Pachomian Monasticism and the Communal Revivification of the Roman Agricultural Heartland
Discussion
Benjamin Suriano:
"Most of Western monasticism grew out of an urban asceticism whose movement found perfection not in the desert but rather in revivifying deserted villages.94 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.96 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.99 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.100 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.101 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.102 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."
More information
From Suriano's notes:
- 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.
- “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)
- “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. 104 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.