Evangelical Christianity might well be more familiar with the various branches of Christian monasticism. When one considers that both movements have sought to elevate the standard of Christian living and devotion in times when mainstream Christianity has been lax, and that both have regularly sought the global expansion of the faith through missionary labor, why have these two expressions of Christianity not become better friends?
Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants
Brazos Press
144 pages
$19.26
School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (New Monastic Library: Resources for Radical Discipleship)
Cascade Books
190 pages
$15.98
The answer to this question, from the evangelical Protestant side, surely has to do with the early Protestant era; ex-monastics such as Martin Luther of Wittenberg (who married a former nun, Katy von Bora), Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, and Peter Martyr Vermigli of Naples were at the forefront of efforts to lead in the reform of European Christianity. These, and others (such as John Calvin) with no monastic past, argued that monasticism was part of late medieval Christianity’s malaise rather than any part of its remedy. It was not only monasticism’s tendency to entropy that troubled them (the institutional church displayed this also); rather, it was the foundational assumptions of a movement that urged that singleness was preferable to marriage and family, and that monastic life cultivated a personal sanctity beyond the reach of Christians in society. It has been said that the Reformers wanted rank and file Christians to live as though they were monks.
Though this Protestant critique stuck, the making of it did not require the Reformers to ignore the positive contributions made by earlier monk-theologians. The Dominican Johannes Tauler (c.1300-1361) influenced the young Luther; the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was a favorite writer of Calvin; the Benedictine Ratramnus of Corbie (d. 868) enabled Cranmer and Ridley to see the Lord’s Supper in a different way.
We now speak regularly of “climate change” and mean by it rising temperatures and melting glaciers. But we can, as appropriately, speak of another climate change. In our lifetimes Catholic bishops have urged their flocks to support Billy Graham, while concurrently evangelical Protestants have been visiting monasteries for prayer retreats. Protestants are now busy exploring monasticism, which, instead of expiring under the barrage of criticism focused on it five centuries ago, has endured. Yet the current rekindling of the evangelical imagination regarding monasticism (in both male and female expressions) is not without perils, the chief of which is myopia, i.e., a poor ability to discern things at a distance. Myopia is a common affliction among Christians who are novice-adoptees in any branch of the Christian family which is new to them.
Which Monasticism?
By stressing the need to discern things at a distance, I do not mean that monasticism can only be studied in connection with its ancient origins; after all, monasticism persists around us to this day. I do mean to emphasize, however, that we cannot properly appraise the distinct “parts” of monasticism without a conception of the “whole.” The four books under review here collectively concentrate on the “parts.”
Dennis Okholm’s Monk Habits for Everyday People provides a window into this Azusa Pacific professor’s more than two-decades long exploration of Benedictine monasticism. He relates that he is among thousands of Benedictine oblates who have espoused the way of Benedict while married and at-large in society. Call it “weekend Benedictinism” if you like. The monastic movement itself, originally associated with the desert regions of eastern Egypt, Sinai, and Syria, had spanned the Mediterranean world and reached as far west as Ireland. There was a two-way traffic involving Easterners such as Athanasius—who, when exiled to the West in AD 336, took with him his eventual classic about the desert monastic patriarch, The Life of Antony—and curious Westerners such as John Cassian, who went to the eastern deserts c. 385 to observe the movement firsthand.
Benedictinism, the “part” which Okholm has investigated through long association, represents the attempt by Benedict of Nursia (480-550) to adapt this monasticism of the desert to a different society, a different climate, and a different temperament: that found in Mediterranean Europe. If desert monasticism represented the daring, the heroic, and the bold, European Benedictinism (the term “Benedictine” only came into common use after AD 1300) represented a monasticism that kept clear of extremes; it offered a stable, housed, communal life characterized by work, prayer, and devotion. It was a not-uncomfortable life, and drew its recruits not from the margins of society but from the center.
Okholm, who has traveled a trajectory that has led him from Pentecostal roots, and a Baptist phase, into mainline Presbyterianism, finds in Benedictinism a kind of access-point to an early, pre-papal Christian antiquity. In its ordered devotion, he finds an antidote to the “froth” that characterizes much evangelical spirituality; in its communal life and deliberation, he finds an alternative model for the way in which Christians should weigh matters of import. To his credit, Okholm alone (of the writers considered here) devotes a chapter to the long-standing Protestant critique of the monastic life. But left unanswered is the paramount question: Why Benedictinism and not the earlier desert monasticism? After all, that was the original. Or why not the hardier monasticism of the Cistercians (a group I take to be exemplary), which was to follow? The Cistercians proposed to improve on Benedictinism’s seemingly inherent tendency to get comfortable and to acquire riches.
By contrast, Karen Sloan, a campus minister at Quinnipac University, Connecticut, was drawn to the form of monasticism which took its rise in the 13th century under the leadership of Dominic (1170-1221). Her look at Dominicanism is given in Flirting with Monasticism. A mainline Presbyterian, Sloan was drawn to investigate this variety of monastic life because—when already open to sampling various forms of Christian spirituality—she met a handsome recruit (novice) who was entering the trial year during which it would be determined how well he was suited to this order. While Sloan was hoping that the novice would find that the Dominican “fit” was poor (and thus be available for a relationship), she gradually became a perceptive interpreter of this order. As it happened, the novice took to Dominican life; the chagrined Sloan nevertheless pressed on to understand this way of life more fully. It is to her credit that she did not depart, crestfallen.
Yet there are loose ends. We are told repeatedly that the Dominicans are an order of friar-preachers, that rather than being pure contemplatives, they serve the Christian world as priest-pastors of churches. But Sloan, rather like Okholm in his admiration of the Benedictines, is fascinated most by the order’s contemplative devotion. She does acknowledge that in the Dominican past there was energetic outward ministry: the order’s theological prowess (illustrated by theologians such as Aquinas) was turned to the dubious purpose of assisting the medieval Inquisition in its hounding of Jews and of Christians whose orthodoxy was questioned. One suspects that a Dominican writer would enumerate the distinctives of this order differently, laying much more stress on acts of ministry and mission carried out beyond cloister and church walls. (Savonarola, the turbulent monk-reformer of Florence [1452-1498], is one striking example of Dominican activism.) One also suspects that Sloan, who writes with an admirable clarity, would have utilized her keen powers of observation and description just as happily on the Benedictines or Cistercians if she had been introduced to a handsome novice oriented to a different order.
It is with the volume of Scott Bessenecker, The New Friars, that we move beyond the commending of monastic devotion and community to a consideration of the possibility that monasticism might serve as a pattern for evangelical activism. The friars, whether Franciscan, Dominican, or Carmelite, were itinerant rather than cloistered, and championed activism in society on behalf of the unevangelized and needy. Bessenecker means to appropriate the preacher-friar aspect of monasticism for the equipping of a new generation of evangelical missionaries to the urban slums of the developing world. It is not monastic dress, communal life, or styles of devotion that fires the imagination of this author but rather the model of a voluntary, celibate, impassioned ministry to the poorest and neediest which he sees displayed in the careers of Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), and Mother Teresa (1910-1997). His apologia for the friar’s life is the more intriguing inasmuch as he, a former Roman Catholic, saw enough indolence in an Iowa Franciscan monastery he visited as a teen to permanently cure him of any romantic notion that monasticism represented the way of living the Christian life.
As with the Bessenecker volume, so also with the composite work produced by Rutba House (a Durham, N.C. community), School(s) for Conversion. The contributors to this symposium are not particularly interested in the relative appeal of any single brand of monasticism from the long-ago; they are very interested in all forms of monastic and Christian communal living which can be considered as a form of dissent from the status quo in the wider culture and in the church. It is the idea of monasticism as counter-culture, as dissenting community, as alternative lifestyle which energizes them.
The operative word in their consideration of monasticism is “new.” Though members of Catholic religious orders are among the contributors to the book and among the members of the residential communities to whose existence the book alludes, the burning desire is to appropriate from “old” monasticism whatever literature, spiritual practices, and ideals will help forward their new projects (whether in ministry to the hungry, the homeless, the disoriented, or the powerless).
Questionable, however, is the readiness of the book’s contributors to suggest parallels between the day of Emperor Constantine and today. They allege that as the Constantinian awarding of toleration to the early Christian movement had a corrosive effect on the Christianity of that day, so also has the effect of the American “Empire” on the church of today been harmful. Sinister imperial corrosion made monasticism necessary then; it makes it necessary again now. In fact, monasticism predated Constantine; only its proliferation followed his rule. This polemic is overheated. In kindness, let me suggest that many of the new monasticism’s ideas are helpful whether or not one endorses this latent “Christ against Culture” view.
All four volumes fail to address the question, “What is the ‘whole’ of which these ‘pieces’ of monasticism are parts?” In order to view the big picture, interested readers will benefit by consulting standard works on this larger subject. I do not know of any compact work that surpasses the overview of the whole of monasticism provided by the late Benedictine scholar David Knowles in Christian Monasticism (1969). The same authority, Knowles, had in 1962 commended the reprint of a 1913 classic worthy of our attention: H.B. Workman’s The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal. Workman (1862-1951), a British Methodist, pointed out that the ideal or aim of the monastic life was regularly modified, century by century, in response to changing circumstances and aspirations. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge between the day of Benedict (6th century), when the ideal was seclusion and contemplation, and the day of Francis (13th century), when the growth of towns and cities created urban poor with their staggering needs. More recently, C.H. Lawrence has provided a more comprehensive guide than that of Knowles: Medieval Monasticism (1984). An interesting 2009 volume, Ivan Kauffman’s Follow Me: A History of Christian Intentionality, while not strictly a work of monastic history, represents a kind of apologetic depiction of ways in which monasticism prior to the Reformation had substantially overlapping concerns with those we have come to associate with the evangelical movements. Kauffman’s broad-brush approach has affinities with those of Bessenecker and Rutba House.
Monasticism as Parachurch?
This question is initially disconcerting. But is it not possible that beyond whatever affinities evangelicals may have with monasticism’s concern to deepen devotion and to carry the gospel to the unbelieving, there is another: a readiness to second-guess the institutional church as an effective matrix for nurture and Christian action? Our four books—had they aimed merely to add to the growing genre of “evangelicals coming home to Rome” literature—would be telling a now-familiar story. But their story is very distinct from that.
Monasticism from its earliest times represents an expression of less than robust trust in the zeal and effectiveness of the institutional church. As he entered his local church, Antony of Egypt heard the gospel story of the rich young man who “went away sad” rather than part with his wealth; but the net effect of Antony’s sense of calling was that he “went away,” leaving the local church for the desert. And this was not the supine, comfortable church, at ease with the empire in the aftermath of Constantine’s edicts—no, it was the church still vulnerable to imperial persecution. Nevertheless, the institutional church was judged by Antony to be lacking something that the desert life could supply. Evangelical Protestants instinctively know this story of Christian agencies (“arms of the church,” we call them) that out-do the church at select tasks.
True enough, the institutional church did eventually restrain monasticism’s tendency to aloofness. Basil the Great (330-379) is credited with obliging the monks in his region to leave their wilderness retreats and come into towns to serve in schools and hospitals. Yet the issue was not settled so quickly in the church at large. Benedictine monasteries in Western Europe were only with difficulty brought under episcopal jurisdiction; Christian donors were more likely to remember monasteries with bequests than they were the institutional church. Even when, in time, all new monastic orders were required to gain a papal charter, the fact remained that the men and women who sought entry to them were, as surely as old Antony, seeking affiliation with a variant of the church which seemed more likely to assist in the pursuit of salvation and sanctity. The institutional church, having established the point that monastic life could no longer exist without reference to the church’s oversight, does not seem to have cared to challenge the premise that monastic life provided benefits not so readily available in the local parish. So, whether our contemporary writers are urging our appropriation of the insights of one branch of monasticism, or of several taken collectively, the question remains: why the monastery and not the church?
Monasticism’s Declining Numbers
There are plenty of reports that in the global south, Catholic monasteries and convents are doing very well; we hear this particularly of such countries as Nigeria. But this is not what we hear about Europe and North America. The Dominicans, whom Sloan observed at such close quarters, number less than 1,000 in North America; the indolent Franciscan monastery in Iowa which Bessenecker visited in his teens is now no more. The BBC reported in 2008 that the number of monks and nuns, globally, declined by 10 percent between 2005 and 2006.
That under these circumstances, we have evangelical writers discovering and commending monastic ideals does not require us to suspect that they are deluded. But again, we are obliged to ask whether the pieces are being seen in relation to the whole. Seeing the whole will require us to understand that over centuries, any marked decline in monastic recruitment has been an indicator of weakness in the church constituency from which recruits come. Conversely, a flood of recruits (and still more, the chartering of new orders) is a reflection of some heightened vitality in the church at large, which lends to monasticism its keenest. There is reason to suspect that our writers have not grasped the wider complexity of the situation they describe.
Can We Smile at the Foibles?
An old cowboy ballad speaks wistfully of a place where “the skies are not cloudy all day.” In the view of our writers, there are few clouds in the monastic sky. I have credited Okholm with acknowledging the critique of monasticism given in the early Protestant era; Sloan admits that the Dominicans were not on the side of the angels in supporting the Inquisition. Bessenecker has never forgotten the Franciscans who so shattered his expectations in his teens. But what one needs to see acknowledged also, in such favorable accounts as these, is that criticisms of the monastic life have been a regular feature of Catholic life. Without this admission, one is left with the impression that only Protestantism has been faultfinding.
When Benedictine monasticism at Cluny grew opulent, it was the puritanical Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux who aimed barbed arrows. Francis of Assisi had the pre-existing monastic orders (Benedictine and Cistercian) in mind when he forbade his own recruits to receive gifts of coin, and discouraged the use of books. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) found easy targets, both monks and nuns, when he composed his Decameron. To crown it all, the still-Catholic Erasmus poked fun at the various mendicant (begging) monastic orders by describing how they sent their “reps” into a dying man’s bedroom; there each jockeyed with the other in hope of seeing his own order included in the man’s will. If loyal Catholics have pointed to monasticism’s foibles, can we not at least smile with them?
Discernment, Discernment
Our authors are (largely) evangelical Protestants appropriating elements within monasticism for the devotion, community life, and mission-outreach of their fellow evangelicals. But in order to serve this constituency well, some basic theological landmarks need to be maintained. This is true especially in reviewing the sacramental practices customary in the monastic orders. Okholm, while he does not openly endorse the Catholic understanding that after consecration, the elements of bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ (physical appearances notwithstanding), nevertheless bluntly indicates that the elements are the body and blood. Not only is this not the view of evangelicalism, broadly conceived, but it is not the view of his own adoptive Reformed tradition. In this tradition, we may speak of a real presence of the heavenly Jesus Christ in the Supper, facilitated by the agency of the Spirit. Sloan, who stands in the same Reformed theological tradition, while she refrains from participating in the Dominican administration of the Mass, makes no theological evaluation of the Catholic devotional practice of the adoration of the host in which she regularly participates; this practice, however, presupposes transubstantiation to be actual. A high Marian devotion, similarly, is observed but given no theological evaluation.
In a similar way, Bessenecker gives an extended defense of the view, popularized by Mother Teresa, that in serving the destitute, we serve Christ unseen. There are signs that his editor did not prevail in pressing him to rethink this problematic interpretation of Matthew 25. The books are intended as windows into monasticism for evangelical Protestants who are utterly new to the subject; to do this effectively requires more theological discernment than they have shown.
Why Not Reciprocity?
Finally, if one accepts the proposal made here that there are actual affinities between monasticism and evangelical Protestantism, we should then expect that exemplary forms of evangelical spirituality would hold a degree of fascination for large-hearted Catholics (monastics among them) as surely as features of monasticism draw evangelical curiosity.
I wish that this expectation had surfaced in the books under review. Instead, their collective tendency is to suggest a unidirectional fascination, in which evangelicals alone must appropriate from the other tradition. As one who accepts that evangelical Protestant movements originated as movements of the Spirit, it seems to me that such unidirectional thinking betrays an evangelical identity crisis. We should affirm that our movement began as a movement of the Spirit, and that there were also earlier initiatives of the Spirit to renew the church. We have a basis for reciprocal curiosity. So, let this conversation about evangelicalism and monasticism undergo some fine-tuning, and then continue.
Books mentioned in this essay:
Scott A. Bessenecker, The New Friars (InterVarsity, 2006).
Dennis E. Okholm, Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants (Brazos Press, 2007).
Rutba House, School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (Cascade Books, 2005).
Karen E. Sloan, Flirting with Monasticism: Finding God in Ancient Paths (InterVarsity, 2006).
Ken Stewart is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He is the author most recently of Ten Myths About Calvinism: Recovering the Breadth of the Reformed Tradition, just published by InterVarsity Press.
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