Natural History of Enthusiasm

by Isaac Taylor

Perhaps the treatment which Jovinian and Vigilantius received from Jerom, Ambrose, and Augustine, may be thought to detract very much from the validity of the apology here offered for the ancient abettors of monachism. But the circumstances of the case are involved in too much obscurity to allow a distinct opinion to be formed on the subject. The protest of Jovinian against the prevailing errors of the church might be connected with some extravagance of belief, or some impropriety of conduct which prevented his testimony from being listened to with respect. Yet certainly the appearances of the case show decidedly against both Jerom and Ambrose. Augustine knew little personally of the supposed error against which he inveighed.

These proper allowances being made, there will be no difficulty in turning from an indignant reprobation of the monkish practices, to a charitable and consoling belief of the personal virtues, and even eminent piety of many who, in every age, have fretted away an unblessed existence within that dungeon of religious delusion—the monastery. In default of complete evidence, yet on the ground of some substantial proof, it is allowable to hope that the monastic orders at all times included many spiritual members.[12] There is even reason to believe that a better style of sentiment, and less extravagance, and less fanatical heat, and less knavish pretension, and more of humility and purity, existed here and there among the recluses of the tenth and eleventh, than among those of the fifth and sixth centuries.

In the earlier period, though there might be much pretension to seclusion from the world, the monastery was in fact a house set on a hill in the midst of the Christian community; and it was ever surrounded by an admiring multitude; so that its inmates might always find a ready revenue of glorification for the exploits and hypocrisies of supernatural sanctity.[13] But in the later periods, and when nothing hardly existed without doors except feudal ignorance and ferocity (we speak of the monasteries of Europe), many of the religious houses were real seclusions, and very far removed from any market of vulgar praise. Then within these establishments, it cannot be doubted, that the pious few found their virtue much rather guarded by the envious eyes of their less exemplary comrades, than endangered by drawing upon itself any sort of admiration. The spiritual monk (let not modern prejudices refuse to admit the phrase), glad to hide himself from the railleries or spite of the lax fraternity, kept close to his cell, and there passed his hours, not uncheered, nor undelicious, in prayer and meditation, in the perusal of religious books, and in the pleasant, edifying, and beneficial toils of transcription. Not seldom, as is proved by abundant evidence, the life-giving words of prophets and apostles were the subjects of these labors; nor ought it to be doubted that while, through a long tract of centuries, the Scriptures, unknown abroad, were holding their course underground, if one might so speak, waiting the time of their glorious emerging, they imparted the substance of true knowledge to many souls, pent with them in the same sepulchral glooms.

The monkish system retained its ancient style, with little alteration, until it received an enhancement, and a somewhat new character in France, in the hands of the followers of Jansen, and the Port Royal recluses. Then the old doctrine of religious abstraction—of the merging of the soul in Deity, and of the merit and efficacy of penitential suicide, was revived with an intensity never before known and was recommended by a much larger admixture of genuine scriptural knowledge than had ever before been connected with the same system, and was graced by the brilliant talents and great learning of many of the party; while at the same time the endurance of persecution gave depth, force, and heroism, to the sentiments of the sect.

It was inevitable that whatever of good might arise within the church of Rome, and remain in allegiance to it, must pass over to the ancient and venerated form of monkish piety. The religion of the monastery was the only sort of devotedness and seriousness known to, or sanctioned by, that church. A new sect of fervent religionists could therefore do no otherwise than either fall into that style, or denounce it; and the latter would have been to break from Rome, and to side with Huguenots.

Embarrassed at every step by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, which they perpetually felt to be at variance with the duty they owed to God, and heavily oppressed and galled by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of the church in which alone they thought salvation could be had, and still more deeply injured by their own zealously loved ascetic doctrine, these good men obtained possession, and made profession of, the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. They have left in their voluminous and valuable writings, a body of divinity, doctrinal and practical, which, when the peculiar circumstances of its production are considered, presents a matchless proof of the intrinsic power of Christianity, upbearing so ponderous a mass of error.

Nevertheless, while the Port Royal divines and their friends are perused with pleasure and advantage, and while the reader is often inclined to admit that in depth, fervor, and solemnity of religious feeling, in richness and elevation of thought, in holy abstraction from earthly interests, in devotedness of zeal, and in the exemplification of some difficult duties, they much surpass the divines of England, he still feels, and sometimes when he can hardly assign the grounds of his dissatisfaction, that a vein of illusiveness runs through every page. Although the great principles of religion are much more distinctly and more feelingly produced than generally they are in the writings of the fathers, and though the evidence of genuine and exalted piety is abundant and unquestionable; yet is there an infection of idealism, tainting every sentiment; a mist of the imagination, obscuring every doctrine. In turning from the French writers of this school to our own standard divines, the reader is conscious of a sensation that might be compared to that felt by one who escapes into pure air from a chamber in which, though it was possible to live, respiration was oppressed by the presence of mephitic exhalations.

Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they so fondly clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them triumphantly through the conflict with their atrocious enemy—"the Society." They were themselves in too many points vulnerable, to close fearlessly with their adversary; and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to be able to drive home a deadly thrust. Had it been otherwise, had they been free, not merely from the shackle of submission to Rome, but free from the debilitating influence of mysticism and monkish notions, their moral force, their talent, their learning, and their self-devotion, might have sufficed, first, for the overthrow of their immediate antagonist, whose bad cause, and worse arguments were hardly supported against the augmenting weight of public opinion, even by the whole power of the court. Then might they, not improbably, have supplied the impulse necessary to achieve the emancipation of the Gallican church from the thraldom of Rome; an event which seemed, more than once, to be on the eve of accomplishment. And if, at the same moment, the Protestants of France had received just that degree of indulgence—of mere sufferance—which was demanded, we do not say by justice and mercy, but by a politic regard to the national welfare; and if by these means a substantially sound, though perhaps partial reform had taken place within the dominant church, and dissent been allowed to spread itself amicably through the interstices of the ecclesiastical structure; if religious liberty, not indeed in the temper of republican contumacy, but in the Christian spirit of quiet and grateful humility, had taken root in France, is it too much to say that Atheism could never have become, as it did, the national opinion, and that the consequent solution of the social system in blood could never have happened?

The Jansenist, and the inmates of Port Royal, and many of their favorers, displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom. But the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the papal superstition could have sprung only from a healthy force of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, with the petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence, with the trivial ceremonials of the daily ritual, with the prim niceties of behavior that pin down the body and soul of a Romish regular to his parchment-pattern of artificial sanctity. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not the beast, they cringed before him; he planted his dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to France!

The monk of Wittemberg had taken a bolder and a better course. When he began to find fault with Rome, he rejected, not only its own flagrant and recent corruptions: but the many delusions it had inherited from the ancient Church; and after a short struggle with the prejudices of his education, he became, not only no papist, but no monk. Full fraught with the principles and spirit of the Bible, he denounced, as well the venerable errors of the fathers, as the scarlet sins of the mother of impurities; and was as little a disciple of Jerom, of Gregory, and of Basil, as of the doctors of the Vatican.