Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

4 On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism

ON D I S C I P L I N E AND HUMILITY IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM Rather than attempt an account in terms of the familiar duality of ideology and social structure, I want to examine disciplinary practices, including the multiple ways in which religious discourses regulate, inform, and construct religious selves. Such an approach seems to me to require an examination of two kinds of power process: formations of the self and manipulations of (or resistances to) others. Weber's famous definition of power as "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance" (1947, 152) helps us to focus on repressive or manipulative processes of power, but it obscures something I wish to examine in this chapter: the conditions within which obedient wills are created. A remarkablefeature of monastic discipline isthat itexplicitly aims to create, through a program of communal living, the will to obey. The Christian monk who learns to will obedience is not merely someone who submits to another's will byforce of argument or by the threat of force—or simply by way of habitual, unthinking response. He isnot someone who has "lost his own will," asthough a man'swill could be truly his only when it remained opposed to another's. The obedient monk is a person for whom obedience is his virtue—in the sense of being his ability, potentiality, power—a Christian virtue developed through discipline. This iscertainly one important difference between the medieval Christian monastery1 and other "total institui . By"medieval Christianity" I refer primarilyto Latin Christendom (broadly: northern and central Italy, northern Spain, France, Rhineland, the Low Countries, England) in the central Middle Ages, a period of crucial change in the economic, political, and ideological formations of western Europe. 125 4 126 tions," such as prisons and hospitals, with which the monastery has sometimes been classified (Goffman 1961). The point is not that force has no necessary place in monasteries; of course it has. It isthat force is a crucial element in a particular transformation of dispositions, not merely in the keeping of order among inmates. Monastic rites governed the economy of desire. Force (punishment ), together with Christian rhetoric, guided the exercise of virtuous desires. The central principle on which these rites were based assumed that virtuous desire had first to be created before a virtuous choice could be made. It stands, therefore, in contrast to our modern assumption that choices are suigeneris and self-justifying. My approach to the analysis of monastic rites differs in certain respects from the dominant concepts of ritual in anthropology. It may therefore be helpful if I deal with this matter briefly before I proceed with my substantive discussion. Some Recent Approachesto the Analysis ofRitual Modern anthropologists writing on ritual have tended to see it as the domain of the symbolic in contrast to the instrumental. In British social anthropology it wasRadcliffe-Brown who helped to popularize this distinction, asin this typical passage: The very commontendency to look for the explanation of ritual actions in their purpose is the result of a false assimilation of them to what may be called technical acts. In any technical activity an adequate statement of the purpose of any particular act or series of acts constitutes by itself a sufficient explanation. But ritual acts differ from technical acts in having in all instances some expressive or symbolic element in them. (1939,143) In other words, some actions require an explanation in terms ofmeaning , others in terms of cause. But this sharp distinction between "expressive or symbolic" activity,on the one hand, and "technical"activity, on the other (which overlapped the older "sacred/profane" dichotomy ) was rephrased by Leach in terms of a continuum: Ritual, I assert, "serves to express the individual's status as a social person in the structural system in which he finds himself for the time being." . . . For mypart I find Durkheim's emphasis on theabsolute ARCHAISMS Discipline and Humility in Christian Monasticism 127 dichotomy betweenthe sacred and the profane to be untenable.Rather it is that actionsfall into place on a continuous scale. At one extreme we have actionswhichare entirelyprofane, entirelyfunctional, technique pure and simple; at the other we have actionswhichare entirely sacred, strictly aesthetic, technically non-functional. Between these two extremes we have the great majority of social actionswhichpartake partlyof the one sphere and partly of the...