The Ones Who Went Out

Most Protestants have exactly one thought about monks, and it arrives already formed: men in robes, hiding from the world, earning heaven by not marrying. Most Catholics have the opposite and equally unexamined thought, that these were simply the serious ones. Both pictures are too small for the actual history, and both make it impossible to ask the only question worth asking, which is what those men and women were trying to do, whether the New Testament asks it of anyone, and what an ordinary believer with a job and a mortgage is supposed to make of it now.

It started with people leaving a church that had stopped costing anything

The timing is the part people miss. The desert movement did not begin during the persecutions. It began right after they ended. For nearly three centuries, being a Christian could cost you your life, and the church was full of people who had counted that cost. Then Constantine, and suddenly the faith was legal, then fashionable, then useful. Bishops had influence. Congregations filled with people who had risked nothing.

Antony went into the Egyptian desert around the year 270, before that shift, but the flood that followed him came after it. Thousands of men and women walked out of comfortable cities into the wilderness within a single generation of the persecutions stopping. They were not fleeing hardship. They were going looking for it, because they had watched the faith get easy and did not trust what easy was doing to them.

That is worth sitting with before any argument about vows. Whatever else the movement was, it began as a protest against a church that had become respectable, made by people who thought respectability was more dangerous than lions.

What Scripture actually says, without stretching it either way

Jesus prayed alone, often, and made a habit of it: "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed." (Mark 1:35). He told one specific rich man, "Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me." (Matthew 19:21), and He spoke of those "which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake" (Matthew 19:12), and the sentence just before it is the guard: "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given" (Matthew 19:11). Christ puts the limit in first. It is given to some; it is not held out as the higher road for everyone. Paul says plainly that he wished all men were unmarried as he was, and just as plainly that this is a gift given to some and not others: "For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that." (1 Corinthians 7:7). His reason is not that marriage is unclean but that the unmarried man "careth for the things that belong to the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:32), and he adds the line every later generation should have kept in front of it: "not that I may cast a snare upon you" (1 Corinthians 7:35).

The common purse is there too, in the first days of the church: "And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." (Acts 2:44-45). And "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17) is a command to everyone, which is precisely the command the monastic hours were built to obey.

So the raw materials are all in the text: solitude, celibacy for those given it, shared goods, unceasing prayer. What is not in the text is a command that any of it be required, or a claim that those who do it are a higher class of Christian. Paul calls celibacy a gift, not a rank. Jesus said not all men can receive it. The New Testament sets these things out as callings, and never once as a ladder.

Where it went wrong, said plainly

Two failures, and they are different failures.

The first is the one Paul saw coming from a long way off. He warned Timothy about teachers "Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving" (1 Timothy 4:3). The moment a gift becomes a requirement, or a discipline becomes proof of a higher standing, the thing has curdled. Not because self-denial is bad, but because a gift you must have in order to be counted is no longer a gift.

The second failure is money, and it is the ugly one. Houses founded in poverty accumulated land for centuries until some of them were among the wealthiest institutions in Europe, holding vast estates while the poor at the gate stayed poor. Vows of poverty administered by corporate landlords is a contradiction visible to anyone, and it was visible to plenty of Catholics long before Luther. Reform movements inside the church said so repeatedly, which is why there are so many orders: each new one is usually an attempt to get back to a rule the last one had drifted from.

When the Reformers dissolved the houses, they were not inventing an objection. They were acting on one that had been made inside the church for three hundred years. What they also did, and what is harder to defend, is throw out the practices along with the institutions. The hours, the rule of life, the daily office, the discipline of silence: none of those were the abuse. England lost its monasteries and gained, in the same century, a prayer book that quietly preserved the morning and evening offices for everyone. That was not an accident.

What the best of them were actually after

Read the sources rather than the caricature and the aim is not escape. Antony's biographer has him leaving for the desert to fight, not to hide, and the fight is with himself. Basil, writing his rule in the fourth century, insisted his monks live in community rather than alone, precisely because a man by himself has nobody to be patient with and can mistake solitude for holiness. Benedict's rule opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord's service, and it is startlingly moderate: enough sleep, enough food, work with the hands, no extremes, and an abbot told to temper everything so the strong have something to strive for and the weak nothing to run from.

That is not a system for earning God. It is a structure built by people who knew their own hearts drift, and who wanted the drift caught early by an ordinary schedule rather than late by a catastrophe.

What is left for the rest of us

Almost all of it, once the ladder is taken out.

A rule of life is simply a decision made once, in advance, so it does not have to be made again every morning when you are tired. Fixed times for prayer. Scripture read on a schedule rather than by mood. A weekly day that is genuinely different from the other six. Confession to somebody who is allowed to tell you the truth. Limits on what you own and what you spend on yourself, chosen rather than imposed. Work treated as prayer rather than as the thing that interrupts it. Silence, which is the discipline the modern Christian has lost most completely and misses least, because a phone answers the boredom that used to drive people to pray.

None of that requires a habit or a vow, and none of it earns anything. It is the same instinct that put a servant's ear against the doorpost: staying, on purpose, where you could have drifted.

Where this lands

The monastic movement was a real answer to a real problem, made by people whose seriousness embarrasses most of us. It hardened into a class system it was never given permission to become, and it accumulated the wealth it existed to renounce, and both of those failures were named from inside long before they were named from outside. On the reading these pages follow, the Reformers were right about the abuse, and the practices did not have to go with it. And the practices are still available, to anyone, without joining anything.

The desert was never the point. The desert was where some people went because the city had stopped asking anything of them. The question that put them there is still a fair question to ask in a comfortable pew: what in my life this week actually cost me anything, and what would I notice if it were gone?

Related: Basil of Caesarea, The Bored Ear, Money, Rest, Prayer, Fasting, Where the Church Drifted, The Church, One Story, and Bellarmine's On Monks, forty-seven chapters translated here, for the Counter-Reformation case argued at full strength by its ablest defender. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Dates for Antony, Basil, and Benedict follow the standard chronology; the Rule of Benedict is quoted from the public-domain translation.