Following the reign of Constantine, who lavished the church with gifts and property, rich and powerful church members were seen as the main beneficiaries of Yah’s blessings, to the disgust of many among the lowly laity. And with the end of persecutions and martyrdom—which was seen as a means of attaining perfection and sainthood—the laity looked to another path to achieving these goals: monasticism.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 10: The Monastic Movement
Major shifts continued to take place within the Christian church as each new era dawned. When persecution erupted during the reigns of certain emperors, Christians braved torture and torment for the sake of their religion, and many, through gross misinterpretations of Scripture, even saw death by martyrdom as a way to attain perfection and instant access to heaven. When persecutions ceased, this created a problem for those who truly believed that martyrdom was a means to achieving sainthood.
What is more, Christian theology was being bent and manipulated by the church leaders to accommodate new developments. Prior to Constantine, early Christians saw the Good News books—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—as good news directed to the poor, almost exclusively. The rich, according to those very books, would find difficulty in both receiving the same news as well as altering their lives and readying their hearts to meet the requirements for salvation. Yet, when Constantine took the throne and showered favor upon the church, great riches, extravagance, and pomp became a mark of Yah’s blessings. The rich were now seen as those worthy of salvation. That theological slant continues to be pushed to this day, through the various prosperity mega churches that have sprung up across the American landscape, showing that the Constantinian era has not ended.
Those who saw Yeshua’s message as one directed at the poor and oppressed, the lowly and meek, rejected the direction in which the church leaders were steering their salvation theology, and yet another radical new shift developed: monasticism, a movement that arose partly in protest against the established order. The establishment greeted Constantine’s sweeping changes and favor as a fulfillment of Yah’s promises to Israel, in whose place they believed they now stood. The narrow gate to salvation now became a broad way so expansive and accommodating that vast multitudes now rushed into the church to partake of Christian privileges and rise to esteemed positions without undergoing any spiritual changes.
Bishops competed for prestigious positions, where one would pull rank over others, and the wealthy rose to power, heavily influencing or outright dominating church life for the masses. In other words, one could hardly see the wheat for all the tares that flourished. When persecution was still an inevitability for Christians, they were on guard against the Roman authorities, who could snatch them away at any moment to undergo a series of trials that would determine their fate, whether they would face death as martyrs or live as disgraced apostates. This epic choice was taken away periodically during the peaceful times that came in the second and third centuries. And that peace caused many Christians to grow weak when persecutions flared once more. This led to the problem of the lapsed, as well as the Donatist controversy, which we covered in the fifth and eighth episodes of this podcast series, respectively.
Many among the laity saw that the security of peaceful times, and the comfort derived from Christian favor bestowed by the state were dangerous elements for sincere believers. When persecutions were determined to be a thing of the past, and the peace and safety of the church was assured during the reigns of Christian emperors; when church leaders were luxuriating in lavish homes and the rich and powerful were being drawn to the Christian movement, which had become a broad avenue for the masses, many sought a different path: the extreme ascetic life of monasticism. Of course, with spiritual leaven, things will always get pushed to the extreme, and in this case, we have two that sit at opposite ends: the riches, excesses, and pomp of the church leadership, and the radical monastic movement among the laity. And I say the laity because:
“The whole monastic movement, and later on that of the friars, was a lay one….”
Writes Chris Wickham, in his book, Medieval Europe.
“… (ordained clergy were usually a minority in monasteries, and, since they had to be male, did not exist at all in nunneries). Men and women in those cases autonomously chose an often extreme version of Christian practice, although this was usually legitimated by equally extreme forms of obedience to abbots/abbesses, and, through them, to the wider order of the church.”
Monasticism was a way for devoted Christians to flee the trappings of society and leave behind social traditions that tended to dominate the mind and body alike. To exercise control over their many passions and resist temptations of every sort, a certain degree of isolation seemed necessary. So, while thousands of new converts flocked to the church to be baptized, thousands more were leaving to worship in solitude.
In his book, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, author Norman F. Cantor gives us a good description of what Medieval Christian monasticism truly embodied:
“Monasticism is a form of religious asceticism, which, in turn, involves the disciplining, limitation, or abnegation of the material and physical aspects of human life to assure a saving relationship with a deity conceived of as a purely spiritual being. Asceticism is therefore intended to secure salvation, and this end can be achieved either by the withdrawal of the ascetic from society and its corrupting temptations and distractions or by the severe control of social life to make the environment suitable for the ascetic to continue to live in the world. The former manifestation of asceticism is called monasticism, and the latter may be termed puritanism. It is obvious that in the circumstances of the early Middle Ages, with a violent, disorganized, and fundamentally un-Christianized society, the puritan control of society to make the world safe for asceticism was out of the question. The ascetic had to withdraw from the world to ensure the triumph of his spiritual will and the salvation of his soul. But the nature of early medieval western monasticism in its ultimate form was such that this flight from the world did not succeed very well; instead, the monastery became a social institution of the utmost importance. The more outstanding monks came to render the greatest services both to the church and monarchy and to give new vitality and leadership to both institutions.”
And in the western part of the realm, where invading barbarians dominated, there was a great deal of societal disorganization, which, in the sixth century, would only be addressed, initially, by the church. The church in the west was the hub for almost all the literate men in Europe, thus it was one of the most powerful and influential institutions in existence. But the church was also deeply affected by the barbarian invasions covered in our last podcast. Calling on Norman F. Cantor once more, he writes that:
“[T]he secular clergy in general was ignorant, corrupt, and unable to deal with the problem of Christianizing a society that remained intensely heathen in spite of the formal conversion of masses of Germanic warriors to Christianity. Heathen superstitions and magic were grafted onto Latin Christianity: The religiosity of the sixth and seventh centuries was infected with devils, magic, relic worship, the importation of local nature deities into Christianity in the guise of saints, and the general debasement of the Latin faith by religious primitivism.”
The Latin church in the west did not suffer the fate of other western institutions post-invasion, most of which vanished. And because of the church’s survival, the monastic movement in particular not only withstood the influence of barbaric customs that flooded into the region, but the monks would also provide leadership, education, and organization to societies in Europe. In this way, monasticism helped shape medieval civilization.
The word monk derives from the Greek, monakhos, meaning “solitary.” And to the ancient monk, the greatest form of solitude could only be derived from the desert. This is where the movement thrived, given its isolation from the busy, active life of society with all its noise, distractions, and temptations. Even the term “anchorite,” which refers to a solitary monk, originally held the meaning, to withdraw, in the sense of a fugitive. So, the desert held great appeal for this very reason, as it was largely inaccessible by the vast majority. One could disappear amidst the hot sands while worshipping in their personal oasis.
Kevin Madigan, writing in his book, Medieval Christianity, says:
“As the Constantinian era wore on, some Christians began to feel their religion was losing the rigor required of the baptized during the times of persecution. They swarmed to the desert and established one of the institutions that would come to define medieval Christianity: monasticism. As medieval Christianity depended heavily—socially, intellectually, economically[…]—on the institution of monasticism and on monks, it is important to understand the emergence of this form of life in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Judea. As more serious Christians began to believe, not wrongly, that the skyrocketing numbers of converts were merely nominal or tepid believers, they began to move into the remote deserts, where they could dedicate themselves to a life of profound Christian commitment, asceticism and prayer, bodily self-mortification, and rumination on the scriptures. Some adopted an ‘eremitical,’ or hermit style, of life, of which St. Antony was the illustrious exemplar. Others followed a coenobitical, or communal form, of life, the form that would come to dominate in the West. Women as well as men (who far outnumbered the women) felt this call to the desert, and monastic establishments were built for them in the wild places. By the end of the fourth century, thousands of monks were living in the desert, making (in the words of Antony’s biographer, Athanasius), ‘the desert a city.’”
The exact origins of Monasticism are a bit sketchy for many historians. Further compounding the origin accounts is the associated flight by many village citizens to the desert who were fleeing heavy tax burdens imposed by the Roman government during times of economic crisis. While Christian monasticism was taking root, Egyptian villagers were abandoning their rural settings and escaping to the desert as fugitives from government obligations. They were anchorites in other words, and it wasn’t always easy to distinguish them from those who fled to the desert for the sake of their spiritual convictions.
Beyond this, two famous early Christian writers proposed two distinct founders of the movement. Jerome, who is credited with the translation of the Latin Vulgate, writes a brief account of a man named Paul who, near the middle of the third century, went to the desert to flee persecution. But his was a life almost entirely of legend, and so cannot be accepted as historical. Paul, it is claimed, spent most of his time in prayer and subsisted mainly on a diet of dates. And, according to Jerome’s account, Paul lived in the desert under these particular circumstances for close to a century and was visited only by wild beasts and another elderly monk named Anthony, who is also believed to be the founder of the Egyptian monastic movement per the account of our second early Christian writer, Athanasius.
Athanasius tells us that Anthony was born on the shore of the Nile in a small village. He was the son of wealthy parents who raised him in the Coptic Church, which brought oppression from both Greeks and Romans. Anthony inherited his parents’ wealth upon their deaths while he was still fairly young, and he intended to live out the rest of his life by means of that inheritance, which would also allow him to care for his younger sister. But a reading of one of the Good News books during church service changed his life. It was taken from Matthew 19:21, where Yeshua tells a rich young man to go and sell his possessions, give to the poor, and he would have treasure in heaven.
Anthony took this to heart and did what was intended for the rich young man in Yeshua’s day. He then entrusted his sister to the care of virgins of the church and headed off to the desert to live life as a monk. But we are told that, during his first few years in the desert, he learned the ways of monastic life at the feet of an old man who lived nearby, which proves he was not the founder of monasticism, nor the first to become a Christian anchorite.
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
Christians in the early centuries of the church’s existence tended to look to fairly recent writings embodied in the works of the emissaries, and even ancient Israelite writings that formed the Scriptures, to shape their Christian thinking. Mainly, they would simply try to emulate what they read in those works. This was true of non-canonical writings as well, such as those found in what is now known as the apocrypha. While historians have trouble pinpointing where monasticism got its start, or who spearheaded the movement, there is an important clue as to what passage of writing influenced the creation of the movement itself. And, as with many of the major early developments in Christendom—corrupted though they be—monasticism also seems to have an Israelite origin.
Well preceding all of the monastic events left to us in history, there is a specific account that sheds light on the inspiration for monks fleeing to the desert to find spiritual solitude. This account is found in the apocryphal book of 1 Maccabees, which highlights important events that took place in Judah during Greek occupation in the second century BCE. It all started with the reign of an evil Greek king named Antiochus Epiphanes, who marched on Jerusalem with a strong force and stripped the temple of all its precious items. Years later, a division of his Greek army which was sent to the Judean cities to collect tribute massacred many Israelites and took woman and children prisoners. They plundered the city, set many homes ablaze, and laid siege to the city of David.
They polluted the sanctuary and established immoral people in the temple. Finally, Antiochus Epiphanes ordered everyone in his realm to worship according to pagan Gentile customs. For Judahites, this meant sacrificing unclean animals to the deities, ceasing the practice of circumcision, and doing away with the Law of Yah and changing the regulations, among many other abominations. Any who refused to do these things would be killed. Many Judahites yielded and defiled themselves to save their lives, but not all did so.
[27] Then Mattathias shouted loudly in the town, “Everyone who is zealous for the Law and supports the covenant should come with me!” [28] So he and his sons fled to the hills and left behind all that they had in the town.
[29] At that time, many who sought righteousness and justice went to live in the desert. [30] They were there with their sons, their wives, and their livestock because troubles pressed heavily on them. [31] The king’s officers and the troops in Jerusalem, David’s City, learned that those who had rejected the king’s command had gone down to hiding places in the wilderness. [32] Many pursued and overtook them. The king’s military forces camped opposite them and prepared for battle against them on the Sabbath. [33] They said to them: “Enough of this! Come out and do what the king commands, and you will live.”
[34] But the Israelites replied: “We won’t come out, and we won’t do what the king commands and so violate the Sabbath.”
—1 Maccabees 2:27 – 34
Those Israelites, having left all their possessions in the town and fleeing to the desert for the sake of righteousness, would be considered monastic in the eyes of the sixth-century church. And the drastic actions of those Israelites were followed almost exactly by ancient monks who, as early as the third century CE, fled to the desert for similar reasons: to escape Roman persecution and oppression, or else to seek a greater level of spirituality.
The Judahites of the account in 1 Maccabees would be considered cenobites as opposed to anchorites, however, in that they formed a community in the desert. The term cenobite derives from two Greek words that together mean “community life,” and while not its founder, the person responsible for organizing and helping to develop that form of monasticism in the Christian era, during the time of the anchorite, Anthony, is known to history. Professor Philip Daileader has more to say on this subject.
“Some of those who followed Anthony, however, and admired him, did develop a more monastic lifestyle in which those who lived an ascetic life lived in a community and encouraged one another. And, the individual who is responsible for gathering followers of Anthony into a community is an Egyptian by the name of Pachomius, who dies in 346. Pachomius and those who lived with Pachomius engaged in collective activities together. They would gather several times a day to pray and then retreat to individual caves for their own devotions. And Pachomius becomes the leader of these individuals; he maintains discipline among them, and they, the followers, accept his judgments.
“Pachomius himself regarded the collective lifestyle in which ascetics would gather for prayer several times a day and then retreat to their own caves as merely a preparatory stage; it was a training ground or bootcamp for the ultimate challenge, which was to follow Anthony into the desert and which was to live by yourself. But some of Pachomius’s followers regarded the collective life in the desert as sufficiently challenging as an end in and of itself rather than as a means to an end. And so communal living became relatively commonplace among the ascetics of Egypt during the fourth century.
“During the course of that century, the individual elements of what we would later regard as monasticism fall into place. You see, for example, the building of individual houses for all of the monks to live in together rather than simply gathering from various parts at certain times of the day. You see the term abbot (abba, ‘father’) applied to the head of the monastery as the abbot assumes responsibility for supervising the various monks. And you see perhaps most importantly the emergence of written rules, guidelines, by which the monks are expected to abide.”
These written rules began to emerge just after the time of Pachomius himself, as Jerome, after penning The Life of Paul the Hermit, also translated Pachomius’s Rule into Latin, which had wide appeal in the Western church, given Jerome’s popularity at the time. Jerome became a monk as well, though a rare scholarly one for that era, and his influence and intellectual stature attracted many in the church to the idea of monasticism. But Jerome’s translation based on Pachomius’s Rule was superseded by the work of another Christian writer. Of him, Professor Daileader says:
“A bishop in the eastern half of the Roman Empire named Basil of Caesarea, who dies in 379, composes probably the first written rule for monks. And living according to a written rule or a regula becomes one of the defining characteristics of the medieval monk. In fact, monks are sometimes referred to as the ‘regular’ clergy, because they live according to a regula, or a rule, and this differentiates them from the ‘secular’ clergy, the priests and the bishops, those who live in the world and do not have to live according to a specific written rule.”
Overshadowing even Basil of Caesarea was yet another writer of monastic rules, Benedict of Nursia. Author Stephen J. Davis tells us in his book, Monasticism: A Very Short Introduction, that:
“In the West, the most well-known and influential of these early Christian monastic rules was the Rule of St Benedict, written in 6th-century Italy. By trying to avoid or moderate certain harsher ascetic practices, Benedict was seeking to distinguish his system from earlier competing models. That is to say, he was founding his own ‘school,’ where the primary ritualized curriculum was … (opus Dei)—a protocol of worship that served to punctuate both the day and the night with designated hours of prayer and ‘sacred reading’ (lectio divina).
“Benedict’s ‘school’ proved to be extraordinarily successful. Originally instituted at Monte Cassino south of Rome, his rule quickly became the prevailing model and guide for cenobitic monasticism throughout early medieval Europe. In the 7th and 8th centuries, use of Benedict’s Rule spread to France, England, and Germany. In the early 9th century, his namesake, Benedict of Aniane, was appointed arch-abbot of all the monasteries in the territories ruled by the Emperor Charlemagne. This latter-day Benedict compiled the Codex Regularum, a compendium of rules incorporating and highlighting the original Rules of St Benedict but mandating somewhat stricter standards of behavior (yet another subtle gesture of ritualized differentiation). But it was in the 11th century that the Benedictine movement reached its pinnacle at Cluny and its ‘daughter houses’ in eastern France. The reforms instituted at Cluny de-emphasized the importance of manual labor for monks. Instead, such labor was assigned to an expanded cadre of servants, and the monks dedicated themselves primarily to the precise details of liturgical performance. In this context, the Divine Office (officium divinum) at Cluny became grander and more elaborate, with the use of golden vessels and utensils, the addition of extra hymns and songs to the Virgin and the angels, and increased attention to the veneration of the saints and their relics.”
Stephen J. Davis also tells us of the influence monasticism had on the development of architectural planning concerning schools and hospitals, which were based on monastic cloisters or monasteries, and infirmaries.
“Monastic scriptoria and libraries played a foundational role for the development of medieval and modern universities (the architectural plans of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are modelled after cloisters), and monastic infirmaries played an equally instrumental role for the development of hospitals.”
Essentially, the monastic movement evolved over time, and it helped shape the societies of both the eastern and western halves of the empire in different ways. What began as a movement that highlighted the solitude of early anchorites grew to accommodate large communities of monks, some with hundreds of members. Monasticism went from frowning on books and learning to being steered by scholars like Jerome, Augustine, and Basil. It began as a lay movement that stood in contrast to the organized church, yet was later embraced by bishops, and eventually set the standard for all bishops. Author Kevin Madigan adds to this equation by stating:
“Particularly significant was the way in which ascetic norms and attitudes entered the cultural bloodstream of the West, how monastic ideals came to be embraced by those outside the walls of the proliferating monasteries. The values of the desert came to be established in the city, as the distinction between those two geographical and cultural realms began to blur. Present in the city, monks influenced and inspired laymen and women. Bishops, many of them once monks, encouraged monastic reading practices in their dioceses, such as reading and meditating on the Bible. A way of life based on withdrawal moved to the city; the periphery and center collapsed into one. Ascetical ideals came increasingly to be appropriated not only by lay Christians, but also by priests and bishops. The walls that separated the lives of monks, the secular clergy, and the laity slowly crumbled. By the late sixth century, a new age had dawned.”
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: monastic, anchorite, abbot, abbess, laity, friar, ascetic, Athanasius, Coptic church, 1 Maccabees, Mattathias, Antiochus Epiphanes, coenobitical, cenobite, Pachomius, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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