fection of a common life in all and for all ( unianimes in domo cum iocunditate
habitare, “live harmoniously in a house pleasantly,” as an ancient rule has it):
Par ceste liberté entrèrent en louable émulation de faire tous ce que à un seul
voyoient plaire. Si quelqu’un ou quelcune disoit : “beuvons,” tous beuvoient;
si disoit: “jouons,” tous jouoient; si disoit: “Allons à l’esbat ès champs,” tous y
alloient [By this freedom they were all moved by laudable emulation to do what
they saw a single one liked. If some man or woman said: “Let’s drink,” they all
drank; if one said: “Let’s go play in the fields,” they all went]. (Rabelais, pp. 61/126)
The abbreviated formulation of the rule is not, however, an invention of Rabe-
lais, but goes back to the author of one of the first monastic rules, and still fur-
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ther, to Augustine, who, in his commentary on the First Epistle of John (7.4.8),
had summarized the precept of the Christian life in the genuinely Gargantuan
stipulation: dilige et quod vis fac, “love and do what you wish.” Moreover, it
corresponds precisely with the way of life of those monks who were, accord-
ing to a tradition inaugurated by Cassian, pejoratively named “Sarabaites” and
whose sole rule was caprice and desire ( pro lege eis est desideriorum voluntas). The Rabelaisian parody, though comical in appearance, is thus so serious that one
can compare the episode of Thélème to the Franciscan foundation of a new type
of order (Gilson, pp. 265–66): the common life, by identifying itself with the
rule without remainder, abolishes and cancels it.
1.3. In 1785, in his cell in the prison of the Bastille, Donatien Alphonse de
Sade, filling a roll of paper twelve meters long with a minute calligraphy in
only twenty days, wrote what many consider his masterpiece: Les 120 journées de
Sodome ( The 120 Days of Sodom). The narrative frame is well known: on November 1 of an unspecified year at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, four powerful
and rich libertines—the duke of Blangis, his brother the bishop, the president of
Curval, and the financier Durcet—lock themselves away with forty-two victims
in the castle of Silling in order to celebrate an orgy that would be without limits
and yet perfectly and obsessively regulated. Here as well, the model is unequiv-
ocally the monastic rule. Yet while in Rabelais, the paradigm is evoked directly
(Thélème is an abbey) in order to be precisely negated and reversed (no clocks,
no divisions of time, no compulsory behavior), at Silling, which is a castle and
not an abbey, the time is articulated according to a meticulous ritualism that
recalls the unfailing ordo of the monastic Office. Immediately after having been
locked up (indeed walled up) in the castle, the four friends write and promulgate
the règlements (“statutes”) that must govern their new common life. Not only
is every moment of the “cenoby” fixed beforehand as in the monastery—the
sanctioned rhythms of waking and sleeping, the rigidly programmed collective
meals and “celebrations”—but even the boys’ and girls’ defecation is subject to
meticulous regulation. On se lèvera tous les jours à dix heures du matin, demands
the rule, parodying the scansion of the canonical hours, à onze heures les amis se
rendront dans l’appartement des jeune filles . . . de deux à trois heures on servira les deux premières tables . . . en sortant du souper, on passera dans le salon d’assemblée (this is the synaxis or collecta or conventus fratrum of monastic terminology) pour la célébration (the same term that in the rules designates the Divine Offices) de ce qu’on appelle les orgies . . . (“the company shall rise every day at ten o’clock in the morning . . . at eleven o’clock, the friends shall repair to the quarters appointed
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for the little girls . . . from two to three the first two tables shall be served . . . the evening meal concluded, Messieurs shall pass into the salon for the celebration
of what are to be called orgies”; pp. 41–43/241–46).
Corresponding to the lectio of Holy Scripture (or of the text of the rule itself, as in the Regula magistri) that accompanied the meals and the daily occupations of the monks in monasteries, one finds here the ritual narration that the four historiennes, la Duclos, la Champville, la Martaine, and la Desgranges, make of their depraved
life. Corresponding to the unlimited obedience-unto-death of the monks toward
the abbot and their superiors ( oboedientia praeceptum est regulae usque ad mortem; Fructuosus, Regula monastica communis, chap. 5, p. 1115B), there is the absolute
malleability of the victims to their masters, including extreme torture ( le moindre
rire, ou le moindre manque d’attention ou respect ou de soumission dans les parties de débauche sera une des foutes les plus graves et les plus cruellement punies, “the least display of mirth, or the least evidence given of disrespect or lack of submission during
the debauched activities shall be deemed one of the gravest of faults and shall be
one of the most cruelly punished”; Sade pp. 44/248—in the same sense, monas-
tic rules punish laughter during gatherings: Si vero aliquis depraehensus fuerit in
risu . . . iubemus . . . omni flagello humilitatis coherceri, “if someone is caught laugh-ing or using scurrilous language . . . we order that he be chastised in the name of
the Lord by every scourge of humility”; Vogüé 1, 1, pp. 202–4/31).
Here also then, as at Thélème, the cenobitic ideal is parodically maintained
(indeed, exaggerated). But while life in the abbey, making pleasure their rule,
ended by abolishing it, at Silling the laws, in being identified at every point with
life, can only destroy it. And while the monastic cenoby is conceived as lasting
forever, here, after only five months, the four libertines, who have sacrificed the
life of their objects of pleasure, hastily abandon the by now half-empty castle to
return to Paris.
1.4. It can appear surprising that the monastic ideal, born as an individual
and solitary flight from the world, should have given origin to a model of total
communitarian life. Nevertheless, as soon as Pachomius resolutely put aside
the anchorite model, the term monasterium was equivalent in use to cenoby
and the etymology that refers to the solitary life was dismissed to such a point
that, in the Rule of the Master, monasteriale can be put forward as a translation of cenobite, and is glossed as militans sub regula vel abbate (“serving under a
rule and an abbot”; Vogüé 2, 1, pp. 328/105). The rule of Basil was already on
guard against the perils and egotism of the solitary life, which “the doctrine of
charity does not permit” ( machomenon tōi tēs agapēs nomōi; Basil, Regulae fusius
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tractatae, chap. 7). “It is impossible, indeed,” adds Basil, “to rejoice with him
who receives an honor or to sympathize with him who suffers when, by reason
of their being separated from one another, each person cannot, in all likelihood,
be kept informed about the affairs of his neighbor” (ibid.). In the community of
life ( en tēi tēs zōēs koinoniai), by contrast, the gift of each becomes common to
those who live together with him ( sympoliteuomenōn) and the activity ( energeia) of the Holy Spirit in each is communicated to all the others (ibid.).
On the
contrary, “he who lives alone . . . and has, perhaps, one gift renders it ineffectual
through inoperativity ( dia tēs argias), since it lies buried within him ( katoryxas en eautōi)” (ibid.). If to advise against solitude, “the desolation of the desert and the terror of various monsters” are invoked at the beginning of the Rule of the
Four Fathers, immediately afterward cenoby is founded, through scriptural ref-
erences, in the joy and unanimity of the common life: volumus ergo fratres unianimes in domo cum iocunditate habitare (“therefore we desire that the brothers live harmoniously in a house pleasantly”; Vogüé 1, 1, pp. 182/17). The temporary
suspension of common life ( excommunicatio; ibid., pp. 202/31) is the punish-
ment par excellence, while leaving the monastery ( ex communione discedere) is
equivalent, in the Regula Macharii, to choosing the infernal darkness ( in exteriores ibunt tenebras; Vogüé 1, 1, p. 386). Even in Theodore the Studite, cenoby is compared to paradise ( paradeisos tēs koinobiakēs zōēs), and leaving it is equivalent to the sin of Adam. “My son,” he admonishes a monk who wants to retire to
the solitary life, “how has Satan the Evil One driven you out of the paradise of
the common life, precisely like Adam who was seduced by the counsel of the
serpent?” ( Epistle 1, p. 938).
The theme of the common life had its paradigm in the Book of Acts, where
the life of the apostles and of those who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teach-
ing” (Acts 2:42) is described in terms of “unanimity” and communism: “All who
believed were together and had all things in common. . . . Day by day, as they
persevered unanimously [ homothymadon] in the temple, they broke bread at home
and ate their food with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:44–46); “the whole group
of those who believed were of one heart and one soul, and no one claimed private
ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common”
(Acts 4:32). It is in reference to this ideal that Augustine’s rule defines as the first
goal of the monastic life “that you dwell in unity in the house, and that you have
but one soul and one heart in God” ( primum propter quod in unum estis congregati,
ut unanimes habitetis in domo et sit vobis anima una et cor unum in Deo; Augustine, Regula ad servos Dei, pp. 1377/17). And Jerome, who in 404 translated the rule of
Pachomius from a Greek version, in an epistle refers explicitly to the Coptic term
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that, in the original, defined those who lived in community: coenobitae, quod illi
“sauses” gentili lingua vocant, nos “in commune viventes” possumus appellare (“There are the cenobites, whom they call in their foreign tongue sauses; we may describe
them as those who live in a community”; Epistle 22.34).
At least up to the monastic renewal of the eleventh century, which with Ro-
muald and Peter Damian saw the rekindling of the “tension between cenoby and
hermitage” (Calati, p. 530), the primacy of the communitarian life over that of
the hermit is a constant tendency. This culminates in the decision of the Council
of Toledo (646), according to which, with a complete inversion of the historical
process that had led from the anchorites to the monastery, no one can be admitted
to the life of the hermit without having first passed through the cenobitic life. The
cenobitic project is literally defined by the koinos bios, by the common life from which it draws its name, and without which it cannot be understood at all.
א The idea of a “common life” seems to have an obvious political meaning. In the
Politics, Aristotle defines the city as a “perfect community” ( koinonia teleios; 1252b29) and makes use of the term syzēn, “to live together,” to define the political nature of humans (“they desire to live together”; 1278b22). Yet he never speaks of a koinos bios.
The polis is certainly born with view toward living ( tou zēn eneka; 1252b30), but its reason for existing is “living well” ( to eu zēn; ibid.). In the introduction to the Cenobitic Institutions, Cassian mentions as a goal of his book, alongside the “improvement of our behavior,” the exposition of the “perfect life” (Cassian 1, pp. 30/13). The monastery, like the polis, is a community that intends to realize the “perfection of the cenobial life”
( perfectionem . . . coenobialis vitae; ibid., pp. 182/82). In the Conlationes (or Conferences), Cassian therefore distinguishes the monastery from cenoby, because a monastery “is the
name of the residence and does not imply more than the place where the monks live.
‘House of cenobites’ points to the character and the way of life of the profession. The residence of a simple monk can be called a monastery. But a place cannot be termed a house
of cenobites unless one means a community of many people living together [ plurimorum
cohabitantium . . . unita communio]” (Cassian 2, pp. 22/191). Cenoby does not name only a place, but first of all a form of life.
1.5. It is starting from this tension between private and common, between
hermitage and cenoby, that the curious threefold or fourfold articulation of genera
monachorum (“types of monks”) seems to have been elaborated. These are found in
Jerome ( Epistle 22); in Cassian ( Conferences, 18.4–8); in the long digression at the beginning of the Rule of the Master; in Benedict; and, in varied forms, in Isidore, John Climacus, Peter Damian, and Abelard, up through the texts of the canonists. The sense of this articulation—which, after having distinguished the cen-
obites, in commune viventes (“living in common”), from the anchorites, qui soli
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habitant per desertum (“who live alone in the wilderness”), opposes to these, as
a “detestable and filthy” type, the Sarabaites (and, in a fourfold variant, which
becomes canonical starting from the Rule of the Master and the Benedictine rule,
the itinerants)—becomes clear, however, only if one understands that what is in
question is not the opposition between solitude and common life, so much as
the (so to speak) “political” opposition between order and disorder, governance
and anarchy, stability and nomadism. Already in Jerome and Cassian the “third
type” (qualified by teterrimum, deterrimum ac infidele) is defined by the fact that they live “together by twos or threes, not many more, and live according to their
own will and independently [ suo arbitratu ac ditione]” (Jerome, Epistle 22.34) and
“do not put up with being governed by the care and power of the abbot” ( abbatis
cura atque imperio gubernari; Cassian 2, pp. 18/186). As the Rule of the Master confirms, “they have as their law the willfulness of their own desires” ( pro lege eis
est desideriorum voluntas; Vogüé 2, 1, pp. 330/105), and they live without “having been tested . . . by any rule” ( nulla regula adprobati; cf. Pricoco, p. 134).
In this “commonplace of monastic homiletics” (Penco, p. 506) that the four-
fold division of the genera monachorum represents, what is at stake is thus the
need to oppose at every point a well-governed community to anomia, a positive
political paradigm to a negative one. In this sense, the classification is not, as has
been suggested (Capelle, p. 309), entirely devoid of logic. Rather, as is evident
in Isidore’s variant in which the types become six, every group has its double or
its negative shadow, in such a way that they are organized precisely according to
a binary opposition ( tria optima, reliqua vero tet
errima; Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis 2.16). In an illustration from the Rule of St. Benedict preserved in the public library of Mantua, the miniaturist opposes the two paradigms representationally: corresponding to the cenobites (exemplified by four monks who are
praying together devoutly) and the anchorites (represented by an austere solitary
monk) are the inferior images of the Sarabaites, who walk in opposite directions
turning their backs to each other, and the itinerants, who gulp down food and
drink without restraint. Once the anchoritic exception is left to one side, the
problem of monasticism will always be more that of constructing and affirming
itself as an ordered and well-governed community.
1.6. Communal habitation is the necessary foundation of monasticism.
Never theless, in the earliest rules, the term habitatio seems to indicate not so
much a simple fact as, rather, a virtue and a spiritual condition. “The virtue that
distinguishes the brothers is habitation and obedience,” proclaims a passage of
the Rule of the Four Fathers (Pricoco, p. 10). In the same sense, the term habitare
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(frequentative of habeo) seems to designate not only a factual situation but a way of life. The Rule of the Master can thus establish that the clergy may also stay for a long time as guests ( hospites suscipiantur) in the monastery, but cannot “inhabit it” ( in monasterio habitare), that is, assume the monastic condition (Vogüé 2, 2,
pp. 342–46).
In the context of the monastic life, the term habitus—which originally signi-
fied “a way of being or acting” and, among the Stoics, became synonymous with
virtue ( habitum appellamus animi aut corporis constantem et absolutam aliqua in
re perfectionem, “By habit we mean a stable and absolute constitution of mind or body”; Cicero, De inventione 1.25.36)—seems more and more to designate the
way of dressing. It is significant that, when this concrete meaning of the word
begins to be affirmed in the post-Augustan age, it is not always easy to distinguish
it from the more general sense, all the more so in that habitus was closely associated with dress, which was in some way a necessary part of the “way to conduct
oneself.” When we read in Cicero virginali habitu atque vestitu (“in the shape and attire of maidens”; Verrine Orations, 2.4.5), the distinction and, at the same time, the proximity between the two concepts are perfectly clear. Yet it is not as certain
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