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 Abélard, 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 Abélard 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 sad, melancholy, austere, and
pharisaical member of the fraternity, whose spirit is buried in a gloomy
grave of ascetic severities, 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.
AUTHORITIES.
Saint Bernard's Works, especially the Epistles; Mabillon; Hélyot's
Histoire des Ordres Monastiques; Dugdale's Monasticon; Döring's
Geschichte der Monchsorden; Montalembert's Les Moines d'Occident;
Milman's Latin Christianity; Morison's Life and Times of Saint Bernard;
Lives of the English Saints; Stephen Harding; Histoire d'Abbaye de
Cluny, par M.P. Lorain; Neander's Church History; Butler's Lives of the
Saints; Vaughan's Life of Thomas Aquinas; Digby's Ages of Faith.
SAINT ANSELM.
* * * * *
A. D. 1033-1109.
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY.
The Middle Ages produced no more interesting man than Anselm, Abbot of
Bec and Archbishop of Canterbury,--not merely a great prelate, but a
great theologian, resplendent in the virtues of monastic life and in
devotion to the interests of the Church. He was one of the first to
create an intellectual movement in Europe, and to stimulate theological
inquiries.
Anselm was born at Aosta, in Italy, 1033, and he died in 1109, at the
age of 76. He was therefore the contemporary of Hildebrand, of Lanfranc,
of Bérenger, of Roscelin, of Henry IV. of Germany, of William the
Conqueror, of the Countess Matilda, and of Urban II. He saw the first
Crusade, the great quarrel about investitures and the establishment of
the Normans in England. Aosta was on the confines of Lombardy and
Burgundy, in a mountainous district, amid rich cornfields and fruitful
vines and dark, waving chestnuts, in sight of lofty peaks with their
everlasting snow. Anselm belonged to a noble but impoverished family;
his father was violent and unthrifty, but his mother was religious and
prudent. He was by nature a student, and early was destined to monastic
life,--the only life favorable to the development of the intellect in a
rude and turbulent age. I have already alluded to the general ignorance
of the clergy in those times. There were no schools of any note at this
period, and no convents where learning was cultivated beyond the
rudiments of grammar and arithmetic and the writings of the Fathers. The
monks could read and talk in Latin, of a barbarous sort,--which was the
common language of the learned, so far as any in that age could be
called learned.
The most famous place in Europe, at that time, where learning was
cultivated, was the newly-founded abbey of Bec in Normandy, under the
superintendence of the Archbishop of Rouen, of which Lanfranc of Pavia
was the prior. It was the first abbey in Normandy to open the door of
learning to the young and inquiring minds of Western Europe. It was a
Benedictine abbey, as severe in its rules as that of Clairvaux. It would
seem that the fame of this convent, and of Lanfranc its presiding genius
(afterwards the great Archbishop of Canterbury), reached the ears of
Anselm; so that on the death of his parents he wandered over the Alps,
through Burgundy, to this famous school, where the best teaching of the
day was to be had. Lanfranc cordially welcomed his fellow-countryman,
then at the age of twenty-six, to his retreat; and on his removal three
years afterwards to the more princely abbey of St. Stephen in Caen,
Anselm succeeded him as prior. Fifteen years later he became abbot, and
ruled the abbey for fifteen years, during which time Lanfranc--the
mutual friend of William the Conqueror and the great Hildebrand--became
Archbishop of Canterbury.
During this seclusion of thirty years in the abbey of Bec, Anselm gave
himself up to theological and philosophical studies, and became known
both as a profound and original thinker and a powerful supporter of
ecclesiastical authority. The scholastic age,--that is, the age of
dialectics, when theology invoked the aid of philosophy to establish the
truths of Christianity,--had not yet begun; but Anselm may be regarded
as a pioneer, the precursor of Thomas Aquinas, since he was led into
important theological controversies to establish the creed of Saint
Augustine. It was not till several centuries after his death, however,
that his remarkable originality of genius was fully appreciated. He
anticipated Descartes in his argument to prove the existence of God. He
is generally regarded as the profoundest intellect among the early
schoolmen, and the most original that appeared in the Church after
Saint Augustine. He was not a popular preacher like Saint Bernard, but
he taught theology with marvellous lucidity to the monks who sought the
genial quiet of his convent. As an abbot he was cheerful and humane,
almost to light-heartedness, frank and kind to everybody,--an exception
to most of the abbots of his day, who were either austere and rigid, or
convivial and worldly. He was a man whom everybody loved and trusted,
yet one not unmindful of his duties as the supreme ruler of his abbey,
enforcing discipline, while favoring relaxation. No monk ever led a life
of higher meditation than he; absorbed not in a dreamy and visionary
piety, but in intelligent inquiries as to the grounds of religious
belief. He was a true scholar of the Platonic and Augustinian school;
not a dialectician like Albertus Magnus and Abélard, but a man who went
beyond words to things, and seized on realities rather than forms; not
given to disputations and the sports of logical tournaments, but to
solid inquiries after truth. The universities had not then arisen, but a
hundred years later he would have been their ornament, like Thomas
Aquinas and Bonaventura.
Like other Norman abbeys, the abbey of Bec had after the Conquest
received lands in England, and it became one of the duties of the abbot
to look after its temporal interests. Hence Anselm was obliged to make
frequent visits to England, where his friendship with Lanfranc was
renewed, and where he made the acquaintance of distinguished prelates
and abbots and churchmen, among others of Eadmer, his future biographer.
It seems that he also won the hearts of the English nobility by his
gentleness and affability, so that they rendered to him uncommon
attentions, not only as a great ecclesiastic who had no equal in
learning, but as a man whom they could not help loving.
The life of Anselm very nearly corresponded with that of the Conqueror,
who died in 1087, being five years older; and he was Abbot of Bec during
the whole reign of William as King of England. There was nothing
particularly memorable in his life as abbot aside from his theological
studies. It was not until he was elevated to the See of Canterbury, on
the death of Lanfranc, that his memorable career became historical. He
anticipated Thomas Becket in his contest to secure the liberties of the
Church against the encroachments of the Norman kings. The cause of the
one was the cause of the other; only, Anselm was trained in monastic
seclusion, and Becket amid the tumults and intrigues of a court. The one
was essentially an ecclesiastic and theologian; the other a courtier and
statesman. The former was religious, and the latter secular in his
habits and duties. Yet both fought the same great battle, the essential
principle of which was the object of contention between the popes and
the emperors of Germany,--that pertaining to the right of investiture,
which may be regarded, next to the Crusades, as the great outward event
of the twelfth century. That memorable struggle for supremacy was not
brought to a close until Innocent III made the kings of the earth his
vassals, and reigned without a rival in Christendom. Gregory VII had
fought heroically, but he died in exile, leaving to future popes the
fruit of his transcendent labors.
Lanfranc died in 1089,--the ablest churchman of the century next to the
great Hildebrand, his master. It was through his influence that England
was more closely allied with Rome, and that those fetters were imposed
by the popes which the ablest of the Norman kings were unable to break.
The Pope had sanctioned the atrocious conquest of England by the
Normans--beneficially as it afterwards turned out--only on the
condition that extraordinary powers should be conferred on the
Archbishop of Canterbury, his representative in enforcing the papal
claims, who thus became virtually independent of the king,--a spiritual
monarch of such dignity that he was almost equal to his sovereign in
authority. There was no such See in Germany and France as that of
Canterbury. Its mighty and lordly metropolitan had the exclusive right
of crowning the king. To him the Archbishop of York, once his equal,
had succumbed. He was not merely primate, but had the supreme control of
the Church in England. He could depose prelates and excommunicate the
greatest personages; he enjoyed enormous revenues; he was vicegerent
of the Pope.
Loth was William to concede such great powers to the Pope, but he could
not be King of England without making a king of Canterbury. So he made
choice of Lanfranc--then Abbot of St. Stephen, the most princely of the
Norman convents--for the highest ecclesiastical dignity in his realm,
and perhaps in Europe after the papacy itself. Lanfranc was his friend,
and also the friend of Hildebrand; and no collision took place between
them, for neither could do without the other. William was willing to
waive some of his prerogatives as a sovereign for such a kingdom as
England, which made him the most powerful monarch in Western Europe,
since he ruled the fairest part of France and the whole British realm,
the united possession of both Saxons and Danes, with more absolute
authority than any feudal sovereign at that time possessed. His
victorious knights were virtually a standing army, bound to him with
more than feudal loyalty, since he divided among them the lands of the
conquered Saxons, and gave to their relatives the richest benefices of
the Church. With the aid of an Italian prelate, bound in allegiance to
the Pope, he hoped to cement his conquest. Lanfranc did as he
wished,--removed the Saxon bishops, and gave their sees to Normans.
Since Dunstan, no great Saxon bishop had arisen. The Saxon bishops were
feeble and indolent, and were not capable of making an effective
resistance. But Lanfranc was even more able than Dunstan,--a great
statesman as well as prelate. He ruled England as grand justiciary in
the absence of the monarch, and was thus viceregent of the kingdom. But
while he despoiled the Saxon prelates, he would suffer no royal
spoliation of the Norman bishops. He even wrested away from Odo,
half-brother of the Conqueror, the manors he held as Count of Kent,
which originally belonged to the See of Canterbury. Thus was William,
with all his greed and ambition, kept in check by the spiritual monarch
he had himself made so powerful.
On the death of this great prelate, all eyes were turned to Anselm as
his successor, who was then Abbot of Bec, absorbed in his studies. But
William Rufus, who had in the mean time succeeded to the throne of the
Conqueror, did not at once appoint any one to the vacant See, since he
had seized and used its revenues to the scandal of the nation and the
indignation of the Church. For five years there was no primate in
England and no Archbishop of Canterbury. At last, what seemed to be a
mortal sickness seized the King, and in the near prospect of death he
summoned Anselm to his chamber and conferred upon him the exalted
dignity,--which Anselm refused to accept, dreading the burdens of the
office, and preferring the quiet life of a scholar in his Norman abbey.
Like Thomas Aquinas, in the next century, who refused the archbishopric
of Naples to pursue his philosophical studies in Paris, Anselm declined
the primacy of the Church in England, with its cares and labors and
responsibilities, that he might be unmolested in his theological
inquiries. He understood the position in which he should be placed, and
foresaw that he should be brought in collision with his sovereign if he
would faithfully guard the liberties and interests of the Church. He was
a man of peace and meditation, and hated conflict, turmoil, and active
life. He knew that one of the requirements of a great prelate is to have
business talents, more necessary perhaps than eloquence or learning. At
last, however, on the pressing solicitation of the Pope, the King, and
the clergy, he consented to mount the throne of Lanfranc, on condition
that the temporalities, privileges, and powers of the See of Canterbury
should not be attacked. The crafty and rapacious, but now penitent
monarch, thinking he was about to die, and wishing to make his peace
with Heaven, made all the concessions required; and the quiet monk and
doctor, whom everybody loved and revered, was enthroned and consecrated
as the spiritual monarch of England.
Anselm's memorable career as bishop began in peace, but was soon clouded
by a desperate quarrel with his sovereign, as he had anticipated. This
learned and peace-loving theologian was forced into a contest which
stands out in history like the warfare between Hildebrand and Henry IV.
It was the beginning of that fierce contest in England which was made
memorable by the martyrdom of Becket. Anselm, when consecrated, was
sixty years of age,--a period of life when men are naturally timid,
cautious, and averse to innovations, quarrels, and physical discomforts.