Several years ago, while visiting the Met Cloisters, I came across ten decorative corbels from a 12th century Benedictine monastery in France. Corbels are architectural support structures that jut out of walls and aid in holding up whatever is above them. These ten corbels were once set just under the ceiling and roof of the Sauve-Majeure abbey in France. However, it wasn’t their practical function that fascinated me but rather how they’d been sculpted into various creatures, as well as what these motifs said about the Benedictine monks’ perspective on the world.
The corbels that once adorned the interior of the monastery had images of biblical figures, angels, and seraphim, whereas those from the exterior of the monastery were of beasts, acrobats, and wrestlers. The contrast between the interior and exterior, the heavenly and the monstrous, spoke of how crossing the monastery threshold was to enter into a holy space, a refuge from the unruly, tricky, and dangerous world that lay just outside.
A soft dualism between interior and exterior, the heavenly and the unruly, is a recurrent theme in Benedict’s worldview, and I detect a connection between this dualism and Benedict’s statements on wealth and poverty, his guidance on individual and collective ownership, as well as on a monastery’s role and responsibility toward the poverty that existed beyond the monastery walls.
The principal document for understanding Benedict’s perspective on wealth and poverty is his Rule, written c. 516, which is a concise text of 73 short chapters containing precepts for autonomous communities of monks living under the authority of an abbot. While there is an emphasis on rigorous obedience to the abbot, its chapters reflect an adaptable and humane approach to living in community. For instance, in contrast to prior rules, Benedict included significant provisions for sick and elderly monks. By laying out a daily pattern of Ora et Labora, he divided monks’ time into eight hours of prayer, eight hours of manual labor and sacred reading, and eight hours of sleep. Benedict’s perspective on wealth and poverty can be found scattered across this Rule, especially chapter 33 which addresses ownership of possessions, chapter 48 on manual labor, and chapters 53 and 66 on the reception of the poor as guests.
Benedict’s Rule is a foundational document for Western monasticism as well as a clue to what was taking place in 6th century Rome, but it is especially important to Anglicans because of how this Rule helped to create an English monastic culture which in turn heavily influenced the spirituality and ethos of the first Book of Common Prayer. Benedict’s Rule is thus one of the foundational documents of Anglican spirituality, and we Episcopalians are the inheritors of both the light and shadow contained in Benedict’s Rule. We encounter Benedict in both the pattern of daily prayer as well as the Episcopal Church’s self-ascribed charism of “all are welcome” hospitality.[1] And after spending the past week exploring his statements on poverty and wealth, I can’t help but wonder whether his legacy extends to this area as well.
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In order to understand Benedict’s Rule -- as well as the corbels decorating the interior and exterior of Sauve-Majeure abbey - it is worth returning to the origins of monasticism in Syria and Egypt. There, Eastern monasticism emerged as a form of ‘silent protest’ against the worldliness of the Church and societal instability in the second and third century. Benedict was the inheritor and creative interpreter of these prior monastics, as evidenced by chapter 73 wherein he cites the work of the fourth century monk bishop Basil of Cesarea. As I note in that prior post, Basil’s Rule drew upon the monastery led by the Egyptian monk Pachomius, who Basil visited in 357 while on an exploratory tour of ascetic practices in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia.
Darmaid McCullough’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years describes monasticism’s development in Syria and Egypt as an “implied criticism of Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.”[2] Monasticism was an alternative and refuge that nevertheless remained within the bounds of an increasingly monarchical and worldly church. It also provided Christians an opportunity to engage in a martyrdom of the self at a time when the Roman persecutions of Christians were in decline.
By stepping out of society -- literally walking out into the desert in some cases -- first ascetic hermits and then early monastic communities in the third century developed a way of life that fused two things held in uneasy tension. By separating from wider society, monks followed Jesus’ rejection of cultural conventions, including the abandonment of worldly wealth, yet their communities remained under authority of the bishop and therefore part of the orbit of the wider Church.[3] Yet this appears to have encouraged a constituent dualism, one that may have had its earlier origins in Gnosticism’s polarized view of flesh and spirit, that depicted the interior life of the monastery as a place of heavenly order and the world outside as unruly and dangerous.
Then again, the world beyond the walls of the monastery was unruly and dangerous, and was increasingly so in the city of Rome by the time of Benedict in the sixth century. The Roman empire had ceased to expand in 117 CE and was forever after defending its borders from encroachment. In 376, Goths and other non-Romans fleeing the Huns began entering the empire in overwhelming numbers. In 410 Rome was sacked by Barbarian armies. By the second half of the fifth century, Barbarian kingdoms had established strongholds in many parts of the western state and Rome wielded a dwindling amount of political and military control. This culminated in the Western State sending the imperial insignia from the city of Rome to the Eastern empire in 476, a key transition point from Late Antiquity into feudal order in the West and the Byzantine Empire in the East. The Church and the Roman papacy, in particular, would soon fill the power vacuum.
All of this would have been in the air when Benedict was born in 480 and also when he was sent as a young man to Rome for his studies. Pope Gregory I’s late sixth century hagiography tells of Benedict fleeing the city’s dissoluteness and lawlessness as a twenty year old man, a story that may have especially resonated with those grappling with what the disintegration of Roman imperial order meant. Benedict is said to have met the monk Romanus of Subiaco upon leaving Rome, whereupon he became a hermit for three years, only to be begged to come out of solitary life to become the abbot of Subiaco monastery. It did not go well. Among the attempts to dislodge the reform-minded Benedict, he is said to have nearly become the victim of poisoning by other monks. Upon leaving that first community, he founded the monastery of Monte Cassino in 529 as well as twelve other monastic communities around the Subiaco region.
Benedict’s Rule, written in 516, envisioned monastic communities as a foil to a sixth century society which was disintegrating all around him. Even the repeated emphasis on obedience and discipline -- which included corporal punishment for disobedient monks -- would likely have been attractive to those who longed for the return and stability of forceful Roman imperial order.[4]
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In chapter 33 of his Rule, Benedict addresses the question of whether monks should have anything of their own with the emphatic reply “This vice especially is to be cut out of the monastery by the roots.” Citing Acts 4:32 which describes Jesus’ early followers as of one heart and soul, with no one claiming any private possessions and holding all things in common, Benedict states that monks are to not give or receive anything without the Abbot’s leave. In the same way their bodies and wills were not at their disposal, so too it was unlawful to have anything which the abbot had not allowed.
Notably, while he explicitly prohibited the private ownership of anything by the individual monk, right down to “books or tablets or pens or whatever it may be”, later Benedictines would make use of his silence on the collective wealth of a monastery. This would later result in some extraordinarily wealthy and sumptuous settings in which individual monks could practice non-ownership. Later generations of Benedictines would come to see this as violating the spirit of Benedict’s Rule, and reform movements like the Cistercians of the 11th century and Trappists of the 17th sought to return to a stricter observance of Benedict’s statements on both poverty and manual labor.
The Rule’s perspective on individual possessions owes much to the writings of John Cassian (c.360-435), a monk and theologian originally from a region now shared by Bulgaria and Romania who later became the founder and abbot of Saint-Victor of Marseille. Key to John Cassian’s writings on poverty is the notion of abjectio, the stepping down of Christ for the salvation of humanity.[5] A monastery was a container where, as Peter Brown describes it, the great reversal took place: “In it, free men became slaves and the wealthy became paupers.”
“Everything that a Gallic farmer had good reason to dread in time of war and famine; everything that a nobleman made destitute by barbarian violence and civil war might experience: all the social ruin of Gaul was turned, as if by a magical inversion, into the basis of a perfect society…”[6]
Yet Cassian was clear that this ‘stepping down’ applied only to those who had crossed the threshold of the monastery; his forceful statements on the greed of individual monks was not paired with a condemnation of the greed and corruption to be found in wider society. In this, Cassian broke with predecessors such as Ambrose and Pelagius and shaped a Western ethos in which the wealthy “remained rich and became a pillar of the church as a donor or almsgiver, or one betook oneself to a monastery.”[7]
John Cassian’s influence can also be seen in Benedict’s 48th chapter of the Rule which addresses daily manual labor. Observing that “idleness is the enemy of the soul”, Benedict prescribes that monks “should be occupied at certain times in manual labor, and again at fixed hours in sacred reading” and later says this should go so far as doing the work of gathering the harvest themselves if and when necessary. This was in service of monastic autarky -- an often unattained ideal of economic self sufficiency - “for they are truly monks when they live by the labor of their hands, as did our Fathers and the Apostles.”
Once again, Benedict’s emphasis on manual labor and monastic autarky owes much to John Cassian who saw monks and monastery’s productivity as a foil to wider society. “In Cassian’s opinion, the monk was the exact opposite of the leisured rentier. He was the only productive member of society. He depended on himself to feed himself. Everyone else was like a beggar, living on the agape - the handouts - of others. Landowners collecting rents; emperors collecting taxes: compared with monks, they were all parasites, expecting to be fed by others.”[8]
Despite the emphasis placed on getting one’s hands dirty, later generations of Benedictine communities would broaden the Rule’s directions on manual labor to prioritize intellectual labor, frequently utilizing their collective wealth to assign manual labor to others. The intellectual, literary, and artistic pursuits that would ultimately have such a profound impact on Western culture, were not originally envisaged by its founder.
While Benedict’s directions on private possessions and manual labor can be seen as imitating Christ's abjectio, what of the poor beyond the monastery walls? In chapter 53, Benedict says that the pilgrims, those who share the Christian faith, and the poor should be received as honored guests. Citing Jesus’ “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25: 35), the Rule states “Proper honor must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims.” After describing the manner in which guests are to be received, he goes on to say “Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.” In chapter 66, the Rule notes the particular role of the porter in receiving guests: “As soon as anyone knocks, or a poor man calls out, he [the porter] replies, ‘Thanks be to God’ or ‘Your blessing, please’; then, with all the gentleness that comes from the fear of God, he provides a prompt answer with the warmth of love.”
There is much to honor and celebrate in this practice of hospitality to the poor, but there is also loss. While the Rule requires the abjectio and dispossession of materials of the monks within the monastery, and extends warm hospitality to the poor who cross the threshold, it departs from prior ascetic thinkers in remaining relatively silent on societal greed and poverty beyond the monastery walls. When Benedictine monasteries did engage in offering charity to the poor, it appears to have been primarily liturgical and ritualistic, confined to certain feast days, and primarily served as symbolic offerings. It wasn’t until the tenth century that the role of almoner became an important function in Benedictine communities, yet even then monasteries primarily distributed alms around liturgical occasions to signify the importance of the poor rather than as a means of offering practical aid.[9]
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Monasticism emerged in Syria and Egypt in the second and third century as an alternative to a Church that was becoming more monarchical and worldly. It began to flourish in the West in the late fifth and sixth centuries through the work of John Cassian and Benedict, as both a refuge from an increasingly unstable and lawless society and as an authorized container for a monk to embody the abjectio of God’s coming in the person of Christ, both a profound yet determinately removed way of living out the great reversal that Jesus preached. Throughout this movement, there is a recurring soft dualism between the heavenly and holy interior of the monastery and the dangerous and lawless world outside. In the writings of first John Cassian and then Benedict, worldly wealth was to be left at the door of the monastery and, generally, care for the poor extended to those who approached and crossed that threshold as guests. Monastic charity to the poor beyond the walls of the monastery was primarily liturgical and symbolic, in contrast to the collections for the poor that characterized the Christian assemblies of the first and second centuries.
Which brings us a bit closer to today.
In the 16th century, Thomas Cranmer drew heavily from Benedict’s Rule and the ethos of English Benedictine life when formulating the first Book of Common Prayer. One of the most significant and celebrated gifts of this work is the condensing of the eight daily offices into Morning and Evening Prayer, services which have been and continue to be profoundly meaningful to me. The extent to which the Rule, these daily prayer patterns, and the English Benedictine outlook have shaped Anglican culture is summed up in the frequently made claim that Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer moved the Rule from the realm of monks to the laity. Certainly, Benedict’s influence on the Book of Common Prayer remains one of the gifts and lights of Anglican spirituality.
Less frequently mentioned, however, is the possibility that Anglicanism also wrestles with Benedict’s shadow. This final paragraph is a bit touchy because speaking about culture requires generalizations, and I am also aware of how beloved the Benedictine tradition is.
Having noted this, I’m struck by how many Episcopal congregations carry forward the limitations and later problematic reinterpretations of Benedict’s Rule. At the extreme end, this includes a dualistic view about contemplative holiness inside the church versus outside, a surprising comfortability with obscene displays of institutional wealth, a valuing of intellectual, literary, and artistic pursuits to the exclusion of recognizing the dignity of manual labor, and an understanding of faith as an interior matter - a personal journey of abjectio to be enacted within the confines of the Church - disconnected from a broader societal critique.
Yet it is in the prioritizing of hospitality that I especially feel Benedict's shadow remains with us. Hospitality is a community charism that, at times, has functioned as communities’ primary means of addressing poverty, but hospitality rarely includes grappling with the systemic causes of what has caused poverty. As a result, many churches are willing to welcome a homeless person into the sanctuary or even a shelter, but far less willing to speak out about the systemic causes of homelessness and to advocate for proven solutions. To be clear, I believe hospitality is vitally important, yet it is limited as a framework for addressing systemic injustice. And so, while there is much to give thanks for in Benedict’s Rule, we should also wrestle with a cultural legacy that suggests holiness is on the inside of the monastery and it is incumbent on the poor to cross our thresholds to receive attention and care.
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[1] I say ‘self-ascribed’ because the demographic data of the Episcopal Church strongly suggests otherwise. Today, the Episcopal Church is more than 90% white and one of the wealthiest denominations, a demographic feat in a socio-economic and racially diverse country that suggests that our sense of welcoming hospitality is primarily extended toward people who match or integrate well into a culture of wealth and whiteness.
[2] McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 200-206
[3] McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 201-202
[4] McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: First Three Thousand Years. 311
[5] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 416.
[6] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 416.
[7] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 418 - 419
[8] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 417
[9] Kleinhenz, Christopher. Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia. Entry on “Charitable Institutions.”
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