Leithart
In a chapter on the “secularization of labor” in his The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture 
Thought eleventh and twelfth-century theorists distinguished three ordines ( oratores, bellatores, laboratores ), Ovitt claims that in economic terms there were only two orders: “those who managed and protected an increasingly ‘rationalized’ society by means of ecclesiastical and military power” and “those who were subject to this domination.”
He sums up:
“In an age of economic expansion and specialization, those who prayed could not be expected to perform sustaining labor. Work remained a part of an individual monk’s or nun’s calling insofar as it helped to undermine the temptations of accidia , but the ideal of self-contained monastic communities . . . was surrendered as the boundaries between monastery and secular world disintegrated. The church came to recognize manual labor, craftsmanship, and technology as the proper sphere of the order of society called to them – the laborantes – and in so doing the church modified its millennium-old ideal of spiritualized, communal, and inner-directed labor. The continued placement of the mechanical arts at the bottom of the hierarchy of learning also reflected the doubts felt by twelfth-century writers about the value of labor. Since human ingenuity and ambition were preoccupied with the production of wealth, the church elected to adapt itself to the secular world by insisting on its own carefully delineated spiritual prerogatives. The Gregorian Reform movements, which established the bureaucracy of the Roman church as protection against secular power; the reformed religious orders with their revised description of spiritual life; and the ideology of the three orders of society, with its distribution of authority based on productive roles – all of these changes in church ideology were adaptations to a world that was being changed by the labor of human hands and the inventiveness of human minds. By the end of the twelfth century, this labor and its products were secularized, and the restoration of perfection was left to the mostly unknown men and women who were called to life in the world.”
He sums up the related theological changes this way: “Twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians continue to subscribe to the Augustinian view that work and its products assist man in realizing God’s providential intentions; the world is the stage of personal and collective self-discovery and perfection, and the tools through which the individual’s apotheosis is realized include both the disciplines of the cloister and the work of the hands. Thinkers like Hugh of Saint Victor and Thomas Aquinas believed that manual labor is redemptive, a protection against sloth and a source of humility. At the same time, these and other writers propagate the view that clear distinctions must be maintained between sacred and secular labor and that a pious man is fully justified in sacrificing the opus manuum in order to advance the opus Dei . In the twelfth century, the idealized Benedictine view of a mixed life of work and prayer is qualified in important ways, primarily as part of a campaign to clarify the means whereby the sacred sphere dominates the secular sphere.” For these writers, the laborantes provided material support for the spiritual calling of the oratores .
Ovitt sees this change as, on balance, a loss, “not because I see the monastery as a model for a perfect world but because, like Lewis Mumford, I see that the in the late Middle Ages labor, which once was a tool for cultivating individual moral values and for sustaining a community’s collective life, began to be controlled by the purveyors of ‘megatechnics,’ by managers and middlemen.”
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