View source for 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.”

(https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/dissertations_mu/article/1643/&path_info=Suriano_marquette_0116D_11069.pdf)


[[Category:Labor]]

[[Category:P2P History]]

[[Category:Civilizational Analysis]]

[[Category:Spirituality]]

[[Category:P2P Theory]]