THE MONKS AND THE CONVERSION OF THE GERMANS
[Sidenote: Importance of the monks as a class.]
21. It would be difficult to overestimate the variety and extent of the
influence that the monks exercised for centuries in Europe. The proud
annals of the Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits contain
many a distinguished name. The most eminent philosophers, scientists,
historians, artists, poets, and statesmen may be found among their
ranks. Among those whose achievements we shall study later are The
Venerable Bede, Boniface, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Fra
Angelico, Savonarola, Luther, Erasmus,--all these, and many others who
have been leaders in various branches of human activity, were monks.
[Sidenote: Monasticism appealed to many different classes.]
The strength of monasticism lay in its appeal to many different classes
of persons. The world became a less attractive place as the successive
invasions of the barbarians brought ever-increasing disorder. The
monastery was the natural refuge not only of the spiritually minded, but
of those of a studious or contemplative disposition who disliked the
life of a soldier and were disinclined to face the dangers and
uncertainties of the times. The monastic life was safe and peaceful, as
well as holy. Even the rude and unscrupulous warriors hesitated to
destroy the property or disturb the life of those who were believed to
enjoy Heaven's special favor. The monastery furnished, too, a refuge for
the disconsolate, an asylum for the disgraced, and food and shelter for
the indolent who would otherwise have had to earn their living. There
were, therefore, many motives which helped to fill the monasteries.
Kings and nobles, for the good of their souls, readily gave land upon
which to found colonies of monks, and there were plenty of remote spots
in the mountains and forests to tempt the recluse.
[Sidenote: Necessity for the regulation of monastic life.]
Monastic communities first developed on a large scale in Egypt in the
fourth century. Just as the Germans were winning their first great
victory at Adrianople, St. Jerome was engaged in showing the advantages
of the ascetic Christian life, which was a new thing in the West. In the
sixth century monasteries multiplied so rapidly in western Europe that
it became necessary to establish definite rules for the numerous
communities which proposed to desert the ordinary ways of the world and
lead a peculiar life apart. The monastic regulations which had been
drawn up in the East did not answer the purpose, for the climate of the
West and the temperament of the Latin peoples differed too much from
those of the Orient. Accordingly St. Benedict drew up, about the year
526, a sort of constitution for the monastery of Monte Cassino, in
southern Italy, of which he was the head. This was so sagacious, and so
well met the needs of the monastic life, that it was rapidly accepted by
the other monasteries and gradually became the "rule" according to which
all the western monks lived.[31]
[Sidenote: The Rule of St. Benedict.]
The Rule of St. Benedict is as important as any constitution that was
ever drawn up for a state. It is for the most part natural and
wholesome. It provides that, since every one is not fitted for the
ascetic life, the candidate for admission to the monastery shall pass
through a period of probation, called the _novitiate_, before he is
permitted to take the solemn and irrevocable vow. The brethren shall
elect their head, the _abbot_, whom they must obey unconditionally in
all that is not sinful. Along with prayer and meditation, the monks are
to work at manual occupations and cultivate the soil. They shall also
read and teach. Those who were incapacitated for outdoor work were
assigned lighter tasks, such as copying books. The monk was not
permitted to own anything in his own right; he pledged himself to
perpetual and absolute poverty, and everything he used was the property
of the convent. Along with the vows of obedience and poverty, he also
took that of chastity, which bound him never to marry. For not only was
the single life considered more holy than the married, but the monastic
organization would, of course, have been impossible unless the monks
remained single. Aside from these restrictions, the monks were commanded
to live rational and natural lives and not to abuse their bodies or
sacrifice their physical vigor by undue fasting in the supposed interest
of their souls. These sensible provisions were directed against the
excesses of asceticism, of which there had been many instances in the
East.
[Sidenote: The monks copy, and so preserve, the Latin authors.]
The influence of the Benedictine monks upon Europe is incalculable. From
their numbers no less than twenty-four popes and forty-six hundred
bishops and archbishops have been chosen. They boast almost sixteen
thousand writers, some of great distinction. Their monasteries furnished
retreats where the scholar might study and write in spite of the
prevailing disorder of the times. The copying of books, as has been
said, was a natural occupation of the monks. Doubtless their work was
often done carelessly, with little heart and less understanding. But,
with the great loss of manuscripts due to the destruction of libraries
and the indifference of individual book-owners, it was most essential
that new copies should be made. Even poor and incorrect ones were better
than none. It was the monks who prevented the loss of a great part of
Latin literature, which, without them, would probably have reached us
only in scanty remains.
[Sidenote: The monks aid in the material development of Europe.]
The monks also helped to rescue honest manual labor, which they believed
to be a great aid to salvation, from the disrepute into which slavery
had brought it in earlier times. They set the example of careful
cultivation on the lands about their monasteries and in this way
introduced better methods into the regions where they settled. They
entertained travelers at a time when there were few or no inns and so
increased the intercourse between the various parts of Europe.[32]
[Sidenote: The regular and secular clergy.]
The Benedictine monks, as well as later monastic orders, were ardent and
faithful supporters of the papacy. The Roman Church, which owes much to
them, appreciated the aid which they might furnish and extended to them
many of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy. Indeed the monks were
reckoned as clergymen and were called the "regular" clergy because they
lived according to a _regula_, or rule, to distinguish them from the
"secular" clergy, who continued to live in the world (_saeculum_) and
took no monastic vows.
[Sidenote: Monks and secular clergy supplement each other.]
The Church, ever anxious to maintain as far-reaching a control over its
subjects as that of the Roman Empire, whose power it inherited, could
hardly expect its busy officers, with their multiform duties and
constant relations with men, to represent the ideal of contemplative
Christianity which was then held in higher esteem than the active life.
The secular clergy performed the ceremonies of the Church, administered
its business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy
illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism
at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly
warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere
mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient
for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and
spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism has laid so much stress.
[Sidenote: The monks as missionaries.]
22. The first great service of the monks was their missionary labors. To
these the later strength of the Roman Church is in no small degree due,
for the monks made of the unconverted Germans not merely Christians, but
also dutiful subjects of the pope. The first people to engage their
attention were the heathen Germans who had conquered the once Christian
Britain.
[Sidenote: Early Britain.]
The islands which are now known as the kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland were, at the opening of the Christian era, occupied by several
Celtic peoples of whose customs and religion we know almost nothing.
Julius Cæsar commenced the conquest of the islands (55 B.C.); but the
Romans never succeeded in establishing their power beyond the wall which
they built, from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth, to keep out the wild
Celtic tribes of the North. Even south of the wall the country was not
completely Romanized, and the Celtic tongue has actually survived down
to the present day in Wales.
[Sidenote: Saxons and Angles conquer Britain.]
At the opening of the fifth century the barbarian invasions forced Rome
to withdraw its legions from Britain in order to protect its frontiers
on the continent. The island was thus left to be gradually conquered by
the Germans, mainly Saxons and Angles, who came across the North Sea
from the region south of Denmark. Almost all record of what went on
during the two centuries following the departure of the Romans has
disappeared. No one knows the fate of the original Celtic inhabitants of
England. It is unlikely that they were, as was formerly supposed, all
killed or driven to the mountain districts of Wales. More probably they
were gradually lost among the dominating Germans with whom they merged
into one people. The Saxon and Angle chieftains established petty
kingdoms, of which there were seven or eight at the time when Gregory
the Great became pope.
[Sidenote: Conversion of Britain.]
Gregory, while still a simple monk, had been struck with the beauty of
some Angles whom he saw one day in the slave market of Rome. When he
learned who they were he was grieved that such handsome beings should
still belong to the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness, and, had he been
permitted, he himself would have gone as a missionary to their people.
Upon becoming pope he sent forty monks to England from one of the
monasteries that he had founded, placing a prior, Augustine, at their
head and designating him in advance as Bishop of England. The heathen
king of Kent, in whose territory the monks landed with fear and
trembling (597), had a Christian wife, the daughter of a Frankish king.
Through her influence the monks were kindly received and were assigned
an ancient church at Canterbury, dating from the Roman occupation before
the German invasions. Here they established a monastery, and from this
center the conversion, first of Kent and then of the whole island, was
gradually effected. Canterbury has always maintained its early
preëminence and may still be considered the religious capital of
England.[33]
[Illustration: Ancient Church of St. Martin's, Canterbury]
[Sidenote: The Irish monks.]
Augustine and his monks were not, however, the only Christians in the
British Isles. Britain had been converted to Christianity when it was a
Roman province, and some of the missionaries, led by St. Patrick (d.
about 469), had made their way into Ireland and established a center of
Christianity there. When the Germans overran Britain and reheathenized
it, the Irish monks and clergy were too far off to be troubled by the
barbarians. They knew little of the traditions of the Roman Church and
diverged from its customs in some respects. They celebrated Easter upon
a different date from that observed by the Roman Church and employed a
different style of tonsure. Missionaries from this Irish church were
busy converting the northern regions of Britain, when the Roman monks
under Augustine began their work in the southern part of the island.
[Sidenote: Conflict between the Roman Church and the Irish monks.]
There was sure to be trouble between the two parties. The Irish clergy,
while they professed great respect for the pope and did not wish to be
cut off from the rest of the Christian Church, were unwilling to abandon
their peculiar usages and accept those sanctioned by Rome. Nor would
they recognize as their superior the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the
pope had made the head of the British church. The pope, on his part,
felt that it was all-important that these isolated Christians should
become a part of the great organization of which he claimed to be the
head. Neither party would make any concessions, and for two generations
each went its own way, cherishing a bitter hostility toward the other.
[Sidenote: Victory of Roman Church.]
At last the Roman Church won the victory, as it so often did in later
struggles. In 664, through the influence of the king of Northumbria who
did not wish to risk being on bad terms with the pope, the Roman
Catholic form of faith was solemnly recognized in an assembly at Whitby,
and the leader of the Irish missionaries sadly withdrew to Ireland.
[Illustration: Map of Christian Missions]
The king of Northumbria, upon opening the Council of Whitby, said "that
it was proper that those who served one God should observe one rule of
conduct and not depart from one another in the ways of celebrating the
holy mysteries, since they all hoped for the same kingdom of heaven."
That a remote island of Europe should set up its traditions against the
customs sanctioned by the rest of Christendom appeared to him highly
unreasonable. This faith in the necessary unity of the Church is one of
the secrets of its strength. England became a part of the ever-growing
territory embraced in the Catholic Church and remained as faithful to
the pope as any other Catholic country, down to the defection of Henry
VIII in the early part of the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: Early culture in England.]
[Sidenote: The Venerable Bede.]
The consolidation of the rival churches in Great Britain was followed by
a period of general enthusiasm for Rome and its literature and culture.
Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and other English monasteries became centers of
learning unrivaled perhaps in the rest of Europe. A constant intercourse
was maintained with Rome. Masons and glassmakers were brought across the
Channel to replace the wooden churches of Britain by stone edifices in
the style of the Romans. The young clergy were taught Latin and
sometimes Greek. Copies of the ancient classics were brought from the
continent and reproduced. The most distinguished man of letters of the
seventh and early eighth centuries was the English monk Bæda (often
called The Venerable Bede, 673-735), from whose admirable history of the
Church in England most of our information about the period is
derived.[34]
[Sidenote: Irish missionaries on the continent.]
[Sidenote: St. Columban and St. Gall.]
23. From England missionaries carried the enthusiasm for the Church back
across the Channel. In spite of the conversion of Clovis and the
wholesale baptism of his soldiers, the Franks, especially those farthest
north, had been very imperfectly Christianized. A few years before
Augustine landed in Kent, St. Columban, one of the Irish missionaries
of whom we have spoken, landed in Gaul. He went from place to place
founding monasteries and gaining the respect of the people by his rigid
self-denial and by the miracles that he performed. He even penetrated
among the still wholly pagan Alemanni about the Lake of Constance. When
driven away by their pagan king, he turned his attention to the Lombards
in northern Italy, where he died in 615.[35] St. Gall, one of his
followers, remained near the Lake of Constance and attracted about him
so many disciples and companions that a great monastery grew up which
was named after him and became one of the most celebrated in central
Europe. Other Irish missionaries penetrated into the forests of
Thuringia and Bavaria. The German church looks back, however, to an
English missionary as its real founder.
[Sidenote: St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans.]
In 718, about a hundred years after the death of St. Columban, St.
Boniface, an English monk, was sent by the pope as an apostle to the
Germans. After four years spent in reconnoitering the field of his
future labors, he returned to Rome and was made a missionary bishop,
taking the same oath of obedience to the pope that the bishops in the
immediate vicinity of Rome were accustomed to take. Indeed absolute
subordination to the pope was a part of Boniface's religion, and he
became a powerful agent in promoting the supremacy of the Roman see.
Under the protection of the powerful Frankish mayor of the palace,
Charles Martel, Boniface carried on his missionary work with such zeal
that he succeeded in bringing all the older Christian communities which
had been established by the Irish missionaries under the papal control,
as well as in converting many of the more remote German tribes who
still clung to their old pagan beliefs. His energetic methods are
illustrated by the story of how he cut down the sacred oak of Odin at
Fritzlar, in Hesse, and used the wood to build a chapel, around which a
monastery soon grew up. In 732 Boniface was raised to the dignity of
Archbishop of Mayence and proceeded to establish, in the newly converted
region, the German bishoprics of Salzburg, Regensburg, Würzburg, Erfurt,
and several others; this gives us some idea of the geographical extent
of his labors.
[Sidenote: Boniface reforms the church in Gaul and brings it into
subjection to the pope.]
After organizing the German church he turned his attention, with the
hearty approval of the pope and the support of the Frankish rulers, to a
general reformation of the church in Gaul. Here the clergy were sadly
demoralized, and the churches and monasteries had been despoiled of much
of their property in the constant turmoil of the time. Boniface
succeeded, with the help of Charles Martel, in bettering affairs, and
through his efforts the venerable church of Gaul, almost as old as that
of Rome itself, was brought under the supremacy of the pope. In 748 the
assembled bishops of Gaul bound themselves to maintain the Catholic
unity of faith and follow strictly the precepts of the vicar of St.
Peter, the pope, so that they might be reckoned among Peter's sheep.
General Reading.--The best history of the monks to be had in
English is MONTALEMBERT, _The Monks of the West from St. Benedict
to St. Bernard_ (Longmans, Green & Co., 6 vols., $15.00). The
writer's enthusiasm and his excellent style make his work very
attractive. The advanced student will gain much from TAYLOR,
_Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_ (The Macmillan Company,
$1.75), Chapter VII, on the origin and spirit of monasticism. See
also HARNACK, _Monasticism_ (Scribners, 50 cents). The works on
church history referred to at the end of the preceding chapter all
contain some account of the monks.