Monasteries were a significant feature of the late Roman social, demographic and cultural landscape. Monasticism represented an alternative both to the secular church and to life in ‘the world’. Its origins - in late third-century Egypt and in Syria and Palestine during the fourth century - lie in the particular conditions of that time, but it rapidly assumed a universal relevance for the late Roman world, and underwent a dramatic expansion during the period up to the sixth century. In spite of efforts on the part of the church and the state to exercise some control over monasticism - embodied in particular in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and repeated in Justinian’s legislation - its diversity and its anti-authoritarianism and spiritual utopianism represented a source of independence from the established structures of Christian life.
The founders of monasticism, as far as the sources show, were Pachomius (c. 290-346) and Anthony (c. 251-356), both of whom developed their own forms of the monastic life in Egypt. While Anthony seems to have been the first to practise desert asceticism, Pachomius established a number of cenobitic monasteries. They inspired many followers in later generations, among whom Jerome (c. 342-420), Euthymius (376-423) Theodosius (423-529) and Sabas (439-532) in Judaea and
Map 4.3 Ecclesiastical administration. (After Jones, Later Roman Empire.)
Map 4.4 Monasteries, pilgrims and holy places.
Palestine became among the best-known in their own lifetimes. From Egypt and Syria-Palestine monasticism quickly established itself in Asia Minor, especially in Cappadocia, where St Basil ‘the Great’ (330-379) became the leading figure, establishing a rule for monastic communities which remains the basis for much orthodox monasticism.
Monasteries and monks, and the even less-readily controlled individual hermits and ‘holy men’ who separated themselves from society by dwelling in the countryside away from other human settlement (frequently choosing quite deliberately a region of wilderness or desert in order to emphasise their withdrawal), often exercised a spiritual and moral authority gained through their lifestyle and their struggle with the forces of evil, which the regular church could not. But this does not mean that they turned their back on the world altogether. Monasteries, like the church, could be endowed with and could own property, in land or other forms. Some monasteries became substantial landlords with considerable estates, and the efforts of the church to retain some degree of control over monastic establishments gave the bishops of the regions where they were to be found an important role. It also led to tensions and conflict: the agreement of the local bishop was necessary in order to establish a monastery, and each such establishment owed the local episcopate a regular tax, called the canonicum (Greek kanonikon). Elections of abbots and their consecration was also the responsibility of the bishop, and arguments between monastic communities and the local church were not unusual.
Monasteries attracted the attention and support of laypersons from all ranks in society, from emperors to the humblest peasant, who endowed them with land for the salvation of their souls - for which the monks would be bound to pray - and who sometimes retired there when they had had enough of the world. Indeed, entering a monastery was a popular way of ‘retiring’ in the late Roman and Byzantine world. Monasteries varied enormously. Some remained very small, with a complement of a few monks. Others became immensely successful and very wealthy. The extent of monastic property in the later Roman period cannot be calculated with any degree of accuracy, but some monastic houses were certainly well off.
The lifestyles associated with such establishments varied, from the ‘idiorrhythmic’, in which individuals followed their own daily rhythm, eating and worshiping independently of one another and with few communal activities, to the cenobitic (from the Greek koinos bios, ‘common life’), in which all followed the same communal timetable for worship, meals, work and meditation. The former was relatively rare before the fourteenth century. In the period from the later fourth to the early seventh century monastic centres flourished in Constantinople, in Cappadocia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, although there were monasteries in many other regions too. In some regions there were almost as many monasteries as there were villages, all involved in a closely interlinked network of agricultural and pastoral exploitation and often tied together in market and commercial relationships.
In many respects monks and individual holy men constituted an alternative source of spiritual authority, a type of authority that challenged implicitly the formally-endowed authority of the regular clergy and the church. Such authority was won by men and women who demonstrated their piety and their spiritual worth by enduring hardships, physical and emotional, through which they were thought to gain a more direct and fuller access to God, and thus at the same time met the superstitious needs of ordinary people at all levels of society in respect of the difficulties and problems they confronted in their daily lives. Such individuals, men as well as women, figured prominently in the political as well as the religious life of the late Roman world, acting as patrons of rural or urban communities in local conflicts, as representatives of popular as well as marginal opinion, as well as, at an individual level, as spiritual guides and advisers to persons of high as well as humble status.
Many of the holy men and women of whom the sources speak spent many years wandering around the provinces of the empire before establishing themselves at a particular location. While their wanderings were often random, the journeys of the pilgrims who travelled to the Holy Land, to established cult centres or to particular holy men were not, and several well-worn pilgrim routes evolved over this period. The pilgrims’ journey represented a particular form of Christian piety and endeavour, but it also generated a considerable ‘pilgrim industry’, with the production of clay pots containing holy water from the Jordan or the Sea of Galilee, for example, as well as the production of reliquaries for items from the bodies, vestments or other objects associated with holy figures. Pilgrimage centres sprang up not just in the Holy Land, at sites associated with the life of Christ, however, but also at many sites associated with the apostles or particular saints - in the eastern empire at Ephesus, Sinope, Euchaita, Seleucia, Chalcedon, for example. Centres of pilgrimage also grew up around particular holy men, too - the site of the column of St Symeon the Stylite in Syria soon became a major tourist attraction with all the appurtenances: guest accommodation, shops, as well as a monastic community, church buildings and so forth.
World History
