The fall of the great Benedictine monasteries of the Middle Ages came when Charlemagne decided they should provide education of letters and the liberal arts in addition to religious devotion. Until this point, the monasteries had remained true to the ideals of St. Jerome, who once said, ‘a monk’s office is not a teacher’s but a mourner’s, who bewails either himself or the world.’ Unlike the new Franciscan and Dominican mendicant orders, once a monk joined a monastery, he stayed there for the rest of his life. He worked the fields, cooked in the kitchens, and the monasteries were essentially self-sustainable. After Charlemagne’s decree, the monks who inhabited them were no longer free to devote their time to only prayer and the exigencies of living.
The segregated nature of these older monasteries folded under, and gave way to mendicant orders–the Dominicans and Franciscans–that sustained themselves by begging. They weren’t chained by necessity to a hoe and pitch-fork, and this gave them the freedom to travel across Europe. St Thomas himself wandered back and forth across the continent numerous times.
Universities arose from these monasteries of learning, and peasants slowly built towns up around them, for they now worked the fields and fed the monasteries. Instead of a feudal, agrarian society, towns took over, and cities arose, which were built in the new Gothic style, learnt from the Arabs of Muslim Spain–al-Andalucia. Everywhere that cities grew the Gothic took hold, in the cathedrals and the schools, and it changed the atmosphere of the land from the downward, earthy, dismal spirit of Romanesque Architecture, which used its weight to remind man of his suffering, his original sin that kept him from the ecstacy of God’s embrace. The Romanesque man was entrenched firmly in the wet ground, and sought to plumb no heights. The new Gothic cathedrals were soaring arches of stone whose carvings were so detailed the naked eye alone could not see them from the cathedral floor, and they swept up into the sky, afire with the light of God’s creation as it streamed in through the stone walls that the Romanesque style had made as impassible as St Peter’s Gate.
Now, instead of existing in the base nature of God’s creation, man could worship bathed in the light of his Word. The stained glass windows took the invisible magic of light and made it visible, even divisible, and revealed its composite parts, just as philosophy would reveal the nature of God’s universe. The windows revealed the Acts of God to man, showing His hand as it acts in everyday life. Everything became a theophany.
On Charlemagne’s establishment of monastic schools: http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/hwp206.htm
