Prominent among the causes producing variations in the monastic type
was the influence of climatic conditions and race characteristics.
The monasticism as well as the religion of the East has always
differed from the monasticism and the religion of the West. The Eastern
mind is mystical, dreamy, contemplative; the Western mind loves
activity, is intensely practical. Representatives of the Eastern faiths
in the recent Parliament of Religions accused the West of materialism,
of loving the body more than the soul. They affected to despise all
material prosperity, and gloried in their assumed superiority, on
account of their love for religious contemplation. This radical
difference between the races of the East and West is clearly seen in
the monastic institution. Benedict embodied in his rules the spirit and
active life of the West, and hence, the monastic system, then in danger
of dying, or stagnating, revived and spread all over Europe. Again, the
hermit life was ill-adapted to the West. Men could not live out of
doors in Europe and subsist on small quantities of food as in Egypt.
The rigors of the climate in Europe demanded an adaptation to new
conditions.
But aside from the differences between Eastern and Western
monasticism, the Christian institution passed through a variety of
changes. The growth of monasticism from the hermit stage to the
cloistral life has already been described. To what shall the
development of the community system be attributed? No religious
institution can remain stationary, unaffected by the changing
conditions of the society in which it exists. The progress of the
intellect, and the development of social, political and industrial
conditions, effect great transformations in religious organizations.
The monastic institution grew up amid the radical changes of
European society. In its early days it witnessed the invasion of the
barbarians, which swept away old political divisions and destroyed many
of the heritages of an ancient civilization. Then the process of
reconstruction slowly began. New states were forming; nations were
crystallizing. The barbarian was to lay the foundations of great cities
and organize powerful commonwealths out of wild but victorious tribes.
The monk could not remain in hiding. He was brother to the roving
warrior. The blood in his veins was too active to permit him to stand
still amid the mighty whirl of events. Without entirely abandoning his
cloistral life, he became a zealous missionary of the church among the
barbarians, a patron of letters and of agriculture, in short a stirring
participant in the work of civilization.
Next came the crusades. Jerusalem was to be captured for Christ and
the church. The monk then appeared as a crusade-preacher, a warrior on
the battle-field, or a nurse in the military hospital.
The rise of feudalism likewise wrought a change in the spirit and
position of the monks. The feudal lord was master of his vassals. “The
genius of feudalism,” says Allen, “was a spirit of uncontrolled
independence.” So the abbot became a feudal lord with immense
possessions and powers. He was no longer the obscure, spiritual father
of a little family of monks, but a temporal lord also, an aristocrat,
ruling wide territories, and dwelling in a monastery little different
from the castle of the knight and often exceeding it in splendor. With
wealth came ease, and hard upon the heels of ease came laziness,
arrogance, corruption.
Then followed the marvelous intellectual awakening, the moral
revival, the discoveries and inventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. The human mind at last had aroused itself from a long
repose, or turned from a profitless activity into broad and fruitful
fields. The corruption of the monasteries meant the laxity of vows, the
cessation of ministration to the poor and the sick. Then arose the
tender and loving Francis, with his call to poverty and to service. The
independent exercise of the intellect gave birth to heresies, but the
Dominicans appeared to preach them down.
The growth of the secular spirit and the progress of the new
learning were too much for the old monasticism. The monk had to adapt
himself to a new age, an age that is impatient of mere contemplation,
that spurns the rags of the begging friar and rebels against the fierce
intolerance of the Dominican preaching. So, lastly, came the suave,
determined, practical, cultured Jesuit, ready to comply, at least
outwardly, with all the requirements of modern times. Does the new age
reject monastic seclusion? Very well, the Jesuit throws off his
monastic garb and forsakes his cloister, to take his place among men.
Are the ignorance and the filth of the begging friars offensive? The
Jesuit is cultured, affable and spotlessly clean. Does the new age
demand liberty? “Liberty,” cries the Jesuit, “is the divine
prerogative, colossal in proportion, springing straight from the broad
basin of the soul's essence!”
Such in its merest outlines is the story of the development of the
monastic type and its causes.