One of the oldest institutions of the Church is that which grew out
of monastic life. It had its seat, at a remote period, in India.
It has existed, in different forms, in other Oriental countries.
It has been modified by Brahminical, Buddhistic, and Persian
theogonies, and extended to Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. Go where
you will in the East, and you see traces of its mighty influence.
We cannot tell its remotest origin, but we see everywhere the force
of its ideas. Its fundamental principle appears to be the desire
to propitiate the Deity by penances and ascetic labors as an
atonement for sin, or as a means of rising to a higher religious
life. It has sought to escape the polluting influences of
demoralized society by lofty contemplation and retirement from the
world. From the first, it was a protest against materialism,
luxury, and enervating pleasures. It recognized something higher
and nobler than devotion to material gains, or a life of degrading
pleasure.
In one sense it was an intellectual movement, while in another it
was an insult to the human understanding. It attempted a purer
morality, but abnegated obvious and pressing duties. It was always
a contradiction,--lofty while degraded, seeking to comprehend the
profoundest mysteries, yet debased by puerile superstitions.
The consciousness of mankind, in all ages and countries, has ever
accepted retribution for sin--more or less permanent--in this world
or in the next. And it has equally accepted the existence of a
Supreme Intelligence and Power, to whom all are responsible, and in
connection with whom human destinies are bound up. The deeper we
penetrate into the occult wisdom of the East,--on which light has
been shed by modern explorations, monumental inscriptions,
manuscripts, historical records, and other things which science and
genius have deciphered,--the surer we feel that the esoteric
classes of India, Egypt, and China were more united in their views
of Supreme Power and Intelligence than was generally supposed fifty
years ago. The higher intellects of Asia, in all countries and
ages, had more lofty ideas of God than we have a right to infer
from the superstitions of the people generally. They had
unenlightened ideas as to the grounds of forgiveness. But of the
necessity of forgiveness and the favor of the Deity they had no
doubt.
The philosophical opinions of these sages gave direction to a great
religious movement. Matter was supposed to be inherently evil, and
mind was thought to be inherently good. The seat of evil was
placed in the body rather than in the heart and mind. Not the
thoughts of men were evil, but the passions and appetites of the
body. Hence the first thing for a good man to do was to bring the
body--this seat of evil--under subjection, and, if possible, to
eradicate the passions and appetites which enslave the body; and
this was to be done by self-flagellations, penances, austerities,
and solitude,--flight from the contaminating influences of the
world. All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form. The
transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the
suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments. The devotee
became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial. He shunned the
habitations of men. And the more desirous he was to essay a high
religious life and thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and
revengeful and unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,--not a
compassionate Creator and Father, but an irresistible Power bent on
his destruction. This degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from
Paganism, tinged the subsequent theology of the Christian monks,
and entered largely into the theology of the Middle Ages.
Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy--both lofty and
degraded--with which the Christian convert had to contend; not
merely the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as
to call out disgust and indignation, but also the views which the
more virtuous and religious of Pagan saints accepted and
promulgated: and not saints alone, but those who made the greatest
pretension to intellectual culture, like the Gnostics and
Manicheans; those men who were the first to ensnare Saint
Augustine,--specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as the Brahmins
of India. It was Eastern philosophy, unquestionably false, that
influenced the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for
above a thousand years,--an institution which all the learning and
eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not
subvert, except in Protestant countries.
Now what, more specifically, were the ideas which the early monks
borrowed from India, Persia, and Egypt, which ultimately took such
a firm hold of the European mind?
One was the superior virtue of a life devoted to purely religious
contemplation, and for the same end that animated the existence of
fakirs and sofis. It was to escape the contaminating influence of
matter, to rise above the wants of the body, to exterminate animal
passions and appetites, to hide from a world which luxury
corrupted. The Christian recluses were thus led to bury themselves
in cells among the mountains and deserts, in dreary and
uncomfortable caverns, in isolated retreats far from the habitation
of men,--yea, among wild beasts, clothing themselves in their skins
and eating their food, in order to commune with God more
effectually, and propitiate His favor. Their thoughts were
diverted from the miseries which they ought to have alleviated and
the ignorance which they ought to have removed, and were
concentrated upon themselves, not upon their relatives and
neighbors. The cries of suffering humanity were disregarded in a
vain attempt to practise doubtful virtues. How much good those
pious recluses might have done, had their piety taken a more
practical form! What missionaries they might have made, what self-
denying laborers in the field of active philanthropy, what noble
teachers to the poor and miserable! The conversion of the world to
Christianity did not enter into their minds so much as the desire
to swell the number of their communities. They only aimed at a
dreamy pietism,--at best their own individual salvation, rather
than the salvation of others. Instead of reaching to the beatific
vision, they became ignorant, narrow, and visionary; and, when
learned, they fought for words and not for things. They were
advocates of subtile and metaphysical distinctions in theology,
rather than of those practical duties and simple faith which
primitive Christianity enjoined. Monastic life, no less than the
schools of Alexandria, was influential in creating a divinity which
gave as great authority to dogmas that are the result of
intellectual deductions, as those based on direct and original
declarations. And these deductions were often gloomy, and colored
by the fears which were inseparable from a belief in divine wrath
rather than divine love. The genius of monasticism, ancient and
modern, is the propitiation of the Divinity who seeks to punish
rather than to forgive. It invented Purgatory, to escape the awful
burnings of an everlasting hell of physical sufferings. It
pervaded the whole theology of the Middle Ages, filling hamlet and
convent alike with an atmosphere of fear and wrath, and creating a
cruel spiritual despotism. The recluse, isolated and lonely,
consumed himself with phantoms, fancied devils, and "chimeras
dire." He could not escape from himself, although he might fly
from society. As a means of grace he sought voluntary solitary
confinement, without nutritious food or proper protection from the
heat and cold, clad in a sheepskin filled with dirt and vermin.
What life could be more antagonistic to enlightened reason? What
mistake more fatal to everything like self-improvement, culture,
knowledge, happiness? And all for what? To strive after an
impossible perfection, or the solution of insoluble questions, or
the favor of a Deity whose attributes he misunderstood.
But this unnatural, unwise retirement was not the worst evil in the
life of a primitive monk, with all its dreamy contemplation and
silent despair. It was accompanied with the most painful
austerities,--self-inflicted scourgings, lacerations, dire
privations, to propitiate an angry deity, or to bring the body into
a state which would be insensible to pain, or to exorcise passions
which the imaginations inflamed. All this was based on penance,--
self-expiation,--which entered so largely into the theogonies of
the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle
Ages. This error was among the first to kindle the fiery protests
of Luther. The repudiation of this error, and of its logical
sequences, was one of the causes of the Reformation. This error
cast its dismal shadow on the common life of the Middle Ages. You
cannot penetrate the spirit of those centuries without a painful
recognition of almost universal darkness and despair. How gloomy
was a Gothic church before the eleventh century, with its dark and
heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive pillars, its low roof,
its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that church to hide
themselves and sing mournful songs,--the Dies Irae of monastic
fear!
But the primitive monks, with all their lofty self-sacrifices and
efforts for holy meditation, towards the middle of the fourth
century, as their number increased from the anarchies and miseries
of a falling empire, became quarrelsome, sometimes turbulent, and
generally fierce and fanatical. They had to be governed. They
needed some master mind to control them, and confine them to their
religious duties. Then arose Basil, a great scholar, and
accustomed to civilized life in the schools of Athens and
Constantinople, who gave rules and laws to the monks, gathered them
into communities and discouraged social isolation, knowing that the
demons had more power over men when they were alone and idle.
This Basil was an extraordinary man. His ancestors were honorable
and wealthy. He moved in the highest circle of social life, like
Chrysostom. He was educated in the most famous schools. He
travelled extensively like other young men of rank. His tutor was
the celebrated Libanius, the greatest rhetorician of the day. He
exhausted Antioch, Caesarea, and Constantinople, and completed his
studies at Athens, where he formed a famous friendship with Gregory
Nazianzen, which was as warm and devoted as that between Cicero and
Atticus: these young men were the talk and admiration of Athens.
Here, too, he was intimate with young Julian, afterwards the
"Apostate" Emperor of Rome. Basil then visited the schools of
Alexandria, and made the acquaintance of the great Athanasius, as
well as of those monks who sought a retreat amid Egyptian
solitudes. Here his conversion took place, and he parted with his
princely patrimony for the benefit of the poor. He then entered
the Church, and was successively ordained deacon and priest, while
leading a monastic life. He retired among the mountains of
Armenia, and made choice of a beautiful grove, watered with crystal
streams, where he gave himself to study and meditation. Here he
was joined by his friend Gregory Nazianzen and by enthusiastic
admirers, who formed a religious fraternity, to whom he was a
spiritual father. He afterwards was forced to accept the great See
of Caesarea, and was no less renowned as bishop and orator than he
had been as monk. Yet it is as a monk that he left the most
enduring influence, since he made the first great change in
monastic life,--making it more orderly, more industrious, and less
fanatical.
He instituted or embodied, among others, the three great vows,
which are vital to monastic institutions,--Poverty, Obedience, and
Chastity. In these vows he gave the institution a more Christian
and a less Oriental aspect. Monachism became more practical and
less visionary and wild. It approximated nearer to the Christian
standard. Submission to poverty is certainly a Christian virtue,
if voluntary poverty is not. Chastity is a cardinal duty.
Obedience is a necessity to all civilized life. It is the first
condition of all government.
Moreover, these three vows seem to have been called for by the
condition of society, and the prevalence of destructive views.
Here Basil,--one of the commanding intellects of his day, and as
learned and polished as he was pious,--like Jerome after him,
proved himself a great legislator and administrator, including in
his comprehensive view both Christian principles and the
necessities of the times, and adapting his institution to both.
One of the most obvious, flagrant, and universal evils of the day
was devotion to money-making in order to purchase sensual
pleasures. It pervaded Roman life from the time of Augustus. The
vow of poverty, therefore, was a stern, lofty, disdainful protest
against the most dangerous and demoralizing evil of the Empire. It
hurled scorn, hatred, and defiance on this overwhelming evil, and
invoked the aid of Christianity. It was simply the earnest
affirmation and belief that money could not buy the higher joys of
earth, and might jeopardize the hopes of heaven. It called to mind
the greatest examples; it showed that the great teachers of
mankind, the sages and prophets of history, had disdained money as
the highest good; that riches exposed men to great temptation, and
lowered the standard of morality and virtue,--"how hardly shall
they who have riches enter into the kingdom of God!" It appealed
to the highest form of self-sacrifice; it arrayed itself against a
vice which was undermining society. And among truly Christian
people this new application of Christ's warnings against the
dangers of wealth excited enthusiasm. It was like enlisting in the
army of Christ against his greatest enemies. Make any duty clear
and imperious to Christian people, and they will generally conform
to it. So the world saw one of the most impressive spectacles of
all history,--the rich giving up their possessions to follow the
example and injunctions of Christ. It was the most signal test of
Christian obedience. It prompted Paula, the richest lady of
Christian antiquity, to devote the revenues of an entire city,
which she owned, to the cause of Christ; and the approbation of
Jerome, her friend, was a sufficient recompense.
The vow of Chastity was equally a protest against one of the
characteristic vices of the day, as well as a Christian virtue.
Luxury and pleasure-seeking lives had relaxed the restraints of
home and the virtues of earlier days. The evils of concubinage
were shameless and open throughout the empire, which led to a low
estimate of female virtue and degraded the sex. The pagan poets
held up woman as a subject of scorn and scarcasm. On no subject
were the apostles more urgent in their exhortations than to a life
of purity. To no greater temptation were the converts to
Christianity subjected than the looseness of prevailing sentiments
in reference to this vice. It stared everybody in the face. Basil
took especial care to guard the monks from this prevailing
iniquity, and made chastity a transcendent and fundamental virtue.
He aimed to remove the temptation to sin. The monks were enjoined
to shun the very presence of women. If they carried the system of
non-intercourse too far, and became hard and unsympathetic, it was
to avoid the great scandal of the age,--a still greater evil. To
the monk was denied even the blessing of the marriage ties.
Celibacy became a fundamental law of monachism. It was not to
cement a spiritual despotism that Basil forbade marriage, but to
attain a greater sanctity,--for a monk was consecrated to what was
rightly held the higher life. This law of celibacy was abused, and
gradually was extended to all the clergy, secular as well as
regular, but not till the clergy were all subordinated to the rule
of an absolute Pope. It is the fate of all human institutions to
become corrupt; but no institution of the Church has been so
fatally perverted as that pertaining to the marriage of the clergy.
Founded to promote purity of personal life, it was used to uphold
the arms of spiritual despotism. It was the policy of Hildebrand.
The vow of Obedience, again, was made in special reference to the
disintegration of society, when laws were feebly enforced and a
central power was passing away. The discipline even of armies was
relaxed. Mobs were the order of the day, even in imperial cities.
Moreover, monks had long been insubordinate; they obeyed no head,
except nominally; they were with difficulty ruled in their
communities. Therefore obedience was made a cardinal virtue, as
essential to the very existence of monastic institutions. I need
not here allude to the perversion of this rule,--how it degenerated
into a fearful despotism, and was made use of by ambitious popes,
and finally by the generals of the Mendicant Friars and the
Jesuits. All the rules of Basil were perverted from their original
intention; but in his day they were called for.
About a century later the monastic system went through another
change or development, when Benedict, a remarkable organizer,
instituted on Monte Cassino, near Naples, his celebrated monastery
(529 A. D.), which became the model of all the monasteries of the
West. He reaffirmed the rules of Basil, but with greater
strictness. He gave no new principles to monastic life; but he
adapted it to the climate and institutions of the newly founded
Gothic kingdoms of Europe. It became less Oriental; it was made
more practical; it was invested with new dignity. The most
visionary and fanatical of all the institutions of the East was
made useful. The monks became industrious. Industry was
recognized as a prime necessity even for men who had retired from
the world. No longer were the labors of monks confined to the
weaving of baskets, but they were extended to the comforts of
ordinary life,--to the erection of stately buildings, to useful
arts, the systematic cultivation of the land, to the accumulation
of wealth,--not for individuals, but for their monasteries.
Monastic life became less dreamy, less visionary, but more useful,
recognizing the bodily necessities of men. The religious duties of
monks were still dreary, monotonous, and gloomy,--long and
protracted singing in the choir, incessant vigils, an unnatural
silence at the table, solitary walks in the cloister, the absence
of social pleasures, confinement to the precincts of their
convents; but their convents became bee-hives of industry, and
their lands were highly cultivated. The monks were hospitable;
they entertained strangers, and gave a shelter to the persecuted
and miserable. Their monasteries became sacred retreats, which
were respected by those rude warriors who crushed beneath their
feet the glories of ancient civilization. Nor for several
centuries did the monks in their sacred enclosures give especial
scandal. Their lives were spent in labors of a useful kind,
alternated and relieved by devotional duties.
Hence they secured the respect and favor of princes and good men,
who gave them lands and rich presents of gold and silver vessels.
Their convents were unmolested and richly endowed, and these became
enormously multiplied in every European country. Gradually they
became so rich as to absorb the wealth of nations. Their abbots
became great personages, being chosen from the ranks of princes and
barons. The original poverty and social insignificance of
monachism passed away, and the institution became the most powerful
organization in Europe. It then aspired to political influence,
and the lord abbots became the peers of princes and the ministers
of kings. Their abbey churches, especially, became the wonder and
the admiration of the age, both for size and magnificence. The
abbey church of Cluny, in Burgundy, was five hundred and thirty
feet long, and had stalls for two hundred monks. It had the
appointment of one hundred and fifty parish priests. The church of
Saint Albans, in England, is said to have been six hundred feet
long; and that of Glastonbury, the oldest in England, five hundred
and thirty. Peterborough's was over five hundred. The kings of
England, both Saxon and Norman, were especial patrons of these
religious houses. King Edgar founded forty-seven monasteries and
richly endowed them; Henry I. founded one hundred and fifty; and
Henry II. as many more. At one time there were seven hundred
Benedictine abbeys in England, some of which were enormously rich,--
like those of Westminster, St. Albans, Glastonbury, and Bury St.
Edmunds,--and their abbots were men of the highest social and
political distinction. They sat in Parliament as peers of the
realm; they coined money, like feudal barons; they lived in great
state and dignity. The abbot of Monte Cassino was duke and prince,
and chancellor of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This celebrated
convent had the patronage of four bishoprics, sixteen hundred and
sixty-two churches, and possessed or controlled two hundred and
fifty castles, four hundred and forty towns, and three hundred and
thirty-six manors. Its revenues exceeded five hundred thousand
ducats, so that the lord-abbot was the peer of the greatest secular
princes. He was more powerful and wealthy, probably, than any
archbishop in Europe. One of the abbots of St. Gall entered
Strasburg with one thousand horsemen in his train. Whiting, of
Glastonbury, entertained five hundred people of fashion at one
time, and had three hundred domestic servants. "My vow of
poverty," said another of these lordly abbots,--who generally rode
on mules with gilded bridles and with hawks on their wrists,--"has
given me ten thousand crowns a year; and my vow of obedience has
raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince."
Among the privileges of these abbots was exemption from taxes and
tolls; they were judges in the courts; they had the execution of
all rents, and the supreme control of the income of the abbey
lands. The revenues of Westminster and Glastonbury were equal to
half a million of dollars a year in our money, considering the
relative value of gold and silver. Glastonbury owned about one
thousand oxen, two hundred and fifty cows, and six thousand sheep.
Fontaine abbey possessed forty thousand acres of land. The abbot
of Augia, in Germany, had a revenue of sixty thousand crowns,--
several millions, as money is now measured. At one time the monks,
with the other clergy, owned half of the lands of Europe. If a
king was to be ransomed, it was they who furnished the money; if
costly gifts were to be given to the Pope, it was they who made
them. The value of the vessels of gold and silver, the robes and
copes of silk and velvet, the chalices, the altar-pieces, and the
shrines enriched with jewels, was inestimable. The feasts which
the abbots gave were almost regal. At the installation of the
abbot of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, there were consumed fifty-
eight tuns of beer, eleven tuns of wine, thirty-one oxen, three
hundred pigs, two hundred sheep, one thousand geese, one thousand
capons, six hundred rabbits, nine thousand eggs, while the guests
numbered six thousand people. Of the various orders of the
Benedictines there have been thirty-seven thousand monasteries and
one hundred and fifty thousand abbots. From the monks, twenty-one
thousand have been chosen as bishops and archbishops, and twenty-
eight have been elevated to the papal throne.
From these things, and others which may seem too trivial to
mention, we infer the great wealth and power of monastic
institutions, the most flourishing days of which were from the
sixth century to the Crusades, beginning in the eleventh, when more
than one hundred thousand monks acknowledged the rule of Saint
Benedict. During this period of prosperity, when the vast abbey
churches were built, and when abbots were great temporal as well as
spiritual magnates, quite on an equality with the proudest feudal
barons, we notice a marked decline in the virtues which had
extorted the admiration of Europe. The Benedictines retained their
original organization, they were bound by the same vows (as
individuals, the monks were always poor), they wore the same dress,
as they did centuries before, and they did not fail in their duties
in the choir,--singing their regular chants from two o'clock in the
morning. But discipline was relaxed; the brothers strayed into
unseemly places; they indulged in the pleasures of the table; they
were sensual in their appearance; they were certainly ignorant, as
a body; and they performed more singing than preaching or teaching.
They lived for themselves rather than for the people. They however
remained hospitable to the last. Their convents were hotels as
well as bee-hives; any stranger could remain two nights at a
convent without compensation and without being questioned. The
brothers dined together at the refectory, according to the rules,
on bread, vegetables, and a little meat; although it was noticed
that they had a great variety in cooking eggs, which were turned
and roasted and beaten up, and hardened and minced and fried and
stuffed. It is said that subsequently they drank enormous
quantities of beer and wine, and sometimes even to disgraceful
excess. Their rules required them to keep silence at their meals;
but their humanity got the better of them, and they have been
censured for their hilarious and frivolous conversation,--for jests
and stories and puns. Bernard accused the monks of degeneracy, of
being given to the pleasures of the table, of loving the good
things which they professed to scorn,--rare fish, game, and
elaborate cookery.
That the monks sadly degenerated in morals and discipline, and even
became objects of scandal, is questioned by no respectable
historian. No one was more bitter and vehement in his denunciations
of this almost universal corruption of monastic life than Saint
Bernard himself,--the impersonation of an ideal monk. Hence reforms
were attempted; and the Cluniacs and Cistercians and other orders
arose, modelled after the original institution on Monte Cassino.
These were only branches of the Benedictines. Their vows and habits
and duties were the same. It would seem that the prevailing vices
of the Benedictines, in their decline, were those which were
fostered by great wealth, and consequent idleness and luxury. But
at their worst estate the monks, or regular clergy, were no worse
than the secular clergy, or parish priests, in their ordinary lives,
and were more intelligent,--at least more learned. The ignorance of
the secular clergy was notorious and scandalous. They could not
even write letters of common salutation; and what little knowledge
they had was extolled and exaggerated. It was confined to the
acquisition of the Psalter by heart, while a little grammar,
writing, and accounts were regarded as extraordinary. He who could
write a few homilies, drawn from the Fathers, was a wonder and a
prodigy. There was a total absence of classical literature.
But the Benedictines, idle and worldly as they were, guarded what
little literature had escaped the ruin of the ancient civilization.
They gave the only education the age afforded. There was usually a
school attached to every convent, and manual labor was shortened in
favor of students. Nor did the monks systematically and
deliberately shut the door of knowledge against those inclined to
study, for at that time there was no jealousy of learning; there
was only indifference to it, or want of appreciation. The age was
ignorant, and life was hard, and the struggle for existence
occupied the thoughts of all. The time of the monks was consumed
in alternate drudgeries and religious devotions. There was such a
general intellectual torpor that scholars (and these were very few)
were left at liberty to think and write as they pleased on the
great questions of theology. There was such a general unanimity of
belief, that the popes were not on the look-out for heresy. Nobody
thought of attacking their throne. There was no jealousy about the
reading of the Scriptures. Every convent had a small library,
mostly composed of Lives of the saints, and of devout meditations
and homilies; and the Bible was the greatest treasure of all,--the
Vulgate of Saint Jerome, which was copied and illuminated by busy
hands. In spite of the general ignorance, the monks relieved their
dull lives by some attempts at art. This was the age of the most
beautiful illuminated manuscripts. There was but little of
doctrinal controversy, for the creed of the Church was settled; but
pious meditations and the writings of noted saints were studied and
accepted,--especially the works of Saint Augustine, who had fixed
the thinking of the West for a thousand years. Pagan literature
had but little charm until Aristotle was translated by Arabian
scholars. The literature of the Church was puerile and
extravagant, yet Christian,--consisting chiefly of legends of
martyrs and Lives of saints. That literature has no charm to us,
and can never be revived, indeed is already forgotten and
neglected, as well it may be; but it gave unity to Christian
belief, and enthroned the Christian heroes on the highest pedestal
of human greatness. In the monasteries some one of the fraternity
read aloud these Lives and Meditations, while the brothers worked
or dined. There was no discussion, for all thought alike; and all
sought to stimulate religious emotions rather than to quicken
intellectual activity.
About half the time of the monks, in a well-regulated monastery,
was given to singing and devotional exercises and religious
improvement, and the other half to labors in the fields, or in
painting or musical composition. So far as we know, the monks
lived in great harmony, and were obedient to the commands of their
superiors. They had a common object to live for, and had few
differences in opinion on any subject. They did not enjoy a high
life, but it was free from distracting pleasures. They held to
great humility, with which spiritual pride was mingled,--not the
arrogant pride of the dialectician, but the self-satisfied pride of
the devotee. There was no religious hatred, except towards Turks
and Saracens. The monk, in his narrowness and ignorance, may be
repulsive to an enlightened age: he was not repulsive to his own,
for he was not behind it either in his ideas or in his habits of
life. In fact, the more repulsive the monk of the dark ages is to
this generation, the more venerated he was by bishops and barons
seven hundred years ago; which fact leads us to infer that the
degenerate monk might be to us most interesting when he was most
condemned by the reformers of his day, since he was more humane,
genial, and free than his brethren, chained to the rigid discipline
of his convent. Even a Friar Tuck is not so repulsive to us as an
unsocial, austere, narrow-minded, and ignorant fanatic of the
eleventh century.
But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles
of ignorance and despair. With the opening of the twelfth century
light began to dawn upon the human mind. The intellectual monk,
long accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those
subjects which had occupied his thoughts,--on God and His
attributes, on the nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the
Saviour, on the power of the will to resist evil, and other
questions that had agitated the early Fathers of the Church. Then
arose such men as Erigena, Roscelin, Berenger, Lanfranc, Anselm,
Bernard, and others,--all more or less orthodox, but inquiring and
intellectual. It was within the walls of the cloister that the
awakening began and the first impulse was given to learning and
philosophy. The abbey of Bec, in Normandy, was the most
distinguished of new intellectual centres, while Clairvaux and
other princely abbeys had inmates as distinguished for meditative
habits as for luxury and pride.
It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in
ample possessions, and their churches rivalled cathedrals in size
and magnificence, and their abbots were lords and princes,--the
palmy age of monastic institutions, chiefly of the Benedictine
order,--that Saint Bernard, the greatest and best representative of
Mediaeval monasticism, was born, 1091, at Fontaine, in Burgundy.
He belonged to a noble family. His mother was as remarkable as
Monica or Nonna. She had six sons and a daughter, whom she early
consecrated to the Lord. Bernard was the third son. Like Luther,
he was religiously inclined from early youth, and panted for
monastic seclusion. At the age of twenty-three he entered the new
monastery at Citeaux, which had been founded a few years before by
Stephen Harding, an English saint, who revived the rule of Saint
Benedict with still greater strictness, and was the founder of the
Cistercian order,--a branch of the Benedictines. He entered this
gloomy retreat, situated amid marshes and morasses, with no outward
attractions like Cluny, but unhealthy and miserably poor,--the
dreariest spot, perhaps, in Burgundy; and he entered at the head of
thirty young men, of the noble class, among whom were four of his
brothers who had been knights, and who presented themselves to the
abbot as novices, bent on the severest austerities that human
nature could support.
Bernard himself was a beautiful, delicate, refined young man,--
tall, with flaxen hair, fair complexion, blue eyes from which shone
a superhuman simplicity and purity. His noble birth would have
opened to him the highest dignities of the Church, but he sought
only to bear the yoke of Christ, and to be nailed to the cross; and
he really became a common laborer wrapped in a coarse cowl, digging
ditches and planting fields,--for such were the labors of the monks
of Citeaux when not performing their religious exercises. But his
disposition was as beautiful as his person, and he soon won the
admiration of his brother monks, as he had won the affection of the
knights of Burgundy. Such was his physical weakness that "nearly
everything he took his stomach rejected;" and such was the rigor of
his austerities that he destroyed the power of appetite. He could
scarcely distinguish oil from wine. He satisfied his hunger with
the Bible and quenched his thirst with prayer. In three years he
became famous as a saint, and was made Abbot of Clairvaux,--a new
Cistercian convent, in a retired valley which had been a nest of
robbers.
But his intellect was as remarkable as his piety, and his monastery
became not only a model of monastic life to which flocked men from
all parts of Europe to study its rules, but the ascetic abbot
himself became an oracle on all the questions of the day. So great
was his influence that when he died, in 1153, he left behind one
hundred and sixty monasteries formed after his model. He became the
counsellor of kings and nobles, bishops and popes. He was summoned
to attend councils and settle quarrels. His correspondence exceeded
that of Jerome or Saint Augustine. He was sought for as bishop in
the largest cities of France and Italy. He ruled Europe by the
power of learning and sanctity. He entered into all the theological
controversies of the day. He was the opponent of Abelard, whose
condemnation he secured. He became a great theologian and
statesman, as well as churchman. He incited the princes of Europe
to a new crusade. His eloquence is said to have been marvellous;
even the tones of his voice would melt to pity or excite to rage.
With a long neck, like that of Cicero, and a trembling, emaciated
frame, he preached with passionate intensity. Nobody could resist
his eloquence. He could scarcely stand upright from weakness, yet
he could address ten thousand men. He was an outspoken man, and
reproved the greatest dignitaries with as much boldness as did
Savonarola. He denounced the gluttony of monks, the avarice of
popes, and the rapacity of princes. He held heresy in mortal
hatred, like the Fathers of the fifth century. His hostility to
Abelard was direful, since he looked upon him as undermining
Christianity and extinguishing faith in the world. In his defence
of orthodoxy he was the peer of Augustine or Athanasius. He
absolutely abhorred the Mohammedans as the bitterest foes of
Christendom,--the persecutors of pious pilgrims. He wandered over
Europe preaching a crusade. He renounced the world, yet was
compelled by the unanimous voice of his contemporaries to govern the
world. He gave a new impulse to the order of Knights Templars. He
was as warlike as he was humble. He would breathe the breath of
intense hostility into the souls of crusaders, and then hasten back
to the desolate and barren country in which Clairvaux was situated,
rebuild his hut of leaves and boughs, and soothe his restless spirit
with the study of the Song of Songs. Like his age, and like his
institution, he was a great contradiction. The fiercest and most
dogmatic of controversialists was the most gentle and loving of
saints. His humanity was as marked as his fanaticism, and nothing
could weaken it,--not even the rigors of his convent life. He wept
at the sorrows of all who sought his sympathy or advice. On the
occasion of his brother's death he endeavored to preach a sermon on
the Canticles, but broke down as Jerome did at the funeral of Paula.
He kept to the last the most vivid recollection of his mother; and
every night, before he went to bed, he recited the seven Penitential
Psalms for the benefit of her soul.
In his sermons and exhortations Bernard dwelt equally on the wrath
of God and the love of Christ. Said he to a runaway Cistercian,
"Thou fearest watchings, fasts, and manual labor, but these are
light to one who thinks on eternal fire. The remembrance of the
outer darkness takes away all horror from solitude. Place before
thine eyes the everlasting weeping and gnashing of teeth, the fury
of those flames which can never be extinguished" (the essence of
the theology of the Middle Ages,--the fear of Hell, of a physical
and eternal Hell of bodily torments, by which fear those ages were
controlled). Bernard, the loveliest impersonation of virtue which
those ages saw, was not beyond their ideas. He impersonated them,
and therefore led the age and became its greatest oracle. The
passive virtues of the Sermon on the Mount were united with the
fiercest passions of religious intolerance and the most repulsive
views of divine vengeance. That is the soul of monasticism, even
as reformed by Harding, Alberic, and Bernard in the twelfth
century,--less human than in the tenth century, yet more
intellectual.
The monks of Citeaux, of Morimond, of Pontigny, of Clairvaux, amid
the wastes of a barren country, with their white habits and
perpetual vigils and haircloth shirts and root dinners and hard
labors in the field were yet the counsellors and ministers of kings
and the creators of popes, and incited the nations to the most
bloody and unfortunate wars in the whole history of society,--I
mean the Crusades. Some were great intellectual giants, yet all
repelled scepticism as life repels death; all dwelt on the
sufferings of the cross as a door through which the penitent and
believing could surely enter heaven, yet based the justice of the
infinite Father of Love on what, when it appeals to consciousness,
seems to be the direst injustice. We cannot despise the Middle
Ages, which produced such beatific and exalted saints, but we pity
those dismal times when the great mass of the people had so little
pleasure and comfort in this life, and such gloomy fears of the
world to come; when life was made a perpetual sacrifice and
abnegation of all the pleasures that are given us to enjoy,--to use
and not to pervert. Hence monasticism was repulsive, even in its
best ages, to enlightened reason, and fatal to all progress among
nations, although it served a useful purpose when men were governed
by fear alone, and when violence and strife and physical discomfort
and ignorance and degrading superstitions covered the fairest
portion of the earth with a funereal pall for more than a thousand
years.
The thirteenth century saw a new development of monastic
institutions in the creation of the Mendicant Friars,--especially
the Dominicans and Franciscans,--monks whose mission it was to
wander over Europe as preachers, confessors, and teachers. The
Benedictines were too numerous, wealthy, and corrupt to be
reformed. They had become a scandal; they had lost the confidence
of good men. There were needed more active partisans of the Pope
to sustain his authority; the new universities required abler
professors; the cities sought more popular preachers; the great
desired more intelligent confessors. The Crusades had created a
new field of enterprise, and had opened to the eye of Europe a
wider horizon of knowledge. The universities which had grown up
around the cathedral schools had kindled a spirit of inquiry.
Church architecture had become lighter, more cheerful, and more
symbolic. The Greek philosophy had revealed a new method. The
doctrines of the Church, if they did not require a new system, yet
needed, or were supposed to need, the aid of philosophy, for the
questions which the schoolmen discussed were so subtile and
intricate that only the logic of Aristotle could make them clear.
Now the Mendicant orders entered with a zeal which has never been
equalled, except by the Jesuits, into all the inquiries of the
schools, and kindled a new religious life among the people, like
the Methodists of the last century. They were somewhat similar to
the Temperance reformers of the last fifty years. They were
popular, zealous, intelligent, and religious. So great were their
talents and virtues that they speedily spread over Europe, and
occupied the principal pulpits and the most important chairs in the
universities. Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and
Duns Scotus were the great ornaments of these new orders. Their
peculiarity--in contrast with the old orders--was, that they
wandered from city to city and village to village at the command of
their superiors. They had convents, like the other monks; but they
professed absolute poverty, went barefooted, and submitted to
increased rigors. Their vows were essentially those of the
Benedictines. In less than a century, however, they too had
degenerated, and were bitterly reproached for their vagabond habits
and the violation of their vows. Their convents had also become
rich, like those of the Benedictines. It was these friars whom
Chaucer ridiculed, and against whose vices Wyclif declaimed. Yet
they were retained by the popes for their services in behalf of
ecclesiastical usurpation. It was they who were especially chosen
to peddle indulgences. Their history is an impressive confirmation
of the tendency of all human institutions to degenerate. It would
seem that the mission of the Benedictines had been accomplished in
the thirteenth century, and that of the Dominicans and Franciscans
in the fourteenth.
But monasticism, in any of its forms, ceased to have a salutary
influence on society when the darkness of the Middle Ages was
dispersed. It is peculiarly a Mediaeval institution. As a
Mediaeval institution, it conferred many benefits on the semi-
barbarians of Europe. As a whole, considering the shadows of
ignorance and superstition which veiled Christendom, and the evils
which violence produced, its influence was beneficent.
Among the benefits which monastic institutions conferred, at least
indirectly, may be mentioned the counteracting influence they
exerted against the turbulence and tyranny of baronial lords, whose
arrogance and extortion they rebuked; they befriended the
peasantry; they enabled poor boys to rise; they defended the
doctrine that the instructors of mankind should be taken from all
classes alike; they were democratic in their sympathies, while
feudal life produced haughtiness and scorn; they welcomed scholars
from the humblest ranks; they beheld in peasants' children souls
which could be ennobled. Though abbots were chosen generally from
the upper classes, yet the ordinary monks sprang from the
peasantry. For instance, a peasant's family is deprived of its
head; he has been killed while fighting for a feudal lord. The
family are doomed to misery and hardship. No aristocratic tears
are shed for them; they are no better than dogs or cattle. The
mother is heartbroken. Not one of her children can ordinarily rise
from their abject position; they can live and breathe the common
air, and that is all. They are unmolested in their mud huts, if
they will toil for the owner of their village at the foot of the
baronial castle. But one of her sons is bright and religious. He
attracts the attention of a sympathetic monk, whose venerable
retreat is shaded with trees, adorned with flowers, and seated
perhaps on the side of a murmuring stream, whose banks have been
made fertile by industry and beautiful with herds of cattle and
flocks of sheep. He urges the afflicted mother to consecrate him
to the service of the Church; and the boy enters the sanctuary and
is educated according to the fashion of the age, growing up a well-
trained, austere, and obedient member of the fraternity, whose
spirit is dominated by its superiors in all activities. He passes
from office to office. In time he becomes the prior of his
convent,--possibly its abbot, the equal of that proud baron in
whose service his father lost his life, the controller of
innumerable acres, the minister of kings. How, outside the Church,
could he thus have arisen? But in the monastery he is enabled, in
the most aristocratic age of the world, to rise to the highest of
worldly dignities. And he is a man of peace and not of war. He
hates war; he seeks to quell dissensions and quarrels. He believes
that there is a higher than the warrior's excellence. Monachism
recognized what feudalism did not,--the claims of man as man. In
this respect it was human and sympathetic. It furnished a retreat
from misery and oppression. It favored contemplative habits and
the passive virtues, so much needed in turbulent times. Whatever
faults the monks had, it must be allowed that they alleviated
sufferings, and presented the only consolation that their gloomy
and iron age afforded. In an imperfect manner their convents
answered the purpose of our modern hotels, hospitals, and schools.
It was benevolence, charity, and piety which the monks aimed to
secure, and which they often succeeded in diffusing among people
more wretched and ignorant than themselves.