Monks and Friars
The Papacy was responsible for the souls of all Christians, but throughout the Middle Ages it showed special solicitude for the welfare of the religious, those men and women who devoted themselves to the communal, celibate
Christianity in the West to the Reformation and impoverished quest for the grace of God.
The foundation charter of Western monasticism is the Rule of St Benedict, written in the middle of the sixth century. The document is not unique, for many monastic leaders composed such rules, and the community at Monte Cassino for which Benedict wrote probably did not survive the sack of their house in 581. Yet because of its inherent excellence, the admiration expressed for the abbot by Pope Gregory I and the desire of Charlemagne for religious uniformity, Benedict’s Rule had by the ninth century become the blueprint for monastic life throughout western Europe. The author called his work ‘a Ettle rule for beginners’. It was intended not for spiritual athletes, who could scale the heights of asceticism as hermits, but for those who sought a school of religious observance under the direction of an autocratic abbot, elected for life, advised but not governed by the counsel of his monks. The liturgy was set firmly at the centre of communal life, but the monk’s day was to be divided between prayer, study and manual work.The Rule of St Benedict was in some ways a reaction against the monasticism of Syria and Egypt, which had expanded so rapidly because many fervent believers, conscious after 312 ce that the purity of Christian observance had been diluted by compromise with the secular power, sought individual salvation through a life of austere isolation, or forming into groups, waged from their desert retreats a violent campaign against paganism and the classical tradition. Benedict and his Western contemporaries, living in the shadow of the distintegration of the Roman Empire in an era of violent uncertainty, existed in a state of siege.
Within their communities they struggled to create a refuge wherein Roman social ideals and classical culture were preserved. Unlike the holy men of the East, they were not wild radicals, but conservatives. They imagined that their new barbarian rulers were both irreligious and philistine. Yet once the initial stage of evangelisation, the conversion of the Germanic war-lords, had been completed, the monasteries came to be highly valued as the only surviving repositories of that Romanitas so ardently admired by the new rulers of western Europe.Because of their monopoly of education in the early Middle Ages, rulers looked to monasteries to provide training for those clerks essential for the servicing of their rudimentary bureaucracies, for written government distinguished a Christian king from a barbarian chieftain. As successful tribal kingdoms extended their frontiers, Christianisation and colonisation went hand in hand, and the monks were in the vanguard, establishing outposts of evangelisation and royal influence in newly conquered territories. Election of an abbot by his monks was soon replaced by royal appointment, and as the monasteries accumulated vast estates, from which the king expected military service as from any others, the religious superiors provided a counterweight to the secular aristocracy, whose interests often conflicted with those of the crown. In countless ways the monastic
order buttressed royal authority, and lesser lords obtained as many benefits from their own religious foundations.
The primary motivation for the establishment of monasteries was, however, surely religious. Early medieval theology was dominated by the Old Testament. The vengeful God of Israel was ideally suited to the tribal society of the barbarian kings, and there was little emphasis upon the love of Jesus. Men lived in perpetual fear of the Last Judgement and the pains of Hell, vividly portrayed sculpturally and in wall-paintings. Preachers constantly emphasised that the aristocratic and military classes, who in this harsh competitive world had to fight to survive, were in the greatest danger of damnation.
The penance imposed by the priest on earth, however, and the debt due to God after death, might in this world, where little store was set by individualism, be discharged by others. The prayers and religious exercises of the monks might be credited to their founders and benefactors. By founding a monastery, great men created for themselves a mausoleum, to be staffed for all time by a community whose raison d’etre was intercessory prayer. Lesser benefactors stipulated that, in return for their gifts, they should on their death-beds be clothed as monks, and treated as such at the divine tribunal. The monks, knights of Christ, were engaged in a constant battle against the forces of darkness for the souls of mankind, and especially of those who had made a spiritual investment in their community. They took upon their shoulders the sins of the world.In the late eleventh century there was a sudden but widespread reaction against the integration of monasticism with the world. This was intimately connected with that intellectual movement known as the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, which was characterised by pronounced concern for the individual and by an attempt to return to primitive ideals. This rejection of past monastic glories was led by young monks, influenced by the new theology which emphasised the love of the human Jesus, sent to be a companion and exemplar, and seeking to establish a personal relationship with him through meditation conducted in an environment divorced from feudal politics and the manorial economy, which was to be a conscious recreation of the life of the apostolic community at Jerusalem or the Desert Fathers of the fourth century.
In the twelfth century, the monolithic structure of Benedictine monasticism was shattered, and many versions of the ‘apostolic and evangelical life’ were offered to those in search of perfection. The Carthusians, most austere of the new orders, combined the solitude of the desert with the discipline of a conventual structure.
The Augustinian canons, whose modest establishments attracted the patronage of the lesser gentry and prosperous merchants, undertook pastoral work and administered hospitals. The military orders, both in the Holy Land and in Spain, combined the monastic vocation with the chivalric ethos, and constituted the most efficient fighting machine of the age.The most successful and influential of the new orders, however, was that of Citeaux. The Cistercian interpretation of the Rule of St Benedict, which was to be followed to the letter, their determination to found communities in places far removed from the conversation of men, their rejection of involvement in the complexities of feudal government and their avoidance of superfluous elaboration in architecture and liturgy convinced many people across western Europe and the Christian Levant that the life of the White Monks provided ‘the surest road to heaven’. The path to salvation was opened not only to the knightly class, from which the choir monks were still exclusively recruited, but to many thousands of illiterate members of the lower ranks of society admitted as lay brethren, who in earning their salvation provided a highly efficient work-force. In an attempt to preserve the pristine purity of the founding fathers in an order which had by 1152 expanded to 328 abbeys, the Cistercians evolved a constitution based on a yearly meeting of all abbots and the annual visitation of all monasteries. This model was later applied by the Papacy to all religious orders, in an attempt to override the traditional autonomy of the ancient Benedictine houses. Cistercian influence on the ecclesiastical politics of twelfth-century Europe was increased immeasurably by the career and writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, a spiritual and theological genius who ardently, if sometimes stridently, combated sin and sloth wherever they were perceived. No king, bishop or scholar was exempt from his criticism, which was directed most fiercely against the alleged laxity of traditional Benedictinism.
It is sad, although perhaps not surprising, that the primitive zeal of the early Cistercians could not be sustained in perpetuity. By the end of the twelfth century social critics found it hard to distinguish them from the Benedictines, except perhaps that their avarice was greater.The function of radical reform within the thirteenth-century Church was fulfilled not by monks, but by a new form of religious institution, the mendicant orders of friars. The institutions of the Church had in the late twelfth century come under attack from various groups of fundamentalist critics, regarded by the hierarchy as heretics. A challenge to Rome was mounted by the very existence of the Cathar faith, firmly entrenched in southern France and with a strong presence in northern Italy. This was a religion closely akin to Christianity rather than a Christian heresy, whose adherents believed in the coexistence of good and evil gods, whose eternal strife was represented by incessant conflict between spirit and matter; this was an unacceptable accentuation of tendencies in Christian, and especially monastic, theology. The presence of dissident groups within the Christian community, such as the Waldensians, was probably the long-term result of Pope Gregory VII’s incitement of pious laymen to open criticism of unworthy priests as part of his programme to purify the Church. Many felt themselves betrayed by the more cautiously bureaucratic popes of the twelfth century and became increasingly alienated from the structure and practice of
Christianity in the West to the Reformation contemporary sacerdotal religion, until their strictures became so abrasive that they were excluded from the Church.
The challenge of the heretics was met by Dominic’s organisation of the Order of Preachers, a disciplined body of skilled theologians trained to excel in popular preaching, and by the spontaneous joy in God’s creation expressed by Francis and his followers, whose enthusiastic imitation of the poverty of Christ evoked such a response in northern Italy that the pessimistic Cathar heresy simply withered away.
Dominic deliberately set out to create a highly motivated elite corps; Francis, whose interpretation of the Gospel message was closely akin to that of many heretical leaders, but who unlike them was unwavering in his loyalty to the Papacy, reluctantly accepted an organisational structure for his followers when it became obvious that the alternative was spiritual anarchy. The poverty of the order—as opposed to the monastic vow of individual poverty, often fulfilled within a rich corporation—was an ideal for Francis, whereas for Dominic it was a means towards the end of counteracting heretical criticism of the Church. The Dominican and Franciscan Orders borrowed heavily from each other, and with their international organisations they became the front-line troops of the Papacy in the battle against heterodoxy and religious dissent. It is symptomatic, however, of their very different origins that the Dominicans, as well as achieving much that would be considered laudable by any Christian, provided the staff of the Holy Inquisition, while the Franciscans were themselves racked by schism when a vociferous minority of the brethren reacted strongly against the alleged corruption of the primitive ideals of the founder by his successors as Minister General, and were themselves condemned as heretical.The resolution of the friars to live by begging forced them into the towns to survive, and in consequence they fulfilled one of the greatest needs of the medieval Church, which since the decline of the Roman Empire had been orientated towards agrarian society. By their charismatic preaching the friars often succeeded in harnessing the potentially anarchic religious enthusiasm of the urban masses to aims approved by the Church. They provided for the poor, in return for the smallest contribution, the services of intercession which their social superiors expected from the monks, and during outbreaks of plague they acquired an enviable reputation for the care of the sick and dying. This evangelical and social work was combined with a formidable record of academic attainment. Within a few years of the foundation of the orders, university teachers of the highest reputation were recruited to their ranks, and the majority of outstanding theologians of the later Middle Ages were members of the mendicant orders, who also established networks of lowers schools across Europe, and led the way in the study of languages and the natural sciences. The friars, however, attracted much hostility from bishops jealous of their exemption from episcopal control, parish clergy fearful for their offerings and academics whose
reputations and fees were jeopardised. The price paid by the Papacy for the establishment of this international militia was the concession that no new rule of religious life should be sanctioned in the future. When by the early fourteenth century the friars had lost their initial radical impulse, there was an embargo on the establishment of any innovative and reforming body within the Church. This surely accounts for the proliferation of heretical groups in the later Middle Ages and the inflexibility of the Church in the face of any criticism.