THE MONKS AND THEIR WAYS.
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF MONACHISM.
As early as the second century men and women began to feel the charm of a peaceful, contemplative life, wholly severed from the selfish, sensual, and brutish ways of large communities. Hence they were attracted to deserts and secluded places, and to seek happiness by living entirely alone. It is thought this turn of religious life was first developed in Egypt. About 378 St. Basil, afterwards Bishop of Cæsarea, introduced monachism into Asia Minor, and thence into the East, and he enjoined poverty, obedience, chastity, and self-mortification as the great objects to be kept in view. A peculiar habit was found to answer best to this kind of life. Both monks and nuns chose plain coarse clothes and girdles. The monks went barelegged, and their hair was more or less shaven. In 529 St. Benedict, an Italian of noble birth, instituted a code of conduct for his monastery on Monte Cassino, a hill between Rome and Naples, and added manual labour for seven hours a day. St. Augustine, the apostle to the Anglo-Saxons, about 596, belonged to the Benedictine order, and so did St. Dunstan, about 930. The habit of the Benedictines consisted of a white woollen cassock, and over that an ample black gown and a black hood. The female houses had also a white under-garment, a black gown and black veil, with a white wimple round the face and neck. The monks of Clugny, in Burgundy, founded in 927, abandoned manual labour and devoted themselves more to contemplative studies. The Clugniacs, the Carthusians, the Cistercians, and the orders of Camaldoli and Grandmont, all sprang from the Benedictine order, each having their own variations. St. Bernard joined the Cistercians in 1113. The Augustinians were a milder order than the Benedictines, and were divided into canons secular and canons regular. A branch of the Augustinians were the military orders, or Knights of the Temple, who arose about 1118, after the experience of the Crusaders, and devoted themselves to escorting pilgrims to Jerusalem and the holy places.
THE MIRACLES AND WORSHIP OF THE MONKS.
Gibbon sums up his account of the monks as follows: “The monastic saints, who excite only the contempt and pity of a philosopher, were respected and almost adored by the prince and people. The Christian world fell prostrate before their shrines, and the miracles ascribed to their relics exceeded at least in number and duration the spiritual exploits of their lives. But the golden legend of their lives was greatly embellished by the artful credulity of their interested brethren; and a believing age was easily persuaded that the slightest caprice of an Egyptian or a Syrian monk had been sufficient to interrupt the eternal laws of the universe. The favourites of Heaven were accustomed to cure inveterate diseases with a touch, a word, or a distant message, and to expel the most obstinate demons from the souls or bodies which they possessed. They familiarly or imperiously commanded the lions and serpents of the desert, infused vegetation into a sapless trunk, suspended iron on the surface of the water, passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile, and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace. These extravagant tales, which display the fiction without the genius of poetry, have seriously affected the reason, the faith, and the morals of the Christians. Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind; they corrupted the evidence of history, and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. Every mode of religious worship which had been practised by the saints, every mysterious doctrine which they believed was fortified by the sanction of Divine revelation, and all the manly virtues, were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.”
PHILOSOPHY OF MONKERY.
Dr. Johnson said: “I do not wonder that, where the monastic life is permitted, every order finds votaries and every monastery inhabitants. Men will submit to any rule by which they will be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance. They are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves.”
MOTIVES FOR BECOMING MONKS.
It would be vain to analyse the many modes by which men were induced to become monks. It has been remarked that young men who became monks out of penitence for their sins were most distinguished for zeal. Men of the first rank, struck by the force of momentary impressions or by sudden reverses of fortune, reminded of the uncertainty of worldly goods, the nearness of death, the vanity of earthly glory, would go into solitude as anchorites or enter a monastery. About 1090 Count Ebrard, of Breteuil, a youth of family and fortune, suddenly forsook all his pleasures, and went about earning his bread as an itinerant charcoal burner, and then for the first time found true peace of mind. Another noble youth, named Simon, about the same time was so struck by the transitoriness of wealth on seeing his father’s dead body, that he also became a monk. Many were driven by sickness, poverty, shame, and remorse to do likewise. Those driven into monasteries by the fear of death were said soon to lose their firmness of purpose. Once St. Bernard, when visiting Count Theobald of Champagne, and seeing a crowd following a robber who was about to be executed, begged of the count to give up to him the criminal to be reformed, and Bernard converted him into an exemplary monk, who lived such for thirty years thereafter. Another monk, Bernard, who lived on a desert island near Jersey, made such an impression on a band of pirates, that when afterwards they were on the point of shipwreck and in fear of sudden death, they remembered the good advice of the hermit, and repented, returned, and joined him in holy exercises for the rest of their days. Anselm of Canterbury, when discoursing on the virtues of monks and the temptations of worldly life, said, “It was true that it was not monks only who are saved. Still, it may be asked, Which of the two attains salvation in the most certain and noble way—he who seeks to love God alone, or he who seeks to love God and the world too at the same time? Was it rational, when danger is on every side, to choose to remain where the danger is greatest?”
THE WEAK SIDE OF MONACHISM.