In Luke 4:1 we read that, "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Holy Spirit into the desert." Similarly, John the Baptist lived an ascetic lifestyle in the wilderness and we read that the word of God came to him in the desert. (Luke 3:2) In conscious imitation of these examples many early Christians withdrew to remote areas. Often this was to escape persecution, but it was also to flee the evil, prevalent in the Roman world and to seek God free from 'worldly' distraction. These communities of Christians that grew up in the Egyptian desert or in the wastes of Judaea were the unconscious fathers of monasticism. Although they had little organisation they regarded the best Christian life as a solitary, ascetic, celibate existence where the 'world' had been totally renounced and had been entirely replaced with heavenly contemplation.
Under the persecutions of the Roman empire, those who had given their lives in martyrdom were regarded as being the most perfect Christians. With the conversion of Constantine in 312 however the age of the martyrs had come abruptly to a closeand the scene was set for the 'new martyrs' to take the stage. These 'new' martyrs were monks: theirs was a life of daily martyrdom as they constantly died to self and lived totally for God. The monks paid particular veneration to the physical remains of the martyrs (relics) and were therefore connected to the martyrs who they replaced. The rise of ascetic monasticism and relic worship however was ver controversial: "Under the cloak of religion we see what is all but a heathen ceremony introduced into the churches..." raged Vigilantius in (400. Both the worship of relics and ascetic monasticism however became mainstays of Medieval religion, and the idea that monks were a new form of martyr persisted and over time monks as well as martyrs were venerated as holy men.
The first of these new holy men was St Martin of Tours (316-397) who combined the austerity of a monk with the office of a bishop. His epitaph read: "Here lies Martin the bishop of holy memory whose soul is in the hand of God; but he is fully here, present and made plain in miracles of every kind." His miracles were known to have been the result of his holiness, and his holiness was evident through his ascetic, prayerful and intimate relationship with God. In popular eyes then the martyrs became monks, and many monks in turn became miracle workers, and slowly but surely the mindset of Western Christendom was changing to accept a very powerful and potent idea: that the monastic vocation was the most important spiritual calling. Monks came to be known as 'Milites Christi' - the soldiers of Christ.
Monks renounced all their worldly belongings and by taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, joined a community of monks. Their lives were spent in communal worship, devotional reading, prayer and manual labour all under the authority of the abbot of the monastic house. Particular monks often had particular jobs- the cellarer or the infirmarer for example, and these like every aspect of monastic life were laid down in the 'Rule'. Monks were nearly always of noble extraction (one had to have wealth in order to give it up) but could also be given to the monastery as children (called oblates) to be brought up as monks.
Hindsight has blurred our vision of the Medieval monk and the result is that the modern Christian mindset has condemned him for his selfish escapism from the world and for his apparent neglect of those who needed Christ outside of the cloister. The Medieval mindset was very different. The monastery was an integral part of the local community- it probably owned most of the farming land in the area- and the fortunes of the people in any area were bound up with the spirituality of its monastic house. The monks were on the front line of the spiritual battle-it was they who did battle in prayer for their community, who warded off devils and demons and who prayed tirelessly for the salvation of the souls of those in their community. Rather than being the cowards of Christianity unable to take the strain of living a Christian life in the real world, the monks were the spiritual stormtroopers interceeding for an area against its supernatural enemies in mudh the same way as a local lord in his castle protected an area against its physical enemies. The people gave gifts to both lord and abbot in return for a service.
This can be illustrated well by a phenomenon known as the 'monastic strike'. If the monks were wronged they would literally go on strike and reftise to pray or carry out the duties of their daily offices, and the local people would lose spiritual protection and prayer for salvation. The fear of natural disaster or of impending divine judgment was normally enough to make the wrongdoer repent and make restitution. The monks were spiritual soldiers fighting for the good of their community but they were also contemplative ascetics seeking God for the good of their own souls and this should never be forgotten. Abbot Guigo 1(1110-1136) of the later Carthusian order said, "We did not flee to the solitude of this desert in order to undertake the material care of other mens bodies; we did so to seek the eternal salvation of our own souls."
The constant tension between the role of a monastery in its local community and the necessity of a strict and spiritual monastic life for its own monks led to constant pressures and the result was regular reforms with each 'new' movement claiming that it and it alone was a more genuine return to the simplicity of the Rule, and was unfetterred by the worldliness that contact with a local community inevitably brought. The original Benedictine order branched out in this manner, with the foundation of the Cistercians in 1075, the Carthusians in 1084, the Premonstratensians in 1120 and many more besides resulting in the ruins of the huge numbers of monastic houses that can still be seen today. (Take a day trip to the Borders or Northumbria!!) At one of them, Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, Bede was one of 600 monks in 716. He had entered the monastery as an oblate aged 7 and spent his entire life there writing books, praying and studying the Bible. At the end of one of his books he puts into a prayer the desire of his heart and one cannot help but be touched by the humility of the plea:
I pray you good Jesus that as you have given me the grace to drink in with joy the word that gives knowledge of you, so in your goodness you will grant me to come at length to yourself, the source of all wisdom, to stand before your face for ever.
Amen
