It has already been shown that some solitude is essential to our
richest culture. Our higher nature demands time for reflection and
meditation. But the monks carried this principle to an extreme, and
they overestimated its benefits. “Ambition, avarice, irresolution,
fear, and inordinate desires,” says Montaigne, “do not leave us because
we forsake our native country, they often follow us even to cloisters
and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, nor hair shirts, nor
fasts, can disengage us from them.”
Besides these passions, which the monks carried with them, their
solitary life tended to foster spiritual pride, contract sympathy, and
engender an inhumane spirit. True, there were exceptions; but the
sublime characters which survive in monastic history are by no means
typical of its usual effects. Seclusion did not benefit the average
monk. Indeed there is something wanting in even the loftiest monastic
characters. “The heroes of monasticism,” says Allen, “are not the
heroes of modern life. All put together, they would not furnish out one
such soul as William of Orange, or Gustavus, or Milton. Independence of
thought and liberty of conscience, they renounced once for all, in
taking upon them the monastic vow. All the larger enterprises, all the
broad humanities, which to our mind make a greater career, were rigidly
shut off by a barrier that could not be crossed. All the warmth and
wealth of social and domestic life was a field of forbidden fruit, to
be entered only through the gate of unpardonable sin.”
Thus self-excluded from a normal life in society, often the subject
of self-inflicted pain, it is no wonder that the monk impaired all the
nobler and manlier feelings of the soul, that he became strangely
indifferent to human affection, that bigotry and pride often sat as
joint rulers on the throne of his heart. He who had trampled on all
filial relations would scarcely recognize the bonds of human
brotherhood. He who heard not the prayer of his own mother would not be
likely to listen to the cry of the tortured heretic for mercy. Man as
man was not reverenced. It was the monk in man who was esteemed. As
Milman puts it, “Bigotry has always found its readiest and sternest
executioners among those who have never known the charities of life.”
Nor is it a matter of surprise that the monk was spiritually proud.
He was supposed to stand in the inner circle, a little nearer the
throne of God than his fellow-mortals. When dead, he was worshiped as a
saint and regarded as an intercessor between God and his lower
fellow-creatures. His hatred of the base world easily passed over into
a sense of superiority and ignoble pride.
“True social life,” says Martensen, “leads to solitude.” This truth
the monks emphasized to the exclusion of the converse, “true life in
solitude leads back to society.” John Tauler, the mystic monk, realized
this truth when he said: “If God calls me to a sick person, or to the
service of preaching, or to any other service of love, I must follow,
although I am in the state of highest contemplation.” The hermits of
the desert, and too often the monks of the cloister, escaped from all
such services, and selfishly gave themselves up to saving their own
souls by contemplation and prayer. Ministration to the needy is the
external side of the inner religious life. It is the fruit of faith and
prayer. The monk sought solitude, not for the purpose of fitting
himself for a place in society, but for selfish, personal ends. Saint
Bruno, in a letter to his friend Ralph le Verd, eulogizes the solitude
of the monastic cell, and among other sentiments he gives expression to
the following: “I am speaking here of the contemplative life; and
although its sons are less numerous than those of active life, yet,
like Joseph and Benjamin, they are infinitely dearer to their
Father.... O my brother, fear not then to fly from the turmoil and the
misery of the world; leave the storms that rage without, to shelter
yourself in this safe haven.”
Thus sinful and sorrowing humanity, needing the guidance and comfort
that holy men can furnish, was forgotten in the desire for personal
peace and future salvation.
Another baneful result of isolation was the strangulation of filial
love. When the monk abandoned the softening, refining influence of
women and children, one side of his nature suffered a serious
contraction. An Egyptian mother stood at the hut of two hermits, her
sons. Weeping bitterly, she begged to see their faces. To her piteous
entreaties, they said: “Why do you, who are already stricken with age,
pour forth such cries and lamentations?” “It is because I long to see
you,” she replied. “Am I not your mother? I am now an old and wrinkled
woman, and my heart is troubled at the sound of your voices.” But even
a mother's love could not cope with their fearful fanaticism., and she
went away with their cold promise that they would meet in heaven. St.
John of Calama visited his sister in disguise, and a chronicler,
telling the story afterwards, said, “By the mercy of Jesus Christ he
had not been recognized, and they never met again.” Many hermits
received their parents or brothers and sisters with their eyes shut.
When the father of Simeon Stylites died, his widowed mother prayed for
entrance into her son's cell. For three days and nights she stood
without, and then the blessed Simeon prayed the Lord for her, and she
immediately gave up the ghost.
These as well as numerous other stories of a similar character that
might be quoted illustrate the hardening influence of solitude. Instead
of cherishing a love of kindred, as a gift of heaven and a spring of
virtue, the monk spurned it and trampled it beneath his feet as an
obstacle to his spiritual progress. “The monks,” says Milman, “seem
almost unconscious of the softening, humanizing effect of the natural
affections, the beauty of parental tenderness and filial love.”