Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Nothing better summed up the business of being a monk than Christ’s words in the parable of the rich young man, as reported in the Gospel of Matthew. “If you would be perfect,” Jesus said, “go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”5 The young man to whom Christ addressed these words was not willing to listen. He departed lamenting that it would be quite impossible for him to give up his money. (Christ responded with his famous line about camels and needles.*) But several hundred years later minds had changed. From the third century a.d., pious men (and some women) throughout the Christian world of the Roman near east had come to the conclusion that in order to save their souls, they needed to strip the lives of all luxuries, fripperies, and temptations. They began to give up their possessions and abandon the secular world and take off into the wilderness, to live in physical squalor but moral purity: praying, contemplating the world, and surviving on donations and scraps. Like so many of the key developments in western monotheism during the first millennium a.d., this trend for what historians