Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz

      II. MONASTICISM, CLERICALISM AND HIERARCHISM.

       Table of Contents

      § 44. Monasticism.121

      Disgusted with worldly pursuits and following an impulse of the oriental character in favour of the contemplative life, many ascetics withdrew into deserts and solitudes, there as Anchorets (ἐρεμίται, μοναχοί, μονάζοντες), amid prayer and labour, privation and self-denial, wringing out of the wilderness their scanty support, they strove after holiness of life which they thought they could reach only by forsaking the accursed world. The place where this extravagant extreme of the old ascetism arose was the Thebaid in Upper Egypt (§ 39, 3). The first, and for a long time isolated, examples of such professional abandonment of the world may be traced back to the 3rd century; but they had wider spread first in the post-Constantine Age. The example of St. Anthony was specially influential in leading a number of like-minded men to betake themselves to isolated dwellings, λαῦραι, in his neighbourhood and to place themselves under his spiritual direction. In this we have already the transition from a solitary anchoret life to a communal cœnobite life (κοινὸς βίος), and this reached maturity when Anthony’s disciple Pachomius gathered the scattered residents in his district into one common dwelling, Claustrum, Cœnobium, Monasterium, Mandra=fold, and bound them under a common system of ascetic practice in prayer and labour, especially basket making and carpet weaving. This arrangement, without, however, any tendency to displace the anchoret life properly so-called, won great favour, and this went on for some decades until first of all in the East, then also in the West about A.D. 370, the land was covered over with monasteries. The monastic life under its twofold aspect was now esteemed as βὶος ἀγγελικός (Matt. xxii. 30), φιλοσοφία ὑψηλή, melior vita. Yet even here corruption soon spread. Not merely the feeling of spiritual need, but ambition, vanity, slothfulness and especially the desire to avoid military service and villainage, taxes and imposts, induced men to enter the monasteries. The Emperor Valens therefore issued an order in A.D. 365 that such men should be dragged out by force from their retreats. Spiritual vices too were not wanting—extravagance and fanaticism, spiritual pride, etc. All the more did the most distinguished bishops, e.g. Basil the Great, feel it their duty to take the monasteries under their special supervision and care. Under such direction, besides serving their own special purpose, they became extremely important and beneficial as places of refuge for the oppressed and persecuted, and as benevolent institutions for the sick and the poor. Sometimes also by the introduction of theological studies as seminaries to prepare candidates for the higher ecclesiastical offices. Other prelates, however, preferred to use their monks as a trusty horde for the accomplishment of their own ambitious party ends. The monks were always reckoned among laymen, but were distinguished from the Seculares as Religiosi or Conversi.

      § 44.1. The Biography of St. Anthony.—According to the Vita s. Antonii ascribed to Athanasius, Anthony was sprung from a wealthy Coptic family of the country town of Coma in Upper Egypt, and was born in A.D. 251. At the age of eighteen he lost his parents, and, being powerfully affected by hearing the story of the rich young ruler in the gospel read in church, he gave away all his goods to the poor and withdrew into the desert (A.D. 285). Amid terrible inward struggles, which took the form of daily conflicts with demons, who sprang upon him from the sides of his cave in the shape of all sort of beasts and strange creatures, he spent a long time in a horrible tomb, then twenty years in the crumbling ruins of a castle, and finally he chose as his constant abode a barren mountain, afterwards called Anthony’s Mount, where a well and some date palms afforded him the absolutely indispensable support. His clothing, a sheep’s skin and a hairy cloak, was on his body day and night, nor did he ever wash himself. The fame of his holiness attracted a multitude of like-minded ascetics who settled in his neighbourhood and put themselves under his spiritual direction. But also men of the world of all ranks made pilgrimages to him, seeking and finding comfort. Even Constantine and his sons testified in correspondence with him their veneration, and he answered “like a Christian Diogenes to the Christian Alexander.” Pointing to Christ as the only miracle worker, he healed by his prayers bodily maladies and by his conversations afflictions of the soul. Amid the distress of the persecution of Maximian in A.D. 311 he went to Alexandria, but found not the martyrdom which he courted. Again, in A.D. 351, during the bitter Arian controversy (§ 50), he appeared suddenly in the great capital, this time gazed at by Christians and pagans as a divine wonder, and converting crowds of the heathen. In his last days he resigned the further direction of the society of hermits gathered about him to his disciple Pachomius, himself withdrawing along with two companions into an unknown solitude, where he, bequeathing to the author his sheepskin, died in A.D. 356, in his 105th year, after exacting a promise that no one should know the place of his burial.—Until the appearance of this book, which was very soon translated into Latin by a certain Evagrius, no single writer, neither Lactantius, nor Eusebius, nor even Athanasius in any of his other undoubtedly genuine writings, mentions the name of this patriarchal monk afterwards so highly esteemed, and all later writers draw only from this one source. Weingarten has now not only proved that this Vita s. Ant. is not a biography in the proper sense, but a romance with a purpose which was intended “to represent the ideal of a monkish life dovetailed into the ecclesiastical system and raised notwithstanding all popular and vital elements into a spiritual atmosphere,” but has also disproved the Athanasian authorship of the book, without, however, seeking to deny the historical existence of St. Anthony and his importance in the establishment of monasticism, as this is already vouched for by the fact that even in the 4th century in the days of Rufinus pilgrimages were made to Mons Antonii.—The most important witness for the Athanasian authorship is Gregory Nazianzen, who begins his panegyric on Athanasius delivered in Constantinople only a few years after that father’s death, which occurred in A.D. 373, with the wish that he could describe brilliantly the life of the highly revered man, as he himself had portrayed the ideal of monasticism in the person of St. Anthony. But, on the other hand, Jerome in his Vita Pauli and Rufinus in his Hist. eremit. seem not yet to have known the author of the book, and the former, first in his De scriptoribus ecclst., written twenty years later, knows that Athanasius was the author. Internal reasons, too, seem with no small weight to tell against the authenticity of the book, the biographical contents of which are largely intermixed with fabulous and legendary elements.

      § 44.2. The Origin of Christian Monasticism.—From the fact that not only Lactantius, but also Eusebius, whose history reaches down to A.D. 324, have nothing to say of a monasticism already developed or then first in process of development, it may perhaps be concluded that although in a general way such an institution was already in existence, it had not yet become known beyond the bounds of the Thebaid where it originated. But from the fact that Eusebius, who died in A.D. 340, in his Vita Constantini reaching down to A.D. 337, never makes any mention of monasticism, we cannot with like probability infer a continuance of such ignorance down to the above-mentioned year, but must attribute it to the limited range of the book in question. In his commentary on Ps. lxviii. 7 and lxxxiv. 4 he distinctly speaks of a Christian monasticism. The fugitive Athanasius, too, so early as A.D. 356 betakes himself to the monks of the Thebaid, and stays for a year with them (§ 50, 2, 4), which presupposes a certain measure of organization and celebrity on the part of the community of that region. In his Hist. Arianorum ad monachos, written about A.D. 360, he declares that already monasticism had spread through all the τόποι or districts of Egypt. Of a monasticism outside of Egypt, however, even this writing still knows nothing. We shall not, therefore, greatly err if we assume that the latter years of Constantine’s reign are to be taken as the period of the essential origin of Egyptian monasticism; though from this it is not to be concluded that the first isolated beginnings of it, which had not yet won any special recognition, are not to be assigned to a very much earlier period. Even the Old and New Testaments, in