A Visit to Fountains Abbey

We arrived at Fountains Abbey in the late afternoon of a cool damp autumn day. A somber brooding mood pervaded the ruin. To me these atmospheric relics of past human activity seem to be the clues in a cosmic puzzle, almost as if I were in some total emersion game punctuated with provocative cryptic pointers here and there as to the meaning of the human predicament: “Here is your next clue….”

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This vast derelict monastery was occupied for nearly four hundred years; the monks must have thought it would go on until kingdom come, but as with so many human endeavors they had no hope of foreseeing the vicissitudes of change. We look on the Abbey now and listen to the audio guide, barely able to connect with the motives and thinking of the men (yes all men) who built and maintained a community in a culture whose world and raison d’etre was so different from our own: in fact today we have all but lost the concept of a civic raison d’etre. Even a ‘believer’ like me finds it difficult to understand the highly civic manifestation of Christianity of the middle ages, although perhaps we can see the beginings of it in religious cults like the Mormons.

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The ruin of the Fountains Abbey is perhaps the nearest medieval equivalent of Stonehenge and Karnak, all being the product of a priestly class, a sign of a labour surplus, a sign of social wealth, but not just wealth, but also evidence of a civic weltanschauung. The monks of Fountains abbey started in a small way after a spat with the clergy of York minister. Like so many before them and many after them, these devout rebels wanted to clear the ground of the religious elaborations subverted by secular wealth and cares, and make a space for themselves to think and worship in simple rustic austerity. They yearned to get back to how they thought things should be, and in order to do so they imposed the time honoured monastic solution to worldly corruption: that of separation and, initially at least, asceticism. And so the Cistercian Abbey of Fountains got started in 1132. The monks lived following the monastic community Rule of St. Benedict. This rule was authoritarian and article driven, as has been the way of many Christian communities before and after Fountains. However, a successful disciplined community ethic is often the road to wealth and a subsequent and necessary involvement in economics and politics as a result. Fountains Abbey became an economic powerhouse and grew rich with the proceeds of the wool trade; ironically in this very material way they blessed the medieval world, increasing its wealth and standard of living; for themselves at least

It is ironic that the disciplined monastic separation of the monks at Fountains in time confronted them with the real challenge that a life of grace faces: grace is not expressed in some ethereal contemplative realm divorced from material reality but in the way we handle secular affairs and cope with the temptations these affairs throw up. Riches are not in themselves wrong and a naïve faith thinks abstinence and separation to be the way of salvation. In the uneasy relation between social riches and spirituality the fault is not in the riches per se, but in a wise and detached handling of them. But as a potential channel of temptation, they too easily become our master and idol.