The particular manner in which this odious pride sprung up in the monastery deserves attention. That sort of plain and practical religion which adapts itself to the circumstances of common life—the religion taught by the apostles, a religion of love, sobriety, temperance, justice, fit for the use of master and servant, of husband and wife, of parent and child, by no means satisfied the wishes of those who sought in Christianity a delicious dream of unearthly excitements. It was therefore indispensable to imagine a new style of religion; and hence arose the doctrine so warmly and incessantly advanced by the early favorers of monkery, that our Lord and his apostles taught a two-fold piety, and recognized an upper and an under class in the church, and sanctioned the division of the Christian body into what might be termed a plebeian, and a patrician order.
This doctrine appears more or less distinctly in every one of the fathers who at all favors the monastic life. It may seem to bear analogy to the principle of the Grecian philosophers who had their common maxims for the vulgar, and their hidden instructions for the few. But the resemblance is more apparent than real: the distinction arose among the Christians from altogether another source. The church, that is to say the collective body of true believers, is called in the New Testament the spouse of Christ; but the monks perverted the figure by using it distinctively, by calling individual Christians "the brides of Christ," and by appropriating the honor to those who had taken the vow of celibacy.
The most absurd and impious abuses of language presently followed from this error, and such as it were even blasphemous to repeat. Yet some of the greatest writers of the times are charmed with these irreligious conceits.
In accordance with this arrogant pretension, it was believed, that, while the Christian commonalty might be left to wallow in the affairs of common life—in business, matrimony, and such-like impurities—the "elect of Christ" stood on a platform, high lifted above the grossness of secular engagements and earthly passions, and were, in their Lord's esteem, immensely more holy, and higher in rank, as candidates for the honors of the future life, than the mass of the faithful. When this supposition became generally adopted and assented to, out of the monastery as well as within it, the first and natural consequence was a great depreciation of the standard of morals among the people. If there were admitted to be two rates or degrees of virtue, there must be, of course, two laws or rules of life: whatever therefore in the Scriptures seemed to be strict, or pure, or elevated, was assigned to the upper code; while the lower took to itself only what wore an aspect of laxity and indulgence. Even an attempt on the part of secular Christians to make advances in holiness might be condemned as a species of presumption, or as an invasion of the proprieties of the saintly order. Heavenly-mindedness and purity of heart were chartered to the regulars—the monopolists of perfect grace. Alas, that the privileged should have availed themselves so moderately of their rights!
A second, and not less natural consequence of the same principle, was the formation, among the monks, either of an insufferable arrogance and self-complacency, or of a villanous hypocrisy—an hypocrisy which qualified those who sustained it to become the agents of every detestable knavery that might promote the ambitious machinations, or screen the debaucheries of the order.
If a reputation for superior sanctity be ever safe and serviceable to a Christian, it must be when his conduct and temper, even to the inmost privacies of domestic life, are open to indifferent observers;—not to the cringing servitors of a religious establishment, or to the holy man's hangers-on and accomplices, but to the children and the servants of a family;—the moral vision of a child is especially quick and clear. He who thus lives under the eye of witnesses not to be deceived, and not to be bribed, may actually demean himself the better for being reputed eminently good. Not so the man who inhabits a den or a cell, who is seen by the world only through a loop-hole; or who shows himself to an admiring crowd when, and where, and in what posture he pleases. To such a one, the praise of sanctity will most often be found inscribed, on its other side, with a license to crime. Under circumstances so blasting to the simple honesty and unaffected humility of true piety, almost the best that charity can imagine is, that the hooded saint deludes himself, more even than he deceives others.
Such are the natural and almost invariable consequences—in monasteries, or out of them, of every ambitious attempt to render religion a something too elevated and too pure to be brought into contact with the affairs of common life. The mere endeavor generates a pretension that can never be filled out by truth and reality; and the deficiency must be made up by delusion and deception; the one begetting arrogance, the other knavery.
IV. Greediness of the supernatural formed an essential characteristic of the ancient monachism.
The cares, and toils, and necessities, the refreshments and delights of common life, are the great teachers of common sense; nor can there be any effective school of sober reason where these are excluded. Whoever, either by elevation of rank, or by peculiarity of habits, lives far removed from this kind of tuition, rarely makes much proficiency in that excellent quality of the intellect. A man who has little or nothing to do with other men on terms of open and free equality, needs the native sense of five, to behave himself only with a fair average of propriety. Absolute solitude (and seclusion in its degree) necessitates a lapse into some species of absurdity more or less nearly allied to insanity; and religious solitude naturally strays into the regions of vision and miracle.[8]
The monastery was at once the place where the illusions of distempered brains were the most likely to abound, and where the frauds which naturally follow in the train of such illusions could the most conveniently be hatched and executed. Those dungeons of dimness, of silence, of absolute obedience; those scenes of nocturnal ceremony; those labyrinths of subterrene communication; those nurseries of craft and credulity, seemed as if constructed for the very purpose of fabricating miracles; and, in fact, if all the narratives of supernatural occurrences that are found upon the pages of the ancient church-writers were numbered, incomparably the larger proportion would appear to have been connected immediately with the religious houses. The wonder which goes to swell the vaunted achievements of the sainted abbot or brother, was effected, we are assured—in the cell, in the chapel or church, in the convent-garden, in the depths of the overhanging forest, or upon the solitude of the neighboring shore! Of all such miracles it is enough to say, that whether genuine or not, they can claim no respect from posterity, seeing that they stand not within the circle of credible testimony. History—lover of simplicity—scorns to place them on her page in any other form than as evidences of the credulity, if not of the dishonesty of the times!