https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ETcB29tMviA
All right. Well, I’m a little sick today, but I’m going to record anyway and hope that this goes okay. I was having that conversation on an open mic night that Father Eric runs, which is very nice. And Corey was there and we were talking about this interesting thing called the monastery. So I think the reason why the monastery is important is because we’ve lost the monastery and there’s a lot of people thinking about monasteries and what they are and what they should do. What they do now is not what they did before. And you see a lot of, we’ll say, good representations of medieval monasteries, but they’re not in the West. They’re in the East because monasteries have more or less kind of survived in Asia where they haven’t here because mostly Henry VIII. And I know Adam and I sort of go over a little bit of that in this video here on the English Revolution. And the thing about monastery is it served a lot of purposes. And the nice thing about the talk that I did with Corey on Father Eric’s open mic night, which I shall link here, all goes well, is I got to sort of talk about all the things you miss because it’s not like the monastery goes away. And now you don’t have a monastery. There’s all these services being provided by the monastery. So one of the services that the monastery provides is it takes in orphans. So it’s an orphanage. That’s good to know, right? It’s also a place for people to go to get charity, right? Food, things like that, that they don’t otherwise have, right? It’s how you feed the poor. The monastery is also the store of value for the community. The community has stuff and it wants to sort of save it for the future or put it away or do something with it. It goes to the monastery. The monastery converts it somehow, stores it, transforms it, preserves it, whatever. And that’s how value is stored. This is why the Vikings hit the monasteries in England, right? That’s how that happened. That’s where the money was. The money wasn’t with the king, it was with the monasteries. This is why Henry VIII sacks the monasteries. He’s like, why can’t I tax the people? I need money. Who has money? Oh, the monasteries. So they were the store of value. At the community level, though, it never really rose up beyond that. I’m not saying there weren’t incidents and bad things didn’t happen and bad people weren’t bad because bad people are always bad, in monasteries and churches, in king’s courts, in the gutter. People do things. But in general, that didn’t happen. Monasteries kind of kept the wealth local. So the other thing that monasteries provide is medicine. A lot of the medicinal stuff comes out of your monastery. And also education. There’s a lot of talk about this. Education comes from monasteries. That’s where it comes from. And education includes military training. Still like that in the East, right? The whole Shaolin Temple, the original Kung Fu series from the 1970s, David Carradine, a particular favorite of mine. Real good lessons in there, for sure. Love that series. Watched it multiple times. The warrior monks. And most monks are warriors, in fact. Maybe in the church, you didn’t fight in a battle, although many bishops did. But in the monastery, you were trained for war. It’s one of the things they trained you for because the center of education and reading and learning and all that stuff. All the books are at the monastery. So it’s also your library. So a lot of these functions have been taken over by governments. That makes the government very heavy. Builds a bureaucracy. It’s possible that all government bureaucracy comes from the burden of taking on the roles that used to be done in the monastery. It’s worth thinking about. But you’re missing far more. And the stuff I’ve listed is not the important stuff that you’re missing. The important stuff that you’re missing from the monastery is this sense of the hierarchy that you live in. So when you’re in a monastery, you’re part of this hierarchy. It’s not the king or the local nobleman, the church and the people. This is also the monastery. Hierarchy is much deeper, much more involved, much richer. The church through the monastery may do the charity, but the church doesn’t do the charity. That’s a relatively recent thing. It’s not the church didn’t know charity. It’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is most of the charity is done by the monastery. The church is feeding the money to the monastery. It’s not using the money itself like it does now to go out and do charity. Not how it worked. So the corrupt priests, and there were, always have been, always will be corrupt priests, couldn’t be as corrupt. In the monasteries, you’re supposed to be praying like eight hours a day. They’re more pious than the priests. Because of that, they are the exemplar for the spiritual life. Not your priest, not your bishop, not the pope. The monks, they’re praying more. They’re doing more. And the thing about it is when you have a deep hierarchy with more than three steps, we’ll say, all hierarchies are ladders. They’re ladders. So the monastery provides you a step that you don’t have without it. And it could be that your position on the hierarchy, go into the priesthood, get up the hierarchy. Hierarchy is not bad. They tell you your place. They give you a place to be. They show you limitations of what you can do. They give you a way to specialize, which I think is really important. We kind of talk about specialization backwards as something you can just adopt. But in fact, not all people can be specialists in all things. And some people can’t be specialists in anything. With a deep enough hierarchy, that doesn’t matter. You can still contribute and be just as valuable as a specialist. That’s worth knowing. But also, you can step into the monastery, even from the lowest point or even from the priesthood. That’s where the priests go to retire sometimes, is the monastery. And that ladder, it’s not the church to the angels to God. It’s the church to the monastery to the angels to God or something like that. I’m not claiming to be an expert at this. But you can see the difference when you remove that step, that rung on the ladder. It gives you a different sense of hierarchy. When you grow up in a village with a church and a monastery and a nobleman and all the peasants, that’s a lot more hierarchy. It’s not just one more step. Because things have interrelationships. In a previous video, on one, two, and three, I talked about this. The number of connections it gets me goes up exponentially. It doesn’t go up in some linear fashion. It’s not like, oh, one more step. You have many more connections with one more step. Because you’re adding that step to the other steps, right, or that rung of the ladder. Gives you more options. Gives you more ways to relate. It gives the lower rungs of the ladder something to look up to. It’s a little closer. Right. There’s one more step. It’s not ten steps. It’s not two steps. One. And all of that is important. Because even just living in something with such a rich and deep hierarchy gives you a better sense, a better understanding, a better appreciation for hierarchy. And gives you a better relationship to hierarchy. Because hierarchy is inevitable. Hierarchy is older than trees, as Jordan Peterson says. So that’s very important. So when we lose the relationship to hierarchy, we lose the relationship to hierarchy. So when we lose the monasteries, we’re not just losing the store of value locally. Charity. Medicine. Education. And, you know, one step on the hierarchy. We’re also losing that exemplification of people who pray eight hours a day. Right. Of people who are in a state of constant sacrifice and submission. Right. Who are, on average, far more humble. Not everybody in the monastery. Not everybody in the monastery is a monk. Like I said, they’re taking in orphans. They’re, you know, giving out charity. They’re giving people a place to stay. Right. When they need it temporarily. Right. They’re doing all these things. They’re not donating to church. I mean, the monastery is part of the church. This is where things get confused with our recent usage of the terms and the more medieval usages. So that’s really important to know. That that sort of sense of all the things that the monasteries actually offering to everybody. Like to you at the bottom, to the church, because the church, the structure of the church, the bishop, the priests, right. They get something out of having the monastery there too. The community in general. Right. The group. You individual poor person. Right. Or person at the bottom. The group. Your family. The people around you. Your immediate community is getting a bunch of stuff out of it. The other elements of the community like the church getting something out of it. Noble people are getting something out of it. Some of them go to the monastery too. Right. When you lose all of that at once, you lose all these things. And one of them is probably a sense of home. Right. And so the collapse of the monastery system in some ways is going to cause some domicide for people. Because even if they have a structure that’s fairly complete but doesn’t have the monastery, maybe they can’t find a home because they needed whatever the monastery provided. It’s no longer there. Or maybe they didn’t need that. But they needed the contrast because you need contrast to see. I’ve talked about that before. They needed the contrast of the monastery to see where they fit in. Even if it’s not in the monastery. Because you need that contrast to see things. Seeing isn’t just a matter of what you know or what information you have access to. It’s also a matter of contrast. It might be the most important thing for sight. At least it is for physical sight with your eyes. So I wanted to do this video and kind of give you a sense for all of the things you’re missing. When the monasteries collapse. And perhaps, at least to me, one of the most important things that you’re missing is the exemplification of people who are putting their full effort into looking up. And giving that upward thing, that highest thing, the thing that I value the most when you watch my videos, which is their time and attention.