What Is Monasticism? Withdrawing From the World, and Then Running It

It starts in the Egyptian desert around the third century, with individuals withdrawing to live alone in prayer and severe asceticism, of whom Antony is the best known through a widely read biography by Athanasius. These hermits attracted followers, and Pachomius, around 320, organised them into a community with a written rule, shared meals, common work and an abbot, which is the transition from solitary to communal practice. The model spread east into Syria and Cappadocia, where Basil wrote rules emphasising community, obedience and service, and west into Gaul and Ireland, where a distinctive and notably severe tradition developed and then exported itself back to the continent through missionary monks. In the sixth century Benedict of Nursia produced a rule of about seventy-three short chapters that became the template for western monasticism, valued precisely because it is moderate: it sets a workable timetable, restrains extreme austerity, insists that the abbot consult the community, and organises the day around the balance of prayer, reading and manual labour.

The pattern is not Christian in origin and appears independently:

• •Buddhist monasticism is older, dating to the Buddha's own community in the fifth or fourth century BC, with a detailed disciplinary code of several hundred rules, and both monks and nuns, though the full nuns' ordination lineage lapsed in several traditions and its restoration is contested
• •Jain monks and nuns follow the most demanding regime of any tradition, with the Digambara order's most advanced practitioners owning nothing at all, and both orders sweeping their path to avoid harming insects
• •Hindu sannyasa is the final stage of an ideal life, in which a person renounces household and possessions, and monastic orders were organised systematically by Shankara around the eighth century
• •Taoist monasticism developed under Buddhist influence and is organised around cultivation, retreat and ritual
• •Judaism and Islam are the notable exceptions among the large traditions, both being broadly unfavourable to celibate withdrawal, though the Jewish Essenes lived communally and Sufi lodges perform many of the same social functions without celibacy

The commitments look like deprivation and are framed within the traditions as removal of obstacles. Poverty ends the calculation of personal advantage and the anxiety of ownership. Celibacy ends the claims of family, which are the strongest competing loyalty a person has. Obedience, in the Benedictine formulation, ends the tyranny of one's own preferences, on the argument that a person who always does what they want is not free but driven. Stability, which Benedict added and which is unusual, binds a monk to one community for life and prevents the restlessness of moving on when things become difficult. The daily structure is the other half: the office of prayer at fixed hours through the day and night sets a rhythm that leaves little unshaped time, which is the practical mechanism by which the ideal is sustained over decades rather than weeks.

The historical contribution of these communities is out of all proportion to their numbers. In post-Roman Europe they preserved literacy and copied the classical texts that survived, which is why a great deal of Latin literature exists at all, and monastic scriptoria produced the manuscripts on which the medieval intellectual revival was built. They cleared land, drained marshes and developed agriculture on a large scale, with the Cistercians in particular running what amounted to industrial estates with water-powered mills and iron works. They ran hospitals, guest houses and schools, and cared for the poor as a matter of rule. They produced the technology of timekeeping, since a community required to pray at fixed hours has an urgent need for mechanical clocks. Buddhist monasteries performed comparable functions across Asia, as centres of education, medicine, manuscript preservation and art, and Tibetan monasteries held a substantial share of the region's literate population. The economic effect was large enough that monastic land became a target: the English dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s transferred perhaps a quarter of the country's landed wealth to the crown and its supporters in a few years.

The recurring pattern is founding, success, wealth, laxity, reform, and repetition. Cluny was founded in 910 to restore Benedictine observance and became within two centuries the head of a network of hundreds of houses and one of the richest institutions in Europe, at which point the Cistercians broke away in 1098 to return to the rule's simplicity, and themselves grew wealthy on wool. The friars of the thirteenth century, Franciscan and Dominican, were a different response again, rejecting the stability of a fixed house in favour of mobile preaching and begging, and the Franciscans then split repeatedly over exactly how literally poverty should be taken. Buddhist history shows the same cycle, with reform movements periodically reacting against monastic wealth and political entanglement. The movement continues: numbers in Western Catholic orders have fallen sharply since the 1960s while new communities and lay associations have formed, and the eight centuries of argument about whether a community that owns nothing can own a building has never been finally settled.

Communal religious withdrawal appears independently in Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism and Taoism, and is organised by a written rule, of which Benedict's sixth-century text became the western template through its moderation. The vows of poverty, celibacy, obedience and stability are framed as removing competing claims rather than as deprivation. Monasteries preserved literacy, developed agriculture and technology, and ran hospitals and schools, accumulating wealth that triggered a repeating cycle of reform movements demanding a return to the original austerity.