It is hard to over-estimate the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries upon the Kingdom of England. This network of brotherhoods, these establishments dedicated to prayer, hospitality and healing both kept England orientated towards God and provided a vital safety net independent from the State. Their dissolution was the real irreversible move to modernity and the consequent atomised individualism, controlling bureaucracy and a dark spirit of power and competition.
With the monasteries still extant there would have been a safeguard against a usurious economy and an overweening State. The ever encroaching tide of secular power and de-sacralisation would have been resisted. In England more than anywhere else its revolutionary declaration of war upon the Church took the form of obliteration of the rich monastic life of the country. Neither Jacobin France nor Bolshevik Russia went quite so far, far as they undoubtedly did go in their rebellion against God! Without the monks’ prayers is it any wonder England became the chief advocate of secular power and trade? Those monks’ prayers might have saved us from the deleterious transformation into a modern economic system.
The dissolution of the monasteries coincided with the move to a modern state with a bureaucracy in large part constructed by Cromwell. The Elizabethan poor law would become necessary without the safety net of the monastery. And the eradication of much herbal and medicinal knowledge guarded by the monks would lead to suspicions of witchcraft in those situations where an elderly peasant crone knew something of the lost herbal remedies. And with the disappearance of the monk soon followed the knight, to be replaced by the merchant and the privateer.
The monastic culture and its establishments distributed across the country was the spiritual heart of England, providing also a practical apparatus. The monasteries were not only a place of prayer, but a social and health service. From their spiritual life many other practical and worldly benefits flowed. Classical knowledge had been preserved in our monasteries through the period of the fall of the Roman Empire. The monks provided a basic education for children. Their artwork in illuminated manuscripts was one example of the creative and artistic work of the monastic world. Alms, medicine, treatment and shelter were provided to those who needed that safety net and that care.
Most significant and least quantifiable was the prayer-life of the monasteries that must have staved off many threats, spiritual and physical and kept the country Christian. Had the monasteries been preserved there would have been a counterweight to the worst excesses of modernity.
The dissolution, by contrast, has ensured our country is one of the most secular. Without the monasteries the avaricious were unrestrained, the poor and weak were unprotected. With no sanctuary and no spiritual conscience to the kingdom we saw a vertiginous decline into materialism, secularism and quantification. By contrast, had there remained a strong monastic element to the country would it have been possible for England to become so quickly a privateering country of mercantile and materialist interests. The disappearance of the monasteries was a de-sacralisation that opened the way to usury, enclosure and the power of the merchant.
With no monastic voice or presence “progress” quickly became the official idol of worship, perhaps concealing the true new god - Mammon. After the monasteries we would see the excesses of iconoclasm, followed by regicide, then Whig corruption, later came enclosure, and then industrialisation alienating us from our land and finally the ultimate state of the tech era in the techno-capitalist society leading to a new low of anomie. All around is rampant individualism now degenerating further into wokeness and “diversity”. Meanwhile the ever-encroaching State seeks to turn us into digital data and remove all personal freedom, absorbing us entirely into their secular machine.
It is because we have no prayers to bring divine protection and hold us together. No faithful monastics praying for the King, lords and common people. We are left exposed to the buffeting and undermining of the evil spirits. We are vulnerable and yet haughty. Proud yet weak. Seemingly dominant yet completely subject to globalist forces that are sweeping us away. Come back monks of old and save us from ourselves.
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