Section 08: The Benedictine Tradition

What became of the Rule after Benedict — and how it relates to the monasticism of the Christian East. The two files cover, first, the spread of the Rule across the Latin West: its survival through the dark centuries, its championing by Gregory the Great, its imposition across the Carolingian empire under Benedict of Aniane (Aachen, 816–817), the reforms of Cluny (910) and the Cistercians (Cîteaux, 1098), and the rise of “the Benedictine centuries” in which the Rule became the framework of Western monastic civilization — and, second, the comparison with Eastern monasticism: Benedict beside St Basil, the Egyptian desert, and the Studite tradition, the deep common roots and the differing emphases of the two great monastic families of the undivided Church.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Latin) / Orthodox reception

Contents

File Topic
The Rule Conquers the West The spread of the Rule; Gregory the Great’s patronage and the Roman mission; the survival of the text; the Carolingian adoption under Benedict of Aniane and the Synods of Aachen (816–817); the Cluniac reform (910) and the Cistercians (Cîteaux, 1098); “the Benedictine centuries”; the monastery as the engine of Western culture — agriculture, learning, the copying of books
East and West Monasticism Benedict and the Christian East: the shared desert roots (Antony, the Apophthegmata, Cassian); Benedict’s debt to St Basil’s Asketikon; the comparison of the Rule with the Studite tradition of St Theodore; cenobitism East and West; the common ascetic theology and the differing institutional shapes

How to Use

  • Read The Rule Conquers the West for the institutional afterlife — how a single sixth-century rule became the constitution of Western monasticism for a thousand years and one of the chief makers of European civilization.
  • Read East and West Monasticism for the placement of Benedict within the one monastic tradition of the undivided Church — the deep kinship, beneath the differences of form, between the father of Western monasticism and the fathers of the East.
  • The modern reception, including the Orthodox veneration, is the subject of Section 09.

Cross-References