From the Egyptian Desert to a Shrinking Western Population

Christian monasticism began in the deserts of Egypt in the late third and fourth centuries, with hermits such as Anthony withdrawing alone and Pachomius shortly after organising the first communal monasteries with a shared rule, an innovation that made monastic life reproducible rather than dependent on one extraordinary individual. Basil of Caesarea shaped the communal model that became standard in the Greek East, while Benedict of Nursia's sixth century rule, moderate by the standards of the harshest desert asceticism, became the near-universal template for Western monasticism for the following thousand years.

Medieval Western monasticism went through repeated cycles of reform, the tenth century Cluniac reform centralising hundreds of houses under one abbey, the Cistercians reacting against that same wealth and centralisation in the twelfth century with a return to austerity and manual labour, and each new order in turn accumulating land and influence that a later reform movement would react against. The English Reformation's dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in the 1530s eliminated the office almost entirely in one country within a few years, a scale of sudden loss with no real parallel elsewhere in Western monastic history. Monastic vocations in Western Europe and North America have fallen steeply since the 1960s, while communities in parts of Africa and Asia have grown, a pattern that broadly mirrors vocations to the priesthood and religious life generally.