THE MONKS AND THE CONVERSION OF THE GERMANS
Importance of the monks as a class.
21. It would be difficult to overestimate the variety and extent of the influence that the monks exercised for centuries in Europe. The proud annals of the Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits contain many a distinguished name. The most eminent philosophers, scientists, historians, artists, poets, and statesmen may be found among their ranks. Among those whose achievements we shall study later are The Venerable Bede, Boniface, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Fra Angelico, Savonarola, Luther, Erasmus,—all these, and many others who have been leaders in various branches of human activity, were monks.
Monasticism appealed to many different classes.
The strength of monasticism lay in its appeal to many different classes of persons. The world became a less attractive place as the successive invasions of the barbarians brought ever-increasing disorder. The monastery was the natural refuge not only of the spiritually minded, but of those of a studious or contemplative disposition who disliked the life of a soldier and were disinclined to face the dangers and uncertainties of the times. The monastic life was safe and peaceful, as well as holy. Even the rude and unscrupulous warriors hesitated to destroy the property or disturb the life of those who were believed to enjoy Heaven's special favor. The monastery furnished, too, a refuge for the disconsolate, an asylum for the disgraced, and food and shelter for the indolent who would otherwise have had to earn their living. There were, therefore, many motives which helped to fill the monasteries. Kings and nobles, for the good of their souls, readily gave land upon which to found colonies of monks, and there were plenty of remote spots in the mountains and forests to tempt the recluse.
Necessity for the regulation of monastic life.
Monastic communities first developed on a large scale in Egypt in the fourth century. Just as the Germans were winning their first great victory at Adrianople, St. Jerome was engaged in showing the advantages of the ascetic Christian life, which was a new thing in the West. In the sixth century monasteries multiplied so rapidly in western Europe that it became necessary to establish definite rules for the numerous communities which proposed to desert the ordinary ways of the world and lead a peculiar life apart. The monastic regulations which had been drawn up in the East did not answer the purpose, for the climate of the West and the temperament of the Latin peoples differed too much from those of the Orient. Accordingly St. Benedict drew up, about the year 526, a sort of constitution for the monastery of Monte Cassino, in southern Italy, of which he was the head. This was so sagacious, and so well met the needs of the monastic life, that it was rapidly accepted by the other monasteries and gradually became the "rule" according to which all the western monks lived.[31]
The Rule of St. Benedict.
The Rule of St. Benedict is as important as any constitution that was ever drawn up for a state. It is for the most part natural and wholesome. It provides that, since every one is not fitted for the ascetic life, the candidate for admission to the monastery shall pass through a period of probation, called the novitiate, before he is permitted to take the solemn and irrevocable vow. The brethren shall elect their head, the abbot, whom they must obey unconditionally in all that is not sinful. Along with prayer and meditation, the monks are to work at manual occupations and cultivate the soil. They shall also read and teach. Those who were incapacitated for outdoor work were assigned lighter tasks, such as copying books. The monk was not permitted to own anything in his own right; he pledged himself to perpetual and absolute poverty, and everything he used was the property of the convent. Along with the vows of obedience and poverty, he also took that of chastity, which bound him never to marry. For not only was the single life considered more holy than the married, but the monastic organization would, of course, have been impossible unless the monks remained single. Aside from these restrictions, the monks were commanded to live rational and natural lives and not to abuse their bodies or sacrifice their physical vigor by undue fasting in the supposed interest of their souls. These sensible provisions were directed against the excesses of asceticism, of which there had been many instances in the East.
The monks copy, and so preserve, the Latin authors.
The influence of the Benedictine monks upon Europe is incalculable. From their numbers no less than twenty-four popes and forty-six hundred bishops and archbishops have been chosen. They boast almost sixteen thousand writers, some of great distinction. Their monasteries furnished retreats where the scholar might study and write in spite of the prevailing disorder of the times. The copying of books, as has been said, was a natural occupation of the monks. Doubtless their work was often done carelessly, with little heart and less understanding. But, with the great loss of manuscripts due to the destruction of libraries and the indifference of individual book-owners, it was most essential that new copies should be made. Even poor and incorrect ones were better than none. It was the monks who prevented the loss of a great part of Latin literature, which, without them, would probably have reached us only in scanty remains.
The monks aid in the material development of Europe.
The monks also helped to rescue honest manual labor, which they believed to be a great aid to salvation, from the disrepute into which slavery had brought it in earlier times. They set the example of careful cultivation on the lands about their monasteries and in this way introduced better methods into the regions where they settled. They entertained travelers at a time when there were few or no inns and so increased the intercourse between the various parts of Europe.[32]
The regular and secular clergy.
The Benedictine monks, as well as later monastic orders, were ardent and faithful supporters of the papacy. The Roman Church, which owes much to them, appreciated the aid which they might furnish and extended to them many of the privileges enjoyed by the clergy. Indeed the monks were reckoned as clergymen and were called the "regular" clergy because they lived according to a regula, or rule, to distinguish them from the "secular" clergy, who continued to live in the world (saeculum) and took no monastic vows.
Monks and secular clergy supplement each other.
The Church, ever anxious to maintain as far-reaching a control over its subjects as that of the Roman Empire, whose power it inherited, could hardly expect its busy officers, with their multiform duties and constant relations with men, to represent the ideal of contemplative Christianity which was then held in higher esteem than the active life. The secular clergy performed the ceremonies of the Church, administered its business, and guarded its property, while the regular clergy illustrated the necessity of personal piety and self-denial. Monasticism at its best was a monitor standing beside the Church and constantly warning it against permitting the Christian life to sink into mere mechanical and passive acceptance of its ceremonies as all-sufficient for salvation. It supplied the element of personal responsibility and spiritual ambition upon which Protestantism has laid so much stress.
The monks as missionaries.
22. The first great service of the monks was their missionary labors. To these the later strength of the Roman Church is in no small degree due, for the monks made of the unconverted Germans not merely Christians, but also dutiful subjects of the pope. The first people to engage their attention were the heathen Germans who had conquered the once Christian Britain.
Early Britain.
The islands which are now known as the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were, at the opening of the Christian era, occupied by several Celtic peoples of whose customs and religion we know almost nothing. Julius Cæsar commenced the conquest of the islands (55 B.C.); but the Romans never succeeded in establishing their power beyond the wall which they built, from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth, to keep out the wild Celtic tribes of the North. Even south of the wall the country was not completely Romanized, and the Celtic tongue has actually survived down to the present day in Wales.
Saxons and Angles conquer Britain.
At the opening of the fifth century the barbarian invasions forced Rome to withdraw its legions from Britain in order to protect its frontiers on the continent. The island was thus left to be gradually conquered by the Germans, mainly Saxons and Angles, who came across the North Sea from the region south of Denmark. Almost all record of what went on during the two centuries following the departure of the Romans has disappeared. No one knows the fate of the original Celtic inhabitants of England. It is unlikely that they were, as was formerly supposed, all killed or driven to the mountain districts of Wales. More probably they were gradually lost among the dominating Germans with whom they merged into one people. The Saxon and Angle chieftains established petty kingdoms, of which there were seven or eight at the time when Gregory the Great became pope.
Conversion of Britain.
Gregory, while still a simple monk, had been struck with the beauty of some Angles whom he saw one day in the slave market of Rome. When he learned who they were he was grieved that such handsome beings should still belong to the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness, and, had he been permitted, he himself would have gone as a missionary to their people. Upon becoming pope he sent forty monks to England from one of the monasteries that he had founded, placing a prior, Augustine, at their head and designating him in advance as Bishop of England. The heathen king of Kent, in whose territory the monks landed with fear and trembling (597), had a Christian wife, the daughter of a Frankish king. Through her influence the monks were kindly received and were assigned an ancient church at Canterbury, dating from the Roman occupation before the German invasions. Here they established a monastery, and from this center the conversion, first of Kent and then of the whole island, was gradually effected. Canterbury has always maintained its early preëminence and may still be considered the religious capital of England.[33]
Ancient Church of St. Martin's, Canterbury
The Irish monks.
Augustine and his monks were not, however, the only Christians in the British Isles. Britain had been converted to Christianity when it was a Roman province, and some of the missionaries, led by St. Patrick (d. about 469), had made their way into Ireland and established a center of Christianity there. When the Germans overran Britain and reheathenized it, the Irish monks and clergy were too far off to be troubled by the barbarians. They knew little of the traditions of the Roman Church and diverged from its customs in some respects. They celebrated Easter upon a different date from that observed by the Roman Church and employed a different style of tonsure. Missionaries from this Irish church were busy converting the northern regions of Britain, when the Roman monks under Augustine began their work in the southern part of the island.
Conflict between the Roman Church and the Irish monks.
There was sure to be trouble between the two parties. The Irish clergy, while they professed great respect for the pope and did not wish to be cut off from the rest of the Christian Church, were unwilling to abandon their peculiar usages and accept those sanctioned by Rome. Nor would they recognize as their superior the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the pope had made the head of the British church. The pope, on his part, felt that it was all-important that these isolated Christians should become a part of the great organization of which he claimed to be the head. Neither party would make any concessions, and for two generations each went its own way, cherishing a bitter hostility toward the other.
Victory of Roman Church.
At last the Roman Church won the victory, as it so often did in later struggles. In 664, through the influence of the king of Northumbria who did not wish to risk being on bad terms with the pope, the Roman Catholic form of faith was solemnly recognized in an assembly at Whitby, and the leader of the Irish missionaries sadly withdrew to Ireland.
Map of Christian Missions
The king of Northumbria, upon opening the Council of Whitby, said "that it was proper that those who served one God should observe one rule of conduct and not depart from one another in the ways of celebrating the holy mysteries, since they all hoped for the same kingdom of heaven." That a remote island of Europe should set up its traditions against the customs sanctioned by the rest of Christendom appeared to him highly unreasonable. This faith in the necessary unity of the Church is one of the secrets of its strength. England became a part of the ever-growing territory embraced in the Catholic Church and remained as faithful to the pope as any other Catholic country, down to the defection of Henry VIII in the early part of the sixteenth century.
Early culture in England.
The Venerable Bede.
The consolidation of the rival churches in Great Britain was followed by a period of general enthusiasm for Rome and its literature and culture. Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and other English monasteries became centers of learning unrivaled perhaps in the rest of Europe. A constant intercourse was maintained with Rome. Masons and glassmakers were brought across the Channel to replace the wooden churches of Britain by stone edifices in the style of the Romans. The young clergy were taught Latin and sometimes Greek. Copies of the ancient classics were brought from the continent and reproduced. The most distinguished man of letters of the seventh and early eighth centuries was the English monk Bæda (often called The Venerable Bede, 673–735), from whose admirable history of the Church in England most of our information about the period is derived.[34]
Irish missionaries on the continent.
St. Columban and St. Gall.
23. From England missionaries carried the enthusiasm for the Church back across the Channel. In spite of the conversion of Clovis and the wholesale baptism of his soldiers, the Franks, especially those farthest north, had been very imperfectly Christianized. A few years before Augustine landed in Kent, St. Columban, one of the Irish missionaries of whom we have spoken, landed in Gaul. He went from place to place founding monasteries and gaining the respect of the people by his rigid self-denial and by the miracles that he performed. He even penetrated among the still wholly pagan Alemanni about the Lake of Constance. When driven away by their pagan king, he turned his attention to the Lombards in northern Italy, where he died in 615.[35] St. Gall, one of his followers, remained near the Lake of Constance and attracted about him so many disciples and companions that a great monastery grew up which was named after him and became one of the most celebrated in central Europe. Other Irish missionaries penetrated into the forests of Thuringia and Bavaria. The German church looks back, however, to an English missionary as its real founder.
St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans.
In 718, about a hundred years after the death of St. Columban, St. Boniface, an English monk, was sent by the pope as an apostle to the Germans. After four years spent in reconnoitering the field of his future labors, he returned to Rome and was made a missionary bishop, taking the same oath of obedience to the pope that the bishops in the immediate vicinity of Rome were accustomed to take. Indeed absolute subordination to the pope was a part of Boniface's religion, and he became a powerful agent in promoting the supremacy of the Roman see.
Under the protection of the powerful Frankish mayor of the palace, Charles Martel, Boniface carried on his missionary work with such zeal that he succeeded in bringing all the older Christian communities which had been established by the Irish missionaries under the papal control, as well as in converting many of the more remote German tribes who still clung to their old pagan beliefs. His energetic methods are illustrated by the story of how he cut down the sacred oak of Odin at Fritzlar, in Hesse, and used the wood to build a chapel, around which a monastery soon grew up. In 732 Boniface was raised to the dignity of Archbishop of Mayence and proceeded to establish, in the newly converted region, the German bishoprics of Salzburg, Regensburg, Würzburg, Erfurt, and several others; this gives us some idea of the geographical extent of his labors.
Boniface reforms the church in Gaul and brings it into subjection to the pope.
After organizing the German church he turned his attention, with the hearty approval of the pope and the support of the Frankish rulers, to a general reformation of the church in Gaul. Here the clergy were sadly demoralized, and the churches and monasteries had been despoiled of much of their property in the constant turmoil of the time. Boniface succeeded, with the help of Charles Martel, in bettering affairs, and through his efforts the venerable church of Gaul, almost as old as that of Rome itself, was brought under the supremacy of the pope. In 748 the assembled bishops of Gaul bound themselves to maintain the Catholic unity of faith and follow strictly the precepts of the vicar of St. Peter, the pope, so that they might be reckoned among Peter's sheep.
General Reading.—The best history of the monks to be had in English is Montalembert, The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard (Longmans, Green & Co., 6 vols., $15.00). The writer's enthusiasm and his excellent style make his work very attractive. The advanced student will gain much from Taylor, Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (The Macmillan Company, $1.75), Chapter VII, on the origin and spirit of monasticism. See also Harnack, Monasticism (Scribners, 50 cents). The works on church history referred to at the end of the preceding chapter all contain some account of the monks.