Monastery (Civ3)/Civilopedia

The Christian faith generated a group of priests and laymen that felt that the only way to live according to
God’s will and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ was to withdraw from the world. To do so, they developed
monasteries, self-contained and self-sufficient retreats, usually in remote locations. While it was a community,
a monastery was made up of individuals so dedicated to absence of contact that they spent much time on their own,
congregating only for worship services, meals, and tasks such as farming that were necessary to keep the monastery
running. The rest of the time they spent performing penance for their sins and contemplating God. The monks lived
in solitary, spartan rooms that were called cells, from which the modern term for prison cell comes, and the modern
term for prisons, "penitentiary", comes from the monastic tradition of penance. One of the tasks of monks was to
transcribe the Word of God and any other sacred or necessary texts, laboriously, by hand, and it was due to this
practice that most of the texts of antiquity that still exist today survived at all through the Dark Ages. Because
of this side effect of their duties, monasteries soon became centers of learning and literature, and many
universities were originally founded near major monasteries or cathedrals.