt him in his inward self. He should use his reason and behave with dignity and goodwill in making his response, in the belief that Providence is ultimately in charge and all will be well.15 (Here the thought chimes with Romans 1.28–9.) That thought will enable a man to keep a sense of proportion when dealing with the irritations and demands of the day (Book II). The mind governed by reason will not be tempted to corrupt itself by indulging in hatred, revenge, deceit; it will be pure (Book III). The Meditations, with their counsel of moderation and their advice on the preservation of tranquillity, do not recommend extreme withdrawal from ordinary life but a calm engagement with it. And above all, they do not expect the moderate man to face a life of ceaseless struggle against temptation. Christian hermits went to the desert and lived in cells so as to cut themselves off completely from the world and its distractions; philosophers did not normally go to such extremes – a life of leisure or inward balancing of philosophy with practical duties, in a well-run home, was often more the philosophers’ way. As Emperor from 161 ad, Marcus Aurelius had himself actually persecuted Christians. For Christians were not flexible; they embraced a particular faith and were not willing to accommodate other religions, as was the Roman syncretistic 5

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition expectation. Perhaps the Emperor saw Christians with their struggles as posing a threat to Stoicism with its calm, balance and moderation. Christians tended to think of troublesome thoughts as temptations of evil spirits. The Bible offered some clues to Christians about both the Devil and smaller demons. Jesus encountered the Devil during his temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4.1–11). In Mark 4.10–20 is told the parable of the Sower, in which Jesus explains that the good seed, the seed which falls by the wayside and is snatched away by birds, is the teaching which enters men’s hearts and is removed by demons. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (6.13–17) again assumes that Christians will need to fight the Devil. James (4.7) also counsels resistance, as does Peter (I Peter 5.8–9), who portrays an active Devil, prowling about like a lion in search of prey. The Book of Revelation describes demons too (16.13–4), as well as the Devil (20.2–3). Problems with demons were not confined to Christian hermits. Superstition was rife in the general population. Pagans, including educated pagans who called themselves philosophers, had a strong notion of the demonic. Contemporary paganism had a well-developed idea of the numinous, a consciousness of powers located in places, in statues, in objects. People – including many educated people who understood philosophy – believed that the air was full of spirits.16 So pervasive was this idea even in the late fourth and early fifth centuries that when Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God he devoted Book VIII to the question of the relation of these spirits to the demons which seemed to plague some Christians. The context was the apparent collapse of the Roman Empire, which had been officially Christian since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312. Exiles from Italy, educated influential people, were asking awkward questions. If the Christian God was as powerful as had been claimed, they wanted an explanation of these events. Augustine knew that even sophisticated pagans with a philosophical training accepted the reality of such supernatural beings. The air of late antiquity was not only commonly envisaged as thick with gods; it was also taken for granted that their behaviour left a good deal to be desired. They were greedy, malicious, demanding placatory sacrifices, open to bribery. Explanations were called for. Augustine argues in the first chapter of Book VIII that these supernatural beings are real enough. However, they are not gods but demons. They are fallen angels, hopelessly sinful but retaining many of the powers they were given at their creation as high spiritual beings. Augustine had serious moral reservations about the corrupting effects of contemporary theatrical performances. He combines them with his concerns about demons by putting the goings-on of demons on 6

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how it all began the ‘stage’ of contemporary society. In Book VIII.5, he depicts an ancient version of a combination of television ‘reality show’ and ‘red-top’ or ‘tabloid’ newspaper, in which a ‘theology’ of gossip about bad behaviour among these divine ‘celebrities’ is combined with the portrayal of their base pleasures and ‘impure desires’. Conduct that had had some sort of dignity in temple worship becomes ‘obscene’ when it takes a debased form in theatrical performances. The trouble with these ‘demon-gods’ is that they are rational beings (even if behaving irrationally), and higher in the cosmic hierarchy than humans are, because they are pure spirit and immortal while we have mortal bodies. On the other hand, like us they are afflicted by passions (VIII.14). These, as Augustine has read, are only too like our passions, marked by vanity, the desire for honour and recognition, pique, revengefulness for perceived injuries (VIII.16). These are not fit beings to worship, Augustine argues (VIII.17). Nor can it make sense to believe that only by propitiating these unpleasant spirits can Christians obtain their advocacy before the higher Divine, which being pure spirit can hear them better than it can us (VIII.18). His own Christian mother had ‘played safe’ in this way by offering at the shrines of the gods just in case. Demons of this kind were often portrayed as wrestling with the hermits in the desert from motives of revenge – because the hermits were Christians and no longer worshipped them – or simply because they were malicious and enjoyed tormenting people. The hermits suffering from this pestering certainly saw the problem as real. The problem raised by the concept of a Devil, or Satan, was rather different. The Supreme Evil might be seen as Christians saw it, as a rebel against an omnipotent and wholly good God, and a rebel who was bound eventually to be defeated. ‘Dualism’ was different. It envisaged a universe ruled by two eternally warring powers, good and evil, spirit and matter, not one supreme omnipotent God but two first Principles, Good and Evil. There was no certainty that the good would ultimately triumph. Dualism took many forms down the centuries; these were broadly shared by Gnostics and Manichees in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, by Bogomils, Cathars and Albigensians. The basic assumption was that the Devil and his demons are engaged in a cosmic war of good and evil, of which the individual personal battle with demons forms but a tiny part. This notion of good and evil eternally opposed and fighting for supremacy allowed much ordinary human experience to be explained. It was an attractive solution to the puzzle that there was so much evil in the world. 7

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition To Christians, dualism was heresy because it was incompatible with the belief that there is one almighty God, wholly good and opposed only by a Devil who is himself a creature doomed to fail in his evil intentions. But some of the assumptions linked with dualism and widespread in the ancient world found their way into Christian culture. In human beings, the body and the soul could be seen as naturally at war, and the body’s desires as strongly attractive and dangerously tempting. They would run away with the soul if not checked. We have already seen this touched on in Galatians 5.17, with its warning that sinful nature wars against the human spirit. Does not everyone feel the tug of sensual pleasures against all reason? It seemed to be common experience that ‘matter’ matter and its attractions was at war with spirit and intellect. On this assumption rested much of the Christian preoccupation with the dangers of gluttony and sex, and the insistence of monastic traditions on the choice of an abstemious and celibate life. The mistrust of ‘matter’ took many forms. Porphyry was convinced that a vegetarian diet was morally superior and would promote the development of higher intellectual powers because the vegetarian did not weigh down his digestion with meat, which was somehow more ‘material’ than vegetables. He wrote to Castricius Firmus on ‘Abstinence from Animal Food’, castigating him for abandoning the vegetarian way of life he had adopted. He had formerly held that a meat-free diet promoted mental endurance and was therefore good for philosophers (I.2) but now he had given it up. Porphyry first sets out the arguments of earlier thinkers against abstinence from meat. Then he refutes them, stressing that his arguments are not directed at all classes of people, not to those who work with their hands or are athletes or soldiers or sailors, or even orators engaged in public life. Vegetarianism is for deep and ambitious thinkers. For such, it is also beneficial to live simply and without luxury or comfort, avoiding alcohol and soft beds and eating little even of their limited vegetarian diet (1.27–8). Too much food and drink over-excites and distracts. Here were the some of the roots of the forms of Christian asceticism which involved minimal eating and drinking. Porphyry develops such ideas at length. He applies them not only to the individual human condition but to society at large. In Book III he reminds Firmus that vegetarianism is not only beneficial to the philosopher but also to the state and civic society generally, because it promotes justice towards others. Those who are in a state of piety towards the gods and have their appetites under control will not ill-treat their fellow men. The underlying presumption that the flesh and its appetites are somehow a distraction and a danger became fundamental to a Christian monasticism, which 8

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how it all began adopted a similar ascetic, going beyond not eating meat and refraining from sexual intercourse and other forms of bodily enjoyments to extremes of physical self-denial. How these ideas entered Christianity and how it adjusted them These ideas formed part of the climate of debate of the first Christian century or two among the educated. Most people would take them more or less for granted. But there were also active leaders of thought who tried out contemporary philosophical principles in the context of their Christian beliefs. Justin Martyr was born at the beginning of the second century, of a family able to give him a good education, beginning with a training in rhetoric, then the basic need of educated men in the Roman Empire. Justin explored the philosophical options of his time as other young men did: the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists. Then, walking on the seashore one day about 130 ad, he met an old man who told him the story of the life and death of Christ. He was converted. He says in his Apology (2 Apol.12) that he came to realise that the Christians who stood so quietly and bravely in the face of persecution and death deserved the utmost respect. Here he showed the zeal of the convert. His Apologia for the faith is addressed to the Emperor as a defence of the Christians and an attempt to protect them against future persecutions. He explains that the Christians respect civic authority and are not revolutionaries. Jesus taught his followers to pay their taxes and render to Caesar what belonged to Caesar (1 Apol.17). As a convert Christian, Justin chose to live a life of great austerity himself, and to travel, debating philosophical questions with those who would listen. He even ran a school in Rome for philosophers interested in Christian ideas. Christian asceticism adopted such beliefs to an extent a true Stoic would have found immoderate, as perhaps Marcus Aurelius did. A preoccupation with the dangers of sexual temptations became the most powerful of all. Augustine’s writings on asceticism (De continentia, De sancta virginitate, De bono viduitatis) place an almost exclusive emphasis on sexual continence, for example. The arguments for the positive benefits of choosing chastity, the freedom from the torments of lust, became largely buried under the negative arguments about the terrible tyranny of the body. ‘Hermetic’ writings also had an influence on this Christian body-hatred. These still-mysterious writings seem to have come to prominence about the second 9

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition century, and had Egyptian connections. The Corpus Hermeticum17 taught an ideal of purification by detachment from bodily enjoyments. A Hermetic image particularly striking to Christians and reappearing down the centuries was of the human being poised between being a god and being a beast. If he behaved in a beastly way he would deteriorate into a mere animal. If he aspired upwards to the spiritual be could become godlike (for pagans, even a god). All this seems to have prompted a long tradition of Christian worry and effort in subordinating the ‘flesh’ and the evolution of an enduring Christian ascetic tradition. And nowhere was this more central to a way of life or more enduring than in monasticism and the eremitical life. The height of the divine and the hermit’s longing Much philosophical effort was also put into the search for the Best and Highest in the late antique world. Many schools of philosophy expected to find that this Highest lay beyond human thought to grasp and language to express. Even the word Being seems to hint at some limitation unworthy of the universe’s Best and Highest, suggested some Platonists, struggling to put the problem into words. This God must by definition be remote, not a person in any way humans can recognise, and any sort of anthropomorphism should be resisted. This set the Platonist ideal a long way from Christian belief in a God who cared for his creation so much that he himself became man to save it. So important was this insistence that God could not be reduced to our human level that a good deal of philosophical effort went into devising a hierarchy of the divine, descending from this Remoteness. Below the Highest and Best would, some suggested, need to be a Logos (Word), a first and creative principle of thought and rationality. Below that might be postulated a ‘Soul of the World’, for even the Logos would not be able to ‘touch’ matter because matter was dirty and contaminating. This Anima Mundi or World Soul would be able to communicate directly with these higher Principles or First Things. Such a ‘trinity’ could be persuaded to fit with Aristotle’s fourfold account of causation: ‘final, efficient, formal and material’, if a place could be found for a Material Cause by identifying it with the matter created things are made of.18 Some Platonists regarded matter as primordial. This ‘hierarchical trinity’ of Platonism was difficult to reconcile with Christian teaching on the Trinity as it developed. Christian theology insisted that the Father 10

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how it all began (or the Highest and Best), the Son (Logos) and the Spirit are equal and coeternal. The Father ‘always’ had a Son and there was ‘always’ a Spirit of God. It had to find arguments to remove the idea of a hierarchy of the divine or any subsidiarity in formulating the Trinity. So without compromising these principles, in Christian theology, God the Father could be seen as the final (ultimate) Cause of all created things; the Logos or Word as the ‘effective’ cause, prompting specific acts of creation in the form of ideas; the Holy Spirit as giving ‘form’ to the rational intentions of the Logos. Matter, itself a created thing, could be seen as combined with ‘forms’ by divine action to produce particular actual created things. For those Christians who longed to spend their lives in contemplating the divine, the other important difference from the thinking of contemporary philosophers was that they believed the Son of God had come to earth as a human being. They therefore had a mediator between God and man quite unlike anything envisaged in classical philosophy. They had someone to talk to personally in prayer. God must indeed be remote, almighty, omniscient, beyond our imaginings, but Jesus was not. So the objective of the soul constantly at prayer, a soul in a body never leaving the cell if it could help it, concentrating with all its force upon its communication with God, might have various objectives depending on the conception of the relative positions of God and man in the exchange. This ‘contemplative’ might also be relatively unsophisticated as a thinker, and certainly not necessarily up-to-the minute in hearing news of the decisions of Councils of the Church who were struggling to agree definitions and adopt terminology to ensure that educated Christians were not seduced into heresy by the attractiveness of the philosophers’ versions. For these ideas are of course far from simple. They gave rise to centuries of debate. How exactly was Jesus also God? Did he just wear his humanity like a cloak of flesh or was he ‘really’ a man? Did he have both a human will and the will of God? ‘Christology’ developed among Christian intellectuals during theological debates about the form the doctrine should take and the quashing of a variety of opinions which were eventually declared to be heresies.19 Belief in Christ also established itself among ordinary believers, but it is the hermits who – as far as the evidence survives – most notably sought an active and developing encounter with him. In Ephesians 3.17–19, Paul speaks of Christ dwelling in the hearts of Christians through faith so that they know the love of God from within themselves and can embrace the breadth and length and height and depth. Hermits and early monks seem to have embraced a relationship with Christ inspired by the idea that something of this sort was possible. 11

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition But it was natural to frame their efforts in terms of certain contemporary imagery. They saw themselves as fighting in his army (doing battle for him),20 and sharing his suffering.21 The soul ascending in the Christian universe The philosophers’ hierarchy of the divine might have no place in Christian thinking because it made the Persons of the Trinity unequal. But Christianity did entertain hierarchies. Late or ‘Middle’ Platonism saw the cosmos ‘mystically’ as a place through which the soul might ‘ascend’ towards God.22 Pushing oneself to the spiritual and physical limits was attractive to Christian hermits and monks because they thought it freed them from the trappings of the body and allowed them to ‘rise’. It was in tune with the ideas which underlay hermetic teachings too to regard the bodily as lower than the spiritual, with human beings, souls in bodies, occupying their middle position in the hierarchy, able to sink as well as to rise, and to become more ‘beastly’ or more ‘godlike’ according to the way they behaved. In the Platonic universe reality inheres in the ideas or forms or models or patterns after which all things have their individual being. All particular exemplifications of those ideas are inferior to the originals. The idea of an elephant is greater than any elephant which may be met on earth, for that elephant will die and its body will decay but there will always be the idea of an elephant. Humans, in their destructible mortal bodies, naturally want to reach a level where there is no decay and all is spiritual. Philosophers might embrace similar ideas but Christian ascetics sought to live them, giving their energies to the necessary self-discipline and sacrifice. Genesis 28.12, with its description of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven, gave Biblical authority for Christian attempts to climb to heaven in a life of prayer. It also sat well with the view that the body holds back the soul in its aspirations. Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, the notable fourth-century hermit, describes a life in which the impediment and distractions of the body are a necessary burden to the soul which must fight evil in the form of demonic temptations if it is to be freed for spiritual ladder-climbing.23 On this understanding that there is a ladder of ascent to God, it fitted with both philosophy and Christian belief to hold that the soul can climb only so far because it is a mere creature. Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296/8–373) saw the gulf 12

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how it all began between man and God as bridgeable only by God coming to us. Some mystics, he says, have held that a person who sets out to seek God (epektasis) may attain a brief unity in a moment of rapture or ecstasy but it cannot attain perpetual union (anakrasis) with the Godhead.24 The created soul is of another order, another kind. It cannot ultimately become God or fuse with the divine. For some thinkers, notably the fifth-century Pseudo-Dionysius,25 this prompted elaborate attempts to depict the hierarchies of heaven, including the angels. For him a distinction lies between rational speculation and an ‘experience’ of the divine and the ‘holy’. In his book on vegetarianism, in which he encouraged abstinence from eating meat, Porphyry recommended ‘contemplation’ as a method of climbing towards the heights. ‘Contemplation’ is not a matter of debate or discussion or ratiocination, as he describes it, but of the steady fixing of the mind on the object of contemplation, with the aim of becoming one with it as far as may be possible.26 Pleasures of the senses can only be a distraction from this task. The ideal life, thus understood, is purely intellectual but it is not for everyone (1.30). Those who want to win the prize must enter the race stripped of worldly entanglements and sensual pleasures, and, naked and unclothed, run for the Olympic prize of the soul (1.31). The imagery of running for a prize is a commonplace of the intellectual climate of the times; it is there in the New Testament too.27 iii. Jewish sects and their desert experiments These philosophical ideas were very widespread in the late antique world. They were carried about the Roman Empire as part of its general intellectual culture and found a corner in the many local cultures of which the Empire was made up. This included the Jewish communities, many of which lived in diaspora about the Empire. Jews could be philosophers too and they were sometimes influenced by thinking which valued extreme asceticism. It has been suggested that John the Baptist, who came ‘neither eating not drinking’,28 may have had links to Jewish ‘baptist’ and ascetic groups.29 Jesus himself went into the wilderness for a time fasting.30 He himself made a link between Elijah, Elisha and John the Baptist,31 which has been taken as evidence of conscious continuity in an existing tradition of a specifically Jewish asceticism. During the first Christian century there was conflict between sects such as the Essenes and the ‘Zealots’ among the Jews who lived in Judaea, which was then a province of the Roman Empire. Another two groups appear in the New 13

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Testament along with the Scribes (who were regarded as the intellectuals). These are the Pharisees (a sect including lay people, with strong views on the interpretation of Judaic law) and the Sadducees (who formed the priestly class).32 Flavius Josephus (37–100), who gives an account of these divisions, was a Pharisee himself. He describes the Pharisees as the ‘people’s party’, while the Sadducees rely on special priestly privilege. Were such groups living a form of proto-monastic life with any of the features of withdrawal from the world to live in and selfdenial which began to emerge among the Christians? Could they have given the Christians the idea? Pliny the Elder (d. 79) wrote about the Essenes in his Natural History. There he describes them as living celibate lives in poverty in communities which he locates near the Dead Sea.33 The historian Josephus confirms that the Essenes lived a pious and communal life, a life in which doing charitable works, not getting angry and sharing communal meals all feature.34 The Hellenic Jew Philo of Alexandria (15/10 bc–45/50 ad) also mentions the Essenes in passing, in his De vita contemplativa, where he describes the life currently being lived by an ascetic community in Egypt, close to Alexandria.35 In De vita contemplativa, Philo, who could see things from the point of view of one who was both a philosopher and a Jew, discusses the similarities between the way of life of the apparently Christian Therapeutae and that of Jewish ascetics sects such as the Essenes. The Therapeutae, men and women, were contemplatives, while the Essenes tended to regard themselves as what in later monasticism would be called an ‘active order’. There were also some differences about the admission or inclusion of women. 36 The Therapeutae are, Philo suggests, to be met with in the greatest numbers in Egypt and especially in the region round Alexandria.37 The climate is good, and that makes it possible for the houses in which the Therapeutae live to be very simple. They need seek only protection from extreme heat and extreme cold and sufficient space to enable them to live apart from one another and protect their individual solitude. Each house or ‘cell’ has its shrine but they have a common place of worship for Sundays, when they assemble in order of age and the oldest and most learned preaches to them all, on topics of moral philosophy. They also have a common place to eat together on occasion. The women have a separate chamber for these meetings but the dividing wall has no roof so that they can hear what the men are hearing. Those joining them bring nothing with them and they do nothing but read the Scriptures and ancient writings, consider them, and pray and sing hymns38 in perpetual concentration on God, with the aim of 14

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how it all began ensuring that no thought but the thought of God ever enters their minds, even in sleep. He notes with approval the consequences of successful contemplative practice. Some can ‘remember’ their last meal for three days without needing to eat again. Some can even manage to go for six days without food (35). When they do eat, they eat only bread and salt, with some bitter herbs (for those of luxurious habits). They drink only water and that in restricted quantities. They regard satisfying their appetites as giving quarter to the body. Their clothing is again the bare minimum necessary for modesty and protection from the weather: shaggy animal skins in winter, a piece of thin linen cloth in summer. Their intermittent community life involves worshipping and eating together as a ‘community’. They come to the special feasts for worship and for celebration in a common meal, in white garments. Before they eat they stand in a row in order of seniority in the life they have chosen, and lift their eyes and their hands to heaven. Women members may share in the feast but they do so separately.39 These women members are usually of mature age, often widows. The seating arrangement is the reclining one usual in late antiquity but the couches are not luxurious. They are simply mats made of papyrus with a small pile at the elbow for the recliner to lean on. The serving at the meal is done not by slaves but by young members of the community, who act from gracious willingness to serve the others. In these ways the community deliberately presents a challenge to the social norms of the day. At these feasts there is no wine but the infirm old men may have their water hot. The Therapeutae, or at least their reputation, may have lasted some time as a offering a mode of monastic life appropriate to lay people. Pseudo-Dionysius was a philosopher aware of monastic thinking and practice. He was known to Severus of Antioch, who cites him in his Adversus apologiam Juliani in 519. He knew about the Therapeutae, whom he identifies as lay monks, but of a superior kind and under the supervision of the clergy. Their act of profession is not, however, an ordination.40 The rite that makes a monk is described in Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy VI.i–iii: ‘The priest stands before the […] altar and chants the invocation for a monk.’41 He does not kneel and the Scriptures are not laid upon him. The priest then asks him whether he renounces all worldly distractions and undertakes not even to phantasise about them in imagination. When he promises the priest makes the sign of the Cross on him and his hair is cut and his monastic clothing given to him. Then all ‘sacred men’ present give him the kiss of peace and he is allowed to participate in ‘divine mysteries’.42 15

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Jewish asceticism and Christianity Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), often considered the Church’s first real ‘historian’, thought Philo might have met Peter when he was in Rome. If he did, he would have had some knowledge of the Christians in that way. He gives a summary of what Philo says in his treatise On the Contemplative Life,43 expressing some uncertainty as to whether the Therapeutae were really Christians, but that name was not well known at the time so Philo chose another in order that his readers would get his drift. He notes that Philo stresses that entrants to the community gave up their personal property to their relatives so as to enter free of the encumbrance of wealth. This Eusebius expressly links with Acts 2.45 where it says that the Christians who joined the apostles also divested themselves of their wealth by selling it, but in their case they brought the price of what they sold and gave it to the community. 44 Eusebius, referring to Philo as his source, explains that in such communities the members spend the whole day purposefully in intellectual and spiritual exercises. They read the Scriptures. They consider what the philosophers have said and seek to interpret it so that, taken figuratively at least, it may be seen to accord with the Scriptures.45 They lead disciplined lives, keeping vigils for major festivals and singing hymns. Philo describes orders of ministry: bishops and deacons. iv. Making martyrs of Christians Why were Christians persecuted? Jesus taught his disciples to ‘belong’ to society, by paying their taxes and being good law-abiding citizens.46 But after his death and resurrection they had to organise themselves. The very earliest Christians were not among the leaders of society in the expanding Roman Empire. They formed the kinds of small local Christian ‘church’ communities to which the New Testament letters of Paul and Peter and James and John were written. Those letters show that these had their local leaders and their dissensions. But the level of debate in their quarrels was not apparently theologically sophisticated; it presented itself more as a tendency to schism. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is full of exhortations to unity. He describes the community as a single body, whose members make their distinct contributions to the whole (1 Cor. 12. 5–31). 16

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how it all began These very early Christians separated themselves from the world – up to a point – by their refusal to engage in practices such as sacrificing to the pagan gods; but they did not as a rule try to design ways of life for themselves which required them to withdraw from ordinary life. The urge to ‘go apart’ which led to the beginning of monasticism emerged during the first centuries. There was no single founder or initiator of this idea, though some of the pioneers became famous. It was not a single ‘movement’. It seems to have happened as a result of the confluence of several streams of change and shifting expectation, and the two influences we have been looking at: that of some of the contemporary philosophical traditions, and precedents set by certain Jewish sects. An important prompter may have been the repeated persecution of Christians. It made martyrs and created a class of ‘conscientious objectors’ who were seen to risk martyrdom on purpose. These courageous individuals refused to compromise with paganism or worship the Emperor. Why did the state authorities begin to reject the very ordinary law-abiding citizens who were Christian believers, most of them not politically significant or any danger to security?47 The ‘state’ was powerful and increasingly enormous, a Roman Empire which had ceased to be governed as a republic, and was expanding across much of modern Europe in the first Christian centuries. In many respects this move to imperialism was a success for Rome. Two centuries of a pax romana were achieved, and the Empire expanded vastly, taking in Egypt and other African territories, the Iberian peninsula and the lands of modern Germany. An imperial ‘cult’ had begun with the Emperor Augustus (63 bc–14 ad). He had seized power after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 bc. His military dictatorship claimed that it was merely continuing to operate the machinery of the old Roman Republic. However, Augustus got his powers granted to him ‘for life’ by the Senate and in reality a Republic had become an Empire. Augustus favoured for himself the title Princeps civitatis (Prince of the City). That enabled him to present himself simply as First in the City, its ‘leading citizen’. One of the consequences of the arrival of Empire, however, was the high elevation of the status of the Emperor – to the level of a god – and soon came an insistence on the ‘worship’ of the Emperor. In a polytheistic society, one god more made little difference and there was no objection for most citizens when they were required to sacrifice to the Emperor as to any other divinity. But the Christians, like the Jews, believed in one God and would not agree to sacrifice to any other deity. As a consequence they lived through dangerous times in these first centuries after Christ, with wave after wave of state persecution and 17

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition accompanying popular opprobrium – for state disapproval encouraged the ‘mob’ to treat Christians as fair game for attack, with stones as well as verbal abuse, when they felt in the mood. Persecution went on at intervals until the Emperor Constantine found it politically advisable to become a Christian at the beginning of the fourth century and with him the whole Empire turned ‘officially’ Christian. Eusebius of Caesarea gives a useful survey of the persecutions, with graphic details.48 Eusebius was well placed for information. In his own times, he had some influence on events at the Council of Nicaea in 325, where he was one of those invited to set out the credal formula his local Church favoured. He became a favourite, if not an intimate, of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor (Emperor 306–37). Eusebius was also a scholar in a sense a modern scholar could recognise. He worked from sources, of which he had an extensive knowledge. (His quotations preserve fragments of sources now otherwise lost.) When he wrote his History of the Church he gave his sources throughout. This carefulness and detail is a great help now in identifying the reasons for the persecutions, the motives of those who ‘reported’ suspected Christians to the authorities, and the ideas and ideals in the minds of those who resisted attempts to make them recant. Nero was the first Emperor to attack Christians. Tacitus (56–117) says in his Annals (xv) that the Emperor Nero (37–68, Emperor from 64), blamed the Christians for the fire which destroyed Rome in 64. The historian Suetonius (c.69–c.122)49 records persecutions at this time, though he does not actually say that the Christians were persecuted in retribution for allegedly causing the fire. In his History, Book III.xvii, Eusebius considers why the Emperor Domitian (Emperor 81–96) revived the practice of persecution; he suggests that it was part of a programme of executions and confiscation of property designed to remove all rivals and threats to his own power. In Book III.xx, Eusebius describes how he sought out those he believed to be ‘of the family of David’; he feared the attack of a militant and military Jewish Messiah. Grandchildren believed to be those of Jesus’ brother Jude were still living and were sent for by the Emperor. They explained that the coming kingdom would not be an earthly but a heavenly one. It would arrive at the end of the world. It could be no threat to the Emperor now. Domitian was persuaded to let them go and end the persecution because they did not seem worth his notice as a serious threat. The Emperor Trajan (Emperor 98–117) was next to launch persecution of Christians. Pliny the Younger, newly appointed governor of Bithynia, raised concerns with the Emperor as a provincial governor about the number of 18

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how it all began Christian martyrs. He said he had not himself observed a trial of the Christians, so he had no sense of the way it was customarily conducted or what the usual rules about punishment were. But he had some questions. Should the older be punished more severely than the younger? Should those who ‘repent’ or recant be pardoned? Should those called Christians be punished for merely bearing the name? He has developed for himself the practice of asking them whether they are Christians and giving them the chance to recant if they ‘confess’. If they do not, he makes it clear that they will be punished. If they stand firm he orders that they shall be taken away for punishment. He has sent Roman citizens to Rome for their cases to be considered. But it has turned out not to be straightforward. He has found that all sorts of variations have appeared. And he has received letters accusing lists of named persons. Some of those called in as a result have denied they were Christians; some said they were Christians once but were so no longer; some have confessed. He has tried to test the accused by bringing in an image of the Emperor and asking them to sacrifice to it; he has asked them to curse the name of Christ.50 Pliny suggested that the Christians were model citizens. They were not breaking the law or acting profanely. They undertook not to commit adultery, murder or other criminal offences. They merely got up early on a particular day of the week and sang hymns, then shared a communal meal. However, such ‘brotherhoods’ could be seen as inherently dangerous to the state because they were secret societies. Pliny had ‘examined’ two women slaves who were known as ‘deaconesses’ but found nothing but a ‘superstition’, though that seemed to him an extreme and depraved one. Unsure what to do next, he turns to the Emperor for guidance. Pliny was concerned that these ‘Christians’ seem to be becoming more numerous. He wants to see this stopped and a return to the sound practice of sacrificing to the gods which is beneficial to civil peace and security. Trajan responded by decreeing that the Christians should not be hunted down but should be punished if they happened to be discovered. Those accused who deny Christ must be tested by requiring them to sacrifice to the gods before being pardoned. The Emperor – aware of the problems which could arise when a delator acted out of malice or self-interest – emphasised that anonymous accusations must not be entertained.51 This was evidently a problem which actually arose for Christians. In his History Eusebius describes the martyrdom of Appollonius at Rome in the reign of Commodus (Emperor 180–92).52 This was a period of comparative peace for Christians, but one of Appollonius’ servants maliciously made accusations against 19

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition him. The accuser had his legs broken as a punishment for making the accusation, as the law at the time required. Appollonius still had to answer the accusations, however. He defended the faith and refused to recant and was decapitated. Eusebius says the arguments put in the trial are on record and may be consulted. When they began to emerge, prominent individuals capable of leading opinion appeared dangerous to the state authorities in a different way from ‘secret societies’. Justin Martyr (c.100–c.65) knew he was risking execution (2 Apol.3) through his teaching of Christian ideas. In the end he became a threat to the authorities great enough to prompt his trial along with half a dozen others, and he was beheaded about 165. Eusebius (History, VI.1) describes the persecution which followed under Severus (Emperor 193–211). Egypt appears prominently again and again in the history of events. In Alexandria especially, martyrs bravely bore witness in the face of torture. Many athletes of God from Egypt and elsewhere won their crowns of victory. Valerian (Emperor 253–60), according to Eusebius (History, VII.x), began well, ‘For his entire house was filled with pious persons and was a church of God’. But he was persuaded to turn to pagan ways and to start persecution of the Christians, mutilating and killing them.53 It was not only the authorities who made martyrs. Popular feeling could run high. There were lynch mobs. Eusebius (History, VI.xli) describes how martyrs suffered in Alexandria under Decius (Emperor 249–51). A hysterical mob seized an old man called Metras and tauntingly demanded that he betray his faith. When he refused, they beat him with clubs and ripped at his face and eyes with pointed sticks, then dragged him outside the city and stoned him. They attacked women, too, dragging one through the city by her feet, then crushing her against millstones and flogging her, before stoning her too to death. Emboldened, the mob then ran about the city, breaking into houses where someone said Christians lived, looting and pillaging. Not all members of the Christian community were so brave, however. When they had to demonstrate their ‘compliance’ to the authorities, many were frightened enough to approach the required act of sacrifice to the Divine Emperor but still nervously held back. The mob jeered them for being afraid of either option. Some were brazen, and went to the altars to sacrifice, claiming that they had never actually been Christians at all. No quarter was given by the authorities to women or children, except for Dioscorus, who answered so steadily as a boy of fifteen, Eusebius says, that he was allowed to go free on account of his youth, to give him time to consider. He 20

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how it all began remains among the Christians still, Eusebius comments, an example to all. There were also examples of attempts by the authorities to use any device to secure a condemnation; targets had to be met. An Egyptian called Nemesion was charged with being associated with robbers. When he cleared his name he was accused of being a Christian, tortured and executed by burning along with the robbers, in an ironic image of Christ’s own death. The third century became the most significant period of state persecution, extending through the Empire. Eusebius (History, IX.vi) writes on those who suffered martyrdom. Peter, Bishop of Alexandria was suddenly arrested without warning and beheaded and several other Egyptian bishops too without reasons given. Lucian of Nicomedia, a priest, was taken to defend himself before the Emperor when he happened to be in Nicomedia and after he had done so he was imprisoned and executed. Eusebius puts some of this down to the activities of Maximin (Emperor 235–8), whose Rescript put up on tablets in public places he quotes (History, IX.vii). The Decian persecution (Decius was Emperor 249–51) encompassed Christian laity as well as clergy and set out to hunt down Christians throughout the Empire. The Emperor Decius sent out commissioners to ensure that all local people participated in sacrifices to the Emperor and that, of course, made it relatively easy for them to see who refused and thus to identify the Christians (and the Jews). Not to sacrifice to the Emperor was easily construed a token of resistance to civil authority. The churches found they hardly knew how to handle the consequences of persecution.54 Some Christians ran for their lives rather than face arrest, torture and imprisonment and eventually execution. This could be deemed a wise retreat to protect oneself from being put in a false position, or simply as apostasy. Some dishonestly purchased false certificates (libelli) declaring that they had sacrificed as required. Inaccuracies about who had actually apostatised, rumours and gossip, injustices, torture and ill treatment of suspected Christians by their own, all compounded the difficulty. These varied responses by those who had called themselves Christians created all sorts of difficulties when persecution eased and the apostates crept back and asked to be readmitted. Christian councils in North Africa debated whether these traitors could be received back if they wished to return to join the Christians who had not apostatised. Could penance restore them to their former standing, even those who had been priests and had left their flocks shepherdless to save their skins? 21

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (d. 258) raised in a letter (15.2) the problem of the lapsed who want to return. He stresses the importance of ensuring that anything done about this is properly authorised – there is no place for sloppiness out of kindness of heart. Some confessors wrote back (Letter 23, 250 ad) to say that they had given ‘peace’ to the repentant lapsed.55 Not all those who suffered torture or imprisonment died or were executed. Cyprian, rigorist thought he was, was willing to give the title of ‘martyrs’ to faithful Christians condemned to work in the mines in penal servitude.56 Tertullian preferred to describe martyrs in waiting as martyres designati. By the fourth century the usage seems to have grown stricter, with the title ‘martyr’ restricted to those who had actually died for their faith.57 That could not, it was argued, include those who had been executed as Christians but were really heretics or schismatics. The ‘traitors’ The last great period of persecution, under Diocletian (Emperor 284–305), was the worst. Between 303 and 305, immense pressure was applied to get Christians to give names of other Christians to the authorities or to hand over the Scriptures to be burned. This handing-over (traditio) gave them the name of traditores, which became the English word ‘traitors’. The emphasis on the purity and rigour demanded by ‘rigorists’ in the debates of the mid-third century now shifted to an emphasis on the consequences of this ‘treason’. When Constantine became a Christian and some traditores were appointed to high posts the Donatists regarded this as creating a schism. They said that such forgiven apostates could not possibly perform sacramental acts validly and efficaciously, and that ministers ordained by them could not have been truly ordained. It followed that generations of churches whose ministers had been thus ‘ordained’ were not churches at all. The ensuing Donatist controversy ran on well into the lifetime of Augustine of Hippo, for the Donatists were active in North Africa.58 Christianity became respectable with the conversion of Constantine (Emperor 306–37). Julian the Apostate (Emperor 361–3) reverted to paganism, but his dislike of Christianity was not enough to reverse the trend and he practised toleration. Theodosius I (Emperor 379–95) was the first Emperor to make Christianity officially the religion in Empire. Lactantius’ (240–320) De mortibus persecutorum was written when the conversion of the Emperor Constantine had, it seemed, taken away the well-founded general fear that even when a period of 22

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how it all began persecution came to an end another was likely to follow. He writes to Donatus, a ‘confessor’ who had been tortured nine times under Diocletian and suffered six years of imprisonment: ‘Your enemies are crushed.’59 He celebrated the divine anger against the persecutors which he argues resulted in the circumstances of their deaths, set out in detail in this work.60 The emergence of a category of ‘special’ Christians In these changed times, there was less call for Christian courage in the face of the extreme of state persecution. Did this great change leave a gap for the passionate Christian, the Christian who wanted to be ‘special’, to show by extreme of suffering how passionate was his or her faith? Respect for those who showed behaviours which had been admired in the martyrs remained, and for the same behaviours. It seems undeniable that some of the ideals of monasticism as it emerged resembled those of the martyrs. There was a period lasting many generations when ‘martyrs’ or ‘confessors’, brave individuals who had resolutely ‘confessed’ the faith when asked to recant, were celebrated. ‘Martyrs in waiting’ easily became ‘Christian heroes’ to others, who saw them as possessed of special virtue. Tertullian, Apologeticus, 1.1, mentions the custom of sending food to imprisoned martyrs (though he did not always approve of this because it weakened their resolve to die). They were visited by the faithful, who sought their prayers because they had faith that they would be specially efficacious. They were asked for advice. The characteristic exemplary spirit of Christians showed itself in other ways too. Eusebius (History, V.ii) describes how some Christians looked after those who were suffering under persecution and had burns and scars and wounds. These faithful Christians were not anxious to be known as ‘confessors’ and humbly but firmly resisted being called by that name. They were fierce in their defence of the faith, but they accused no one and prayed for forgiveness for those who had tortured them. The recurrent state persecutions created a ‘cult’ of the martyrs, in which being a martyr was to make a Christian élite among his fellows. A martus was originally a witness, as in a court of law, but Christ’s ‘martyr-witnesses’ risked death for telling what they believed to be the truth and could save themselves from execution only by denying what they believed or ‘moving away’ from it (‘apostatising’). One option was just to flee, so as to avoid being forced to ‘confess’ or ‘deny’. Opinion was divided as to whether this was permissible. 23

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Martyrs came to be regarded as the first ‘special’ Christians since the apostles who had actually known Jesus in his life on earth. Cyril of Jerusalem (c.313–86) wrote in Catechesis III (10) that only the baptised can be saved, with the exception of martyrs, who may enter the Kingdom of Heaven without the water of baptism. When Jesus’ side was pierced as he hung on the cross, water and blood flowed out. The martyrs may not have the water of baptism but they are in a sense baptised in their own blood, when they die ‘confessing’ their faith. In his Apologeticus, written in 197, Tertullian, himself an adult convert to Christianity, argued for state toleration of Christians.61 Later Tertullian wrote the De fuga in persecutione to address the dilemma faced by Christians. He took the opportunity to modify his own earlier view that flight was not permissible. Should they hide? His answer is that God must be countenancing the persecution, for nothing happens which is not his will. Christians should see persecution as a test they should face, and bravely. Probably also near the end of the century, and close to the date of the Apologeticus, Tertullian wrote To the Martyrs. Those he was addressing were among the candidates for what with hindsight could be considered the earliest Christians with ‘special’ vocations. These were martyres designati, individuals awaiting martyrdom. They had been arrested but not yet executed. These were often called confessores, because they so bravely ‘confessed the faith’ in times of persecution when others ‘denied Christ’. The Didascalia Apostolorum, probably of the mid-third century, but purporting to be the teaching of the apostles themselves, urges Christians to support those who find themselves condemned to ‘the games’, the beasts’ or ‘the mines’ for their faith. Charitable giving should include sending these prisoners food and making sure their guards are paid to treat them well (Didascalia Apostolorum, xix.1), acting through their bishops (though it is no shame to visit prisoners in person). This is the Gospel instruction to visit those in prison62 writ large, for these are holy prisoners. v. Christians to the desert From martyrs to monks: Life in the desert Not every ‘martyr’ and ‘confessor’ hero is likely to have chosen to live a life of solitude and contemplation in a remote place if freed from imprisonment, but 24

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how it all began that ‘calling’ was certainly felt during the centuries of persecution and there are similarities in the ideals involved. Prudentius (348–c.413) even suggests that martyrs are a kind of monk.63 Although Western monasticism has characteristically involved ‘community’ life, it has also had its solitaries and hermits. These have usually been regarded as exceptional, and as choosing a still more demanding life than that of the monk or nun ‘in community’. They may be seen as ‘dependants’ of the community. The most notable of the orders who have placed this emphasis are the Carmelites. Modern Carmelites explain their special calling online as requiring: a particular charism and grace to live a solitary and hidden life in the austere

wildernesses of Carmel. In the solitude of the wilderness, these men arise as fire,

men consumed with the love of God like their Father St Elias. These hermits live, not as men of this world, but as souls set apart to begin to taste the fruits of heaven

even in this life. As the Lord’s intimate friend who has been drawn into the wine cellar of his love, where he inebriates him in his charity, the life of the hermit is consumed in love for God and for the entire world. The hermit can repeat with the prophet Jeremias, ‘Thou hast captivated me, O Lord, and I have let myself be captivated.’64

It is recognised that not everyone, even of these especially called, can persevere in this solitary life to the end. But invisible thought their efforts may be to the world at large, they are of supreme value: St John of the Cross reminds us of the mystical effectiveness of the hermits when he writes, ‘An instant of pure love is more precious in the eyes of God […] and

more profitable to the Church, than all other good works together, though it may seem as if nothing were done.’ 65

Some of the earliest attempts to live a life which developed into a recognisable ‘monasticism’ were made in the deserts of Egypt. Ancient Egyptian monasteries still survive as places where the monastic life is lived, and new monasteries in Egypt have thriving communities. Anthony the Great (c.251–356) became one of the most famous of the early ‘desert fathers’, partly because Athanasius Bishop of Alexandria (c.296/8–373) wrote his life-story. Anthony’s tomb lies deep beneath the monastery near the Red Sea which still bears his name. Macarius (c.300–c.91) became one of Anthony’s disciples and founded a monastery of his own; his 25

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition remains now lie in the monastery called after him, at Scetes (Wadi el Natrun) in Egypt. Paradoxically, although their calling was to humility and self-abasement, the desert pioneers found they were regarded as beacons, spiritual examples: The initiators and masters of the blessed monastic way of life, being entirely on fire with divine and heavenly love and counting as nothing all that men hold to be beautiful and estimable […] hid themselves away, and by their supreme humility in keeping most of their good works hidden, they made progress on the way that leads to God.66

To a modern commentator they can still seem ‘giants of the spirit’,67 because of the quality of ‘their vision of God – so Holy, so great, possessed of such a love, that nothing less than one’s whole being could respond to it’. 68 The uncompromising common assumption was that ‘this small particle of the Cosmos, which is our soul and body must be conquered, freed by a lifelong struggle freed from enslavement to the world and the Devil’.69 These early monks were ‘ruthless to themselves, yet so human’.70 They were following a logic which to them was inescapable: that any experience of God ‘is always a gift […] it is an act of Divine Love and cannot therefore be deserved’. The response is the ascetic endeavour. 71 By contrast, Modern man seeks mainly for ‘experience’ – putting himself at the centre of things

he wishes to make them subservient to his aim; too often, even God becomes the source from which the highest experience flows, instead of being Him Whom we […] are prepared to serve, whatever the cost to us.72

If we accept that this was a high calling, it also has to be recognised that it was – and is – also one whose ‘validity’ rested on certain presumptions which might not now command general Christian approval. For why would anyone come to think that setting off into the desert to live in discomfort and solitude was an act of supreme devotion to Christ? There was some sensitivity to this fundamental question even at the beginning. Arsenius (b. Rome c.360), was tutor to the sons of the Emperor Theodosius. He prayed to be shown the way to salvation. ‘A voice came’ saying ‘flee from men and you will be saved’. He obeyed. But it did not turn out to be simple to do as the voice told him. Should he practise self-denial to an extreme? He concluded that one should do as much as one could, put up with bad 26

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how it all began smells and hunger, but only according to one’s capacity. 73 He found himself facing many further decisions about fixing the boundaries of appropriate behaviour. For example, should one act as Jesus said ‘good sheep’ should, and visit the sick and those in prison? ‘Eat, drink, sleep, do no work, only do not leave your cell’ was the advice. ‘Steadfastness in the cell keeps the monk in the right way.’74 Here we see a beginning of the monastic requirement of ‘stability’ which became important in the West, and a glimmering of awareness that wandering was a dangerous habit for monks, even if their travel seemed to be in a good cause. Here in an inchoate way the later Western monastic ideal of stillness and tranquillity was beginning to take an outwardly visible form.75 But here, too, was the tension between the living of a life out of the world and the choice of an active engagement with the world, which the ‘active’ monastic orders much later embraced. As many other hermits also complained, Arsenius faced the problem that people would not leave him alone. If the hermit welcomes visitors he will no longer be alone and will have to move, as Arsenius told an archbishop who wanted to come to see him.76 When it was known that a hermit was to be found in the desert, others wanted to become his disciples or just to visit him. Three fathers used to go and visit blessed Anthony every year and two of them used to discuss their thoughts, and the salvation of their souls, with him, but the third always remained silent and did not ask him anything. Abba Anthony asked him why. He replied, ‘It is enough for me to see you, father.’ 77 In his Dialogues, writing in Latin, Gregory the Great (c.540–604) offered many anecdotes along similar lines about the pestering of holy men who sought solitude. Some practical problem-solving was tried as the experiments in desert life threw up such implications. Women seeking to visit holy men could be particularly troublesome. A rich virgin of senatorial rank came from Rome to see Arsenius, but he refused to see her and when she came anyway, he sent her away fiercely because he did not want more women coming, and she became ill with grief. She had to be told, firmly, that ‘it is through women that the enemy wars against the saints’.78 Plenty of examples are given of the advice a visitor might receive, though it might not be what he or she wanted to hear. In the fourth and fifth centuries a literature emerged which survives as the Apophthegmata Patrum, the ‘Sayings’ of the Desert Fathers. This includes ‘sayings’ of earlier periods, but all attributed to individuals who seem to have lived mainly in the deserts of Egypt. Mostly, it seems, they chose to live alone, but not to cut themselves off from visits by seekers after guidance. The ‘sayings’ seem chiefly to consist of this guidance and advice. 27

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Abba John the Dwarf (b. c.339) first thought he ‘should like to be free of all care, like the angels, who do not work, but ceaselessly offer worship to God’.79 But he was brought to realise that he ought to expect to work at some task which could earn him a bare living. Being a desert hermit ought to be hard work in every way. ‘It is by warfare that the soul makes progress.’ If the solitary experiences peace of mind he should pray for temptations to return so that he can continue to battle with them.80 ‘We fathers go through many insults in order to enter joyfully into the city of God.’81 The life, rightly lived, involves constant vigilance. ‘Watching means to sit in the cell and be always mindful of God.’82 Poemen (‘The Shepherd’)83 left many challenging ‘sayings’, forming about a seventh of the whole collection.84 He agrees that ‘the distinctive mark of the monk is made clear through temptations’;85 ‘All bodily comfort is an abomination to the Lord.’86 The fruits of the struggle could be dramatic. Powers of wonderworking were reportedly achieved. Anthony the Great promised that ‘obedience with abstinence gives men power over wild beasts’.87 The Life of Anthony of Egypt (c.251–356) by Athanasius of Alexandria was translated into Latin in the late fourth century.88 Athanasius sent this life-story to monks ‘in other countries’ as an example, and as a stimulus to effort. These monks have, he says in his Prologue, entered into a competition with the monks of Egypt. They should want to outdo them in virtue and in effort. This is, by now, a way of life which they can be confident other people will look on with respect. Anthony and his biographer Athanasius are mentioned among the ‘illustrious’ men (no. 88) by Jerome (c.347–420). Anthony is credited by Jerome with seven letter-homilies of great good sense sent in Coptic to monastic communities but now in Jerome’s day available in Greek. In late antiquity education mattered. The well-born were taught to be orators and advocates and eloquent flatterers of the great; they studied philosophy in order to improves their skills in argument. Conscious that his hero may not be taken seriously if he is revealed not to be an educated man, Athanasius comments on Anthony’s qualifications in this respect (para. 72). He lacked formal education but he was ‘wise’ and quick-witted. Two Greek philosophers came to test him. He recognised them for what they were from their appearance, and played logical games with them until they went away impressed. Anthony’s way of life was severe in its asceticism (para. 7). He kept vigils which lasted so long that he often spent whole nights without sleep. When he did sleep, it was on a rush mat, or more often on the bare ground. He ate only once a day in the evening, and sometimes he did not eat at all for several days. He ate only bread with salt and drank only water. He avoided anointing himself with 28

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how it all began oil (which was the skin-protecting custom of the time), because he said it was important to learn to be hardy and to do without such comforts and luxuries. Prominent in Anthony’s story were his own repeated struggles with the Devil or with demons. For example (para. 8), Athanasius describes how he went to live among the tombs, which were at a distance from the town, and arranged for friends to bring him bread occasionally. He went into one of the tombs and had himself shut in there. Many demons arrived and lashed him until he was prostrate with pain and lying on the ground. It so happened that the next day was one of those when bread was to be brought and when his friends found him they lifted him up and took him back with them. The demon-fights included examples (para. 64) of his casting out demons from others. He kept up this ‘training regime’ in solitude for twenty years (para. 14). He never went out of his cell and he was rarely spotted by anyone. But his fame spread and disciples gathered, wishing to live nearby and learn from him. He showed no excitement at the sight of all his visitors, nor any disturbance. To the eyes of contemporary critics, this tranquillity was admirable (para. 14). He responded only as reason directed. In the end, his old friends came and wrested the door of his cell open by force. He came out and everyone was astonished to see that he looked just the same. He bore no bodily marks of starvation or suffering. His powers, developed through this régime, manifested themselves in his interactions with his visitors (para. 14). He was able to heal the sick and cheer the sad, and drive out the demons who possessed some of those who faced him in the crowd. God gave him grace to speak encouragement to them all. The consequence was an immense recruitment of new hermits who found that they too wanted to live in the desert in imitation of Anthony. Athanasius emphasises certain features of Anthony’s special spiritual experiences, another achievement of his long struggle. He was said to have experienced raptures (para. 65), so sudden and so compelling that he left a meal he was about to eat and was snatched up ‘in the Spirit’, lifted by angels, and seemed to see himself from outside. He had a vision of the scale of the warfare in which souls must engage. This ‘out-of-body experience’ is compared by Athanasius with the experience of Paul when he was ‘caught up’ to the third heaven.89 For the aspirant to this testing life, there were Scriptural ‘authorities’ to turn to which, now the way of life was taking shape, seemed to speak directly. Scripture has something to say about retreating to the desert, though the most important examples describe only a period of retreat, not a permanent way of life. John the Baptist’s flight to the desert of Jordan90 was described by Peter Chrysologus 29

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition (c.380–c.450)91 as preparing the very soil of Israel to receive the ‘seed’ of the Word. Jesus’ own temptations in the ‘wilderness’ are described by Matthew 4.1–11, Mark 1.12–13 and Luke 4.1–13. He spent only forty days in the desert and did not seek to dwell there, so, like that of John the Baptist, his period in the desert was finite. John came back to preach. Jesus’ ministry of preaching and teaching also involved life with the community of his disciples. These temporary desert dwellers do not fit the Old Testament motif of the ‘scapegoat’, except insofar as Jesus later suffered, Christians believed, for the sins of the whole world. The desert hermit of early monasticism was intent primarily on his own salvation, not the salvation of the world. The early experimenters in monastic life included women. The life was hard work for them too. Syncletica, a desert ‘mother’, compared the living of the spiritual life to someone who lights a fire and is choked by the smoke at first: ‘in the beginning there are a great many battles and a good deal of suffering for those who are advancing towards God and afterwards, ineffable joy.’92 Not everyone welcomed women. Arsenius’ reaction to the rich widow was not unusual.93 But Syncletica is a reminder that not all women who consulted holy hermits were seductively dangerous to their commitment, or a nuisance. Egeria, a woman of good birth and sufficient resources, may have been a wandering ‘nun’. She went on pilgrimage to the holy places in the early 380s and wrote a ‘letter home’ in the form of an account of her journeyings, part of which survives in an eleventh-century copy at Monte Cassino.94 Her objective was twofold: to see for herself the places where the events described in Scripture had taken place, and to meet living Christian heroes and pray with them. In chapters of her story she describes her visits to Syria to visit the monks there. 95 She saw the shrines of martyrs and met the bishop at Edessa, ‘truly a religious man, a monk, and a confessor, and who […] hospitably received’ her.96 Recognising the sincerity of her purpose, he showed her many holy things and places, at some of which miracles had been recorded. As she went on, she noted clergy and monks both present in certain places where the population was mostly pagan. At Seleucia, which also had a bishop who was a former monk, she saw communities of virgins among ‘countless monastic cells for men and women’. The virgins were under the direction of her friend Marthana. Egeria was able to pray with many of these people who were living the monastic life.97 In Chapter 24 Egeria gives a detailed account of the daily lives of these monks and nuns in their interrelationship with the routines of the church. Before cockcrow each morning the doors of the Anastasis are opened and the monks and nuns, and also laypeople if they wish, come down. They all sing hymns and antiphons and 30

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how it all began say prayers until dawn, when they sing the morning hymns. Then the bishop enters with his clergy and prays for the people, commemorating those names he chooses in particular. He blesses the catechumens and leaves the sanctuary. Those who want to do so kiss his hand.98 Most of this is repeated at the sixth and the ninth hour and then at vespers (the tenth hour) a great crowd gathers, there are lights, and the worship is longer and fuller. On Sundays the crowds are very great. Early Christian writers touch on the robustness of women in fighting the spiritual fight. Women can have ‘virility of spirit’ if not of body, and fight the spiritual fight just as well or better. ‘Of the number of these are those who compose the virgin throng’, comments Basil.99 Renunciation of the world is required not only of the religious, but also of the married. ‘Do not relax your efforts […] you who have chosen the companionship of a wife, as if you were at liberty to embrace wordliness’,100 he adds. The personal struggle and the value of suffering These early stories and pictures stress the difficulty and struggle and painfulness of this way of life. The suffering involved is seen as qualification for heaven. Here again we can see a parallelism between the evolving monastic way of life and the confessors and martyrs who suffered human rather than demonic persecution for their Christian faith. Similar themes are found in exhortations to those who had not withdrawn voluntarily from the world but were imprisoned for their faith in periods of persecution. In 250, Cyprian wrote to martyrs and confessors in prison to assure them that the more they suffer, the greater and more glorious is their ‘confession’ or open witness to the faith. All in the prison are soldiers of Christ, engaged in a glorious continuing struggle, an early Christian ‘la lutta continua’. They have not given in under questioning or bowed under torture. Hammering and nails have been resisted by their battered and wounded limbs. Their steadfast faith is expressed by a free voice and a mind which cannot be corrupted. Do not be sad, he urges, if the persecution ends before you die. Some he knows are ‘crowned’, some ‘near to the crown of victory’. Those who die are sure of heaven but those who survive will live to testify to their faith even longer.101 Cyprian wrote to Rogatian and other confessors (Letter 13, 250 ad) with a warning that confessors should not be strutting about and exalting themselves over their achievement. In Letter 10 he had urged, ‘do not boast about your confession’. There could be pridefulness in this and that was to be discouraged. 31

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition But perhaps, paradoxically, compensations (such as feeling proud of oneself ) might be needed before death brought the ultimate reward. A feature of life in the desert was that even while it was full of distractions and temptations and the demons were active at their prodding, it could be extremely boring and depressing. The very tedium exposed the hermit further to the temptations. Anthony was ‘beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts’. He had a vision of a man praying, then getting up to plait a rope, then returning to prayer: ‘It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him.’ He found this simple device of distracting himself with some manual labour worked well.102 The experience was reportedly common enough. Cassian (c.360–435), one of the early leaders of Western monasticism, devotes a section of the ‘vices’ part of his Institutes to acedia. This sinking of the spirits is common in hermits and solitaries, he comments. It often strikes at about the sixth hour. It makes the monk depressed, sunk in torpor, unable to rouse himself to effort. His fellows are tedious to him. Nothing seems to matter. He is making no spiritual progress. He has no hope. Cassian’s diagnosis too is that the cause is idleness. Keeping busy is the best defence. That had implications for the theory of ‘work’ later variously embraced by monasticism. Some work was seen as essential if a hermit or members of a monastic community were to live, but nothing quite like the modern concept of the ‘dignity of labour’ seems to have been involved. Abbot Paul collected leaves daily and then burnt them at the end of each year. It was the collecting, not its purpose or usefulness, that mattered.103 Manual work was simply a device, a useful distraction from boredom. Cassian too thought work is a good remedy for accidie but not inherently dignified or valuable, though it can help with prayer. Augustine’s De opere monachorum in the same era emphasises the value of manual labour partly in the context of the health of a Christian who is to engage in it (he discusses the example of St Paul and his bodily infirmity). He is aware that there is difference of opinion. He points out that the apostles worked in order to earn their livings. But he knows that others prefer the principle that the faithful should supply the needs of hermits and monks while the monks concentrate on their lives of prayer.104 Pachomius and the beginning of Christian monastic ‘community’ Another ‘example’ to those engaged in early monastic living was Pachomius of Egypt (286–346).105 He made experiments with community life as well as setting an example as a hermit. Eusebius explains that Pachomius began his ‘life for God’ 32

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how it all began alone in a cave. Then an angel came to him in a vision and instructed him to bring together a community of young men to live with him as monks, now that he had prepared himself by study to be their instructor. Sozomen (c.400–c.450) was educated by monks in his native Palestine, became a lawyer and wrote a local History; he describes the monastic community founded by Pachomius at Tabenna.106 He was given a tablet, which Sozomen says has been carefully kept. It contained instructions for the living of the monastic life, with rules for eating, drinking, working, fasting. Those doing heavy manual labour were to be allowed to eat more. The serious fasters were to be the ones practising strictly as ascetics and contemplatives. This variation was appropriate in a community where each monk was to have his separate cell along with two brothers. Monks were to eat in silence in the common refectory and sit with their heads and faces covered so that they could see only the table and the food immediately before them. This was to ensure they were not distracted by the sight and company of their fellows. For the same reason, no strangers were to eat with them, except temporary passing travellers being shown hospitality. (Perhaps the tradition of monastic hospitality is already to be glimpsed here.) If newcomers wanted to join as permanent members of the group they must serve three years of ‘probation’, during which they must do hard and disagreeable work for the community, wearing skins, linen tunics with girdles, and woollen headgear with a crown of purple nails. They must sleep on special enclosed couches. At the beginning and end of the week (Sunday and Saturday) they must take Communion and each day, evening and night they must pray twelve times, with further detailed and requirements, many of them onerous, as a test of the strength and sincerity of the postulants’ vocations. Sozomen says that Pachomius’ community’s members were exemplary in despising worldly goods, resisting the temptations of the flesh, giving all their energies to heavenly contemplation and looking urgently and joyfully towards their deaths. Liturgical authority for the principles of desert life Many of the monks of the West would have been able to learn something of the content of Scripture through liturgy. The Psalms became central to monastic Scripture reading and liturgy in later centuries, but in the period when monasticism was individualistic, eremitical, unstructured, the regularity of reading and 33

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition study expected by Benedict was not there to imbue its practitioners with the ‘habit’ of Bible reading or to make the text so deeply familiar that their reading was sometimes described as a form of mastication. Both monks and hermits could have picked up the Gospel message and Scriptural – especially Old Testament – echoes through oral transmission,107 but this was likely to have been a hit-and-miss affair. The reality seems to have been that the earliest eremitical and monastic experiments emerged more or less spontaneously in many places (or because a charismatic individual had settled somewhere and attracted followers), and only later developed settled practices and expectations, borrowing from others who had tried to live such a life. The vocabulary did not exist at first which could make it easy to take up a way of life with a clear description or definition attached to it. The word monakos appears in second-century Christian writings, among the Nag Hammadi texts. But it did not then mean ‘monk’ in the later sense. That usage seems to have appeared only early in the fourth century. The third century is apparently silent on the subject.108 During that period, the core ideas of ‘oneness’ and ‘solitude’ had to be adapted to encompass ways of living in which solitaries congregated and formed a community, in which there was ‘unity’. By the fourth century that was happening in an increasingly ordered way, and it became the distinctive mark of Western monasticism. vi. Lessons for the West from the early experiments in monastic life in the East Western monasticism was born of those first ‘community’ experiments. But before we move further into this story, we need to consider the growth of monastic life in parts of the East of Europe and the Near East, and explore some of the ‘lessons’ which were emerging to be carried West into the foundation of Western monasticism. For some of those who had been monks in the East moved to the West and took their ideas and practices with them. The Holy Land and the Near East The preeminence of Egypt in the earliest centuries of Christian eremitical life gave it almost the status of another ‘Holy Land’ in the eyes of pilgrims and the frankly 34

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how it all began curious who, by the fourth century, wanted to visit famous hermits to see them for themselves. But hermits and loose groupings of individuals living a monastic life were also clustering in Palestine and the surrounding lands of the Near East. The deserts of Palestine had two regions of early monastic concentration: round Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, and further south near Gaza. In the Gaza area dwelt some hermits and monks with higher ‘intellectual’ pretensions than the simple hermits of the Egyptian desert. Among these were Rufinus (340/5–410) and Jerome.109 Some of Syria’s early Christian churches adopted an unusual hybrid structure, with a community of celibate ascetic Christians, but living as though ‘embedded’ in a wider local worshipping community. In one important respect this gave these hybrid churches a shape not unlike that of the Manichean communities in one of which Augustine of Hippo spent a decade as a young man. There was a core group in each ‘church’, of those who were marked out as special. Among the Manichees these were the ‘elect’. Among the Christians in Syria they were the individuals, men and women, who had chosen to withdraw from the world’s pleasures and live celibate lives as ‘members of the covenant’, in the service of the Church. Ordinary Christian worshippers accorded them particular respect. There are many examples of individuals engaging in exploration and ‘tasting’ of monastic life. One of the writers who offer glimpses of the range of experimentation in this wider geographical area of early Eastern monasticism beyond Egypt and extending as far as Constantinople is Ephrem the Syrian (c.306–73). He was born – probably to a Christian family – at a time when the local Christians were often Syriac speakers, and was baptised as an adolescent or young man. The Nicene Creed, agreed by the Council of Nicaea in 325, had yet to establish itself as the universal standard statement of orthodox Christian faith it was to become. Many Christians it had declared to be heretics continued to call themselves the true Church. But Ephrem himself supported the theology set out in the Creed. He moved to Edessa when the area of his birth and youth was attacked by the Persians (in the course of centuries-long war on the Romano-Persian border). There he spent some years of his maturity. He probably lived as a monk in Scetis in the Nile delta for eight years.110 During that time he met the famous Egyptian monk Abba Bishoi. Later he went to Constantinople where he met Basil the Great.111 These travels gave him opportunities to encounter various practitioners who could help shape his own idea of monastic life. Ephrem’s Letter to Publius may have been written to a Publius who was a contemporary hermit. It is concerned with the life to come and how best to get 35

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition there, and written in visionary language. One of his themes is the place of sexual continence in the armoury of the ascetic. He ‘saw’ virgins who were to be rewarded with heaven and virgins who were not: I said to myself, ‘No one from henceforth should rely solely on the chaste name of virginity when it is lacking those deeds which are the oil for the lamps’.112

His conclusion was that chastity was not enough on its own. Euthymius (377–473) had been ordained a priest and entrusted with responsibility for monasteries in the diocese of Melitene in the West of Syria, but he too found he was drawn to at least the tasting of a personal experience of monasticism. With a companion, he went to Jerusalem and lived for a time in a cave near a local community. Such companions were often servants and were not considered to ‘count’ against the solitude of their masters, but in this case Theoctistus and Euthymius were friends and social equals. Then in 411 the two set up their own cell in the wilderness, but not for long did they remain uninterrupted. Euthymius was believed to have effected a miraculous cure of the son of a leader of a local people. That made him famous and he was forced into repeated attempts to withdraw into solitude, only to be found by his admirers. But he had become a focus for local monastic Christianity and immensely influential. Disciples gathered and they had to found a monastery, where Theoctistus presided but Euthymius acted as hermit-advisor. By the fifth century, the monasteries of Palestine had become preeminent, perhaps because of the fame of some of their most well-known and influential monks and hermits, but the decay of the Roman Empire under pressure of continuing invasions was changing the culture in which such lives could be lived. The early sixth-century letters of Barsanuphius to John include letters of advice in response to questions about matters of practical theology of the day – such as how should a Christian conduct himself in his relations with Jews and pagans and how should a monk behave towards laymen? The advice is full of wisdom and common sense but it also contains an implicit assumption that the monk or hermit has first and foremost responsibility for his own soul. Letter 733 contains the advice to deal with a close friend who is a heretic by explaining the correct faith to him; but it is wise not to enter into arguments or to try to understand what it is he believes because in that way one may become misled oneself. And if he refuses to be convinced, have no more to do with him. If you saw someone drowning you would give him your staff with which 36

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how it all began to haul himself out, but you would not give him your hand in case he dragged you in and you drowned too.113 Meeting a friend who is an apostate, you should behave towards him as you would towards any other apostate, and not as a friend. 114 Monasteries multiplied and lasted. On Mount Sinai, the Emperor Justinian (527–65) founded a monastery dedicated to St Catherine, which still survives. There in the seventh century, John Climacus made a collection of the ‘sayings’ of the desert fathers.115 Sabas was a Cappadocian who had founded a monastery above the Kidron Valley in 483. It too proved enduring. In the seventh century John of Damascus became a monk there after a life of active public service under the Arab conquerors, and ecclesiastical politics. In the mid-720s, still in the world and not yet a monk, he had become a campaigner in the iconoclastic controversy, writing to the Emperor defending the worship of icons. So the exchange of ideas and the sampling of modes of monastic life beyond Egypt was to help establish lasting traditions. Cappadocia A group particularly influential in the West emerged in Cappadocia, far north of Egypt, beyond Syria and close to Constantinople. This was predominantly Greekspeaking territory. Basil the Great (329/30–79), brother of Gregory of Nyssa and one of the Cappadocian ‘Fathers’, describes in a letter how he had himself come to recognise the value of the monastic life: Having read the Gospel and having seen clearly there that the greatest means for perfection is the selling of one’s possessions, the sharing with needy brethren, the

complete renouncing of solicitude for this life, and the refusing of the soul to be led astray by any affection for things of earth, I prayed to find some one of the brethren who had chosen this way of life, so as to pass with him over life’s brief and troubled waters.

He found his models in Egypt still. He was impressed by their powers of endurance of hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness, their ability to manage with little sleep. They were bearing in their own bodies the dying of Jesus. He became involved with a group in his own region which seemed the same, and he was misled by their outward clothing and behaviour. He did not realise that they were heretics.116 Basil established a monastery on the Iris River with his brother Gregory and together they developed rules for the community in which prayer according to 37

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition a liturgy and manual labour were balanced.117 The sense of the importance of ‘community’ was strong in him. Basil writes to his monks in 375, longing for an opportunity of a ‘conference’: ‘But as long as this is not granted to us, we hold it necessary to visit you through our true and God-fearing brethren and to converse with your charities by letter.’118 In a letter to monks, he is again: encouraging all of you to accept the common life in imitation of the apostolic manner of living. I desire greatly both to see you united and to hear concerning you

that you do not like the life without witnesses. But, rather, that you are all pleased to be […] guardians of each other’s exact discipline. This, each will receive both the perfect reward for himself and that for the advancement of his brother […] not to be shaken by those who are attempting to confuse you in your solitude.

‘Strictness of life’ is of no benefit without faith.119 Basil was unhappy as a priest of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea and spent a period away, preaching the ascetic life. Those who heard him seem to have asked him for advice on how to live this life well and he began to collect together a draft of a short rule or Asketikon, which was probably in circulation by the mid-360s. 120 Basil sees ascetics as soldiers, on the march, without a home, drinking only water, doing battle, and looking for the rewards of their delighted king when the battle is over.121 In 370 Basil himself became a leading bishop, Metropolitan of Caesarea. Now his uneasy compromise between ascetic and ecclesiastical priorities was tested still further. In response to demand he expanded the Asketikon. The problem was that novel and experimental ways of living the monastic life continued to proliferate. A Council met at Gangra in about 340, to take a view on the behaviour of an ascetic ‘movement’ led by Eustathius.122 Its members were considered socially undesirable and a danger to good order. They took over local church funds so that they could give to the poor. Their clothing was noticeably eccentric and their women sometimes dressed as men.123 They discouraged marriage in the community at large, not merely celibacy for processed monks or individual hermits, and they approved of one spouse embracing celibacy without the other’s consent. These were seen as practices likely to lead to a breakdown of family life. We shall meet this kind of thing again, in Spain, under the influence of Priscillian of Avila, arousing similar fears about threat to social order.124 Development of Basil’s own thinking is perceptible, perhaps as a result of contact with the ideas of Eustathius. He moved from favouring independent 38

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how it all began ascetic life to preferring an ordered community with rules.125 Basil’s basic idea was less radical – that all Christians are called to the ascetic vocation, properly understood. There are not two ways and no ‘special’ Christian life. In a community dedicated to this way of life, men, women and children may all live under one rule, but separately in different buildings. The reason why the common life should be common is that it discourages individualism and extremism. In Basil’s expanded longer Asketikon, expectations about repentance, confession and discipline are developed.126 (He held that confession should be only to appointed persons, thus putting down a marker on a matter which was to become important and controversial when it came to deciding where the boundary lay between a monk and priest.)127 There are hints that the strictures of the Ganga Council are being applied. The Eucharist should not be celebrated in private houses but in a church. The feasts of the martyrs should be respected and celebrated. Runaway slaves should not be admitted to the community without their masters’ permission.128 There are more details on the admission of other categories.129 There are also fuller requirements and expectations about permanence and Basil has become willing to support legal action if relatives try to prevent a postulant from giving away his wealth.130 Evagrius of Pontus (c.345–99) studied philosophy with Basil and with Gregory Nazianzus. After a period of ‘civil service’ and an unfortunate love affair, he retreated to Rufinus’ monastic community on the Mount of Olives. He then moved to the Egyptian desert to learn how to live the hermit life with the aid of the Macarii. His often enigmatic writings on this way of life – in the form of apophthegms or proverbs – became influential, but were also controversial enough to be condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 553. His messages were practical as well as theoretical: if you make your body your slave it will not make you suffer, if you feed it it will hurt you (6); intemperance leads to sexual impurity and temperance to chastity (7); love is pleased to be poor, hate likes to be rich (16); wealth makes the soul dark (18); ignorance goes with evil, the holy have knowledge (24); the monk who does not give alms will find himself in need, the one who is generous to the poor will be enriched (25). Macrina (c.330–79) was sister to two of the Cappadocian fathers. She, it was said, ‘exceeded woman’s nature’. Her mother wanted her educated but not in secular literature which could be unsuitable for the ‘soft and pliable nature of a girl’s mind’. The Iliad and Greek tragedies were felt to be full of dangerously seductive moral turpitude. Instead she was taught appropriate parts of Scripture, 39

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition with an emphasis on morally improving portions, such as the Wisdom of Solomon. She always had the Psalms with her and read from them regularly all day.131 She grew up very beautiful and was betrothed young to keep her from the attentions of the many predatory men who wanted to carry her off in marriage. The young man died before they were married and she seized the opportunity to declare herself ‘widowed’ and at the same time not free to marry another, since her intended husband was still ‘living’ (with God). She declared that she would live out her life with her mother, ministering to her mother’s bodily needs and earning a living for them both. Her mother had many practical and financial concerns. She had property in several provinces of the Empire so she had three lots of taxes to pay, and four sons and five daughters to protect. (The other daughters were fittingly married.)132 The brothers were educated in the usual way of their class, as philosophers and rhetoricians. Naucratius went off to live alone, taking just a faithful servant. This was a common practice which throws another light on talk of solitude. He chose a place remote from the noise of city life, and warfare and oratory. His solitude was further interrupted by the duty to look after a group of frail elderly people, including his mother. He lived like this for five years. Then he was killed while out hunting with his servant trying to bring home food for the old people. Macrina was the one who rose to the occasion, for her mother had collapsed with grief at the news. She calmed her with reason and reassurances. 133 Macrina and her mother now set out to live together a life of holy philosophy, as it were in mid-air, almost floating free of their bodies so far did they share celestial life.134 Macrina, living this holy life among her family even after her mother’s death, made a good death herself.135 As Basil’s elder sister, Macrina was also influential in setting standards for monastic life. By the time she died – as her Life testifies – her nuns were busy at prayer and at the reading of Scripture, ministering to the poor and showing hospitality, but all this in a cooperative relationship with bishops and clergy, and manifesting no socially disruptive excesses.136 It seems likely, too, that she and her mother helped the ending of class distinctions in monastic communities of widows and virgins.137 vii. Constantinople, iconoclasm and monasticism The invasions of the Arabs who eventually conquered Syria from the Romans in the 640s helped to shift the geographical focus of Christian monasticism north 40

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how it all began once again, this time to Constantinople. The iconoclasm controversy raged in the East in the eighth and ninth centuries and divided monasticism as it did the rest of the ecclesiastical establishment. Theodore (759–826) was from a family of highly placed officials in the financial civil service, many of whom became monks. In 799 he became abbot of the monaster of Stoudios in Constantinople and under his leadership the community grew hugely.138 He became one of the active campaigners for icons in the era of the iconoclastic controversy, energetically writing letters. This topic was important to the monasteries, which venerated many icons. Arguments over the acceptability of images were not going to sweep the West with comparable fierceness until the end of the Middle Ages.139 Emerging expectations These experiments in Eastern monasticism took place without that regularising process which enabling ecclesiastical structures and the underlying ecclesiology to develop in an orderly way, ratified by Councils with published decrees. From them began to emerge developments which were going to be important in Western monasticism, whether followed and adopted, or resisted there. The precarious balance between solitary and community monastic life had to be struck and struck again. We have seen that successful hermits did not always remain alone for long because others came to join them, or to learn from them as eremitical ‘apprentices’. Some sort of rule of life had to be devised for these loose communities, and in some places groups of hermits chose to live in close proximity and to eat together and worship together, even if only intermittently. These structurally rather untidy communities were to grow in Western monasticism into something much more formal. Western monasticism in its Benedictine form was going to place great emphasis on the permanence of a monk’s final vows and the expectation of stability. Some key principles emerge The flavour of these early monastic centuries in the Near East remained experimental. It was not necessarily an irrevocable decision to become a hermit or a monk. John Chrysostom was born about 349, to Christian parents. He received an excellent education, and entered the Church intending to join the ministry. 41

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition He was made lector at Antioch. He withdrew to try the eremitical life in 372, but extreme fasting affected his health and he returned to the post of lector which he had left to try to be a hermit. John Chrysostom’s first Homily was given on his return from the desert. The main sources cited in his Homilies are Scripture and the Apophthegmata Patrum, the ‘Sayings of the Fathers’, in which the traditions of the desert Christian solitaries were recorded.140 He says he did not forget the Christians in Antioch while he was there; rather he saw himself as an exile for Christ. He says he knew how Paul felt when he wrote in Philippians 1.7 that while he was in prison it was as though he had the Philippians with him in his heart. So monastic or eremitical life could offer no more than periods of reflection, ‘retreats’ from a world to which an individual remained attached. Yet separation from the world crystallised into a firm expectation. The anonymous second-century Letter to Diognetus sees Christians as exiles, doing their duties as citizens but living as if in a foreign country (5). Christians are maligned but unjustly (5). Christians are to the world like the soul to the body (6). Tertullian (c.160–225), a Carthaginian, urged the martyrs to detach themselves from their family ties and their affections in the world. The world is the real prison. They are not in prison, but on their way to freedom.141 He explores the importance of the subjugation of the flesh with its fears of pain and death (4).142 The monk, like the hermit, was turning his back on the world and ordinary social life and family ties. These developments also raised the question whether monks and nuns were in some sense ‘special’ Christians in the way the martyrs and confessors had been in times of persecution. Of such special Christians particularly high standards may be expected. Cyprian writes (Letter 15.1) to martyrs and confessors, urging them to take especially seriously their duty to follow Christ’s commandments. In the West, claims by monks and friars to be special among Christians were to grow controversial in the later Middle Ages and the Reformation. Before these monastic experiments had fairly got under way, several of the normative patterns of monastic life had been identified as desirable in the Christian life. These too were to take distinctively Western forms. Effort and striving were recommended by some writers. Tertullian mentions the Spartan custom of whipping young men before the pagan altar at a public ceremony where they demonstrate their powers of endurance and the victory of their spirits over bodily discomforts (4.7).143 The martyrs are soldiers winning battles and athletes winning crowns, as Eusebius emphasises. Glorious martyrdoms under Severus’ 42

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how it all began persecution were achieved by the ‘athletes of religion’, especially in Alexandria.144 Here were the germs of Western monastic ascetic excesses too. Such calls raised the important question whether it was allowable for martyrs actually to seek to suffer. Some Christians actively sought martyrdom, even requesting the local authorities to execute them. This was not approved of. Yet monks entered voluntarily into a way of life guaranteeing suffering and demanding spiritual athleticism. Eusebius gives an example of extreme courage in the case of Apollonia. This old woman had her teeth broken by blows and then the mob threatened to burn her alive if she would not recant. She refused and pleaded with the mob. When the mob let her go, she leapt into the flames of her own free will and died a martyr in that way. There were Western monks in later centuries who would have taken excess to the point of volunteering for suffering in the same manner. Western monasticism’s insistence on personal (if not institutional) poverty had its roots in the East too. It was a practice of wealthy early Christians to have given away all their possessions, to the poor or to the community. Origen did it, according to Eusebius (History, VI.3.9–10), also selling his library to provide himself with an income so that he need not depend on others; so, according to Athanasius, did Anthony, making himself poor by choice.145 Eusebius says exemplary Christians had responded to the loss of property at the hands of the mobs in times of persecution by regarding the theft and destruction of their property as a blessing. Augustine reminds his readers that many in Jerusalem sold their goods and laid them at the apostles’ feet. Was this required?146 Should monks who were not called to be martyrs and did not suffer theft by the mob ‘for their faith’ voluntarily give away property? Monks seem universally to have been expected to embrace poverty, and if they had had wealth when they decided to become monks they either gave it to the poor or to the monastery they proposed to enter. The last course was controversial because it could lead to perceived ‘expectations’ on the part of a monk who entered as a major benefactor. Augustine recognises that some joined ad hanc professionem servitutis Dei who were poor, even ex conditione servili and could bring no wealth.147 It is important that they suffer no disadvantage, for example of status in the community. Salvian (b. 400/5) wrote at length on almsgiving and the disposal of property in his Ad ecclesiam. He advances the idea that giving up property can be regarded as payment for sin, and that the sinner may do well to quantify his debts and pay accordingly by giving alms.148 His contention is that even though there has 43

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition been a change of customs since Old Testament times when a good man might perfectly fulfil the law while living in some comfort and enjoying his wealth, and even though the higher standards of self-denial now expected seem to make the Gospel more exigeant than the Old Law, this is right. As Christians, ‘we now pay more to our Lord because we owe more’. 149 He is firm in urging wealthy widows and virgins to realise that self-denial is not enough without a willingness to give away wealth. The property of the monastery became sacred, so that even a few beans dropped required penance, omnia vasa monasterii cunctamque substantiam, ac si altaris vasa sacrata conspiciat.150 This could be linked with a presumption that a monastery should be generous in almsgiving and not waste its substance. ‘Let us not allow the Lord’s table to be left empty behind us without provision for the needy, standing there visible but without resource, lest the groans which our indifference has wrung from the poor rebound upon us.’151 In Western monasticism these complex property questions were resolved for many centuries by the practice of expecting monks and nuns to enter a monastery or convent without personal property but lodging a sum of money as a dowry or entrance-payment, which would be kept on their behalf so that if they ever left the order it could be returned to them and they would not be destitute. Institutional wealth in medieval Western monasticism was also increased by the gifts of the pious and their families. So personal poverty was not generally going to be matched by community poverty in the West. Otherwise deliberately poor monks, no longer able to give alms, might themselves come to need alms. Here the relationship between fasting and almsgiving did not go unnoticed. Even the poor can help martyrs by fasting instead of eating their usual meals and sending the price of the meal.152 Peter Chrysologus (c.380–c.450) made a similar point, when he said in a sermon: ‘Fasting heals the wounds of sins, but without mercy it does not cleanse the scars made by the wounds […] May our lunch be the meal of the poor.’153 This is in the spirit of the Gospel. Luke says that to those who give alms, all things are clean.154 If you encounter a refugee from persecution, receive him and offer him refreshment and regard yourself as sharing in the glory of his persecution, says the Didascalia Apostolorum (xix.2).155 Was special monastic clothing appropriate? Pachomius and his disciples dressed a little differently from other monks, clothing themselves in skins in imitation of the prophet Elijah (II Reg. 1.8).156 They also wore sleeveless tunics, in token that their hands were never ready to do evil; and they wore cowls in 44

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how it all began imitation of infant head-gear, in token of their innocence. They wore girdles as a sign that they were always ready for action in God’s service. Sozomen gives these reasons though he knows there are other opinions. Gregory of Nyssa discusses the priestly robes in which Moses ascended Mount Sinai.157 The rapturously ascending soul of the monk in contemplation may be described as clad in garments suitable for wearing in heaven. Cassian (c.360–435), in a Western monastery, begins Book I of the Institutes with a discussion the proper dress and footwear of monks. These have considerable symbolic significance. Monastic dress should reflect the duty to be a soldier of Christ, always girded ready for battle. The extent of the clothing is also important. It should protect the wearer’s modesty but not by its colour or cut encourage vanity about being fashionable. A small hood should be worn in token of childlikeness and simplicity, a staff carried, and enough protection for the feet provided to ensure that the monk was ready to run in his Lord’s service if need be. He explains that the custom of wearing skins and a leather belt was a model established by the prophet Elijah.158

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chapter ii

Monks go West

To turn to the arrival of monasticism in Western Europe is to be confronted with puzzles. Did Western monasticism take its character from the experiments in Egypt and in the Greek East, whose reputation was carried about the Roman Empire in the ordinary processes of internal communication? Or did it have an identifiably ‘Latin’ and Western origin? How did monasticism cross the language barrier from Greek to Latin as the two language communities became increasingly divided with the decline of Empire and the advance of the sixth century? Was the resolutely Latinist Augustine or the less monoglot Cassian dominant in shaping Western monasticism? From which of these – or from where else – did the anonymous ‘Master’ take the collection of principles which seems to have been used by Benedict?1 And did Benedict draw the components of his Rule from any or all of these or from a climate of expectation emerging during his own lifetime?2 We must now try to answer such questions by accompanying the first bringers of monasticism to Western Europe. Patterns emerge again and again, most noticeably perhaps the way in the decaying Empire people went backwards and forwards among its provinces. The great language division between Greek and Latin speakers was not yet the barrier it was to become by the sixth century.

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monks go west i. Monks in Gaul The spread of an idea: Irenaeus, Martin of Tours, Hilary of Poitiers, Sulpicius Severus, Paulinus of Nola Western monasticism seems to have begun at the prompting of some who had already tried to live the life in the Eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire. An early example of this crossing of the East–West boundary (we shall meet many more) was Irenaeus (d. c.202). He probably came from the area which is now Turkey and he was probably a Greek. In a period of persecution under Marcus Aurelius he fled to the West and served as a priest in Lyons. The language barrier at this date would not have been insuperable. Latin – rather like modern English – was an international language, and within the Roman Empire educated people would be able to make themselves understood in Latin even if their mother-tongue was Greek or one of the minor local languages of the Empire. Conversely, educated readers whose first language was Latin were still expected to be fluent in Greek, if not bilingual, because they would need to read the literature of classical Greek, especially its philosophy. Irenaeus was an able man and a considerable theologian. He had been made Bishop of Lyons after he had been sent to Rome to discuss with the Pope the problem posed by the Montanists, a charismatic sect emerging from Phrygia in Asia Minor. They were dangerous because they held themselves to be spirit-led and gifted with prophetic powers and that made them liable to wander into heresies. He went on writing theology until he died, and he wrote in Greek. Yet already a Greek speaker from the East was likely to have a different inward ‘culture’ from a Western European from the Latin-speaking tradition. And that divergence grew with the fall of the Roman Empire and the growing separation of the Greek and Latin cultures. The monastic way of life does not seem to have been introduced in Gaul for another century and a half. But as members of the new communities of monks began to multiply, monastic leaders and ordinary monks in Gaul were soon contributing significantly to the discourse about the faith in which the leaders of the Church were engaged. Martin of Tours (316–97) made a beginning and provided a Rule for monks to live by, based on that of St Basil.3 This is the St Martin whose biographer Sulpicius Severus (c.363­–c.425) tells the story of his encounter with a beggar wearing only inadequate rags. Martin cut his military cloak in half and shared it with him. 47

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Martin of Tours was born in 316 in what is now Hungary, to a father who was an officer in the Imperial Horse Guard and therefore likely to move about, as he was stationed in different parts of the Empire. Although it was now – since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine – lawful to be a Christian, this was not a Christian family. Nevertheless, as a boy Martin attached himself to the local Christian church and became a catechumen. As the son of an officer, Martin was required to become a cavalry officer himself and a posting took him to Gaul. This family’s experience is an example of the way the spread of Christianity from Eastern Europe was reaching the West by way of the mobile military and provincial governance provisions of the Empire. The Provinces of the Empire were not politically isolated from one another. Late Rome was an Empire at war and also an Empire which had to be governed. Both administrators and soldiers could be posted across Europe. This interconnectedness of public affairs in the Empire proved to be an efficient means of transmission of the ideas which underpinned the development of early monasticism and brought it into the West. Another prompter of long journeys by Christians was the need to escape local outbreaks of theological controversy. Being condemned for heresy by one side or the other could be dangerous and it might be wise to move elsewhere. By the time he was a young adult Martin had been baptised and come to the conclusion that, as a soldier of Christ, he ought not to fight in a worldly army. He was court-martialled but astutely offered to go and stand at the front of the army and submit himself to execution. That proved he was no coward, so he was released. He went to live at Tours where he became a follower of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers (c.300–c.68). Hilary was a native of southern Gaul but he knew some Greek. It seems the Christians in the south of Gaul already formed quite a wellconnected network and knew who to turn to – and where to find him in an emergency. There was a period of exile, danger and disruption when Bishop Hilary was forced out of his See at Poitiers because a controversy had broken out over his teaching on the Trinity. This was a period when the Imperial Court favoured Arianism, the heresy of the followers of Arius. Arius (250–336) had been a priest in Alexandria. He had gathered quite a following for his teaching that Christ was somehow secondary or subordinate to the Father and not of one substance with the Father and ‘begotten before all worlds’, as the Nicene Council’s Creed said. So attempts to describe clearly the relationship of Jesus to his Father were always likely to provoke lively arguments.4 48

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monks go west Martin, as a known disciple of Hilary, found it wise to move elsewhere. He had various adventures and seems to have spent some time living as a hermit on an island in the Ligurian Sea. But when Hilary was able to return to Gaul, Martin did so too. There he founded a monastery at Marmoutier close to Tours. From there he travelled in Gaul preaching the Gospel and attracting more recruits to the monastic life. Like Bernard of Clairvaux much later,5 he perceived monastic life to present no barrier to active politics.6 Sulpicius Severus, author of the Life of St Martin,7 was a native of Aquitaine, well-educated in classical literature and a lawyer (a training in forensic rhetoric was still a fundamental of late Roman education). He became one of Martin’s converts and gave away all his wealth to become a monk. Sulpicius Severus in his turn founded a monastery at Primuliacum in the foothills of the Pyrennees on part of his family estates. Sulpicius Severus’ Dialogues include tales of monastic life in Egypt. A literature of reference material was being built. Paulinus of Nola (c.352/4–431) became Sulpicius Severus’ friend and correspondent. He too was a native of Aquitaine, where his family had estates. He began the usual career of his class, a combination of senior civil service and governor responsibilities in different parts of the Empire, serving in Rome and South Italy. When the tide of contemporary politics turned he went back to Bordeaux, about 384. He married a Christian and was baptised a Christian himself. He and his wife went to live on his family’s further estates in Spain, where, after their first child died in infancy, they agreed to live an ascetic life apart from the world. Paulinus became the victim of the sort of ‘forced ordination’ Augustine of Hippo later experienced, which was then quite common. The ‘calling’ of the Church might take a vigorous form. An able man might be ‘seized’ by the Church because it needed such recruits to the clergy, and physically thrown down before the bishop by his captors, to be ordained whether he liked it or not. Paulinus objected with sufficient feeling to prompt him to remove himself with his wife in 395 from Spain to southern Italy, where he settled at Nola. There he wrote letters, adding to the literature of the early monastic West, including some correspondence with Jerome (c.347–420) on monastic matters, and also with Augustine of Hippo (354–430).8 Niceta of Remesiana (c.335–415) had moved from Remesiana in Dacia to Rome, and was among Paulinus’ correspondents. Paulinus wrote regretfully but eloquently, to map for him, his journey home to carry on with his missionary work. He says God’s plan for Niceta was that he would link East to West.9 49

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition These contacts and exchanges illustrate the geographical range and the connectedness of the growing Christian influence among the educated upper classes within which early Western monasticism was now emerging. Paulinus and Sulpicius Severus exchanged some letters of solidarity in the form of mutual support, couched in high-minded generalities. ‘We can put God first and win a great reward by indifference to our possessions.’10 The Bread of life is Christ and we are ordered to eat it ‘with all haste in marching dress, girt up and strongly shod, without laying down our sticks’.11 Monasteries multiply: Vincent of Lérins, Salvian, Cassian Vincent, a monk of Lérins who died between 434 and c.454, created a famous test of orthodoxy which was still capable of prompting a sense of sudden illumination in the mind of a reader a millenium and a half later. It helped to trigger the conversion to Roman Catholicism of John Henry Newman (1801–90)12 in nineteenth-century Oxford. Newman had been reading the Fathers in search of a better understanding of primitive Christianity and he came across Vincent’s dictum that the test of the one true faith will be that it is ‘that which has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone’.13 Vincent belonged to a monastic community on an island off what is now the French Riviera. It was quite a new monastery, which began when a hermit called Caprasius inspired a certain Honoratus to imitate his way of life. Honoratus seems to have been born in Gaul, to pagan parents, but he and his brother became Christians and in 368 they went on a journey to see the Holy Land, in the company of Caprasius. The pilgrimage was ended by the sudden death of Honoratus’ brother and he returned to Gaul, travelling through Italy on his way back and spending time at Rome. He took advice from the Bishop of Fréjus about what he should do next. Honoratus went to live alone on what had previously been an uninhabited island. He too was soon joined by would-be disciples. He formed them into a community and founded a monastery at Lérins, which grew rapidly and was described as ‘immense’ by the 420s. Honoratus later became Bishop of Arles but the community continued to thrive. Vincent’s Commonitorium, with the wording which so struck John Henry Newman, seems to have been written in 434. Vincent mentions the Council of Ephesus (431) as having taken place three years earlier. That Council was concerned 50

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monks go west with Nestorianism, one of the Christological theories which were currently being ‘tested’ for heresy. Nestorius had been Patriarch of Constantinople from 428–31. Nestorius’ idea was that it was impossible for Christ to have been truly both divine and human, so that Christ was not the Son of God but a human being in whom the Son somehow dwelt. Vincent’s evident awareness of this argument and its potential to become a significant heresy (as it did) is indicative of an efficient dissemination of the latest Christian ‘news’ through the Empire. Communications about modes of living a monastic life were also apparently circulating. Vincent’s Dialogues,14 with their accounts of the way early monastic life was led in Egypt, also show how the influence of the ideals of that distant desert was being felt even in such a relatively remote part of Europe as Gaul. In Dialogue 1, 10, Vincent describes a mode of monastic life in which ‘belonging’ under a vow of obedience to the abbot helped to form and maintain a stable community; he explains how monks in Egypt live together in groups of a hundred, under an abbot, and in obedience to him. Some go into the desert with permission to live as hermits, but they do not ‘leave’ their community when they do this. The abbot arranges for a food supply to be taken to them. In one case, it is claimed, miraculous bread was provided by God for a fasting hermit. ‘Private enterprise’ in travelling and experimenting with monastic life and social connections, as well as official ‘postings’ of officials round the Empire, could all work to spread awareness of recent monastic experiments as well as knowledge of the background history of eremitical pioneers, in Egypt and elsewhere. Salvian of Marseille (b. 400/5), who became a monk at Lérins, had married, but he and his wife agreed to part and enter monastic life separately, to the prolonged disapproval of their families. He wrote to his parents, pleading that it is right that he and his wife should give thanks to God. How better to do it than this, he asks.15 A letter to the monks at Lérins was provided as an introduction to be carried by a young man who was Salvian’s kinsman. He had suffered in one of the attacks by the invading barbarians who were destroying the authority of the Roman Empire and its infrastructure, and had been captured with his family at Cologne. The letter explains that his mother remains there, in dire need but able to make a living while avoiding the status of slave by hiring out her ‘hands’ to the wives of the conquering barbarians.16 Salvian’s De gubernatione Dei, ‘On the Governance of God’, was written in the midst of these alarming events about 439. He mentions a capture at Toulouse and the conquest of Carthage. He was not the only author among his contemporaries to tackle the great central question of Augustine of Hippo’s City of God. 51

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Why was the Christian God allowing a Christian Empire to suffer such depredations?17 Salvian too needed to explain how an omnipotent Christian God could be allowing the destruction of what was now an officially Christian Empire, with Imperial endorsement almost uninterrupted since the time of Constantine the Great. His answer is that it is a punishment for people’s bad behaviour. They have brought it on themselves by their decadent and self-indulgent habits. The invading tribes, by contrast, have high standards and self-discipline. John Cassian (b. c.360) was probably born in Eastern Europe. He and his friend Germanus spent some time in Palestine, where they lived in a monastic community for a few years. Then they set off for Egypt, where in the course of two visits they explored a number of monasteries, with, it seems, no sense that a monk should regard ‘stability’ as good behaviour for a monk. They travelled with clear consciences. More than a decade later, the two were in Constantinople, possibly in flight from a theological controversy in Egypt where they may well have feared their lives might be in danger. The Patriarch of Constantinople himself was shortly sent into exile and it seems likely that it was as a useful Latin speaker that Cassian was sent to Rome. There the opportunity presented itself to found his own monastery near Marseille. His monastery complex apparently included provision for women as well as men, possibly in a ‘double monastery’ style which was to have its legacy in the double monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England.18 Cassian became the author of some key Latin texts of early Western monasticism. Cassian’s Conferences, an attempt to convey the teaching of the desert fathers, were not published until at least 425. He had left Egypt twenty-five years before but although that may have dimmed his memory, it had clearly not diminished the importance for him of what he had seen and heard there.19 The Conferences (Collationes) was a work with another purpose, again partly based on Cassian’s encounters in Egypt, in heremo Sciti. In Conference 1, he says that seeking Abba Moses among the other hermits ‘was like looking long at a bed full of fragrant flowers until we found the flower which truly smelled the sweetest’:20 Abbas Moyses, qui inter illos egregios flores suavius non solum actuali, verum etiam theorica virtute fragrabat.21

It was intended in this ideal depiction that monks in a community should live with a ‘single mind and single spirit’,22 but the enlargement of communities and the arrival of new recruits could create pressures. Conference 19 discusses how 52

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monks go west a monk is to cope with being in a crowd. At the coenobium of Abba Paul there were more than 200 resident monks. A large number of other monks joined them for a feast on the anniversary of a dead abbot. One young monk was slapped for bringing a dish of food too slowly. He bore the reproof with exemplary patience. Another, an old monk called John, is taken as an example of how to continue in the life (since many monks leave after a year or two, unable to bear the discipline). Old John had withdrawn from his hermit life to the coenobium to ‘go back to school’ to learn to live better.23 Cassian’s Institutes, like the Conferences, reflect his absorption of the ideas and practices he encountered in those parts of Egypt he knew well – mainly the area round Alexandria. In the Preface, he also mentions with respect his debt to the teaching of Basil and Jerome as precedents for the cenobitic life rightly lived. In the Institutes, Cassian’s chief concern is to explain the rules for living as a monk, though he continues into a lengthy discussion of the virtues and vices24 and concludes with more general reflections, especially on the absolute requirement of obedience to even the most absurd instruction from a superior. It was not for the monk to question why.25 Northern France The chronicler Orderic Vitalis (1075–c.1142) tells the story of the early history of monasticism in northern France from the seventh century. Orderic says that under the Franks, St Ouen the local bishop founded a house for monks at Rouen and another for nuns at Fécamp. In this same seventh-century period were founded monasteries at Fontenelle and Jumièges and St Évroul. These houses were effective in preaching the Gospel locally and Christianising the pagan local peasantry (agrestes incolas).26 But moral standards slipped among the Frankish leadership and that opened the kingdom to the ninth-century invasions of the Norsemen. Cities were burned and so were religious houses and the monks and nuns scattered. These invasions in the end gave a part of northern France (to become ‘Normandy’) to the invaders, but their leader Rollo became a Christian and was baptised in 912. His son William of Normandy and William’s son Richard restored some monasteries and founded others.27 This encouraged local barons, sometimes supported by their wives, as Orderic notes, to make similar foundations for their souls’ salvation and that of their ancestors.28 53

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition ii. From North Africa to Italy: Augustine Augustine of Hippo (354–430) became probably the most widely read writer in Latin-speaking Western Europe for more than a thousand years after his death. His conversion to Christianity in 386 was prompted in part by hearing the sermons on Genesis preached by Ambrose, then Bishop of Milan. He went to hear the bishop preach, with an arrogant assumption that as the newly appointed professor of rhetoric in Milan he would discover him to be a mere amateur at public speaking. But he found he was impressed, and not only by the elegance of the oratory. Augustine had long struggled with the problem of evil, and how a good God could allow it in a universe entirely of his own making; he had for a decade been an adherent of the solution offered by the Manichee cult. Here was Ambrose preaching on the subject in his homily-exegesis of the Scriptures, citing Greek writers Augustine had not read, the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus, his brother Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, whose Neoplatonism was at the cutting edge and who had much of a technically sophisticated kind to say about the process of creation.29 Ambrose was a live link with contemporary Greek thinking and his sister Marcellina was already a pioneering nun, in a community established in Milan, one of the first in the West. The call to the virgin life was not popular with parents, who preferred to see their daughters married, and who objected to the enthusiasm with which Ambrose preached this way of life. It proved to be a strong ‘draw’ to the girls themselves, and houses of nuns began to multiply through Italy. We shall come to his contribution to Italian monasticism in a later chapter.30 Augustine himself had had a personal encounter with monastic ideals just before his conversion. A letter of Paulinus of Nola written in 396 touches on Augustine’s possible debt to an Egytian-inspired monasticism.31 But in his Confessions, Augustine himself tells the story of a visit from Ponticianus, a high imperial official and a fellow North African. He found Augustine and his friend Alypius together when he called. During the casual conversation which followed, he looked at a text Augustine had left lying on the table and beamed with delight when he found it was a copy of the Pauline Epistles. He himself was a Christian and the conversation turned to matters of common interest. Ponticianus mentioned Anthony of Egypt and the hermit life. When he realised that Augustine had never heard of Anthony and knew nothing about the lives of Christian hermits in the deserts, Ponticianus told him all about them. He explained the ideals they 54

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monks go west sought to embrace and told Augustine about the monastery nearby, outside the city walls at Milan and under the protection of bishop Ambrose, which was also unknown to him. He explained that he himself had learned about Anthony because of a chance encounter, on a walk with three colleagues at Triers. They had come upon a humble dwelling where a few Christians were living an eremitical life and there was a copy of the Life of Anthony. Two of the companions realised the pointlessness of the life they were living in the imperial service and were ‘converted’ on the spot. They remained in the dwelling and joined the group, ‘fixing their hearts on heaven’. Augustine says he too was moved. He was inwardly turned round and made to gaze at his own sinfulness. And it was not to be long before he was converted to Christianity himself.32 Augustine had long cherished an ambition common in the ancient world. He would have liked to live in philosophical retirement, with a few like-minded friends, and discuss great questions. The ‘model’ which he would have had in mind in youth was probably the sort of ‘philosophical discussion’ described by Cicero in the books he wrote in retirement. When Cicero withdrew from his duties in public life he gave his energies to philosophy and produced a series of books on such themes as the nature of the gods, duty, friendship, old age. These were not especially original works. They synthesised and analysed – and, in the case of Against the Academics, rebutted – the opinions of published writers on key philosophical questions. His favourite form was the conversation or dialogue, in which a group of friends discuss a problem. This was quite different from the uncomfortably probing dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates repeatedly makes mincemeat of those rash enough to engage with him in argument. The Ciceronian dialogue was a conversation of equals, quietly exploring questions of common interest about the purpose of life and how best to live it. Immediately after his conversion to Christianity Augustine retired with his mother, his son and some friends to spend a time of reflection at Cassiciacum, now Cassago Brianza in Lombardy, though that lasted only six months. At Cassiciacum the little community spent its time in what was essentially philosophical discussion of a Ciceronian sort. The subjects it chose included ‘the blessed life’ (De Beata Vita) and ‘order’ (De Ordine). Seneca the Younger had written a De Beata Vita in the mid-first century. Augustine recognised that these are among the archetypal philosophical questions; in the resulting accounts of the conversations there is much reflection on aspects of these central questions new Christians would need to think about. 55

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Alypius realised that in discussing ‘order’ the friends had actually been working out rules to live by. The life the group had been leading was orderly in quite a formal way. There was prayer to begin and end the day. Psalms were said or sung. There was reading at meals, sometimes half a book of Virgil’s Aeneid, instead of Scripture or a Christian author. They undertook some manual labour.33 Returning to North Africa after his baptism, and after the sudden untimely deaths of his mother and son, Augustine sold the estates he inherited and gave the money to the poor, keeping only the house, which he ran as a monastic community with a group of friends – for here, too, he preferred to live in such a community. Augustine brought with him on his return to North Africa a form of semimonastic life shaped by a Ciceronian classical philosopher’s ideal of thoughtful retirement we shall meet in Cassiodorus too.34 We shall come in a later chapter to the way this developed into the ‘Augustinian Rule’.35 Once he became Bishop of Hippo in 395, Augustine had to make domestic arrangements for the way he was to live as bishop. He was allowed to form a community within the actual garden of the church at Hippo. 36 He also had to deal as bishop with existing local communities of monks. So his thinking about the way to be a monk began to be shaped from several directions by this wider experience, his own way of life and better knowledge of that of others. The local monks were not always leading irreproachable lives. He wrote to reproach them. In about 400, Aurelius, Bishop of Carthage, asked him to write a treatise, which became the De opere monachorum.37 In it Augustine tried to resolve the disagreement between monks who say they should work for their livings and those who preferred to trust to God for their maintenance (or, some said, refused to lower themselves to manual labour). Entangled in this dispute was a quarrel about monastic hairstyles (tonsures) – a matter which was going to arise again in Anglo-Saxon England, as the English monastic scholar Bede relates.38 Bede’s carefully researched History remains a key source for much of what is known about the early monastic life of the British Isles. Hippo was not Egypt. It is not clear how much of a tradition of eremitical or communal desert life there was locally when Augustine returned to North Africa after his conversion to Christianity and then found himself made Bishop of Hippo, or how widely the notions he had been introduced to by Ponticianus had become familiar there. There is evidence that in his time, though not necessarily in his time as bishop at Hippo, ‘when any servant of God, either from the cenobitic monasteries of Egypt, or the holy places of Jerusalem, or the holy and venerated 56

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monks go west recesses of the desert, came to Carthage for the performance of God’s duties, be received abuse, profanation and curses’.39 iii. Spain: Priscillian of Avila, Leander and his siblings, Julian of Toledo Priscillian of Avila and a false start Irenaeus and Tertullian both mention earlier Christians in Roman Spain, but the most important developments from the point of view of the emergence of a Western monasticism took place in the fourth century.40 This was when controversy arose over the teachings of Priscillian of Avila (d. 385). He had established a community of ascetics and had a growing following among people forswearing married life for celibacy. This troubled the local authorities, who said their way of life presented a challenge to the fabric of society by undermining family life. Perhaps they need not have worried. This was not a call to permanent commitment to monastic life in an established community. These were to be short-term retreats. Those who engaged in them seem to have been members of ‘groups’ of men or women, but there was no Rule or wearing of habits or expectation of permanent separation from the world.41 Nor was Priscillian apparently seeking to set up a rival system to that of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Spanish bishops were divided. Some agreed with him; some saw him as a threat, particularly in his insistence that marriage was one of the things which must be given up, and the attractiveness of his teachings to women. A diocese where family life was discouraged and no children were born would become a social challenge indeed. In fact, Priscillian held a senior ecclesiastical office himself. He had been appointed Bishop of Avila about 381, at the instigation of two other bishops, Instantius and Salvian. His selection was challenged by an appeal to the Emperor Gratian, who had issued a rescript banning heretics and could be expected to be sympathetic to the repression of unorthodox beliefs and practices. Priscillian and his supporters went to Italy to seek the support of Ambrose of Milan (340–97). They were also intending to find support in Rome, though they were not successful there. Things went better in Milan, where the Emperor Gratian’s magister officiorum was won to their side. They passed through Aquitaine, rousing support there, and attracting the attention of Sulpicius Severus.42 So the scandal – if scandal it was – became notorious across the Empire and ceased to be local. 57

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Priscillian’s offence probably consisted not so much in his ideas as in his success. On the face of it, Priscillian’s teaching was not unusual for the times. He believed that in order to free himself for the full-time and total concentration on God which is at the heart of the contemplative life, a Christian must separate himself from all bodily pleasures so as to open himself to gifts of the Spirit; he must be poor, celibate, a vegetarian. The gift of ‘illumination’ was especially to be desired.43 Possibly the heightened contemporary expectation that the end of the world was near, which has occurred at intervals throughout Christian history, gave force to this call.44 But as others saw it, he was in effect issuing an invitation to all Christians to retreat to remote places or to secluded country villas to practise their faith in the way he recommended. Priscillian would expound his teaching to them there.45 Popular writings were always a potential danger and Priscillian and his ideas were becoming popular. A series of treatises survives, breathing the spirit of Priscillian’s call to an extreme Christian life. The first is a lengthy apologia denying the main accusations made against him, for instance that he was a Manichee. The second was a book addressed to Bishop Damasus on the same theme.46 He was exposed to this allegation because of his insistence that the body was a source of temptation and its urges had to be suppressed, though he was probably scarcely firmer on this point than other enthusiastic ascetics of the time. There were, however, indications in what he wrote that he might be doctrinally dubious (for example, interested in the occult). It was easy enough to demonise a popular leader who seemed to be challenging the established order. Figures with unimpeachably orthodox opinions were, however, drawn onto Priscillian’s side. Salvian wrote to his sister a letter of encouragement after she had fallen ill. ‘The health of the body is inimical to the soul’, he says. So she will be the stronger spiritually for having her flesh weakened.47 Yet parties formed. The legitimacy of episcopal appointments of bishops favouring or condemning Priscillian became the subject of challenge too. At Saragossa in 380 a dozen assembled bishops, apparently unsure what to do, approved canons which included reproofs for women who went to hear the Bible read in the houses of men who were not their relatives, and condemnation of teachers who taught without being licensed; of those who went into retreat; of clergy who sought to become monks. There was no formal condemnation of named persons.48 The first Council of Saragossa (380) specifically condemned Priscillian and excommunicated him, and he fled with his supporters. Some of 58

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monks go west the Spanish bishops started litigation against him in the Imperial Court. Martin of Tours was no enthusiast for Priscillian’s ideas, but he rushed to Trier to try to prevent the case continuing. He had some success but as soon as his back was turned the case was concluded and Priscillian was executed. So the Priscillianist experiment in community-based ascetic life in Spain fell foul rather dramatically of the institutional Church. But that was not the end of the matter. The dissemination of ideas and influences was of course as strong in the case of ‘wrong’ ideas as of ‘correct’ ones, which is one of the reasons why there were so many disputes about orthodoxy of faith and practice in early Christian centuries. Sulpicius Severus (c.363–425) wrote about Priscillian and provides important evidence for his life and teachings.49 Orosius of Braga (c.375–after 418) travelled to Hippo and Alexandria to meet key figures. In his Memorandum to Augustine on the Error of the Priscillianists and Origenists, he mentions Priscillian’s leanings towards astrology.50 He included Origen as perpetrator of errors because Origen was also a controversial figure and his alleged followers were liable to be condemned with him. Origen had the disadvantage that he had written before many points of Christian theology had been officially clarified and in a climate of late Platonism, where it proved easy to slide into grey areas. The ‘Origenists’ of the fourth century were so called because they were said to imitate him, for example, in saying that Scripture might be read in non-literal senses; or that the Persons of the Trinity could be thought of as standing in a hierarchical relationship, not as co-equal and co-eternal; or that the created world is eternal. ‘Priscillianist heresy’ spread even after its ‘official’ condemnation, beyond Spain into Gaul. The Bishop of Arles and the Bishop of Aix-en-Provence were expelled from their sees in 412 because their archbishops were strict about what amounted to rigorist opinions. Later councils and synods continued to pronounce against it in Spain, at Toledo in 447 and as late as 563 (the Synod of Braga). Mainstream monasticism arrives in Spain The Council of Nicaea of 325 had pronounced Arian views to be heresy. But the Arian controversy continued to divide Christian Europe. That does not necessarily mean that everyone in a largely uneducated population was theologically sophisticated enough to give an acccount of specific views. It was a question of political affiliation rather than belief. For some generations Gothic and Vandal tribes were 59

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition taken to hold Arian views. Vandals with alleged Arian beliefs were laying seige to Hippo when Augustine died in 430. Even the movement of monasticism into Spain may be explained by the flight of monks from North Africa, ahead of these Arian invaders, though some went to Italy or Gaul. In Spain the Visigoth invaders found themselves gradually absorbing RomanoHispanic culture rather than dominating it. Toledo, the imperial city, soon had monasteries on its outskirts. Officially, Visigothic rule in Spain under Recared (559–601) changed its position when Recared declared for Catholic orthodoxy at the beginning of 587, probably under the influence of Leander, Bishop of Seville. Leander was the brother of the Isidore, Fulgentius and Florentina we shall meet in a moment. The majority of the Romano-Hispanic population were mostly of the Catholic view already. It took time for the influential supporters of the Arian position to come round and there were some rebellions. The change opened the way to active forced ‘conversion’ of the Jews of Spain, with acts of military oppression and restrictions of their freedom. By about 600 Spain had evidently adopted female monasticism. The earliest reference to the Rule of Augustine for nuns comes from Spain.51 Leander of Seville had been a monk before he became a bishop and he may have encouraged his sister Florentina to become a nun and found a community of fellow-virgins. He wrote to Florentina to express opinions on the ‘education of nuns’.52 He reminds her that no earthly pleasure is worth her time or attention, for all is fallible and capable of decay. God gave her the gift of virginity; virgins are first fruits of the body of Christ, their lives oblations acceptable to God. Virgins can look with confidence to the glory to come, and they are able to intercede for others in the power of their virginity. Consecrated virgins should follow certain rules of life. They should avoid contact with women living ordinary lives in the world and of course with men. They should concentrate on maintaining a bond of love amongst themselves within their community. On the other hand, they should not form special friendships or talk to one another alone. They should remain in the community they first join and not go back to the world. They should live ascetically, eating and drinking little, but not go to extremes. They should speak plainly and not swear. When they bathe it should not be for pleasure but for the sake of their health. They should study Scripture. The life of Julian of Toledo (642–90), bishop and author of Prognosticon futuri seculi,53 is known chiefly from the encomium written by his successor Felix.54 Julian and Gudila, his friend, apparently wanted to be monks as young men. Felix says that at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, they sought to live a life of 60

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monks go west quiet contemplation. Whether this meant that they would have liked to join an actual monastic community is not clear, but the desire for a life of that kind was evidently there. The Arab invasion of Spain came with the eighth century but it did not put an end to Christian monasticism in Spain. In the mid-ninth century, Eulogius of Cordoba mentions nine monasteries still surviving near the city to the north, some of them founded in his lifetime. There was coexistence. Arab rulers seem to have been willing to make use of the notarial assistance of monks, including as translators. iv. Italy: Jerome, Rufinus, Ambrose, Cassiodorus The arrival of monasticism in Italy: Jerome and Rufinus It seems to have been in Italy that interest in imitating the desert life of Anthony was first stimulated, partly by the publication of Athanasius’ Life of Anthony. Athanasius (c.296/8–373), Bishop of Alexandria, spent a long life opposing the Arian heresy, both before he became bishop and afterwards, and when that heresy was politically in the ascendant his life was sometimes in danger. About the middle of the fourth century, after his banishment in 338, he went to Rome in the company of Ammon and Isidore, two disciples of Anthony of Egypt. This was his second exile to the West; the first had been at Trier a few years earlier. While he was in the West he also visited Gaul, in connection with the resolution of this controversy and his own dangerous situation. Jerome Jerome (c.347–420) had been baptised as a young adult after he had gone to study in Rome. As a student in the city he was often carried into excesses he later regretted. He would try to restore his balance by visiting the tombs of the apostles and martyrs in the Christian catacombs. He found it a terrifying experience: I often went into the tombs deep underground, where the bodies of the dead lay

on shelves on either side in the gloom. It recalled ‘may the living go down to hell’ in the Psalm (54.16) and passages of Virgil’s Aeneid.55

61

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Like so many others we are meeting in the early history of Western monasticism, Jerome travelled extensively about the Empire. He spent time at Trier, then some years at Aquileia with Rufinus. There he made friends with other like-minded Christians with whom he began a journey, passing through Thrace and across Asia Minor, into Syria. He wrote wistfully in 374 to a Theodosius, who was probably one of the hermits in the ‘community’ of the Syrian desert, of the ‘wonderful fellowship [of the] desert, the fairest city of all’.56 Lingering at Antioch (c.373–4) he had a vision. He tried hard to give up the secular literature he loved, but throughout his life Jerome felt the tug of the beauty and interest of secular literature. He suffered periods of depression and uncertainty in all this about what he himself should do with his life and how best and where to be a monk or a hermit. He was ashamed to discover himself ‘more a Ciceronian than a Christian’. Apollinaris of Laodicea was in Antioch at the time Jerome found himself there in the mid-370s, and he encouraged Jerome to study the Scriptures seriously, though as yet there was no final agreement about what made up a ‘canon’ of inspired Scripture. Local Jewish Christians seem to have helped him with the study of Hebrew. During his Antioch period he also retreated to the desert to try life as a hermit. He moved on again, to Constantinople, where he was able to study further with Gregory Nazianzus. This took him back to Rome and a position in close contact with the Emperor and with socially important Christians in Rome. He was recognised by Pope Damasus as a useful linguist and scholar to whom could be entrusted the task of overhauling the Old Latin Bible. This was a confusing collection of different translations and a definitive version was badly needed. Jerome’s ‘common’ version (Vulgate) was to become ‘the Bible’ in the West for more than a thousand years, and it was still being relied on in the Roman Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council in the mid-twentieth century. Among the influential Romans he was now in contact with were several widows and their daughters, educated women of high social standing, who sought guidance on the living of a dedicated Christian life. The daughters, Blaesilla and Eustochium, Jerome encouraged to remain virgins, and their mothers chaste. They were to adopt ascetic habits. A correspondence with some of these women survives, written with the sometimes coy artifices of late antique rhetoric. To ‘virgins’ Jerome writes that he is sending only a small piece of parchment because he is so poor. He asks why they have not written and says he is hurt. 62

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monks go west One of the best-known of these letters was written to Eustochium but is intended as an open letter about the monastic life. Jerome addresses her as the Bride of Christ, who should be wrestling, engaged in a struggle with her fleshly lusts, giving things up so as to deny herself.57 She should regard the call to the monastic life as a journey from which she must not try to return. It is not enough to leave your home country, your people, your father’s house; you must also try to ‘leave’ your own flesh and cling closely to Christ the bridegroom, he urges. He cites texts of Scripture. Leave the plain for the mountains. Put your hand to the plough and do not look back. Do not come down from the roof to fetch another coat.58 Walk in fear that robbers will attack your soul as it accumulates spiritual gold.59 Run for the prize.60 Jerome knows how difficult this is to achieve. He describes in some detail his own experience of desert life. He would sit alone in that vast emptiness and tempting pictures of the amusements of life in Rome would come into his mind. He spent his time with tears and groans and fought the urge to sleep. He drank only water and regarded cooked food as an indulgence not to be permitted. Even then, when he had done all he could to subjugate the flesh, lusts attacked him. ‘I was often surrounded by dancing girls.’61 He was also unable to resist the lures of secular literature, to the point where he had a dream in which he was accused of being more a Ciceronianus than a Christianus.62 If he has found it so hard to live as a monk should, how will Eustochium succeed, accustomed as she is to a life of luxury? She should expect to be anxious and wretched, sleepless and in tears. She should not allow entry to those comforting clerics who aim for advancement and dress fashionably and wear perfume and positively seek to put themselves in positions where they will be admired by women and will be able to spend time with them, even finding their way into their bedrooms. They very much enjoy a good breakfast in the houses of wealthy married women.63 Jerome’s famously abrasive manner and the contrast of lives of his ascetic circle with the social mores of others of their class caused offence. Social approval among the influential Senatorial families of Rome was lost over the death of Blaesilla, Paula’s daughter and sister of Eustochium, already in poor health. She followed Jerome’s instructions so thoroughly that she made herself ill and died. Jerome said that mourning her was inappropriate. This was greeted with howls of disapproval, but her mother Paula seems to have continued to regard him as a guru, to the point where he was accused of forming an inappropriate relationship with her. 63

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition He left Rome in 385 and went back to Antioch, followed shortly after by Paula and Eustochium. The company became pilgrims to the holy places and then left for Egypt, where Jerome was impressed by the stories and living examples of the lives of desert hermits. In 388 they returned to Israel and Jerome set up his hermit cell near Bethlehem with his friends about him. Paula was a rich widow and able to support them all. Rufinus Rufinus of Aquilegia (340/45–410) was born, apparently of a Christian family, in a north Italian city near Aquilegia. He was living there in a community of monks about 370 when he met Jerome. Soon after, Rufinus himself went travelling, to Alexandria to study with Didymus the Blind who ran the school for catechumens there, and then to Jerusalem. There he founded a monastery of his own on the Mount of Olives, in which there was to be study of the thought and writings of Greek Christians. He may already have met in Italy a rich Roman widow, Melania, who took a group of monks and clergy with her to live in Palestine, away from the Arian persecutions they had reason to fear. She established a monastic community in Jerusalem too, and seems to have provided financial support for Rufinus’ venture. Rufinus formed a friendship there with John, Bishop of Jerusalem, who had once been a monk himself. When Jerome arrived in Jerusalem he and Rufinus continued their acquaintance but Jerome was not a comfortable friend. They had a serious quarrel, never fully repaired, apparently involving a division of opinion on the orthodoxy of Origen. That was never an easy matter to resolve, for Origen’s writings are explorations and he was capable or contradicting himself in his struggles to unify philosophy and the Christian faith. Rufinus returned to Rome in 397. To meet the demand of local Christians for more information about Origen and his views, he made some Latin translations. That brought him trouble, for the Pope was one of those who considered Origen a heretic. And the threat from the barbarian invaders had not gone away. Two years before his death in 410 Rufinus and Melania were in flight again, this time to Sicily, where he carried on with his exploratory Latin translations of Origen’s Greek. This work was to be of immense importance during the Middle Ages because it made Origen accessible to a Latin-speaking world in which there were few who could have read him in Greek. 64

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monks go west Ambrose and his nuns Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, had a sister who lived as a nun. As a bishop, he himself was conscious of the contrasts between the ways of Christian living required in monastic life and those which seemed appropriate to a priest or bishop. In Letter 63, written to Limenius, Bishop of Vercellae, about 396, he made a systematic comparison. Clergy live as on a stage; monks out of sight in their cells. Clergy must contend with worldly distractions; monks with the temptations of the flesh which beset them in their retreats.64 The cleric has to be a fighter; the monk retreats into seclusion. The cleric overcomes the world; the monk leaves it.65 Ambrose’s own special preoccupation with ‘purity’ was a commonplace of later antiquity, closely linked to the expectation that monks would be celibate, for sexual purity was the leading preoccupation. He mentions purity in this letter (para. 66), linking it to abstinence and self-restraint and moderation (even extreme moderation) in all things, to fasting and temperance. He sees these habits as desirable for priests and not only for monks. The ‘grace’ of priesthood is the greater if the bishop requires his young ordinands to practise abstinence and live pure lives. He holds up the Old Testament models of Elijah and Elisha and the New Testament model of John the Baptist (para. 67), pointing to their wearing of skins for clothing, their poverty and hunger, their dwelling in remote places in discomfort.66 Ambrose wrote ‘On virginity’ with his sister in mind but also for the sheer ‘love of purity’, again citing Elijah.67 He considered it as important for men as for women. His contention is that this prizing of virginity is a Christian introduction; it is not merely one of the ascetic ideals borrowed from philosophy. Christian virgins are not to be compared with the Vestal virgins or participants in Phyrygian rites.68 Virgins are free from the toils of greed, luxury, vanity, and need waste no time on pleasing men.69 It is not that Ambrose is decrying marriage;70 he just believes chastity is better and that it spares young women the stresses of being ‘sold in the market’ of marriage. So popular is the alternative to marriage that he knows virgins come from distant places in order to receive the veil in Milan.71 Ambrose’s De Officiis (‘On duties’), modelled on Cicero’s De Officiis, was probably written in the 380s. Cicero was still regarded as an important author in fourth-century education in the West, and he was widely read; Ambrose refers to him a good deal. Cicero writes on the virtues and an ethical approach to public life, but from a pre-Christian point of view.72 Clerical life, as Ambrose was seeking to define its parameters, was public life too, but in a changed Roman world. 65

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Jerome’s alarm at finding himself more a Ciceronianus than a Christianus contrasts with Ambrose’s attitude. When Ambrose wrote ‘On duties’, he was rather of the view that Cicero and Christ might be brought together and turn out to agree. In the Latin tradition for centuries afterwards, several works of Cicero on integrity in public continued to be widely read. It was felt that his ideas on duty and friendship and old age were largely compatible with those of the Christian tradition, allowing for the fact that, through no fault of his own, Cicero had not known Christ.73 Cassiodorus Cassiodorus (c.485–c.585)74 was born in southern Italy, into a family belonging to the governing classes. Like others of his class he practised law and held offices of state, including the consulship in 514; he ultimately became praetorian prefect for Italy. He put together a collection of model official letters, the Variae, drawn from the files and covering his time as Quaestor, as Magister Officiorum and as Praefect. Learned men, who had become my friends through conversations which we had

had together, or benefits which I had bestowed upon them, sought to persuade me to draw together into one work the various utterances which it had been my duty to make, during my tenure of office, for the explanation of different affairs.75

His literary interests remained strong through these years of toil in the public service. He and Pope Agapetus I created a library of texts, Greek as well as Latin, which they intended to become the reference collection for a school for Christians at Rome. This school was never built, but the idea lingered and helped shape Cassiodorus’ ambitious school and library at his monastery at Vivarium when he eventually retired. But these were unsettled times. There were tensions between the Gothic administration in Ravenna and the old Roman ways of the Roman civil and public service. There were executions, including that of Cassiodorus’ close contemporary Boethius (c.480–524/5), whose Consolation of Philosophy was written while he was under house arrest awaiting execution. When Cassiodorus decided to retire from public life, the question was what he should retire to. In about 537–8 he went to Constantinople and stayed there 66

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monks go west for nearly twenty years, giving his time to the study of Christian theology. A ‘philosophical retirement’ could also include a study of the Scriptures. To those who knocked on this door, there might be found flowers to delight the senses.76 There was the purest sweetness.77 And the prophet felt God breathe on him.78 The Psalms in particular were always to remain an important resource in Western monasticism. Cassiodorus says he sank himself thirstily in the Psalms, drinking from them spiritually with the help of Augustine’s commentary-sermons.79 In his final retirement at about the age of sixty-five, he came back to Italy and founded a monastery. His family estates were close to the Ionian Sea at Squillace, and there he built Vivarium. One building provided accommodation for a community, another for those who preferred to live as hermits. His idea was that it should offer not only a community in which the monastic life could be lived but also a school. He did not provide a Rule, but a handbook for students. This seems to have evolved during his own prolonged period of ‘mature’ studies, in the 530s and 540s in Constantinople and later in Italy again. He describes in the Preface how he and Agapetus had failed to fulfil their objective in Rome because of the bella ferventia et turbulenta which were racking Italy at the time and which made it impossible to create a place for study which would be quiet and peaceful. In Book I of these Institutiones, he writes to his ‘dearest brothers’ that he hopes it will be useful to them once they have equipped themselves in holy reading and by meditation: postquam se milites Christi divina lectione compleverunt, et frequenti meditatione firmati cognoscere coeperint loca librorum oportune nominata. 80

v. Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’: Ireland, Wales and Scotland The monastic community at Llancarfan in modern Glamorganshire may have been a fruit of the visit to Wales of Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre (c.378–c.448). He had been a friend of Cassian, in the first or second quarter of the fifth century. The biography of Germanus himself was not written until a generation later (about 480), by Constantius of Lyons, an acquaintance of Lupus of Troyes. Lupus accompanied Germanus on his visit to Britain and could have told Constantius what happened. They had apparently been despatched on the visit by bishops in Gaul who were concerned at rumours that Britain was rife with Pelagianism. In his 67

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Ecclesiastical History of Britain, Bede gives space to the story of this visit to Britain by Germanus.81 He confirms that he came by invitation, with Lupus of Troyes (c.383–478), monk of Lérins and from 426 Bishop of Troyes, to help the British master the theological refinements of the contemporary debates about the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius’ heresy – against which Augustine wrote many books – took the view that human good behaviour was simply a matter of living by God’s rules; there was no such thing as predestination to heaven or hell, no impediment to good behaviour if a person made the effort. That meant that Pelagius was questioning the doctrine of original sin. Relatively newly defined in the West, this said that humans are born with the stain of original sin upon them, for they inherit it as children of Adam and Eve. Original sin makes it impossible for people to resist committing actual sins to add to their inherited guilt. It followed that sinners needed the sacraments, especially those of baptism and penance, to cleanse them of sin and save them from its consequences. If Pelagius was right and the sacraments were not normally necessary to salvation as a vehicle of God’s saving grace, the role of the Church would be diminished. So the institutional ecclesiastical establishment naturally resisted this teaching. (Though Augustine never said that the grace of God could not intervene to make good any ‘sacramental failures’ or omissions.) The two visitors to Britain were said to have preached everywhere they went, and to have won many converts from ‘Pelagian opinions’. Pelagius was rumoured to be British by origin though his teachings had become controversial mainly because he had become a fashionable preacher in Rome and consequentially influential among the wealthy who came to hear him preach. His natural appeal was perhaps to the sort of successful people who thought they could indeed do all that was necessary by their own efforts. Perhaps there were fewer of these in Britain than in Rome. Germanus visited St Alban’s tomb where, once it had been specially opened for the purpose, he placed relics of the apostles and martyrs. He was reported to have performed miracles, including the restoring of sight to a blind child. Bede treats these as symbolic of the restoration of sound belief in the true faith. The details of these journeyings and events remain historically unclear, but Germanus’ visit is certainly a plausible route by which the notion of a Western-style monastic life may have arrived in Britain. Myths about ‘hermits’ in early Christian Ireland tell us little in detail about the understanding of the faith the early hermits and monks there could have had, or 68

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monks go west where they got their ideas about the way they should choose to live their Christian lives. However, something is to be learned about the way those early Welsh experiments may have had their influence in Ireland. The Irish Finnian (470–c.549), founder of a monastery at Clonard, is said to have got his Christian learning at school in Wales in the monastery at Llancarfan. Finnian (d. 549) made Clonard into a community with (oral) rules; cells of monks spread through Ireland. Clonard seems to have become a ‘school’ of the monastic life for the dozen who came to be known as ‘the apostles of Ireland’, though the level of theological education available to these monks is hard to guess. Cadoc, Finnian’s abbot there, is also credited with founding a monastery in Scotland. So there are early hints that Christian members of the tribes in the West and north of the British Isles in the period between the withdrawal of Roman occupation and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon invaders in south, east and central Britain may have influenced one another in adopting monastic life. In Ireland a tribe ‘converted’ to Christianity might build a special sacred enclosure with a little building in it to serve as a church. Where a monastic community emerged in such a development, it could provide a focus for the local secular community, and village and monastery devised a way of life in which both had a role. The village head tended to expect to appoint the abbot. The local children might be educated in the monastic school, though not as child oblates and not necessarily with any assumption that they would grow up to be monks. The Irish monasteries were generally respected as places of learning from an early date.82 But the level of education is hard to pin down for the early years. Columba Columba (521–97) is credited with the foundation of numerous Irish monasteries before he left for the island of Iona and then for Scotland to be a missionary among the Picts. Adamnan (627/8–704) wrote his Life.83 As Bede describes Adamnan, he himself was Irish, and a monk of long standing who had been abbot of a monastery at Skreen in County Sligo before he became Abbot of Iona in succession to Columba.84 Adamnan also wrote about the holy places of Palestine and gave a copy to Aldfrith and the interested King of Northumbria (685–704). He had obtained what he knew chiefly from the Frankish bishop Arculf, who had been a pilgrim himself and actually seen the places described.85 Adamnan describes Columba as ‘father and founder of monasteries’.86 Numerous miracles 69

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition are cited as proofs of Columba’s power (virtutum documenta), including repelling demons. Columbanus Another prominent figure of early Irish monasticism was Columbanus (540–615). He was apparently first educated in Ireland. In a restless generation, he sailed with twelve companions to mainland Britain, but he soon moved on to France by way of Brittany, then on again to spend time in Burgundy. There he founded a monastery in a Roman fortress at Annegray in the Vosges mountains. (Using Roman ruins seems to have been a fashionable choice for new monasteries at the end of the Roman Empire and for some time beyond.)87 Crowds arrived. Columbanus proved to have powers of attraction of the sort which in Egypt a couple of centuries earlier had drawn clusters of disciples round respected ascetics. He had to found communities at Luxeuil and Fontenay to accommodate the overflowing numbers. Independent monastic activity by these immigrants proved uncongenial to monastic Gaul. And Columbanus took an opposing position to that of the local bishops in Gaul in the controversy over the date of Easter which was to divide seventh-century Europe. This was not merely a matter of choosing different dates at a time when the calculation of the date of the moving feast of Easter was not straightforward. It was seen as a symbol of a profound disunity in the Church if Christians were not celebrating the resurrection of the Lord on the same day everywhere. But there was also the important question whether local bishops had jurisdiction over monasteries established in their sees. In the early sixth century Councils had ruled that bishops had jurisdiction over monastic communities and could require abbots to render spiritual account to them. When Columbanus objected, a synod to consider his behaviour was held in 602. He wrote to the bishops firmly but politely and refused to attend. Columbanus exemplifies the importance of the links of Ireland with monastic Gaul, but also the conflicts. He also made the mistake of quarrelling with the powerful in another people’s political system he did not fully understand. Brunechildis, ‘that Jezebel’, grandmother of Theuderic the current king, brought him the bastard sons of Theuderic to bless. Her motive was to avoid Columbanus persuading the king to marry and beget lawful sons, because that would introduce a rival to herself. He said these illegitimate children could 70

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monks go west never be legitimate rulers. She was angry and forbade the monks to leave the monastery. Columbanus went to discuss things with the king, who sent him placatory gifts. He would not accept them and threatened to excommunicate the king if he did not give up his adultery. Courtiers, instigated by the queen, stirred up ill feeling against Columbanus and demanded an inquiry into the running of the monastery. Columbanus indignantly replied that was no business of a layman. The king told Columbanus that if he wanted royal protection he must allow an inspection. Columbanus said threateningly that the kingdom would collapse if the monastery was invaded. They tried to exile him but he returned to the monastery unimpeded. The king sent in ‘hit-men’, but they found themselves caught in a difficult situation. They begged Columbanus to make peace, because they would suffer either God’s displeasure or the king’s, whichever they obeyed. For the sake of peace, Columbanus left for Italy and and Rome, and founded the monastery at Bobbio in Italy.88 The links of Irish with continental European monasticism were many and complex in this period. Irish houses in France were quite numerous in the seventh century.89 Columbanus’ biographer Jonas entered Bobbio in 618, Columbanus having died there only three years earlier. Cassian and Isidore became well known in Ireland, though it is hard to say how soon.90 Columbanus’ biographer Jonas knew Cassian’s Conferences (Vita Iohannis, 18). Celts who spent time in Gaul could have known Cassian’s work that way. However, evidence that Cassian’s work reached Ireland is not early, perhaps pointing to the seventh or eighth century.91 Columbanus’ monastic rule was given approval by a Council at Mâcon in 627. It had features that echo what Basil had thought important but others that were also central to the Rule of Benedict, which seems to have become dominant in most of Western Europe by the end of the century.92 Most important of these is obedience. Columbanus marshalls a series of Scriptural texts to support the expectation of unquestioning and instant obedience. The moment a monk hears the voice of his senior or superior he must rise up and obey. He includes as further requirements for his monks the panoply of typical aspects of monastic selfdenial: silence (especially the avoidance of loose speech), abstinence, temperance, humility, chastity, mortification. He gives details of the choir office (arrangements for prayer and the singing especially of psalms) and specifies the diet (vegetables, beans, a little bread). Clothing is prescribed. There is to be manual labour. This is all envisaged in the context of a communal life, under the discipline of a single 71

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition ‘father’ or abbot; the monks learn from one another how to be humble and patient and meek and not to seek to fulfil their own wishes. Patrick The place and date of St Patrick in the early history of Irish Christianity remains a puzzle.93 Columbanus wrote to Pope Boniface IV in about 613, making the flattering comment that Christianity came to Ireland through Rome, in succession to the apostles. He did not mention Patrick, but referred to Palladius. There is more than one candidate who could have been this ‘Palladius’. Germanus of Auxerre had a deacon of that name, who came from Poitiers and had apparently picked up some of Pelagius’ opinions while in Rome. That had encouraged him to retreat to live an ascetic life in Sicily in the first decade of the fifth century, and put his daughter into a convent there. There is some evidence that it may have been this Palladius rather than the bishops of Gaul who persuaded Pope Celestine to send Germanus to what was still Roman Britain, as a missionary. There is a tradition that this visit, or a visit specifically for the purpose in 431, included helping Patrick to bring Christianity to Ireland; but it is also possible that this was a different Palladius. It is also possible that the names of Patrick and Palladius were sometimes confused. The name of Secundinus is also important. There is a story that a Secundinus quarrelled with Patrick, though they subsequently mended their disagreement. If Patrick is to be credited with the main evangelisation of Ireland he did it as a bishop, not a monk. Yet it was the monks of Ireland and Wales who took the task further by coracle, as professional wanderers, allowing themselves to be taken where God chose, there to preach the Gospel. Picts and Scots It was said that it was God who chose to ‘carry’ some of these monastic wanderers to what is now Scotland. This was not a mission like that of Augustine to England, despatched by the Pope with a purpose. Nor was it successful in a tidy way. Ninian was born about 360, in Galloway or Strathclyde. He succeeded in converting the southern or eastern Picts, but it turned out to be a precarious and incomplete achievement; the northern Picts were converted only later by 72

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monks go west Columba and the ones Ninian converted seem soon to have reverted to their old religious beliefs. Bede has a good deal to say about Ninian. He was believed to have gone to Rome when he was still a young man, where he caught the eye of Pope Damasus. Damasus’ successor Siricus make him a bishop and sent him back to Britain to preach the Gospel. On his way back through Gaul he heard about Martin of Tours and visited him at the abbey. He stayed there long enough, it seems, to adopt some of Martin’s ideas and he even used masons from St Martin’s monastery when he wanted to build a church in Scotland. Apparently the effects of Ninian’s conversion faded among the general population, if he brought Christianity to Scotland before Columba as Bede suggests. Columba and Kentigern, Bishop of Glasgow both refer to lapses. Columba found himself evangelising from scratch at the end of the sixth century. Nevertheless, the monastery Ninian founded endured and became famous and it seems to have preserved a legacy of the tradition of Martin of Tours among the Pict-Scots. So inspiration for Celtic monasticism in Britain may have come partly from St Martin of Tours, even if that legacy became confused.94 vi. Bede and Anglo-Saxon Britain We have visited some of the early monasteries on the outskirts of the British Isles with their expansionist behaviour and their wandering monks. What was happening in the heart of England? Here we are on Bede’s home territory, for he remained a monk all his life at the double monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria. Bede’s first mention of monks in his Ecclesiastical History occurs at the point where he is describing the mission of Augustine of Canterbury. The story went that Pope Gregory the Great had been struck by the fair-haired Saxon beauty of some English children he happened to see for sale in a slave market in Italy. He is said to have remarked that they were ‘not Angles but angels!’ (non angli sed angeli). So he dispatched Augustine to England ‘and many other God-fearing monks with him’ (et alios plures cum eo monachos timentes deum).95 When they arrived, the monk-missionaries were offered a place to stay (mansio), and they began to live there in such a way as to testify to their faith, according to the principles of the life of the first apostles, with prayer and vigils and fasting, preaching and spurning all worldly things as alien to them.96 They were ready to die for the faith if necessary, and Bede says the example they set of 73

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition sweetness and simplicity of life attracted many converts.97 So this is presented as at every point a monastic98 mission, though not necessarily a Benedictine one.99 The mission was successful in bringing England officially into the fold of ‘Roman’ Christianity, though not without the lingering controversies with the Celtic tradition which we shall see come to a peak at the Synod of Whitby. Celtic or Roman? It is hard to estimate how distinct the ‘Celtic’ and ‘Roman’ monastic traditions remained in mainland Britain and for how long. Bede’s accounts of early monasticism in England include a good deal about the Irish coming to England, but also about English monks going to Ireland. Traditions survive of foundations of English monasteries by Irish hermits in the seventh century, such as Bosham, Hanbury and Abingdon. These stories describe much ‘wandering’ (peregrinatio). Irish monasticism had no strong tradition of monastic ‘stability’, and indeed – though he himself seems to have had no wanderlust at all – Bede has no criticism of their apparent lack of stability. Irish monks tended to regard ‘wandering to see where the Lord led’ as a virtuous, not a reprehensible, activity. Bede describes how Fursey (d. 650) came from Ireland ‘desiring to lead a wandering life for the Lord’ (cupiens pro Domino […] peregrinam ducere vitam).100 As a preacher Fursey was successful and won many converts, as well as the patronage of King Sigebert. He built a monastery amongst the East Angles, apparently on a ruined Roman fort on the coast there.101 Fursey found it hard to settle.102 He had left Ireland because he could not bear the pressure of coping with the sheer crowds of his converts. Leaving the cure of souls in the monastery to another brother, he soon took a year off to retreat to live as a hermit (ab omnibus mundi rebus in anchoretica conversatione), perhaps hoping to end his life thus (vitam finire). He took with him one of his (blood) brothers, who also had long experience as a monk (de monasterii probatione diuturna ad heremeticam pervenerat vitam).103 He went ‘without possessions’ (rebus nudus) and he talked speculative theological philosophy (iam theoricam pascebat) with his brother. There is a hint in all this of recognition that the eremitical life is difficult and only experienced monks ought to attempt it. That became a general view. Later still Fursey ran away to France because (according to Bede) there were too many wars in England. He was received by King Clovis and built yet another monastery at Lagny-sur-Marne.104 The author of the story of his journeyings, 74

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monks go west entitled the Transitus, wrote good classical Latin with learned quotations and rhetorical stylistic devices. He relates examples of Fursey’s many visions, especially of heaven and hell. Bede describes how many English had gone to Ireland, where some became monks and others travelled about visiting the cells of famous hermits teachers (alii magis circuendo per cellas magistrorum). Egbert is an example. He settled to monastic life in Ireland, giving away his income and reducing himself to poverty. In Lent he ate one meal a day, just bread and skimmed milk, and even that in a fixed small quantity.105 The mingling of English and Irish monasticism was not always a success, it seems. Imitating the swarming of bees, Columba took a group of Irish monks from the community at Lindisfarne (leaving some behind to maintain the life there)106 and created new foundations. Four founders of monasteries came from Ireland to visit him.107 But tensions arose when the Irish monks would wander off at harvest time and then expect to come back and share the harvest the English monks had gathered in. Crisis: the Synod of Whitby Bede describes the events leading to the Synod of Whitby, during which monastic leaders and bishops met to try to resolve disagreements about the date of Easter and about differences among monks in their style of tonsure.108 Celtic monks had their hair shaved across the forehead but left unshaved at the back, in a style which it has been suggested may have been borrowed from the Druids.109 Monks in the Roman tradition had a bare patch shaved clear on the crowns of their heads, leaving a ring of hair reminiscent of the Crown of Thorns. There was discussion of the Scriptural evidence about shaving and or letting hair grow, and of the elusive views of early Christian writers. The apostle Peter was thought to set an acceptable standard, and he was believed to have been tonsured in the form of a crown.110 A monk such as Colman from Ireland, who had become Bishop of Lindisfarne, could be expected to see the issues from both the ecclesiastical and the monastic point of view. The controversy over the date of Easter Sunday, which was of international importance in Europe at the time, was to be considered together with this matter of monastic hairstyle in seeking to resolve differences between ‘Celtic’ and ‘Roman’ Christians. 75

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The Easter question had arisen from the use of different methods of calculating the date of this moveable feast each year, so that Western Christians found themselves celebrating Easter on a different Sunday from those in the Greekspeaking East. The difference could happen in the West too, with Christians originally converted by Celtic and Roman missions celebrating Easter at different times. When that affected the ruling classes, it was politically as well as domestically uncomfortable to have one spouse celebrating Easter to the Roman timetable and the other to the Celtic one. The later ‘Roman’ date kept the Queen, who came from Kent and was of the Roman conversion, still fasting her way through Lent while her husband the King of Northumbria, a Celtic Christian, feasted for Easter. That made for royal marital disharmony and gave the matter secular as well as ecclesiastical prominence. The tonsure debate, as well as the one about the date of Easter, turned on the question whether unity in monastic hairstyles was a matter of faith or of ‘use’. It made a difference. There could be only one faith, but differences of ‘rite’ or ‘practice’ had been allowed by Councils of the Church from an early date. Columbanus, as an experienced traveller in Europe, had become a determined defender of the Celtic way of doing things, with respect both to the date of Easter and to the monastic haircut. 111 It was not in his lifetime, however, but in that of Colman (605–75), successor of Finnan, who had succeeded Aidan as Bishop of Lindisfarne, that a Synod was called at Whitby to resolve the growing conflict prompted by the awkwardness of the division in the royal household. At the Synod of Whitby Colman stoutly maintained the Celtic position on both Easter and tonsures, but the Synod’s decision went against him and when it was over, he resigned and returned to Ireland to hold consultations about what to do next, with others there who shared his opinions.112 Bede notes this as a decisive moment. Eata had been one of the dozen young Englishmen schooled at Lindisfarne under Aidan. Now he became became Prior, then Abbot of Lindisfarne, to provide care for those monks who had not gone back to Ireland and who were willing to accept the Roman way.113 Bede wrote a Life of Cuthbert (634–87),114 as well as mentioning him in his Ecclesiastical History.115 Cuthbert had become a monk at Melrose in 651116 and remained there for a decade, showing a preference for a life of silence and solitude (vita solitaria) to which he returned when he could. After Whitby, Cuthbert conceded at least partly to the Roman position and went with his abbot from Melrose, Eata, whom he had followed briefly to Ripon in 661, to take over Lindisfarne. As an abbot he not only acted as master and guide to his monks but 76

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monks go west also tried to teach the local people and encourage them in the Christian life. To do this he would leave the monastery and go about on horseback, so that he could preach in the surrounding area (10). It was only with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to agree to become Bishop of Lindisfarne (25); he did not want to leave his monastery. But once he had been consecrated he discharged his duties with exemplary pastoral care until he felt entitled to retire, by a warning that his death was near. He ended his life on Farne Island as a hermit. Bede’s stories of monastic life in England and the role of nuns Monasticism began to have social impact in England in unexpected ways. As early as Bede’s lifetime, English kings were seemingly beginning to see advantages in retiring to monastic life. Bede gives the example of King Sebbi, who had been notable in earlier life for his almsgiving and the time he spent in prayer, and his preference for simplicity instead of the wealth he could have enjoyed as king. He waited as long as he did to become a monk, it was said, only because his wife refused to set him free.117 But had she shared his longing, she could have become a nun. The married couple who chose to go their separate ways into the religious life became a commonplace in the eleventh century. The stories told about women in Anglo-Saxon monastic life tend to be coloured by the social expectations of the age, and the place where they lived. Women naturally seemed to have been less free to choose where and when to enter monastic life than male monks. Longing for permission to be a nun, Aethelthryth was married to King Ecgfrith (c.645–85) and became an Anglo-Saxon queen, but nevertheless remained a virgin for twelve years. She kept asking the king to let her become a nun. Eventually he allowed it. As a nun she practised extremes of self-denial. Having got up for matins in the middle of the night she stayed in church praying until dawn. She bathed only before the greater feasts and then only after all the other nuns had washed themselves so that the water was far from clean. And she ate only once a day. When she died her body did not decay. This was regarded as proof she remained a virgin. Her grave-cloths and coffin healed the sick and that was regarded as further proof.118 Here is a ‘type’, the nobly born woman who chooses virginity and becomes a nun, partly perhaps because that is the best way to protect her virgin state from the expectation that she will marry to strengthen her family’s dynastic position; it was her only alternative ‘career choice’. 77

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Bede gives some examples of women known to him who chose to be nuns and became prominent examples to others. Heiu was the first woman to be a nun in Northumbria; she had been ‘consecrated’ by Aidan.119 More famous was Hild (c.614–80). At the age of 33, Hild, a woman of noble birth, decided to live alone as a hermit-nun, and planned to go to Gaul to live at Chelles. But first she sought advice and asked Bishop Aidan what she should do. He perceived her talent as administrator, perhaps, and sent her instead to start a community on a hide of land on the north bank of the river Wear. She was subsequently transferred to become abbess at Hartlepool. There she built a reputation which brought many to her for advice, including secular figures.120 Bede says approvingly that she quickly ensured her community lived in every respect according to the Rule (mox hoc regulari vita per omnia).121 Bede does not say which Rule it was, only that it was strict and required the nuns to live justly, piously and chastely, in poverty, peace and charity. She was so successful that she was able to found another monastery at Whitby, where, again, her insistence on observation of the Rule ensured good order. Bede suggests that Hild’s nuns proved sufficiently well-instructed to be trusted to serve at the Eucharist and to carry out other ecclesiastical duties. That raises important questions about the way their sanctity was understood and whether becoming a nun was in some way thought of as form of ordination and not simply joining an ‘order’, but those uncertainties cannot be resolved from the information Bede gives. These early communities in which nuns lived were not solely female communities. There were double monasteries where an abbess presided overall. So there were several experimental aspects which might have been queried in later ages. This prominence of certain individuals suggests that able women could be ‘players’ in the social and political positioning of the time and also that monasteries were serving social purposes which went beyond those of providing a place where a spiritual life of great intersity could be led. Bede reports on five monks from one monastery who afterwards became bishops in Hild’s time.122 Eastern influences continue The travelling which had encouraged the interaction of Western with Eastern monasticism in late antiquity was still going on, even though the governmental structures and educational provision of the Roman Empire had by Bede’s time almost wholly decayed away. Europe was now full of people – and of ‘peoples’ – on 78

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monks go west the move, partly because of the pressures of migrations from the East, including the Arab invasions of southern Europe. Theodore (602–90) – who was to become Archbishop of Canterbury from 669 – was born in Tarsus, but by 649 he had arrived in Rome, perhaps seeking to escape the threat of the impending Muslim conquests. Hadrian (d. 710) met him there. Hadrian himself was a native of North Africa, probably modern Libya, and he too may have been a fugitive from Arab invasions, which were having a considerable impact there. In Rome Hadrian was already experienced as a monk, but he was evidently not living a strictly enclosed life. He had the ear of the Pope and was probably instrumental in encouraging the choice of Theodore for Canterbury. The two friends were well educated and able to set a high standard and they actively fostered the education of the clergy in England. Aldhelm (c.640–709) was educated in the school run at Canterbury under Theodore, when he was Archbishop, and Hadrian, who became Abbot of St Augustine’s monastery at Canterbury. Aldhelm was not to remain indebted only to this early education with its flavours of Eastern Christianity. He seems to have picked up more from Frankish sources. These became available in England when travelling monks and scholars arrived in Wessex.123 Bede mentions that because there were as yet so few monastic houses in England for them to go to, English women were sent to Frankish Gaul, mainly to the monasteries at Brie, Chelles and Andelys-sur-Seine.124 But he gives little detail about the continuing links of English monks with monasticism in Gaul, and tantalisingly little about the important question whether the influences on Anglo-Saxon monasticism as a whole were predominantly those of Rome or those of Wales and Ireland. Aldhelm seems less likely to have benefitted from Irish learning, though his Latin is florid and full of obscure vocabulary like that of early Irish Christian texts. His treatise ‘On virginity’ has a ‘plot’, based on a Passio S. Anastasii, possibly brought to England by Theodore,125 distinguishing three levels of chastity: virginitas; castitas (people who have been married or suffered widowhood and now live chastely though no longer virgins); and iugalitas, where limited sexual intercourse is allowed strictly for procreation within marriage. He gives historical examples, including some in which virginity is presented as militant and heroic.126 Anglo-Saxon monastic life in a period of decline Monasticism in Anglo-Saxon England may have made an impressive and, in the long term, influential beginning, but after Bede’s time it seems to have entered 79

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition a period of relative decline. This was not for lack of significant leading figures. Egbert, Archbishop of York 732–66, had been a former pupil of Bede. Alcuin (c.735–804) was educated as a boy in his school at York, as were some future bishops for Germany. Bede had his concerns about Egbert. He wrote him a worried letter covering both monastic and episcopal topics. He exhorts him to regard preaching as a primary duty of a bishop’s life. Since the diocese is too big for him to do all the preaching and teaching himself, Bede thinks it advisable to divide up this enormous diocese; he should appoint others to assist him.127 King Ceowulf his cousin will, Bede knows, support him in the endeavour to get more bishops consecrated and a new Metropolitan established at York to provide a Primate for northern Britain.128 In the letter Bede recommends the holding of a General Council to establish a more comprehensive ecclesiastical framework for the nation. He thinks this should include bringing the monasteries under episcopal jurisdiction and if possible selecting the new Metropolitan Bishop from their membership.129 In the Orthodox Church it was normal from the sixth century to appoint as a new bishop someone who had been a monk, or at least was celibate, even if he had formerly been married. In the West, appointing monks as bishops was not uncommon but it proceeded from talent-spotting and family connection rather than from dogma or a theoretical orthopraxis. The problem which needed to be addressed, in Bede’s view, lay with families which were setting up ‘family monasteries’ on lands under their control and then running them as a family concern. This defrauded the king of the services which would otherwise be due to him on these lands when they were held by his nobles. It also tended to secularise the monasteries. Laymen who had no experience of the life of monks gave money to create monastic foundations for which they asked for charters assigning them heritable rights. These devices allowing lay control of monasteries became merely a front for the acquisition of wealth and power.130 Laymen presided over these foundations though they were not monks and filled them with their own protegés, who were not monks either. These ‘abbots’ lived at home with their families and yet they presumed to interfere with the interior conduct of the monastery’s life. They set up arrangements under which their wives could similarly preside over convents while remaining laywomen. The Archbishop of York should busy himself enquiring into what is happening and ensuring that no unworthy or lay person is appointed as abbot or abbess, urges Bede.131 80

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monks go west King Alfred the Great, who was King of Wessex 871–99 and did much to unify the separate small kingdoms of England, tried to bring together a group of learned men to discuss reform of the nation’s intellectual life. His biographer Asser (d. 908/9) said that there were plenty of monasteries but the monastic life was not being led in any of them ordinabiliter.132 It became clear that some tidying of the ways of life in monasteries would be advisable. 133 vii. The post-Roman collapse, the Viking invasions, some ‘Saracen’ pirates, and monks as missionaries in the further conversion of Western Europe ‘The world grows old’: Mundus iam seniscit.134 Eastern monasticism had made its way west through a good deal of private initiative and plentiful opportunity to travel during the last generations of the Roman Empire. Individuals had been able to move about, as we have seen them doing, within the sophisticated and extensive road system the Romans built, and sometimes on the business of the state. They spread rumours of monastic life as a new way of living for Christians. Even while it was under threat from the ‘barbarian invasions’, Rome was able to protect its position for a long time by strategic engagement of the conquering tribes with the Roman system of administration. If that worked, it could be pretended that they were mere guests at the fringes of the Empire. The organisation of the Christian Church was an immense help here. The fall of Rome eventually left Europe short of secular institutions which could provide continuity and a degree of reliability. Roman ‘globalisation’ had failed. For a time the ecclesiastical administration helped to maintain such necessities of life as the movement and distribution of grain. By the time of Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century the Christian Church was the only surviving authority capable of providing much of the framework necessary to organise the transport of grain across Europe. Gregory’s Letters are much concerned with these practical matters of the distribution of the necessities of life. Nevertheless, violence and ‘organised crime’ began to take over. At their best monasteries were ‘safe places’, providing continuity of life and degree of protection and service to the inhabitants of the locality. The invading ‘barbarian’ destroyers of the Empire had brought their own tribal cultures with them. Anglo-Saxon England with its many separate kingdoms 81

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition exemplified what could happen. As tribal structures took over, especially in northern Europe, a ‘feudal’ system emerged. The word ‘feudal’ is derived from ‘fee’, a system of land-tenure in which the holders of land paid the landowners for the use of it. This payment might be in kind, in days of knight-service to the landlord when he needed to raise an army. The king remained the owner of the lands of a kingdom. His barons held land from him as his personal vassals and when a baron died, a new personal bond of vassalage had to be entered into before the right to the land could be transferred to the next holder or ‘inherited’. This was based on a power structure in which membership of the leading families was important. On the whole the powerful were born to power but they might also have to fight for it, for this became a society in which only two professions were open to the nobility: military and ecclesiastical. Bishops were barons too, for a see had its lands which only a king could ‘grant’ the use of, in return for the usual landholder services to the monarch, including days of ‘knight service’ when the king needed an army. A bishop was as much a vassal of the king from the point of view of land-tenure as his brother the baron. And often bishops were the brothers of barons. The situation with abbots and their abbeys was somewhat different. Abbeys might receive grants of land from the nobility, but they were eager to ensure that their charters were renewed when the king passed by. It was possible to rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy by other routes, as we shall see, but a tendency emerged with the Middle Ages for the great families to ensure that one or two sons in each generation became abbots or bishops and to seek control of the lands of monasteries and dioceses in whatever ways they could. The restructured way of life of medieval Europe made it easier for Western monasteries – particularly those in the Benedictine tradition – to manage the property, lands and wealth which accrued to them and to develop a degree of institutionalisation which the desert systems could not have sustained. The Viking invasions and some ‘Saracen’ pirates135 The flow of peoples moving west did not end with the collapse of the Roman Empire. There was continuing upheaval all over Europe. It was not only in later Anglo-Saxon England that circumstances were now making it difficult for monasteries to maintain their standards in a quiet steady way. Ralph Glaber (985–1047) describes the incursions of the Spanish Arabs into Italy ‘about the year 900’ and those of the Normans into Gaul about the same time. 82

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monks go west Islam had been founded as a strictly monotheistic religion during the last two decades of his life from 610–22 by Muhammad, a native of Mecca (c.570–622). He believed he had received revelations from the Archangel Gabriel. These, with their strong echoes of the Old Testament, were recorded and in due course brought together into the Qur’an. After his death there was disagreement about who should succeed him as leader; the Shia and Sunni division arose from this dispute, with its lasting consequences for the history of Islam. Muhammad led his followers in a successful period of military expansion in Arabia. The energetic and militaristic new religion of Islam brought an era of conquests of the North African coastline and southern Spain from the 620s to the mid-eighth century, with a few less successful sallies into other parts of Europe. The would-be Arab conquerors entered Spain in 711 and got as far as southern France before being driven back by the Franks, at the decisive battle of Tours in 732, with further victories against the attempted Islamic incursion until about 760. Sicily and Rhodes and Cyprus were attacked. The Arabs held Cyprus for three hundred years from the mid-seventh to the mid-tenth century. Sicily was captured between 831 and 902, with Palermo becoming the Arab capital. Rhodes was attacked in the mid-seventh century and conquered in the 670s. That did not end the attacks on Mediterranean Europe, or the ambitions of the Islamic invaders to move further north and further inland. Marseille was sacked in 838 and Bari in southern Italy was captured in 841.136 Ralph Glaber writes the story of the Saracen attacks on Spain which reached as far as the borders of Gaul.137 A Muslim fleet sailed up the Tiber in 846 and left Rome only when the invaders gained the promise of a yearly tribute from the Pope. In 911 Muslims held the Alpine passes between France and Italy. In 1004 the Arabs sacked Pisa in the far north of Italy and in 1015 they conquered Sardinia. Miscellaneous raids continued, though the steady conquering push which had made North Africa Muslim was losing impetus and Europe as a whole did not suffer the same fate. Monastic communities and their leaders were personally vulnerable to bandits, and to kidnappers who took advantage of the disruption caused by the invasions. The Abbot of Cluny was kidnapped with his companions by Muslim pirates while crossing the Alps in 972. He sent a letter asking his monks to pay the substantial ransom needed. These were the ‘Somali pirates’ of their time, probably brigand Muslims, not part of the process of Spanish invasion. This was a serious recognised problem and Hugh of Arles had tried to eradicate it in 942 with land and sea ‘pincer’ attacks. The pirates seem to have lingered as a threat from the 890s to 972.138 In later accounts – for the original letter is lost – the abbot calls his captors ‘hordes of Belial’. This was not usually a term used for Muslims at this date so it 83

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition is uncertain whether he realised they were Muslims. He may have thought they were simply the sort of robber bands all travellers risked meeting. While the Muslims were uneasily held at bay at the southern boundaries of Europe, after their inroads into the Iberian peninsula in the first decades of the eighth century, the Norsemen (mainly the Danes) attacked northern parts of Europe by sea from the north.139 Here again there was disruption and risk to monasteries. Among the attractions of this Norse invasion of France was the opportunity to raid monasteries for their gold and silver vessels and other portable wealth. The first Viking invaders seem to have entered England in 787. The raids were reaching the coasts of northern and western France by the last decade of the century. There was a Viking colony in Gascony by the middle of the ninth century and attacks on Rouen and Jumièges in about 840. This also provided a base from which the Vikings could make raids into northern Spain. Within five years they were moving up the Seine towards Paris. By 911 Charles the Simple had signed a treaty ceding what is now Normandy to the ‘Northmen’. From Normandy also came the Norman Conquest, the ultimately successful invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, which had its own considerable ramifications for monastic life. It brought the French language, a French nobility and bishops and archbishops as well as abbots of Norman French extraction. In the eleventh century the Norsemen were also still a force to be reckoned with in southern Europe, where their presence in Sicily and southern Italy was a significant factor in the crusading period. There was some interaction between these widely different northern and southern invaders of Europe. From the beginning of the ninth century Viking traders were selling slaves captured on their raids to the Muslims. In the end the two invading movements confronted one another over the future of Sicily; between 1064 and 1091 the Normans captured Sicily from the Muslims. Monte Cassino is an example of the ups and downs all this caused to longstanding monasteries. The Abbey of Monte Cassino was attacked several times in its early centuries. At the end of the Roman Empire, in 584, it suffered at the hands of the Lombard invaders who sacked the abbey. The monks ran to Rome for safety; it was more than a century before they returned. In 718, Pope Gregory II gave Petronax the task of restoring the monastery on its original site. A new church was built to hold Benedict’s remains. The fame of the abbey grew and it attracted as monks members of the great noble families of Western Europe. But a century later there was a new assault from invaders, this time from the Arabs. They attacked the abbey in 884 and killed the abbot and some of the 84

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monks go west monks. This time the rebuilding began almost at once but most of the community stayed away – at the Abbey of Teano in Campania – until the middle of the tenth century. In 994 the Arabs again attacked and destroyed the monastery. Yet when they returned once more to their old home, the monks of Monte Cassino, undeterred, gained a reputation for setting a high standard for the living of the monastic life. Even the rigorous Odilo of Cluny commented on it with approval. The high point of its reputation in the early Middle Ages was the abbacy of Desiderius (1058–87), who became Pope Victor III from 1087. The church was restored and there were more than 200 monks at this time. The Viking invasions were destructive of monastic life and of the buildings and estates of monasteries in England too. When the Viking invasions were decisively rebuffed at the end of the 870s, there had to be rebuilding. King Alfred assembled advisers, several of whom were bishops. One was Asser, originally a monk from Wales, who was brought into this group by Alfred in the mid-880s, and made Bishop of Sherborne.140 Others were bishops too, but some were monks, notably the Abbot of Corvey in modern Germany and the Abbot of St Bertin’s in Flanders. Wandering and stability Monks who were habitual wanderers, gyrovagi, were rarely approved of in the West, however common a practice wandering behaviour by monks and hermits may have been in the earliest centuries and in the East. The need to discourage monastic vagrancy was one of the reasons for the Benedictine insistence on ‘stability’. There were testing requirements to ensure than anyone who said he wanted to join the community as a monk was serious.141 This last was important for many reasons. Monks unsuited to the life needed to be tested before they were admitted. In the case of monks who dropped out and wanted to return, their capacity for stability needed to be tested. Benedict’s Rule (29) requires a ‘returner’ to promise better behaviour in future. A returner should have only one chance. The early Western monastic rules agree that a wandering monk is a bad monk. There had to be rules to assist a community in dealing with the ‘passing trade’ of monks who have left their previous monasteries and arrived at its door, as well as its own monks who have dropped out and then decided they want to come back. If a priest wished to move to another diocese, he would need letters from his bishop to the new bishop. However, this was not the case for monks. Benedict’s 85

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Rule (61) allows ‘stranger monks’ to be received if they seem to have the right attitudes; and if they stay for a while and fit in and then wish to remain, they may declare their willingness to be ‘stable’ and stay permanently. Nevertheless, this ought not to happen without the consent of the monk’s former abbot or some form of commendatory letter. There must be no ‘poaching’. This became a controversial matter in the early twelfth century, when the Cluniacs and the Cistercian lost monks to one another as fashions changed. Some of the wanderers were dishonest and morally dubious; others were heretical or doctrinally unsound. Letting such undesirable characters join a community too easily might cause unrest among the other monks. On the other hand, the Western monastic community took seriously its duty to be hospitable. A traveller could expect to be received and welcomed. Guests should expect to be met by the abbot and brethren with prayer. They were to treat them with dignity and respect and humbly wash their hands and feet. Managing these mixed visitors required some finesse. There were occasions when it was necessary for a monk to travel, for example on community business. As Benedictine houses became wealthy with the progress of the Middle Ages, accumulating sometimes far-flung lands which were granted to them by benefactors, the abbot might on occasion have to travel to oversee these possessions. Anselm of Bec made such a journey to see the abbey’s lands in England shortly before he was seized to be made Archbishop of Canterbury at the king’s wish. There are rules for leaving the community for such reasons, not as a punishment or an admission of failure, but just so as to travel on necessary journeys. When travel is planned (and the abbot must give his permission) the intending travellers ask for the prayers of the community, and when the travellers return safely they should lie prostrate during worship and ask for the prayers of the others in case they may have been distracted or put in danger by anything they saw or heard while they were away. They must not talk to the others about what they have seen or heard. The outside world is a dangerous place and curiosity about it must be discouraged. Monasticism and Western missions reach the borders with the Greek Orthodox Though ‘wandering’ came to be widely regarded in the West as a bad habit for monks, one of its purposes could be to carry out missionary work. This involved 86

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monks go west a significant shift of direction, from a vocation to improve the hopes of heaven for oneself and one’s own benefit, to a desire to benefit others by bringing them to Christ. We have seen something of the endeavours of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionary-monks. What part did monastic effort play in the conversion of the rest of Europe? Eastern Europe lay at the meeting point between the eastern and western halves of the old Roman Empire, but once the east, with its capital in Constantinople, became Byzantium, the boundary was less clear. Attempts to convert the Slavs were made from the west by the Franks and also from the east, especially by Byzantines who remained in Italy from the days when Ravenna had been the seat of Byzantine government. There was a Church there from the early ninth century. It was the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius who achieved largescale conversion in the 860s at the invitation of Prince Rastislav, developing the alphabet which came to be known as Cyrillic and providing a translation of the Bible into the local vernacular.142 This was an ecclesiastically rather than a monastically led process, though monastic life arrived in Slavic regions at this time. It seems to have been monastic mission from Byzantium which initially brought Christianity to Hungary. The Byzantines also took the lead in mid-ninthcentury Bulgaria, where the monarch Boris I decided it would be politically advantageous to make Christianity his state religiom. He was baptised in 864 and was able to design an autocephalous Church for Bulgaria which would use the Cyrillic alphabet. The European parts of Russia became Christian under Orthodox influence over a period of several centuries from the eighth century. Vladimir the Great was baptised late in the tenth century. In Poland, on the other hand, the Western Church became dominant and its population has remained Roman Catholic rather than Orthodox. Monk, missionary, bishop: Growing tensions The roles, duties and ecclesiological position of monks, missionaries and bishops were easily confused in these chaotic and dangerous centuries. The same individual appears in the record in different roles (and sometimes in more than one at the same time). Part of the problem was that monastic missionaries needed to establish institutional structures to give ecclesiastical permanency to communities of new Christians. A bishop would be needed for the purpose. Augustine of Canterbury had realised this difficulty in his mission to England at the end of the 87

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition sixth century. While remaining a monk, he was consecrated ‘Bishop of the English’ at Arles, by Bishop Virgilius. When his mission proved a success, he wrote to the Pope to ask how to make a bishop for the newly converted Christians, since that normally and properly took three bishops and the bishops of Gaul were too far away to help. The role of monks in missions from England That difficulty arose again in the process of converting the European mainland from the British Isles. According to Bede, Egbert (d. 729) was one of the monks who went from Northumbria to Ireland to improve his hopes of heaven (peregrinam ducere vitam pro adipiscenda in caelis).143 He became convinced that he ought to spend the rest of his life in this pilgrimage. He conceived a desire to take the Gospel to German peoples – for he knew that the Angles and Saxons had come from German lands as pagans.144 There were also many geographically closer to him who were still enslaved to pagan rites (sunt alii perplures hisdem in partibus populi paganis adhuc ritibus servientes), so he meant to sail round Britain and bring these to Christian faith. Then he intended to go to Rome to pray at the shrines of the martyrs and apostles there. Egbert did not complete this programme of missionary travelling, because he was told of a vision in which it was said that he must not go on this journey but instead must go to the monastery of Columba to teach (ad Columbae monasteria magis docenda pergat).145 Columba had been first teacher of the faith to the Picts and in Iona so this could be regarded as almost a missionary activity. Instead of Egbert, Wihtberht, who had long experience as a hermit in Ireland (in Hibernia peregrinus anchoreticam), sailed to Frisia and preached the gospel there for two years, but with no success. So he went back to be a hermit in Ireland.146 The role of monks in the conversion of Germanic peoples Meanwhile, Egbert had not entirely given up his plan. He sent Willibrord (c.658–739) to preach on the other side of the North Sea. Willibrord’s father had himself retired to live the hermit life and Willibrord was given as a child oblate to Ripon Abbey, where he was well educated. He did not stay there as an adult but moved to another monastery at Rathmelsigi in Ireland. There standards of 88

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monks go west learning were high and he lingered for a decade. That was where he studied with Egbert, who chose him to accompany a dozen others on the mission to Frisia in 690.147 Intercourse with Frisia there almost certainly was, at the level of trading and slavery at least. Bede describes someone called Imma being sold to a ‘certain Frisian in London’.148 But it is not easy to judge how missionary monks affected these social and commercial realities. There were political aspects too. This mission and the one which followed it were undertaken at the request of King Pepin of the Franks. Such success as this mission had – and it resulted in the building of churches and monasteries and the establishment of a bishopric of Utrecht – was overturned in 716 when the pagan ruler Radbod took control of Frisia from Charles Martel. Willibrord retreated to his monastic foundation at Echternach and Boniface went back to England and then to Rome, where the Pope made him Bishop for Germania. So Boniface officially became a leading missionary to the peoples in mainland Europe just across the North Sea from Britain. His letters home reflect some popular attitudes and assumptions. They tell a colourful story, including a method of mission by invoking the threat of horrid consequences of refusal to persuade anyone reluctant to become a Christian.149 There is a description, in a letter written to the Lady Eadburga, of a vision seen by a monk at Wenlock. This is a ‘story’ vision in which he is carried up into heaven and shown the pit of hell, and treated to a parade of the personified vices to which he has himself been subject, such as ‘drowsiness, by which you were late to make your confession to God’.150 This carries a strong message about what will happen to those who fail to keep up their guard against sin. Another letter-story tells of a vision about King Ceolfrid of Mercia, who was still alive. He was being protected against the assaults of devils by a screen provided by the angels. But he continued to sin, so the angels took the screen away and at once the devils rushed in from all over the universe to torment him.151 The monk of Wenlock seemed to be out of his body in the vision described in the letter, but he looked down at it and it seemed ‘so offensive to him that in all his visions he saw nothing so hateful and contemptible, nothing except the demons and the glowing fires, that exhaled such a foul stench as his own body’. For years he had worn an iron girdle about his loins to punish it.152 Pope Leo sent Boniface with a commission to convert Germanic Europe because he considered he had the requisite learning: You are to teach them the service of the kingdom of God by the persuasion of the truth in the name of Christ, the Lord our God. You will pour into their untaught

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition minds the preaching of both the Old and the New Testament in the spirit of virtue and love and sobriety and with reasoning suited to their understanding.

He was then to baptise them according the proper sacramental discipline.153 On Radbod’s death in 719 Willibrord was back, with Boniface, this time with the royal protection of Charles Martel as well as papal approval. The role of monks in the conversion of Scandinavia The Vikings wrought a great deal of damage on monasteries in Britain during their raids. But Christianity was slowly coming to Scandinavia as well as to the Low Countries. In the early 820s a monk known as Ansgar was appointed to help oversee new Christian converts in Jutland in the retinue of King Harald. But Harald’s tenure did not last and Ansgar moved on to try to do similar work among new Christian Swedes. He later became Archbishop in the new Archdiocese of Hamburg founded in 831 and thus altered his position and authority from that of monk to that of bishop. So transitions from being a monk or hermit to being a missionary to becoming a bishop can be seen in a sometimes bewildering kaleidoscope of change.

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chapter iii

The first Western Rules for monks and nuns

Community: the great discovery of Western monasticism The Benedictine life is lived in a community, and it should normally be the community in which a monk or nun is first professed. This expectation of stability discourages community-hopping, where an individual repeatedly moves on in search of a community where he or she feels more comfortable. The idea is that a monk or nun needs the constant correction and lifelong discipline of living with a group of people which may include some who are difficult or dislikeable. There is also an acceptance of living in a confined place, an enclosure, again in the expectation that within that voluntary accepted restriction the monk may learn more than in a life in the world.1 This new emphasis on the community cannot have been merely because it was less practical in colder climates to live a solitary life in a remote place. We have met communities in early monasticism, but they tended to be informal and mainly a convenient way for solitaries to form a loose cluster for practical living. Western monks living in groups soon found they needed rules. In fact monastic community life in the West was formed and given shape by formal sets of such ‘Rules’. Some Eastern leaders had begun to form such regulations, but what is the debt of the Western Rule-makers to earlier attempts at community in the East?2 91

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition i. The nature of the bond uniting a monastic community The vows of a monk or nun are to God. So what holds a monastic ‘community’ together? What is the nature of the bond entered into? One answer is that it consists of a mutual ‘charity’, which is necessary in the demanding daily life of a community living for God the hard way, where personal irritations seem inevitable. But more is required: the cultivation of a spirit of unity and unanimity in positive goodwill. The ideal of a (preferably cheerful) unanimity is to be found in a group of Rules of the fifth century associated with the foundation at Lérins. ‘So brothers let us desire to be of one mind and live in our home with joy.’3 ‘Unanimity’ is there again in later discussions of the etymology of ‘monk’ which emphasise unity.4 This depended partly on a false etymology which derived ‘monk’ (monachus) from monas (‘one’). But the concept of ‘unanimity’ became central, especially as the Middle Ages unfolded.5 Testing vocations A person who asks to be admitted to a monastic community is not simply to be welcomed. If it is to be successful, a monastic community should not be too easy to join. Vocations could be brutally tested in the early generations. The first consideration is whether the person offering himself or herself really has a vocation and is likely to stay. In Book IV of the Institutes Cassian turns to the requirements made of those who say they wish to renounce the world. These renunciantes or postulants must lie outside the monastery for at least ten days before they are let in, then humbly clutch the knees of all the brothers and meekly receive their reproaches and insults, which the monks will deliver with lusty enthusiasm. The would-be monks are required to divest themselves of all their property (though not to give it to the monastery in case that gives them a false sense of their importance there). To be allowed to join the community is therefore a privilege intended to be hard won. Benedict’s Rule (Chapter 58) also stipulates that someone who applies to join the community should be made to knock again and again for several days, and to do so in the face of resistance and hostility to show that he is determined. He may not join the community fully until he has spent a period in a separate living area for novices, where he is to pray and eat and sleep and learn from the novice-master 92

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the first western rules for monks and nuns who will teach him what is expected of him, and also observe him to see whether he will fit in. At intervals of some months the Rule is read to him three times and he is asked whether he can follow it. Then he is admitted; he takes his vows of stability, conversion of behaviour (chastity) and obedience, and from that time he is committed. A written record of the vow is made and he puts his hand to it. The newly professed monk throws himself to the ground and asks his new brothers to pray for him. His clothes are exchanged for the monk’s habit (and kept, just in case he ever leaves). Before admission he disposes of his wealth. He does this in token not only of his intention to practise poverty, but also that he accepts that he will no longer have control over anything, including his own body. Leadership and obedience The Abba or ‘Father’ of the desert had commanded a natural superiority because those who gathered about him came to learn, and remained by choice. The commonly accepted Western way of achieving this pooling of individualities in a single common mind lay through the arrangement by which everyone submitted to the direction of the abbot. Setting the standard in the West was a concept of humble submission to a leader of the community who could be regarded as standing in Christ’s place as its Head. One of the Scriptural authorities cited in support of this idea was Paul’s call to the Corinthians to ‘submit yourselves’.6 Lifelong obedience to whoever was chosen as the the abbot or superior under a vow became increasingly important, and tended to be stressed, in the Western ‘rules’ for the new-style communities. It was to be recognised throughout the medieval centuries that this was an arrangement with its challenges. The Franciscan Bonaventure (1221–74) suggests that the six ‘wings’ of a good superior are: (1) zeal for justice; (2) kindness, brotherly compassion; (3) patience; (4) an exemplary life; (5) prudent discernment; (6) devotion to God. Monks will have to choose monastic superiors carefully if they are to find someone who can offer all this. A new abbot’s behaviour, however carefully he is chosen, may be unpredictable. Bonaventure refers to Bernard of Clairvaux’s observation in the twenty-third of his sermons on the Song of Songs: that those who live well under the authority of a master may get out of control when that yoke is removed; and that those who can live at peace with others under someone else’s authority may behave badly when they are in charge. A superior needs to be established in good behaviour 93

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition and to be capable of leading others.7 Those who have not done it before may need a ‘master’ (mentor), someone to teach them how. But the monks should take their duty of obedience seriously and not quibble about the abbot’s decisions and directive. One idea (known as ‘pactualism’) about the basis of this submission was that the monks formed a ‘contract’ with their abbot, under which they agreed to accept his authority. This understanding of a ‘pact’ or ‘contract’ may have had some currency in early Spanish monasticism.8 The Council of Elvira (early fourth century) uses the term in the context of women religious, in seeking to provide for what shall happen if virgins who have dedicated themselves to God break their ‘contract of virginity’.9 Pactualism could involve an almost ‘presbyterian’ system of governance in which a supervisory body was elected from the ‘permanent’ monks who had made a lifelong commitment, to determine the rules for keeping feasts and fasts and requirements for being present at shared worship. This type of community structure made provision for bringing in specialist workmen from time to time when the community needed them and could not provide the necessary skills from among its permanent members. Others might join the community for a time, and even receive payments for services rendered, such as the painting of icons; these might keep their personal property, derive earnings from outside employment, and arrange their lives, including eating, in their own way (idiorhythmically). Such hybrid communities did not take off more widely in the West perhaps because the ‘community ideal’ as it developed there so strongly stressed permanence of commitment. The usual Western way was to form a stable ‘community’ whose unity of life became one of its virtues and, by extension, a virtue of those who lived it. We have seen the early desert hermits and their visitors come and go, sometimes spending periods in different places, forming temporary or enduring clusters of Abba and disciples. The monk or nun who took ‘vows’ in a Western monastery undertook ‘stability’ too, which meant remaining in the community he or she was joining. The Rule of Benedict (c.480–547), which became by far the most influential in the West for centuries, included various images of the way monks ‘belonged’ to their community. These help to round out out this central ideal of submission to the abbot. The Prologue to Benedict’s Rule calls on monks to see themselves as soldiers and as studying in a ‘school’ – and also as tenants in the ‘tabernacle’, owing their lifelong service in the feudal way as ‘rent’. He summarises all this in a call to monks to listen to the precepts of their abbot as ‘master’, and cheerfully obey 94

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the first western rules for monks and nuns them. Thus by making the effort of showing obedience to their ‘master’ they may return to the God they have disobeyed through their fallen human sinfulness. The monk, then, is giving up his own will, submitting it to the will of his abbot, and doing battle as a soldier of Christ in the strength of that obedience. ii. The puzzle of Augustine’s Rule There is another early Western Rule with a complex and uncertain history which persisted into the Middle Ages, though it apparently never rivalled Benedict’s Rule in terms of numbers who chose to live under it. Augustine of Hippo’s Rule has been the subject of much scholarly debate. If it originated with Augustine, this ‘Augustinian Rule’ antedates Benedict’s Western Rule by more than a century.10 Augustine of Hippo certainly lived a version of a monastic life in community while he was Bishop of Hippo, but the only surviving detailed picture of his preferences for shaping such a community is his experiment at Cassiciacum soon after his conversion to Christianity. There he retired with a group of friends, his illegitimate son Adeodatus and his mother, to discuss such great questions as order in the universe and the nature of the blessed life. Their conversations are recorded in a series of dialogues in which glimpses of domestic arrangements are sometimes to be seen. The Rule which bears his name has a different look altogether. Like that of Benedict, Augustine’s Rule11 calls for unity of heart among the brothers, under strict obedience to the abbot. This is to express itself in the holding of all possessions in common, including food and clothing (in the spirit of Acts 4.32,35). Those who offend any of the others and are sorry should be forgiven. Quarrels should be made up speedily. The work of the community is first and foremost to pray. To enable them to do this better, they will need to be free of distractions. There should be chastity, self-discipline, self-denial, and moderation in all things. There should be no room for individuality of behaviour or any kind of display. The monks should go about together similarly dressed and be modest in their bearing and conduct. If they happen to see a woman they must not stare at her or allow themselves to entertain lascivious thoughts. Baths should be taken, but only when necessary. There is no virtue in being filthy as some of the desert hermits had thought. The texts linked with Augustine’s name in which these principles appear were influential in late antiquity. Founders of Western monasticism in Gaul seem to have borrowed from them. Caesarius of Arles used the Regulations for a Monastery and the Rule in the first quarter of the sixth century 95

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition in both his Rule for Monks and the two versions of his Rule for Nuns. The Regula monasterii Tarnantensis (14–23) in Gaul adopted most of the Augustinian Rule in the third quarter of the sixth century. iii. The Rule of the Master and the Rule of Benedict The story of Benedict of Nursia’s Life (c.480–543) was first told by Gregory the Great in his Dialogues.12 This is a work which stands apart from Gregory’s other writings in its style. The Life is less a biography than a collection of Benedict’s miracles and edifying episodes in his life, designed to be read by those in search of an example to imitate. The outline of his life which emerges has him born in Nursia, to a good family, and educated at Rome in the usual way of the time (Romae liberalibus litterarum studiis traditus fuerat).13 The Rule which bears his name was to dominate Western monasticism for centuries. As was later reported of many saints – until it became quite a standard item in medieval saints’ Lives – Benedict gave up these studies in order to concentrate better on God.14 He felt distaste for the behaviour of his fellow-students, and he wanted to make sure he was not tempted to fall into bad habits himself. In pursuit of this ideal, he went to live with a like-minded group near Subiaco. But their way of life did not satisfy him. From this community he withdrew – possibly at the suggestion of Romanus, a local hermit-monk – to live in solitude.15 The solitude was not complete – he took with him his childhood nurse. It was asked whether he should have have left his ‘brothers once he had joined them’ (fratres quos semel suscipit)?16 But the move was a success, and he stayed there for several years. His biographer Gregory says he experienced raptures, and he comments that holy men do indeed know God’s thoughts because they become one with him.17 This sort of retreat into living alone did not remove a hermit from the public eye at this date even in Italy, any more than it had secured solitude for the hermits of the desert. Benedict became famous locally just as so many of the desert hermits had done. When a nearby monastic community found itself in need of an abbot, he was asked to take over. He was reluctant but they eventually persuaded him. It was not a success and attempts were made to poison him – in vain, because when he prayed the poisons were miraculously revealed or removed (in one case by an obliging raven, says Gregory). As time went on, Benedict began to respond to the growing interest by founding monasteries near his retreat, eventually that at Monte Cassino between 96

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the first western rules for monks and nuns Rome and Naples, from which developed the Benedictine order. For these communities he provided a Rule. These are the bones of the story. However, the Rule does not seem to have been Benedict’s own original unaided work. The slightly earlier Rule of the Master18 (Regula Magistri) contains much that also appears in the Rule of St Benedict. It may not have been a straightforward matter of borrowing. Both Rules seem to reflect expectations of the time which may go much wider in their sources. The relationship between the two, and between Benedict’s ideas and those of other contributors to the early literature of monastic discipline, remains controversial.19 Four kinds of monk are identified by ‘the Master’, and Benedict’s four are the same. The first kind are cenobites, monks who live in communities as ‘Christian soldiers’ under discipline and authority (militans sub regula vel abbate). This was to become the approved main style of Western monasticism. The second kind are anchorites or hermits, but these are not independent experimenters, hot with the fervour of new conversion (non conversionis fervore novicio). Conversio became the term for conversion to monastic life; it did not mean conversion to Christianity itself. These ‘converts’ should be experienced monks who have already proved themselves in community life.20 Here Benedict’s recommendation seems paradoxical if it is true that he had himself gone off to be a hermit without first establishing himself successfully in community life. Then there are two kinds of pretend monk who are really nothing but laymen. There are the Sarabaites who, untested by any Rule (nulla regula adprobati), do as they like. Also bad are the wandering gyrovagi.21 The objection to these kinds is their ‘ir-regularity’, their lack of submission to a Rule. Yet a life governed by no published or agreed Rule – and even a wandering life – had not been thought reprehensible among the desert fathers and their self-chosen disciples. Benedict himself had behaved in both these ways. If it is to be discouraged, there seems to be a shift of fundamental expectation, towards making the community life, not the monastic life, the norm and the starting-point. Benedict’s Rule and the principles of sound monkly behaviour Certain rules of good conduct in a monastery emerge as settled things in Benedict’s Rule. Chapter 6 imposes silence. Talk should be rare even when the discourse is edifying. Idle chatter and jokes are strictly forbidden. 97

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition In the silence monks should practise humility. Humility should be mastered in steps or stages (Chapter 7). The monk should first remember that God is always watching him. Then he should learn to give up his own wishes; then to submit himself completely to his superiors; then to learn to obey patiently and without grumbling even when he does not wish to do so. Then he must learn to tell his abbot frankly all the wrong thoughts he has entertained and all his misbehaviours, to learn to see himself as a vile worm, and to do nothing but what he is told to do under the Rule and at the instruction of others. Then he must learn to say nothing and certainly never laugh. When he must speak it should be quietly and briefly. Ultimately it should be obvious to anyone observing him that he is truly humble, living always as though he stood before the seat of God’s judgement. Then he will be truly free because he will act always from the love of Christ and his humility will become effortless. The daily round Regularity of life tended to be taken to an extreme in the early Western Rules. The discovery of the desert hermits that boredom is best countered by work, developed into a routine which is taken very seriously in Benedict’s Rule. The monk’s life is above all a life of prayer, but there should also be regular reading and manual labour. Chapter 48 deals with this daily work. In the summer months when daylight lasts longer the monks begin with four hours’ work outside. From the fourth to the sixth hour they read. After their meal they rest on their beds in silence, though anyone wishing to continue reading may do so, so long as he does not disturb the others. (This is one of the indications that private reading was done aloud at this date.) After None, said in the eighth hour, they should work again until Vespers. If this work has to include getting in the harvest themselves, the monks should remember that the apostles worked to earn their livings too. In winter the monks should begin the day with two hours of reading, then after Terce until the ninth hour they should work. Once they have eaten they should then give themselves to reading or to the Psalms. Food, clothing and accommodation Benedict’s Rule is firm about food. Chapter 39 prescribes the kind and quantity, limited to two kinds of cooked food and perhaps fruit or raw vegetables at each of the two meals allowed in summer. One pound of bread a day is the ration, taken either 98

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the first western rules for monks and nuns in the form of two-thirds at the main meal and one-third at the second, or all at the single meal in winter. The abbot may give permission for a little more if the monks have been working hard physically, but not too much. A monk must never eat so much that he suffers from indigestion. Far from seeking more food, the monk should try to live as though it is always Lent (Chapter 49). He should fast and strive to purify himself at all times, making a special effort in Lent and on fast days. Children should be offered smaller portions and the sick should not be given red meat. The abbot is also to determine what the monks are to wear, depending on the climate where the monastery happens to be. A cowl and a tunic should be enough, woollen for winter and a thinner one in summer, with a change of clothes so that one set may be washed. These basic garments are worn at night too (with the exception of a knife, so as to avoid accidental injuries to the sleeping monk), so that the monk may be always symbolically girded for action. For work, a scapular should be worn. Stockings and shoes are allowed. These articles of clothing should be cheap and not fashionable or colourful. In the dormitory (Chapter 22), each monk must have his own bed, with the beds of younger monks interspersed with those of older ones and a superior to watch over the whole dormitory. A light should be kept burning in the dormitory all night. Bedding is to consist of a straw mattress, a blanket, a coverlet and a pillow. It should be searched regularly and if it is found that any monk privately owns any special article and is hiding it under his bedclothes he must be punished severely (Chapter 55). The abbot is to distribute the clothing and bedding (Chapter 55) to ensure that each monk gets what he needs and no more (Acts 4.35). The emergence of Western-style abbots In an organised community such as was beginning to be favoured in the West, choosing the abbot and determining his role and his task are clearly important in a way which was not obvious in the days of the Abba, or ‘father’ of a desert hermit group. Unlike the Augustinian or Basilian Rules, both Benedict’s Rule and the Rule of the Master give priority to the abbot. The Western abbot is not the guru of the desert. The Master and Benedict both set out the desirable characteristics of an ‘abbot’ and also his role and tasks. There is still a strong concept of ‘fatherhood’ or spiritual paternity, but the connotation of ‘superior’ and ‘subordinate’, master and obedient servant, is strong, alongside that of ‘master’ and ‘disciple’. 99

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Just as the bishop or priest is the vicar of Christ to his flock, so the abbot is Christ’s vicar or representative in the monastic community. The abbot must render account for the souls in his charge. He must ensure that his teaching is sound and appropriate and that he sets an example by his own holiness of life. The abbot must insist on his monks’ instant and unquestioning obedience (Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 5). They must take the command of their abbot to be the command of God. They must obey cheerfully and willingly and without muttering. Reluctant obedience is not meritorious; rather the reverse. This is not an unqualified monarchy. There is provision in Benedict’s Rule for the abbot to summon the monks into a ‘council’ when a difficult or ‘weighty’ question has to be resolved. The abbot asks everyone’s opinion, then he makes the decision himself. Monks must accept that and should not argue. The election of the abbot is also to be by the monks and with their consent (and with provision to ensure that they do not collude to choose an abbot who will let them behave as they like) (Chapter 44). The abbot should take his responsibilities seriously but not be over-fussy and a martinet. He should be guided by his love for the brothers (Chapter 64). Other officers will be needed for the monastery. Priors can be a problem, behaving like little abbots and becoming tyrannous (Chapter 55). There should be a wise senior monk as porter (Chapter 56), and rules for all the other necessary office-holders (such as the cellarer). If the community is very large it may be sensible to appoint deans (Chapter 21). In use but not in circulation? Given the evidence of their widespread influence, it remains a puzzle that no very early copies of the texts of either Augustine’s Rule or Benedict’s Rule survive, only copies from almost two centuries after their presumed dates of composition. Benedict of Aniane in the ninth century, according to his biographer Ardo Smaragdus, collected all the monastic rules he knew and wrote a commentary on the Rule of Benedict.22 Why was Benedict’s Rule so influential? Benedict’s Rule became the standard one in medieval monasticism for many centuries. It is not easy to say why. No higher ecclesiastical authority prescribed 10 0

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the first western rules for monks and nuns it. The founding of monasteries long continued to be an ad hoc business. Anyone could do it and give ‘founder’s instructions’ about the way the monks were to live. Though leading figures in the monastic world are often reported as meeting bishops and kings, the Rule was not required by the ecclesiastical or the secular authorities The Dialogues of Gregory the Great will have had their influence because of the name of their author or purported author. But the account of Benedict’s life and miracles they contain does not include a ‘recommendation’ of his Rule. The success of the Rule is more likely to have been a matter of influence and convenience. The influence of the great house at Monte Cassino could be important in providing a ready-made guide to the life for other monasteries. That said, it is important not to take it for granted that Western monasteries were using Benedict’s Rule in the first centuries of its probable existence. In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede has a good many stories to tell about monks and monasticism, or in which monks figure. It is notable that although he often mentions the introduction of a ‘Rule’, he does not give details of the sources or types of these Rules by which they lived. He speaks of disciplina regularis or regularis vita and those are vague phrases.23 At his own double monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, Bede mentions the Rule Benedict Biscop (c.628–90) introduced, but it is not certain which Rule that was either. Benedict Biscop certainly had an opportunity to study and compare rules and ways of life in Italian monasteries and he brought back copies of books from Monte Cassino.24 He could have got a copy of Benedict’s Rule there. But he also spent a year or two at Lérins in 665­–7 on his way back from one of his journeys to Rome, and it was in that monastery that he took his vows, so there he must have been ‘formed’ as a monk by a different Rule. Bede cites Benedict’s Rule in his homilies,25 but it is entirely possible that the Rule by which the monks lived at Wearmouth and Jarrow was something of a regula mixta.26 iv. The emergence of monastic Rules in Spain The success of monasticism in Spain owed much to some influential figures we have already met. Isidore of Seville (b. c.560) became the author of a Rule for monks. He was one of four siblings, twenty years younger than his brother Leander. His sister became an abbess and he himself may have been a monk for a time, though in 600 he succeeded Leander as Bishop of Seville. 101

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Isidore tried to set monastic life in its wider context among the ways of life for which the Church had its own rules or expectations. His book on ecclesiastical offices and the corresponding duties (De ecclesiasticis officiis) accordingly includes a substantial portion on monks and monasticism. He asks where the idea originated that monks ought to embrace poverty. He is also interested in the origins of the ideal of solitude. He knows Elijah has been cited as a precedent and also those Old Testament prophets who lived in solitude in remote places; and John the Baptist, who lived alone in the desert and ate only locusts and wild honey. He lists other ‘noble leaders’ who have set the expectations of the holy institution of monastic life. In his Life of Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus mentions a young man in Spain claiming to be Elijah.27 Ambrose had commented on Elijah, pointing out that Elijah learned endurance by living in the desert and grew stronger though he ate so little. He noted that John the Baptist grew up in the desert too and practised constancy and prepared himself to reprove those in high places.28 Interest in Elijah’s influence persisted down the centuries. The Carmelites referred to Elijah as the first monk. Isidore writes at length about the monastic way of life as it should be lived. Monks must first put from them the world’s temptations, then form or join a community where they will live a life of prayer and holy reading and discussion of theological questions and vigils and fasting. They will live modestly and calmly and without envy or rivalry. They will have no personal property and dress soberly. They must obey the abbot in all things.29 There are six kinds of monk, says Isidore, in a variation of the fourfold classification we have already met. Three are exemplary, three bad.30 Good are the cenobites whose life is marked by their holy community and their poverty. Good too are the hermits, who live in isolation and simplicity and in conversation with God. Good, thirdly, are the anchorites, who have learned how to live in a cenobitic community but who shut themselves away in cells so that their contemplation of God may not be interrupted by visitors (for visitors could be a problem to the hermits).31 The three bad ways are listed next. ‘Pretend’ anchorites spend only a short time in the coenobium and then they withdraw to cells where they can enjoy a reputation for holiness and humility, with their real behaviour unobserved. The ‘wanderers’ are those who travel about selling as holy relics parts of the bodies of alleged martyrs, seeking glory and honour but fundamentally dishonest. The last category is the worst. These are the Sarabaitae who found ‘monasteries’ in which they live by their own rules and without proper supervision. ‘Free from the rule of the elders, they 102

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the first western rules for monks and nuns live by their own desire.’ They are often found to be hoarding wealth. Isidore cites Jerome’s disapproving comments about their affectation in Jerome’s Letter 22.34, their loose sleeves and flapping boots, their loud sighs, their visiting of virgins and their detraction of clerics.32 Women may live the monastic life too, says Isidore, but in separate communities where men may not enter, and only old men may even come as far as the door to make essential deliveries to such communities.33 In the seventh century, both Braulio of Saragossa and Fructuosus of Braga wrote about monastic Rules.34 Fructuosus, Archbishop of Braga (d. 665),35 was the son of a Visigothic nobleman and active in campaigning for the release of political prisoners of the contemporary invaders of Spain. He dressed so conspicuously as a poor man – even when he was a prince of the Church – that he was sometimes treated with discourtesy by those who did not realise who he was. He founded a monastery at Compludo among other communities in Galicia and throughout Spain. Some of his foundations attracted large numbers. He is the author of two monastic ‘Rules’. One of them, the Regula communis, appears to have been a general set of instructions for monasteries issued by Fructuosus as bishop, and places an emphasis on the requirement for monks to pray at the canonical hours.36 The Regula monachorum Fructuosus wrote for the monks at Compludo is exacting. The ‘pact’ or oath taken by the entrant begins with a credal statement before the making of the actual vows. 37 Obedience to superiors is an absolute requirement.38 Monks were expected to keep nothing from their superior, not even their dreams. In addition to common prayer there is to be (including during the night) private prayer and meditation and reading and other ‘work’. So firmly were monks discouraged from forming ‘special friendships’ or engaging in any sort of sexual activity that they were not even allowed to look at one another and they were to be ‘inspected’ at bedtime and at intervals during the night. Careful rules are set out for monks visiting houses of nuns. They should greet the abbess, then the whole community, and if there is shared worship the sexes must sit separately. Not even those a monk says are his own sisters may be kissed. No hint must arise of anything that looks like procuring.39 Extreme obedience went with heavy punishments for any breaches. Runaway monks must be brought back with hands tied behind their backs, and not received by another house if they try to gain entry there.40 Recidivist failed novices tend to return and must be interrogated and checked very carefully if they declare they want to be readmitted.41At Compludo punishments could include being confined 103

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition to a cell and given only a small amount of bread a day for months. Harshness extended even to the sick. They will be cared for but must never complain.42 The Regula monastica communis stresses that no one may create a monastery at will, or in his own home. It cannot be an independent venture, but needs episcopal permission.43 Nevertheless, monasteries in Spain expanded so enthusiastically in the seventh century that it was said that monks came to outnumber clergy.44

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chapter iv

Coda: Western monasticism takes stock

i. Monasticism’s self-image Annals and chronicles writing the history Western monasticism wrote its story and drew word-pictures of itself in monastic annals and chronicles, at first including no more than a short note of a key event for a given year. A ‘chronicle’, far more lengthy in its entries, had practical objectives, including establishing the continuing rights of a monastery to ‘hold’ the lands on which it stood and other lands given to it by wealthy benefactors who wanted to ensure a place in heaven for themselves. In the tenth century, the Chronicle of Aethelweard 1 continues until 975. The author dedicates this chronicle to Matilda, a relative of his, born in 949, who was an abbess from her youth until she died in 1011. This was historiography of a peculiarly medieval sort. Its purpose was edification rather than factual record. It was not unusual to begin such a history with the creation of the world so as to set recent events in their cosmic context. Bede was careful to stress that he had gone to considerable trouble to check his facts from eye-witnesses wherever possible. Nevertheless, when he wrote his Ecclesiastical History he included, side by side, accounts of battles and the deaths of kings, and miracle-stories. 105

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Orderic Vitalis (b. c.1075) was given by his father to be a monk at SaintEvroul, a privilege for which his father paid with a ‘free will’ offering of 30 marks of silver. He was put to school in Shrewsbury under Siward from 1080–5 and then his father sent him off to France and never saw him again. He arrived in France as a young boy in tears, feeling like ‘Joseph in a strange land’, and found he could not understand the language. Orderic remained there for fifty-six years, except for a few journeys to dependencies of the house.2 The house used him in the scriptorium where he did a lot of copying and supervised others. He became a historian. He was conscious, as he says in the Prologue to his ‘histories’, that as a claustralis coenobita he could not explore far because he was bound by monachilis observantia; nevertheless, he could try to write for posterity about things he has seen in his lifetime or learned about from neighbours.3 His Ecclesiastical History Books I and II are mostly compilations from writings of earlier periods, the Gospels, Bede (I), lives of saints and the liturgy (II), but the remaining books contain history which goes far beyond the bare chronicle customary in the preceding centuries. Chronicles were also documents of legal record. Chroniclers recognised the importance of covering in their record any disputes in which the monastery had been – or might become – involved, which could be financially damaging or lead to litigation, for example noting kinship relations of local nobility and abbots, who might make grants of lands to their lay kinsfolk.4 Royal favour could be fickle and bribes to hold it might misfire.5 Modbert the ‘custodian’, possibly Prior, of the abbey of Abingdon, busily alienated lands and made payments to the king until the abbey fell into ruins and the few remaining monks did not have enough food to eat. His nephew Nicholas had a vision in which the Virgin told him that Faritius the cellarer of Malmsbury would be a good abbot for them, so they enquired, and King Henry I appointed him at the monks’ request. He was a physician from Arezzo and highly competent at organising the rebuilding. Modbert was sent off to the abbey of Milton in Dorset.6 Small affairs and disturbances had a place in the chronicler’s story as well as large ones. A dispute took place about the proposal that the cheese allowance being reduced.7 Eadmer describes the episode of the Aethelweard, a young man in the monastery ‘possessed’ by a devil, and comments that ever since the time of the Viking invasions the monks had been living under lax discipline and in a secular manner (cessante disciplina, in saeculari […] conversatione ultra quam debebant iacere).8 106

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coda: western monasticism takes stock Biographies of monastic saints Chroniclers included miracles in their histories because they felt they told spiritual truths. Their literal truth did not need defending in an age that was willing to believe miracles really happened. Miracles were simply testimonials to the extreme holiness of the saints who performed them, though that might need periodic restating. Eadmer (c.1060–126) was brought up among the older generation of English monks at Christ Church, Canterbury. There he learned to revere the Anglo-Saxon saints, and found he had to revise his assumptions when there was controversy over their claims to sanctity under Lanfranc (c.1005–89) at the end of the eleventh century.9 Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, Book II, describe the life and miracles of Benedict. He set norms for this kind of miracle story. Benedict went off when still a boy (with his nurse) to live in solitude. He performed his first miracle when he mended a tray for her.10 One day temptation came to Benedict. It was brought him by a blackbird; he could not stop thinking about a woman he knew and nearly left the wilderness, so strong was the unsettling effect. Then he threw himself into a patch of nettles and thorns and the pain quite drove the temptation away.11 Numerous miracles took place at Barking, which have been recorded, says Bede, ‘for the edification of later generations’ (ad memoriam aedificationem sequentium).12 Relics of Cuthbert had performed miracles, he claims. One miracle was ‘told to me by the very brother it happened to’. A young man with a tumour on his eye applied some of Cuthbert’s hairs to it, in faith (credens) that it would heal him, and the next morning his eye was completely healed.13 Aethelwald succeeded Cuthbert as solitary dweller on Farne Island. He had visits from the pious. On one occasion some visitors were beset by a storm on the way back, but he prayed and calmed the sea just long enough for them to get safely to land, after which the storm continued as violently as before.14 If the saint being celebrated was a former abbot or the founder of the writer’s house, so much the better. The Waltham Chronicle is a ‘foundation history’.15 It was written by a former canon of the college of secular canons at Waltham after the house was suppressed in 1177 and replaced by an abbey of Augustinian canons. It includes the story of the discovery of the relic of a figure of the crucified Christ in the time of King Cnut, which was brought to the abbey and, it was said, worked many miracles. Lives of saints might be rewritten to ‘improve’ the story they told. The Prologue to the Vita Dunstani suggests that old Lives lack the elegance of 107

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition writing their subjects deserve and some more recent ones may not be reliable, so there is a need for new ones. Monasteries became anxious to see ‘holy abbots’ canonised, in order to attract a lucrative ‘tourist trade’ of visitors to the new saint’s shrine, and biographies were commissioned to record their spiritual achievements and their miracles. There were hagiographers-for-hire in the late eleventh century. Osbern, a monk of Canterbury who died about 1090, is an example. He translated Anglo-Saxon saints’ ‘Lives’ and could be commissioned to write new ‘lives’ about those recently dead abbots who lacked a published life-story. The pattern included certain more or less standard features. Often the mother of the putative saint had a vision about the child she was carrying while she was pregnant and found the child exceptional in his holiness when he was born. Ralph Glaber reports how the mother of William, who was to become Abbot of Fécamp, had visions of a great future for him.16 William had the usual exemplary childhood, showing himself to be wise beyond his years.17 One old lady used to baby-sit little William and sometimes he stayed the night. When she gave him a hug her breasts filled with milk. She reported this token of his future saintliness to the abbey.18 Commonly the future saint also proved himself outstanding in the study of the liberal arts (mirabiliter eruditus) before giving up the intellectual for the religious life. As a monk he was always exemplary, tending to the extreme in his observance of the Rule, and there were always miracles in token of his high degree of holiness. Monastic letter-writing Peter of Celle was monk of Saint-Martin-des-Champs when young, then Abbot of Montier-la-Celle from 1145 to 1161/2, then Abbot of Saint-Remi, Reims until 1181; then he became Bishop of Chartres and remained in that post until he died in 1183. As abbot he was active in negotiations with popes, making appeals over lands and elections. He had a reputation which brought him requests to write such letters on behalf of others. He also wrote letters to Hugh, Archbishop of Sens, on behalf of Celle and also for others. Often these covering letters display great elegance, but merely recommend messengers, who are to explain what the problem is. The letters, despite their comparative lack of detail about the business in hand, reveal the repeated need for reform when abbeys decay, or when there are disputed elections of abbots (Letter I).19 108

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coda: western monasticism takes stock There are also letters touching on the spiritual life or on theology. Peter of Celle’s Letter 13 to Bishop Theobald of Paris includes a passage on the classic difficulty of balancing a busy life with a life of contemplation (quies contemplationis) and the distraction of the mind by secular business (distentio mentis per occupationes seculi). Peter laments that he finds it impossible to focus his mind on such ‘similar yet different’ things (simul ac tam diversa) at the same time.20 Letters 161 and 162 concern three Grandmontine novices who had transferred to Pontigny, which is a Cistercian house. Their question is whether they should return to their former vows and their former house. Peter says (Letter 161) that it must be good to keep one’s promise. But (Letter 162) true peace is to be found in the Cistercian way of life and they should not allow themselves to be made restless at Pontigny by sighing for a better quiet they think they had at Grandmont.21 Letters of this high literary quality owe something to the ‘art of letter-writing’ which had developed at the end of the eleventh century in an effort to improve the quality of the growing correspondence of ecclesiastical and secular civil servants on behalf of their masters. To that class belong some of Peter’s correspondents, notably John of Salisbury with whom he had a lengthy exchange. John had been at Celle in 1148 staying with his friend Peter, whom he had probably met while they were both students at Paris, and his work at the Council of Reims which led to his appointment as Secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury.22 The Letters of Peter of Blois (b. c.1135) display the same high literary pretensions. Although he was not himself a monk, he corresponded with monastic leaders. His letters also provide glimpses of behind the scenes at court.23 For example, a letter of 1208–9, when Peter of Blois was Archdeacon of London, beseeches the Abbess of Wherwell to pray for the Church during the interdict caused by the behaviour of King John, because the prayers of a wise and constant woman are more powerful than those of strong men.24 ii. Monasticism beds down in medieval society Monasteries emerge as social and economic ‘players’ in the feudal system About 720, an abbess wrote to Boniface about the distressing situation in which her community found itself: We are oppressed by poverty and lack of temporal goods, by the meagreness of the

produce of our fields and the exactions of the king […] So also our obligations to

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the king and queen, to the bishop, the prefect, the barons and the counts […] To all these troubles must be added the loss of friends and compatriots, the crowd of

relatives and the company of our kinsfolk. We have neither son nor brother, father nor uncle, only one daughter, whom death has robbed of all her dear ones, excepting

one sister, a very aged mother, and the son of a brother, a man rendered unhappy because of his folly.

This depleted and impoverished few would like to go to Rome on a pilgrimage. But they feel the need of some dispensation, for to leave their house would be to fail in their duty of stability. They know that: the canons of council prescribe that everyone shall remain where he has been placed; and where he has taken his vows, there he shall fulfil them before God.25

Here is an abbess who would like a holiday. Land-tenure in the emerging feudal systems of medieval northern Europe26 was based on a series of social relationships which potentially compromised the independence and spiritual integrity of monasteries. In a feudal region, all land belonged to the king. He would grant the use of it to chosen nobles for their lifetimes in return for their personal loyalty and the provision of a certain number of fighting-days, in the form of the men who were to do the fighting. The relationship thus created was one of vassalage. The landholder became in this sense ‘the king’s man’, in servitude or ‘service’ to him, though not a slave. This ‘enfeoffment’ made the landholder a sworn supporter of his lord, who had taken an oath of ‘fealty’ (faithfulness). A unit of land granted in this way was a ‘fief ’ or ‘fee’. A single ‘fee’ provided for one knight’s service, so this constituted a form of ‘military’ tenure. That could be commuted to a money payment.27 The vassal might be a baron, even a king, as when King Harold became a vassal of William, Duke of Normandy at the time of the Norman Conquest of England. Or he might be a mere knight, holding his land from the baron or noble and forming one of the military men on whom he could call in order to meet his obligation of knight service to his own lord. The land-holder could allow others the use of parts of the land by the process of sub-infeudation. If the grant was to a monastery it could be rent-free and then it would count as a form of charitable gift or almsgiving. This was thought likely to benefit the giver’s chances of heaven. However, payment of the debt of military service to the king attaching to the land could still be required; and monasteries 110

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coda: western monasticism takes stock often had to provide their due of soldiers, as did bishops and archbishops, who also held the lands of their sees (the secular rights or ‘temporalities’) from the king. Like other vassals, monasteries had to renew the grant of land when the original grantor died. Monastic charters can be seen to take advantage of every opportunity to renew their rights when a peripatetic ruler passed nearby.28 Sub-letting gave rise to tensions, especially in the later Middle Ages. An English Statute of 1290, Quia Emptores, sought to stop the habit of creating a chain of sub-tenants whose loyalties were not to the king or the baron at the top of the chain, but to the immediate grantor. But the social pyramid got its strength from a clear understanding that it was all held together by the royal ownership of the lands of the kingdom. Fragmentation of loyalties made it difficult for the landlord to ensure he got all his dues. The new law created the expectation that successive tenants would take over the terms of the original grant and would owe all the taxes and other dues to the lord who had made the original grant. There were other rules in other parts of Europe designed to protect the social fabric and monasteries might be offered gifts of land under the laws of these different jurisdictions. Many monasteries drew income from gifts of lands in places remote from the house itself. The Abbey of Bec, for example, had had so many English lands at the end of the eleventh century that Anselm, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who from 1063 to 1092 had been first Prior then Abbot of Bec, had had to visit England to ensure all was well with them. Below the level of landholding by nobles and freemen, the work on the land was likely to be done by serfs or slaves, who belonged to the lord as his property. These enslaved people themselves could form part of the gift to a monastery. The late-tenth-century will of Aethelgifu, a widow, disposed of twelve estates in different parts of England and property in London, and freed seventy servants and workers, handing over others to the beneficiaries of the will, to become their serfs.29 She included gifts to St Albans of land at Westwick, Hertfordshire with the stock on it, on condition that the monks of St Albans should have the use of it forever. Some of her servants who worked on that estate were to be given to St Albans.30 Details of this sort can be found in the Polyptychs in which monasteries sometimes collected lists of all their property. The Abbot of St Germain-des-Prés in Paris ordered such a list to be drawn up in 810. It survives only in part, but that is enough to give a detailed picture of a number of estates, their extent, the people who live and work there, even the crops which can be grown on the land. At Neuillay there is a farm with numerous buildings and ten small fields able to carry a crop of oats, with meadows which yield a quantity of hay. There is also a forest 111

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition three leagues by one, which is big enough to fatten 800 pigs. Some of the landworkers are named. Electeus, a serf, and his wife Landina hold half a farm and owe no service or rent beyond spreading manure on the lord’s fields. Another named serf and his wife are dependents of the abbey with three named children; another named pair have two named children. A third, apparently with no wife living, has three named children. These three families together seem to hold a farm. They owe a payment in lieu of military service due, which they pay in kind (2 sheep, 9 hens, 30 eggs, 100 planks, 100 shingles, 12 staves, 6 hoops and 12 torches; and 2 loads of wood). They too have to spread manure on the lord’s fields, in addition to having to plough for both winter and spring wheat. So although pious gifts to monasteries by noble laymen had the effect of adding greatly to the wealth of monasteries from early in the history of Western monasticism, they were not without their disadvantages. Guibert of Nogent later deplored the fact that succeeding generations have become less generous and are even requiring payment for the necessary renewal of the gifts of earlier generations.31 These gifts often created immense and potentially expensive legal complexities for monasteries. For gifts also carried responsibilities. In her will Aethelgifu, daughter of King Alfred (849–99), rewards several religious houses.32 She uses her local monastery to provide written recording and help provide protection of the gifts.33 But many conditions attach to these gifts. Aethelgifu wants all the manumission of serfs and the almsgiving involved in the benefactions to be counted as her alms.34 Aethelgifu identifies lands to be given to Leofsige on condition he gives three days food-rent from the two estates to St Albans each year, listing what this means in malt, meal, honey, sheep, a bullock, 30 cheeses, wine and swine.35 Family opposition to the making of such gifts to monasteries could be strong. Aethelgifu notes in a plea to the king that there were things her husband left her in his will which his kinsmen do not allow her to have and she asks royal protection to ensure her will is honoured. (And may anyone who tries to interfere with it go to hell.)36 Under the feudal system, gifts would need to be renewed generation by generation because the land could not be sold or given permanently to the monastery. There was also the possibility that a gift would go elsewhere when the heirs of an existing benefactor took over his estates. Renewals of gifts might have to be paid for. There was competition among monastic houses to seem the most desirable to potential benefactors. As Westminster and Glastonbury abbeys disputed which was the older, Glastonbury ‘took over the legend of Joseph of Arithmathea and 112

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coda: western monasticism takes stock the Holy Grail’ so it could claim that it had been founded thirty-one years after the Crucifixion.37 Competition could lead to some dubious practices. The resulting legal complications bred a host of professional notaries from the eleventh century and lead to the design of an ‘art’ of writing business letters and legal documents, to formularies and standard documents, and eventually even to the creation of universities.38 And so desperate were monasteries to ensure that rights and privileges were respected and the lands they held were safe that forgeries were not uncommon.39 There could be a well-founded sense of insecurity. Montier-en-Der, in the north of Burgundy, faced Viking attacks. Its cartulary contains forgeries including pretend papal bulls giving it privileges.40 ‘My brother the abbot’ 41 The mingling of lay and monastic and ecclesiastical hierarchies is obvious everywhere in the medieval centuries. The great families of northern Europe were comparatively few and their closely related members occupied leading positions in both ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies, but even the minor gentry had their entanglements. The problem of lay meddling became prominent in many further aspects of established monasticism. Nobles and bishops alike wanted control of monastic communities. The cartulary of Montier-en-Der, founded in 666, shows that before the Viking invasions the monastery had been run by lay abbots and the local bishops.42 The Abbey of Cluny was founded by a lay patron, the Duke of Aquitaine, in 910. He chose the first abbot. The links to the nobility remained important in succeeding generations. Odilo of Cluny, who became abbot in 994, had been at Cluny as a monk for only four years. He came from a leading family in the Auvergne and continued to be a valued advisor to the great, both ecclesiastical and secular. He enhanced the reputation of Cluny so effectively that nearly thirty new ‘Cluniac’ houses were added in his time. These he inspected personally. His personal observance of the Rule set a high standard of exactness and self-denial; so strongly did he care for the welfare of the poor that he was even willing to sell the monastery’s possessions on one occasion to feed them in time of famine. Hugh of Cluny was another well-connected nobleman from the ruling house of Burgundy. He was professed at Cluny in 1039 at the age of sixteen and so strongly were the monks said to have been impressed by his piety that he was chosen as their next abbot when Odilo died in 1049, young though he was. 113

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The sense of mutual benefit was strong. The powerful, nervous – perhaps with some reason – of their fitness for heaven, were anxious to buy what assistance they could from the spiritual professionals. Benefactors of monasteries came mainly from noble families but humbler gifts from the less well-born were also received, sometimes in the expectation of benefits in return, such as being accepted into the monastery in time of illness or having prayers said for the soul of a family member.43 Monasteries might run hospitals, though perhaps mainly for wealthy patrons.44 This early became an established tradition. Orderic Vitalis mentions the role of benefactors such as Earl Aelfgar and his wife Lady Godiva of Coventry and the monastery at Coventry, which he built and she lavished with all her treasure, hiring goldsmiths to make covers for gospel books, crosses, ornaments for the church.45 Lay or ecclesiastical gifts of land to monasteries might be ‘unencumbered’, making them the more valuable. In 1300, a gift of John de Murray, Knight, renewed the gift of his ancestors to the Abbot of Lindores, for the salvation of his soul and those of his descendants (pro salute animorum suarum et suorum successorum), free of all aids, taxes, secular demands and litigation risks which he takes on himself.46 So highly valued was the spiritual labour of monks in praying for the souls of lay people that in 1342, the King of Scotland commanded the support of the monastery of Lindores because it has been enfeebled by wars and exactions and the monks need security for their maintenance.47 The result for successful monasteries (successful in gathering gifts if not in matters spiritual) could be staggering wealth. The household of Walter de Wenlock, Abbot of Westminster 1283–1307, had eight departments: private chamber and chapel, public hall, kitchen, larder, buttery, pantry, marshalcy, each with its head, who rendered account each evening to the steward of the household and the steward of the lands. A principal steward would usually be a monk. Other stewards could be stipendiary. Many household servants would be paid servants such as grooms. The sheer scale of this household and the opulence of the abbot’s lifestyle show him to be as much a spiritual ‘baron’ in contemporary society as their Lordships the bishops. (When in modest mood, the abbot ‘often travelled with fewer than ten horses in his retinue’.)48 Big Benedictine houses might be expected to ‘share the common life’ with prelates.49 The scale of the churches of some monasteries may be judged fom the one which is now Gloucester Cathedral. By the later Middle Ages abbots came to have a role not unlike that of modern ‘chief executives’. There was no diminution of the importance of the influence great abbeys and their abbots, still commonly scions of noble families, had in politics.50 On the death of the previous abbot, steps might be taken at 114

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coda: western monasticism takes stock once to prevent attempts to buy office or alienate the property of the abbey.51 Lay interference in the election remained controversial. The business could involve intrigue worthy of a novel by C. P. Snow.52 The Letters of Fulbert of Chartres (952/62–1028/9) include correspondence of Fulbert and cathedral canons. Letters were also exchanged with Abbo of Fleury urging the principle that no one can lawfully be made abbot or should be received as such who asks for it while the previous abbot is alive or tries to influence the powerful to procure it for him. It is noted that this is shocking behaviour.53 Abbots as fundraisers appear in Thomas of Marlborough’s History of the Abbey of Eynsham. Serlo of Gloucester (1072–1104) became abbot when the abbey was very poor. He respectfully (humiliter) asked Aethelwig for help and got all sorts of assistance.54 Abbots might also have to ‘act tough’ as protectors of their abbeys. William de Andeville, as Abbot of Eynsham (1149–59), courageously (audacter) excommunicated William Beauchamp and his accomplices who had destroyed the cemetery wall and plundered the abbey in time of war. Internal disputes could be as damaging as disputes between monasteries and their benefactors. In 1307 there was a falling-out between the Abbot of Westminster and the prior, Reginald Hadham. The prior claimed that the abbot had been taking more than his proper share of the revenues of the house. He tried to initiate an appeal to the ecclesiastical Court of Canterbury. Wenlock, the abbot, suspended him from his office as prior. He prepared a copy of his appeal to Rome so that it could be considered by the General Chapter of the Order in September in Oxford, but the abbot, who was to preside, ‘got his retaliation in first’ by preparing charges against the prior accusing him of misconduct over past years. Hadham was not to be intimidated. He would not withdraw his appeal to Rome, but he still faced his abbot’s charges and had to try to clear his name. The method in use in the courts was for the accused to find a sufficient number who would testify on oath to his good character. (The question was not whether he had done what he was accused of but whether he was the sort of person who could possibly have done such a thing.) The higher the class or standing of the accused, the more compurgators he needed. Hadham needed twenty-four but he could find no more than seventeen and so he was sent to prison. When he tried to appeal to Rome against his sentences he was excommunicated. It was not until after the abbot died the following year that he was found not guilty by a papal delegate as judge and let out of prison.55 There was a trend towards out-of-court settlement, which might be more flexible and certain, quicker and cheaper than litigation, but the very emergence of a need for that is an indicator of the size of the problem.56 115

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Post-Conquest monastic wealth in England and the problems it created After the Norman Conquest there had been wholesale removal of Anglo-Saxon abbots to replace them with Normans,57 and the Norman king and nobility began to take an interest in abbeys.58 The result of taking an interest could be the amassing of considerable wealth. Malmsbury Abbey had been founded in the seventh century, possibly though not certainly by Aldhelm,59 but by the twelfth century it had a church to rival a cathedral in size and beauty. That was a mark of wealth indeed, and an indicator of patronage. There were grants of land free of all services, as when William I granted the Church of St Olaf, Exeter, to Battle Abbey with the lands belonging to that church, free of all earthly service (tenant duties), including pleas, plaints, shires and hundreds, geld, scot, aid, gift, danegeld, sake, soke, toll and infangenetheof and work on castles and bridges as if it were the royal gift of alms directly.60 Such Frankalmoin tenancies by monasteries meant a guarantee of spiritual ‘service’ instead of the customary service, with the monks praying for the patron and his family. A monastery’s founder might enjoy the income from the land during a vacancy, be allowed to add his voice by ‘assent’ in elections of the abbot and be the advocatus of the house. Usually monasteries got portions of land within manors rather than whole manors. A favourite grant was the gift of the local parish church.61 Such grants might need to be renewed for safety’s sake and it was customary to make sure they were. Church–state relations from the late eleventh century and the question of investiture There were two ‘interfaces’ to be negotiated in medieval monasticism in the West: the one between the ecclesiastical authorities and the monasteries and monks; the other between the monasteries and the secular authorities. The regrettable tendency of late eleventh-century monarchs was to intrude upon the making of bishops to the extent of sometimes giving the ring and staff to their chosen appointees and thus crossing the line into sacramental areas where they had no right to be. In 1122 the Concordat of Worms apportioned control over the spiritualities of a see to the ecclesiastical authorities and left the temporalities to the secular authorities. A king or emperor retained authority over the granting of the lands of the see and could usually ensure that his preferred candidate became bishop, but in future he must stay out of ordination and 116

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coda: western monasticism takes stock consecration. This agreement held quite well for some centuries, partly because interest shifted away from the balance of power between Church and State to the internal power-games of the Church, with the emergence of a monarchical papacy claiming plenitudo potestatis and jurisdiction throughout the West. In the case of bishops it was not too difficult in principle to separate the question of power over the lands of the see (granted by secular authority) from the spiritual powers. It was less easy to state the principles governing powers over the monastic property which was to become so tempting to secular would-be dissolvers of monasteries throughout Protestant northern Europe in the sixteenth century. Appointing the first Abbot of St Evroul involved first obtaining the support of William of Normandy in 1050 and his protection of the chosen site, ‘free and quit from all customs and dues’; then his permission to choose an abbot. Then Robert, Abbot of Jumièges, was asked if the new house could have his monk Thierry to lead it. They presented Thierry to Duke William and he invested him with the ‘church of St Evroul’ by handing him the pastoral staff ‘as was the custom’.62 Then the Bishop of Lisieux brought Thierry to the monastery and blessed him in a solemn ceremony which Orderic describes as ‘ordination’, so it may in fact have been an ordination to the priesthood which made the presence of the bishop appropriate. This description should have rung warning bells. It would have done so half a century later. The lay patron should not have involved himself in the part of the making of a bishop which was deemed sacramental, the investing with the ring symbolic of the marriage of Christ and the Church and the pastoral staff symbolic of his role as pastor of the flock. Also, the abbot should be chosen by the monks and not by any external authority. The bishop had no powers to bring them their new abbot and install him on episcopal authority. Thierry was an excellent abbot, in the event. Setting to work, and bringing with him his nephew and some of the brothers from Jumièges, Thierry taught his monks to observe the Rule of St Benedict and oversaw a regular life and the proper conduct of the liturgy. He moderated the expectations for those of poor education, including two elderly men who were rustici presbyteri, but whom he deemed incapable of understanding the profunda Scripturarum sintagmata.63 Simony It was sometimes difficult for a monastery to avoid at least the appearance of involvement in buying ecclesiastical advantage. The monastery of Loches was 117

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition founded by Fulk of Anjou, probably on his return from pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1003. He came back in high good humour (exultanter) and wanted to found a monastery of monks to intercede day and night for his salvation. He asked the Archbishop of Tours to consecrate the monastery’s new church, but the archbishop refused until Fulk had restored various serfs and property which he had stolen from the diocese. Fulk was furious and went to Rome to try to bribe the Pope with a great deal of gold and silver. The Pope sent a cardinal to resolve the dispute, but the local bishops were angry because this presumed to intrude on the jurisdiction of a local bishop. A storm brought the roof of the church down and showed God’s displeasure.64 John Gualbert (985/95–1073), monk at San Miniato, took up arms against simony because he was so indignant that his own abbot was guilty of it, and also the Bishop of Florence. He left the monastery, took refuge at Camaldoli, then probably before the end of the 1030s founded a new monastery at Vallombrosa. He campaigned vigorously against simony and others who shared his concerns came to join him from their own monasteries in other parts of Italy. Family interests in close-up: The family affairs of Guibert of Nogent Guibert of Nogent, a monk from a modest but noble family in northern France, rose no higher than to be abbot of the tiny abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy, but he wrote an ambitious autobiography which is unusual for its times.65 The style of the opening suggests he wanted to emulate Augustine’s Confessions in writing a spiritual autobiography, but the narrative quickly settles down into a detailed account of his life and times which tells us a good deal about the relationship of the nobility to contemporary monasticism. He is also the author of a ‘History’.66 The first choice for a family of any standing was whether its sons should go into the Church or lead the secular life running the family estates and fighting as a knight when called upon by the king. Guibert’s mother had a dangerous moment during her pregnancy when it seemed likely both she and her child would die and Guibert says that she promised that if her child survived he would become a cleric, not a knight. One of Guibert’s cousins, a layman, was said to be given to outrageous debauchery, and made a habit of sleeping with married women, though he was loud in condemnation of clergy behaviour of a similar sort. This same cousin was a close friend of the lord of the local castle. He interceded with him to give Guibert a living which was currently occupied by an absentee ‘married priest’ who was 118

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coda: western monasticism takes stock not even bound by a Rule, although he held the post of abbot. Even after he was stripped of his canonry this priest had to be stopped from celebrating Mass while he continued to live with his ‘wife’. It began to be rumoured, Guibert reports, that this priest was excommunicating members of Guibert’s family in revenge at these Masses, and that included his mother and himself. His mother was frightened and decided to withdraw from the offer of the priest’s former canonry which had been made for Guibert. She began to bargain with the lord of the castle for another, based on the expectation that the present holder of a living would die. This eleventh-century ‘helicopter parent’ continued her efforts. A brother was awaiting payment of a debt owed to him by the lord of Clermont. It was suggested that if he were to make a canonry at Clermont available to young Guibert the family might see its way to forgiving the debt.67 Guibert says he was caught up in these machinations because he did not yet understand why they were wrong.68 Both Guibert and his mother (and his schoolmaster too) entered the monastic life. In the autobiography is a tribute (with mixed feelings) to his own mother’s decision to become a nun. Guibert’s schoolmaster helped her with a plan to build a small house near the monastery of Fly. Into this she moved with, for company, an old woman who wore the habit of a nun and whose example of fasting and hard living she could imitate. She had her beautiful hair cut off and took to wearing ragged shapeless black garments and shoes with holes in them. She occupied her time in prayer, combing her past life for sins to confess. She learnt the seven penitential psalms from her companion and ‘chewed and sucked at them’. to extract from them every bit of flavour. She had many visitors from her old life, so that her solitude was disturbed a good deal. This left Guibert virtually an orphan, but she was determined not to put the child before her own salvation, says Guibert – with the approval of hindsight – though he had clearly felt the disruption of his childhood at the time.69 Once his mother had made her own arrangements, Guibert the small boy had to be found a place to go. He was given to the monastery of Fly, where he describes some adolescent struggles. He was much tempted by inappropriate secular reading which he did secretly under the bedclothes. He was seduced into writing poetry. iii. Monks and clerics: The ecclesiology The desert monks and hermits often accepted episcopal authority alongside that of their ‘father’ or Abba.70 In the West the relationship of ecclesiastical hierarchy 119

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition to monastic autonomy has remained uneasy. Many bishops in the early Christian West had been monks, and continued to live surrounded by a monastic community when they later held episcopal office. Vincent of Lérins’ Life of St Martin describes a way of life which permitted a monk who became a bishop to go on living as monk with other monks, each in own cell, sharing common meals and prayer. Augustine of Hippo in the late fourth century and Anselm of Canterbury in the late eleventh both chose to surround themselves with a monastic community. In the early Christian centuries ordination by force could make a hermit or monk a priest or bishop whether he wanted it or not. Gregory Thaumaturgos, born in Cappadocian Pontus about 210–15, was the subject of a Life written by Gregory Nazianzus. He describes how he returned home from Alexandria where he had been studying philosophy. He did not talk philosophy but ‘lived’ it. So he retreated to a remote place to live with God and think. Attempts were made to find him and bring him back to take a leading place in the Church by forced ordination but he moved from one retreat to another. They got him in the end.71 Despite his best efforts, Augustine was snatched in a similar way to be made Bishop of Hippo. In Cassian’s world, monks actively avoided ordination because the responsibility would be a distraction and because it might make them proud not humble.72 Monks were not necessarily priests but when they were, their dual allegiance to bishop and abbot could cause difficulties. Benedict’s Rule includes chapters intended to address the problem of the priest who wishes to live in the monastery (60). This is to be discouraged, but if he persists it should be made clear to him that he will be expected to follow the Rule in its entirely and observe stability, and will be given no special treatment. On the other hand, because he is a priest and empowered to give blessings and celebrate the Eucharist, he may be allowed to stand beside the abbot to give blessings and to celebrate Mass, but only if the abbot so orders. Making priests of existing monks is a different matter from taking in someone who is already a priest to be a monk in the house, says Benedict in his Rule (62). The abbot should choose the most suitable of the monks to be ordained. Ordination will require a bishop. It cannot be done by an abbot. The new priest should remember his continuing duty as a monk to be humble and not become puffed up with pride at his new status in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. For Gerhoch of Reichersberg in the mid-twelfth century, clergy, monks, virgins, widows are all sancti ordines,73 but he clearly does not mean that these are all categories of clergy or ordained ministry. It did not follow that a monk who is not a priest can celebrate the Eucharist.74 120

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coda: western monasticism takes stock Episcopal or papal jurisdiction: Who had authority over the monasteries? So there were tensions between ecclesiastical and monastic authorities, and they were cropping up in a particularly challenging way in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ralph Glaber noted the drive to win freedom for monasteries from episcopal control.75 In the tenth century, among the letters of Fulbert of Chartres, we read a tough episcopal letter to Abbot Richard of the monastery of SaintMédard, Soissons, whose servants have been guilty of violence and bloodshed in the forecourt of their church. Why do they think they can dedicate a new church without the bishop’s consent?76 Local bishops naturally wanted to exert jurisdiction over the often wealthy and influential monasteries in their dioceses. The monasteries equally naturally preferred to petition for Papal privileges and direct rule from Rome so as to maintain their independence locally. Some orders claimed that they had always been directly under papal jurisdiction and not answerable to their local bishop. They were, they said, geographically but not ecclesially ‘within’ the diocese where the house stood. There was much eleventh-century concern when as part of its ‘reform’ Cluny was found to be developing a monastic ‘order’ with daughter houses answerable only to the Pope and not to local bishops. Fleury had been ‘reformed’ by Odo of Cluny, but was not under its authority by the late tenth century.77 Abbo of Fleury’s Collectio canonum had been aimed primarily at claiming independence for Fleury from the jurisdiction of the local Bishop of Orleans.78 But the exemption from episcopal jurisdiction he won was extended in 1024 to Cluny and its dependent houses. This did not go unchallenged. The Council of Anse 1025 objected. In response Odilo went to Rome and obtained four papal bulls asserting the immediate jurisdiction of the Pope and restating the privileges of Cluny. The Pope then pressed this point hard with the bishops concerned.79 By the twelfth century it was possible to state the problem of Church– monastery relations as it then looked. Rupert, Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Deutz (d. 1130), wrote a treatise De vita vere apostolica (‘On the true apostolic life’). In it he addresses a concern which he knows has arisen and been expressed at intervals through the centuries. The Church, with its territorial dioceses and its bishops and their priests acting as the bishops’ ‘vicars’, imposes good order through ecclesiastical discipline, and defends the one faith through its structures and on its authority. Individuals who choose to live as hermits or to join monastic communities do not fit neatly into these structures. Some of them positively threaten 121

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition good order by their extreme behaviour and unlicensed teaching, and have been classified and attacked as heretics. Rupert consciously made his contribution some centuries into this debate, disapproving of the bad blood it caused in his own time: This is an old controversy between monks and clergy, as to which of them are more

worthy to celebrate the mysteries of the Church, to the extent that while they fight among themselves about apostolic worthiness then drift away from apostolic charity.80

Rupert held up the monastic life as the veritable exemplar for the Church. He even claims that the Church ‘began’ in the monastic life and the apostles were really monks (videtur Ecclesia inchoasse a vita monachorum).81 In his Prologue Rupert presents priests and monks as the ‘two eyes’ of a ‘body’ made up of the whole people. He quotes the warning of Luke 9.34 that if the eye is darkened the whole body is in the dark. If the eyes are not working properly together what should the remedy be? He is confident that the ‘life and rule’ of monks has the authority of the Gospel and was treated with equal dignity by the apostles. iv. Discipline and the problem of penance A monk of Fly, who was a priest, was fond of riding. On one occasion he was given two shillings by a noblewoman, presumably with the intention of making a benefaction to the monastery. He did not hand over the money but put it into a little bag and carried it about with him. When he died the bag was discovered while he was being washed before burial. His brothers realised that he had broken his vow of poverty. It was decided that that meant he could not be buried in the monastery cemetery but must be placed in unconsecrated ground. That was done, but the monks still prayed for his soul.82 Becoming a monk or nun was no guarantee of good behaviour. The early Irish monastic life was so strict that if it resulted in death, the suffering it entailed could be seen as a form of martyrdom.83 On this view, a monk or nun must always be struggling and always failing and must always be in need of pastoral guidance, a confessor, and assurance of forgiveness, in order to be able to try again. In the early Christian centuries penance was rare and serious and exacted only for the major sins of murder, adultery, apostasy. Baptism was commonly left until 122

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coda: western monasticism takes stock late in life and it could not be repeated if the baptised Christian sinned again. The only possibility was to do penance, and the extreme rigorists denied that even that was possible. As the theology of penance developed, and especially after infant baptism became the norm in the West from the end of the fourth century, it became accepted that people were going to sin and sin a good deal during their lifetimes. It was only fallen human nature that they should. They were not necessarily going to commit the most serious sins, but they would need some mechanism for dealing with the minor ones. It became acceptable for a priest to hear confessions in private and impose penances and pronounce absolution. It was still held that penance was ‘only efficacious through the ministry of the priest […] as judge’ (and as deciding the severity of the penalty). But priests now became the ordinary ministers of penance, not bishops.84 So the strict and extreme practice of the first generations had mutated by Carolingian times, to allow a cosier and more minute private confession of lesser sins to a priest, who would impose an appropriate and proportionate penance and grant absolution. This may have begun in Ireland, but it seems to have spread. The question arose whether absolution for monks within their own houses was possible unless they had a priest among them. ‘Self-punishment’ for the glory of God, as described by Monica Baldwin, was only a step from using monasteries as places of punishment for sinners. In his treatise On Ecclesiastical Doctrines, Gennadius of Marseille (d. c.496) describes a practice of using a spell in monastic life in the penitential process as a punishment for penitent sinners.85 Clonard too had its complement of penitents on punishment-stints. The Spanish monasteries of the seventh century came under additional pressure because they were expected to receive individuals sentenced by the ecclesiastical authorities to withdraw from public life or spend a period doing penance. This meant they were treated as prisons for misbehaving individuals as well as communities of dedicated religious.86 These were not monks voluntarily embracing self-punishment. They were ordinary sinners sent to share a life which for them was punitive and redemptive only in the sense that it enabled them to purge their secular sins and return to the world. Some of the seminal literature on the new-style ‘regular’ penitential process was produced within the linked monastic traditions of Wales, Ireland and Gaul. Mid-fifth-century bishops Secundinus, Auxilius and Iserninus came to Ireland and this was also the period of St Patrick’s mission.87 The Penitential of Columban is Irish but composed on Frankish soil.88 123

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Gildas’ De poenitentia, a monastic code with application to sinners outside the monastery,89 was probably a sixth-century Welsh composition. It sets penances graded in their severity according to whether the sinner is a priest who has formerly taken vows as a monk (ante monachi voto), a monk of lesser ecclesiastical standing (inferiore gradu), a priest or deacon who is not a monk, or a lay person.90 Satisfactions required mainly consist of fasting, or the singing of psalms, or manual labour. The Synod of North Britain, probably sixth-century, is another Welsh text and again it envisages a world in which both monks and lay people may do their prescribed penances. For example, if a monk sins with a man or woman, he is to be sent away into another country, to a monastery (expellatur ut alterius patriae cenobio vivat), where he is to do penance after he confesses, and live in confinement for three months.91 Sending to monasteries as a punishment is also ordered in the Book of David, probably sixth-century, and again Welsh. It is appropriate for those who have slept with a nun or married woman or an animal or a man; for the rest of their lives these shall live a monastic life dead to the world (mortui mundo Deo vivant).92 A priest, deacon or virgin who commits certain sins shall sleep on the ground for a year, then on a stone for a pillow for a year, then on a board for a year and eat only bread, water, salt, some pease porridge (11). Afterwards (12), even when the penalty has been paid, a deacon may not hold the chalice or become a priest and a priest may not ‘offer’ (celebrate the Eucharist).93 From the Irish tradition, the Collectio Hibernensis includes canons 5–11 of the ‘First Synod of St Patrick’, possibly of 457, on clerics and monks. It includes a number of restrictions to prevent unruly behaviour, such as the decree that (3) no vagrant cleric in the community (in plebe) is to be tolerated. Clergy must be properly and modestly dressed (6). Monks and virgins should not travel or take lodgings together or engage in long conversations (9).94 A monk who wanders without his abbot’s permission is to be punished (34). In order to prevent those who were not ordained from officiating in sacraments, a cleric new to a plebs or community must not baptise or officiate (offerre) without the bishop’s permission (in plebe quislibet novus ingressor) (27).95 The ‘Second Synod of St Patrick’ (probably Irish, from a seventh-century Synod and probably not connected with Patrick), canon XVII, seeks to provide for monks who live independently under the supervision of a bishop or abbot.96 A sideswipe comments that these are not monks but wandering philosophers: bactroperiti.97 The Bigotian Penitential is a mixed product possibly of the eighth or ninth century (containing a chapter of the Rule of Benedict of which ‘no trace in the 124

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coda: western monasticism takes stock early Irish Church’ so it probably arrived in its present form via a trip to France).98 This opens with a description of the ‘physician’ theory of penance.99 The junior monk is guided by a senior who provides spiritual direction and hears the monk’s confession.100 This process remains the monk’s responsibility: The truest judge of repentance and the marks of forgiveness resides in our conscience, which reveals to us who are still living in the flesh the absolution of our sinfulness before the day of […] judgement.101

It is only inwardly that the monk can know whether he is ‘cured’ of a particular bad habit: A person should know that he is not absolved of his former sins as long as the image of the things that he did or of similar misdeeds dances before his eyes.102

The principle that the confessor in a monastery must be a priest became important in later centuries. Robert of Flamborough was a canon of St Victor from before 1205. Priests of St Victor were authorised to act as confessors to Paris university students and to assign penances.103 Book I of his Penitential Manual is a gentle invitation to the penitent. Robert asks ‘are you of our flock?’ No, says the penitent, but I come to you with the permission of my abbot (Non sum, sed de licentia abbatis mei ad vos venio). The confessor reminds him that his confession cannot be valid unless it is made with the permission of whoever has cure of his soul, except in a case of necessitas when his own pastor cannot act.104 Once the propriety of the process is established, the manual moves to consider the content. What is required of the penitent? Faith, hope, charity and good behaviour; sorrow for past sins; the intention to do better in future; complete and frank confession; obedience (dolor de praeteritis, cautela de futuris, integra et nuda confessio et obedientia).105 Do you often grieve for your sins?, asks the confessor. Sometimes, says the penitent. Make it regular, constant, urges the confessor. 106 The approach taken by Benedict’s Rule Benedict’s Rule (70) makes provision for monkish misbehaviour. If a monk strikes another monk he shall be disciplined publicly, as a warning to others. That will not be appropriate if the act was simply an appropriate chastisement of one of 125

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the monastery’s children, but striking a fellow adult is never permissible. A monk who realises he has irritated his superior should immediately throw himself to the ground at his feet and beg forgiveness (71). There were rules for dealing with the failures. According to Benedict’s Rule, a monk who is disobedient or has otherwise offended should be warned tactfully by his superiors not once but twice. If that does not work he should be taken to task before the other monks. If he does not mend his ways even then, and provided he understands the seriousness of what is happening, he should be excommunicated. A further sanction is corporal punishment. It is for the abbot to judge how severe the punishment should be and when it should be meted out. For minor faults various discomfiting penalties are provided, such as banning the offending monk from eating with the others and from joining in worship until he has made satisfaction and been pardoned. He must eat alone and three hours later than the others. No one may bless him or his food and the quantity of food he is allowed is at the abbot’s discretion. No one is to speak to him and he is to do his daily work alone. Any monk who did associate with him was himself committing a disciplinary offence and would be cut off from the community in the same way. Yet in all this the abbot is to regard the offending monk as a sick person and show him care and seek to heal him. He is to send older and wiser monks to talk to the offender and help him to admit his fault and mend his ways. The abbot has a duty to his flock to make sure none of his sheep is lost. Sometimes a monk will refuse to change his behaviour and then in the end he will be sent out of the community. Such expelled monks may wish to return and then they must give strong assurances that they are reformed characters. If such a one is readmitted, it is as the last of the monks. He may have a third chance, but that will be his last. v. Keeping up standards: The periodic need for reforms of monastic life Monasticism, once embedded in medieval society in the West, did not always set a shining example. The need arose for periodic reform of whole houses and even whole orders of monks. Reform of the Abbey of Montier-en-Der had to be put in hand in 827. Emperors Louis I and Lothair I sent bishops to investigate the monastery.107 It was found in English reforms too that it was helpful to have royal support. King Edgar was said to be alarmed to learn that sacra coenobia, the holy 126

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coda: western monasticism takes stock monasteries in his realm, were falling into such a state of decay and neglect.108 The Viking invasions were disruptive in Anglo-Saxon England,109 and standards had slipped to the point where it was not easy to find anyone in Wessex who could reliably follow and understand the Latin liturgy. Wanting to see reform, King Alfred had to look far afield for advisers, to Wales and Mercia and beyond the shores of Britain. An English monastic revival took place in the tenth century partly under the influence of Dunstan (909–88), Abbot of Glastonbury and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Dunstan came from a well-connected family near Glastonbury which produced bishops and had royal links. He became a monk at about the age of 14 at Glastonbury. There was a good education to be had there and pilgrims visited. King Edmund gave him a place in the royal household, but there were jealousies and his enemies had him thrown out.110 The king thought again and Dunstan became Abbot of Glastonbury from 940. He was intrumental in improving standards at Glastonbury and in prompting others to do the same elsewhere. One of Dunstan’s pupils was Ethelwold, who became Abbot of Abingdon in about 954, where the reforms continued under his rule. Oswald set about improving standards in the Worcester area. The Regularis Concordia was drawn up in about 970 to provide a general guide for reformed English monasticism. The unknown author had evidently travelled about the country checking the monasteries.111 The scheme includes comprehensive instructions for daily life:112 Do not initiate new customs.113 When you are travelling and it is time to say the Office, do not mutter the words as you ride but get off your horse to say the Office properly.114 Do not accept invitations to worldly meals or gatherings (saecularia convivia).115 Do not put on your day shoes (se calciare diurnalibus) until the bell is rung after Prime.116 Underlying these warnings and forbiddings is a structure of expected good practice, an Ordo qualiter, or ‘order for how to do it’.117 It emphasises the community focus of the common life: church, dormitory, refectory, cloister and daily chapter-house meeting are all all communal.118 There is to be universal general silence, but talk is allowed (quietly), about necessary matters or house business. Recreation with some conversation is uncertainly permitted. There was caution about the risk of paeophilia. The little boys, the oblates of the monastery must live together as a group, and must never be alone with their master or any monk; there is to be no petting or cuddles.119 A regular daily round of offices is to be followed, with some extras, masses, a daily Maundy of the poor.120 The rest of the time should be spent in work or 127

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition reading. The reading (lectio) should be accompanied by meditatio, such as reflecting and learning Psalms by heart; there may be other study if a monk has time and inclination. Time should be spent in hospitality especially to the poor, including the monastery’s own group of the poor, of whom three a day were chosen to receive the daily Maundy and share the monks’ meals. Time must also be allocated for such practical matters as changing shoes and washing, and for eating. The winter ‘day’ ran from about 2.30 in the morning to 6.30 in the evening, with one meal at 2.00 p.m. In the summer the community arose about 1.30 in the morning, and slept at about 8.15 in the evening, with two meals allowed. The first was at 12.00 midday and the second at 7.30 p.m. The monks were allowed a siesta after the first meal. It was not an easy life and it is easy to see how laxity might creep in. The most famous reforming influence in Western monasticism was probably the monastery of Cluny. The historian Ralph Glaber (985–1047) saw Cluny as having rescued the Rule of Benedict from its decline.121 He admired the rumours he had heard of its strictness, and longed to visit and see for himself. Then he heard that its Abbot Mayol was coming to visit Lucedio where he was then a monk, and so he went to talk to him during his visit. He was permitted to move to Cluny. After he had spent some time there and proved his abilities, Mayol sent him to assist the monks of one of Cluny’s houses to raise their standards. Cluny was acquiring many houses in need of reform and he used William of Volpiano (962–31) as a sort of reforming headmaster.122 Otloh of St Emmeram (c.1010–c.1072) faced strong family resistance when he wanted to become a monk, though he eventually took his vows at St Emmeram at Regensburg in 1032. In his book on his ‘temptations’ (De suis tentationibus) the ‘narrator’, who is really Otloh himself, says he found his fellow monks a mixed community (diversae qualitatis homines) and the available reading-matter a jumble of secular and Christian. ‘I suffered various delusiones Satanae, waking and sleeping.’ The less success the Tempter had, the harder he tried. He used fallacious arguments and ‘spun’ the truth to delude his victim, showing enormous cunning. Otloh strove valiantly to resist, praying hard. So here is a man conscious that monastic life is an active struggle for virtue. He concludes with a little list of his writings, in imitation, like others of his period123 who perhaps had a notion of adding their own works to the list started by Jerome in his De viris illustribus. The ‘monastic constitutions’ of Lanfranc124 reflect a continuing awareness of the need to be constantly reforming and reviving monastic standards. There is no reason why all houses should use identical customs, Lanfranc thinks, but standards must be right.125 The life of monks is usually regulated by abbots, though it can 128

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coda: western monasticism takes stock sometimes come under the pastoral duty of bishops behaving like ‘fathers’.126 Certain things are essential for the salvation of the soul: faith, contemptus mundi, love, charity, chastity, humility, patience, obedience, repentance for sins and humble confession, prayer, silence and so on.127 These reforms did not end the problem of decline of standards. The college set up in 1362 by the Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, in what is now one of the quadrangles of Christ Church, Oxford, had among its students both Benedictine monks (Canterbury ones included, under a custos), groups of monks received from other houses, and secular clerks. Letter LVI and XXIV both suggest that all categories could and did misbehave.128 In Letter XXIV (c.1474), the Prior of St Mary’s, Coventry writes to the Prior of the Canterbury community to complaint of one of the Coventry residents ‘his conversation being not vertuos nor good’, who was egging others on to imitate him (‘excityng other to the same’).129 In Letter XVI (c.1493) the Warden writes to the Prior of Canterbury that he has ‘had trobyl late with sum off the breederyn that be suggerners with us, specyally with them of Peterburgh’.130 So perpetual monastic reform did not get rid of all the bad apples. The fifteenth century yields examples of continuance of serious bad behaviour, as a set of letters written to the Chapter at Citeaux at the end of the fifteenth century testify. A troublesome monk could be hugely expensive to a monastery in litigation (Letter 2); monks could tell the Visitors dreadful tales of what was amiss in their house. Letters 79 and 80 contain depositions of the monks at Wardon and the severe findings and inhibitions on pain of deposition of the two abbots who conducted the visitation in 1492, the Abbot of Graces near the Tower of London and the Abbot of Stratford Langthorne. They wrote a further letter (81) about a monk accused of trying to poison the Abbot of Warden.131 vi. Monks get an education Monasteries as centres of learning After the collapse of the Roman Empire, with its high intellectual culture and advanced educational expectations of its leading citizens, monasteries gradually became the main centres of education in most of Europe. The cathedral schools became important here, providing a location, and an expectation down the generations that their canons would be men of letters. The Emperor Charlemagne 129

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition (742–814) decreed that all cathedrals should run schools in order to ensure a reasonable level of education among the clergy. But some scholars associated with such schools became ambitious ‘published theologians’ and exchanged views with contemporary monastic scholars. The whole scene of what is sometimes called the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ was stimulated by individual endeavours and personal exchanges and especially by theological controversy among this loose cluster of individuals who were developing recognisable ‘scholarly habits’ of a medieval or modern kind. How well did these enterprising students and schools succeed in maintaining standards? Were they able to produce cultured as well as ‘learned’ individuals? The difference from the ancient world’s intellectual interests was becoming clear. In late antiquity the educated man was ‘cultured’. He wrote perhaps on theological subjects if he was a Christian, anyway on philosophical ones if his interests ran that way. He might be a great letter-writer. He might do as Cicero did and try out his ideas and his drafts on friends for comment by letter. This climate and context had now been lost. Opportunities for the exchange of ideas had a different character where the writer and his scholarly contact were in separate monasteries with no regular postal service and no longer in a world where a group of friends could spend a few days together in a pleasant country house to enjoy philosophical discussion. In this changed environment could monastic scholars match the achievements of those who wrote the books of classical antiquity? The surviving contents of monastic libraries and their catalogues show that monks continued to study many of those books, at least those written in Latin and the few Greek works available in Latin translations. But they tended to read them with humble respect rather than as the works of fellow-writers and equals who happened to be of an earlier generation. They treated them as ‘authorities’, though lesser authorities than the Bible and the writings of early Christian authors such as Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great. To fill the libraries of monasteries after late antiquity and bring their contents back into use, much depended on the enterprise of individuals, such as Benedict Biscop. He brought to Northumbria books gathered on his travels in Italy. Bede had to make what sense he could of what he was able to read as a result. There was nowhere to turn for guidance, no national library system, no universities before about 1200. As the centuries went on, surviving correspondence shows monasteries lending books for copying by other houses. In this way, monasteries became important repositories for books, and places where serious study could 130

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coda: western monasticism takes stock be attempted, teaching provided, and intelligent young men enabled to become students themselves. Most Greek writings had become inaccessible in the West as it became to all intents and purposes a Latin-only culture. When it came to deciding what it was proper for monks to read, extreme selectivity was required in choosing among the Latin classics, although monastic libraries did hold copies of the plays of Terence and other such morally ‘unedifying’ items. (And it seems that there were sometimes performances. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts include performance notes in the margins in the form of sketches of gestures and expressions.) Certain authors were still acceptable reading for Christians in search of edification. For example, some of Cicero’s writings contained matter useful to the Christian moralist. His books of duty and old age and friendship could be read and learned from by the conscientious Christian. It could even be held that Cicero would undoubtedly have been a Christian if he had been fortunate enough to be born in the Christian era. Theological controversy Benedict and the authors of the other monastic Rules had not thought to include express provision to regulate the published writings of monks. The Rule expected them to read and to study, but writing new books was something else. In the absence of an educational ‘system’, there was no recognised framework for expressing personal theological opinions, no ‘professional academics’ or journals or book reviews; anyone who had views to express could write as he or she chose. A ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ freedom for anyone to say what he thought existed in all but its modern electronic form. Monks could and did have their say in theological controversy as they chose. The interconnectedness of monasteries and cathedral schools became apparent through the exchanges of leading individuals as they quarrelled in Latin across the language barriers of the vernaculars which were to develop into modern French, German, Italian, English and so on. A prime example was a group of Carolingian controversialists. Gottschalk or Godescalc of Orbais (c.808–67), born in the region of Mainz, became a monk at Fulda. Fulda was then a comparatively recent foundation of 744, one of the fruits of Boniface’s mission. At that time Hrabanus Maurus (c.780–856) was its abbot. Hrabanus was of Frankish origins and had been educated at Fulda and at the cathedral school at Tours, where he studied under Alcuin. He returned to 131

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition take charge of the school at Fulda, where it developed a reputation as a centre of learning. He had a period of enforced exile after a disagreement with the then abbot and he may then have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He was back at Fulda in 817 as soon as a new abbot was elected, and in 822 he became abbot himself. There he remained until he was made Archbishop of Mainz in 847. In his time at Fulda he had met Walafrid Strabo (808–49) and Loup (Lupus) de Ferrières. Lupus (c.805–c.862) became Abbot of Ferrières. In 829 Gottschalk applied to the Synod of Mainz to be allowed to leave his abbey because he said his abbot was placing unreasonable restrictions on him. He then went to the Abbey of Corbie, and made the acquaintance there of Ratramnus (d. c.870), who was to become one of his allies in controversy. The abbot, Paschasius Radbertus was also a theologian of note and he contributed not only to the two debates in which Gottschalk was prominent, on predestination and the Eucharist, but also the controversy with the Greeks over the Filioque, the disputed addition of ‘and the Son’ to the Nicene Creed.132 What were the emerging controversies among these monastic scholars and why did they become so heated? The controversy over predestination was partly prompted by Augustine of Hippo’s extensive but inconclusive writings on the subject. Augustine had taken an extreme predestinationist position. But the Church went on teaching that striving to be good could make a difference to a person’s hopes of heaven. The very claim to the social usefulness of monastic life assumed that that the willing suffering of monks had merit and that gifts to monasteries by the wealthy might enable them to ‘buy into’ that merit. The Carolingian controversy concerned a question which was a refinement of this paradoxical theology. It was suggested that if God predestines the saved he must in some sense also predestine those who go to hell. That would make God responsible for a ‘double predestination’ of some to heaven and others to hell. Others objected that that would make God the author of evil, for going to hell is certainly an evil. At one extreme end of the scale of opinion claiming extreme double predestination stood Gottschalk. He appeared before a Synod at Mainz at which he unsuccessfully set out his views, countering what Hrabanus had said to support the opposite view when he wrote to Gottschalk’s Italian supporters. He was condemned as a heretic, sentenced to flogging and made to take an oath that he would leave the region for ever. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims was given responsibility for carrying out the sentence of banishment and despatched him back to Orbais. Back in Frankish Gaul he tried once more to defend his position at a 132

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coda: western monasticism takes stock Synod at Quierzy in 849, but he was condemned again, flogged and imprisoned at the monastery at Hautvilliers. They made him burn his statement of his beliefs but he could not be made to retract. Hincmar tried. But Gottschalk sent unrepentant letters from his place of detention to leading theologians and influential friends. The result was an immense expansion of the controversy. It drew in Prudentius of Troyes133 and Florus of Lyon (c.810–60) on Gottschalk’s side. Lupus of Ferrières was also personally of the view that there was indeed predestination to hell as well as to heaven, though he preferred to say that God simply ‘knew’ who would not be saved, and since his knowledge is certain, that knowledge was infallible. Hincmar appealed to John Scotus Erigena (c.815–77), another of the prodigies with links to Irish monasticism who chose to work on the Continent in this period. Somewhere, possibly in Ireland, he had learned some Greek, a rare accomplishment at the time, and that took him into areas of patristic reading then not much visited in the Latin West. He read and translated Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662) and the Cappadocians. He also read Pseudo-Dionysius and set about turning him into Latin and providing a commentary. He enjoyed royal patronage and he was made head of the Palace School after Alcuin. The matter was debated at a series of local church councils in the years 853, 855 and 859. Then the Pope intervened and called Hincmar to a council at Metz in 863. He was too ill to go, and died within a few years, leaving the controversy to fade until it revived again many centuries later. Another topic of monastic scholarly controversy concerned what exactly happens when the bread and wine are consecrated at the Eucharist. Paschasius Radbertus took the view that they literally became the body and blood of Christ. Ratramnus wrote a treatise ‘On the body and blood of Christ’ in opposition.

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chapter v

A new age of monastic experiment

i. A monastic explosion and some experiments Adult entrants and monastic life as ‘retirement’ By the end of the eleventh century something new was beginning to happen. Suddenly, adults were choosing to enter monasteries which had previously received many of their future monks as child oblates.1 This trend away from giving infants to monasteries as child oblates to recruitment of adults was commented on by Guibert of Nogent, in whose generation in France it first seems to have become noticeable. At the beginning of his book ‘On my life’ (De Vita Sua), he mentions the contemporary fashion for mature adults to leave their military lives and retire to monasteries, often with their wives becoming nuns at the same time. Some reported experiencing a personal conversion.2 But if Guibert’s description is accurate, it seems it all became quite competitive. He sketches the nobles trying to outdo each other in giving up their property to monasteries and entering monasteries themselves, and monasteries trying to win more recruits than others. Noblewomen joined the competition, leaving their children as well as their husbands. Some did not go to such extremes but still gave generously, seeking to ‘equal’ the monastic way of living without actually becoming monks or nuns.3 Monks ad succurrendum formed a special category of mature entrant. These asked urgently to be professed when they were ill and feared death, so that they could be looked after in their last illness and also procure for themselves a stronger 134

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a new age of monastic experiment chance of going to heaven by dying as monks. Although they were allowed in in a hurry and sometimes just by monks who were called to the sickbed for the purpose, those who recovered could stay in the community as fully professed monks if they chose (though they were allowed to leave). One ageing nobleman who retired to the monastic life at Fly, a case Guibert may have known personally, is described by Guibert as having done so despite the resistance of his wife. He was placed in one of the cells provided for the elderly and infirm monks. He was so assiduous in prayer and attendance at worship and in tears that the other monks came to respect him greatly. But two devils came to visit him with temptations, one with red hair and a tonsure and in bare feet with straw between the toes, and the other in a black habit with a hood.4 There could be strong family feeling about this choice, whether made because of ‘conversion’ or in emergency because the family stood to lose control of property given to the monastery in return for taking in the sick or converted person.5 Some ex-military men founded their own communities. The Vita Herluini, the Life of the founder of Bec, describes how Herluin, who had spent his life as a knight, had found himself in danger in a battle. He swore that if he came out of it alive he would build a monastery on his family estates at Bec in Normandy. He got the approval of the bishop, who allowed Herluin to be abbot despite his lack of experience in the monastic life, because of his social standing and his piety (nobilitas et religio).6 Guibert of Nogent takes the opportunity to review the monastic world of his lifetime and explore the social and other factors which were prompting change. He believes there had been very large numbers of monks in earlier ages. But the numbers have dropped and in his own time monks are few, he thinks. Modern monasteries may well be wealthy because of the lands they were given in former times, but the quality of their monks tends to be compromised by the fact that noble families have been placing children there in infancy. This may mean they grow up without vocation and also without the practical knowledge of the world which could ensure that when they undertook administrative tasks for their monasteries they did so both honestly and efficiently.7 Monastic experimentation Guibert suggests that the ‘retirement option’ was only one of the prompters of a renewed popularity of monastic life and increasing numbers of recruits overflowing 135

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the available accommodation. New recruits began to be billeted out locally in twos or threes and some tried experiments of their own. Caves and woods became habitations for some of these groups.8 Certain individuals, Guibert says, set about repairing this decay of monastic life by making independent experiments. Other adults, discontented monks, took off to lead experimental lives as hermits or with bands of followers. One, called Theobald, turned his back on his professional life as a knight and began to live as a monk, working as a charcoal-burner to support himself. He took to wearing rough simple clothing and became emaciated. Everard, Count of the Castle of Breteuil near Amiens, rich and influential, eventually came to realise that for his soul’s health he should turn his back on his wealth and power. He set off privately with a group of friends to set up a community of brothers and live where he was not known, also earning his keep as a charcoal-burner.9 It was easy to fall into moral error. Guibert tells the story of a monk who had formerly been a soldier and who sought permission to live as a hermit in the village where he had been born. He spent his time mending the road, supported by the gifts of the faithful. There was money left over and he kept it. Then he fell seriously ill, but he did not confess that he had kept the money given. His monastery took him back to look after him in his mortal illness and still he did not confess, but he gave the money to the monastery servant who nursed the sick, for him to take care of. At the last moment, just before he died, he confessed at last. The monastery authorities then turned their attention to finding the money. The servant who had been entrusted with it had hidden the silver in the straw of the cradle where his child slept. When the child was put into the cradle it was attacked by little devils which pinched it and made it cry. Guibert knew this story because the child’s mother had been his mother’s maid and she told her what had happened and told her that the money was hidden in the cradle. His mother explained about the devils and persuaded the reluctant couple to give the money back to the monastery.10 Guibert is describing changes which were social as much as spiritual.11 In its early days in the mid-eleventh century, the Abbey of la Trinité, Vendôme, attracted a socially mixed crowd, and the community was anxious to build a respectable community of properly professed monks.12 The acceptability of recruits who might not be of the highest social class could become contentious. In Benedictine houses such as la Trinité, Vendôme, the servants who worked in menial ways to support the abbey were given various titles (famuli, laici, villati, servientes). Some were freemen and some consented to be bound as serfs in return for the support and 136

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a new age of monastic experiment security of membership of the abbey’s familia. Some came in payment of a debt or in fulfilment of a vow. Some, perhaps with marketable skills, came for a salary and might move on if they got a better offer elsewhere.13 Lay monks elsewhere too could be of various social classes and types. In Cluniac houses some were illiterate but of good family; once they had learned to read and presumably mastered sufficient Latin they could progress to full choir monk status. Cistercian practice was to have ‘lay’ brothers who were illiterate and of lowly families; these remained manual labourers and distinct from the choir monks.14 From experiment to heresy Henry of Lausanne (d. 1148) had been a Benedictine monk at Cluny. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote scathingly about him as a monk who had abandoned his vocation.15 He appeared in Le Mans where he began to preach without a licence. He proved to be an attractive preacher and gathered a considerable following. But Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who wrote a treatise against him and another worrying figure, Peter of Bruys, accuses him of preaching dubious and puritanical ideas, including the claim that the invocation of saints was wrong. He says he rejected the authority of the Church and the need for sacraments and called for reliance on ‘Scripture alone’. Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans, called him to a ‘duel’ in a public disputation where he was felt to have shown his lack of theological education. That did not stop him spreading his ideas by preaching across the south of France. Nuns in changing times Questions of social class arose among nuns too. In the earlier Middle Ages would-be nuns tended to be affected by all this change chiefly as the wives of husbands who wanted to retire to monastic life and who might well look round for a similar solution for themselves. But other well-born women were given to religious houses in youth by their families as the only alternative to finding them husbands. A dowry was payable for a bride of Christ just as it was for the bride of a noble husband, but perhaps at a lower cost and with fewer potential political complications. A nun who was a noblewoman could expect to rise to be abbess if she outranked others among her sisters. Lanfranc wrote to Maurice, Bishop of 137

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition London, about a quarrel among the nuns at Barking and how each should behave as befits her station in the house, abbess as abbess and prioress as prioress.16 A very few nuns can be identified now as intellectuals in their own right. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a tenth child of her noble family, was dedicated to the religious life by the family from an early age. Hildegard had begun to have visions as a child. Her family was wealthy enough to ensure that she was provided with someone to act as her amanuensis when she wanted to record what she had seen. She also had – or acquired – friends in high places. The Archbishop of Mainz helped get papal approval for the publication of the visions under the title of Scivias. She was a correspondent of Bernard of Clairvaux in the same cause, laying before him her sense of unworthiness but her conviction nevertheless that her visions were important and ought to be shared.17 Hildegard began to win a following at Disibod, the house she had first entered, and with the support of a ‘vision’ she negotiated a move to a new foundation at practical Rupertsberg, to which she took her loyal nuns. She was a considerable letter-writer, which gave her influence in Europe. She wrote on many subjects: on medicine and nursing; on the Athanasian Creed;18 on the Rule of Benedict; and more books of visions.19 Her first secretarial assistant, Volmar, who was a monk, was followed by others: a nun, an abbot, a nephew, more monks. They were instructed to be faithful to what she had written and merely to correct her Latin. Her use of the ‘modesty topos’ was as disingenuous as that of any male writer. ‘I am a little person in a woman’s body, unlearned in human knowledge.’20 Gertrude the Great (1256–1302) became a nun at Helfta, where she had been sent to school when she was four years old. She seems to have had an excellent education, including a good grounding in Latin, and access to a good library where she read hard. Like Hildegard she came to prominence through having visions, though hers apparently began only in her twenties. Her writings were chiefly on spiritual subjects and other nuns contributed parts, within what was evidently a well-educated community. The Carthusians One of the more lasting of the monastic experiments of Guibert of Nogent’s day was the founding of the Carthusians by Bruno (c.1030–1101). Bruno was born in Germany but spent half a century in France, studying at Reims and then teaching in the cathedral school there. He left when, during a furore about the appointment 138

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a new age of monastic experiment of the next Archbishop of Reims, he found that his own name was in the frame to be made Archbishop, and settled in a hermitage at Chartreux. The Carthusian monks (though the order soon included houses of nuns) got their name from their house at Chartreux. A letter of Bernard de Portes’ encourages nuns to join.21 The Carthusians earned their living from keeping sheep, buying what they needed from the profits of selling their wool. They had an entourage of nearly two dozen pious laymen who lived close by and observed their rule as far as was possible for laymen, carrying out the manual work necessary for the support of the monks in prayer in their cells. The Prologue to the Carthusian Statutes stresses that the life is a ‘calling’, but it was a new kind of calling.22 Theirs was not the Benedictine Rule but a set of Statutes of their own devising in which the now-familiar character of the Benedictine emphasis on the importance of community life was missing. Guibert of Nogent describes a group of thirteen Carthusian monks who have a cloister but do not use it in the usual way. Instead they have separate cells in which they live individually and not as a community. They read and pray and eat and sleep in their cells. Each one gets his week’s ration of bread and beans from the cellarer on Sunday and cooks his own food in his cell.23 They meet for Mass and they talk very little, if at all. This rigorous way of life is supervised by a prior who is the local bishop, the Bishop of Grenoble. The pious Count of Nevers, hearing of their growing reputation, paid them a visit and was impressed by their poverty. Yet he saw fit to send them gold and silver vessels, which they very properly refused. Abashed, the Count, sent them ox-hides and parchment instead, which they, as a learned order, were happy to accept. Bruno himself moved on to Calabria where he founded another house. Again there were attempts to elevate him to the episcopate and again he fled.24 The Cistercians So a man with an idea could start something new in the monastic life. Most such experiments failed or became tainted with unorthodoxy, but one was spectacularly successful. Robert of Molesme led away a group of monks from Molesme to found a new monastery at Cîteaux in 1098 in which it was planned that the group would live according to the primitive Benedictine Rule, stripped of all its later adjustments. The life was to be simple and austere and include a proper proportion of manual labour, avoiding the accretions of wealth and lands now common in 139

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Benedictine houses, and choosing remote sites to build on. This small founding group so anxious to return to the original purity of their monastic calling included Stephen Harding and Alberic. Stephen Harding, who followed Robert as third abbot, drew up a carta caritatis (‘charter of charity’) and developed the idea of refusing to accept children given as oblates by their parents and allowing only adults to become monks in this reformed Benedictine way of life. He set about providing for the needs of the monastery not through revenues from lands but by farming by the monks themselves, with the support of a body of ‘lay’ brothers or conversi. These would come from the peasant classes and were not expected to be literate or to share in the reading and liturgical ‘work’ of the choir monks. He also proposed a middle way between the traditional Benedictine autonomy of individual houses and the Cluniac arrangement which made all Cluniac abbeys dependencies of the mother house. The Cistercians proved to have a strong appeal. Bernard (1090–1153), a well-born young Burgundian, joined the movement soon after 1110, bringing with him more than two dozen of his friends and family. Possibly because of his skills as a preacher, the Cistercians multiplied rapidly and had to found new houses in rapid succession. Soon he was sent off to build a new Cistercian abbey at Clairvaux with twelve companions. More came to join them and within a few years Cîteaux itself had several daughter houses. The success of the Cistercians now challenged the primacy of the Cluniacs. Cluny had become a monastic ‘lifestyle choice’. More ceremonies, more chant, meant less reading and less manual labour.25 Ulrich (1029–93) produced detailed Constitutions in three books between 1079 and 1087.26 Peter Damian also noted this pattern on his visit in 106327 and Peter the Venerable acknowledged its onerousness.28 Anselm of Bec and Canterbury had admitted to feeling that to go to Cluny would be to end his opportunity for study because of the severity of the rule there (districtio ordinis). He wondered whether that was not the best reasons for doing so, since his love of learning might be a temptation of the Devil. But in the end he chose Bec.29 The new Cistercian Order was taking on a big and powerful rival. In 1100 Cluny was nearly 200 years old and included more than 600 houses and 10,000 monks.30 But now the cream of ‘vocations’ began to choose to go to Cistercian houses rather than Cluniac ones and some Cluniac monks became restless and wanted to move and become Cistercians. This led to acrimonious correspondence between Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable, then Abbot of Cluny. 140

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a new age of monastic experiment The affair helped to prompt what might now be seen as a ‘public relations’ battle between the two orders. Charges against Cluniacs by Cistercians and Peter’s replies survive.31 Bernard wrote a vigorous polemical letter attacking Cluny and its practices. The Cluniacs wear fine clothing and eat well. They may eat beans but they are cooked in an haute cuisine manner. The monks chatter and do no manual work. Peter the Venerable wrote back, to accuse the Cistercians of complacency. They are Pharisees. He defends Cluniac practices of allowing far more than two dishes at meals as a concession to frailty, and the habit of shortening the novitiate to a wish to avoid frustrating those with a clear vocation by delaying their profession.32 In 1125, William, Abbot of St Thierry, and an old friend of his, had asked Bernard to write a defence of the Cistercians when they were accused of unfairly attacking the Cluniacs. Bernard’s Apologia is a sophisticated exercise in decrying such childish activities, admitting they evince only an unattractive self-righteousness, while allowing himself plenty of room to mock Cluniac conduct, the way they eat and dress and the way they live. If monks are ‘flying’ from other communities and institutions to ‘our’ order, knocking on our door and entering, what reason can there be but a desire to leave behind what is unsatisfactory in the life they are living?33 Bernard’s argument developed into a defence of the Cistercian way not only against the Cluniacs but against other monastic practices of the time, and pointing an accusing finger at an abuse which was to be taken up vigorously in the later twelfth century: the decadence and wealth and display of senior abbots as well as bishops.34 Reflecting on the strengths of the Cistercian version of the Benedictine life, Bernard explored the boundaries of obedience and asked what, for a monk, can be considered not a requirement, but merely a matter of choice or personal judgement.35 He also wrote a treatise on ‘the steps of humility and pride’36 to warn his monks how easily they could descend to the depths of unmonkish behaviour. ‘A definition of humility is that it is the virtue by which a man truly sees himself for the vile thing he is.’37 He has noticed that a monk begins the downward journey to pride by letting himself be distracted by curiosity. Then he becomes a flibbertigibbet, merry one minute, gloomy the next. Then he grows giggly, finding trifles amusing. Then he chatters, saying everything that enters his head. Then he moves on to boasting and after that to believing himself more holy than other people. Next comes the habit of believing himself always right and insisting that others accept his views. If he acts wrongly he tries to justify himself. He becomes insubordinate and refuses to obey his superiors. Then he feels free to sin when he 141

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition feels like it and feels no shame. Now he is far gone, a habitual and unrepentant sinner destined for hell. For contrast, Bernard offers the example of a supremely good monk, by writing a Life of Malachi, Archbishop of Armagh (1094–1148), who had recently died. Such men are examples, mirrors in which we may see better, the salt of the earth.38 Ailred of Rievaulx Ailred (1110–67) was not a transferee from the Cluniacs. He had spent his youth as a courtier in the court of King David of Scotland. There he had become a steward (echonomus) and he could reasonably have hoped to be found a bishopric through an act of patronage in due course.39 But he felt a strong call to the monastic life40 where he thought he could live in a plainness of dress and simplicity and purity which was not possible at court. Ailred heard about the Cistercians. He was told that they wore pure white wool and lived a life of strict poverty and obedience.41 It was barely two years earlier that they had landed in England, but their fame as exemplary religious was already a wonder. They are mirabiles […] et religione insignes. 42 Among them no one deems himself superior. The only distinction recognised is that of greater holiness (maior sanctitas). They live with such rigour and dedication that to be among them is like living on a religionis palestra, a monastic wrestling ground.43 In 1134, Ailred offered himself to the monastery at Rievaulx, founded by a party of twelve monks from Clairvaux in 1132. His biographer Walter Daniel says he was ‘called to the cloister’ for the common good (ad utilitatem et consolacionem multorum) as well as for his own peace. 44 Peace was to be found there, as Walter Daniel describes in an ecstatic passage. The movement of the branches of the beautiful trees makes the leaves rustle so that the ear is delighted by the changing but musically harmonious sounds (sonos various set equipollentes in musica).45 Ailred was warmly welcomed, and although he meant to take time to think it over, on fire with the Holy Spirit, as Walter Daniel explains, he returned the next day. The monks talked him into joining them. He had to make arrangements to settle his affairs, which took four days. Then he became a novice, but the monks found it difficult to regard him as a mere beginner. His novice-master called him socius, a colleague, not discipulus, a pupil. Nevertheless, he outshone all his fellows in humility.46 He concentrated with all his might and mental energy (omne robur cogitationis sue refundebat) as though he was held by a long thread to the crucified 142

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a new age of monastic experiment Christ, a thread reaching onwards to the seat of God the Father.47 In the interests of practising subjugation of flesh he had a little brick chamber built under the floor of the novice house with a stream flowing into it. He used to go in there when no one was looking and sit in the icy water to quench in himself the heats of vice.48 From a practical point of view, Ailred’s administrative experience as a Scottish courtier and steward seems to have stood him in good stead. Abbot William found him very useful in solving problems in the abbey.49 He also proved a useful fundraiser. His biographer is enthusiastic: ‘His fame runs through the whole countryside. Bishops, earls, barons venerate the man and the place itself, and in their reverence and affection load it with possessions, heap gifts upon it and defend it by their peace and protection.’ He thinks it is virtuous to accept lands because in troubled times when the land is laid waste, disturbed and disrupted (vastacione turbata et confusa) by war, at least it provides a safe place of refuge.50 By 1143, after a period as novice-master at Rievaulx, he was entrusted with the task of being abbot to a new foundation from Rievaulx, at Revesby. In 1147, he succeded William as Abbot of Rievaulx itself. Like Bernard, Ailred became a considerable author. Though he was selfeducated he was learned.51 He wrote letters and the ‘Mirror of Love’ (Speculum Caritatis),52 probably composed about 1142. Most of his writings seem to have been completed in his period as Abbot of Rievaulx. He wrote a book on the soul,53 and composed a book of advice for nuns and especially those with a call to live as solitaries, the De institutione inclusarum, in which similar concerns predominate. Nuns, like monks, are to live in a place where the ebb and flow of worldly business does not intrude.54 There will be no tedious social distractions in their reclusive lives; this is a life which sets them free to sigh and long for Christ, encourages devotion to the Cross. The religious woman should be careful to free herself of distracting cares and worry.55 She should sit on her own and listen to Christ.56 He teaches nuns thus: First you need to understand for what cause and reason this way of life was instituted in time past. The ancients chose to life in a special way in order the more freely to embrace Christ.57 It is not enough to live an enclosed life. You must also refrain from letting your thoughts wander about.58 The recluse must not sit at her window and gossip with those who come to pay her respect (clearly a recognised danger).59 The abbot in an early Benedictine monastic community could be seen as occupying the place of Christ among his disciples, as leader and master and teacher.60 Ailred of Rievaulx described a different idea, that Christ is present 143

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition as a third in the monastic friendship (amicitia) of two people.61 He made this suggestion in an important study of ‘spiritual friendship’, De spiritali amicitia. In his Prologue Ailred distinguishes this kind of friendship from the ordinary human friendships of his youth. ‘When I was a boy at school, I enjoyed the company of my friends, and I loved to love and be loved’, but these friendships did not last. Then he read Cicero On Friendship,62 and understood the subject more deeply. But on becoming a monk he realised there was much more to learn.63 In Western monastic communities, brothers were expected to live in unity and unanimity without forming ‘special friendships’ and the same was true for communities of nuns. The important difference, as Ailred saw it, is that Christ is present in a monastic friendship.64 Monastic friendship lasts because the fountain and source of this friendship is the love of God. Love can be natural, like mother for child, or we may love our enemies or those who look attractive. The essential thing is to found friendship on the love of God.65 ‘Here are you and here am I, and Christ makes a third between us.’66 ii. Active orders: The canons The Little Book of Different Orders was probably the work of a mid-twelfth-century canon of Liège,67 who had come to believe that the experimentation of the times in new varieties of monastic life was probably going too far. The author had heard of Anthony, the famous early desert hermit, but he does not seem to know much more about the early history of monasticism. Nevertheless, he has views on hermits. It is a dangerous way of life. Liciosi are male hermits living with no proper Rule. Some are no better than ‘wild men of the woods’. Women, rich widows, living at the gates of monasteries, with no formal structure to their lives, can also set a bad example.68 Expressions of concern follow, about the need for some consistency in regulation of monastic communities and monastic life. Those who follow new and foreign ways (qui novas et alienas constitutiones sequuntur) could be leading the way to schism and unrest (scisma et perturbatio). The author thinks the best plan is to ensure consistency locally, where aberrant behaviours will be noticed. If locally some are fasting and others are not there will be jealousies and rivalries.69 In the interests of promoting better understanding of the options, he offers a survey. ‘Different servants of God have arisen from the beginning of the early 14 4

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a new age of monastic experiment church’, and different ways of making a monastic profession (diversi professionum status).70 There are hermits, enclosed monks, canons, various types of women religious.71 He suggests that the earliest humans lived simple lives without houses and probably alone. Modern hermits live simply, with rough clothing and food, fasts, vigils. Solitude still has its place.72 However, there are monks who live near people, such as the Cluniacs. They have the benefit of gifts of lands, alms, tithes, revenues of Church to help them live in community as loving brothers.73 Cistercians, by contrast, remove themselves from human habitation.74 Orders of canons were coming into fashion. Some, says the author of the Little Book, live remote from other people, such as the Premonstratensians.75 Some canons live close to centres of population, such as the Victorines.76 Some the author thinks are really seculars, not ‘religious’ at all, and these make him uneasy. Of those, some cathedral ‘canons’ are good men who live simply and have managed church property well, but it would be better if they lived in an orderly and regular way under a Rule.77 Canons may be especially precariously balanced between worldliness and unwordliness.78 ‘Regular’ canons were simply priests serving a cathedral who lived under a Rule. Bede records Pope Gregory’s advice to Augustine of Canterbury on his mission to England at the end of the sixth century, about the way bishops should organise their households.79 This Augustine was experienced in living under a monastic Rule and the Pope suggests he should not live apart from his clergy but in a community with them, where no one has personal property. Any minor clergy who are married should live out and received their stipends separately, but they too should regard themselves as bound by a Rule (sub ecclesiastica regula sunt tenendi). Some centuries later, the priests who served as canons of cathedrals and also as priests in the diocese might or might not live under a Rule. But it increasingly began to be felt to be advisable if they did. Symeon was a scribe at Durham Priory (a Benedictine community which belonged to the Cathedral) before 1093. He was still a scribe there in 1128. He lists 230 who have made their monastic profession at Durham since the time of Aidan.80 Patterns of foundations in England from the Norman Conquest to the reign of Henry I show a preponderance of Benedictine monastic ones, but for succeeding reigns, until Henry III (d. 1272), new foundations tended to be for regular canons, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, Gilbertines, later friaries.81 The buildings of older foundations were sometimes handed over to orders of canons, as happened at Inchaffrey in Scotland in about 1200.82 145

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The Augustinians did not regard themselves as ‘new’, claiming as they did that they were living by the Rule of Augustine of Hippo.83 Robert of Bridlington wrote in the mid-twelfth century about the way the Augustinian Rule was being interpreted to fit the needs of the reviving vocation to the life of a regular canon.84 Robert’s Dialogue85 begins with a Prologue which is an extended ‘modesty topos’. (Robert confesses he has been slow and a leaky vessel.) He describes a monasterium as simply a house in which an orderly life is lived, moderately, with no extremes, no showing off, a single shared ‘wardrobe’ and a common table. Victorine canons were an innovation. They got their name from the house of St Victor in Paris, where the community was founded in 1108/9 by William of Champeaux. The proximity of experiments in higher education encouraged them to be educators too. Hugh of St Victor wrote several works of pedagogy, as well as of spirituality. His Didascalicon forms a handbook to meet the basic educational needs of entrants to the order. Andrew of St Victor (c.1110–75) seems to have taken a special interest in the exegesis of the Old Testament and he probably had some knowledge of Hebrew, which was a rare asset at the time. The particular study of Richard of St Victor (d. 1173) was spirituality, but he wrote on the Apocalypse too and made an effort to work out (with diagrams) how the Temple described in Ezekiel, Chapter 40, could possibly have stood up, given the measurements provided which seem to require that it be built on a steep slope.86 Godfrey (c.1125–94) came to St Victor after a period of study in the Paris schools. Robert of Melun, another Paris scholar, made a synthesis of the work of Hugh of St Victor. Robert claimed to have heard Hugh teach. So these canons were significant contributors to the emergence of ‘higher education’ in Paris independently of the cathedral school there. The Premonstratensian canons were founded ten years later, in 1120, by Norbert. He became Archbishop of Mainz in 1126, and in the same year his order gained papal approval. One of its leading early members was Anselm of Havelberg (c.1100-1158). He was sent by the Holy Roman Emperor as an ambassador to Constantinople to seek reunion with the Greeks after the schism of 1054 seemed to be lasting too long. He too won approval in high places and was later made a bishop. There was rivalry and resentment, for canons could claim to be superior to monks because they were all priests. During one of the periods when he lived in a community of monks, Peter Abelard wrote to a regular canon to complain that the reputation of the monastic order was being injured (laesum) by canons who said it was inferior because not all its members are priests. But, says Abelard, 146

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a new age of monastic experiment it is a common experience that highly placed clerics decide to become monks (monasticam eligere vitam). Clergy become abbots. He supports his argument with extensive patristic quotations.87 iii. Military monastic orders In the seventh century St Wandrille had an ‘enormous army of monks’ (ingens monachorum agmen), says Orderic Vitalis; and he mentions an insignis acies, a notable troop, at Jumièges too. He uses this military language to describe the role or work of monks in a violent age, in taming barbarians and winning them to a better way of life by their example.88 Orderic goes on to give descriptions of the settlement of areas of Europe converted to Christianity by establishing monastic houses. 89 It is not surprising that the image of the monk as ‘soldier of Christ’ should have come to mind. Feudal northern Europe in the Middle Ages was a society where the sons of leading families had two choices of career: to enter the army or to enter the Church. Transfers from one to the other were sometimes possible in the case of monks. We have already seen that some of those who had been knights all their lives were turning to monastic life in their retirement. Orderic gives an example of the monk beginning the life in old age who had been a soldier ‘in the world’ (in saeculo miles fuerat), and with many relatives who were also redoubtable soldiers. The soldier who turns monk has chosen a better army, he says, and committed himself to a better fight (meliori militia exerceri nisus est).90 William Son of Giroie was one such and he had been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem twice. After the second occasion he ‘left the world’ (saeculum reliquit) and became a monk of Bec.91 Among the most extreme of the experiments in the monastic life tried in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries were attempts to mingle the callings of monk and knight in orders specially designed for the purpose. This was a way for a monk to be a soldier too. This was an age first of pilgrimage and then of crusade into the Holy Lands, as they came under Muslim rule and became accessible to Christians only with risk and difficulty. Pilgrimage had a long history as a Christian endeavour. Jerome had written to Paulinus in 394 describing pilgrimage as an educational experience, a way of learning about God by learning about the world.92 The wandering of the early Irish Christians could be seen as pilgrimage as well as missionary activity.93 Adamnan wrote a book on the holy places, which Bede knew about and imitated 147

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition in his own book on the same subject.94 We have seen that the actual journey he chiefly relied on for information had been made by Arculf, just after the Muslim conquest. Arculf probably came from Gaul and was in Jerusalem before 683.95 Bede seems to have made some use of sources other than Arculf, and added links to Biblical references to places visited. However, Arculf told his story directly to Adomnan (indubitabile narratione dictavit to Adomnan).96 We have already seen some of the earliest characters to appear in this book visiting the Holy Land. That practice continued into the Middle Ages.97 Pilgrims, as serious-minded and peaceful travellers in search of a glimpse of these holiest of places, needed somewhere to stay on the way, and they needed protection. Hospitality could readily be provided by monasteries on the pilgrim routes across Europe. For example, the conversion of the Magyars to Christianity opened a pilgrim way to Holy Land by way of the river Danube in the eleventh century, and a religious house was founded at the frontier, to provide hospitality to pilgrims. With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam and the ensuing Arab conquests, the Holy Land had become a dangerous place for Christians to visit, in unprecedented ways. Protection for the pilgrims to guarantee them safe passage across war-torn lands became essential. That problem grew greater when Christian armies, disturbed to see what they regarded as their own their Holy Places in non-Christian hands, set off from Western Europe to recapture the Holy Land. The call to go on crusade was repeated several times from the 1090s for more than a century. The purpose – to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity – attracted much of Western Europe. Not everyone’s motives were pure and even for the idealists the financial and practical rewards became enticing. The venture held out the possibility of wealth, lands, power, as well as the hope of heaven promised by Pope Urban II when he launched the First Crusade in a speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Christians, once they had conquered territory holy to Christians, were keen to build fortifications and ecclesiastical buildings to consolidate their position. They built to impress, commissioning fine mosaics and other beauties. 98 Going crusading was tempting to some young monks who had been placed in monasteries by their families and who did not necessarily have much of a vocation. Anselm wrote to try to dissuade one of these from abandoning his vows. Whether they left their communities and went in person or not, monks took an active interest in the crusades as historians and chroniclers. A flurry of chronicles and stories of the crusades appeared, a number written by monks or former 148

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a new age of monastic experiment monks. Robert the Monk, one of those who gives a version of Urban II’s speech at Clermont, did not himself participate in the crusade. He wrote his account, the Historia Hierosolymitana, about 1106, paraphrasing the Gesta Francorum. Gilo of Paris was a monk of Cluny. He had become cardinal Bishop of Tusculum by 1121, possibly as a result of a visit of Calixtus II and the papal entourage to Cluny in 1120. Gilo felt the contrast between the peace of the cloister and the corruption of Rome.99 When he was at Cluny, he wrote: ‘I first knew what it would be to have a little dwelling in the kingdom of heaven. What Cluny taught me I could not keep to in Rome’ (Quod Clunianus docuit Romae servare non potui). He wrote a ‘history’ of the journey to Jerusalem.100 The Hospitallers Of the two monastic orders which emerged to meet the needs of the crusading period, the Hospitallers were already there in embryo. They probably began by running a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem as early as the seventh century. The buildings were destroyed in the invasions but rebuilt in 1023. The hospital as it existed then was run by Benedictine monks. The origins of the Hospitallers may reach back into these times, but they came to prominence as a distinct order in the period of the First Crusade and after, as an order with the responsibility of protecting pilgrims. That could mean, if necessary, providing an armed bodyguard; this military aspect of their work came to include defending the Holy Land. They were approved as an order by the Pope in 1113. At first they wore black, with a distinctively shaped white cross, but the garment got in the way of fighting and in 1248 it was replaced by a more conveniently shaped red one. Some of the Hospitallers concentrated on nursing the sick, some on fighting. The order amassed wealth and built strategically placed fortifications on lands made available to them. The First Crusade was relatively successful, but the three which followed, up to the Fourth Crusade of 1204, were less so. From then on crusading began to tail away in a series of unsuccessful ventures. The failures of the crusading movement took the Hospitallers to new headquarters, first in Rhodes and then Malta. Between 1287 and 1291 the Holy Land was recaptured by the Arabs and the Hospitallers were forced out. They tried to settle in Cyprus but the political climate was too stormy for them there. Their time with Rhodes as their base (from 1309) was more successful. However, the military threats on all sides were serious and the nursing increasingly gave way to fighting. 149

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The Hospitallers were successively attacked by Barbary pirates, and from Egypt, and then by the Ottomans. Suleiman the Magnificent drove them out in 1522 and they withdrew, first to Sicily and then to Malta, under the protection of the German Emperor Charles V who was also King of Sicily. They were attacked again and again but eventually held off the Ottoman conquerors. From then on they could scarcely be said to be operating as a religious order. There was no longer any possibility of nursing Holy Land pilgrims, only some useful work in tackling the problem of piracy from the Barbary coast which was threatening merchant shipping. Some Hospitallers simply hired themselves as mercenaries to foreign armies. Nevertheless, their 268 years in Malta led to the rise of Malta as a power in the Mediterranean and the Hospitallers did build hospitals there. The Templars Hugh de Payens, himself not a monk but a knight, made a suggestion to the crusader King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II (King 1118–31). Hugh’s idea was to establish an order of monks with the single purpose of offering protection to the growing numbers of pilgrims coming to the Holy Land after the successful First Crusade had made it Christian territory again. This became the other special monastic order with a ‘military’ vocation. The new order was given a location in the mosque which the Crusaders had captured in the Temple area. This was believed to be the site of Solomon’s Temple, so the new order took the name of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, which was shortened in common parlance to ‘Templars’. The community began with only about nine members and no funding except what they received through charitable donation.101 By 1129 they had the Church’s endorsement and began to attract gifts as they became the fashionable charity of the moment. In 1139 the Templars were placed directly under the Pope’s jurisdiction and given freedom to cross all borders. The Templars, whose numbers now grew in response to their popularity, did a good deal of actual fighting or supporting of military endeavours, as they became involved in the much less successful Crusades which followed the first. Bernard of Clairvaux, who happened to be a nephew of one of the first Templars, heard of this new order. He strongly approved of the scheme in its first idealism and wrote a treatise about 1135, ‘In praise of the new knighthood’, addressed to Hugues de Payens, first Grand Master and Prior of Jerusalem (1129).102 This 150

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a new age of monastic experiment contains thoughts which help to ‘fix’ the way monasticism was being thought of in the West in the mid-twelfth century. The death of his saints is precious in the sight of God however they die, emphasises Bernard.103 He describes the order as a ‘new kind of knighthood’ (novum militiae genus) recently arisen in the lands where the Lord lived in the flesh. This is an ‘unworldly community’ (saeculis inexpertum) which will be fighting the ills of the world and spiritual ills too. The life of the secular soldier compares unfavourably with that of the Templar (II). The knights of the new militia are safe from the moral corruptions of secular warfare.104 They have their own conversio to a life lived sparely, without excess or food or clothing, spent in community without wives and children, but enjoying delightful and sober company (plane iucunda et sobria conversatione). 105 Templars can be assured of heaven (I.2), whether they die in their beds or in battle: Et quidem sive in lecto, sive in bello quis moritur, pretiosa erit sine dubio in conspectu Domini mors sanctorum ejus.

Bernard tells his readers in some detail how a Templar should spend his time (IV.7). He should never sit idle or wander about just satisfying idle curiosity. If they are not busy (which will rarely be the case) they should not eat the bread of idleness but mend their armour and polish their weapons and pray. Templars should not be respecters of persons; they should defer to those who are good, not to those who are more highly born; they should carry one another’s burdens; they should not engage in games or gambling or idle pastimes. For the edification of this pilgrim order, Bernard adds a tour of the Holy Places, the Temple, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Olivet, Joran, Calvary, Sepulchre, Bethphage, Bethany, to heighten their sense of the preciousness of what they are protecting.106 Developments followed, which could and did encourage the corruption of the original ideal. The Templars were relied upon by knights going on crusade, who needed someone to look after their financial affairs in their absence. From the mid-twelfth century, they began to act as a banking organisation which could provide letters of credit for crusading knights and pilgrims who would need money in the Holy Land. That was a practical protection especially for the pilgrims, making them less likely to have their money stolen on their journeys. The result of all this was that the order grew wealthy and powerful, operating a ‘global network’ of business interests – and not always with impeccable honesty. That in 151

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition turn made it hated and feared. In 1307, the King of France, in financial difficulties of his own, had the Templars arrested and forced to make confessions about secret initiation ceremonies on the basis of which he had them executed. The Pope closed down the order in 1320.107 iv. From primary education to university We have seen something of the sophistication of Carolingian monastic controversialists, who had evidently had no difficulty in acquiring a high level of theological and general education. What sort of education was available to the ordinary run of monk, and especially to those placed in monasteries as infants and expected to remain there for the rest of their lives? In his early Rule, Basil the Great included provision for the acceptance of children who wished to join the monks of a community. If they were very young, this would mean that they had been given to the monastery by their parents and had had no say in the matter. Benedict gives a whole section of the Rule (Chapter 59) to child oblates out of concern to protect them from parents trying to buy influence by giving their son. The gift of a child requires special legal protections where the parents are noble and wealthy. Benedict says he has learned by experience that such parents must give a binding undertaking that if they make gifts to the monastery the gifts will have no strings attached. There must be no attempt to buy privileges for their son or to make gifts in such a way that he will ever become possessed of property. Even if they are poor, parents must give a similar undertaking, though those who own nothing may simply make a declaration before witnesses when they give their son. The little oblates would have to be taught enough to enable them to play a full part in the worship and reading expected of monks. By Benedict’s time this was beginning to mean learning Latin as a language which was not necessarily a mother tongue, as well as learning to read and perhaps to write. During the medieval centuries which followed, much would depend on who was available in a given house to act as schoolmaster for the boys. Some houses might offer little more than bare literacy, while others could rise to a much higher level of education. Some had quite good libraries; others did not. In sixth-century Ireland it seems to have been usual to send Irish boys to monasteries for schooling,108 though not necessarily with the intention that they should become monks. So there were some implicit contradictions of purpose to 152

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a new age of monastic experiment be fitted in. The elementary schooling needed by a child who was destined to be a monk would soon diverge from that needed by a boy whose parents simply wanted to make him literate and possibly numerate. They might perhaps all usefully learn the Psalms by heart but only the small boys of the monastery needed to know the antiphons and responses they were required to sing in the choir. Charlemagne put out a General Admonition in 789 that there should be schools (scolae) for teaching children to read and more. In each monastery or cathedral school they would need to learn the psalms, singing, practical arithmetic, Latin grammar.109 A glimpse of the realities of elementary monastic ‘schooling’ is to be found in the Colloquy of Aelfric, who was Abbot of Eynsham from 1005.110 He was a born ‘primary school teacher’ but in any case he had the model of the ‘dialogue’ ready to use. It had been employed by Augustine, though at a rather more Socratic level, and was to be used in the teaching of catechisms for many centuries, in a format where the dialogue was formal, the answers ready-made, and no real discussion between master and pupil was involved. Aelfric himself had been educated at Winchester, in the Benedictine community, and may have shown his talents as a teacher there. He was sent to be schoolmaster at Cerne and won the goodwill of lay patrons with an enthusiasm for learning. He wrote homilies in English using material drawn from the Fathers because he was concerned that non-Latinists were denied access to these sources. He also provided textbooks to help students of Latin, a grammar and (probably) a glossary as well as the Colloquy. He made some use of the dialogue method in the grammar so that students could try out particular grammatical rules. The Colloquy is pitched at a very simple level, but it provides oral practice which would help with pronunciation. Since in some houses the boys were allowed to speak only Latin, forming good habits of that sort would be helpful alongside learning to get the grammar right. Benedict’s Rule (Chapter 45) is quite strict about speaking Latin correctly, for standards must be maintained in worship in the round of the Office. The Glossary provides a vocabulary. The Colloquy helps the students to use it in sentences. ‘Help us, master, to speak correctly for we are foolish (idiote) and our speech is full of mistakes’; ‘We would rather be beaten than remain in ignorance.’ (Discipline is envisaged as a normal accompaniment to learning for the children of the monastery. To die of a flogging was even seen as a form of martyrdom.) The class then pretends to represent various trades and professions and the boys practise explaining what each does for a living. This creates opportunities to use many more words. 153

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Aelfric was teaching in monastic schools – finally the one at Eynsham where he became abbot – across the year 1000. Another commentator with something to tell about schooling in monasteries is Ralph Glaber, a monastic historian much preoccupied with the millenium.111 He seems, like others of the time, to have been linked with several monasteries in the course of his litetime. Ralph says that at only twelve years old and more than commonly (pre ceteris) fond of the distractions of secular literature, he was firmly removed (abstractus) from the temptations of the world (a perversissima […] saecularis vite vanitate) by one of his uncles, and that is how he became a monk.112 These monastic schools had no fixed syllabus except for the sort of thing Charlemagne had prescribed. The schools must have varied greatly in quality and standards, depending on who the monastery had available to act as schoolmaster. Cluny and its houses, predicably, had detailed expectations and ensured that they were fulfilled. Hugh of Cluny (1024–1109) limited the number of children in the house to six during his abbacy. The boys had at least two schoolmasters who also had to supervise them at all times. The boys must always be with others and never alone with one of their masters. The school was a school for morals as well as for mind. In their own little ‘Chapter’, the boys would practise accusing themselves and one another of sins and breaches of discipline.113 Although they sang in the choir, the boys lived separately from the monks, just passing them in the corridors with a bow. When one of these oblates was fifteen, or sooner if he showed exceptional maturity, he was allowed to become a novice. Here he joined a group some of whose members had grown up outside and some of whom might be much older. With their new companions the intending novices stated their wish to join and were told in no uncertain terms how hard was the life they wished to embrace. They spent their time as novices learning the details of the observances to which they would be bound. Towards ‘higher education’: The contribution of monastic schools Lanfranc and his successor Anselm clearly taught at a level we would now consider to be ‘higher education’. Lanfranc (1005–89) ran a school at the then very new Abbey of Bec, to which it was said many students came (multi convenerunt) from France, Gascony, Brittany and Flanders. This does not seem to have been an ‘institutional’ school of quite the conventional in-house monastic sort. The students came (ad magisterium eius) to Lanfranc as a ‘Master’,114 in the ‘wandering 154

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a new age of monastic experiment scholar’ fashion of the generations before the universities emerged. The reputation which drew them was built partly through public appearances, for example at the Synods of Rome and Vercelli in 1050, where he outpointed Berengar of Tours in the debates over the Eucharist and the question whether the bread and wine ‘really’ changed when the words of consecration were said, and if so how. Lanfranc was the first (primitus) to bring the study of the liberal arts to Normandy, says Orderic Vitalis, for under the Normans before him ‘scarcely any Norman had engaged in liberal studies (vix ullus Normannorum liberalibus studiis adhaesit).115 The standard of the instruction was probably at the level of modern ‘higher education’. There is plentiful evidence of that in Lanfranc’s surviving commentaries on the Psalms with their comprehensive underpinning of technical knowledge of the trivium.116 Orderic gives the impression that this lecturing took Lanfranc out of the cloister (de claustrali quiete protractus magister processit), though there is no evidence that it was carried on outside Bec itself.117 On the contrary, Anselm simply took over the running of a school at Bec when Lanfranc left, first to be Prior of Caen and then to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm had come to Bec from Italy in Lanfranc’s wake as a wandering scholar himself,118 apparently aware of Lanfranc’s reputation as a teacher of the liberal arts as well as of theology, and hungry for more. Again, what was offered was ‘higher’ education; the standard of the school seems to have been much like that which the first universities would adopt more than a century later. Anselm’s pupils, says Orderic, ‘almost all seemed to be philosophers’ (paene omnes videantur philosophi), even those who seemed illiterate and were described as ‘peasants’ (qui videntur […] illiterati et vocantur rustici).119 However, Anselm’s method of teaching was quite different from that of Lanfranc. This was no longer a school which took external students. Anselm’s pupils were monks of Bec, whose numbers increased under his pedagogical influence. And although he had come from Italy full of the liberal arts, positively bowed under the burden of his secular learning (saeculari eruditione philosophorum onustus) and anxious to learn still more from Lanfranc, he did not teach the elements of the liberal arts when he himself took over the school.120 He made a deliberate decision to concentrate on theology (coelesti theoriae omnimodis inhesit).121 These comments of Orderic’s are generally supported by his recollections of reading Eadmer’s Life of Anselm, though he had evidently got more information from personal reminiscences of other monks of Bec.122 But in any case there is abundant evidence in Anselm’s early treatises123 that he taught by an almost ‘Socratic’ method, making his pupils think and try out answers, and helping 155

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the student monks to interpret passages of Scripture by close consideration of the words in the light of a basic understanding of formal rules of grammar and logic. Orderic says that as Anselm’s successors at Bec when he left to become Lanfranc’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, William and Boso (his companion in the dialogue Cur Deus Homo) strove to teach in the same spirit. 124 Continuity in the provision of a higher education in a monastery would inevitably depend not only on the availability of a suitable master but also on having a good library. Bec’s library was greatly enlarged by Lanfranc, says Orderic, both in the liberal arts and in theology (ingens in aecclesia Beccensi liberalium artium et sacrae lectionis sedimen).125 Anselm’s correspondence witnesses to exchanges of books for copying to make additions to monastic libraries and the circulation of new writings was also apparently enthusiastic, or Gaunilo of Marmoutiers would not have been able to read the Proslogion so speedily and write his challenge. Abbot Thierry of St Evroul was a calligrapher himself and organised copying to supply the house with many books.126 The earliest Bec library catalogues survive from the twelfth century, and Robert of Torigny seems to have had a hand in enlarging the library there.127 Much later, William Worcestre (1415–80/5) was interested in compiling his ‘itineraries’ not only in buildings but in contents of monastic libraries and gives an indication of their range and quality in the later Middle Ages.128 Levels of monastic learning could be impressive, but this may have been the result of the private efforts of monks who were natural scholars and who corresponded with others of similar bent. Rupert of Deutz (c.1075–1129), a lifelong monk who became Abbot of Deutz, exemplifies the high-quality scholarship which was to be found in a number of houses. He wrote treatises on topical theological controversies – such as divine omnipotence and the divine will – which show him to have been in touch with contemporary debate. In his exegetical commentaries he explores an idea also developed by Anselm of Havelberg and famously by Joachim, Abbot of Fiore (c.1135–1202). This sees Scripture as prophetic. The Old Testament describes the Age of the Father and points forward to the New Testament, which describes the Age of the Son. We are now living in the Age of the Holy Spirit when the world will end. Monastic schools and the coming of the universities Monastic schools played an incidental part in the development of the schools which were inventing themselves as universities by the end of the twelfth century. 156

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a new age of monastic experiment Some of the great schools of higher learning about 1200 were still to be found attached to cathedrals, as they were at Chartres129 and Laon. By the twelfth century most educational experimentation was taking place in the cathedral schools (where Charlemagne’s directive still required the provision of teaching for the canons), and in the schools run by the new orders of canons which began to form. They were setting the standards. The Victorine canons at Paris took a conspicuous lead in the developments which by the end of the twelfth century would have created one of the first ‘universities’ in Paris. The success of the schools – and their attractiveness to ambitious boys looking perhaps for a career in the ecclesiastical civil service with a view to an eventual bishopric – owed much to cathedral canons too. What contribution were monks able to make to this educational explosion? Among the ambitious early ‘academics’ to be found sometimes in and sometimes out of monastic life was Peter Abelard (1079–1142). His career as an independent master or lecturer took him from Laon to Paris and from logic to theology and it made him a controversial figure. There was as yet no institutional framework, no universitas or ‘gild’ of Masters controlling admission to their number. Abelard was condemned twice for heretical teaching and he was castrated after he became involved in a sexual relationship with a girl pupil, Heloise, which resulted in the birth of a child. He wrote the story of his troubles (historia calamitatum) in a genre invented in the ancient world, when it was known as a ‘letter of consolation’ (epistola consolatoria).130 (The theory was that telling others of one’s own worse problems would be a source of comfort to them in dealing with their own.) After relating how he was punished for his sexual sins by castration, Abelard asks what ‘path’ then lay open to him. He would be an object of ridicule in the world. He would not be allowed to become a priest. He admits that it was the humiliation of his position rather than any positive monastic vocation that sent him into monastic life at the Abbey of St Denis. He strongly suggested to his paramour Heloise that she should become a nun and she obeyed.131 He took the same route to monastic refuge himself, only to find that standards were poor and the house stood in need of reform.132 He made a second retreat to monastic life, when he found himself ‘persecuted’ again,133 and did not hesitate to take refuge with Heloise and her apparently rather intellectually inclined nuns who wanted to read the Scriptures with the aid of professional exegetical skills. Abelard says he was shocked by the scandalous standards of the monks he joined. Characteristically he was frank in criticism, both privately, and publicly in the lectures he gave to his students: 157

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Erat autem abbatia illa nostra ad quam me contuleram secularis admodum vite atque turpissime […] ad cellam quandam recessi, scolis more solito vaccaturus.134

It is scarcely surprising that the monks of St Denis drove him out. After further upheavals and condemnations because of his teaching, Abelard turned once more to the monastic life for refuge. This time he was offered the abbacy of St Gildas in Britanny, but he found the monks there even more corrupt and the local people uncivilised and lawless. There was a further problem. A local lord had been seizing the lands of the abbey for his own purposes and making exactions which were hard for the monks to pay. So Abelard could not easily ensure that the monks got fed and clothed, for there was no common property to pay for it. The monks had got into the habit of holding individual property from which each paid for his own upkeep (and for that of a mistress if he fancied one, and any sons and daughters who had resulted). They tormented Abelard when he tried to restore order. He felt isolated: illi vehementer accensi clamare ceperunt nunc me patenter ostendisse quod semper monasterium illud nostrum infestaverim.135

Meanwhile Heloise and her fellow nuns were expelled from their nunnery. Abelard was able to provide them with a place which was to be called the Paraclete in which to begin again, found a nunnery and carry on their lives, and Heloise was to be abbess.136 He continued to take an interest in her education and that of her sisters. He writes to tell her that at her request, ‘I have collected some hymns for the community of the Paraclete’: Ad tuarum precum instantiam, soror mihi Heloisa, in seculo quondam cara, nunc in Christo carissima.137

Abelard found this house of nuns a welcome refuge from the conditions in which he was living at St Gildas and often visited them. He says his monks even tried to poison him and when that failed, they bribed local brigands to mug him or try to kill him with a sword when he travelled.138 St Gildas, too, he eventually abandoned, though at the end of his life he was able to settle apparently contentedly at Cluny, then a popular ‘retirement home’ for academics. In lives less beset with drama too there seems to have been a good deal of moving about and opportunity for scholarly exchange with monks and 158

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a new age of monastic experiment monasteries. Monasteries were not in general hostile to academic study despite the frequent claims that the saints they had produced had been very learned but had given up their studies to become monks. Gilbert of Sempringham (c.1083–190) was ‘chosen’ (electus) to be ‘God’s servant in the land of England’. Though his parents were of a low class (inferior conditio), his mother had the usual prophetic vision (the moon came down from heaven while she was pregnant and entered her womb). In early childhood he was handed over to the study of letters (in etate parvula traditus est litteris), though he made slow progress at first. He eventually became a master (liberalibus et spiritualibus studiis).139 The author of The Waltham Chronicle had lived at Waltham since he entered it at the age of five in 1124. This house had a fairly advanced school. He describes how he received a good education and how strict the discipline was in the school.140 Not all his schoolfellows remained ‘stable’ as he did. There was evidently a good deal of transfer. The boys often became canons when they left. Laurence, who was one of his school contemporaries, became a monk at Durham. Alexander Nequam (1157–1217) was apparently schooled at St Albans, where the monastery appointed the schoolmaster. But this seems to have been an external school and not run internally to the monastery. He went to Paris (possibly 1175–82?) and also taught at Dunstable. There he asked for and got the job of schoolmaster at St Albans. Eventually he became an Augustinian canon at Cirencester, and later he taught at Oxford in the 1190s, where the level was that of ‘higher’ education. He preached, including to communities of monks but also ‘university sermons’.141 There are hints of the routes by which those who became famous scholars in the new ‘higher’ educational context had obtained their primary education, but it seems as likely to have been with the local priest as in a monastic school. John of Salisbury describes how when he was a boy he was sent to the local priest to ‘learn his Psalms’. This priest dabbled in the magic arts, but John reports that even at a tender age, he had the wits to take no notice: Dum enim puer, ut psalmos addiscerem, sacerdoti traditus essem, qui forte speculariam magicam exercebat.142

His tantalisingly brief mention of his experience raises many questions. Why would parents send a boy to a ‘school’ like this? What career plans did they have in mind for a boy who was not going to be a monk? Was he to become a cleric? Indeed he did, and eventually a bishop, but can that have been a plan for him from his boyhood? 159

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The beginning of universities At the end of the twelfth century some of the developing ‘schools’ emerged as universities. These early universities created themselves. They were formed by the Masters who taught in them and who wanted to control local provision. The early universitas was a gild like any other medieval gild, with its Masters of Arts, its ‘journeymen’ the Bachelors of Arts, and the students its apprentices. It was a corporate legal body, with from the beginning a strong tradition of autonomy and control over its own powers to award degrees (gradus), set and teach the syllabus and decide who should be admitted to study or teach in it. Paris and Oxford were the first, though Bologna’s ‘business school’ for notaries and civil servants had some claim to have been running something approximating to a university from the end of the eleventh century. It developed rather differently as a law school for graduate students and was controlled by the students rather than by the Masters. Once they had begun, universities began to feel the need for protection and for grants of privileges and exemptions from taxation, which they sought from both ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Charters were granted. Papal privileges were particularly desirable. There were various disputes with monarchs about the right of the state to intrude on their affairs and allow them to operate in particular places. Arrangements were negotiated with local bishops about the granting of licences to preach to graduates of the university. Once the universities were seen to be making their mark as the place for scholars to be, aspiring monastic houses became eager to send some of their monks there to study. Various arrangements were made for their accommodation, for it was not appropriate for them to live in lodgings in the town as ordinary students did. From St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester came monks who lived in some of the buildings which are now part of Worcester College, Oxford. Richard of Wallingford, who became Abbot of St Albans, was taken into the care of the prior of a cell of St Albans at Wallingford after his father’s death in 1302. From there he was sent to Oxford in 1308. Then he returned to the monastic life and became a monk at St Albans, where he was ordained deacon in 1316, then priest in 1317. He was evidently perceived as a natural scholar who should be encouraged, because he was sent back to Oxford once more, to pursue a ‘higher degree’ in theology. He remained there fore nine years and became interested in subjects in which Oxford had leading thinkers at the time: mathematics and astronomy, and possibly also music.143 160

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a new age of monastic experiment v. Friars go wandering and take over the universities The early thirteenth century saw something new in Western monasticism in the appearance of the ‘mendicant orders’; these tried to return to the apostolic life not only by living in poverty, but also by travelling to preach the gospel as Jesus himself had sent off the disciples to do. Dominicans The order founded by Dominic de Guzmán (1170–1221) came to be known as the Order of Preachers or the ‘Dominicans’. Its mission was to provide preachers for the conversion of the heretics who were winning large numbers of ordinary people as converts to their views in southern France and northern Spain. Two groups were causing particular concern in the area: the radical anti-Establishment Waldensians with their apparent origins in Lyons; and the Albigensians further south, who favoured a ‘cosmic war’ dualism. Bringing them back to the fold of orthodoxy was a task the Cistercians’ missionary preachers had tackled without success.144 Dominic realised that there was potential for a new order whose members could minister to urban populations, particularly those who were being seduced by heretical preachers. He planned that his preachers should support themselves on the donations of the faithful, just as Christ had expected his disciples to do.145 His first community was set up in Toulouse in 1214 under the Augustinian Rule, with some borrowings from Premonstratensian practice. The order won papal approval very quickly in 1216 and 1217. As early as 1217 Dominic had sent a group to set up a studium generale in Paris, where a higher education was now available. Before his death in 1221, houses were being established in other cities where universities were coming into existence – in Bologna in 1218, Montpellier in 1220 and Oxford in 1221. The Dominicans did not remain for long simple preachers of the Gospel. They needed too much education and that made them too useful to the powerful. They had their period of being the most fashionable order to join, as the Cistercians had been in a previous generation. Young men of ability and ambition chose them in preference to other orders. Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–80) became a Dominican between 1223 and 1229. His potential as an academic theologian became evident as he studied and taught at Bologna and Paris as well as at 161

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Cologne and a series of other German schools. His great achievement was to attempt the synthesis of the philosophical and scientific works of Aristotle, newly arrived in the West in Latin translations and urgently needing study in order that it should be clear what of their contents could be reconciled with Christian teaching. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was another academically invaluable recruit to the order. He studied under Albertus and was commissioned to write textbooks for Dominican students, a synthesis of Christian theology (the Summa theologiae) as well as a Summa contra gentiles, which would bring together in an organised way all possible heretical opinions. This handbook to error was to be a useful reference book for preachers against heresy. Franciscans The ideal of Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226) was rather different, though his followers shared with the Dominicans a vocation for preaching and the notion of developing an urban ministry. Francis was the son of a wealthy family who was enjoying a privileged life and beginning the usual military career of his class when he had a vision. He went on pilgrimage to Rome and mingled with the poor who were begging outside St Peter’s. Returning to Assisi he chose to live in poverty himself, preaching in the streets, attempting an apostolic life such as the one to which Jesus had sent out his disciples. Like Dominic, he was able to gain speedy papal approval for his new order (in 1210) and he founded an enclosed non-preaching order for women too, which was to be known as the Poor Clares. On the death of Francis, his followers were faced with the need to establish an institutional framework for themselves. There were rivalries and battles for power, decisions to be made about the degree of centralisation and clericalisation to be sought. It was decided to have a Minister General and provincial Ministers under him. The papacy took a keen interest. A division emerged between those who thought poverty was essential to the future of the order and those who considered this to be unrealistic and argued that there would have to be property ownership. The Franciscans found they needed highly educated preachers just as the Dominicans did. Bonaventure (1221–74) became Minister General and a leading scholar of the order very quickly after he became a Franciscan in 1242. He could match the Dominicans in scholastic skills and scholarly rigour but he also wrote in other genres. The Franciscans had more room for traditional monastic spirituality in their educational framework. Bonaventure’s chief work of this kind was the 162

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a new age of monastic experiment Itinerarium mentis ad deum, ‘the journey of the mind to God’. The work is a blend of spiritual, mystical and metaphysical journeying.146 Other influential Franciscans appear in Oxford. Robert Grosseteste (b. c.1175/9), student of Greek in an age when that was rare, was in turn probably Chancellor of Oxford, then Bishop of Lincoln (1235–53). 147 Adam Marsh, one of the Oxford Masters, who had become a Franciscan about 1232, came from a wealthy and powerful family. He can be seen in a number of his letters to be negotiating in high places, and seeking to influence events in orders other than his own. Writing as an Oxford Master, he interceded by letter to help get people into monasteries. To Grosseteste when he was Bishop of Lincoln, Adam writes at the request of many Oxford scholars to make a pressing request on behalf of Margaret, niece of Reginald of Bath, who wants to be a nun at Godstow. The abbess and commmunity are willing to receive her; please will the bishop assist?148 To the Bishop of Worcester he sends the bearer of the letter, a clerk called Robert, who had benefited from the Bishop’s patronage to become a Cistercian. He had failed to take his final vows and left and he sends him now as a prodigal son to a father who will surely forgive and assist him.149 To Henry, Abbot of Waltham, interceding on behalf of a clerk and scholar of Paris who wants to be a monk, he writes humbly requesting Henry to allow him to enter the religious life. He cites John 16.33 as Christ’s foundation text for the religious life (‘In the world there is trouble but I have overcome the world’).150 He writes to Queen Eleanor, asking her to intercede with Robert of Manneby, master of the Hospitallers in Jerusalem, so that Sir William of Hampton may be admitted there with no violation of the gospel or canon law involved.151 He writes to William of Nottingham, Provincial minister of the Franciscans, to ask ‘together with Sir Thomas de Wicke, the bearer of this letter’, that he will admit him as a friar: Although in the divinely disposed orders of ecclesiastical hierarchy the priesthood

is far superior to the monastic profession, nevertheless, declining the burden of ecclesiastical governance, to which his shoulders are unequal, Thomas desires

the surer freedom of the religious life to facilitate study (securiorem vacationem studiis).152

He writes to Walter, Prior of Newnham, about a false accusation made against one of his canons, also called Walter. He has investigated this and cleared the man’s name on the testimony of men who can be relied on. They made the accusations only to extort money.153 163

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The most significant impact of the Franciscans on the life of late medieval Europe was through their academic work and through their role as confessors to the powerful. But the original vision of Francis was not disregarded. The Minims were a late-medieval offshoot of the Franciscan Order. Their founder, Francis of Paola (b. 1416) was promised by his mother to the Franciscans for a year if he survived when he became dangerously ill as an infant. She kept her promise but he decided not to leave. His community of ‘poor hermits of St Francis’ was the fruit of an experiment with two friends in the mid-1430s. The order gained papal approval in 1474 and it got its own Rule twenty years later. It had the appeal of extreme simplicity of life and self-denial and it gained recruits through Europe into the sixteenth century. William of St Amour and the attack on the mendicants in the universities Both Dominicans and Franciscans set up houses for their friars in the new ‘university towns’ from a very early stage. Both were eager to ensure that their recruits had a university education. Their lecturers were soon competing for the most senior positions in the universities, the professorships or chairs. In the expanding universities the academic ambitions of both orders led to rivalry between the mendicants and the Masters who were teaching students as ‘seculars’ (that is, as non-members of religious orders). Alexander IV (Pope from 1254–61) strongly supported the academic ambitions of the mendicant orders and took their side in the battle with the secular Masters, insisting that Aquinas and Bonaventure must be given doctorates to authorise them as teachers of theology, and not mere licences. William of St Amour (b. c.1200) was a secular Master at Paris. When the academics began to be annoyed at the incursions of the friars, he became a ringleader of the resistance. William and five of the other secular Masters approached Pope Innocent IV. He took their side and set a limit to prevent the friars dominating the posts of professor in the university. But his successor Alexander IV took the opposite view as a supporter of the Franciscans and reversed this ruling. The chronicler Matthew Paris (c.1200–c.1259) describes the upset all this caused, with popular riots as well as arguments, lectures and disputations cancelled. William began to write passionate attacks and got himself suspended by the Pope and exiled from the university. William’s works included a treatise on The dangers of recent times (De periculis novissimorum temporum), linking the impact of 164

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a new age of monastic experiment the friars with the disruption of the Last Days and the imminence of the end of the world. The friars were alleged to be bringing Antichrist to the university. There was an attempt to identify the friars with the false prophets described by Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202) in his writings prophesying the imminent end of the world. Aquinas and Albertus Magnus both wrote against him and his book was condemned to be burned. He was exiled from France and although he was back in Paris in 1266, he does not seem to have been allowed to return to the university as a teacher. That did not prevent him writing another attack, the Collationes catholicae, for the consideration of the new Pope, Clement IV. His emphasis was on the intrusion of the friars into the affairs of the Church, for they not only preached but undertook the cure of souls and heard confessions, and in influential places at that. They claimed direct authority from the Pope for doing this, and a right to take over pastoral work in dioceses without the permission of the local bishop. Clement supported the friars and renewed their privileges. Thomas Aquinas was sent back to Paris in the winter of 1268/9, perhaps to put him in a position to respond effectively to this new attack.154 This time it was more academic than populist and turned on the claims that friars should not be carrying out pastoral work which properly belonged to the normal ecclesiastical hierarchy. Gerard d’Abbeville and Nicholas of Lisieux joined the secular side and Bonaventure wrote on the mendicants’ side, as did John Pecham. The debate raged until 1271. Aquinas was inescapably involved in responding to the campaigns of resentment against the mendicants. The dispute about poverty Poverty had been important in both the main mendicant orders because they wanted to distinguish themselves from the now conspicuously wealthy Benedictines. It was especially important in the Franciscan ideal. When Bonaventure wrote his ‘defence’ he was anxious to establish both the sincerity of the mendicants’ vocation to poverty and its value.155 But poverty became a highly sensitive matter, and had been so since the lifetime of Francis himself. The wider interests of the Church were engaged, for the Church was wealthy and not happy to countenance the view that the poverty of Christ and his disciples was to be regarded as setting a standard for future generations of Christians. Factions formed, respectively supporting extreme 165

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition poverty and pressing for practical common sense about acquiring sufficient wealth to ensure the sustainability of the order. The Franciscans had had Pope Innocent III’s approval for their work, like the Dominicans, and Francis obtained his audience with the Pope. But in the period of dispute about the future of the order, the General Chapter resorted to Pope Gregory IX for a ruling. Gregory IX’s decision, Quo elongati, allowed funds to be held as a reserve by approved officers of the order. It declared that the Testament of St Francis should not be regarded as a document legally binding on the order. The future of the order must be protected and that meant that it would need adequate financial resources. The scene was set for the evolution of the mendicants into powerful, rich and influential forces in late medieval Europe. It was also set for their ‘demonisation’ by their enemies. vi. Monks who preach Ought monks to be preachers? The Orders of Friars met a need for effective popular preaching and that made it necessary for them to ensure that those who joined them had a thorough theological education; they must not mislead the faithful. Dominicans also had to be able to out-argue heretics; heretics could be very knowledgeable and well able to quote Scripture back at them. But should members of religious orders be preaching to the public at all? In early Western monasticism, reading at meals had sometimes included the sermons of Augustine or Gregory the Great. Anselm of Bec told his monks (and monks at monasteries he visited) little analogy-stories, but no formal sermons of his survive. New preaching outside the monk-preacher’s own house seems to have been unusual until the twelfth century. The Cistercians helped to establish a new trend. Bernard of Clairvaux was a keen preacher; he set a fashion. He preached for the round of the liturgical year. He also offered series of exegetical sermons, in an updated version of the patristic way – as Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great had done – unfolding a whole book of the Bible. His eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs were very influential and they prompted other Cistercians to preach on the same theme. Ailred of Rievaulx, like Bernard, preached sermons through the liturgical year, drawing the monks’ attention to the spiritual application of the round of the Church’s seasons: 166

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a new age of monastic experiment We celebrate the feasts of Easter, Pentecost and so on three times, twice in this life (in penance, in righteousness) and once in the life to come (in glory).156

For instance, preaching on the Feast of St Benedict, Ailred explores the imagery of exile and return, the crossing of Jordan. Jerusalem is peace, Babylon confusion, he explains. When we were in the spiritual Babylon we were in fear.157 Ailred’s published Sermones were prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Gilbert, Bishop of London. It acknowledges that for a monk to go preaching creates a tension with his primary calling. This letter hints at the time and energy required for the composition of sermons and the inroads this makes on time for prayer and reflection and spiritual reading. He knows Gilbert finds the cares of office and his ‘pastoral care’ duties make it difficult for him to be a cultor sapientiae, quietis amicus, etc. or to find time to read.158 Keen they may have been, but the Cistercians failed in the endeavour to preach the Albigensians back to orthodoxy and they left the way open for Dominic and the Dominicans to try. The ‘Ars praedicandi’ The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw the emergence of a formal ‘art of preaching’, based on the principles of classical oratory, but that developed chiefly in the universities. The universities provided a forum for the ‘university sermon’ as well as a place where practical rhetorical skills needed by mendicant preachers could be taught. The formal ‘art of preaching’ required scholarly expertise in the analysis of a ‘theme’, with comparison texts from the rest of Scripture and examples and illustrations from hstory and literature brought in as appropriate.159 Alan of Lille (d. 1202) was one of the first to design a formal handbook on the art of preaching (Ars praedicandi), including convenient little collections of points to make in a sermon intended for particular kinds of audience, princes, widows, virgins.160 By the 1230s manuals on the ‘Art’ were beginning to multiply. As the universities became established, Dominicans and Franciscans were likely to learn their preaching skills in the houses the orders speedily established in the new university environment. Thomas Waleys (fl.1318–49) was sent by the Dominicans to study at Oxford. His ‘how to compose a sermon’ (De modo componendi sermones) idealistically describes the preacher’s task as ‘more angelic than human’ (habent enim praedicatores verbi dei officium evangelicum et bene 167

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition angelicum).161 But he is willing to give plain practical advice to mere human friars: preachers’ gestures should be modest and restrained, and yet the preacher should not stand stock-still, nor should he talk too fast. Preachers need a sense of what is important and what trivial; they must not overstate their case or defame people in attacking them for their vices; they should be faithful to God’s Word; they should avoid grammatical errors.162 Then he moves on to themes and authorities and all the rhetorical apparatus of the thirteenth-century sermon: the trained preacher should put his thoughts in order, be fluent and persuasive and responsive to his audience’s reactions. (Alan of Lille told preachers to stop when they had made their listeners weep.) Monks too made their contribution to the development of later medieval preaching. Robert of Basevorn’s Forma praedicandi is a fourteenth-century manual about whose author little is known but who seems to have dedicated the book, by means of a cryptic device, to the abbot of the Welsh Abbey of Basingwerk. ‘Preaching and teaching’, Robert says, ‘are necessary works of the Church.’ It follows that there ought to be a science which teaches the necessary formal skills.163 The first question is what predicatio is. Preaching’s job is to be persuasive but about the appropriate matters. Determining questions (as scholastics do) is not preaching – he mentions the gallicus et anglicus […] de duabus magis famosis universitatibus emanentes.164 Nor is political oratory, however skilled and persuasive. Nor is making one small point about how to attain eternal life strictly preaching.165 Some have to preach as part of their office. A praedicator ex officio is the Pope, as is a bishop (even one who rarely preaches). A praedicator ex exercitatio is a frequent preacher.166 Women religious do not seem to have been welcomed as preachers.167 vii. Medieval mysticism and spirituality ‘Inner lives’ Contemplative monks and nuns had a great deal of time to spend with God. That was essentially the aim of the life they had chosen. Their principal task was to pray. For those living in community, some of the time allocated to prayer was shared, part of the round of liturgy prescribed in the daily Office. Some was private, solitary, personal. The concept of private prayer as a formal discipline or skill to be cultivated seems to have arrived comparatively late in the West, but that 168

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a new age of monastic experiment does not mean personal prayer was not being practised. Matilda of Tuscany asked Anselm of Bec to help her learn to pray and he provided her with a collection of prayers and an explanatory preface.168 She should not feel that she is restricted to the words he has written, he urges her. They are merely a starting-point for her own soul’s explorations. There is no need to begin at the beginning, either. She can begin where she feels moved to begin. Hugh of St Victor, a generation later, teaching the canons of St Victor, was rather more inclined to promote an analytical and schoolmasterly method of meditation. Reading and meditation (lectio and meditatio) are the essentials of study.169 ‘Meditation is frequent purposeful thinking; it prudently investigates the cause and origin, method and benefit of each thing’: Meditatio est cogitatio in consilio frequens, que causam et originem, modum et utilitatem uniuscuiusque rei prudenter investigat.170

Perhaps Hugh was able to practise a spirituality less cerebral in his own prayers. He speaks of the seven gifts of the spirit and of love. But even here his approach is orderly and somewhat prescriptive. The beginner has skills and a methodology to learn. Meditation may be on creatures (prompted by admiratio), Scripture (prompted by lectio), behaviour (prompted by circumspectione). The first requires research, seeking causes and reasons. The second provides material for the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth. The third is divided into affections, thoughts and deeds.171 A third ‘school’ of spirituality of the period with a dstinctively monastic inspiration is represented by Bernard of Clairvaux. He wrote On Consideration for Pope Eugenius III, who had been a monk of Clairvaux but now had to balance the demands of public life and high office with his personal spiritual obligations. Bernard probably took the word consideratio from Gregory the Great, who had himself experienced the difficult transition from monastic life to high office in the Church when he became Pope and who wrote the Regula Pastoralis to guide bishops in the task of getting their priorities right. Gregory had begun by discussing consideratio and how it differs from contemplatio because it involves the striking of a balance between active and spiritual responsibilities. The Pope was allowing too much of his time to be taken by lawyers bringing appeal cases to the papal court. Baldwin of Ford (c.1125–90) wrote a dialogue in the form of a conversation with his own soul. His opening argument is that the common life monks lead is in 169

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the image of the Trinity and this supreme model flows from God to the apostles and thus to Christians leading the common life today. The primitive Church was built on the common life, and the infancy of the

newborn Church began with the common life […] we who are set upon the earth can begin to be fashioned in the likeness of the angels of God, for in the eternal life to come, we shall be united with them as their like and their equal.172

  Love does not know what it is to be ungenerous and it hates to be solitary […]. it strives, as if through the love of sharing, to bring about a sharing of love.173

  Whatever good we do is for the common benefit […] we hope to aid each other in the sight of God by our mutual prayers and mutual merits and by the merits and prayers of the saints whom we love.174

Female monastic spirituality: Elizabeth of Schönau Was female monastic spirituality in any way distinctive? It is hard to say, although a tendency to experience ‘visions’ was often reported by women seeking to enter, or already in, religious life. These women were also in a position where they might need a male representative to help them spread their ideas and tell their stories in Latin to ensure the result was widely circulated. We have already met Hildegard of Bingen, the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’.175 Elizabeth of Schönau (1129–65) was her friend. They wrote to one another and may have influenced one another, although they were of different generations born thirty years apart. Elizabeth was a nun in the double monastery at Schönau from 1147 and became mother superior there ten years later.176 She too had visions. Hers were prophetic as well as ecstatic. She had them recorded on wax tablets and showed them to the abbot, Hildelin. He sent her for advice to her brother Egbert, who was a priest at Bonn, but was to become a monk himself at Schönau in 1155 and in due course its abbot. Egbert offered to edit the visions for publication. Three books of Elisabeth’s visions eventually appeared, beginning with a simple record and progressing to something more technically challenging from a theological point of view. She wrote like an Old Testament prophet to warn people of judgement to come if they do not mend their ways, priests who neglect their flocks, worldly monks guilty of avarice, lay people in their various sins. Egbert wrote on such matters himself and may well have added his views to hers in ‘editing’ her prophecies. 170

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a new age of monastic experiment Bridget, foundress of the Bridgittine Order, was freed by widowhood to explore ‘visions’ of visits from Christ she had been having since her youth. She said Christ gave her ‘revelations’ which were translated into Latin for her by Magister Matthias and Prior Peter.177 By 1346 she had founded an order of nuns in a house at Vadstena, and had the patronage of the King and Queen of Sweden. She went to Rome in 1349 to seek papal approval and made various pilgrimages, but she did not return to Sweden. Another female visionary of the fourteenth century, Catherine of Siena (1347–80),178 experienced visions and raptures and believed she had been united to Christ in a mystical marriage. She displayed the stigmata. Until she was permitted to join the Dominican Third Order of Penance she remained at home, but she corresponded with popes and had her impact on contemporary politics. Richard Rolle and the mixed life There were independent practitioners, too, living a ‘religious life’ without entering an order. This meant that they were living a ‘mixed life’. Richard Rolle (1290–1349) and Marjorie Kempe (1373–1438) had ‘experiences’ of ‘warmth’ and explored idea of evoking the scenes of Scripture imaginatively as vividly as possible.179 Richard Rolle saw no difficulty in the living of a spiritual life even when one is ‘in the world’: Many […] although they live physically among people, are mentally removed from

them; they never falter in their heavenly longing, because in spirit they are far removed from a sinful way of life.180

Richard Rolle led a life which illustrates that a high degree of independence might have been possible to those with religious vocations who wanted to experiment. He was a student at Oxford for a time but he experienced a ‘conversion’, returned to his home in Yorkshire, borrowed some of his sister’s clothing and made himself a ‘habit’. He set about preaching locally, in chapels where he was made welcome, and was offered a cell on the estate of John Dalton, who was one of his father’s friends. He was able to live there according to his own rhythms, not fasting or observing the round of the Office. There, in the chapel, he had his first experience of feeling the love of God and its sweetness and what he called canor – hearing the singing of the blessed in heaven.181 171

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Rolle acquired a following of well-born women who came to him for spiritual advice, although he was never ordained and could not in the normal sense function as a confessor with sacramental authority; nor, because he was not a priest or a graduate, did he have a licence for the preaching he continued to deliver. He refused to recognise the ecclesiastical authorities so it is surprising that he was not attacked for heresy. He was, however, disliked by the members of the monastic community and their supporters. When he found his free cell too noisy he complained and moved elsewhere, citing an additional reason which may have been that at least one woman was making herself a nuisance. In due course he settled at Hampole where he had a whole community of nuns to advise. Rolle was free to write what he chose, unless he chose to write heresy. He wrote in imitation of contemporary genres such as the guidebook for priests with pastoral responsibilities, which at this date meant duties in hearing confessions and allocating penances.182 The drawback to his writing on these matters, even with modifications to include his own theology of divine love, was that only a priest could grant absolution. The ecclesiastical authorities also forbade him to preach because he had no bishop’s licence. He claimed that direct inspiration by the Holy Spirit taught him to interpret Scripture. He wrote commentaries on the Bible, selecting parts relevant to his favourite themes, such as the opening sentences of the Song of Songs, and passages from the book of Job which appeared in the Office for the Dead, which enabled him to emphasise the joys to come in heaven. This apparently became quite a popular work in the diocese of York, where the clergy made use of it. It was even printed in 1483 at Oxford. ‘The Fire of Love’ (Incendium Amoris)183 is his spiritual autobiography, in which he describes his own discovery of the gifts of the spirit, one of which, canor, he believed was new, a singing in the soul’s ear, which only the select few were given to hear. He came to believe he had a special ministry to those who sought ‘amendment of life’ and especially to women eager to follow the route to dulcor, fervor and canor. Among these was Margaret Kirkby, an anchoress and nun of Hampole for whom he wrote in English, with the purpose of making his ideas comprehensible to those who did not understand Latin. For her too he composed a manual of intruction for the would-be recluse. Matilda Newton, who became Abbess of Sion and recluse at Barking, was another of the women drawn to this independent spiritual way of life under a set of rules (if any) made up by the person living it.184 Richard Rolle was thus a ‘danger’ to ecclesiastical order in several ways. His theology was predestinationist and seemed to offer a ‘special Christian’ status in 172

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a new age of monastic experiment a new way; his spiritually intimate ministry to women could easily be misunderstood; he was ‘popularising’ a theology without the appropriate training and with no licence to teach or preach. Popular attention he certainly got. Margaret Kirkby may have been living as a nun and recluse but she had a servant girl and maintained enough contact with her family and others among the local nobility and gentry for them to read Rolle’s English writings – or at least possess copies, some in his handwriting. They were sufficiently highly placed to transmit his ideas to court circles and make them fashionable there. There were attractions for lay believers in the idea that salvation might lie in cultivating warm feelings rather than hard penance. Rapture and darkness Early Western thinking about mystical experiences looked to the idea of ‘rapture’ as it is described in the New Testament.185 Those who experienced it could be shy about admitting it. Walter Daniel, author of the biography of Ailred, relates how though he never saw Ailred in rapture, Ailred privately described to him how he had experienced it.186 In the late Middle Ages monastic spirituality seems to have become mystical in some new ways, though it never developed in quite the same direction as the platonic mysticism experienced in the Greek-speaking East from the end of the ancient world. Meister Eckhardt, a Dominican by profession but an eccentric, argued that the constant practice of the presence of God is essential. You have not ‘attained’ God if you have to use aids and prompts when you want him. This ‘presence’ takes hard work but is not achieved by running away from the world. Yours should be an inner solitude.187 Henry Suso (c.1300–66), a Dominican and a pupil of Eckhardt, saw himself as the Servant of the Eternal Wisdom or Logos; he felt a calling to bring help to others. He lived an austere life and said he experienced ecstasies and had visions. He was not without his detractors. He became a popular preacher in much of Teutonic central Europe, though he seems to have liked best to act as a spiritual director to individuals. Among those to whom he acted as a guide and advisor were communities of women, notable the Katherinental, which bred more than one female mystic in this century and the previous one, and Töss. At the Katherinental in the Rhineland was Anna Ramswag, who confessed her visions to Eckhardt and Elisabeth of Beggenhofen; she asked for advice about how to 173

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition behave when God acted upon her.188 At Töss one of the nuns he most influenced was Elizabeth Stagel (c.1300–c.1360). They exchanged letters, which she collected, and she translated some of his Latin writings into German and gave them wider popular appeal. She also encouraged him to write his life-story.189 Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), wrote on ‘learned ignorance’ (docta ignorantia) and negative mysticism. His idea, borrowed in part from the fifth-century writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, was that all we can know of God is what we do not know. God is ‘in-finite’, and no measurement or reasoning can enable us to glimpse his bounds. But Nicholas, being a late medieval thinker, considered that that did not rule out speculation.

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chapter vi

Reformation and dissolution

i. Criticisms by the reformers The Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century were uniformly hostile to monasticism. Some of their objections had been articulated more than a century earlier. John Wyclif (d. 1384) had had a good deal to say in impassioned criticism of monks and friars, for the claims he said they made to special status. This notion of a special calling continues to require some care in the stating. In Vita Consecrata in 1996, the then Pope spoke of a ‘special way of following Christ’;1 of ‘living in a particularly radical way’;2 and argued that ‘the ordained ministry and the consecrated life each presuppose a distinct vocation and a specific form of consecration, with a view to a particular mission’.3 Wyclif ’s loathing was prompted above all by perceptions about the tyrannical abuse of power which he saw in the papacy. His hatred of monasticism was part of his dislike of the whole clerical estate under the Pope, whom he came to identify with Antichrist. The clergy are a ‘Caesar’ in a multitude of ‘sects’.4 He identifies four such ‘sects’. The first comprises the clergy, who rob the state. The second is made up of monks, whose ‘patron’ is Benedict. These are a burden on the state and rob the poor by using resources which could otherwise support them. The third sect contains canons, who lie when they say they were founded by Augustine; they are deceivers all. The fourth is the mendicants, with their lies that Christ lived and begged like them, that their life is more perfect than others and their prayers 175

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition more effective.5 They are hypocrites, antichrists, deceivers (pseudofratres, ypocritas, anticristos).6 Wyclif is sure that Christ did not found the monastic and mendicant orders.7 These ‘sects’ were never established by Christ, he insists.8 ‘Religion’ as lived by monks requires obedience to merely human authority (one of his pet hates).9 Monks obey man, not God and they respect ‘human impositions’, not God’s laws.10 One of his most frequently voiced objections was to the alleged claim of the religious that they had a better chance of getting to heaven because they were a superior kind of Christian. Wyclif fulminated against monks because he said they thought they were superior to other Christians. He repeatedly sought to refute arguments that monks lead a higher form of Christian life and are more likely to be saved.11 He was against spiritual privilege in all its forms, and often said that monks were really treating the taking of monastic vows as a second baptism. In any case, the vows were inappropriate, especially that of celibacy. And the whole apparatus of self-denial including fasting involved an assumption that it was possible to earn heaven by such practices. They were not essential to salvation. Moreover, having taken these vows, monks and nuns broke them. Wyclif ’s views were his own, and bred of his particular personal battles with authority in both Church and State. He was, however, saying things which chimed with the thinking of the times. Popular preachers in the vernacular were calling for revolt against the traditional authorities. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400) was Wyclif ’s near-contemporary. Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims include a monk, a friar, a pardoner and a prioress, all examples of the worst of their kind.12 The Monk is a Benedictine, ambitious (‘to been an abbot able’), wealthy, well-dressed, well-fed, with an interest in hunting and other sports favoured by the nobility, including venery, it is hinted. He regards strict observance of old-fashioned vows as out of date. The Friar is a gossip and a frequenter of good company. He carries small gifts for the ladies. He is a popular confessor to a number of women, with whose faults he is very gentle, in return for a good fee. The yellow-haired Pardoner is a travelling seller of the papal indulgences which were believed to release sinners from the penances imposed for their sins and shorten the time which might have to be served in Purgatory. He has a walletful ‘from Rome all hot’. The system of indulgences was proving a significant source of income for the Church and was now reaching its late medieval height. The Prioress is ladylike, carrying a lapdog and pretending to gentility. No plainly dressed and modest nun, she wears jewellery and is a coy flirt. 176

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reformation and dissolution Sixteenth-century themes These anti-monastic themes, of rejecting ‘claims to be a better class of Christian’, ‘human impositions’, making objections to the taking of ‘vows’ and of the features of monastic life – particularly celibacy – reappear in the attacks of the sixteenth-century reformers, from Luther onwards. The reformers were not necessarily directly influenced by Wyclif, but the resentments he expressed had been grumbling away in Europe in intervening generations. John Hus’ ideas were a direct influence on Luther, who had found a copy of his sermons by chance. Hostility to the religious orders was part of a growing sense that Church in the West was corrupt and power-hungry. The reformers of the sixteenth century inherited this dislike and on similar grounds. But the consequences were decisive. Monasticism was almost destroyed in the West, when institutions of many kinds tumbled as the Church divided. The reformers challenged the whole apparatus of sacramental requirements which the Church in the West had developed by the sixteenth century, proposing different ‘necessities for salvation’. Luther believed that ‘only faith’ counted with God, Calvin (1509–64) that God chose those he wished to save and made them aware that they were elect. The ‘mistaken’ doctrine that entry into monastic life was a form of second baptism, offering a safer road to heaven, had not then been thought of in the early Church, Calvin claims: For as yet the sacrilegious dogma was not broached which compares the profession

of monasticism to baptism, nay, plainly asserts that it is the form of a second baptism.13

There was also a consensus that the apparatus and its manifold requirements were merely ‘human impositions’. Although he had joined the Augustinians, Luther became deeply hostile to all the apparatus of the ‘religious’ life, its rules and its self-denials, because these were, he claimed, not God’s requirements at all. Calvin claims that Paul condemns human impositions.14 ‘The monastic life is a human invention’,15 agreed Martin Bucer (1491–1551). There was, too, a general agreement among the reformers that even if the monastic way of life had been a good thing, claiming to be better Christians but actually setting a poor example was not. Luther snarls at ‘priests and monks who revile the gospel as heresy […] and wish to be considered at the same time as the best Christians’.16 Luther writes of: 177

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition the sad condition of the monasteries. The evil spirit, who to-day confuses all classes

by man-made laws and makes life intolerable, has taken possession of certain abbots, abbesses and prelates. The result is that they so govern the brothers and sisters that they consign them the more speedily to hell.17

  I say very bluntly that all monks and nuns are the Devil’s […] because they all set their salvation on cowls, tonsures or good works and expect to be saved through

them, which is something which will never happen […] for their works are nothing in the sight of God.18

He pulled no punches here. Luther could be coarse when he chose: It was said that it is manifest that the devil is the author of the monks; when he

wished to imitate God, the author of the priests, he made the mould too large, and it turned out to be a monk.19

  Cloistered women are called nuns because in German sterilized swine are so called.20

Calvin too was critical of lax moral standards in contemporary monastic life: It is well ascertained that there is more obscenity in the cloisters of monks and nuns than in common dens of infamy.21

Martin Bucer regrets that the monks used to be part of the congregation, and worked with their own hands

in order to be an example of discipline to others. We do not repudiate such monks, but we fail to find them among our opponents’ ranks.22

The criticisms went on through the sixteenth century. In England John Jewel (1522–71), Bishop of Salisbury, comments: Augustine denieth it to be leeful for a monk to spend his time slothfully and idly, and under a pretensed and counterfeit holiness to live all upon others.23

Even extremists, such as the Anabaptists, who were against most of the traditional ecclesiology and tended to be outcasts among the reformers, took time to condemn monastic extremism in particular (‘Damnable monastic ecstatics’).24 178

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reformation and dissolution Vows Whether it was right to take vows or oaths was a vexed question of long standing. Dissidents in the Middle Ages had commonly interpreted Jesus’ words ‘let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no”, “no”’ (Matthew 5.33–7) as meaning that there should be no swearing of oaths. In the attempts to identify and condemn heretics, inquisitions seeking to discover dissidents such as Lollards made it one of the standard questions whether the accused was prepared to take an oath. If he would not, that meant he was a heretic, whatever views he said he held. Dissident refusal to swear was partly based on a literal reading of this passage of Scripture in which Jesus tells his disciples not to swear.25 Swearing ‘by’ holy things or taking the name of the Lord in vain by using it as a swear word were of course a different matter from taking an oath of poverty and chastity. But the two kinds of ‘swearing’ were commonly conflated in Reformation controversies. When Martin Luther wrote against monasticism from 1521, he specifically attacked the taking of monastic vows. However, Calvin thought that there might be vows which God would find acceptable. He analyses the different sorts, including vows to go on pilgrimages or crusades wearing special clothing, and the belief that that kind of thing was especially pleasing to God. But for some of tender conscience any form of vow is too much, he concludes, and there is no need for swearing of any kind: Vows not legitimate, and not duly conceived, as they are of no account with God, should be regarded by us as null.26

Other aspects presented difficulties even if it was accepted that ‘vowing’ was not wrong in itself. An important question was whether monks could or did keep the vows they took. ‘We now come to the great multitudes who swear many vows but keep few’, says Luther.27 Calvin criticises contemporary monasticism for its preoccupation with the minutiae of following rules about food and clothing. Monks have forgotten the spirit of their calling and are idle. If a vow, even a harmless one, is about inessentials it will not be binding or ‘necessary for salvation’, thought Calvin.28 On more important matters, Calvin did not take so fierce a line as Luther on the wrongheadedness of Christian self-denial, for example by fasting.29 He could see the value of fasting as a preparation for prayer, and a means of subduing bodily appetites which might be distracting. He also argued that when a people had 179

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition special need of God’s help, they might plead their cause better if they were willing to fast to show how serious they were (cf. Acts 13.3 and 14.23). If a vow is for a flawed purpose then it cannot be binding. This, Calvin believes, is the case with vows of monastic obedience. ‘That on vowing monastical obedience, the end is vicious, is plain.’30 He also claimed that vows of poverty were flawed. Matthew 19.21 sets a standard for those who wish to be ‘perfect’. They must sell all they have and give to the poor. That was taken as a foundation principle for early monasticism but Calvin thought it was a mistake of the Fathers to regard voluntary poverty as a necessary qualification for entry into heaven. The vow of chastity is, he admits (17), a continuation of a practice of the early Church but it is not Scriptural unless the various relevant passages have their interpretation stretched to the point of distortion. Deaconesses as the early Church knew them were women with tasks to perform for the community, not nuns with nothing to do but chant the Office in ‘unintelligible murmurs’.31 Might those who are bound by monastic vows regard themselves as free to disregard them? Luther’s ‘On monastic vows’ (De votis monasticis) was published in 1521, with claims that there was no warrant in Scripture for the living of the monastic life. He argued that those who had taken vows need therefore not feel bound by them. His own local Augustinian chapter held a meeting in 1521 and accepted his position, dispensing any of the clergy living under their rule from their vows and allowing them to marry.32 In Wittenberg, where Augustine had been a member of the community, almost all of them left: Would to God all monks and nuns could hear this sermon and properly understand this matter and would all foresake the cloisters and thus all the cloisters in the world would cease to exist; that is what I would wish. But […] they hear about

others who are leaving the cloisters in other places […] and then they want to follow their example, but have not yet fortified their consciences and do not know that it is a matter of liberty. This is bad.33

Calvin’s Antidote says that three things matter with a vow. Is it ‘in our power’? Is its ‘purpose’ ‘right’? Is it ‘pleasing to God’? The purpose would be wrong if it was not to glorify God but to satisfy some human need or desire: The celibacy of monks and nuns cannot be good, for it is not undertaken for the sake of the kingdom of heaven […] but only for their own sake.34

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reformation and dissolution Abandoning celibacy could even be seen as a ‘statement’. Michael Sattler claimed that ‘pomp, pride, usury and great whoredom of the monks and priests’ prompted him to marry.35 Few aspects of the abandoning of vows had so obvious a consequence as the discarding of the obligation of celibacy. Nuns left convents and went to Luther.36 Luther’s future wife, Katherine von Bora, had been placed in a convent as a small child. News of Luther’s radical proposals reached them and they expressed a wish to leave. Luther is said to have arranged this by providing transport in herring barrels in a friend’s cart. Some of the dozen escapees were able to return to their families, while husbands were found for others. Eventually Luther was persuaded to marry Katie, and after a time of adjustment (about which he complained) he found her a useful helpmeet in the house and as manager of the domestic accounts. She was good at growing vegetables too. Luther took her Bible education in hand. In due course the pair had six children and fostered others. Luther said some nuns ‘should be allowed to stay at their pleasure’ in the houses where they had always lived,37 but this was not always practicable, expecially once the dissolution of the monasteries began across Europe. There were also upsets cause by the disturbance of long-term arrangements for getting round celibacy which had been working nicely. ‘The canons were forced to give up their whores [1532]. This lasted two weeks. The canons were unable to contain themselves and had to take the women back’, but the women made conditions.38 ii. Dissolution of the monasteries The monks and the magistrate: an old power struggle renewed We have seen bishops and leaders of religious communities at odds down the centuries about authority over monks, monastic affairs and monastic property. The problem arose afresh and in a new way from the sixteenth century. In some countries where the Reformation took hold, bishops were done away with in the upheavals of order in the Church. Even where bishops were retained, as in England, the overarching jurisdiction of the Pope might be rejected. Who was now in charge of ecclesiastical and monastic affairs and property? Was the underlying structure, the pattern of jurisdiction, the whole order of the Church now changed? Among reformers, some located authority to appoint ministers in the local community of the ‘gathered church’. 181

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition In Lutheran lands, the secular authority found itself taking over some of the former ecclesiastical responsibilities of the Bishop of Rome and of his bishops, at least in matters secular such as property-holding. The notion of allowing the ruler to determine the official religion of his subjects was given practical reality in the Lutheran concept of the ‘Magistrate’. On the cuius regio, eius religio principle, the religion of the Magistrate or Prince becomes ‘officially’ that of his subjects. (The actual phrase cuius regio, eius religio seems to have been coined only in 1582, by Joachim Stephani (1544–1623).) In an age when not all the Magistrate’s subjects might be of one mind, agreement had to be reached about what was to become of those who could not accept the change this entailed. It was even possible for anyone who refused to comply to be deemed a heretic and executed. The Reformation was a time when believers on all sides were prepared to die for their faith. One solution was to allow any of those dwelling in the realm who would not accept the Magistrate’s religion to move elsewhere and take their possessions with them. These principles were agreed at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, at least for Protestants who were Lutherans, though it did not apply to other kinds of reformers, including the Calvinists, and especially not to Anabaptists or other extremists who might threaten good order in more radical ways. Nor did the agreement cover the whole Empire. This solution became hard to enforce as a recognised reality locally, as the complexity of local religious affiliations grew. A special difficulty was posed by the position of prince-bishops and prince-abbots where it was decided that if such a figure became a Protestant he would have to cease to occupy his post or role and be replaced. He could not ‘take a diocese or abbey with him’. Ferdinand’s Declaration exempted some cities and ecclesiastical states. (There seemed to be parallels with proposals for ‘flying bishops’ during the debates about allowing women to be bishops in the twenty-first-century Church of England.) The location of the boundary between temporal and spiritual had been thrashed out during the Investiture Contest of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and had concluded with an uneasy agreement that spiritual matters should be under the control of the Church and temporal ones under that of the state.39 The boundary now had to be redrawn, for the reformers disputed the sacramental nature of some things which had formerly been thought definitely ‘spiritual’. If the jurisdiction of the Pope was rejected, there was a question over what was to replace it in spiritual matters. There were practical implications, not least for the setting of moral and legal standards in a community. Should what was immoral also be illegal? Where did 182

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reformation and dissolution the line of demarcation now lie between the authority of the Church and that of the State? ‘Erastianism’ is named after Thomas Erastus (1524–83), a follower of the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531). The views credited to him probably go beyond what he taught, but he does seem to have taken the view that in the partitioning of powers and jurisdiction between Church and State, it properly falls to the state to punish sin as well as crime. How did these huge shifts of power and responsibility in the lands where the Reformation took hold affect monks and nuns and canons and friars? These changes meant in practice that authority to dissolve monasteries and powers to seize their property could pass into lay, secular, magistral or monarchical hands. Monasteries had lands and buildings and property well worth impounding by any authority that could get away with it. There was a positive rush to close monasteries in much of newly Protestant Europe. Secular authorities took advantage of the trend for secular reasons. There was politicking both secular and ecclesiastical, for suddenly there was property to be seized. Dissolution of the monasteries and implications for ecclesiology The closure of monasteries in Germany seems to have begun in earnest after the publication of Luther’s treatise ‘On monastic vows’ (De votis monasticis) in 1521. Luther had been an Augustinian canon. His own Augustinian Order had decided at a special meeting of the province’s houses that all regular clergy who were under Augustinian vows might renounce them, leave and marry if they wished. The alacrity with which this was agreed and acted on strongly suggests that there was some pressure in this direction ready to be released. The motivation for the suppression of monasteries by the state was quick to go beyond a desire for religious reform. Collapse of a religious house threw the future of its possessions into uncertainty and that was a matter of interest to landowners and those in power politically. Within a few years the Danish King confiscated the lands of more than a dozen of the richest monasteries in Denmark and took action against the mendicants.40 The Danish monarchy passed a series of laws during the 1530s which banned friars altogether and made monastic houses hand over the titles of their lands to the Crown. They could then be given to nobles in return for their loyalty. In the same few years the King of Sweden had won an edict from his Diet allowing him to confiscate monastic lands and, if he chose, to require them to be 183

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition returned to the families which had originally given them to the monasteries. That gained him too a great deal of land for the Crown and many grateful members of the nobility. Without their lands the monasteries could not feed their monks and many quickly disappeared, with Sweden entirely stripped of its monasteries in the next half-century. Huldrych Zwingli was pastor of the Grossmünster in Zurich from 1518. From the beginning he preached reform. He attacked the friars for corruption and hypocrisy, and for using resources which would be better spent on the poor. He worked by holding public debates – the first notable one in 1522 – and gradually won the approval of the people of Zurich. In 1523 the city authorities put pressure on nuns to leave their convents. Monasteries, Zwingli said, should be turned into hospitals and refuges for the poor and sick and their wealth should be transformed into a fund for supporting the needy. With the consent of the city council, his own Grossmünster (which legend claimed had been founded by Charlemagne) and its female counterpart the imperial nunnery, the Fraumünster, founded in 853 for Hildegard, the daughter of Louis the German (Charlemagne’s grandson), were treated in this way. The monks and nuns were sent away, the churches stripped of ornament and images. The speed of this transformation of public opinion is the more remarkable because of the fact that the great towers of the Grossmünster had been built only at the end of the fifteenth century. At that time the city was pround and respectful of the building and its servants. Basel was suppressing houses of monks and nuns by 1529 and Geneva was doing so in 1530, with a bid in the same year (unsuccessful) to close down the Abbey of St Gall. Dissolution of the monasteries in England Germany and Scandinavia were thus ahead of England in dissolving monasteries.41 It is unclear where the idea of dissolution arose in England or when. Thomas Cromwell left a legacy to four friaries in his will, made as late as 1529, which suggests he had no settled purpose of closing them then.42 Nevertheless, there were critics. The driver was probably partly financial. There was a national deficit to repair. Henry VIII asked Oxford for a copy of the articles of Wyclif ’s condemnation, possibly in search of useful ideas.43 Cardinal Wolsey set about gaining control of the monasteries by demanding reform. He called Benedictine abbots and priors to a meeting in November 1521. He followed this up with a visitation of the Abbey of Westminster to justify 184

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reformation and dissolution claims that the monks’ lives were lax. Deals involving payments were made. But the overarching declared purpose was to demand higher standards from houses of all orders, standards they either could not or were not willing to meet. That would warrant potential regulatory intervention, backed up as needed by more visitations. ‘Visiting’ or official ‘inspections’ proved a useful device though easily corruptible. George Wyatt (1553–1624) wrote a critical account of the state of the monasteries when Thomas Cromwell organised the visitations and the religious houses bribed the Visitors, so that ‘not onlie the visitours themselves became shortelie very rich, but also their servants were suddenlie wealthy’. He mentions their greed, and many tricks and deceptions practised to get money – for example, making an idol or image seem to move when a pilgrim prayed to it.44 Wolsey extended these activities to the friars too. The orders resisted, and some of them had influence in Rome, but Wolsey’s intentions were financial rather than spiritual, dominating rather than reformative, and he ground on with his campaigns in the intervals of the current complex political position in England.45 He used competent agents, including Thomas Cromwell, to bring about suppressions and the confiscation of revenues.46 He also had the notion of creating new bishoprics from the profits, using the finer churches of the former monastic houses as new cathedrals. Gloucester Cathedral is one notable result.47 The dissolution of the English monasteries and also of the houses of the mendicants gathered force in the 1530s.48 Alien priories were the first to be attacked. The ones founded or controlled by continental abbeys, some of which had been suppressed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, made available choices for confiscation by those wanting to found colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. St Radegund’s became Jesus College, Cambridge. Cold Norton was transmuted into Brasenose College. John Fisher as Bishop of Rochester took over nunneries to enable him to found St John’s, Cambridge. The method was to hold an ‘inquiry’, then seek permission from Rome for the suppression of the original house and the transfer of any property and revenues to the new foundation.49 In 1535, the year Henry VIII and his ministers were beginning in earnest their task of dismantling England’s monastic foundations, Margaret Vernon, the Prioress of Little Marlow – a small Benedictine house in Buckinghamshire –  wrote to Thomas Cromwell seeking his advice. The Visitors had sent away several of her nuns. She had some pull with him because she had once been his son’s governess and he ensured that she at least did not find herself homeless and without position and income. She was not alone. Transfers and pensions were made available for some heads of houses. 185

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition A monk of St Augustine’s, Canterbury commented on what was happening and how widespread and sudden it was. He represents it as a punishment for disobedience to royal authority: The same year [1534], the brethren friers wear expulsed from their conservance, from their seates and from their places throughout all England, for their disobedience towardes te kinges majestye.50

  The same year [1534] also many Cartusienses suffered deth for disobedience towardes the kinges majestye.51

This impression that punishment was deserved may have been strengthened by the appearance of royal ‘commissioners’ to carry out the suppressions; these were appointed to go round and do the deed with respect to particular houses in the early 1530s: In the yere of our Lorde 1537 the xxiij day of February, the monasterie of Seynct

Gregories was suppressed and the chanons were expulsed: mr Spilman and mr. Candish being the kynges commissioners herunto appointed.52

It was also being said that the monks had deserved it by their lax ways: The same yere [1537] the monasterie of Abindon, by the consent of the abbot, was

given to the kynges majestie, the moonkes therof being expulsed because of their slowthefulnes.53

On the other hand, there are hints of reasons connected with reforming ideas, such as condemnation of reverence for images: The same yere [1537] was the monastery of Boxley suppressed, and the fygure of

the crosse called Roodrooffe before all the people […] broken and cut in peaces, the bishop of Rochester at the tyme making the sermon.54

The Act of Suppression 1536, dealt with the smaller houses, perhaps because they were easiest to dissolve and least likely to offer resistance. The campaign against the friars mounted in 1538. (They had not been included in the 1536 Act.) They were less tempting at first perhaps because they had less property. Richard Ingworth, who had been a Prior Provincial of the Dominicans, was appointed to 186

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reformation and dissolution visit the friars, all four orders in England, in 1538. He found them poor and few. At Droitwich there was a community of one. He was reluctant to act decisively but Cromwell insisted on action. The device used was to offer the friars a choice. They could live according to their Rule (which in practice they could no longer do for lack of resources) or give their houses into the king’s hands. So they chose to do the latter.55 Problems arising over how to ensure that confiscated property would become the king’s to dispose of were resolved by Second Act of Suppression, May 1539. Houses had various fates. They were turned into cathedrals or colleges, which sometimes did not last long. Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, Ely, Norwich, Worcester, Durham and Carlisle had been served by houses of monks or canons. The permanent new bishoprics were five: Gloucester, Chester, Peterborough, Bristol and Osney, which became Oxford.56 Shortly before the Dissolution Evesham had at least one monk, a former student at Oxford serving as chaplain to the abbot, who was capable of corresponding with dozens of others in good classical Latin.57 The Journal of William More (born Peers), Prior of Worcester 1518–36, is full of detail on local financial affairs.58 Little Malvern Priory was dissolved on 31 August 1534, when the prior was John Bristowe and there were six monks. These all accepted the king’s supremacy. The priory and its lands were then leased and finally sold to the Russell family, on condition that the church should remain in use for Church of England worship and that the family would pay its curate an income. The family extended the remaining monastic living quarters and built themselves a house. The family remained Roman Catholic, changed its surname in the eighteenth century as a consequence of a marriage, and became the Beringtons. This sort of transformation was bound to raised concerns about future rights of ownership: Many Catholics now live in the grounds of monasteries and other derelict religious houses, in which, as most often happens, new buildings have been erected or started; should they be warned not to proceed with the building?

There were also going to be ethical questions for a conscientious Roman Catholic purchaser: If a man buys this property with good intent or accepts it as a gift in order to

preserve it for the churches and monasteries and to prevent it falling into the hands of the heretics, and if he is ready to give it back when England returns to Apostolic

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition obedience, he will not have sinned […] it may be allowed to sell and distribute proceeds to the poor.59

There were economic consequences: What is to be done with monastic churches […] which have been abandoned? […] Churches which are unharmed and in the same condition as before must not be

prophaned or put to prophane uses […] [the Pope is said to have given permission

in Queen Mary’s time] for an Englishman to use a large house made from the stones of a monastery that had been destroyed by the Lutherans, provided that the Catholic abbot agreed to it.60

The social impact The dissolution of the monasteries left societies altered across Europe. Displaced monks and nuns were suddenly visible presences in the community. Some had been in the religious life since infancy and must have had as much difficulty adjusting to life in contemporary society as a prisoner does when he is released at the end of a long sentence. Those women who lost their homes in nunneries with the dissolution had limited choice as to what they would do next. Some married. Some were given a pension which may have enabled them to avoid marrying for financial security. But returns for Lincolnshire in 1554 show that out of 101 women who had been nuns and were eligible for pensions, only nineteen had married.61 The released religious could not all go back to their families and in many cases the family members were now of a later generation than those they had known. Some had been sent into convents and monasteries by families who could not afford to support them but had – in the case of nuns – paid substantial dowries to convents to be rid of further financial responsibility for them. The nun became a bride of Christ and a dowry was due just as it would have been if she had become a bride in ordinary marriage. Family claims for the return of dowries led to a good deal of dispute and litigation. There were various interests and benefits involved. A payment requirement meant that convents would be unlikely to have to admit vagabonds and members of poor families. Some convents set the fee very high in order to be selective from only the best families. The bishops found the dowry a reassurance that numbers would be kept within bounds and a guarantee of the financial stability of convents.62 188

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reformation and dissolution But there were drawbacks too. In Spain there were disagreements between convents and families about payment of maintenance costs for daughters who became nuns, about the extent to which a nun could ‘use’ her dowry for the continuing benefit of the family she had left, and about what should be done about inheritance of the sum paid in dowry when the nun died. For the dowry was held only in trust, in case the nun left and it had to be returned to her family. If she ‘left’ by dying, what happened next? It was all difficult enough when only an individual was involved. Where monasteries were dissolved the question of return of multiple dowries could present a highly challenging financial question.63 Many devout Roman Catholic families continued in their historic faith, in England as ‘recusants’ who refused to worship in what became the Church of England’s churches or accept the sacraments of the new ‘established’ Church. Queen Elizabeth I was inclined at first not to enquire too closely into men’s consciences and to apply the law lightly if the recusants would cooperate with some superficial appearances of conformity. With the Roman Catholic Mary Queen of Scots available to replace Elizabeth if a Roman Catholic Spanish or French invasion was successful, and the long history of Franco-Scottish alliances against England, there was reason for anxiety. The 1559 Act of Uniformity put recusants at risk of imprisonment if they were discovered to be attending private masses and if they did not pay a substantial regular fine for not going to church. In France political control went the other way. There was a massacre on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572 of the Huguenots, French Protestants, by Roman Catholics and similar attacks took place elsewhere. iii. Reformation and after: the vocations of nuns Nuns and dissolution What became of those who felt a call to the monastic life in Protestant countries in these uncomfortable times? There followed a period of adjustment and adaptation by aristocratic Roman Catholic families and their members who wanted to become monks and nuns. Roman Catholic young men could be sent to the college at Douai to be educated. That became the only route to higher education for Roman Catholics in England after the passing of the Test Acts and the succeeding legislation between 1672 and 1702. This banned anyone who was not a practising member of the Church of England from studying or teaching at 189

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Oxford and Cambridge, until this restriction was lifted by the Universities Tests Act of 1871.64 New routes to becoming a nun For women, options were even more limited by the social norms of the day. There is some evidence that the preponderance of aristocratic women in monastic life in the Middle Ages had grown less by the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. In any case, nuns had always formed only a minority in the religious orders in the medieval West, perhaps a quarter of the number of monks, and numbers had dropped further in the later medieval centuries. Nevertheless, the Roman Catholics who refused to become Protestants, in countries where this became the official religious expectation, numbered among them individuals with a traditional monastic sense of vocation, especially women who still wanted to become nuns. Lay reliance on and loyalty to monasteries continued beyond the sixteenthcentury upheavals and against all the odds. In one English Franciscan community in 1636, ‘Samuel Alexander and Jane Hercott, tooke up there Residence at this our Monastery […] where living in all vertuous Sort: in some Roomes with out the enclosure’. Alexander died a year and a half later and ‘His wife Surviving dedicated hir selfe intirely to the Service of the Monasterye taking several daingerous Journeys into England’ for its ‘helpe and assistance’.65 Among the names which most often appear in the history of would-be women religious in post-Reformation England is that of Mary Ward (1585– 1645). She was born into a recusant Roman Catholic family in Yorkshire and was educated at home but to more than an elementary level (she was taught Latin). She spent her girlhood in several households among her relatives. The most influential of these may have been that of Sir Ralph and Lady Grace Babthorpe of Osgodby and Babthorpe near York. This was a home with a resident Jesuit priest and a devout atmosphere. According to her autobiographical notes, made later, she was about fifteen when she first expressed the hope of becoming a nun. There was family opposition to this idea but she refused various suitors offered to her and, in 1606, went to Flanders in search of a place where she could fulfil her vocation. This was the year after the passing of the Popish Recusants Act 1605, which made families such as hers technical ‘refuseniks’, and imposed severe fines on those who would not worship in the Church of England and accept its sacraments. 190

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reformation and dissolution Mary’s explorations included existing religious orders. They also opened up the possibility of establishing new ones. She first approached the Jesuits who had an English College at St Omer. They recommended the Poor Clares. However, she lacked the dowry which she needed to become a choir nun and had to seek to become a mere lay sister. Perhaps because of her useful connections in England, the convent used her as a fund-raiser. The resulting experience in making friends and influencing people gave her the idea of creating a community for Englishwomen.66 She succeeded with surprising speed, perhaps because she had adequate funding. A convent opened in Gravelines in 1608, to which the English nuns from St Omer were transferred. They were joined there by a steady stream of English postulants from the English recusant community. There Mary Ward might have stayed, but she began to have visions and discovered that she felt a further call. In 1609 she helped to found a new order at St Omer, near the Jesuits and in conscious imitation of some of their ideals. This was to be called the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was to be an ‘active’ not a contemplative order, with a ministry to the poor and the sick and an educational role in running schools for girls. It soon had members in London, working among the poor there, and also in East Anglia.67 It foreshadowed by two centuries the nineteenth-century English women’s ‘sisterhoods’, mainly Anglican but also offering active service among the poor and needy.68 The Jesuits, who had no provision for female religious, found this aspiration controversial and there were campaigns against the Institute, including clergy as well as Jesuits and some of the English noble families who had remained Catholic. The Institute offended social norms by encouraging women religious to teach and even to be missionaries; it offended Jesuit sensibilities by aspiring to a level of independence in determining how it would organise its work. Despite these attacks, the Institute succeeded. New houses were founded in Germany, Italy and Austria. Mary Ward travelled to raise funds and disseminate her ideas. The Institute’s schools became famous. The papacy was hostile to this European dissemination. The Bull Pastoralis Romani pontificis of 1631 suppressed the Institute. Mary Ward was sent to prison for several weeks. Reprieve soon came, however. She went to Rome and had an audience with the Pope, who changed his view, declared she was not a heretic, and allowed her to set up a school in Rome under papal protection and with papal funding, to be run by women. Her Institute survived, in fragmentary form. Katherine Fortescue Bedingfield had married Francis Bedingfield in 1603 against her wishes, because she felt called to be a nun. She had eleven daughters of 191

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition whom ten became nuns and the one who married had two daughters who became nuns. Frances Bedingfield (alias Long) (b. 1616) was one of those daughters who found she wanted to be a nun. She had been educated on the Continent and took vows in Rome in 1633. There she became closely involved with Mary Ward, and, after a period in Munich, accompanied her to London in 1639 and then to various places in England. When Mary Ward died in 1645, Frances continued to move about among the houses of nuns and to take an active part in running them, until she died in 1704. This was still a dangerous activity. Though she had the support of senior Roman Catholic clergy, she was arrested several times over the decades.69 Two widows, Lucy Davis and Petronilla Brown, entered the Franciscan ‘third order’70 in Brussels, planning to establish an English convent of nuns of whom the first were professed in 1621. A house was purchased and other Englishwomen joined them. Sister Petronilla went to England in 1621 and ‘returned with six virgens’, who became nuns at a young age, some only fifteen or sixteen years. Marie (professed at twenty-one) and Elizabeth Gernegam (professed at nineteen), who were sisters, became one ‘an excellent organist’ while of the other it is recorded that ‘She song musick well’.71 This venture was deemed to lie in the English Province of Friars Minor under the supervision of the Convent of St Bonaventure in Douai. The community moved to Nieuport in 1637 because they needed more space. In 1653 a colony was sent to Paris to start a house there.72 The ‘blue nuns’ at Paris were an offshoot of this community at Nieuport though they suffered under the pressures of contemporary political events. The convent became short of money and unable to support the burden of various sisters who had become ill. They sent five sisters to England, three of them sick and in need of care, and two to engage in fund-raising. Pressure was applied to persuade the community to give up the Franciscan Rule and in 1661 they became sisters of the Immaculate Conception instead, joining a small order with fifteenth-century origins. Their new habits gave them the nickname of ‘blue nuns’. In the eighteenth century they made money by running a school and taking in ‘lady pensioners’. These paid a regular sum for food and lodging and clothing but not for medical attention or teaching, which were extra.73 In 1678, for example, several girls are noted as coming to the nuns ‘for Education’.74 Grateful ‘pensioners’ could sometimes be relied on to leave money in their wills to their ‘retirement home’. In 1716 there died Mademoiselle de Viniolle, a Frenchwoman ‘by Bearth’, who left 500 livres, and was buried in the cloister garden ‘towords the South’. However, the diarist reports that in that year ‘her Lagasey was not payd’.75 In 1718 the income from various sources is listed as ‘for charity’ 2,863 livres, in rents 192

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reformation and dissolution 2,634 livres and from pensioners 3,041 livres.76 This would suggest that pensioner income was inportant. However, the disbursements exceeded the receipts, for they amounted to 9,062 livres. And they were involved in costly litigation with the heirs of an estate resulting in a requirement that they pay substantial sums to the heirs, and forced to borrow 8,550 livres.77 Links with the English recusants seem to have remained strong. In 1746 several English nuns are mentioned as entering or leaving and English ‘pensioners’ arrived in 1747, paying 25 pounds sterling each.78 Some of these pensioners seem to have been very young. In 1791 two pensioners of six years old, one of seven and another of only five arrived, but an eleven-year-old came to the school and a seventeen-year-old came to be a pensioner, so the age-range was evidently considerable.79 In 1800 the remaining half-dozen went to England where they were provided for by a pious Norfolk Roman Catholic aristocratic family, the Jerninghams, until they died or left to join other orders. The Bar Convent in York was founded in 1686 to run a school for girls.80 Recusant families with links to this community seem to have bred nuns in some numbers, to judge from the lists of entrants. Eighteen entrants came from the Caley family.81 Maria Mawhood was professed as a nun at the English Convent in Brussels on 20 July 1779, but the nuns had to flee to England in 1793 in the disturbances of the Revolutionary wars. William Mawhood and his eldest daughter Dorothy Corney tried to help the nuns, who settled at Hengrave Hall, near Bury St Edmunds for eight years when they risked returning to Bruges under the Peace of Amiens.82 Religious orders in the New World From the sixteenth century, the New World was opened to the influence of Western monasticism. In Quebec in French Canada, new orders of nuns emerged in some numbers, with such lasting success that until the twentieth century quite a substantial proportion of girls chose to enter religious life. Teaching orders ran girls’ schools and others ran hospitals and ophanages, refuges for unmarried pregnant girls and care homes for the elderly. However, the papacy remained suspicious of new orders of women. In 1749 Benedict XIV issued Quamvis justo on the subject.83 There was reason for this. Other women of independent mind became involved in similar or connected ventures which expanded the reach of religious life for women and allowed them to run schools which could improve the level of women’s education. 193

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition iv. The Jesuits Men with monastic vocations had a different experience from women in the post-Reformation world. Their social position was not the same. They had more avenues open to them than marriage, work as servants, or monastic life. Some highly individual and eccentric experiments were tried. Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1637) bought the manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire in 1625 and restored its church, so as to set up an experimental family community living a life of prayer and good works. One new order exclusively for men, which had been founded in the sixteenth century, became spectacularly successful, to the point where it was felt as a social and political challenge throughout Europe. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) was one of several founders of religious orders we have seen down the centuries being drawn to an idea. His idea was simple enough on the face of it. He wanted to imitate Christ. Painfully wounded in a military skirmish in 1521, he read the lives of the saints during his convalescence. He had a vision of Mary with the infant Christ and was converted. With the zeal of the convert he went to extremes of penance for his previous sinful life, and energetically practised self-denial. He felt a call to visit the Holy Land but when he arrived there the Franciscans sent him back. They were under instructions from the Pope that pilgrims were to be discouraged because of the expense of paying their ransoms when they were kidnapped. Between the years 1524 and 1535, he studied theology. He encouraged others to attempt the imitation of Christ, at first with no notion of founding a new form of monastic life. He began to gather a group of companions. The spirit of the movement became missionary and militant. It adopted the name ‘Company’ or ‘Society’ of Jesus, with its connotation of a ‘company of soldiers of Christ’. In 1540 Pope Paul III approved this new ‘church of a militant order’ (regimini militantis ecclesia) as a mendicant order whose members would be regular clergy. The name ‘Jesuit’ was a mocking title of the 1540s used because the members of this new Society spoke the name of Jesus so often, but it stuck and was adopted by the order itself. The Constitutions of the order were gradually designed, and tested over a period of some years. Power in the order lay with the General, who was democratically elected but rarely challenged by a meeting of the general Congregation of the order, and with the Provincials, heads of each province of the order. Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ establish ground-rules in which obedience is prominent.84 The first is unconditional obedience to the ‘Church hierarchical’ (‘all 194

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reformation and dissolution judgement laid aside’). The ninth is to defend all the ‘precepts’ of the Church, and to be ready with arguments to defend them. The tenth is to do the same with the acceptance of the orders of superiors. On no account should the Jesuit speak ill of superiors behind their backs, especially to the common people, for that will undermine their authority. The thirteenth rule is to believe that white is black and black white if the Church hierarchical says so. Under their eleventh rule, Jesuits were expected to persist in using scholastic methods of argument and rely on the Fathers and leading medieval authorities such as the twelfth-century Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the works of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and those of the Franciscan Bonaventure. The twelfth rule enjoins respect for these earlier authors. The Jesuit should not suggest that modern authors know better. (In the eighteenth century, loss of respect among intellectuals for the Christian thought of earlier ages encouraged mockery of ‘scholasticism’, and of the Christian institutions which had supported this ‘out-of-date’ style of learning, including the monastic and the mendicant.85 The Jesuits were derided for adopting that method, and accused of casuistry.) The Jesuits had great influence as educators wherever they settled, even among those who did not become Jesuits themselves. Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) was one of the seventeenth-century thinkers who was ‘formed’ and educated by the Jesuits, although he never joined the order. Instead he became a ‘Minim’ Friar,86 and in due course, after a period of university study, a priest.87 He became a member of the European ‘corresponding society’ of leading names in science, mathematics and philosophy, who were exchanging letters during the seventeenth century. There was global missionary work for the order from the beginning. Its members were sent to battle with ‘paganism’ in the East, as missionaries to Islam and in India, Japan, China, and also the Americas. But these were highly learned preachers and they also became immensely useful to the Roman Catholic Church in its battle with Protestantism. Jesuits led the Counter-Reformation, with some success, in parts of Germany and Austria and in France. The process of becoming a Jesuit was and remains lengthy. The novitiate leads to simple vows, and those who intend to become priests must then spend some years in study and teaching, and follow a second novitiate before they take perpetual vows as ‘coadjutors’. Those who are priests and go a step further by becoming ‘professed’ take a vow in addition to those of poverty, chastity and obedience, to go wherever the Pope may send them as missionaries. 195

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition ‘Let us eat a Jesuit’: Jansenists and Jesuits88 Cornelius Jansen died in 1638, before the furore over his ideas broke out. Friends of his popularised his views and ‘Jansenism’, with its leaders based at a religious house in Paris, Port-Royal, became an active body of opinion well into the eighteenth century. He had revived a very old controversy. He view was that God predestines those he chooses for heaven. But that tended to undermine the Church’s sacraments because it made baptism and penance seem pointless. If God has already decided one’s eternal fate there seemed no need for good works or worries about the consequences of sins committed or reliance on the sacramental provisions of the Church to put one right with God. There was respectable authority for predestinationist views. Over the course of his lifetime, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) taught an increasingly strong doctrine of predestination which depended on a powerful belief in the sinfulness of fallen humanity and human helplessness except where there was an intervention of divine grace. Calvin’s teaching on predestination was naturally less respectable in Roman Catholic circles. It included two elements not in Augustine, and rejected by him. The first was the controversial belief in ‘double predestination’ (that God predestines to hell as well as to heaven); the second the ‘assurance’ that those who are saved know it. Since the Reformation a strong doctrine of predestination had had a Calvinist ring. The Church had never quite made up its mind about predestination, though it was clear about the importance of sin. So debates about all this had reached a high pitch several times over the centuries. This was to be one of those times. Port-Royal’s house in Paris, seen as the ‘headquarters’ of the Jansenist movement, was an offshoot of a popular abbey at Port-Royal-de-Champs, founded in 1626 to relieve overcrowding among the nuns there. It had begun in 1204 as an abbey for Cistercian nuns, but its seventeenth-century prominence came from the patronage of the Arnauld family. By 1609 Marie Angelique Arnauld (1591–1661) had become its reforming abbess. The house ran schools of exceptional quality. In that way it won its complement of leading thinkers and writers, including the dramatist Jean Racine (1639–99), who was educated there when his grandmother went to live at Port-Royal and took him with her. It might seem that the monk’s or nun’s belief that a life of suffering and self-denial will improve hopes of going to heaven would be less persuasive in the light of a belief in predestination, but members of religious orders had had Augustine in their houses’ libraries for centuries. 196

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reformation and dissolution Numerous leading intellectuals became associated with the house and its educational opportunities, until its association with Jansenism brought a papal condemnation in 1708, with the nuns aggressively driven out in 1709 and the very buildings destroyed89 In 1713 the Bull Unigenitus decisively condemned Jansenism. So the theological debate became highly politicised and entangled with power struggles in the Church. The Jesuits sided with the ecclesiastical authorities against the Jansenists. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Church authorities had been moderately tolerant of the Jansenist position, though a Papal Bull of 1653 condemned as heretical several of the Jansenist teachings. Antoine Arnauld was prepared to accept that there were heretical views associated with the ‘Jansenist’ camp, but he said these were not Jansenist teaching at all. In 1664 the Church in France unilaterally imposed a requirement on the Jansenists, including Arnauld and others at Port-Royal, to sign a ‘formulary’ attesting to the orthodoxy of their opinions and in effect forswearing Jansenism. This led to a five-year controversy over the legitimacy of this action, since it did not proceed from Rome. The Jesuits were less restrained in their continuing hostilities with the Jansenists. Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a friend of Antoine Arnauld, was among the intellectuals who took the side of the abbey and ‘its’ movement. Partly in defence of his friend, Pascal attacked the Jesuits in a series of Provincial Letters of 1656–7, seeking to discredit them through heavy irony about their flexible moral standards and intellectual casuistry. He may indeed have been largely responsible for encouraging the use of the ‘casuist’ label for Jesuits, arguing that in one ‘case’ they came to one conclusion and in another to a different conclusion, employing their famous skills in scholastic argumentation. This game of spreading damaging stories is familiar enought in modern political warfare. Pascal pretended the letters were written from Paris by someone simply anxious to keep a correspondent in the provinces au fait with events in the capital. Letter 5 (dated 20 March 1656) sets out some ‘first outlines of the morals taught by those good fathers the Jesuits’. He says he did not merely trust the rumours but talked to Jesuits to see whether the stories applied to more than a few individuals: In the conversation I had with the Jansenist, he told me so many strange things

about these fathers that I could with difficulty believe them, till he pointed them

out to me in their writings; after which he left me nothing more to say in their defence than that these might be the sentiments of some individuals only, which it was not fair to impute to the whole fraternity.

197

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition His opinion is that the Jesuits are not deliberately setting out to corrupt behaviour. But they certainly do not want to reform it. They argue either way depending on whom they wish to please: Should any person present himself before them, for example, fully resolved to make

restitution of some ill-gotten gains, do not suppose that they would dissuade him

from it. By no means; on the contrary, they would applaud and confirm him in such a holy resolution. But suppose another should come who wishes to be absolved

without restitution, and it will be a particularly hard case indeed, if they cannot furnish him with means of evading the duty, of one kind or another, the lawfulness of which they will be ready to guarantee.

Their offence, then, is that they use their wits to argue any matter either way depending on the circumstances: Such is the manner in which they have spread themselves over the whole earth, aided by the doctrine of probable opinions, which is at once the source and the basis of all this licentiousness.90

Pascal also claimed the Jesuits were oppressing the poor, while using their wits to present a quite different picture of their activities to the wealthy and powerful. A rich man might confess, immediately sin again in the same way, and get away with a light penance. Whose faith in contradiction bore, whom lies, Nor nonsense, nor impossibilities,

Nor shame, nor death, nor damning can assail.91

This line of accusation chimed with existing resentments of the Jesuits. They were highly educated; they got about the world with alarming persistence; and they were perceived as a threat because of their political activities and influence among the powerful. To some extent this was a reenactment of a process which had happened before. In the later Middle Ages the friars had won themselves enemies in a similar way, particularly by acting as confessors to the mighty, and therefore having the ear of the powerful. The old Gallican battle over the liberties of the Church in France, or ‘Gaul’, with its resentment of interference from ‘over the Alps’ (Ultramontanism) reawoke. 198

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reformation and dissolution The papacy wisely let tempers cool and refrained from forcing a resolution of the Jansenist problem. The Jesuits remained controversial but flourishing. The Jesuit mission to England and its consequences The Jesuit mission to England took place under the supervision of Robert Persons or Parsons (1546–1610). He was one of the English intellectuals captured by the Jesuit missioners (in his case by Alexander Briant).92 He was apparently drawn into the movement by a period at Louvain in 1574 on his way to Padua to study medicine. The ‘Spiritual Exercises’ did their work. By 1575 he was a postulant among the Jesuits and had given up the plan to study at Padua. The English College at Rome came under Jesuit control in 1579 after a period of internal warfare there, in the resolution of which Persons took a leading part. The same episode brought him into communication with William Allen, who had founded the school at Douai which provided a Catholic education for exiled Englishmen. Allen was in Rome in 1579 discussing a mission to England by the Jesuits. Persons was given responsibility for overseeing it, along with Edmund Campion (1540–81), another product of Douai. Campion had been prominent at Oxford as a young scholar, and had even been chosen as one of those to welcome Queen Elizabeth officially when she visited the university in 1566. She was to be entertained with a Latin disputation, in which Campion was also chosen to take part. He won patronage and prizes as a result but he began to be drawn to Catholicism. He was able to leave England only after an abortive attempt, but in 1573 he was on his way to Rome and entered the Jesuit novititate. The mission took place in 1580–1, but it cost Campion his life on charges of treason. Persons’ flight from England saved his own life but laid him open to accusations of cowardice; he remained in exile for the rest of his life, subject to the criticism of those who observed that Catholics in England had to pay the price of his uncompromising stance towards the Elizabethan government. Exile provided him with the freedom to exercise his self-defined ‘apostolate’ of writing, while the fate of Campion impelled him to work untiringly to build up the resources of the English mission and to secure, if possible, a political dispensation in England that would favour the growth of the Roman Catholic church. He was backed by Philip II of Spain, anxious to gain a foothold in English affairs, in founding what became a highly successful school at St Omer where the sons of English recusants could get a Catholic education.93 This had become important because there were plans 199

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition for legislation in England which would have restricted educational freedom. To head the school, Spain sent William Flack who had been in exile in Valladolid. The Archpriest controversy and a novel ecclesiology The old Roman Catholic hierarchy had died out in England and Wales with the death of the Bishop of St Asaph in 1585. The informal arrangements under which Cardinal William Allen (1532–94) had provided supervision for the several hundred remaining Roman Catholic priests, including the ‘missionary’ role, were deemed unsafe from the point of view of discipline and good order after his death. Squabbles began to break out. Here the influence of the new order of the Jesuits became important. George Blackwell (1547–1613) was chosen to hold the ecclesiologically novel office of ‘Archpriest’, to provide an overarching authority even though he was not a bishop. This appointment, made on papal authority, gave him jurisdiction over all the secular Roman Catholic clergy of Britain, including Scotland. Blackwell had been one of half a dozen Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford ejected from the college in 1571 for failure to move with the times in his religious opinions. After a few years taking refuge in Gloucester College, he went to the English College at Douai. From there he had returned to England in 1576 as a missioner priest. But he was soon in danger of arrest and lived more or less in hiding, enjoying the protection of some of the remaining Catholic nobility. As Archpriest he worked under Jesuit supervision. Now that the English College in Rome had a Jesuit director, and from 1598 so did the English College in Douai,94 new English-born priests who had studied abroad were likely to come back with Jesuit sympathies. But this was by no means welcome everywhere or without its potential for internal controversy among the Roman Catholic recusants and their clergy. Persons had gone to Rome in 1597 to help settle disturbances among the Jesuits there. The English secular clergy took the opportunity to plan a Memorial against the Jesuits to place before the Pope. Persons would have preferred a bishop, even if the bishop had to live in the Low Countries. Some of the secular priests actively objected to this ecclesiological novelty. William Bishop and Robert Charnock went to Rome on the objectors’ behalf to lay their concerns before the Pope, but when they arrived they were arrested and held as prisoners in the English College at Rome. Once the appointment of the Archpriest was formally confirmed they were released. They were told they 20 0

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reformation and dissolution could neither stay in Rome nor return to England. The English Jesuit Thomas Lister had them charged with schism. There followed an energetic dispute as to whether the action of appealing to Rome was schismatic. The University of Paris was consulted; it said there had been no schism. Blackwell issued a decree condemning this finding and forbidding any defence of the appellants to be published. That prompted the publication of a series of pamphlets in early 1601 including attacks on the Jesuits, and a further appeal to Rome by thirty-three priests. Anxious to get this dispute out of England, the Government arranged for the Privy Council to ‘banish’ some of the priests. That enabled them to leave the country and take their appeal to Rome. The notion that Jesuits might devour the realm and overthrow the Government was nosed abroad: regna et monarchias insatiabili desiderio devoraverint.95 Jesuits as ‘terrorists’: The controversy over the Oath of Allegiance At some stage in his formation Blackwell seems to have met the leading Jesuit scholar and politician Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Bellarmine became a Jesuit novice in 1560 and was sent by the order to continue his studies. He was in the Low Countries doing that, at the same time as Blackwell. He became a leading theologian for the Roman Catholic Church. When James I succeeded Elizabeth and became King of England as well as King of Scotland in 1603, he brought a flavour of Calvinist Scottish Protestantism into England and disappointed the Roman Catholics who had expected a more tolerant regime from the son of a Roman Catholic mother. In 1605 the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ failed. This had involved a scheme to blow up the Houses of Parliament while the new king was there, conducting the State Opening. The plotters were betrayed and either died or were executed. The Jesuits were suspected of having known all about it, and having been behind the plot.96 Henry Garnet, their leader in England, was executed. A Popish Recusants Act was hastily passed in 1605, to strip Roman Catholics in England of their civil rights. They were not to be allowed to stand as trustees or act as guardians. They could not be lawyers or physicians. Suspected persons might find their houses being searched for weapons and explosives. Not to receive communion in the Church of England in the local parish church at least once a year became punishable by a substantial fine or the loss of two-thirds of the 201

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition offender’s lands. To accept the authority of the Bishop of Rome became treason. Roman Catholics were to take an oath of allegiance to the new king: I, A.B., do truly and sincerely acknowledge, &c. that our sovereign lord, King James, is lawful and rightful King &c. and that the pope neither of himself nor by any

authority of Church or See of Rome, or by any other means with any other, has any power to depose the king &c., or to authorize any foreign prince to invade him &c., or to give licence to any to bear arms, raise tumults, &c. &c. Also I do swear

that notwithstanding any sentence of excommunication or deprivation I will bear allegiance and true faith to his Majesty &c. &c. And I do further swear that I do

from my heart abhor, detest, and abjure, as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position, – that princes which be excommunicated by the pope may be

deposed or murdered by their subjects or by any other whatsoever. And I do believe that the pope has no power to absolve me from this oath. I do swear according to the plain and common sense, and understanding of the same words &c. &c. &c (3 James I, c. 4).

When a new oath of allegiance was formulated as part of the Act for the Better Discovery and Repressing of Popish Recusants (1606), Blackwell first said Roman Catholics should take the oath because the Pope expected subjects to be obedient to secular authorities in civil matters. The oath of allegiance created a furore. Some said it intruded on men’s consciences. The Pope condemned it. Blackwell wavered but eventually took the oath after a period of imprisonment. Bellarmine wrote to him to tell him that he strongly disapproved. Blackwell was replaced in the Archpriest’s office. The potential importance of all this went much wider than the British Isles. James himself responded to Robert Bellarmine in an exchanged of polemical pamphleteering, partly conducted under pseudonyms. Bellarmine widened the scope of the dispute by writing more broadly about the powers of the Pope in temporal affairs. That offended Gallican thinkers in France. Meanwhile in Venice in 1605–6 there was a related controversy about the extent of papal power to intervene in the secular affairs of Venice when they related to church property. Spain sided with the Pope and his claims; France sided with Venice and its resistance to those claims. In Vienna the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolph was being perceived as insufficiently loyal to Rome and too willing to give space and freedom to Protestants. A crisis came at about the time of the dispute in England.97 202

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reformation and dissolution In England there was a further episode of alarm over a threat of sedition, which came to be known as the Popish Plot. Again the Jesuits were rumoured to be involved, though they rejected the chief architect of the affair when he wanted to join them. The rumour seems to have been instigated by Titus Oates (b. 1649), who became a Roman Catholic in 1677 and was allowed to try for entry as a Jesuit. He was rejected after a few months by the English College at Valladolid. He was given a second chance at St Omer, but that College rejected him too in 1678. Then he began the story of the Popish Plot, spreading the belief that there was to be an assassination of Charles II (had not his father been executed?). Potential assassins among members of the religious orders were named or hinted at. It was put about that this was all part of a Jesuit conspiracy to take over the world. It was only too plausible to the English populace and gave credence to the general view of the Jesuits expressed by John Oldham earlier in the century as in league with the powers of darkness and political enemies alike: Long had the famed impostor found success, Long seen his damned fraternity’s increase,

In wealth, and power, mischief, guile improved,

By popes and pope-rid kings, upheld, and loved.98

v. Going to extremes in the early modern world To some individuals in the early modern world, the extreme asceticism of the first monastic era was still profoundly attractive. Thomas More (1478–1535) is an example of a lay person who engaged in some of the practices of monastic life without actually becoming a monk. In maturity he was reputed still to wear a hair shirt and to scourge himself with the ‘discipline’, a device with knotted cords or strips bound to a handle. Young More had been sent to Canterbury College, Oxford about 1492 by a patron. This was a Benedictine house run by the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury. Though there was no expectation attached to his being educated there that More himself would become a monk, he was exposed to Benedictine ideas and learned the patterns of the Benedictine life. When after two years he went to London to study law, he was drawn into the ‘humanist’ movement. This was the period when Erasmus, Colet, Linacre and Grocyn were influential in England. 203

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition But he kept up his interest in monastic life and spent time, possibly even lived, with the London Carthusians, who led a most austere form of the monastic life. Thomas More was now living an intense spiritual life, but as a layman, performing spiritual exercises; and among the Carthusians he had opportunities to read not only Latin works for whose perusal he was well equipped by his education, but also many of the works of late medieval English spirituality the house is known to have possessed. It was also keen to make them more widely known. More later recommended them to others. He thus remained on the fringes of an area of observance influenced by monastic practice where individuals could go to extremes, as it was said he continued to do privately in his own spiritual life. Extreme mortification seems to have been especially popular among Spanish religious in the sixteenth century, including those with busy active lives. Ignatius Loyola favoured the constant irritation which could make the skin bleed, wearing, it was said, a hair shirt as well as a metal belt or girdle (some examples of which had inward-facing spikes). Some of these extremists became famous chiefly for their practice of the higher forms of endurance of pain in a pursuit of spiritual progress. Teresa of Avila (1515–82), who became a Spanish Carmelite, was drawn to mortification and the active embracing of voluntary suffering (‘Lord, let me suffer or let me die’). Her ‘autobiography’ was written before 1567, under the supervision of her confessor, who no doubt guided her understanding. It contains what look like authentic glimpses of her childhood.99 As a child, the narrative says, she used to play ‘monasteries’ with her little brother. They built toy ‘hermitages’ in the orchard using small stones, though these did not stand up very well and tended to collapse into ruins. With her friends she built more ambitious play-monasteries and they all pretended to be nuns. She used to give alms and say her prayers as hard as she could (Chapter 1). There followed a ‘reprehensible’ period when she was tempted to read popular literature about chivalry and became quite worldly and interested in fashion under the undesirable influence of some cousins (Chapter 2). Her mother died when she was eleven or twelve and her father soon lodged her in a monastery which, she hints, specialised in the education of difficult children like herself. The pretext was that her sister had been married and it was not fitting for her to remain at home without mother or sister to watch over her (Chapter 2). At first she suffered greatly from this change, but in a few days she found a new contentment. The nuns seemed to like her and although she felt no desire to join them, she liked them in return (Chapter 2.10). One nun in particular influenced 204

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reformation and dissolution her. She told her how she herself had become a nun and how rewarding she found the life (Chapter 3.1). In that monastery Teresa stayed for more than a year and came to think she would rather be a nun than be married, for that prospect frightened her. But she wanted to enter the religious life elsewhere because she thought some of the devotional practices she had observed were excessive. Besides, one of her best friends had become a nun in a different monastery, so she thought she might go there (Chapter 3.2). Returned to her home, she began to listen to a local widower who was preparing to enter the monastic life himself. She used to go and see him and he read works of devotion with her in Spanish. She put up with this for the sake of politeness (Chapter 3.5) but it had its effect. Gradually but reluctantly she persuaded herself to become a nun. It seemed safest, the most likely way for her to get to heaven. Yet it was a life which offered suffering and the Devil told her she lacked the robust physical constitution which would be needed (Chapter 3.6–8). That seemed to her all the more reason to accept it. Christ had suffered for mankind so why should she not suffer for his sake? She set off with her brother, whom she had persuaded to become a friar, and went to the house where her close friend was a nun. She says it was inexpressibly painful to leave her family, for she felt no corresponding love of Christ to draw her elsewhere. But when she tried it, she found she loved the life and was completely happy in it (Chapter 3). The order she had chosen was that of the Carmelites, a mendicant order of obscure origins and one which in due course she set about reforming, together with St John of the Cross. Their aims were paradoxical. As mendicants they would not normally be expected to be contemplatives, let alone enclosed. The direction in which they wanted to move was towards the ideals of the desert, back to a way of life concentrated in prayer and withdrawal from the world. She wrote of her own practical experience: Since I could not meditate intellectually, I would try to imagine Christ within me, and I found myself the better, I believed, for dwelling on those times in his life when he was most lonely.

Her idea was that that vulnerability would make him more likely to ‘admit her’ to his presence.100 Teresa became unpopular with the sisters because they thought she was taking religious life too seriously and setting herself up above them. She herself became worried in case the Devil was tempting her with the enticements of 205

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition extreme ascetic living. Other Spanish women of hysterical tendencies had become convinced of special favours from Christ and Mary, prophecies, glossolalia, and there had been scandals. A quite recent nun, Magdalena de la Crux of Cordoba, a Franciscan, had won a great following among some important people and then confessed it had all been a scam and she had made a pact with the Devil at the age of five. So Teresa had reason to fear being tarred with the same brush.101 In the end Jesuit support was useful.102 She was able to leave her convent for years and live with her family and carry on her life of prayer independently. The medieval flavour of extreme monasticism had not died with the Reformation. Where monasticism continued in Roman Catholic Europe it was with continuity in some familiar attitudes. In the early modern centuries, those offering guidance in Christian living were often able to presume on a level of active personal commitment to the disciplines of Christian life in their readers. The poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593–1633) wrote about ‘the Parson’s Life’ in terms whose orderliness and fundamentals fit the priorities of monastic life equally well. ‘Man is a shop of rules, a well truss’d pack.’103 The two ‘highest points of Life’ for any Christian, he suggests, are ‘Patience in regard of afflictions, Mortification in regard of lusts and affections and the stupifying and deading of all the clamorous powers of the soul’. His parish priest must thoroughly ‘study’ these, ‘that he may be an absolute Master and commander of himself, for all the purposes which God hath ordained him’. Herbert also writes on ‘the Parson’s state of life’. Ideally, ‘considering that virginity is a higher state then Matrimony, and that the Ministry requires the best and highest things’, the Parson should remain unmarried. He should be ‘very exact in the governing of his house’, ensuring that the food is ‘little, but very good’, and that nothing is wasted (chickens can pick up any crumbs); keeping strict discipline in his family if he has one; and expecting his wife and children to be ‘preachers’ themselves, each ‘the beginner of good discourses’ in his or her encounters; on Fridays there should be fasting and abstinence from ‘company, recreation, and all outward contentments’.104 So he is to live in a Christian household which seems in many respects a secular version of the monastic community. In his inner life, George Herbert’s parish priest must ensure he knows the Scriptures. Like the medieval monk, he should feed on them. ‘There he sucks, and lives.’ He must practise prayer when he reads and also equip himself with ‘accessary knowledges’, by reading the Fathers and the medieval theologians and 206

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reformation and dissolution later writers, from which he will compile a collections of source-materials to draw on in his sermons.105 Above all, he should practise self-examination: By all means use sometimes to be alone.

Salute thy self: see what thy soul doth wear.

Dare to look in thys chest, for ’tis thine own:

And tumble up and down what thou findst there.106

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chapter vii

Enlightenment and suppression

i. Suppression of the monasteries continues In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing to an end the Thirty Years War in Europe. Also signed was the Treaty of Münster, which was designed to be an ‘instrument of peace for the monasteries’ (Instrumentum Pacis Monasteriensis). The intention was for the government of each participating state to be free to decide its official religion (cuius regio eius religio) while those whose religion was different from that of the state where they lived should be free to practise it in private without punishment, and even in public at agreed times and places. The ‘religions’ included were Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. In Germany and Austria much confiscation of religious property followed, with at least a hundred houses being suppressed. The process went on into the next century. A new wave of closures in the mid-eighteenth century was prompted by German Electors and Imperial pressure. Maximilian III (1745–77), Elector of Bavaria set about first the mendicants, then the nuns, and then the monks, and his work of suppression was continued by his successors until Napoleon’s time. Gradually property rights were removed and houses were forbidden to receive new entrants. Communities of religious attached to cathedrals were included in the bans. The long history of many great monasteries such as St Emmeram at Ratisbon ended. Emperor Joseph II (Emperor 1765–90) was bent on ensuring that in the longstanding struggle for supremacy of Church and State, the state should dominate 208

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enlightenment and suppression in Austria. His idea was to secularise ecclesiastical and monastic property. He particularly disliked houses of contemplatives, which he considered were doing nothing useful to the state. Nearly half the monasteries in Austria and the Slavic lands it controlled were closed and their wealth sequestered. The education of the clergy became the business of the state, with new state seminaries established to ensure that this happened. Monasteries were forbidden to teach theology. A new order of worship was imposed by the state. Papal dispensations from religious vows were made available. Some of these draconian measures were eased and they were not insisted on everywhere, but the signals were clear. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars The signals grew stronger with the coming of the French Revolution. The revolutionary mobs in Paris in 1789 stripped Saint-Lazare and its convent. The clergy gave up their rights to the feudal tithe with surprising speed in August of that year. The newly created National Assembly decreed that the property of the Church was now for the nation to dispose of as it chose. It was proposed to ban the taking of monastic vows. By 1794, France’s religious orders were under sentence of closure, and they were largely dissolved in the course of the Revolution, swept away in a general anticlericalism. The revolutionaries’ hostility to the Church was part of their dislike for the ‘establishment’ as a whole. It was argued that the clergy and members of religious orders were doing nothing useful and were – or their houses and hospitals and schools were – more prosperous than was compatible with their vocations. The ancient conviction that prayer was useful to the whole of society and that in giving their lives to prayer monks and nuns were working for others too busy to do the same, no longer had its former currency. The Napoleonic Wars led to much impounding of monastic property in Europe. The Benedictines disappeared from Hungary. Catholic Germany was stripped of her remaining abbeys, and their property was handed to Austria, Bavaria and Prussia. Houses for women were treated more gently because of the difficulty, in the society of the times, of simply ejecting their nuns to fend for themselves. However, they were not allowed to accept any more novices. Some of the displaced religious fled to Italy or France and some returned to their families. There was a certain amount of social upheaval over the return to the community of so many monks and nuns at once. 209

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Running to Italy was not necessarily a recipe for safety for monks and nuns trying to escape this Europe-wide suppression of monastic life. Italy was not ‘unified’ until the middle of the nineteenth century and patterns varied in different areas, but Napoleon was able to impose restrictions on religious orders in Rome in 1810 and in Naples from 1806 the orders were closed down and their property confiscated. As elsewhere, some exceptions were allowed in Italy for houses which were assisting the poor, providing help for the sick, or in some cases running schools. These revolutionary changes had their setbacks and there was some rethinking. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) reversed what it could. Numerous houses in Italy were reestablished and the houses in Tuscany were given financial compensation for the lands taken from them. However, the property of religious orders was too tempting to be left alone for very long. In the course of the ensuing unification of Italy, suppression began again. Cavour (1810–61) and Victor Emmanuel (1820–78) suppressed the monasteries once more. The members of religious orders were in some cases pensioned off. At Monte Cassino some were allowed to stay to look after the buildings. The thrust of the legislative changes in Italy was to take away from religious communities the protections of the law built up over centuries. But new communities could be formed without those protections, and some communities simply went to France. A similar pattern of repeating suppression and reestablishment was noticeable in Spain. Napoleon had imposed a constitution in 1812 under which religious congregations were to be suppressed. A war won independence back and restored King Ferdinand III, who reestablished them all in 1814. But in 1820 Spain’s internal revolution suppressed them again, with the exception of a small number who could be said to meet social needs by looking after the old and ill. Once more the king was speedily restored to power and he gave their property back to the religious orders. However, the situation had by now become highly unstable. In the 1830s the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes, legislated to ban the taking of religious vows and the property of the religious houses was confiscated. Some of their possessions of artistic importance were removed to museums, but there were sales to dispose of them, breaking up collections. Buildings were taken over for public use, for example as barracks, or sold, or allowed to fall into ruin. Monastic churches became parish churches. A few houses of friars were left in being to continue to supply clergy for the Spanish colonies in the New World. A similar process took place in Portugal in the 1830s, with a similar exception for houses furnishing clergy for colonies. 210

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enlightenment and suppression ii. The Enlightenment Monasticism sat uncomfortably not only with the European politics of the eighteenth century but also with the fashionable thinking of the Enlightenment. Men of reason they might be, but the pragmatic social usefulness of active orders did not impress many leading intellectuals. Voltaire (1694–1778) expressed only a moderate approval of those nuns who nursed the sick and cared for the poor. Denis Diderot (1713–84), atheist and editor of the Encyclopédie, wrote a novel about a nun which illustrated the equivocal attitudes then prevailing among the intelligentsia. He was probably prompted by the way the Marquis de Croismare, himself a loyal Roman Catholic, had interested himself in the case of a nun who was appealing to be permitted to go back to the world. He said she had been forced by her parents to enter the convent and take her vows. (Her bid for escape failed and she remained a nun until she died.) The Marquis’ friends teasingly tried to tempt him back to Paris and out of retirement by making up a similar story about a fictional nun who was eager to escape. They wanted to see whether he would offer practical help; whether he was convinced or not – and possibly playing them at their own game – he offered this pretend nun refuge in his household. Diderot wrote his novel La réligieuse (The Nun)1 to tell the story of this episode and others like it. His own sister had died in a convent, it was said from the harshness of the life. He includes the name of the Marquis at the beginning, as the fictional girl tells her story. In the story she has two sisters who are preferred by her parents. She is sent to a convent to get her out of the way. When her sisters are safely married she thinks it will be her turn for a husband next but she is told that she is to become a nun, either in her present convent or in another which would take her in return for a small dowry. She describes her novitiate as a time of cunning seduction by the nuns. She says she was indulged and not allowed to glimpse the austere reality she would enter when she was professed, the ‘forty or fifty years of suffering’. One of those driven mad by the life escaped from her cell one day ‘all dishevelled and half naked, […] dragging iron chains, wild-eyed, tearing her hair and beating her breast, rushing along and shrieking’.2 Told that she must take her final vows, the nun resists. They lock her in her cell. Then they send her home to her family and she is told that since she is illegitimate her family is determined not to treat her like the others and provide for her marriage. In the end she gives in and remains a nun.3 211

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition The Jesuits still seen as social and political enemies The eighteenth-century Jesuits remained influential as well as wealthy, and a formidable threat to other interests among the powerful of Europe. In the middle of the eighteenth century, covetous looks were cast by Portugal on the lucrative Jesuit missions in South America; there was both pamphlet war and real war and in Portugal itself the Jesuits were barred from the Court. Allegations against the Jesuits were sent to the Pope in the name of the King of Portugal. Jesuits were imprisoned and even executed. In Spain ministerial and political plotting also led to a movement to suppress the Jesuits, and because Spain then largely controlled Naples and Parma the Jesuits there were affected too. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain was arranged and at the beginning of April 1767 the magistrates of the Spanish towns were sent instructions to find and eject the Jesuits who lived there. Many thousands were forcibly taken to ships and removed to the Papal States, which eventually sent them on to Corsica. From Naples in November it was just a matter of a forced march of Jesuits overland to the Papal States. Parma simply drove the Jesuits out. In France there was annoyance over a trading controversy involving the Jesuits in Martinique. The Jesuits tried to recover losses they had suffered when a ship carrying their goods was sunk. The case went on appeal to the Parlement of Paris. The Jesuits had enemies in the Parlement and also among the Jansenists who were well represented in the political machinations of the day. In the University of Paris too there were enemies, where the Jesuits were felt to command too strong an intellectual lead. Those in power at Court became divided and even Madame de Pompadour, the royal mistress, set her face against the Jesuits – a Jesuit confessor had refused to absolve her. The fray descended into vituperative attacks on the Jesuits’ reputation. They were accused of immoral behaviour, of teaching heresy, of Socinianism and even of Lutheranism. There was a desperate attempt to separate off the French Jesuits under new governance arrangements but in 1764 the Jesuit colleges were closed and the Jesuits threatened with banishment if they would not abandon their vows. The king signed an edict which dissolved the Society of Jesus throughout his realm. Nevertheless, the Jesuits had their powerful supporters, including Frederick of Prussia (d. 1786), who was open-armed and comprehensive in his willingness to provide shelter for these Jesuit exiles out of favour. The tide of intellectual fashion was running strongly against Jesuit educational ideas. The eighteenth-century philosophical fashion was for reliance on a new sort of ‘reason’ which sat uncomfortably with the scholastic style of Aristotelian 212

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enlightenment and suppression ‘reasoning’ of the Middle Ages, and more recently of the Jesuit ‘casuists’. It did not concern itself so much with the processes of formal logical reasoning so highly developed in the universities during the Middle Ages. It relied on empirical evidence rather than on faith. Just as in Chaucer’s day monks and friars had seemed fair game for satire, so in the eighteenth century the Jesuits were resented because of their perceived wealth and influence. Their missions were seen as exploiting the local people (with Paraguay a prominent example) and they are the butt of satire in Voltaire’s Candide. Political pressure for the suppression of the Jesuits grew in the second half of the eighteenth century. One of the prime movers was Charles III of Spain (1716–88). Under his Decree of 1767 (the Pragmatic Penalty) the Jesuits were driven out of Spain and their property was taken over by the state. The king’s ambassador to Rome pressed the anti-Jesuit cause there. They were also ejected from colleges where they had been teaching and studying, including the Irish College in Rome and colleges in other Italian cities. In 1773, place by place and one by one, Jesuits were ejected or suppressed throughout Europe on the orders of Rome. The Brief details the offences of the order: They are causing disruption and disorder everywhere.

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chapter viii

Nineteenth-century experiments

i. A new Oratory and a Jesuit controversy A new Oratory movement John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic in 1845. He had been one of the leaders of the Tractarians, a High Church Anglo-Catholic movement of the 1830s and 1840s, most of whose prominent supporters were in Oxford.1 Becoming a Roman Catholic automatically excluded him from the University of Oxford at that time, because students and the Fellows of Colleges had by law to be practising members of the Church of England. So he needed a new ‘framework’ in which to live. Frederick Faber (1814–63) was feeling the same. He was another convert from the Church of England and one of those who had been influenced at Oxford by the preaching of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. He seems to have suggested the idea of establishing a modern Oratory. Newman went to Italy to find out more about what would be involved. He came back with papal consent to start an Oratory in Birmingham. Faber did the same in London a few years later. The Birmingham Oratory was founded in a tradition which began in the sixteenth century when Philip Neri, recently ordained a priest, began to gather a group of pious laymen around him in the middle of the century. They prayed together, visited the sick and those in prison, and made trips to see convents and monasteries. As the group grew, some of its members were themselves ordained and a set of ‘Exercises’ evolved, for the practice of private and community prayer 214

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nineteenth-century experiments and spiritual reading. Here, in embryo, was a new ‘apostolate’. The members of the group shared a bond of charity but took no vows. Other Oratories were founded in imitation. The idea of an Oratory was that it should be a place of common prayer and sacrament, run democratically and providing priests to do a variety of work in the community such as visiting the sick, and offering spiritual guidance to those who came to ask for it. Oratorians took no vow of poverty and those with sufficient wealth contributed to the upkeep of the house. They ate but did not worship together. They were expected to practise stability by remaining in their Oratory.2 This was not in a strict sense a monastic order, nor was it quite an order of canons. But it had some elements of such a life and it presaged the twentieth century development we shall come to in a moment. A new Jesuit controversy The hummocky continuance of post-Reformation Roman Catholic religious life in England was interrupted by a controversy in the late nineteenth century. After the reign of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor (1553–8) England’s Roman Catholics had no English bishops but only apostolic vicariates to administer their Church. The restoration of a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in England took place in 1850. It was needed partly to provide adequate pastoral care for immigrant Irish Roman Catholics who were flooding into England after the potato famine and because there was work for them as ‘navvies’ in the digging of the canals. The Jesuits had remained a presence in England. In 1767 Jesuits were still in residence at Worcester, where four priests were supported by Jesuit funds.3 Roman Catholics in England were understandably perturbed by the Oxford Movement of the mid-nineteenth century with its call to return to a Church in sympathy with earlier ages but not necessarily in union with Rome. There had been particular concerns that the Oxford Movement, for all its sympathies with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, would prove to be at variance with Jesuit ideals. Mary Frances Sanders, who became Mrs Thomas Lomax, was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1834 and was thrown out by her family. She was twenty and Lingard the Jesuit sixty-three when the correspondence between them began. As he wrote to her: 215

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Pusey, Newman, Palmer, Sewell & the other authors of the tracts for the Times, are endeavouring to suppress the spirit which they have roused, by writing most bitterly

against us, but their disciples are not to be kept down, and pursue unremittingly the project – delusive project – of an union with Rome.4

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) decided to become a Jesuit after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1866, and a period of inner turmoil about whether he should go on writing poetry at all. Switzerland barred Jesuits, so first he visited the country while he could still go and see it. He took his vows as a Jesuit in 1870.5 Also in in 1872, and against this background of a continuing and sometimes insistent Jesuit presence in post-Reformation England, Herbert Vaughan became Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford in industrial northern England. The Jesuit Provincial from 1873 was Peter Gallwey.6 The Jesuits wanted to found a college but Vaughan refused permission. A letter from Father General Peter Beckx dated 27 February 1875 set out the facts which supported the request. Manchester and Salford had more than half a million souls, there were twentysix nearby towns with 25,000 inhabitants and many villages, and transport links were now good. The Royal Commission for Schools in Great Britain had called in 1868 for England to match France and Germany in having colleges ‘which give complete and sound instruction in all the principal branches of experimental and applied knowledge’. There were plenty of ‘workshops’ for teaching ‘various manufacturing processes’ but lack of ‘schools of the technical knowledge’ the economy needs. The development could be good for Catholics, it was argued, because it would attract the middle classes who are under-represented among the Roman Catholic community in England. ‘Let a solid classical grounding be available and many could answer the divine call and enrol in the secular or regular clergy.’7 The contentious question was one of jurisdiction. The bishop claimed that the English province of the Society of Jesus had no authority to open a school in his diocese unless he agreed. The Jesuits maintained that to do so was in accord with the privileges of their order. The dispute was ended when the Jesuits closed the school and the bishop agreed not to investigate their privileges. In a more accepting climate the Jesuits established Campion Hall in Oxford in 1896, to make it possible for members of religious orders and Roman Catholic priests to study in Oxford. The community survives as a Permanent Private Hall of the University.8 216

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nineteenth-century experiments ii. Anglican religious orders, gentlewomen among the poor and a role for men The poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) mentioned in a letter of January 1830 that he intended to write a History of the Monastic Orders.9 In the previous year he had made the practical suggestion that something like the Beguinages of the later Middle Ages might be revived (Colloquies, xiii).10 These had in their time provided a respectable way of life for laywomen who wanted to live unmarried but independently of their families and do useful work in the world under the protection of a household of fellow Beguines. Their respectability was precarious. The ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Ages had suspected them of heretical opinions. But the underlying idea, that there was a need for provision for safe communities for working women who did not feel called to take formal vows but were willing to live lives of chastity, had its place in other ages. Southey’s suggestion had encouraged James Hornby, a Liverpool clergyman, to form a society with residential provision for nurses who found themselves between periods of service in the private houses, where they were employed from time to time to look after the sick and dying. The intention was to restrict entry to ‘persons of good character and religious principles’, but that proved hard to ensure and the venture failed.11 The notion persisted, however, and Southey’s death in 1843 prompted talk of a memorial, and recollection of this wish of his to bring modern Beguinages to England. There were other strands of influence in what happened next. In earlier nineteenth-century and Victorian England young women from good families might well feel the urge to find useful work. Society denied them much to do unless they married, and even then their hands and minds might lie idle. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s, with its heightened sense of the Catholicism of the Church of England, its romantic view of the Middle Ages and its interest in the renewal of monastic life, was a distinct prompter of this desire to be dedicated and useful and have a ‘calling’. Here was the opportunity to form ‘active orders’ of gentlewomen who could work among the poor. Marian Hughes (1817–1912), a vicar’s daughter, became the first woman in England to take religious vows since the Reformation. She was inspired by an ideal which could not easily be realised when she wanted to do this in 1841. So on Trinity Sunday in 1841 she took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in a private house, in the presence of one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82). She wrote in her diary: 217

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition This day Trinity Sunday 1841, was I enrolled one of Christ’s Virgins, espoused to Him and made His handmaid […] Written by me in the 24th year of my life at 12 o’clock at night on my knees. (Hughes, MS diary)12

Within months she was visiting Normandy to see how religious houses there ran themselves. She was able to help Lydia Sellon (1821–76) with her plans to establish a community of sisters at Devonport. She herself remained with her mother and the two of them moved to Oxford. There she found work among the local poor. By the early 1850s and after her mother’s death, Marian Hughes was living in St John Street, Oxford, where there was room to house a small community to be called the Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, dedicated to the service of the poor and needy and the care of the sick – especially in the adjacent Jericho area of Oxford – and also, not long after, to the running of schools. The rule they chose to follow was based on that of the Ursulines in France. Oxford had a cholera epidemic in which the sisters displayed great heroism. Pusey himself founded a community of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1845, at Park Village, in Regent’s Park in London. Marian Hughes worked with Pusey to design a rule for the community and he provided spiritual direction for the sisters.13 Park Village sent some of its sisters to nurse under Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. Priscilla Lydia Sellon (1821–76) had established a similar community in 1849; this (known as the Devonport Sisters) eventually merged in 1856 with Pusey’s community to form Ascot Priory, which opened in its new building in 1861. Pusey gave money buy a house for the purpose and so did Miss Sellon’s father. The first objective of the community was to provide convalescent care in semi-rural surroundings for those discharged from London hospitals, but these sisters too went to the Crimea and they later ran schools. In 1866 a temporary hospital was set up in Bethnal Green to care for the victims of a cholera outbreak there. The Irishwoman Harriet Monsell (1811–83) was another of the pious ladies attracted by the Oxford Movement and eager to offer herself for practical work within a community of sisters. She became the foundress of an order of women Augustinians with a mission of service to social needs. A special calling was the rescue of fallen women. Harriet Monsell was drawn into this work after the death of her clergyman husband when she was living near Windsor in the village of Clewer, where the local people worked on the railroad or were connected with the army and there was quite a call for prostitutes. 218

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nineteenth-century experiments The Clewer sisterhood was founded in 1849 by Mrs Tennant, another widow whose husband had been an Anglican clergyman.14 She ran a House of Mercy at Clewer, to provide a refuge for fallen women, the ‘penitents’, and help them back to moral rectitude and social acceptability. However, her health was not good enough to keep it going and from 1852 a new vicar, Thomas Telluson Carter, became its warden. There Harriet and two others took religious vows. The order extended its work to care for orphans and became known as the Community of John the Baptist. It flourished and had several hundred members by the end of the century, reaching west to the United States and east to India. Their social work embraced schools and orphanages as well as hospitals and missions to soldiers. Etheldreda Bennett (various spellings of her name are found), another Pusey penitent, and a close friend of Marian Hughes and Harriet Brownlow Byron,15 founded the Sisters of Bethany, for the less robust woman who might find the strains of the religious life too much for her health. This community ran retreats for laywomen. She herself had to wait to begin active participation in the movement while she looked after an invalid father, but she spent some time as a novice from 1866­–8, nursing the aged and infirm, and then took her vows in the Chapel of the All Saints Sisters before she started her own ‘Bethany’ community.16 There are hints of some rivalry over spiritual directors, with Fr. Upton Richards preferred by some to Pusey.17 However it seems these girls, mostly very young, took it for granted that they should submit themselves to direction in this way. Harriet Brownlow Byron founded the All Saints Sisters of the Poor in the early 1850s, after working among the poor in Marylebone on her own for six months until a few others joined her. She was another woman of good family who had been influenced by the Oxford Movement. Her family circumstances had given her opportunities to travel and she knew a good deal about religious life in Catholic Europe. She even had friends among the members of such communities. She trained as a nurse. Once launched, the community was hugely successful and it soon began to expand into work overses, including the United States.18 These communities provided themselves with Rules, variously blending Victorian expectations for the behaviour of gentlewomen with the norms of an earlier monastic life. In the case of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, the Rule had to be revised over the years to add provision for new needs – for example, the admission of lay sisters.19 The lay sisters were women who for various reasons were not free to take full vows, or who did not wish to do so yet. Some of them 219

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition were married. Some were socially influential and helped to spread the news of the sisters’ work and raise money.20 The All Saints Sisters of the Poor Rule of 1855 states two objectives: To provide a religious Asylum for incurables, aged and infirm persons in destitute circumstances, and to train up Orphan children to useful employments […] although other works of mercy may from time to time be added at the discretion of the Superiors.

To afford opportunities for persons apart from the world and its distractions to

‘perfect Holiness in the fear of the Lord’.

The entrants needed the recommendation of a clergyman. Sisters were expected to pay an annual fee towards the maintenance of the house and must undertake to possess no money or property of their own in future. Books could be brought in only with permission. The women must not leave the house except with permission. They must attend the community’s worship regularly. They must be neat, punctual, gentle, ‘recollected’ at all times. They could visit a parent, if necessary, and be visited freely by their close relatives, but letters would be censored. The main headings of the Rule are: Fasting, Silence, Humility, Charity, Poverty of Spirit. Inquisitiveness must be curbed and there should be no loud gossiping at Recreation.21 The daily timetable ran from 5.30 a.m. to bedtime at 10 p.m. with the traditional monastic hours interspersed with work, spiritual reading and three meals.22 Rules needed to be legally watertight, it proved. One of the women who had taken vows in the community led by Miss Sellon and given all her wealth to the community became a Roman Catholic and left, demanding her money back. Pusey had been caused much worry as a result. 23 Autobiographical accounts survive of the life the sisters led. Sister Caroline Mary wrote her recollections as one of the All Saints Sisters, after nearly sixty years. She explains that she had to contend with family expectations. Her father died in 1857 and her widowed mother ‘felt she could not give me up altogether’. ‘She wished me to lead a life “out of the world and devoted to the poor” in her home.’ Her elder sister and her husband were at Lucknow and feared dead in the Indian Mutiny. At first she was allowed only patchy involvement with the new experiments in religious life for women, including a spell at St Michael’s School, Bognor, where she was able to ‘help with the younger children’s lessons’, all with her mother’s permission. 220

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nineteenth-century experiments There seems to have been sharing of the ideals of this new way of life among friends. One of Caroline Mary’s friends was an Outer Sister of All Saints Convent. In 1859 she too was allowed by her mother to become an ‘Outer Sister’ there.24 Another of the Outer Sisters, Sister Anne, carried demanding domestic responsibilities. She lived with her father in Portland Place. She used to come daily to 7 o’clock Mass and go back to her home to see to

her father’s breakfast and to the House-keeping, then return to the All Saints

Home and work all day till 7 p.m. when she had to return to dress for dinner and provide her father with company all the evening – not getting to bed till midnight.25

Caroline Mary describes the intensity of the female piety these young women embraced. They favoured a ‘strict Lent’, ‘very ascetic’, ‘no butter (dry bread only) […] and 3 days no meat’. ‘The Sisters and all of us were young and we were allowed to be stricter as to food, etc. than later on.’26 The sisters’ house accommodated more than the ‘only 9 sisters’ at that time. Also living there were ‘old people’, ‘very sick and dying people’, ’20 or more orphans on another floor’, and ‘Industrial girls who slept in the attics and whose work-room was on the ground floor’.27 These ‘industrial girls’ were given some education. During their dinner one of the sisters would read to them and in the evenings, the schoolroom used for the Day School for the parish became their schoolroom, together with some girls from the ‘district’ where the sisters were exercising their ministry. The sisters did the teaching. The Industrials slept in a dormitory under the supervision of a sister who slept in a room nearby and who used to see them invidually for ‘private spiritual talks’. They were expected to read their Bibles in bed until the whole dormitory was ready for sleep. Regular baths were provided.28 It could be assumed that, as gentlewomen, the majority of the sisters would be literate and able to sew and might have other skills appropriate to a ‘lady’. Special talents and skills found an outlet. A sister who was ‘a beautiful needlewoman’ supervised sewing and taught others, including some of the Industrial girls, so that the sisters could fulfil ‘needlework orders’. After 1845 possibly 10,000 women became involved in this sort of ‘active community’ with ninety communities. Quakers and Methodists attempted communities too, as did deaconesses.29 221

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Popular hostility The sisterhoods were not widely approved of. There was popular and clerical hostility. The conduct of the sisters in involving themselves with dirty work amongst unsavoury people was feared to be unladylike. Their independence was said to constitute a threat to family life, and some said also a threat to the Church’s hierarchy and social order.30 Pressure on young women to conform could be very strong. Waiting for objecting parents to die was quite common and even when a woman was professed and under vows, she could be pressurised to return home so that a sister could marry while she looked after the remaining parent.31 There were conspiracy theories, claims that spiritual directors were tempting girls away from their family duties and the chance of marriage. Vitriolic pamphlets were written by clergy and a reputation-damaging book by Margaret Goodman who had left Park Village hinted at forcible imprisonment. There was talk of ‘stolen daughters’. ‘My household broken into – my family peace invaded – my parental authority contemned’, said Scobell, himself a clergyman and rural dean of Lewes in Sussex. His daughter was already an adult when she joined the nursing Society of St Margaret and not under her father’s authority as a minor in any case. Members of this sisterhood trained as nurses at the Westminster Hospital and extended their ministry to the local poor, under the leadership of a vicar’s daughter, Ann Gream. As a relatively new sister, Scobell’s daughter died of scarlet fever and left a legacy to the sisterhood. Her father accused John Mason Neale, founder of the venture in 1854, of having entrapped his daughter so as to steal her money. Counter-arguments were put forward by early ‘feminists’. The Englishwoman’s Journal campaigned for women’s right to work, and approved of sisterhoods as assisting that ambition. Frances Power Cobbe claimed that ‘Ritualist Nunneries at present offer the most easily accessible back-door out of Belgravian drawingrooms into anything like a field of usefulness’.32 The Ellen Ranyard Mission, founded in 1857, was a venture intended to help the poor help themselves. Ellen Raynard, horrified at a glimpse of the reality of the conditions in which the London poor were living, began it by seeking ‘a good poor woman’ who could hand out Bibles. These ‘Biblewomen’, whose activities were run at first from Ellen Raynard’s own home in Bloomsbury, multiplied and extended their activities to giving practical domestic support where they met the need. They were soon given the Bibles free to sell and thus earn themselves a living. The scope for personal independent ventures was very great and that too prompted concerns within a Church structure with tight rules and hierarchy. 222

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nineteenth-century experiments Deaconesses The Lutheran deaconess orders in Germany had an influence in prompting some Englishwomen to want to be deaconesses too. The prospect offered a career, an independent life, community. Oddly perhaps, deaconesses were not generally perceived as a threat to the clergy in the same way as the sisterhoods,33 though they had much the same range of activities as the ‘sisters’.34 Deaconesses could claim historical and Biblical respectability.35 Elizabeth Ferard (1825–83) spent some time in Germany studying what the deaconesses were doing, and came back wanting to initiate an order of deaconesses in England. She kept a Journal of her experience in the community on the Rhine in 1856, not well punctuated and hinting at the limited education available to girls, even those of good family. In it she grumbles steadily about the bed and the food and was clearly impeded by not knowing much German. Some of the sisters said that ‘the Life of a Deaconess offered sufficient opportunities of Self Denial without any self imposed mortifications’.36 Elizabeth Ferard founded the North London Deaconess Institution. There was an important question about the nature of the appointment of a deaconess. It was not the equivalent of becoming a deacon. This was not a step on the ladder to becoming a priest or bishop. It was not indelible or lifelong and it was not ‘ordination’.37 Admission to the ‘order’ of deaconess by the Bishop of the London diocese on this occasion was deemed to be an undertaking lasting for five years and certainly not an indelible ordination.38 It included the same undertaking to minister to ‘the poor, the sick, and the ignorant’, ‘setting aside all unwomanly usurpation of authority in the Church’ (form of admission, 1868). Rules include silence, avoiding gossip and complaint, giving and receiving presents, plainness of dress, neatness. In 1870, a First Order was created for those with ‘personal qualifications for leading’.39 The realities of their work were bound by strict contemporary conventions of propriety. Deaconesses who were nursing were not to go into the private sitting room of the house surgeon.40 The 1886 reminiscences of a Head Sister, Isabella Gilmore, of Rochester, emanating from the Guy’s Hospital ward where she was sister, note that the bishop made a very detailed fuss about the dress: ‘I remember how emphatic he was that it was to be a lady’s dress in every particular.’41 She describes how when she took her vows, she removed her rings, including her wedding ring (she was a widow). After the service with laying on of hands, one 223

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition woman ‘kissed and kissed me & said “it is like a wedding with no husband”’, and another ‘put £30 in my hand and told me when you want more money we will find it’.42 Men as well as women Pusey’s influence, and that of the Oxford Movement at large, is visible everwhere in these developments. Victorian gentlemen did not have the same need as gentlewomen to escape domestic confinement and find work in the world. Nevertheless, some men were attracted by the idea of returning to an older tradition of monastic life. Pusey had also planned to set up a house in Leeds where celibate priests could live together under a rule, but this venture came to nothing. Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837–1908) wanted to introduce a Benedictine way of life in the Church of England. Lydia Sellon and Pusey both encouraged him. While he was serving as deacon and non-stipendiary curate to George Prynne (1818–1903), one of the Oxford Movement enthusiasts, he founded a Society of the Love of Jesus and took the name of Brother Joseph. Travelling in Europe for his health he was able to observe monasteries and convents at first hand. Later, in 1862, he tried to set up a community near Ipswich, but there was local protest and the Bishop of Norwich would not grant him a licence to preach. He took the name of Father Ignatius and became more and more prominent as a dangerous eccentric. He was refused ordination to the priesthood unless he stopped dressing as a monk and trying to bring back Benedictinism. Undeterred, he set up a community of Anglican nuns and preached in London until the bishop there forbade him. He finally succeeded in procuring land and financial support for a community in Wales, where he became abbot and adopted such elements of the Benedictine Rule as he chose. This too failed, because he was often away and there was controversy about his acceptance of a young monk postulant who was a ward in Chancery (under the protection of the courts). In 1898 he persuaded an Old Catholic bishop to ordain him and began to plan to bring Old Catholicism into Britain. But his ideas and his behaviour became more and more outrageous.43 St Dunstan’s Priory, Norwich and the Mission House, Cowley (known as the Cowley Fathers) were the only two men’s communities in the Church of England in 1865. Cowley’s founder compiled a Rule by looking up old ones in the Codex 224

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nineteenth-century experiments Regularum Monasticarum, to be run by fully professed members who were priests, with some lay brothers.44 Not an order: University men on temporary vacation work among the poor John Ruskin (1819–1900) was another leader of Victorian reform who was struck by the possible relevance of comparisons with medieval religious orders. In his Fors clavigera, a series of letters written to British working people (though not in language likely to be easy for people of limited education to read), he said of Francis of Assisi: If instead of quitting his father’s trade, that he might nurse lepers, he had made his

father’s trade holy and pure […] perhaps at this day the Black Friars might yet have had an unruined house by the Thames shore.45

A ‘Christmas letter’ tried to evoke the true spirit of monasticism: an acknowledgement that you are not better than the poor, and are content to share their lowliness in that humility, you enter into the very soul and innermost good of sacred monastic life, and have the loveliness and sanctity of it, without the sorrow

or the danger; separating yourself from the world and the flesh, only in their sin and in their pain […] there are thousands upon thousands […] joined in no recognised fellowship, but each in their own place doing happy service to all men.46

This kind of thing has to be set in the context of a movement in which Ruskin was personally involved, which encouraged privileged young men, students at Oxford, to spend their vacations working among the poor. The Rev. S. A. Barnett, Vicar of St Jude’s, Whitechapel, wrote in 1884: It is nine years since four or five Oxford undergraduates chose to spend part of their vacation in East London […] becoming members of clubs, and teaching in classes or schools.47

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chapter ix

Modern Western monasticism

i. The modernisation of traditional forms of monasticism The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) transformed both the external and visible features and something of the the inward spirit of monastic life in the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican II Decree on the adaptation and renewal of religious life (Perfectae caritatis) was proclaimed on 28 October 1965. It began with a summary history of the ways in which, from the beginning of Christianity, some ‘lived as hermits or founded religious families, which the Church gladly welcomed and approved by her authority’. It explained that those who are called to this life have chosen to ‘bind themselves to the Lord in a special way’, following Christ in embracing poverty and in obedience. Through ‘this total life-long gift of themselves’ they enrich ‘the life of the Church’. The decree approves the ‘distinctiveness’ of the different orders and their work. It also fosters acculturation – adjustment of the way of life of an order to fit its times and the places where it finds itself – with members of religious orders encouraged to acquire ‘an adequate knowledge of the social conditions of the times they live in and of the needs of the Church’:1 The manner of living, praying and working should be suitably adapted everywhere, but especially in mission territories, to the modern physical and psychological circumstances of the members and also, as required by the nature of each institute, to the necessities of the apostolate, the demands of culture, and social and economic circumstances.2

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modern western monasticism The new expectations are strongly expressed. Updating of Rules is encouraged: Let constitutions, directories, custom books, books of prayers and ceremonies and such like be suitably re-edited and, obsolete laws being suppressed, be adapted to the decrees of this sacred synod.3

Updating of dress is required. The language is of ‘must’: The religious habit, an outward mark of consecration to God, should be simple and modest, poor and at the same time becoming. In addition it must meet the requirements of health and be suited to the circumstances of time and place and to the

needs of the ministry involved. The habits of both men and women religious which do not conform to these norms must be changed.4

For contemplative nuns whose calling is to live an enclosed life, ‘Papal cloister should be maintained’ but modernised: It must be adjusted to conditions of time and place and obsolete practices suppressed. This should be done after due consultation with the monasteries in question.

In orders where the nuns do work outside their convents, enclosure should be less strict: Other nuns applied by rule to apostolic work outside the convent should be

exempted from papal cloister in order to enable them better to fulfill the apostolic

duties entrusted to them. Nevertheless, cloister is to be maintained according to the prescriptions of their constitutions.5

Lay and clerical members of ‘Secular institutes, although not Religious institutes’ must ‘live in the world’.6 The consequences of these changes went further than had been anticipated and in unforeseen directions. After Vatican II, the religious orders opened themselves up to lay involvement in new ways, as instructed. For many centuries the special calling of monks and nuns had – sometimes controversially, as we have seen – been a defining idea, as had their separation from the world. An enclosed order of Benedictine nuns might have had extern sisters but they were there to 227

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition emphasise the completeness of the enclosure of the ‘choir’ nuns. They could not be full members of the community. Local people might join in the worship of the community but the nuns remained behind a screen and did not sit together with the lay congregation. Removing the sense of ‘apartness’ proved less welcome to the laity than had been expected. Some orders of nuns adopted modern dress, even informal lay-style dress, in place of the uncomfortable and constricting garments worn since the Middle Ages. Religious orders began to explore new ways of being active in the world and where they dressed more or less like lay people this could be confusing. It was felt by some to send mixed messages about the set-apartness and dedication of the nuns, and there was some pulling back. In 1996 Pope John Paul II set out revised principles to govern the choice of dress for those in the religious life: The Church must always seek to make her presence visible in everyday life, especially in contemporary culture, which is often very secularized and yet sensitive to the language of signs. In this regard the Church has a right to expect a significant contribution from consecrated persons, called as they are in every situation to bear clear witness that they belong to Christ.

The religious habit is symbolic, ‘a sign of consecration, poverty and membership in a particular Religious family’, so there is a case for expecting that men and women religious will ‘wear their proper habit, suitably adapted to the conditions of time and place’. If lay dress is worn for ‘valid reasons’, religious should dress modestly and simply and wear a symbol which makes their consecration apparent.7 A drop in recruitment One of the consequences of these post-Vatican II changes proved to be a drop in the number of vocations to traditional forms of monastic life as well as to the priesthood. The very air of ‘specialness’ which had made Wyclif and then the sixteenth-century reformers so indignant was missed when it was diminished. The changes throughout the Church included the abandonment of Latin as the language of worship. The liturgy became vernacular throughout the Church, except for a few places where Latin was retained, and many orders of monks and nuns chose to adopt the vernacular too, both for worship and for reading. But that 228

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modern western monasticism again helped to put off some potential recruits. The number of recruits entering seminaries to prepare for the priesthood dropped so much – a mere few dozen even for Jesuits and Franciscans – that seminaries began to close. Since then priests, monks and nuns in the old-established orders have become a steadily ageing community with a substantial net loss of total numbers. The number of monks in the USA has more than halved since 1965 and half of the remainder will be over seventy years old by the end of the present decade. There have ceased to be enough priests to provide one for each parish. Less than a tenth of the number of ‘teaching’ nuns running schools in 1965 (over 100,000) were teaching in 2002.8 Similar patterns of decline are observable elsewhere in the world, especially perhaps in northern Europe and the ‘old West’. Despite these great changes and their consequences, traditional forms of Western monasticism persist today, some in conscious continuity with the past. Old traditions are still vividly alive in such communities. ‘Papal enclosure’ still imposes the strictest possible separation from the world upon nuns in those Benedictine houses which accept it, some of which continue to use Latin and seek to live in a pre-Vatican II manner, with extern sisters dealing with the practical communication with the world which is necessary. 9 Other ‘traditional’ communities have established new relationships with the world, showing it their faces in novel ways. Religious houses commonly have websites on which they explain their way of life and how the would-be monk or nun may enter the order. The English Stanbrook Abbey of Benedictine nuns, which moved from its former house to a new one, now offers an invitation on its website which includes a familiar estate-agent’s adjective (‘stunning’) to describe the beauty of the new place: Rooted in the ancient monastic tradition and transplanted to this stunning location, the Stanbrook Community invites you to join us.10

The old tradition might have made the lack of beautiful scenery a positive feature for the postulant who simply wanted to spend a life alone with God. In a newsletter for the season of Advent 2012, the abbey describes with dry humour the celebration of the Golden Jubilee in the monastic life of one of its nuns, Swedish by birth: There was the traditional escort of the Jubilarian to the calefactory by the Abbess for tea and recreation at which a beautiful confection, decorated with chocolate

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition runic marks […] was served. The rendition of the Jubilee song, an adaptation of a

Swedish hymn, Den signade dag,‘This Most Blessed Day’ (translated and adapted by the Jubilarian), was somewhat impaired by the low volume of the portable organ outside the calefactory […] [the Jubilarian] presented us with a beautiful wall

hanging, about six feet long, designed and woven by herself in a rose path pattern and using strong bright colours apparently favoured in Lapland. 11

The West beyond Europe today When ‘Western’ monasticism began, ‘West’ meant Western Europe and included Latin-speaking North African parts of the Roman Empire. It was distinguished from ‘Eastern’ monasticism partly by the language barrier which grew up between Greek- and Latin-speaking areas as the Roman Empire decayed. A millennium and a half later, ‘the West’ means something geographically quite different. It includes parts of the world colonised by Western European explorers in the sixteenth century and after, in which a European language remains dominant and where Christianity is a significant if not a majority religion. It is impossible to attempt more than a sketch here. In the USA are monasteries founded mainly from Roman Catholic Europe as well as half a dozen ‘congregations’ or federations of direct American origin but formed on European models. A list as it stood in 2009 included seven Benedictine communities of women, mostly small. From the congregation of Solesmes came the Monastery of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Vermont, founded in 1981 by the Abbaye SainteMarie des Deux-Montagnes in Canada. From Stanbrook Abbey in England derived St Scholastica Priory (1980) in Massachusetts, but Stanbrook itself is a seventeenthcentury foundation first begun in Cambrai in Flanders, where English Benedictines could practise the monastic life in relative safety. A US community of Camaldolese nuns is a dependent priory of Sant’ Antonio Abate, Rome. There is much variety in the styles and attitudes of these communities. Some were founded in the last fifty years. Some regard themselves as having a special calling to serve specific immigrant communities, loosely mirroring within the Western traditions the fragmented diaspora of the European Orthodox where immigrants from different countries with different native languages preserve separate Orthodox Churches (for example, a Serbian Orthodox Church and so on). Monastic communities also survive formed on the old models but outside the Roman Catholic Church. These have arisen in Protestant churches, especially 230

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modern western monasticism the Anglicans and Lutheran.12 Anglicanism embraces a wide spectrum of ‘Churchmanship’ from ‘high’ to ‘low’, ‘Catholic’ to ‘Evangelical’. Lutheran Benedictines arose in the Lutherans’ own ‘high church’ community. In 1960 four Lutheran theological students took religious vows and formed the Holy Cross Fraternity, with the guidance of a priest who was an Anglican Franciscan, though they eventually identified themselves as followers of the Benedictine Rule. This monastery sustains itself financially by producing candles for ecclesiastical use. These Anglican and Lutheran houses are invited to send their abbots as observers, though not as full participants, to the conferences of Benedictine abbots in Rome. Modern mental health concerns At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Benedictine community entered by Monica Baldwin, the old extreme austerities were thought normal and not unhealthily excessive. She writes of the use of the scourge for self-flagellation, of ‘bracelets of steel […] studded with points […] chain girdles on the same lines […] Haircloths – the favourite garment of the Fathers of the Church – were desperately uncomfortable things […] made of knotted horsehair with as many ends as possible left loose to prick the wearer’, all inflicted in pursuit of the ‘subjection of the body to the spirit’.13 The underlying presumptions here had not changed since the early Christian centuries, when they were formed by strong currents in late antique philosophy. There is much more awareness today than in former ages that some of those who choose to leave the world and live an extreme life may be mentally ill. Those wishing to join the Carthusians now need a medical check to guard against their entering this contemplative order with known psychiatric problems.14 Combining the old and the new Alongside these communities which seek to continue a past tradition are innovations which combine old tradition with an adaptation to meet modern needs. Some of these could be said to coincide with archetypes which have appeared at intervals down the centuries. Some are more modern in conception. A medieval monastic tradition was the care of the sick. Nuns in ‘active orders’ still nurse. A 231

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition congregation founded specifically for disabled women in the 1930s gave rise in 2001 to a house in Connecticut, founded by St Joseph Monastery in Brou-surChantereine in France and called the Community of Jesus Crucified.15 Its members are few and all in their seventies and their nursing has unavoidably turned inward to look after their own. Some traditional monastic communities are thus forced into active life – whether or not this forms part of the special mission of the order – at least in part, by the very medical needs of their ageing members which turns their brothers and sisters perforce into nurses, when younger recruits are few. Others have embraced the activity as a defining feature of their particular way of life. Lay vocations and the idea of ‘tertiaries’ Where active engagement in work for the world occurs, it brings with it new needs about working with the laity or allowing the laity to play a part in the life of the community. The Second Vatican Council offered an opening to the expansion of a ‘third way’ of sanctified life to those who continued to live in the world with families and jobs. ‘Third Orders’ rethought their rules and constitutions. In Christifideles Laici, published in 1988 after the Synod of Bishops of 1987, the Pope explored the notion that the lay faithful are Christ’s labourers in the vineyard, ‘sent’ by him just as much as are clergy and members of religious orders.16 A ‘member’ of a Third Order is not a cleric and takes no vow. The chosen way of life can be abandoned at any time. There are now flourishing secular Franciscan fraternities17 and Anglican Franciscan tertiaries.18 A ‘third order’ of Augustinians is made up of lay men and women who lead their lives inder the guidance of professed Augustinian friars. Ecumenical ‘third orders’ also appeared. The Order of St Andrew began within Anglicanism but it welcomes all members who are Christians. The Community of Aidan and Hilda describes itself as ‘a dispersed, ecumenical body drawing inspiration from the lives of the Celtic saints’.19 Opus Dei Opus Dei in its modern meaning20 offers strictness and mortification as a way of life for the laity as well as for religious and clergy. It began in 1928, as a project 232

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modern western monasticism of a Spanish priest, and won papal approval in 1950.21 Members of Opus Dei, approaching 100,000 and mainly lay people living at home with their families, have their own bishop, who has personal jurisdiction wherever they happen to live. Some members are priests and some are celibate. But the influence of Opus Dei probably depends on the presence of its members in positions of power in a wide variety of universities22 and other educational establishments (several schools in the Philippines) and training courses. Opus Dei has attracted strong criticism for alleged excesses of austerity in the sacrifices and self-disciplines it expects of its members in their daily lives, and for allegedly involving itself in global politics by doing deals with undesirable governments. ii. Experimental new modern forms of religious life Communes The new experiments have included ‘communes’, a phenomenon particularly popular in the 1960s but reviving again more recently.23 These may differ from Christian monastic communities in substituting a secular ideal for the Christian one. They have often been seen as a political and social ‘good thing’, holding possessions in common, demonstrating self-sufficiency in supporting themselves, and getting ‘back to nature’ and ‘back to the land’. They tend to welcome both sexes. The German Kommuja, which had an earlier history, revived in the 1960s and sometimes included nudity and a sexual communism among their members. A recent emphasis has been the attempt to live an eco-friendly life. Experimental Christian communities today may be non-residential, like the St Jude Community founded in London in 2005. Its members see themselves as ‘voyagers’. They have ‘Community Guardians’ for members to consult if they find themselves in difficulties. Another community which took the name of Moot identified a mission of hospitality in the centre of London to ‘seekers’ or ‘questers’ after answers to spiritual questions. In the modern world such communities can have ideals geared especially to social work. The Odyssey movement, started in Derby in the early twenty-first century, shared this notion of ‘journeying’ through reaching out to local people, especially the homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics and others damaged by modern life such as survivors of abuse, and offering them a ‘safe place’. This group practises prayer and Bible reading but 233

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition opens itself to those who do not feel at home with the traditional Churches and their offerings. Closer to traditional monasticism are experiments in which there is a formal process of joining a community in a commitment involving something more like the notion of a ‘second baptism’ which so offended Wyclif and the sixteenth-century reformers. Such communities may, however, be far more generous in their requirements, allowing married people to join and not requiring stability or even living together in community, merely some form of ‘belonging’. These experimenters find they are facing some of the same questions as had arisen in the early Church. Called? For what and how? If this is to be a religious community and not simply a charity or not-for-profit venture, will there be regular arrangements for prayer and worship? What will be the balance between the activity they specialise in and the inward religious life of their members? How will they organise the leadership or governance of the community, especially if it begins with loyalty to a particular person with an attractive idea? Will anyone be allowed to join or will they impose some form of test? How will they preserve the vision or ideal with which they set out? What will they do if enthusiastic joiners do not stay long but tend to leave after a short time? How will they deal with the differences of opinion and disputes which arise in any community? iii. Monasticism and modern mission Missionary activity is by definition ‘outgoing’. That may seem at odds with a calling to withdraw from the world. Religious orders have not always found it easy to keep a balance. We have seen where missionary activity led for the Jesuits from the late sixteenth century; it made them high-profile, influential, but suspected of political intrigue and plotting in high places.24 Missionary work to bring Christianity to new peoples for the first time happened first in the European and North African parts of the Old World. Western Europe was more or less ‘Christianised’ by the end of the Middle Ages. Islam’s conquest of the Middle East and much of North Africa and southern Spain delayed further Christian missionary penetration until Spain became mainly Christian once more by the end of the fifteenth century. In the Balkans there remained a complicated area of ‘interface’ between Greek Orthodox and Latin Roman Catholic Christians and Islam had a presence there too. 234

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modern western monasticism Modern missionary activity beyond Europe followed upon the European ‘discovery’ of the rest of the world – that is, the world which lies outside Europe, North Africa and Asia, which were known to the ancient world. It was a process almost entirely conducted from Western Europe and it has left its stamp on the language, politics and societies of much of the globe. Monastic mission and the New World The West’s first missionary experiments of modern times were in South America. Spanish and the Portuguese mendicant orders were quick to send missionaries in the sixteenth century as part of the settlement of the newly discovered continent. Spanish Roman Catholic missions reached north into California in the eighteenth century, when Franciscan missions arrived from South America. The mission at Santa Barbara (1768) was the tenth of these. These missionaries came to stay. They built a convento for the friars at each mission and huts within the compound for the native American converts to live in. Possibly there was a hope that some of the converts would themselves become Franciscans.25 Yet the period of active Franciscan mission conducted in this manner lasted barely a century. In the 1830s the lands moved into private hands. California became a state in 1850. The mudbrick buildings decayed and the local native American converts went away.26 The nineteenth century to today: Mission and commerce Roman Catholic missionary activity has continued to be led by religious orders, particularly the mendicants, which had always been ‘active’ orders, and above all the Jesuits, who had had a missionary calling from their foundation. The Marist Fathers (the Society of Mary) were founded with a special missionary purpose in 1816 by Jean-Claude Colin, bringing to fruition an idea of Jean-Claude Courveille (1787–1866) and drafting a Rule for it. The society was slowly permitted to try out its missionary zeal locally in France, then to run a seminary. Among the parts of the world most urgently needing evangelisation were Africa, Asia and Oceania. In 1836, Rome entrusted Oceania, including New Zealand, to the Marists. There they have pursued their mission, and done a good deal to make the botany and zoology and the languages of the islands better known. 235

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the i.b.tauris history of monasticism: the western tr adition Vita Consecrata on mission and modern culture In 1996, after a Synod of Bishops, Pope Paul II issued an Apostolic Exhortation on ‘The Consecrated Life’ (Vita Consecrata). This included reflections on mission and on education seen as a ‘dimension’ of the Church’s mission. ‘Consecrated persons […] are called to bring to bear on the world of education their radical witness to the values of the Kingdom.’ They have a ‘rich heritage of pedagogical traditions built up since the establishment of their Institute’ which helps them ‘to be especially effective in educational activities’. There should be ‘missionary boldness’ (paras 96–7). There is a difficult balance to be maintained. The consecrated ‘should ensure the preservation of their unique Catholic identity in complete fidelity to the Church’s Magisterium, all the while engaging in active dialogue with present-day cultural trends’. Monastic life is seen as having special experience since ‘the Middle Ages, when monasteries became places for the study of the cultural riches of the past, and for the development of a new humanistic and Christian culture’. They have had to do something similar ‘every time the light of the Gospel has spread to new nations and peoples. Many consecrated persons have been promoters of culture, and frequently have studied and defended indigenous cultures.’ ‘A commitment to study does not isolate consecrated persons […] rather, it is an incentive to dialogue and cooperation, a training in the capacity for judgment, a stimulus to contemplation and prayer.’ The challenges of ‘social media’ are touched on, though in 1996 they had scarcely begun to have the effects they now have. ‘Just as in the past consecrated persons successfully used all kinds of means at the service of evangelization and skilfully met difficulties, today too they are challenged anew by the need to bear witness to the Gospel through the communications media.’ This too needs care ‘with regard to the distorted use of the media, especially given their extraordinary power of persuasion’. ‘The Church’s response is above all educational: it aims at promoting a correct understanding of the dynamics underlying the media and a careful ethical assessment of their programmes, as well as the development of healthy habits in their use.’27

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Conclusion

‘Religious life’ has taken many forms in the West. A writer of the twelfth century became so exasperated by the proliferation of experimental forms (and it was to grow worse) that he wrote a short critical book, ‘On different orders’ (De diversis ordinibus).1 This diversity was seen as God’s intention in 1996 in a papal response to a Synod of Bishops, Vita Consecrata: Diversity is also a work of the Spirit. It is he who establishes the Church as an organic communion in the diversity of vocations, charisms and ministries.2

Many variations are approved in this papal statement, designed to be definitive for the future. Among the traditional monastic vocations, contemplatives ‘in solitude and silence, by listening to the word of God, participating in divine worship, personal asceticism, prayer, mortification and the communion of fraternal love […] direct the whole of their lives and all their activities to the contemplation of God’.3 Hermits ‘bear witness to the passing nature of the present age by their inward and outward separation from the world’.4 Canons and friars and other ‘active’ orders live an ‘apostolic religious life’ in ‘the different families of Canons Regular, the Mendicant Orders, the Clerics Regular and in general the Religious Congregations of men and women devoted to apostolic and missionary activity and to the many different works inspired by Christian charity’.5 More modern experiments, unknown in quite these forms to earlier ages, are described. These are the secular institutes. ‘Through their own specific blending of presence in the world and consecration, the[se] seek to make present in society the newness and power of Christ’s Kingdom, striving to transfigure the world from 237

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conclusion within by the power of the Beatitudes’.6 Responding to a calling both old and new, some choose to try to live a ‘consecrated life’ in their own homes, as an Order of Virgins ‘committed to serve while remaining in the world’.7 These have their precedents in the earliest Christian centuries, as Jerome’s correspondence with such consecrated virgins and widows attests.8 Traditional and modern dangers are also noted in Vita Consecrata. One is the risk of contamination by ‘the world’. In past centuries this took many forms, as we have already seen in earlier chapters. There is a particularly modern risk too in an age when the culture of the West prizes multicultural flexibility and condemns discrimination against those whose beliefs differ. Vita Consecrata warns that ‘the praiseworthy desire to become close to the men and women of our day, believers and non-believers, rich and poor, can lead to the adoption of a secularized lifestyle or the promotion of human values’. This is territory on which it is not at all easy to tread with confidence. It is ‘necessary to recognize and overcome certain temptations which sometimes, by diabolical deceit, present themselves under the appearance of good’. ‘The legitimate need to be familiar with today’s society in order to respond to its challenges can lead to a surrender to passing fashions.’ ‘Sharing in the legitimate aspirations of one’s own nation or culture could lead to embracing forms of nationalism.’9 We have watched monks and nuns down the centuries falling into pride in their spiritual achievements or allowing themselves luxuries and breaches of the Rule, even getting involved in the business of the ‘world’ they are supposed to have ‘left’, but the danger of the last happening is probably greater now than ever before. For its part, ‘the world’ has tended to take its own view of monastic life, sometimes mercilessly. The monk or nun or friar as a figure of fun or satire became a commonplace of the legacy of the monastic life in the West. Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims include a gaggle of ridiculous and improper characters who are variously ‘in the religious life’: an abbot, a prioress, a monk, various mendicants and their hangers-on. Shakespeare’s plays contain numerous uncomplimentary allusions: to a ‘fat friar’;10 a ‘meddling friar’;11 a ‘saucy friar, a very meddling fellow’.12 Friar Laurence helps to spin the plot in Romeo and Juliet. Jesuits appear as protagonists in some of the scandals of the early modern world. In some Protestant Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, monks are still seen as fit subjects for satire.13 Matthew Lewis was the son of a planter in Jamaica who wanted him to have a diplomatic career (his mother had run away with a music tutor). Lewis’ The Monk was written in 1794 when he was nineteen and working in a lowly position in the British Embassy 238

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conclusion in The Hague. The plot begins with the seduction of Abbot Ambrosio by a demon-woman who has taken the form of a nun. She persuades him to sell his soul to the Devil and there follows a rollicking tale of Satanism, sex and death. This was a derivative work, a work of its time, influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and behind those, by German (Goethe) and Greek sources. Commercially, it proved a very successful novel outside the English-speaking world, even in Revolutionary France; popular versions with red-top titles were put out. Yet in this uneasy climate of mutual mistrust, for centuries in Western countries, Christian belief has formed the bedrock to social attitudes. The expression of society’s expectations about behaviour have been until very recently broadly those of Christian ethics. Generation by generation, children were educated in Christian beliefs and became familiar with the content of the Bible, sang hymns and engaged in expressly Christian worship at school or in ceremonial national contexts. The culture of the USA is now unusual in the West in accepting it as normal (and a vote-winner) for politicians to present themselves as believing Christians. Detailed personal knowledge of Christian faith and Christian history is now not to be taken for granted in many Western populations. In the multicultural societies of contemporary Europe, particularly in Britain, religious education has adjusted to meet multifaith needs. Children of families of non-Christian faith communities are possibly more likely to be brought up with an understanding of the history and beliefs of their religion. Children of the Christian tradition are less likely to grow up with a basic knowledge of Christian beliefs or the text of the Bible and they therefore lack the concomitant awareness of the cultural heritage of Christian Europe. All this is important for the attempt to write a history of Western monasticism because the monastic life has been embedded in a cultural and intellectual climate of assumptions which cannot now be taken for granted. Monasticism’s attractions tend to baffle modern Western understanding. Few people now present themselves at the door of a monastery eager to give up for life all their personal property; ownership of their very selves; the right to choose what they do from hour to hour; and the freedom to plan their own lives, pursue a career, marry and start a family. But some still do, responding to the call the earliest ‘desert Fathers’ believed they heard. Those who have done so have often found profound satisfactions and windows on the world and glimpses of the divine, which it seems may only be opened in that way.

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Notes

Introduction    1 For more on these, see p. 15.   2 Bernhard Eckerstorfer, OSB, ‘The Future of Monastic Formation: Reflections from an Austrian Monk’, The American Benedictine Review, 64 (September 2013): 282–305, http://www.communityofthegospel.org/images/The_Future_of_ Monastic_Formation.pdf.   3 Ibid.   4 Ibid.   5 Ibid.   6 Ibid.   7 Vita Consecrata, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/ documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.   8 Anselm, Proslogion, l, S 1, 97.    9 William of Saint Thierry, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu 1.120–4, trans. Theodore Berkeley, The Works of William of St Thierry, Cistercian Fathers, 12 (Massachusetts, 1971), 51–2.  10 Thomas Merton on St Bernard, ed. Patrick Hart, Cistercian Publications, 8 (Kalamazoo, 1980), 39.  11 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/ hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.   12 See pp. 66–7.  13 Fulgentius, Vita, Selected Works, trans. Robert B. Eno (Washington, 1997), 8.   14 Ibid., 9.  15 Bede, EH, 122–5.  16 Libri sub oculis dixi et, quia tempus paulo vacantius repperi, posteriora tractando dictavi, cumque mihi spatia largiora suppeterent, Moralia, 3. 241

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notes  17 Modo per contemplationis ascensum, modo per moralitatis instrumentum volui, Moralia, 3.  18 Qui certamina spiritalis pugnae sustinuit, etiam consummatae suae victoriae gesta narravit, Gregory, Moralia, Preface (I. 3), 9.  19 Vita Consecrata, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/ documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html (last accessed 5 August 2015).

I. How it all began    1 Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.95), writing on Perfection, is one of the early Christian Fathers to to discuss the practice of the imitation of Christ: Life of Macrina, Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1966), 93ff.   2 Gabriele Winkler, ‘The origins and idiosyncrasies of the earliest form of asceticism’, The Continuing Quest for God, ed. William Skudlarek (Collegeville, MN, 1982), 9–43, 16–21 for examples.    3 D. Burton-Christie made the practical attempt to search for Biblical references in the ‘sayings’ of the desert fathers, in an endeavour to show that at least some of them are likely to have had access to or knowledge of the necessary texts of the Scriptures: D. Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), 34.   4 Ibid., 43.    5 See p. 29.   6 Winkler, ‘The origins and idiosyncrasies of the earliest form of asceticism’, 11–12.   7 Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 45–7.   8 New Revised Standard Version.    9 See pp. 181–2.  10 Origen, Contra Celsum, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1953).  11 Porphyry, Against the Christians: Literary Remains, ed. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY, 1994).   12 Sebastian Guly, ‘The distinction between propatheiai and First Voluntary Movements in Origen’s De Principiis III’, Studia Patristica, 50 (2011): 177–88.   13 Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, 1981), 104.  14 Ibid.  15 http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.mb.txt.   16 P. R. L. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, Carl Newell Jackson lectures (Harvard Press, 1978).  17 Corpus Hermeticum, ed. A. D. Nock (Paris, 1960–72), 4 vols.  18 Aristotle, Metaphysics, V, 1013a.

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notes   19 On these controversies, see Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (rev. edn) (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002).   20 RB, Prologue.   21 RB, Prologue.  22 Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, xii–xiii.   23 Ibid., 99.   24 Ibid., 96.   25 Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius (Oxford, 1993).  26 Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 1.29, trans. Gillian Clark (London, 2000).   27 I Corinthians 9.24.   28 Matthew 11.18.   29 Winkler, ‘The origins and idiosyncrasies of the earliest form of asceticism’, 14–15.   30 Matthew 4.1–11.   31 Matthew 11.13–14.   32 Matthew 16 and Matthew 22.34.   33 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, V.17 (29); V.15 (73).  34 Flavius Josephus, Judaean Antiquities, 1–4, trans. with commentary Louis H. Feldman (Boston, 2004).  35 Philo, De vita contemplativa, III (21)–(34).  36 Ibid.  37 Ibid.  38 Ibid.   39 Ibid., VIII (6.8).   40 Severus of Antioch, Adversus apologiam Juliani, ed. R. Hespel (Louvain, 1964–71), 128.   41 Invocation of the Holy Spirit was ‘for a purpose’, as in confirmation or ordination or, as here, for the making of a monastic profession.   42 PG 3.529–33B.  43 Eusebius, EH, 2.17.   44 Acts 2.45.   45 This urge to find all authorities speaking with one voice became central to Christian Biblical exegesis too.   46 Mark 12.17.  47 Eusebius, EH, 5.1.7.  48 Eusebius, EH, 8.1.  49 Suetonius, Life and Works, ed. and trans. C. Rolfe and J. Carew (Cambridge, MA, 1960).  50 Eusebius, EH, 3.33. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96 and 97/98.  51 Cicero, De officiis, ii.4.  52 Eusebius, EH, 5.21.

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notes   53 Dionysius relates these things concerning Valerian, says Eusebius.   54 Eusebius, EH, 8.3.  55 Liviu Barbu, ‘“Charisma” vs. “Institution”? The Ascetics and the Church’, Studia Patristica, 45 (Louvain, 2010), 4–8, 5 on this dispute.  56 Cyprian, Letter 76.   57 Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, ed. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA, 1950–2), 3 vols, XXII, xvii.   58 William Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford, 1971).  59 Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, (1).   60 More on the martyrs of Palestine is to be found in Eusebius, EH, Book 8.  61 Tertullian, Apologeticus, eds. F. Oehler, John E. B. Mayor, trans. A. Souter (Cambridge, 1917).   62 Matthew 25.36.  63 Prudentius, Poems, trans. M. Clement Eagan, The Fathers of the Church (New York, 1962), 67–8.  64 http://www.carmelitemonks.org/FormationProcess.php  65 Ibid.  66 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward (London, 1975), Prologue, 1. This material was preserved in Coptic, Syrian, Greek, and later in Latin, from an oral tradition which cannot be precisely dated. Taken from the text in PG 65.71–440.   67 Ibid., Introduction by Metropolitan Anthony, vii.  68 Ibid.   69 Ibid., viii.   70 Ibid., ix.   71 Ibid., vii.  72 Ibid.   73 Ibid., 9.  74 Ibid.   75 Winkler, ‘The Origins and Idiosyncrasies of the Earliest Form of Asceticism’, 20–3.  76 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 8.  77 Ibid., 6.   78 Ibid., 12.   79 Ibid., 73.   80 Ibid., 75.   81 Ibid., 81.   82 Ibid., 78.   83 Who may be the one who met Rufinus in the 370s or a later figure.  84 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 137.   85 Ibid., 143.   86 Ibid., 145.   87 Ibid., 7.

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notes  88   89   90   91

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vita-antony.asp. 2 Corinthians 12.2–4. Matthew 3.1, Mark 1.4. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 137, trans. William B. Palardy, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 2005), Vol. 2, 165–6.  92 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 193.   93 Ibid., 12.  94 Egeria, Itinerarium Egeriae, Diary of a Pilgrimage, trans. George E. Gingras, Ancient Christian Writers (New York, 1970).   95 Ibid., 75.   96 Ibid., 77.   97 Ibid., 87.   98 Ibid., 89.   99 St Basil, Ascetical works, trans. M. Wagner, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 10. 100 Ibid., 16–17. 101 Cyprian, Letter 10, 250 ad, to martyrs and confessors in prison. 102 The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 2. 103 Owen Chadwick, John Cassian (Cambridge, 1950), 62. 104 Augustine, De opere monachorum, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL (Vienna, 1900), XIII.14 and XVI.17. 105 http://www.saintjonah.org/services/stpachomius.htm. 106 http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/sozomen_on_pachomius.htm. 107 Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 47. 108 D. F. Bumazhnov, ‘Some Further Observations Concerning the Early History of the Term MONAKOS (Monk)’, Studia Patristica, 45 (2010): 21–6. 109 Barsanuphius and John, Letters, trans. John Chryssaugis, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 2006), 3–4. 110 Ephrem the Syrian, Selected Prose Works, trans. E. G. Matthews, Joseph P. Amar, Kathleen McVey (Washington, 1994), 15, but the complexity of the sources makes this uncertain. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 350. 113 Barsanuphius and John, Letters, 264. 114 Ibid., 265. 115 Henrik Rydell Johnsén, ‘Training for Solitude: John Climacus and the Art of Making a Ladder’, Studia Patristica, 48 (Louvain, 2010), 159–64 and see PG 88. 116 Basil, Letter 223, trans. Agnes Clare Way, The Fathers of the Church, 127–8. 117 Ibid., 131. 118 Ibid., Letter 224, 141. 119 Ibid., Letter 295, 286–7.

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notes 120 Anna Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford, 2005), 2. 121 St Basil, Ascetical Works, trans. M. Wagner, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 9. 122 Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great, 84–6. 123 Ibid., 19–20. 124 See pp. 57–9. 125 Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great, 86–7, 102–27. 126 Ibid., 35. 127 Ibid., 431. 128 Ibid., 31. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 32. 131 Life of Macrina, by Gregory of Nyssa, her brother, Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1966), 163–5. 132 Ibid., 166–8. 133 Ibid., 168–70. 134 Ibid., 171. 135 Ibid., 180–1. 136 Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great, 20–1. 137 Ibid., 81. 138 http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/history3.aspx#Monasticism. 139 See p. 206. 140 See Graham Gould, ‘The collection of Apophthegmata patrum in Palladii Lausiaca 20 (PL 74.377–82)’, Studia Patristica, 45 (2010): 27–31. 141 Tertullian, Apologeticus, 2.1.1–3. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 Eusebius, EH, 6.3. 145 Matthew 19.21ff. and see Richard Finn, ‘Early Christian Asceticism and Almsgiving: Origen’s Ascetic Beginnings’, Studia Patristica, 45 (2010): 9–20. 146 Acts 2.45 and 4.34–5; Augustine, De opere monachorum, XXI.25. 147 Augustine, De opere monachorum, XXII.25. 148 Salvian, Ad ecclesiam, Writings, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 269–371, 271. 149 Ibid., 301. 150 Chadwick, Cassian, 62; Cassian, Institutes, IV.20, Reg. 31. 151 Letter 34 ‘On the Alms Table’, Letters of St Paulinus of Nola, trans. P. G. Walsh, 2 vols (London, 1967), Vol. II, 163. 152 Didascalia Apostolorum, xix.1. 153 Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 41, trans. William B. Palardy, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 2004), Vol. 1, 165–6.

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notes 154 Luke 11.41. 155 This attitude is faintly redolent of the habit of the Manichees and other dualists of distinguishing between the elect and the followers. These too thought they could gain merit by providing for the elect. The very rich may even be able to buy the freedom of the prisoners, says the Didascalia Apostolorum (xix.1). 156 http://www.saintjonah.org/services/stpachomius.htm. 157 Ann Conway-Jones, ‘The Garments of Heaven: Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of the Priestly Robe (Life of Moses, 2.189–91) seen in the Light of Heavenly Ascent Texts’, Studia Patristica, 50 (2011): 207–15. 158 II Kings 1.8.

II. Monks go West   1 David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1964).   2 Adalbert de Vogüé, The Rule of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary (Kalamazoo, 1983), 57–8.    3 See pp. 57–8.    4 On the Arians, see Rowan Williams, Arius (London, 1987).    5 See pp. 157–8.   6 Henry Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila (Oxford, 1976).   7 Sulpicius Severus, Life of St Martin, Opera, ed. C. Halm, CSEL, 1 (Vienna, 1866).   8 On Jerome and Augustine see p. 49.    9 Niceta of Remesiana, Writings, trans. Gerald C.Walsh, The Fathers of the Church (New York, 1949), 5.  10 Letter 11 to Severus, Letters of St Paulinus of Nola, trans. P. G. Walsh, 2 vols (London, 1967), Vol. I, 99.  11 Ibid.  12 See John Henry Newman, ‘The mission of St Benedict’, Atlantis, January 1858, Historical Sketches, Vol. II, 377.   13 John Henry Newman, Apologia, 3 and 4 (1865), http://www.newmanreader. org/works/apologia65/chapter3.html; and Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction, 7, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/historical/volume1/primitive/ vincent.html.   14 Vincent of Lérins, Dialogues, 1.10.  15 Salvian, Letter 4, Writings, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 241–50.  16 Salvian, Letter 1, Writings, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 238–9.   17 See p. 42.

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notes   18 See p. 98.  19 Chadwick, Cassian, 29.  20 Cassian, Conferences, in Western Asceticism, Christian Classics, 195.  21 Cassian, Collationes, CSEL, 13, 7.   22 Cassian, Conferences, 195.   23 Ibid., 279–80.  24 Cassian, De Institutione coenobiorum, CSEL, 17 on the eight principal vices and their remedies. This became one of the foundation texts for the extensive ‘vices and virtues’ literature of the Middle Ages.   25 John Cassian, Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsay (New Jersey, 2000).   26 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1969), Vol. II, 4–5.   27 Ibid., 6–9.   28 Ibid., 14–15.  29 Augustine, Confessions, Book V, xiii.23.   30 See p. 54.  31 Letters of St Paulinus of Nola, Letter 6, trans. P. G. Walsh, 2 vols (London, 1967).  32 Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, vi–vii.14–18, and see Lawless, 156.  33 Augustine, De ordine, 2.8.25–2.19.51, ed. K. Daur and W. M. Green, CCSL, 29 (Turnhout, 1970). Alypius thanks Augustine at the end for providing these ‘rules of life’.   34 See p. 86.   35 See pp. 95–7.   36 Lawless, 161.  37 Augustine, De opere monachorum, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL (Vienna, 1900).   38 See p. 96.  39 Salvian, The Governance of God, Book VIII.4, Writings, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 231.   40 Henry Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila (Oxford, 1976), 2.   41 Ibid., 9–10.   42 Priscillian of Avila, The Complete Works, ed. Marco Conti (Oxford, 2010), 2–3.  43 Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila, 9–10.  44 Ibid.   45 Ibid., 8.   46 Priscillian of Avila, The Complete Works.  47 Salvian, Letter 5, Writings, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962), 251–2.  48 Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila, p. 14.   49 Sulpicius Severus, Chronica, REF, II.46.  50 Orosius of Braga, Memorandum to Augustine on the Error of the Priscillianists and Origenists, trans. Craig L. Hanson (Washington, 1999), 170.

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notes   51 Lawless, 131.   52 Leander of Seville, PL 72.873–98, and Iberian Fathers, trans. Claude W. Barlow, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1969).  53 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticon futuri seculi, trans. Tommaso Stancati, Ancient Christian Writers (New Jersey, 2010).   54 He relies heavily on Isidore.  55 Jerome, Commentarius in Ezechielem, 12.243–9, CCSL 75.556–7. Crebroque cryptas ingredi, quae in terrarum profunda defossae, ex utraque parte ingredientium per parietes habent corpora sepultorum, et ita obscura sunt omnia, ut propemodum illud propheticum compleatur: Descendant ad infernum viventes (Ps. LIV,16): et raro desuper lumen admissum, horrorem temperet tenebrarum, ut non tam fenestram, quam foramen demissi luminis putes: rursumque pedetentim acceditur, et caeca nocte circumdatis illud Virgilianum proponitur (Aeneid. lib. II): Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent.   56 Jerome, Letter 2, to Theodosius and other Anchorites, The Letters of St Jerome, trans. C. C. Mierow (London, 1963), Vol. I, 28–9.  57 Jerome, Letter 122, to Eustochium, The Letters of St Jerome, 134ff.   58 Genesis 19.17; Luke 9.62; Matthew 24.17–18.   59 Romans 11.20.   60 1 Corinthians 9.24.  61 Jerome, Letter 122, to Eustochium, The Letters of St Jerome, 139–40.  62 Jerome, Letter XXII to Eustochium, PL 22.416.  63 Jerome, Letter 22.  64 Ambrose, Letter 63, Para. 72, in Ambrose, Letters, trans. M. M. Beyenka (Washington, 1954).   65 Ibid., Para. 74.  66 http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/340963.htm.  67 Ambrose, On Virginity, Ch. 3 (10), trans. James Shiel (Chicago, 1963).  68 Ibid., Ch. 4 (14–15, 16).   69 Ibid., Ch. 10 (54).   70 Ibid., Ch. 6.  71 Ambrose, De Officiis, ed. and trans. Ivor J. Davidson (Oxford, 2001), 2 vols.  72 Ibid.   73 Ibid., 80.   74 James, J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (California, 1979), 178.  75 Cassiodorus, Variae, trans. Thomas Hodgkin, Preface, http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/18590/18590-h/18590-h.htm#Page_133.  76 Domini confidentes caelestis mysterii claustra pulsemus, ut aperiate sensibus nostris floriferas sedes. Cassiodorus, In Psalmos, Praefatio, CCSL 97, 2 (1): 4.  77 Dulcedo mirabilis, quae saeculi corruptionibus non acescit, sed in sua permanens dignitate, gratia semper purissimae suavitatis augetur. Cassiodorus, In Psalmos, Praefatio, CCSL 97, 2 (1): 4.

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notes   78 Prophetia est aspiratio divina. Cassiodorus, In Psalmos, Chapter I, CCSL 97, 2 (1): 7.  79 Repulsis aliquando in Ravennati urbe sollicitudinibus dignitatum et curis saecularibus noxio sapore conditis, cum psalterii caelestis animarum mella gustassem […] avidus me perscrutator immersi, ut dicta salutaria suaviter imbiberem post amarissimas actiones. Cassiodorus, In Psalmos, Praefatio, CCSL 97, 2 (1): 3.   80 Cassiodorus, Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937), 3.  81 Bede, EH i.7, 54–5ff.  82 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1957), xiv–xv. Owen Chadwick is less confident of this.  83 Adomnán’s Life of Columba, eds. and trans. A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson (Oxford, 1991). Heavy on miracles and prophecies.  84 EH IV.25, 422.   85 See too p. 168.   86 Describes Columba as ‘pater et fundator monasteriorum’ (NB: founding many monasteries is common). Adomnán’s Life of Columba, 2.  87 Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 11 (London 2005), 4. See EH 270 n.2 and cf. 404 n. 1.  88 The fourth book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, ed. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960), 23–9.  89 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1957), ix.  90 The Irish Penitentials, ed. Ludwig Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1963), 10.  91 Chadwick, Cassian, 201.  92 http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T201052/index.html.  93 Four Latin Lives of St Patrick, ed. Ludwig Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1971).   94 By way of Wales and possibly Strathclyde; perhaps ideas made their way from the Egyptian desert too. Sancti Columbani Opera, xii.  95 Bede, EH I.23, 68.  96 Coeperunt apostolicam primitivae vitam imitari, orationibus videlicet assiduis vigiliis ac ieiuniis serviendo, verbum vitae […] praedicando, cuncta huius mundi velut aliena spernendo.  97 EH I.26, 76. Cf. the 1830 Australian journey and how the natives were impressed.   98 EH I.33, 115. Augustine founded a monasterium at Canterbury.   99 On the origins of the Benedictine Rule and its dominance, see the section on the designing of rules, p. 121. 100 EH III.19, 269. 101 Transitus beati Fursei, Latin text and trans. Oliver Rackham (Norwich, 2007), 52–3. 102 Ibid., 54–5. 103 EH III.19, 276. 104 Ibid.

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notes 105 EH III.27, 314. 106 EH IV.4, 346. 107 Adomnán’s Life of Columba, 206. 108 Bede, EH, 295ff. 109 Bede, EH, 139 n.3. There was a further option: tonsure in the Easter mode believed to imitate St Paul. Theodore of Tarsus had to regrow his hair from this style so as to be tonsured in the Roman way when he came to England (331). 110 Bede, EH, 547. 111 Ibid., 147 n.2. 112 Ibid., 296–312. 113 Ibid., 309. 114 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-cuthbert.asp. 115 EH IV.26–7. 116 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio Dunelmensis Ecclesiae (Oxford, 2000), 27. 117 EH IV.11, 364. 118 Bede, EH, 391. 119 Bede, EH, IV.23–4, 404ff. 120 Ibid., 406–7. 121 Ibid., 404ff. 122 Ibid., 408–9. 123 EH III.7–8 and Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 112–13. 124 EH III.8, 238–9 and Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Continental Influence at Bath Monastery in the Seventh Century’, Anglo-Saxon England, 4 (1975): 1–10. 125 Aldhelm, Prosa de virginitate, ed. S. Gwara, CCCM 24A (Turnhout, 2001), 56*. 126 Prosa de virginitate et quidem universa haec, quae per gimnosofistas exerceri deprompsimus inter scolares saecularium disciplinas. Aldhelm, Prosa de virginitate, 43. 127 Bede, Letter to Egbert, 5, ed. C. Plummer, Ecclesiastical History (Oxford, 1948–63), Vol. I, 406. 128 Ibid., Letter to Egbert, 9. 129 Ibid., Letter to Egbert, 9 and 10. 130 Ibid., Letter to Egbert, 12. 131 Ibid., Letter to Egbert, 14. 132 Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), 80. 133 On the Regularis Concordia, see pp. 146–7. 134 The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, 1–2. 135 The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar. 136 Ralph Glaber, Histories, 32–3. 137 Ibid., 80–1ff. 138 Scott G. Bruce, ‘An abbot between two cultures: Maiolus of Cluny considers the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet’, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007): 426–40, 431; and Glaber, Histories, 22–4.

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notes 139 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Vol. II, 6–9. 140 Regularis Concordia, ed. Thomas Symons (London, 1953), ix. 141 See p. 112. 142 Old Church Slavonic. 143 Bede, EH V.9, 476. 144 Quarum in Germania plurimas noverat esse nationes, a quibus Angli vel Saxones, qui nunc Britanniam incolunt, genus et originem duxisse noscuntur. 145 Ibid., 478. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., 253 n.4 and 491 nn.4, 5. 148 Bede, EH IV.22, 404. 149 The first version was published by Monumenta Germaniae Historica in the edition of Ernst Dümmler (1892). Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius, Nach der Ausgabe in den Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH (1916). 150 Vision of a monk at Wenlock, Boniface, Letters, Letter 2 (10), 716, The English Correspondence of St Boniface, trans. Edward Kylie (London, 1924), 27. 151 Ibid., 30. 152 Boniface, Letters, Letter IV (12), 719, The English Correspondence of St Boniface, 33. 153 Boniface, Letters, Letter 2 (10), 30.

III. The first Western Rules for monks and nuns   1 http://www.stvincentmonks.com/vows-freedom-in-communion.    2 On borrowings from Pachomius’ rules: Trois règles viieme siècle, Les règles des saints pères, ed. A. de Vogüé (Paris, 1982), Vol. II, 414–15.   3 Volumus ergo fratres unianimes (sic) in domo cum iocunditate habitare. Trois règles de Lérins au vieme siècle, Les règles des saints pères, Vol. I, 182.    4 See p. 164.    5 See p. 164.    6 1 Corinthians 16.16: ut et vos subditi sitis eiusmodi et omni cooperanti et laborant.   7 Bonaventure, De sex alis seraphim, Opuscula, trans. J. de Vinck (New Jersey, 1966), 135–6.   8 Perhaps under the more or less remote influence of theories of ‘social contract’ deriving from Teutonic invaders of the Roman Empire.   9 Canon 13, Virgines quae se Deo dicaverunt, si pactum perdiderunt virginitatis. A. W. Dale, The Synod of Elvira and Christian Life in the Fourth Century (London, 1882), http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/main/elvira/canons_of_elvira_01.shtml.   10 George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule (Oxford, 1991).  11 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ruleaug.html, trans. Robert Russell, based on the Latin edition of L. Verheijen, La règle de saint Augustin, Etudes Augustiniennes (Paris, 1967).

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notes   12   13  14  15  16   17  18  19  20  21   22   23   24  25   26

 27  28   29   30  31   32   33  34   35  36  37   38   39

Gregorii Magni, Dialogi, Book II, ed. Umberto Moricca (Rome, 1924). Ibid., 71. http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_01_dialogues_book1.htm. Benedictus in illa solitudine habitavit secum, in quantum se intra cognitationis claustra custodivit. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Book II, ed. O. J. Zimmerman, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1959), 55–6. Dialogi, Book II, 83. Ibid., 82–3. La règle du maître, ed., A. de Vogüé (Paris, 1964), 3 vols. Vetus Disciplina Monastica, ed. P. Engelbert, Corpus Consuetudinem Monasticorum, I (Siegberg, 1999). La règle du maître, Vol. I, 328–32. Ibid. PL 103.351–90; and see Paula Barata Dias, ‘The Libellus de Regularibus Observantiis’, Studia Patristica, 45 (2010): 61–7. Compare Bede, EH, 360, 374, 406, 408. A. G. P. van de Walt, ‘Reflections of the Benedictine Rule in Bede’s Homiliary’, JEH, 37 (1986), 367–76, 367. Ibid. P . Wormald, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’, Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. G. Bonner (London, 1976). However, as Mayr-Harting pointed out, the Benedictine Rule crops up in many places in Anglo-Saxon England: at Wilfrid’s monasteries, at Lindisfarne and in Wessex. Henry Mayr-Harting, Jarrow Lecture, 7. Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila, 9–10. Ambrose, Letter 63, paras 75–6. Isidore of Seville, De ecclesiasticis officiis (II.xv/xvi), trans. Thomas L. Knoebel, Ancient Christian Writers (New York, 1989), 87–8. Ibid., 85–6. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 89. Regula monachorum Complutensis and Regula monastica communis, trans. Claude W. Barlow, Iberian Fathers, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1969). Not to be confused with Fructuosus (d. 259), a bishop of Tarragona in Spain, who had suffered arrests during persecutions of Christians and was eventually martyred by burning. For reference to correct Fructuosus, see Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila, 2. Vita sancti Fructuosi, ed. F. C. Nock (Washington, 1946), 56. Regula monastica communis, 207. Ibid., 184–5. Ibid., 200–1.

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notes   40   41   42   43   44

Ibid., 205. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 177–8. Julian of Toledo, Prognosticon futuri seculi, trans. Tommaso Stancati, Ancient Christian Writers (New Jersey, 2010).

IV. Coda: Western monasticism takes stock   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10  11  12   13   14  15  16   17   18   19  20   21   22   23  24  25

The Chronicle of Aethelweard, ed. A. Campbell (London, 1962). Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 1, 4–5 and Vol. 6, 555. Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 1, 130–3. Historia ecclesie abbedonensis, ed. John Hudson (Oxford, 2002), Vol. II, xlii–iii. Ibid., xliv–v. Ibid. Ibid., xlviii. Eadmer, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald, Miracles of St Dunstan, 19, ed. and trans. Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford, 2006), 182–5. Ibid., xv. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 56–7. Ibid., 59–60. Bede, EH, 358–9. Ibid., 447. Ibid., 456. The Waltham Chronicle, ed. Leslie Watkiss and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1994). Glaber, Histories, 258–9. Ibid., 258–61. Ibid., 258–9. Peter of Celle, Letters, ed. Julian Haseldine (Oxford, 2001), 5–6. Ibid., Letter 13, 35. Ibid., Appendix 14, and see 627. Ibid., Appendix 8, and see Letter 70. J. Armitage Robinson, The Saxon Abbots of Glastonbury, Somerset Historical Essays (Oxford, 1921), 101ff. Licet sitis nobilis sapienseque virago fortiumque virorum animos constantia et consilio transcendatis. The later letters of Peter of Blois, Letter 17, ed. Elizabeth Revell (Oxford, 1993), 99. The abbess Eangyth and her daughter Heaburg (Bugga) to Boniface. Boniface, Letters, Letter VI (-361): 36–7. 254

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notes  26 Charters of the Mowbray Family, 1130-91, ed. D. E. Greenway (London, 1972), xxxix.   27 Ibid., xxxiii, xxxvii.  28 Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–87), ed. David Bates (Oxford, 1998).  29 Charters of St Albans, ed. Julia Crick, Anglo-Saxon Charters, XII (London, 2007), 91.   30 Ibid., 148.   31 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, I.11.  32 Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 11 (London 2005), 96.   33 Ibid., 95.   34 Ibid., 151.   35 Ibid., 149.   36 Ibid., 151.   37 J. Armitage Robinson, The Saxon Abbots of Glastonbury, Somerset Historical Essays, (Oxford, 1921), 1. On the conflicting lists, see ibid., 26.   38 See p. 120.  39 Regesta Regum Anglo-Normaorrum, the Acta of William I, ed. David Bates (Oxford, 1998), 73–4 lists total forgeries (not just rewritten lost documents) by Battle Abbey and Crowland Abbey and many others.  40 Cartulary of Montier-en-Der, 666–1129, ed. Constance Brittain Bouchard (Toronto, 2004), 11.   41 Guntramn, King of the Franks, founded a monastery in the 24th year of his reign. The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, ed. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960), 3–4.   42 Item (7), Cartulary of Montier-en-Der, 666-1129, 64ff.   43 Penelope D. Johnson, Prayer, Patronate and Power: The Abbey of la Trinité, Vendôme, 1032-1187 (New York and London, 1981), 89–91.   44 Ibid., 160.  45 Orderic, Ecclesiastical History, Book IV (Vol. II), 216–17, and see Ecclesiastical History, Book III (Vol. II), 68–9.  46 Chartulary of the Abbey of Lindores, 1195–479, 134, Scottish History Society, ed. John Dowden (Edinburgh, 1903), 172–3.  47 Chartulary of the Abbey of Lindores, 1195–479, 135, Scottish History Society, ed. John Dowden (Edinburgh, 1903), 174–5.  48 Documents Illustrating the Rule of Walter de Wenlock, Abbot of Westminster, 1283–1307, ed. Barbara Harvey, Camden Fourth Series, 2 (London, 1965), 6–9.  49 Ibid., 9.  50 The Chronicle of the Election of Hugh Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, ed. and trans. Rodney Thomson (Oxford, 1974), xxvi–iii.   51 Ibid., 5.   52 C. P. Snow, The Masters (London, 1956).

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notes  53 Letters of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. Frederick Behrends (Oxford, 1976), 4–5.   54 Thomas of Marlborough, History of the Abbey of Eynsham, eds. and trans. Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2003), Book III, 1, 165.  55 Documents illustrating the rule of Walter de Wenlock, 17ff.  56 Johnson, Prayer, Patronate and Power, 92–3.  57 Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 11 (London 2005), 29.   58 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum printed selected charters recording gifts of land and churches to monastic houses in England and Wales: 1st edn [in Latin], 3 vols (1655–73) with engravings mainly by Wenceslaus Hollar and Daniel King. A continuation in 2 volumes was published under the title: The History of the Ancient Abbey, Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches: Being Two Additional Volumes to Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon anglicanum by John Stevens (1722–3). 2nd edn in English with additional material and new engravings eds. J. Caley, Sir H. Ellis and B. Bandinel, 6 vols (1817–30).  59 Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, 2.   60 Battle Abbey, 1070, No. 14, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normanorum, the Acta of William I, ed. David Bates (Oxford, 1998), 133.  61 Charters of the Mowbray Family, 1130–91, ed. D. E. Greenway (London, 1972), xliii.   62 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Vol. II, 16–9.   63 Ibid., 20–1.  64 Glaber, Histories, Book II, 60–5.   65 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua.   66 Guibert of Nogent, Gesta dei per francos, PL 156. 679ff.   67 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, I.6.   68 Ibid., I.7.   69 Ibid., I.14.  70 Liviu Barbu, ‘“Charisma” vs. “Institution”? The Ascetics and the Church’, Studia Patristica, 45 (Louvain, 2010), 4–8.  71 Gregory Thaumaturgos, Life, Gregory Nazianzus, 3 (24–6), trans. M. Slusser, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1998), 52.   72 Chadwick, Cassian, 64.  73 Gerhoch of Reichersberg, Liber de aedificio Dei, xliii (Pl 194.1302) as quoted in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. J. Taylor and L. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 222.  74 PL 170.644.   75 Glaber, Histories, lxxix.  76 Letters of Fulbert of Chartres, 28–9.  77 Glaber, Histories, lx.  78 PL 139.473–508.  79 Glaber, Histories, lx.

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notes  80 Vetus est enim haec inter monachos et clericos controversia, qui eorum digniores sint ad Ecclesiae tractanda mysteria, adeo ut, dum inter se contendant pro apostolica dignitate, vacui ambulent ab apostolica charitate, PL 170.611, Prologue.   81 De vita vere apostolica, PL 170.609–64, at 644.   82 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, I.22.  83 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1957), xiii.   84 B. Poschmann, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (London, 1963), 124–31.  85 Oscar D. Watkins, A History of Penance (London, 1920), vi, 547. Gennadius continued Jerome’s de viris illustribus and mentions Maximus of Turin.  86 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticon futuri seculi, trans. Tommaso Stancati, Ancient Christian Writers (New Jersey, 2010).  87 The Irish Penitentials, ed. Ludwig Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1963), 2.  88 Poschmann, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, 131–3 on the importance of Irish and Anglo-Saxon influence on the continent.  89 Watkins, A History of Penance, 603.  90 The Irish Penitentials, 60–1.  91 Ibid., 66–7.  92 Ibid., 70–1.  93 Ibid.  94 Ibid., 54–5.  95 Ibid.  96 De proposito monachorum: Monachi sunt qui solitarie sine terrenis opibus habitant sub potestate episcopi vel abbatis.  97 The Irish Penitentials, 191–2.   98 Ibid., 10.  99 Ibid., 198–9. 100 Chadwick, Cassian, 58. 101 Cassian, Conference XX.V.3, Germanus and Pinufius, trans. Boniface Ramsay, 696. 102 Cassian, Conference XX.V.2, 696. 103 Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, ed. J. J. Francis Firth (Toronto, 1971), 3. The prolegomena discuss the changes across 1215 and the evolution of penitential practice. 104 Ibid., 56–7. 105 Ibid., 58. 106 Ibid., 61. 107 Cartulary of Montier-en-Der, 67ff. 108 Regularis Concordia, ed. T. Symons (London, 1953), 1. 109 See pp. 101–4.

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notes 110 Regularis Concordia, xiii–vi. 111 Ibid., xx. 112 Ibid., 5. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 7. 115 Ibid., 8. 116 Ibid., 15. 117 Ibid., xlviii. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., xli ff. 120 Ibid., xlviii. 121 Glaber, Histories, Book III.18, 125. 122 Glaber, Histories, 264–5. 123 An example is Sigebert of Gembloux (c.1039–112), PL 146.29–58. 124 The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed. and trans. David Knowles and C. N. L. Brooke 2nd edn (Oxford, 2002). 125 This acceptability of variation of rites had been well established in the early Church. 126 The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, 4–5. 127 Ibid., 2–3. 128 Christ Church Letters, ed. J. B. Sheppard, Camden Society, New Series, 19 (1877), xiv. 129 Ibid., 29. 130 Ibid., 59. 131 Letters from the English Abbots to the Chapter at Cîteaux, ed. C. H. Talbot, Camden 4th Series, 4 (London, 1967), 7, and see https://archive.org/stream/ jstor-25011826/25011826#page/n1/mode/2up. 132 This was the addition to the clause which then reads: ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.’ The Orthodox world objected to the addition on several grounds and it became one of the points on which East and West divided after the schism of 1054. 133 John Eriugena held ‘no distinguished ecclesiastical office’, according to Prudentius of Troyes, PL 115.1043A.

V. A new age of monastic experiment    1   2    3   4   5

See p. 89. Johnson, Prayer, Patronate and Power, 40. Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, Book I.11. Ibid., II.5. Johnson, Prayer, Patronate and Power, 41.

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notes   6 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Vol. II, 12–13.    7 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, Book I.8.   8 Ibid., I.11.   9 Ibid., I.9.   10 Ibid., I.21.  11 General Chapter of Province of Canterbury, c.1218–25, Oxford, Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapter of the English Black Monks, 1215–540, ed. W. A. Pantin, Camden 3rd series, 45 (London, 1931), 8ff.  12 Johnson, Prayer, Patronate and Power, 37.   13 Ibid., 45–7.   14 Ibid., 39.   15 Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 241, LTR.  16 Lanfranc, Letters, 59, 174–5.  17 I have an inward understanding of the Psalter, the Gospels, and other volumes. Nevertheless, I do not receive this knowledge in German. Indeed, I have no formal training at all, for I know how to read only on the most elementary level, certainly with no deep analysis. But please give me your opinion in this matter, because I am untaught and untrained in exterior material, but am only taught inwardly, in my spirit. Hence my halting, unsure speech. When I hear from your pious wisdom, I will be comforted. For with the single exception of a certain monk in whose exemplary life I have the utmost confidence, I have not dared to tell these things to anyone, since there are so many heresies abroad in the land, as I have heard. I have, in fact, revealed all my secrets to this man, and he has given me consolation, for these are great and fearsome matters. Now, father, for the love of God, I seek consolation from you, that I may be assured. More than two years ago, indeed, I saw you in a vision, like a man looking straight into the sun, bold and unafraid. And I wept, because I myself am so timid and fearful. http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/ letter/1188.html.  18 O filie que vestigia Christi in amore castitatis subsecute estis et que me pauperculam in humilitate subjectionis propter supernam exaltationem vobis in matrem elegistis. Hildegard, Explanatio Symboli Sancti Athanasii, CCCM 226, 109.  19 Benedict doctrinam suam in timore Dei mitissime hausit et in pietate precepta Dei docuit ac in caritate murum sanctitatis regule constituit et in castitate omnibus pompis et deliciis terreni seculi peregrinus fuit. Hildegard, De regula sancti Benedicti, CCCM 226, 68.  20 Et ego paupercula feminea forma et humano magisterio indocta et verum lumen et ad memoriam beati Benedicti secundum peticionem vestram prospexi. Hildegard, De regula sancti Benedicti, CCCM 226, 67.   21 Bernard de Portes, Letter II, Lettres des premiers chartreux, ed. un chartreux, Sources chrétiennes, 274 (Paris, 1999), 79–89.  22 http://transfiguration.chartreux.org/statuts-en-1.htm.   23 Guibert of Nogent, De Vita Sua, I.11.  24 Ibid.

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notes   25 David Knowles, Cistercians and Cluniacs: The Controversy between St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, The Dr. Williams Lectures, 9 (Oxford, 1955), 6.  26 Consuetudines Cluniacenses, PL 149.635–778.  27 PL 144.378.  28 Knowles, Cistercians and Cluniacs, 7.   29 Ibid., 6, and Anselm Eadmer VA I.v, 89.  30 Knowles, Cistercians and Cluniacs, 5.   31 Peter the Venerable, Letter 28, Letters, ed. Giles Constable (Harvard, 1967), 2 vols, Vol. I, and discussed Vol. II 275ff.   32 LTR III. 61–107.  33 De aliis congregationibus et institutionibus ad nostrum Ordinem pervolasse, pulsasse, intrasse, qui hoc quidem agendo, et suis scandala reliquerunt. LTR III, 107.   34 LTR VII, 219.  35 Bernard, De praecepto et dispensatione, LTR III.   36 Bernard on steps of humility and pride, LTR III, 13–15.  37 Humilitatis vero talis potest esse definitio: humilitas est virtus, qua homo verissima sui cognitione sibi ipse vilescit. LTR III, 17.  38 Semper quidem operae pretium fuit illustres Sanctorum describere vitas, ut sint in speculum et exemplum, ac quoddam veluti condimentum vitae hominum super terram. Vita S. Malachiae, LTR III, 307.  39 The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, ed. Walter Daniel, ed. and trans. F. M. Powicke (London, 1950), 5–16.   40 Ibid., 9.   41 Ibid., 11.   42 Ibid., 9–10.   43 Ibid., 12.   44 Ibid., 8–9.   45 Ibid., 13.   46 Ibid., 15–17.   47 Ibid., 19.   48 Ibid., 25.   49 Ibid., 23.   50 Ibid., 28.   51 Ibid., 25–6.   52 Speculum caritatis; De Iesu Puero, CCCM, 1.  53 De anima, CCCM, 1.  54 Ubi non fluunt fluctus seculi nequam nec excitatur tempestas maris, ubi non volant turbines. The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, 10.   55 De institutione inclusarum, CCCM, 1, 639.  56 Ibid., 641.  57 Ibid., 638.

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notes  58 Ibid., 638.  59 Ante cuius fenestram non anus garrula vel rumigerula mulier sedeat. De institutione inclusarum, CCCM, 1, 638.   60 Romans 8.15, quoted in RB, II.   61 Ailred of Rivaulx, De spiritali amicitia, Opera Omnia, eds. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM, 1 (Turnhout, 1971).  62 De spiritali amicitia, Prologue, CCCM, 1, 287.   63 Prologue, Ailred of Rievaulx, On Spiritual Friendship, CF, 5 (Kalamazoo, 1977), 45.   64 Ibid., 51.   65 Ibid., 91.  66 De spiritali amicitia, Book I, CCCM, 1, 289.  67 Libellus de diversis ordinibus, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard Smith (2nd edn, Oxford, 2003), xv.   68 Ibid., xix–xxi and Ch. 9, 32.   69 Ibid., xix–xxi.   70 Ibid., 3.  71 Libellus de Diversis Ordinibus, eds. Giles Constable and Bernard Smith (Oxford, 2003), 4–5.   72 Ibid., 4–5.   73 Ibid., 16ff.   74 Ibid., 38–9ff.   75 Ibid., 51ff.   76 Ibid., 66ff.   77 Ibid., 86ff.   78 Ibid., 38–9ff.  79 Bede, EH, 81.   80 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio Dunelmensis Ecclesiae (Oxford, 2000).   81 Also some Cistercians and Carthusians.  82 Charters of Inchaffrey Abbey, eds. W. A. Lindsay, John Dowden, M. Thomson (Edinburgh, 1908), xxvii on the establishment of a priory of Augustinian Canons about 1200 to replace an older observance, perhaps a legacy of Celtic monasticism.   83 See p. 63.   84 Robert of Bridlington, The Bridlington Dialogue (London, 1960), x–xi.   85 Robert of Bridlington, The Bridlington Dialogue (London, 1960).   86 Richard of St Victor, On the Trinity, trans. T. Angelici (Cambridge, 2011).  87 Abelard, Letters XI–XIV, ed. E. R. Smits (Groningen, 1983), 257–8.   88 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Book III, Vol. II, 5.   89 Ibid., 10–12.   90 Ibid., 40.   91 Ibid., 15.  92 Jerome, Letter 53, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001053.htm.

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notes  93 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1957), xv.  94 Adamnan, De locis sanctis, ed. Denis Meehan, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1958), discussed by Bede, EH, V.15.   95 Ibid., 9.   96 Ibid., 36–7. See also p. 168.  97 Itinerarium Symonis Semeonis Ab Hybernia ad Terram Sanctam, ed. Mario Esposito, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1960).   98 Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art (Aldershot, 2008).   99 PL 193.1389–90. 100 The historia vie hierosolimitane of Gilo of Paris, eds. and trans. C. W. Grocock and J. E. Siberry (Oxford, 1997). 101 But see M. Buhagiar, Essays on the Knights and Art and Architecture in Malta, 1500–798 (Malta, 2009). 102 Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber ad Milites Templi de laude novae militae I, LTR III, 214. 103 Ibid., I, 215. 104 Ibid., III, 217. 105 Ibid., IV, 219ff. 106 Bernard of Clairvaux, instructions to Hospitallers, LTR III, 205. 107 Malcolm Lambert, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, 1978). 108 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae (Dublin, 1957), xii. 109 Psalmos, notas, cantus, compotum, grammaticam per singula monasteria vel episcopia et libros catholicos bene emendate. MGH II.i.60. 110 Aelfric of Eynsham, Colloquy, ed. G. N. Garmonsway (London, 1938). 111 Glaber, Histories. 112 Glaber, Histories, Book V (3), 221. 113 Joan Evans, Monastic Life at Cluny, 910-1157 (Oxford, 1931), 47–51. 114 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II, 250–1. 115 Ibid. 116 Margaret Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford, 1978). 117 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II, 250–1. 118 Ibid., 294–5. 119 Ibid., 296–7. 120 See Letters 19 and 20, S III. 121 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II, 294–5. 122 R. W. Southern, St Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), 144 n.3. 123 Monologion, De grammatico and the ‘three treatises on the study of Holy Scripture’, Anselm, S 1. 124 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. II, 296–7. 125 Ibid.

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notes 126 Ibid., 48–9. 127 Giles Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and his Theological Inheritance (Aldershot, 2004), 94. 128 William Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford, 1969). 129 R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism (Oxford, 1970). 130 See Peter Abelard, Letters, ed. E. R. Smits (Groningen, 1983). 131 Transmisi eam ad abbatiam quandam sanctimonialium prope Parisius, […] ubi ipsa olim puellula educata fuerate atque erudita, vestesque ei religionis que conversationi monastice convenirent. Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris, 1967), 79–81. 132 Erat autem abbatia illa nostra ad quam me contuleram secularis admodum vite atque turpissime, […] ad cellam quandam recessi, scolis more solito vaccaturus. Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 80–1. 133 Illi vehementer accensi clamare ceperunt nunc me patenter ostendisse quod semper monasterium illud nostrum infestaverim, Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 90–1. 134 Ibid., 80–1. 135 Ibid., 90–1. 136 Ibid., Ch. XIII. 137 Abelard, Hymnarius Paraclitensis, ed. J. Szövérffy (Albany and Brookline, 1975), 9. 138 Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, Ch. XV. 139 Liber Sancti Gileberti, eds. R. Foreville and G. Keir (Oxford, 1987), 11–15. 140 Waltham Chronicle, Ch. 25, 64–7. 141 Richard Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–217), ed. and revd M. Gibson (Oxford, 1984). 142 John of Salisbury, Policratus, ii.28, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1909), Vol. I, 164; and see John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (Oxford, 1986), xii. 143 Richard of Wallingford, ed. J. D. North (Oxford, 1976). See Vol. I, 531 on his lost work on the Prologue to Benedict’s Rule. 144 On Cistercian missionary preaching, see also Brian MacGuire, The Cistercians in Denmark, Cist. Pub (Kalamazoo, 1982), 37–89. 145 Matthew 10.14. 146 http://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/666/Journey_of_the_Mind_ into_God_St_Bonaventure.html. 147 R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 1986); Grosseteste, Hexameron, ed. Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben (London, 1982), trans. C. F. J. Martin (Oxford, 1996). 148 Adam Marsh, Letters, Letter 29, ed. and trans. C. H. Lawrence (Oxford, 2006 and 2010), 2 vols, Vol. I, 77. 149 Ibid., Letter 70, Vol. I, 170–1. 150 Ibid., Letter 88, Vol. I, 222–3. 151 Ibid., Letter 151, Vol. II, 370–1. 152 Ibid., Letter 191, Vol. II, 470–1.

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notes 153 Ibid., Letter 91, Vol. I, 240–1. 154 J. A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino (Oxford, 1974), 263. 155 Bonaventure, Apologia Pauperum, Defense of the Mendicants, trans. J. de Vinck (New Jersey, 1966), 56–7. 156 Ailred, Sermones, ed. G. Raciti, CCCM 2B (2001), 331. 157 Ibid., 333ff. 158 Ailred, Sermones, Homeliae de oneribus propheticis Isaiae, prefaced by a letter to the Bishop of London, Gilbert, 3–5. 159 Artes praedicandi, ed. Th.-M. Charland (Paris, 1936). 160 PL 210 and trans. G. R. Evans, Introduction to the Art of Preaching, Cistercian Publications (Kalamazoo, 1981). 161 Ibid., 329. 162 Ibid., 332–40. 163 Cum igitur Ecclesiae Dei necessaria sit praedicatio et doctrina, […] scientia quae tradit formam artificialiter praedicandi. Ibid., 233. 164 Ibid., 244. 165 Artes praedicandi, ed. Th.-M. Charland (Paris, 1936), 238. 166 Ibid., 239. For more recent work in this area, see J. J. Murphy, Medieval Rhetoric: A Select Bibliography, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1989). 167 Alcuin Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives’, Viator, 26 (1995): 135–52; Alcuin Blamires, ‘Beneath the pulpit’, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge, 2003), 141–58. 168 Anselm’s prayers and Matilda of Tuscany ref. S III. 169 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, Praefatio, ed. C. H. Buttimer (Washington, 1939), 1–3. 170 Hugues de Saint-Victor, La contemplation et ses espèces, ed. R. Baron (Paris, 1955), 41. 171 Hugues de Saint-Victor, Six opuscules spirituels, ed. R. Baron (Paris, 1969), 45–59. 172 On the Cenobitic or Common Life, Tractate XV, Baldwin of Ford, Spiritual Tractates, trans. David N. Bell, CF 41 (Kalamazoo, 1986), 156–7. 173 Ibid., 160. 174 Ibid., 189. 175 Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen (Routledge, 1989), 19. 176 Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau (Philadelphia, 1992), nun from age 12 at Schönau. 177 Sancta Birgitta, Regula Salvatoris, Opera Minora, I (Lund, 1975), 102–3; Sancta Birgitta, Sermo Angelicus de excellentia virginis, Opera Minora, II (Lund, 1972). 178 Late Medieval Mysticism, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XIII (London, 1967), 263ff. 179 Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim (Cornell, 1983), 144–5.

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notes 180 English Writings of Richard Rolle, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford, 1931) 13.87, as trans etc. 181 Prologue, Admirabar magis quam enuncio quando siquidem sentivi cor meum primitus incalescere, et vere non imaginarie, quasi sensibile igne estuare. Eram equidem attonitus quemadmodum eruperate ardor in animo et de insolito solacio propter inexperienciam huius abundancie, […] letabundus liquefactus sum in affectum. Richard Rolle of Hampole, Incendium Amoris, ed. Margaret Deanesley (Manchester, 1915), 145. 182 His first work, Judica me Deus (Bodl. Oxf., MS Laud misc. 528; ed. J. P. Daly, 1984) was written around 1330, after the completion of his source, William Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis. A handbook for a secular priest, it contains model penitential sermons and guides on the administration of confession, modified, in comparison with Pagula’s work, by Rolle’s subjective intimations of salvation, his mystical experiences of God’s love. 183 Incendium amoris, written before 1343, the date of the author’s marginal note (Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 35; ed. M. Deanesley, 1915). 184 Richard Rolle of Hampole, Incendium Amoris, 113. 185 1 Thessalonians 4.17. 186 Walter Daniel, Life of Ailred, ed. F. M. Powicke (London, 1950), 69. 187 Meister Eckhardt, ‘On solitude and the attainment of God’, Late Medieval Mysticism, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XIII (London, 1967), 202. 188 Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (New York, 2013). 189 Henry Suso, Late Medieval Mysticism, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XIII (London, 1967).

VI. Reformation and dissolution   1 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/ hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.   2 Ibid.   3 Ibid.   4 Clerus cesarius est multitudo sectarum; monachi […] cuius patronus dicitur esse Benedictus, tertia secta dicuntur canonici, cuius patronus fingitur Augustinus; Quarta secta […] dicuntur fratres, who come in many kinds, Quatuor secte noviter introducte. De Christo et suo adversario antichristo, John Wyclif, Polemical Works in Latin, ed. R. Buddensieg (London, 1883), 2 vols, Vol. II, 656–7.   5 De quattuor sectis novellis, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. I, 241ff.   6 De fundatione sectarum,Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. I, 13ff.   7 De religione privata, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. II, 524.   8 De ordinatione fratrum, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. I, 87ff.

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notes   9 De religione privata, I, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. II, 491ff. and De religione privata, II, 524ff.  10 De religione privata, II, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. II, 000.  11 De religione privata, I, Wyclif, Polemical Works, Vol. II, 524.  12 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue, ed. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, 2004).  13 Calvin, Institutes, IV.13 (14).  14 Articles of faith with the Antidote, Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises, trans. H. Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1844), I, 116.   15 Martin Bucer, Common Places, ed. and trans. D. F. Wright (Abingdon, 1972), 411.   16 Thomas Muntzer, Sermon before the Princes, 1524, Spiritual and Anabaptist Writings, ed. George Hunstanton Williams (London, 1957), 69.  17 Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, trans. Bertram Lee Woolf (London, 1952), 163.   18 Luther, Two Sermons at Weimar, 1522, Second Sermon, October 19, 1522, Luther’s Works, Vol. 51 (Philadelphia, 1959), 115.  19 Luther, TableTalk, Luther’s Works, Vol. 54 (Philadelphia, 1959), 327–8.   20 Ibid., 188.   21 Calvin, Antidote to Council of Trent, Session I, Tracts and Treatises, Vol. III, 45.  22 Bucer, Common Places, 227.  23 Jewel, Apology, V, English Reformers, ed. T. H. L. Parker (London 1966), 41.   24 Thomas Muntzer, Sermon before the Princes, 1524, Spiritual and Anabaptist Writings, ed. George Hunstanton Williams (London, 1957), 56. See too, on the Hutterians, Peter Walpot, ‘True Yieldedness’, Early Anabaptist Spirituality, trans. Daniel Liechty (New York, 1994), 138ff.   25 Matthew 5.34–44.  26 Calvin, Institutes, IV.13 (20) Calvin’s The Necessity of Reforming the Church.  27 and no more mendicant houses should be built […] the numerous sects and differences within the one Order should be abolished. Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, trans. Bertram Lee Woolf (London, 1952), 155ff.   28 Might those who bound by monastic vows regard themselves as free to disregard them? Calvin’s Antidote says that three things matter with a vow. Is it ‘in our power’? Is its ‘purpose’ ‘right’? Is it ‘pleasing to God’?  29 Calvin, Institutes, IV.12 (14–16) and 13.  30 Articles of faith with the Antidote, Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises, trans. H. Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1844), I, 116.  31 Calvin, Institutes, IV.13 (17 and 19).  32 David Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge, 1976), 63–70.

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notes   33 Luther, Eight Sermons at Wittenberg, 1522, Third Sermon, March 11, 1522, Luther’s Works, Vol. 51 (Philadelphia, 1959), 79.  34 Bucer, Common Places, 422.   35 Trial and Martyrdom of Michael Sattler (1490–527), Rottenberg, 1527, Spiritual and Anabaptist Writings, ed. George Hunstanton Williams (London, 1957), 141–3.  36 Luther, Table Talk, Luther’s Works, Vol. 54, 134.   37 Ibid., 188.   38 Ibid., 135.   39 See p. 136.  40 Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs, 64–5.   41 Ibid., 83.   42 Ibid., 83–4.   43 Ibid., 85.   44 ‘A Chronicle and Defence of the English Reformation’ (?1604), The Papers of George Wyatt, ed. D. M. Loades, Camden 4th Series (London, 1968), 155–61.   45 David Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs, 57–9.   46 Ibid., 61.   47 Ibid., 62.   48 There were 73 Franciscan houses in England at the Dissolution.  49 Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs, 55.  50 A monk of St Augustine’s Canterbury, Chronicle of the Years 1532–7, John Foxe, Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, Camden Society, 1859, 281.   51 Ibid., 282.   52 Ibid., 284.   53 Ibid., 286.  54 Ibid.  55 Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs, 245–6.   56 Ibid., 274ff.   57 Ibid., 20–5.   58 Ibid., 26–43.  59 Elizabethan Casuistry, ed. P.  J. Holmes, Catholic Record Society (Oxford, 1981), 96–7.   60 Ibid., 26–7.   61 John Blair and Brian Golding, ‘The English Nuns and the Dissolution’, The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey (Oxford, 1996).   62 Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1980), 228.  63 Elizabeth Lehfeldt, ‘Convents as litigants: dowry and inheritance disputes in Early-Modern Spain’, History Faculty Publications, Paper 3, 2000, 
http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clhist_facpub/3.

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notes   64 Edward Dicconson (1670–752), Douai College Documents, 1639–794, ed. P. R. Harris, Catholic Record Society (London, 1972).  65 English Franciscan Nuns, 1619–821, and the Friars Minor of the same Province 1618–761, ed. Richard Trappes-Lomax, Catholic Record Society, 24 (London, 1922), 2.   66 William Hunnybun, ‘Registers of the English Poor Clares at Gravelines’, Miscellanea, IX, Catholic Record Society, 14 (1914): 26–173.  67 An I.B.V.M. Biographical Dictionary of the English Members and Major Benefactors, ed. Sr. Gregory Kirkus, IBVM, Catholic Record Society (London, 2001), 1.   68 See p. 217.  69 Joseph S. Hansom, ‘The Nuns of the Institute of Mary at York’, Miscellany, IV, Catholic Record Society, 9 (1907), 353.   70 On these lay orders see p. 232.  71 English Franciscan Nuns, 7, 9.  72 Ibid.  73 The Diary of the ‘Blue Nuns’ […] at Paris (1658–810), eds. Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-Lomax, Catholic Record Society, 8, (1910), viii–xii.   74 Ibid., 28–9.   75 Ibid., 69.   76 If that is a correct reading of two thousand eleven hundred and forty one.  77 The Diary of the ‘Blue Nuns’, 70–2.   78 Ibid., 116.   79 Ibid., 188–9.  80 http://www.bar-convent.org.uk/.  81 An I.B.V.M. Biographical Dictionary of the English Members and Major Benefactors, 179–85.  82 The Mawhood Diaries, ed. E. E. Reynolds, Catholic Record Society, 50 (London, 1956), 13.   83 L. Byrne, Mary Ward: A Pilgrim Finds Her Way (Dublin, 1984).  84 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/loyola-spirex.asp, The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, trans. S. J. Elder Mullen (New York, 1914).   85 See p. 182.   86 On the Minims, see p. 164.   87 See p. 295.  88 Haydn Mason, Optimism Demolished (New York, 1992).   89 C. A. Saint-Beuve, Port-Royal (Paris, 1878).  90 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pascal/blaise/p27pr/contents.html.  91 The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Robert Bell (London, Charles Griffin, 1871), 81.   92 His niece Mary was to be one of the founding members of the English Benedictine abbey in Brussels.   93 This eventually became Stoneyhurst.

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notes   94 In 1598 Thomas Worthington, known to be favourably disposed towards the society, became president of the English College in Douai.  95 The Archpriest Controversy, ed. Thomas Graves Law, Camden Society, NS 66 (London, 1896), 7.  96 Kathryn Murphy, ‘Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 1.1 (2009).   97 Hobbes, Leviathan, Books III–IV should perhaps be read as an attack on Bellarmine’s views. The Archpriest Controversy, ed. Thomas Graves Law, Camden Society, NS 66 (London, 1896).  98 The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Robert Bell (London, 1871), 105.   99 Theresa of Avila, Autobiography, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/life.toc.html. 100 S. Clissold, St Theresa of Avila (London, 1979), 42. 101 Ibid., 45–6. 102 Ibid., 49. 103 George Herbert, ‘The Church-Porch’, Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), 12. 104 George Herbert, ‘A priest to the Temple or, the Country Parson’, Works, 227–43. 105 Ibid. 106 George Herbert, ‘The Church-Porch’, Works, 12.

VII. Enlightenment and suppression    1   2    3

Denis Diderot (1713–84), The Nun, trans. Leonard Tancock (London, 1972). Compare Hobbes, Letter 78, Vol. I, 261–2, which refers to a similar episode. Diderot, The Nun, 27. The novel, written about 1780, was not published in Diderot’s lifetime.

VIII. Nineteenth-century experiments   1 Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (Stanford, 1960).   2 http://oratoryparish.org.uk/the_oratory.asp.   3 English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–778, ed. Marie B. Rowlands, Catholic Record Society, Monograph Series, 5 (1999), 268.   4 The Letters of Dr. John Lingard to Mrs Thomas Lomax (1835–51), ed. John TrappesLomax, Catholic Record Society (London, 2000), 117.    5 Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (London, 1991).   6 Bishop Herbert Vaughan and the Jesuits: Education and Authority, ed. Martin John Broadley, Catholic Record Society, 82 (2010).

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notes   7   8   9   10  11   12  13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28  29   30   31   32  33   34   35   36   37  38  39

Ibid., 32–7. http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/colleges/campion-hall. Robert Southey, New Letters, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York and London, 1965), 350. Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert (London, 1998). Southey, New Letters, 350 n.3. This reference is taken from the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Catholic Literature Association (1933). Sisterhood of St John Baptist, Clewer, Rules of the Sisterhood, 1855, and see Thomas Thelluson Carter, The First Five Years of the House of Mercy, Clewer (London, 1856). Susan Mumm, All Saints Sisters of the Poor: An Anglican Sisterhood in the Nineteenth Century, Church of England Record Society, 9 (Woodbridge, 2001), 8. Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 8. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xii. Ibid., xxiv. Ibid., 67–76. Ibid., 76–7. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 3–5. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 6–7. Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester, 1999), 4. J. Scobell to Miss Gream, 1855, in Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers, 176, and also see 209. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 168. Deaconesses: The Beginning of Women’s Ministry: The Revival of the Deaconess in the 19th-century Church of England, ed. Henrietta Blackmore, Church of England Record Society, 14 (2007). Ibid., xv–xvii. Ibid., xxi. Ibid., 29. Ibid., xxxi. Deaconesses: The Beginning of Women’s Ministry: The Revival of the Deaconess in the 19th-century Church of England, ed. Henrietta Blackmore, Church of England Record Society, 14 (2007), 43–4. House Rules, in ibid., 51–6.

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notes   40 Ibid., 64ff. See also 59–60. Directions for Behaviour at Public Worship (1974) seeks a balance betweed high and low Church in the matter of bowing and crossing oneself.   41 Ibid., 78.   42 Ibid., 80.   43 P. F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion, 4th edn (1964).  44 Anglican Franciscans, Cerne Abbas Dorset, 1911. Peter F. Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion (London, 1955), 200–1.   45 John Ruskin, Fors clavigera, Letter 41, May 1874, Works, Vol. 28, 89.   46 John Ruskin, Fors clavigera, Letter 93, Christmas 1883, Works, Vol. 29, 473–5.   47 S. A. Barnett, Settlements of University Men in great Towns (Oxford, 1884), 3.

IX. Modern Western monasticism   1 http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html.   2 Ibid.   3 Ibid.   4 Ibid.   5 Ibid.   6 Ibid.   7 Vita consecrata, 25.   8 http://www.olrl.org/misc/jones_stats.shtml.   9 http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccscrlife/documents/rc_con_ ccscrlife_doc_13051999_verbi-sponsa_en.html (accessed 9 August, 2015).  10 http://www.stanbrookabbey.org.uk/.  11 http://www.stanbrookabbey.org.uk/upload/files/Newsletter_Advent2012.pdf.   12 For Anglican Benedictines, see http://www.osb.org/intl/angl/angl1.html#England.  13 I Leap Over the Wall, 197–8.  14 http://www.vocatiochartreux.org/THE%20JOY%20OF%20BEING%20A%20 CARTHUSIAN%20MONK.html.   15 Compare http://www.fmjccommunity.com/.  16 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/ hf_jp-ii_exh_30121988_christifideles-laici_en.html.  17 http://www.nafra-sfo.org/.  18 http://www.tssf.org/.  19 http://www.aidanandhilda.org/index.php.   20 As distinct from its medieval meaning of the monastic liturgical daily round.  21 http://www.odan.org/tw_day_in_life_numerary.htm.

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notes   22   23   24  25   26  27

Opus Dei has a number of academic institutions worldwide, schools and universities. For example, http://www.camphill.org.uk. See earlier chapters on Jesuits. The California Missions, E. E. Kimbro, J. G. Costelly and T. Ball (2009). Ibid., 1. Vita Consecrata, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/ documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.

Conclusion   1 Anon., Libellus de diversis ordinibus, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2003).   2 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/ hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.   3 Ibid.   4 Ibid.   5 Ibid.   6 Ibid.   7 Ibid.    8 See p. 83.   9 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/ hf_jp-ii_exh_25031996_vita-consecrata_en.html.  10 Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, 4.1.36.  11 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 5.1.127.  12 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 5.1.135.  13 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathllen Scherf (Toronto, 2004).

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bibliogr aphy Regula monachorum Complutensis and Regula monastica communis, trans. C. W. Barlow, Iberian Fathers, The Fathers of the Church (Washington,1969). Reuter, Timothy, ‘Gifts and Simony’, Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power and Gifts in Context, eds. E. Cope and M. B. de Jong, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions: Medieval and Early Modern Peoples, 2 (Leiden, 2001), 157–68. Reynolds, E. E., ed., The Mawhood Diaries, Catholic Record Society, 50 (London, 1956). Richard Rolle of Hampole, Incendium Amoris, ed. M. Deanesley (Manchester, 1915). Rivers, Julian, The Law of Organised Religions (Oxford, 2010). Robert of Bridlington, The Bridlington Dialogue (London, 1960). Robert of Flamborough, Liber poenitentialis, ed. J. J. Francis Firth (Toronto, 1971). Rorem, Paul, Pseudo-Dionysius (Oxford, 1993). Rowlands, Marie B., ed., English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–778, Catholic Record Society, Monograph Series, 5 (1999). Saint-Beuve, C.A., Port-Royal (Paris, 1878). Salter, H. E., ed., A Cartulary of the Hospital of St John the Baptist (Oxford, 1917). Salvian, ‘The Governance of God, Book VIII.4’, Writings, trans. J. F. O’Sullivan, Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962). ———Writings, trans. J. F. O’Sullivan, Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1962). Sandberg, Russell, Law and Religion (Cambridge, 2011). Savage, Anne and Nicholas Watson, trans., Anchoritic Spirituality, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, 1991). Sheppard, J. B., ed., Christ Church Letters, Camden Society, New Series, 19 (1877). Silvas, Anna, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford, 2005). Sims­Williams, Patrick, ‘Continental Influence at Bath Monastery in the Seventh Century’, Anglo­Saxon England, 4 (1975): 1–10. Southern, R. W., St Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963). ———Medieval Humanism (Oxford, 1970). ———Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 1986). Southey, Robert, New Letters, ed. K. Curry (New York and London, 1965). Stevens, John, The History of the Ancient Abbey, Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches: Being Two Additional Volumes to Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (London, 1722–3). Sulpicius Severus, Letters, trans. B. M. Peebles, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1949). Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio Dunelmensis Ecclesiae (Oxford, 2000). Symons, Thomas, ed., Regularis Concordia (London, 1953). Talbot, E. S., ‘Foreword’, Work for University Men among the London Poor (Oxford, 1844). Tertullian, Apology, ed. and trans. A. H. Woodham (Cambridge, 1843). Theophilus, De Diversis Artibus, ed. C. R. Dodwell (Oxford, 1961). Theresa of Avila, Autobiography, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/life.toc.html. Thomas of Marlborough, History of the Abbey of Eynsham, eds. and trans. J. Sayers and L. Watkiss (Oxford, 2003).

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Index

Alexander IV, Pope 164 Alfred the Great, King 81, 85, 112, 127 All Saints Sisters of the Poor 219–21 Allen, William 199, 200 almsgiving 43, 44, 112 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan 54, 55, 57, 65–6, 102 Anabaptists 178, 182 anachoresis (withdrawal) xvii anchorites 97, 102 Ancient Greece 3 Andrew of St Victor 146 Anglicanism 231, 232 Anglo-Saxon Britain 73–81, 127 Anglo-Saxons 69 annals 105–6 Anselm of Bec 86, 111, 140, 155–6, 169 Anselm of Canterbury 120 Anselm of Havelberg 156 Ansgar 90 Anthony the Great 12, 25, 27, 28–9, 32, 54–5 and Italy 61 and poverty 43 anti-monasticism 175–81 Antioch 42, 62, 64 apatheia 5 Apollinaris of Laodicea 62 Apollonia 43 Apology ( Justin Martyr) 9

Abbey of la Trinité, Vendôme 136–7 Abbo of Fleury 115, 121 abbots 99–100, 114–15 Abelard, Peter 146–7, 157–8 absolution 123 abstinence 8, 13, 65 accommodation 99 Act of Uniformity (1559) 189 active life xvii–xviii Acts 2.32–47 3 Acts of Suppression (1536/9) 186, 187 Ad ecclesiam (Salvian) 43–4 Adamnan 69–70 adult entrants 134–7, 140 Aelfgar, Earl 114 Aelfric 153–4 Aethelgifu 111, 112 Aethelthryth, Queen 77 Agapetus I, Pope 66, 67 Age of the Holy Spirit 156 agriculture 140 Aidan 76, 78, 145 Ailred of Rievaulx 142–4, 166–7, 173 Alan of Lille 167, 168 Alban, St 68 Albertus Magnus 161–2, 165 Albigensians 7, 161, 167 alcohol 8 Alcuin 80 Aldhelm 79

285

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index Basil the Great, St 35, 37–9, 47, 152 Bec 111, 135, 154–6 Beckx, Peter 216 bedding 99 Bede xviii, 56, 68, 73–81, 89, 105 and Benedict 101, 107 and books 130 and pilgrimage 147–8 Bedingfield, Frances 192 Bedingfield, Katherine Fortescue 191–2 Beguinages 217 Bellarmine, Robert 201, 202 Benedict, St 34, 46, 84 and child oblates 152 and miracles 107 and Rule 92–3, 94–5, 96–101, 120, 125–6 and Rules 85–6 Benedict of Aniane 100 Benedict Biscop 101, 130 Benedict XIV, Pope 193 Benedictines 86, 91, 97, 136–7, 224 and foundations 145 benefactors 114 Bennett, Etheldreda 219 Berengar of Tours 155 Bernard of Clairvaux 49, 93, 137, 138 and Cistercians 140–2 and preaching 166 and spirituality 169 and Templars 150–1 Bernhard, Dom xvi Best, the 10–11 Bible, the 3, 6, 62, 87, 172 see also New Testament; Old Testament; Scriptures Biblewomen 222 Bigotian Penitential 124–5 biographies 107–8 Birmingham Oratory 214–15 Bishop, William 200–1 bishops 80, 82, 87–8, 116–17, 120 and jurisdiction 121 and Reformation 181, 182 Blackwell, George 200, 201, 202 Blaesilla 62, 63 ‘blue nuns’ 192–3

Apophthegmata Patrum 27–8, 42 apostates 21–2, 37 Apostles 1, 2, 3, 24 Appollonius 19–20 Aquinas, Thomas 162, 164, 165, 195 Aquitaine, Duke of 113 Arabs 40–1, 61, 79, 82, 83 and Monte Cassino 84–5 Archpriest 200–1 Arculf 69, 148 Arianism 48, 59–60 Aristotle 10, 162 Arius 48 Arnauld, Antoine 197 Arnauld, Marie Angelique 196 Ars praedicandi (Alan of Lille) 167–8 Arsenius 26–7 asceticism 1, 2, 28–9, 38 and diet 8–9 and Jews 13, 14 and women 62–3 Asketikon 38, 39 Asser 81, 85 astrology 59 Athanasius of Alexandria 12–13, 25, 28, 29, 61 Augustine of Canterbury 73, 87–8, 145 Augustine of Hippo xviii, 4, 9, 46, 49, 54–7 and community 120 and demons 6–7 and poverty 43 and predestination 132, 196 and Rule 95–6 and work 32 Augustinians 145, 146, 161, 183, 232 Augustus, Emperor 17 Aurelius, Bishop of Carthage 56 Austria 208–9 Auxilius 123 Baldwin, Monica 231 Baldwin of Ford 169–70 Baldwin II of Jerusalem, King 150 Balkans, the 234 baptism 24, 122–3, 177 barbarians 51–2, 64, 81–2 Barsanuphius 36–7 286

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index Celestine, Pope 72 celibacy 8, 14, 35, 65 and reformers 176, 177, 180–1 Celsus 4 cenobites 97, 102 Ceolfrid, King 89 Ceowulf, King 80 Charlemagne 129–30, 153, 154, 157 Charles II, King 203 Charles III of Spain, King 213 Charles V, Emperor 150 Charnock, Robert 200–1 Chartres Cathedral 157 chastity 9, 36, 79, 93, 180 Chaucer, Geoffrey 176, 238 child oblates 134, 135, 140, 152 Christ see Jesus Christ Christ Church, Canterbury 129 Christianity 3–5, 8, 176, 177, 239 and community 16–17 and conversions 87–90 and Crusades 148–9 and hierarchies 10–12 and persecution 5–6, 9, 17–23, 24 and spread 48, 50 see also Catholicism; Orthodox Christianity; Protestantism Christifideles Laici 232 Chronicle of Aethelweard 105, 106 chronicles 105–6 Church, the 81, 117, 121–2 and corruption 177 and Jesuits 197 and poverty 165–6 and Reformation 181, 182–3 Church of England 189–90, 214 Cicero 4, 55, 65–6, 131 circumcision xi Cistercians 86, 109, 137, 139–42 and preaching 166, 167 Cîteaux 139–40 City of God, The (Augustine) 6–7 class 136, 137 Clement IV, Pope 165 clergy 65, 175 Clewer sisterhood 219 Clonard 69, 123

body, the 9–10, 12 Boethius 66 Bogomils 7 Bonaventure 93, 162–3, 164, 165, 195 Boniface 89–90, 109–10 Boniface IV, Pope 72 Book of David 124 Boris I, King of Bulgaria 87 Braulio of Saragossa 103 Bridget 171 Bristowe, John 187 Britain see Great Britain Brown, Petronilla 192 Brunechildis 70–1 Bruno 138–9 Bucer, Martin 177, 178 Bulgaria 87 Byron, Harriet Brownlow 219 Byzantine Empire 87 Cadoc 69 Caesar, Julius 9, 17 Caesarius of Arles 95–6 California 235 calligraphy 156 Calvin, John 177, 178, 179–80, 196 Calvinists 182 Camaldolese 230 Cambridge University 185, 190 Campion, Edmund 199–200 Canada 193, 230 Candide (Voltaire) 213 canons 144–7, 157, 175 Cappadocia 37–40 Caprasius 50 Carmelites 25, 102, 205 Carter, Thomas Telluson 219 Carthusians 138–9, 231 Cassian, John 32, 45, 46, 52–3, 71, 120 Cassiodorus xviii, 66–7 Cathars 7 Catherine of Siena 171 Catholicism 60, 87 and England 199, 200, 201, 215 and Jesuits 195 and Reformation 187–8, 189 Cavour 210 287

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index Crusades 148–9, 150, 151 Cuthbert 76–7, 107 Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage 22, 31, 42 Cyprus 83, 149 Cyril 24, 87 Cyrillic alphabet 87

clothing 15, 44–5, 71, 99 and modernisation 227, 228 Clovis, King 74 Cluniacs 86, 113, 137 and Cistercians 140–2 and education 154 Cluny Abbey 83–4, 121, 128 Cnut, King 107 Cobbe, Frances Power 222 Colin, Jean-Claude 235 Collectio Hibernensis 124 Colloquy (Aelfric) 153 Colman 75, 76 Columba 69–70, 73, 75, 88 Columbanus 70–2, 76 Commonitorium (Vincent of Lérins) 50–1 communes 233–4 community 15, 16–17, 33, 37–9, 41, 51, 91–6 Community of Aidan and Hilda 232 Community of Jesus Crucified 232 Community of John the Baptist 219 Concordat of Worms (1122) 116 Conferences (Cassian) 52–3 confession 39, 123, 125 Confessions (Augustine) 54 Congress of Vienna (1814–15) 210 Constantine I, Emperor 2, 6, 18, 22–3 Constantinople 41, 52 Constantius of Lyons 67 contemplation 13, 14–15 convents 184, 188–9 conversions 87–90, 161 Coptic Christianity 2 Corinthians 16 Council of Anse (1025) 121 Council of Clermont (1095) 148 Council of Constantinople (553) 39 Council of Ephesus (431) 50–1 Council of Nicaea (325) 18, 35, 59 Council of Saragossa (380) 58 Counter-Reformation 195 Courveille, Jean-Claude 235 Cowley Fathers 224–5 Crimean War 218 Croismare, Marquis de 211 Cromwell, Thomas 184, 185, 187

Dalton, John 171 Damasus, Pope 62, 73 Damian, Peter 140 Daniel, Walter 142, 173 David I of Scotland, King 142 David II of Scotland, King 114 Davis, Lucy 192 De diversis ordinibus 237 De gubernatione Dei (Salvian) 51 De Officiis (Ambrose) 65 De opere monachorum (Augustine) 56 De poenitentia (Gildas) 124 De spiritali amicitia (Ailred of Rievaulx) 144 De vita contemplativa (Philo) 14 De vita vere apostolica (Rupert of Deutz) 121–2 deaconesses 223–4 Decius, Emperor 20, 21 demons 5, 6–7, 29 Denmark 183 desert, the 25–32, 63, 102 Desiderius 85 Devil, the 5, 6, 7–8, 29, 205–6 Devonport Sisters 218 Dialogues (Gregory the Great) 101, 107 Dialogues (Vincent of Lérins) 51 Diatessaron (Tatian) 2 Diderot, Denis 211 diet 8, 15, 71, 98–9; see also fasting Diocletian, Emperor 22, 23 Dioscorus 20–1 discipline 39 disputes 106, 115 dissolution 183–9 Dominic de Guzmán 161 Dominicans 161–2, 164, 166, 167–8 Domitian, Emperor 18 Donatism 22 dormitories 99 288

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index Eucharist, the 39, 120, 132, 133, 155 Eugenius III, Pope 169 Eulogius of Cordoba 61 Europe xi–xii, 78–9, 81–2 Eusebius of Caesarea 16, 18, 19–21, 23, 43 and Basil the Great 38 and Pachomius 32–3 Eustathius 38 Eustochium 62, 63, 64 Euthymius 36 Evagrius of Pontus 5, 39 extremism 203–7

Douai 189, 192, 199, 200 dowries 137, 188–9 dualism 7–8, 161 Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury 127 Durham Priory 145 Eadmer 106, 107 Easter 70, 75–6 Eata 76 ecclesiastical authorities 116, 119–20, 160 and Reformation 182 and Rolle 172 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Dionysius) 15 Ecclesiastical History (Bede) 68, 73, 101, 105 Ecgfrith, King 77 Eckhardt, Meister 173 Edgar, King 126–7 Edmund, King 127 education 28, 69, 129–33, 146, 152–60 and Franciscans 162–3, 164 and Jesuits 195, 196–7, 199–200, 212–13, 216 and women 193 see also universities Egbert, Archbishop of York 75, 80, 88, 89 Egeria 30–1 Egypt xi, 2, 4, 14 and Cassian 52, 53 and desert life 25–6, 34–5 and persecution 20–1 Elijah 44, 45, 65, 102 Elisabeth of Beggenhofen 173–4 Elisha 65 Elizabeth I, Queen 189, 199 Elizabeth of Schönau 170–1 Elizabeth Stagel 174 end of the world 58, 165 England 184–8 and Catholicism 201–2, 215 and Jesuits 199–201, 203 Enlightenment, the 211–13 Ephrem the Syrian 35–6 episcopal control 121 Erastus, Thomas 183 Essenes 13, 14 Ethelwold 127

Faber, Frederick 214 family life 1, 57 fasting 44, 99, 179–80 Felix of Toledo 60–1 fellowship (koinonia) 3 Ferard, Elizabeth 223 Ferdinand III of Spain, King 210 Ferrar, Nicholas 194 feudalism 82, 110–13, 147 Filioque 132 Finnian 69 Firmus, Castricius 8 Flack, William 200 Florentina 60 Florus of Lyon 133 food 98–9 Forma praedicandi (Robert of Basevorn) 168 foundations 145 France 50, 53, 70 and Arabs 83 and Ireland 71 and Jesuits 196–7, 198–9, 212 and land rights 111–12 and Norman Conquest 84 and Reformation 189 Francis of Assisi 162, 164, 165, 166, 225 Francis of Paola 164 Franciscans 162–4, 165, 166, 194, 232 Franks 83 Frederick of Prussia 212 French Revolution 209 friars 145, 164–5, 185, 186–7 289

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index and Catholicism 200 see also England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales Greek language 46, 47, 131 Gregory the Great, Pope xviii, 27, 73, 81, 145 and Benedict 96, 101 and spirituality 169 Gregory II, Pope 84 Gregory IX, Pope 166 Gregory Nazianzus 62, 120 Gregory of Nyssa 37–8, 45 Gregory Thaumaturgos 120 Grosseteste, Robert 163 Gualbert, John 118 Gudila 60–1 Guibert of Nogent 112, 118–19, 134, 135–6 and Carthusians 139 ‘Gunpowder Plot’ 201 gyrovagi 85, 97

friendship 144 Frisia 88, 89 Fructuosus of Braga 103 Fulbert of Chartres 115, 121 Fulda 131–2 Fulgentius of Ruspe xviii Fulk of Anjou 118 Fursey 74–5 Galatians 4, 8 Gallwey, Peter 216 Garnet, Henry 201 Gaul 47–53, 59, 70, 79 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers 156 Genesis 12 Gennadius of Marseille 123 Gerard d’Abbeville 165 Gerhoch of Reichersberg 120 Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre 67–8, 72 Germany 88, 89–90, 183, 184 and deaconesses 223 and suppression 208, 209 Gertrude the Great 138 gifts 111–13, 114 Gilbert, Bishop of London 167 Gilbert of Sempringham 159 Gilbertines 145 gilds 160 Gilmore, Isabella 223–4 Gilo of Paris 149 Glaber, Ralph 82, 83, 108, 121 and Cluny 128 and education 154 Glastonbury Abbey 112–13, 127 glossolalia 206 Gloucester Cathedral 114, 185 gluttony 8 Gnostics 7 God 10–11, 12–13 Godfrey of St Victor 146 Godiva, Lady 114 Goodman, Margaret 222 Gospels, the 1, 2 Goths 59–60, 66 Gottschalk of Orbais 131, 132–3 Gratian, Emperor 57 Great Britain 67–8, 73–81, 84, 127

Hadham, Reginald 115 Hadrian 79 haircuts 56, 75, 76 Harald, King 90 Harding, Stephen 140 Harold, King 110 heaven 2, 176 Hebrew 62 Heiu 78 Heloise 157, 158 Henry I, King 106 Henry of Lausanne 137 Henry VIII, King 184, 185 Herbert, George 206–7 heretics 36, 37, 166 and conversion 161 and Reformation 182 Herluin 135 hermits xi, 1, 4, 5, 41 and Benedict 96, 97 and the body 9–10 and demons 7 and the desert 25–32 and Ireland 68–9 and Jesus Christ 11–12 290

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index and pilgrimage 147 Irenaeus 47 Iserninus 123 Isidore of Seville 71, 101–3 Islam 83–4, 148, 234; see also Arabs; Muslims Israel 64 Italy 49, 54, 61–7, 210 and Arabs 83 and Monte Cassino 84–5

and Ponticianus 54–5 and Spain 102 higher education 154–6 Highest, the 10–11 Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers 48–9 Hild 78 Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans 137 Hildegard of Bingen 138 Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims 132, 133 Holy Cross Fraternity 231 Holy Land 50, 194 and Crusades 148, 149, 150, 151 Honoratus 50 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 216 Hornby, James 217 hospitality 33, 128, 148 Hospitallers 149–50 Hrabanus Maurus 131–2 Hugh of Arles 83 Hugh of Cluny 113, 154 Hugh de Payens 150 Hugh of St Victor 146, 169 Hughes, Marian 217–18, 219 Huguenots 189 humanism 203 humility 98 Hungary 87, 209 Hus, John 177

James I and VI, King 201, 202 Jansenism 196–9, 212 Jerome 28, 35, 49, 61–4, 103 and pilgrimage 147 Jerusalem 64, 149 Jesuits 190, 191, 194–203, 212–13, 215–16 Jesus Christ 1, 2, 11–12 and the Devil 6 and friendship 143–4 and the wilderness 30 Jewel, John, Bishop of Salisbury 178 Joachim of Fiore 156, 165 John, Bishop of Jerusalem 64 John, King 109 John the Baptist 13, 29–30, 65, 102 John Chrysostom 41–2 John Climacus, St 37 John de Murray 114 John of Damascus 37 John the Dwarf 28 John of Salisbury 109, 159 John Paul II, Pope 228, 232, 236 John Scotus Erigena 133 John XXII, Pope 152 Jonas 71 Joseph II, Emperor 208–9 Josephus, Flavius 14 Judaism 1, 2, 13–14, 60 Julian, Emperor 22 Julian of Toledo 60–1 Justin Martyr 2, 9, 20

iconoclasm 37, 41 Immaculate Conception 192 imperialism 17 imprisonment 31 Incendium Amoris (Rolle) 172 India 219, 220 Ingworth, Richard 186–7 Innocent III, Pope 166 Innocent IV, Pope 164 inquisitions 179 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary 191 Institutes (Cassian) 53, 92 investiture 117, 182 Iona 88 Ireland 68–72, 74, 75, 79, 88–9 and education 152–3 and immigrants 215 and penance 123, 124

Katherine von Bora 181 Katherinental 173 Kempe, Marjorie 171 291

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index Luther, Martin 177–8, 179, 180, 181, 183 Lutherans 182, 231 lynch mobs 20 Lyne, Joseph Leycester 224

Kentigern, Bishop of Glasgow 73 Kirkby, Margaret 172, 173 Kommuja 233 Kremsmünster Abbey xvi Lacantius 22 laity 80, 113–14, 115, 227–8, 232 land rights 82, 106, 110–13 and dissolution 183–4, 187 and Normans 116 Lanfranc 107, 128–9, 154–5, 156 language 46, 47, 228–9, 230 Laon Cathedral 157 Last Days 165 Latin 46, 47, 131, 228–9 and education 152, 153 leadership 93–5 Leander, Bishop of Seville 60, 101 legislation 106, 112, 113, 182–3 Lent 99 Leo, Pope 89–90 Letter to Diognetus 42 Letter to Publius (Ephrem) 35–6 letter-writing 108–9, 138 Lewis, Matthew 238–9 libraries 130–1, 156 Life of Anthony (Athanasius) 12, 28, 61 Life of Martin (Vincent of Lérins) 120 Life of St Martin (Severus) 49 Lindisfarne 75, 76–7 Lisieux 117 Lister, Thomas 201 literature 238–9 Little Book of Different Orders 144–5 liturgy 33–4 Loches 117–18 Logos 10, 11, 173 Lollards 179 Lombard, Peter 195 Lothair I, Emperor 126 Louis I, Emperor 126 Low Countries 90 Loyola, Ignatius 194–5, 204 Lucian of Nicomedia 21 Luke 2 Lupus de Ferrières 132, 133 Lupus of Troyes 67, 68

Macarius 25–6 Macrina 39–40 Madame de Pompadour 212 Magdalena de la Cruz 206 Magistrate 182 Magyars 148 Malachi, Archbishop of Armagh 142 Malmsbury Abbey 116 Malta 149, 150 Manichees 7, 35 manual labour 32, 56, 71, 98 Marcellina 54 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor 5–6, 9, 47 Marist Fathers 235 marriage 57, 65 Marsh, Adam 163 Martel, Charles 89, 90 Martin of Tours 47–9, 59, 73 martyrdom 17, 20, 21, 22, 23–5, 42–3 and feasts 39 Mary, Caroline 220–1 Mary and Martha, story of (Luke 10.38–42) xvii Mary Queen of Scots 189 Mary Tudor 215 Matilda of Tuscany 169 Maundy money 127, 128 Mawhood, Maria 193 Maximilian III, Elector of Bavaria 208 Maximin, Emperor 21 meditation 169 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) 5 Melania 64 mendicants 161, 164–6, 175–6, 185 mental health 231 Mersenne, Marin 195 Merton, Thomas xvii Methodists 221 Methodius 87 military orders 147–52 Minims 164, 195 292

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index Napoleon Bonaparte 210 Napoleonic Wars 209–10 Natural History (Pliny the Elder) 14 Naucratius 40 Neale, John Mason 222 Nemesion 21 Nequam, Alexander 159 Neri, Philip 214 Nero, Emperor 18 Nestorianism 51 New Testament xi, 1, 2 Newman, John Henry 50, 214 Newton, Matilda 172 Nicene Creed 35, 132 Niceta of Remesiana 49 Nicholas of Cusa 174 Nicholas of Lisieux 165 Nightingale, Florence 218 Ninian 72–3 nobility 113, 114, 134 Normans 82, 84, 116 Norsemen 84 North Africa xi, 22, 56–7, 83; see also Egypt notaries 113 novices 92–3, 154 nuns 54 and Ailred 143 and changes 137–8 and Diderot 211 and dissolution 184, 185, 188–91 and England 77–8 and Heloise 157, 158 and Luther 181 and modernisation 227–8, 229 and post-Reformation 190–3 and Spain 60 nurses 217, 218, 222, 223, 231–2

miracles 68, 69–70, 101, 107, 108 missionaries xviii, 86–90, 195, 234–6 Modbert 106 monasteries 3, 52 and benefactors 114 and dissolution 183–9 and education 129–33 and Egypt 25–6 and England 73–4 and France 53 and invasions 83, 84–5 and Ireland 69 and jurisdiction 70, 80–1, 82, 121 and land rights 110–13, 116 and legislation 106 and Palestine 37 and punishment 124 and reform 126–9 and suppression 208–10 Monastery of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 230 monastic life xv–xviii, 1–3, 30–1, 42–3 and Augustine 56–7 and beginnings 17 and Cassiodorus 67 and Columbanus 71–2 and community 37–9, 51, 91–6 and consistency 144–5 and England 77–8 and modernisation 226–33 and Pachomius 33 and Spain 101–4 and work 32 see also Rules Monk, The (Lewis) 238–9 Monsell, Harriet 218, 219 Montanists 47 Monte Cassino 84–5, 96–7, 101 Montier-en-Der Abbey 126 Moot 233 More, Thomas 203–4 More, William 187 mortification 204, 206 Muhammad 83 multiculturalism 239 Muslims 83–4, 84, 147, 148 mysticism 173–4

Oates, Titus 203 oath of allegiance 202 oaths 179 obedience 71, 93–5, 100 Oceania 235 Odilo of Cluny 113, 121 Odyssey movement 233–4 Old Testament xi, 102 293

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index Peter, St 75 Peter of Blois 109 Peter of Bruys 137 Peter of Celle 108–9 Peter Chrysologus 29–30, 44 Peter of Cluny 137 Peter the Venerable 140–1 Petronax 84 Pharisees 14 Philip II of Spain, King 199 Philip IV of France, King 152 Philo of Alexandria 14–15, 16 philosophy 3–6, 8, 9, 10–11, 28 and Augustine 55–6 Picts 72–3, 88 pilgrimage 30, 147–8 piracy 83–4, 150 Plato 55 Platonism 10, 12 Pliny the Elder 14 Pliny the Younger 18–19 Poemen (‘The Shepherd’) 28 Poland 87 politics 48, 49, 59–60, 89, 213 Polyptychs 111 Ponticianus 54–5, 56 Poor Clares 162, 191 Popish Plot 203 Popish Recusants Act (1605) 190, 201 Porphyry 4, 8, 13 Port-Royal 196–7 Portugal 210, 212 postulants xvi, 92 poverty 3, 14, 43–4, 93 and Calvin 180 and dispute 165–6 and Franciscans 162 prayer xvii, 3, 168–9 preachers 166–8 predestination 132–3, 196 Premonstratensians 145, 146, 161 priests 120 and confession 123, 125 and Jesuits 195, 200–1 Priscillian of Avila 38, 57–9 probation period 33 propatheiai 5

Oldham, John 203 On Consideration (Bernard of Clairvaux) 169 On Friendship (Cicero) 144 ‘On monastic vows’ (Luther) 180, 183 Opus Dei 232–3 Oratory 214–15 Order of St Andrew 232 Orderic Vitalis 53, 106, 147, 155–6 ordination 49, 120 Origen 4, 43, 59, 64 original sin 68 Orosius of Braga 59 Orthodox Christianity xii, 87, 230 Osbern 108 Oswald 127 Otloh of St Emmeram 128 Ottoman Empire 150 Oxford Movement 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 224 Oxford University 160, 163, 185, 190 Pachomius of Egypt 32–3, 44–5 pactualism 94 paedophilia 127 paganism 4, 6, 17, 88 Palestine xi, 35, 36–7, 52, 64 Palladius 72 papacy 121, 175, 181, 191 Paris, Matthew 164 Pascal, Blaise 197–8 Paschasius Radbertus 132, 133 Patrick, St 72 Paul, St 16 Paul III, Pope 194 Paulinus of Nola 49–50, 54 Peace of Augsburg (1555) 182 Peace of Westphalia (1648) 208 peasants 4, 140 Pecham, John 165 Pelagianism 67, 68, 72 penance 122–6 pensioners 192–3 Pepin, King of the Franks 89 persecution 5–6, 9, 17–23, 24 Persons, Robert 199, 200 Peter, Bishop of Alexandria 21 294

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index Robert of Melun 146 Robert of Molesme 139, 140 Robert of Torigny 156 Robert the Monk 149 Rolle, Richard 171–3 Rollo 53 Roman Empire 3, 4, 5–6, 9, 48 and barbarians 51–2 and Christianity 16–23 and collapse 6, 47, 81 and Jews 13 routine 98, 127–8 royalty 110–11, 116–17 Rufinus 35, 39, 64 Rule of the Master 97, 99 Rules 3, 46, 47, 91 and Spain 101–4 and wandering 85–6 and women 220 see also Augustine of Hippo; Benedict, St Rupert of Deutz 121–2, 156 Ruskin, John 225 Russia 87

property 3, 16, 43–4, 92 and confiscation 208–9, 210 and Reformation 182 prostitution 218, 219 Protestantism xii, 117, 175, 201, 230–1 and France 189 and Reformation 182 Prudentius 25, 133 Prynne, George 224 Psalms 67, 128, 155 Pseudo-Dionysius 13, 15 punishment 103–4, 123, 126 purity 65 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 217, 218, 219, 220, 224 Quakers 221 Quia Emptores (1290) 111 Qur’an, the 83 Racine, Jean 196 Radbod 89, 90 Ramswag, Anna 173 Rastislav, Prince 87 Ratramnus 132, 133 Raynard, Ellen 222 reading 98, 128, 169 Recared 60 recreation 127 recruitment 135–6, 228–30 recusants 189, 190, 191 Reformation, the xii, xvi, 181–3, 189–93 reformers 175–81 Regularis Concordia 127 relics 107 La réligieuse (The Nun) (Diderot) 211 repentance 39 retirement 134–5, 192–3 retreats 57, 58 Rhodes 83, 149 Richard of St Victor 146 Richard of Wallingford 160 Richards, Upton 219 Rievaulx Abbey 142–4 Robert of Basevorn 168 Robert of Bridlington 146 Robert of Flamborough 125

Sabas 37 Sadducees 14 Sahidic language 2 St Catherine monastery 37 St Dunstan’s Priory 224 St Evroul 117 St Jude Community 233 St Omer 191, 199–200 St Scholastica Priory 230 saints 107–8 Salvian of Marseille 43–4, 51–2, 58 Sanders, Mary Frances 215–16 Sarabaites 97, 102–3 Saracens 83 Satan see Devil, the satire 213, 238–9 Sattler, Michael 181 Scandinavia 90, 183–4 schism xii, 201 schools 156–7, 159 Scotland 69, 72–3, 189 Scriptures 2–3, 16, 29–30, 33–4, 62 295

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index and suppression 210 spirituality 169–73, 204 stability 85–6, 91, 93 Stanbrook Abbey 229–30 State, the 117, 182–3, 208–9 Statutes 139 Stephani, Joachim 182 Stoicism 5–6 Suetonius 18 suffering 31, 43, 204, 205 Suleiman the Magnificent 150 superstition 6 suppression 208–10 Suso, Henry 173–4 swearing 179 Sweden 183–4 Switzerland 184, 216 Symeon 145 Syncletica 30 Synod of North Britain 124 Synod of Whitby 74, 75–7 Syria 2, 35–6, 40

Sebbi, King 77 Second Vatican Council (1962–5) 62, 226–7, 228, 232 secular authorities 116, 117, 160, 182 secularism xviii, 81 Secundinus 72, 123 self-denial 2, 3, 26–7, 71, 176 Sellon, Priscilla Lydia 218, 224 Seneca the Younger 55 serfs 111, 112 Serlo of Gloucester 115 Sermones (Ailred of Rievaulx) 167 Severus, Emperor 20 Severus, Sulpicius 47, 49, 50, 57, 59, 102 Severus of Antioch 15 sexual relations 5, 8, 9, 36, 103 and Abelard 157 Shakespeare, William 238 Sicily 72, 83, 84, 150 Sigebert, King 74 simony 117–18 sin 122–3, 124, 182–3 Siricus, Pope 73 Sisters of Bethany 219 Sisters of the Holy Cross 218 slavery 39, 84, 89, 111 Slavs 87 social class 136, 137 social media 236 social order 38, 57, 188–9 social work 233–4 Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity 218 Society of the Love of Jesus 224 Society of St Margaret 222 Socrates 55 solitary life 25–32, 102 soul, the 12, 13 South America 235 Southey, Robert 217 Sozomen 33, 45 Spain 49, 57–61, 234 and Islam 83 and Jesuits 212, 213 and penance 123 and Reformation 189 and Rules 101–4

Tacitus 18 talking 97–8, 127 Tatian 2 taxation 160 Templars 150–2 temptation 5, 6, 32 Terence 131 Teresa of Avila 204–6 Tertullian 22, 23, 24, 42 Test Acts (1672–1702) 189–90 theatre 6–7, 131 Theobald, Bishop of Paris 109 Theoctistus 36 Theodore 41, 79 Theodosius I, Emperor 22, 26 theology 67, 131–3, 155–6 Therapeutae 14–16 Theuderic 70–1 Thierry of Jumièges 117 Thierry of St Evroul 156 Third Orders 232 tonsures 56, 75, 76 Töss 173, 174 Tractarians 214 296

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index Waldensians 161 Wales 67, 69, 124 Waleys, Thomas 167–8 Waltham Chronicle, The 107, 159 wandering 85–6, 97, 102 Wandrille, St 147 Ward, Mary 190–1, 192 wealth 3, 16, 44, 93, 114 Wearmouth and Jarrow monastery 73, 101 websites 229–30 Westminster Abbey 112, 115, 184–5 widows 40 Wihtberht 88 William de Andeville 115 William of Champeaux 146 William the Conqueror 53, 84, 110, 116, 117 William of Fécamp 108 William of Normandy see William the Conqueror William of St Amour 164–5 William of St Thierry xvii, 140 William Son of Giroie 147 Willibrord 88–9, 90 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 184–5 women 14, 15, 27, 103 and desert life 30–1 and Jerome 62–4 and nineteenth century 217–22 and persecution 20 and post-Reformation 191–3 and preaching 168 and Priscillian 57, 58 and Richard Rolle 172–3 and suppression 209 see also deaconesses; nuns Worcestre, William 156 World Soul (Anima Mundi) 10 Wyatt, George 185 Wyclif, John xvi, 175–6, 177, 184

‘traitors’ (traditores) 22 Trajan, Emperor 18–19 travel 85–6 Treaty of Münster (1648) 208 Trinity, the 10–11, 12, 48 Ulrich 140 unanimity 92 ungovernable thoughts 4–5, 6 United States of America 219, 229, 230, 235, 239 universities 113, 156, 160 and Dominicans 161 and mendicants 164–5 and preaching 167 and Reformation 185, 189–90 Universities Tests Act (1871) 190 Urban II, Pope 148, 149 Ursulines 218 Valerian, Emperor 20 Vandals 59–60 vassals 110–11 Vaughan, Herbert 216 vegetarianism 8, 13 Vernon, Margaret 185 Victor Emmanuel II of Italy 210 Victor III, Pope 85 Victorines 145, 146, 157 Vikings 84, 85, 90, 127 Vincent of Lérins 50–1 virginity 40, 60, 65, 79 Visigoths 60 visions 88, 89, 138, 170–1 Vita Consecrata xvii, xviii, 236, 237–8 Vita Dunstani 107–8 Vivarium monastery 66, 67 Vladimir the Great 87 vocations xvi, 92–3 Voltaire 211, 213 vows 179–81, 217–18, 219–20

Zealots 13 Zwingli, Huldrych 183, 184

Walafrid Strabo 132

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1. Anthony of Egypt (c.251–356), one of the most famous of the ‘desert fathers’ who retreated to remote places to live with God, became a hero-figure of Western monasticism.

2. Jerome (c.347–420) struggled with his temptations, which included the reading of secular literature. He went to live alone in the desert in order to be free of this torment. He is often shown with the lion he is said to have tamed by taking a thorn out of its paw. 4. Benedict of Nursia (c.480–543/7) founded a series of monastic communities at Subiaco near Rome and at Monto Cassino in South Italy. The Rule he designed for his monks was based on the Rule of the Master but it became the most commonly followed Rule in the West for many centuries.

3. Martin of Tours. Before he became Bishop of Tours, Martin of Tours (316–97) founded a monastery at Marmoutier. He had been a Roman soldier but became a Christian after he had cut his cloak in half and given half to a beggar he met in Marmoutier. That night he had a dream in which Christ appeared to him wearing the half cloak.

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5. Monte Cassino. Benedict’s great monastery at Monte Cassino has been destroyed and rebuilt many times down the centuries. This is how it looks today, still a great and flourishing house.

7. Illuminated manuscript of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, showing the discovery of his Incorrupt Body. Cuthbert (c.634–87) was one of the Celtic Christians who brought Christianity and the monastic life to Northumbria in northern England.

6. John Cassian (c.360–435) was one of the first to teach the principles of the desert fathers in the West. He was probably born in modern Bulgaria and spoke both Greek and Latin. With his friend Germanus he spent time in the early monasteries of Palestine and Egypt, and in both Constantinople and Rome, before he was invited, in about 415, to found a monastery near Marseilles.

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8. Illuminated page with Chi Rho monogram from the Gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels. The abbey at Lindisfarne was built on an island off the coast of north-east England which came to be known as the Holy Island. The Lindisfarne Gospels were written and illustrated there about 700–15. Their creator is thought to have been the Eadfrith who later became Bishop of Lindisfarne.

9. Monastic tonsure. The Celtic tonsure was adopted by Celtic monks in contrast to the one worn by Roman monks. Theirs involved shaving a circle at the centre of the head. The Celtic one seems to have left only a semi-circle of hair. The difference became controversial and was one of the things discussed at the Synod of Whitby in 664.

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10. An ancient coracle boat. The coracle was the small light boat in which Celtic missionaries sometimes set sail from Ireland, in faith that the Spirit of God would ‘blow’ them where he wanted them to go so that they could preach the Gospel there.

11. Augustine of Canterbury (d. c.604) was sent to Britain in 595 by Pope Gregory I, to convert the Anglo-Saxons. In this much later picture the artist has shown him trying to explain the Christian faith to the King and his courtiers. The first task was to persuade the rulers and only then could the missionaries be allowed to explain Christianity to the ordinary people of the kingdom.

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12. The Venerable Bede (672/3–735) spent his whole life from childhood in the double monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria. There he studied books which had been brought back to Britain from Monte Cassino by Benedict Biscop, the founder of the monastery. He wrote commentaries on Scripture and helped to introduce classical authors to the medieval West.

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13. The monastery of St Denys on the northern outskirts of modern Paris. There was a church there from early Christian times, and St Denys, first Bishop of Paris, was buried there. The monastery and church there was granted many special privileges down the centuries and grew large and important. Its last powerful friend was Abbot Suger, who in the early 1140s set about the construction of the Gothic edifice which is still there today.

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14. Cluny Abbey. Cluny became one of the great influential abbeys of medieval Europe. It kept a tight control over its daughter houses and so it was able to impose its stamp on the way their monks lived. It was a centre of reform from the tenth century, imposing strict detailed rituals to ensure that life in its monasteries did not become lax.

15. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who made the newly founded Cistercian Order immensely popular, was a great preacher. Many of his sermons survive, biblical, eloquent, and lengthy, including a long series on the Song of Songs.

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16. The Virgin appearing to Bernard. Bernard of Clairvaux was one of the creators of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary which became popular from the late eleventh century. Several of his sermons and other writings focus on her as an object of personal devotion and in this picture she is shown appearing to him in a vision.

17. These Cistercians busy with manual labour may be Cistercian lay brothers. The picture comes from a Life of Bernard of Clairvaux.

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18. Dominic (1170–1221) founded the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers, to tackle the problem of heresy in the south of France and northern Spain. The Dominicans placed a strong emphasis on higher education, to ensure that their preachers were fully equipped to argue theological points correctly.

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19. Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226) founded the Order of Friars Minor, known as the Franciscans. He was brought up a rich young man until he had a vision and fell in love with the idea of living an ‘apostolic’ life of poverty and preaching, on the model Jesus had given to his apostles. After his death a great debate about poverty divided the Church, for the Church was rich and powerful and not minded to give up its wealth.

20. Franciscan monk, Peru. The friars were among the leaders of the conquest and settlement of South America in the sixteenth century and the traditions they brought among the South American Indians have endured.

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21. Genealogical tree of the Dominicans, 1473. The late fifteenth-century woodcut tries to depict the influence of Dominic, who lies asleep at the bottom of the picture. Out of him grows a Dominican ‘family tree’ showing sixteen great and famous Dominicans with their names on scrolls. Over the whole presides the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus.

22, 23, 24. Chaucerian characters. Chaucer’s pilgrims, most of them treated with satirical irreverence in The Canterbury Tales, include a genteel prioress and a decadent friar, who likes a drink and a pretty girl. There is also a disreputable monk, ambitious to be abbot, steward of the monastery estates but happier in a tavern than eating modest meals in the monastery. (continued on the following page)

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25. Glastonbury Abbey was founded in the seventh century, but its buildings were destroyed by fire late in the twelfth century. It was rebuilt to become a spectacular and powerful abbey until it was suppressed in the course of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1539, its last abbot was executed for treason by hanging, then his body was drawn and quartered. A late medieval legend said it had been founded by Joseph of Arimathea and it became associated with the King Arthur stories and the Grail legends.

26. The Spanish nobleman Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) was converted when he was seriously wounded in battle. He founded the Society of Jesus, who became known as the Jesuits. This became a missionary order and immensely influential throughout Europe and beyond in the centuries which followed.

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27 Jesuit Church in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Jesuits built churches throughout Europe and beyond which became important local centres of worship.

28. The Rila monastery is an important example of the way a boundary grew up between Eastern and Western monasticism. It probably developed on the site where the Bulgarian Ivan Rilsky (876–946) lived as a hermit. It was destroyed and rebuilt several times down the centuries and became a great complex of library, fortifications and monastic house. It kept to Orthodox rather than Roman Catholic loyalties even before the great schism between East and West which took place in 1054.

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29. Whitby Abbey in 1780. Whitby Abbey had a long history before Henry VIII dissolved it, and it was left to become the towering ruin which can be seen in this picture. So striking is it that it is thought to have been an inspiration for a location for Dracula by Bram Stoker. In 657 the King of Northumbria founded a monastery here and gave it Hilda, of the royal family, to be its abbess. This was to be one of the double monasteries with twin houses for monks and nuns, which were experimented with in the Anglo-Saxon centuries. Then it was ruined during the Danish invasions and rebuilt as a Benedictine monastery after the Norman Conquest.

30. Nuns went on running schools into the nineteenth century and beyond. Here are the girls at St Margaret’s Convent School, East Grinstead.

31. The Sisters of the Holy Family were founded in New Orleans in 1842 as an African American community with a mission to proclaim the Gospel.

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32. St Boniface (c.675?– 754), whose name was really Winfrid, became famous as missionary to the Germanic tribes. He got his education in a monastic school near Winchester and then taught as a monastic schoolmaster. He was able to lead a life in which monasticism remained central while travelling as a missionary and becoming Archbishop of Mainz.

33. Monks working at various labours. There was always discussion about the way a monk’s day should be divided. The chief activity must be prayer. There should be holy reading. But in some orders manual labour and a range of practical activities took place as here.

34. A nun in modern dress. This nun is wearing the kind of modernised clothing approved by the Second Vatican Council. It is practical but still distinctive.

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35. Lewis’s The Monk. Matthew Lewis published The Monk in 1796. It was a Gothic novel, written while he was still in his teens. Its convoluted plot, set in Spain, involves highly dramatic misdoings by monks and nuns. It became a best-seller.

36. Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Archbishop of Canterbury, is shown here being burned at the stake in Oxford in 1556. He had been caught up in the changes enforced by Queen Mary, the Roman Catholic sister of the Protestant Edward VI, who came to the throne on his early death in 1553. Cranmer recanted his Protestant beliefs then changed his mind. Friar John, shown here, travelled with him to his execution, hoping to procure a second change of mind so that he could be spared death.

37. Heretics being burned at the stake. Heretics – like witches – were traditionally burned ‘at the stake’ (tied to a stake), as shown here. Even though the Church courts could not impose the death penalty, monks who were accused of heresy or treason had no protection against this form of capital punishment if it was imposed by the state.

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38, 39. These two depictions of friars preaching reflect the expectations of different medieval periods. Striking is the size of the audience, all standing. Friars often preached outdoors but even inside churches there were normally no seats in the Middle Ages. Sermons were regarded as a form of popular entertainment as well as a source of edification. N

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Clairvaux, No. 2 (Cistercian), Monastic Buildings. Church K. Infirmary S. Cellars and Cloister L. Lodgings of Novices Storehouses Chapter-House M. Old Guest-House T. Water-course Monks' Parlour N. Old Abbot's Lodgings U. Saw-mill and Oil-mill Calefactory O. Cloister of V. Currier's Workshops Kitchen and Court Supernumerary Monks X. Sacristy Refectory P. Abbot's Hall Y. Little Library Cemetery Q. Cell of St Bernard Z. Undercroft of Little Cloister R. Stables Dormitory

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40. Clairvaux layout.

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