As a temporary refuge from the trials of life, where the soul could be strengthened by seclusion, meditation, peaceful labor, and rigid discipline, thousands must have found the institution of Monachism most beneficial who had not resolution enough to give themselves up to a life of ascetic devotion and privation. These facilities for entrance and departure, however, only rendered more probable the admission of the turbulent and the worldly; and the want of stringent and effective regulations must have rendered itself every day more apparent, as the holy multitudes waxed larger and more difficult to manage, and as the empire became covered with wandering monks, described by St. Augustin as beggars, swindlers, and peddlers of false relics, who resorted to the most shameless mendacity to procure the means of sustaining their idle and vagabond life.[208]
It was this, no doubt, which led to the adoption and enforcement of the third of the monastic vows—that of obedience—as being the only mode by which during the period when residence was voluntary, the crowds of devotees could be kept in a condition of subjection. To what a length this was carried, and how completely the system of religious asceticism succeeded in its object of destroying all human feeling, is well exemplified by the shining example of the holy Mucius, who presented himself for admission in a monastery, accompanied by his child, a boy eight years of age. His persistent humility gained for him a relaxation of the rules, and father and son were admitted together. To test his worthiness, however, they were separated, and all intercourse forbidden. His patience encouraged a further trial. The helpless child was neglected and abused systematically, but all the perverse ingenuity which rendered him a mass of filth and visited him with perpetual chastisement failed to excite a sign of interest in the father. Finally the abbot feigned to lose all patience with the little sufferer’s moans, and ordered Mucius to cast him in the river. The obedient monk carried him to the bank and threw him in with such promptitude that the admiring spectators were barely able to rescue him. All that is wanting to complete the hideous picture is the declaration of the abbot that in Mucius the sacrifice of Abraham was completed.[209] This epitomizes the whole system—the transfer to man of the obedience due to God—and shows how little, by this time, was left of the hopeful reliance on a beneficent God which distinguished the primitive church, and which led Athenagoras, in the second century, to argue from the premises “God certainly impels no one to those things which are unnatural.”
The weaker sex, whether from the greater value attached to the purity of woman or from her presumed frailty, as well as from some difference in the nature of the engagement entered into, was the first to become the subject of distinct legislation, and the frequency of the efforts required shows the difficulty of enforcing the rule of celibacy and chastity. Allusion has already been made to a law of Jovian which, as early as 364, denounced the attempt to marry a nun as a capital crime. Subsequent canons of the church show that this was wholly ineffectual. The council of Valence, in 374, endeavored to check such marriages. The synod of Rome, in 384, alludes with horror to these unions, which it stigmatizes as adultery, and drawing a distinction between virgins professed and those who had taken the veil, it prescribes an indefinite penance before they can be received back into the church, but at the same time it does not venture to order their separation from their husbands.[210] A year later, the bolder Siricius commands both monks and nuns guilty of unchastity to be imprisoned, but he makes no allusion to marriage.[211] Notwithstanding the fervor of St. Augustin’s admiration for virginity and the earnestness with which he waged war in favor of celibacy, he pronounces that the marriage of nuns is binding, ridicules those who consider it as invalid, and deprecates the evil results of separating man and wife under such circumstances, but yet his asceticism, satisfied with this concession to common sense, pronounces such unions to be worse than adulterous.[212] From this it is evident that these infractions of discipline were far from uncommon, and that the stricter churchmen already treated such marriages as null and void, which resulted in the husbands considering themselves at liberty to marry again. Such view of monastic vows was not sustained by the authorities of the church, for about the same period Innocent I., like St. Augustin, while condemning such marriages as worse than adulterous, admitted their validity by refusing communion to the offenders until one of the partners in guilt should be dead; and, like the synod of 384, he considered the transgression as somewhat less culpable in the professed virgin than in her who had consummated her marriage with Christ by absolutely taking the veil.[213] It was probably this assumed marriage with Christ—a theory which St. Cyprian shows to be as old as the third century, and which is very strongly stated by Innocent—which rendered the church so much more sensitive as to the frailty of the female devotees than to that of the men. As yet, however, the stability of such marriages was generally accepted throughout the church, for, a few years before the epistle of Innocent we find it enunciated by the first council of Toledo, which decided that the nun who married was not admissible to penitence during the life of her husband, unless she separated herself from him.[214]
It is evident from all this that an effort had been made to have such marriages condemned as invalid, and that it had failed. We see, however, that the lines had gradually been drawn more tightly around the monastic order, that the vows could no longer be shaken off with ease, and that there was a growing tendency to render the monastic character ineffaceable when once assumed. Towards the middle of the fifth century, however, a reaction took place, possibly because the extreme views may have been found impracticable. Thus Leo I. treats recalcitrant cenobites with singular tenderness. He declares that monks cannot without sin abandon their profession, and therefore that he who returns to the world and marries must redeem himself by penitence, for however honorable be the marriage-tie and the active duties of life, still it is a transgression to desert the better path. So professed virgins, who throw off the habit and marry, violate their duty, and those who in addition to this have been regularly consecrated commit a great crime—and yet no further punishment is indicated for them;[215] and the little respect still paid to the indelible character claimed for monachism is shown by the manner in which the civil power was ready to interfere for the purpose of putting an end to some of the many abuses arising from monastic institutions. In 458 Majorian promulgated a law in which he inveighs with natural indignation against the parents who, to get rid of their offspring, compel their unhappy daughters to enter convents at a tender age, and he orders that, until the ardor of the passions shall be tempered by advancing years, no vows shall be administered. The minimum age for taking the veil is fixed at forty years and stringent measures are provided for insuring its observance. If infringed by order of the parents, or by an orphan girl of her own free will, one-third of all the possessions of the offender is confiscated to the state, and the ecclesiastics officiating at the ceremony are visited with the heavy punishment of proscription. A woman forced into a nunnery, if her parents die before she reaches the age of forty, is declared to be free to leave it and to marry, nor can she be disinherited thereafter.[216] Fruitless as this well-intentioned effort proved, it is highly suggestive as to the wrongs which were perpetrated under the name of religion, the stern efforts felt to be requisite for their prevention, and the power exercised to annul the vows.
In the East, the tendency was to give a more rigid and unalterable character to the vows, nor is it difficult to understand the cause. Both church and state began to feel the necessity of reducing to subjection under some competent authority the vast hordes of idle and ignorant men who had embraced monastic life. In the West, monachism was as yet in its infancy, and was to be stimulated rather than to be dreaded, but it was far otherwise in the East, where the influence of the ascetic ideas of India was much more direct and immediate. The examples of Antony and Pachomius had brought them innumerable followers. The solitudes of the deserts had become peopled with vast communities, and as the contagion spread, monasteries arose everywhere and were rapidly filled and enlarged.[217] The blindly bigoted and the turbulently ambitious found a place among those whose only aim was retirement and peace; while the authority wielded by the superior of each establishment, through the blind obedience claimed under monastic vows, gave him a degree of power which rendered him not only important but dangerous. The monks thus became in time a body of no little weight which it behooved the church to thoroughly control, as it might become efficient for good or evil. By encouraging and directing it, she gained an instrument of incalculable force, morally and physically, to consolidate her authority and extend her influence. How that influence was used, and how the monks became at times a terror even to the state is written broadly on the history of the age. Even early in the fifth century the hordes of savage Nitrian cenobites were the janizaries of the fiery Cyril, with which he lorded it over the city of Alexandria, and almost openly bade defiance to the imperial authority. The tumult in which Orestes nearly lost his life, the banishment of the Jews, and the shocking catastrophe of Hypatia show how dangerous an element to society they were even then, when under the guidance of an able and unscrupulous leader.[218] So the prominent part taken by the monks in the deplorable Nestorian and Eutychian controversies, the example of the Abbot Barsumas at the Robber Synod in Ephesus, the exploits of Theodosius of Jerusalem and Peter of Antioch, who drove out their bishops and usurped the episcopal chairs, the career of Eutyches himself, the bloodthirsty rabble of monks who controlled the synod of Ephesus and endeavored to overawe that of Chalcedon, and, in the succeeding century, the insurrections against the Emperor Anastasius which were largely attributed to their efforts—all these were warnings not lightly to be neglected. The monks, in fact, were fast becoming not only disagreeable but even dangerous to the civil power; their organization and obedience to their leaders gave them strength to seriously threaten the influence even of the hierarchy, and the effort to keep them strictly under subjection and within their convent walls became necessary to the peace of both church and state.
At the council of Chalcedon, in 451, the hierarchy had their revenge for the insults which they had suffered two years before in the Robber Synod. A large portion of the monks, infected with Eutychianism, came into direct antagonism with the bishops, whom they defied. With the aid of the civil power, the bishops triumphed, and endeavored to put an end for the future to monastic insubordination, by placing the monasteries under the direct control and supervision of the secular prelates. A series of canons was adopted which declared that monks and nuns were not at liberty to marry; but while excommunication was the punishment provided for the offence, power was given to the bishops to extend mercy to the offenders. At the suggestion of the Emperor Marcian, the council deplored the turbulence of the monks who, leaving their monasteries, stirred up confusion everywhere, and it commanded them to devote themselves solely to prayer and fasting in the spot which they had chosen as a retreat from the world. It forbade them to abandon the holy life to which they had devoted themselves, and pronounced the dread sentence of the anathema on the renegades who refused to return and undergo due penance. No monastery was to be founded without the license of the bishop of the locality, and he alone could give permission to a monk to leave it for any purpose.[219]
This legislation was well adapted to the end in view, but the evil was too deep-seated and too powerful to be thus easily eradicated. Finding the church unable to enforce a remedy, the civil power was compelled to intervene. As early as 390 Theodosius the Great had ordered the monks to confine themselves strictly to deserts and solitudes.[220] Two years later he repealed this law and allowed them to enter the cities.[221] This laxity was abused, and in 466 the Emperors Leo and Anthemius issued an edict forbidding for the future all monks to go beyond the walls of their monasteries on any pretext, except the apocrisarii, or legal officers, on legitimate business alone, and these were strictly enjoined not to engage in religious disputes, not to stir up the people, and not to preside over assemblages of any nature.[222]
History shows us how little obedience this also received, nor is it probable that much more attention was paid to the imperial rescript when, in 532, Justinian confirmed the legislation of his predecessors, and added provisions forbidding those who had once taken the vows from returning to the world under penalty of being handed over to the curia of their municipality, with confiscation of their property, and personal punishment if penniless.[223] Had the effort then been successful, he would not have been under the necessity of renewing it in 535 by a law making over to the monastery, by way of satisfaction to God, the property of any monk presuming to abandon a life of religion and returning to the cares of the world.[224] The prevalent laxity of manners is further shown by another provision according to which the monk who received orders was not allowed to marry, even if he entered grades in which marriage was permitted to the secular clergy, the penalty for taking a wife or a concubine being degradation and dismissal, with incapacity for serving the state.[225] Ten years later, further legislation was found necessary, and at length the final expedient was hit upon, by which the apostate monk was handed over to the bishop to be placed in a monastery, from which if he escaped again he was delivered to the secular tribunal as incorrigible.[226] The trouble was apparently incurable. Three hundred and fifty years later, Leo the Philosopher deplores it, and orders all recalcitrant monks to be returned to their convents as often as they may escape. As for the morals of monastic life, it may be sufficient to refer to the regulation of St. Theodore Studita, in the ninth century, prohibiting the entrance of even female animals.[227]