from the duties of active life and society. But, without now entering into these questions, we may remark that the statements which we have quoted suggest the inquiry whether such multitudes can really have been what the monastic profession supposed them to be? whether they did not, for the most part, follow the fashion of their times, rather than any prompting of their own spiritual desires? whether it is to be believed that so many myriads could have quitted the pleasures of the most corrupt society to follow in sincerity a life of rigid mortification and devotion? And on the other side there is plentiful evidence that the great mass of monks were not the saintly innocents that we are required to suppose. They appear ready for all manner of violence; their conduct in times of controversial excitement (even where they were on the orthodox side) is that of a fanatical and ruffianly mob; they disgust the heathen, not (as M. de Montalembert represents) by their piety, but (as is clear from wellknown passages of Eunapius, Libanius, and Zosimus) † by their grossness and brutality, their greed, their assumption, their turbulence. The conduct of the Asiatic monks towards the great and good Chrysostom, whom they endeavoured to waylay as he was proceeding to the place of his exile, may be mentioned as one specimen of the monastic unruliness. In short, whatever of mischief might be expected from the mistaken principle of their foundation, the expectation is amply borne out by the actual records of monastic life.

Over some of the more extravagant developments of the monkish spirit-such as the life of the solitaries who spent their days on the top of lofty pillars, or that of the 'grazers' who went on all fours and browsed on the grass of the field-M. de Montalembert passes with as few words as possible (i. 97); for it is pretty clear that his own judgment of them differs from that of the writers who admiringly recorded their fanaticism. Indeed, Eastern monkery very soon loses its attraction for him, and he tells us that after an age of incomparable virtue and fecundity, after having presented to the religious life of all ages not only immortal models, but also a sort of ideal which is almost unattainable, the monastic order allowed itself to be mastered, throughout the Byzantine Empire, by the enfeeblement and the barrenness of which Eastern Christianity has been the victim' (i. 132). Under the influence of the imperial power (that bane of all goodness!), the Eastern monks are described as having sunk into stagnation, which for fifteen centuries has become

*See t. i. pp. 112-3.

These are collected by Gieseler, I. ii. 28, 232.

only

only more and more complete and hopeless. We cannot say that this view of the matter altogether agrees with our own recollections of history: for example, throughout the controversy as to images, which lasted to the middle of the ninth century, the monks of Constantinople were furious opponents of the iconoclastic emperors, and many of them endured tortures, banishment, and death on behalf of the cause which M. de Montalembert would approve. And if, as our author holds, imperialism was the ruin of Eastern monkery, surely there must be a deplorable want of vigour in a system of religion which, while it professed a peculiar superiority to earthly things, could be ruined by such altogether earthly means.

But from the decay of Eastern monachism we now come to the proper subject of the book-the Monks of the West. M. de Montalembert strongly holds the doctrine that

'Westward the course of empire takes its way.'

'It has been with religion as with the glory of arms, and with the splendour of literature. According to a mysterious but indisputable law, it is always from east to west that progress, light, and power have proceeded. Like the light of day, they are born in the east, but it is to arise and to shine more and more in proportion as they advance towards the west.'-i. 134.

And perhaps (although we are not explicitly told so) he may expect that the great future which he believes to be in store for monkery is to be realised beyond the Atlantic. :

The introduction of monachism at Rome is due to St. Athanasius, who, in one of his many exiles from his see, arrived there with a train of Egyptian monks. The appearance and manners of his companions excited a great sensation, and within years monachism became fashionable in the capital of the world. Many men of high birth and great wealth, without secluding themselves in cloisters, adopted the monastic severity of life (i. 146), while among the patrician ladies it found many enthusiastic votaries and countless admirers.*

Among the promoters of monachism at Rome, the most

* M. de Montalembert appears to antedate the use of the term religio as exclusively applied to monachism, by referring it to the middle of the fourth century (i. 142). This seems, indeed, to be its sense in the words which he quotes from Eucherius: Unus in religionis, alius in sacerdotii nomen ascendit' (ad Valerian. ap. Migne, 1. 719). But Eucherius was of later date, as he died in 450; and in Salvian, who survived him, the name of religiosi includes not only monks, but clergy and all others who professed an especial strictness of life. (See Baluze's notes on Salvian, ib. liii., 31, 86, 209.) The Council of Epaone, in 517, uses religio as equivalent to professio continentiae, requiring it as a condition of ordination (Hefele, Conciliengeschichte,' ii. 666); and the Second Council of Lyons, in 566 (Can. 2), includes the clergy as well as the monks among 'religiosi.'

eminent

eminent and the most active was St. Jerome, that lion of Christian polemics; a lion at once inflamed and subdued-inflamed by zeal, and subdued by penitence' (i. 158). To this celebrated man our author pays the tribute of respect which is justly deserved by his abilities, his learning, and his labours in the cause of religion, while he does not affect to be blind to the fact that there was much of a less admirable kind in him. But perhaps it may be fairly asked whether this mixture of evil with good in Jerome has not something to do with the question as to the merits of monasticism. If, indeed, he were merely a monk who had been famous as a scholar or as a controversial theologian, we should consider his. faults as only personal, and not as discrediting his profession. But when we consider that he was set forth as a pattern of a practical and practical and very elevated Christian life, that in his own time he was the most revered exemplar of it, we may surely say that the idea of that life, however high its pretensions may have been, was very imperfectly Christian. For the case of Jerome is a proof that a man might pass through the severest monastic discipline, and might be regarded as having attained to a very lofty degree of monastic sanctity, without subduing his violent irritability, his imperious pride, his bitter envy; nay, perhaps, that the effect of the monastic training was even to exasperate these vices.

From Jerome we come to the more illustrious name of Augustine. That this great father was a monk we believe M. de Montalembert to be wrong in maintaining (i. 199); for the companions whom, when a bishop, he gathered around him for something like a monastic life were all clergy, whereas, in his time, and long after, monks were usually laymen; nor is there, in so far as we know, any trace of their having been bound to their manner of life by any vow; while the rule which passes under the name of St. Augustine, and which M. de Montalembert attributes to him (i. 206), is supposed by competent critics to have been really framed (chiefly from Augustine's writings, it is true) in the latter part of the eleventh century.* We might, therefore, take exception to some expressions in the following passage; but we quote it not only for its eloquence, but for the justice with which our author characterises the great African father:

The monastic institute, then, can claim the glory of him who has been declared [by Bossuet] to be the most renowned and the greatest of theologians, the father and the master of all preachers of the holy Gospel, and who takes his place between Plato and Bossuet, between

* Gieseler, II., ii. 282.

Cicero and St. Thomas of Aquino, in the first rank of those rare spirits who tower above the ages. It was among the exercises and the austerities of the cloistral life that this man specially formed himself -great alike in thought and in faith, in genius and in virtue, born to exercise the most legitimate sway over his own time and over all times. No doubt all is not perfect in the remains of him which we possess. The subtlety, the obscurity, the bad taste of an age of literary decline are to be found in them. But who has ever surpassed him in the immensity, the variety, the inexhaustible fertility of his labours, in the deep sensibility and the charming candour of his soul, in the glowing curiosity, the elevation, and the reach of his spirit? From the midst of his innumerable works two masterpieces stand out, which will endure as long as Catholic truth itself the "Confessions," in which repentance and humility have involuntarily put on the sublime adornment of genius, and which have made Augustine's inmost life the patrimony of all Christians; the "City of God," which is at once a triumphant apology for Christianity and a first essay in the true philosophy of history, which Bossuet alone was to surpass. His life, inflamed, devoured, by an inextinguishable ardour for good, is but one long struggle; first, against the learned follies and the shameful vices of the Manichaeans; then, against the blameable exaggerations of the Donatists, who carried their sanguinary rigorism to the length of schism, rather than acquiesce in the wise indulgence of Rome; then again, against the Pelagians, who claimed for human freedom the right to dispense with God; lastly, and always, against the remains of paganism, which struggled in Africa with the old Carthaginian obstinacy against the new and victorious religion of Rome. He died at the age of seventy-six, on the ramparts (?) of his episcopal city during its siege by the Vandals-a living image of that church which erected itself between the Roman empire and the barbaric world, to protect the ruin, and to purify the conquest.'*-i. 200-2.

But after Augustine and his contemporaries, the splendour of Western monachism too began speedily to pass away; and in the beginning of the sixth century it had greatly declined, when a revival was effected by Benedict of Nursia, with whom M. de Montalembert considers his history more properly to begin.

We need not follow the career of Benedict, from his withdrawal in boyhood to the cave near Subiaco,† to his death, after having founded

*This passage is followed by one on the subject of the views which Augustine at different times entertained as to the toleration of religious error-his later opinions, as is well known, having been in favour of such coercion as he had at an earlier time reprobated (i. 202-4). M. de Montalembert's language is curiously affected by his position as a member of a Church which, when triumphant, has never hesitated to persecute, while his own disposition is sincerely in favour of that tolerance which, in the present circumstances of his country, his Church is glad to profess.

Of this cave M. de Montalembert says, 'Tous y reconnaissaient le site sacré que le prophète Isaïe semble avoir montré d'avance aux cénobites par ces paroles d'une

founded the great monastery of Monte Cassino, and governed it by a rule which became the general law of Western Monachism. The spirit of that rule, we need hardly say, was especially distinguished from the spirit of the earlier Eastern Monachism by greater reasonableness, mildness, and elasticity. But the principle of obedience to superiors, which it laid down, seems to us to be quite deserving of the words in which it has been characterised by M. Guizot-The fatal present that the monks made to Europe, and which so long altered or enervated its virtues.'* According to M. Guizot, the idea of this obedience was copied from the worship of the imperial majesty,' and M. de Montalembert quotes these words with respectful reprobation :-

No; it is not a production of social decline, nor a mark of religious slavery. It is, on the contrary, the triumph of that moral and spiritual liberty of which imperial Rome had lost all notion, which Christianity alone could have restored to the world, and of which the reign, propagated and assured above all by the children of St. Benedict, has rescued Europe from the anarchy, slavery, and decrepitude into which the Roman empire had precipitated it.

Without doubt, this passive and absolute obedience, in temporal matters, and under chiefs imposed from without, and who command according to the will of their interests or their passions, would con-. stitute an intolerable servitude. But, besides that among the Benedictines it was always and for all to be the result of a free determination, it remains at once sanctified and tempered by the nature and the origin of the command. The Abbot holds the place of Christ; he can ordain nothing but what is conformable to the law of God. His charge is that of a father of a family, that of a good shepherd. His life ought to be the mirror of his lessons. Charged with the awful mission of governing souls, he owes to God the strictest account of it, and almost in every page the rule enjoins on him never to lose sight of this fearful responsibility.'-ii. 51.

To us we confess that M. Guizot's derivation of the principle seems fanciful, but as to its character and effects we entirely agree with him. How such an obedience as would have been an intolerable slavery if required by any secular authority, can have become the very reverse when required by an abbot, we are altogether unable to understand. If the abbot was tyrannical, it was no consolation to his subject monks that they had voluntarily chosen the monastic life, and that perhaps they had shared in the mistake of electing him for their head. It is useless to tell us that abbots were solemnly charged to be guided in their re

d'une application si parfaitement exacte-Attendite ad petram de qua excisi estis, et al CAVERNAM LACI de qua præcisi estis, (ii. 13). Unluckily other versions are less adapted to the monastic application than the Latin Vulgate.

* Civilisation in France,' Lect. xiv. (vol. ii. p. 77, Hazlitt's translation).

quirements