Sources

The monks as such belong to the laity. Monasticism was viewed as a lay institution as late as the Council of Chalcedon (451)[217:2]when the legal authority of the bishop over the monks of his diocese was recognised. The monks were calledreligiosiin contrast to theseculares, the priests. The monks were the "regulars" who formed the spiritual nobility and not the ruling class in the hierarchy. They formed another grade in the hierarchy between the clergy and the laity. But after the fifth century the difference became less marked. Since monasticism was considered the perfection of Christian life, it was natural to choose the clergy from the monks. Gregory the Great was the first monk to be elected Pope. Monasteries were the theological seminaries to supply priests for the Church, hence the ignorant clergy looked up to the educated monks. Still monks at first, because not ordained, could not say mass nor hear confession. Each monastery kept a priest or an ordained monk to fulfil these duties. Abbots were usually in priestly orders.[218:1]In time, however, monks assumed the dress of priests and became ambitious for priestly powers,[218:2]especially after the Council of Chalcedon, backed by the state, gave bishops jurisdiction over cloisters. Often monasteries applied to the Pope for independence from episcopal jurisdiction and were taken under the immediate protection of the Bishop of Rome. By the sixth century monks were classed in the popular mind with the clergy. In 827 a council at Rome ordered that abbots should be in priests' orders. Monks now began to sit in and to control Church synods, and to exercise all the rights of the secular clergy, even to having parishes,[218:3]and thus became powerful rivals of the established priesthood.

The crystallisation of ascetic ideals into monasticinstitutions was attacked by heathenism and did not meet the unanimous approval of Christendom. Before Constantine the pagans denounced the hermits because they were guilty of the treasonable act, from a Roman view, of fleeing from social and civic duties. After Constantine, when monasticism became the "fad," it was assailed by the aristocratic pagan families, who lost sons, and especially wives and daughters, in the maelstrom of enthusiasm, because it broke family ties and caused the neglect of obvious responsibilities. Julian, the imperial pagan reactionist, called it fanaticism and idolatry. Pagan poets like Libanus and Rutilius denounced it as an institution "hostile to light."

Within Christendom hostility came from Christian rulers like Valens, because monasticism withdrew civil and military strength from the state, when all was needed against the barbarians, and because it encouraged idleness and unproductiveness instead of useful activity and heroic virtue[219:1]; from Christians of wealth and indulgence who felt rebuked by the earnestness, poverty, and holy zeal of an ascetic life; from the clergy who did not comprehend the significance of monasticism[219:2]; and from the liberal party in the Church who took a saner view of salvation and ethics. Jovinian (d. 406), like Luther, first a monk and then a reformer, held these five points according to Jerome: (1) that virgins, widows, and wives are all on an equality if good Christians; (2) that thankfully partaking of food is as efficacious as fasting; (3) that spiritual baptism is as effectual in overcoming the devil as baptism;(4) that all sins are equal; (5) that all rewards and punishments will be equal. Jerome answered him and Pope Siricius excommunicated him and his followers as heretics (390).[220:1]Helvidius of Rome denounced the reverence for celibacy and declared that the marriage state was as holy as that of virginity. Again Jerome wielded his intellectual cudgel.[220:2]Bonasus, Bishop of Sardica, was excommunicated for holding the same view (389). Vigilantius, an educated Gallic slave, a disciple of Jovinian, attacked the necessity of celibacy, denied the efficacy of virginity, opposed fasting and torture, ridiculed relics, objected to candles, incense, and prayers for the dead, and doubted miracles. He was a Protestant living in the fifth century.[220:3]He too was assailed by Jerome and put under the papal ban.[220:4]Ærius of Sebasta, a presbyter, called into question the need or value of fasts, prayers for the dead, the inequality of rank among the clergy, and the celebration of Easter and of course was outlawed by the Church.[220:5]Lactantius declared that the hermit life was that of a beast rather than a man and treasonable to society. But all these loud outcries against the monks were branded as heresy and drowned in counter-shouts of praise.

When the results and influences of monasticism are carefully weighed, it is seen that the good and evil "are blended together almost inextricably." These diametrically opposite effects are perplexing andastonishing. Conspicuous among the positive results are the following:

1.Religious.The effort to save pure Christianity from the secularised state-Church by carrying it to the desert or shutting it up in a monastery, produced the first great reform movement within the Christian Church. "It was always the monks who saved the Church when sinking, emancipated her when becoming enslaved to the world, defended her when assailed."[221:1]Monasticism was, therefore, a realisation of the ideal in Christianity. In no small sense it likewise paved the way for the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The monastic conquest of Christianity left in its train higher ideals of a holy Christian life and a keener religious enthusiasm, and emphasised the necessity of humility and purity. Likewise monasticism, through its aggressive missionary efforts, completed the overthrow of heathenism in the Empire and in its stead planted the true faith over western Europe. The monks were the fiercest champions of orthodoxy, and the intellectual giants of that age, like Jerome and St. Augustine, were in their ranks. The monk rather than the priest was the apostle of the Middle Ages who taught men and nations the simple Christian life of the Gospel. In monasticism were developed the germs of many humanitarian institutions through which Christianity expressed itself in a most practical manner. The monastery offered a home to the poor and unfortunate, and gave hope and refuge to both the religious invalid, who was sick of the world, and to the religious fanatic. The Papacy, too, was supported and strengthened in a thousand different ways by monasticism,and the whole religious history of the Middle Ages was coloured by it.

2.Social.Monasticism tended to purify and regenerate society with lofty ideas. It became an unexcelled machine for the administration of charity. It fed the hungry, cared for the sick and dying, entertained the traveller, and was an asylum for all the unfortunates. It helped to mitigate the terrors of slavery. It inculcated ideas of obedience and usefulness. It advocated and practised equality and communism, and it tutored the half-civilised nations of western Europe in the arts of peace.

3.Political.In its organisation and practical life it kept alive ideas of democracy. From the ranks of the monks came many of the best statesmen in the various European governments. Monastic zeal had much to do in saving the Roman Empire from utter destruction at the hands of the barbarians and in helping to preserve imperial ideas until the rough Teutons were Latinised in their legal and political institutions. In addition the monks helped to form the various law codes of the German tribes, put them into written form, and took an active part in many forms of local government. In many an instance they saved the unprotected vassal from the tyrannical noble.

4.Educational.In the monasteries the torches of civilisation and learning were kept burning during the so-called Dark Ages. The first musicians, painters, sculptors, architects, and educators of Christian Europe were monks. They not only established the schools, and were the schoolmasters in them, but also laid the foundations for the universities. They were the thinkers and philosophers of the day and shaped the political and religious thought. To them, bothcollectively and individually, was due the continuity of thought and civilisation of the ancient world with the later Middle Ages and with the modern period.

5.Industrial.Not only did the monks develop the various arts such as copying and illuminating books, building religious edifices, painting, and carving, but they also became the model farmers and horticulturists of Europe. Every Benedictine monastery was an agricultural college for the whole region in which it was located. By making manual labour an essential part of monastic life, labour was greatly ennobled above the disreputable position it held among the Romans.

The negative effects of monasticism were by no means lacking and may be stated here under the same institutional headings:

1.Religious.In making "war on nature" the ascetics made war also on God. They aimed not too high religiously but in the wrong direction. They exaggerated sin and advocated the wrong means to get rid of it. They took religion away from the crowded centres of population, where it was most needed, to the desert or monastery. Thus an abnormal, unwholesome type of piety was created. In replacing faith by works the monks thus gave birth to a long list of abuses in the Church, and in nourishing an insane religious fanaticism they entailed many grave evils. From one point of view monasticism became a "morbid excrescence" of Christianity and tended to degrade man into a mere religious machine. At the same time the doctrine of future rewards and punishments reached an abhorrent evolution. The awful pangs of hell, the terrific judgments of God, and the ubiquitous and wily devil of the monks' vivid imagination sound strange to a modern mind. But the gravest error in themonastic system was the false and harmful distinction so clearly drawn both in theory and practice between the secular and the religious. The modern world easily harmonises the two.

2.Social.Monasticism disrupted family ties and caused the desertion of social duties on the ground of a more sacred duty. It lowered respect for the marriage state by magnifying the virtue of celibacy. In making the monk the ideal man of the Middle Ages, it advocated social suicide. All natural pleasures and enjoyments of life were labelled sinful. Practices, which were little more than superstitions, were advocated. Society in general was demoralised because monasticism failed to practise its own teachings.

3.Political.By inducing thousands, and many of them men of character, ability, and experience, to desert their posts of civic duty, the state was weakened and patriotism forgotten. The monk "died to the world" and abjured his country. Monasticism aided powerfully in developing the secular side of the papal hierarchy and soon came to exercise a large amount of political power itself. The monks frequently became embroiled in social disputes and military quarrels, and thus incited rather than allayed the fiercer brute passions of men.

4.Cultural.By holding the education of the people in their hands the monks had a powerful weapon for evil as well as good. In making the monk the ideally cultured man a false standard was set up and certain fundamentals in education ignored. Secular learning was not generally encouraged. The supreme end of all their education was not to produce a man, but a priest.

5.Industrial.Thousands withdrew from the variouslines of industrial activity, some to obtain the higher good, but many to enter as they supposed a life of ease and idleness. Much of the good that was done in the earlier days was negatived by the begging friars later.

Of these two sets of influences which predominated? That both were powerful no one can doubt. All things considered, however, it must be said that monasticism, as it developed in the West, fulfilled a genuine need and performed an important service for Christian civilisation. St. Benedict not only presented a satisfactory solution of the grave dangers threatening this institution as a force in the evolution of the mediæval Church, but with his organised army of devoted, obedient followers, he met the barbarian hosts invading the Roman Empire and gradually won them to adopt and in due course of time to practise the Christian code. Indeed it is difficult to imagine how the Church could have forged its course so triumphantly through all the breakers, trials, and vicissitudes of this crucial epoch—how its jurisdiction could have been extended so rapidly and so effectively to all parts of western Europe and to some points in the East and in northern Africa—how its great humanising, spiritualising, and edifying influences could have been so persistent and at the same time so efficient—how the simple, fundamental truths of the Gospel as set forth in the Apostolic Church could have been handed on to the later ages—had not the growth of monasticism been regulated and utilised. Therefore, next to the evolution of that magnificent organisation of the Papacy, as a creative factor in the rise of the mediæval Church, must be placed organised, western monasticism.

FOOTNOTES:

[198:1]Jerome,Ep., 15.

[199:1]The Hindoo monks exhausted their minds in devising means of self-torture.

[199:2]Lea,Sac. Celib., 24;Laws of Manu, bk. 6., st. 1-22. See Hardy,Eastern Monasticism, Lond., 1850.

[199:3]The disciples of Pythagoras were called cenobites. Montalembert, i., 215.

[200:1]Lea,Sac. Celib., 24.

[200:2]Numb. vi., 1-21.

[200:3]Pliny,Nat. Hist., v., 15; Porphyry,De Abstinentia, iv., 11; Edersheim, ch. 3;Döllinger,Gentile and Jew, ii., 330. See p. 44, 45.

[200:4]Isa. xxii., 2; Dan. ix., 3; Zech. xiii., 4; 2 Kings i., 8; iv., 10, 39, 42.Cf.Heb. xi., 37, 38;Expositor, 1893, i., 339.

[200:5]Schaff, ii., 390.

[200:6]Lea,Sac. Celib., 24.

[200:7]Eusebius, ii., 17; Philo,Contemp. Life, bk. 1;Jewish Quart. Rev., viii., 155;Baptist Rev., Jan., 1882, p. 36ff.; seeJewish Encyc.;Döllinger, ii., 335.

[200:8]Matt. xix., 21; Luke xviii., 22; Mark x., 21.

[200:9]Tertullian held that all the Apostles except Peter were unmarried.

[201:1]Mark x., 29, 30.

[201:2]Paul, especially 1 Cor. vii.; Lea,Sac. Celib., 25.

[201:3]Texts quoted as favourable to monasticism: Acts ii., 44; iv., 32; xv., 28, 29; 1 Cor. vii., 8; iv., 3; Matt. xix., 12, 21; xxii., 30; Rev. xiv., 4; Luke xx., 35; Mark x., 29, 30.

[201:4]Harnack,Monasticism, 10.

[201:5]Montalembert, i., bk. 1.

[202:1]Montalembert, i., 188.

[202:2]Lightfoot,The Colossian Heresy.

[202:3]Marcionites, Valentinians, Abstinents, Apotoctici, Encratites, etc.

[203:1]Cyprian,Ep., 62.

[203:2]Euseb.Eccl. Hist., vi., 42.

[204:1]Harnack,Monasticism, 65.

[204:2]1 Tim. v., 3-14.Cf.Acts ix., 39, 41.

[204:3]Justin Martyr observed that Christians were commencing to abstain from flesh, wine, and sexual intercourse. He, with Ignatius and others, lauds celibacy as the holiest state.

[205:1]Celibacy was habitually practised by some; others devoted their lives to the poor. Many converts like Cyprian sold their possessions for the needy. Still others like Origen mutilated themselves.

[205:2]Irenæus,Against Heresy, i., 24; Epiphanius,Heresy, 23.

[206:1]Rufinus,Concerning Ascetic Life, 30; Socrates, iv., 23; Sozomen, i., 14. See Montalembert, i., 227.

[206:2]Augustine,Confessions, viii., 15.

[206:3]Harnack,Monasticism, 27.

[206:4]Ibid., 47.

[207:1]Sozomen, vi., 33; Tillemont,Mem., viii., 292.

[207:2]Severus,Dialogues, i., 8.

[207:3]Evagrius,Ch. Hist., i., 13, 21; ii., 9; vi., 22; Theodosius,Philoth., 12, 26; Nilus,Letters, ii., 114, 115; Gregory of Tours, viii., 16.

[207:4]Augustine,City of God, i., xiv., ch. 51.

[207:5]Tillemont,Mem., viii., 633.

[209:1]The rule of St. Oriesis is little more than a mystical praise of asceticism.

[209:2]Socrates, iv., 23; Sozomen, i., 14.

[209:3]Gwatkin,Arianism.

[209:4]Sozomen, iii., 14.

[209:5]Hergenröther, 452.

[210:1]Theod.,Hist. Rel., 30; Augustine,De Mor. Eccl., i., 31.

[210:2]Sozomen, iii., 14; vi., 32.

[210:3]A follower of Hilarion. Made bishop of Cyprus in 367.

[210:4]Sozomen, vi., 32.

[210:5]Ibid., vi., 32.

[210:6]Eusebius, viii., 13; Socrates, iv., 36; Sozomen, vi., 38.

[210:7]Sozomen, vi., 32.

[210:8]Theodoret,Hist. Eccl., ch. 26.

[210:9]Smith,Rise of Christ. Monast., 48.

[211:1]Augustine,De Mor. Eccl., p. 33. He had been in Gaul in 337 and 338.

[211:2]Ambrose,Letters, 63, 66.

[211:3]Augustine,Confessions, viii., 15.

[211:4]Montalembert, i., 291-300.

[211:5]Jerome,Letter127.

[211:6]Jerome,Letter23.

[211:7]Montalembert, i., 291; Jerome,Letter26.

[211:8]Jerome,Letter96.

[212:1]Sulpic, Severus,Life of St. Martin.

[212:2]See Ozanam,Hist. of Civ. in the 5th Cent.

[212:3]Mosheim, bk. ii., cent. 5, part 2, ch. 3, § 12, tells of a German fanatic who built a pillar near Treves and attempted to imitate the career of Simeon Stylites, but the neighbouring bishops pulled it down.

[213:1]Cassian,Inst., ii., 2; St. Benedict,Rule, ch. 1; Jerome,Ep., 95.

[213:2]Gregory I.,Dialogues, bk. ii. See Montalembert, i., bk. 4.

[214:1]Henderson, 274,Rule of our most Holy Father Benedict, Lond., 1886; Ogg,Source Book, § 11.

[215:1]Doyle,The Teaching of St. Benedict, Lond., 1887.

[216:1]Lea,Sac. Cel., 116. SeeCath. Encyc.

[216:2]Stephen,Essays in Eccl. Biog., 240.

[216:3]It was boasted that no less than twenty Emperors and forty-seven kings cast aside their crowns to become Benedictine monks, while ten Emperors and fifty queens entered convents, but it is impossible to discover them.

[217:1]Milman, iii., 88.

[217:2]Schaff, iii., 173.

[218:1]The vast amount of legislation on this point is very indicative.

[218:2]Gregory,Letterv., 1; i, 42.

[218:3]This right was prohibited in the 11th and 12th centuries, but Innocent III. granted the permission in certain cases.

[219:1]Cod. Theodos., xii., 1, 63.

[219:2]See the works of Sulpicius Severus for attacks on the monks in Gaul and Spain.

[220:1]Against Jovinian(392).

[220:2]The attack is found in two works,Against Helvidius(383) and hisApology.

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