Medieval Christianity and Labor
Discussion
Benjamin Suriano:
"Early Christian culture vacillated between two conflicting images of labor, as portrayed by the ambivalent views within the scriptural tradition. In Genesis labor is depicted as both a primordial good, given to the joyful task of keeping and cultivating creation, and as a cursed affair, the toilsome consequence of the Fall. As Jacques Le Goff notes, within the early Middle Ages Christianity tended toward the latter interpretation as it culturally retained the aristocratic Greco-Roman disdain for labor, compounded also by similar disparagements within the warrior ethos that came with the infusion of the Germanic peoples. Society was thus ruled largely through a bipartite structure of oratores and bellatores, clerics and warriors, with little place for the lot of ordinary workers.
In many ways, however, it is through the ascetic formations of monasticism that an opening was made for reevaluating labor positively rather than negatively. As the early monastics retreated into a life entirely devoted to spiritual exercise they nevertheless took up manual labor to provide a withdrawal not lacking in self-sufficiency. While the monk’s physical labors initially were deemed a matter of penitence and a means of resisting acedia, the fact that the significance of work was already integrated into the very practice of spiritual life evinced a consciousness of the laboring body far removed from the commonplace Neoplatonic asceticisms of late antiquity. Still conditioned by the upper-class ethos of a slave-based society, ancient pagan ascetics, especially with the arrival of Gnosticism, typically protested the present social body out of contempt for the lower body of economic activity itself. Retreat from society was often in order to escape into an elite enclave of pure intellectual contemplation without regard for the material contradictions that continually confronted individual and social bodies. Christian asceticism, however, from the so-called “desert Fathers” to especially the larger scale, coenobitic mobilizations that led to Western medieval monasticism proper, began to express and understand the body as the concentrated site of society’s contradictions.
In protesting and renouncing the dominant social structures, their task was not primarily to escape material contradictions through self-mortification, but more often to build an alternative communal embodiment of unity within the whole body itself, reconciling its lower with its higher elements. As Peter Brown states, the active physical body became not merely an instrument to be tolerated and efficiently used as in the ancient ascetic separation of spirit, but rather a “field to cultivate” holistically for a unified material and spiritual transformation.
Brown’s quotation marks out a key for understanding the monastic valorization as it began to recognize the laboring body’s constitutive value for actively integrating and reconciling the material and spiritual. Referring to the body and its work as a “field to cultivate” comes from Horsiesius (d. 400 CE), an early founder of communally organized monasticism that had begun with Pachomius.93 It at once reflects the communal mode of production that monasticism was taking up and its sociocultural consciousness of a more comprehensive spirituality reflectively emerging from this base. Despite the literature surrounding the legend of Antony and the exaggerated sense of monasticism as initially a retreat to the isolated desert, most of Western monasticism grew out of an urban asceticism whose movement found perfection not in the desert but rather in revivifying deserted villages.
With the decline of the Roman Empire, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the village life of communal production became increasingly pressed into, not only heavy taxation, but crushing debt bondage. This entailed a process that effectively hollowed out much of Rome’s rural agrarian base, setting the stage for its eventual refilling by manorial conduits toward feudal serfdom.
With many villages abandoned, Pachomian monasticism occupied these depopulated rural villages by way of reclaiming their agricultural production. In reentering village production back into viable economic life this village monasticism had begun providing a kind of alternative socioeconomic organization to the emerging feudal relations of production, a movement that had begun to draw the people back to village life, beginning with Pachomius’s original successes in the deserted villages of Tabannese and Pbow.
As James Goehring states,
- “Its leaders were the new holy men of antiquity, but its institutions were also among the new purveyors of social and economic power in the hinterland. Its success in Egypt was dependent on both elements.”
From the constitutive involvement of coenobitic monasticism with organized communal production the notion of manual labor came to be understood not only as necessary for the maintenance of the body but also for the salvation of the soul.
This form of communal production and its affirmation of labor as constitutive for the life of
the spirit spread quickly from Pachomius into the West, with the Pachomian rule for
planned living directly influencing the rise of the Benedictine community.
For Benedictine monks manual labor was also understood essentially as a constitutive aspect of spirituality, to be practiced and improved upon daily, along with prayer and contemplation. The rise of this figure of saintly perfection amongst the oratores permitted, in a way unimaginable to the contemplative life of the Greek elite and the heroic life of the Germanic warrior, a more honorable view of work. This not only raised the consciousness of productive activity within the spiritual practitioner, who increasingly came to reflect upon the spiritual meaning and value of labor as more than merely a useful tool, but it also raised popular consciousness to the dignity of labor because of its integral association with the ideal life of the saints.
Yet, more importantly, the ongoing development of monasteries as societies of economic and spiritual flourishing led to increased technological innovations in the forces of production that facilitated their unified embodiment and spiritual growth. As René Dubos states, “for the first time in the history of human institutions, the Benedictine abbey created a way of life in which practical and theoretical skills could be embodied in the same person. … they destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative, the manual and the liberal arts.” The increased organization of productive activity meant the increased experience of the transformative power of labor as well as a surplus of intellectual labor for reflecting upon the meaning, value, and use of work.
Such surplus labor led to a greater experimentation with the forces of production in themselves, a tendency that led toward vast innovative leaps beyond antiquity in the development of productive technologies, a transformation whose inventive scale has been estimated on par with the nineteenth century industrial revolution.103 With new developments in mills and machinery among other technologies, the Middle Ages saw productive yields, especially in agriculture, grow at unprecedented rates.
Thus, as the practices of manual labor increased and developed in their communal organization, creating a monastic social formation more complex in its forces and relations of production, there was also a greater development of intellectual and spiritual labors, which led to a greater appreciation of physical labor as an internal good to the totality of social and natural relations. This trajectory positively incorporated labor into a spirituality that was increasingly given not to a separation of the inner spirit, but to a higher cultivation of the unifying potentials of nature and humanity.105 The closeness of the community to subsistence production and the reallocation of surplus goods and surplus labor for perfecting and transforming productive activity into higher forms of communal self-organization allowed for a new view of labor as not merely a means of self-preservation but a transformation of subsisting according to new forms of creative development. This new view upon labor as integrating material and salvific economies was being opened, then, precisely because the mode of production did not primarily serve to produce commodities solely for trade and acquisition of wealth, but rather served to perfect the community of primary producers itself in their creative activity. As George Ovitt states in opposing Weber’s retrojection of a capitalist ethos on monastic industria: “Monasticism, as shaped by the early history of asceticism and by the earliest monastic Rules, saw significance in the process of labor, not its products; it was centripetal and socialistic in its pursuit of communal self-sufficiency.”
More information
From the notes of chapter 1 of the thesis:
- Jacques Le Goff, “Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen in the Value Systems of the Early Middle Ages
(Fifth to Tenth Centuries),” trans. Arthur Goldhammer in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 71–86.
- On the difference with Neoplatonist asceticism see, John G. Gager, “Body-symbols and Social Reality:
Resurrection, Incarnation and Asceticism in Early Christianity,” Religion 12.4 (1982): 345–363. But especially see Peter Brown, The Body and Society, (Columbia University Press, 1988).
- Peter Brown states: “Seldom, in ancient thought, had the body been seen as more deeply implicated in
the transformation of the soul; and never was it made to bear so heavy a burden. For the Desert Fathers, the body was not an irrelevant part of the human person, that could, as it were, be ‘put in brackets.’ It could not enjoy the distant tolerance that Plotinus and many pagan sages were prepared to accord it, as a transient and accidental adjunct to the self. It was, rather, grippingly present to the monk: he was to speak of it as ‘this body, that God has afforded me, as a field to cultivate, where I might work and become rich.’” Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 235–236.
- Peter Brown refers to the 4th century Pachomius and the monastic movement he started as establishing
“alternative villages in miniature”, The Body and Society, p. 217.
- James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), p. 94. “Unlike Antony, Pachomius’s ascetic vocation was not fulfilled by withdrawing further into the desert. He did not move from his initial location near his village deeper into the desert to distance himself further from society. His ascetic career moved him in exactly the opposite direction. Pachomius finds ascetic perfection in his return to the village, albeit a deserted village on the shore of the Nile.” On the papyrological evidence that monasticism had its origins in urban asceticism rather than in the remote desert, see pp. 78–79.
- In noting these changes in the late Empire, Goehring points to the socioeconomic analysis of
M. Rostovtzeff in his The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. However, for a more thorough and contemporary analysis of these emerging contradictions within the Empire, especially according to an explanation of modes of exploitation that would allow these early monastic forms to more clearly stand out in their alternative socioeconomic organization, see
- Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World;
- Jairus Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic
Dominance (Oxford University Press, 2001); as well as
- Chris Wickham, “The Other Transition: From the
Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past and Present, 103 (May, 1984): pp. 3–36.
- Goehring notes that their social organization both of their spiritual community and the
village life of the peasantry, by the 4th and 5th centuries, had come to rival “the great Egyptian Byzantine estates” (p. 49).
- George Ovitt, Jr. cites one of Jerome’s letters as describing the Pachomian monastics as those “who
allow no one [into the monastery] who is unwilling to work, for they think labor is necessary not only for supporting the body but also for the salvation of the soul.” Ovitt, “Manual Labor and Early Medieval Monasticism,” Viator v. 17 (1986), p. 9.
- “The organization of religious life into a productive organic whole by Pachomius must surely stand as
the most significant social innovation in early Christian history. St. Benedict’s contribution to Western Monasticism is incomprehensible without the Pachomian achievement.” George Ovitt, Jr. The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 94. On the influence of St. Basil’s rule on Benedict, which had similarly upheld labor especially agricultural labor as constitutive to the spiritual life of the community, see Rembert Sorg, Holy Work: Towards a Benedictine Theology of Manual Labor (St. Louis, MO: Pio Decimo Press, 1953).
- “When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really
monks.” RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1981), p. 69.
- See also Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical
Water Wheel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 109
- “This new atmosphere proved of enormous importance for the development of European technology and
science. The Benedictine abbeys did not immediately launch into scientific investigations, but by encouraging the combination of physical and intellectual work they destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative, the manual and the liberal arts. This created an atmosphere favourable for the development of knowledge based on experimentation.” René Dubos, “Franciscan Conservation versus Benedictine Stewardship,” in Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives—Past and Present, ed. R. J. Berry (New York: T & T Clark International, 2006), p. 57.
- Jean Gimpel argues that the Middle Ages introduced a technological boom that should be known as the
first European industrial revolution. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). As Lewis Mumford argues, the influence of medieval monasteries on the social whole were “largely responsible for the fact that Western civilization caught up with, and then surpassed, the technical inventiveness of China, Korea, Persia, and India.” The Myth of the Machine: Technics of Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), p. 263.
- Monasteries were some of the first European communities to develop and implement the watermill.
Almost every Benedictine and Cistercian community owned and operated one or more mills for various purposes. As Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men, p. 110, states, “The earliest waterpowered hemp mills, beer mills, tanning mills, hammer mills, and ore stamps of which we have knowledge were monastic mills, and the Cistercians, in particular, played a very active role in the medieval iron industry.” Within the early Middle Ages there was also a significant leap in agricultural production, in terms of both quantitative and qualitative yields, through the new developments of the heavy plow, the padded horse collar, and the three-field system along with the use of water-powered mills. See Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). For Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 15, the Benedictines are significant precursors to the modern integration of science and technology. Their practical bent and the maintaining of a common life of artists, craftsmen, agriculturists and saints provided a context for “a more effective scientific mentality than that of the ancient world.”
- The claim that monasteries valorized labor only according to virtues of self-discipline to avoid idleness
and provide self-subsistence leaves unexplained the great leap from antiquity in productive technologies initiated by the monastic movement. The virtue of self-sufficiency alone does not necessarily lead to a greater appreciation for labor in its productive forces and its development into higher cultural and social forms of organization. This is to suggest that there was something more like a growing consciousness of the constitutive value of labor to the social whole and thus its cultivation as an internal good—a whole for which otherworldly aims begin to refocus on and materially lift up this world.
- Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (London: Socialist Resistance, 2007), p. 240. “When the
supply of slaves dwindled [within the late Roman Empire], the latifundia had to disappear. The monasteries picked up this large-scale production and developed it further, since free brothers replaced slaves in the work. Because of the general decline of society, the monasteries ended up by being the only places in the Empire where some remnants of ancient technology persisted and were preserved through the tempests of the great migrations, and even perfected in many points.” pp. 239–240.
- “Throughout the early Middle Ages the monastics performed a wide variety of work that brought them
into contact with the laity. They ran hospices and xenodochia for travellers and pilgrims, cared for the sick, distributed food to the poor at the porta or gate of the monastery, educated the young and advised and assisted laypeople in many other ways.” Giles Constable, Monks, Hermits, and Crusaders in Medieval Europe (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), p. 353. These forms of social programs are in addition to the technological forces of production that monasteries had already developed and shared with the wider society, not to mention the work done in clearing lands and creating new roads.