The Evolution of Enclosure at the Monastery of St. John's as Viewed through the Lens of the Rule of Virgins

In Chapter 2 of Caesarius of Aries' Rule of Virgins. it says: If anyone has left her parents and wishes to renounce the world and enter the holy sheepfold, so that with God's help she is able to escape the jaws of the spiritual wolf, she should not leave the monastery until her death, not even to go into the basilica where the door is located. Caesarius, writing in the first half of the sixth century, leaves no room for doubt, he is mandating perpetual reclusion! Can one safely assume that this prescription was part of his founding vision? Caesarius himself alluded to the fact that he continually revised the rule in response to developments in the community between 512 and 534, writing Although, by God's grace we created a Rule for you when we established the monastery, afterwards, with many changes here, we have made numerous additions and deletions (Rule, 48.1). Scholar Adalbert de Vogue, in his masterful analysis of the Rule of Virgins' literary sources and vocabulary, has conclusively established that it was written in four separate phases over a period of twenty-two years.1 In 512, Caesarius drafted chapters 1 to 16 of the rule for the foundation of the Monastery of St. John. Between 520 and 530 he composed chapters 17-35, as well as the finalized norms for liturgy, meals and fasting in chapters 66-72. 3 Chapters 36-47 were written between 530 and 534,4 and the Recapitulation (chapters 48-65) and Conclusion (73) in 534.5 Vogue suggests that Caesarius may not have inserted Chapter Two's mandate for perpetual reclusion until the final revision. If this mandate was not part of Caesarius's founding vision, what subsequent events led him to think it was necessary? This paper will seek to answer this question by analyzing the prescriptions regulating enclosure found in each of the phases of the rule and laying out some broader trends of Caesarius's revisionary process tied to specific historical exigencies. Prescriptions governing enclosure remained relatively minimal until some 18 to 22 years after the foundation of the Monastery of St. John, at which point they mushroomed and then culminated in perpetual reclusion. This profound shift, it may be argued, is connected to increased exchanges with the outside world that demanded the development of a permeable and yet clearly defined monastic boundary. Caesarius of Aries was born in 470 to a wealthy family in the Burgundian town of Chalon, south of Dijon. Caesarius entered the local clergy at the age of seventeen and became a monk of Lerins two years later. In 503 he was appointed Bishop of Aries.8 Prior to founding the Monastery of St. John, he sent his sister Caesaria to a monastery in Marseille to prepare her to lead the community (Life, 1.35). In 507, he was in the midst of building a monastery outside the city walls for his sister and two or three companions when the Franks and Burgundians besieged the city of Aries. The Vita Caesarii reports: During this siege the monastery that Caesarius was beginning to have built for his sister and other virgins was almost completely destroyed; its beams and upper rooms were ripped apart and overturned by savage barbarians. And when he saw in ruins the work that he had been hastening to complete and had erected with his own hands and sweat, he was consumed by a double sorrow (Life, 1.28). When Caesarius began building a monastery for his sister and her companions a second time, it was no longer outside the city walls, but next to a bustling cathedral, connected to his residence. In light of these events, Jane T. Schulenburg proposes that Caesarius viewed enclosure as essentially an external, physical defense to protect the nuns and their chastity from barbarian invaders and local violence. While this seems a logical conclusion, it is not verified by what is found in the initial rule that Caesarius gave his community in 512. Aside from the previously discussed interpolation, there seem to be no protective or prohibitive restrictions, but only a spiritual exhortation: stay continually in the cell of the monastery and implore the visitation of the Son of God with constant prayer (RuIe9 1. …

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