I have been listening to a programme about the dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII. One interesting little fact was that in England in the Middle Ages no one was more than a half an hour’s walk from some kind of monastery or religious house, and perhaps and hour’s walk in Wales. Just to put that into perspective, today, in the countryside most people live more than half an hour’s walk from one of the clergy.
So what disappeared at the dissolution of the monasteries? Prior to their dissolution and that of other religious houses the religious landscape was populated by Monks and Nuns, who spent lives in one place dedicated to prayer, study and manual labour, who as well as prayer, provided among other things, education, poor relief and medicine, there were the friars living in the towns and cities who provided all of the above as well as, pastoral care, spiritual counsel and they also evangelised those places which had no parish clergy. In the cities and towns as well as in the countryside there were hermits, anchorites and others living solitary lives of prayer and worship who nevertheless also provided spiritual counsel. There were also colleges of clergy offering prayers for the departed. And alongside all of this were the ordinary parish clergy, alongside and in some cases attached to all of this lay fraternities or ordinary taking their religious life seriously. After dissolution of the monasteries and other religious houses, the only people left to continue were the parish clergy and the ordinary people of the parish. Everything else has disappeared; it is like one is looking at a picture when all of a sudden most of it vanishes perhaps leaving just a quarter of a quarter the picture.
To understand what was gone and to perhaps see what is needed in order to replace it we have to look at why Christian monasticism began in the first place.
In the second chapter of the book of Acts we read that those who became believers ‘devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers’. Four things ‘Fellowship’ for which we can substitute the words ‘Community’ or living a common life; ‘the apostle’s teaching’ a community that is listening to and learning from those who had known Jesus; ‘the breaking of bread’ following Jesus’ commandment to do so in remembrance of him and ‘the prayers’ by which was meant the customary prayers in the morning and before sleep. This is the way of living that one would have found in the monasteries of later centuries. So how did the monasteries come about?
When Christianity was legalised and later became the state religion, it became ‘the religion of the powerful’ ‘Monasticism was silent rebellion’ against this new found status and power 1. Men and woman went out into the desert to try and recapture the early ideals spoken of earlier in the book of Acts. They began first as solitaries and hermits later as groups of hermits and later still as whole communities dedicated to common lives of prayer, worship, learning and supporting themselves with the work of their hands. Though out in the desert these hermits and communities were not divorced from society as a whole, many ordinary people would visit these hermits and communities to receive wise counsel from them. In the story of one of these encounters we read.
“A brother came to a hermit: and as he was taking his leave, he said, ‘Forgive me, father, for preventing you from keeping your rule.’ The hermit answered, ‘My rule is to welcome you with hospitality, and to send you on your way in peace.’
It is a common view that from this point onwards there was a kind of two Christianity, the monastics who retained the earlier vision, and a less rigorous Christianity of everybody else. ‘Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement that the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate’. I think that there is both truth and error in this characterisation. It overestimates the lack of spirituality amongst the laity and underestimates the laxity in many monasteries. It is true to say that every monastic renewal movement during the middle ages begins as a reaction against the loss of thoroughness in the monasticism of the preceding era. This is true of the beginnings of monasticism itself.
So what message does this have for us in our own time?
The first lesson I would draw is that it reminds us (should we need reminding) that Christianity is not just about the clergy. The vast majority of Monks, Nuns and Friars were not clergy and that remains the case. I have often been asked when I joined the church and my answer is simple, the 20th August 1967, the date of my Christening, I was ordained much later. I think that it can be argued that when the monasteries and religious houses were dissolved, when the monks and Friars disappeared, all that was left were parish clergy, and they were left somehow to fulfil all the functions of monks and Friars alongside their own. If monasticism had inadvertently professionalised lay Christianity, the dissolution of monasteries, and their attendant movements among the wider laity, destroyed both in reality and symbolically, a potent lay Christianity which in term both clericalised and professionalised Christianity even further.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that ‘…the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this…’
He wrote this against the back drop of Nazi Germany which posed both a threat to both the church and the world. He was not advocating a return to the monasteries but rather a turning back to earliest kind of Christianity in terms of faith and practice. This might seem like a conservative movement. It is nothing of the kind. Conservatism is not really about trying to return to the good things of the past. Conservatism is about preserving the status quo, the state things as they have become in the interests of those who are doing best out of that status quo.
What Bonhoeffer shared with the early monastics, the reformers and others was a radical Christianity. Radicalism in terms of religion is not and should not be conservative or fundamentalist, (the fundmentum, the foundations of a building are lifeless whereas the roots [in Latin ‘radices‘] of a tree are living). Radicalism is it is simply about returning to the roots, to the original inspiration of a tradition, a return to the roots and wells from which it has sprung.
When one looks at renewal in the life of the church, it has never sprung from conservatism or fundamentalism, it has always sprung from an attempt to return to the roots, to the life, teaching and living of Jesus. The word ‘radical’ has been sequestered and taken over by those who breathe violence and hatred (and those who are trying to describe them), it is time to take the word back and use it for Christianity, and return to the Lord, his life and his teaching of love and mercy. In a sense to be radical is to be repentant, to be returning to God our primary inspiration and source, and ultimate end and destination. It results in a simple commitment to ‘devote ourselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers’. This is the ‘horse’ that draws the ‘cart’ of all of our giving and serving on Christ, and it is time for the church, that is the body of Christ as a whole to rediscover it.
Brislington Community News 