IX.

What was left? What new form of monasticism remained possible after all these 108attempts? None—or rather, perhaps, one, which in truth is no longer one, and yet became the last and in a true sense the authentic word of Western monasticism. It remained possible to begin with reversing the relations between asceticism and ecclesiastical service; to keep at once in the eye, as the purposed and highest aim, the ideal which had always floated before the gaze of Western monasticism, but had never been taken up save with hesitation. It remained possible to find, instead of an ascetic union with ecclesiastical tendencies, a society that should pursue no other aim than to strengthen and extend the dominion of the Church. The glory of recognising this possibility, and of understanding the lessons of history, belongs to the Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola. His creation, the Society of Jesus, which he set up against the Reformation, is no monasticism in the oldest sense of the word, nay, it appears as a downright protest against the monasticism of a St Antony or a St Francis. True, 109the Society is equipped with all the rules of the older Orders; but its first principle is that which they had uncertainly viewed as a side-purpose, or which they had unwillingly allowed to be imposed upon them by circumstances. To the Jesuits all asceticism, all renunciation, is but a means to an end. Emancipation from the world extends only so far as such emancipation helps towards domination over the world—a domination exercised politically by means of the Church. The professed aim of the Order is the dominion of the Church over the world. Religious enthusiasm, culture and barbarism, splendour and squalor, diplomacy and simplicity, all alike are employed by this Order to attain the one purpose to which it has dedicated itself. In it, Western Catholicism, so to speak, neutralised monasticism, and gave it a turn by which it made the aims of monasticism its own. And yet the Society was not the work of a cunning, calculating intelligence merely. As it arose, it was the product of 110a high enthusiasm, but of an enthusiasm from within that Church which had already rejected any sort of evangelical reform, and which had resolved to maintain itself for ever in the form given to it, in the course of a long history, by worldly wisdom and policy.

On the other side, the Jesuit Order is the last and authentic word of Western monasticism. Its rise, no less than its nature, lies entirely on the lines which we have traced from Benedict to Bernard, and from Bernard to the mendicants. The Society of Jesus has solved the problems to which they were unequal, and has attained the objects for which they strove. It produced a new form of piety, and gave to that piety a special expression and a methodical form, and in this respect it made a successful appeal to the whole of Catholic Christianity. It has known how to interest the laity in the Church, and has opened to them in its mysticism that which hitherto had been denied to them. It has penetrated the life of the Church in all 111its domains, and brought the faithful to the feet of the Pope. But not only has the Order constantly pursued objects of its own in the service of the Church; it has also known how to maintain itself at all times in a certain independence of her. While it has not seldom corrected the policy of the Popes in accordance with the programme of the Papacy, it to-day rules the Church by its peculiar Christianity, its fantastic and sensuous mode of worship, and its political morality. It never became a mere tool in the hand of the Church, and it never, like the earlier Orders, sank into mere insignificance. It never transformed itself into a department of the Church; rather did the Church fall under the domination of the Jesuits. In the Society of Jesus, in fact, monasticism has actually won the victory over the secular Church of the West.

Monasticism, then, prevailed; but what form of monasticism? Not that of St Francis; but one which had previously made the programme 112of the Church its own, and thus emptied and renounced its own essence. In it asceticism and renunciation have become mere political forms and instruments; diplomacy and a sensuous mysticism have taken the place of a simple piety and moral discipline. This monasticism can no longer materially maintain its genuineness except by its opposition to states and their culture, and by making small account of the individual. Under the supremacy of the Jesuits the Church has become specifically and definitively secularised; she opposes to the world, to history, and to civilisation, her own worldly possessions, which are the legacy of the Middle Ages. Her consciousness of ‘other-worldliness’ she strengthens to-day mainly by her opposition to the culture of the Renascence and of the Reformation; but she draws her strength from the failings and defects of that culture and from the mistakes of its protectors. If we regard the negative attitude of the Church to the modern State as the expression of her 113‘other-worldly’ sentiment, then monasticism has indeed conquered in her; but if we see, in the manner in which she to-day maintains this attitude, an essential secularisation, then it is precisely the Jesuitic monasticism which is to be made answerable therefor. As historical factors, the other Orders are to-day nearly without importance. The Society of Jesus influenced the older and the younger almost without exception. Whether they returned, like the Trappists, to an Oriental silence, or whether some of them, in the style of the old Egyptian monks, have come to view even ecclesiastical learning with mistrust, and to declaim against it; whether they continue their existence divided between the world and asceticism, though it be to the attainment of something notable in social usefulness or in the salvation of individuals—in any case they have ceased to be an historical factor. Their place has been taken by the Jesuits, and by the ‘Congregations,’ those elastic and pliant creations in which the 114spirit of the Jesuitic Order has found a point of contact with the needs and institutions of modern society. The Congregations, directed in the spirit of the Society of Jesus, and the innumerable ‘free’ Catholic associations which work in the same spirit, and which are at need secular or spiritual, free or ‘tied’; these are the real Catholic monasticism of modern times.

In the Church of the West, which set before herself moral and political aims, monasticism in its original form, and the ideals of that monasticism, have had in the long run but sporadic effects. So far as it decided to bear its part in the secular mission of the Church, it had to transform itself into that society which betokens its freedom from the world by a worldly and political reaction against culture and history, and which thus brought to completion the secularisation of the Church. Monasticism in the East maintained its independence at the cost of stagnation; monasticism in the West remained effectual at the 115cost of losing its essential principle. In the East it was shattered, because it thought it could despise moral effort for the benefit of the world; and in the West it succumbed, because it subjected itself to a Church that devoted religion and morality to the service of politics. But there, as here, it was the Church herself that engendered monasticism and appointed its ideals; and thus in East and West alike, though after long vacillation and severe struggles, monasticism came finally to be the protector of ecclesiastical tradition and the guardian of ecclesiastical empiricism; and so its original aims were transformed into their opposites.

Even to-day, to certain hearts weary of the world, monasticism may indeed bring peace; but the view of history passes beyond monasticism to the message of Luther, that man begins the imitation of Christ when, in his calling and in his sphere of life, he aids in the work of God’s kingdom by faith and ministering love. Even this ideal is not simply 116identical with the content of the Gospel message; but it points out the lines along which the Christian must move, and secures him against insincerity and self-deception. Like all ideals, it was set up when men were striving to escape from an intolerable position; and, like them, it was soon falsified and tainted by the world. But if it aims to be no more than the confession that no man attains to the perfection of life which is set before us in the Gospel; and if it expresses the fact that in any condition the Christian may rely on the divine help and grace; then it will be the strength of the weak, and in the strife of creeds it may yet be a signal of peace.