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, false as we regard it,
which created 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 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.
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 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.
