Part 14
When the several circumstances above mentioned are duly considered, they will remove from candid minds almost every sensation of asperity or of contemptuous reprobation, towards those who, in their day of defective knowledge, became the victims, or even the zealous supporters of the prevalent enthusiasm. We have done, then, with the parties in these scenes of delusion and folly; or at least with those of them who were sincere in their error. But when we turn to the system itself, and gain that license which charity herself may grant, while an abstraction only is under contemplation, we must remember that this monkery, so innocent in its commencement, and so plausible in its progress, was the chief means of destroying the spiritual reality of Christianity, and ought to be deemed the principle cause of that gross darkness which hung over the church during more than a thousand years.
[4] This conjecture, hazarded in 1829, would seem now to be not unlikely to be, to some extent, realized.
[5] The errors and extravagances generated by the monastic life did not ordinarily extend to the fundamental principles of Christianity. The monks were, for the most part, zealously attached to the doctrine of the Nicene creed; and the church owes to many of them its thanks for the constancy with which they suffered in its defence.
SECTION IX.
THE SAME SUBJECT.—INGREDIENTS OF THE ANCIENT MONACHISM.
Among the principal elements of the ancient Monachism, it is natural to name, first—
Its contempt of the divine constitution of human nature, and the outrage it offered to the most salutary instincts.
It may be difficult to determine which is the greater folly and impiety, that of the Atheist, who can contemplate the admirable mechanism of the body, and not see there the proofs of divine wisdom and benevolence; or that of the Enthusiast, who, seeing and acknowledging the hand of God in the mechanism of the human frame, yet dares to institute, and to recommend, modes of life which do violence to the manifest intentions of the Creator, as therein displayed; and, moreover, is not afraid to assert a warrant from Heaven for such outrages; as if the Creator and Governor of the world were not one and the same Being;—one in counsel and purpose: or as if the Author of Christianity were at variance with the Author of nature! Yet this preposterous error, this virtual Manichæism, has seemed to belong naturally to every attempt to stretch and exaggerate the precepts of the Gospel beyond their obvious sense; and indeed has seldom failed to show itself in seasons of unusual religious excitement.
Christianity is a religion neither for angels nor for ghosts; but for man, as God made him. Nevertheless, in revealing an endless existence, and in establishing the paramount claims of the future world, it has placed every interest of the present transient life under a comparison of immense disparity; so that it is true—true to a demonstration, that a man ought to "hate his own life" if the love of it puts his welfare for immortality in jeopardy. Unquestionably, if by such means the well-being of the imperishable spirit could be secured and promoted, it would highly become a wise man to pass the residue of life, though it should hold out half a century, upon the summit of a column, exposed, like a bronze, to the alternations of day and night, of summer and winter; or to stand speechless and fixed, with the arms extended, until the joints should stiffen, and the tongue forget its office; or to inhabit a tomb, or to hang suspended in the air by a hook in the side: these, and if there be any other practices still more horrifying to humanity, were doubtless wise, if, in the use of them, the soul might be advantaged; for the soul is of infinitely greater value than the body.
And much more might it be deemed lawful and commendable to refrain from matrimony, to withdraw from human society, to be clad in sackcloth, to inhabit a cavern, if such comparatively moderate abstinences and mortifications were found to promote virtue, and so to ensure an enhancement of the bliss that never ends. Conduct of this sort, however painful it may be, is perfectly in harmony with the principle universally admitted to be reasonable, and in fact very commonly reduced to practice, namely, to endure a smaller immediate loss or inconvenience, for the sake of securing greater future good.
The dictates of self-interest every day prompt sacrifices of this kind; and the maxims of natural virtue go much further, and often require a man to make the greatest deposit possible, even when the future advantage is doubtful, and when it is not the sufferer who is to reap the expected benefit! On this principle the soldier places himself at the cannon's mouth, because the safety or future welfare of his country can be purchased at no other price. On this principle a pious son denies the wishes of his heart, and remains unmarried, that he may sustain a helpless parent. Christianity is not therefore at all peculiar in asserting the claims of higher, over lower reasons of conduct, in peculiar circumstances, or in demanding that, on special occasions, the enjoyments of life, and life itself, should be held cheap, or abandoned.
Our Lord and his ministers explicitly enjoined such sacrifices, whenever the interests of the present and of the future life came in competition: and themselves set the example of the self-denial which they recommended. Nothing can be more clear than the rule of bodily sacrifice maintained and exemplified in the New Testament; and this rule is in perfect accordance with the dictates of good sense, and with the common practice of mankind. Fasting, celibacy, martyrdom, and such like contrarieties to the "will of the flesh," stand all on the same ground in the system of Christian morals: they are ills which a wise and pious man will cheerfully endure whenever he is so placed that they cannot be avoided without damage or hazard to the soul, or to the souls of others. But when no such alternative is presented, then the voluntary infliction becomes, as well in religious as in secular affairs, a folly, an impiety, and often a crime. To die without necessity, or to inflict one's self without reason, is not only an absurdity; but a sin.
And how immensely is this folly and immorality aggravated, when it is found that the voluntary suffering, instead of being simply useless, becomes, in its consequences, highly pernicious; and when, by abundant evidence, it is proved to generate the very worst corruptions and perversions to which human nature is liable! Such, clearly, are the inflictions of the monastic life—the solitude, the abstinence, the celibacy, the poverty!
The rule of Christian martyrdom is precise and unequivocal, and is such as absolutely to exclude every sort of spontaneous heroism. The motive also by which the Christian should be sustained, is of a heart-affecting, not of an exciting kind; and the style of the apostles when alluding to this subject, is singularly sedate and reserved; nor is an idea introduced of a kind to inflame fanatical ambition. The reason of this caution is obvious; for to have kindled the enthusiasm of martyrdom would have been to nullify the demonstration intended to be given to the world of the truth of Christianity. So long as martyrdom rested on the primitive basis (and it rested there, with few exceptions, until miraculous attestations had ceased to be afforded,) it yielded conclusive proof of the reality of the facts affirmed by the confessors. That is to say, so long as Christians suffered only when suffering could be avoided in no other way than by denying their profession; and so long as they endured tortures, and met death, in a spirit not raised above a calm courage; or even displayed timidity or reluctance, such sufferings afforded direct demonstration of the sincerity of their belief; and they, having been eye-witnesses of supernatural interpositions, and being often the very agents of miraculous power, their sincere belief, and their honesty, carried with it the proof of the facts so attested.
But when, at a later time, martyrdom was courted in a spirit of false heroism, and came to be endured in a corresponding style of enthusiastic excitement, it lost almost the whole of its value as a proof of the truth of Christianity. For it is well known to be within the compass of human nature to endure, unmoved and exultingly, the most extreme torments in fanatical adherence to a religious tenet: but such sufferings evince nothing more than the firmness or the infatuation of the victim. On the contrary, when the confessor has fallen into the hands of persecuting power by no imprudence or temerity of his own, and when he avails himself, with promptitude and calmness, of every legal and honorable means of self-defence or escape, and when he pleads truth and right in arrest of judgment, and at last yields to the stroke because nothing could avert it but the forfeiture of conscience, then it is manifest that a deliberate conviction is the real motive of his conduct: and then also, if he have had a personal knowledge of the facts, for affirming which he dies, his death, on the surest principles of evidence, must be accepted as containing incontestible proof of those facts.
The recluses were not the first to spoil the primitive practice of martyrdom; but their principles greatly cherished the abuse when once it had been introduced; and still more did their conduct and their writings enhance the pernicious superstitions which presently afterwards resulted from the foolish respect paid to the tombs and relics of confessors. These trivial and idolatrous reverences of human heroism can find no room of entrance until the great realities of Christianity have been forgotten; and until the humbling and peace-giving doctrine of atonement has been lost sight of. The contrite heart, made glad by the assurance of pardon through the merit of him who alone has merit supererogatory, neither admits sentiments of vain glory for itself, nor is prone to yield excessive worship to the deeds of others.
It deserves particular notice that the martyrs of the Reformation in England, France, Spain, and Italy, with very few exceptions, suffered in a spirit incomparably more sedate, and more nearly allied to that displayed and recommended by the apostles, than did the Christians, generally, of the third century. The reason of the difference is not obscure; these modern confessors understood the capital doctrine of Christianity much more fully and clearly than did those of the age of Origen.
Celibacy, though it may seem to be a kind of self-devotion less extreme than voluntary martyrdom, was in fact a much greater, and a much worse outrage upon human nature. This fundamental article of the monkish system had evidently two distinct motives: the first, and probably the originating cause of so extraordinary a practice, was the impracticability of uniting the pleasures of seclusion and of lazy meditation, with the duties and burdens of domestic life. The alternative was unavoidable, either to renounce the happiness and the cares of husband and father, or the spiritual luxuries of supine contemplation. The one species of enjoyment offered itself precisely as the price that must be paid for obtaining the other.[6]
The second motive of monkish celibacy, and which so gained ascendency over the first as to keep it almost wholly out of sight, sprung more immediately from the centre illusion of the system; and the real nature of that illusion stands forward in this instance in a distinct and tangible form. The very germ of that transmuted piety, which, in the end, banished true religion from the church, may readily be brought under inspection by tracing the natural history of the sentiment that attributes sanctity to single life.
For reasons that are obvious and highly important, a sentiment of pudicity, which can never be thrown aside without reducing man to the level—nay, below the level of the brutes, belongs to the primary link of the social system. But this feeling, necessary as it is to the purity and the dignity of social life, suggests, by a close and easy affinity of ideas, the supposition of guilt as belonging to indulgence; and then the correlative supposition of innocence, or of holiness, as belonging to continence. Nevertheless, feelings of this sort, when analyzed, will be found to have their seat in the imagination exclusively, and only by accident to implicate the moral sense. They belong to that class of natural illusions, which, in the combination of the various and discordant ingredients of human nature, serve to amalgamate what would otherwise be utterly incompatible. Among all the natural illusions, or, as they might be termed, the pseudo-moral sentiments, there is not one which so nearly resembles the genuine sense of right and wrong as this, or one that is so intimately blended with them.
It is easy then to perceive the process by which infirm minds passed into the error of attributing sanctity to celibacy. But the law of Christian purity knows of no such confusion of ideas. The very same authority which forbids adultery, enjoins marriage; and so long as morality is understood to consist in obedience to the declared will of God, it can never be imagined that a man is defiled by living in matrimony, any more than by "eating with unwashen hands." But when once religion has passed into the imagination, and when the sentiments which have their seat in that faculty have become predominant, so as to crush or enfeeble those that belong to conscience, then is it inevitable that the true purity which consists in "keeping the commandments," should be supplanted by that artificial holiness which is a mere refinement upon natural instincts. Under the influence of false notions of this sort, nothing seems so saintly as for a man to shrink horrifically from the touch of woman; nothing scarcely so spiritually degrading as to be a husband and a father.[7] Impious and mad enthusiasm! and not only irreligious and absurd, but pestilent also; for this same monkish doctrine of the merit of virginity stands convicted, on abundant evidence, of having transplanted the worst vices of polytheistic Greece into the very sanctuaries of religion; and so, of infecting the nations of modern Europe with crimes which, had they not been kept alive in monasteries, Christianity would long ago have banished from the earth.
How little did the pious men, who, in the third century, extolled the merit of mortification, and petty torture, and celibacy, think of the hideous corruptions in which these practices were to terminate! A sagacity more than human was needed to foresee the end from the beginning. But, with the experience of past ages before us, we may well learn to distrust every specious attempt to exaggerate morality, or to attach ideas of blame to things innocent or indifferent. This over-doing of virtue never fails to divert the mind from what is substantially good, and is moreover the almost invariable symptom of a transmuted or fictitious pietism.
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II. The ancient monkery was a system of the most deliberate selfishness. That solicitude for the preservation of individual interests which forms the basis of the human constitution, is so broken up and counteracted by the claims and pleasures of domestic life, that, though the principle remains, its manifestations are suppressed, and its predominance effectually prevented, except in some few tempers peculiarly unsocial. But the anchoret is a selfist by his very profession; and, like the sensualist, though his taste is of another kind, he pursues his personal gratifications, reckless of the welfare of others. His own advantage or delight, or, to use his favorite phrase—"the good of his soul," is the sovereign object of his cares. His meditations, even if they embrace the compass of heaven, come round, ever and again, to find their ultimate issue in his own bosom; but can that be true wisdom which just ends at the point whence it started? True wisdom is a progressive principle. In abjuring the use of the active faculties, in reducing himself, by the spell of vows, to a condition of physical and moral annihilation, the insulated being says to his fellows, concerning whatever might otherwise have been converted to their benefit—"It is corban;" thus making void the law of love to our neighbor, by a pretended intensity of love to God.
That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the name of sanctity, and should have done so too in front of Christianity, is indeed amazing; and could never have happened if Christianity had not first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space. The tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences to petrify the heart has been already adverted to; and it receives a signal illustration in the monkish life; especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there imbedded below the touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of enthusiastic piety; and it may be met with even in our own times among those who have no inclination to run away from the comforts of common life.
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III. Spiritual pride, the most repulsive of the religious vices, was both a main cause, and a principal effect of the ancient monachism.
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.
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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]