.
.
.
Monasticism was actually an immense and
multifarious series of experiments in alternative
community lifestyles. The monks prayed and
meditated (directed fantasy), sang, read, composed
music, copied and illuminated manuscripts,
studied every classical language and discipline,
developed new agricultural techniques, provided
solace and hospitality, worked, ate, and drank
together in thousands of different communal
patterns. Nor were they wholly "withdrawn" from
the everyday world. They interacted with it at a
hundred different levels. They served, taught,
nursed, prayed for, and contributed to the life
of the commonweal. The different monastic orders
displayed numberless fantasies of how human beings
could live together in love and mutuality.
.
The monks understood their relation to the
rest of Christendom within a theological
worldview that seems implausible to us today,
at least on the surface. They were praying for
the people who had less time to pray because
they fought, ruled, or toiled in the fields.
The monks lived out a longing for spiritual
perfection that was hardly possible for all men.
Their communities, in other words, were
contributing in their own distinctive way to
the future everyone in Christendom expected
or at least hoped for, a blissful reward in
heaven after death.
.
rest of Christendom within a theological
worldview that seems implausible to us today,
at least on the surface. They were praying for
the people who had less time to pray because
they fought, ruled, or toiled in the fields.
The monks lived out a longing for spiritual
perfection that was hardly possible for all men.
Their communities, in other words, were
contributing in their own distinctive way to
the future everyone in Christendom expected
or at least hoped for, a blissful reward in
heaven after death.
.
.
Though this theology eludes us today,
the monks were really more accurate than
we often think. They were in fact contributing
to the future of the whole civilization, though
not quite in the way they understood.
The seeds of the Renaissance and the Reformation
were cultivated in the monasteries. Luther and
Mendel were both monks. The Benedictines
practiced participatory democracy before it
became a political issue. The idea of a
disciplined work schedule and of work as
service to God began with the monks, and
without it the entire Industrial Revolution
could never have occurred. Max Weber was
right when he said that during the Reformation
"every man became a monk and the whole world
a monastery." Life styles, discipline, and
communal patterns that had been born,
nourished, and refined in small communities
now supplied the pattern for a whole civilization.
.
From The Feast of FoolsHarvey Cox
.
Though this theology eludes us today,
the monks were really more accurate than
we often think. They were in fact contributing
to the future of the whole civilization, though
not quite in the way they understood.
The seeds of the Renaissance and the Reformation
were cultivated in the monasteries. Luther and
Mendel were both monks. The Benedictines
practiced participatory democracy before it
became a political issue. The idea of a
disciplined work schedule and of work as
service to God began with the monks, and
without it the entire Industrial Revolution
could never have occurred. Max Weber was
right when he said that during the Reformation
"every man became a monk and the whole world
a monastery." Life styles, discipline, and
communal patterns that had been born,
nourished, and refined in small communities
now supplied the pattern for a whole civilization.
.
From The Feast of FoolsHarvey Cox
.
.
.
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