{"id":320,"date":"2009-02-18T23:29:41","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T06:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2009\/02\/18\/on-the-origins-of-monasticism-beer-related\/"},"modified":"2009-03-10T12:59:15","modified_gmt":"2009-03-10T19:59:15","slug":"on-the-origins-of-monasticism-beer-related","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2009\/02\/18\/on-the-origins-of-monasticism-beer-related\/","title":{"rendered":"On the origins of monasticism (beer-related)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian monasticism, the story goes, began all at once with the hermit St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert in 310 AD, to be precise in a way that seems improbable.\u00a0 However it started, it spread rapidly.\u00a0 Within a few years, the phenomenon is widespread, with centers in Syria and Egypt.\u00a0 Within the lifetime of Anthony’s devotee, St. Macarius, there were 50,000 monks in the Egyptian desert; an apocryphal number, to be sure, but still: many.\u00a0 Peter Brown in his essential Rise of Western Christendom<\/em> notes Martin’s Loire Valley monastery with monks wearing Egyptian camel hair robes and Roman Christian women travelling to nunneries in \"St.<\/a>Jerusalem by 380 AD.<\/a> By the fifth century we have the Rule of St. Benedict and evidence of Christian monasticism in Ireland (and, eventually, California<\/a>.)\u00a0 The Irish for monastery is \u201cmainistir\u201d but it was common to name monasteries in Ireland \u201cdeserts\u201d (disert, dysert, dysart, disart, desert), since they wanted to emulate the desert fathers of Syria and Egypt even in the wet green fields of Ireland.<\/p>\n

Did all this spring from nothing?\u00a0 It seems that there were, in the first centuries after Christ, wandering bands of celibate renunciants in Syria.\u00a0 And we know about sadhu-like movements and charismatic preachers throughout the world of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.\u00a0 Around this time there were also ‘philosophical schools,’ such as the Neopythagoreans, which had many characteristics that later came to be called monastic.\u00a0 But there are many ‘sadhu-like’ movements and philosophical schools and few monastic ones.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Only Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism today have monastic traditions.\u00a0 Islam never did, unless you count sadhu-like sufi orders.\u00a0 Likewise Hinduism; definitional sadhus, no monasticism.\u00a0 Neither did Judaism have monks or nuns, although the Essenes are fun to argue about.\u00a0 Manicheaism did, and that might be a clue, since Mani lived just before Anthony.\u00a0 But the Manichean elect were a different than the monastic orders of Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism.<\/p>\n

Buddhist (or Jain) connections to Christian monasticism cannot be proven and represent a bit of a third rail in the study of (at least Christian) monasticism.\u00a0 I’ve always imagined that a place like Edessa, at the end of the Silk Road, or a cosmopolitan trading port like Alexandria would be good places to look for evidence.<\/p>\n

\"Cheers!<\/a>A friend suggested the trade routes from India via Axum in Ethiopia and up the Nile but that got us talking, as we drank beer at Hanger 24, that a much simpler connection is via Syrian Christians on the south Indian coast.\u00a0 The timing is right; Syriac Christians have lived in what is now Kerela since nearly the time of Christ and there has always been trade back and forth.\u00a0 Syria is one of the two monastic centers from the early period.\u00a0 And there were Buddhists in south India in the first centuries AD.\u00a0 That’s no proof of anything, of course, but not a bad thesis to test either.<\/p>\n

Lacking textual evidence, I think monastic architecture might be a good place to start; even within the Buddhist world it’s not obvious to me how the ruins of a Gandharan monastery in Pakistan are similar to those of a monastic complex in Japan or Tibet or Burma or Thailand or at other south Asian sites like Nalanda or Ajanta.\u00a0 If you could develop a pattern language of monastic architecture to describe the Buddhist variety, you might be able to match that against the Christian variety and identify degrees of similarity or difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian monasticism, the story goes, began all at once with the hermit St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert in 310 AD, to be precise in a way that seems improbable.\u00a0 However it started, it spread rapidly.\u00a0 Within a few years, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1061,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-5a","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}