Monasticism

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Monasticism is the ordering of an entire life around withdrawal from ordinary society for the sake of religious discipline — typically renunciation of property, marriage, and self-will, sustained by prayer, fasting, and manual or intellectual labor. The word descends from the Greek monos, alone; the earliest figures were hermits, and the solitary remained one pole of the practice long after most monks had gathered into communities.

The Christian form took shape in the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the late third and fourth centuries. Antony, who withdrew into the Egyptian wilderness around 270 and whose life was later written by Athanasius, became the pattern of the solitary ascetic; Pachomius, a generation afterward, organized the first communities under a common rule, inventing the shared, regulated life — the koinobion — that most later monasticism would follow. From there the impulse spread fast: Basil of Caesarea gave the Greek East a rule emphasizing obedience and charitable work, and in the sixth century Benedict of Nursia composed for the Latin West a rule whose moderation, its balance of prayer, reading, and labor, became the organizing document of European monastic life for a thousand years. The medieval monastery was, among other things, the institution that copied and preserved the classical and Christian texts the modern world inherited.

The traditions hold the practice toward different ends. Christian monks understood the renounced life as a return to the purity of Eden and a foretaste of heaven, the monastery a school for the service of God. Buddhism made the monastic order — the sangha — central from the start: the one who goes forth from household life abandons possessions and family precisely because attachment binds one to suffering and rebirth, and the discipline aims at release. Jain and Hindu renunciants pursue parallel paths of austerity and detachment; later Sufism developed its own communities of poverty, the dervish in his patched frock a deliberate refusal of the world’s goods.

So many unconnected traditions arrived at the cloister and the cell. The resemblance is real and has often been noticed — withdrawal, poverty, celibacy, fixed hours, a master and a rule. It is worth resisting the temptation to read it as a single thing wearing different clothes: the Benedictine seeks union with a personal God, the Buddhist monk an extinction that is no union at all, and the difference is not cosmetic. What the traditions share is narrower and stranger than a common doctrine — a recurring judgment that the fullest religious life requires subtracting most of what ordinary life is made of, and that something is gained in the subtraction.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · Warren — Buddhism in Translations (1896)

→ Related: Mysticism · Gnosis · Alcuin · Middle Ages