attention to dress Paula said, “A clean body and a clean dress mean an unclean soul.” To her credit, she was more lenient with others than with herself. Jerome admits she went to excess, and prudently observes: “Difficult as it is to avoid extremes, the philosophers are quite right in their opinion that virtue is a mean and vice an excess, or, as we may express it in one short sentence, in nothing too much.” Paula swept floors and toiled in the kitchen. She slept on the ground, covered by a mat of goat’s hair. Her weeping was incessant. As she meditated over the Scriptures, her tears fell so profusely that her sight was endangered. Jerome warned her to spare her eyes, but she said: “I must disfigure that face which, contrary to God’s commandment, I have painted with rouge, white lead and antimony.” If this be a sin against the Almighty, bear witness, O ye daughters of Eve! Her love for the poor continued to be the motive of her great liberality. In fact, her giving knew no bounds. Fuller wisely remarks that “liberality must have banks as well as a stream;” but Paula said: “My prayer is that I may die a beggar, leaving not a penny to my daughter and indebted to strangers for my winding sheet.” Her petition was literally granted, for she died leaving her daughter not only without a penny but overwhelmed in a mass of debts.
As Jerome approaches the description of Paula’s death, he says: “Hitherto the wind has all been in my favor and my keel has smoothly ploughed through the heaving sea. But now my bark is running upon the rocks, the billows are mountain high, and imminent shipwreck awaits me.” Yet Paula, like David, must go the way of all the earth. Surrounded by her followers chanting psalms, she breathed her last. An immense concourse of people attended her funeral. Not a single monk lingered in his cell. Thus, the twenty hard years of self-torture for this Roman lady of culture ended in the rest of the grave.
Upon her tombstone was placed this significant inscription:
“Within this tomb a child of Scipio lies, A daughter of the far-famed Pauline house, A scion of the Gracchi, of the stock
Of Agamemnon’s self, illustrious: Here rests the lady Paula, well beloved Of both her parents, with Eustochium
For daughter; she the first of Roman dames Who hardship chose and Bethlehem for Christ.”
Another interesting character of that period was Marcella, a beautiful woman of illustrious lineage, a descendant of consuls and prefects. After a married life of seven years her husband died. She determined not to embark on the matrimonial seas a second time, but to devote herself to works of charity. Cerealis, an old man, but of consular rank, offered her his fortune that he might consider her less his wife than his daughter. “Had I a wish to marry,” was her noble reply, “I should look for a husband and not for an inheritance.” Disdaining all enticements to remain in society, she began her monastic career with joy and turned her home into a retreat for women who, like herself, wished to retire from the world. It is not known just what rules governed their relations, but they employed the time in moderate fasting, prayers and alms-giving.
Marcella lavished her wealth upon the poor. Jerome praises her philanthropic labors thus: “Our widow’s clothing was meant to keep out the cold and not to show her figure. She stored her money in the stomachs of the poor rather than to keep it at her own disposal.” Seldom seen upon the streets, she remained at home, surrounded by virgins and widows, obedient and loving to her mother. Among the high-born women it was regarded as degrading to assume the costume of the nun, but she bore the scorn of her social equals with humility and grace.
This quiet and useful life was rudely and abruptly ended by a dreadful catastrophe. Alaric the Goth had seized and sacked Rome. The world stood aghast. The sad news reached Jerome in his cell at Bethlehem, who expressed his sorrow in forceful language: “My voice sticks in my throat; and as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The city which has taken the whole world is itself taken.” Rude barbarians invaded the sanctity of Marcella’s retreat. They demanded her gold, but she pointed to the coarse dress she wore to show them she had no buried treasures. They did not believe her, and cruelly beat her with cudgels. A few days after the saintly heroine of righteousness went to her long home to enjoy richly-merited rest and peace.
“Who can describe the carnage of that night? What tears are equal to its agony?
Of ancient date a sovran city falls; And lifeless in its streets and houses lie Unnumbered bodies of its citizens.
In many a ghastly shape doth death appear.”
Marcella and her monastic home fell in the general ruin, but in the words of Horace, she left “a monument more enduring than brass.” Her noble life, so full of kind words and loving deeds, still stirs the hearts of her sisters who, while they may reject her ascetic ideal, will, nevertheless, try to emulate her noble spirit. As Jerome said of Paula: “By shunning glory she earned glory; for glory follows virtue as its shadow; and deserting those who seek it, it seeks those who despise it.”
Still another woman claims our attention,–Fabiola, the founder of the first hospital. Lecky declares that “the first public hospital and the charity planted by that woman’s hand overspread the world, and will alleviate to the end of time the darkest anguish of humanity.” She, too, was a widow who refused to marry again, but broke up her home, sold her possessions, and with the proceeds founded a hospital into which were gathered the sick from the streets. She nursed the sufferers and washed their ulcers and wounds. No task was beneath her, no sacrifice of personal comfort too great for her love. Many helped her with their gold, but she gave herself. She also aided in establishing a home for strangers at Portus, which became one of the most famous inns of the time. Travelers from all parts of the world found a welcome and a shelter on landing at this port. When she died the roofs of Rome were crowded with those who watched the funeral procession. Psalms were chanted, and the gilded ceilings of the churches resounded to the music in commendation of her loving life and labors.
These and other characters of like zeal and fortitude exemplify the spirit of the men and women who interested the West in monasticism. Much as their errors and extravagances may be deplored, there is no question that some of them were types of the loftiest Christian virtues, inspired by the most laudable motives.
Noble and true are Kingsley’s words: “We may blame those ladies, if we will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at their weaknesses, the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity, we fancy we discover. We must confess that in these women the spirit of the old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been dead so long, flashed up for one splendid moment ere it sank into the darkness of the middle ages.”
_Monasticism and Women_
The origin of nunneries was coeval with that of monasteries, and the history of female recluses runs parallel to that of the men. Almost every male order had its counterpart in some sort of a sisterhood. The general moral character of these female associations was higher than that of the male organizations. I have confined my treatment in this work to the monks, but a few words may be said at this point concerning female ascetics.
Hermit life was unsuited to women, but we know that at a very early date many of them retired to the seclusion of convent life. It will be recalled that in the biography of St. Anthony, before going into the desert he placed his sister in the care of some virgins who were living a life of abstinence, apart from society. It is very doubtful if any uniform rule governed these first religious houses, or if definitely organized societies appear much before the time of Benedict. The variations in the monastic order among the men were accompanied by similar changes in the associations of women.
The history of these sisterhoods discloses three interesting and noteworthy facts that merit brief mention:
First, the effect of a corrupt society upon women. As in the case of men, women were moved to forsake their social duties because they were weary of the sensual and aimless life of Rome. Those were the days of elaborate toilettes, painted faces and blackened eyelids, of intrigues and foolish babbling. Venial faults–it may be thought–innocent displays of tender frailty; but woman’s nature demands loftier employments. A great soul craves occupations and recognizes obligations more in harmony with the true nobility of human nature. Rome had no monitor of the higher life until the monks came with their stories of heroic self-abnegation and unselfish toil. The women felt the force and truth of Jerome’s criticism of their trifling follies when he said: “Do not seek to appear over-eloquent, nor trifle with verse, nor make yourself gay with lyric songs. And do not, out of affectation, follow the sickly taste of married ladies, who now pressing their teeth together, now keeping their lips wide apart, speak with a lisp, and purposely clip their words, because they fancy that to pronounce them naturally is a mark of country breeding.”
Professor Dill is inclined to discount the testimony of Jerome respecting the morals of Roman society. He thinks Jerome exaggerated the perils surrounding women. He says: “The truth is Jerome is not only a monk but an artist in words; and his horror of evil, his vivid imagination, and his passion for literary effect, occasionally carry him beyond the region of sober fact. There was much to amend in the morals of the Roman world. But we must not take the leader of a great moral reformation as a cool and dispassionate observer.” But this observation amounts to nothing more than a cautionary word against mistaking evils common to all times for special symptoms of excessive immorality. Professor Dill practically concedes the truthfulness of contemporary witnesses, including Jerome, when he says: “Yet, after all allowances, the picture is not a pleasant one. We feel that we are far away from the simple, unworldly devotion of the freedmen and obscure toilers whose existence was hardly known to the great world before the age of the Antonines, and who lived in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and in constant expectation of the coming of their Lord. The triumphant Church, which has brought Paganism to its knees, is very different from the Church of the catacombs and the persecutions.” The picture which Jerome draws of the Roman women is indeed repulsive, and Professor Dill would gladly believe it to be exaggerated, but, nevertheless, he thinks that “if the priesthood, with its enormous influence, was so corrupt, it is only probable that it debased the sex which is always most under clerical influence.”
But far graver charges cling to the memories of the Roman women. Crime darkened every household. The Roman lady was cruel and impure. She delighted in the blood of gladiators and in illicit love. Roman law at this time permitted women to hold and to control large estates, and it became a fad for these patrician ladies to marry poor men, so that they might have their husbands within their power. All sorts of alliances could then be formed, and if their husbands remonstrated, they, holding the purse strings, were able to say: “If you don’t like it you can leave.” A profligate himself, the husband usually kept his counsel, and as a reward, dwelt in a palace. “When the Roman matrons became the equal and voluntary companions of their lords,” says Gibbon, “a new jurisprudence was introduced, that marriage, like other partnerships, might be dissolved by the abdication of one of the associates.” I have but touched the fringe of a veil I will not lift; but it is easy to understand why those women who cherished noble sentiments welcomed the monastic life as a pathway of escape from scenes and customs from which their better natures recoiled in horror.
Secondly, the fine quality of mercy that distinguishes woman’s character deserves recognition. Even though she retired to a convent, she could not become so forgetful of her fellow creatures as her male companions. From the very beginning we observe that she was more unselfish in her asceticism than they. It is true the monk forsook all, and to that extent was self-sacrificing, but in his desire for his own salvation, he was prone to neglect every one else. The monk’s ministrations were too often confined to those who came to him, but the nun went forth to heal the diseased and to bind up the broken-hearted. As soon as she embraced the monastic life we read of hospitals. The desire for salvation drove man into the desert; a Christ-like mercy and divine sympathy kept his sister by the couch of pain.
Lastly, a word remains to be said touching the question of marriage. At first, the nun sometimes entered the marriage state, and, of course, left the convent; but, beginning with Basil, this practice was condemned, and irrevocable vows were exacted. In 407, Innocent I. closed even the door of penitence and forgiveness to those who broke their vows and married.
Widows and virgins alike assumed the veil. Marriage itself was not despised, because the monastic life was only for those who sought a higher type of piety than, it was supposed, could be attained amid the ordinary conditions of life. But marriage, as well as other so-called secular relations, was eschewed by those who wished to make their salvation sure. Jerome says: “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins; I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell.” He therefore tolerated marriage among people contented with ordinary religious attainments, but he thought it incompatible with true holiness. Augustine admitted that the mother and her daughter may be both in heaven, but one a bright and the other a dim star. Some writers, as Helvidius, opposed this view and maintained that there was no special virtue in an unmarried life; that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was also the mother of other children, and as such was an example of Christian virtue. Jerome brought out his guns and poured hot shot into the enemies’ camp. In the course of his answer, which contained many intolerant and acrimonious statements, he drew a comparison between the married and the unmarried state. It is interesting because it reflects the opinions of those who disparaged marriage, and reveals the character of the principles which the early Fathers advocated. It is very evident from this letter against Helvidius that Jerome regarded all secular duties as interfering with the pursuit of the highest virtue.
“Do you think,” he says, “there is no difference between one who spends her time in prayer and fasting, and one who must, at her husband’s approach, make up her countenance, walk with a mincing gait, and feign a show of endearment? The virgin aims to appear less comely; she will wrong herself so as to hide her natural attractions. The married woman has the paint laid on before her mirror, and, to the insult of her Maker, strives to acquire something more than her natural beauty. Then come the prattling of infants, the noisy household, children watching for her word and waiting for her kiss, the reckoning up of expenses, the preparation to meet the outlay. On one side you will see a company of cooks, girded for the onslaught and attacking the meat; there you may hear the hum of a multitude of weavers. Meanwhile a message is delivered that her husband and his friends have arrived. The wife, like a swallow, flies all over the house. She has to see to everything. Is the sofa smooth? Is the pavement swept? Are the flowers in the cup? Is dinner ready? Tell me, pray, amid all this, is there room for the thought of God?”
Such was Roman married life as it appeared to Jerome. The very duties and blessings that we consider the glory of the family he despised. I will return to his views later, but it is interesting to note the absence at this period, of the modern and true idea that God may be served in the performance of household and other secular duties. Women fled from such occupations in those days that they might be religious. The disagreeable fact of Peter’s marriage was overcome by the assertion that he must have washed away the stain of his married life by the blood of his martyrdom. Such extreme views arose partly as a reaction from and a protest against the dominant corruption, a state of affairs in which happy and holy marriages were rare.
_The Spread of Monasticism in Europe_
Much more might be said of monastic life in Rome, were it not now necessary to treat of the spread of monasticism in Europe. There are many noble characters whom we ought to know, such as Ambrose, one of Christendom’s greatest bishops, who led a life of poverty and strict abstinence, like his sister Marcella, whom we have met. He it was, of whom the Emperor Theodosius said: “I have met a man who has told me the truth.” Well might he so declare, for Ambrose refused him admission to the church at Milan, because his hands were red with the blood of the murdered, and succeeded in persuading him to submit to discipline. To Ambrose may be applied the words which Gibbon wrote of Gregory Nazianzen: “The title of Saint has been added to his name, but the tenderness of his heart and the elegance of his genius reflect a more pleasing luster on his memory.”
The story of John, surnamed Chrysostom, who was born at Antioch, in 347, is exceedingly interesting. He was a young lawyer, who entered the priesthood after his baptism. He at once set his heart on the monastic life, but his mother took him to her chamber, and, by the bed where she had given him birth, besought him in fear, not to forsake her. “My son,” she said in substance, “my only comfort in the midst of the miseries of this earthly life is to see thee constantly, and to behold in thy traits the faithful image of my beloved husband, who is no more. When you have buried me and joined my ashes with those of your father, nothing will then prevent you from retiring into the monastic life. But so long as I breathe, support me by your presence, and do not draw down upon you the wrath of God by bringing such evils upon me who have given you no offence.” This singularly tender petition was granted, but Chrysostom turned his home into a monastery, slept on the bare floor, ate little and seldom, and prayed much by day and by night.
After his mother’s death Chrysostom enjoyed the seclusion of a monastic solitude for six years, but impairing his health by excessive self-mortification he returned to Antioch in 380. He rapidly rose to a position of commanding influence in the church. His peerless oratorical and literary gifts were employed in elevating the ascetic ideal and in unsparing denunciations of the worldly religion of the imperial court. He incurred the furious hatred of the young and beautiful Empress Eudoxia, who united her influence with that of the ambitious Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, and Chrysostom was banished from Constantinople, but died on his way to the remote desert of Pityus. His powerful sermons and valuable writings contributed in no small degree to the spread of monasticism among the Christians of his time.
Then there was Augustine, the greatest thinker since Plato. “We shall meet him,” says Schaff, “alike on the broad highways and the narrow foot-paths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod.” He, too, like all the other leaders of thought in his time, was ascetic in his habits. Although he lived and labored for thirty-eight years at Hippo, a Numidian city about two hundred miles west of Carthage, in Africa, Augustine was regarded as the intellectual head not only of North Africa but of Western Christianity. He gathered his clergy into a college of priests, with a community of goods, thus approaching as closely to the regular monastic life as was possible to secular clergymen. He established religious houses and wrote a set of rules, consisting of twenty-four articles, for the government of monasteries. These rules were superseded by those of Benedict, but they were resuscitated under Charlemagne and reappeared in the famous Austin Canons of the eleventh century. Little did Augustine think that a thousand years later an Augustinian monk–Luther–would abandon his order to become the founder of modern Protestantism.
Augustine published a celebrated essay,–“On the Labor of Monks,”–in which he pointed out the dangers of monachism, condemned its abuses, and ended by sighing for the quiet life of the monk who divided his day between labor, reading and prayer, whilst he himself spent his years amid the noisy throng and the perplexities of his episcopate.
These men, and many others, did much to further monasticism. But we must now leave sunny Africa and journey northward through Gaul into the land of the hardy Britons and Scots.
Athanasius, the same weary exile whom we have encountered in Egypt and in Rome, had been banished by Constantine to Treves, in 336. In 346 and 349 he again visited Gaul. He told the same story of Anthony and the Egyptian hermits with similar results.
The most renowned ecclesiastic of the Gallican church, whose name is most intimately associated with the spread of monasticism in Western Europe, before the days of Benedict, was Saint Martin of Tours. He lived about the years 316-396 A.D. The chronicle of his life is by no means trustworthy, but that is essential neither to popularity nor saintship. Only let a Severus describe his life and miracles in glowing rhetoric and fantastic legend and the people will believe it, pronouncing him greatest among the great, the mightiest miracle-worker of that miracle-working age.
Martin was a soldier three years, against his will, under Constantine. One bleak winter day he cut his white military coat in two with his sword and clothed a beggar with half of it. That night he heard Jesus address the angels: “Martin, as yet only a catechumen has clothed me with his garment.” After leaving the army he became a hermit, and, subsequently, bishop of Tours. He lived for years just outside of Tours in a cell made of interlaced branches. His monks dwelt around him in caves cut out of scarped rocks, overlooking a beautiful stream. They were clad in camel’s hair and lived on a diet of brown bread, sleeping on a straw couch.
But Martin’s monks did not take altogether kindly to their mode of life. Severus records an amusing story of their rebellion against the meager allowance of food. The Egyptian could exist on a few figs a day. But these rude Gauls, just emerging out of barbarism, were accustomed to devour great slices of roasted meat and to drink deep draughts of beer. Such sturdy children of the northern forests naturally disdained dainty morsels of barley bread and small potations of wine. True, Athanasius had said, “Fasting is the food of angels,” but these ascetic novices, in their perplexity, could only say: “We are accused of gluttony; but we are Gauls; it is ridiculous and cruel to make us live like angels; we are not angels; once more, we are only Gauls.” Their complaint comes down to us as a pathetic but humorous protest of common sense against ascetic fanaticism; or, regarded in another light, it may be considered as additional evidence of the depravity of the natural man.
In spite of all complaints, however, Martin did not abate the severity of his discipline. As a bishop he pushed his monastic system into all the surrounding country. His zeal knew no bounds, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. “No one ever saw him either gloomy or merry,” remarks his biographer. Amid many embarrassments and difficulties he was ever the same, with a countenance full of heavenly serenity. He was a great miracle-worker–that is, if everything recorded of him is true. He cast out demons, and healed the sick; he had strange visions of angels and demons, and, wonderful to relate, thrice he raised bodies from the dead.
But all conquerors are at last vanquished by the angel of death, and Martin passed into the company of the heavenly host and the category of saints. Two thousand monks attended his funeral. His fame spread all over Europe. Tradition tells us he was the uncle of Saint Patrick of Ireland. Churches were dedicated to him in France, Germany, Scotland and England. The festival of his birth is celebrated on the eleventh of November. In Scotland this day still marks the winter term, which is called Martinmas. Saint Martin’s shrine was one of the most famous of the middle ages, and was noted for its wonderful cures. No saint is held, even now, in higher veneration by the French Catholic.
It is not known when the institution was planted in Spain, but in 380 the council of Saragossa forbade priests to assume monkish habits. Germany received the institution some time in the fifth century. The introduction of Christianity as well as of monasticism into the British Isles is shrouded in darkness. A few jewels of fact may be gathered from the legendary rubbish. It is probable that before the days of Benedict, Saint Patrick, independently of Rome, established monasteries in Ireland and preached the gospel there; and, without doubt, before the birth of Benedict of Nursia, there were monks and monasteries in Great Britain. The monastery of Bangor is said to have been founded about 450 A.D.
It is probable that Christianity was introduced into Britain before the close of the second century, and that monasticism arose some time in the fifth century. Tertullian, about the beginning of the third century, boasts that Christianity had conquered places in Britain where the Roman arms could not penetrate. Origen claimed that the power of the Savior was manifest in Britain as well as in Muritania. The earliest notice we have of a British church occurs in the writings of the Venerable Bede (673-735 A.D.), a monk whose numerous and valuable works on English history entitle him to the praise of being “the greatest literary benefactor this or any other nation has produced.” He informs us that a British king–Lucius–embraced Christianity during the reign of the Emperor Aurelius, and that missionaries were sent from Rome to Britain about that time. Lingard says the story is suspicious, since “we know not from what source Bede, at the distance of five centuries, derived his information.” It seems quite likely that there must have been some Christians among the Roman soldiers or civil officials who lived in Britain during the Roman occupation of the country. The whole problem has been the theme of so much controversy, however, that a fuller discussion is reserved for the next chapter.
_Disorders and Oppositions_
But was there no protest against the progress of these ascetic teachings? Did the monastic institution command the unanimous approval of the church from the outset? There were many and strong outcries against the monks, but they were quickly silenced by the counter-shouts of praise. Even when rebellion against the system seemed formidable, it was popular nevertheless. The lifted hand was quickly struck down, and voices of opposition suddenly hushed. Like a mighty flood the movement swept on,–kings, when so inclined, being powerless to stop it. As Paula was carried fainting from the funeral procession of Blaesilla, her daughter, whispers such as these were audible in the crowd: “Is not this what we have often said? She weeps for her daughter, killed with fasting. How long must we refrain from driving these detestable monks out of Rome? Why do we not stone them or hurl them into the Tiber? They have misled this unhappy mother; that she is not a nun from choice is clear. No heathen mother ever wept for her children as she does for Blaesilla.” And this is Paula, who, choked with grief, refused to weep when she sailed from her children for the far East!
Unhappily, history is often too dignified to retail the conversations of the dinner-table and the gossip of private life. But this narrative indicates that in many a Roman family the monk was feared, despised and hated. Sometimes everyday murmurs found their way into literature and so passed to posterity. Rutilius, the Pagan poet, as he sails before a hermit isle in the Mediterranean, exclaims: “Behold, Capraria rises before us; that isle is full of wretches, enemies of light. I detest these rocks scene of a recent shipwreck.” He then goes on to declare that a young and rich friend, impelled by the furies, had fled from men and gods to a living tomb, and was now decaying in that foul retreat. This was no uncommon opinion. But contrast it with what Ambrose said of those same isles: “It is there in these isles, thrown down by God like a collar of pearls upon the sea, that those who would escape from the charms of dissipation find refuge. Nothing here disturbs their peace, all access is closed to the wild passions of the world. The mysterious sound of waves mingles with the chant of hymns; and, while the waters break upon the shores of these happy isles with a gentle murmur, the peaceful accents of the choir of the elect ascend toward Heaven from their bosom.” No wonder the Milanese ladies guarded their daughters against this theological poet.
Even among the Christians there were hostile as well as friendly critics of monasticism; Jovinian, whom Neander compares to Luther, is a type of the former. Although a monk himself, he disputed the thesis that any merit lay in celibacy, fasting or poverty. He opposed the worship of saints and relics, and believed that one might retain possession of his property and make good use of it. He assailed the dissolute monks and claimed that many of Rome’s noblest young men and women were withdrawn from a life of usefulness into the desert. He held that there was really but one class of Christians, namely, those who had faith in Christ, and that a monk could be no more. But Jovinian was far in advance of his age, and it was many years before the truth of his view gained any considerable recognition. He was severely attacked by Jerome, who called him a Christian Epicurean, and was condemned as a heretic by a synod at Milan, in 390. Thus the reformers were crushed for centuries. The Pagan Emperor, Julian, and the Christian, Valens, alike tried in vain to resist the emigration into the desert. Thousands fled, in times of peril to the state, from their civil and military duties, but the emperors were powerless to prevent the exodus.
That there were grounds for complaint against the monks we may know from the charges made even by those who favored the system. Jerome Ambrose, Augustine, and in fact almost every one of the Fathers tried to correct the growing disorders. We learn from them that many fled from society, not to become holy, but to escape slavery and famine; and that many were lazy and immoral. Their “shaven heads lied to God.” Avarice, ambition, or cowardice ruled hearts that should have been actuated by a love of poverty, self-sacrifice or courage. “Quite recently,” says Jerome, “we have seen to our sorrow a fortune worthy of Croesus brought to light by a monk’s death, and a city’s alms collected for the poor, left by will to his sons and successors.”
Many monks traveled from place to place selling sham relics. Augustine wrote against “those hypocrites who, in the dress of monks, wander about the provinces carrying pretended relics, amulets, preservatives, and expecting alms to feed their lucrative poverty and recompense their pretended virtue.” It is to the credit of the Fathers of the church that they boldly and earnestly rebuked the vices of the monks and tried to purge the monastic system of its impurities.
But the church sanctioned the monastic movement. She could not have done anything else. “It is one of the most striking occurrences in history,” says Harnack, “that the church, exactly at the time when she was developing more and more into a legal institution and a sacramental establishment, outlined a Christian life-ideal which was incapable of realization within her bounds, but only alongside of her. The more she affiliated herself with the world, the higher and more superhuman did she make her ideal.”
It is also noteworthy that this “life-ideal” seems to have led, inevitably, to fanaticism and other excesses, so that even at this early date there was much occasion for alarm. Gross immorality was disclosed as well as luminous purity; indolence and laziness as well as the love of sacrifice and toil. So we shall find it down through the centuries. “The East had few great men,” says Milman, “many madmen; the West, madmen enough, but still very many, many great men.” We have met some madmen and some great men. We shall meet more of each type.
After 450 A.D., monasticism suffered an eclipse for over half a century. It seemed as if the Western institution was destined to end in that imbecility and failure which overtook the Eastern system. But there came a man who infused new life into the monastic body. He systematized its scattered principles and concentrated the energies of the wandering and unorganized monks.
Our next visit will be to the mountain home of this renowned character, fifty miles to the west of Rome. “A single monk,” says Montalembert, “is about to form there a center of spiritual virtue, and to light it up with a splendor destined to shine over regenerated Europe for ten centuries to come.”
III
_THE BENEDICTINES_
Saint Benedict, the founder of the famous monastic order that bears his name, was born at Nursia, about 480 A.D. His parents, who were wealthy, intended to give him a liberal education; but their plans were defeated, for at fifteen years of age Benedict renounced his family and fortune, and fled from his school life in Rome. The vice of the city shocked and disgusted him. He would rather be ignorant and holy, than educated and wicked. On his way into the mountains, he met a monk named Romanus,–the spot is marked by the chapel of Santa Crocella,–who gave him a haircloth shirt and a monastic dress of skins. Continuing his journey with Romanus, the youthful ascetic discovered a sunless cave in the desert of Subiaco, about forty miles from Rome. Into this cell he climbed, and in it he lived three years. It was so inaccessible that Romanus had to lower his food to him by a rope, to which was attached a bell to call him from his devotions. Once the Devil threw a stone at the rope and broke it.
But Benedict’s bodily escape from the wickedness of Rome did not secure his spiritual freedom. “There was a certain lady of thin, airy shape, who was very active in this solemnity; her name was Fancy.” Time and again, he revisited his old haunts, borne on the wings of his imagination. The face of a beautiful young girl of previous acquaintance constantly appeared before him. He was about to yield to the temptation and to return, when, summoning all his strength, he made one mighty effort to dispel the illusion forever. Divesting himself of his clothes, he rolled his naked body among the thorn-bushes near his cave. It was drastic treatment, but it seems to have rid his mind effectually of disturbing fancies. This singular self-punishment was used by Godric, the Welsh saint, in the twelfth century. “Failing to subdue his rebellious flesh by this method, he buried a cask in the earthen floor of his cell, filled it with water and fitted it with a cover, and in this receptacle he shut himself up whenever he felt the titillations of desire. In this manner, varied by occasionally passing the night up to his chin in a river, of which he had broken the ice, he finally succeeded in mastering his fiery nature.”
One day some peasants discovered Benedict at the entrance of his cave. Deceived by his savage appearance, they mistook him for a wild beast, but the supposed wolf proving to be a saint, they fell down and reverenced him.
The fame of the young ascetic attracted throngs of hermits, who took up their abodes near his cell. After a time monasteries were established, and Benedict was persuaded to become an abbot in one of them. His strictness provoked much opposition among the monks, resulting in carefully-laid plots to compass the moral ruin of their spiritual guide. An attempt to poison him was defeated by a miraculous interposition, and Benedict escaped to a solitary retreat.
Again the moral hero became an abbot, and again the severity of his discipline was resented. This time a wicked and jealous priest sought to entrap the saint by turning into a garden in which he was accustomed to walk seven young girls of exquisite physical charms. When Benedict encountered this temptation, he fled from the scene and retired to a picturesque mountain–the renowned Monte Cassino. Let Montalembert describe this celebrated spot among the western Apennines: “At the foot of this rock Benedict found an amphitheatre of the time of the Caesars, amidst the ruins of the town of Casinum, which the most learned and pious of Romans, Varro, that pagan Benedictine, whose memory and knowledge the sons of Benedict took pleasure in honoring, had rendered illustrious. From the summit the prospect extended on one side towards Arpinum, where the prince of Roman orators was born, and on the other towards Aquinum, already celebrated as the birthplace of Juvenal…. It was amidst those noble recollections, this solemn nature, and upon that predestinated height, that the patriarch of the monks of the West founded the capital of the monastic order.”
In the year 529 a great stronghold of Paganism in these wild regions gave way to Benedict’s faith. Upon the ruins of a temple to Apollo, and in a grove sacred to Venus, arose the model of Western monasticism,–the cloister of Monte Cassino, which was to shine resplendent for a thousand years. The limitations of my purpose will prevent me from following in detail the fortunes of this renowned retreat, but it may not be out of place to glance at its subsequent history.
Monte Cassino is located three and a half miles to the northeast of the town of Cassino, midway between Rome and Naples. About 589 A.D. the Lombards destroyed the buildings, but the monks escaped to Rome, in fulfilment, so it is claimed, of a prophecy uttered by Benedict. It lay in ruins until restored by Gregory II. in 719, only to be burned in 884 by the Saracens; seventy years later it was again rebuilt. It afterwards passed through a variety of calamities, and was consecrated, for the third time, by Benedict XII., in 1729. Longfellow quotes a writer for the _London Daily News_ as saying: “There is scarcely a pope or emperor of importance who has not been personally connected with its history. From its mountain crag it has seen Goths, Lombards, Saracens, Normans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, scour and devastate the land which, through all modern history, has attracted every invader.”
It was enriched by popes, emperors and princes. In its palmy days the abbot was the first baron in the realm, and commanded over four hundred towns and villages. In 1866, it shared the fate of all the monasteries of Italy. It still stands upon the summit of the mountain, and can be seen by the traveler from the railway in the valley. At present it serves as a Catholic seminary with about two hundred students. It contains a spacious church, richly ornamented with marble, mosaics and paintings. It has also a famous library which, in spite of bad usage, is still immensely valuable. Boccaccio made a visit to the place, and when he saw the precious books so vilely mutilated, he departed in tears, exclaiming: “Now, therefore, O scholar, rack thy brains in the making of books!” The library contains about twenty thousand volumes, and about thirty-five thousand popes’ bulls, diplomas and charters. There are also about a thousand manuscripts, some of which are of priceless value, as they date from the sixth century downward, and consist of ancient Bibles and important medieval literature.
Benedict survived the founding of this monastery fourteen years. His time was occupied in establishing other cloisters, perfecting his rule, and preaching. Many stories are related of his power over the hearts of the untamed barbarians. Galea the Goth, out on a marauding expedition, demanded a peasant to give him his treasures. The peasant, thinking to escape, said he had committed them to the keeping of Benedict. Galea immediately ordered him to be bound on a horse and conducted to the saint. Benedict was seated at the gateway reading when Galea and his prisoner arrived. Looking up from his book he fastened his eyes upon the poor peasant, who was immediately loosed from his bonds. The astonished Galea, awed by this miracle, fell at the feet of the abbot, and, instead of demanding gold, supplicated his blessing. Once a boy was drowning, and, at the command of Benedict, St. Maur, a wealthy young Roman, who had turned monk, walked safely out upon the water and rescued the lad. Gregory also tells us many stories of miraculous healing, and of one resurrection from the dead.
Benedict’s last days were linked with a touching incident. His sister, Scholastica, presided over a convent near his own. They met once a year. On his last visit to her, Scholastica begged him to remain and “speak of the joys of Heaven till the morning.” But Benedict would not listen; he must return. His sister then buried her face in her hands weeping and praying. Suddenly the sky was overcast with clouds, and a terrific storm burst upon the mountains, which prevented her brother’s return. Three days later Benedict saw the soul of his sister entering heaven. On March 21, 543, a short time after his sister’s death, two monks beheld a shining pathway of stars over which the soul of Benedict passed from Monte Cassino to heaven. Such, in brief, is the story preserved for us in his biography by the celebrated patron of monasticism, Pope Gregory I.
_The Rules of Benedict_
The rules, _regulae_, of St. Benedict, are worthy of special consideration, since they constitute the real foundation of his success and of his fame. His order was by far the most important monastic brotherhood until the thirteenth century. Nearly all the other orders which sprang up during this interval were based upon Benedictine rules, and were really attempts to reform the monastic system on the basis of Benedict’s original practice. Other monks lived austere lives and worked miracles, and some of them formulated rules, but it is to Benedict and his rules that we must look for the code of Western monachism. “By a strange parallelism,” says Putnam, “almost in the very year in which the great Emperor Justinian was codifying the results of seven centuries of Roman secular legislation for the benefit of the judges and the statesmen of the new Europe, Benedict, on his lonely mountain-top, was composing his code for the regulation of the daily life of the great civilizers of Europe for seven centuries to come.”
The rules consist of a preface and seventy-three chapters. The prologue defines the classes of monks, and explains the aim of the “school of divine servitude,” as Benedict described his monastery. The following is a partial list of the subjects considered: The character of an abbot, silence, maxims for good works, humility, directions as to divine service, rules for dormitories, penalties, duties of various monastic officers, poverty, care of the sick daily rations of food and drink, hours for meals, fasting, entertainment of guests, and dress. They close with the statement that the Benedictine rule is not offered as an ideal of perfection, or even as equal to the teaching of Cassian or Basil, but for mere beginners in the spiritual life, who may thence proceed further.
The Benedictine novitiate extended over one year, but was subsequently increased to three. At the close of this period the novice was given the opportunity to go back into the world. If he still persisted in his choice, he swore before the bones of the saints to remain forever cut off from the rest of his fellow beings. If a monk left the monastery, or was expelled, he could return twice, but if, after the third admission, he severed his connection, the door was shut forever.
The monk passed his time in manual labor, copying manuscripts, reading, fasting and prayer. He was forbidden to receive letters, tokens or gifts, even from his nearest-relatives, without permission from the abbot. His daily food allowance was usually a pound of bread, a pint of wine, cider or ale, and sometimes fish, eggs, fruit or cheese. He was dressed in a black cowl. His clothing was to be suitable to the climate and to consist of two sets. He was also furnished with a straw mattress, blanket, quilt, pillow, knife, pen, needle, handkerchief and tablets. He was, in all things, to submit patiently to his superior, to keep silence, and to serve his turn in the kitchen. In the older days the monks changed their clothes on the occasion of a bath, which used to be taken four times a year. Later, bathing was allowed only twice a year, and the monks changed their clothes when they wished.
Various punishments were employed to correct faults. Sometimes the offender was whipped on the bare shoulders with a thick rod; others had to lie prostrate in the doorway of the church at each hour, so that the monks passed over his body on entering or going out.
The monks formerly rose at two o’clock, and spent the day in various occupations until eight at night, when they retired. The following rules once governed St. Gregory’s Monastery in England: “3:45 A.M. Rise. 4 A.M. Matins and lauds, recited; half-hour mental prayer; prime _sung_; prime B.V.M. recited. 6:30 A.M. Private study; masses; breakfast for those who had permission. 8 A.M. Lectures and disputations. 10 A.M. Little hours B.V.M., recited; tierce, mass, sext, _sung_. 11:30 A.M. Dinner. 12 noon. None _sung_; vespers and compline B.V.M., recited. 12:30 P.M. Siesta, 1 P.M. Hebrew or Greek lecture. 2 P.M. Vespers _sung_. 2:30 P.M. Lectures and disputations. 4 P.M. Private study. 6 P.M. Supper. 6:30 P.M. Recreation. 7:30 P.M. Public spiritual reading; compline _sung_; matins and lauds B.V.M., recited; half-hour mental prayer. 8:45 P.M. Retire[D].”
[Footnote D: Appendix, Note D.]
Such a routine suggests a dreary life, but that would depend upon the monk’s temperament. Regularity of employment kept him healthy, and if he did not take his sins too much to heart, he was free from gloom. Hill very justly observes: “Whenever men obey that injunction of labor, no matter what their station, there is in the act the element of happiness, and whoever avoids that injunction, there is always the shadow of the unfulfilled curse darkening their path.” Thus, their ideal was “to subdue one’s self and then to devote one’s self,” which De Tocqueville pronounces “the secret of strength.” How well they succeeded in realizing their ideal by the methods employed we shall see later.
The term “order,” as applied to the Benedictines, is used in a different sense from that which it has when used of later monastic bodies. Each Benedictine house was practically independent of every other, while the houses of the Dominicans, Franciscans or Jesuits were bound together under one head. The family idea was peculiar to the Benedictines. The abbot was the father, and the monastery was the home where the Benedictine was content to dwell all his life. In the later monastic societies the monks were constantly traveling from place to place. Taunton says: “As God made society to rest on the basis of the family, so St. Benedict saw that the spiritual family is the surest basis for the sanctification of the souls of his monks. The monastery therefore is to him what the ‘home’ is to lay-folk…. From this family idea comes another result: the very fact that St. Benedict did not found an Order but only gave a Rule, cuts away all possibility of that narrowing _esprit de corps_ which comes so easily to a widespread and highly-organized body.”
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, it became necessary for the general good of each family to secure some kind of union. The Chapter then came into existence, which was a representative body, composed of the heads of the different houses and ordinary monks regularly appointed as delegates. To the Chapter were committed various matters of jurisdiction, and also the power of sending visitors to the different abbeys in the pope’s name.
Each society was ruled by an abbot, who governed in Christ’s stead. Sometimes the members of the monastery were consulted, the older ones ordinarily, the whole congregation; in important matters. But implicit obedience to the abbot, as the representative of God, was demanded by the vows.
The abbot was to be elected by the monks. At various periods popes and princes usurped this power, but the monks always claimed the right as an original privilege. Carlyle quotes Jocelin on Abbot Samson, who says that the monks of St. Edmundsbury were compelled to submit their choice to Henry II., who, looking at the committee of monks somewhat sternly, said: “You present to me Samson; I do not know him; had it been your prior, whom I do know, I should have accepted him; however, I will now do as you wish. But have a care of yourselves. By the true eyes of God, if you manage badly, I will be upon you.”
In Walter Scott’s novel, “The Abbot,” there is an interesting contrast drawn between the ceremonies attending an abbot’s installation, when the monasteries were in their glory, and the pitiable scenes in the days of their decline, when Mary Stuart was a prisoner in Lochleven. In the monastery of Kennaquhair, which had been despoiled by the fury of the times, a few monks were left to mourn the mutilated statues and weep over the fragments of richly-carved Gothic pillars. Having secretly elected an abbot, they assembled in fear and trembling to invest him with the honors of his office. “In former times,” says Scott, “this was one of the most splendid of the many pageants which the hierarchy of Rome had devised to attract the veneration of the faithful. When the folding doors on such solemn occasions were thrown open, and the new abbot appeared on the threshold in full-blown dignity, with ring and mitre and dalmatique and crosier, his hoary standard-bearers and juvenile dispensers of incense preceding him, and the venerable train of monks behind him, his appearance was the signal for the magnificent jubilate to rise from the organ and the music-loft and to be joined by the corresponding bursts of ‘Alleluiah’ from the whole assembled congregation.
“Now all was changed. Father Ambrose stood on the broken steps of the high altar, barefooted, as was the rule, and holding in his hand his pastoral staff, for the gemmed ring and jewelled mitre had become secular spoils. No obedient vassals came, man after man, to make their homage and to offer the tribute which should provide their spiritual superior with palfrey and trappings. No bishop assisted at the solemnity to receive into the higher ranks of the church nobility a dignitary whose voice in the legislature was as potent as his own.”
We are enabled by this partially-quoted description to imagine the importance attached to the election of an abbot. He became, in feudal times, a lord of the land, the richest man in the community, and a tremendous power in political councils and parliaments. A Benedictine abbot once confessed: “My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.”
No new principle seems to be disclosed by the Benedictine rules. The command to labor had been emphasized even in the monasteries of Egypt. The Basilian code contained a provision enforcing manual labor, but the work was light and insufficient to keep the mind from brooding. The monastery that was to succeed in the West must provide for men who not only could toil hard, but who must do so if they were to be kept pure and true; it must welcome men accustomed to the dangerous adventures of pioneer life in the vast forests of the North. The Benedictine system met these conditions by a unique combination and application of well-known monastic principles; by a judicious subordination of minor matters to essential discipline; by bringing into greater prominence the doctrine of labor; by tempering the austerities of the cell to meet the necessities of a severe climate; and lastly, by devising a scheme of life equally adaptable to the monk of sunny Italy and the rude Goth of the northern forests.
It was the splendid fruition of many years of experiment amid varying results. “It shows,” says Schaff, “a true knowledge of human nature, the practical wisdom of Rome and adaptation to Western customs; it combines simplicity with completeness, strictness with gentleness, humility with courage and gives the whole cloister life a fixed unity and compact organization, which, like the episcopate, possessed an unlimited versatility and power of expansion.”
_The Struggle against Barbarism_
No institution has contributed as much to the amelioration of human misery or struggled as patiently and persistently to influence society for good as the Christian church. In spite of all that may be said against the followers of the Cross, it still remains true, that they have ever been foremost in the establishment of peace and justice among men.
The problem that confronted the church when Benedict began his labors, was no less than that of reducing a demoralized and brutal society to law and order. Chaos reigned, selfishness and lust ruled the hearts of Rome’s conquerors. The West was desolated by barbarians; the East dismembered and worn out by theological controversy. War had ruined the commerce of the cities and laid waste the rural districts. Vast swamps and tracts of brush covered fields once beautiful with the products of agricultural labor. The minds of men were distracted by apprehensions of some frightful, impending calamity. The cultured Roman, the untutored Goth and the corrupted Christian were locked in the deadly embrace of despair. “Constantly did society attempt to form itself,” says Guizot, “constantly was it destroyed by the act of man, by the absence of the moral conditions under which alone it can exist.”
But notwithstanding failures and discouragements, the work of reconstructing society moved painfully on, and among the brave master builders was Benedict of Nursia. “He found the world, physical and social, in ruins,” says Cardinal Newman, “and his mission was to restore it in the way,–not of science, but of nature; not as if setting about to do it; not professing to do it by any set time, or by any series of strokes; but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new world he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure.”
But the chaos created by the irruption of the barbarous nations at this period seriously affected the moral character and influence of the clergy and the monks. The church seemed unequal to the stupendous undertaking of converting the barbarians. The monks, as a class, were lawless and vicious. Benedict himself testifies against them, and declares that they were “always wandering and never stable; that they obey their own appetites, whereunto they are enslaved.” Unable to control their own desires by any law whatsoever, they were unfitted to the task before them. It was imperative, then, that unity and order should be introduced among the monasteries; that some sort of a uniform rule, adapted to the existing conditions, should be adopted, not only for the preservation of the monastic institution, but for the preparation of the monks for their work. Therefore, although the Christianity of that time was far from ideal, it was, nevertheless, a religion within the grasp of the reckless barbarians; and subsequent events prove that it possessed a moral power capable of humanizing manners, elevating the intellect, and checking the violent temper of the age.
Excepting always the religious services of the Benedictine monks, their greatest contribution to civilization was literary and educational[E]. The rules of Benedict provided for two hours a day of reading, and it was doubtless this wise regulation that stimulated literary tastes, and resulted in the collecting of books and the reproduction of manuscripts. “Wherever a Benedictine house arose, or a monastery of any one of the Orders, which were but offshoots from the Benedictine tree, books were multiplied and a library came into existence, small indeed at first, but increasing year by year, till the wealthier houses had gathered together collections of books that would do credit to a modern university.” There was great danger that the remains of classic literature might be destroyed in the general devastation of Italy. The monasteries rescued the literary fragments that escaped, and preserved them. “For a period of more than six centuries the safety of the literary heritage of Europe,–one may say of the world,–depended upon the scribes of a few dozen scattered monasteries.”
[Footnote E: Appendix, Note E.]
The literary services of the earlier monks did not consist in original production, but in the reproduction and preservation of the classics. This work was first begun as a part of the prescribed routine of European monastic life in the monastery at Vivaria, or Viviers, France, which was founded by Cassiodorus about 539. The rules of this cloister were based on those of Cassian, who died in the early part of the fifth century. Benedict, at Monte Cassino, followed the example of Cassiodorus, and the Benedictine Order carried the work on for the seven succeeding centuries.
Cassiodorus was a statesman of no mean ability, and for over forty years was active in the political circles of his time, holding high official positions under five different Roman rulers. He was also an exceptional scholar, devoting much of his energy to the preservation of classic literature. His magnificent collection of manuscripts, rescued from the ruins of Italian libraries, “supplied material for the pens of thousands of monastic scribes.” If we leave out Jerome, it is to Cassiodorus that the honor is due for joining learning and monasticism.
“Thus,” remarks Schaff, “that very mode of life, which, in its founder, Anthony, despised all learning, became in the course of its development an asylum of culture in the rough and stormy times of the migration and the crusades, and a conservator of the literary treasures of antiquity for the use of modern times.”
Cassiodorus, with a noble enthusiasm, inspired his monks to their task. He even provided lamps of ingenious construction, that seem to have been self-trimming, to aid them in their work. He himself set an example of literary diligence, astonishing in one of his age.
Putnam is justified in his praises of this remarkable character when he declares: “It is not too much to say that the continuity of thought and civilization of the ancient world with that of the middle ages was due, more than to any other one man, to the life and labors of Cassiodorus.”
But the monk was more than a scribe and a collector of books, he became the chronicler and the school-teacher. “The records that have come down to us of several centuries of medieval European history are due almost exclusively to the labors of the monastic chroniclers.” A vast fund of information, the value of which is impaired, it is true, by much useless stuff, concerning medieval customs, laws and events, was collected by these unscientific historians and is now accessible to the student.
At the end of the ninth century nearly all the monasteries of Europe conducted schools open to the children of the neighborhood. The character of the educational training of the times is not to be judged by modern standards. A beginning had to be made, and that too at a time “when neither local nor national governments had assumed any responsibilities in connection with elementary education, and when the municipalities were too ignorant, and in many cases too poor, to make provision for the education of the children.” It is therefore to the lasting credit of Benedict, inspired no doubt by the example of Cassiodorus, that he commanded his monks to read, encouraged literary work, and made provision for the education of the young.
The Benedictines rendered a great social service in reclaiming deserted regions and in clearing forests. “The monasteries,” says Maitland, “were, in those days of misrule and turbulence, beyond all price, not only as places where (it may be imperfectly, but better than elsewhere) God was worshipped,… but as central points whence agriculture was to spread over bleak hills and barren downs and marshy plains, and deal its bread to millions perishing with hunger and its pestilential train.” Roman taxation and barbarian invasions had ruined the farmers, who left their lands and fled to swell the numbers of the homeless. The monk repeopled these abandoned but once fertile fields, and carried civilization still deeper into the forests. Many a monastery with its surrounding buildings became the nucleus of a modern city. The more awful the darkness of the forest solitudes, the more the monks loved it. They cut down trees in the heart of the wilderness, and transformed a soil bristling with woods and thickets into rich pastures and ploughed fields. They stimulated the peasantry to labor, and taught them many useful lessons in agriculture. Thus, they became an industrial, as well as a spiritual, agency for good.
The habits of the monks brought them into close contact with nature. Even the animals became their friends. Numerous stories have been related of their wonderful power over wild beasts and their conversations with the birds. “It is wonderful,” says Bede, “that he who faithfully and loyally obeys the Creator of the universe, should, in his turn, see all the creatures obedient to his orders and his wishes.” They lived, so we are told, in the most intimate relations with the animal creation. Squirrels leaped to their hands or hid in the folds of their cowls. Stags came out of the forests in Ireland and offered themselves to some monks who were ploughing, to replace the oxen carried off by the hunters. Wild animals stopped in their pursuit of game at the command of St. Laumer. Birds ceased singing at the request of some monks until they had chanted their evening prayer, and at their word the feathered songsters resumed their music. A swan was the daily companion of St. Hugh of Lincoln, and manifested its miraculous knowledge of his approaching death by the most profound melancholy. While all the details of such stories are not to be accepted as literally true, no doubt some of this poetry of monastic history rests upon interesting and charming facts.
A fuller discussion of the permanent contributions which the monk made to civilization is reserved for the last chapter. I have somewhat anticipated a closer scrutiny of his achievements in order to present a clearer view of his life and labors. His religious duties were, perhaps, wearisome enough. We might tire of his monotonous chanting and incessant vigils, but it is gratifying to know that he also engaged in practical and useful employments. The convent became the house of industry as well as the temple of prayer. The forest glades echoed to the stroke of the axe as well as to hymns of praise. Yes, as Carlyle writes of the twelfth century, “these years were no chimerical vacuity and dreamland peopled with mere vaporous phantasms, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The sun shone on it, the vicissitudes of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowed fields ploughed and houses built.”
_The Spread of the Benedictine Rule_
It is generally held that Benedict had no presentiment of the vast historical importance of his system; and that he aspired to nothing beyond the salvation of his own soul and those of his brethren.
But the rule spread with wonderful rapidity. In every rich valley arose a Benedictine abbey. Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, France and Spain adopted his rule. Princes, moved by various motives, hastened to bestow grants of land on the indefatigable missionary who, undeterred by the wildness of the forest and the fierceness of the barbarian, settled in the remotest regions. In the various societies of the Benedictines there have been thirty-seven thousand monasteries and one hundred and fifty thousand abbots. For the space of two hundred and thirty-nine years the Benedictines governed the church by forty-eight popes chosen from their order. They boast of two hundred cardinals, seven thousand archbishops, fifteen thousand bishops and four thousand saints. The astonishing assertion is also made that no less than twenty emperors and forty-seven kings resigned their crowns to become Benedictine monks. Their convents claim ten empresses and fifty queens. Many of these earthly rulers retired to the seclusion of the monastery because their hopes had been crushed by political defeat, or their consciences smitten by reason of crime or other sins. Some were powerfully attracted by the heroic element of monastic life, and these therefore spurned the luxuries and emoluments of royalty, in order by personal sacrifice to achieve spiritual domination in this life, and to render their future salvation certain. But whatever the motive that drew queens and princes to the monastic order, the retirement of such large numbers of the nobility indicates the influence of a religious system which could cope so successfully with the attractions of the palace and the natural passion for political dominion.
Saint Gregory the Great, the biographer of Benedict, who was born at Rome in 540 A.D. and so was nearly contemporaneous with Benedict was a zealous promoter of the monastic ideal, and did as much as any one to advance its ecclesiastical position and influence. He founded seven monasteries with his paternal inheritance, and became the abbot of one of them. He often expressed a desire to escape the clamor of the world by retirement to a lonely cell. Inspired by the loftiest estimates of his holy office, he sought to reform the church in its spirit and life. Many of his innovations in the church service bordered upon a dangerous and glittering pomp; but the musical world will always revere his memory for the famous chants that bear his name.
Gregory surrounded himself with monks, and did everything in his power to promote their interests. He increased the novitiate to two years, and exempted certain monasteries from the control of the bishops. Other popes added to these exemptions, and thus widened the breach which already existed between the secular clergy and the monks. He also fixed a penalty of lifelong imprisonment for abandonment of the monastic life.
Under Gregory’s direction many missionary enterprises were carried on, notably that of Augustine to England. The story runs that one day Gregory saw some men and beautiful children from Britain put up for sale in the market-place. Deeply sighing, he exclaimed: “Alas for grief! That the author of darkness possesses men of so bright countenance, and that so great grace of aspect bears a mind void of inward grace!” He then asked the children the name of their nation. “Angles,” was the reply. “It is well,” he said, “for they have _angelic_ faces. What is the name of your province?” It was answered, “Deira.” “Truly,” he said, “_De-ira-ns,_ drawn from anger, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is your king called?” They answered, “AElla, or Ella.” Then he cried “_Alleluia!_ it behooves that the praise of God the Creator should be sung in those parts.” While it is hard to accept this evidently fanciful story in its details, it seems quite probable that the sale of some English slaves in a Roman market drew the attention of Gregory to the needs of Britain.
Some years afterwards, in 596, Gregory commissioned Augustine, prior of the monastery of St. Andrew’s on the Celian Hill, at Rome, with forty companions, to preach the gospel in Britain. When this celebrated missionary landed on the island of Thanet, he found monasticism had preceded him. But what was the nature of this British monasticism? On that question Rome and England are divided.
The Romanist declares that no country received the Christian faith more directly from the Church of Rome than did England; that the most careful study of authentic records reveals no doctrinal strife, no diversity of belief between the early British monks and the Pope of Rome; that St. Patrick, of Ireland, and St. Columba, of Scotland, were loyal sons of their Roman mother.
The Anglican, on the other hand, believes that Christianity was introduced into Britain independently of Rome. As to the precise means employed, he has his choice of ten legends. He may hold with Lane that it is reasonable to suppose one of Paul’s ardent converts, burning with fervent zeal, led the Britons to the cross. Or he may argue with others: “What is more natural than to imagine that Joseph of Arimathea, driven from Palestine, sailed away to Britain.” In proof of this assumption, we are shown the chapel of St. Joseph, the remains of the oldest Christian church, where the holy-thorn blossoms earlier than in any other part of England. Many Anglicans wisely regard all this as legendary. It is also held that St. Patrick and St. Columba were not Romanists, but represented a type of British Christianity, which, although temporarily subjected to Rome, yet finally threw off the yoke under Henry VIII. and reasserted its ancient independence. Still others declare that when Augustine was made archbishop, the seat of ecclesiastical authority was transferred from Rome to Canterbury, and the English church became an independent branch of the universal church. It was Catholic, but not Roman.
The difficulty of ascertaining when and by whom Christianity was originally introduced into southern Britain must be apparent to every student. But some things may be regarded as historically certain. The whole country had been desolated by war when Augustine arrived. For a hundred and fifty years the brutality and ignorance of the barbarians had reigned supreme. All traces of Roman civilization had nearly disappeared with the conquest of the heathen Anglo-Saxons. Whatever may be thought about the subsequent effects of the triumph of Roman Christianity, it is due to Rome to recognize the fact that with the coming of the Roman missionaries religion and knowledge began a new life.
The Anglo-Saxons had destroyed the Christian churches and monasteries, whose origin, as we have seen, is unknown. They drove away or massacred the priests and monks. Christianity was practically extirpated in those districts subject to the Germanic yoke. But when Augustine landed British monks were still to be found in various obscure parts of the country, principally in Ireland and Wales. Judging from what is known of these monks, it is safe to say that their habits and teachings were based on the traditions of an earlier Christianity, and that originally British Christianity was independent of Rome.
The monks in Britain at the time when Augustine landed differed from the Roman monks in their tonsures, their liturgy, and the observance of Easter, although no material difference in doctrine can be established. The clergy did not always observe the law of celibacy nor perhaps the Roman rules of baptism. It is also admitted, even by Catholic historians, that the British monks refused to acknowledge Augustine their archbishop; that this question divided the royal family; and that the old British church was not completely subdued until Henry II. conquered Ireland and Wales. These statements are practically supported by Ethelred L. Taunton, an authoritative writer, whose sympathy with Roman monasticism is very strong. He thinks that a few of the British monks submitted to Augustine, but of the rest he says: “They would not heed the call of Augustine, and on frivolous pretexts refused to acknowledge him.” A large body of British monks retired to the monastery of Bangor, and when King Ethelfrid invaded the district of Wales, he slew twelve hundred of them in the open field as they were upon their knees praying for the success of the Britons. It was then that the power of the last remnants of Celtic or British Christianity was practically broken, and the Roman type henceforth gradually acquired the mastery.
Montalembert says: “In no other country has Catholicism been persecuted with more sanguinary zeal; and, at the same time, none has greater need of her care.” While the latter observation is open to dispute, it is certainly true that England has never remained quiet under the dominion of Rome. Goldsmith’s tribute to the English character suggests a reasonable explanation of this historic fact:
“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state, Fierce in their native hardiness of soul, True to imagined right, above control, While even the peasant boasts those rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man.”
The fact to be remembered, as we emerge from these ecclesiastical quarrels and the confusions of this perplexing history, is that the monks were the intellectual and religious leaders of those days. They exercised a profound influence upon English society, and had much to do with the establishment of English institutions.
But, on the other hand, the continent is indebted to England for the gift of many noble monks who served France and Germany as intellectual and moral guides, at a time when these countries were in a state of extreme degradation. Boniface, the Apostle to the Germans, who is regarded by Neander as the Father of the German church and the real founder of the Christian civilization of Germany, was the gift of the English cloisters, and a native of Devonshire. Alcuin, the ecclesiastical prime minister of Charlemagne and the greatest educator of his time, was born and trained in England. Nearly all the leading schools of France were founded or improved by this celebrated monk. It was largely due to Alcuin’s unrivaled energy and splendid talents that Charlemagne was able to make so many and so glorious educational improvements in his empire.
Notable among the men who introduced the Benedictine rule into England was St. Wilfred (634-709 A.D.), who had traveled extensively in France and Italy, and on his return carried the monastic rule into northern Britain. He also is credited with establishing a course of musical training in the English monasteries. He was the most active prelate of his age in the founding of churches and monasteries, and in securing uniformity of discipline and harmony with the Church of Rome.
One of the most famous monastic retreats of those days was the wild and lonely isle of Iona, the Mecca of monks and the monastic capital of Scotland. It is a small island, three miles long and one broad, lying west of Scotland. Many kings of Scotland were crowned here on a stone which now forms a part of the British coronation chair. Its great monastery enjoyed the distinction from the sixth to the eighth century of being second to none in its widespread influence in behalf of the intellectual life of Europe.
This monastery was originally founded in the middle of the sixth century by Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia, an Irish saint actively associated with a wonderful intellectual awakening. The rule of the monastery is unknown, but it is probable that it could not have been, at the first, of the Benedictine type. Columba’s followers traveled as missionaries and teachers to all parts of Europe, and it is said, they dared to sail in their small boats even as far as Iceland.
Dr. Johnson says in his “Tour to the Hebrides”: “We are now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessing of religion. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.” The monastery which Columba founded here was doubtless of the same character as the establishments in Ireland. Many of these Celtic buildings were made of the branches of trees and supported by wooden props. It was some time before properly-constructed wooden churches or monasteries became general in these wild regions. In such rude huts small libraries were collected and the monks trained to preach. Ireland was then the center of knowledge in the North. Greek, Latin, music and such science as the monks possessed were taught to eager pupils. Copies of their manuscripts are still to be found all over Europe. Their schools were open to the rich and poor alike. The monks went from house to house teaching and distributing literature. As late as the sixteenth century, students from various parts of the Continent were to be found in these Irish schools.
There is an interesting story related of Columba’s literary activities. It is said that on one occasion while visiting his master, Finnian, he undertook to make a clandestine copy of the abbot’s Psalter. When the master learned of the fact, he indignantly charged Columba with theft, and demanded the copy which he had made, on the ground that a copy made without permission of the author was the property of the original owner, because a transcript is the offspring of the original work. Putnam, to whom I am indebted for this story, says: “As far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the first instance which occurs in the history of European literature of a contention for a copyright.” The conflict for this copyright afterwards developed into a civil war. The copy of the Latin Psalter “was enshrined in the base of a portable altar as the national relic of the O’Donnell clan,” and was preserved by that family for thirteen hundred years. It was placed on exhibition as late as 1867, in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy.
Enough has now been said to enable the reader to understand something of the spirit and labors of the monks in an age characteristically barbaric. For five centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, the condition of Europe was deplorable. “It may be doubted,” says an old writer, “whether the worst of the Caesars exceeded in dark malignity, or in capriciousness of vengeance, the long-haired kings of France.” The moral sense of even the most saintly churchmen seems to have been blunted by familiarity with atrocities and crimes. Brute force was the common method of exercising control and administering justice. The barbarians were bold and independent, but cruel and superstitious. Their furious natures needed taming and their rude minds tutoring. Even though during this period churches and monasteries were raised in amazing numbers, yet the spirit of barbarism was so strong that the Christians could scarcely escape its influence. The power of Christianity was modified by the nature of the people, whose characters it aimed to transform. The remarks of William Newton Clarke respecting the Christians of the first and second centuries are also appropriate to the period under review: “The people were changed by the new faith, but the new faith was changed by the people.” Christianity “made a new people, better than it found them, but they in turn made a new Christianity, with its strong points illustrated and confirmed in their experience, but with weakness brought in from their defects.”
Yes, the work of civilizing the Germanic nations was a task of herculean proportions and of tremendous significance. Out of these tribes were to be constructed the nations of modern Europe. To this important mission the monks addressed themselves with such courage, patience, faith and zeal, as to entitle them to the veneration of posterity. With singular wisdom and unflinching bravery they carried on their missionary and educational enterprises, in the face of discouragements and obstacles sufficient to dismay the bravest souls. The tenacious strength of those wild forces that clashed with the tenderer influences of the cloister should soften our criticism of the inconsistencies which detract from the glory of those early ministers of righteousness and exemplars of gentleness and peace.
IV
_REFORMED AND MILITARY ORDERS_
The monastic institution was never entirely good or entirely bad. In periods of general degradation there were beautiful exceptions in monasteries ruled by pure and powerful abbots. From the beginning various monasteries soon departed from their discipline by sheltering iniquity and laziness, while other establishments faithfully observed the rules. But during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries there was a widespread decline in the spirit of devotion and a shameful relaxation of monastic discipline. Malmesbury, King Alfred, Alcuin, in England, and many continental writers, sorrowfully testified against the monks because of their vices, their revelings, their vain and gorgeous ornaments of dress and their waning zeal for virtue. The priests hunted and fought, prayed, preached, swore and drank as they pleased. “We cannot wonder,” says an anonymous historian, “that they should commit the more reasonable offence of taking wives.” Disorders were common everywhere; the monastic vows were sadly neglected. Political and religious ideals were lost sight of amid the prevailing confusion and wild commotion of those dark days. “It is true,” says Carlyle, “all things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true in three centuries much imperfection accumulates; many an ideal, monastic or otherwise, shooting forth into practice as it can, grows to a strange reality; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your ideal? For alas the ideal has to grow into the real, and to seek out its bed and board there, often in a sorry way.”
This, then, may be accepted as the usual history of a monastery or a monastic order. First, vows of poverty, obedience and chastity zealously cherished and observed; as a result of loyalty to this ideal, a spirit of devotion to righteousness is created, and a pure, lofty type of Christian life is formed, which, if not the highest and truest, is sufficiently exalted to win the reverence of worldly men and an extra-ordinary power over their lives and affections. There naturally follow numerous and valuable gifts of land and gold. The monks become rich as well as powerful. Then the decline begins. Vast riches have always been a menace to true spirituality. Perhaps they always will be. The wealthy monk falls a prey to pride and arrogance; he becomes luxurious in his habits, and lazy in the performance of duty. Vice creeps in and his moral ruin is complete. The transformation in the character of the monk is accompanied by a change in public opinion. The monk is now an eyesore; his splendid buildings are viewed with envy by some, with shame by others. Then arise the vehement cries for the destruction of his palatial cloister, and the heroic efforts of the remnant that abide faithful to reform the institution. This has been the pathway over which every monastic order has traveled. As long as there was sufficient vitality to give birth to reformatory movements, new societies sprang up as off-shoots of the older orders, some of which adopted the original rules, while others altered them to suit the views of the reforming founder. “For indeed,” says Trench, “those orders, wonderful at their beginning, and girt up so as to take heaven by storm, seemed destined to travel in a mournful circle from which there was no escape.” These facts partly explain the reformatory movements which appear from the ninth century on.
The first great saint to enter the lists against monastic corruption was Benedict of Aniane (750-821 A.D.), a member of a distinguished family in southern France. The Benedictine rule in his opinion was formed for novices and invalids. He attributed the prevailing laxity among the monks to the mild discipline. As abbot of a monastery he undertook to reform its affairs by adopting a system based on Basil of Asia Minor and Pachomius of Egypt. But he leaned too far back for human nature in the West, and the conclusion was forced upon him that Benedict of Nursia had formulated a set of rules as strict as could be enforced among the Western monks. Accordingly he directed his efforts to secure a faithful observance of the original Benedictine rules, adding, however, a number of rigid and burdensome regulations. Although at first the monks doubted his sanity, kicked him and spat on him, yet he afterwards succeeded in gathering about three hundred of them under his rule. Several colonies were sent out from his monastery, which was built on his patrimonial estate near Montpellier. His last establishment, which was located near Aix-la-Chapelle, became famous as a center of learning and sanctity.
One of the most celebrated reform monasteries was the convent of Cluny, or Clugny, in Burgundy, about fifteen miles from Lyons, which was founded by Duke William of Aquitaine in 910. It was governed by a code based on the rule of St. Benedict. The monastery began with twelve monks under Bruno, but became so illustrious that under Hugo there were ten thousand monks in the various convents under its rule. It was made immediately subject to the pope,–that is, exempt from the jurisdiction of the bishop. Some idea of its splendid equipment may be formed from the fact that it is said, that in 1245, after the council of Lyons, it entertained Innocent IV., two patriarchs, twelve cardinals, three archbishops, fifteen bishops, many abbots, St. Louis, King of France, several princes and princesses, each with a considerable retinue, yet the monks were not incommoded. It gave to the church three popes,–Gregory VII., Urban II. and Paschal II.
From his cell at Cluny, Hildebrand, who became the famous Gregory VII., looked out upon a world distracted by war and sunk in vice. “In Hildebrand’s time, while he was studying those annals in Cluny,” says Thomas Starr King, “a boy pope, twelve years old, was master of the spiritual scepter, and was beginning to lead a life so shameful, foul and execrable that a subsequent pope said, ‘he shuddered to describe it.'”
Connected with the monastery was the largest church in the world, surpassed only a little, in later years, by St. Peter’s at Rome. Its construction was begun in 1089 by the abbot Hugo, and it was consecrated in 1131, under the administration of Peter the Venerable. It boasted of twenty-five altars and many costly works of art.
So great was the fame and influence of this establishment that numerous convents in France and Italy placed themselves under its control, thus forming “The Congregation of Cluny.”
After the administration of Peter the Venerable (1122-1156), this illustrious house began to succumb to the intoxication of success, and it steadily declined in character and influence until its property was confiscated by the Constituent Assembly, in 1799, and the church sold for one hundred thousand francs. It is now in ruin.
But in spite of every attempt at reform during the ninth and tenth centuries the decline of the continental monasteries continued. Many persons of royal blood, accustomed to the license of palaces, entered the cloister and increased the disorders. The monks naturally respected their blood and relaxed the discipline in their favor. The result was costly robes, instead of the simple, monastic garb, riotous living, and a general indifference to spirituality. Spurious monasteries sprang up with rich lay-abbots at their head, who made the office hereditary in their families. Laymen were appointed to rich benefices simply that they might enjoy the revenues. These lay-abbots even went so far as to live with their families in their monasteries, and rollicking midnight banquets were substituted for the asceticism demanded by the vows. They traveled extensively attended by splendid retinues. Some of the monks seemed intent on nothing but obtaining charters of privileges and exemptions from civil and military duties.
In England the state of affairs was even more distressing than on the Continent. The evil effects of the Saxon invasion, the demoralization that accompanied the influx of paganism, and the almost complete destruction of the religious institutions of British Christianity have already been noted. About the year 700, the island was divided among fifteen petty chiefs, who waged war against one another almost incessantly. Christianity, as introduced by Augustine, had somewhat mitigated the ferocity of war, and England had begun to make some approach toward a respect for law and a veneration for the Christian religion, when the Danes came, and with them another period of disgraceful atrocities and blighting heathenism. The Danish invasion had almost extirpated the monastic institution in the northern districts. Carnage and devastation reigned everywhere. Celebrated monasteries fell in ruins and the monks were slain or driven into exile. Hordes of barbaric warriors roamed the country, burning and plundering.
“At the close of this calamitous period,” says Lingard, in his “History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” “the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle to the friends of religion: 1. The laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan forefathers. 2. The clergy had grown indolent, dissolute and illiterate. 3. The monastic order had been apparently annihilated. It devolved on King Alfred, victorious over his enemies, to devise and apply the remedies for these evils.” The good king endeavored to restore the monastic institution, but, owing to the lack of candidates for the monastic habit, he was compelled to import a colony of monks from Gaul.
The moral results of Alfred’s reformatory measures, as well as those of his immediate successors, were far from satisfactory, although he did vastly stimulate the educational work of the monastic schools. He devoted himself so faithfully to the gathering of traditions, that he is said to be the father of English history. The tide of immorality, however, was too strong to be stemmed in a generation or two. It was a century and a half before there was even an approach to substantial victory over the disgraceful abuses among the clergy and the monks.
The churchman who is credited with doing most to distinguish the monks as a zealous and faithful body was Dunstan (924-988 A.D.), first Abbot of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Winchester, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury. He is the most conspicuous ecclesiastical personage in the history of those dark days, but his character and labors have given rise to bitter and extensive controversy.
It was Dunstan’s chief aim to subjugate the Anglo-Saxon church to the power of Rome, and to correct existing abuses by compelling the clergy and the monks to obey the rule of celibacy. He was a fervent believer in the efficacy of the Benedictine vows, and in the value of clerical celibacy as a remedy for clerical licentiousness. Naturally, Protestant writers, who hold that papal supremacy never was a blessing in any country or in any age, and who think that clerical celibacy has always been a fruitful source of crime and sin, condemn the reforms of Dunstan in the most unqualified terms. A statement of a few of the many and perplexing facts may assist us to form a fairly just judgment of the man and his work.
The principle of sacerdotal celibacy appeared early in the history of Christianity, and for many centuries it was the subject of sharp contention. Roman Catholics themselves have been divided upon it. In every Christian country, from the Apostolic period onward, there were priests and teachers who opposed the imposition of this rule upon the clergy, and, on the other hand, there were those who practiced and advocated celibacy as the indispensable guarantee of spiritual power and purity.
What the rule of celibacy was at this period, in England, seems uncertain. Lingard maintains that marriage was always permitted to the clergy in minor orders, who were employed in various subordinate positions, but that those in higher orders, whose office it was to minister at the altar and to offer the sacrifice, were expressly bound to a life of the strictest continence. During the invasion of the Danes, when confusion reigned, many priests in the higher orders had not only forsaken their vows of chastity, but had plunged into frightful immoralities; and married clerks of inferior orders were raised to the priesthood to fill the ranks depleted by war. These promoted clerks were previously required to separate from their wives, but apparently many of them did not do so. Consequently, from several causes, the married priests became a numerous body, and since the common opinion seems to have been that a married priest was disgracing his office, this body was regarded as a menace to the welfare of the church and the state.
Lea, in his elaborate “History of Sacerdotal Celibacy,” holds that the rule of celibacy was only binding on the regulars, or monks, and that the secular priesthood was at liberty to marry. But from several other passages in his work it seems that he also recognizes the fact that, while marriage was common, it was in defiance of an ancient canon. “It is evident,” he says, “that the memory of the ancient canons was not forgotten, and that their observance was still urged by some ardent churchmen, but that the customs of the period had rendered them virtually obsolete, and that no sufficient means existed of enforcing obedience. If open scandals and shameless bigamy and concubinage could be restrained, the ecclesiastical authorities were evidently content. Celibacy could not be enjoined as a law, but was rendered attractive by surrounding it with privileges and immunities denied to him who yielded to the temptations of the flesh.”
Throughout Western Christendom the law of celibacy was openly and shamefully trampled upon, and every reformer seemed to think that the very first step toward any improvement in clerical morals was to be taken by enforcing this rule.
When Dunstan commenced his reforms, the clergy were guilty of graver sins than that of living in marriage relations. Adultery, bigamy, swearing, fighting and drinking were the order of the day. The monasteries were occupied by secular priests with wives or concubines. All the chroniclers of this period agree in charging the monks and clergy with a variety of dissipations and disorders.
It is quite clear, therefore, that in Dunstan’s view he was doing the only right thing in trying to correct the existing abuses by compelling the priests to adopt that celibate life without which it was popularly believed the highest holiness and the largest usefulness could not be attained. In the light of this purpose and this common opinion of his time, Dunstan and his mission should be judged.
Dunstan was aided in his work by King Edgar the Pacific, who, by the way, was himself compelled to go without his crown seven years for violating the chastity of a nun. Oswald, the Bishop of Worcester, and Ethelwold, the Bishop of Winchester, were also zealously engaged in the task of reform.
A law was enacted providing that priests, deacons and sub-deacons should live chastely or resign. As a result of this law, many priests were ejected from the monasteries and from their official positions. Strict monks were put in their places. A strong opposition party was created, and the ejected clergy aroused such discontent that a civil war was barely averted. This state of things continued until the Norman invasion, when the monks and secular clergy joined forces in the common defence of their property and ecclesiastical rights.
It would seem that many writers, misled by legends for which Dunstan must not be held responsible, and blinded by religious prejudice, have unjustly charged him with hypocrisy and even crime. All his methods may not be defensible when estimated in the light of modern knowledge, and even his ideal may be rejected when judged by modern standards of Christian character, but he must be considered with the moral and intellectual life of his times in full view. He was a champion of the oppressed, a friend of the poor, an unflinching foe of sinful men in the pulpit or on the throne. His will was inflexible, his independence noble and his energy untiring. In trying to bring the Anglo-Saxon church into conformity to Rome he was actuated by a higher motive than the merely selfish desire for ecclesiastical authority. He regarded this harmony as the only remedy for the prevailing disorders. He believed, like many other churchmen of unquestioned purity and honesty, that it was necessary to compel temporal authorities to recognize the power of the church in order to overcome that defiance of moral law which was the chief characteristic of the kings and princes in that turbulent period.
What the Anglo-Saxon church might have been if the rule of celibacy had not been forced upon her, and if she had not submitted to Roman authority in other matters, is a theme for speculation only. The fact is that Dunstan found a church corrupt to the core and left it, as a result of his purifying efforts, with some semblance, to say the least, of moral influence and spiritual purity. Some other kind of ecclesiastical polity than that advocated by Dunstan might have achieved the same results as his, but the simple fact is that none did. In so far as Dunstan succeeded in his monastic measures, he laid the foundations of an ecclesiastical power which afterwards became a serious menace to the political freedom of the Anglo-Saxon race. The battle begun by him raged fiercely between the popes, efficiently supported by the monks, and the kings of England, with varying fortunes, for many centuries. But perhaps, under the plans of that benign Providence who presides over the destiny of nations, it was essentially in the interests of civilization, that the lawlessness of rulers and the vices of the people should be restrained by that ecclesiastical power, which, in after years, and at the proper time, should be forced to recede to its legitimate sphere and functions.
Another celebrated reformatory movement was begun by St. Bruno, who founded the Carthusian Order about the year 1086. Ruskin says: “In their strength, from the foundation of the order at the close of the eleventh century to the beginning of the fourteenth, they reared in their mountain fastnesses and sent out to minister to the world a succession of men of immense mental grasp and serenely authoritative innocence, among whom our own Hugh of Lincoln, in his relations with Henry II. and Coeur de Lion, is to my mind the most beautiful sacerdotal figure known to me in history.”
Bruno, with six companions, established the famous Grand Chartreuse in a rocky wilderness, near Grenoble, in France, separated from the rest of the world by a chain of wild mountains, which are covered with ice and snow for two-thirds of the year.
Until the time of Guigo (1137), the Grand Chartreuse was governed by unwritten rules. Thirteen monks only were permitted to live together, and sixteen converts in the huts at the foot of the hill. The policy of this monastery was at first opposed to all connection with other monasteries. But applications for admission were so numerous that colonies were sent out in various directions, all subject to the mother house. The Carthusians differed in many respects from other orders. The rules of Dom Guigo indicate that the chief aim was to preclude the monks from intercourse with the world, and largely with each other, for each monk had separate apartments, cooked his own food, and so rarely met with his brethren, that he was practically a hermit. The clothing consisted of a rough hair shirt, worn next the skin, a white cassock over it, and, when they went out, a black robe. Fasting was observed at least three days a week, and meat was strictly forbidden. Respecting contact with women Dom Guigo says: “Under no circumstances whatever do we allow women to set foot within our precincts, knowing as we do that neither wise man, nor prophet, nor judge, nor the entertainer of God, nor the sons of God, nor the first created of mankind, fashioned by God’s own hands, could escape the wiles and deceits of women.”
Blistering and bleeding, as well as fasting, were employed to control evil impulses. On the whole, the austerities were as severe as human nature in that wild and cold region could endure. Yet the prosperity that rewarded the piety and labors of the Carthusian monks proved more than a match for their rigorous discipline, and in the middle of the thirteenth century we read charges of laxity and disorder.
The Carthusians settled in England in the twelfth century, and had a famous monastery in London, since called the Charterhouse. The order was in many respects the most successful attempt at reform, but as has been said, “the whole order, and each individual member, is like a petrifaction from the Middle Ages.” Owing to its extremely solitary ideal and its severe discipline, it was unfitted to secure extensive control, or to gain a permanent influence upon the rapidly-developing European nations. Its chief contributions to modern civilization were made by the gift of noble men who passed from the seclusion of the cell into the active life of the world, thus practically proving that the monks’ greatest usefulness was attained when loyalty to their vows yielded to a broader ideal of Christian character and service.
Thus the months passed into years and the years into centuries. Man was slowly working out his salvation. Painfully, laboriously he emerged out of barbarism into the lower forms of civilization; wearily he trudged on his way toward the universal kingdom of righteousness and peace.
There were many other attempts at reform which may not even be mentioned, but one character deserves brief consideration,–Bernard of Clairvaux,–the fairest flower of those corrupt days. The order to which he belonged was the Cistercians, so named because their mother house was at Citeaux (Latin, _Cistercium_), in France. Its members are sometimes called the “White Monks,” because of their white tunics. Their buildings, with their bare walls and low rafters, were a rebuke to the splendid edifices of the richer orders. Austere simplicity characterized their churches, liturgy and habits. Gorgeousness in decoration and ostentation in public services were carefully avoided. They used no pictures, stained glass or images. Once a week they flogged their sinful bodies. Only four hours’ sleep was allowed. Seeking out the wildest spots and most rugged peaks they built their retreats, beautiful in their simplicity and furnishing some of the finest examples of monastic architecture. The order spread into England, where the first Cistercians were characterized by devoutness and poverty. After a while the hand of fate wrote of them as it had of so many, “none were more greedy in adding farm to farm; none less scrupulous in obtaining grants of land from wealthy patrons.” In general, the order was no better and no worse than the rest, but its chief glory is derived from the luster that was shed upon it by Bernard.
[Illustration: SAINT BERNARD]
This illustrious counselor of kings and Catholic saint was born in Burgundy in 1091. When about twenty years of age he entered the monastery at Citeaux with five of his brothers. His genius might have secured ecclesiastical preferment, but he chose to dig ditches, plant fields and govern a monastery. He entered the cloister at Citeaux because the monks were few and poor, and when it became crowded because of his fame, and its rule became lax because of the crowds, he left the cloister to found a home of his own. The abbot selected twelve monks, following the number of apostles, and at their head placed young Bernard. He led the twelve to the valley of Wormwood, and there, in a cheerless forest, he established the monastery of Clairvaux, or Clear Valley. His rule was fiercely severe because he himself loved hardships and rough fare. “It in no way befits religion,” he writes, “to seek remedies for the body, nor is it good for health either. You may now and then take some cheap herb,–such as poor men may,–and this is done sometimes. But to buy drugs, to hunt up doctors, to take doses, is unbecoming to religion and hostile to purity.” His success in winning men to the monastic life was almost phenomenal. It was said that “mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands, and companions their friends, lest they be persuaded by his eloquent message to enter the cloister.” “He was avoided like a plague,” says one.
Bernard’s monks changed the whole face of the country by felling trees and tilling the ground. Their spiritual power rid the valley of Wormwood of its robbers, and the district grew rich and prosperous. Thus Bernard became the most famous man of his time. He was the arbiter in papal elections, the judge in temporal quarrels, the healer of schisms and a powerful preacher of the crusades. He was the embodiment of all that was best in the thought of his age. His weaknesses and faults may largely be explained by the fact that no man can rise entirely above the spirit of his times and absolutely free himself from all pernicious tendencies. “As an advocate for the rights of the church, for the immunities of the clergy, no less than for the great interests of morality, he was fierce, intractable, unforgiving, haughty and tyrannical.” There was, however, no note of insincerity in his work or writings, and no tinge of hypocrisy in fervent zeal. He was brave, honest and pure; controlled always by a consuming passion for the moral welfare of the people.
Our chief interest in Bernard relates to his monastic work which shed undying luster on his name. Vaughan, in his “Hours with the Mystics,” says of him: “His incessant cry for Europe is, Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord…. Bernard had the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry, and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christianity.”
But in spite of Dunstans, Brunos and Bernards, the monastic institution keeps on crumbling. The edifice will not stand much more propping and tinkering. While we admire this display of moral force, this commendable struggle of fresh courage and new hope against disintegrating forces, the conviction gains ground that something is radically wrong with the institution. There is something in it which fosters greed and desperate ambition. “Is it not a shame,” we feel compelled to ask, “that so much splendid, chivalrous courage and magnificent energy should be expended in trying to prevent a structure from falling, which, it seems, could not possibly have been saved?” But while the decay could not be stayed, we must admire the noble aims and pious enthusiasm of the reformers who sought to preserve an institution which to them seemed the only hope of a sinful world.
Dr. Storrs, in his life of Bernard, says: “His soon-canonized name has shone starlike in history ever since he was buried; and it will not hereafter decline from its height or lose its luster, while men continue to recognize with honor the temper of devoted Christian consecration, a character compact of noble forces, and infused with self-forgetful love for God and man.”
_The Military Religious Orders_
The life of Bernard forms an appropriate introduction to a consideration of the Military Religious Orders. Although weary with labor and the weight of years, he traveled over Europe preaching the second crusade. “To kill or to be killed for Christ’s sake is alike righteous and alike safe,” this was his message to the world. In spite of the opposition of court advisers, Bernard induced Louis VII. and Conrad of Germany to take the crusader’s vow. He gave the Knights Templars a new rule and kindled afresh a zeal for the knighthood. Although the members of the Military Orders were not monks in the strict sense of the word, yet they were soldier-monks, and as such deserve to be mentioned here.
At the basis of all monastic orders, as has been pointed out, were the three vows of obedience, celibacy and poverty. Certain orders, by adding to these rules other obligations, or by laying special stress on one of the three ancient vows, produced new and distinct types of monastic character and life.
The Knights of the Hospital assumed as their peculiar work the care of the sick. The Begging Friars, as will be seen later, were distinguished by the importance which they attached to the rule of poverty; the Jesuits, by exalting the law of unquestioning obedience. In view of the warlike character of the Middle Ages it is strange the soldier-monk did not appear earlier than he did. The abbots, in many cases, were feudal lords with immense possessions which needed protection like secular property, but as this could not be secured by the arts of peace, we find traces of the union of the soldier and the monk before the distinct orders professing that character. The immediate cause of such organizations was the crusades. There were numerous societies of this character, some of them so far removed from the monastic type as scarcely to be ranked with monastic institutions. One list mentions two hundred and seven of these Orders of Knighthood, comprising many varieties in theory and practice. The most important were three,–the Knights of the Hospital, or the Knights of St. John; the Knights Templars; and the Teutonic Knights. The Hospitallers wore black mantles with white crosses, the Templars white mantles with red crosses, and the Teutonic Knights white mantles with black crosses. The mantles were in fact the robe of the monk adorned with a cross. The whole system was really a marriage of monasticism and chivalry, as Gibbon says: “The firmest bulwark of Jerusalem was founded in the Knights of the Hospital and of the Temple, that strange association of monastic and military life. The flower of the nobility of Europe aspired to wear the cross and profess the vows of these orders; their spirit and discipline were immortal.”
A passage in the Alexiad quoted in Walter Scott’s “Robert of Paris” reads: “As for the multitude of those who advanced toward the great city let it be enough to say, that they were as the stars in the heaven or as the sand of the seashore. They were in the words of Homer, as many as the leaves and flowers of spring.” This figurative description is almost literally true. Europe poured her men and her wealth into the East. No one but an eye-witness can conceive of the vast amount of suffering endured by those fanatical multitudes as they roamed the streets of Jerusalem looking for shelter, or lay starving by the roadside on a bed of grass.
The term Hospitallers was applied to certain brotherhoods of monks and laymen. While professing some monastic rule, the members of these societies devoted themselves solely to caring for the sick and the poor, the hospitals in those days being connected with the monasteries.
About the year 1050 some Italian merchants secured permission to build a convent in Jerusalem to shelter Latin pilgrims. The hotels which sprang up after this were gradually transformed into hospitals for the care of the sick and presided over by Benedictine monks. The sick were carefully nursed and shelter granted to as many as could be accommodated. Nobles abandoned the profession of arms and, becoming monks, devoted themselves to caring for the unfortunate crusaders in these inns. The work rapidly increased in extent and importance. In the year 1099, Godfrey de Bouillon endowed the original hospital, which had been dedicated to St. John. He also established many other monasteries on this holy soil. The monks, most of whom were also knights, formed an organization which received confirmation from Rome, as “The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.” The order rapidly assumed a distinctly military character, for, to do its work completely, it must not only care for the sick in Jerusalem, but defend the pilgrim on his way to the Holy City. This ended in an undertaking to defend Christendom against Mohammedan invasion and in fighting for the recovery of the Holy Sepulcher.
After visiting some of these Palestinian monasteries, a king of Hungary thus describes his impressions: “Lodging in their houses, I have seen them feed every day innumerable multitudes of poor, the sick laid on good beds and treated with great care. In a word, the Knights of St. John are employed sometimes like Martha, in action, and sometimes like Mary, in contemplation, and this noble militia consecrate their days either in their infirmaries or else in engagements against the enemies of the cross.”
The Knights Templars were far more militant than the Knights of St. John, but they also were actuated by the monastic spirit. Bernard tried to inspire this order with a strong Christian zeal so that, as he said, “War should become something of which God could approve.” The success which attended its operations led as usual to its corruption and decline. Beginning with a few crusaders leagued together for service and living on the site of the ancient Temple at Jerusalem, it soon widened the scope of its services and became a powerful branch of the crusading army. It was charged by Philip IV. of France, in 1307, with the most fearful crimes, to sustain or to deny which accusations many volumes have been composed. Five years later the order was suppressed and its vast accumulations transferred to the Knights of St. John. “The horrible fate of the Templars,” says Allen, “was taken by many as a beginning and omen of the destruction that would soon pass upon all the hated religious orders. And so this final burst of enthusiasm and splendor in the religious life was among the prognostics of a state of things in which monasticism must fade quite away.”
Wondrous changes have taken place in those dark and troubled years since Benedict began his labors at Monte Cassino, in 529. The monk has prayed alone in the mountains, and converted the barbarian in the forest. He has preached the crusades in magnificent cathedrals, and crossed stormy seas in his frail bark. He has made the schools famous by his literary achievements, and taught children the alphabet in the woodland cell. He has been good and bad, proud and humble, rich and poor, arrogant and gentle. He has met the shock of lances on his prancing steed, and trudged barefoot from town to town. He has copied manuscripts in the lonely Scottish isle, and bathed the fevered brow of the pilgrim in the hospital at Jerusalem. He has dug ditches, and governed the world as the pope of the Church. He has held the plow in the furrow, and thwarted the devices of the king. He has befriended the poor, and imposed penance upon princes. He has imitated the poverty and purity of Jesus, and aped the pomp and vice of kings. He has dwelt solitary on cold mountains, subsisting on bread, roots and water, and he has surrounded himself with menials ready to gratify every luxurious wish, amid the splendor of palatial cloisters. Still there are new types and phases of monasticism yet to appear. The monk has other tasks to undertake, for the world is not yet sufficiently wearied of his presence to destroy his cloister and banish him from the land.
V
_THE MENDICANT FRIARS_
Abraham Lincoln only applied a general principle to a specific case when he said, “This nation cannot long endure half slave and half free.” Glaring inconsistencies between faith and practice will eventually destroy any institution, however lofty its ideal or noble its foundation. God suffers long and is kind, but His forbearance is not limitless. Monasticism, as has been shown, was never free from serious inconsistency, from moral dualism. But the power of reform prolonged its existence. It was constantly producing fresh models of its ancient ideals. It had a hidden reserve-force from which it supplied shining examples of a living faith and a self-denying love, just at the time when it seemed as if the system was about to perish forever. When these fresh exhibitions of monastic fidelity likewise became tarnished, when men had tired of them and predicted the speedy collapse of the institution, forth from the cloister came another body of monkish recruits, to convince the world that monasticism was not dead; that it did not intend to die; that it was mightier than all its enemies. The day came, however, when the world lost its confidence in an institution which required such constant reforming to keep it pure, which demanded so much cleansing to keep it clean. Ideals that could so quickly lose their influence for good came to be looked upon with suspicion.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century we are confronted by the anomaly of a church grossly corrupt but widely obeyed. She is nearing the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things, especially, command the attention,–first, the immorality and laxity of the monks; and second, the growth of heresies and the tendency toward open schism. The necessity of reform was clearly apprehended by the church as well as by the heretical parties, but, since the church had such a hold upon society, those who sought to reform the monasteries by returning to old beliefs and ancient customs were much more in favor than those who left the church and opposed her from the outside. The impossibility of substantial, internal reform had not yet come to be generally recognized. As time passed the conviction that it was of no use to attempt reforms from the inside gained ground; then the separatists multiplied, and the shedding of blood commenced. The world had to learn anew that it was futile to put new wine into old bottles or to patch new cloth on an old garment.
“It is the privilege of genius,” says Trench, “to evoke a new creation, where to common eyes all appears barren and worn out.” Francis and Dominic evoked this new creation; but although the monk now will appear in a new garb, he will prove himself to be about the same old character whom the world has known a great many years; when this discovery is made monasticism is doomed. Perplexed Europe will anxiously seek some means of destruction, but God will have Luther ready to aid in the solution of the problem.
_Francis Bernardone_, 1182-1226 _A.D._.