Many important results followed the fall of the monasteries. The
majority of the House of Lords was now transferred from the abbots to
the lay peers. The secular clergy, who had been fighting the monks for
centuries, were at last accorded their proper standing in the church.
Numerous unjust ecclesiastical privileges were swept aside, and in many
respects the whole church was strengthened and purified. Credulity and
superstition began to decline. Ecclesiastical criminals were no longer
able to escape the just penalty for their crimes. Naturally all these
beneficent ends were not attained immediately. For a while there was
great disorder and distress. Society was disturbed not only by the
stoppage of monastic alms-giving, but the wandering monks, unaccustomed
to toil and without a trade, increased the confusion.
In this connection it is well to point out that some writers make
very much of the poverty relieved by the monks, and claim that the
nobles, into whose hands the monastic lands fell, did almost nothing to
mitigate the distresses of the unfortunate. But they ignore the fact
that a blind and undiscriminating charity was the cause, and not the
cure, of much of the miserable wretchedness of the poor. Modern society
has learned that the monastic method is wholly wrong; that fraud and
laziness are fostered by a wholesale distribution of doles. The true
way to help the poor is to enable the poor to assist themselves; to
teach them trades and give them work. The sociological methods of
to-day are thoroughly anti-monastic.
On the other hand, the infidel Zosimus, quoted by Gibbon, was not
far wrong when he said “the monks robbed an empire to help a few
beggars.” The fact that the religious houses did distribute alms and
entertain strangers is not disputed; indeed it is pleasant to reflect
upon this noble charity of the monks; it is a bright spot in their
history. But it is in no sense true that they deserve all the credit
for relieving distress. They received the money for alms in the shape
of rents, gifts and other kinds of income. Hallam says, “There can be
no doubt that many of the impotent poor derived support from their
charity. But the blind eleemosynary spirit inculcated by the Romish
church is notoriously the cause, not the cure, of beggary and
wickedness. The monastic foundations, scattered in different countries,
could never answer the ends of local and limited succor. Their gates
might, indeed, be open to those who knocked at them for alms....
Nothing could have a stronger tendency to promote that vagabond
mendicity which severe statutes were enacted to repress.”
It seems almost ungracious to quote such an observation, because it
may be distorted into a criticism of charity itself, or made to serve
the purposes of certain anti-Romanists who cannot even spare those
noble women who minister to the sick in the home or hospital from their
bigoted criticisms. Small indeed must be the soul of that man who
permits his religious opinions to blind his eyes to the inestimable
services of those heroic and self-sacrificing women. But even Roman
Catholic students of social problems must recognize the folly of
indiscriminate alms-giving. “In proportion as justice between man and
man has declined, that form of charity which consists in giving money
has been more quickened.” The promotion of industry, the repression of
injustice, the encouragement of self-reliance and thrift, are needed
far more than the temporary relief of those who suffer from oppression
or from their own wrong-doing.
Some of those who deplore the fall of the monasteries make much of
the fact that the modern world is menaced by materialism. “With very
rare exceptions,” cries Maitre, a French Catholic, “the most
undisguised materialism has everywhere replaced the lessons and
recollections of the spiritual life. The shrill voice of machinery, the
grinding of the saw or the monotonous clank of the piston, is heard
now, where once were heard chants and prayers and confessions. Once the
monk freely undid the door to let the stranger in, and now we see a
sign, 'no admittance,' lest a greedy rival purloin the tricks of
trade.” Montalembert, referring to the ruin of the cloisters in France,
grieves thus: “Sometimes the spinning-wheel is installed under the
ancient sanctuary. Instead of echoing night and day the praises of God,
these dishonored arches too often repeat only the blasphemies of
obscene cries.” The element of truth in these laments gives them their
sting, but one should beware of the fervid rhetoric of the worshipers
of medievalism. This century is nobler, purer, truer, manlier, and more
humane than any of the centuries that saw the greatest triumphs of the
monks. They, too, had their blasphemies, often under the cloak of
piety; they, too, had their obscene cries. Their superstitions and
frauds concealed beneath those “dishonored arches” were infinitely
worse than the noise of machinery weaving garments for the poor, or
producing household comforts to increase the happiness of the humblest
man.
There is much that is out of joint, much to justify doleful
prophecies, in the social and religious conditions of the present age,
but the signs of the times are not all ominous. At all events, nothing
would be gained by a return to the monkish ideals of the past. The hope
of the world lies in the further development and completer realization
of those great principles of human freedom that distinguish this
century from the past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that
the monasteries could not minister to that development of liberty,
truth and justice, which constitute the indispensable condition of
human happiness and human progress. Unable to adjust themselves to the
new age, unwilling to welcome the new light, rejecting the doctrine of
individual freedom, the monks were forced to retire from the field.
So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had
exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests
of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived
on English soil. “The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its
last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent
in rapt and lovely adoration before the altar.” Its majestic and solemn
ruins proclaim its departed grandeur. Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts
with kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its
virtues and its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its
poverty, all are gone. Silence and death keep united watch over
cloister and tomb. We should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings;
we should be untrue if, ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to
life that which God has laid in the sepulcher of the dead.
“Where pleasant was the spot for men to dwell,
Amid its fair broad lands the abbey lay,
Sheltering dark orgies that were shame to tell,
And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way,
All in their convent weeds of black, and white, and gray.
From many a proud monastic pile, o'erthrown,
Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled;
The web, that for a thousand years had grown
O'er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread.”
—Bryant.
All forms of religious character and conduct are grounded in certain cravings of the soul, which, in seeking satisfaction, are influenced by theoretical opinions. The longings of the human heart constitute the impulse, or the energy, of religion. The intellectual convictions act as guiding forces. As a religious type, therefore, the monk was produced by the action of certain desires, influenced by specific opinions respecting God, the soul, the body, the world and their relations.
The existence of monasticism in non-Christian religions implies that whatever impetus the ascetic impulses in human nature received from Christian teaching, there is some broader basis for monastic life than the tenets of any creed. Biblical history and Christian theology furnish some explanation of the rise of Christian monasticism, but they do not account for the monks of ancient India. The teachings of Jesus exerted a profound influence upon the Christian monks, but they cannot explain the Oriental asceticism that flourished before the Christ of the New Testament was born. There must have been some motive, or motives, operating on human nature as such, a knowledge of which will help to account for the monks of Indian antiquity as well as the begging friars of modern times. It will therefore be in order to begin the present inquiry by seeking those causes which gave rise to monasticism in general.