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The Role and Significance of the Monastic Life in Medieval Christianity

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The Role and Significance of the Monastic Life in Medieval Christianity

What is monasticism?

The central and original role of the monastic life can be drawn from the meanings of the words 'monk' and 'hermit'. the word 'monk' comes from the Greek word 'monaches' which means solitary and 'hermit' from 'heremites' a desert dweller. The early monks and nuns were just that: men and women who fled the worldliness of urban life and the ethos of a church that was at the time of Anthony and St. Paul and established institution of the Roman Empire. They fled to the desert to repent and seek God by prayer, fasting and hard manual labour. In the desert they practiced an aesthetical lifestyle of great poverty …show more content…

Therefore to begin with in order to set the monastic life in context I am briefly going to look at society in the medieval Christianity civilisation.

For many centuries in the medieval west the rule for monks composed by Saint Benedict provided the standard pattern of monastic observance.

What was the Benedictine rule?

Richly endowed, and sometimes exploited by lay rulers, the great Benedictine abbeys came to hold a prominent place in the social landscape of Europe as landowning corporations, ecclesiastical patrons and centres of learning.

''we must' wrote Benedict in his preface 'create a scola for the Lord's Service.' in the language of the sixth century the word scola had a military as well as academic sense; it meant a special regiment of corps d'elite.'

(Lawrence: :28)

The Benedictine monastery was not a place of quiet retreat or leisure, neither was it a school in the academic sense; it was a kind of unit in which the recruit was trained and equipped for his spiritual warfare under an experienced commander- the abbot.

The central objective of the Benedictine monasteries was the conquest of spirituality and self will that made a man receptive to God. In order to achieve this the rule prescribed careful ordered routine of prayer, works and study which filled the day, varying only according to the liturgical year and

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