The Story of Monasticism: Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality by Greg Peters (review)

I teach a course on Monasticism(s) Old and New. Virtually all of my seminary students are Protestant, most of them moderate to conservative in theology. Some of them live outside the United States. Few are familiar with the history of monasticism.

I decided to allow my students to choose between The Historical Atlas of Eastern and Western Christian Monasticism, edited by Juan María Laboa and Peters’ The Story of Monasticism. I also assign other readings and lecture-videos. Why I chose The Story of Monasticism, and why I feel compelled to require other resources is what this book review is all about.

There are a number of things that Peters does well in this book, things that make it an excellent text. First, Peters presents a clear summary of the commonly-treated expressions of Christian religious life. Part I covers the centuries from Antony to Benedict. Peters describes the emergence of religious life from the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. He summarizes the life of Antony, the Sayings literature of the Desert ascetics, the community of Pachomius, and the transmission of early Egyptian monastic life to the West through the writings of John Cassian. Then, in chapter Three, he provides an introduction to the monastic rule.

Part II treats the period from Benedict to Bernard. Chapter Four is devoted to the Benedictine tradition. In chapter Five, Peters mentions “other voices” in monastic history, including Celtic, Frankish, and Eastern monasticism. He devotes only a few pages to Eastern monasticism, which is why I give students the option to read The Historical Atlas of Eastern and Western Christian Monasticism. In the remaining chapters of this part Peters discusses the challenges of secular support/control and the road to monastic reform through the Clunaic centuries.

Part III presents religious life from Bernard to Luther. In chapters Eight and Nine he introduces Camaldolese, canons, hospitallars, the military orders, and other reforming groups. In chapter Ten Peters presents something that The Historical Atlas omits: the mendicant friars. While some historians of religious life do not consider friars to be “monastic,” Peters realizes that the distinctions are not significant enough to warrant the neglect of such an important expression of religious life.

The second thing that Peters does well is presented in Part IV. In this section Peters treats, along with the Jesuits, Carmelites, and other religious orders of the modern period, key Protestant expressions that can be understood as something like religious life. Much of this is a condensation of his earlier book Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of Religious Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014). In addition to discussing Luther and Calvin, Peters describes the foundation of Anglican and Lutheran communities. He considers the thought of Karl Barth on religious life and provides a wonderful chart comparing the Rule of Benedict to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. He also summarizes a number of newer Protestant expressions. The bold inclusion of Protestant expressions into this survey makes The Story of Monasticism a distinct contribution to the study of the history of religious life.

The third thing that Peters does well is expressed in the subtitle and at the close of every chapter of the book. The Story of Monasticism is not just a history of religious life, but also a step toward its retrieval. The term he uses at the end of each chapter is ressourcement, with a nod to the interests of the nouvelle théologie in the early twentieth century. His point is that our exploration of this history of monasticism is a “rediscovery and recovery of the past in order to give fresh expression to contemporary faith” (2, italics original). Thus, he teases his readers with a theme appropriate to each chapter, probing them to consider what meaning each expression might suggest today. Vocation, rule of life, hospitality, counter-cultural living, tensions of outward and inward, and voluntary poverty all make their way...