Tolerance

by Hendrik Willem Van Loon

To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore look upon the reality of existence.

For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people, have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century) hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so many fortresses of the Lord.

Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness and its too insistent creditors.

The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.

“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”

The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.

There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.

He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.

In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or to prayer.

But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the glory of the kingdom of God.