Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGIN OF MONACHISM.

e do not aim in these chapters at writing general history, or systematic treatises. Our business is to give a series of sketches of mediæval life and mediæval characters, looked at especially from the artist’s point of view. And first we have to do with the monks of the Middle Ages. One branch of this subject has already been treated in Mrs. Jameson’s “Legends of the Monastic Orders.” This accomplished lady has very pleasingly narrated the traditionary histories of the founders and saints of the orders, which have furnished subjects for the greatest works of mediæval art; and she has placed monachism before her readers in its noblest and most poetical aspect. Our humbler task is to give a view of the familiar daily life of ordinary monks in their monasteries, and of the way in which they enter into the general life without the cloister;—such a sketch as an art-student might wish to have who is about to study that picturesque mediæval period of English history for subjects for his pencil. The religious orders occupied so important a position in mediæval society, that they cannot be overlooked by the historical student; and the flowing black robe and severe intellectual features of the Benedictine monk, or the coarse frock and sandalled feet of the mendicant friar, are too characteristic and too effective, in contrast with the gleaming armour and richly-coloured and embroidered robes of the sumptuous civil costumes of the period, to be neglected by the artist. Such an art-student would desire first to have a general sketch of the whole history of monachism, as a necessary preliminary to the fuller study of any particular portion of it. He would wish for a sketch of the internal economy of the cloister; how the various buildings of a monastery were arranged; and what was the daily routine of the life of its inmates. He would seek to know under what circumstances these recluses mingled with the outer world. He would require accurate particulars of costumes and the like antiquarian details, that the accessories of his picture might be correct. And, if his monks are to be anything better than representations of monkish habits hung upon “lay figures,” he must know what kind of men the Middle Age monks were intellectually and morally. These particulars we proceed to supply as fully as the space at our command will permit.

Monachism arose in Egypt. As early as the second century we read of men and women who, attracted by the charms of a peaceful, contemplative life, far away from the fierce, sensual, persecuting heathen world, betook themselves to a life of solitary asceticism. The mountainous desert on the east of the Nile valley was their favourite resort; there they lived in little hermitages, rudely piled up of stones, or hollowed out of the mountain side, or in the cells of the ancient Egyptian sepulchres, feeding on pulse and herbs, and water from the neighbouring spring.

One of the frescoes in the Campo Santo, at Pisa, by Pietro Laurati, engraved in Mrs. Jameson’s “Legendary Art,” gives a curious illustration of this phase of the eremitical life. It gives us a panorama of the desert, with the Nile in the foreground, and the rock caverns, and the little hermitages built among the date-palms, and the hermits at their ordinary occupations: here is one angling in the Nile, and another dragging out a net; there is one sitting at the door of his cell shaping wooden spoons. Here, again, we see them engaged in those mystical scenes in which an over-wrought imagination pictured to them the temptations of their senses in visible demon-shapes—beautiful to tempt or terrible to affright; or materialised the spiritual joys of their minds in angelic or divine visions: Anthony driving out with his staff the beautiful demon from his cell, or rapt in ecstasy beneath the Divine apparition.[1] Such pictures of the early hermits are not infrequent in mediæval art—one, from a fifteenth century MS. Psalter in the British Museum (Domit. A. xvii. f. 4 v), will be found in a subsequent chapter of this book.

We can picture to ourselves how it must have startled the refined Græco-Egyptian world of Alexandria when occasionally some man, long lost to society and forgotten by his friends, reappeared in the streets and squares of the city, with attenuated limbs and mortified countenance, with a dark hair-cloth tunic for his only clothing, with a reputation for exalted sanctity and spiritual wisdom, and vague rumours of supernatural revelations of the unseen world; like another John Baptist sent to preach repentance to the luxurious citizens; or fetched, perhaps, by the Alexandrian bishop to give to the church the weight of his testimony to the ancient truth of some doctrine which began to be questioned in the schools.

Such men, when they returned to the desert, were frequently accompanied by numbers of others, whom the fame of their sanctity and the persuasion of their preaching had induced to adopt the eremitical life. It is not to be wondered at that these new converts should frequently build, or select, their cells in the neighbourhood of that of the teacher whom they had followed into the desert, and should continue to look up to him as their spiritual guide. Gradually, this arrangement became systematised; a number of separate cells, grouped round a common oratory, contained a community of recluses who agreed to certain rules and to the guidance of a chosen head; an enclosure wall was generally built around this group, and the establishment was called a laura.

The transition from this arrangement of a group of anchorites occupying the anchorages of a laura under a spiritual head, to that of a community living together in one building under the rule of an abbot, was natural and easy. The authorship of this cœnobite system is attributed to St. Anthony, who occupied a ruined castle in the Nile desert, with a community of disciples, in the former half of the fourth century. The cœnobitical institution did not supersede the eremitical; both continued to flourish together in every country of Christendom.[2]

The first written code of laws for the regulation of the lives of these communities was drawn up by Pachomius, a disciple of Anthony’s. Pachomius is said to have peopled the island of Tabenne, in the Nile, with cœnobites, divided into monasteries, each of which had a superior, and a dean to every ten monks; Pachomius himself being the general director of the whole group of monasteries, which are said to have contained eleven hundred monks. The monks of St. Anthony are represented in ancient Greek pictures with a black or brown robe, and often with a tau cross of blue upon the shoulder or breast.