3 - Society

Summary

Benedict called upon his followers to forsake society, but those that adopted his rule fashioned a life that acknowledged and assimilated the economic, social and cultural ways of the world. In the medieval mind the monastery was conceived of as a city, certainly a centre of worship, but also a focus of material, social and political commerce. The Benedictines were the monks of society (‘qui iuxta homines habitant’), a counterpoint to the monks outside society, ‘away from all disturbance’ (‘a turbis omnino segregati’), the archetype of early monasticism to which the reformed orders aspired. The social integration of the Black Monks was a consequence of their early years. The pioneers of the RB were public figures, prelates and princes, and the customs of Benedict became an instrument of their confessional and territorial ambitions; the endowment of property secured the first colonies in unsettled regions and unstable polities but also bound them forever to the emerging infrastructure. Yet the social dynamics of the Benedictines were also inherent in the RB itself: Benedict's cenobium was sustained by social ties: the paternal care of the superior for his brethren, the fraternal bond of the professed, the blend of age, status and skill in the liturgical and manual opera of the horarium, the caritas of the community for wayfarers and pilgrims; of course, its premise was that a life of spiritual fulfilment, of perfection even, was not only the possession of the solitary but might also be the reward of a life in common.

Their social ties were the chief source of tension in their medieval history. A recurrent theme among reformers, the instinctive worldliness of the Benedictines should not be exaggerated. As individuals they were not immune to eremitical impulses; collectively they repeatedly challenged the encroachment of secular interests, particularly in successive phases of reform. Yet they also accepted their place in the material world, and in the later Middle Ages sought to defend it in the face of growing opposition; when compulsory enclosure was required by sixteenth-century reformers, they rejected it; they also cultivated the interest of society in their observance and adapted their liturgical, pastoral and charitable customs accordingly. The laity shaped the social identity of the Benedictines, yet they harboured doubts over their worldly involvement which only heightened in the later Middle Ages as their own hierarchy was threatened.