Guenter Risse has provided, in his Mending Bodies, Saving Souls, a fascinating account of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem during the crusader years.
The Hospital reflected and elaborated on the values found in the earlier monastic history of Christian hospitals. Here are some glimpses, prefaced by a brief timeline of Jerusalem’s history: Continue reading
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What follows are some acute observations on the Christian landscape of the early Middle Ages from Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994). For those interested in the monastic culture of the Middle Ages or the ins and outs of medieval spirituality, this is a wonderful text. McGinn has solidly mastered all that he writes about, and he communicates it in terms understandable to the nonspecialist reader.
The notes that follow are taken from Chapter 1, “The Making of Christendom.” Each note begins with the page number.
17 “The changes in Christian spirituality between 400 and 800 are especially significant for understanding the development of medieval Latin mysticism. No one disputes that these centuries saw the end of ancient Christianity, tied to the world of the late Roman city, and the birth of early medieval Christianity, more often than not rural and monastic in character. . . .” Continue reading
These are brief excerpts and quotations I marked while reading Columba Stewart, OSB, Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998)
The whole Orbis Traditions series of which this book is a part is outstanding–short, affordable paperbacks that are meaty, wise, and quotable. And Stewart’s is the best of the series out of the 4 or 5 I’ve read so far. You will find here (1) a nutshell biography, (2) a lively exegesis of various sections of the Rule, and (3) succinct and penetrating observations on the distinctives of the Benedictine way: the lectio divina, the “work of God” (liturgy), silence, personal prayer, humility, obedience, and much else that I, at least, found illuminating. Continue reading
I am fascinated by Francis.
Francis of Assisi (1181/2 – 1226) was, I think, a man in many ways well ahead of his time. Being human, he was not without his oddities and peccadilloes. But he drank deeply from the sorts of spiritual wells that have more recently animated the charismatic movement.
He took monasticism to its next logical step in living what Weber would later call a “worldly asceticism”: his model of Imitatio Christi understood as a vigorous and peripatetic service to the world transformed medieval religious life. The Franciscans and Dominicans both lived it out for centuries after his death, though often in ways that would have made poor Francis’s hair curl.
He recognized with laser clarity the toxicity of wealth and the heroic measures necessary to save oneself from pride.
What a saint was Francis! Still today I am challenged every time I read of his life.
All of this I was beginning to discover in 1994, at age 31, as I moved on from both my Christian tutelage in the charismatic movement and my secular vocation in corporate communications to the full-time study of church history Continue reading
Reading Guenter Risse’s account, in Mending Bodies, Saving Souls, of how hospitals were pioneered and operated for many centuries by monks, I began to wonder–how and why did this situation change? How did we get from monastic hospitals to the huge, shiny, bureaucratic and largely secular institutions that loom on today’s medical landscape? Here is the beginning (but only the beginning) of the answer to my question:
“[In the 11th century,] Benedictine monasteries throughout Europe ceased to play their hitherto prominent roles in the provision of social welfare and medical care. For almost 1,000 years, almshouses and hospitals had been organized and run in accordance with highly successful monastic models of prayer and work. Now, in the face of rapid population growth and urbanization, these establishments became inadequate purveyors of traditional charitable assistance. An increasingly urban economy based on commerce that demanded markets, contracts, and currency loans rapidly became the instrument and measure of work. Continue reading
Continuing my reading of Guenter Risse’s Mending Bodies, Saving Souls, I encounter the following vivid description of the look, feel, administration, and theological underpinnings of those first medieval hospitals. This was not some blip in the history of medicine, but rather the way hospitals were run for many centuries from their medieval inception:
“Until the time of Purchard’s rule at St. Gall [monastery in Switzerland: Purchard was abbot from 958 to 971], hospitals in the West had been mostly small shelters established mainly for the homeless poor and travelers, including pilgrims. Some were located in cities, attached to a bishop’s palace; others operated near major roads, on mountain passes, or in monasteries alongside infirmaries restricted for sick monks. Hospitals comprised a lodging hall with 12 – 15 beds, an attached kitchen, and a chapel. Dormitories featured suspended mattresses filled with straw, pillows, bed sheets, and blankets. The large beds held two or three inmates.” (106) Continue reading
It’s often the “just-right source” that opens up a topic for me, and as I teach it, for my students. In the Resources for Radical Living course, I will be profiling the history of Christian practices of medical healing (that is, not including “faith healing”). An excellent source on this topic just came to me via the wonderful almighty inter-library loan system (thank you Mark Nygaard in the Bethel Seminary library), and I’d like to share a bit of it with y’all. [For more of the story beyond what follows, see here and here.
Guenter B. Risse of the Department of the History of Health Sciences, UC San Francisco, provides fascinating insights into the many stages of medical practice within Christian communities from the earliest years of the church onward in his compendious book Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (Oxford University Press, 1999).
To take just one example: I have seen it said in a number of places that the hospital was a medieval Christian invention. What follows are some excerpts from Risse on health care within medieval monasteries, from chapter 2: “Christian hospitality.” “Invention” is likely too strong a word to use of medieval developments in care of the sick–the Cappadocian father Basil the Great (330 – 379) was setting up something like ancient hospitals in Caesarea to address famine and disease in that city, and there were earlier pagan models that bore some resemblance to what later became hospitals. However, we can see from early on in Benedictine monasteries many of the rudiments of modern hospitals:
“From the start, providing hospitality and healing the sick became key responsibilities of European monasteries, reflective of both the inward and worldly missions they had assumed. As in the East, early Christian welfare in Europe targeted voluntary and structural paupers—there were few distinctions between them—as well as pilgrims. Continue reading
Though the following is a critical review, I want to be clear: I am deeply sympathetic with the aims and perspectives of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. I just think we need to be historically responsible when we compare new and old movements.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “A Vision So Old It Looks New” in Monasticism Old and New (Christian Reflection, Baylor University, 2010 issue)
This article was adapted from Wilson-Hartgrove’s book New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008).
In his introduction to this issue of Christian Reflection, Robert Kruschwitz summarizes this article : “In A Vision So Old It Looks New (p. 11), Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove explores how monasticism over the centuries has offered a powerful critique of mainstream culture. Tracing its origins from Antony and the fourth-century desert Christians, through the medieval monasteries inspired by Benedict of Nursia, to the intentional communities of radical Protestant Reformers, he shows, ‘In every era God has raised up new monastics to pledge their allegiance to God alone and remind the church of its true vocation’” (8).
Wilson-Hartgrove opens the article: “It is hard to be a Christian in America today. . . . The church in America is not living up to what it claims to be. Somehow we have lost our way.” (11) Especially he gives examples of behavior: spousal abuse, racism, hypocrisy in areas of sexuality. We ain’t that different from secular society, or sometimes worse, in many of those areas. Continue reading
Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Resources for Radical Living
Tagged African-American Christianity, Antony of Egypt, Benedict of Nursia, Benedictinism, church and state, communal life, Constantine, Constantinianization, Council of Nicea, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Martin Luther, Medieval, medievalism, Middle Ages, monasticism, new monasticism, prophetic life, radical Christianity, slavery
The Summer of Research has given way to the Summer of Writing, issuing in the first halting words of Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants (Baker Books, forthcoming). Here are some initial, gut-level thoughts–rough and unrevised:
I write this book not as an expert but as a pilgrim. The subject is medieval faith, but academically I am an Americanist. I write for the American evangelical Protestant church(es) in a time of intense pain and confusion. Battered by modernity, we have tried in turn rational apologetic, pragmatic ecclesiology, charismatic experience, and postmodern experimentation. None of these has proved lasting.
The rationalism of modern apologetics has collapsed as the questions of the unchurched have turned away from doctrine and the agonies of the churched have centered on spirituality and practice rather than belief.
The pragmatism of the church growth specialists has dissolved, as it always has, as its shallow spirituality has become evident.[1]
The experientialism of the charismatic movement seems often to have failed to build lasting, faithful, discipled churches as worshippers have bounced from one high to the next.
The postmodernisms of some emerging Christians seem already to be veering into heresy.[2] Continue reading
G. K. Chesterton, “Christianity and Rationalism” (1904, The Clarion), G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. 1, pp. 373 – 380.
The following argument for the truth of Christianity comes from the Blatchford controversies, a civil exchange between anti- and pro-Christians in the pages of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, 1904, from which G. K. Chesterton’s contributions have been culled and published in vol. 1 of his Collected Works:
“The Secularist says that Christianity has [376] been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of these men’s surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all pleasures for one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy. They may have been mad; but it looks as if there really were such a pleasure. They gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience.” (375 – 6) Continue reading
We share with all the saints one Lord
Francis of Assisi--part of an altarpiece by Bartolomeo Vivarini, in the Brooklyn Museum
From a mid-15th-century Dutch prayerbook: Saint James the Great; Saint Joseph; Saint Ghislain, abbot of St Ghislain, near Mons; Saint Eligius; Saint Ermes (Hermes)
Gregory the Great and St. Mamertinus, from a 14th-century French translation of Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea
Cologne Cathedral
The clocktower of the Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles church in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt (Val-d'Oise), France
Masaccio, Crucifixion, 1426 (Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte); the blonde figure is Mary Magdalen
Door of Tewkesbury Abbey cloister
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 