A walk through twelve centuries of history has shown that like the church generally, the world of the medieval monastery emerged from the culture of Late Antiquity and came to be established in every region of Western Christendom. In both monasteries and the church, Christian piety found universal expression. Yet while the church strove for unification, in the vita religiosa no single force was able to bind its widely divergent manifestations together coherently. The spectrum of possibilities for the world of monasticism was remarkably diverse. And that diversity had been established from the beginning. The vita religiosa had always divided itself along two lines, each corresponding to the fundamental ideals of being free from earthly concerns and of “having God always in view,” as it was said, but along different paths: on the one hand, an eremitic life under the leadership of charismatic personalities who established norms by way of word and deed, and on the other hand, a cenobitic life in community, lived in enclosed spaces, that played out within fixed institutional forms grounded in a written rule.
All of this diversity was the result of remarkable flexibility in the face of ongoing changes in ideas and practices of piety, social needs, and conceptualizations of both individuality and community. Moreover, the full spectrum of the vita religiosa itself, together with all of the particular forms and institutions within it, was in fact part of the universal church, but as such it was either allowed a certain latitude in its affairs or bound to particular functions in remarkably divergent ways. In view of the constantly changing ecclesiological models of a church that experienced fundamental reform, a church that consolidated itself institutionally as the mediator of salvation, and that began to articulate legal distinctions between clergy and laity, the position of the vita religiosa changed considerably.
The changes in the world of medieval monasticism resulted, however, not only from outside influences. Much more decisive was that world’s own internal dynamic, which emerged over the course of its many centuries. This dynamic inspired constant innovation in matters of spirituality and organization—in the years around 1200, for example, in the cultivation of lay piety. The same dynamic helped to refine and optimize all that was already to hand, as among the Dominicans, or to cultivate a return to supposedly ideal early forms, such as the apostolic community. In many cases these processes were of a decidedly experimental character, as was true among the new hermits of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, but the story often enough had its share of failures—as, for example, in the case of the Friars of the Sack.
The world of monasticism appears as a rich and complex braid, one that formed itself from interwoven cycles, for example, the frequent return to specific centers of reform, or from shifting focal points of influence, as in the movement from the monastic community to the mendicant friary, or from the sometimes fierce competition that broke out between orders, as was true of the Cluniacs and Cistercians. There were also peripheral forces, hardly visible at first, that suddenly erupted, seen, for example, in the impact of the Rule of Augustine or the Rule of Saint Benedict, as well as supposedly dead ends that suddenly opened up new paths for development, like the congregation that emerged around Norbert of Xanten and became the Premonstratensian Order. Across a wide chronological span, too, this interweaving witnessed times of rupture (the Carolingian reforms), of transformation (the establishment of the regular canons), of continuation (the flowering of Cluny), and of acceleration, especially during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
This world of diversity and change built itself up, as it were, from only a few basic but remarkably fruitful elements. To understand each of them is indispensable for a proper understanding of this complex historical braid.
A closing chapter of this book thus outlines its most important contours. It offers a systematically comparative view that focuses on the relationships between individual and community in the spiritual life of the monastery, the legal and normative range of the vita religiosa, modes of institutionalization ranging from charismatic leadership to the formal establishment of an order, the orders’ historical self-consciousness, the mutual tensions between cloister and world, the worldly economic realities that sustained monastic life, and finally the search for knowledge and faith.