The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

2.9 Conclusions
The Visigothic sources make it clear that monasticism was a marked feature of
seventh-century Iberia. The monastic rules, meanwhile, present a picture of monastic
practice that in some ways remained faithful to the ideals of the Desert Fathers, yet in others
had developed substantial differences. In the first instance, the notion of the opus Dei seems
to have been alive and well, although monastic rules were also aware of the pragmatic needs
of the monastery. As such, the lives of monks were taken up with physical work for both the
good of the community and their souls. Monasteries, moreover, were institutions that had
developed a long way past individual collections of anchorites in the wilderness. Instead,
they were communities that existed as part of the Visigothic landscape, rather than detached
from it. In many senses they were not closed communities but could possess substantial links
with the outside world and a congregation made up of all the social strata.
Seventh-century Visigothic monasticism was subject to some degree of variation in its
practice throughout Iberia. Exactly how life was played out in the „unofficial‟ monasteries is
impossible to be clear about, but monks in those monasteries which followed one of the three
surviving monastic rules were likely to experience different approaches to monastic life in
varying scales. In many ways, however, the issue of regional differentiation is a difficult one.
The fact that any given practice is only mentioned in one monastic rule, for example, does not
necessarily exclude the practice from occurring elsewhere: absence of evidence does not
signify evidence of absence. That said, many scholars have been quick to define Galician
monasticism in particular as being characterised by certain attributes not found elsewhere.
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