V.18.4
SUPERIOR STANDARDS OF SANITATION:
COLLECTIVE PLANNING AND
CHRISTIAN RETICENCE
THE MONASTERY: A PLANNED SOCIETY
The basic ecological reason for these comparatively high
standards of monastic sanitation are easy to define: in
contrast to the medieval or classical city, whose growth was
subject to pressures beyond the control of its inhabitants,
the monastery was a planned society. Its population was
stable, and in general not subject to unexpected fluctuations.[669]
The same care that was used in regulating the
spiritual life of the community, therefore, could also be
applied to the organization of its physical environment.
DIFFERENCE IN
UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS
There are other reasons, moreover, of a deeper and more
philosophical nature that made it necessary for this side
of life to be carefully ordered. The classical civilizations
of Greece and Rome, affirmative in their response to the
human organism and the pleasures derived from it, reacted
to the problem of evacuation of human waste with the
same naturalness with which they responded to the phenomenon
of eating or breathing. To the Christian mind,
taught to "chastise the body" and to "deny the desires of
the flesh,"[670]
it was, by contrast, an indignity inflicted upon
man because his soul was condemned to reside in a body.
This different concept is as manifest in the terminology
used to define this physiological inevitability as it is in the
layout of the building devised for its accommodation. The
classical languages are clear, descriptive, and to the point
on this matter.[671]
The monastic language, as one is not
surprised to find, is reticent but not prudish. St. Benedict
coined the evasive phrase ad necessaria naturae exire ("to
go out for the necessities of nature")[672]
which becomes the
base for numerous insignificant variations subsequently
used, such as necessitas fratrum,[673]
corporis necessaria,[674]
corporea
necessitas naturae,[675]
necessitas naturae;[676]
or the variants
necessarium, exitus necessarius, or requisitum naturae used on
the Plan of St. Gall—a terminology designed to express the
inescapable condition of the function it denotes.
The needs to which he attends in the privy were not
only the lowest of all activities in which a monk was bound
to engage, but were also a source of mortal danger. The
light shown on the Plan of St. Gall as an obligatory piece of
equipment in the Monks' Privy is a precautionary measure
aimed at more than merely protecting the monks from
stumbling in a physical sense.[677]
Besides his bed and his
bath, this was the only other place where, by no fault of his
own, he could not avoid bodily contact with himself. Like
the temptations of the dormitory and of the bathhouse, the
temptations of the privy could only be met with the most
stringent of directives for conditions and time of use—
especially strict in the case of the younger monks. We learn
more about these from Carolingian commentaries to the
Rule of St. Benedict than from the Rule itself.
[678]
ARCHITECTURAL IMPLICATIONS
It is clear that this change in attitude would also have
its effect on the architectural layout of the monastic privy.
The amphitheater-style layout of the public Roman latrine
with its convivial sociability had no chance of survival in
this new environment. The prescribed and proper deportment
of the monk required that he draw his cowl over his
head, so as not to be recognized.[679]
To expose himself
freely to the view of others, or be exposed to theirs, would
have been an act of blasphemy. This is unquestionably the
reason why the seats of the monastic privies of the Middle
Ages were stretched out in a single line in an elongated
structure that had more the character of a corridor than of
a room, and where any propensity toward social intercourse
was frustrated by the establishment of separating
cross partitions.
