The Military Orders as Monastic Orders

In spiritual affairs and temporal, the twelfth century was an age when one’s interests were advanced by associating with the influential. Those who renounced the world for religion were believed to amass influence in heaven. By conferring gifts upon them the laity hoped to share that influence, and the statement that such gifts were made for the good of their souls became formulaic in their charters. ¹ Sometimes donors explained their motives or why a particular monastic establishment had been chosen for preferential treatment. Having considered bonds of kinship or fealty and the obligations of practicality, these donors were free to invest in one of three broad categories of (living) religious. The first comprised saintly individuals, whose solitary contemplation fostered an intimate knowledge of matters divine and detached insights into the affairs of men. The second comprised enclosed communities, perhaps young and zealous, perhaps moderate and well-established, but either way hopeful arks of salvation sailing away from worldly sin on voyages of inner purification. The third comprised charitable communities which risked polluting that purity to effect tangible good deeds in the world. Our task is not to determine the extent to which contemporaries assessed these three alternatives and weighed their options accordingly, but to locate the Temple and Hospital within this spiritual diagram. This is necessary because some of monasticism’s greatest historians have completely ignored them, even though they belong in the third category with the canons regular. ² Although Colin Morris, Hugh Lawrence, Janet Burton and the archaeologists Patrick Greene and Roberta Gilchrist have at least acknowledged that these orders should feature in the history of Western monasticism, surrounding debates remain unresponsive to their reintegration. Too many discussions of active spirituality for example still revolve around the canons regular and later the friars. Add the military orders and active spirituality is augmented enormously. How then should this affect our understanding of the trends within contemporary monastic benefaction? In short, it forces us to consider the possibility that charity, commonly associated more with the thirteenth century, was successfully competing with enclosed religion early in the twelfth.