The medieval monastic culture is orientated toward the after life. Monastic life, study, reading, prayer and community life were all significant themes for St. Benedict because they were vehicles of obtaining eternal life. An integral virtue which leads toward a desire for God and His eternal Kingdom is detachment from the world. Thus, St. Benedict believed that endeavors such as study and praying the scriptures were important only because they led one to a detachment from self and a converse attachment to God and eternal life. The only values stressed are those of eternal life, the only reality upon which unfavorable judgment is passed is sin.
Study is ranked as one means, within a framework of others, to the end, which is eternal life.
The life of a monk was ideally holy, detached and a continual development of a desire for God and eternal life. St. Gregory, who was pope from 590 a.d. to 604 a.d., wrote letters and his Pastoral Care which had a profound influence on the monastic culture. St. Gregory strengthened the institutional role the Church had on medieval society. In fact, the Church was the primary political, social, and religious structure in the West. Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual's life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual.