Medieval Monasticism

The title is On Loving God, which is the title of a famous book by St. Bernard of Clare Bowel, that I will talk about in a moment, and the lecture is on medieval monasticism. Last time we had an overview of the last 500 years of the ancient and medieval period of church history, and now we begin to look at some of those important events that took place during that time. I look at those in more detail. The prayer is from St. Bernard, one of the great figures of the medieval church, and as we prepare to think about medieval monasticism, let's pray in the words of St. Bernard of Clare Bowel. O Lord, come quickly and reign on thy throne. For now often something rises up within me and tries to take possession of thy throne, pride, covetousness, uncleanness, and sloth, want to be my kings. And then evil speaking anger, hatred, and the whole train of vices join with me in warring against myself and try to reign over me. I resist them, I cry out against them, and say, I have no other king than Christ, no king of peace come and reign in me, for I will have no king but thee, amen. It's been some time since we have had a look at monasticism in the West. It all goes back, of course, to St. Benedict of Newerseus, who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries, and from that point on, from the seventh century through the tenth century, we could speak of that period as the Benedictine centuries. When asticism began and flourished, communities continued to be created in different places in Europe, all following the Benedictine rule. According to Benedict, each monastery was to be a self-containing unit under the direction of its own habit. Benedict did not envision so much great orders, highly organized and centralized as individual monasteries, each with its own habit, but in due time in the West a more centralized approach to the monasteries developed, particularly during the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was not true in the East, Eastern monasteries continued to be independent units and monasticism in the East, which was very important for the Orthodox Church, never developed the centralized structures that it did in the West. Benedict had envisioned the monastic life as a group of laypeople coming together to pray and to work with their hands and to serve God as a community. That pattern has largely continued in the East, but for more in the West, the monks became priests so that the monastic orders in the West were orders of priests. The monasteries were colleges of priests. In the West there was often a second order, which would be an order for women in any given arrangement. There would be the order for men, many priests, although some laymen still participated, but a second order for women and then sometimes a third order for laypeople. So in the West you'd often had those three orders, one for priests, one for women, and one for laypeople. The three main duties of the person living in the monastery given in the syllabus, the first is prayer and worship. If you would have gone to one of those medieval monasteries, you would find that for three or four hours of each day, the monks were engaged in prayer and worship. Generally communal prayer and worship, reading through the scriptures together, singing the Psalms together, some of that time was in private prayer, but for at least three hours, maybe four hours, the monks would be involved in worship. And then four or five hours in study, or what they preferred to call spiritual reading. Their study was always of a devotional nature, reading of the church fathers, reading of the scriptures, with the idea of developing their own love for God and knowledge of him. And then six or seven hours a day, they worked manual work, taking care of the building, farming to produce food for the monastery, or going out in the community to carry on works of charity. Perhaps you have read some of the brother Kadfield stories by Ellis Peters. He has created brother Kadfield as a kind of medieval sleuth. He is a Benedictine monk who lives on the border of Wales and England near Shrewsbury. He lives in the 12th century, and there are numerous stories now. And television series dedicated to the life and adventures of brother Kadfield. If you like mystery stories, it's a good way to get a kind of feel for what life may have been like in a Benedictine monastery in the 12th century. I've read a good many of those, but I have to put a little note in the beginning of the book or I don't remember that I've read it. They all seem to sound pretty much alike after a while, but there are some very interesting stories there, and certainly you do get some understanding of medieval monastic life. Between the 10th and 11th centuries, there were some definite movements that took place in order to revive and renew the monastic movement flowing out of the Benedictine history. So much of these new movements took place in central France. The map here indicates two places, in particular, that I want to mention, C. Toe is right here. Claire Vaux is right here, not very far apart. But France became in the 10th century, 11th century, 12th century, the great center for monastic life and monastic reform in the Catholic Church. First of all, we have the Cluniac order being established. That was a reformed movement based on the Benedictine rule. And during the 10th century and the 11th century, Cluniac represented just about everything that was vital and progressive in Western Christianity, the greatest figure of the Cluniac movement was Benard of Cluny. There are two Benards now, so you need to keep these two straight. First of all, Benard of Cluny, and then later I'll talk about Benard of Claire Vaux. Benard of Cluny lived in the 12th century. He wrote a great poem called Day Contempt to Mundi, which means contempt for the world. A 3000-line poem, which satirized a contemporary monastic corruption. Here is a month writing a poem that talks about how other monks are corrupt and how the monastic movement needs to be reformed and brought back into line with its original ideals. This poem contrasts monastic corruption and the transient pleasures of this life with the glory of heaven, so a good bit of the form is about heaven. In fact, it has served as the base for several hymns, including the hym Jerusalem, the Golden, which you may be familiar with. In the English translation, we have these words from that hymns, sweet and blessed country, the home of God's elect, those sweet and blessed country that eager parts expect. Jesus, in mercy, brings us to that dear land of rest who art with God the Father and spirit ever blessed, so you can get in Benard of Cluny, a real Lord for heaven and a longing to be there, speaks of God's elect as well, and certainly some emphasis on the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity just in those few lines. Well the monastic movement, the study of monasticism, falls into a rather dreary pattern actually. A movement has come that have high ideals, and then pretty soon decline, and something else has to come along and reform that movement, which itself originated as a reform of the church or a reform of monasticism. Cluny built the Cluniac, built a great abbey at Cluny, it was the greatest church in Europe. Wish I could show you some pictures of it, but we don't have any pictures, at least not modern pictures, because that church was destroyed in the 19th century, and served as a kind of quarry for people in that area for a long time, so they took the stones away and built their own houses and buildings from this great church, but in its heyday, the church at Cluny was greater than any church anywhere in the world. I have read that the largest enclosed space on earth today is the Pentagon, and in the 11th century and the 12th century, the largest enclosed space on the earth was the church at Cluny, so that gives you some idea about the size of this church, and it was a church of great splendor and magnificence. It seemed strange for a monastery to have produced, but that is what happened at Cluny. The order of Cluny, the Cluniac order, came to an end in 1790 during the pebbles connected with the French Revolution, so it has not continued down to the present. But as I've already suggested, Cluny fell into a kind of worldly spirit itself, producing great and splendid churches, but no longer maintaining its concern for the monastic ideal, and so another order came along, found it not too far from Cluny, and this is called the Sistertian order. A new order sometimes referred to as a reform of the reform. Cluny was the reform of the Benedictine movement, and now the Sistertians are a reform of the Cluniac movement. The disorder began at C2 near Dijon, it's why it's called Sistertian, because of the name of the town, C2, and its leader was another Benard, Benard of Clervot. And so we come to Benard of Clervot, we certainly come to one of the major, major figures of the Middle Ages. We sometimes call the last of the church fathers because of the importance of Benard as a church leader, we sometimes call the uncrowned emperor of Europe, because he seemed to have more influence than any king or emperor, and often more than the Pope. Gonzales says in our text that his personality dominated his time. Let me try to summarize Benard for you in a few points and stress something of his importance. First of all, he was a great reformer. We have something of his concern for church reform in his book called Unconsideration. He actually wrote that book for one of his own monks who was being promoted to a high office in the church actually, he was becoming the Pope. And so Benard wrote a book as a guide for him so that he would know how to be a good Pope. And it is a very good book. Lordship is forbidden, he told this new Pope. From the Sustertians, Lordship is forbidden, ministry is forbidden. Don't rule over people, serve people. Luther said that all Pope should know this book by heart and felt quite correctly that most popes had no attention to it, but if they did, things would have been quite different in Rome. So Benard has ideal to reform not only the monastic movement, but the whole church. And he wrote books and he wrote letters, and he advised people. Somebody has said he was extremely advisory. He was giving advice all the time. And rather, dogmatic advice, but he felt that people needed to hear what he had to say. And they did need to hear what he had to say. As a reformer, Benard can almost remind us of a kind of medieval Puritan. He felt the church was too rich, too extravagant, too given over to pomp and ceremony. And he wanted to see things quite changed. Benard once said, we must not pass over in silence the decay in the church. Better to provoke a scandal than to abandon the truth. Interesting comment from medieval church leader. Don't just cover over all these things that are going wrong. It'd be better to create a scandal than to abandon the truth. Well, people did not follow that advice much until we came to the 16th century. And there were people like Lutheran Calvin and John Knox, and Swingley who did create a scandal, divided the church because they could not abandon the truth. So we have Benard as a reformer, working hard to try to bring the church in line with more Christian understanding of what the church ought to be. Benard was also a great preacher, sometimes referred to as Dr. Malifoulos. That means the doctor whose words were like honey, he could preach with eloquence and with power, he often used for himself the motto pasque verbo pasque vita, which means feed with the word feed with the life, feed the people with the word of God, but also demonstrate through your living the truth of the word of God. It's to be our life as well as our preaching that commands the gospel and draws people to Christ. Benard was a great mystic in the best sense of that word. We'll look at medieval mysticism later, and there are some good things we can learn from the mystics. There are some errors too that they fall into, but Benard, for the most part, managed to stay on the good side of mysticism, and one of the great books of the Middle Ages, is the book on loving God. It's a book that we could still read with great deal of profit. We had J.I. Packers knowing God, and then Benard's loving God could put those two books side by side and read them both from time to time. And Benard was a great theologian, his greatest writing on theology, I think, is the book on grace and free choice. And here we finally come to a true Augustinian in the middle of all the semi-pollegianism and the semi-agustinianism of the medieval church. I think Benard's on grace and free choice is the greatest book written on grace between St. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Bradward Dean of Canterbury, about 900 years in there. We'll talk about Bradward Dean later for that long period, almost a millennium. This is the great book on God's grace. John Calvin in the Institute's praise this book, he said, Benard agreed with Augustin when he makes the church speak thus, draw me, however unwilling, to make me willing. Call me slow-footed to make me run. So you get a resistible grace, God's election, and the teaching of Augustin and the Bible in Benard of Clareville on grace and free choice. Actually, the Clareville community did not continue permanently either, it was broken up and property confiscated by the state in 1790, also during the French Revolution when there was so much anti-clarical activity in France. I understand that the order, the community, the house at Clareville still stands, but for the last 200 years, it served not as a church, but as a prison. Actually one of the successor movements to the sistersions is the movement of the capuchins, a kind of revival of the sisterion movement. The capuchins wore brown roads with white chasuk and hood, and for that reason the Italians call Caughtino, little capuchin because it's brown with a little white bit of foam on top. It looks like a little capuchin monk. Well, let's go now to an entirely different movement. What I've been talking about so far has been a kind of history of the Benedictines as that movement has spawned certain developments at Clooney and Cito and other places too, but those are the most important, but two new movements arose in the 13th century. We need to look at these two today. The first is the Franciscans, Francis of a CC, Italy, four and 1181 died in 1226, but in that short life, Francis was able to impact the church of his day and of successive centuries as well. You have the story of Francis, I won't repeat that, but it is in our text, or worldly young man, dramatically converted, goes on to a life of dedication to God in which, as G.K. Chesterton put it, he found a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. With Francis, we really do get a very unique individual. Nobody quite liked him in the history of the church. He was not a scholar. He did not write very much, in fact except for a few prayers and a few hymns or prayers that became hymns. The only thing that he left was his testimony, kind of testimony in which he tells in a few pages about why he did what he did, because testimony was written shortly before his death. It was not long though, before Francis's followers produced a book called The Little Flowers of St. Francis, and in that book you get the stories, highly imaginative stories, which one writer has put it, may not be totally untrue, but certainly embellished about the life of St. Francis. And Francis lives on in our memories because of The Little Flowers. For instance, in The Little Flowers you have all those stories about Francis' preaching. Francis was a preacher, but he often preached to the animals, birds, and animals that he would find, as he wandered about in Italy. Here's Francis' config and his congregation, St. Francis preaches to the animals. He not only preached to nice animals, like birds and rabbits and sheep, but according to The Little Flowers he preached to bad animals, too, like the fierce wolf of Gubio, who was creating aught of disturbance in his area of Italy by eating things, including people, and the people of Gubio, the St. Francis, to come and do something about this terrible fierce wolf. Francis came, went out and met the wolf, called unto him, come hither, brother wolf, I command you in the name of Christ Jesus, that you do no matter of evil, either to me or to anyone else, according to The Little Flowers, wonderful to relate immediately. That St. Francis made the sign of the cross, the terrible wolf closed his jaws, gave over running and came meekly as any lamb and laid himself down at the feet of St. Francis, depicted here in this drawing, is called the conversion of the fierce wolf at Gubio. Well, I could go on with many stories from The Little Flowers, but you might want to look at those sometimes, they are entertaining stories. The life of Francis was a life of poverty and service. That was really what Francis wanted to do, just to be poor, and to have people around him that felt the way that he did, that life is not made up of what we have, but of what we can give. And that was his principle, that he was very dedicated to that, to such an extent that people thought that he was a little bit unbalanced about it. He did not want to have anything that he kept refusing to take anything, it was not even clear that a Franciscan could own a Bible, because if you own a Bible, one book, you'd probably want two books, and if you had two books, you'd want three books, and pretty soon you'd have a big library, and you'd be proud of it, and you tripped away from God. So don't start down that slippery slope, Francis would say, to his followers, Franciscans were not so much reformers as innovators, creating a new force in the church to minister to spiritual and physical need, something new and different was breaking forth in the church. And you can see what a contrast this was to the church, to the great church at Clooney, to the splendor and pomp at Rome. Here was this poor little man wandering about, saying, none of that matters, in fact it's all bad, and the only thing that matters is to love God, and to love people. Francis prayed his great prayer, that we still use Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. That's what he really wanted to be, just helping bring peace to this world. His life was filled with praise to the hymns that he wrote, or all hymns of praise, the most famous of those, is the canticle of brother, son. It's not a song about pantheism, he's not worshipping the son, it's not a canticle to brother son, it's the canticle of brother, son, he's calling on the son to join with him and to join with all creation in the worship of God. There is a paraphrase by William H. Draper of that canticle of brother, son, that we often sing, all creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with a sing, hallelujah, hallelujah, our burning son with golden beam, thou silver moon with softer gleam, O praise him, O praise him, hallelujah, hallelujah, men, it's a very scriptural idea, the Psalms call upon all creation to praise God with us, as does St. Francis. The order that Francis created was called the order of the lesser brothers. We usually refer to them as Franciscans, but the official name is the order of lesser brothers, or the OFM ordo friars menorace, you see OFM after a person's name, you know that person is a Franciscan. The second order, the order for women was founded by St. Clair, and that order still exists alongside of the Franciscan order, and a third order was established for lay people. While even during the end of Francis's life there was a struggle within these orders to maintain Francis's rule of absolute poverty, it's hard for his followers to really believe that he meant what he said, and these orders, even the order of the Franciscans could quite quickly develop into a wealthy order, because people admired these monks and wanted to give to them money and buildings and land and other things. Francis died in 1226, he was canonized just two years later, 1228, that's very quick canonization just two years. Some people think that Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be canonized quickly, but probably won't be two years. Here is a very rapid canonization, and almost immediately Francis's followers began to build a great Basilica in his honor. It's there in the CC today, and if you go there you can go to the great church of St. Francis in a CC. It became the richest church in Italy, a strange memorial to the poor little man whose favorite saying was, foxes have holes, and the birds of the AR had nest, but the son of man had not where to lay his head. Well, I won't go on in the history of the Franciscans, but very bitter controversies developed among the Franciscans because of the difficulty that Francis's followers had in trying to decide what to do, should we become wealthy and prominent and rich, which we have a chance to do or should we not. The secret of brother Francis, well I think perhaps you'll find it in the story in the syllabus when brother, my say, oh, looking earnestly at Francis one day began to say, why the, why the, and finally Francis gave him an answer. You can read that answer in the syllabus as I move on to the last of the orders that I want to talk about today, and that is the Dominicans. It's quite a different order. It comes into existence about the same time as the Franciscans, but with a different purpose and a different ethos and a different contribution to the history of the church. Dominic was Spanish, a Spanish monk living in Spain in a monastery that was trying to follow the rule of St. Augustine, and he became interested through a couple of journeys that he made, interested in thinking of how Catholics could evangelize, how they could reach pagan people, and also how they could reclaim heretics. That heretics that he particularly had in mind with the alvegenciums in southern France, that mystic like Maniquillin called, that had control so much of the area of southern France. And so Dominic as he lived in his monastery in Spain began to plan a new order, that would be a missionary order, an order of preachers, and that's what he established, the order of preachers. We call it the Dominicans today, but OP stands for order of preachers. For many of us, as soon as you say OP, you think of Orthodox Presbyterians, but I am referring to the OP here as the order of preachers, stress on preaching and teaching. Not on poverty so much, although the Dominicans took a vow of poverty, they really did not see it as so essential to their spirituality as Francis did, and they don't put much emphasis on manual labor, as the Benedictines did, they did not see that they should spend most of their day cutting wood and drawing water and washing dishes, they even limited the times of prayer, they didn't pray nearly so long in the day as some of the other orders, because they wanted to study. Here is an order that dedicates itself to books. These orders can be very, very different, and they certainly are, even today in the Catholic Church, but each one has its own distinctive, and the distinctive of the Dominicans is that it is an order of scholars, of people who are studying, who are planning to be teachers and preachers. They did develop into great preachers, some of the greatest preachers in the medieval church where the Dominicans, for one thing, they punctuated their sermons by rhyme or by alliteration. They invented the idea of having three points all beginning with a letter A, or something like that, and they used illustrations, and they even used humor, so the Dominican sermons sound quite modern to us. They used all these things because they wanted to communicate with people, and they found that these were effective ways to make people hear what they had to say. These Dominicans became great scholars. They realized that it was important for them to get into the universities, to infiltrate the universities, and the schools of Europe, and become teachers, because if they could teach, they could persuade, and so before long there are Dominicans all over the place, teaching at Paris, and Bologna, and Cologne, and all the universities, and starting schools all the way down to the level of children, just beginning school that the Dominicans became the educators of Europe, and certainly of the Catholic Church. You would think that a movement like this would produce great scholars, and that is true. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. His parents wanted him to become a Benedictine, but he wanted to become a Dominican, and he did, and became the great theologian of the high middle ages. Interestingly, as we'll see, not only were there great scholars among the Dominicans, but some of the great mystics of the Middle Ages were Dominicans as well, including Meister Eckhart. One other thing to say about the Dominicans, they became the inquisitors of the Middle Ages. That is the people on the lookout for heresy, and they developed schemes, plans, and programs to identify and root out heretics. In fact, their nickname was the Watch Dogs of the Lord. Dominic canis, sounds like Dominican, or Dominic, Watch Dogs of the Lord. It's not long before Cathars and Waldensians will study about later, and a couple centuries down the line, Protestants will feel that watchful eye of Dominican inquisitors as they

try to discover heresy and root it out. The great inquisitors of the Middle Ages, they will be followed later by a 16th century order called the Jesuits. Well, how do we look at all of this history of monasticism? I think it's possible for Protestants to dismiss it all as pretty worthless, and that would

be false impression. It's probably possible for Catholics to glamorize it all as wonderful, and that would be a false impression as well. Certainly, nobody would accuse Robert Lewis Dabney, the Southern Presbyterian, of being

too soft on Catholicism, or on monasticism, and I think Dabney writes something about wise when he says monastic life, with all its perversions, produced not a little of the moral heroism in the Middle Ages. By the time we come to the Reformation, a lot of that will have been lost, and monasticism will not be nearly so noble in the 16th century as it was in some earlier centuries. So, like so much of church history, we try to see the good, also see the bad, and learn from both. I want to end with the last verse of a song by Bernard of Clairville. We know it is Jesus Dowjoy of loving hearts, and with these words we'll close this lecture. O Jesus, ever

with us stay, make all our moments calm and bright. Chase the dark night of sin away, shed or the world by holy light. Why did the Dominicans become the inquisitors? They were concerned

about Catholic doctrine. They were concerned about orthodoxy. They were concerned about heretics. And so, as they travel about preaching, one of the things they want to do is to discover heresy and to try to eliminate it. The alvegency and movement in Southern France was a massive

movement. It pretty much wiped out half of France as far as Catholicism was concerned. And the church, particularly the Dominicans, felt that if the church doesn't do a better job at preventing heresy, then the whole thing is going to go. So it became very important to them to take on that task. The work of the inquisition really comes a little later. That will be a highly structured approach to heresy. What questions to ask, what force to use, what to do, if a person recants, all of this will develop during the counter-reformation, but the Dominicans are in the foreguard of that movement.