Tag Archives: monasticism

The original desert father

Posted on November 1, 2009 | 1 comment

Another of my entries for the Zondervan Dictionary of Spirituality,this one features “the original desert father,” Antony of Egypt. Antony, too, features in my Patron Saints for Postmoderns.

Antony of Egypt (251-356). Egyptian monastic pioneer. He is often (though incorrectly) called the first monk and founder of monasticism: he himself imitated a tradition of “holy solitaries”—men who lived ascetic lives at the edges of Egyptian towns. His innovation was that when he heard the word of the Gospels preached—“Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow me”—he sold his belongings, gave away the proceeds, and moved out into the desert to live as a hermit. This he did decades before Constantine’s legalization of Christianity—so spiritual declension of the church under state sponsorship was not the initial impetus for Christian monasticism. Athanasius’s Life of Antony is our only source on the Egyptian monk’s life, aside from a few “sayings” and a small set of letters. Athanasius’s book paints a prototypical holy man. Continue reading →

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A pope worth knowing

Posted on November 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is my profile of Gregory the Great for the Zondervan Dictionary of Spirituality. He is indeed a pope worth knowing–and one of the ten figures in my Patron Saints for Postmoderns.

Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604). Pivotal medieval pope. “The Great” is the customary honorific for Pope Gregory, the first practicing monk to be elected to the papacy (590 – 604). Roman Catholics designate him Doctor of the Church and one of six Latin Fathers. Born of noble blood and ascending to the secular prefecture of Rome before entering the monastery, he became pope at a time of barbarian invasion, plague, drought, famine, and the abdication of responsibility by the old Roman senatorial class. He filled the leadership void, negotiating peace with the invaders, draining the coffers of the church on behalf of the suffering, and leading penitential parades beseeching God to turn back the plague. His leadership in Rome is considered a key moment in the rise of the papacy to Western power both ecclesiastical and secular. However, appalled by claims of the Patriarch John of Constantinople to be “ecumenical patriarch,” Gregory styled himself “Servant of the servants of God” (though still assuming the Western primacy of the Roman bishop). Continue reading →

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Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Patron Saints for Postmoderns

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Re-Monking the Church: new monasticism

Posted on October 28, 2009 | 9 comments

In a 2007 issue of Christian History & Biography dedicated to Benedict and Western monasticism, I contributed the following piece:

Christians struggling for sanctity in a too-comfortable world should pay attention to this observation by Mark Noll: “For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel was done either by those who had chosen the monastic way or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.” Can Western monasticism’s “father,” Benedict, still give us an antidote to cultural compromise?

At first blush, this might seem unlikely, at least in the Western church. Between 1978 and 2004—nearly the entire span of John Paul II’s pontificate—the number of men in monastic and religious orders (not including priests) decreased by 46% in Europe and 30% in the Americas, while the number of women decreased by 39% and 27%, respectively. Compare this to the trend in the global South: During the same period, men in monastic and religious orders increased by 48% in Africa and 39% in Asia, with women increasing on those two continents by 62% and 64%.

A number of the Catholic writers in the 2006 volume A Monastic Vision for the 21st Century frankly wonder if “monasticism as we know it” is, in God’s providential plan, destined for obsolescence in the West. Yet most suggest that new and powerful forms of the monastic impulse may even now be arising.

This is certainly the impression given by the 21st annual Monastic Institute, held in July 2006 at St. John’s Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota. There, Catholic Benedictines and members of established communities such as L’Arche and the Catholic Worker Movement joined with leaders of new Protestant communities with names like the Simple Way (Pennsylvania), Rutba House (North Carolina), and the Church of the Servant King (Oregon) to mine the riches of Benedict’s Rule. This strikingly diverse group—50% Catholic, 50% Protestant—discussed the topic of “new communities” with high hopes that, indeed, God is still in the monastic impulse. Continue reading →

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Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Resources for Radical Living

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Summary of chapter 6: The mission of the monks

Posted on October 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

The contemplative life in some way resembles the life of quasi-monastic scholarship lived by the dons of Oxford University. Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams taught there, and Sayers attended there and returned there repeatedly in her imagination. There is a culture there of, if not strict asceticism, then at least a communal life focused on the contemplation of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, through the study of texts and the mutual admonition and edification of minds and spirits brought together in a sort of quasi-Benedictine life of stability. Continue reading →

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