Monasticism was supposed to have ended, or at least to have been relegated to a minority religious practice, as modernity did its work. The sociology of secularization predicted it. The cultural narrative of the 20th century assumed it. Instead, beginning roughly in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, something different happened: a revival of interest in monastic life, monastic practice, and monastic community that crossed denominational lines, included large numbers of laypeople who had no intention of taking vows, and generated some of the most substantive thinking about friendship and human community produced in recent decades.
The monastic revival is not a single movement. It includes the dramatic growth of contemplative religious orders that were written off as declining — Trappist monasteries in the United States that saw surges of applicants, Benedictine communities that found themselves hosting thousands of retreat guests annually, Cistercian communities whose publications and recordings reached audiences their founders could not have imagined. It includes the oblate movement, through which people living entirely ordinary secular lives affiliate with monastic communities and take on modified versions of monastic practice. It includes new monastic communities — intentional communities inspired by monastic patterns but organized around laypeople living in urban contexts. And it includes the enormous reach of monastic writing: Thomas Merton's readership spanning Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and secular readers; Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk becoming a general-audience bestseller; Esther de Waal's Benedictine commentary finding readers among corporate executives and schoolteachers. Something about the monastic recovery of human community spoke to a culture that had tried other arrangements and found them insufficient.
The friendship dimension of monastic revival is specific and worth isolating. The monastic tradition had always been, among other things, a tradition of thinking seriously about how human bonds work within community — about the difference between particular friendship (the exclusive dyad) and the ordered love that community requires, about the practices that sustain genuine knowing between people over decades, about the relationship between solitude and the capacity for genuine presence to others. When the revival brought these ideas into contact with a secular culture experiencing acute friendship deficits, the fit was not coincidental. The monastic analysis of friendship's structural requirements — time, shared purpose, accountability, the development of interiority that makes genuine other-directedness possible — addressed precisely the conditions that secular modernity had dismantled.
What the revival disclosed about friendship is most visible in the oblate and retreat contexts, where people who were not seeking religious experience per se were seeking something the monastery provided that their ordinary social lives did not. The retreatant who spent a week in silence at a Benedictine monastery and came away describing the quality of human attention available there — the monks who knew their guests as persons rather than customers, the shared liturgy that created social attunement without requiring social performance, the space for genuine interior quiet that made genuine human meeting more possible — was describing a friendship environment, even if the language used was spiritual. The monastery had preserved conditions for the kind of attention that friendship requires, conditions that the surrounding culture had allowed to erode.
The revival's friendship implications are not without their own limits. Monastic communities are, by definition, communities organized around religious commitment, which means their friendship environment is inseparable from a specific theological and liturgical structure. The person who wants the friendship environment without the religion has to extract the relevant practices from their institutional matrix, and extraction is lossy. The new monastic movement has attempted this extraction with varying degrees of success, maintaining some of the structural features of monastic community (shared life, common rule, accountability practices) while loosening the theological requirements. The results are instructive about both what the structure can produce when maintained and what is lost when parts of it are removed.
The dignity logic here is about recognition: what the monastic revival offered was a set of social arrangements in which persons were recognized as having an interior life that mattered, that required cultivation, and that was taken seriously by the community. This is dignity at the level of social structure — not the dignity of legal rights but the dignity of being treated as a person whose interior life is real and whose development as a person is a collective concern. In a consumer culture organized around preference satisfaction, this form of dignity is in short supply.