A Short History of Abbeys: And What It Might Mean for Us
A statue of St. Francis on our Abbey property.
An abbey is where a group of devoted Christian men (monks) or women (nuns) would live in community to worship and work for the good of the world. Some early Christian saints, both men and women, left the temptation and distraction of the secular world to find solace and peace in the desert or wilderness. These Christians’ pursuit of God ultimately attracted disciples who wanted to follow them and learn from them.. The irony is that the very crowds these hermits and holy people sought to avoid came to their doorsteps. Instead of shooing them away or refusing to teach the hungry in soul, communities developed in a rather organic fashion around these holy teachers. The first abbeys then originated as groups of devoted students of a particular holy person congregated in specific communities. The 6th century saw a codification of this community living with the Rule of St. Benedict, essentially a rule or guidebook to living in Christian community with expectations of conduct that covered all facets of life from sleep to work and worship.
These rules of life were the private constitutions or understandings of agreed upon behavior among members of these intentional communities. This essay is not so much to discuss the common Rule of the members of a particular order, like the Benedictines, Cistercians, or Augustinians, so much as it is an attempt to describe the role of the abbey in medieval society and what clues that might give us as we at Church of the Lamb consider what it means to build an “abbey” on the little corner of Creation God has entrusted us with.
Abbeys were of significant importance in medieval society. They were centers of learning, storehouses or repositories of cultural and literary treasures, economic engines, innovative centers of agriculture, places of refuge, solace and pilgrimage, and they performed a significant civic function of providing social safety nets in the form of food, shelter and clothing to the poor paid for by a subscription. There is a misconception, probably taught by Monty Python’s Holy Grail, that the work of monks' was chanting in Latin and hitting their heads in unison with books. This is perhaps the fruit of zealous reformers and iconoclasts suspicious of all things Roman Catholic and the delightful if irreverent wit of John Cleese and friends. The reality is quite different. The work of the holy orders was focused on the geographic locus of a place, the abbey. The center or heart of the abbey was the church, usually laid out in a cruciform pattern facing east towards Jerusalem, ad orientem. It also included rooms for the monks and their guests to stay, called cells. The abbey housed not only those in holy orders but lay workers and their families as well as travelers and pilgrims.
The value of the abbey cannot be overstated to not only the locality surrounding the abbey but to the greater community as well. Abbeys were centers of learning. When one hears the term “Dark Ages'' it really is a misnomer associated with the aftermath of the fall of Rome and its empire. As the barbarians tore down the gates of Rome, Roman peace and Roman law splintered into regional disunity and warfare. Christianity in the Roman Empire was primarily a religion of city dwellers. The Apostle Paul’s letters and missionary journeys were to cities, and the message resonated with many literate city dwellers. In fact, the term paganus in the late Roman Empire/early medieval period could be translated as “hick” or “peasant,” someone illiterate and uneducated. Abbeys on the other hand were inhabited by some of the most educated people in the world. The Church valued education and received many second sons from wealthy families, who already possessed rudiments of education that the Church polished. Into the darkness of ignorance, the Church brought the light of literacy and teaching via the abbey. Education gave everyone a step up in life. And abbeys provided education for the children of lords and serfs, rich and poor alike. Many who studied in the abbeys remained and took up the trade of copying or illuminating texts, like the magnificent Book of Kells.
The abbey was also a place of refuge and pilgrimage. Abbeys were safe havens and places of rest for weary travelers and destinations of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages, like Iona off of the west coast of Scotland and Lindisfarne off the northern coast of England. There is something in the human animal, the biped homo sapiens, some internal need to travel and see what’s around the corner. We are creatures of pilgrimage. We desire, dare I say need to see new places and revisit old beloved haunts. We are peripatetic creatures cursed to roam after our exclusion from the Garden, and we like to have a purpose to our travel. Abbeys became destinations for pilgrims because of the relics of saints housed on their grounds, or because of the beauty of their surroundings, or the generosity of their fare. Abbeys were places of solace and hospitality, spiritual and physical healing, places that people wanted to visit because of their own longings and hunger.
The great abbeys of Europe were profitable centers of agricultural innovation and stewardship. They were oftentimes the most fertile lands in a county or shire, and as a result these abbeys became centers of commerce and trade in a region. The medieval abbey farm was tended by monk and lay brother alike. Beer, wine, grain, and vegetables all were produced on abbey farms. These were not mono-crop farm operations but diverse and varied multiple crop- and livestock-producing enterprises that enhanced a locality’s agricultural knowledge and productivity.
So what is the relevance of the historic abbey for us? The high water mark of the abbey is past. We are left with the stone ruins of yesterday’s abbey. Church of the Lamb has an opportunity to integrate some sense or concepts of the historic abbey at the Keezletown property. Significant contributions of the historic abbey which resonate today as much as they did in the 7th century are education, pilgrimage and agriculture all bound by the concept of a common rule. The abbey dispensed God’s blessings in a community. Good things flowed from the abbey and this stream of goodness, in the form of education, rest and healing, and agricultural excellence, was life-giving, life-improving for the communities surrounding the historic abbey. Man’s economy is one of zero-sum gain; if you receive more, it is to my detriment and vice-versa. God’s economy is the economy of the garden, and in order for our garden to thrive, we must divide the mature plant and give a portion away so that both plants can grow and divide again. It is the economy of exponential generosity. I challenge us at Church of the Lamb to use the grounds we are currently entrusted with in Keezletown to foster education, create a place of peace, pilgrimage and healing, and to be exemplary stewards of the land so that we can co-labor in fostering God’s Kingdom and be conduits of His blessing to our parish, community and world.
