III.

But let us return to the Church of the third century. These zealots had indeed a right to criticise her; for the great dangers which they foresaw if the Church should enter into relations with the world-state did indeed appear. The saying of the apostle, ‘To the Jews a Jew, to the Greeks a Greek,’ noble as it was, was yet a dangerous maxim. The tradition of centuries has accustomed us to date the first secularisation of the Church from the time when, under Constantine, she began to be a State-Church. This tradition is false; the Church was already—in the middle of the third century—to a high degree secularised. Not that she had denied her traditional dogmas, or renounced her characteristic nature; but she had dangerously lowered her standard of life; and the apparatus of external culture with which she had enriched herself had turned to her spiritual harm. True, she was externally more firmly and solidly compacted than ever—she had become a state within a state—but the strong band that held her together was no longer religious hopes or brotherly love, but a hierarchic system which threatened to stifle not only Christian freedom and independence, but also the very sense of brotherhood. Her doctrine already rivalled the admired systems of the philosophers; but she had herself become too deeply imbued with their philosophy; her aims were deranged, her methods disturbed. Especially had she been influenced by the latest, posthumous system of Greek thought, Neoplatonism. By that which Neoplatonism lent her, she sought to hide the gaps caused long since by the loss or the change of her purely religious ideals. But the supramundane God of Neoplatonism was not the God of the Gospel, and the Neoplatonic promise of release from the world of sense was far different from the original Christian hope of salvation. Yet the theologians who studied or opposed it were subdued to its influence, and their own conceptions became imperceptibly affected thereby. Yet further, the tendency to conform to the State grew ever more manifest. It is true that Christianity sought to support the State; but she demanded its support in return, and did more to gain it over than she ought to have done. Lastly, the Church at length proved unable to maintain even her abated claims on the moral life of individuals; she was often constrained to content herself with a minimum, a mere external obedience to her institutions and forms of worship. On the other hand, she had attained this one point, that no Christian should wantonly assail her claim to be the Christian society; she had established the dogma that her organised community, with its bishops, its divine gifts, its sacred books, its worship, was the authentic and genuine foundation of Christ and His apostles, outside of which there was no salvation. Such was the Christian Church at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth. To this she had come, not without her own fault. Yet we ought to say, that while it is easy to measure this Church by the standard of apostolic times or by an imagined prototype, and to censure her gross secularisation, it is yet unjust to leave out of sight the historic conditions which influenced her. What she kept was, after all, not merely a remnant that she could not lose, nor a ruin that was not worth the preserving, but the old Gospel—though a Gospel dressed in the hulls and trappings of the time, and bereft of the vigorous claim to regulate the whole of life from within.

But this Church was no longer in a position to give peace to all that came to her, and to shelter them from the world. She could promise a peace beyond the grave, but peace in the storms of this life she could not secure. Then began the great upheaval. Ascetics, even anchorites, there had already been in the great Church, no less than evangelists without property and travelling from place to place. In the course of the third century, there may already have been a few instances of individuals, tired of the world, fleeing into the desert; nay, they may here and there have actually joined together for common life. At the opening of the new century their number increased. They fled not the world only, but worldliness in the Church; yet they did not therefore flee from the Church. Honours and riches, wife and children, they renounced in order to shun pleasure and sin, to give themselves up to the enjoyment of the contemplation of God, and to consecrate life by the preparation for death. And rightly, in so far as the dominant theology also taught that the ideal of the Christian life consisted precisely in this practising for death, and again in that absorption in God in which man forgets his existence, and mortifies his body all but to death, in order to absorb himself in the very vision of the heavenly and eternal. This was the universal view of the wise, and they were in earnest. Yet further, no age, perhaps, was ever more deeply penetrated with the idea that the fashion of this world passeth away, that life is not worth living. In actual fact, a great epoch in human history was passing away. The Roman Empire, the old world, hastened to die, and fearful were its death-bed agonies. Sedition, bloodshed, poverty, pestilence within; without, the barbarous hordes on all sides. What was to be set against all this? No longer the power of a self-sufficient State, or the force of a uniform and tried ideal of civilisation, but an Empire falling asunder, hardly held together by a decaying and disintegrated culture; and that culture itself hollow and untrue, in which scarcely a single man could keep a good conscience, or a free natural mind, or a clean hand. But nowhere was the inner unreality of all relations more necessarily felt than at the centres of culture, and especially at Alexandria. Is it then wonderful that precisely there, in Lower Egypt, hermit life took its rise? The Egyptian people had the longest and richest history of all known nations; and even under the dominion of foreigners, under the sword of the Roman conqueror, Egypt was the land of toil, and its capital had remained the school of culture. But now the hour of the nation had come. It was then that monasticism, as a mighty movement, there took its origin; not much later we meet it on the east coast of the Mediterranean, and on the banks of the Euphrates. Attempts have in recent times been made to explain its rise from specifically heathen influences on Christianity in Egypt; but the question has not been sufficiently carefully examined, though we ought to be thankful for the proof that older analogous phenomena existed in the domain of the Egyptian religion. External influence was here not stronger, but probably even weaker than in any other province of Christian life and thought. It is true that, after the general fashion of mankind, Christianity at every stage of its development elaborated and proclaimed as the highest that ideal of life which necessity imposed. But here social, political, and religious pressure combined with a long existent Christian ideal which soon passed for that of the Apostles.

There were, however, diverse conditions, and correspondingly different stages which preceded the growth of monasticism. Though the main agent was an ascetic instinct, born in the Church from heathen origins, the instinct to free the spirit from its many tyrants, to overcome both gross and refined egoism, to lead the soul to God—yet there was combined with it an ascetic ideal which was less related than opposed to that impulse. In the Alexandrian catechumen school, which in the third century was the chief fountain of ecclesiastical theology, the fundamental ideas of the idealist Greek moralists since Socrates were all taken up and closely studied. But these moralists had long since turned the Socratic rule ‘Know thyself’ into various directions for a right guidance of life. Most of these directions endeavoured to divert the true ‘Wise Man’ from absorption in the service of daily life and from “taking up the burden of public duty.” They asserted that “there could be nothing more fitting or appropriate for the spirit than a care for itself, which, not looking without, nor busying itself with external things, but turning inwardly on itself, devotes its essence to itself, and thus practises righteousness.” Here was taught the doctrine that the Wise Man, standing no longer in need of anything, is nearest to the Godhead, because, in full command of his richly endowed Ego, and in peaceful contemplation of the world, he has his share in the highest good. There it was proclaimed that the spirit, freed from the dominion of sense and living in constant meditation on eternal ideas, becomes at length worthy to behold the invisible and is itself made divine. It was this flight from the world which the ecclesiastical philosophers of Alexandria, and above all, Origen, taught their pupils. We have but to read the panegyric of Gregory Thaumaturgus on his great master, to see where are to be found the prototypes of this doctrine of the flight from the world, so belauded in the theologians. No one can deny that this form of renunciation involves a specific secularisation of Christianity, or that the self-sufficient Wise Man is almost diametrically opposed to the humble soul. But neither can anyone fail to recognise that both admitted of material realisation in endless diversities of form; and by this very diversity were liable to pass over into one another. And in this sense specially is Origen himself to be counted among the real founders of monasticism. True, what even he in his ethics brought to full expression was not merely the Stoic or Neoplatonic ideal, nor did he realise it in his life. Rather, all the ethical tendencies of the past, the Christian included, meet in him. For the position of the Egyptian theologians in the history of the world is this—and they all were forerunners or else pupils of Origen—that, alike in the domain of dogma and in that of the discipline of the Christian life, they unified the manifold gains of the existing forms of knowledge and practical rules, and threw over them the ægis of Revelation. It is thus that they became the fathers of all those parties in the Greek Church, that afterwards arose and contended with each other. As Origen could with equal right be claimed both by Arianism and by Orthodoxy, so he can be made answerable with equal justice for the peculiar secularisation of the theology of the Church and for the monastic inclinations first of the theologians and then of the laity. The same man who maintained the desirability of a lasting peace between Christianity and the State on earth, and predicted its realisation, simultaneously wished to see established, in the shadow of a universal peace, the cell of the learned monk, pious and self-absorbed. But the man that was not pious and learned, had yet in his faith an inexhaustible object of contemplation. Thus the demand, in truth, is made upon all Christians; yet, in a Christianity that was ever growing more indifferent, almost two generations went by before these ideas asserted their force, and they never became the most decisive ideas to the masses. Rare, indeed, were unions of monks, such as those which were modelled by Hieracas, the pupil of Origen, on the plan supplied by Origen himself. Distress and disgust with the everyday life started the movements as if with an irresistible natural force; and the Church of Constantine drove into solitude and the desert those who wished to devote themselves to religion.

About 340 A.D. the movement had already become powerful. There must by that time have been thousands of hermits. The beginnings of monasticism proper, as of every great historical phenomenon, are shrouded in legend; and it is to legend, not to history, that we owe the memory of pretended founders. It is no longer possible to discriminate between fact and fancy. But we are certain on two points; and these are sufficient to enable us to discern and rightly judge the movement in its general outlines. We know the original ideal, and we can measure the extent of the renunciation. The ideal was an undisturbed contemplation of God; the means, absolute denial of the good things of life—and among them of Church communion. Not only was the world, in every sense of the word, to be avoided, but the secularised Church as well. Not that her teachings were held insufficient, her ordinances inappropriate, her divine gift indifferent; but her foundation was regarded as insecure, and men doubted not to make up for the loss of her sacramental advantages by asceticism and unceasing contemplation of what is holy.

And what was the attitude of the secular Church herself to the movement? Could she bear to see her members venturing to release themselves from her direct guidance, and striking out a path of salvation outside her own control? Could she permit her sons, even if they did not directly attack her ordinances, to cast on them the shadow of a suspicion? She did not, and she could not, hesitate for a moment. She did the one thing left to secure her safety, in expressly approving the movement, nay, in bearing testimony that it realised the original ideal of the Christian life. The dread of inevitably losing themselves in the whirl of life, the disgust with that life, so empty and common, the prospect of a lofty good, had driven these men out of the world, and the Church made a virtue of necessity. Nor could she help doing so; for the more deeply she became involved in the world, in politics, and in culture, the more loudly and impressively had she preached what monasticism now practised.

It is one of the most striking historical facts that the Church, precisely at the time when she was becoming more and more a legal and sacramental institution, threw out an ideal of life which could be realised, not in herself, but only alongside of herself. The more deeply she became compromised with the world, the higher, the more superhuman became her ideal. She herself taught that the loftiest aim of the Gospel was the contemplation of God; and she herself knew no surer way to this contemplation than flight from the world. Yet this line of thought appears in her only as the incongruous complement of the shallow morality to which she had reduced Christianity. Though her aims were actually directed to subjecting every thing to her poor moral rules and her ordinances of worship, yet her own theology tended in the opposite direction. Monasticism, unable to find satisfaction in ‘theology,’ seriously accepted the view that Christianity is a religion, and demands from the individual a surrender of his life. But it is an evidence of the extraordinary force with which the Church had established herself in the minds of men, that monasticism, on its first appearance, did not venture, like the Montanists, to criticise the Church, or to brand her path as a departure from the truth. If we consider what an enthusiasm, nay, what a fanaticism, speedily developed itself in the monastic communities, we shall be astonished to observe how few and ineffective were the attacks on the Church—even though they were not altogether absent. Hardly a single man demanded a reform of Christianity generally. The movement might well have proved a revolution for the secular Church, yet in truth it did not turn her paths aside. It is true that men conceived a strong distrust of the priestly office; how many fled when an attempt was made to impose that office on them! But reverence for it did not die out: it was only its dangers that men feared. Here and there a strain may have been visible between priests and monks, but in those cases it was the person, not the office, that was contemned.

IV.

But let us not anticipate. Thousands had gone out, and the reputation of sanctity, dissatisfaction with the world, or dislike of work, enticed thousands after them. Of inducements to a monastic life there were many, especially since the establishment of a State Church, when a real or affected enthusiasm no longer led to martyrdom. Even about the middle of the fourth century there was a motley crew of anchorites in the desert. Some had gone out in order really to make atonement and to become saints; others to pose as such. Some fled society and its vices; others their calling and its toils. Some were simple-hearted and of indomitable will; others were sick of the whirl of life. In the one case the hermit desired to be rich in knowledge and true joy, and to devote his life to ‘philosophy’ in peaceful mental enjoyment; in the other he desired to become poor both in mind and in body, despising reason and learning. We have touching confessions of both kinds; but the complaints of the temptations of the world and of the inroads of sense resound louder than those of the selfishness of the heart. And alongside of the silent penitent we soon find the lawless enthusiast. The latter required a fetter; the other two required an organisation. And organisation was soon to appear; a life in common emerges into our view. We find it in two forms: colonies of eremites on the one hand and actual monasteries on the other. Rules were laid down, often very severe. They exhibit not only the sternness of asceticism, but also, even thus early, gross excesses which were to be punished, and simultaneously, here and there in the monastic colonies, an awakening fanaticism which passed all bounds. Thus early do we come across men who remind us of the Mad Dervishes of whom Oriental travellers still tell us. But even among genuine monks we observe, even in the fourth century, the most important differences. True, the fundamental rules of exclusive life with God, of poverty and chastity, and, in the monasteries, of obedience, are in all cases the same. But how differently did they work out in practice! To name only one point: some, full of thankfulness to have escaped from a false and artificial culture, discover in solitude what they had never seen—Nature. Into her they gradually grow; her beauty they search out and extol. From hermits of the fourth century we have pictures of nature such as antiquity seldom produced. Like happy children they tried to live to their God in His garden. In that garden they see the tree of knowledge—no longer forbidden—and thus solitude becomes to them a Paradise; no curse lies upon their toil, for to know is to be blessed. But the others—they understood asceticism otherwise. Not only culture, but nature, is to be shunned; not only social ordinances, but humanity itself. Everything that can be an occasion of sin—and what is there that cannot?—must be cast aside; all joy, all knowledge, all that is lofty in man. And what was the result? One man starved himself to death; a second ranged to and fro like a beast of the desert; a third plunged into the mud of the Nile and let himself be tortured by insects; a fourth, half-naked, the sport of wind and weather, spent years in silence on a pillar. Thus was the flesh to be subjected and crucified; thus was man to gain peace of soul in the contemplation of God: he was to be pure and to keep silence. But these men themselves were fain to confess that the sense of peace came upon them but rarely and for a moment. In its place came terrible phantasies, which took shape as concrete realities. And contemporaries eagerly listened to accounts of such experiences. The ageing world was enraptured with this refinement of renunciation, and with the wild dreams of monks dwelling miserably in the desert. Men to whom courage and will to perform were wanting, sought to enjoy these emotions at least in fancy. Story-tellers in monks’ dress made novels and tales out of the actual or visionary experiences of silent penitents. Now appeared a new species of literature of the strangest kind, that of monasticism, and in its pages whole centuries found edification. This is one of the ways in which the secular Church repaid the deeds of that stern heroism which her own neglect was constantly calling into exercise.

But of the two forms of monasticism here sketched in outline, which can claim a direct descent from Græco-Christian ancestry? Which ideal, considered under historical and religious relations, was the genuine one? That of the brethren who joyed in God and Nature, and devoted their lives in quiet seclusion to the knowledge of God and the world; or that of the heroic penitents? It is not merely to judge by results to say the latter alone. For, in considering the former, we must attend to the close relation in which it stands to the classical ideal of the philosopher; nor this alone. Let us for a moment put ourselves into the historic standpoint. The highest ideal—in the universal belief of the time—can only be realised outside of the world, outside of any calling; it lies hidden in asceticism. Asceticism is indeed a means to an end; but at the same time it is an end in itself: for it contains in itself the assurance that the penitent shall attain to the vision of God. If these prepositions are correct, then all is mere compromise that hinders the struggle à outrance; then not culture only, but nature, history, in a word, all purposed moral activity must be put aside as imperfect and harmful. Then it becomes essential to dare the glorious attempt, to free oneself from nature, from culture, nay, from the world of social morality, in order to be able in this way to form in oneself a pure type of the religious man. Here we reach the actual secret, but here also we touch the boundary of the old Greek view of Christianity. Even before the secular Church there floated as the highest ideal a vision of the religious life which raises man, even here on earth, beyond all the conditions of his existence—including the historical and social conditions. Not as if these were indifferent, or as if their opposite were equally right. But hitherto Christianity had been unable to realise any new moral life in a community, and the moral standards of the old life were outworn, useless, or no longer to be found. It was only a natural consequence that thus the more serious spirits—who yet were no reformers—should have felt the moral ordinances, in their degenerate state, as barriers essentially no better than the elementary conditions of human existence. Thus is a Christian ideal sketched out which is ostensibly purely religious—I should like to say supra-moral. It is not by way of historically founded social ordinances, or of activity with a moral end, that the Christian faith is to come by its own; but by way of the renunciation of everything human; that is, by the extremest asceticism. Thus shall we anticipate our coming share in the divine nature. This is, even to-day, the ideal aim of Greek Christendom, so far as it is not fossilised or diverted by Western influences: we cannot deny to it our sympathy if we think of the low level of so-called Christian morality above which, since it knows no better, it strives to rise. But it is a flight as barren as it is magnificent. For what do we now perceive? On the one side, a secular Church, subjected to the State and so knitted with the national life as to be indistinguishable from it; essentially a civilising agent, with but the smallest influence on the moral life of its members, and no longer pursuing definite aims of its own. On the other, a monasticism without historic aims, and therefore without historic development. Today—a few modern and perhaps hopeful phenomena being disregarded—it remains essentially what it was in the days of the first Byzantine Emperors. Even external regulations have scarcely altered. True, the type of Simeon Stylites is extinct; such types cannot conquer in the struggle for existence; but the cause of Simeon has been victorious, and so far has Stylites prevailed that even today the extremest asceticism counts for the best, and above all in this point, that Greek monasticism has seldom succeeded in giving itself up to purposed toil in the service of the Church or of humanity. The Greek monks—of course with venerable exceptions—to-day as a thousand years ago, live “in silent contemplation and blissful ignorance.” To work they give only just as much attention as is necessary for a livelihood; but even now the unlearned monk is to the learned necessarily a reproach, the avoider of nature a reproach to the nature worshipper; still must conscience smite the working hermit when he sees the brother who neither toils nor spins nor speaks, but waits in solitary contemplation and mortification for the holy light of God to shine at last on him. As in the fifth century, so now, the rift continues between the regulars and the seculars. It is true that the higher dignitaries of the Church are chosen from the regulars—monasticism has even given Emperor and court a temporary or lasting ugly varnish—but the mutual relations have remained the same. The monastery stands alongside the Church, not in it; and it cannot be otherwise. What could it do for the Church which itself renounces every task of its own? The one thing in which it takes a living interest is the worship of the Church: it paints pictures of saints; occasionally it illuminates books. But even from worship it is allowed to emancipate itself. The hermit who for years shuns the communion of the Church is not merely tolerated by her; he is admired. Nay, she cannot help admiring him; for he realises the ideal to which she herself cannot attain—her higher ideal, I mean; for she now has two—that of asceticism and that of worship. He to whom the gift or the power is not given of attaining God by asceticism, may yet reach Him by becoming imbued with the holy mysteries of divine service. Salvation may be obtained by the worship of the Church if we join in it with piety, and if Church duties are duly performed. Monasticism has never attacked this theory, but rather supported it; and rightly, for indirectly she was benefited by it.

For short periods the monastery approached the secular Church; and the latter, again, sought to take it into her service. For short periods, also, the attempt succeeded. The great Synods of the fifth to the seventh centuries provide examples. The dogmas which these Synods established arose in part from monkish fancy, and were defended by monkish arguments and monkish blows. But as the Bishops grew more cautious they shrank from calling the fanaticism of the monks to their aid; for whenever the latter took part in the strife there arose in due consequence revolution, war, and bloodshed. Accordingly after they had compromised certain Emperors of sham monastic piety, and soon after overturned the ideals of certain despotic reforming Emperors, they were left out in the cold. And why not, since their work was done? After the ninth century they seldom played a part in history. Precisely in consequence of their victory, they became, in their dealings with the world and the secular Church, a conservative force. Strange to say, these haters of the world are now the passive defenders of public worship and morality. When these are attacked, their fanaticism awakes, and it is here that monasticism knows itself to be at one with the spirit of the masses. In other respects the regulars and the seculars march side by side—or rather, when the former hold out a hand to the other, they place themselves unconditionally at the disposal of the State. The monk-bishop, as in the Byzantine Empire, so in the Turkish, has in many cases not yet ceased to be a policeman or perhaps a tax-gatherer—though a gradual improvement is unmistakable. Along with the State he exploits the Christian people; he enjoys the honours of a high official, but takes his share also in the official’s corruption and incalculable changes of fortune. Thus the exaltation of the ideal found its punishment. Men tried by faith to remove all natural restrictions; in their presumption they thought also they could dispense with the benefits of moral achievement; and, with broken wing, they fell to the ground. A Church that had become political and secular, a monasticism of barren asceticism without a history, stubbornly maintaining national and ecclesiastical failings, was the result. The Greek Church contrived to unite in herself the opposite poles of asceticism and of the performance of ecclesiastical worship. Her proper domain, that of regulating the morals of daily life by faith, falls outside her direct cognisance. It is given over to the State and to the people—for it is essentially worldly. Nor did they find it hard gradually to annex the whole Church and to fashion it into an instrument for the attainment of their aims. Just because the ideal of monasticism and of the secular Church remained victorious in the contest with the Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries-just because of this did monk and priest become effectively and definitively the slaves of the State. In their flight from the sensuous the State overtook them; it imposed on them its own view of morality, but it appropriated their worship. Thus the Byzantine State still shows itself the genuine though degenerate descendant of the ancient one. But this one end was attained that, where the State set up expressly Christian ideas as the standard in public law and life, it took them in monkish form. The Byzantine code of laws—our own social and moral views, too, have not yet emancipated themselves from its bonds—is in part a strange congeries of pitiless Roman craft and of the monastic view of the world.

Such is the history of monasticism in the East. We must again and again remind ourselves that to-day as of old it is the complement of the secular Church; that even to-day it rescues individuals from the trammels of common life; that there are many saints within its borders; that it is a protest against barren ecclesiasticism. But this review shows us that among the various human ideals as based on the Gospel, the ideal of contemplation and renunciation as a means of saving the soul can not be the last and highest; it shows that a merely passive courage must at length succumb; and that the world will intrude its ideals into the Church if the Christian strives to realise his own outside of the world. True enough is it that there are times when the weight of injustice pressing on the active man becomes unendurable, and that there will ever be individuals so highly strung that they must carry their best into solitude in order to preserve it; but where a pis aller is proclaimed as the highest virtue, there high virtues will lose their value, and finally men lose the reward for which those possessions were sacrificed. Have we not in our own times seen a personality like that of Tolstoï arise from the bosom of the Russian Church-a layman, it is true, but in his writings a genuine Greek monk, to whom the only chance of Church reform lies in a radical breach with culture and history, and to whom the whole moral code—even marriage—seems defiled so far as it stands in dependence upon sense? What a terrible foe of the Greek Church Manichæism must have been of old, we can learn to calculate from the writings of this extraordinary man. The more serious the Christianity of the Greek monk, the more helpless is he before the gloomy view that the whole world lieth in the Evil One. In the long run the monk must again flee to Church authority, lest he fall a slave to Manichæism.

V.

How utterly different has been the evolution of monasticism in the West! A glance at its history in that region is sufficient at once to reveal the essential differences. In the first place, monasticism there had a real history; and in the second, monasticism there made history, secular and religious alike. It stands not merely alongside the Church, wasting itself in silent asceticism and mystical speculation; it stands in the very midst of the Church—nay, it has been, next to the Papacy, the strongest influence in all domains of Latin Christianity. The history of Oriental monasticism, from the fourth century to the present day, is bound up with but few names. Seldom did it produce sharply-marked individualities. But the history of Western monasticism is a history of persons and characters.

Roman Catholicism shows us in its development a continuous chain of living reforms; and every one of these reforms is dependent upon a new step in the development of monasticism. The foundation of the Benedictine Order in the sixth century, the Clunian Reform of the eleventh, the appearance of the Mendicant Orders in the thirteenth, the foundation of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth, are the four great landmarks in the history of Western monasticism; but they are at the same time landmarks in the history of Western Catholicism. It was always the monks who saved the Church when sinking, emancipated her when becoming enslaved to the world, defended her when assailed. These it was that kindled hearts that were growing cold, bridled refractory spirits, recovered for the Church alienated nations. These indications alone show that in Western monasticism we have to recognise a factor of the first importance in Church and civilisation. How did it become so?

Comparatively late and slow was the advance of monasticism from East to West, for neither the natural conditions nor the civilisation of the West were favourable to it. Whereas, by the middle of the fourth century, it had already spread wide in the East, and, as we may assume, arose in many districts independently of Egyptian influences, in the West it was only at the end of that century that it took firm root—nay, it was literally imported from the East. In the West its first admirers were those theologians who, like Rufinus and Jerome, had travelled over Egypt and Syria, and stood in the closest connection with the ‘Greeks.’ If monasteries arose, as they did, especially in Southern Gaul, it was under Eastern influences that they did so. And in the West, monasticism had from the very beginning to meet decided opposition from the Church; whereas in the East we hear but little of such opposition. We should read the works of Sulpicius Severus (circ. 400) in order to learn what attacks monasticism in Gaul and Spain had about that time to meet before it could establish itself. The secularised Bishops, indeed, were not far from treating the monks as Manichæans. Nevertheless, the opposition speedily abated; even in the West it was not long before the prevailing feeling met monasticism half way, and shortly the once-anathematised name of that honest saint, Martin of Tours, came into high repute. Even before the great Augustine had espoused the cause, it had naturalised itself; and during the storms of the great migrations, it took firm root. The monastic ideal was at first identical in its essentials both in the East and in the West, and it remained so during a thousand years—absorption in God and stern asceticism, but especially virginity, which, in West as in East, ranked as the first condition of a consecrated life. To many, indeed, virginity was neither more nor less than the very essence of Christian morality. The Egyptian anchorites, even in the West, were reckoned at all times as the fathers and models of the true Christian life. In spite of all attempts in that direction, their achievements were never cast into the shade by those of St Martin; and the narratives of their lives, during many generations, carried on an unobtrusive mission in Italy, Gaul, and Germany—nay, even beyond the Channel, in England and the Emerald Isle. And yet, in the fifth century, the influences were already working which were to give to Western monasticism a quite other importance and a history. We need only remark, in passing, that the climatic conditions of the West, apart from all others, necessarily demanded a somewhat different mode of life from that of the East. “Edacitas in Graecis gula est, in Gallis natura,” observed one of the earliest patrons of the Western monks. But apart from this, the internal evolution of Western Christendom, so early as the time of Tertullian, had taken a course different from that which it took in the East. Not only did practical religious questions—such as those of Penance, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Nature of the Church—come to the front, but the ancient expectations of the reign of Christ on earth were more slowly sacrificed to the nebulous theological speculations of the East. In such speculations men took only a languid interest. In the so-called ‘Chiliast’ conceptions the Western Church retained a keen eye for that which the Church of Christ ought to be; and these conceptions were necessarily the more valuable in proportion as, in contradistinction to Montanism, the fantastic element was stripped off, and as the idea of a literal fulfilment of the prophecies fell, of its own accord, into the background. Western monasticism, in contrast to the Eastern, maintained the Apocalyptic element of Chiliasm, which, it is true, lay dormant for long periods, but at critical moments constantly emerged. The ecclesiastical ideas of Western Christendom were fused together to a new Christian philosophy of the world and of life by St Augustine. Augustine’s central conceptions are the grace of God in the Church working for righteousness, and the Church herself. The Church, primarily as the congregation of the faithful, but secondarily as a visible institution, is the kingdom of righteousness and of the morally good—the Kingdom of God. At the time of the fall of the old Empire of the West, and of the rise of new half-heathen States, he sketched the noble conception of a future history of the Church. Her business is to fulfil humanity with the strength of the good, and with true righteousness; as the visible manifestation of the City of God, she has to press into her service the world-empire and the kingdoms of the world; she has to guide and train the nations. Only then does Christianity come by its own, when it creates a kingdom of moral excellence on earth, a supramundane brotherhood of humanity: only then does it come by its own, therefore, when it rules; and it only rules by the rule of the Holy Catholic Church. Spiritual dominion over the world, a divine City of Righteousness on earth, is thus a Christian ideal, an ideal alike for individuals and for the Church as a whole. Not only the old Apocalyptic hopes and the practical aims of the West, but also Greek speculation, are brought by Augustine into a marvellous interdependence; they are indeed not to correct but to delimit each other. Christian salvation, so to speak, appears in double form; it is the eternal blissful contemplation of God both in this world and in the next, but it is at the same time in this world an imperial city of divine gifts and moral powers.

These positions had a very different drift from that of the painfully elaborated dogmas of Greek Christianity. They assigned to the Church an independent mission, for the State and by its side. She was to serve God and the world. This mission was a problem demanding a worthy solution. The Greek ideal is a problem only in so far as its realisation is but approximately possible; in itself it has but one meaning. But for Augustine’s conception every task resolved itself at the same time into a question which every man learnt to put only in proportion as he himself actively worked at it. The detail in the whole of the Christian conception, clearly as it could be viewed in itself, revealed its essence and received its value only in its proper relations to other things.

How is the service of the world related to the service of God? In what connection with religion is morality to be placed? The discovery was again made that there already exists genuine good in this world; that everything proceeding out of the hand of God is good, and that man finds his blessedness only in surrendering his will to God. In this surrender of heart and will by faith and love, which is alone possible by divine grace as bestowed in the Sacraments, man becomes justified and receives freedom and righteousness—that is, moral perfection. This perfection is indeed a very high good; but it is not the highest. For the hope is still alive that man, when raised to God, shall enjoy a blessedness which eye hath not seen nor car heard—the blessedness of seeing God and being like Him. But what is the relation of this religious aim to the moral purpose of a perfect righteousness in the earthly kingdom of God? We may assert that the one is subordinate to the other, and yet act quite differently. This appears to be the case with Augustine; and the Church in her march to world-dominion followed him. Again and again, as a matter of fact, in attempting to identify herself with the kingdom of Christ, she attached paramount importance to a zeal for her own maintenance and dominion, teaching the nations that they must seek and find in her the highest good. In her consciousness that she possesses and can distribute the divine grace of justification, she ceased in principle to suffer anyone to seek his blessedness by a path of his own, in good works and in asceticism. For the sake of the alone sufficient grace of God, and at the same time for the interest of the Church, she set at naught for the Catholic Christian, so early as the fifth century, the value of an asceticism not sanctioned by the Church. But in this point she did not escape a certain amount of vacillation; for she never denied that the Church cannot guarantee salvation, and that in the last instance the individual will stand before his God, alone, and without her protection. To this hesitation on the question how far the individual Christian is to be left independent—a question which was inevitably to prove of decisive import for the position of monasticism in the Western Church—corresponds her uncertainty in appraising civil ordinances and all political forms. The Church is the kingdom of righteousness and love; outside her all is unrighteousness and hatred. But how does it then stand with States? Are they and their ordinances, after all, independent values, or do they become so only in subjecting themselves to the Church; or, finally, is it altogether impossible for them to become so? Has the Church to rule alongside of the State, or over and in the State by legal forms, or is she to rule by making all social contracts unnecessary? So far, these questions were not fully fathomed; but men lived in them. The history of Western Catholicism is the history of these ideas, until, by the great popes of the Middle Ages, they were realised in the world-dominion of the Church.

What was to be the attitude of monasticism to these ideas? The answer is not difficult. Either it had to make the attempt to come to terms with the Church, and, after the Greek fashion, to continue alongside of the Church the mere preparation for the Beyond; or else it must permit its asceticism to be curtailed by the higher aim, and to assist the Church in her great task, that of moulding mankind by the Gospel, and of building up the kingdom of Christ on earth in the Church. It did both. Western monasticism bore its share in the solution of the ecclesiastical problem; but inasmuch as it refused to sacrifice its original ideal of a contemplative life, its own ideals became problems; and as it helped towards realising the aims of the Church, but could not always follow in her path, it passed through peculiar vicissitudes. Let us endeavour to sketch in brief the stages of this history.

VII.

And yet there had already begun a second movement in the Church; a second revival of monasticism. This revival started in France. The monastery of Clugny, founded so early as the tenth century, became the home of that great reform of the Church which the West experienced in the eleventh. Begun by monks, it was at first supported by pious and intelligent princes and bishops as a counterpoise to the secularised Papacy; but later the great Hildebrand took it up, and alike as Cardinal and as Pope opposed it to the princes and the secularised clergy. The West gained by it an effective reformation of the Church; a reformation, however, not on Evangelical but on Catholic lines. The aims of this new movement were in the first instance a restoration of the old discipline, of true renunciation and piety in the monasteries themselves; but later, first, a subjection of the secular clergy to the regulars, and, secondly, the dominion of the whole spiritualty, as regulated by the monks, over the laity—princes and nations alike. The great reform of the monks of Clugny and of their mighty Pope presents itself first as the energetic attempt to conform the life of the whole spiritualty to monastic ordinances. In this movement Western monasticism for the first time puts forth the decisive claim to pose as the only Christian life for all adult believers, and to ensure the general recognition of this claim. Monasticism in the West must inevitably come again and again into contact with the secular Church, for the reason that it can never cease itself to put forth claims on the whole of Christendom or to serve the Church. The Christian freedom at which it aims is to it, in spite of all vacillation, not only a freedom of the individual from the world, but the freedom of Christendom for the service of God in the world. We Evangelicals can even to-day still judge this great movement with sympathy: for in it expression is given to the consciousness that within the Church there can be only one morality and only one ideal of life, and that to this therefore all adult Christians are pledged. If monasticism is really the highest form of Christianity, it comes to this, that all adult confessors should be subjected to the monastic rule, and all Christians in their nonage—i.e., in the mediæval view all the laity—should be urged at least to obedience. Such were the ideas that dominated Clugny and Clugny’s great Pope. Hence the stern enforcement of the celibacy of the clergy; hence the struggle against the secularisation of the spiritualty, and specially against simony; hence the monastic discipline of the priests. And what about his effort after political supremacy? Though it might from this point of view be looked on as a mere parergon which was to last because, and only so long as, the true conversion of the world was incomplete, yet here begin the points of difference between monasticism and the reformed secular Church. It is possible so to represent the ideas of Hildebrand and those of his more earnest friends as to make them appear to differ only by a shade. Yet this shade of difference led to policies totally opposed. From the very first voices were heard, even among the most zealous supporters of the Pope, crying that it was enough to reform manners and to cherish piety: it was not for the Church to rule in the style and with the weapons of the State. These voices demanded a true return to apostolic life, and a renewal of the Early Church. It is incorrect to describe these efforts of the monks as if they betokened a retrogression to the standard of the Greek Church, and thus fell outside the circle of Western Catholicism. The real truth is, these monks had a positive aim—Christian life for the whole of Christendom. But since tradition offered to them a conception of a supernaturally renewed Empire, which they did not renounce the hope of realising on earth, they conceived an almost invincible mistrust of the ‘parergon,’ which the Roman Bishop held out and for which he strove. In this mistrust was included that shrinking from everything in the Church that recalled political or legal ordinances. Repugnance to public law and to the State is in the Western monasticism as characteristic as in the East the reason is plain why Greek ascetics show no such repugnance. But in the eleventh century devotion to the Church and her ruler was powerful enough to prevent an open conflict between the reformed clergy and the monks. In the Sacrament of Penance the Church possessed the strongest means of binding even the monks to herself. With conscience stained and courage broken, many bowed to the will of the great monastic Pope. And it was precisely those that had most willingly dedicated their whole life to God whom he drew out of the quiet of the monastery. He knew well that only that monk will help to subjugate the world who shuns it and strives to free himself from it. Renunciation of the world in the service of a world-ruling Church—such is the amazing problem that Gregory solved for the next century and a half. But Gregory’s aims, and those of the reformed bishops, with all their political character, were spiritual also. Only as spiritual did they transform the masses, and inflame them against the worldly clergy in upper Italy, or against simoniacal princes throughout Europe. A new religious zeal stirred the nations, and specially the Romance nations, of the West. The enthusiasm of the Crusades was the direct fruit of the monastic reform of the eleventh century. That religious revival which Europe experienced is expressed most vividly in them. The dominion of the Church is to be consummated on earth. It was the ideas of the world-ruling monk of Clugny that led the van of the Crusades; and the Crusaders brought back from the Holy Land and the Holy Places a new, or at least till now rare form of Christian piety—that of absorption in the sufferings and in the Via Dolorosa of Christ. Asceticism, once negative, received a positive form and a new positive aim, that of becoming one with the Redeemer by fervent love and perfect imitation. A personal element, working from heart to heart, began to vivify the hitherto unimpassioned and aimless struggle of self-abnegation, and to awaken the sleeping subjectivity. Even to monasticism, though as a rule only in a few isolated cases, it lent an inner impulse. The great number of new Orders that were founded at this time, specially in France, bears witness to the general enthusiasm. It was then that arose the Carthusians, the Cistercians, the Præmonstratensians, the Carmelites, and many other Orders. But the constant appearance of fresh Orders only shows that monasticism, in alliance with the secular Church, was ever losing its special character. Each new Order sought to call back the monks to their old austerity and to drag them away from secularisation; but in the very act of subjecting itself to the secular Church, it was annexed and exploited by the Church. It shows the illusions in which men moved that the Orders which were founded to restore the original monasticism, by the very terms of their foundation expressly announced their subjection to the bishops, and thenceforward renounced not only the care of souls, but all special programmes within the Church and for the Church. In the twelfth century the dependence of Christendom, and thus also of monasticism, on the Church is still a very naïve one: the contradiction between the actual form of the world-ruling Church and the Gospel which she preaches is felt indeed but always suppressed, and criticism of the claims and of the constitution of the Church is as yet ineffective. We need only mention the name of a single man, that of Bernard of Clairvaux, in order to see as in a picture alike all the greatness which this second monastic reform of the Church introduced, and its limitations and illusions. The same monk who in the quiet of his cell speaks a new language of devotion, who dedicates his soul entirely to the Bridegroom, who urges Christendom to forsake the world, who tells the Pope that he is called to the chair of Peter not for dominion but for service: this same man was yet imbued with all the hierarchical prejudices of his time, and himself led the politics of the world-ruling Church. But it was precisely because monasticism in that age went with the Church that it was able to do so great a work for her. It roused, it is true, a reform in the Church; but this reform, in the long run, came to strengthen the political power of the Church, and so to increase her secularisation—a strange and yet easily intelligible result. The domain in which Church and cloister found constantly their common ground was the contest with all the claims of the laity, and specially of the princes, on the Church. Western monasticism took this to be a ‘liberation from the world,’ and therefore offered its services in the struggle to the Church. Only by observing this can we understand how one and the same man in that age could be at once an upright monk and a prince of the Church, or how he could deceive himself and others, or even be uncertain, as to the final aims of this opposition to the State.

A newly moulded piety, dominated by the surrender of the soul to Christ, spread forth from Assisi and made itself master of the Church. It was religious individuality and freedom that had been awakened; Christianity as the religion of poverty and love was to come by its own as opposed to the degeneracy in morality and politics.

The finest of mediæval hymns, the mightiest of mediæval sermons, belong to the Franciscan Order or to the nearly-related Dominicans. But to art and science also these Orders gave a new impulse. All the important schoolmen of the thirteenth century—a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Albertus Magnus—were mendicant monks. The noblest paintings of the old Italian school are inspired by the new spirit, the spirit of absorption in the sufferings of Christ, of a holy sorrow and a transcendental strength. A Dante, a Giotto, and again a Tauler, and a Berthold of Ratisbon—all these, in their feelings, thoughts, and creations, lived in the religious ideas of the mendicant Orders. But—what is more significant—these monks stooped to the populace and to individuals. They had an eye for their sorrows and an ear for their complaints. They lived with the people, they preached to the people in their own language, and they brought them a consolation they could understand. What the sacrament and the services had hitherto failed to give—a certainty of salvation—the mysticism of the Orders aimed at producing: but not outside of the Church means of grace. The eye must learn to see the Saviour; the soul must attain peace by sensuous perception of His presence. But the ‘theology,’ which here arose, proclaimed also the religious freedom and blessedness of souls lifted above the world and conscious of their God. If by this idea it did not actually begin the Evangelical Reformation, it made the path straight for it.

By the help of the mendicant Orders, of which she availed herself to the full, the Church was able in the thirteenth century to maintain herself at the height of her dominion. She won back the hearts of the faithful; but at the same time, through the activity of the monks, she ordered and brought to perfection her hold on the goods of the world, science, art, and law. It was then that the body of canon law was completed, which regulates all the relations of life from the standpoint of the Church’s world-dominion, and of an asceticism devoted to her service. This canon law is no longer recognised in civilised states, but its ideas still bear fruit. To a much higher degree are philosophy and theology, as well as social politics, still dependent on the mode of thought which in the thirteenth century, in the mendicant Orders, led to the masterly development of great scholastic systems. Through these Orders, again, the Church succeeded in overcoming the sectarian movements that had taken hold of the laity. It was the mendicants who with furious zeal conquered the heretical, but, alas! also free-spirited and evangelical, movements of the thirteenth century. Thus here also they made common cause with the world-ruling Church, the Church of politics and of the sword: nay, they became precisely the most favoured clerical servants of the Popes, who endowed them with the highest privileges, and permitted them everywhere to interfere with the regular administration of the Church and with the cure of souls. In the mendicant Orders, the Roman Pope found a tool wherewith to weld the national churches of the country more closely to his see, and to crush the independence of the Bishops. Thus they had the largest share in the Romanising of the Catholic Church in Europe, and also influenced in many ways the older foundations which sprang out of the Benedictine Rule. But they became secularised as speedily as any other Order before them. The connection with the secular Church proved once again fatal to monasticism. That connection had been from the first extraordinarily close—Francis had been compelled to yield as if to a decree of Fate—and the ruin was all the more rapid. What was meant to raise them above the world—their poverty—proved but an occasion of specific secularisation to those who no longer took poverty seriously. They saw themselves led to speculate on the coarseness, the superstition, and the sluggishness of the masses; and they became, like the masses, coarse, superstitious, and sluggish.

Yet the high ideal set before Christendom by St Francis could not disappear without shaking to their foundations the Church and the Order founded by him. When one party in the Order urged a modification of the strictness of the regulations imposing poverty, another, faithful to the Master, arose to defend them. When the Popes took up the cause of the former, the zealous party turned their criticism upon the Papacy and the secular Church. Complaints of the corruption of the Church had long been uttered by individual monks, but they had always died away again. The strife of the Church against the states and their claims had hitherto constantly enticed monasticism to recognise in the programme of the Church the beginning of the realisation of its own. But now arose the idea which had always lain dormant in monasticism and had again and again been suppressed. The tie with Church and Papacy was sundered: ancient apocalyptic ideas emerged; the Papal Church appeared as Babylon, as the Kingdom of Antichrist, who has falsified the true Christianity of renunciation and poverty. The whole history of the Church appeared suddenly in the light of a monstrous apostasy; and the Pope no longer as the successor of Peter but as the heir of Constantine. It was hopeless to attempt to move the Church to turn back. Nothing but a new revelation of the Spirit could avail to save her, and men accordingly looked for a future final Gospel of Christian perfection. With all the means in her power the Church suppressed this dangerous uprising. She pronounced the teachings of the Franciscans on the poverty of Christ and the Apostles to be heresy, and she demanded submission. A bitter struggle was the result. Christendom witnessed the new spectacle of the secular Church in arms against a doctrine of renunciation that had become aggressive. With the courage of men who had sacrificed all, the Spirituals preached to Pope and Bishop their doctrine of poverty, and sealed their testimony at the stake. At the end of the fourteenth century the secular Church came forth, victorious and unchanged, from her strife with poverty. Thus once again, at the end of the Middle Ages, the sleeping but ever reviving antagonism between the aims of the Church and the aims of monasticism had come to light in a terrible crisis. But monasticism was vanquished. The foundation of the mendicant Orders was its last great attempt in the Middle Ages to assert itself and its ideal in the Church as a whole while maintaining its connection with the history and constitution of that Church. But the development of the Franciscan Order was twofold. The one party, from the very first, resigned its original ideal, subjected itself completely to the Church, and became speedily secularised; the other sought to maintain its ideal, made that ideal stricter, set it up even against the Church, and exhausted itself, until it succumbed, in fantastic pursuits. This development will to some appear an unredeemed tragedy; but it will perhaps not seem an unmixed evil to those who recognise that individuals of the Order which strove to emancipate itself from the Church, sought deliverance at the hands of the State, and, in opposition to the claims of the Church, which they no longer or only partially admitted, began to defend the independence and ordinances of the State. It was the Franciscans who, in the fourteenth century, discovered a scientific foundation for the Hohenstaufen theory of politics. Western monasticism, as we learn from this astonishing volte-face, is unable to exist for any length of time without a close alliance with the forces of society. When the Church is not available, it seeks even the State. Yet this movement was but transitory. In the fifteenth century it deathly stillness reigns in the Order, which is now in entire subjection to the Church; attempts it reform were feeble, and resulted in no fresh life. In the age of the Renascence monasticism—with a few honourable exceptions—seemed to have condemned itself to inaction and uselessness. Yet the new culture, whose supporters, it is true, frequently spent their shafts of ridicule on the ignorant, slavish, and hypocritical monks, was not utterly hostile to ascetic ideals. Rather did the vision reappear of a wise and pious man, absorbed in the enjoyment of a quiet contemplation of heaven, without neglecting the world, in peaceful detachment from the noises of the day; who needs nothing because in spirit he possesses all. The attempt was even made to revive this ideal in the traditional forms of cloister-life; nor did it everywhere fail. But it was only given to isolated individuals to unite the rule of the convent with the study of Cicero or Plato, and to be sufficient for both. The scholar who was at the same time a man of the world, and who at his desk became enthusiastic for Stoical indifference or for Franciscan independence of externals, was anything but a monk; and the Church, in spite of all classical and edifying dissertations, remained as she was. The poor, as in the days before St Francis had shown them the way, sought to secure their salvation in pious and enthusiastic unions of every kind, which were, it is true, of occasional service to the Church, but nevertheless were to her a constant danger.