Called to Community. Thomas Merton
Benedict, were awakening with new commerce. The Roman roads were cleared and rebuilt. Yet as trade increased, the division between rich and poor also widened. Alongside a rising urban middle-class of merchants, bankers, and lawyers grew an underclass of poor and underemployed. Beginning with monks such as Rupert of Deutz (who wrote a little treatise titled On the Truly Apostolic Life) a movement arose to restore the model of the Jerusalem community for the entire church. Others, such as Gerhoh of Reichersberg, argued that if monasticism is the pattern for the church, then all Christians should be monks of a sort; God’s call to the Christian life is universal, not limited to the cloister. The apostolic life, they said, was not simply a life of prayer and devotion but of social and economic justice. Ordinary Christians should reconcile economic divisions through solidarity with the poor, banding together with those marginalized by the new economy through fraternal charity, scripture study, voluntary poverty, and active proclamation of the faith.
This awakening led to the formation of small evangelical communities across Europe. In western France, Robert d’Abrissel gathered a diverse group of men and women, including a number of former prostitutes, into a community at Fontevrault known as Christ’s Poor. In southern France, groups of Christians known as the cathari, or “pure ones,” organized radical communities which rejected sexual relations, the eating of meat, and hierarchical authority. The Cathars were regarded as heretics because of their denigration of the material creation, and were relentlessly persecuted. Northern Italy produced a movement called the humiliati, or “humble ones,” in which both clerics and laypeople attempted to conform their lives to the gospel call to simplicity. The movement included both celibate and married people, many of whom were drawn from the thriving garment industry in the area. Though the communities produced rich cloth in the textile industry, they wore only plain, undyed clothes. They refrained from political engagement, served the disadvantaged, and prayed the Benedictine hours. By the end of the thirteenth century, there were communities of Humiliati in most cities in northern Italy.
In southern France, a wealthy merchant named Peter Waldo led a similar movement. In a story not unlike Anthony’s, Waldo gave up his business, made reparation for his dishonest dealings, and began distributing bread in the streets of Lyons. Others followed his example of poverty and commitment to studying the Bible, and they became known as the Poor Men of Lyons. The “Waldensian” movement spread quickly to Germany and Italy, where it eventually merged with the Humiliati. Small communes formed which engaged in common work and gospel preaching; some remain to this day.
Saint Francis became the most famous exemplar of the apostolic life. Like so many earlier community leaders, Francis was a scion of aristocrats, who relinquished all his wealth, even the clothes on his back (he literally went naked for a time). Exchanging rich silk garb for a rough woolen habit, Francis and his friends traipsed across Europe preaching and exhorting people to follow Jesus’ way. Before long the roads of medieval Europe were clogged with tens of thousands of friars singing, preaching, and begging for daily bread. The Franciscan movement spread throughout the continent, spilling over into North Africa and the Middle East, where friars initiated some of the first interfaith conversations with Muslims. Besides celibate communities of men and women, confraternities of married people with children who vowed to follow the simple way of the gospel grew up in major cities.
Farther north, in what is now Belgium, groups of single women inspired by Francis joined together to form communities within the great urban centers of Leuven, Ghent, and Bruges. Known as Beguines, they established “towns within towns” that contained houses, workshops, churches, hospitals, and dorms for poorer members of the community. The women practiced celibacy, daily prayer, and simplicity, wearing plain beige dresses. Most worked in the Belgian textile factories, spending their extra time with the poor and sick. Unlike traditional nuns, the Beguines took no formal vows and shared no rule of life, but each woman promised obedience to the local community and the local pastor. Similar communities of men called the Beghards soon followed their lead. A little later, in the fourteenth century, the Brethren of the Common Life flourished in the Netherlands and Germany. Like the Beguines and the Beghards, the Brethren did not take formal vows. They roomed together in large houses and ministered to others by preaching (some were priests) and producing devotional literature. The most well-known example is The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, a book on the devotional life that has guided many people to the Way.
Such movements to “monasticize” all of Christian society climaxed in the Great Reformation. The Reformers mounted a devastating critique of the “monkish” life, which was already suffering under the weight of internal problems. Luther, himself an Augustinian monk, renounced his vows, marched out of the monastery, and married a nun. Calvin likewise opposed traditional monasticism as morally and spiritually bankrupt, believing it represented a double standard for Christians – all should strive for moral perfection. Monks and nuns in reformed lands were released from their vows, and many married and joined secular life.
Meanwhile, more radical Reformers such as Michael Sattler (a former Benedictine prior) organized new apostolic communities that rejected military service and political involvement and revived the ancient practice of believer’s baptism. Among these “Anabaptists,” the Mennonites considered it a mark of the true church that there should be no poor among them. The Hutterites went further, abolishing private property altogether and practicing full economic sharing. The egalitarian spirit was manifest in the practice of calling other members “brother” and “sister”; hence some groups in Moravia and Switzerland were simply called “Brethren.” Persecuted across Europe by Catholics and Protestants alike, Anabaptist communities saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the persecuted early church.
The “age of exploration” opened the pathways of the sea and connected the world in previously unimaginable ways. Wherever Christians sojourned, intentional communities developed. Hundreds of Baptists and other dissenters left their homes in England and Scotland in order to build a Christian society in the New World. Both the Pilgrims who settled Plymouth Colony in 1620 and the Puritans who established the “Bible commonwealth” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 attempted to create cohesive Christian communities. The Plymouth Pilgrims practiced the discipline of shared property in the first generation of their colony; all shared a high standard of moral discipline. The idealism of these founding communities directly influenced the formation of America’s distinct sense of mission and left a legacy of utopian community, both Christian and non-Christian, in the New World.
Many of these New World communities had a millenarian cast – they believed the Second Coming was at hand. The austere community of Bohemia Manor, founded in the 1680s in Pennsylvania by the followers of Jean de Labadie (the “second Calvin”), had no private property and shared common work on the estate; food and dress were plain. A few years later, the Seventh Day Baptists established a community, also in Pennsylvania, called Ephrata Cloister. Perhaps most successful were the Shakers, established right before the Revolutionary War. By the 1830s they had attracted some four thousand members to more than sixty celibate communes called “families” in nearly twenty different settlements from Maine to Indiana. One community remains, at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Other North American communities likewise attracted thousands: German Pietists flocked to communities such as Harmony and Economy in Pennsylvania, and New Harmony in Indiana. Another German sect, the Inspirationists, built seven communal villages in Amana, Iowa, in the 1850s, which survived until the Great Depression. The largest intentional Christian communities in the New World are the Hutterites, who fled oppression in Europe and established expansive farming colonies on the western plains of the United States and Canada. Today there are around forty thousand Hutterites living in more than four hundred colonies.
The twentieth century witnessed a revival of radical Christian community. Communal life focused on discipleship was seen as a way to heal the wounds left by centuries of religious strife and political turmoil. In response to the church’s complicity in war, Eberhard Arnold founded the Bruderhof community in Sannerz, Germany, in 1920. A few years later, in 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a community committed to serving the homeless poor. In 1934, Dietrich Bonhoeffer started the experimental underground Christian community in Finkenwald, which would become the subject of Life Together. In 1938, a Presbyterian pastor named George MacLeod founded the Iona Community in Scotland, in order to close the gap between middle- and working-class