The Nomadic Alternative – Page 210

Stability, or perseverance in one particular place was one of the three pillars of the Benedictine vow. No monk must allow himself the temptations of the road and he needed permission from the bishop before leaving the diocese. Repetitious chanting of the litany, seasonal feasts, fasts and penances, and cyclical process-ions round the ambulatory reproduced in miniature and within the cloister the automatism and the discipline of the mobile life.

"We find", wrote Thomas Merton, "a progressive interiorizat[ion] of the pilgrimage theme, until in monastic literature, the peregrinatio of the monk is entirely spiritual, and is in fact synonymous with monastic stability."

But the internal itinerary is but a substitute for freedom of movement and its appeal is limited to relatively few well-disciplined minds. Total theocracy is impractical and inevitably falls victim to the waywardness of men. Any authority that aspires to the complete regimentation of its people triggers off an equally react-ionary response. Had the Mediaeval Church tried to settle the quasi-religious riff-raff of the road, harmonious communities would have become hotbeds of revolution overnight. Authority was forced to channel the restlessness elsewhere and cast round for alternative outlets - a safety valve to nullify chaos at home.

"Deus Vult!" shrieked the mob when Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Any crusade is a trumped-up excuse to unleash - in the name of high-sounding prin-ciple, such as Democracy, Communism, Islam or Christianity - poten-tially criminal elements on an unsuspecting and undeserving foreigner.

At the same time the Crusade augments the wealth and power of the ruling caste at home. All expansionist enterprises operate on these lines.

The Crusade was to be a "War to end all Wars". It aimed at the complete unification of Christendom, and God's Vicar on Earth naturally elected himself President over it. The Pope ordered all fellow Christians to bury their rivalries in the "Truce of God", and this was a signal for a rash of pogroms against the local Jews.