Beginning in the 4th century AD, when the Roman Empire legalized Christianity, we had to find a new way to witness for our faith. No longer did we have the threat of martyrdom in the arena hanging over our heads. Being a devout Christian no longer represented the willingness to sacrifice in order to follow our Lord. What did we have to give up, when it became a status bonus to follow the religion of the Emperor? And yet, clearly the world had not yet embraced the Kingdom of God.
So in protest against the "worldliness" of the way that people lived throughout the Empire, a few brave souls decided to walk away from the cities. They wanted to find a place where they could concentrate on their search for God, first and only. They left behind the usual values of success and wealth, the rampant idolatry of the old gods, and the distractions of popular culture in order to "seek first the Kingdom of God." They gave up homes and family, jobs and status, even the respect and approval of their peers, and walked out into the wilderness to pray and fast. They sought to be personally transformed by a closer relationship with the Lord Jesus, in just the same way that Jesus walked away to the wilderness to pray after his baptism in the Jordan. They became hermits in the desert.
Of course, they knew it would be hard. It's never easy to fast and pray. It takes lots of determination to defy conventional "wisdom" and to follow a way that the world views as "crazy." And there would be temptations. The Devil must divert those who choose to break a new path to God, lest they succeed and draw others behind them. Jesus Himself was tempted to get off the path, into materialism, hyper-spiritualism, or political power, but He saw those traps and avoided them. Satan would have temptations and traps for them, too, passions and extremism of all sorts, and some would give up in frustration, finding that they could not persevere alone.
Plus, our Lord came to serve, so we have to find ways to serve also, and not just retreat from the world. His Presence was his witness to the Kingdom, because He is perfect, but our witness would be our absence, because we are not. Our service is to pray for the world, that it might be transformed into our Lord's Kingdom, and all souls might turn to Him and be saved. But first we have to be transformed ourselves, by His grace allowing us to remain in His Presence. One of his graces has been to let us gather together in small groups, like-minded, to pray together and help guide each other.
In the early days of the Desert Fathers, those who were recognized as exceptionally holy became leaders, as the beginners came to them for advice. The saints, Anthony and Pachomius, organized their followers into communities of monks, on the principle that each would be a help to the others, to encourage and reprove each other along the path. The community would assign tasks to each for its collective upkeep, according to their skills. These were usually simple tasks, anything from weaving mats, to keeping bees, to cooking dinner, or copying scriptures for those who had nothing to read. The monks were expected to be able to continue to pray while they worked, and there were also times when the community would come together to pray, or to eat dinner together and listen to a reading from the Scriptures.
In these early years, the monks would have been daily praying through the whole book of Psalms, as well as a daily liturgy including the Eucharist. At first, they used a bowl or bag of stones, 150 of them, to keep track of their progress, but later they found that a knotted rope was far easier to use and carry, so they could be away from their cells to work and not lose track of their prayers. Eventually, they would have every one of the Psalms safely in their memories, and could recite them all by heart. And of course, they would meditate on episodes from our Lord's life, and dwell on his sayings.
Nearly from the beginning of this monastic development, Saint Anthony would have had a copy of Saint Athanasius' New Testament, which he compiled in 367 AD. This was the first list of the same 27 books that we know as canonical today. The two men were close friends, and Bishop Athanasius stayed in the desert with Anthony on several occasions. He later wrote Anthony's biography. If a monk could have had a copy of one of the Gospels, it would have been a most prized possession. For certain, it would have been a source of "holy reading" at the dinner gathering.
Of course, every community needs a set of rules to prevent confusion and keep them on track. Saint Pachomius was the first to make up a Rule for his community. He called it "The Paradise," and it was so successful that he drew enough followers to fill eight monastic communities. Elsewhere, each community had its own Rule to follow, some more strict than others, but all involved some degree of asceticism. There was almost always a requirement to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Thus, there were some who desired a monastic life, but who could bear neither the strictures nor the privations, and they wandered from one community to the next, seeking a "proper fit."
The abbots were well aware of this aimless wandering, and many stated that a monk would be better off to simply choose one place and stay put. As Saint Anthony said it, "A frequently transplanted tree cannot bear fruit." Finally, it was Saint Benedict who decided that any monk who wished to join his community would also have to take a vow of stability as well. This meant promising that he would stay in one place, until sent away by the Abbot. The Rule of Saint Benedict was so successful that it became the basis of most of the monastic communities in Europe. And since it was meant to be a humane, if simple way of life, a monk would rather stay in place than leave, unless the Abbot sent him in a small group to found another monastery. It was also Saint Benedict who established the canonical Hours of Prayer, or "Opus Dei" as he chose to call it. Eight times each day, including once during the night, the monks would come to chapel to pray, chanting a liturgy of Psalms. This is still the common practice of monks to this day.
As not all novices applying for entrance into a monastic community were literate, especially during the "Dark Ages" between the sack of Rome in 405 and the rise of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, and allowing for the scarcity of hand copied books, the practice of praying the whole book of Psalms began to wane. It was difficult to find a teacher to tutor one in reading, and no less challenging to acquire a text for study and memorization. Thus, many of the younger monks would make do by reciting other, better known prayers, like the Jesus prayer, the Our Father or a prayer to the Virgin Mary, and counting out 150, or more, of these each day. The long strings of knots then came to be called a Rosary, especially when a majority of the prayers were offered to Mary toward the end of the 7th century. There was no official rule to organize how the prayers were said, but combining the practice with meditations on various episodes from the Gospels was a natural extension of devotion. It also helped to forestall the criticism that one was merely piling up a multitude of words without meaning, which Jesus warned us against.
Eventually, the Rosary that we know today began to emerge after the turn of the millennium. Its division into decades marked by beads made the practice much easier than reciting all of the Psalms from memory. And the shorter prayers, fewer in number, could satisfy the intention to pray without ceasing without the need for posession of a book. Soon, various mendicant orders, pursuing an apostolic vocation of preaching and service in the world, began to use the Rosary as a teaching device.
Indeed, legend has it that, in the early 12th century, Saint Dominic received a vision of Mother Mary in which she requested that the faithful should pray the Rosary, and promised to intercede for us with Jesus and bestow many boons of grace on those who would persevere on a daily basis. The followers of Saint Francis also made habitual use of the Rosary in this way. The popularity of this practice swelled, not only among those with religious vocations, but also among the common people all across Europe. And in 1569, Pope Pius V, himself a Dominican, officially sanctioned the Rosary as a devotion of the Catholic Church.
In 1683, a campaign of praying the Rosary was credited with gaining divine assistance for the armies of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian alliance in their battle to relieve the seige of Vienna imposed by the Ottoman Turks. Thereafter, praying the Holy Rosary has remained the weapon of choice for civilians to support their troops who have been deployed into conflict. And in 1917, in a vision at Fatima, Our Lady asked that we pray the Rosary for an end to World War I. If these prayers hold out the hope that our warlike inclinations can be ameliorated and curtailed, then perhaps the world can be transformed.
And so we see a gradual transition. Those who once were discontented with the world are no longer abandoning its distractions and demands for commerce with conventional "wisdom." They are trying to evangelize any who will listen, and praying that the Gospel might now prove to be a leaven to cause the world itself to rise toward God. And a primary tool applied to this task is one conceived in the desert by hermits, and in the monasteries of the disaffected: the Holy Rosary offered to the Mother of God. Its decades of prayers remind the faithful to meditate on the life of our Lord Jesus. And perhaps we will thus be transformed into his likeness, and carry with us a little spark of the Kingdom of God. Then, some day, the Light may prove more powerful than the darkness, and the society of men may begin to resemble that of the angels in Heaven. "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven." We must have faith, and hope, and love one another as Jesus loved us.
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