Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 5-12

11. Early Frankish Monasticism

C h a p t e r 1 1 Early Frankish Monasticism The sixth century was the period in which medieval Christianity was formed.1 By the year 600, bishops were well-established political figures, asceticism was institutionalized in the monasteries, and saints worked through their relics. During the century after the conversion of Clovis, late antique Gaul developed the assumptions about church governance, monasticism, and the holy dead that dominated for the next thousand years. Once early medieval Christianity settled on its broad outlines, the tendency was to re-remember the past as having followed the same pattern. Christians of the seventh century shaped their religious practices by contemplating their past, retelling the story of their predecessors until an account of fairly radical religious and structural innovation became the story of what had always been done. Earlier Christian communities in Gaul had had a much less orderly governance system and had witnessed far more independent hermits and wandering ascetics than monks living under a Rule, but that was not how they were recalled. Such an act of creative memory obscured for later medieval thinkers the differences between the Christianity of late antiquity and that of the following centuries in Europe. For it was not inevitable that the organized church take the form it had by around 600, something not presaged by the first centuries of Christianity, yet a form that then persisted for close to a millennium. Early—that is, sixth- and seventh-century—Frankish monasticism did not think of itself as early monasticism. Some three centuries previously, Anthony had first attracted followers as he retreated into the Egyptian desert, away from both materiality and Roman society. Separation from the world, accompanied by fervent prayer, marked those who wanted a more intensely religious life than that followed by other Christians. In the late fourth and 194 Chapter 11 early fifth centuries, there was a virtual explosion of wandering monks all around the Mediterranean, men who claimed apostolic precedent for their wandering and begging but who were regarded with deep suspicion by the church hierarchy. Initially without legal status, being neither clergy nor laymen , they commanded no respect.2 These gyrovagi (wanderers) could be perceived as holier than the established clergy, as they themselves asserted, or could be considered both lazy and crazy. But in sixth-century Gaul most of these debates were either irrelevant or over. Hermits might still be found in ones and twos in any wild patch, but there were few crazed wanderers—indeed, it is estimated that a good twothirds of sixth-century hermits were aristocratic men seeking spiritual purity.3 Begging and solitary wandering became less viable with the collapse of Roman urban culture. Monks were now a recognized and respected legal category, subject to their bishops as specified in the 451 Council of Chalcedon.4 They were supposed to be stable, live in groups, and follow some kind of a rule under a master or abbot. Unlike their predecessors, sixth-century communities of monks had their own fields and orchards, as assumed in the Benedictine Rule written in this period, and generally their own serfs and peasant tenants to work these fields. The well-to-do could and did support the followers of holy poverty, but such support increasingly took the form of donations of property rather than a coin pressed into a beggar’s hand. By the seventh century, such donations were explicitly tied to a search for salvation by the powerful, and new monasteries generally received a formal foundation charter, commemorating both their foundation and the donors’ generosity. When the monks of the sixth and seventh centuries constructed the memory of their own past, many of the transformations of the previous centuries were smoothed out, so that their predecessors were assumed to be almost like the monks of their own time, even while monastic authors also argued for the exceptional achievements of these predecessors. And yet the past remained foreign enough that monks felt compelled to create explanations for how their houses had reached what seemed their entirely self-evident Present. The Origins of Monasticism in Gaul Monasticism had reached Gaul when Martin, bishop of Tours, founded Marmoutier , the first Western monastery, shortly before 400.5 Even more Early Frankish Monasticism 195 influential was Lérins, founded about a generation later. This house, on an island off what is now the Riviera, began as a hermitage of...