Monks, missions and the parting of East and West

From the desert to the monastery

When the last Western emperor was deposed in 476, the old order crumbled, and the monasteries kept faith and learning alive. Their roots lay in the Egyptian desert. Around 270 a young Christian named Antony heard the Gospel read in church, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor" (Matthew 19:21). He gave away his inheritance and went out to live in prayer and solitude. The Life of Antony by Athanasius was read across the empire and even helped to bring Augustine to faith (Augustine). In the East, Basil the Great wrote rules for monks living in community.

Western monasticism took its shape from Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547). His life is told mainly in Gregory the Great's Dialogues, so full of miracle stories that it is hard to say how much is history. Around 530 he wrote a Rule for his monastery at Monte Cassino that pictures the monastery as a school in which one learns to serve the Lord The Rule of Saint Benedict. Taking the psalmist's words, "Seven times a day I praise You" (Psalm 119:164), the monks met at set hours by day and night to pray, and sang the whole Psalter every week: the daily office. Idleness, the Rule says, is the enemy of the soul, so they worked with their hands and gave hours to reading Scripture. Guests were welcomed as Christ himself, and each monk vowed stability, to stay in one community for life. The famous motto ‘pray and work’ is a later summary; it is not in the Rule.

The monks wanted to live like the first church in Jerusalem: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer" (Acts 2:42). John Wesley comments, "So their daily Church communion consisted in these four particulars: Hearing the word; Having all things common; Receiving the Lord's Supper; Prayer" Wesley. A monastery tried to make exactly that its daily order. Monks copied the Scriptures by hand for the next generation, and their houses served as schools, libraries and hospitals.

To the ends of the earth: Gregory and the missionaries

Gregory the Great had been prefect of the city of Rome, but he spent his wealth on founding monasteries and became a monk himself. Chosen bishop of Rome (pope) in 590, while plague ravaged the city, he served until 604 and called himself ‘the servant of the servants of God’. His Book of Pastoral Rule, on the pastor's life and on fitting the word to each kind of hearer, became the pastor's handbook for the whole Middle Ages Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule. His sermons on the Gospels fill many pages of the Catena. On the Lord's words that the labourers are few, Gregory laments, "Behold the world is full of priests, but seldom is there found a laborer in God's harvest, because we undertake indeed the priestly office, but we perform not its works" Gregory.

He did more than lament. In 596 he sent Augustine, the prior of his own monastery, with a band of monks to the English, and they landed in Kent in 597. King Æthelberht, whose queen was a Christian, received them and is said to have been baptized soon after; Augustine became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Earlier, in the fifth century, Patrick had taken the gospel to Ireland. Born in Roman Britain, carried off by Irish raiders as a boy and held as a slave, he escaped and later returned as a missionary. The stories of his explaining the Trinity with a shamrock and driving the snakes from Ireland are later legends.

Irish monks in turn crossed the sea. Columba founded a monastery on Iona, off Scotland, around 563, and Columbanus went to the continent. In the eighth century the English monk Boniface laboured among the Germanic peoples and was martyred in Frisia around 754. In the East, in 863 the brothers Cyril and Methodius went to the Slavs of Moravia, devised an alphabet and gave them Scripture and worship in their own tongue. What moved them all was the Lord's last command:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew 28:19-20

Matthew Henry comments, "The salvation they were to preach, is a common salvation; whoever will, let him come, and take the benefit; all are welcome to Christ Jesus" Matthew Henry. The missions of this age had their shadows. Whole peoples were often baptized when their king was, and some mission came with the sword, as when Charlemagne forced baptism on the Saxons. Yet the monks' monasteries, schools and translated Scriptures were where many peoples of Europe first heard the gospel.

Icons and the Second Council of Nicaea

In the eighth century the Eastern church was torn over icons, painted images of Christ and the saints. From the reign of Leo III, and above all under his son Constantine V, Byzantine emperors condemned icons as idolatry and had them removed. Their great opponent was John of Damascus (c. 675–749), a monk living under the Muslim caliphs, out of the emperor's reach, best known for An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, a classic summary of the Greek Fathers John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. In his writings defending icons, his argument was the incarnation. The invisible God cannot be pictured; but the Son, "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), became man and was seen, and to paint his face is to confess that he truly became flesh. I do not worship matter, he said in effect, but the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake.

In 787 the empress Irene called the Second Council of Nicaea, which defended the icons Second Council of Nicaea. It distinguished the veneration shown to icons, with a kiss or a bow, from the true worship that belongs to God alone, and it borrowed Basil's saying that the honour paid to an image passes to the one it represents Basil, On the Holy Spirit. The struggle ended only in 843, a victory the Orthodox still celebrate each year as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The Orthodox and Catholic churches receive this council as the seventh ecumenical council.

Protestants are wary here. God commanded, "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything … You shall not bow down to them or worship them" (Exodus 20:4-5). However clear the line between veneration and worship may be in theory, the Reformers feared it blurs easily when people bow before images. Nor did the West welcome the council at first: in 794 a council at Frankfurt, reading its decrees in a faulty Latin translation, rejected them. Gregory the Great had called pictures books for those who cannot read, forbidding both smashing images and worshipping them. The Heidelberg Catechism answers that old idea: God "will not have his people taught by dumb idols, but by the lively preaching of his Word" Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 98. Protestants differ among themselves. Lutherans held that pictures and crucifixes may stay in churches so long as they are not worshipped; the Reformed removed images from their places of worship.

East and West part

East and West were long one church, but they drifted apart. The West spoke Latin and the East Greek, and in time few in either knew the other's language. The bishop of Rome claimed, as Peter's successor, authority over the whole church; the East gave Rome the first place of honour but held that great matters belong to councils of the whole church.

The Nicene Creed of 381, following Jesus' words about "the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father" (John 15:26), confessed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father. From about the time of the Third Council of Toledo (589), churches in the West added ‘and the Son’, in Latin filioque, and Rome accepted the phrase in 1014. The creed in this app follows the Western form, confessing the Spirit "who proceeds from the Father and the Son" The Nicene Creed, fourth article. The East objected that one part of the church had altered alone a creed confessed by all, and that the addition obscured the Father as the one source of the Son and the Spirit; in the ninth century Patriarch Photius of Constantinople pressed the charge hard (see the doctrine course's lesson The Trinity).

In 1054 Cardinal Humbert, legate of Pope Leo IX, laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the patriarch's synod excommunicated the legates in turn. The pope had died some months before, and the sentences fell on persons, not on whole churches, so many historians see 1054 less as a sudden break than as the symbol of a long estrangement. In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the excommunications together.

The deeper wound came in 1204, when the Fourth Crusade, bound for the Holy Land, turned aside, sacked the Christian city of Constantinople and set up a Latin patriarch. Pope Innocent III rebuked the plunder, but Eastern Christians did not forget it. That Christians sacked a brother city in Christ's name is a shameful chapter of church history.

The Orthodox understand themselves as the church that has kept unchanged the faith of the seven ecumenical councils. They still celebrate the Divine Liturgy that bears Chrysostom's name, meditate on the promise that we may become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) as the goal of salvation, and treasure the Jesus Prayer, a short prayer repeated without ceasing. Evangelicals share with them the Nicene faith, the Christ of Chalcedon and a love of prayer. They differ on authority, for the Orthodox read Scripture within the church's holy Tradition and its councils while evangelicals hold Scripture alone as the final judge, and on the veneration of icons and saints and the understanding of the sacraments.

This age leaves us the monks' prayer and love of Scripture, a zeal to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, and the pain of division. Jesus prayed "that all of them may be one" (John 17:21), so that the world may believe. For more, see Why are there so many churches and denominations? and How do Catholics and Protestants differ?.

Practice