Organising the monastic community
The first monastic 'rule of life' appeared not that long after the original desert hermits. What do these first steps of formalisation show us?
Part 16 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.
The birth of the monastic Rule of Life is associated with St Pachomius. He was born in 286 CE, only a generation after St Anthony and St Paul of Thebes, the very first of the desert hermits. He was not an innovator but an organiser. His Rule was the answer to a question, a response to a need. It was formed to provide structure for the ulterior form of life that was emerging, organic and unmanaged in the Egyptian desert.
Reading the brief Monastic Rule of Saint Pachomius the Great is an exercise in cautious imagination. Its numbered points don't explain themselves. They give instructions about practices, places and objects that are sometimes distant and strange, though no doubt entirely familiar to those who first followed it.
It begins like this:
When someone uninstructed comes into the assembly of the saints, the porter shall introduce him according to his rank from the door of the monastery and give him a seat in the gathering of the brothers. He shall not be allowed to change his place or rank of sitting until the housemaster transfers him to the place he should have.
He shall sit with all modesty and meekness, tucking under his buttocks the lower edge of the goat skin which hangs over his shoulder down his side, and carefully girding up his garment — that is, the linen tunic without sleeves called lebitonarium — in such a way that it covers his knees.
As soon as he hears the sound of the trumpet calling the brothers to the synaxis, he shall leave his cell, reciting something from the scriptures until he reaches the door of the synaxis.
And when he begins to walk into the synaxis room, going to his place of sitting and standing, he should not tread upon the rushes which have been dipped in water in preparation for the plaiting of ropes, lest even a small loss should come to the monastery through someone’s negligence…
And on it goes. We peer through a hazy window into a world of roles and titles, with its own system of rank. There is a dress code and corresponding etiquette. The community's emblem was to be sewn into each hood. There is a social and liturgical pattern with its own architecture: a meeting place called a synaxis, (etymological cousin to the synagogue). A footnote tells me that there would not in fact be anything as grand as a “trumpet” to call the monks, but that Jerome (in his Latin translation of the Rule) was paraphrasing what would have been a hammer on a block of wood.
Here is an image of life moving between the hermit’s cell and the common gathering place, where the cenobites would chant prayers, recite biblical texts and hear addresses from superiors. But the synaxis was not only the place of common worship; it was also the place of work, where the monks would weave ropes and baskets out of the reeds that grew in the desert, deep in prayer all the while. The religious, the social and the economic were not three things, but one: a rigorously integrated life.
Pachomius’ Rule was a formalisation of desert life: a way of giving clarity and agreement to what they were already doing. In The Sayings of the Desert Fathers there is a leaning toward those who lived in varying degrees of remote solitude, but there were, at the same time, those who lived the hermetic life in small communities.
Many attached themselves to a more experienced hermit for guidance. There were those who pooled together their economic activities — growing food and producing rope and such — to create small, generous and peaceable village economies. There were those who preferred to develop a shared pattern of prayer and devotion, alongside those who preferred solitude. The age-old questions were sure to arise: What time to gather? Who’s in charge of the stores? Which psalms and readings today? Do the next community know there was a dead animal in the stream? What to do with the troublesome member? How to decide who’s at fault? How to know who’s in charge? And so of course, communities began to organise themselves and create expectations, norms, and finally rules.
A great deal of the Rule concerns the conduct and tone that was expected of a monk: “He shall not walk in cleverness… He shall not forget the poverty of his soul… He shall not give up out of weariness of soul… He shall not be found drunk…” This sort of thing was already normative among desert dwellers, but not everyone reads the room. Much of the Rule concerns practical matters: laundry, work, food distribution, gathering times and other protocols.
As with all archaic codes, there are things that will puzzle the modern reader. For example:
“No one shall have in his own possession little tweezers for removing thorns he may have stepped on. Only the housemaster and the second shall have them, and they shall hang in the alcove in which the books are placed.”
Whatever this strange rule was about it was obviously a particularly vexing issue since the matter is reiterated a few pages later:
“No one shall draw a thorn out of a man's foot, except the housemaster or the second or another so ordered.”
Was this to prevent a consumerist dystopia where everyone has their own tweezers, rather than sharing one tool between households? Was it to prevent the frustrating situation that commonly arises when people would use the tweezers without putting them back for the next person? Was it to mitigate the temptations that might occur when people handled each other’s feet? Was a thorn in the flesh considered a matter of spiritual importance, having been something mentioned by the apostle Paul? I don’t know. I am at least reminded to proceed with humility when reading an ancient code.
Note the specificity of the location of the tweezers. The Rule refers to a particular place: that alcove, where the books are kept. This document was the product of a particular community trying to find particular solutions to their own particular problems. And yet, it seems that formalising common life into a Rule was so helpful to so many people that the Pachomian Rule was passed around and adopted by one community after another.
In this primitive world, a monastery was a grouping of numerous ‘houses.’ Houses were clusters of about thirty monks. The houses tended to have common economic skills: weaving, farming, baking. As they began to organise and formalise life together under the Rule, they became well-oiled operations and established settlements. These monasteries began to grow, sometimes into the thousands. They became cities in the desert.
There is much to be explored in this moment of formalisation, in which certain things are gained and other things are lost, but to begin with it is important to note the nature of the thing. It was a natural, perhaps inevitable step, that made ulterior life increasingly accessible to the outsider. There was safety in structure and efficiency in formalisation. Monasticism was no longer the exclusive province of some pious elite of ascetic oddballs. Droves of people from various walks of life began to enlist.
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