The Role and Significance of the Monastic Life in Medieval...

The Role and Significance of the Monastic Life in Medieval Christianity What is monasticism? The central and original role of the monastic life can be drawn from the meanings of the words monk and hermit. the word monk comes from the Greek word monaches which means solitary and hermit from heremites a desert dweller. The early monks and nuns were just that: men and women who fled the worldliness of urban life and the ethos of a church that was at the time of Anthony and St. Paul and established institution of the Roman Empire. They fled to the desert to repent and seek God by prayer, fasting and hard manual labour. In the desert they practiced an aesthetical lifestyle of great poverty†¦show more content†¦Therefore to begin with in order to set the monastic life in context I am briefly going to look at society in the medieval Christianity civilisation. For many centuries in the medieval west the rule for monks composed by Saint Benedict provided the standard pattern of monastic observance. What was the Benedictine rule? Richly endowed, and sometimes exploited by lay rulers, the great Benedictine abbeys came to hold a prominent place in the social landscape of Europe as landowning corporations, ecclesiastical patrons and centres of learning. we must wrote Benedict in his preface create a scola for the Lords Service. in the language of the sixth century the word scola had a military as well as academic sense; it meant a special regiment of corps delite. (Lawrence: :28) The Benedictine monastery was not a place of quiet retreat or leisure, neither was it a school in the academic sense; it was a kind of unit in which the recruit was trained and equipped for his spiritual warfare under an experienced commander- the abbot. The central objective of the Benedictine monasteries was the conquest of spirituality and self will that made a man receptive to God. In order to achieve this the rule prescribed careful ordered routine of prayer, works and study which filled the day, varying only according to the liturgical year andShow MoreRelatedThe Medieval Christian History1493 Words   |  6 PagesThe medieval Christian history has gone through various reforms to construct the most effective idea of religious concepts. Reforms were the most effective way to alter the ways of religious teachings or to manufacture a new type of teaching altogether. The two main types of reforms are: grassroots reform and centralized reform. Grassroots reforms are changes in monastic life and founding of new religious orders. 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