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 supposed to be 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. Tins 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 mournful 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 monks, ignorant and degenerate 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 monotonous 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 affected 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,
Bérenger, 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.