MONASTICISM, MORMONISM, AND THE PATH NOT TAKEN The Rise of Monasticism in the Post-Apostacy Church The Christian Church of the First and Second Centuries spread like wildfire under the protective aegis of the Roman state as it converted the adherents of the several degenerate and dying religions of the Mediterranean, most of which had been associated with the societies and peoples of nations now absorbed into the Roman Empire and which now had little or no raison d'etre once the states they had been associated with no longer existed. The early Church soon outran its own support system. Many of the Apostles themselves were constrained to serve as Bishops or Metropoles (the name apparently used for Stake President- equivalents in the Primitive Church, drawing on Roman civil usage for the comparable area ruled by the parallel Roman civil magistracy, just as the a term Diocese was borrowed from the Roman state structure for what we today call a Ward -- the latter term adopted from the Nauvoo experience in which local groups of Latter-day Saints were divided according to the civil wards of the city. Just as the modern Apostle Heber J. Grant served concurrently as a member of the Twelve and as Stake President in Tooele and Apostle Charles Rich concurrently as President of the Bear Lake Stake, so tradition tells us that James served for at least a time as Bishop of Jerusalem, John of Ephesus, and Peter of Rome. To be sure each apostle stepped down as soon as a qualified successor was found. But with the Church growing so rapidly, qualified successors were not always found and the number of apostles to oversee the growth of local churches being so limited, it is apparent that in at least some instances local leadership was installed bringing with them traditions incompatible with the Church. This has happened in our day. During WWII when local leadership was left to administer the Church in Great Britain, Anglican Church tradition soon crept into local branches of the LDS Church. Some of those called to serve as Branch Presidents, thus being exempt from military call up. Some of these, however, sensing the disapproval of neighbors who did not understand their eccesiastical calling -- which not only justified but necessitated such exemption -- took to wearing the clerical collar familiar to every Englishman and which avoided explanantion of their situation. From this it was not long until, always to be sure for reasons of conserving electricity in a period of wartime shortage, some branches began using lighted candles as part of their services. This was not difficult for most LDS congregations to accept since most were themselves converts and the tradition of candles as part of worship was both familiar and comfortable. Fortunately the war was over in six brief years, and with the return of an experienced Mission President, matters were soon put right.But with the weakening of the Primitive Church under Roman persecution and the death of Peter, Paul, and John and others of the apostolate, and given the slowness and uncertainty of communications and transportation at the time, many traditions and usages of the other Mediterranean religions took root in the Church without experienced leadership to extirpate them. Indeed, as these changes in usage were accompanied by doctrinal changes to accomodate Christianity to Greek philosophy, thus to appeal to the Middle and Upper Classes, this eventuated in the no-longer-Primitive Church's becoming so popular and numerous that it was adopted as the state religion. The Emperor Constantine, noting the new religion's vigor and strength and the superior honesty and virtue of its members, hoped that universal Christianity might halt the erosion of Roman virtue and the strength of the Roman state, thus favoring both Christianity and the Empire. Rather, as we now know, it eventuated in the apostacy, as the Roman version of the church prevailed over the various surviving independant branches founded by one or another of the Apostles, some of whom may have preserved valid priesthood for a longer period of time than others. But eventually, it came to pass that the Primitive Church and all of its variant groups had changed sufficiently in both doctrine and practice that it now longer corresponded to the Church founded by Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost no longer manifested its powers, revelation ceased, and the Great Apostacy was complete. Monasticism in the Apostate Church -- Anchorites, Cenobites and Stylites With its adoption as the state religion, a state-paid salary was soon attached to religious office as it was to every other state magistracy in decadent Rome (beware, America, as we equate a reasonable allowance to cover the costs of service to the state of citizen legislators who are serving as stand-ins for the rest of us with the escalated salary structure of senior executives in the private sector whose elevated incomes represent rare skills, risk taking, and contribution to the satisfaction of society's utility function as evalutated by the market. Businessmen can win big. They also must be compensated for potentially huge losses. What is the potential risk horizon of a Congressman with a 93% reelection rate!) Similarly, with the adoption of a paid ministry, Christianity soon became an alternative career option for the ambitious.) In any event, at about this point, Christians in some of the more remote reaches of the Empire, adapting local traditions of celibacy and monastic (i.e. living alone or a mona ) life, began going off into the wilderness (anchorites); sitting in isolation on the tops of some of the eroded tuffa hills located in what is now central Turkey (then known as Cappadocia), (cenobites); or sealing themselves in sealed tomb-like cubicles in which they remained imobile as evidence of their dedicated holiness, even food having to be brought to them by friends or family, to spare themselves from the careerism, worldliness, and degeneracy of the Roman Church.Interestingly, Cappadocia had served for a time as St. Paul's Missionary Training Center (MTC), and many of thse tuffa hills hollowed out to serve as residences and some as churches can still be visited. Some of these cave churches dating from the Second and Third Centuries contain religious art of considerable historic interest. The Evolution of Communal Monasticism With the passage of time and the spread of the monastic heresy, man's natural economizing faculty took over, and as the movement spread to the west, the practice of Monastic Orders evolved, i.e. groups of monks adopted common rules for living their lives, farmed, lived, and worked together in communes, and came together for prayer and worship, but separated at night to pass their time in a monastic cell constructed as part of the greater (and in some cases enormously wealthy and elaborate) monastery. Some of the better known of these groups in history are the Cisterians, Gregorians, Trappists, and Augustinians -- all denominated according to their founders or principal order of life. In time, female orders also came into being following similar lifestyles. Following the Reformation, some Catholics, recognizing the essential sterility of the monastic life style, created new, non-cloistered Orders, e.g. the Jesuits, who no longer sequestered themselves from the world, rather seeing it as their mission to "go forth into the world" to preach, teach, and serve (latterly, often in the workforce or public sector in order to achieve more intense and more continual contact with the world). During most of history since the evolution of manasticism, these Orders have been overwhelmingly conservative in their order of worship, lifestyle, and dress. Only since the Vatican Conference under Pope John Paul have some Orders revised their dress codes to permit nuns to wear dress styles less medieval in appearance and priests and lay brothers to assume normal dress in public. The Road Not Taken Human beings, while infinitely varied in thought, opinion, and personal appearance seem to bear within them any number of powerful traits tending to conformity And it is astounding how frequent, given the common technological evolution of human events, how frequently great technological breakthroughs and inventions appear in relatively isolated societies. It is reported that mechanical clocks had been invented in China prior to the arrival of Marco Polo. Further production was however forbidden by the Emperor for fear of upsetting the elaborate social balance of his kingdom. Similarly, dozens of individuals were working on the problem of flight at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Leonardo, it is said, had solved the airfoil problem in the Sixteenth, but was stymied by a lack of a mechanical engine. With the invention of the reciprocating gasoline motor, it was more a matter of chance than approach which led to the success of the Wright brothers in beating the calendar. With the Restoration of the Gospel in 1830 after centuries of darkness, all the human problems of sectarian tradition, staffing a rapidly growing new Church, accomodating human pride, selfishness, and egotism, and satisfying the demands of powerful existing political institutions, faced the Restored Church. Not least of the problems was responding to the teachings regarding the United Order or Order of Enoch. While revealing the doctrine, the Lord seems to have left it pretty much to human leadership to reflect and ponder, "studying it out in your own mind" then "asking if it is right" in terms of evolving the modalities for implementing the practice. Had the Church longer to gather membership before severe persecution began, and had it not been favored by the existence of steamships (and within a few years the telegraph and railroad) permitting the gathering of an overwhelming proportion of its converts to Zion within a few years of the move west, there is no telling what idiosyncratic modalities of behavior isolated groups of converts might have adopted left more or less on their own for extended periods of time. James J. Strang's dissident movement went off on a heretical Kingship tangent; Lyman Wight and David Whitmer also formed splinter churches of their own which, in time, became much like the protestant churches around them; Samuel Brannan, as President of the Church in California, came to consider himself the equivalent of Brigham Young at Church Headquarters and took it upon himself to spend Church tithes without even being subject to the control of Counselors or High Council. We see somewhat parallel events transpiring today in Africa where many local usages have been incorporated into Latter-day Saint worship and baptisms have had to be deliberately restricted to avoid membership outrunning experienced leadership, resulting in problems similar to those encountered by the Primitive Church and splinter Mormonism. Nor did the large numbers of Saints gathering into more or less isolated new settlements stretching from Canada to Mexico and seeking to incorporate the commandment for group living into their social arrangements, escape their own measure of problems. For lack of detailed revelation, a number of modalities were adopted. Drawing on the Shaker experience of some converts, some communities took to living in tight societies holding land and farming in common, with wives often sharing food conservation, cooking, and child education responsibilities. Others, more familiar perhaps with contemporary Cooperativist experiments in Europe, formed cooperative shops and purchase and sales arrangements. Others, yet, lived an essentially traditional lifestyle. I emphasize, essentially , because there were distinct differences for anyone living in a Latter-day Saint community. My own Great Grandfather, who with his brother and cousin was one of the first settlers of a village near the Idaho border, with ten sons of his own, some of whom were approaching maturity, took up suffient land to provide for himself and his immediate descendants, only to be told by the newly appointed bishop that he must give up half his land for new settlers. When Great Grandfather remonstrated, he was told "Robert, six feet have been enough for better men than you". A parallel demand on his brother led him to leave the Church. The point is, that the concept of even private property being considered "consecrated to building up of Zion" was taken seriously by most members in earlier generation and that the Mormon experience, despite all the assimilation of Frontier Culture remained something quite different for Church members. Among other differences from traditional societal forms, Mormon men from age twelve up, are organized into Priesthood Quorums, whose basic purposes are to administer Church and Quorum programs, direct or otherwise participate in worship services, perform missionary work at home and abroad, and look to the welfare of their brothers and their families, including offering compassionate services when necessary, giving spiritual counsel as required, and assisting them to find gainful employment as needed. Above all the Quorum is a brotherhood to which the member is ideally far more committed and actively involved than the temporal brotherhoods of Mason, Moose, Woodman, or Elk. Being thus a religious and spiritual committment, the Mormon Quorum might well have taken a turn during the Church's formative period towards the historic tradition of communal monasticism. Mormonism had of course rejected the celibate heresy. But there was nothing actually to have inhibited the spread of the form of intense, communally centered life that in fact did emerge in some Mormon United Order colonies, which characterizes the Israeli kibbutz, and which would not have been so different from the intense communal life of many of the great monasteries -- though with nunnery and monastery combined, and schools for children as well as monk-initiates. One suspects that the frontier Americanism which infused so much of Mormon life, despite its differences, and the fact that most Mormons were European converts, prevented this happening. Indeed, one is persuaded that more of these European converts, perhaps as part of the conversion process, were determined to give up as much worldly tradition as possible, rather than bringing it with them into the new church, but often ended up adopting more of the frontier tradition of fierce independence than of the difficult new doctrine of (relatively undefined) United Order communitarianismAnd, of course, there were other problems imposed by the American government inhibiting the free evolution of Mormon tradition. As Robert Frost once wrote, "Once I came to a fork in the trail and I, followed the path less traveled by." Where might Mormonism be today had it started out with six or eight million members steeped in thousands of years of tradition, a substantial number of whose members were successful businessmen and bankers and thus able to finance a challenging new social experiment, blessed with a sovereign government of its own instead of a hostile, and ebuliently aggressive nation which had just incorporated its land, sending an outlander governor and Territorial officials, looking askance at its peculiar social, religious, and ownership usages, prepared to confiscate its temples, churches, and other properties, and to send both its first and second echelon leaders to prison until compliance with the government's quite different lifestyle was promised. The Israeli Experience As one becomes acquainted with the State of Israel, all sorts of questions naturally arise about the form Quorum membership and activities might have taken in different circumstances. The Israeli government deliberately encourages a variety of economic forms: at least two forms of kibbutz -- one where children all live together, visiting parents but twice a day for brief periods, and where all meals are prepared and taken in common; the other where families live together in individual houses or apartments, but where farming and/or manufacturing enterprises are carried out in common. Some farm collectively, using commonly-owned tractors and equipment and rotating assignments from time to time, others allocate a portion of land to the individual commune member who must schedule in advance the use of commonly owned machinery somewhat like the use of Tractor Stations in the Soviet Union. Others farm as Cooperatives, ordering seed, fertilizer, and equipment cooperatively and selling their products cooperatively to get the best price both buying and selling. Others are free to elect free enterprise farming, owing their own land and equipment and buying and selling on an individual basis. And similarly with shops, factories, and other enterprises. Associational relationships range from the most intense kibbutz form to total free enterprise. Israelis have found by experience that before permitting anyone reared on a kibbutz to apply for membership upon attaining his or her majority, it is essential to insist first that they complete their one year's national military service and then to pass the next year working in a free enterprise operation in order to be able to compare knowledgably the lifestyle of the outside world. If the candidate persists in his or her desire to join a kibbutz, he must work on the kibbutz for a year on probation to permit other kibbutz members to evaluate him as a colleague. A vote is then taken whether to admit the candidate member, who, if accepted, must sign a promissary note to cover the cost of the accumulated capital value of the commune. Payment of the note is made by deductions of part of the proportionate share of the new member's profits from future operations. Anyone familiar with the musical The Order Is Love may wonder whether that not atypical United Order colony would have experienced the same rebellion on the part of its youth had they been subjected to the same "outside residence" test before being expected to remain with the commune. And, indeed, if the colony and its crops had been subsidized by the federal government instead of sanctioned, and its membership idealized by the greater society around it rather than looked upon as aberrant and one of the two great social evils of its time, whether this United Order colony might have been preparing to celebrate its Sesquicentennial of successful operation rather than the near centennial of its demise. Pondering some of the "what might have beens", one wonders just what role the evolution of Priesthood Quorums in the LDS might have taken had the "other" road been taken. Quorums originally were permanent associations in the Brotherhood of the Priesthood. With the arrival in the West and the need to settle distant new colonies, participation in quorum activites became difficult at best and at times impossible. As a result President Brigham Young reordered quorum membership on a geographical basis, so that one, in effect, became a temporary associate of a geographically based unit dependent on residence. Given an alternative historical experience, had United Order colonies become a permanent feature of Mormondom, it is entirely possible that the Quorum might have evolved into the directing authority of the community, much on the order of government by the abbot and prelates within the monasteries even today. Indeed, had United Order colonies become the prevalent form of social organization within the early church of the restoration, one wonders whether the existing form of wards and stakes might not have had quite different importance in Church government today. What organizational challenges might then have confronted the Church as its membership inevitably spread into metropolitan areas around the globe. Already the "ward" (remember the term originated from political language, referring to church units based on the contiguous city blocks constituting the political divisions of Nauvoo, has changed enormously in nature The ward still familiar to most of the older generation was a close neighborhood of friends living near enough to walk to church together). After only a hundred and fifty years,if has been transmogrified into a term more nearly that of the "diocese" of Primitive Christianity, covering all, or a major part of a great city and requiring a car or public transportation to get to church. No longer does a set of youngsters go to school and church together and associate as neighborhood chums until college and careers separate them. Today's young Church member's schoolmates and closest friends are probably not co-religionists. And the problems of dating and marriage within the Church are issues which are leading to unprecedented numbers of young members leaving the Church or just falling into inactivity. The monastic heresy was an attempt on the part of well-intentioned individuals in the later stages of apostacy within the Primitive Church at a solution to the simony, careerism, and spiritual corruption which became endemic as the church became an instrument of the State. Had the early church been more successful in preserving the temple ceremony as a means of transmitting the fulness of the Gospel message, and had a stronger quorum structure been maintained (which was infinitely difficult given the hardships and uncertainties of transportation and communication of the time), such individualistic attempts to achieve salvation might have been avoided. Indeed, the Restored Church has not yet found durable solutions to the problem of maintaining quorum devotion, brotherhood, and committment as an ever more diverse and mobile membership spreads throughout the world. The possibility is imminent that a form of "Mormon monasticism" may yet evolve as the focus on Ward and Quorum is replaced with an intense concentration on personal life and the unitary family, eclipsing the importance of both church and, ironically, of the the outside world (hence my choice of the term "Mormon monasticism" to describe the phenomenon). Under the new bloc plan for meetings, church members now see each other for a brief, concentrated three hour session once a week, with the effects on friendship and dating already mentioned. If long continued, this might yet take the form of a family-focussed "monasticism" as an alternative to the individual or group structured form which developed from the Third Century onward or the dedication to Quorum or United Order Colony which might have evolved within the Restored Church under other circumstances, as creeping individuation erodes the importance of both Quorum membership and involvement in the neighborhood ward, which were among the most significant doctrinal and organizational contributions of the Restoration. Any number of critics of Mormonism seem to see this happening, charging Mormon families with exclusivity and coldness towards outsiders; while many within the Church sense a dwindling of dedication to home teaching and other facets of quorum committment and to family involvement in ward activities.