new questions began to be asked about how believers could best serve God and ensure their own salvation. Although it is traditional to see the period as one of growing conflict between the Greek and Latin Churches, it is remarkable how similar spiritual developments in the Mediterranean seem to be and there are strong grounds for suggesting a considerable flow of spiritual currents between east and west.
There was, for example, a growing enthusiasm for all forms of the monastic life. Monasticism was, of course, of eastern provenance and the orthodox Church of the tenth and eleventh centuries harboured a variety of monastic styles seeing no need to regiment monks into monastic orders but merely to allow adherence to the general precepts earlier laid down by St Basil. But two main styles prevailed--the coenobitic or communal and the lavriote, where monks lived alone in cells, sometimes quite widely scattered, but met together for the liturgy each week. The coenobitic style emphasized the virtues of the sublimation of the individual will to that of the community and emphasized the necessity of obedience to the abbot; the lavriote style concentrated rather on the individual's spiritual development and lonely fight against the temptations of the Devil. It continued the eremitic tradition of the Desert Fathers. In tenthcentury Byzantium, monasteries which combined the two styles began to emerge and this change is epitomized by the new monastic foundations on Mount Athos. Although the mountain had been famous for its hermits in the ninth century, it was not until the foundation of the Great Lavra by St Athanasius in 963 that the new 'hybrid' monasticism, first developed in the monastic communities of western Asia Minor, began to gain influence there. Most of the monks lived a communal life in new buildings built with the aid of patrons who included the Byzantine emperors, but a few, advanced in the spiritual life, were allowed to leave the house and live solitary lives in the vicinity. Whilst traditional, communal urban monasteries continued to be founded, the attraction of this kind of life, which theoretically allowed every monk the possibility of being permitted to live the 'higher' spiritual life, is demonstrated by the vast expansion in the numbers of monks on Athos in particular
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