At first, monasticism was a spontaneous movement, quite outside Church organization. It was Saint Athanasius who reconciled ecclesiastics to it. Partly as a result of his influence, it came to be the rule that monks should be priests. It was he also, while he was in Rome in 339, who introduced the movement into the West. Saint Jerome did much to promote it, and Saint Augustine introduced it into Africa. Saint Martin of Tours inaugurated monasteries in Gaul, Saint Patrick in Ireland. The monastery of Iona was founded by Saint Columba in 566. In early days, before monks had been fitted into the ecclesiastical organization, they had been a source of disorder. To begin with, there was no way of discriminating between genuine ascetics and men who being destitute. found monastic establishments
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* The desert near Egyptian Thebes.
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comparatively luxurious. Then again there was the difficulty that the monks gave a turbulent support to their favourite bishop, causing synods (and almost causing councils) to fall into heresy. The synod (not the council) of Ephesus, which decided for the Monophysites, was under a monkish reign of terror. But for the resistance of the Pope, the victory of the Monophysites might have been permanent. In later time, such disorders no longer occurred.
There seem to have been nuns before there were monks—as early as the middle of the third century. Some shut themselves up in tombs.
Cleanliness was viewed with abhorrence. Lice were called «pearls of God,» and were a mark of saintliness. Saints, male and female, would boast that water had never touched their feet except when they had to cross rivers. In later centuries, monks served many useful purposes: they were skilled agriculturists, and some of them kept alive or revived learning. But in the beginning, especially in the eremitic section, there was none of this. Most monks did no work, never read anything except what religion prescribed, and conceived virtue in an entirely negative manner, as abstention from sin, especially the sins of the flesh. Saint Jerome, it is true, took his library with him into the desert, but he came to think that this had been a sin.
In Western monasticism, the most important name is that of Saint Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order. He was born about 480, near Spoleto, of a noble Umbrian family; at the age of twenty, he fled from the luxuries and pleasures of Rome tothe solitude of a cave, where he lived for three years. After this period. his life was less solitary, and about the year 520 he founded the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, for which he drew up the «Benedictine rule.» This was adapted to Western climates, and demanded less austerity than had been common among Egyptian and Syrian monks. There had been an unedifying competition in ascetic extravagance, the most extreme practitioner being considered the most holy. To this Saint Benedict put an end, decreeing that austerities going beyond the rule could only be practised by permission of the abbot. The abbot was given great power; he was elected for life, and had (within the Rule and the limits of orthodoxy) an almost despotic control over his monks, who were no longer allowed, as previously, to leave their monastery for another if they felt so inclined. In later times, Bene-
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dictines have been remarkable for learning, but at first all their reading was devotional.
Organizations have a life of their own, independent of the intentions of their founders. Of this fact, the most striking example is the Catholic Church, which would astonish Jesus, and even Paul. The Benedictine Order is a lesser example. The monks take a vow of poverty, obedience, and chastity. As to this, Gibbon remarks: «I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: ‘My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.’ I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.» * The departures of the Order from the founder’s intentions were, however, by no means all regrettable. This is true, in particular, of learning. The library of Monte Cassino is famous, and in various ways the world is much indebted to the scholarly tastes of later Benedictines.
Saint Benedict lived at Monte Cassino from its foundation until his death in 543. The monastery was sacked by the Lombards, shortly before Gregory the Great, himself a Benedictine, became Pope. The monks fled to Rome; but when the fury of the Lombards had abated, they returned to Monte Cassino.
From the dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, written in 593, we learn much about Saint Benedict. He was «brought up at Rome in the study of humanity. But forasmuch as he saw many by the reason of such learning to fall to dissolute and lewd life, he drew back his foot, which he had as it were now set forth into the world, lest, entering too far in acquaintance therewith, he likewise might have fallen into that dangerous and godless gulf: wherefore, giving over his book, and forsaking his father’s house and wealth, with a resolute mind only to serve God, he sought for some place, where he might attain to the desire of his holy purpose: and in this sort he departed, instructed with learned ignorance, and furnished with unlearned wisdom.»
He immediately acquired the power to work miracles. The first of these was the mending of a broken sieve by means of prayer. The townsmen hung the sieve over the church door, and it «continued there many years after, even to these very troubles of the Lombards.» Abandoning the sieve, he went to his cave, unknown to all but one
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* Op. cit., XXXVII, note 57.
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friend, who secretly supplied him with food let down by a rope, to which a bell was tied to let the saint know when his dinner had come. But Satan threw a stone at the rope, breaking both it and the bell. Nevertheless, the enemy of mankind was foiled in his hope of disrupting the Saint’s food-supply.
When Benedict had been as long in the cave as God’s purposes required, our Lord appeared on Easter Sunday to a certain priest, revealed the hermit’s whereabouts, and bade him share his Easter feast with the saint. About the same time certain shepherds found him. «At the first, when they espied him through the bushes, and saw his apparel made of skins, they verily thought that it had been some beast: but after they were acquainted with the servant of God, many of them were by his means converted from their beastly life to grace, piety, and devotion.»
Like other hermits, Benedict suffered from the temptations of the flesh. «A certain woman there was which some time he had seen, the memory of which the wicked spirit put into his mind, and by the memory of her did so mightily inflame with concupiscence the soul of God’s servant, which did so increase that, almost overcome with pleasure, he was of mind to have forsaken the wilderness. But suddenly, assisted with God’s grace, he came to himself; and seeing many thick briers and nettle bushes to grow hard by, off he cast his apparel, and threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that, when he rose up, all his flesh was pitifully torn: and so by the wounds of his body, he cured the wounds of his soul.»
His fame being spread abroad, the monks of a certain monastery, whose abbot had lately died, besought him to accept the succession. He did so, and insisted upon observance of strict virtue, so that the monks, in a rage, decided to poison him with a glass of poisoned wine. He, however, made the sign of the cross over the glass, whereupon it broke in pieces. So he returned to the wilderness.
The miracle of the sieve was not the only practically useful one performed by Saint Benedict. One day, a virtuous Goth was using a bill-hook to clear away briers, when the head of it flew off the handle and fell into deep water. The Saint, being informed, held the handle in the water, whereupon the iron head rose up and joined itself again to the handle.
A neighbouring priest, envious of the holy man’s reputation, sent
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him a poisoned loaf. But Benedict miraculously knew it was poisoned. He had the habit of giving bread to a certain crow, and when the crow came on the day in question, the Saint said to it: «In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, take up that loaf, and leave it in some such place where no man may find it.» The crow obeyed, and on its return was given its usual dinner. The wicked priest, seeing he could not kill Benedict’s body, decided to kill his soul, and sent seven naked young women into the monastery. The Saint feared lest some of the younger monks might be moved to sin, and therefore departed himself, that the priest might no longer have a motive for such acts. But the priest was killed by the ceiling of his rooms’ falling on him. A monk pursued Benedict with the news, rejoicing, and bidding him return. Benedict mourned over the death of the sinner, and imposed a penance on the monk for rejoicing.
Gregory does not only relate miracles, but deigns, now and then, to tell facts in the career of Saint Benedict. After founding twelve monasteries, he
