THE SAME SUBJECT.—INGREDIENTS OF THE ANCIENT MONACHISM.
Among the principal elements of the ancient Monachism, it is natural to
name, first—
Its contempt of the divine constitution of human nature, and the outrage
it offered to the most salutary instincts.
It may be difficult to determine which is the greater folly and impiety,
that of the Atheist, who can contemplate the admirable mechanism of the
body, and not see there the proofs of divine wisdom and benevolence; or
that of the Enthusiast, who, seeing and acknowledging the hand of God in
the mechanism of the human frame, yet dares to institute, and to
recommend, modes of life which do violence to the manifest intentions of
the Creator, as therein displayed; and, moreover, is not afraid to
assert a warrant from Heaven for such outrages; as if the Creator and
Governor of the world were not one and the same Being;—one in counsel
and purpose: or as if the Author of Christianity were at variance with
the Author of nature! Yet this preposterous error, this virtual
Manichæism, has seemed to belong naturally to every attempt to stretch
and exaggerate the precepts of the Gospel beyond their obvious sense;
and indeed has seldom failed to show itself in seasons of unusual
religious excitement.
Christianity is a religion neither for angels nor for ghosts; but for
man, as God made him. Nevertheless, in revealing an endless existence,
and in establishing the paramount claims of the future world, it has
placed every interest of the present transient life under a comparison
of immense disparity; so that it is true—true to a demonstration, that a
man ought to "hate his own life" if the love of it puts his welfare for
immortality in jeopardy. Unquestionably, if by such means the well-being
of the imperishable spirit could be secured and promoted, it would
highly become a wise man to pass the residue of life, though it should
hold out half a century, upon the summit of a column, exposed, like a
bronze, to the alternations of day and night, of summer and winter; or
to stand speechless and fixed, with the arms extended, until the joints
should stiffen, and the tongue forget its office; or to inhabit a tomb,
or to hang suspended in the air by a hook in the side: these, and if
there be any other practices still more horrifying to humanity, were
doubtless wise, if, in the use of them, the soul might be advantaged;
for the soul is of infinitely greater value than the body.
And much more might it be deemed lawful and commendable to refrain from
matrimony, to withdraw from human society, to be clad in sackcloth, to
inhabit a cavern, if such comparatively moderate abstinences and
mortifications were found to promote virtue, and so to ensure an
enhancement of the bliss that never ends. Conduct of this sort, however
painful it may be, is perfectly in harmony with the principle
universally admitted to be reasonable, and in fact very commonly reduced
to practice, namely, to endure a smaller immediate loss or
inconvenience, for the sake of securing greater future good.
The dictates of self-interest every day prompt sacrifices of this kind;
and the maxims of natural virtue go much further, and often require a
man to make the greatest deposit possible, even when the future
advantage is doubtful, and when it is not the sufferer who is to reap
the expected benefit! On this principle the soldier places himself at
the cannon's mouth, because the safety or future welfare of his country
can be purchased at no other price. On this principle a pious son denies
the wishes of his heart, and remains unmarried, that he may sustain a
helpless parent. Christianity is not therefore at all peculiar in
asserting the claims of higher, over lower reasons of conduct, in
peculiar circumstances, or in demanding that, on special occasions, the
enjoyments of life, and life itself, should be held cheap, or abandoned.
Our Lord and his ministers explicitly enjoined such sacrifices, whenever
the interests of the present and of the future life came in competition:
and themselves set the example of the self-denial which they
recommended. Nothing can be more clear than the rule of bodily sacrifice
maintained and exemplified in the New Testament; and this rule is in
perfect accordance with the dictates of good sense, and with the common
practice of mankind. Fasting, celibacy, martyrdom, and such like
contrarieties to the "will of the flesh," stand all on the same ground
in the system of Christian morals: they are ills which a wise and pious
man will cheerfully endure whenever he is so placed that they cannot be
avoided without damage or hazard to the soul, or to the souls of others.
But when no such alternative is presented, then the voluntary infliction
becomes, as well in religious as in secular affairs, a folly, an
impiety, and often a crime. To die without necessity, or to inflict
one's self without reason, is not only an absurdity; but a sin.
And how immensely is this folly and immorality aggravated, when it is
found that the voluntary suffering, instead of being simply useless,
becomes, in its consequences, highly pernicious; and when, by abundant
evidence, it is proved to generate the very worst corruptions and
perversions to which human nature is liable! Such, clearly, are the
inflictions of the monastic life—the solitude, the abstinence, the
celibacy, the poverty!
The rule of Christian martyrdom is precise and unequivocal, and is such
as absolutely to exclude every sort of spontaneous heroism. The
motive also by which the Christian should be sustained, is of a
heart-affecting, not of an exciting kind; and the style of the apostles
when alluding to this subject, is singularly sedate and reserved; nor is
an idea introduced of a kind to inflame fanatical ambition. The reason
of this caution is obvious; for to have kindled the enthusiasm of
martyrdom would have been to nullify the demonstration intended to be
given to the world of the truth of Christianity. So long as martyrdom
rested on the primitive basis (and it rested there, with few exceptions,
until miraculous attestations had ceased to be afforded,) it yielded
conclusive proof of the reality of the facts affirmed by the confessors.
That is to say, so long as Christians suffered only when suffering could
be avoided in no other way than by denying their profession; and so long
as they endured tortures, and met death, in a spirit not raised above a
calm courage; or even displayed timidity or reluctance, such sufferings
afforded direct demonstration of the sincerity of their belief; and
they, having been eye-witnesses of supernatural interpositions, and
being often the very agents of miraculous power, their sincere belief,
and their honesty, carried with it the proof of the facts so attested.
But when, at a later time, martyrdom was courted in a spirit of false
heroism, and came to be endured in a corresponding style of enthusiastic
excitement, it lost almost the whole of its value as a proof of the
truth of Christianity. For it is well known to be within the compass of
human nature to endure, unmoved and exultingly, the most extreme
torments in fanatical adherence to a religious tenet: but such
sufferings evince nothing more than the firmness or the infatuation of
the victim. On the contrary, when the confessor has fallen into the
hands of persecuting power by no imprudence or temerity of his own, and
when he avails himself, with promptitude and calmness, of every legal
and honorable means of self-defence or escape, and when he pleads truth
and right in arrest of judgment, and at last yields to the stroke
because nothing could avert it but the forfeiture of conscience, then it
is manifest that a deliberate conviction is the real motive of his
conduct: and then also, if he have had a personal knowledge of the
facts, for affirming which he dies, his death, on the surest principles
of evidence, must be accepted as containing incontestible proof of those
facts.
The recluses were not the first to spoil the primitive practice of
martyrdom; but their principles greatly cherished the abuse when once it
had been introduced; and still more did their conduct and their writings
enhance the pernicious superstitions which presently afterwards resulted
from the foolish respect paid to the tombs and relics of confessors.
These trivial and idolatrous reverences of human heroism can find no
room of entrance until the great realities of Christianity have been
forgotten; and until the humbling and peace-giving doctrine of atonement
has been lost sight of. The contrite heart, made glad by the assurance
of pardon through the merit of him who alone has merit supererogatory,
neither admits sentiments of vain glory for itself, nor is prone to
yield excessive worship to the deeds of others.
It deserves particular notice that the martyrs of the Reformation in
England, France, Spain, and Italy, with very few exceptions, suffered in
a spirit incomparably more sedate, and more nearly allied to that
displayed and recommended by the apostles, than did the Christians,
generally, of the third century. The reason of the difference is not
obscure; these modern confessors understood the capital doctrine of
Christianity much more fully and clearly than did those of the age of
Origen.
Celibacy, though it may seem to be a kind of self-devotion less extreme
than voluntary martyrdom, was in fact a much greater, and a much worse
outrage upon human nature. This fundamental article of the monkish
system had evidently two distinct motives: the first, and probably
the originating cause of so extraordinary a practice, was the
impracticability of uniting the pleasures of seclusion and of lazy
meditation, with the duties and burdens of domestic life. The
alternative was unavoidable, either to renounce the happiness and the
cares of husband and father, or the spiritual luxuries of supine
contemplation. The one species of enjoyment offered itself precisely as
the price that must be paid for obtaining the other.[6]
The second motive of monkish celibacy, and which so gained ascendency
over the first as to keep it almost wholly out of sight, sprung more
immediately from the centre illusion of the system; and the real nature
of that illusion stands forward in this instance in a distinct and
tangible form. The very germ of that transmuted piety, which, in the
end, banished true religion from the church, may readily be brought
under inspection by tracing the natural history of the sentiment that
attributes sanctity to single life.
For reasons that are obvious and highly important, a sentiment of
pudicity, which can never be thrown aside without reducing man to the
level—nay, below the level of the brutes, belongs to the primary link of
the social system. But this feeling, necessary as it is to the purity
and the dignity of social life, suggests, by a close and easy affinity
of ideas, the supposition of guilt as belonging to indulgence; and then
the correlative supposition of innocence, or of holiness, as belonging
to continence. Nevertheless, feelings of this sort, when analyzed, will
be found to have their seat in the imagination exclusively, and only by
accident to implicate the moral sense. They belong to that class of
natural illusions, which, in the combination of the various and
discordant ingredients of human nature, serve to amalgamate what would
otherwise be utterly incompatible. Among all the natural illusions, or,
as they might be termed, the pseudo-moral sentiments, there is not one
which so nearly resembles the genuine sense of right and wrong as this,
or one that is so intimately blended with them.
It is easy then to perceive the process by which infirm minds passed
into the error of attributing sanctity to celibacy. But the law of
Christian purity knows of no such confusion of ideas. The very same
authority which forbids adultery, enjoins marriage; and so long as
morality is understood to consist in obedience to the declared will of
God, it can never be imagined that a man is defiled by living in
matrimony, any more than by "eating with unwashen hands." But when once
religion has passed into the imagination, and when the sentiments which
have their seat in that faculty have become predominant, so as to crush
or enfeeble those that belong to conscience, then is it inevitable that
the true purity which consists in "keeping the commandments," should be
supplanted by that artificial holiness which is a mere refinement upon
natural instincts. Under the influence of false notions of this sort,
nothing seems so saintly as for a man to shrink horrifically from the
touch of woman; nothing scarcely so spiritually degrading as to be a
husband and a father.[7] Impious and mad enthusiasm! and not only
irreligious and absurd, but pestilent also; for this same monkish
doctrine of the merit of virginity stands convicted, on abundant
evidence, of having transplanted the worst vices of polytheistic Greece
into the very sanctuaries of religion; and so, of infecting the nations
of modern Europe with crimes which, had they not been kept alive in
monasteries, Christianity would long ago have banished from the earth.
How little did the pious men, who, in the third century, extolled the
merit of mortification, and petty torture, and celibacy, think of the
hideous corruptions in which these practices were to terminate! A
sagacity more than human was needed to foresee the end from the
beginning. But, with the experience of past ages before us, we may well
learn to distrust every specious attempt to exaggerate morality, or to
attach ideas of blame to things innocent or indifferent. This over-doing
of virtue never fails to divert the mind from what is substantially
good, and is moreover the almost invariable symptom of a transmuted or
fictitious pietism.
* * * * *
II. The ancient monkery was a system of the most deliberate selfishness.
That solicitude for the preservation of individual interests which forms
the basis of the human constitution, is so broken up and counteracted by
the claims and pleasures of domestic life, that, though the principle
remains, its manifestations are suppressed, and its predominance
effectually prevented, except in some few tempers peculiarly unsocial.
But the anchoret is a selfist by his very profession; and, like the
sensualist, though his taste is of another kind, he pursues his personal
gratifications, reckless of the welfare of others. His own advantage or
delight, or, to use his favorite phrase—"the good of his soul," is the
sovereign object of his cares. His meditations, even if they embrace the
compass of heaven, come round, ever and again, to find their ultimate
issue in his own bosom; but can that be true wisdom which just ends at
the point whence it started? True wisdom is a progressive principle. In
abjuring the use of the active faculties, in reducing himself, by the
spell of vows, to a condition of physical and moral annihilation, the
insulated being says to his fellows, concerning whatever might otherwise
have been converted to their benefit—"It is corban;" thus making void
the law of love to our neighbor, by a pretended intensity of love to God.
That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the
name of sanctity, and should have done so too in front of Christianity,
is indeed amazing; and could never have happened if Christianity had not
first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of
its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space. The
tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences to petrify the heart has
been already adverted to; and it receives a signal illustration in the
monkish life; especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation
from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen
deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there imbedded below the
touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the
ultimate and natural issue of enthusiastic piety; and it may be met with
even in our own times among those who have no inclination to run away
from the comforts of common life.
* * * * *
III. Spiritual pride, the most repulsive of the religious vices, was
both a main cause, and a principal effect of the ancient monachism.
The particular manner in which this odious pride sprung up in the
monastery deserves attention. That sort of plain and practical religion
which adapts itself to the circumstances of common life—the religion
taught by the apostles, a religion of love, sobriety, temperance,
justice, fit for the use of master and servant, of husband and wife, of
parent and child, by no means satisfied the wishes of those who sought
in Christianity a delicious dream of unearthly excitements. It was
therefore indispensable to imagine a new style of religion; and hence
arose the doctrine so warmly and incessantly advanced by the early
favorers of monkery, that our Lord and his apostles taught a two-fold
piety, and recognized an upper and an under class in the church, and
sanctioned the division of the Christian body into what might be termed
a plebeian, and a patrician order.
This doctrine appears more or less distinctly in every one of the
fathers who at all favors the monastic life. It may seem to bear analogy
to the principle of the Grecian philosophers who had their common maxims
for the vulgar, and their hidden instructions for the few. But the
resemblance is more apparent than real: the distinction arose among the
Christians from altogether another source. The church, that is to say
the collective body of true believers, is called in the New Testament
the spouse of Christ; but the monks perverted the figure by using it
distinctively, by calling individual Christians "the brides of Christ,"
and by appropriating the honor to those who had taken the vow of
celibacy.
The most absurd and impious abuses of language presently followed from
this error, and such as it were even blasphemous to repeat. Yet some of
the greatest writers of the times are charmed with these irreligious
conceits.
In accordance with this arrogant pretension, it was believed, that,
while the Christian commonalty might be left to wallow in the affairs of
common life—in business, matrimony, and such-like impurities—the "elect
of Christ" stood on a platform, high lifted above the grossness of
secular engagements and earthly passions, and were, in their Lord's
esteem, immensely more holy, and higher in rank, as candidates for the
honors of the future life, than the mass of the faithful. When this
supposition became generally adopted and assented to, out of the
monastery as well as within it, the first and natural consequence was a
great depreciation of the standard of morals among the people. If there
were admitted to be two rates or degrees of virtue, there must be, of
course, two laws or rules of life: whatever therefore in the Scriptures
seemed to be strict, or pure, or elevated, was assigned to the upper
code; while the lower took to itself only what wore an aspect of laxity
and indulgence. Even an attempt on the part of secular Christians to
make advances in holiness might be condemned as a species of
presumption, or as an invasion of the proprieties of the saintly order.
Heavenly-mindedness and purity of heart were chartered to the
regulars—the monopolists of perfect grace. Alas, that the privileged
should have availed themselves so moderately of their rights!
A second, and not less natural consequence of the same principle, was
the formation, among the monks, either of an insufferable arrogance and
self-complacency, or of a villanous hypocrisy—an hypocrisy which
qualified those who sustained it to become the agents of every
detestable knavery that might promote the ambitious machinations, or
screen the debaucheries of the order.
If a reputation for superior sanctity be ever safe and serviceable to a
Christian, it must be when his conduct and temper, even to the inmost
privacies of domestic life, are open to indifferent observers;—not to
the cringing servitors of a religious establishment, or to the holy
man's hangers-on and accomplices, but to the children and the servants
of a family;—the moral vision of a child is especially quick and clear.
He who thus lives under the eye of witnesses not to be deceived, and not
to be bribed, may actually demean himself the better for being reputed
eminently good. Not so the man who inhabits a den or a cell, who is seen
by the world only through a loop-hole; or who shows himself to an
admiring crowd when, and where, and in what posture he pleases. To such
a one, the praise of sanctity will most often be found inscribed, on its
other side, with a license to crime. Under circumstances so blasting to
the simple honesty and unaffected humility of true piety, almost the
best that charity can imagine is, that the hooded saint deludes himself,
more even than he deceives others.
Such are the natural and almost invariable consequences—in monasteries,
or out of them, of every ambitious attempt to render religion a
something too elevated and too pure to be brought into contact with the
affairs of common life. The mere endeavor generates a pretension that
can never be filled out by truth and reality; and the deficiency must be
made up by delusion and deception; the one begetting arrogance, the
other knavery.
* * * * *
IV. Greediness of the supernatural formed an essential characteristic of
the ancient monachism.
The cares, and toils, and necessities, the refreshments and delights of
common life, are the great teachers of common sense; nor can there be
any effective school of sober reason where these are excluded. Whoever,
either by elevation of rank, or by peculiarity of habits, lives far
removed from this kind of tuition, rarely makes much proficiency in that
excellent quality of the intellect. A man who has little or nothing to
do with other men on terms of open and free equality, needs the native
sense of five, to behave himself only with a fair average of propriety.
Absolute solitude (and seclusion in its degree) necessitates a lapse
into some species of absurdity more or less nearly allied to insanity;
and religious solitude naturally strays into the regions of vision and
miracle.[8]
The monastery was at once the place where the illusions of distempered
brains were the most likely to abound, and where the frauds which
naturally follow in the train of such illusions could the most
conveniently be hatched and executed. Those dungeons of dimness, of
silence, of absolute obedience; those scenes of nocturnal ceremony;
those labyrinths of subterrene communication; those nurseries of craft
and credulity, seemed as if constructed for the very purpose of
fabricating miracles; and, in fact, if all the narratives of
supernatural occurrences that are found upon the pages of the ancient
church-writers were numbered, incomparably the larger proportion would
appear to have been connected immediately with the religious houses. The
wonder which goes to swell the vaunted achievements of the sainted abbot
or brother, was effected, we are assured—in the cell, in the chapel or
church, in the convent-garden, in the depths of the overhanging forest,
or upon the solitude of the neighboring shore! Of all such miracles it
is enough to say, that whether genuine or not, they can claim no respect
from posterity, seeing that they stand not within the circle of credible
testimony. History—lover of simplicity—scorns to place them on her page
in any other form than as evidences of the credulity, if not of the
dishonesty of the times!
Many laborious and voluminous discussions might have been saved, if the
simple and very reasonable rule had been adopted of waiving
investigation into the credibility of any narrative of supernatural or
pretended supernatural events, said to have taken place upon consecrated
ground, or under sacred roofs. Fanes, caves, groves, churches, convents,
cells, are places in which the lover of history will make but a
transient stay: and he may easily find better employment than in sifting
the evidence on which rest such stories as that of the roof-descended
oil, used at the baptism of Clovis; or that of the relics discovered by
Ambrose for the confutation of royal error, and a thousand others of
like nature. Those who, reading church history cursorily, are perplexed
by the frequency of suspicious miracle, are probably not aware,
generally, how very large a proportion of all such annoying relations
may be readily and reasonably disposed of by adhering to the rule above
stated.
The miraculous powers existing in the church after the apostolic age,
rest under a cloud that is not now to be thoroughly dispelled. But with
safety the following propositions may be affirmed: first, That the
Christian doctrine probably received some miraculous attestations after
the death of the apostles; secondly, That so early as the commencement
of the fourth century, fraudulent or deceptive pretensions to miraculous
power were very frequently advanced; and lastly, That at that period,
and subsequently, there are instances, not a few, of a certain sort of
sincerity and fervor in religion, conjoined with very exceptionable
attempts to acquire a thaumaturgal reputation. These deplorable cases
deserve particular attention, especially as they show what are the
natural fruits of fictitious pietism.
If we choose to read the church history of the early centuries in the
spirit of frigid scepticism, all the toil and perplexity that belong to
the exercise of cautious and candid discrimination will be at once
saved; and we shall, in every instance, where supernatural interposition
is alleged, and whatever may be the quality of the evidence, or the
character of the facts, take up that obvious explanation which is
offered, by attributing a greedy credulity to the laity of those times,
and a villanous and shameless knavery to the clergy. But this short
method, how satisfactory soever it may be to indolence, or how
gratifying soever to malignity, can never approve itself to those who
are at once well informed of facts, and accustomed to analyze evidence
with precision. The compass of human nature includes many motives, deep,
and intricate, of which infidelity never dreams, and which, in its
unobservant arrogance, it can never comprehend.
Long before the time when ecclesiastical narratives of supernatural
occurrences assume a character decidedly suspicious, or manifestly
faithless, the great facts of Christianity had, with a large class of
persons, and especially with the recluses, become the objects of
day-dream contemplation, and formed rather the furniture of a theatre of
celestial machinery, than the exciting causes of simple faith, and hope,
and joy. The divine glories, the brightness of the future life, the
history and advocacy of the Mediator, the agency of angels, and of
demons, were little else, to many, than the incentives of intellectual
intoxication. When once this misuse of religious ideas had gained
possession of the mind, it brought with it an irresistible prurience,
asking for the marvellous, just as voluptuousness asks for the aliments
of pleasure. This demand will be peculiarly importunate among those who
have to uphold their faith in the front of a gainsaying world; and who
would much rather confound the scoffer by the blaze of a new miracle,
than convince him by an argumentative appeal to an old one.
The first step towards the pseudo-miraculous is taken without doing any
violence to conscience, and little even to good sense; provided that
opinions of a favoring kind are generally prevalent. Good, and even
judicious men, might be so under the influence of the imagination as to
have their sleep hurried with visions, and their waking meditations
quickened by unearthly voices; and might complacently report such
celestial favors to greedy hearers, without a particle of dishonest
consciousness.[9] Thus the taste for things extraordinary was at once
cherished and powerfully sanctioned by the example of men eminently wise
and holy. Then, with an inferior class of men, the progression from
illusions, real and complete, to such as were in part aided by a little
spontaneity and contrivance, and which, though somewhat unsatisfactory
to the narrator, were devoured without scruple by the hearer, could not
be difficult. The temptation to produce a commodity so much in demand
was strong; often too strong for those whose moral sense had been
debilitated by an habitual inebriety of the imagination. Another step
towards religious fraud was more easily taken than avoided, when it was
eagerly looked for by open-mouthed credulity, and when the church might
cheaply and securely be glorified, and Gentilism triumphantly confuted.
The plain ground of Christian integrity having once been abandoned, the
shocks of a downward progress towards the most reprehensible extreme of
deception were not likely to awaken remorse.
Practices, therefore, which, viewed in their naked merits, must excite
the detestation of every Christian mind, might insensibly gain ground
among those who were far from deserving the designation of thorough
knaves. They were fervent and laborious in their zeal to propagate
Christianity; they believed it cordially, and themselves hoped for
eternal life in their faith; and in the strength of this hope were ready
"to give their bodies to be burned." They prayed, they watched, they
fasted, and crucified the flesh, and did everything which an
enthusiastical intensity of feeling could prompt; and this feeling
prompted them to promote the gospel, as well by juggling as by preaching.
But had not these religious forgers read the unbending morality of the
gospel? Or, reading it, was it possible that they could think the
sacrifice of honesty an acceptable offering to the God of truth? The
difficulty can be solved only by calculating duly the influence of
imaginative pietism in paralyzing the conscience; and if the facts of
the case still seem hard to comprehend, it will be necessary, for
illustration, to recur to instances that may be furnished, alas! by most
Christian communities in our own times. Is it impossible to find
individuals fervent, and in a certain sense sincere, in their devotions,
and zealous and liberal in their endeavors to diffuse Christianity, and,
perhaps, in many respects amiable, who, nevertheless, admit into their
habitual course of conduct very gross contrarieties to the plainest
rules of Christian morality? When instances of this sort are under
discussion, it is alike unsatisfactory to affirm of the parties in
question, that they are, in the common sense of the term, hypocrites; or
to grant that their piety is genuine, but defective. The first
supposition, though it may cut the difficulty, does not by any means
nicely accord with the facts: and the second puts contempt upon the most
explicit and solemn declarations of our Lord and his ministers, whose
style of enforcing the divine law will never allow those who are
flagrantly vicious, those who are "workers of iniquity," to be called
'imperfect Christians.'
One alternative presents itself for the solution of the pressing
difficulty. The religion of these delinquent professors is sincere in
its kind, and perhaps fervent; but not less fictitious than sincere. Or
rather the religion they profess is not Christianity, but an image of
it. Whatever there is in the Gospel that may stimulate emotion without
breaking up the conscience, has been admitted and felt; but the heart
has not been made "alive towards God." Repentance has had no force, the
desire of pardon no intensity. Certain vices may be shunned and
reprobated, and others as freely indulged; for nothing is really
inconsistent with the dreams of religious delusion—except only the
waking energy of true virtue. And thus it was with many in the ancient
church; the stupendous objects of the unseen world had kindled the
imagination; and in harmony with this state of mind, a supernatural
heroism and an unnatural style of virtue were admired and practised,
because they fed the flames of a fictitious happiness, which compensated
for the renunciation of the pleasures of sense. In this spirit martyrdom
was courted, and deserts were peopled, until they ceased to be
solitudes; and in this spirit also miracles were affirmed, or
fabricated, not perhaps so often by knaves as by visionaries.
Tho subject of the suspicious pretensions to miraculous power advanced
by many of the ancient Christian writers should not be dismissed without
remarking, that it is one thing to compose a gaudy narrative (de
virtutibus) of the wonder-working powers of a saint gone to his rest in
the preceding century, and another to be the actor in scenes of
religious juggling. If this distinction be duly considered, a very large
mass of perplexing matter will at once be discharged from the page of
ecclesiastical history, and that without doing the smallest violence
either to charity, or to the laws of evidence. Some foolish presbyter,
or busy monk, gifted with a talent of description, has collected the
church tales current in his time, concerning a renowned father. The
turgid biography, applauded in the monastery where it was produced,
slipped away silently to the faithful of distant establishments, and
without having ever undergone that ordeal of real and local publicity
which authenticates common history, was suffused through Christendom, as
it were, beneath the surface of notoriety, and so has come down to
modern times to load the memory of some good man with unmerited disgrace.
* * * * *
V. The practice of mystifying the Scriptures must be named as an
especial characteristic of monkish religion.
This practice was, in the first place, the natural fruit of a life like
that of the recluses; for the Bible is a directory of common life; it is
the heavenly enchiridion of those who are beset with the cares, labors,
sorrows, and temptations of the world. To the anchoret it presents
almost a blank page: a style of existence so unnatural as that which he
has chosen, it does not recognize; his imaginary troubles, his frivolous
duties, his visionary temptations, his self-inflicted sufferings, and
his real difficulty of maintaining virtue under the galling friction of
a presumptuous vow, are all absolutely unknown to the Scriptures, which
therefore to the recluse, are _not_ profitable for reproof, or
correction, or for instruction in the false righteousness which he
labors to establish.
To adapt the Bible to the cell, it must of necessity, be allegorized.
Then indeed it becomes inexhaustibly rich in the materials of spiritual
amusement. It was thus that the Jewish doctors, the authors of the
Talmudical writings, found the means of diverting the heaviness of their
leisure; and it was thus, though in a different style, that the Essenes
of the wilderness of the Jordan whiled away the hours of their solitude;
and thus, yet again after another pattern, that the Christian monks,
especially those of Palestine[10] and Egypt, transmuted the words of
truth and soberness into a tangled wreath of flimsy fable.
The doctrine of a mystical sense has invariably been espoused by every
successive body of idle religionists; that is to say, by all who,
spurning or forgetting the authority which the Scriptures assert over
the life and conscience, convert them into the materials of a delicious
dream. The mask of allegory imposed on the Bible, serves first as a
source of entertainment, and then as a shelter against the plain meaning
of all passages directly condemning the will-worship, the fooleries, and
the extravagances to which persons of this temper are ever addicted. So
did the rabbis make void the law of God; so did the monks; so have all
classes of modern mystics; so do modern Antinomians: all have asserted a
double, a treble, or a quadruple sense; a mystery couched beneath every
narrative, and every exhortation, or even hidden in single words: or
they have descried a profound doctrine packed in the bend of a _Samech_
or a _Koph_. Not one of the absurdities of the ancient monkery has been
so long-lived as this: nor is there to be found a more certain symptom
of the existence of fatal illusion in matters of religion.
* * * * *
VI. The monkish system recommended itself by astonishing feats of
devotedness, and by great proficiency in the practices of artificial and
spontaneous virtue.
The excitements of enthusiasm are so much more congruous with the
uncorrected impulses of human nature, than are the principles of genuine
piety, that the former have usually far surpassed the latter, as
motives, in the difficult and mortifying achievements of self-denial. In
proportion as a system of fanaticism is remote from truth, its
stimulating force is found to be great. Thus the fakirs of India have
carried the feats of voluntary torture far beyond any other order of
religionists. Mohammedans, generally, are more zealous, devout, and
fervent than Christians. Romanists surpass Protestants in the solemnity,
intensity, and scrupulosity of their devotional exercises. In conformity
with this well-known principle, the monastic orders have had to boast,
in all ages, of some prodigious instances of mortification, as well as
of charitable heroism. And the boast might be allowed to win more praise
than can be granted to it, if there were not manifest, invariably, in
these exploits, a ferment of sinister feelings, quite incompatible with
the simplicity and purity of Christian virtue.
For example, let a comparison be drawn between a daughter who, in the
deep seclusion of private life, and without a spectator to applaud her
virtue, cheerfully devotes her prime of years to the service of an
afflicted parent;—and the nun, who inveigles beggars daily to the
convent, where she absolves them, against their will, from their filth,
dresses their ulcers, and cleanses their tatters. Assuredly the part she
performs is more seemingly difficult, and far more revolting than that
of the pious daughter; yet it is in fact more easy; for the inflated
"sister of charity"[11] is sustained and impelled by notions of heroism,
and of celestial excellence, and by a present recompense of fame among
her sisterhood, of all which the other does not dream, who, unless she
were actuated by the substantial motives of true goodness, could never
in this manner win the blessing of heaven.
Self-inflicted penances, wasteful abstinences, fruitless labors,
sanctimonious humiliations, and all such like spontaneities, may fairly
be classed with those painful and perilous sports, in pursuing which it
often happens that a greater amount of suffering is endured, and of
danger incurred, than ordinarily belongs to the services and duties of
real life. But these freaks of the monastery, or these toils of the
field, deserve little praise, seeing that they meet their immediate
reward in the gratification of a peculiar taste. In both instances the
adult child pleases himself in his own way, and must be deemed to do
much if he avoids trampling down the rights of his neighbor.
Fictitious virtue, if formed on the model of the Koran, naturally
assumes the style of martial arrogance, of fanatical zeal and of bluff
devotion. But if it be the Gospels that furnish the pattern, then an
opposite phase of sanctity is shown. Abject lowliness, and voluntary
poverty (which is no poverty at all,) and ingenious austerities, and
romantic exploits of charity, and other similar misinterpretations of
the spirit and letter of New Testament morality, are combined to form a
tawdry effigy of the humility, purity, and beneficence of Christian
holiness. But compel the imitator to relinquish all that is heroic, and
picturesque, and poetical in his style of behavior: oblige him to lay
aside whatever makes the vulgar gape at his sanctity; let him uncowl his
ears, and cover his naked feet: ask him to acquit himself patiently,
faithfully, Christianly, amid the non-illustrious and difficult duties
of common life, and he will find himself destitute of motive and of zest
for his daily task. Temperance without abstinence will have no charm for
him; nor purity without a vow; nor self-denial without austerity; nor
patience without stoicism; nor charity without a trumpet. The man of
sackcloth, who was a prodigy of holiness in the cloister, becomes, if
transported into the sphere of domestic life, a monster of selfishness
and sensuality.
* * * * *
Time, which insensibly aggravates the abuses of every corrupt system,
does also furnish an apology, more and more valid from age to age, for
the conduct of the individuals who spring up, in succession, to act
their parts within its machinery. While ancient institutions rest
tranquilly on their bases, while venerable usages obtain unquestioned
submission, while opinion paces forwards with a slumbering step upon its
deep-worn tracks, men are not more conscious of the enormity of the
errors that may be chargeable upon their creeds and practices, than a
secluded tribe is of the strangeness and inelegance of the national
costume. This principle should never be lost sight of when we are
estimating the personal character of the members of the Romish church
before the period of the Reformation; or indeed in later times, where no
free and fair conflict of opinions has taken place. The system and its
victims are always to be thought of apart.
The recurrence, by a people at large, to abstract principles of
political or religious truth, is a much less frequent event than the
rarest of natural phenomena. It is only in consequence of shocks,
happening in the social system by no means so often as earthquakes do in
the material, that the human mind is rent from its habitudes, and placed
in a position whence it may with advantage compare its opinions with
universal truth. The Christian church underwent not once the perils and
benefits of such a convulsion during the long course of fifteen hundred
years. Throughout that protracted space of time the men of each age,
with few exceptions, quietly deemed that to be good which their fathers
had thought so; and as naturally they delivered it to their successors,
endorsed with their own solemn approbation. In forming an opinion,
therefore, of the merits of individuals, justice, we need not say
candor, demands that the whole, or almost the whole amount of the
abstract error of the system within which, by accident of birth, they
move, should be deducted from the reckoning. This sort of justice may
especially be claimed in behalf of those who rather acquiesced in the
religious modes of their times, than appeared as its active champions.
Thus we excuse the originators and early supporters of a bad system, on
the ground of their ignorance of its evil tendency and actual
consequences; and again we palliate the fault of its adherents in a late
age, by pleading for them the influence of that natural sentiment of
respect which is paid to antiquity.
Perhaps the treatment which Jovinian and Vigilantius received from
Jerom, Ambrose, and Augustine, may be thought to detract very much from
the validity of the apology here offered for the ancient abettors of
monachism. But the circumstances of the case are involved in too much
obscurity to allow a distinct opinion to be formed on the subject. The
protest of Jovinian against the prevailing errors of the church might be
connected with some extravagance of belief, or some impropriety of
conduct which prevented his testimony from being listened to with
respect. Yet certainly the appearances of the case show decidedly
against both Jerom and Ambrose. Augustine knew little personally of the
supposed error against which he inveighed.
These proper allowances being made, there will be no difficulty in
turning from an indignant reprobation of the monkish practices, to a
charitable and consoling belief of the personal virtues, and even
eminent piety of many who, in every age, have fretted away an unblessed
existence within that dungeon of religious delusion—the monastery. In
default of complete evidence, yet on the ground of some substantial
proof, it is allowable to hope that the monastic orders at all times
included many spiritual members.[12] There is even reason to believe
that a better style of sentiment, and less extravagance, and less
fanatical heat, and less knavish pretension, and more of humility and
purity, existed here and there among the recluses of the tenth and
eleventh, than among those of the fifth and sixth centuries.
In the earlier period, though there might be much pretension to
seclusion from the world, the monastery was in fact a house set on a
hill in the midst of the Christian community; and it was ever surrounded
by an admiring multitude; so that its inmates might always find a ready
revenue of glorification for the exploits and hypocrisies of
supernatural sanctity.[13] But in the later periods, and when nothing
hardly existed without doors except feudal ignorance and ferocity (we
speak of the monasteries of Europe), many of the religious houses were
real seclusions, and very far removed from any market of vulgar praise.
Then within these establishments, it cannot be doubted, that the pious
few found their virtue much rather guarded by the envious eyes of their
less exemplary comrades, than endangered by drawing upon itself any sort
of admiration. The spiritual monk (let not modern prejudices refuse to
admit the phrase), glad to hide himself from the railleries or spite of
the lax fraternity, kept close to his cell, and there passed his hours,
not uncheered, nor undelicious, in prayer and meditation, in the perusal
of religious books, and in the pleasant, edifying, and beneficial toils
of transcription. Not seldom, as is proved by abundant evidence, the
life-giving words of prophets and apostles were the subjects of these
labors; nor ought it to be doubted that while, through a long tract of
centuries, the Scriptures, unknown abroad, were holding their course
underground, if one might so speak, waiting the time of their glorious
emerging, they imparted the substance of true knowledge to many souls,
pent with them in the same sepulchral glooms.
* * * * *
The monkish system retained its ancient style, with little alteration,
until it received an enhancement, and a somewhat new character in
France, in the hands of the followers of Jansen, and the Port Royal
recluses. Then the old doctrine of religious abstraction—of the merging
of the soul in Deity, and of the merit and efficacy of penitential
suicide, was revived with an intensity never before known and was
recommended by a much larger admixture of genuine scriptural knowledge
than had ever before been connected with the same system, and was graced
by the brilliant talents and great learning of many of the party; while
at the same time the endurance of persecution gave depth, force, and
heroism, to the sentiments of the sect.
It was inevitable that whatever of good might arise within the church of
Rome, and remain in allegiance to it, must pass over to the ancient and
venerated form of monkish piety. The religion of the monastery was the
only sort of devotedness and seriousness known to, or sanctioned by,
that church. A new sect of fervent religionists could therefore do no
otherwise than either fall into that style, or denounce it; and the
latter would have been to break from Rome, and to side with Huguenots.
Embarrassed at every step by their professed submission to the authority
of the popes, which they perpetually felt to be at variance with the
duty they owed to God, and heavily oppressed and galled by their
necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of the church in which
alone they thought salvation could be had, and still more deeply injured
by their own zealously loved ascetic doctrine, these good men obtained
possession, and made profession of, the great truths of Christianity
under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been
sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the
present times. They have left in their voluminous and valuable writings,
a body of divinity, doctrinal and practical, which, when the peculiar
circumstances of its production are considered, presents a matchless
proof of the intrinsic power of Christianity, upbearing so ponderous a
mass of error.
Nevertheless, while the Port Royal divines and their friends are perused
with pleasure and advantage, and while the reader is often inclined to
admit that in depth, fervor, and solemnity of religious feeling, in
richness and elevation of thought, in holy abstraction from earthly
interests, in devotedness of zeal, and in the exemplification of some
difficult duties, they much surpass the divines of England, he still
feels, and sometimes when he can hardly assign the grounds of his
dissatisfaction, that a vein of illusiveness runs through every page.
Although the great principles of religion are much more distinctly and
more feelingly produced than generally they are in the writings of the
fathers, and though the evidence of genuine and exalted piety is
abundant and unquestionable; yet is there an infection of _idealism_,
tainting every sentiment; a mist of the imagination, obscuring every
doctrine. In turning from the French writers of this school to our own
standard divines, the reader is conscious of a sensation that might be
compared to that felt by one who escapes into pure air from a chamber in
which, though it was possible to live, respiration was oppressed by the
presence of mephitic exhalations.
Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they so fondly clung, the piety of
these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them
triumphantly through the conflict with their atrocious enemy—"the
Society." They were themselves in too many points vulnerable, to close
fearlessly with their adversary; and they grasped the sword of the
Spirit in too infirm a manner to be able to drive home a deadly thrust.
Had it been otherwise, had they been free, not merely from the shackle
of submission to Rome, but free from the debilitating influence of
mysticism and monkish notions, their moral force, their talent, their
learning, and their self-devotion, might have sufficed, first, for the
overthrow of their immediate antagonist, whose bad cause, and worse
arguments were hardly supported against the augmenting weight of public
opinion, even by the whole power of the court. Then might they, not
improbably, have supplied the impulse necessary to achieve the
emancipation of the Gallican church from the thraldom of Rome; an event
which seemed, more than once, to be on the eve of accomplishment. And
if, at the same moment, the Protestants of France had received just that
degree of indulgence—of mere sufferance—which was demanded, we do not
say by justice and mercy, but by a politic regard to the national
welfare; and if by these means a substantially sound, though perhaps
partial reform had taken place within the dominant church, and dissent
been allowed to spread itself amicably through the interstices of the
ecclesiastical structure; if religious liberty, not indeed in the temper
of republican contumacy, but in the Christian spirit of quiet and
grateful humility, had taken root in France, is it too much to say that
Atheism could never have become, as it did, the national opinion, and
that the consequent solution of the social system in blood could never
have happened?
The Jansenist, and the inmates of Port Royal, and many of their
favorers, displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them
through the fires of martyrdom. But the intellectual courage necessary
to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the
papal superstition could have sprung only from a healthy force of mind,
utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, with the
petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence, with the trivial
ceremonials of the daily ritual, with the prim niceties of behavior that
pin down the body and soul of a Romish regular to his parchment-pattern
of artificial sanctity. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they
worshipped not the beast, they cringed before him; he planted his
dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were
lost forever to France!
The monk of Wittemberg had taken a bolder and a better course. When he
began to find fault with Rome, he rejected, not only its own flagrant
and recent corruptions: but the many delusions it had inherited from the
ancient Church; and after a short struggle with the prejudices of his
education, he became, not only no papist, but no monk. Full fraught with
the principles and spirit of the Bible, he denounced, as well the
venerable errors of the fathers, as the scarlet sins of the mother of
impurities; and was as little a disciple of Jerom, of Gregory, and of
Basil, as of the doctors of the Vatican.
The English reformers trod the ground of theological inquiry with the
same manly step; and that firm step shook the monasteries to the dust.
Those great and good men went back to the Scriptures, where they found
at once the great realities of religion—a condemning law, a justifying
Gospel, and a provision of grace for a life of true holiness. With these
substantial principles in their hearts, they spurned whatever was
trivial and spurious, and amid the fires of persecution, they reared the
structure—a structure still unshaken—of religion for England, upon "the
foundation of the apostles and prophets." Had there existed a taste for
mysticism, a fondness for penitential austerities, a cringing deference
to the fathers, among the divines of the time of Edward VI., such a
disposition must, so far as known causes are to be calculated upon, have
utterly spoiled the reformation in England; or have postponed it a
hundred years.
[6] In the only places in the New Testament where celibacy is
recommended, Matt. xix. 12, and 1 Cor. vii. 32, the reason is of this
substantial and intelligible kind, namely, that in the case of
individuals, placed in peculiar circumstances, a single life would be
advantageous, inasmuch as it would give them better opportunity of
serving the Lord without distraction. Precisely the same advice might
sometimes with propriety be given to a soldier, or to a statesman: a
high motive justifies a sacrifice of personal happiness. Nowhere in the
discourses of our Lord, or in the writings of the apostles, is there to
be discovered a trace of the monkish motives of celibacy—namely, the
supposed superior sanctity of that state.
[7] "Grande est et immortale, pœne ultra naturam corpoream, superare
luxuriam, et concupiscentiæ spasmeam adolescentiæ facibus accensam animi
virtute restinguere, et spiritali conatu vim genuinæ oblectationis
excludere, _viveréque contra humani generis legem_, despicere solatia
conjugii, dulcedinem contemnere liberorum, quæcumque esse præsentis vitæ
commoda possint, pro nihilo spe futurorum beatitudinis computare." The
Epistle of Sulpitius _de Virginitate_, in which this passage occurs,
contains, it should be confessed, much more good sense and good
morality, in the latter part of it, than one would expect to find in
conjunction with absurdities such as that above quoted. The annotator on
the passage well says, that the Ascetics avoided the pleasures of
domestic life, not because they were sweets, but because conjoined with
great cares, which those escaped who lived in celibacy. Nor is it to be
denied, says he, that married life is obnoxious to great and heavy
inconveniences: nevertheless, if under those difficulties we live holily
and religiously, our future recompense will surely not be less than as
if, to be free from them we had embraced a single life.
[8] "Habitant plerique in eremo sine ullis tabernaculis quos Anachoretas
vocant. Vivunt herbarum radicibus: nullo unquam certo loco consistunt,
ne ab hominibus frequententur: quas nox coëgerit sedes habent.... Inter
hujus (Sina) recessus Anachoreta esse aliquis ferebatur quem diu
multumque quæsitum videre non potui, qui ferè jam ante quinquaginta
annos à conversatione humanâ remotus, nullo vestis usu, setis corporis
sui tectus, nuditatem suam divino munere vestiebat. Hic quoties eum
religiosi viri adire voluerunt, cursu avia petens, congressus vitabat
humanos. Uni tantummodo ferebatur se ante quinquennium præbuisse,
qui credo potenti fide id obtinere promeruit: cui inter multa
conloquia percunctanti, cur homines tantopere vitaret, respondisse
perhibetur, Eum qui ab hominibus frequentaretur non posse ab angelis
frequentari."—_Sulp. Sev. Dialog._ I.
[9] The two signal instances may be mentioned of Cyprian and Augustine,
men whose honesty and sincerity will not be questioned by any one who
himself possesses the sympathies of virtue and integrity. They were both
carried by the spirit of their times almost to the last stage of
credulity and self-delusion; but the latter much farther than the former.
[10] Origen, as every one knows, led the way in the Christian Church in
this mode of interpretation. It is also well known that the monks,
especially those of Alexandria, warmly espoused the cause of this
ingenious writer against the bishops and clergy, who with equal warmth
condemned his works as heretical.
[11] The charitable offices of the nuns in the hospitals of France ought
always to be mentioned with respect and admiration.
[12] The "De Imitatione Christi" alone affords proof enough of the
possibility of the existence of elevated piety in the monastery. It
abounds also with indications of the petty persecution to which a
spiritual monk was exposed among his brethren.
[13] Many of the ancient _solitaries_, far from living as their
profession required, in seclusion, were accustomed to admit daily the
visits of the multitude who flocked around them, to gaze at their
austerities, to hear their harangues, or to be exorcised, or healed of
their maladies. Symeon, "the man of the pillar," every day exhibited
himself to a gaping crowd, collected often from distant countries.
St. Anthony, more sincere in his love of retirement, when pestered by
the plaudits of the vulgar in Lower Egypt, withdrew into a desert of the
Thebaïs; yet even there he soon found himself surrounded, not only by
dæmons, but worse, by admirers. See Athan. Op. Vita S. Antonii.