Monasticism in Early Church

[Music] in this lecture I'm going to talk about the rise of early monasticism in the church both in the East and in the western halves of the late Roman Empire and the reason we study monasticism has really a couple of features within it the popular misconception of monasticism usually arises after or as a result of the Reformation if you look at the ways in which the monastic movement suffered after the reformation and some of the things that were said about monastics by Luther and Calvin and others in England in all the areas and countries in the 16th century that were touched by protestantism you tend to get a bit of a strange image of monasticism that is a bit out of joint with the way monasticism functioned historically there are a lot of popular misconceptions about monasticism some of them have kernels of Truth others of them do not and so we should start just briefly by defining what a monk or what a monastic house is the first thing we have to discuss is that monastic people were not the kinds of people that we find in the later Middle Ages they were not living in monasteries necessarily to save their own Souls they were not enacting lives of penance at least not to the extent that we find Luther and others doing in the 15th and 16th centuries monasticism has an important role to play in the development of the church both in the East and in the west and it should be noted historically that despite the fact that monasticism later took on so many changes and it became so in mesed in late medieval Catholicism that it led Protestants to ultimately reject the monastic movement nevertheless they were elements of the monastic movement that we have to both acknowledge as being pivotal and important and in some cases which we can cherish as part of the wider Heritage of the western church and of the church as a whole throughout the world first of all we should look at a definition what is a monk the or of a monk come from the early church but they don't really begin there the early church took concepts of aesthetical life and they adapted them to meet the Christian world of the first three or four centuries of the church if we look in the Old Testament we see examples of self-denial prophets or leaders who are called by God who abstain from things sometimes for a period of time and and sometimes for longer we know for example the Nazarite vow The Vow that Sansom and others took a vow to never touch a fermented drink to not touch alcohol not to cut your hair we also see the prophets at times particularly Elijah living seemingly alone in the desert praying to God interceding for people for God living a life devoted directly to God apart from the world and there were lots of Jewish traditions of aesthetical life we can't explore all of those but we can at least acknowledge that there is a Jewish background to aesthetical life we see in the New Testament two examples of aesthetical life that are commendable in some ways or at least they can be mimicked in this life the first is St John the Baptist moving out into the Wilderness wearing a hair shirt eating locusts and honey and preaching the kingdom of God John the Baptist in fact is one of the main Inspirations for the monastic order there are all kinds of parallels to what monks are attempting to do in the wilderness and what John the Baptist is attempting to do as the Forerunner to Messiah above all though you see Christ himself going through periods of fasting 40 days in the wilderness these sorts of things we also have Jesus teachings that are very clear in one case that we should sell all of our possessions and follow God in the early church though this backdrop starts to take on a new seriousness with the rise of monasticism now let's begin first by talking about what a monk is if you just look at the Greek origin of the word a monk is someone who lives alone the Greek word monos is the word for alone therefore a monk is someone who is ideally living in some way alone and is olated from the world around them the word monk can be applied in a couple of different ways and we're going to talk about both of them in this lecture the first form of monasticism is what we call artical monasticism it is hermit if you look at the word artical and you just sort of add an H to the front of it you can kind of get this the sense artical hermetical a Hermit a Hermit as we even use that word today would be someone who lives alone someone who lives almost entirely in isolation in the aeromedical monastics were people who often attempted to live in the desert usually in caves sometimes in fortresses abandoned buildings these kinds of things or they lived on the edges of deserts so that they could withdraw for periods of time Into the Wilderness so when we look at the origins of the Aram medical side there is really one great forefather or or founder of the Aram medical tradition and that is St Anthony St Anthony was a greeking Christian Living in and around the area of Alexandria in the middle to late 3rd century and on in really to the middle of the 4th Century who decided to perfect his calling by following the example of John the Baptist in Jesus now most of what we know about St Anthony was not written down by him but rather was written in a by iography by the great athanasius the scourge of Aryans and the defender of the Incarnation of Christ and athanasius for a time had met with and explored the life of monasticism and and seemed to have been enamored by it and it led to him writing a great biography of St Anthony and Anthony athanasius tells us was somebody who decided that he had had enough with society that he was concerned about pursuing Christ to the fullest that he wanted to live a life devoted fully to God and to not be wrapped up in the everyday cares of life and so aanus tells us Anthony moved to the edge of a desert the desert was just a number of miles west of Alexandria and athanasius tells us that Anthony lived in this desert for about 13 years now the common question that comes up at this point is what did he eat how did he live if he's in in an actual desert where's the water and the short answer is he survived on very very little he didn't eat very much in fact he was almost always fasting the little that he did eat was often brought to him by pilgrims or by lay people who would come out to the desert to consult with St Anthony as a wise man they would bring him maybe a piece of bread or they'd bring him some other sorts of things and he would often sort of sit there and dispense wisdom as they came to him with their cares and these 13 years were formative for St Anthony tradition has it mostly through athenus we know that these 13 years were a period of some sort of trial or torment there are all these stories of the devil tormenting Anthony directly he sent Phantoms of women designed to seduce him he sent him beasts designed to scare him and at the end of the 13 years we are told the devil actually physically beat St Anthony to a pulp nearly beats him to death he only comes to at some point and he decides that he has to withdraw from the desert for a period of time for convalescence and this ongoing tradition of St Anthony tempted and tormented by the devil is really symbolized by Michelangelo's famous painting of the torment of St Anthony you see that the Demonic Spirit sort of wrapped around him attacking him and assaulting him yet he with stood even after being physically harmed he takes on his second monastic period of trial in this case St Anthony moved to an old Roman Fort there were all of these now abandoned forts on the edges of the Roman Empire remember these are the times of the Civil Wars this is just on the cusp of Constantine's rise to the throne but nonetheless in this case there was an old Roman Fort that had been abandoned and St Anthony decides to move into it now there is there is no comfort in this fort it's it's it's a shell of a building really but it provides him some sort of boundaries and we are told that St Anthony locked the door he barred the door he did something that would enclose him in this cell or in this sort of small Fort and there Anthony lived for an additional 20 years and much that we have of Anthony's sayings of his wisdom comes from this period of time when pilgrims would come to the Fort they'd bring a little bit of food as they would pass the food usually through a little window he would stand there as they ask their questions and the response would sort of be whispered back through the door and for the next 20 years St Anthony is locked in this fort and he is engaging in aesthetical practices of of denying oneself of prayer again there are struggles with the devil and in this case we we are told he overcomes he overcomes not by his own power but he overcomes we are told because when he is tempted and when he is when he sees these demonic forces come at him he responds by saying that they have no power over him that he belongs to Christ and that therefore he is not afraid and The Story Goes that St Anthony was then granted God's favor and the devil was forced to flee so that's St Anthony Anthony is again a bit of a a warrior in fact Anthony is historically considered one of the great athletes of God and that that's actually a technical term following Anthony and following the the description of his heroic exploration of the Christian Life often these early arom medical monastics would be called the athletes of God using the Pauline language of sanctification as something like exercise where you beat your body into submission the couch potato in us all has to be forced to submit when the Aram medical monastics consider what they are attempting to do they see themselves as engaging in the Christian Life through a series of seemingly athletic exercises again it's a parallel they they're not actually doing Athletics um if you're not eating all day long um the desire to to to do exercises probably wouldn't be very strong but nonetheless the spiritual exercises the labor of spiritual formation is something that the early Aram medical monastics consider to be very very important and it it raises just one minor point that is worth noting and that is the early monastics and historically the the background in the in the Old Testament and New Testament saw monasticism in a particular light and this is something that was essentially lost over a period of time or forgotten and that is when a monastic decides that he is going to renounce marriage or he is going to renounce property or that he is going to fast and go through a life of abstinence or even a period of abstinence you have to remember that in these early centuries of the church it was still allowed for priests to marry it was still allowed in nearly every case for a priest to own property fasting was of course a responsibility of all Christians for certain periods of time voluntary fasting in some cases communal fasting where a church would decide that they were going to fast for perhaps a big decision or for uh any number of reasons and that drives home the point that when a monastic person in the early church is seeking to abstain from certain things the early impulse was not to see these things as inherently evil so marriage for example is never maligned as some sort of false of the person who has to get married for his own lusts property is not considered evil on its own fasting is not is not undertaken because food is somehow evil so we have to remember that in these early days this is a process of in general sanctification is what they're seeking the Christian Life lived out before God and what they are doing what these what these monks are doing people like St Anthony is they are abstaining from the things that the average person even the average Pastor or priest took part in not because they were evil but because it was an additional sacrifice just again as the nazarenes or John the Baptist didn't believe that fermented drink or that living in the cities was inherently evil nevertheless they abstained from certain things to live devoted to God and that really is why we talk about the early athletes of God these early monks if artical monasticism or hermit style monasticism was the first type of monasticism to come on the scene the second type of monasticism is what we know today as cobit or cobic monasticism this word is a bit strange at least in terms of its atmology it it comes from two Greek words that are combined and then kind of morphed over time and the two words are Coos and bios the idea here is that a cabit lives in a common life a Coos bias a common life in other words citic or cobit monasticism is the kind of monasticism that we know very well in the western church where monks live together as a community they share a common life together they do certain things together they of course have periods where they withdraw maybe for personal prayer but the goal of a cabit is not to live in isolation but to live in a community of monks separated from the world but nevertheless working together for their own Christian lives for their own sanctification and other things cabit monasticism is begun about the same time just just slightly after the time of St Anthony and the first to come on the scene with this idea is St pomus pomus has much of the same impulse that Anthony does he desires to be a Christian athlete to use that term in he wants to live a life fully devoted to God he wants to sell all that he has and devote himself to a life of prayer he is born in the city of Thieves which is the modern day of Luxor Egypt he is actually a soldier pomus actually served during the Roman Civil Wars the crisis of the late 3rd Century as we call it he was your average Roman Pagan Soldier his parents were Pagan he had no contact with the Christian world but IUS eventually finds himself essentially suppressed or oppressed both physically and militarily he ends up Landing in a city in Egypt and while he is there he and a number of other young soldiers are kind of hardpressed and what happens is in the city the Christian Community begins to take care of these soldiers they come out each day and they give them food and comfort they are amazing examples of Christian hospitality and pomus again just a pagan part of the the Roman establishment as an Army soldier he vows then and there that when his army service is over he is going to explore Christianity he wants to see what these Christians are all about if this is the model that they're going to live by he was actually intrigued by it and so in 3:14 pomus is baptized and early on pomus models his desire to be a monk off of St Anthony directly in fact his first attempt is to move move near St Anthony in the region of Alexandria as we are told though a voice comes to pomus and it tells him that he should not live in isolation in full but that he should actually build a residence for a number of monastic individuals who live around the area and this gave rise to pomus building the what we call the tabina monastery it was built and sort of developed sometime around 318 to 323 and the tabina monastery is bit of an interesting amalgam or a development really of the monastic way of life the tabina monastery focuses on monks living in what we today call cells cell clusters what the ideal here is is that monks would live in moderate Community they live in in somewhat in a communal lifestyle but that they would again withdraw for a period of time for themselves and first his brother and then eventually up to about 100 monks come and live at the tabina monastery most live in Huts or they live in caves around the tabina monastery and these men and women would come together out of their huts and caves for periods of worship they held all things in common at the tabina monastery lots of the things that we would come to know as cabit monasticism or monastic houses are all designed here in tabina and one of the final things that pomus gives us is the name of the Abbot while at the tabina monastery the monks would call him ABA which of course means father they would call him ABA pomus father pomus and over time the word ABA became associated with the head of a cabit monastic order and therefore over time the ABA becomes the Abbot or the abbis the man or the woman who is in charge of a cabit monastic community and all of the r rules and all the practices that St pomus draws up are eventually written down in what we call the atica the aea is really sort of a textbook or a rule book for how to live in a monastic house with multiple entities how do you live together how do you share all things in common how do you conduct work and so forth and the aesthetica really particularly in the East it's it's it's largely forgotten in the west but the atica in the East has become the benchmark or the early foundational loadstone of the cabit monastic orders particularly in the East for Western monasticism there was one great monastic founder of the cabit movement and that was St Benedict St Benedict Was an Italian he was born in the area of nura he spent his early years studying in Rome and after a period of study he decided to retreat to compa now the impulse for Benedict to live a mon Astic life was already there in compa he meets up with some other individuals living the monastic life but Benedict's Zeal for monastic practice actually seem to have uh offended these monks and they actually attempt to poison him to death forcing him to flee Benedict then flees to Monta Casino which is the place where his name would finally be established as one of the great founders of monasticism most of what we know about Benedict comes from a later writing by Pope Gregory the Great Gregory and his dialogues which are a resource that historians have explored for centuries to understand the period of time as well as to understand Gregory's theology the dialogues have a number of accounts of Benedict and Benedict's Zeal for monastic life and for the ways in which Benedict ordered the house in Monta casino to live to a certain rigorous piety and what Gregory notes for us is that Benedict doesn't Retreat for his own sake he doesn't Retreat for the sake of his own sanctification his own self-denial his own desire to live before God but we are told that Benedict desires to save the world the monastic house the work of monks as somehow contributing to the kingdom at large and this really is a is a is a bit of a departure as we'll see in later lectures Western monasticism begins to take on this tone as those who are there to not remove themselves from society but remove themselves in general and then serve Society whether it's through medicine whether it's through prayer preaching teaching whether it's through food and clothing to the poor whatever it might be in the west following Gregory's sort of impulse the Western monastic world will see itself as saving the world as as saving those around them in while at Monta Casino Benedict comes up with not just a generic understanding of monasticism of living in community but Benedict actually writes what we call a rule that is a regula in fact later Western monks are sometimes called the regular clergy it doesn't mean that the others are not regular or that they're somehow strange rather the regula the regular clergy or the clergy or the monks who follow a rule and the rule of St Benedict it cannot be overemphasized the the effect the rule will have on Western Manas I ISM the book is in 73 chapters it has a prologue it then has seven chapters on we might call the philosophy of the aesthetical life and the rest of the book deals with practical matters it deals with what the character of a monk ought to be it it deals with very sort of earthy things like sleeping Arrangements manual labor it stressed that monks should not eat meat and that they should only have limited wine it demanded that there be no property for the monks that they that they leave their material possessions behind and the Brilliance of the Benedictine rule is not so much that it was overly ordinate but actually that it was so flexible the rule in fact can be applied to any number of different context when it talks about manual labor it doesn't specify what it has to be it just says manual labor needs to be part of life when it talks about the other practices of the day and of life it allows for enormous flexibility to occur and in fact the rule becomes so important in Western history doe in large part to its flexibility just a couple of things about what life would be like in the Benedictine house the praying of the canonical hours or what's sometimes called the Daily Office this is one of the things that Benedict does put in stone that becomes really the Hallmark of not just Catholic Western Christianity but it it has been carried over in into a number of even Protestant traditions and this is the idea that there ought to be regular prayer hours throughout the day for a Christian and prayer began with matens matens began in the middle of the night it was between the hours of 2: and 4: a.m. when the monks would rise and come together and they would pray and after a period of prayers usually not overly long maybe somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes prayer would be said and then they would go back to bed that would then followed up by LS which was the prayer at first light then there would be prime prime was the midm morning prayer usually around 9:00 a.m. and that would be followed up by the lunch prayer time of tur sometimes called sex sometimes called non and that was the lunch prayer this would be followed up by Vespers which would be the prayers at dusk then there would be compline compline would be the prayer to end the day of work and finally at long last you would get to knock turn which would be the prayers said just before bed and these prayers have gone through a number of different practices some monastic houses kept slightly different variations of this some monastic houses got in the habit of all night vigils on occasion but nonetheless the Supreme desire of the monk ought to be that of prayer and in fact not just a little bit of prayer but a great deal of prayer and so when we look at the rise and the development of early monasticism we see two different impulses we see two different trajectories really on the one hand you have the artical tradition which starts on relatively solid footing it it is not a gnostic movement that is denying life and marriage and food because it sees the world as evil rather it is attempting to apply the biblical pattern of an additional vow on top of what was required or expected of Christians very often both in the East and in the west it was the cobit monastic houses the the communal monastic houses that would come to dominate the world in the East the cabit monastic houses have carried on all the way down till today they have as well in the west but what happened in the western church of course is with protestantism and with a number of developments in the Middle Ages you see a number of changes that happen in monasticism that give rise to a variety of problems in the West in particular you have the problem over the course of the Middle Ages of the monastic houses becoming lazy there are some archaeological evidence that monastic houses in some cases once they became endowed with money and property and farms actually ate quite well they weren't always living the life of aesthetical piety that at times they were quite wellfed and well watered and as we'll see in a later lecture as some monastic houses become more lazy or they become corrupted you have the rise of reform efforts within the church to reestablish committed Orthodox monastic houses and some of those Inspirations some of those attempts at reform directly relate to ongoing developments that go all the way down to protestantism and actually lead to a number of developments in Theology and in Christian thinking [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ryan Reeves

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Keywords: Monasticism (Taxonomy Subject), Church History, St Anthony, Cenobite (Character Species), Eremetical Tradition, Monks, Monasticism (Literature Subject), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Roman Catholic Church (Organization Founder), Roman Empire (Country), Religion (TV Genre), Medieval Literature (Field Of Study), Middle Ages (Event), Early Christianity (Literature Subject), Early Middle Ages (Event), Ryan M. Reeves

Id: Aotkle8uCdI

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Sat May 31 2014