The desert and the monastery

Antony goes into the desert

Around 270, in a village in Egypt, a young man named Antony, whose parents had died, walked into church as the Gospel was being read:

Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”

Matthew 19:21

He took the words as spoken to him. He gave the land he had inherited to the villagers, sold the rest and gave to the poor, placed his sister with a community of trusted virgins, and lived alone in prayer and work, going ever deeper into the desert. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who knew him, wrote the Life of Antony after Antony's death around 356, telling of his life of prayer and his fight with temptation.

The book was soon translated into Latin and read in the West. In the Confessions (8.6) Augustine recalls how in Milan in 386 a visitor told him of Antony, of whom he had never heard, and of two imperial officials at Trier who read the book and left the world's business on the spot. In the fourth century, as persecution ended and the church grew comfortable, many went to the desert like this. Historians see in them Christians who, with martyrdom no longer asked of them, sought another way to follow the one who said that his disciple "must deny himself and take up his cross daily" (Luke 9:23). Not only men went: desert mothers such as Syncletica are remembered too.

Living together: Pachomius and Basil

The one who opened a way other than the hermit's was Pachomius (c. 292–346). He is said to have come to Christ as a young conscript, when Christians he did not know brought food to the recruits. In the 320s at Tabennisi in southern Egypt he founded a community in which monks ate, worked and prayed together under one rule, and by his death there were several monasteries, women's houses among them. Their pattern was the first church:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.

Acts 2:44-45

John Wesley comments: "Not that there was any positive command for so doing: it needed not; for love constrained them" Wesley.

The short sayings and stories of the desert fathers were later gathered and are still read. One old man told a brother who asked him for a word to go and sit in his cell, and his cell would teach him everything. Another, called to sit in judgment on a brother's fault, came carrying a leaking jug of water: his own sins, he said, were running out behind him where he could not see them, and he had come to judge another's.

In the East, Basil the Great (c. 330–379), bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, visited the monks of Egypt and Syria and then wrote The Longer and Shorter Rules for monks living in community. He asked whose feet the solitary would wash, commending a common life for love's sake, and around 370 he built outside Caesarea a house to care for the poor, the sick and travellers. The monasteries of the Eastern Orthodox still honour him as a father of their life.

Benedict and his Rule

The Western shape of the monastery came from Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547). He left his studies in Rome, lived as a hermit at Subiaco and gathered disciples, and around 529 founded a monastery at Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples. His life is known mainly from the stories Gregory the Great gathered half a century later in the second book of his Dialogues, so full of miracles that history is hard to separate from them.

His Rule divides the day between the hours of prayer, the work of the hands and the reading of Scripture, and binds the monk to one community for life. Guests are to be welcomed as Christ, who said, "I was a stranger and you took Me in" (Matthew 25:35). Beside the severity of the desert the Rule was known for its moderation, and by the ninth century it was the rule of most Western monasteries. The famous ‘ora et labora’, pray and work, is a later summary, not a line of the Rule. How the monasteries kept the church's faith and learning in these centuries is the Theology course's Monks, missions and the parting of East and West.

What the monks gave, and the Reformers' questions

The monks gave the church a great deal: prayer offered many times a day, Bibles and books copied by hand for the next generation, houses that took in travellers and rooms where the sick were nursed, and men like Martin of Tours, a fourth-century soldier turned monk, who carried the gospel to the villages of Gaul.

There were dangers too, and the Fathers themselves differed. Jerome set those who sell everything in the first grade Jerome; Augustine wrote: "Nor are such only partakers in the kingdom of heaven, who, to the end they may be perfect, sell or part with all that they have" Augustine. At the Reformation the question was pressed further: young people bound by lifelong vows, and the thought that the monastic life earns merit before God. Martin Luther, himself an Augustinian friar, wrote On Monastic Vows in 1521, arguing that lifelong vows taken to earn merit go against faith and the freedom of the gospel, and the Lutherans' Augsburg Confession of 1530 recalls that "In Augustine's time cloister-fraternities were free", objecting to the vows laid on them later Augsburg Confession, Article 27.

The Catholic Church and the Orthodox understand monastic vows not as a way required of all, but as the response to grace of those who are called to give themselves wholly to God. Paul, too, says that the unmarried can give their care to the Lord's affairs, and adds that he speaks "not to restrict you" (1 Corinthians 7:35). The monks heard in that verse a call to "undivided devotion to the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:35); the Reformers heard a warning to bind no one.

Monastic life is alive today in many traditions. The Coptic church of Egypt, one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, keeps an ancient monastery of St Antony near the Red Sea, and the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos stand in Greece. The Catholic Church has many orders, among them the Benedictines, who have an abbey at Waegwan in Korea. Some convents of Lüneburg in northern Germany live on as Lutheran women's communities, and from the nineteenth century religious communities grew again in the Anglican churches. The Taizé community, founded in France in 1940 by Brother Roger, who came from the Reformed church, gathers brothers from many churches, and Jesus Abbey, founded in 1965 at Taebaek in Korea by the Anglican priest Archer Torrey (1918–2002), is a community of prayer and work.

Not every Christian goes to the desert, but all follow the same Lord. On taking up the cross daily Wesley writes: "Therefore that day is lost wherein no cross is taken up" Wesley. The next lesson, The fall of Rome and Augustine, follows Augustine, once stirred by Antony's story, as he watched Rome fall.

Practice