Monastic Order

What makes a monastic order monastic is a commitment to a place.

A Benedictine professes stability to a particular abbey. He does not join an order and get posted; he joins that house, and expects to die in it. The abbot is elected by the monks of that house and is answerable to them, not appointed from a headquarters, and a Benedictine congregation is a federation of autonomous monasteries that share a visitation system rather than a chain of command. There is no general who can move a monk from Bavaria to Brazil, because there is no such office.

The consequences are considerable. A community that cannot expel its difficult members and cannot escape them has to develop ways of living with them, and a great deal of the Rule is practical machinery for exactly that. A house that owns its own land and elects its own superior accumulates local wealth, local obligations and a long institutional memory, which is why monasteries became landlords, schools, hospitals, brewers and archives, and why their dissolution transferred so much property so profitably to whoever dissolved them.

Enclosure, silence during defined hours, common ownership rather than individual poverty, and a day divided by the office are the usual practical marks.

Buddhist monasticism looks similar from the outside and rests on a different foundation. A monk is bound by a training rule rather than by a vow to a house. He may move between monasteries, and he may hand the robe back and return to lay life without disgrace or dispensation. Monasteries accordingly depend on continuing lay support and on the personal authority of teachers rather than on incorporation and endowment, though large landholding monastic institutions have existed in Tibet, Sri Lanka and elsewhere and have exercised political power comparable to any European abbey.

Christian monasticism did not begin as a life lived in community. Its first widely admired form, in Egypt from the late third century, was the hermit's solitude: Anthony withdrawing alone into the desert, sought out by visitors precisely because he had left society behind. The communal, ruled form now taken as the default came slightly later and from a different founder. Pachomius, a former soldier, organized a walled community of monks at Tabennisi in Upper Egypt in the 320s, with shared work, shared meals, and a superior giving orders, borrowing more from the discipline of an army camp than from a hermit's cave.

Basil of Caesarea took the communal model and gave it a theological argument in the fourth century, holding that charity and mutual correction were impossible in solitude and that monks needed each other to practice the virtues the life demanded. The West received both strands and eventually settled on the communal one: Benedict of Nursia's sixth century rule for Monte Cassino absorbed earlier monastic writing, including Basil's, into a single moderate document that balanced prayer, work and rest, and it was this synthesis, rather than the older eremitic ideal, that later reform movements like Cluny and Citeaux took as their starting point when each argued the current practice of monastic life had drifted from it.