Chapter 18

The existence of monasticism in non-Christian religions implies that whatever impetus the ascetic impulses in human nature received from Christian teaching, there is some broader basis for monastic life than the tenets of any creed. Biblical history and Christian theology furnish some explanation of the rise of Christian monasticism, but they do not account for the monks of ancient India. The teachings of Jesus exerted a profound influence upon the Christian monks, but they cannot explain the Oriental asceticism that flourished before the Christ of the New Testament was born. There must have been some motive, or motives, operating on human nature as such, a knowledge of which will help to account for the monks of Indian antiquity as well as the begging friars of modern times. It will therefore be in order to begin the present inquiry by seeking those causes which gave rise to monasticism in general.

_Causative Motives of Monasticism_

Whatever the origin of religion itself, it is certain that it is man's inalienable concern. He is, as Sabatier says, "incurably religious." Of all the motives ministering to this ruling passion, the longing for righteousness and for the favor of God is supreme. The savage only partially grasps the significance of his spiritual aspirations, and dimly understands the nature of the God he adores or fears. His worship may be confined to frantic efforts to ward off the vengeful assaults of an angry deity, but however gross his religious conceptions, there is at the heart of his religion a desire to live in peaceful relations with the Supreme Being.

As religion advances, the ethical character of God and the nature of true righteousness are more clearly apprehended. But the idea that moral purity and fellowship with God are in some way associated with self-denial has always been held by the religious world. But what does such a conception involve? What must one do to deny self? The answer to that question will vastly influence the form of religious conduct. Thus while all religious men may unite in a craving for holiness by a participation in the Divine nature, they will differ widely in their opinions as to the nature of this desirable righteousness and as to the means by which it may be attained. Roman Catholicism, by the voice of the monk, whom it regards as the highest type of Christian living, gives one answer to these questions; Protestantism, protesting against asceticism, gives a different reply.

The desire for salvation was, therefore, the primary cause of all monasticism. Many quotations might be given from the sacred writings of India, establishing beyond dispute, that underlying the confusing variety of philosophical ideas and ascetic practices of the non-Christian monks, was a consuming desire for the redemption of the soul from sin. Buddha said on seeing a mendicant, "The life of a devotee has always been praised by the wise. It will be my refuge and the refuge of other creatures, it will lead us to a real life, to happiness and immortality."

Dharmapala, in expounding the teachings of the Buddha, at the World's Parliament of Religions, in Chicago, clearly showed that the aim of the Buddhist is "the entire obliteration of all that is evil," and "the complete purification of the mind." That this is the purpose of the asceticism of India is seen by the following quotation from Dharmapala's address: "The advanced student of the religion of Buddha when he has faith in him thinks: 'Full of hindrances is household life, a path defiled by passions; free as the air is the life of him who has renounced all worldly things. How difficult is it for the man who dwells at home to live the higher life in all its fullness, in all its purity, in all its perfection! Let me then cut off my hair and beard, let me clothe myself in orange-colored robes and let me go forth from a household life into the homeless state!'"

In the same parliament, Mozoomdar, the brilliant and attractive representative of the Brahmo Somaj, in describing "Asia's Service to Religion," thus stated the motives and spirit of Oriental asceticism: "What lesson do the hermitages, the monasteries, the cave temples, the discipline and austerities of the religious East teach the world? Renunciation. The Asiatic apostle will ever remain an ascetic, a celibate, a homeless Akinchana, a Fakeer. We Orientals are all the descendants of John the Baptist. Any one who has taken pains at spiritual culture must admit that the great enemy to a devout concentration of mind is the force of bodily and worldly desire. Communion with God is impossible, so long as the flesh and its lusts are not subdued.... It is not mere temperance, but positive asceticism; not mere self-restraint, but self-mortification; not mere self-sacrifice, but self-extinction; not mere morality, but absolute holiness." And further on in his address, Mozoomdar claimed that this asceticism is practically the essential principle in Christianity and the meaning of the cross of Christ: "This great law of self-effacement, poverty, suffering, death, is symbolized in the mystic cross so dear to you and dear to me. Christians, will you ever repudiate Calvary? Oneness of will and character is the sublimest and most difficult unity with God." The chief value of these quotations from Mozoomdar lies in the fact that they show forth the underlying motive of all asceticism. It would be unjust to the distinguished scholar to imply that he defends those extreme forms of monasticism which have appeared in India or in Christian countries. On the contrary, while he maintains, in his charming work, "The Oriental Christ," that "the height of self-denial may fitly be called asceticism," he is at the same time fully alive to its dangerous exaggerations. "Pride," he says, "creeps into the holiest and humblest exercises of self-discipline. It is the supremest natures only that escape. The practice of asceticism therefore is always attended with great danger." The language of Mozoomdar, however, like that of many Christian monastic writers, opens the door to many grave excesses. It is another evidence of the necessity for defining what one means by "self-mortification" and "self-extinction."

Turning now to Christian monasticism, it will be found that, as in the case of Oriental monasticism the yearning for victory over self was uppermost in the minds of the best Christian monks. A few words from a letter written by Jerome to Rusticus, a young monk, illustrates the truth of this observation: "Let your garments be squalid," he says, "to show that your mind is white, and your tunic coarse, to show that you despise the world. But give not way to pride, lest your dress and your language be found at variance. Baths stimulate the senses, and are therefore to be avoided."

To keep the mind white, to despise the world, to overcome pride, to stop the craving of the senses for gratification,--these were the objects of the monks, in order to accomplish which they macerated and starved their bodies, avoided baths, wore rags, affected humble language and fled from the scenes of pleasure. The goal was highly commendable, even if the means employed were inadequate to produce the desired results.

All down through the Middle Ages, the idea continued to prevail that the monastic life was the highest and purest expression of the Christian religion, and that the monks' chances of heaven were much better than those of any other class of men. The laity believed them to be a little nearer God than even the clergy, and so they paid them gold for their prayers. It will readily be understood that in degenerate times, so profitable a doctrine would be earnestly encouraged by the monks. The knight, whose conscience revolted against his conduct but who could not bring himself to a complete renunciation of the world, believed that heaven would condone his faults or crimes if in some way he could make friends with the dwellers in the cloister. To this end, he founded abbeys and sustained monasteries by liberal gifts of gold and land. Such a donation was made in the following language: "I, Gervais, who belong to the chivalry of the age, caring for the salvation of my soul, and considering that I shall never reach God by my own prayers and fastings, have resolved to recommend myself in some other way to those who, night and day, serve God by these practices, so that, thanks to their intercession, I may be able to obtain that salvation which I of myself am unable to merit." Another endowment was made by Peter, Knight of Maull, in these quaint terms: "I, Peter, profiting by this lesson, and desirous, though a sinner and unworthy, to provide for my future destiny, I have desired that the bees of God may come to gather their honey in my orchards, so that when their fair hives shall be full of rich combs, they may be able to remember him by whom the hive was given."

The people believed that the prayers of the monks lifted their souls into heaven; that their curses doomed them to the bottomless pit. A monastery was the safe and sure road to heaven. The observation of Gibbon respecting the early monks is applicable to all of them: "Each proselyte who entered the gates of a monastery was persuaded that he trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness."

The second cause for monasticism in general was a natural love of solitude, which became almost irresistible when reinforced by a despair of the world's redemption. The poet voiced the feelings of almost every soul, at some period in life, when he wrote:

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumor of oppression or deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more."

The longing for solitude accompanied the desire for salvation. An unconquerable weariness of the world, with its strife and passion, overcame the seeker after God. A yearning to escape the duties of social life, which were believed to interfere with one's duty to God, possessed his soul. The flight from the world was merely the method adopted to satisfy his soul-longings. If such times of degeneracy and rampant iniquity ever return, if humanity is again compelled to stagger under the moral burdens that crushed the Roman Empire, without doubt the love of solitude, which is now held in check by the satisfactions of a comparatively pure and peaceful social life, will again arise in its old-time strength and impel men to seek in waste and lonely places the virtues they cannot acquire in a decaying civilization.

Even amid the delights of human fellowship, and surrounded by so much that ministers to restfulness of soul, it is often hard to repress a longing to shatter the fetters of custom, to flee from the noise and confusion of this hurrying, fretful world, and to pass one's days in a coveted retirement, far from the maddening strife and tumult. Montalembert's profound appreciation of monastic life was never more aptly illustrated than in the following declaration: "In the depths of human nature there exists without doubt, a tendency instinctive, though confused and evanescent, toward retirement and solitude. What man, unless completely depraved by vice or weighed down by care and cupidity, has not experienced once, at least, before his death, the attraction of solitude?"

While the motives just described were unquestionably preeminent among the causative factors in monasticism, it should not be taken for granted that there were no others, or that either or both of these motives controlled every monk. The personal considerations tending to keep up the flight from the world were numerous and active. It would be a mistake to credit all the monks, and at some periods even a majority of them, with pure and lofty purposes. Oftentimes criminals were pardoned through the intercession of abbots on condition that they would retire to a monastery. The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt, the deserted or bereaved wife, the pauper and the invalid, the social outcast and the shirker of civic duties, the lazy and the fickle were all to be found in the ranks of the monastic orders. Ceasing to feel any interest in the joys of society, they had turned to the cloister as a welcome asylum in the hour of their sorrow or disappointment. To some it was an easy way out of the struggle for existence, to others it meant an end to taxes and to military service, to still others it was a haven of rest for a weary body or a disappointed spirit. Thus many specific, individual considerations acted with the general desires for salvation and solitude to strengthen and to perpetuate the institution.

_Beliefs Affecting the Causative Motives_

In the first chapter it was shown that a variety of views respecting the relation of the body and the soul influenced the origin and development of Christian monasticism. It will not now be necessary to repeat what was there said. The essential teaching of all these false opinions was that the body was in itself evil, that the gratification of natural appetites was inherently wrong, and that true holiness consisted in the complete subjection of the body by self-denial and torture. Jerome distinctly taught that what was natural was opposed to God. The Gnostics and many of the early Christians believed that this world was ruled by the devil. The Gnostics held that this opposition of the kingdom of matter to God was fundamental and eternal. The Christians, however, maintained that the antagonism was temporary, the Lord having given the world over to evil spirits for a time. The prevailing opinion among almost all schools was that a union with God was only possible to those who had extinguished bodily desires.

The ascetic theory undoubtedly derived much support from the views held concerning the teachings of the Bible. The Oriental monks frequently quoted from their sacred books to justify their habits and ideals. In like manner, the Christian monks believed that they, and they alone, were literally obeying the commands of Christ and his apostles. This phase of the subject will receive attention when the three vows of monasticism are considered.

In the West, two conditions, one political and social, the other religious, set in motion all these spiritual desires and ascetic beliefs tending toward monasticism. One was the corrupted state, of Roman society and the approaching overthrow of the Roman Empire. The other was the secularization of the church.

Men naturally cling to society as long as there exists any well-founded hope for its regeneration, but when every expectation for the survival of righteousness yields to a conviction that doom is inevitable, then the flight from the world begins. This was precisely the situation in the declining days of Rome and Alexandria, when Christian monasticism came into being. The monks believed that the end of the world was nigh, that all things temporal and earthly were doomed, and that God's hand was against the empire. "That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them," says Kingsley, "contemporary history proves abundantly. That they were correct, likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall on man, is proved by the fact that it did fall."

So they fled to escape being caught in the ruins of society's tottering structure,--fled to make friends with the angels and with God. If one cannot live purely in the midst of corruption, by all means let him live purely away from corruption, but let him never forget that his piety is of a lower order than that which abides uncorrupted in the midst of degenerate society. There is much truth in the observation of Charles Reade in "The Cloister and the Hearth": "So long as Satan walks the whole earth, tempting men, and so long as the sons of Belial do never lock themselves in caves but run like ants, to and fro corrupting others, the good man that sulks apart, plays the Devil's game, or at least gives him the odds."

But the early Christian monks believed that their safety was only in flight. It was not altogether an unworthy motive; at least it is easy to sympathize with these men struggling against odds, of the magnitude of which the modern Christian has only the faintest conception.

The conviction that the only true and certain way to secure salvation is by flight from the world, continued to prevail during the succeeding centuries of monastic history, and it can hardly be said to have entirely disappeared even at the present time. Anselm of Canterbury, in the twelfth century, wrote to a young friend reminding him that the glory of this world was perishing. True, not monks only are saved, "but," says he, "who attains to salvation in the most certain, who in the most noble way, the man who seeks to love God alone, or he who seeks to unite the love of God with the love of the world?... Is it rational when danger is on every side, to remain where it is the greatest?"

The Christian church set up an ideal of life which it was impossible to realize within her borders, and one which differed in many respects from the teachings of Jesus. Her demands involved a renunciation of the world, a superiority to all the enticements of bodily appetites, a lofty scorn of secular bonds and social concerns. A vigorous religious faith had conquered a mighty empire, but corruption attended its victory. The standard of Christian morals was lowered, or had at least degenerated into a cold, formal ideal that no one was expected to realize; hence none strove to attain it but the monks. When Roman society with its selfishness, lust and worldliness, swept in through the open doors of the church and took possession of the sanctuary, those who had cherished the ascetic ideal gave up the fight against the world, and the flight from the world-church began. They could not tolerate this union of the church with a pagan state and an effete civilization. In some respects, as a few writers maintain, many of these hermits were like the old Jewish prophets, fighting single-handed against corruption in church and state, refusing to yield themselves as slaves to the authority of institutions that had forsaken the ideals of the past.

Thus the conviction that the end of human society was nigh, and that the church could no longer serve as an asylum for the lovers of righteousness, with certain philosophical ideas respecting the body, the world and God, united to produce the assumption that salvation was more readily attainable in the deserts; and Christian monasticism, in its hermit form, began its long and eventful history.

_Causes of Variations in Monasticism_

Prominent among the causes producing variations in the monastic type was the influence of climatic conditions and race characteristics.

The monasticism as well as the religion of the East has always differed from the monasticism and the religion of the West. The Eastern mind is mystical, dreamy, contemplative; the Western mind loves activity, is intensely practical. Representatives of the Eastern faiths in the recent Parliament of Religions accused the West of materialism, of loving the body more than the soul. They affected to despise all material prosperity, and gloried in their assumed superiority, on account of their love for religious contemplation. This radical difference between the races of the East and West is clearly seen in the monastic institution. Benedict embodied in his rules the spirit and active life of the West, and hence, the monastic system, then in danger of dying, or stagnating, revived and spread all over Europe. Again, the hermit life was ill-adapted to the West. Men could not live out of doors in Europe and subsist on small quantities of food as in Egypt. The rigors of the climate in Europe demanded an adaptation to new conditions.

But aside from the differences between Eastern and Western monasticism, the Christian institution passed through a variety of changes. The growth of monasticism from the hermit stage to the cloistral life has already been described. To what shall the development of the community system be attributed? No religious institution can remain stationary, unaffected by the changing conditions of the society in which it exists. The progress of the intellect, and the development of social, political and industrial conditions, effect great transformations in religious organizations.

The monastic institution grew up amid the radical changes of European society. In its early days it witnessed the invasion of the barbarians, which swept away old political divisions and destroyed many of the heritages of an ancient civilization. Then the process of reconstruction slowly began. New states were forming; nations were crystallizing. The barbarian was to lay the foundations of great cities and organize powerful commonwealths out of wild but victorious tribes. The monk could not remain in hiding. He was brother to the roving warrior. The blood in his veins was too active to permit him to stand still amid the mighty whirl of events. Without entirely abandoning his cloistral life, he became a zealous missionary of the church among the barbarians, a patron of letters and of agriculture, in short a stirring participant in the work of civilization.

Next came the crusades. Jerusalem was to be captured for Christ and the church. The monk then appeared as a crusade-preacher, a warrior on the battle-field, or a nurse in the military hospital.

The rise of feudalism likewise wrought a change in the spirit and position of the monks. The feudal lord was master of his vassals. "The genius of feudalism," says Allen, "was a spirit of uncontrolled independence." So the abbot became a feudal lord with immense possessions and powers. He was no longer the obscure, spiritual father of a little family of monks, but a temporal lord also, an aristocrat, ruling wide territories, and dwelling in a monastery little different from the castle of the knight and often exceeding it in splendor. With wealth came ease, and hard upon the heels of ease came laziness, arrogance, corruption.

Then followed the marvelous intellectual awakening, the moral revival, the discoveries and inventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The human mind at last had aroused itself from a long repose, or turned from a profitless activity into broad and fruitful fields. The corruption of the monasteries meant the laxity of vows, the cessation of ministration to the poor and the sick. Then arose the tender and loving Francis, with his call to poverty and to service. The independent exercise of the intellect gave birth to heresies, but the Dominicans appeared to preach them down.

The growth of the secular spirit and the progress of the new learning were too much for the old monasticism. The monk had to adapt himself to a new age, an age that is impatient of mere contemplation, that spurns the rags of the begging friar and rebels against the fierce intolerance of the Dominican preaching. So, lastly, came the suave, determined, practical, cultured Jesuit, ready to comply, at least outwardly, with all the requirements of modern times. Does the new age reject monastic seclusion? Very well, the Jesuit throws off his monastic garb and forsakes his cloister, to take his place among men. Are the ignorance and the filth of the begging friars offensive? The Jesuit is cultured, affable and spotlessly clean. Does the new age demand liberty? "Liberty," cries the Jesuit, "is the divine prerogative, colossal in proportion, springing straight from the broad basin of the soul's essence!"

Such in its merest outlines is the story of the development of the monastic type and its causes.

_The Fundamental Monastic Vows_