When we think of the monk, we picture him first in the choir, gathered in prayer: there lies the heart of his day. Yet imagination also carries him elsewhere – in the fields or in the workshops, engaged in labor. It is no coincidence that St. Benedict, in his Rule, warned that “idleness is the enemy of the soul” and required monks to devote themselves to workat set times, while reserving others for silence and the study of God’s Word.
Western tradition – beginning with Benedict’s Rule – conceived work as a rhythm within a rhythm: between prayer, lectio, and rest, the effort of the hands and the mind acts as a hinge, not as the protagonist. It is a remedy for otiositas, an exercise in humility, a balance of the soul, always subordinate to the opus Dei. The famous expression ora et laboradoes not literally appear in the Rule, but it captures its balance: to alternate, measure, and order time in the service of God.
At the root lies a serious Gospel tension: “Look at the birds of the air…” on one side; “Whoever refuses to work shall not eat” on the other. Augustine, in De opere monachorum, resolves the knot without shortcuts: primacy of prayer, yes; but also the duty of work for all, against the idleness that corrupts and against the temptation of living off donations. Work is an honest means of sustenance and discipline of the heart, not an added penitential burden.
The Rule of the Master also insists: once the officia Dei are done, let them turn to opera corporalia. Not to produce at all costs, but to occupy free hours, restrain wandering thoughts, and educate the senses. The schedule is concrete: three-hour shifts, small groups (decadae), a praepositus overseeing, and a reading aloud accompanying the work. Prayer is not suspended: it flows like an unbroken undertone.
Why, then, does the monk work? Because labor keeps him awake – not only to material reality (the garden, the bakery, the small workshops) but also to the inner one. The repeated gesture, far from being an escape, roots prayer in the body and preserves humility. No surprise that Benedict dedicates an entire chapter (RB 48) to work and considers it part of the spiritual path: a “moderate asceticism,” suited to beginners rather than heroes, that prevents both activism and disengagement.
And there is an uncomfortable correction to our stereotypes: heavy farming was not the norm. Benedict foresaw it only as an extraordinary case – the poverty of the monastery, the necessity of the place – and even then reluctantly, since it might disrupt participation in the Divine Office. “Si autem necessitas loci…”: the monk goes if need be, but it is no ordinary program. The exception proves the rule: work must not devour prayer or uproot the monk from the cloister.
And what of intellectual labor? Monks, without romanticism, called it manual work. To copy a manuscript meant to bend back and eyes; “three fingers write, the whole body toils,” noted a scribe. Transcribing was born as a craft to sustain the community, and only later became, for us, a cultural monument. Monastic culture, which would eventually fill scriptoria and libraries, grew from this concrete discipline, from the rhythm of the pen before the abstraction of ideas.
History then became more complex. Between the 10th and 11th centuries, a division of orders was theorized: oratoresand laboratores had distinct tasks. At Cluny, the scale tipped decisively toward liturgy: prayer itself became the labor, the body engaged in the office like in a true toil, and the statutes of the community tended to reduce manual activity until Peter the Venerable felt the need to restore it, at least partly, as a safeguard against idleness. The center of gravity remained the same: the opus Dei. But here the “active life” coincided with the choral office, not the workshop. At the opposite extreme stood the Carthusians. If Cluny “internalized” labor in liturgy, the Charterhouse reduced it to the cell: the management of lands was entrusted to the lay brothers; for the monk, only copying manuscripts remained as external toil, three to four hours in winter, up to eight in summer, within solitude. “Since we cannot with our voices, we preach with our hands the Word of God,” they said. The gesture of the scribe became a form of silent preaching, able to outlast time.
This variety is not inconsistency, but fidelity to the essential. Everywhere – in the most cenobitic rule as in the most eremitic experience – labor remains a means of preserving the primacy of God and the quality of communal life. When it risks dissolving the unity of the day, it is limited; when the community slides into inertia, it is reintroduced. Thus work saves prayer from evasion, and prayer saves work from the idolatry of efficiency. It is the monastic way of resolving the old tension between Martha and Mary.
There is also a practical note, often forgotten by rhetoric: many monasteries did not till the “great estates” directly; they administered, leased, and oversaw them. Not out of laziness, but to prevent management from consuming spiritual life and communal unity. The garden, yes; the large estate, no. Measure here is not only virtue, but a politics of time. And yet precisely this “politics” produced diverse solutions: the use of lay brothers, the Cistercian granges, the networks of lay skills around the cloisters show how work extended the monastery beyond its walls, creating a functional reciprocity with the world: prayer offered protection, discipline inspired trust. Even when the monk did not hold the plow, work – administrative, artisanal, scribal – remained part of his ascesis.
What, then, does it mean for a monk to work? Not to accumulate, but to order; not to perform, but to purify; not to fill time, but to consecrate it. In the workshop as in the scriptorium, the repeated exercise trains the will, makes the body obedient, banishes fantasies of the ego. Spiritually, it matters because it prevents prayer from dissolving into vague sentiment and community life from decaying into chatter. Practically, it matters because it ensures sober self-sufficiency and makes monks just stewards of the gifts received. As long as work remains a means and not an end, the monk finds in it the same word he sings in choir: a patient, tenacious yes, day after day.
Perhaps here lies a lesson even for us, outsiders to the cloister yet not to exhaustion. The monk does not save the world by working more, but by working well: with measure, with meaning, with a purpose beyond the result. This is what makes toil a theological space, not a cult of efficiency. And this is what allows us, across all seasons of monastic history, to recognize the red thread beneath differences: work as a school of freedom, because it frees from idleness and anxiety; and as a school of faith, because it returns every gesture to the One for whom it is worth doing.
p.A.S.
Silere non possum