All right, we're talking about monasticism today. The rise of monasticism in the church, why that happened, what it looked like, and some of the effects that it had on the church as a whole. Monasticism, and we as Protestants have, I have found that we as Protestants tend to be sort of pretty uneasy about monasticism, or at least it's kind of mysterious to us, like we don't really do that a whole lot. I might argue that we actually have our own versions of it, because I think the impulse is a pretty universal one. Monasticism, Well, first of all, let's talk about the four different kind of stages of monasticism. The monastic impulse. And so what we're talking about here is a desire to be a hermit, or a monk, or a nun, or something of that nature, in its various forms. And it took shape in a particular order. From the earliest, and there are... We struggle to interpret these sometimes, but there's hints even in the New Testament that the apostles were talking about certain people choosing to kind of exit from normal life and devote themselves to the service of the church. Either men or women, kind of And like I said, there's a lot of debate about how to, the widows that, you know, let no widow be taken into the number unless she is this or that. And a lot of times people think that was a widow, somebody who was married and then her husband died, and she chooses not to remarry or do anything else, and instead to enter the full-time service of the church. It was a common thing that happened. It also happened even with virgins, and we're not sure how early, but pretty early, that young girls would want to just not get married And not just so they could be high-powered boss girl career women like they do today, but so that they could enter the full-time service of the church in various ways. So the first stage is asceticism. And asceticism has been there forever. It's been all the way back, and there's pros and cons. It's clear, even from the New Testament, that there was a legitimate place for it. Asceticism is just, in general, the desire to deny oneself some level of the creature comforts for a spiritual benefit. Of course, fasting, you know, fasting is talked about, Jesus talks about fasting. When you fast, don't fast like this, fast like that. A fast would be a conscious desire to say, I'm not going to eat anything but just real simple food, just the basic food for some period of time. I'm not going to drink any alcohol. I'm going to abstain from coffee or sugar. Or even the more extreme levels of fasting where somebody just isn't eating at all. Now, when we're talking about fasting, I'm not talking here about fasting that might be done for health purposes. intermittent fasting or longer types of fasting, and it's not that I'm saying those things are bad, it's just not what I'm talking about. What we're talking about is fasting that is done for a spiritual purpose. And, you know, the church has always recognized the value, the Old Testament had like regularly established fasts and things, but in the New Testament, there's nowhere where any mandated fasts are given to us, but there is still an assumption that fasting is periodically gonna be a part of the Christian life. that we will choose from time to, and what it does is, you know, like say I'm used to drinking coffee every day, and say I choose, well I'm gonna not drink coffee for a month. Then every time in the morning, when I get up and I go for that cup of coffee, because that's my habit, and I'm like, oh wait, I'm not doing that. especially after I get over the headache after the first couple days, that's gonna remind me of why I'm doing it. And it's an opportunity to focus myself in prayer and to focus on whatever reason. Fasting that's done for a meritorious purpose, I'm earning grace with God through this fast or something, of course would not be anything we would ever wanna do. But that's the kind of the first level of the monastic impulse. is that desire to restrict myself in some of my normal creaturely comforts for some spiritual benefits. So I can remind myself to focus on prayer. I can get used to denying myself the physical comforts for purposes of greater levels of discipline and so forth. Asceticism, now asceticism is part of all the rest of the monastic movement. That's one thing that all of the monastic movement always has in common is that ascetic impulse. But asceticism doesn't have to be, asceticism can be done just purely within our regular lives. I can go about my, and that's actually what Jesus talks about. He says don't disfigure yourself and pour ashes on your head and make a big show. Just go about your daily business. He says, perfume yourself, put oil on your head. That is the normal things you would do. Put your deodorant on, wash your face, and all the things you'd normally do, because you're not doing this for a big show. Presumably you're doing this for internal spiritual benefits, and then therefore don't make a big show of it. So it could certainly, there isn't necessarily a need to withdraw from normal life, just that impulse within ourselves to try and focus more on spiritual truths and our own self-discipline and so forth through ascetic practices. And that's always been present in the church, in all forms of the church. Then there is aramidic monasticism. We get the word hermit from the word aramite, which comes from a word meaning to be separate or alone. Hermits were people who chose to withdraw from regular society and go out into the desert, go out into the wilderness and live by themselves, maybe for some period of time, maybe forever. A true hermit would be somebody who just decided to do that for the rest of their lives. Now in the Bible we have examples of, you say Jesus going out to the wilderness for 40 days to fast and pray. He wouldn't, you wouldn't call that a hermit because that wasn't, that was a short period of time, I mean 40 days is a long time to fast. But that wasn't the way of life that he was adopting. A hermit was typically one who wanted to do this forever, or at least for some very long extended period of time. They're also called anchorites sometimes, often referred to as the desert saints or the desert fathers. These were people who, this was especially, this arose probably mostly in Egypt, where it was where it first became the most common. Egypt is especially conducive to this sort of thing, because Egypt is, if you're familiar with the geography at all, there's the river, there's the Nile. Almost all the people in Egypt, even today, live right around the Nile, because the rest of it's a desert. But by desert, it isn't just endless, endless waves of sand, like the, I mean, who could live there? You just go out and die, right? But it's, It's canyons and valleys and very rough. There is vegetation. There isn't a lot. And there are little pockets of oases and waters and little streams that go through in little places. It's not nearly enough to support any large number of people, but one person could go out and they could find themselves a little valley somewhere with a little pond and a couple of date trees by it and live there, you know, theoretically forever. And people did. Oftentimes, though it wasn't quite that extreme, maybe they would just be on the kind of the outskirts of the village. They'd live just near town, but not in town. And one of the reasons for that is that hermits would often attract followings. There would be groups of disciples that would want to learn from the hermit. They would regard him as a guru. They were often believed to perform miracles and so forth. And so people would come and, you know, that kind of stereotype of the of, you know, you're climbing the high mountain to find the guru up on top to ask him advice about your life. And then you'd bring gifts. Of course, the hermits would often live, people would bring them food as a gift in return for their advice or their prayer, hoping for a healing miracle or something of that nature. Very common in The Eastern Church, especially in the southern part of the Eastern Church, for what might be obvious reason, being a hermit does not work in Northern Europe. Hermits don't last long, you know, in the winters of Northern Europe. Also for reasons that might be obvious, this was almost entirely a male phenomenon. Women very rarely did this. For safety and vulnerability reasons, it was usually men that would become hermits. Egypt, Palestine, Syria especially. There was a very large hermit movement in Syria. And throughout North Africa is especially where you'll see lots of hermits. They're often called the athletes of God because hermits were reputed to be the ones who really engaged in really extreme levels of asceticism. Like there were hermits who lived in cells where they could not sit down ever, right? So they would sleep standing up. There were hermits that would eat two pieces of bread a week, and that was all. Beat themselves with whips and all those kinds of really extreme things was most common. At the same time, a lot of it was, you know, legends built up and how trustworthy all of that is. There was also a recognition, as we'll see in the monastic movement, that the solitary life isn't good for our spiritual development, usually. And hermits often became, in many places, hermits became known for great levels of vice and wickedness, because they kind of didn't have that social structure supporting them. So that, over time, those with the monastic impulse gravitated more towards the next stage, which is a Kenabitic monasticism, we would refer to as a Kenabite. A Kenabite is a monk or a nun, in other words, an ascetic that lives in a community. That's what defines this next stage. There was a recognition that the Christian life is talking all the time. The Bible talks all the time about loving other people and holding other people accountable. Hermits in the early days just sort of said they were super Christians that were sort of immune from that need. And so they were so spiritual that they didn't need that community support. And often then that they didn't need the Bible or they didn't need the sacraments. So they didn't need... And over time, those that were interested in the monastic whole movement and world recognized that that really wasn't true. A lot of people experienced the hermit life and recognized it actually was pretty unhealthy spiritually. And so there was a move more towards, as I said, what was known as monasticism, where groups of people would gather together and live the monastic life together. It was virtually always segregated by sex, so you'd have male communities or you'd have female communities. They wouldn't mix though. And this could look like a lot of different things, this could be. In the Frankish Empire, for example, in the 6th, 7th centuries, it was real common for, you say, an older guy, he'd had a wife, he'd had kids, at a certain point his wife would die. and his kids would be out of the house, and so he would decide he's not going to get married again, but he's going to find a group of like-minded men, men of his same stage in life, and they're going to get a house together, and they're just going to encourage each other in prayer, and have regular Bible readings together, and they're going to pool their resources so that they can do charitable works in the community, and they're going to and they would often like adopt orphans to come live in the, and so that's a very kind of informal monastic, and it would just be right in town, it wouldn't be like off somewhere in some special structure, just be a normal house, and you'd have maybe three or four, you wouldn't have a structure or an order or anything like that, you'd just have three or four Christian men that would wanna live together, they'd be a little older and encourage each other in the faith and do good works. That was a common model in the Frankish empire. There would usually be some kind of rule, though. Most monasteries would have an order. There was a guy named, I've got him down here below, a guy named Pacomius. This was in, let's see, Pacomius was, oh, I have it on the other thing. He was early fourth century, so it was right after the Diocletan persecutions ended. He'd become a Roman soldier. He was drafted into the Roman army. against his will, and that was a really tough life. The Roman army was not a fun place to be most of the time. And he really didn't want to be a soldier. He was in Egypt and came in contact with a group of Christians who were very generous to him and his fellow soldiers and treated them really well and eased their discomfort a good deal, and that really impressed him. He got an opportunity to leave the army fairly quickly after that, unexpectedly, and decided to become a Christian, and not only a Christian, but to be a monk. But he recognized early on, he talked to some other hermits and things and recognized that this was probably not the best way to do it. And so he's often viewed as the father of monasticism, because he was the first one, he came up with a list of rules about how a monastery ought to work. And they were things like, you know, somebody that came into the monastery, he had to swear, to certain things, vows of poverty, he was gonna give up all his wealth, any possessions he had, he was gonna give to the monastery to manage in community, he was gonna vow obedience to his superiors, that was generally a rule of monastic communities, was whoever the abbot, the leader of the monastic community was, everybody had to obey them unquestioningly and had to do what they said. and there would be regular times of prayer, and there would also be work. In most monastic communities, there would be requirements that you engaged in work, because they recognized early on, idleness is not good for people. And so they needed to work, and they'd farm, or they engaged in crafts, or they'd do scholarly work. They'd copy down manuscripts and things like that. And then they would use the proceeds of that to benefit the poor and things like that in their community. And communal monastic life was a major feature of the Christian world basically all the way up to the Reformation. It was a really important feature of the Christian experience. They pretty much always, well a feature was celibacy. that a monk or a nun would vow to celibacy to not being with the opposite sex. Pacomius was, and that was in the fourth century. The final stage, the development was what was known as the monastic orders. And these were communities of communities. So you probably heard of like the Franciscans or the Dominicans or the Jesuits or the Benedictines or the Augustinians These are monastic orders. And now what you would have would be larger networks of monastic communities that would all follow the same rule. They would report to the same hierarchy and they would have things they would focus on. They would have things that were their kind of special area of focus. The Dominicans were always really well known for their scholarly work, their apologetics. The Franciscans were the mendicants. They were traveling monks that were especially engaged in traveling. We'll talk about friar the mendicant monks in a minute. They would travel around. They wouldn't have any fixed place. They would rely on the charity of strangers and serve the poor and so forth. The Jesuits were All about blocking the Reformation, pretty much. They were established after the Reformation. They were there to bolster the authority of the Pope. They were a rare monastic order, really the only one that reports directly to the Pope instead of to an abbot. And these were powerful influences. The monastic orders, like monasteries in general, basically all, with the exception of the Jesuits probably, all basically started as reactions against the corruption and immorality of the established church. So that The church as a whole, it was interesting the way the church as a whole, the kind of mainstream hierarchy of the church and the monastic orders often were actually in a lot of tension with each other. The monastic orders were often early attempts at reformation. They would recognize how corrupt the church had become. They'd recognize how abusive the leadership could be, how worldly the church had often become. And in reaction against that, they would form these orders that would be kind of protest movements. Now, over time, a lot of those orders themselves became corrupt, and over time, and fabulously wealthy, and often ended up being co-opted by the larger church as a whole. But at least at their start, that generally wasn't what they were. So that gives you kind of a rough idea. The monastic orders, in a lot of ways, kind of functioned almost as denominations. There were, you know, the Augustinians, for example, obviously because of their name, would often be very strongly characterized by the theology of Augustine, right? The Jesuits and the Augustinians, for example, really didn't like it. The Augustinians were more predestinarian, focused on the sovereignty of God. The Jesuits rejected that. They had long arguments about those things. the views of how church order ought to function. They'd have big differences from one monastic order to another. And then with the, and lots of times people would, again, because there was, you know, before the Reformation, there weren't other denominations. There was just the church, right? Although there was the church in Europe, but there was also the Eastern church and those different things. But within that larger structure, people would identify themselves, you know, a lot of, sometimes as, you know, primarily as a Dominican or an Augustinian or a Benedictine or something like that. That would be their order. And that would be oftentimes where their primary loyalty would lie within the church. The larger church as a whole they might regard as kind of hopeless and corrupt, but their order was, so they kind of functioned almost like denominations within the larger church. And the whole history of the, we're gonna, monastic order, this is kind of an introduction. The whole rest of the history that we're gonna talk about, these monastic orders, and their various influence on parts and various aspects of church history will pop up again and again. So, again, so that's kind of an overview of the stages of monasticism, how it developed from just a personal asceticism to the kind of hermit impulse, and then to the monastic communities, and then to the communities of communities, the larger monastic orders. Any comments or questions so far? Why did people do it? There were aspects of bad teaching, which was part of it. It was an influence of Gnostic dualism, which is the idea, as we talked about before, it's kind of the idea that the physical world is the source of our sin. Or it's even more like just regular human society is the source of our sin. That sin primarily comes from the bad examples emanation of the people around us, or even contact with the physical world. So there was this sort of attempt to, and I think most Christians probably feel this, I know I do sometimes, it's like, man, I just wanna go to the mountains. I don't wanna go be by myself for a while. Just kind of get away from it all, that sort of impulse. And you kind of put that on kind of hyper drive, the guy who's, I think today you see it in the impulse that people have to maybe go on foreign missions or something like that. But there was very much an idea that our sinful behavior came from our environment. And so if I went out into the desert, lived in a cave somewhere, then maybe I could escape that. All the distractions and temptations, Now that's not actually true, and as we said, even like the hermits would recognize after a while, they took their sin with them out to the desert. So it didn't solve the problem at all. There was also, you know, again, just that desire for spiritual uplift, that desire for a higher something, a more intense Christian experience. It's no accident that, and this has to do with point two and three, actually all three of these other points, it's no accident that the major period of monastic activity happened after Constantine. Because that desire for the really intense Christian experience, You didn't need to go looking for that before Constantine. You were living under the constant possibility that you could get arrested and thrown into an arena of lions. That happened. It tended to weed out the nominal anyway, right? And that desire, kind of that desire for that That, like I said, that intense religious experience to really go the extra mile for God, that tended to come looking for you in the Roman Empire. You didn't have to really worry about that too much. But after Constantine, again, persecution ended. All sorts of people started flooding into the church. The church started to become wealthy. And along with that started to get decadent and immoral. The church started becoming run by people who were there for political reasons rather than religious reasons. You know, just think how you feel if I, the pastor of your local church, were actually appointed by the city council. You know? And so, especially for people who either had been around before Constantine or heard the stories of, which was pretty much every serious Christian, knew what things had been like before, there was really kind of a yearning for it. There was like, man, that was when the church was pure. That was when the church was strong. There was a romanticizing of it, but there was also some reality to it. And now that being a Christian didn't mean anything. Everybody was a Christian. And most of the Christians lived exactly the same way as the pagans did, except they went to church sometimes. And they did that because there was political advantage to being seen in the church. And so there was this, so this part of it was legitimate. I think there was some misguided, I don't know that it was expressed the right way. A lot of them, a lot of people in response to that they would seek to, we talked about the Donatist controversy in the last couple of weeks, that ultra purist movement within the church. That was sparked by a lot of the same impulses. Sometimes that was the impulse. There would be groups that would just split off and just have their own church separate from the rest of the decadent church. Other people would take the splitting to an even more extreme form. They'd split entirely. They'd go live in the desert. A desire for a stronger, purer, more authentic, real Christianity than could often be found in Christian Roman society was a lot of what drove the monastic movement. And I think what, because the things that they struggled with within the Roman Empire were the things they struggled, the things that Christians have been struggling with ever since. Especially in places where the church is secure and it's, and there isn't out, at least there isn't a lot of outward overt persecution where churches become mainstream. And the churches are full of a lot of people who are there for maybe not the best reasons. That desire then for a... And I also think it's a wrestling with the problem of sin. We all wrestle with the problem of sin. We all want to stop sinning, and it's hard, and we get frustrated. And there's this impulse to say, well maybe if I did this, take this extreme step. Go live in this community. you know, do this thing, to serve God in a special way. I think it's an impulse that probably every serious Christian can... It certainly resonates with me, you know, that desire to kind of go the extra mile and especially without all the distractions of, you know, the distractions of family life and the distractions of needing to make a living and all of those kinds of things just kind of, because those things are hard too. And I think that's also part of the impulses. Sometimes people just wanted to flee responsibility. That would be the less admirable part of it. So a lot of different motives. Later on, the monasteries would serve in a really important social function in a lot of ways. And there are pros and cons, and we can talk about that more, but monasteries became, you know, like if you were an orphan, and for most of the time through, not just Rome, but you know, all through medieval Europe, if you were an orphan, there was probably no better place for you to be most of the time than a monastery. Monasteries would take in orphans and widows, and they would also take in the, ne'er-do-well idiot younger brothers of the king. They'd want to get rid of him because he didn't know how to do anything. He was kind of worthless and didn't want to work or anything. And so they'd send him to a monastery. And that's where a lot of the problems, one of the big problems came from that sort of thing later on when the monasteries got filled full of people who just didn't want to do anything, didn't want to work. And their families just wanted to kind of get them out of the picture for one reason or another. So they didn't have to worry about him anymore. That was mostly a later development. The life of a monk, generally, especially in the more organized monasteries that were under a particular order, under a particular rule, and the Augustinian rule was one of the earliest. Augustine was in a monastic community for a while, and that community established an order, and that order became, it was echoed off of Pacomius' order, which was earlier, and all of the monastic orders that came later were all echoes to one degree or another with variations of Pacomius' order. And it was regular prayer, you'd have daily prayer, morning and evening, prayer times throughout the day, gathering for worship, sacraments, work. You really wouldn't have a lot of free time generally in a monastery, at least ideally, that if you weren't in times of worship, then you would have work and that work would typically be assigned to you. by the abbot. An abbot was one who, an abbot or an abbess, an abbess is a woman who ruled over a nunnery. And monasteries and nunneries operated very, very similarly, basically the same rules. Just early on, the local abbot, the ruler of a monastery, he would also rule the nunnery. He would be the governor of both. Later on, the nunneries tended to get their own, they tended to have an abbess that would rule over the nunnery instead of the abbot. But the work would be assigned to you, and again, it would be depending on your rank within, or the seniority within the monastery, you would be assigned just menial, manual labor, farming, cleaning up, things like that. As you advanced, or if you had special abilities, then maybe you'd do scholarly work, you'd do translations, and copying manuscripts. That, by the way, was one, long-term, that was one of the most valuable things for Christians and civilization in general was the copying of manuscripts. There are a great many, not just Christian works, not just Bibles, but ancient works of all kinds that basically we have today because of monasteries. And we would not have otherwise. We would not have the works of Aristotle or Plato at all. Homer at all. if it weren't for monasteries. They preserved that. So much stuff from the ancient world that they preserved through their labor. So we always, you know, whatever criticism we might have of monasticism, God used them in lots of ways for sure. There was always a focus on doing good works to the surrounding communities, acts of charity. There was also a lot of teaching that went on. Monasteries were often local, especially the wealthier people would often send their children to the monastery for education. They would teach classes in exchange for donations from the wealthy that would then support the community. That was a common thing. Questions so far? On the pro side, As I said, they advanced and preserved learning a great deal. Now the anchorites didn't. The hermits, they didn't really do much of that. Living out in the desert, they didn't really do a lot of writing or a lot of copying. There were a few exceptions, but in general, that wasn't a feature of that life. But the monasteries, especially in the later orders, really, really did a lot to preserve learning, to preserve education, to preserve, like I said, a ton of ancient works that we just wouldn't have if it weren't for the monasteries. They often acted as a protest against worldliness. The monasteries were protest movements. All of the monastic orders were basically formed, again with the exception of the Jesuits that I know of, but most of them basically were formed as reactions against the immorality and oppressiveness of the mainstream church. Because the church did get corrupt, as we'll talk about over time. And that started with Constantine and went back and forth, and there were always these attempts. The Reformation was not by any stretch the first attempt to reform the church, it was just the most wide-ranging and successful attempt. to reform the church. There were multiple attempts before that that had some success. They were protests against how worldly the world, and they became places then where those who did want to live a more rigorous and serious Christian life could go and pursue that, and became an opportunity for that. They did a lot of charitable work. They provided an outlet and shelter for many of the poorest and weakest in society. Again, monasteries at their best, did tremendous work this way in charity, taking care, you know, again, if you were a widow, if you were an orphan, for most of human history, there just wasn't a lot, you didn't have a lot of options. And monasteries, there was, monasteries would always take you in. You could always go to a monastery, which was a whole lot better than starving, you know. often ended up as an important source of dissent and disagreement with a hierarchy. And it was really the monasteries that ended up producing the Protestant Reformation. Again, it is no accident that Martin Luther came out of a monastery. He was a monk. And a lot of the early reformers were. The We think of monasteries, from kind of our Protestant perspective, we think of our monasteries as a feature of kind of Catholic Christianity or even Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But it's important to recognize that the monasteries actually, the monastic orders especially, sat pretty uneasy with the mainstream church. Because one of the things the monasteries were saying was they were kind of separate from the leadership structure of the church as a whole. They didn't really answer to the local bishop. They had their abbot. And they were kind of saying, we don't need to be part of this in order to be a Christian. When remember, especially going into the Middle Ages, the theology very much was, you need to be part of this particular hierarchy of the church. or else you're not really in fellowship with Christ. The monasteries were an early dissent against that. An early statement of Christians saying, no, we can be separate from all of that and still be in fellowship with God through prayer and through the word and even have the sacraments ourselves. The church, the mainstream church, did not like the monastic movement early on. They didn't encourage it. They tried to, and there were different points at which they kind of tried to stamp it out. It never really worked, and so over time, the church would make their peace with the monastic orders and try and kind of bring them into the fold. Later on, to be a legitimately recognized monastic order, you had to kind of get licensed by the pope, you know, and the pope would appoint the abbots and So there was kind of an attempt to kind of, I don't know, co-opt them a little bit. But even later, most of the monastic orders were alternate structures, alternate sources of power, alternate sources of teaching to the mainstream church. And I think that was a very positive influence. They acted as a check on the influence and power of the central church, which was increasingly after the fall of Rome in the West, increasingly that meant the Roman church. Actually, that leads me to something I meant to talk about a little bit earlier. The difference in the monastic orders in the Eastern and the Western Church. The monastic, the East, this is the Eastern Orthodox Church, the church in Greece and Turkey and Russia and Syria and all those places, really where the monastic movement started. Those areas never had monastic orders. It never, monastic orders are a feature of, like the Benedictines and Augustinians and those folks. They never had anything like that in the Eastern Church. And the reason is really simple. The reason is, is because, and we'll talk about this a lot more too, in the East, the Roman Empire did not fall. We talk about the Roman Empire falling in 476 AD, but that wasn't the Roman Empire. That was just the western half of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, what became known as Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire, continued to the 15th century. And the church in the east was always subordinate to the state. The term for that is Caesaropapism. And again, something we'll talk about more later. As a result, things like monastic orders were never permitted in the Eastern Church, and the monasteries always served as a subordinate. There was a tradition that the Patriarch of Constantinople had to be a monk from early days. He was always drawn out of the monasteries. That didn't happen in the Western Church until much later. And the reason was because that was all subsumed under the interests of the state. So the church was not allowed, in the Eastern Church, the church was not allowed to protest the way the state operated. It was not allowed to act as a check against the power of the state. The church was an agency of the state. The Eastern Emperor, he decided who the patriarch, he appointed the patriarch. So the state had much more control over the church and as a result the church in the east was always a lot more mystical, a lot more otherworldly, a lot more concerned with introspection and spiritual experiences. didn't really have a lot to say about society as a whole. Not universally, but not near like the Western Church. The Western Church was a lot more activist, a lot more trying to get the state to act the way they thought the state should act. That didn't happen in the East. And as a result, monasteries were actually more encouraged in these. They were always seen as a general part of the life of the church, but never allowed to act as a check against the power of either the church or the state. And as a result, monastic orders just didn't develop in the East. So it was a lot more contemplative, a lot more internal, spiritual. Western monasticism was always a lot more activist. Okay, so that gets back to pros and cons. The cons of the monastic movement was that it really encouraged, very often, a meritorious view of salvation. you know, that if you went and did these extra things, you went and took on these things, did these extra things that the Bible never said you needed to do, but if you went and did these things, then you would have extra merit with God. That was explicitly taught by a lot of those in the monastic movement, that really good Christians are gonna kind of check out of the regular life and they're gonna go, they're gonna go You know, have this special experience be different than the rest of the Christians. And then there was, along with that, this kind of two-tier model of spirituality or righteousness. That there is the spirituality or there is the Christianity that can be expected of regular people. People like you and me. people who are married, people who have jobs, people who live in society, and you didn't really expect very much of them. You couldn't really accomplish a great deal of Christianity in that And as a result, the theology of marriage, of work, of politics, of science, and all those things really suffered in a lot of ways through the whole Middle Ages. It really was not until the Protestant Reformation that those things started getting really serious attention from a Christian perspective. And the reason was simple, was because every really good Christian is gonna check out of all those things and go live in a monastery. Right? And at the same time, then you can see another effect that it had was that a lot of the best and most serious Christians were drained out of the mainstream church, drained out of mainstream society, and they went into monastic life. And they didn't have children. where it wasn't that their talents were wasted, but a lot of times they were. A lot of times the very best Christians would go lock themselves in a tiny little room and spend the next 50 years praying and doing nothing for anybody else around them. And these were often the most serious and passionate Christians around. It taught or at least encouraged a false view of sin and that sin is caused by the environment. And that if we change our environment, we change our outward structure, then we can be better Christians. They didn't all have that view, but it definitely over time crept up. And the damage of such a false view of sin became apparent when by the time of the Protestant Reformation, monasteries were absolute hotbeds of every kind of wickedness and immorality you can imagine. Calvin once said, it defiles the tongue to speak of the things that happen in monasteries. That because they thought of it as environmental, and also then because monasteries often became dumping grounds for people that nobody else Like I said, if you were the king and you had three sons and your oldest son was being groomed for the kingship, and then the next oldest son, he was a great military guy and he was going to be a general in the army, and the third son, man, he just was a waste. He was drunk and he was grew up rich and he's worthless, what do you do with him? Well, put him in a monastery. That's what they do with predictable results, you know? And it wasn't with the idea that he would be reformed, it was with the idea that he would be warehoused. He'd be kept, he'd be, you know, you'd get him off someplace where he wouldn't cause any trouble, except that he would ruin the monastery, you know? As an example of the kind of, the ways, The ways that monasteries often drained society of productive wealth, productive talent. Spain, at a certain point after the discovery of the New World, Spain was the richest empire on earth. They said in Madrid, gold flowed like water. All the gold they got, just huge amounts of wealth. Today, Spain is at the bottom tier of European society. And that was true within a good 100 years of the discovery of the New World, they lost most of that wealth. You know, one of the chief ways they lost an awful lot of that wealth? The monasteries, Jesuits. Jesuits, after the Reformation especially, Jesuits would go, what you would do is, and Jesuits, they were raising money, and especially to counter the Reformation wherever they could. And so you'd go find some wealthy older woman. Her husband's dead, and the Jesuit priest would really get in with this wealthy older woman. He'd become her personal guru, right? And flatter her, and talk to her, and really attach her to himself. And he would convince her, for the good of society, all of your children except the oldest son, the oldest son is gonna inherit your wealth, carry on the family name, all of the other children send to monasteries. And because if your parents said you had to go to a monastery, then you had to go to a monastery, you didn't have a choice, right? So all of the children except the oldest would go into the monasteries. And then life in those days being what it was, you had a fairly decent chance that that son would die too. from disease or just whatever, right? And then he would die, then that wealthy woman would have no heir, then guess what would happen to all her money? Go to the Jesuits, you know? And they sucked huge amounts of money out of especially the Catholic countries. Spain, it was notorious in Spain, but it was bad in Italy and France as well. France was never all that religious, so it didn't affect them, but Spain, that was a different story. So the monasteries ended up, and sometimes that wealth was put to productive use, but especially by that point in history, these monasteries that were founded on vows of poverty and so forth just became insanely wealthy. Even today, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, these people have untold amounts of wealth at their disposal. Those books are not audited by any outside auditors, but there's tremendous amounts of wealth that is tied up, especially in the monastic orders. And that wealth has largely been taken out of productive use and out of productive society into these monasteries. monastic orders. So that was a lot of the, it was one of the great things that happened in the Protestant Reformation was that the Protestant Reformation taught you can be, you can be every bit as good, as every bit as possible to pursue the Christian life in whatever area of life you're in. You don't have to go do something special. You can be a father, you can be a mother, you can be a milkmaid, you can be any of these careers, all of that. You can be a slave, you can be a freeman, you can be rich, you can be poor. You can pursue the authentic Christian life in any of these circumstances. And the result was a whole new flowering of thinking about what it meant to be Christian as a father, as a mother, as a husband, a wife. as a businessman, as a politician, any of those things. All of those things that were always seen sort of as pursuits for sort of lesser Christians before that. And society bore a lot of benefits from that. I think that's a major reason you see today that the most prosperous countries were those Protestant countries. The wealthiest, most prosperous, the ones that did the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution happened mostly and first in Germany, and in the Netherlands, and in England, and in America, all very Protestant countries, where the Catholics lagged behind. And I think this idea of what it means to be righteous and Christian is a big, so that your most talented, smartest, and often your most dedicated Christian people were all going into monasteries. Whereas in the Protestant world, they were being encouraged to raise families, start businesses. pursue politics, all to the glory of God. And that changed a lot of things about those countries as a result. So, as I said, pros and cons. I think God used monasteries in a lot of ways. Overall, I think it is the right thing, though, for us to leave them behind. You know, sometimes we raise the question in Protestant circles, you know, is there still a place for something like this? Is there a place for the person who wants to dedicate themselves to a celibate life serving God exclusively? And that's an interesting question and discussion, but overall, I think the model held up by the monastery was not ultimately a terribly biblical one, and that the Protestant world was right to leave it behind, as much as God used it in earlier stages of the church to move things forward. Questions or comments? Yeah, Terry. Oh yeah, there are still, well, there are still a great, there are still monastic orders. And some of our biggest, you know, Notre Dame and Georgetown, and these, Notre Dame's a Jesuit institution, you know, it's the Franciscans and Dominicans. I don't know that there are as many monasteries as there used to be. I know there is one in Wyoming. I'm not sure what order it is. I think in the West these days, pretty much all monasteries are gonna be part of a monastic order. But in the East, there's still lots of them. In any place where Eastern Orthodoxy is a big deal, you're going to have monasteries. The Copts have monasteries, the Ethiopians have monasteries. There are even some, I understand there are even some Lutheran and Episcopalian monasteries. I don't know much about those, but those would be Protestant examples of monasteries. I think the monastic impulse these days often gets funneled into things like foreign missions, or I think even sometimes a desire that we had this way for a while where every good Christian would adopt kids, right, would foster and adopt kids. And I sort of think that was kind of a manifestation of the same sort of thing, the desire to kind of go the extra mile and do the extra thing, you know, that sort of thing. Because it's still there, it's still very much there. It just plays out differently in the Protestant world. Other questions or thoughts? Terry. No, there was, there was difference. Monks were not necessarily clergy. There were different members. They would have lay members of the monastery that were, they were not ordained. They were just, they were just members. They were just there. They were like lay people. but they lived in the monastery. But then they would have the various ranks. Priests, generally if you were a priest that meant you were outside of the monastery. The monastery had different terms for the abbot and so forth. So, but they would have ranks within the monastery. A priest was generally one who served, that would usually be what they would call a secular. You'd be either secular or religious, and that term meant, secular meant you were a priest out in the regular world, and a religious meant you were a member of an order. You were a member of a monastic order. Yeah, they had religious clergy. They had clergy that was a member of the monastery, and they were the ones who would do mass and so forth. But they would, again, also have lay members that were not ordained, but were lay members of the monastery. Other questions, comments? Anybody want to be a monk now? Depends on the day, right? Sometimes. I have, I'll take this up next time. I've got some interesting stories of some of the different monks and some of the different kind of heroes of that. We'll talk about that next time. Let's go ahead and close in prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your blessings. Thank you for the way you've preserved and developed the church, even through sometimes faulty ideas of things. Nonetheless, you always did your work and you did good even through the weakness of man. We thank you for that. Lord, we pray that you'd guide us Grant us a desire to serve you faithfully wherever you placed us in whatever kind of life, whatever work we have put in front of us to do, Lord. Bless us and be with us, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.