What Is a Monastery? A Rule, a Timetable and a Thousand Years

Christian monasticism started with individuals rather than institutions, in the Egyptian desert during the third and fourth centuries, where hermits withdrew to live in solitude and prayer and became known collectively as the desert fathers. Solitary asceticism proved hard to sustain and easy to distort, and communities formed around notable figures, with Pachomius organising the first structured communal settlements. The two modes persisted side by side: eremitic monasticism, meaning solitary, and cenobitic, meaning communal, with some orders combining them by housing hermits within a shared enclosure. The practice spread east into Syria and Asia Minor, where Basil of Caesarea wrote rules that still shape Eastern monasticism, and west into Ireland, where a distinctive and severe form developed that produced missionaries who founded houses across Britain and the continent. Monasticism is not exclusively Christian, and Buddhist monastic communities predate it by centuries with their own detailed code, the Vinaya, governing a comparable set of questions.

Benedict of Nursia wrote his Rule around 530, a short document of about seventy-three chapters that became the standard across western Europe because it was moderate and workable rather than heroic:

• •A daily timetable dividing the hours between the divine office, that is communal prayer at fixed times, manual labour and reading, which is the origin of the phrase about prayer and work
• •Three vows in the Benedictine form: obedience, conversion of life and stability, the last binding a monk to one house rather than allowing wandering, which was a deliberate correction of a real problem
• •Common ownership, with no personal property at all, so that everything is held by the house and distributed according to need
• •An elected abbot with substantial authority, required nonetheless to consult the whole community on important matters and to listen to the youngest members, since God may reveal what is best to them
• •Provision for hospitality, requiring guests to be received as Christ, which made monasteries the inn system of medieval Europe
• •Explicit moderation in food, drink, sleep and penance, with allowances for the sick, the old and the young, which is why the Rule outlasted more austere alternatives

The social functions were enormous and mostly incidental to the spiritual purpose. Monastic scriptoria copied manuscripts, which is the mechanism by which a large part of classical Latin literature survived the collapse of the western empire, since a text survived only if someone kept copying it before it decayed. Houses ran schools, infirmaries and almshouses, and monastic medicine preserved and transmitted classical medical texts alongside practical herbal knowledge. They were major agricultural enterprises, and the Cistercians in particular developed marginal land, drained marshes, cleared forest and pioneered water-powered industry, running mills, forges and fulling operations at a scale that has led some historians to describe their operations as proto-industrial. They kept records and chronicles, which supply much of what is known about the period. They functioned as banks, lenders and landlords, accumulating estates through donations from people purchasing prayers for their souls, and that wealth is precisely what made them politically vulnerable.

Monastic history runs in cycles of endowment, wealth, laxity and reform. Cluny reformed in the tenth century and became immensely rich and powerful, prompting the Cistercians in the twelfth to reject its elaboration and return to austerity, after which they too grew wealthy. The friars of the thirteenth century, the Dominicans and Franciscans, represented a different answer entirely, rejecting stability and endowment in favour of preaching in towns and living by begging. The ruptures came later and were political. Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries between 1536 and 1541, seizing assets that amounted to a substantial fraction of the kingdom's landed wealth, expelling the communities and leaving the ruins that remain a feature of the British landscape. Comparable suppressions followed in revolutionary France, in several German states, and in a range of twentieth-century states. Monasticism nonetheless continues, in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Buddhist, Jain and other traditions, and several houses have sustained themselves through the same combination the Rule always assumed, of prayer, labour and a saleable product.

A monastery is a community living under a written rule that fixes the timetable, the property arrangements and the decision-making. Benedict's Rule of around 530 divided the day between communal prayer, labour and reading, required stability in one house, abolished private property and mandated moderation, which is why it outlasted harsher alternatives. Monasteries preserved classical texts by copying them, ran schools and infirmaries, developed agriculture and water power, and accumulated the wealth that eventually made them targets.