In vinea Sorech laborare: The Cultivation of Unity in Twelfth-Century Monastic Historiography

Summary

‘Ecce quam bonum et quam iucundum habitare fratres in unum – see how good and how delightful it is for brothers to live together in unity’: thus wrote the psalmist in Psalm 132, and there is a mass of evidence suggesting that medieval monks not only agreed, but even found this verse particularly applicable to their own profession. Unity, ordered communal life, was a highly desirable good, and could be sought in a variety of units: families, local communities, larger political units, but also in monastic communities, and in the universal Church. But what, in basic terms, allowed brothers to live together in unum? What was considered the principle or cause of human unity? In what follows I will suggest how some monastic historians of English origin, active in the first half of the twelfth century, would have answered these questions, and how their answers influenced their mode of structuring historical narratives. I will discuss the principles of human unity and group identity as they appear in William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Ailnoth of Canterbury, in order to suggest that to twelfth-century monastic writers of history, the perfect unity attainable for human communities consisted in the realization of the potential inherent in human nature. Such unity, it will be argued, needed to grow organically out of what was given by nature, but required careful cultivation in order to reach maturity.

In the monastic intellectual culture of the early twelfth century, as in its classical and patristic precursors, the human person was seen as created for, and only completed by, communal life. This idea was not only found expressed in the psalms, of course; the more learned of medieval monks might have come across the following statement: ‘It seems quite clear to me from the state in which we are born, that there should be a bond of community between all of us, but the stronger the closer we are to each other.’ The words are Cicero’s, but the sentiment expressed pervades medieval thought on how human beings naturally bond together. Human communities, it was thought, were formed through reciprocal bonds of association, societas, between their members, and such human bonding was rooted in human nature.