Monasticism Research Paper

2. The Religious Life

For Weber, the life of the monk, the religious virtuoso par excellence, is in direct contrast to that of the warrior, albeit both vocational forms of life exhibit a primitive communism valorizing a segregationist ascetic ethic of celibacy, poverty, and fraternal solidarity. Warrior-monks—Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic Knights, Samurai—have existed within the great religious traditions as attempts to integrate the call(ings) to arms and alms. However, the military life consecrated to violence and the religious life dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of an interior spiritual state and the prefiguration of the kingdom of God usually have existed in mutual tension as separate ‘ways.’ Like militarism, monasticism typically cultivates a compliance culture characterized by pervasive regulatory structures for the discipline of the body together with elaborate command hierarchies demanding uncritical obedience to legitimate superiors (‘alter Christi,’ in the case of Christian religious orders) as a mark of the fidelity and successful socialization of conscripts and volunteers.

Detached from the responsibilities of marriage and family, monastic life provides opportunity for both personal sanctification and an exemplary ‘life for others.’ Be it through life-long observance of ‘the nine canonical hours’ or the daily round with the begging bowl of the temporary Buddhist monk, ‘the ascetic death-in-life’ (Weber 1963), serves to ‘mortify the flesh’ and ‘raise the mind, heart and soul to God.’ This quotidian self-discipline develops a unified life of work and prayer where the contemplation of cloister, cell, or convent integrates with the labors of field, study, or hospital ward. Weber (1963) characterized occidental monasticism as ‘the disciplined army of a rational bureaucracy of office’ and deemed it a mode of ‘asceticism directed toward the outer world.’ By contrast, ‘oriental monasticism’ was considered to be ‘of magical character,’ dominated by the innerdirected mysticism of fakirs, sages, and mystagogues.

Becoming a ‘religious,’ be that a scholar monkpriest, enclaustrated nun, nursing sister, or liqueurmaking brother, entails a lengthy process of formation through various graded orders of membership as entrants pass, usually via a formal investiture ceremony (‘the taking of the habit’), from novice through to ‘full profession.’ Under the watchful eye of experienced ‘directors of souls,’ entrants to ‘the vowed life’ are absorbed within a distinctive tradition of discipleship having its own idiosyncratic mores, prayer routines, division of labor, and ‘heroic’ exemplars such as saints and martyrs. Thus, each separate religious ‘clan’ transmits its own spiritual ‘disciplines’ and cultural inheritance to incoming generations of recruits whose individual members ‘become’ religious of a given stamp: Carthusian, Carmelite, Community of the Resurrection, Shinto, Sufi, Tibetan Buddhist, and so on. Distinct ‘family resemblances’ unite the members of the same monastic dynasties across time and space. This religious cultural capital manifests not only as material symbolic externals such as the cut and color of the diverse religious costumes, but also in the characteristic religious responses associated with the various spiritual ‘paths’ and their associated forms of life. To the outsider, all monks and nuns may look alike and engage in much the same works of divine service and charity. To the insider, however, a de la Salle Teaching Brother and a Franciscan friar are as different as chalk and cheese. A howling Dervish is not a silent Cistercian Trappist.

3. Civilizational Mission

Civilizations east and west have been marked inerradicably by their monastic patrimonies that have been formative at critical renewal points in the histories of peoples, empires, and cultures. Nisbet (1973) goes so far as to opine: ‘Without any question, it seems to me, the monastery, especially as it was conceived by Benedict, is the true source of most of our Western ideas of community achieved through the processes of withdrawal and renewal.’ Across the faith traditions east and west, monasteries as centers of ‘godliness and good learning’ (Leclercq 1961) have been power-houses of liturgical, musical, and architectural creativity; sites of practical wisdom in agriculture, animal husbandry, and horticulture (grape growing and bee-keeping being renowned monkish specialisms); pre-eminent throughout the religious traditions in the arts and sciences of calligraphy, printing, and librarianship; and, as ‘experiments in living,’ ‘prophetic’ centers of innovation in modes of selfgovernance and welfare administration. Despite a reputation for social conservatism, religious virtuosi from all the world faith traditions across all five continents have participated in diverse independence movements and human rights campaigns.

As a force in the development of the western social order, monasticism has spawned many regional ‘styles’ with their own distinctive roots and Rules but with considerable syncretism in evidence (Knowles 1969). In the course of time, ‘Celtic’ monasticism, itself deriving from the Egyptian eremetical exemplars (Antony and Pachomius) fused with the reverence for learning of the Greek and Frankish scholar-monks, such as Basiland Cassianto develop the high Latin culture that was the main conduit of Christianity from the last days of the Roman Empire to the initial centuries of Christendom in the early Middle Ages. Missionary monks inspired by St. Patrick and St. Columbas took the Christian gospel into the heartlands of European tribal society in the sixth and seventh centuries. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries (‘the Benedictine centuries’), the proliferation of daughter monasteries of Benedict’s Monte Cassino (founded 529) created the network of organization and intelligence that shaped the character and ethos of medieval European civilization. The religious culture of early modern urban development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was much influenced by the preaching friars (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians) of the Mendicant Orders (Lawrence 1994). Throughout Asia and the Far East the monasteries of Theravada Buddhism had comparable influence (Silber 1995).

4. Styles of Life

The ‘contemplative’ and ‘active’ styles of religious life rarely are walled off entirely from each other. The ‘world’ knocks at the monastery gates in every era. Pontiffs and prelates have sought the support of abbeys and nunneries in the promotion of this or that ecclesial cause from prayers for the crusades to theological backing in the extirpation of heresy. Monarchs and nobles have found ways to secure preference and placement for one of their number in the governmental and suffrage systems of religious life. Paradoxically, these attractions and achievements have at times led to monasticism assuming considerable economic and political power be it that of the great medieval religious foundations (Grande Chartreuse, Cluny, Citeaux, Monte Cassino) with their vast benefices and endowments; or the self-governing republic since 1052 of the influential monastery of Mount Athos in northern Greece; or the three centuries of state control assumed by the Dalai Lama, the chief abbot of Tibetan Buddhism; or the impact since 1837 of the Senusi Islamic brotherhood on Sudan and the eastern Sahara. There is a continuous tradition of criticism of the worldly foibles and contradictions of monastic elites down the ages, from Vigilantius (fourth century), through Chaucer, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin, to Voltaire and modern anticlerical republicanism worldwide. Liberation theology and a spate of contemporary novels and films directed against ‘new world theocracies’ (the Paraguayan Reductions) and colonial ‘foreign missions’ sustain the iconoclastic suspicion of monastic imperialism.

Successive waves of new religious foundations have been launched by charismatic religious founders animated by a utopian ‘return to sources’ (ad fontes) from which ‘scriptural primitivism,’ the combined attack on abuses within the Church and world, have been prepared down the centuries. The inherent tension between its thisworldly and other-worldly parameters accounts in great measure for the transformative capacities of monasticism which owes its survival and dynamism to an ongoing internal reform impulse (the Gregorian Reforms, for instance). Following the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation (‘the dissolution of the monasteries’) and the French Revolution, Roman Catholicism invested heavily in ‘apostolic orders’ (Jesuits, Daughters of Charity) and missionary teaching congregations (Sallesians, Marists) which served as ‘the pope’s battalions’ in the Tridentine ‘counter-modern’ offensive. The nineteenth-century Oxford Movement saw fit to revive monasticism within Anglo-Catholicism (Hill 1973). Come the age, come the religious order. The aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) with its emphasis on ‘adaptation to the signs of the times’ and ‘a preferential option for the poor’ (Sweeney 1994) is the most recent expression of the sporadic self-reform tendency in religious life to check the mixed fruits of sanctity’s success, social, and theological drift.

Each new age of monastic life and religious congregations addresses the perceived apostolic needs and ecclesiastical interests of the epoch be that for grand monastic citadels, hostels for crusaders and pilgrims, sanctuaries from plague and persecution, hospitals, schools, orphanages, hospices, food kitchens, or way stations for state policies of care in the community. Monasticism serves as a ligature binding civilizations east and west to their pasts and a bridge across which lessons of the religious quest are passed over into civil society. Not surprisingly, militant secular regimes have found pretext to sequester monastic assets and secularise (and worse) religious personnel. Monasticism and the religious orders provide the great world religions with multiple and mixed benefits: an outlet for ‘charisms’ to flourish then ‘routinize’; an opportunity context for a specialized religious ‘division of labor’; social space to cultivate a realm of intermediate associational life—collegia— within the complex organic ecclesiastical commonwealth (the communitas communitatum) without need for secession from the Mother Church.

5. Sign of Contradiction

If, on the one side, the religious institutes represent gemeinschaft in its most comprehensive guise (anticipatory democracy, brotherhood of equals, protofeminist sisterhood), on the other side, monastic life can exemplify the ‘total institution’ as escapist flight into infantile dependency and social parasitism. As a ‘sign of contradiction,’ monasticism and religious life west and east, appear destined to live out these two contrary images and appeals. As many established religious orders enter the ‘terminal’ stage in the monastic life-cycle (Hostie 1972) marked by membership hemorrhage, aging and low, erratic recruitment (Ebaugh 1993), the third millennium is likely to see novel forms of monasticism—mixed gender lay communities; gay and lesbian institutes; multifaith congregations—bearing witness ‘against all reason’ and the ‘possessive individualism’ of secular modern consumer society to the resilience and revitalization (Cada et al. 1979) of ‘the consecrated life.’

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