The Great Paradox of Medieval Monasticism

Solitude leads to community, and community to solitude.

Monasticism was so central to medieval culture that to study one without the other is simply impossible. The spiritual, architectural, agricultural, intellectual, and artistic achievements of the Middle Ages were inseparable from the lives of men and women from all over Europe who chose to own nothing, renounce self-will, subdue the flesh, exalt the spirit, and give themselves entirely to God. They sought to build for themselves a peaceful, secluded, sanctifying world of prayer, study, and manual labor. In so doing, they built up an entire civilization.

This is a situation where pictures tell a story that you can’t quite put into words.

Image copyright Oxford University Press.

This is a map of monasteries that existed in a period roughly corresponding to the High Middle Ages (AD 1000–1300). It’s striking even before you consider that the population density at this time was perhaps one-tenth of what it is now.

However, take a careful look at the legend: this map includes only institutions associated with change from the established Benedictine model of monasticism. In other words, it identifies centers of Benedictine reform and houses belonging to the new orders (namely, Dominicans and Franciscans, known as mendicant orders, and Premonstratensians, who technically were canons regular rather than monks). If the map had dots for all types of monastic institutions, it would look very different—according to one estimate, there were well over ten thousand monasteries in Europe during this period.

Let’s look more closely at the case of England. In the map, the number of dots isn’t overwhelming; you could count them if you really wanted to. My quick tally was eighty or so. If the map included all religious houses, the island would be almost filled with dots—England at this time had closer to five hundred monasteries, and by the end of the Middle Ages, the number was approaching nine hundred. George Bernard, a professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton, provides some thought-provoking statistics:

The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. There were nearly 900 religious houses in England, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. If the adult male population was 500,000, that meant that one adult man in fifty was in religious orders.¹

Dr. Bernard also comments on the social presence of monasteries:

Religious houses were everywhere; in towns, in remote rural areas. Monks, nuns and friars were altogether a familiar part of everyday life.… To varying degrees monasteries were involved in hospitality, charity, artistic and musical patronage, scholarship and education.

There is much to reflect upon here, but what I find most fundamentally fascinating is that monasteries and their monastic occupants were “everywhere” in medieval society, and yet the vital core of monastic life—the deep spiritual seed from which all of Western monasticism grew—was “the solitary combat of the desert.”

Monastic life predates the Middle Ages and originated in the eastern Roman Empire. Antony and Pachomius, both of whom died during the middle of the fourth century, were pivotal figures in the development of Christian monasticism. Their lives of asceticism and prayer in the Egyptian desert were a heroic and radical response to the ideals of the Gospel—rather too radical for most mortals, I’d say, and it was not long before a more moderate and sustainable approach to Christian asceticism was taking shape in the West.

St. Anthony of the Desert blessing the poor, the sick, and a rather western-European assortment of animals; early fifteenth century.

Antony exemplified the solitary, or “eremitical,” form of monastic life—the Greek word eremia suggests a wild and uninhabited region. Pachomius is honored as the founder of coenobitism, from Greek for “common life” (koinos + bios); what we now understand as basic monasticism, with monks or nuns living as a community, holding property in common, eating meals together, taking recreation together, and so forth, is coenobitic monasticism.

As the Patristic era transitioned into the early medieval era, the extreme ascetical solitude of the Desert Fathers understandably lost favor. Religious fervor naturally cooled, Roman virtues of moderation and prudence filtered into spirituality, and Christianity so thoroughly merged with European social structures that the Church was soon filled with countless ordinary believers who had not the slightest interest in exotic deserts, agonizing solitude, and astonishing feats of self-abnegation. Nevertheless, monastic life never lost its connection with the eremitical ideal—even in the West, and even in the famously moderate monasticism that emerged from the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s right there in the word “monk,” from Greek monos: “alone.”

Benedict himself began his monastic journey as a hermit who for three years lived in a cave and ate whatever a monk living nearby brought to him. Three years doesn’t sound like a long time when you mention it casually, but I for one would lose my mind and perhaps even die of boredom and loneliness long before those three years had elapsed (maybe something like two years and fifty-one weeks before). Furthermore, Benedict never lost his love and admiration for religious solitude, despite the fact that he recognized its dangers and understood that it was beyond the abilities of most. Though a well-balanced man of practical skill, profound wisdom, and fatherly kindness, he esteemed eremitical life as the summit of the monastic vocation. His Rule, clearly written for stable communities of imperfect monks, bears witness to this in the very first chapter, which describes hermits as

those who, no longer in the first fervor of their reformation, but after long probation in a monastery, having learned by the help of many brethren how to fight against the devil, go out well armed from the ranks of the community to the solitary combat of the desert.

St. Benedict giving his Rule; early fifteenth century.

The paradox of medieval monasticism, then, lies first of all in the mysterious convergence of solitude and community: If you wish to be alone with God, you must first live in harmony with others; if your spirit is strong and happy in a community of men, perhaps it is time to seek happiness only in the companionship of God. If the simplicity and beauty of the desert calls to you, you must first gain mastery over the complexity and occasional ugliness of human society; if you are comfortable and content in human society, perhaps it is time to seek the raw and sanctifying power of the unspoiled wilderness, where God’s sublime craftsmanship is so clearly seen and His cosmic poetry so clearly heard.

This fundamental paradoxicality—from solitude to community, from community to solitude—is not merely a theory of monastic spirituality, not does it play out only within the spiritual dynamics of a single monastery or a single monastic era. It is actually inscribed into the very arc of European history.

First, the radical solitude of the Desert Fathers inspired early Western monks, and Western monks built medieval Europe into a flourishing Benedictine world—that is, a vast network of extraordinarily successful religious communities that permeated secular society and became one of the most powerful civilizing forces in the history of the human race.²

But the great wheel of history is ever turning, and eventually, some members of these communities felt that communal life had outgrown its proper place in the monastic experience. They were ready for greater solitude.

Let’s consider another remarkable map:

Image copyright Cambridge University Press (source).

This includes only Cistercian monasteries founded during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The Cistercians began as Benedictines who sought a return to the ideals of primitive monastic practice, with emphasis on simplicity, seclusion, and manual labor. All the dots on that map are places where people voluntarily embraced a life of hard work, penitential austerity, silent prayer, extreme poverty, and intense solitude.

The Carthusians were another such reform movement. Their asceticism was so severe as to defy belief: complete abstinence from meat, a thrice-weekly diet of bread and water, hair shirts worn regularly, the relentless psychological strain of meditative prayer and solitary life….

And yet, what the Carthusians sought—again, paradoxically—was not misery or pain or early death, but joy: joy in the noble movements of the spirit, joy in the beauties of Creation, joy in the everlasting goodness of the Creator. We see this clearly in a letter that St. Bruno, founder of the order, wrote to the archbishop of Reims:

I live the life of a hermit far from the haunts of men…. What words can describe the delights of this place: the mildness and wholesomeness of the air, the wide and fertile plain between the mountains, green with meadows and flowering pastures, the hills gently rising all around, the shady valleys with their grateful abundance of rivers, streams and fountains…. Only those who have experienced the solitude and silence of a hermitage know what profit and holy joy it confers on those who love to dwell there.

St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne in front of his hermitage; early thirteenth century.

1. Bernard, G. W. (2011), “The Dissolution of the Monasteries.” History, vol. 96, pp. 390–409.

2. The Rule of St. Benedict became the standard for Western monasticism in the ninth century, after regulations to that effect were drawn up by Benedict of Aniane under the authority of Emperor Louis the Pious.