Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

The convents for women are contemporaneous with the monasteries. The virgins devoted to the Church, the young widows, and the deaconesses, led a kind of life calculated to prepare them for habits of reclusion, of contemplation, and asceticism. The sisters of St. Anthony and St. Pachomius were placed by their venerable brothers at the head of two communities of virgins, in Egypt and in Palestine. In Pontus and Cappadocia St. Basilius founded several convents, and their number increased so largely, that in the beginning of the fifth century, one single convent (cœnobium) contained two hundred and fifty virgins.

In Europe the convents for virgins increased no less rapidly. Two religious houses for young women were opened at Rome in the days of St. Anthony, and, no doubt, at his instigation. Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, founded an establishment of the same kind close to his church; but the most remarkable of all these convents was that founded at Milan by St. Ambrose, a religious asylum in which his sister, Marcellina, and her faithful companion, Candida, took refuge.

Towards the end of the fourth century, a Roman lady, St. Paula, built three convents and a monastery in Africa, the management of them being undertaken by St. Jerome. St. Augustine also founded two religious houses in his diocese of Hippona, one for cenobites, the other for virgins, imposing on them the regulations of St. Anthony and St. Pachomius, as to life in common and poverty. “There were at this time,” says this illustrious father, “monks all over the world.” They were called monks, from the Greek μóνος (alone), because of their solitary life; and cenobites, from the Greek words κοινóς and βíος (life in common). They abstained from meat and wine, living upon bread and fruits, and being only allowed to eat cooked vegetables on the Sunday. They were obliged to prepare their own food, and to make their own clothing. Upon Sunday they took the communion with the general congregation, and went back after the service into their monastery.

Fig. 238.—History of St. Benedict.—On the left are the monks of a neighbouring monastery, who have come to seduce him from his hermitage in order to place him at their head; but the austerity of his rule soon dissatisfies them, and they resolve to rid themselves of him. On the right the monks are offering him a cup of poison, but, on his making the sign of the cross on the vase, it is shattered to pieces.—From a Fresco by Spinello d’Arezzo (1390) in the Church of San Miniato, near Florence.

Before the monkish order had been in existence a century, in the East as in the West, the monastic regulations underwent considerable relaxation. The monks having become part of the clerical hierarchy (by force of circumstances, for there was often a deficiency of clergy), took precedence of the latter; their abbots, called archimandrites in the Eastern Church, were raised to the priesthood and to the episcopate; they even took part in councils, though these functions and duties interfered with their cenobitic life. This manifest infraction of the primitive discipline, while it lowered the moral position of the monks, rather increased than otherwise their social influence, and gave them greater weight in the world. Their piety, too, was only temporarily distracted from its original purpose, for men of note like St. Honoratus, St. Maximus, St. Hilary, St. Dalmatius, the two brothers Romanus and Lupicius, maintained the true tradition of monkish life; and the famous abbeys of Lérins and Mount Jura were built. The ascetics of Constantinople, too, were spoken of in high terms, as keeping up a perpetual psalmody (401–405). In Palestine, not far from Jerusalem, a multitude of hermits, under the guidance of St. Euthymius, practised the most rigorous abstinence.

In Africa, St. Fulgentius, exiled by the Arians, was the promoter of regular observances—that is, he preached strict obedience to monastic rule (501–523); while in the West there were founded, in the midst of the Romagnol Alps, in the towns of Arles and St. Maurice d’Agaune, three model monasteries, the first superintendents of which were St. Hilary, St. Cæsarius, and St. Severinus; and its principal benefactors, Theodoric, King of the Goths, Theodoric the Great, and Sigismund, King of Burgundy (504–522). In the monastery of Kildare, governed by St. Bridget, and in the monastery founded by St. Colomba, in Ireland, which was afterwards so justly called the Isle of Saints, the teaching of Christian art, of the liturgy, of ecclesiastical lore and profane literature, was unequalled in its perfection, and the fame of it reached even to Gaul.

Fig. 239.—History of St. Benedict.—As his disciples were attempting to put a stone in place for the construction of their chapel, the devil placed himself upon it, and the united efforts of several persons failed to dislodge him; but St. Benedict having blessed the stone, the devil took flight.—From a Fresco by Spinello d’Arezzo (1390), in the Church of San Miniato, near Florence.

Such was the general position of cenobitism when St. Benedict (Fig. 238), the future patriarch of the monks of the West, the supreme legislator of the monastic order, abandoned his humble cell at Subiaco (528) to found the immense abbey of Monte-Cassino (Fig. 239), which was the glory of the age. The Benedictine rule, the result of profound physiological and philosophical studies, a work of moral science, of wisdom, and of piety, divided the monks’ time between prayer and manual labour, to be succeeded by the cultivation or exercise of the intellect whenever the glory of God, the interests of the monastery, and the education of the people might require it. St. Benedict soon had under his control an army of monks who spread throughout the whole Christian world the rules of their illustrious chief. Amongst them were St. Maurus and Cassiodorus, the former minister of Theodoric the Great: one of them founded the monastery of St. Maur-sur-Loire, in France; the other, that of Vivieri, in Calabria. Cassiodorus took great pains to collect books of the Old and the New Testament, with their commentaries. He went to great expense in collecting all the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, of the Jewish historians as well as of those of the Church, and the principal works on geography, grammar, and rhetoric, and even the best treatises on medicine, so that the monks attached to the infirmary might be fully capable of tending the sick. The monastery of Vivieri contained one of the richest libraries of the period. We find in the collection of the Institutions of Cassiodorus the following remarkable homage paid to the calligraphist monks, who were the greatest men of letters in that day: “I confess, my brethren, that of all your physical labours, that of copying books has always been the avocation most to my taste; the more so, as by this exercise of the mind upon the Holy Scriptures, you convey to those who will read what you have written a kind of oral instruction. You preach with the hand, converting the fingers into organs of speech, announcing silently to men a theme of salvation; it is as it were fighting the evil one with pen and ink. For every word written by the antiquary, the demon receives a severe wound. At rest in his seat, as he copies his books, the recluse travels through many lands without quitting his room, and the work of his hands has its influence in places where he has never been.”