The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History, Andrew Jotischky, Yale University Press, £25

Perhaps aptly, for institutions that laid claim to eternity, there is no agreed origin for monasticism. Saint Jerome, writing around the turn of the fourth century, believed that it began with Christians fleeing into the desert to escape Roman persecution. Later, after the persecution ended in 312 under the Christian emperor Constantine, the withdrawal from society and the sacrifices that an ascetic life entailed became an analogue for martyrdom as the prospect of actual martyrdom faded. For others, such as Uthred of Bolden in the 14th century, the phenomenon reached back to Elijah, Elisha, and the sons of the Old Testament prophets. Andrew Jotischky meanwhile, in The Monastic World, his ambitious 1,200-year history of the phenomenon, suggests it had antecedents in the Essenes, a Jewish sect of the Second Temple period who lived in the Judaean desert, and who practised communal self-denial in pursuit of personal salvation.

Where monasticism began is no more settled. The documentary record points clearly to an origin in Egypt. But then, late Roman Egypt was a sophisticated bureaucratic society with a climate well adapted for the survival of papyrus; documentary evidence for everything is more abundant in Egypt. Syria, on the frontier between Rome and Persia, offers much less in the way of such proof. The archaeological record, however, suggests that monasticism in Syria probably developed in parallel with Egypt, albeit following a different model with markedly less emphasis on enclosed communities.

Indeed, if our idea of monasticism is shaped by withdrawal, it was a complicated phenomenon that could take different forms. There was the physical retreat from society into what John Cassian, writing in the 420s, called the ‘unbroken silence of the desert’. The principal exemplar here is Saint Antony, whose Life, written by Athanasius in the mid-fourth century, is the most-read biography of a monk in the history of the Church. Anthony’s spiritual progress can be seen a series of greater retreats: beginning around 271 he retreated from his village to learn the discipline and routines of austerity and self-denial at the feet of an older monk. After 14 years he retreated further into the desert, living in a tomb in a necropolis where he was beset by, but eventually defeated, demons in the form of wild animals. He then retreated yet further, living for 20 years in an abandoned Roman fort, where more demons waited, far from the settled world.  But if these movements can be understood as withdrawals, they are also expansive, territorially aggressive acts: the desert, as Anthony’s experience attested, was where demons lived; ‘by invading the desert’, Jotischky writes, ‘monks were taking the war to the Devil’.

There was another kind of retreat, too; the retreat from society’s mores in order to critique them, which was a somewhat different phenomenon. It was most pronounced in Syria, where a monk like Symeon, a ‘holy fool’ of the seventh century, might go to a town like Emesa, walk around naked dragging a dead dog on a rope and defecate in the town marketplace – all to demonstrate the hollowness of the townspeople’s values. The aim was not so much to master the body through mental and spiritual discipline, as to lose all sense of body and self entirely. Such performative self-erasure required an audience, so the quest for invisibility self-paradoxically bestowed, if not demanded, intense visibility. Another Symeon, the Stylite, in fifth-century Syria, became an international celebrity by withdrawing from society to live at the top of a column, where he nonetheless expected to be supported by villagers who lived closed by.

Episcopal authorities in different parts of Christendom diverged on their accommodation of such ostentatious displays of fortitude and virtue. Wulfilaicus, a sixth-century Frankish hermit, followed Symeon the Stylite and lived on top of a column outside Trier. The region was still predominantly pagan, and Wulfilaicus’s column was situated so that people passing into the forest to observe their rites couldn’t fail to see him. Nevertheless, when Wulfilaicus descended to attend a meeting at the request of his bishop, he returned to find that the bishop had used the occasion to have his column destroyed. This tension between the need for institutionally prescribed discipline and what Jotischky calls the ‘unregulated ascetic life’ is intrinsic to monastic history. St Benedict of Nursia, founder of Monte Cassino and arguably the most influential figure in western monasticism, was living an eremitic life when he was approached by a group of monks to lead them. Benedict warned that they would baulk at the discipline, but they insisted. He was right, however: the monks tried to murder him in the end, but a miracle shattered the jar of poisoned wine they had prepared.

The question persisted: what was monasticism for? Jotischky is keen to stress that, ‘from the beginning monasticism encompassed a rich variety of forms and styles of living’, and his account bears that out. Under the Pachomian Rule of early fourth-century Egypt – the first attempt to create a formula for monastic life – ‘the collective endeavour of worship and work was a means of recreating a Christian community that came as close as was possible on earth to living out the Gospel’. For Ireland’s St Columbanus at the turn of the sixth century, the disciplines of austerity and self-denial were enforced under his Rule with the goal of personal perfectibility. We are accustomed to viewing monastic history in the West through the frame of the Rule of Benedict, written in the sixth century and ubiquitous by the tenth or so, but Jotischky’s 1,200-year span, and his decision to explore monasticism in both the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, effectively works to decentre the Benedictine Rule – and indeed to dissolve overly discrete distinctions between the various orders more generally. Circumstances in the East were somewhat different in that, while the Rule written by St Basil in the late fourth century was greatly influential, individual houses were governed by unique typika, often drafted by their founders.

‘What is a monk?’ asked the fourth-century Egyptian John Kolobos. ‘A monk is work,’ he wrote. ‘The monk works at everything he does.’ But the relationship between labour and prayer was thorny, even from the beginning. By the early fifth century a monk of the by-now former monastery at Skete in the desert outside Alexandria could look back wistfully on days when ‘the work of our soul was our real job, and our manual labour we regarded as a sideline. But now the work of the soul has become the sideline and the craftwork has become the real job’. Wistful reflection on the past glories of monastic prowess would be a significant motor for self-punishment across the centuries. But this self-conscious retrospection – in a sense another kind of competitiveness – also reflects the extent to which monasticism was a textual phenomenon as much as a material one, a key theme of the book. Every iteration of it existed in relation to its predecessors, as understood through not just the various Rules and typika which came to govern monastic life, but also through the immense quantity of hagiographic literature. This was particularly true in the East. Hagiography, Jotischky notes, is the single largest category of Byzantine literature; the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Gracea, contains some 3,000 lives.

Some tried to reconcile the twin pillars of prayer and labour, as if spiritual and manual work were synonyms of a kind. Monks could practise manual labour ‘in such a way that meditation on the psalms and the rest of the scriptures is never entirely omitted’, Cassian suggested. In practice, however, the roles quickly diverged. In Palestine, volunteering for menial work was the first step on the path to virtue that rose from work in the stables and kitchens to a place in the choir. In the Irish monastic tradition, manual labour was understood to be a form of penance rather than a routine obligation. The Basilian rules that informed monastic life in the Byzantine world, meanwhile, saw it as a social leveller: the higher the previous social status of the monk, the heavier the manual tasks should be in order to teach them humility.

Across both eastern and western churches, and perhaps particularly in the West, as Jotischky demonstrates, monasticism was essentially an aristocratic phenomenon. One problem with the Benedictine strictures on manual labour in the West was that few monks had the skills, knowledge or experience to undertake many of the physical tasks required for the upkeep of a monastery or its landholdings. The practice was more or less dead in Benedictine houses by the 11th century, and the Cistercian order, founded 1098, formalised the development through extensive use of conversi – that is, lay brothers – to undertake the requisite manual tasks: ‘cobblers, cowherds, stablemen, masons, smiths, reapers and vine-growers’, as one Cistercian monastery described them. Conversi were part of the monastic community; but they ate, slept and lived apart from the choir monks. Typically they were peasants, and often widowers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as Jotischky writes, the ‘performance or non-performance of manual labour came to be a fraught issue in reform movements within monasticism’.

So much for labour, then. What of prayer? Prayer was the engine of monastic life. Although few monasteries in East or West went as far as St John Stoudios – founded in Constantinople in the fifth century as a ‘sleepless community’ in which the monks sang the liturgy perpetually in shifts across the day so that silence never fell – constant prayer, the repetition of the liturgy, was the defining monastic activity. To be a monk was to seek the perfection of angels, and psalm-singing was a mark of that angelic aspiration: angels were silent but for when they praised God in prayer.

And it was through prayer that monasteries in the West became, in Jotischky’s words, ‘the spiritual engine rooms of Christendom’. Their stock-in-trade was commemorative prayer – ‘the balancing of spiritual favour with social and financial capital’, as he describes it. Members of the social elite gave land and other forms of wealth – including children, dedicated young – and in return had penance done on their behalf and received the possibility of redemption achieved through monastic prayer.

There was nothing subtle about this kind of deal. The Benedictine abbey at Cluny in east-central France was, before the building of St Peter’s in Rome in the 16th century, the largest church in Christendom. It was founded by William of Aquitaine in 910 with a grant of land. William was quite clear about what he believed himself to be buying: ‘this is my trust, this is my hope’, he wrote, ‘that although I myself am unable to despise all things, nevertheless by receiving despisers of this world, whom I believe to be righteous, I may receive the reward of the righteous.’

It’s surprisingly easy therefore to discuss monasticism in mechanistic terms analogous to corporate capitalism, to talk of prayer as a commodity, to view monastic practice as a transactional offering in a spiritual economy that shadowed the material one in much the same way as spirit always shadows and informs matter. Prayer, you might say, had become detached from labour only to become ensnared by wealth and the processes of secular power.

The Monastic World is many things, but it is primarily a narrative of monastic development in the changing political and economic world of medieval Europe. And framing monastic prayer as heavenly intercession for the social elite reveals very simply why the Reformation was so catastrophic for the monastic estate: society, no longer certain of intercession, stopped wanting to buy what monasticism was selling. The other principal aspect of monastic life – the individual’s search for grace through contemplation – was swept aside in the unravelling of monasticism’s wider contractual ties with society. Only later, centuries later, did the idea of collective, corporate pursuit of Christian life slowly return to the West.

The Monastic World is not without weaknesses. Jotischky has elected to omit detailed discussion of the mendicant orders, and likewise the flowering of anchoritic life in the later medieval world. Both are understandable choices in what is already a dense and complex narrative, but they are to be regretted nonetheless. Jotischky is at pains to include examples of female monasticism, but late-medieval anchoritism was a notably female phenomenon, and its absence here is felt.

Moreover, while his account may not be a monolithic one, the book nevertheless remains more an institutional history than an exploration of the wellsprings of intense religious feeling, and the discussion of monasticism’s quick and brutal end across much of Europe during the Reformation, driven as much by politics as faith, is surprisingly brief.

Nevertheless, this is a subtle and profound study of an extraordinary social phenomenon that dominated Europe for over a millennium. From the beginning, they were places of paradox, absurd and beautiful in their contradictions, tensions, and variety; but also places where, sometimes, heaven met earth and flawed human spirits might soar, however briefly, out of their flawed human selves, and stream upwards towards God. Jotischky quotes the 17th-century English parliamentarian John Oglander: ‘tyme pulleth downe greate things and setth up poore things’. These great institutions were not undying families after all, to paraphrase the Benedictine historian David Knowles, but all too human and mortal. The shock of that revelation still feels visceral today.