The Children of Abraham by F. E. Peters

Author:F. E. Peters [F. E. Peters]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Monastic Rule

One who had considerable experience of monasticism in most of its Middle Eastern varieties was Basil (d. 379), the wealthy nobleman who had himself become a monk and later the bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. He had visited monastic communities in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria about 358 C.E. and his own earlier experience of the disorganized and even anarchical monastic tradition in his native Cappadocia led him to draw up a set of rules for the governance of monastic life. These are extant in a longer and a shorter version, and they set out in some detail not only the ideals but the practices of the monk’s life from standards of admission to the monastery to the manner of dress there.7

For Basil, community life was far preferable to the eremitical because of its greater social good. It was, in fact, Basil who established the social goals—with their economic and intellectual consequences—so evident in monastic life in the West,8 where Benedict (d.ca. 550) took over much of Basil’s thinking for his own Rule at Monte Cassino.9 Basil believed in work, physical and intellectual, and the life of the monk was to be one of work and prayer. Daily morning and evening prayers were not uncommon in some of the larger Christian churches, but Basil set a standard of monastic prayer eight times a day, beginning at dawn and proceeding at about three-hour intervals through the day and the night as well, since the monks were obliged to rise at midnight and just before dawn to pray once again.

Basil put the monastery under the firm control of the superior (hegoumenos) or abbot, as he was called in the West, but the Great Church went further in its own enactments. Monastic communities, it turned out, could be as troublesome to Church order as individual monks, and the theological disputes of the fifth and sixth centuries were often accompanied by monastic riots.10 The Council of Chalcedon reacted in 451 C.E. by placing monastic communities under the jurisdiction of the bishops, and succeeding councils attempted, not always successfully, to strengthen the hierarchy’s grip on the sometimes overenergetic athletes of God. When in the sixth century the imperial government began to intervene more directly in the affairs of canon law, the emperor too took up the cause of monastic regulation and reform.

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