Rethinking the History of Monasticism East and West: a Modest tour d'horizon (2014) (original) (raw)

Th e last 50 years have seen more revisions in understanding the history of Christian monasticism than any comparable period since the Reformation. Some new evidence has been discovered, but the changes have come mostly as a result of reading more broadly than the traditional monastic canon, and reading the familiar texts with the tools of modern historical-critical scholarship. Th e implications for monastic history of the approaches that created the nineteenth-century upheaval in biblical criticism became clear only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Although these new perspectives are now taken for granted in academic circles, they have yet to make a serious impact on the historical self-understanding of monks and nuns. Some may reasonably argue that there is no reason they should, and that the traditional interpretations of monastic history and the traditional corpus of monastic literature have served well and continue to nourish new monastic generations. But as someone who, like Sister Benedicta, inhabits the realms of both vowed monastic life and the modern academy, I feel it necessary and important to make the eff ort to bridge them in the hope that both will benefi t. My own interest in frontiers between regions and cultures, and in the transmission of ideas across those frontiers, has made me all the more sensitive to the shortcomings of some of the standard monastic narratives, and correspondingly excited about eff orts to revisit them for the sake of better understanding of the sources of monasticism and of its continuing potential for transforming the church and the world. Th e present essay, off ered in tribute to one who models for so many of us both monastic fi delity and scholarly rigour, must be modest in scope. I will consider some of the basic assumptions of traditional accounts of the origins of monasticism in the Christian east, and then turn to analogous problems with the received narrative of the rise of Benedictine monasticism in the west.