The Rise of the Mediaeval Church / And Its Influence on the Civilization of Western Europe from the First to the Thirteenth Century

by Alexander Clarence Flick

The negative effects of monasticism were by no means lacking and may be stated here under the same institutional headings:

1. Religious. In making "war on nature" the ascetics made war also on God. They aimed not too high religiously but in the wrong direction. They exaggerated sin and advocated the wrong means to get rid of it. They took religion away from the crowded centres of population, where it was most needed, to the desert or monastery. Thus an abnormal, unwholesome type of piety was created. In replacing faith by works the monks thus gave birth to a long list of abuses in the Church, and in nourishing an insane religious fanaticism they entailed many grave evils. From one point of view monasticism became a "morbid excrescence" of Christianity and tended to degrade man into a mere religious machine. At the same time the doctrine of future rewards and punishments reached an abhorrent evolution. The awful pangs of hell, the terrific judgments of God, and the ubiquitous and wily devil of the monks' vivid imagination sound strange to a modern mind. But the gravest error in the

monastic system was the false and harmful distinction so clearly drawn both in theory and practice between the secular and the religious. The modern world easily harmonises the two.

2. Social. Monasticism disrupted family ties and caused the desertion of social duties on the ground of a more sacred duty. It lowered respect for the marriage state by magnifying the virtue of celibacy. In making the monk the ideal man of the Middle Ages, it advocated social suicide. All natural pleasures and enjoyments of life were labelled sinful. Practices, which were little more than superstitions, were advocated. Society in general was demoralised because monasticism failed to practise its own teachings.

3. Political. By inducing thousands, and many of them men of character, ability, and experience, to desert their posts of civic duty, the state was weakened and patriotism forgotten. The monk "died to the world" and abjured his country. Monasticism aided powerfully in developing the secular side of the papal hierarchy and soon came to exercise a large amount of political power itself. The monks frequently became embroiled in social disputes and military quarrels, and thus incited rather than allayed the fiercer brute passions of men.

4. Cultural. By holding the education of the people in their hands the monks had a powerful weapon for evil as well as good. In making the monk the ideally cultured man a false standard was set up and certain fundamentals in education ignored. Secular learning was not generally encouraged. The supreme end of all their education was not to produce a man, but a priest.

5. Industrial. Thousands withdrew from the various

lines of industrial activity, some to obtain the higher good, but many to enter as they supposed a life of ease and idleness. Much of the good that was done in the earlier days was negatived by the begging friars later.

Of these two sets of influences which predominated? That both were powerful no one can doubt. All things considered, however, it must be said that monasticism, as it developed in the West, fulfilled a genuine need and performed an important service for Christian civilisation. St. Benedict not only presented a satisfactory solution of the grave dangers threatening this institution as a force in the evolution of the mediæval Church, but with his organised army of devoted, obedient followers, he met the barbarian hosts invading the Roman Empire and gradually won them to adopt and in due course of time to practise the Christian code. Indeed it is difficult to imagine how the Church could have forged its course so triumphantly through all the breakers, trials, and vicissitudes of this crucial epoch—how its jurisdiction could have been extended so rapidly and so effectively to all parts of western Europe and to some points in the East and in northern Africa—how its great humanising, spiritualising, and edifying influences could have been so persistent and at the same time so efficient—how the simple, fundamental truths of the Gospel as set forth in the Apostolic Church could have been handed on to the later ages—had not the growth of monasticism been regulated and utilised. Therefore, next to the evolution of that magnificent organisation of the Papacy, as a creative factor in the rise of the mediæval Church, must be placed organised, western monasticism.