Monks to be sure

Monks, to be sure, found themselves in communities more often than not, and a social expectation developed that only the holiest could be allowed to live on their own, entirely detached. They were the ones most willing to expose themselves to public view by enacting a visible role, or the ones most willing to retreat entirely and genuinely from human contact. Others were expected to remain in houses with fellow monks and place themselves under some supervision.

Long influence

One sixth-century monk whose views would have long influence, an Italian from the hill country southeast of Rome, began his set of rules for monastic life by sternly insisting on stability—that is, on regular residence in one place under a particular authority. He had stinging rebuke for the monks he called “sarabaites” and “gyrovagues”—the kind who went about on their own, begging for sustenance, and offering contact with their presumed holiness promiscuously to one and all. Such a vigorous rebuke must mean that the practice was common, and one man’s fraud is another man’s saint. To see those figures as atypical and necessarily either virtuous or vicious is a mistake. We should instead see and admire their instability and their ability to elude the nets their society would set out to control them, even when monasteries themselves began to wield such nets.

In different parts of the Christian worlds, monks took on different appearances and had different fates. In Egypt, they were by now long settled in desert fastnesses not far from the cities of the Nile, and they also thronged the cities, particularly Alexandria. The financial resources that went into the churches, and that grew as churches acquired property, were the underpinnings of the communities, the implicit tax that sustained unproductive hands. The urban oppressed poor of classical antiquity were now joined by the urban privileged poor, these monks. A monk might be poor by choice, but he had little risk of starving to death. The monasteries in town and outside it were hotbeds of spiritual authority, which some would call charlatanism. Wanderers and the renegades might be reined in not by sage teaching but by their own desire to settle down and share the power of great monks and great houses.