Powerful figures as Cassian

Eastern monasticism grew and flourished, and its ascetics probably numbered in the tens of thousands, some even in double monasteries, communities with men and women living separately in the same house. In the west, even with such intellectually powerful figures as Cassian and eventually Gregory, monasticism long remained in small houses, scattered and finding their respective authority in different ways. In Ireland, abbots were bishops and monks ruled the church, but elsewhere, some houses stood alone and rose and fell in a generation or two, while wealth and patronage began to build more powerful houses near royal courts and cathedrals.

Generations after Justinian

Despite all the quarreling of monks, in the generations after Justinian, particularly, but not only, in the western provinces, something important faded from view: heresy. For Justinian’s great effort to bring the whole world into doctrinal alignment with himself not only failed; it failed catastrophically and permanently. Egypt and Syria settled into their versions of monophysitism; Constantinople clung to its increasingly nuanced and impenetrable version of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; the western churches gradually tumbled together under something like the authority of the bishop of Rome—an authority that would sometimes be contested, but rarely on doctrinal grounds. The history of the development of the core doctrines of Christianity henceforth comes to an end, and what will occur in the future are occasional revivals and repetitions of old arguments. Christians in the west during the ninth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries fought over free will and predestination. Westerners could never agree on these questions, though they held little interest at any period for the eastern churches. Now and again, communities would need to act out their hostilities, as when the Greek and Latin churches, long adrift and estranged, found it necessary in the eleventh century—just when harmony would have begun to be valuable—to declare their enmity with mutual excommunications not lifted for 900 years.