Salvian, in his picture of Roman society, spared no class, no calling; even the clergy, whom at first he excepted from his denunciations, he included later in his general summary of those who shared in the almost universal laxity of conduct.
It could hardly have been otherwise, when it is remembered that a large portion of the society of the Empire in the second half of the fourth century was Christian only in name, while in heart and mind it remained Pagan.
There were, however, many earnest and devout followers of Jesus amidst the thoughtless masses who made up the population of the Empire, who clearly recognized the grave peril, and felt that something must be done lest Christianity should be swamped—lost in the crowd of heedless professors of the beautiful creed which had inspired the comparatively small company of believers in the centuries of persecution.
It was out of this urgent need that monasticism arose. The great Chrysostom, writing circa A. D. 376, defends and extols the monastic spirit which was then beginning to be a great power in the Church. It has many powerful adversaries, but he speaks of it as "the true philosophy." He considers that monasticism, in the confused state of things which existed in the last quarter of the fourth century, was the one resource and hope of Christianity, and all through his brilliant, checkered career, the great theologian, preacher, and thought-leader continued to defend and extol the new monastic institutions. And with him, in his estimate of monasticism, with scarcely an exception, went all the group of eminent men who at that hour of extreme peril, when the very foundations of the old society were being uprooted, kept the lamp of Christianity brightly burning; whose words and writings during the fifteen centuries which have elapsed since they fell asleep, have been the treasure house, the arsenal of her theology. In the Eastern churches, men such as Athanasius and Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzen; in the Western churches, Martin of Tours, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; and a few years later, Vincent of Lerins and Caesarius of Aries, with one voice, in their teaching and by their example not only defended the novel institution of monasticism, but pointed to it as an organization absolutely necessary to the Church and to Christendom. It appeared first in the East in the last years of the third and the early years of the fourth century. Amid the deserts of Egypt we mark its first real beginnings. Some of the victims of the bitter persecution of Diocletian sought there a refuge from the cruelty of the Government, but as Bossuet well says, "The persecution made fewer solitaries than the peace and the triumph of the Church." The name of Anthony, who died in A. D. 356, is deservedly celebrated as the father and head of the solitaries of the Thebaid, whom he transformed into Coenobites. A contemporary of Anthony was Pachomius, who died in A. D. 348. He gave to the Coenobites of Anthony a written rule, traditionally given to him by an angel. This Pachomius founded upon the Nile at Tabenne, an island a little above the first cataract in the Thebaid, the first monastery properly so-called—or rather a congregation of eight monasteries, containing, it is said, many thousand monks. Rapidly the two Thebaids of the Egyptian deserts were peopled with monks. The houses of nuns or female solitaries at this same period in number were nearly equal to the monasteries. The numbers given are simply enormous, but are probably exaggerated. Each of these early religious houses was a school of labor, the inmates numbering in their ranks weavers, couriers, carpenters, etc. At Tabenne there was a special school of scholars. Under the rule of Pachomius every monk was required to be able to read and write. Not a few profound theologians and teachers were trained in these houses of prayer and solitude. An almost perpetual fast was rigorously required from the many inmates of the religious houses. From Egypt, before the end of the fourth century, this strange, novel stream of monastic life overflowed into Arabia, Syria, and Palestine, and even further east into Mesopotamia, where we hear of it from the writings of Ephrem of Edessa.
In the West it was almost an unknown feature in Church life until circa A. D. 340, when Athanasius, driven from his home in Alexandria by the Arians, came to Rome. This eminent and far-sighted Church leader at once used his great influence to introduce into Rome and Italy the new phase of Church life which had so rapidly and powerfully moved Egypt. Somewhat later he issued his life of Anthony, the great Egyptian monk; and this work, published under the name and authority of the greatest of the Catholic theologians, quickly acquired a wide popularity throughout the West. The story of Egyptian monasticism, told with all the winning power of the great Master, came as a revelation to the Church of the West, which was languishing and fading under the conditions
There is in one of the charmed passages of the Confessions of Augustine a chance reference to this "Life of Anthony the Monk" by Athanasius, which undesignedly tells us into what centers it had penetrated, how widely it was circulated, how powerful was its influence. Augustine was at Milan lecturing upon eloquence. One day he received a visit from one of his African countrymen, named Potitianus, a military officer of high rank on the staff of the Emperor. "We seated ourselves," said Augustine, "to talk, when he happened to notice a book which lay on the table before us. He opened it; it was 'The Apostle Paul.' I confessed to him that reading it was my principal study. He was then led in the course of conversation to speak to us of Anthony, the monk of Egypt, whose name so glorious among Thy servants was unknown to us. He perceived this, and confining himself to that subject he revealed the great man to our ignorance, which astonished him much; and we were lost in admiration when we heard of these marvels so recent, almost contemporary, which were worked in the Catholic Church. From them his conversation turned upon the holy flocks of the monasteries, and the perfumes of virtue which went up from them towards their Lord ... of which we knew nothing. Even at Milan there was a cloister full of Brothers trained under the wing of Ambrose, at that time Bishop of Milan, and we knew nothing of it." Then the soldier told Augustine how he came first to hear of Anthony and the new life of monasteries, "He was in garrison at Treves on duty at the Imperial Palace; the Emperor was spending the afternoon at the spectacles of the Circus; he and three of his brother officers went to walk in the gardens laid out close to the walls of the City, and as they walked two and two, one with him and the two others together, they separated. The two latter entered a cottage on the way, where lived some of those voluntary poor who are Thy servants, and there they found a manuscript of the Life of Anthony. One of them began to read it, he admired it, his heart burned, and as he read the thought rose up: should he embrace such a life and leave the warfare of the age to serve Thee? (They were both in the service of the Emperor.) Suddenly he was filled with, a divine love and holy shame . . . and casting his eyes on his friend he said: Tell me, I pray thee, whither all our labors tend? What is it we seek? For whom do we carry arms? What can be our greatest hope in this palace but to be friends with the Emperor? And how frail is that fortune I What perils, and how many perils before reaching the greatest peril! Besides, when shall that be attained? But if I desire to be a friend of God I am so, and instantly.' He spoke thus, all shaken by the birth of his new life, and then his eyes returning to the holy pages (of the Life of Anthony the monk) he read: His heart changed in Thy sight ... he read on, and the waves of his soul flowed, trembling ... he was already Thine, when he said from his soul, 'It is done, I break with all our hope, I will serve God, and now in this place I begin the work, if thou wilt not follow me deter me not.' The other answered that he also would win his share of glory and spoil. Potitianus and his companion, after having walked in another part of the garden, reached their retreat, seeking their two companions, and told them it was time to go back because the day fell. But they, declaring their design, told how their resolution had come to them and had established itself in their minds; they entreated their friends not to oppose their determination even if they refused to share it, they piously congratulated their comrades and returned to the palace." Both these officers, Augustine tells us, had betrothed brides, who, hearing this, consecrated to Him their virginity. Then Augustine, in the vivid page of his Confessions, relates the effect produced upon him by Potitianus' story. "I was penetrated with shame and contusion while Potitianus spoke. I seized Alypius (his dear friend and companion) and cried out: "What, then, are we doing? How is this? These ignorant men rise; they take heaven by force, and we with our heartless sciences, behold we are wallowing in the flesh." The sequel of this strange moving scene is well known. Augustine renounced his career and the world, and became the leading spirit of the Church of his day, the greatest teacher of the period in which he lived; in some respects, after the Apostles, who had heard the Master's voice, the most influential teacher of all the Christian ages.
Under Augustine, who after his conversion (alluded to in the note above) became subsequently Bishop of Hippo and the most influential leader and adviser in the churches of the West, numerous monasteries for both sexes multiplied in the North African provinces. It was Augustine who, in the year 423, drew up the famous monastic rule which bears his name. This "Rule," originally compiled for a monastery of women in Hippo of which his sister was Superior, subsequently became the fundamental code of an immense branch of the monastic order which for many centuries has borne the honored name of Augustine.
The new organization came into existence in the West about the middle of the fourth century; in the East, as we have seen, it arose a few years earlier. It grew out of the necessity of the time, and was approved and shared in by the large majority of the noblest professors of Christianity. We must not, however, in our warm appreciation of the great services rendered by monasticism to the Church, and indeed to all society, shrink from confessing that dark shadows in many cases were not wanting in the pictures we have been sketching. Disorder and various abuses rapidly crept in; the monastic life was sometimes chosen as a pretext for idleness, as a cloak under which life's ordinary duties might be evaded. But these errors and flaws were recognized at a very early period and sternly denounced by the eminent Church leaders and teachers who so earnestly promoted the system and advocated its general adoption as the most effective means of breathing fresh life into the Christian communities. We find these stern reproofs, these earnest warnings, notably in the writings of Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine. Jerome, indeed, denounced with boldness and energy all such idle monks, and pointed out with scathing severity the faults and dangers of the monastic institution. Augustine is not behind-hand in his grave reproofs and pointed warnings, when he dwells with an eloquence peculiarly his own on the high motives of that lain of labor which has ever remained the glory and strength of monasticism.
Too much stress has been laid by certain writers upon some of the forms of life adopted in the first great outbreak of asceticism, especially in the East, where there were many eccentric examples of what may be fairly termed a terrible self-abnegation; the instances of Simeon Stylites and his imitators, with their life-long awful penances and ghastly self-tortures, are often quoted. Yet these, after all, were exceptions, and such examples found comparatively few imitators in the West. Nay, even the unnatural life-work of these earnest though mistaken enthusiasts was not thrown away. "Imperfect and distorted as was the ideal of the anchorites, deeply, too, as it was perverted by the admixture of spiritual selfishness, still the example was not wholly lost upon the world. The very eccentricities of their lives, their uncouth forms, their horrible penances, won the admiration of rude men. Multitudes of barbarians were converted to Christianity at the sight of S. Simeon Stylites."
Even in its earliest days the monastic development of Christianity was far from being opposed or even indifferent to learning. We have dwelt above on the comparative few ascetics, such as Simeon Stylites, whose extreme austerities necessarily separated them entirely from ordinary human life, its possibilities and its thoughts; and we have justly judged their ideals as something extravagant and excessive, although not without their influence upon the dissolute and thoughtless world of those days and times. Ordinary monastic life, however, even in the East, included, as part of its invariable rule, useful work of varied kinds. Each monastery was a great school of labor; and to simply manual labor the monks united the culture of the mind, and especially the study of sacred literature. It was from among their ranks that the most learned and successful adversaries of the greatest and most dangerous heresy that has ever appeared were drawn. The monk, as a rule, was the deadly foe of Arianism. Augustine, in his "De Opere Monachoruin," dwells upon the regular work of the monastics, who divided their day between manual labor, reading, and prayer.
In the first half of the fifth century, to take well known and conspicuous examples, the famous houses of Lerins, of S. Victor of Marseilles, and scarcely later, of Condat in the Jura, were famous far and wide as houses of great learning, as well as seminaries of instruction, where their inmates led the austere and saintly life which monasticism pressed upon those who voluntarily took on them its obligations and duties, and at the same time pursued their various studies.
Before the close of the fifth century this new departure in Christian life and work, which commenced a very few years after the peace of the Church and the general adoption of Christianity by the Empire in the first half of the fourth century, had permeated the whole life of the Christian communities. Very large indeed was the number of monastics in the various provinces now completely under the power of the barbarian invaders. The great need, however, in the new organization was for some acknowledged discipline and order.
In the East the rule of S. Basil was largely acknowledged, but many diversities prevailed. In the West the want of a recognized order was even more marked. This lack of an established rule was supplied through the energy of a remarkable man who appeared in Italy at this juncture, Benedict, whose life dates from A. D. 480 to A. D. 543. This Benedict succeeded in impressing his views of discipline and order upon a number of the Italian monastic houses, and gradually his "Rule" was accepted by the majority at least of Western monasteries.
Under the new conditions of order and discipline devised by him, monasticism continued to grow in numbers and influence, rendering to the human race during the long drawn out period of stress and storm which followed, services which can scarcely be overstated.
Looking back from the vantage ground of the experience of many centuries, we are in a position fairly to weigh these services which the monastics have rendered to civilization. Here one voice proceeds from the cool judgment of the philosophic essayist, and from the somewhat passionate enthusiasm of the Roman Catholic historian; the one not unbiassed by an aversion to the system, the other influenced by his admiration for the mysticism which more or less colors the works and days of all monasticism.
These services can only be characterized as immense, and as continuing during a long period of well-nigh universal desolation and confusion stretching over some six or seven centuries.
The life of a monk, it must be remembered, was an exceptional life; its advocates never taught that it should be the common life of men and women; there was never any idea of transforming the entire universe into a cloister; the conception was that by the side of the storms and failures of the world there should be a home, a refuge, a school of peace and strength apart from the world. These monks were ever men of prayer and penitence, but they did not limit themselves to prayer and penitence. They busied themselves in the practical work of life besides. Not only were the farm lands immediately adjacent to the religious houses admirably cultivated, but vast tracts of country, which owing to the long-continued state of anarchy and confusion had become once more marsh land or forest land, were brought back to a condition of high cultivation.
In every department of agricultural life the monk was distinguished—vineyards, corn lands, pastures, orchards, just to name a few examples, were restored or introduced in all the provinces of the desolated Empire. It is difficult to trace the history of a well-cultivated estate or district to any source save to these cloistered settlers. Nor was their work in literature, in its many departments, of less value. We have already alluded to the regulations respecting reading and study, which formed an invariable and important part of the earliest monastic rules in the East and in the West; and when the old life of the Roman Empire had literally "gone under" as the barbarian flood spread over the unhappy provinces, it was in the monasteries alone that the great works of antiquity were preserved. A favorite occupation of the monk was the copying, in a more or less elaborate fashion, the writings of the poets, philosophers, and historians which had charmed the citizens of the great Empire between the days of Augustus and Theodosius.
The care of the monks here, although, perhaps, especially devoted to sacred and ecclesiastical literature, was by no means confined to works of the Christian school, but was extended over the whole period of classic letters. For centuries, too, the monk was the only teacher and instructor, and learning of all kinds was exclusively confined to these homes of prayer, so plentifully scattered over the provinces of the barbarian-harassed Empire. The charge of Jerome at the close of the fourth century, "that a monk should always have a book in his hand or under his eyes," was faithfully observed in a thousand religious houses. From the first, well-nigh every monastery possessed its library, great or small, and as time advanced many of these became famous for the number and value of the volumes they contained.
In the great ruin which in the fifth and following centuries overtook the Empire, it seemed well-nigh certain that, under the rough and destructive barbarian rule, all art in its various departments would surely decay and die. Here again, the network of monastic institutions at first preserved the poor remnant of the many-sided artistic crafts, and subsequently developed and even gave them a new coloring.
As early as the first years of the sixth century, Benedict (A. D. 480-543), the great organizer of these houses, in his famous rule provided for artistic work being carried on in his cloister. Very soon the more important religious houses contained, in addition to schools and libraries, studios and work rooms where painting, mosaic work, sculpture, engraving, ivory carving, book-binding, and the arts of the goldsmith and of the jeweller, were studied and practiced.
A great impulse was given to these various art industries by the monk Cassiodorus, the once famous statesman, a contemporary of Benedict. All through the darkest ages of the history of the world, a period covering the sixth and the four following centuries, elaborate and even exquisite works of art were produced in the religious houses of the West, while the stately Romanesque was revived, and subsequently the Gothic, schools of architecture of the Middle Ages were gradually developed in the lonely islands of prayer, whose strange rise we have been sketching in outline.
How successful the monk had been in his unwearied artistic toil in these gloomy centuries of confusion and anarchy is admirably phrased in a gentle though grave rebuke of an eleventh century abbot to his brethren, when he warned them not to be over-attentive to these pursuits lest those higher duties, the peculiar glory of Christianity and the especial duty of the monk, should suffer.
"It matters little that our churches rise to heaven, that the capitals of their pillars are sculptured and gilded, that our parchment is tinted purple, that gold is melted to form the letters of our manuscripts, and that their bindings are set with precious stones, if we have little or no care for the members of Christ, and if Christ himself lies naked and dying before our doors."
Such is a brief outline of services rendered by monastics to society during a long and terrible period in the history of the world. It seems indeed scarcely probable that the great Christian Doctors of the fourth and fifth centuries, much as they admired and encouraged the monastic spirit, ever dreamed of a future of such a paramount and far-reaching influence for the groups of self-denying solitaries who arose out of the sore needs of the Church, weakened and wounded strangely enough by the very magnitude and suddenness of her decisive victory over Paganism.
The task I set myself is done. How often in the silence of night, under the roof of the old dwelling house of the Deans of Gloucester, the ancient home of the long line of Abbots and Priors of the once famous Benedictine Abbey, in which the foregoing pages have been mostly written, have I fancied that I saw around me the imposing procession of teachers, martyrs, and saints whose life story I have endeavored to tell. My work has been no panegyric, not even an apologia; the faults and weaknesses which too often scarred the heroic lives of the brave confessors of the Faith have not been slurred over, the divisions and bitter schisms which divided the Christians even in the days of persecution have been faithfully though sorrowfully recorded. It has been a simple, truthful tale—nothing more. But how often, as I read over my narratives of one or other of the stirring or pathetic incidents which make up the wondrous epic of Christian life in the age of persecutions, have I felt that mine was only "a cold and sad pen after all," quite unworthy of the beautiful, difficult task I had set myself. My hope is that my work will please others more than it has succeeded in pleasing the writer—my prayer, that the reader at least may be as intensely persuaded as is the writer, of the awful reality of the stern, long drawn-out conflict between Christianity and Paganism, of the Ever Presence, in the ranks of the Christian combatants, of the Holy Spirit of God and His Christ.