Rethinking the History of Monasticism East and West: a Modest tour d'horizon (2014) (original) (raw)
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Religions, 2021
The monastic tradition has its roots in the New Testament practices of withdrawing into the desert, following a celibate lifestyle and disciplines of fasting. After the empire became Christian in the 4th century these ascetic disciplines evolved into monastic communities. While these took various forms, they developed a shared literature, gained a recognised place in the church, while taking different ways of life in the various settings in the life of the church. Western and Eastern traditions of monastic life developed their own styles of life. However, these should be recognised as being formed by and belonging to the same tradition, and showing how it can adapt to specific social and ecclesiastical conditions. In the modern world, this monastic way of life continues to bring renewal to the church in the ‘new monasticism’ which adapts traditional monastic practices to contemporary life. New monastic communities engage in evangelism, serve and identify with the marginalised, offer...
4. Christian Monasticism. — Expansion of Monasticism
Lectures CM407 - Christian Monasticism Lecturer: Rev. Prof. Ugo-Maria Er. Dio Blackfriars The history of monasticism is one of the strangest problems in the history of the world. For monasticism ranks among the most powerful influences which have shaped the destinies of Christendom and of civilisation; and the attempt to analyse it is more than usually difficult, because the good and the evil in it, are blended together almost inextricably. To those who contemplate it from a distance, wrapped in a romantic haze of glory, it may appear a sublime and heroic effort after superhuman excellence. To others, approaching it more closely and examining it more dispassionately, it seems essentially faulty in principle, though accidentally productive of good results at certain times and under certain conditions. They regard the blemishes, which from the first marred the beauty of its heavenward aspirations, as well as the more glaring vices of its later phases, as inseparable from its very being. To them it is not so much a thing excellent in itself, though sometimes perverted, as a radical mistake from the first, though provoked into existence by circumstances; not an aiming too high, but an aiming in the wrong direction. By declaring “war against nature,” to use the phrase of one of its panegyrists, it is, in their eyes, virtually “fighting against God.” In their judgment it degrades man into a machine. In their estimation the monk shunning the conflict with the world is not simply deserting his post, but courting temptations of another kind quite as perilous to his well-being. In brief, far from being an integral and essential part of Christianity, it is in their estimation a morbid excrescence. What proportion of truth is in each of these conflicting theories, a careful study of the facts, so far as they can be ascertained from history, may help to determine.
The Beguine Option: A Persistent Past and a Promising Future of Christian Monasticism
Religions
Since Herbert Grundmann’s 1935 Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, interest in the Beguines has grown significantly. Yet we have struggled whether to call Beguines “religious” or not. My conviction is that the Beguines are one manifestation of an impulse found throughout Christian history to live a form of life that resembles Christian monasticism without founding institutions of religious life. It is this range of less institutional yet seriously committed forms of life that I am here calling the “Beguine Option.” In my essay, I will sketch this “Beguine Option” in its varied expressions through Christian history. Having presented something of the persistent past of the Beguine Option, I will then present an introduction to forms of life exhibited in many of the expressions of what some have called “new monasticism” today, highlighting the similarities between movements in the past and new monastic movements in the present. Finally, I will suggest that the Christian Church woul...
Speculum 96, 3, 2021
Once upon a time, as Felice Lifshitz notes in her contribution to this terrific new handbook, monastic history "seemed to be simplicity itself": the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict quickly became the norm, then observance waned until the reforms of Cluny in the tenth century saved Benedictine life for another three centuries, and the rest of the story was really marginal (1:365). The new, far more complex vision she and others outline here fully acknowledges the diversity of monastic life, from the first stirrings of the ascetic movement in the late third century to the early decades of the sixteenth. Gone are the usual accounts of orders rising and declining, of monks and farming, monks and missions, monks and learning, monks and architecture-with an occasional appendix on "nuns." Instead we discover a world where consecrated female ascetics lead the way, hermits and recluses as well as lay brothers and sisters form an integral part of monastic life for centuries, while monastic liturgies are diverse and ever evolving. The resulting "polyphony of monasticisms," as editors Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin put it, aims to serve as "an inflection point" that will encourage future generations of scholars "not to be constrained by definitions, categories, and narratives" embedded in the conventional historiography of monastic orders (1:15). This massive project gathers the work of more than eighty authors divided into sixty-four chapters, for a total of more than 1,200 densely printed pages. Although limited to Western, Latin Christendom, it lends generous space to developments in the Near East and sources in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac, for instance in the remarkable chapter on "Re-Reading Monastic Traditions: Monks and Nuns, East and West, from the Origins to c. 750," by a team led by Anne-Marie Helvétius. It also devotes due attention to east-central Europe and southern Italy as areas of exchange with Eastern monasticism (Michel Kaplan's chapter on "The Economy of Byzantine Monasteries," though most valuable in its own right, seems somewhat out of place). Intended to cover the broadest possible range of monastic initiatives, the handbook includes the mendicants and such "lay religious" as beguines and tertiaries but not military orders-the latter's exclusion is left unexplained (see 1:7). The authors are drawn from eleven countries; for some, their work appears here for the first time in English. The editors summarize their mission thus: "Our approach has been to question any aspect of [the] traditional approach [to monastic history] that is not sound, to keep what is good, and to present the new questions and new answers that emerge" (1:4). Having dispatched "orders-based history" and abandoning all pretense to narrative comprehensiveness, the editors opted for a problem-based strategy: for each of the four periods considered (Origins to the Eighth Century; Carolingians to the Eleventh Century; The Long Twelfth Century; The Late Middle Ages), the handbook offers surveys of historiography and primary sources, followed by thematic chapters tracing particular research avenues. The contributors are an appealing mix of seasoned experts and up-and-coming scholars fresh from new projects. Curiously, it is often the former who seem to have relished the opportunity to clean the slate and start anew. I particularly enjoyed the clarity and acuity of David Brakke on heterodoxy and early monasticism, Albrecht Diem and Philip Rousseau on monastic rules, John Van Engen
Contested Origins of Monasticism: Divergent Models of Authority
As Christianity moved from the periphery to the centre of the Roman empire, monasticism evolved, not without tension, from the desert of the fathers to the urban environment of bishops. Doctrinal differences and functional frictions as a source of tension between clerical and monastic interpretations of the ascetic life, as represented by the conflict between Augustine of Hippo and the arch-heresiarch Pelagius, one symptomatic of friction between the personal charisma of ‘holy men’ and the institutional charisma of bishops, have since influenced the discourse. This paper will examine the contested biblical origins of monasticism in order to emphasise competing institutional models of authority as a potential source of political tension between monastic and clerical interpretations of a Christian society.
The Story of Monasticism. Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality
Philotheos, 2018
assistance of many people. My interest in and study of Christian monasticism continues to benefit from my friendship with the monks and oblates of St. Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, especially Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB, and Fr. Cassian DiRocco, OSB. The past and present faculty, staff, and students of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University continue to stimulate my thinking on monasticism through their insightful questions and comments. I am thankful to the administration of Biola University for awarding me a sabbatical during which I began writing this book. I appreciate my research assistant Nadia Poli for dutifully retrieving articles and books and for moments of levity in an otherwise stressful environment. The members of Anglican Church of the Epiphany, La Mirada, have been gracious in supporting me, their priest, through this and all writing projects. My wife, Christina, continues to support me unconditionally, creating a home that is both conducive to and a refuge from the ups and downs of writing. I am truly thankful for her companionship and love. Lastly, I give thanks for Brendan and Nathanael, to whom I dedicate this book. I am blessed that God called me to be their father.