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           Title: Monasticism: Its Ideals and History and The Confessions of St
                  Augustine
      Creator(s): Harnack, Adolf (1851-1930)
     Print Basis: Originally published by Williams and Norgate in 1911
   CCEL Subjects: All; Theology
      LC Call no: BX2431.H35 1901
     LC Subjects:

                  Christian Denominations

                  Roman Catholic Church

                  Monasticism. Religious orders
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                                  Monasticism:
                             Its Ideals and History

  and

                        The Confessions of St. Augustine

Two Lectures
By

ADOLF HARNACK

    RECTOR OF, AND PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN, THE UNIVERSITY, AND
    MEMBER OF THE ROYAL PRUSSIAN ACADEMY, BERLIN

TRANSLATED BY

E. E. KELLETT, M.A.,

AND

F. H. MARSEILLE, Ph.D., M.A.

    Published by Williams and Norgate, 1911
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TRANSLATORS' PREFACE.

   The larger works of Professor Harnack have long been known in England,
   and have established his fame as one of the foremost leaders of
   contemporary religious thought. His minor works display on a smaller
   scale the same historic sense, the same wide and profound learning, and
   the same sympathy with varying points of view, which characterise his
   more ambitious productions; and at the same time are perhaps capable of
   appealing to a wider circle of readers. Two of the most popular and
   interesting of these, Das Mönchthum and Augustin's Confessionen, are
   here offered to the English public. The version of the former is made
   from the fifth German edition.

   The translators desire to express their best thanks to the Rev. Dr
   Taylor, Rector of Winchcombe, for several valuable suggestions.
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Monasticism

   The Christian creeds, different as they may be from one another, unite
   in demanding that faith must exhibit itself in a Christ-like life:
   that, in fact, Christianity only comes by its own where it issues in a
   characteristic life. A genuinely Christian life is the common ideal of
   Christendom. But what is the nature of that life to be? Here the ways
   part. The diversity of creeds among us is, in the last analysis, as
   much due to the difference of beliefs as to that of the ideals of life
   engendered by the belief. All other distinctions, in a religious sense,
   are unessential, or derive from hence their importance and their
   meaning. It is not only theological wrangling, nor priestly lust of
   power, nor national diversities, to which schism in the Church is
   due--they have had their share, it is true, in originating it, and
   still help to maintain it; but what has really divided the Church, and
   given permanence to that division, is the variety of answers to the
   question,--What is the ideal of life? It is with the relations of
   groups not otherwise than with those of individuals. Not theoretic
   opinions, but feelings and aims, sunder and unite.

   If we ask either the Roman or the Greek Church wherein the most perfect
   Christian life consists, both alike reply: in the service of God, to
   the abnegation of all the good things of this life--property, marriage,
   personal will, and honour; in a word, in the religious renunciation of
   the world, that is, in Monasticism. The true monk is the true and most
   perfect Christian. Monasticism, then, is not in the Catholic Churches a
   more or less accidental phenomenon alongside of others; but, as the
   Churches are to-day, and as they have for centuries understood the
   Gospel, it is an institution based on their essential nature; it is the
   Christian life. We may therefore be allowed to expect that in the
   ideals of monasticism the ideals of the Church will be expressed, and
   in the history of monasticism the history of the Church.

   But is it possible for monasticism to have varying ideals? Is a history
   of monasticism possible? Is it not condemned to pass through history in
   the everlasting repetition of a grand monotony? Of what variety are the
   ideals of poverty, chastity, and resolute flight from the world
   capable? What sort of development can they experience or introduce who
   have turned their back not on the world only, but on its changing
   forms--that is, on its history? Is not the renunciation of the world
   essentially the abnegation of all development and of all history? Or,
   if it has not been so in fact, is not a history of monkish ideals from
   the very first a protest against the very conception of monasticism? It
   appears so--and it perhaps not merely appears so. But the history of
   the West shows even the most careless observer that monasticism has had
   its history, not only external but internal, full of the mightiest
   changes and the mightiest results. What a chasm divides the silent
   anchorite of the desert, who for a lifetime has looked no man in the
   face, from the monk who imposed his commands upon a world! And between
   these extremes are the hundreds of figures, peculiar and distinct, and
   yet monks, all inspired and dominated by the idea of a renunciation!
   And yet more, all stirrings of the heart, the most passionate and the
   most delicate, meet us in that world of renunciation. Art, poetry,
   science, have found in it a foster-mother; nay, the beginnings of our
   civilisation are a chapter from the history of monasticism. Was all
   this only possible to a monasticism that abandoned its ideals, or do
   its most special ideals admit of such effects? Does renunciation
   constitute a second world and a second history, like the usual world
   and the usual history, but purer and greater, or must it transform the
   world into a wilderness? Is the true monasticism that which sees in the
   world the temple of God, and which perceives with rapture in silent
   nature the breath of the divine spirit; or is that the true monasticism
   which maintains that the world with its nature and its history is the
   devil's? Both these watchwords resound to us from the kingdom of
   renunciation: which of them is authentic, having the sanction of
   historical truth? In monasticism the individual has been released from
   the bonds of society and custom, and raised to a noble self-reliance
   and humanity; in monasticism, again, it has been enslaved to
   narrowness, empty barrenness, and servile dependence. Is the original
   ideal to be blamed for the one or praised for the other?

   Such questions, and others like them, arise here. The evangelical
   Christian has in their correct answer no merely historical interest.
   Even if he be convinced that Christian perfection is not to be sought
   in the forms of monasticism, he has yet to test that system and
   establish its true character. Only then is it in truth overcome when a
   better can be set above the best it has to offer. But he who
   disparagingly casts it aside understands it not. He who understands it
   will recognise how much there is to learn from it. Nay, he will be able
   to learn from it not as from an opponent but as from a friend; not only
   not to the injury of his evangelical standpoint, but rather to its
   advantage. Let us then seek to gain a true appreciation of monasticism
   by means of an historical survey.
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  I.

   Monasticism is not as old as the Church. It is true that the Church of
   the fourth century, in which it took shape, thought it found even in
   the apostolic age essentially similar institutions; but the models
   which some persons have invoked, and still invoke, as precedents belong
   chiefly to legend. Yet the ancient Church was not wholly in error in
   its view. The idea of detachment, of forming close associations within
   the congregation, and of practising a special renunciation, could
   obviously not occur to individuals in the earliest decades of the
   Church's existence. But those who felt themselves driven by the Spirit
   of God to dedicate their whole life to the spread of the Gospel, as a
   rule gave up all their possessions, and wandered in voluntary poverty
   from one city to another as Apostles or Evangelists of Christ. Others,
   renouncing property and marriage, devoted themselves wholly to the
   service of the poor and needy of the congregation. These apostolic men
   were doubtless, when monasticism sought for its origins in the
   apostolic age, again remembered. And further, all Christians, so far as
   they were serious, were equally dominated by the belief that the world
   and its history had but a short span allowed before the end. Where this
   expectation is a living force, life, as usually lived, can no longer
   maintain an independent value, however conscientiously a man may
   recognise the calls of duty. The Apostle Paul, under special
   circumstances, repeatedly and expressly drove these home to the hearts
   of his congregations. For this reason he has been claimed on the
   Evangelical side as an opponent of monkery and all ascetic forms of
   Christianity; for he was the champion of Christian freedom. But we must
   not forget that even he has laid it down, in reference to worldly
   goods, that it is more advantageous to the Christian to renounce them,
   and that such is also the teaching of the Gospels. Yet by this that
   which has developed itself as monasticism is neither recommended nor
   commanded. Christ laid on us no heavy burdens as a new and painful law;
   and still less did He see salvation in asceticism as such. He Himself
   did not live as an ascetic; but He set before us a perfect simplicity
   and purity of thought, and a detachment of heart which, in abnegation
   and tribulation, in the possession and use of earthly goods, should
   remain unalterably the same. The simplest and hardest command in the
   Law--the love of God and of our neighbour--He set at the head of all,
   and opposed to all ceremonial sanctity and to all over-refined
   morality. He bade us take up each his own cross, that is, the
   sufferings which God appoints, and follow Him. The following of Jesus,
   in which is realised the search for the Kingdom of God and His
   righteousness, includes in itself the renunciation of all that clogs or
   hinders. But monasticism in later times tried so to adapt itself to the
   decisive Evangelical command Deny thyself,' that it fixed the bounds of
   denial without regard to individual disposition or calling.

   When, in the first century and in the beginning of the second,
   Christianity took up its mission in the Græco-Roman world, it was
   welcomed by those susceptible to its influence as the message of
   renunciation and of resurrection. The latter offered the delivering
   hope, and the former demanded the severance from the world of sin and
   sensuality. The first Christians saw in heathendom, in its idolatry, in
   its public life, even in its political constitution, the Kingdom of
   Satan actually realised; and they demanded therefore renunciation of
   that world. But to them it was no irreconcilable contradiction that the
   earth is the Lord's, guided and ruled by Him, and that it yet lies at
   the same time under the devastating rule of Satan. Again, they knew
   themselves as citizens of a world to come, upon which they were soon to
   enter. One who thus believes may easily make light of all that is
   around him, without falling into the attitude which is called
   pessimism, and which at best is the mental habit of the disappointed
   and wearied hero. He will keep the joy of life'; for he wishes for
   nothing more earnestly than to live, and he will gladly surrender
   himself to the death which leads to life. There is no room for the
   abnegation of joy where there is a living belief that God made and
   rules the world, or where it is clearly realised that not a sparrow
   falls without our Father. True it is that the imagination was then most
   actively stirred by the conception that the present course of the world
   stands forfeit to judgment, inasmuch as the trail of the serpent is
   over the whole creation which thus deserves destruction; but this world
   was nevertheless recognised as the sphere of God's kingdom, and thus
   worthy of a transforming renewal. Christianity had to take up the
   struggle alike with the gross and with the refined sensuality of
   heathenism; and Christianity, as has been well said, exhausted all her
   energies in proclaiming the great message: "Ye are not animals, but
   immortal souls; not the slaves of the flesh and of matter, but the
   lords of your flesh, and servants of the living God only." All ideals
   of culture must fall into the background till this message is believed.
   Better that man should regard marriage, eating and drinking, nay, his
   human side in itself as impure, than that he should make these things
   impure by sensual degeneracy. No new principle can assert itself in
   this world of sluggishness and custom unless it applies the keenest
   criticism to the condition of the present time and makes the most
   exacting demands upon us. Such demands the oldest Christianity did
   make; but soon arose the question what their theoretic foundations were
   to be, and to what extent they were to be binding.
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  II.

   So early as the beginning of the second century, a motley crowd of
   enquirers and believers began to knock at the doors of the Christian
   churches. Among them were men--usually called Gnostics--who were
   nourished and bewildered by the old and newest wisdom of the mysteries,
   but who were at the same time captivated by the evangelical message,
   and by the purity of the Christian life. They sought to define wherein
   consisted the essence of the Christian religion as a cognition of God
   and of the world; and they imagined they had established the true
   meaning of the Gospel--a meaning unknown to the common herd--God as the
   Lord and Creator of spirits, but over against Him from all eternity the
   realm of matter, of the finite and sensuous, which as such is evil: the
   human spirit a spark of the divine, but fatally enveloped by its enemy,
   the material world; the redemption by Christ a release of the spirit
   from the body, and the restoration of pure .spirituality. Hence the
   moral task--perfect asceticism, flight from daemonic nature, union with
   the original source of spirit by gnosis and knowledge. In the strife
   with this doctrine, which was Greek, but endeavoured to naturalise
   itself as Christian, and in the strife with Marcionism, which in its
   practical teachings was closely allied with Gnosticism, the Church
   passed through the first great crisis in her history. She was
   victorious. This apparently attractive attempt to find a philosophic
   basis for her own criticism of the present world she rejected as false
   and foreign to herself. She recognised in these doctrines the
   recurrence of daemonic, that is, of heathen conceptions; and condemned
   us secular Gnostic Christianity, with its asceticism and its lofty
   proclamations of the nobility and value of the Spirit. Nor only this,
   but she refused to know anything of a pretended higher esoteric
   Christianity for the spiritual': as against the Gnostic distinction of
   two Christian ideals, she took her stand, though with some hesitation,
   on the demand of a single and universally attainable Christian order of
   life. From the end of the second century it was for ever established in
   the Church that the belief in an essential dualism of God and the
   World, Spirit and Nature, was irreconcilable with Christianity, and
   that therefore all asceticism which rests on that dualism was equally
   irreconcilable therewith. The doctrine, indeed, continued to be taught
   that the present course of the world and the future time stand in
   opposition, that the earth has fallen under the dominion of demons. But
   it was God himself that made the surrender, and yielded the world to
   the devil. Yet He will show His omnipotence at the Last Judgment: nay,
   He shows it already in the victory of the faithful over the demons. The
   earth is the Lord's, but it is temporarily governed by the wicked
   angels; the world is good, but the life of the world is bad. It was
   thus that the theory of dualism was overthrown; by decrying it in
   theology,' and by seeking the explanation of evil in the freedom of the
   creature, which was a necessity in God's plan. Nevertheless the enemy
   that lurks here may indeed be defeated, but he cannot be annihilated.
   He found secret allies even in many theologians of authority, who knew
   how in subtle fashion to combine dualism with a belief in God the
   Almighty Creator. Under the most various disguises he again and again
   appears in the history of Christianity; but he has been obliged to mask
   his features. As an open enemy he is seen no more.

   Before this first crisis was at an end, a second arose to confront the
   Church. From the middle of the second century the conditions of the
   external position of Christendom began to alter more and more. Hitherto
   it had been scattered over the Roman Empire in a few small communities.
   These had been provided only with the most necessary forms of political
   organisation, as few and loose as were required by a religious union
   based on superhuman hopes, strict discipline, and brotherly affection.
   But a change was at hand. The Church received large multitudes which
   stood in need as much of a belated discipline--education and
   forbearance--as of a political guidance. The prospect of an approaching
   end of the world no longer, as of old, dominated all hearts. In place
   of the original enthusiasm there arose more and more a sober conviction
   or, perhaps, even a mere theoretical belief and a submissive
   acceptance. There were many who did not become Christians, but, finding
   themselves Christians, remained so. They were too strongly impressed by
   Christianity to leave it, and too little impressed to be Christian
   indeed. Pure religious enthusiasm began to wane, old ideals received a
   new form, and the self-reliance and responsibility of individuals grew
   weaker. The priests and kings of God' began to clamour for priests, and
   to come to terms with the kings of the earth. Those who once had prided
   themselves on being filled with the Spirit, no longer traced that
   Spirit so actively in themselves, and sought to recognise it in symbols
   of faith, in holy books, in mysteries, and in forms of Church order.
   The differences, again, in the social status of the brethren' began to
   assert themselves. Christians were already to be found in all
   callings--in the Emperor's palace, among the officials, in the
   workshops of the handicraftsmen, and in the studies of the learned,
   among the free, and among the enslaved. Were all these to continue in
   their occupations? Should the Church make the decisive stride into the
   world, enter into its relations, comply with its forms, recognise, as
   far as anyhow possible, its ordinances, meet its requirements; or
   should she remain, as she had been at first, a congregation of
   religious enthusiasts, separate and distinct from the world, and
   influencing the world only by a direct missionary propaganda? From the
   latter half of the second century the Church found herself confronted
   with the dilemma, either to begin a world-mission on a grand scale by
   effectively entering the Roman social system--of course, to the
   rejection of her original equipment and force--or to retain these, to
   keep the original forms of life, but remain a small and insignificant
   sect, scarcely intelligible to one in a thousand, incapable of saving
   and educating whole nations. This was the question--thus much we can
   assert to-day, obscurely as it could then be perceived. It was a great
   crisis, and--it was not the worst Christians who cried a halt. Now for
   the first time were voices heard in the Church, warning bishops and
   congregations against the advancing secularisation, holding up to the
   secular Christian those well-known sentences about the imitation of
   Christ in their literal sternness, and demanding a return to pristine
   simplicity and purity. Then once again arose, loud and penetrating, the
   cry to establish life on the ground of the expectation of the Lord's
   speedy return. There were congregations which, led by their bishops,
   withdrew to the desert; there were congregations which sold all their
   possessions in order to be able to meet the coming Christ, having laid
   aside every weight; there were voices that cried that Christians should
   forsake the broad way and seek the narrow way and the strait gate. The
   Church herself, impelled rather by circumstances than by a free
   movement, decided otherwise. She entered the world-state by the open
   door in order to establish herself permanently in it, to preach
   Christianity in its streets, to bring it the word of the Gospel,
   but--to leave it in possession of all except its gods. And she equipped
   herself with all the good things she could get from it, without marring
   the elasticity of the structure within which she was now establishing
   herself. With the aid of its philosophy she created her new Christian
   theology; its constitution she exploited in order to give herself a
   firm organisation; its jurisprudence, trade, intercourse, art,
   handicraft she pressed into her service; even from its ritual she
   learned to profit. Thus it is that at the middle of the third century
   we find the Church furnished with all the forces that a State and its
   culture could offer her, entering on all the relations of life, and
   ready for any concession which did not concern her creed. With this
   equipment she undertook and carried through a world-mission on a large
   scale. And those old-fashioned, those more serious believers, who
   protested against this secularised Church in the name of the Gospel,
   who aimed at gathering for their God a holy congregation, regardless of
   numbers and of circumstances? These could no longer remain in the great
   Church; and the majority of them, to provide a foundation for their
   stricter demands, claimed to have received a new and final revelation
   of God in Phrygia, and thus hastened the breach. They severed
   themselves, or were severed, from the Church. But, as usually happens,
   they had in the very struggle grown narrower and more one-sided. If, in
   the earlier times, a lofty enthusiasm had called forth as of itself
   stern forms of life, these now, minutely regulated, were to conserve
   and beget that original life. They became formalists in the direction
   of their lives, which after all were but little stricter than those of
   their adversaries, and they became haughty in their assertion of a
   pure' Christianity. Secular Christianity they despised as a mongrel,
   mechanical, unspiritual Christianity. In this sect' of the Montanists
   of the Empire, and in the related but older and yet more uncompromising
   Encratites, with their shrinking from the world, their more strictly
   ordered fasts and prayers, their distrust of the priestly office, of
   Church polity, of all property, and even of marriage, some have seen
   the forerunners of later monasticism. Nor is this view incorrect, if we
   look merely at the motives of the two movements; but in other respects
   there remains a great difference. Monasticism presupposes the
   comparative legitimacy of the secular Church; these Montanists denied
   it altogether. The device of a double morality in the Church may have
   existed in embryo; but it did not, at the beginning of the third
   century, dominate the entire conception of the Christian life, as is
   shown by the very fact that Montanism severed itself from the Church.
   True, the Church set a value on its confessors,' its virgins,' its
   celibates, its God-serving widows--provided they remained true to her
   communion--and that value became higher the oftener she discovered by
   experience that they tended to grow distrustful of the great society.'
   But these spiritual aristocrats were as yet no more monks than were the
   Montanists. Again, monasticism raised a way of life into a principle,
   which in the first instance was based, not on the prospect of the
   impending revelation of the kingdom of Christ, but on the idea of a
   perfect enjoyment of God here and of immortality yonder. Monasticism
   had necessarily to make an effort to fly from the world; Montanism did
   not expressly require a flight from that which its enthusiastic hope
   regarded as a thing already overcome.
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  III.

   But let us return to the Church of the third century. These zealots had
   indeed a right to criticise her; for the great dangers which they
   foresaw if the Church should enter into relations with the world-state
   did indeed appear. The saying of the apostle, To the Jews a Jew, to the
   Greeks a Greek,' noble as it was, was yet a dangerous maxim. The
   tradition of centuries has accustomed us to date the first
   secularisation of the Church from the time when, under Constantine, she
   began to be a State-Church. This tradition is false; the Church was
   already--in the middle of the third century--to a high degree
   secularised. Not that she had denied her traditional dogmas, or
   renounced her characteristic nature; but she had dangerously lowered
   her standard of life; and the apparatus of external culture with which
   she had enriched herself had turned to her spiritual harm. True, she
   was externally more firmly and solidly compacted than ever--she had
   become a state within a state--but the strong band that held her
   together was no longer religious hopes or brotherly love, but a
   hierarchic system which threatened to stifle not only Christian freedom
   and independence, but also the very sense of brotherhood. Her doctrine
   already rivalled the admired systems of the philosophers; but she had
   herself become too deeply imbued with their philosophy; her aims were
   deranged, her methods disturbed. Especially had she been influenced by
   the latest, posthumous system of Greek thought, Neoplatonism. By that
   which Neoplatonism lent her, she sought to hide the gaps caused long
   since by the loss or the change of her purely religious ideals. But the
   supramundane God of Neoplatonism was not the God of the Gospel, and the
   Neoplatonic promise of release from the world of sense was far
   different from the original Christian hope of salvation. Yet the
   theologians who studied or opposed it were subdued to its influence,
   and their own conceptions became imperceptibly affected thereby. Yet
   further, the tendency to conform to the State grew ever more manifest.
   It is true that Christianity sought to support the State; but she
   demanded its support in return, and did more to gain it over than she
   ought to have done. Lastly, the Church at length proved unable to
   maintain even her abated claims on the moral life of individuals; she
   was often constrained to content herself with a minimum, a mere
   external obedience to her institutions and forms of worship. On the
   other hand, she had attained this one point, that no Christian should
   wantonly assail her claim to be the Christian society; she had
   established the dogma that her organised community, with its bishops,
   its divine gifts, its sacred books, its worship, was the authentic and
   genuine foundation of Christ and His apostles, outside of which there
   was no salvation. Such was the Christian Church at the end of the third
   century and the beginning of the fourth. To this she had come, not
   without her own fault. Yet we ought to say, that while it is easy to
   measure this Church by the standard of apostolic times or by an
   imagined prototype, and to censure her gross secularisation, it is yet
   unjust to leave out of sight the historic conditions which influenced
   her. What she kept was, after all, not merely a remnant that she could
   not lose, nor a ruin that was not worth the preserving, but the old
   Gospel--though a Gospel dressed in the hulls and trappings of the time,
   and bereft of the vigorous claim to regulate the whole of life from
   within.

   But this Church was no longer in a position to give peace to all that
   came to her, and to shelter them from the world. She could promise a
   peace beyond the grave, but peace in the storms of this life she could
   not secure. Then began the great upheaval. Ascetics, even anchorites,
   there had already been in the great Church, no less than evangelists
   without property and travelling from place to place. In the course of
   the third century, there may already have been a few instances of
   individuals, tired of the world, fleeing into the desert; nay, they may
   here and there have actually joined together for common life. At the
   opening of the new century their number increased. They fled not the
   world only, but worldliness in the Church; yet they did not therefore
   flee from the Church. Honours and riches, wife and children, they
   renounced in order to shun pleasure and sin, to give themselves up to
   the enjoyment of the contemplation of God, and to consecrate life by
   the preparation for death. And rightly, in so far as the dominant
   theology also taught that the ideal of the Christian life consisted
   precisely in this practising for death, and again in that absorption in
   God in which man forgets his existence, and mortifies his body all but
   to death, in order to absorb himself in the very vision of the heavenly
   and eternal. This was the universal view of the wise, and they were in
   earnest. Yet further, no age, perhaps, was ever more deeply penetrated
   with the idea that the fashion of this world passeth away, that life is
   not worth living. In actual fact, a great epoch in human history was
   passing away. The Roman Empire, the old world, hastened to die, and
   fearful were its death-bed agonies. Sedition, bloodshed, poverty,
   pestilence within; without, the barbarous hordes on all sides. What was
   to be set against all this? No longer the power of a self-sufficient
   State, or the force of a uniform and tried ideal of civilisation, but
   an Empire falling asunder, hardly held together by a decaying and
   disintegrated culture; and that culture itself hollow and untrue, in
   which scarcely a single man could keep a good conscience, or a free
   natural mind, or a clean hand. But nowhere was the inner unreality of
   all relations more necessarily felt than at the centres of culture, and
   especially at Alexandria. Is it then wonderful that precisely there, in
   Lower Egypt, hermit life took its rise? The Egyptian people had the
   longest and richest history of all known nations; and even under the
   dominion of foreigners, under the sword of the Roman conqueror, Egypt
   was the land of toil, and its capital had remained the school of
   culture. But now the hour of the nation had come. It was then that
   monasticism, as a mighty movement, there took its origin; not much
   later we meet it on the east coast of the Mediterranean, and on the
   banks of the Euphrates. Attempts have in recent times been made to
   explain its rise from specifically heathen influences on Christianity
   in Egypt; but the question has not been sufficiently carefully
   examined, though we ought to be thankful for the proof that older
   analogous phenomena existed in the domain of the Egyptian religion.
   External influence was here not stronger, but probably even weaker than
   in any other province of Christian life and thought. It is true that,
   after the general fashion of mankind, Christianity at every stage of
   its development elaborated and proclaimed as the highest that ideal of
   life which necessity imposed. But here social, political, and religious
   pressure combined with a long existent Christian ideal which soon
   passed for that of the Apostles.

   There were, however, diverse conditions, and correspondingly different
   stages which preceded the growth of monasticism. Though the main agent
   was an ascetic instinct, born in the Church from heathen origins, the
   instinct to free the spirit from its many tyrants, to overcome both
   gross and refined egoism, to lead the soul to God--yet there was
   combined with it an ascetic ideal which was less related than opposed
   to that impulse. In the Alexandrian catechumen school, which in the
   third century was the chief fountain of ecclesiastical theology, the
   fundamental ideas of the idealist Greek moralists since Socrates were
   all taken up and closely studied. But these moralists had long since
   turned the Socratic rule Know thyself' into various directions for a
   right guidance of life. Most of these directions endeavoured to divert
   the true Wise Man' from absorption in the service of daily life and
   from "taking up the burden of public duty." They asserted that "there
   could be nothing more fitting or appropriate for the spirit than a care
   for itself, which, not looking without, nor busying itself with
   external things, but turning inwardly on itself, devotes its essence to
   itself, and thus practises righteousness." Here was taught the doctrine
   that the Wise Man, standing no longer in need of anything, is nearest
   to the Godhead, because, in full command of his richly endowed Ego, and
   in peaceful contemplation of the world, he has his share in the highest
   good. There it was proclaimed that the spirit, freed from the dominion
   of sense and living in constant meditation on eternal ideas, becomes at
   length worthy to behold the invisible and is itself made divine. It was
   this flight from the world which the ecclesiastical philosophers of
   Alexandria, and above all, Origen, taught their pupils. We have but to
   read the panegyric of Gregory Thaumaturgus on his great master, to see
   where are to be found the prototypes of this doctrine of the flight
   from the world, so belauded in the theologians. No one can deny that
   this form of renunciation involves a specific secularisation of
   Christianity, or that the self-sufficient Wise Man is almost
   diametrically opposed to the humble soul. But neither can anyone fail
   to recognise that both admitted of material realisation in endless
   diversities of form; and by this very diversity were liable to pass
   over into one another. And in this sense specially is Origen himself to
   be counted among the real founders of monasticism. True, what even he
   in his ethics brought to full expression was not merely the Stoic or
   Neoplatonic ideal, nor did he realise it in his life. Rather, all the
   ethical tendencies of the past, the Christian included, meet in him.
   For the position of the Egyptian theologians in the history of the
   world is this--and they all were forerunners or else pupils of
   Origen--that, alike in the domain of dogma and in that of the
   discipline of the Christian life, they unified the manifold gains of
   the existing forms of knowledge and practical rules, and threw over
   them the ægis of Revelation. It is thus that they became the fathers of
   all those parties in the Greek Church, that afterwards arose and
   contended with each other. As Origen could with equal right be claimed
   both by Arianism and by Orthodoxy, so he can be made answerable with
   equal justice for the peculiar secularisation of the theology of the
   Church and for the monastic inclinations first of the theologians and
   then of the laity. The same man who maintained the desirability of a
   lasting peace between Christianity and the State on earth, and
   predicted its realisation, simultaneously wished to see established, in
   the shadow of a universal peace, the cell of the learned monk, pious
   and self-absorbed. But the man that was not pious and learned, had yet
   in his faith an inexhaustible object of contemplation. Thus the demand,
   in truth, is made upon all Christians; yet, in a Christianity that was
   ever growing more indifferent, almost two generations went by before
   these ideas asserted their force, and they never became the most
   decisive ideas to the masses. Rare, indeed, were unions of monks, such
   as those which were modelled by Hieracas, the pupil of Origen, on the
   plan supplied by Origen himself. Distress and disgust with the everyday
   life started the movements as if with an irresistible natural force;
   and the Church of Constantine drove into solitude and the desert those
   who wished to devote themselves to religion.

   About 340 A.D. the movement had already become powerful. There must by
   that time have been thousands of hermits. The beginnings of monasticism
   proper, as of every great historical phenomenon, are shrouded in
   legend; and it is to legend, not to history, that we owe the memory of
   pretended founders. It is no longer possible to discriminate between
   fact and fancy. But we are certain on two points; and these are
   sufficient to enable us to discern and rightly judge the movement in
   its general outlines. We know the original ideal, and we can measure
   the extent of the renunciation. The ideal was an undisturbed
   contemplation of God; the means, absolute denial of the good things of
   life--and among them of Church communion. Not only was the world, in
   every sense of the word, to be avoided, but the secularised Church as
   well. Not that her teachings were held insufficient, her ordinances
   inappropriate, her divine gift indifferent; but her foundation was
   regarded as insecure, and men doubted not to make up for the loss of
   her sacramental advantages by asceticism and unceasing contemplation of
   what is holy.

   And what was the attitude of the secular Church herself to the
   movement? Could she bear to see her members venturing to release
   themselves from her direct guidance, and striking out a path of
   salvation outside her own control? Could she permit her sons, even if
   they did not directly attack her ordinances, to cast on them the shadow
   of a suspicion? She did not, and she could not, hesitate for a moment.
   She did the one thing left to secure her safety, in expressly approving
   the movement, nay, in bearing testimony that it realised the original
   ideal of the Christian life. The dread of inevitably losing themselves
   in the whirl of life, the disgust with that life, so empty and common,
   the prospect of a lofty good, had driven these men out of the world,
   and the Church made a virtue of necessity. Nor could she help doing so;
   for the more deeply she became involved in the world, in politics, and
   in culture, the more loudly and impressively had she preached what
   monasticism now practised.

   It is one of the most striking historical facts that the Church,
   precisely at the time when she was becoming more and more a legal and
   sacramental institution, threw out an ideal of life which could be
   realised, not in herself, but only alongside of herself. The more
   deeply she became compromised with the world, the higher, the more
   superhuman became her ideal. She herself taught that the loftiest aim
   of the Gospel was the contemplation of God; and she herself knew no
   surer way to this contemplation than flight from the world. Yet this
   line of thought appears in her only as the incongruous complement of
   the shallow morality to which she had reduced Christianity. Though her
   aims were actually directed to subjecting every thing to her poor moral
   rules and her ordinances of worship, yet her own theology tended in the
   opposite direction. Monasticism, unable to find satisfaction in
   theology,' seriously accepted the view that Christianity is a religion,
   and demands from the individual a surrender of his life. But it is an
   evidence of the extraordinary force with which the Church had
   established herself in the minds of men, that monasticism, on its first
   appearance, did not venture, like the Montanists, to criticise the
   Church, or to brand her path as a departure from the truth. If we
   consider what an enthusiasm, nay, what a fanaticism, speedily developed
   itself in the monastic communities, we shall be astonished to observe
   how few and ineffective were the attacks on the Church--even though
   they were not altogether absent. Hardly a single man demanded a reform
   of Christianity generally. The movement might well have proved a
   revolution for the secular Church, yet in truth it did not turn her
   paths aside. It is true that men conceived a strong distrust of the
   priestly office; how many fled when an attempt was made to impose that
   office on them! But reverence for it did not die out: it was only its
   dangers that men feared. Here and there a strain may have been visible
   between priests and monks, but in those cases it was the person, not
   the office, that was contemned.
     __________________________________________________________________

  IV.

   But let us not anticipate. Thousands had gone out, and the reputation
   of sanctity, dissatisfaction with the world, or dislike of work,
   enticed thousands after them. Of inducements to a monastic life there
   were many, especially since the establishment of a State Church, when a
   real or affected enthusiasm no longer led to martyrdom. Even about the
   middle of the fourth century there was a motley crew of anchorites in
   the desert. Some had gone out in order really to make atonement and to
   become saints; others to pose as such. Some fled society and its vices;
   others their calling and its toils. Some were simple-hearted and of
   indomitable will; others were sick of the whirl of life. In the one
   case the hermit desired to be rich in knowledge and true joy, and to
   devote his life to philosophy' in peaceful mental enjoyment; in the
   other he desired to become poor both in mind and in body, despising
   reason and learning. We have touching confessions of both kinds; but
   the complaints of the temptations of the world and of the inroads of
   sense resound louder than those of the selfishness of the heart. And
   alongside of the silent penitent we soon find the lawless enthusiast.
   The latter required a fetter; the other two required an organisation.
   And organisation was soon to appear; a life in common emerges into our
   view. We find it in two forms: colonies of eremites on the one hand and
   actual monasteries on the other. Rules were laid down, often very
   severe. They exhibit not only the sternness of asceticism, but also,
   even thus early, gross excesses which were to be punished, and
   simultaneously, here and there in the monastic colonies, an awakening
   fanaticism which passed all bounds. Thus early do we come across men
   who remind us of the Mad Dervishes of whom Oriental travellers still
   tell us. But even among genuine monks we observe, even in the fourth
   century, the most important differences. True, the fundamental rules of
   exclusive life with God, of poverty and chastity, and, in the
   monasteries, of obedience, are in all cases the same. But how
   differently did they work out in practice! To name only one point:
   some, full of thankfulness to have escaped from a false and artificial
   culture, discover in solitude what they had never seen--Nature. Into
   her they gradually grow; her beauty they search out and extol. From
   hermits of the fourth century we have pictures of nature such as
   antiquity seldom produced. Like happy children they tried to live to
   their God in His garden. In that garden they see the tree of
   knowledge--no longer forbidden--and thus solitude becomes to them a
   Paradise; no curse lies upon their toil, for to know is to be blessed.
   But the others--they understood asceticism otherwise. Not only culture,
   but nature, is to be shunned; not only social ordinances, but humanity
   itself. Everything that can be an occasion of sin--and what is there
   that cannot?--must be cast aside; all joy, all knowledge, all that is
   lofty in man. And what was the result? One man starved himself to
   death; a second ranged to and fro like a beast of the desert; a third
   plunged into the mud of the Nile and let himself be tortured by
   insects; a fourth, half-naked, the sport of wind and weather, spent
   years in silence on a pillar. Thus was the flesh to be subjected and
   crucified; thus was man to gain peace of soul in the contemplation of
   God: he was to be pure and to keep silence. But these men themselves
   were fain to confess that the sense of peace came upon them but rarely
   and for a moment. In its place came terrible phantasies, which took
   shape as concrete realities. And contemporaries eagerly listened to
   accounts of such experiences. The ageing world was enraptured with this
   refinement of renunciation, and with the wild dreams of monks dwelling
   miserably in the desert. Men to whom courage and will to perform were
   wanting, sought to enjoy these emotions at least in fancy.
   Story-tellers in monks' dress made novels and tales out of the actual
   or visionary experiences of silent penitents. Now appeared a new
   species of literature of the strangest kind, that of monasticism, and
   in its pages whole centuries found edification. This is one of the ways
   in which the secular Church repaid the deeds of that stern heroism
   which her own neglect was constantly calling into exercise.

   But of the two forms of monasticism here sketched in outline, which can
   claim a direct descent from Græco-Christian ancestry? Which ideal,
   considered under historical and religious relations, was the genuine
   one? That of the brethren who joyed in God and Nature, and devoted
   their lives in quiet seclusion to the knowledge of God and the world;
   or that of the heroic penitents? It is not merely to judge by results
   to say the latter alone. For, in considering the former, we must attend
   to the close relation in which it stands to the classical ideal of the
   philosopher; nor this alone. Let us for a moment put ourselves into the
   historic standpoint. The highest ideal--in the universal belief of the
   time--can only be realised outside of the world, outside of any
   calling; it lies hidden in asceticism. Asceticism is indeed a means to
   an end; but at the same time it is an end in itself: for it contains in
   itself the assurance that the penitent shall attain to the vision of
   God. If these prepositions are correct, then all is mere compromise
   that hinders the struggle à outrance; then not culture only, but
   nature, history, in a word, all purposed moral activity must be put
   aside as imperfect and harmful. Then it becomes essential to dare the
   glorious attempt, to free oneself from nature, from culture, nay, from
   the world of social morality, in order to be able in this way to form
   in oneself a pure type of the religious man. Here we reach the actual
   secret, but here also we touch the boundary of the old Greek view of
   Christianity. Even before the secular Church there floated as the
   highest ideal a vision of the religious life which raises man, even
   here on earth, beyond all the conditions of his existence--including
   the historical and social conditions. Not as if these were indifferent,
   or as if their opposite were equally right. But hitherto Christianity
   had been unable to realise any new moral life in a community, and the
   moral standards of the old life were outworn, useless, or no longer to
   be found. It was only a natural consequence that thus the more serious
   spirits--who yet were no reformers--should have felt the moral
   ordinances, in their degenerate state, as barriers essentially no
   better than the elementary conditions of human existence. Thus is a
   Christian ideal sketched out which is ostensibly purely religious--I
   should like to say supra-moral. It is not by way of historically
   founded social ordinances, or of activity with a moral end, that the
   Christian faith is to come by its own; but by way of the renunciation
   of everything human; that is, by the extremest asceticism. Thus shall
   we anticipate our coming share in the divine nature. This is, even
   to-day, the ideal aim of Greek Christendom, so far as it is not
   fossilised or diverted by Western influences: we cannot deny to it our
   sympathy if we think of the low level of so-called Christian morality
   above which, since it knows no better, it strives to rise. But it is a
   flight as barren as it is magnificent. For what do we now perceive? On
   the one side, a secular Church, subjected to the State and so knitted
   with the national life as to be indistinguishable from it; essentially
   a civilising agent, with but the smallest influence on the moral life
   of its members, and no longer pursuing definite aims of its own. On the
   other, a monasticism without historic aims, and therefore without
   historic development. Today--a few modern and perhaps hopeful phenomena
   being disregarded--it remains essentially what it was in the days of
   the first Byzantine Emperors. Even external regulations have scarcely
   altered. True, the type of Simeon Stylites is extinct; such types
   cannot conquer in the struggle for existence; but the cause of Simeon
   has been victorious, and so far has Stylites prevailed that even today
   the extremest asceticism counts for the best, and above all in this
   point, that Greek monasticism has seldom succeeded in giving itself up
   to purposed toil in the service of the Church or of humanity. The Greek
   monks--of course with venerable exceptions--to-day as a thousand years
   ago, live "in silent contemplation and blissful ignorance." To work
   they give only just as much attention as is necessary for a livelihood;
   but even now the unlearned monk is to the learned necessarily a
   reproach, the avoider of nature a reproach to the nature worshipper;
   still must conscience smite the working hermit when he sees the brother
   who neither toils nor spins nor speaks, but waits in solitary
   contemplation and mortification for the holy light of God to shine at
   last on him. As in the fifth century, so now, the rift continues
   between the regulars and the seculars. It is true that the higher
   dignitaries of the Church are chosen from the regulars--monasticism has
   even given Emperor and court a temporary or lasting ugly varnish--but
   the mutual relations have remained the same. The monastery stands
   alongside the Church, not in it; and it cannot be otherwise. What could
   it do for the Church which itself renounces every task of its own? The
   one thing in which it takes a living interest is the worship of the
   Church: it paints pictures of saints; occasionally it illuminates
   books. But even from worship it is allowed to emancipate itself. The
   hermit who for years shuns the communion of the Church is not merely
   tolerated by her; he is admired. Nay, she cannot help admiring him; for
   he realises the ideal to which she herself cannot attain--her higher
   ideal, I mean; for she now has two--that of asceticism and that of
   worship. He to whom the gift or the power is not given of attaining God
   by asceticism, may yet reach Him by becoming imbued with the holy
   mysteries of divine service. Salvation may be obtained by the worship
   of the Church if we join in it with piety, and if Church duties are
   duly performed. Monasticism has never attacked this theory, but rather
   supported it; and rightly, for indirectly she was benefited by it.

   For short periods the monastery approached the secular Church; and the
   latter, again, sought to take it into her service. For short periods,
   also, the attempt succeeded. The great Synods of the fifth to the
   seventh centuries provide examples. The dogmas which these Synods
   established arose in part from monkish fancy, and were defended by
   monkish arguments and monkish blows. But as the Bishops grew more
   cautious they shrank from calling the fanaticism of the monks to their
   aid; for whenever the latter took part in the strife there arose in due
   consequence revolution, war, and bloodshed. Accordingly after they had
   compromised certain Emperors of sham monastic piety, and soon after
   overturned the ideals of certain despotic reforming Emperors, they were
   left out in the cold. And why not, since their work was done? After the
   ninth century they seldom played a part in history. Precisely in
   consequence of their victory, they became, in their dealings with the
   world and the secular Church, a conservative force. Strange to say,
   these haters of the world are now the passive defenders of public
   worship and morality. When these are attacked, their fanaticism awakes,
   and it is here that monasticism knows itself to be at one with the
   spirit of the masses. In other respects the regulars and the seculars
   march side by side--or rather, when the former hold out a hand to the
   other, they place themselves unconditionally at the disposal of the
   State. The monk-bishop, as in the Byzantine Empire, so in the Turkish,
   has in many cases not yet ceased to be a policeman or perhaps a
   tax-gatherer--though a gradual improvement is unmistakable. Along with
   the State he exploits the Christian people; he enjoys the honours of a
   high official, but takes his share also in the official's corruption
   and incalculable changes of fortune. Thus the exaltation of the ideal
   found its punishment. Men tried by faith to remove all natural
   restrictions; in their presumption they thought also they could
   dispense with the benefits of moral achievement; and, with broken wing,
   they fell to the ground. A Church that had become political and
   secular, a monasticism of barren asceticism without a history,
   stubbornly maintaining national and ecclesiastical failings, was the
   result. The Greek Church contrived to unite in herself the opposite
   poles of asceticism and of the performance of ecclesiastical worship.
   Her proper domain, that of regulating the morals of daily life by
   faith, falls outside her direct cognisance. It is given over to the
   State and to the people--for it is essentially worldly. Nor did they
   find it hard gradually to annex the whole Church and to fashion it into
   an instrument for the attainment of their aims. Just because the ideal
   of monasticism and of the secular Church remained victorious in the
   contest with the Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries-just
   because of this did monk and priest become effectively and definitively
   the slaves of the State. In their flight from the sensuous the State
   overtook them; it imposed on them its own view of morality, but it
   appropriated their worship. Thus the Byzantine State still shows itself
   the genuine though degenerate descendant of the ancient one. But this
   one end was attained that, where the State set up expressly Christian
   ideas as the standard in public law and life, it took them in monkish
   form. The Byzantine code of laws--our own social and moral views, too,
   have not yet emancipated themselves from its bonds--is in part a
   strange congeries of pitiless Roman craft and of the monastic view of
   the world.

   Such is the history of monasticism in the East. We must again and again
   remind ourselves that to-day as of old it is the complement of the
   secular Church; that even to-day it rescues individuals from the
   trammels of common life; that there are many saints within its borders;
   that it is a protest against barren ecclesiasticism. But this review
   shows us that among the various human ideals as based on the Gospel,
   the ideal of contemplation and renunciation as a means of saving the
   soul can not be the last and highest; it shows that a merely passive
   courage must at length succumb; and that the world will intrude its
   ideals into the Church if the Christian strives to realise his own
   outside of the world. True enough is it that there are times when the
   weight of injustice pressing on the active man becomes unendurable, and
   that there will ever be individuals so highly strung that they must
   carry their best into solitude in order to preserve it; but where a pis
   aller is proclaimed as the highest virtue, there high virtues will lose
   their value, and finally men lose the reward for which those
   possessions were sacrificed. Have we not in our own times seen a
   personality like that of Tolstoï arise from the bosom of the Russian
   Church-a layman, it is true, but in his writings a genuine Greek monk,
   to whom the only chance of Church reform lies in a radical breach with
   culture and history, and to whom the whole moral code--even
   marriage--seems defiled so far as it stands in dependence upon sense?
   What a terrible foe of the Greek Church Manichæism must have been of
   old, we can learn to calculate from the writings of this extraordinary
   man. The more serious the Christianity of the Greek monk, the more
   helpless is he before the gloomy view that the whole world lieth in the
   Evil One. In the long run the monk must again flee to Church authority,
   lest he fall a slave to Manichæism.
     __________________________________________________________________

  V.

   How utterly different has been the evolution of monasticism in the
   West! A glance at its history in that region is sufficient at once to
   reveal the essential differences. In the first place, monasticism there
   had a real history; and in the second, monasticism there made history,
   secular and religious alike. It stands not merely alongside the Church,
   wasting itself in silent asceticism and mystical speculation; it stands
   in the very midst of the Church--nay, it has been, next to the Papacy,
   the strongest influence in all domains of Latin Christianity. The
   history of Oriental monasticism, from the fourth century to the present
   day, is bound up with but few names. Seldom did it produce
   sharply-marked individualities. But the history of Western monasticism
   is a history of persons and characters.

   Roman Catholicism shows us in its development a continuous chain of
   living reforms; and every one of these reforms is dependent upon a new
   step in the development of monasticism. The foundation of the
   Benedictine Order in the sixth century, the Clunian Reform of the
   eleventh, the appearance of the Mendicant Orders in the thirteenth, the
   foundation of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth, are the four great
   landmarks in the history of Western monasticism; but they are at the
   same time landmarks in the history of Western Catholicism. It was
   always the monks who saved the Church when sinking, emancipated her
   when becoming enslaved to the world, defended her when assailed. These
   it was that kindled hearts that were growing cold, bridled refractory
   spirits, recovered for the Church alienated nations. These indications
   alone show that in Western monasticism we have to recognise a factor of
   the first importance in Church and civilisation. How did it become so?

   Comparatively late and slow was the advance of monasticism from East to
   West, for neither the natural conditions nor the civilisation of the
   West were favourable to it. Whereas, by the middle of the fourth
   century, it had already spread wide in the East, and, as we may assume,
   arose in many districts independently of Egyptian influences, in the
   West it was only at the end of that century that it took firm
   root--nay, it was literally imported from the East. In the West its
   first admirers were those theologians who, like Rufinus and Jerome, had
   travelled over Egypt and Syria, and stood in the closest connection
   with the Greeks.' If monasteries arose, as they did, especially in
   Southern Gaul, it was under Eastern influences that they did so. And in
   the West, monasticism had from the very beginning to meet decided
   opposition from the Church; whereas in the East we hear but little of
   such opposition. We should read the works of Sulpicius Severus (circ.
   400) in order to learn what attacks monasticism in Gaul and Spain had
   about that time to meet before it could establish itself. The
   secularised Bishops, indeed, were not far from treating the monks as
   Manichæans. Nevertheless, the opposition speedily abated; even in the
   West it was not long before the prevailing feeling met monasticism half
   way, and shortly the once-anathematised name of that honest saint,
   Martin of Tours, came into high repute. Even before the great Augustine
   had espoused the cause, it had naturalised itself; and during the
   storms of the great migrations, it took firm root. The monastic ideal
   was at first identical in its essentials both in the East and in the
   West, and it remained so during a thousand years--absorption in God and
   stern asceticism, but especially virginity, which, in West as in East,
   ranked as the first condition of a consecrated life. To many, indeed,
   virginity was neither more nor less than the very essence of Christian
   morality. The Egyptian anchorites, even in the West, were reckoned at
   all times as the fathers and models of the true Christian life. In
   spite of all attempts in that direction, their achievements were never
   cast into the shade by those of St Martin; and the narratives of their
   lives, during many generations, carried on an unobtrusive mission in
   Italy, Gaul, and Germany--nay, even beyond the Channel, in England and
   the Emerald Isle. And yet, in the fifth century, the influences were
   already working which were to give to Western monasticism a quite other
   importance and a history. We need only remark, in passing, that the
   climatic conditions of the West, apart from all others, necessarily
   demanded a somewhat different mode of life from that of the East.
   "Edacitas in Graecis gula est, in Gallis natura," observed one of the
   earliest patrons of the Western monks. But apart from this, the
   internal evolution of Western Christendom, so early as the time of
   Tertullian, had taken a course different from that which it took in the
   East. Not only did practical religious questions--such as those of
   Penance, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Nature of the Church--come to the
   front, but the ancient expectations of the reign of Christ on earth
   were more slowly sacrificed to the nebulous theological speculations of
   the East. In such speculations men took only a languid interest. In the
   so-called Chiliast' conceptions the Western Church retained a keen eye
   for that which the Church of Christ ought to be; and these conceptions
   were necessarily the more valuable in proportion as, in
   contradistinction to Montanism, the fantastic element was stripped off,
   and as the idea of a literal fulfilment of the prophecies fell, of its
   own accord, into the background. Western monasticism, in contrast to
   the Eastern, maintained the Apocalyptic element of Chiliasm, which, it
   is true, lay dormant for long periods, but at critical moments
   constantly emerged. The ecclesiastical ideas of Western Christendom
   were fused together to a new Christian philosophy of the world and of
   life by St Augustine. Augustine's central conceptions are the grace of
   God in the Church working for righteousness, and the Church herself.
   The Church, primarily as the congregation of the faithful, but
   secondarily as a visible institution, is the kingdom of righteousness
   and of the morally good--the Kingdom of God. At the time of the fall of
   the old Empire of the West, and of the rise of new half-heathen States,
   he sketched the noble conception of a future history of the Church. Her
   business is to fulfil humanity with the strength of the good, and with
   true righteousness; as the visible manifestation of the City of God,
   she has to press into her service the world-empire and the kingdoms of
   the world; she has to guide and train the nations. Only then does
   Christianity come by its own, when it creates a kingdom of moral
   excellence on earth, a supramundane brotherhood of humanity: only then
   does it come by its own, therefore, when it rules; and it only rules by
   the rule of the Holy Catholic Church. Spiritual dominion over the
   world, a divine City of Righteousness on earth, is thus a Christian
   ideal, an ideal alike for individuals and for the Church as a whole.
   Not only the old Apocalyptic hopes and the practical aims of the West,
   but also Greek speculation, are brought by Augustine into a marvellous
   interdependence; they are indeed not to correct but to delimit each
   other. Christian salvation, so to speak, appears in double form; it is
   the eternal blissful contemplation of God both in this world and in the
   next, but it is at the same time in this world an imperial city of
   divine gifts and moral powers.

   These positions had a very different drift from that of the painfully
   elaborated dogmas of Greek Christianity. They assigned to the Church an
   independent mission, for the State and by its side. She was to serve
   God and the world. This mission was a problem demanding a worthy
   solution. The Greek ideal is a problem only in so far as its
   realisation is but approximately possible; in itself it has but one
   meaning. But for Augustine's conception every task resolved itself at
   the same time into a question which every man learnt to put only in
   proportion as he himself actively worked at it. The detail in the whole
   of the Christian conception, clearly as it could be viewed in itself,
   revealed its essence and received its value only in its proper
   relations to other things.

   How is the service of the world related to the service of God? In what
   connection with religion is morality to be placed? The discovery was
   again made that there already exists genuine good in this world; that
   everything proceeding out of the hand of God is good, and that man
   finds his blessedness only in surrendering his will to God. In this
   surrender of heart and will by faith and love, which is alone possible
   by divine grace as bestowed in the Sacraments, man becomes justified
   and receives freedom and righteousness--that is, moral perfection. This
   perfection is indeed a very high good; but it is not the highest. For
   the hope is still alive that man, when raised to God, shall enjoy a
   blessedness which eye hath not seen nor car heard--the blessedness of
   seeing God and being like Him. But what is the relation of this
   religious aim to the moral purpose of a perfect righteousness in the
   earthly kingdom of God? We may assert that the one is subordinate to
   the other, and yet act quite differently. This appears to be the case
   with Augustine; and the Church in her march to world-dominion followed
   him. Again and again, as a matter of fact, in attempting to identify
   herself with the kingdom of Christ, she attached paramount importance
   to a zeal for her own maintenance and dominion, teaching the nations
   that they must seek and find in her the highest good. In her
   consciousness that she possesses and can distribute the divine grace of
   justification, she ceased in principle to suffer anyone to seek his
   blessedness by a path of his own, in good works and in asceticism. For
   the sake of the alone sufficient grace of God, and at the same time for
   the interest of the Church, she set at naught for the Catholic
   Christian, so early as the fifth century, the value of an asceticism
   not sanctioned by the Church. But in this point she did not escape a
   certain amount of vacillation; for she never denied that the Church
   cannot guarantee salvation, and that in the last instance the
   individual will stand before his God, alone, and without her
   protection. To this hesitation on the question how far the individual
   Christian is to be left independent--a question which was inevitably to
   prove of decisive import for the position of monasticism in the Western
   Church--corresponds her uncertainty in appraising civil ordinances and
   all political forms. The Church is the kingdom of righteousness and
   love; outside her all is unrighteousness and hatred. But how does it
   then stand with States? Are they and their ordinances, after all,
   independent values, or do they become so only in subjecting themselves
   to the Church; or, finally, is it altogether impossible for them to
   become so? Has the Church to rule alongside of the State, or over and
   in the State by legal forms, or is she to rule by making all social
   contracts unnecessary? So far, these questions were not fully fathomed;
   but men lived in them. The history of Western Catholicism is the
   history of these ideas, until, by the great popes of the Middle Ages,
   they were realised in the world-dominion of the Church.

   What was to be the attitude of monasticism to these ideas? The answer
   is not difficult. Either it had to make the attempt to come to terms
   with the Church, and, after the Greek fashion, to continue alongside of
   the Church the mere preparation for the Beyond; or else it must permit
   its asceticism to be curtailed by the higher aim, and to assist the
   Church in her great task, that of moulding mankind by the Gospel, and
   of building up the kingdom of Christ on earth in the Church. It did
   both. Western monasticism bore its share in the solution of the
   ecclesiastical problem; but inasmuch as it refused to sacrifice its
   original ideal of a contemplative life, its own ideals became problems;
   and as it helped towards realising the aims of the Church, but could
   not always follow in her path, it passed through peculiar vicissitudes.
   Let us endeavour to sketch in brief the stages of this history.
     __________________________________________________________________

  VI.

   It was in Italy, in the sixth century, that monasticism took the first
   new stride in its development. St Benedict of Nursia gave it a new
   rule, and rendered it capable of organised activity and fruitful
   exertion. It was necessary that it should be itself reorganised before
   it could effectively act. Certainly, considered from the point of view
   of its content, the rule was in no sense new; but there were in the
   West, at the beginning of the sixth century, highly varied, and in part
   highly doubtful, forms of monasticism. The merit of Benedict consists
   in the reduction of these forms to a single one, and that the most
   effective. Still greater than the merit was the result. The
   unconditional obedience to which the monks were constrained, their
   organisation, the opposition to the vagrant and debased monks, the
   strict regulation of daily life, and the assertion of work--and in the
   first instance of agriculture--as a duty; all these are notable facts.
   True, we have met the demand for obedience and for work in Eastern
   rules; nor in the new rule is this demand yet specially recognised as
   of paramount importance; but in the sequel it became of the most
   decisive moment. And what a change did it introduce! From the rude,
   somewhat dispersed, and disordered colonies of monks, arose regular
   united societies, with a vast capacity for work that had to find a
   field for its exercise. That great occupant of the see of Peter,
   Gregory the First, himself a monk in head and heart, pressed into his
   service this new force and made it an agent of the Church. Even before
   this the Ostrogoth statesman Cassiodorus, in retreating into the
   cloister after a long and weary life, had introduced scientific labour
   into the programme of the monastery, and himself began by compiling
   historical and theological manuals for the cloister. From the seventh
   century onwards we meet brethren of the Benedictine Order far in the
   West. They clear woods, they turn deserts into ploughland, they
   study--with good or bad conscience--the lays of heathen poets and the
   writings of historians or philosophers. Monasteries and monastic
   schools begin to flourish; and every single settlement is at the same
   time a centre of religious life and of education in the country. By the
   help of these bands the Roman Bishop was enabled to introduce or to
   preserve, in the West, Christianity and a remnant of the ancient
   culture: by their means he Romanised the new German states. We say the
   Roman Bishop--for such activity on the part of his Order had been no
   part of the scheme of Benedict, nor did it naturally arise out of his
   Rule, nor yet was it consciously regarded by his disciples as their
   task. In this first stage, on the contrary, we see monasticism utterly
   at the disposal and under the management of great Roman bishops, or of
   Roman legates like St Boniface. The Romanising of the Frankish
   Church--secular from its origin--which was the greatest event of the
   epoch, and the suppression of all monasteries not conducted according
   to the Benedictine Rule, was only possible to the Order by submission
   to the ecclesiastical guidance of Rome. "Though many brothers of the
   Order laboured hard as missionaries with blessed results; though many
   others spread learning outside of their monasteries; and though
   isolated brothers, pitying the poor, taught them, terrified them,
   consoled them in their own language by writing and speech; in spite of
   all this, the communication and influence of the spiritual possessions
   of the Order lay outside the Order's aims."

   Yet--and this phenomenon occurs again and again in Western history--the
   more monasticism allowed itself to be used by the Church, and the more
   it took part in her mission, the more it was itself secularised, and
   the more it sank into a mere institution of the Church. This was
   inevitably felt most strongly by serious monks who had devoted
   themselves solely to God. Nothing remained to them but either, in spite
   of all, to renounce their world-mission, and to confine themselves once
   more to the strictest asceticism, or to preach to the Order itself
   far-reaching reforms, and then to attempt a reorganisation of the
   secular canons and clergy. But it is characteristic of the West that
   the monks who with reckless determination return to Greek asceticism,
   are not long satisfied with it, but after a longer or shorter time,
   turn of their own accord to the consideration of a reform not only of
   the Order but of the secular Church. Such a man, above all, was St
   Benedict of Aniane. Yet attempts at reform during the eighth and ninth
   centuries came to nothing. The monasteries became ever more and more
   dependent, not only on the bishops, but also on the great ones of the
   land. The abbots tended to become more and more what they had long been
   in fact, mere courtiers: it was soon only certain ceremonies that
   distinguished the regular clergy from the secular. In the tenth century
   it appeared as if monasticism had well-nigh played its part in the
   West: it seemed--a few houses, chiefly nunneries, being disregarded--as
   if Western monasticism had succumbed to the danger which in the East
   could not possibly in this way arise--it had become worldly, and
   vulgarly worldly, not by a hair's breadth higher than the world at
   large. In the tenth century, Pope, Church, and monastery alike seemed
   to have reached the last stage of decrepitude.
     __________________________________________________________________

  VII.

   And yet there had already begun a second movement in the Church; a
   second revival of monasticism. This revival started in France. The
   monastery of Clugny, founded so early as the tenth century, became the
   home of that great reform of the Church which the West experienced in
   the eleventh. Begun by monks, it was at first supported by pious and
   intelligent princes and bishops as a counterpoise to the secularised
   Papacy; but later the great Hildebrand took it up, and alike as
   Cardinal and as Pope opposed it to the princes and the secularised
   clergy. The West gained by it an effective reformation of the Church; a
   reformation, however, not on Evangelical but on Catholic lines. The
   aims of this new movement were in the first instance a restoration of
   the old discipline, of true renunciation and piety in the monasteries
   themselves; but later, first, a subjection of the secular clergy to the
   regulars, and, secondly, the dominion of the whole spiritualty, as
   regulated by the monks, over the laity--princes and nations alike. The
   great reform of the monks of Clugny and of their mighty Pope presents
   itself first as the energetic attempt to conform the life of the whole
   spiritualty to monastic ordinances. In this movement Western
   monasticism for the first time puts forth the decisive claim to pose as
   the only Christian life for all adult believers, and to ensure the
   general recognition of this claim. Monasticism in the West must
   inevitably come again and again into contact with the secular Church,
   for the reason that it can never cease itself to put forth claims on
   the whole of Christendom or to serve the Church. The Christian freedom
   at which it aims is to it, in spite of all vacillation, not only a
   freedom of the individual from the world, but the freedom of
   Christendom for the service of God in the world. We Evangelicals can
   even to-day still judge this great movement with sympathy: for in it
   expression is given to the consciousness that within the Church there
   can be only one morality and only one ideal of life, and that to this
   therefore all adult Christians are pledged. If monasticism is really
   the highest form of Christianity, it comes to this, that all adult
   confessors should be subjected to the monastic rule, and all Christians
   in their nonage--i.e., in the mediæval view all the laity--should be
   urged at least to obedience. Such were the ideas that dominated Clugny
   and Clugny's great Pope. Hence the stern enforcement of the celibacy of
   the clergy; hence the struggle against the secularisation of the
   spiritualty, and specially against simony; hence the monastic
   discipline of the priests. And what about his effort after political
   supremacy? Though it might from this point of view be looked on as a
   mere parergon which was to last because, and only so long as, the true
   conversion of the world was incomplete, yet here begin the points of
   difference between monasticism and the reformed secular Church. It is
   possible so to represent the ideas of Hildebrand and those of his more
   earnest friends as to make them appear to differ only by a shade. Yet
   this shade of difference led to policies totally opposed. From the very
   first voices were heard, even among the most zealous supporters of the
   Pope, crying that it was enough to reform manners and to cherish piety:
   it was not for the Church to rule in the style and with the weapons of
   the State. These voices demanded a true return to apostolic life, and a
   renewal of the Early Church. It is incorrect to describe these efforts
   of the monks as if they betokened a retrogression to the standard of
   the Greek Church, and thus fell outside the circle of Western
   Catholicism. The real truth is, these monks had a positive
   aim--Christian life for the whole of Christendom. But since tradition
   offered to them a conception of a supernaturally renewed Empire, which
   they did not renounce the hope of realising on earth, they conceived an
   almost invincible mistrust of the parergon,' which the Roman Bishop
   held out and for which he strove. In this mistrust was included that
   shrinking from everything in the Church that recalled political or
   legal ordinances. Repugnance to public law and to the State is in the
   Western monasticism as characteristic as in the East the reason is
   plain why Greek ascetics show no such repugnance. But in the eleventh
   century devotion to the Church and her ruler was powerful enough to
   prevent an open conflict between the reformed clergy and the monks. In
   the Sacrament of Penance the Church possessed the strongest means of
   binding even the monks to herself. With conscience stained and courage
   broken, many bowed to the will of the great monastic Pope. And it was
   precisely those that had most willingly dedicated their whole life to
   God whom he drew out of the quiet of the monastery. He knew well that
   only that monk will help to subjugate the world who shuns it and
   strives to free himself from it. Renunciation of the world in the
   service of a world-ruling Church--such is the amazing problem that
   Gregory solved for the next century and a half. But Gregory's aims, and
   those of the reformed bishops, with all their political character, were
   spiritual also. Only as spiritual did they transform the masses, and
   inflame them against the worldly clergy in upper Italy, or against
   simoniacal princes throughout Europe. A new religious zeal stirred the
   nations, and specially the Romance nations, of the West. The enthusiasm
   of the Crusades was the direct fruit of the monastic reform of the
   eleventh century. That religious revival which Europe experienced is
   expressed most vividly in them. The dominion of the Church is to be
   consummated on earth. It was the ideas of the world-ruling monk of
   Clugny that led the van of the Crusades; and the Crusaders brought back
   from the Holy Land and the Holy Places a new, or at least till now rare
   form of Christian piety--that of absorption in the sufferings and in
   the Via Dolorosa of Christ. Asceticism, once negative, received a
   positive form and a new positive aim, that of becoming one with the
   Redeemer by fervent love and perfect imitation. A personal element,
   working from heart to heart, began to vivify the hitherto unimpassioned
   and aimless struggle of self-abnegation, and to awaken the sleeping
   subjectivity. Even to monasticism, though as a rule only in a few
   isolated cases, it lent an inner impulse. The great number of new
   Orders that were founded at this time, specially in France, bears
   witness to the general enthusiasm. It was then that arose the
   Carthusians, the Cistercians, the Præmonstratensians, the Carmelites,
   and many other Orders. But the constant appearance of fresh Orders only
   shows that monasticism, in alliance with the secular Church, was ever
   losing its special character. Each new Order sought to call back the
   monks to their old austerity and to drag them away from secularisation;
   but in the very act of subjecting itself to the secular Church, it was
   annexed and exploited by the Church. It shows the illusions in which
   men moved that the Orders which were founded to restore the original
   monasticism, by the very terms of their foundation expressly announced
   their subjection to the bishops, and thenceforward renounced not only
   the care of souls, but all special programmes within the Church and for
   the Church. In the twelfth century the dependence of Christendom, and
   thus also of monasticism, on the Church is still a very naïve one: the
   contradiction between the actual form of the world-ruling Church and
   the Gospel which she preaches is felt indeed but always suppressed, and
   criticism of the claims and of the constitution of the Church is as yet
   ineffective. We need only mention the name of a single man, that of
   Bernard of Clairvaux, in order to see as in a picture alike all the
   greatness which this second monastic reform of the Church introduced,
   and its limitations and illusions. The same monk who in the quiet of
   his cell speaks a new language of devotion, who dedicates his soul
   entirely to the Bridegroom, who urges Christendom to forsake the world,
   who tells the Pope that he is called to the chair of Peter not for
   dominion but for service: this same man was yet imbued with all the
   hierarchical prejudices of his time, and himself led the politics of
   the world-ruling Church. But it was precisely because monasticism in
   that age went with the Church that it was able to do so great a work
   for her. It roused, it is true, a reform in the Church; but this
   reform, in the long run, came to strengthen the political power of the
   Church, and so to increase her secularisation--a strange and yet easily
   intelligible result. The domain in which Church and cloister found
   constantly their common ground was the contest with all the claims of
   the laity, and specially of the princes, on the Church. Western
   monasticism took this to be a liberation from the world,' and therefore
   offered its services in the struggle to the Church. Only by observing
   this can we understand how one and the same man in that age could be at
   once an upright monk and a prince of the Church, or how he could
   deceive himself and others, or even be uncertain, as to the final aims
   of this opposition to the State.
     __________________________________________________________________

  VIII.

   A new age arose, with which the old conceptions did not harmonise. The
   Church had attained to political world-dominion; she had either
   actually overcome, or was on the point of overcoming, the Empire and
   the old State order. The aims and results of the mighty efforts put
   forth by the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had now been
   made manifest; but now a movement began among the laity and in the
   nations to emancipate themselves from the tutelage of the hierarchy. In
   social movements, in religious sectarianism, in pious unions which
   failed to find satisfaction in official piety, in the endeavours of
   nations and princes to order their own concerns independently, was
   heralded the approach of a new era. For a whole century the secular
   Church succeeded in holding back the tide; and in doing so she was
   aided by a fresh phenomenon in monasticism which is marked by the
   foundation of the mendicant Orders.

   The figure of the tenderest and most loveable of all monks, the quaint
   saint of Assisi, stands out brilliantly in the history of the Middle
   Ages. Here, however, we are not asking what was his character, but what
   were his aims in devoting himself to the service of God and of his
   brethren. In the first place he desired to renew the life of the
   Apostles by imitating the poverty of their life and their preaching of
   the Gospel. This preaching was to arouse penitence in Christendom and
   to make Christendom effectively that which she already was through her
   possession of the Holy Sacraments. A society of brethren was to be
   formed which, like the Apostles, should possess nothing but penitence,
   faith, and love, and which should own no other aim than to serve others
   and to win souls. St Francis never clearly defined how far this society
   was to extend itself. He was no politician, and never intruded on the
   domain of government. But what could converts, made by the preaching of
   the poor brethren, have become, but themselves brethren, serving
   itinerant preachers, in their turn? For them St Francis himself laid
   down fixed and settled rules. Neither individuals nor even the society,
   united as it was for a truly Christ-like life, was to possess property
   of any kind. "Go sell all that thou hast." Life in God, suffering along
   with His Son, love for His creatures, human and other, service even to
   the sacrifice of one's own life, the riches of the soul, which
   possesses nothing but the Saviour--such was the Gospel of St Francis.
   If any man ever realised in his life what he preached, St Francis was
   that man. And--what is the characteristic mark of this Western
   movement--intense as this asceticism was, heartfelt as this religion
   was, it did not drive its disciples into solitude or the desert, but
   the reverse. Christendom, nay, the whole world, was to be won for this
   new and yet old Christianity of repentance, renunciation, and love. A
   Christian world--this conception, at the beginning of the thirteenth
   century, had a quite other content than in the sixth and eleventh; not
   only because the geographical horizon had extended itself for the West,
   but to a higher degree because the poor and the ordinary man were now
   to be reckoned as part of that world. Western monasticism, down to the
   end of the twelfth century, had been essentially an aristocratic
   institution; the privileges of the monasteries were in most cases
   conditioned by the descent of their inmates. The monastic schools were
   as a rule open only to the nobility. To the coarse and common people
   the monastery remained as inaccessible as the castle. There were no
   popular Orders and few popular monks. St Francis did not break down the
   walls of the noble monasteries but raised alongside them huts for poor
   and rich. He thus restored the Gospel to the people, who had hitherto
   possessed only the priest and the Sacrament. But the saint of Assisi
   was the most submissive son of the Church and of the Pope in history.
   His labours were devoted to the service of the Church. Thus he was the
   first to give to monasticism--for a monasticism his brotherhood became,
   little as he meant it--special tasks for Christianity as a whole, but
   in the bosom of the Church: for care for the Church is care for
   salvation. Clugny and its monks had exclusively devoted themselves to
   the reform of the spiritualty. St Francis would know no distinctions.
   We may say without exaggeration that he wished not to found a new order
   of monks but to revolutionise the world--to make the world a fair
   garden, colonised by men who follow Christ, who need nothing, in whose
   hearts is God. It was love that enlarged his horizon: his fancy neither
   grew rankly luxuriant, nor did it become barren through his stern
   asceticism: his determination to serve Church and Christianity remained
   to the end strong and powerful, though he was constrained with pain to
   see how the Church corrected and narrowed his creation. Hundreds of
   thousands flocked to him. But what were thousands when it was a
   question of millions? The emergence of the so-called Tertiary Brethren
   by the side of the strict monastic order is on one side, of course, an
   indication that this Gospel does not penetrate into human society
   without compromise, but on the other a shining example of the
   far-reaching influence of the Franciscan preaching. The Tertiaries kept
   up their secular callings, their marriages and their possessions; but
   they adapted themselves as far as possible to the monastic life, held
   themselves aloof from public affairs, and devoted themselves, as far as
   they could, to asceticism and works of piety. This institution, which
   formed itself without any recognised founder, is a striking proof of
   the universal character of the Franciscan movement. Sects had led the
   way; but the brotherhood remained true to the Church. Nay, the interest
   of the laity in the life and in the sacraments of the Church was
   awakened by them; through them the idea grew slowly effective that a
   layman, sincerely obedient to the Church and inwardly pious, has a
   right to share in the highest good which the Church can communicate.
   The conception of a double morality differing in value, could on this
   basis be transformed into another more tolerable conception of a
   morality differing only in kind. An active Christian life may be of
   equal value with the contemplative; the latter is only a more direct
   path to salvation.

   A newly moulded piety, dominated by the surrender of the soul to
   Christ, spread forth from Assisi and made itself master of the Church.
   It was religious individuality and freedom that had been awakened;
   Christianity as the religion of poverty and love was to come by its own
   as opposed to the degeneracy in morality and politics.

   The finest of mediæval hymns, the mightiest of mediæval sermons, belong
   to the Franciscan Order or to the nearly-related Dominicans. But to art
   and science also these Orders gave a new impulse. All the important
   schoolmen of the thirteenth century--a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura,
   an Albertus Magnus--were mendicant monks. The noblest paintings of the
   old Italian school are inspired by the new spirit, the spirit of
   absorption in the sufferings of Christ, of a holy sorrow and a
   transcendental strength. A Dante, a Giotto, and again a Tauler, and a
   Berthold of Ratisbon--all these, in their feelings, thoughts, and
   creations, lived in the religious ideas of the mendicant Orders.
   But--what is more significant--these monks stooped to the populace and
   to individuals. They had an eye for their sorrows and an ear for their
   complaints. They lived with the people, they preached to the people in
   their own language, and they brought them a consolation they could
   understand. What the sacrament and the services had hitherto failed to
   give--a certainty of salvation--the mysticism of the Orders aimed at
   producing: but not outside of the Church means of grace. The eye must
   learn to see the Saviour; the soul must attain peace by sensuous
   perception of His presence. But the theology,' which here arose,
   proclaimed also the religious freedom and blessedness of souls lifted
   above the world and conscious of their God. If by this idea it did not
   actually begin the Evangelical Reformation, it made the path straight
   for it.

   By the help of the mendicant Orders, of which she availed herself to
   the full, the Church was able in the thirteenth century to maintain
   herself at the height of her dominion. She won back the hearts of the
   faithful; but at the same time, through the activity of the monks, she
   ordered and brought to perfection her hold on the goods of the world,
   science, art, and law. It was then that the body of canon law was
   completed, which regulates all the relations of life from the
   standpoint of the Church's world-dominion, and of an asceticism devoted
   to her service. This canon law is no longer recognised in civilised
   states, but its ideas still bear fruit. To a much higher degree are
   philosophy and theology, as well as social politics, still dependent on
   the mode of thought which in the thirteenth century, in the mendicant
   Orders, led to the masterly development of great scholastic systems.
   Through these Orders, again, the Church succeeded in overcoming the
   sectarian movements that had taken hold of the laity. It was the
   mendicants who with furious zeal conquered the heretical, but, alas!
   also free-spirited and evangelical, movements of the thirteenth
   century. Thus here also they made common cause with the world-ruling
   Church, the Church of politics and of the sword: nay, they became
   precisely the most favoured clerical servants of the Popes, who endowed
   them with the highest privileges, and permitted them everywhere to
   interfere with the regular administration of the Church and with the
   cure of souls. In the mendicant Orders, the Roman Pope found a tool
   wherewith to weld the national churches of the country more closely to
   his see, and to crush the independence of the Bishops. Thus they had
   the largest share in the Romanising of the Catholic Church in Europe,
   and also influenced in many ways the older foundations which sprang out
   of the Benedictine Rule. But they became secularised as speedily as any
   other Order before them. The connection with the secular Church proved
   once again fatal to monasticism. That connection had been from the
   first extraordinarily close--Francis had been compelled to yield as if
   to a decree of Fate--and the ruin was all the more rapid. What was
   meant to raise them above the world--their poverty--proved but an
   occasion of specific secularisation to those who no longer took poverty
   seriously. They saw themselves led to speculate on the coarseness, the
   superstition, and the sluggishness of the masses; and they became, like
   the masses, coarse, superstitious, and sluggish.

   Yet the high ideal set before Christendom by St Francis could not
   disappear without shaking to their foundations the Church and the Order
   founded by him. When one party in the Order urged a modification of the
   strictness of the regulations imposing poverty, another, faithful to
   the Master, arose to defend them. When the Popes took up the cause of
   the former, the zealous party turned their criticism upon the Papacy
   and the secular Church. Complaints of the corruption of the Church had
   long been uttered by individual monks, but they had always died away
   again. The strife of the Church against the states and their claims had
   hitherto constantly enticed monasticism to recognise in the programme
   of the Church the beginning of the realisation of its own. But now
   arose the idea which had always lain dormant in monasticism and had
   again and again been suppressed. The tie with Church and Papacy was
   sundered: ancient apocalyptic ideas emerged; the Papal Church appeared
   as Babylon, as the Kingdom of Antichrist, who has falsified the true
   Christianity of renunciation and poverty. The whole history of the
   Church appeared suddenly in the light of a monstrous apostasy; and the
   Pope no longer as the successor of Peter but as the heir of
   Constantine. It was hopeless to attempt to move the Church to turn
   back. Nothing but a new revelation of the Spirit could avail to save
   her, and men accordingly looked for a future final Gospel of Christian
   perfection. With all the means in her power the Church suppressed this
   dangerous uprising. She pronounced the teachings of the Franciscans on
   the poverty of Christ and the Apostles to be heresy, and she demanded
   submission. A bitter struggle was the result. Christendom witnessed the
   new spectacle of the secular Church in arms against a doctrine of
   renunciation that had become aggressive. With the courage of men who
   had sacrificed all, the Spirituals preached to Pope and Bishop their
   doctrine of poverty, and sealed their testimony at the stake. At the
   end of the fourteenth century the secular Church came forth, victorious
   and unchanged, from her strife with poverty. Thus once again, at the
   end of the Middle Ages, the sleeping but ever reviving antagonism
   between the aims of the Church and the aims of monasticism had come to
   light in a terrible crisis. But monasticism was vanquished. The
   foundation of the mendicant Orders was its last great attempt in the
   Middle Ages to assert itself and its ideal in the Church as a whole
   while maintaining its connection with the history and constitution of
   that Church. But the development of the Franciscan Order was twofold.
   The one party, from the very first, resigned its original ideal,
   subjected itself completely to the Church, and became speedily
   secularised; the other sought to maintain its ideal, made that ideal
   stricter, set it up even against the Church, and exhausted itself,
   until it succumbed, in fantastic pursuits. This development will to
   some appear an unredeemed tragedy; but it will perhaps not seem an
   unmixed evil to those who recognise that individuals of the Order which
   strove to emancipate itself from the Church, sought deliverance at the
   hands of the State, and, in opposition to the claims of the Church,
   which they no longer or only partially admitted, began to defend the
   independence and ordinances of the State. It was the Franciscans who,
   in the fourteenth century, discovered a scientific foundation for the
   Hohenstaufen theory of politics. Western monasticism, as we learn from
   this astonishing volte-face, is unable to exist for any length of time
   without a close alliance with the forces of society. When the Church is
   not available, it seeks even the State. Yet this movement was but
   transitory. In the fifteenth century it deathly stillness reigns in the
   Order, which is now in entire subjection to the Church; attempts it
   reform were feeble, and resulted in no fresh life. In the age of the
   Renascence monasticism--with a few honourable exceptions--seemed to
   have condemned itself to inaction and uselessness. Yet the new culture,
   whose supporters, it is true, frequently spent their shafts of ridicule
   on the ignorant, slavish, and hypocritical monks, was not utterly
   hostile to ascetic ideals. Rather did the vision reappear of a wise and
   pious man, absorbed in the enjoyment of a quiet contemplation of
   heaven, without neglecting the world, in peaceful detachment from the
   noises of the day; who needs nothing because in spirit he possesses
   all. The attempt was even made to revive this ideal in the traditional
   forms of cloister-life; nor did it everywhere fail. But it was only
   given to isolated individuals to unite the rule of the convent with the
   study of Cicero or Plato, and to be sufficient for both. The scholar
   who was at the same time a man of the world, and who at his desk became
   enthusiastic for Stoical indifference or for Franciscan independence of
   externals, was anything but a monk; and the Church, in spite of all
   classical and edifying dissertations, remained as she was. The poor, as
   in the days before St Francis had shown them the way, sought to secure
   their salvation in pious and enthusiastic unions of every kind, which
   were, it is true, of occasional service to the Church, but nevertheless
   were to her a constant danger.
     __________________________________________________________________

  IX.

   What was left? What new form of monasticism remained possible after all
   these attempts? 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, the 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 a
   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 its 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 of 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 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 spirit 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 cost
   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
   identical 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.
     __________________________________________________________________

The Confessions of St Augustine

The Confessions of St Augustine

   During the period between the death of Constantine and the sack of Rome
   by the Vandals, that is, from about 340 A.D. to 450, took place the
   accumulation of the spiritual capital inherited from antiquity by the
   Middle Ages. Whether we look at religion and theology, or at science
   and politics, or at the leading ideas generally of the mediæval mind,
   everywhere we become conscious of the absolute dependence of these
   ideas on the intellectual acquisitions made by the Fathers of the
   Church in the century of migrations. These acquisitions, it is true, do
   not themselves bear the stamp of new production; rather are they
   entirely a selection from a much richer abundance of ideas and living
   forces.

   When, in the reign of Constantine, the Church had gained the victory,
   her leaders sought to make themselves masters of all forms of spiritual
   life, and to subject everybody and everything to the dominion of the
   Church and her spirit. The great task, long since commenced, of fusing
   Christianity with the Empire and with ancient culture, was finished
   with astonishing quickness. Now first was the union between the
   Christian religion and ancient philosophy completed. Through the favour
   of circumstances an active interchange between East and West, Rome and
   Greece, was again brought about. The Latin Church was equipped with a
   store of Greek philosophy immediately before the great severance
   between East and West. It. would almost seem that the impending doom,
   the approaching night of barbarism, had been already foreboded. The
   firm building of the Church was completed in haste. Whatever in Greek
   philosophy seemed capable of use was drawn into the scheme of dogmatic
   teaching; the remainder was relegated to the rear as dangerous or as
   heretical, and thus gradually got rid of. The constitution of the
   Church was supplemented from the tried forms of the imperial
   constitution; the ecclesiastical canons followed the lines of Roman
   law. Public service was revised and its forms extended. Already
   whatever appeared imposing and venerable in the old heathen mysteries
   had been long imitated; but now the whole service became still more
   magnificent. Thus was formed that splendid pomp, that wonderful union
   of elevated thoughts with ceremonial forms, which even to-day makes the
   Catholic service so impressive. Art, again, was not forgotten: ancient
   tradition was made to yield up certain of its motives'--few, but those
   highly significant and of high creative import--to which the Church
   lent the glamour of sanctity. Even the stores of ancient culture, and
   the literature of leisure, were prepared for the good of the coming
   centuries. The old heathen fables, heroic sagas, and novels were sifted
   and transformed into Christian Lives of Saints.

   In every case the ascetic ideal of the Church formed the basis of these
   stories; though the contrast to the varied and sinful life in which
   this ideal was given its play, lent an especial charm to the old
   legends in their new form.

   Thus everything borrowed from antiquity was made Christian,' and
   received, by its union with sanctity, the guarantee of permanence. The
   remnant of old culture, thus incorporated with the Church, was now able
   to defy the approaching storms and to serve the coming nations.

   But it was after all a mere remnant, a poor selection from the capital
   of a falling world, protected by the authority of sanctity; not,
   indeed, lacking in inner unity, but as yet without progressive force or
   the power of growth.

   In the Middle Ages, during more than seven centuries, if we disregard
   the fresh and youthful vigour contributed by the Germanic races, the
   West remained confined to the above possession; but, on the other hand,
   it owned a treasure of incomparable fulness, a man who lived at the end
   of the ancient time, and who projected his life over the centuries of
   the new--Augustine.

   Between St Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian
   Church has possessed no one who could measure himself with Augustine;
   and in comprehensive influence no other is to be compared with him. We
   are right, both in the Middle Ages and to-day, to mark a distinction
   between the spirit of the East and that of the West; and we are right
   to observe in the latter a life and motion, the straining of mighty
   forces, high problems, and great aims. But, if so, the Church of the
   West at least owes this peculiarity of hers in no small degree to one
   man, Augustine. Along with the Church he served, he has moved through
   the centuries. We find him in the great mediæval theologians, including
   the greatest, Thomas Aquinas. His spirit sways the pietists and mystics
   of those ages: St Bernard no less than Thomas à Kempis. It is he that
   inspires the ecclesiastical reformers--those of the Karling epoch as
   much as a Wyclif, a Hus, a Wesel and a Wessel: while, on the other
   hand, it is the same man that gives to the ambitious Popes the ideal of
   a theocratic state to be realised on earth.

   All this, perhaps, may to us, to-day, seem somewhat foreign: our
   culture, it is said, springs from the Renascence and the Reformation.
   True enough; but the spirit of Augustine ruled the beginnings of both.
   Upon Augustine, Petrarch and the great masters of the Renascence formed
   themselves; and without him Luther is not to be understood. Augustine,
   the founder of Roman Catholicism, is at the same time the only Father
   of the Church from whom Luther received any effective teaching, or whom
   the humanists honoured as a hero.

   But Augustine has still closer points of contact with us than these.
   The religious language we speak, so familiar to us from songs, prayers,
   and books of devotion, bears the stamp of his mind. We speak, without
   knowing it, in his words; and it was he who first taught the deepest
   emotions how to find expression, and lent words to the eloquence of the
   heart. I am not here speaking of what is called the tongue of Zion. In
   this also he has his share, though to but a small degree. But it is the
   language of simple piety and of powerful Christian pathos; and further,
   that of our psychologists and pedagogues is still under his influence.
   Hundreds of great masters have since his time been given us; they have
   guided our thoughts, warmed our emotions, enriched our speech; but none
   has supplanted Augustine.

   Finally, which is the main point, we find in his delineation of the
   essence of religion and of the deepest problems of morality, such
   striking depth and truth of observation, that we must still honour him
   as our master, and that his memory is still able in some measure, even
   to-day, to unite Protestant and Catholic.

   I do not propose to set before you a complete picture of the activity
   and influence of this man. I prefer rather to portray him merely
   according to the work in which he has portrayed himself--the
   Confessions'--the most characteristic of the many writings he has left
   us.

   This work Augustine wrote in mature years--he was then forty-six--and
   twelve years after his baptism at Milan. He had already been for some
   time Bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa, when he felt impelled to give
   to himself and to the world, in the form of a confession to God, an
   account of his life down to his baptism, in order that, as he says, God
   might be praised. "He hath made us, but we had brought ourselves to
   destruction; He who made us, also hath made us anew." "I tell this to
   the whole race of man, howsoever few thereof may read my writing, in
   order that I and all who read this may think from how great a depth
   must man cry to God." At the end of his life, thirty years later, he
   looked back to this work. He calls it the one of his books which is
   read most fondly and most often. Some points in it, it is true, he
   himself censures; but, as a whole, in the presence of death itself, he
   marks it as a witness of the truth. It was not to be a mingling of
   Dichtung and Wahrheit; but he meant, plainly and without reserve, to
   show in the book what he had been.

   The significance of the Confessions' is as great on the side of form as
   on that of content. Before all, they were a literary achievement. No
   poet, no philosopher before him undertook what he here performed; and I
   may add that almost a thousand years had to pass before a similar thing
   was done. It was the poets of the Renascence, who formed themselves on
   Augustine, that first gained from his example the daring to depict
   themselves and to present their personality to the world. For what do
   the Confession' of Augustine contain? The portrait of a soul--not
   psychological disquisitions on the Understanding, the Will, and the
   Emotions in Man, not abstract investigations into the nature of the
   soul, not superficial reasonings and moralising introspections like the
   Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but the most exact portraiture of a
   distinct human personality, in his development from childhood to full
   age, with all his propensities, feelings, aims, mistakes; a portrait of
   a soul, in fact, drawn with a perfection of observation that leaves on
   one side the mechanical devices of psychology, and pursues the method
   of the physician and the physiologist.

   Observation, indeed, is the strong point of Augustine. Because he
   observes, he is interested in everything that the professed philosopher
   disregards. He depicts the infant in the cradle and the naughtinesses
   of the child; and he passes reflections on the innocence of childhood.'
   He watches the beginnings of speech, and shows how speech develops
   itself slowly out of the mimetic tendency. He stands by the games of
   children, and sees in the child the adult, in the adult the child. Full
   of sympathy, he listens to the first sighs of the boy who has to learn.
   He accompanies him as he leaves home for school, and is thus plunged
   into the stream of human society. He observes the dominant educational
   system, how it reposes on fear and ambition. He compassionates youth on
   the false and fruitless matter that it has to learn. He is of opinion
   that we ought only to learn what is true, and that grammar is better
   than mythology, physics better than windy speculation. Next, he watches
   the busy doings of the adult: "The antics of children are called
   business in the grown-up." He appraises society, and finds that every
   man in it strives to obtain good things, and that malice is an aim in
   itself to no man; but he finds, on the other hand, that the man who
   does not set his heart on moral perfection, sinks step by step to lower
   ideals, and that we have a greater repugnance to the good and holy, the
   longer we live without goodness and holiness. He observes the
   fascination and contagious power of social evils: "O Friendship, worse
   than the deepest enmity, unfathomable betrayer of souls! Merely because
   someone says, Come, let us do this or that,' and we are ashamed not to
   be shameless." He reveals the dependence of the individual on the
   opinion of others: "Each man thinks he pushes others, and is only
   pushed in the deeper himself." He regards the individual altogether not
   as a free, self-guiding personality, but as a link in an endless chain:
   "We wear the fetters of our mortality, and are fettered to society." He
   watches the contented beggar, and indulges in reflections; he gives an
   amusing picture of the repute and the hollowness of a renowned teacher.
   He paints for us the professors and the students; the busy, trifling,
   charming intercourse between friends following the same calling. What
   is characteristic, indeed, never escapes him. But, above all, he
   watches the most secret motions of his own heart; he tracks the dainty
   ripples and mighty upheavings of his own feelings. He knows every
   subterfuge and by-path by which man strives to escape from his God and
   his high destiny.

   If we consider what was written elsewhere at that time, and the manner
   in which it was written, we are struck dumb with astonishment at the
   sight of this poetic delineation of truth, this unparalleled literary
   achievement. Stimulating influences were certainly not wanting. In the
   school of the Neoplatonists Augustine had learnt to flee the barren
   steppes of Aristotelian and Stoic psychology, and to fix his attention
   on mind and character, impulse and will. A great teacher--his own
   master, Ambrose of Milan--again, had introduced him to a new world of
   emotion and observation. But his Confessions' are none the less
   entirely his own. No forerunner threatens the claim of this undertaking
   to originality. It has, indeed, been observed that there is a morbid
   strain in the book, that he has made a stage-play of his bleeding
   heart, and it is true that in many places he seems to us overstrained,
   unhealthy, or even false; but if we remember in what an age of depraved
   taste and lying rhetoric he wrote, we shall justly wonder that he has
   raised himself so high above the foibles of the time.

   As the very conception of Augustine's book was new, so also was its
   execution and language. Not only is the force of his observation
   admirable, but equally so is the force of his diction. In the language
   of the Confessions' there meets us an inexhaustibly rich individuality,
   dowered at once with the irresistible impulse and faculty to express
   what it feels. Goethe makes his Tasso use the sad and proud saying:

     "Though other men are in their torments dumb,
     Me God permits to say how much I suffer."

   This is true equally of Augustine. But not only of his sufferings was
   he able to speak. It was given to him to trace every motion of his
   heart in words, and above all, to lend speech to the pious mind and to
   intercourse with God. Of the power of sin and of the blessedness of the
   heart that hangs on God, he has been able so to speak that even to-day
   every tender conscience must understand his language. Before him, Paul
   and the Psalmists alone had thus spoken; to their school Augustine, the
   pupil of the rhetoricians, went to learn: and thus arose the language
   of the Confessions.' It is not difficult to dissect it into its
   component parts, to discriminate the Biblical element from the
   rhetorical, and to point out much that is far-fetched, and
   archaic--frigid conceits and artificial turns. But that which strikes
   us to-day as strange, or even occasionally as painful, is richly
   compensated by the highest merits. Admirable, above all, is the use of
   sayings and ideas from Holy Writ. Through the position which he gives
   them, he lends to the most insignificant words something striking or
   moving. In that great literary art, the art of giving to a well-known
   saying the most effective setting, he has surpassed all others.

   Wonderful also is his power of summing up the phenomena of life and the
   riddles of the soul in short maxims and antitheses, or in pregnant
   sentences and new connotations. Much of the Confessions' has passed
   into the languages of the Western nations. We use much, or find much in
   our great writers like Lessing and Goethe, without thinking of its
   origin. The dumb chatterers,' victorious garrulity,' the biter bit,'
   the betrayed betrayers,' the hopeful young man,' the fetters of our
   mortality,' the rich poverty,' ignominious glory,' hateful gibberish,
   life of my life,' and many similar images are either borrowed direct
   from Augustine, or can be traced back to him. But more important are
   his psychological descriptions and his maxims:--That was my life--was
   it a life?' I became to myself a great problem,' Man is a deep abyss,'
   Peace of mind is the sign of our secret unity,' Every man has only his
   one Ego,' Every unordered spirit is its own punishment,' Every
   forbidden longing, by an unchangeable law, is followed by delusion,'
   You cannot do good without willing it, though what you do may in itself
   be good.'

   These are a few isolated specimens; it would be easy to go on for a
   long time with other examples. But he is much greater even than here in
   his connected descriptions. One example among hundreds must suffice. He
   pictures himself as wishing to rise to a vigorous Christian life, but
   held back by the lust of the world and by custom:

   "Thus the burden of the world lay softly on me as on a dreamer, and the
   thoughts in which my senses turned towards Thee, my God, were like the
   efforts of those who would rouse themselves from sleep, but, overcome
   by the depth of slumber, ever sink back again. And when Thou calledst
   to me, Awake, thou that sleepest,' I would give thee no other answer
   than the words of delay and dream, Presently, but let me dream a little
   longer.' Yet the presently' had no end, and the yet a little longer'
   lengthened evermore."

   Great as is his art, he never destroyed the uniformity of his style,
   which is from one fount, because dominated by a single rounded
   personality. It is a person that meets us in his language, and we feel
   that this person is everywhere richer than his expression. This is the
   key to the understanding of the enduring influence of Augustine. Life
   is kindled only upon life, one lover inflames the other: these are his
   own words, and we may apply them to himself. He was far greater than
   his writings, for he understood how by his writings to draw men into
   his life. And with all the tenderness of feeling, with all the constant
   melting into emotion and the lyricism of the style, there is yet a
   sublime repose throughout the work. The motto of the book--"Thou, Lord,
   hast made us after Thine own image, and our heart cannot be at rest
   till it finds rest in Thee"--is at the same time the seal of the book
   and the keynote of its language. No fear, no bitterness thenceforward
   troubles the reader; and that though the book is a sketch of the
   history of distress and inner trouble. "Fear is the evil thing," says
   Augustine in one place; but he talks with God fearlessly as with a
   friend. He has not ceased to see riddles everywhere--in the course of
   the world, in man, in himself; but the riddles have ceased to oppress
   him, for he trusts that God in His wisdom has ordered all things. Mists
   of sorrow and of tears still surround him, but at heart he is free. The
   impression, then, that the book leaves, may be compared with the
   impression we receive when, after a dark and rainy day, the sun at
   length gains the victory, and a mild ray lightens the refreshed land.

   But the wonderful form and the magical language of the book are not,
   after all, its most important characteristics. It is the content, the
   story he tells, that gives it its real value. As a record of facts, the
   book is poor indeed. It paints the life of a scholar who grew up under
   conditions then normal, who had not to contend with adverse fortune or
   want, who absorbs the manifold wisdom of his time, and accepts a public
   office in order at last, with scepticism and dissatisfaction, to hand
   himself over to a holy life of resignation, to theological science, and
   to the firm-based authority of the Church. It was a course of
   development such as not a few of Augustine's contemporaries passed
   through. No other outlet, indeed, was then possible to piety and a
   serious scientific mind. If we conceive the story of Augustine from
   this point of view, we can get rid of a widespread prejudice, for the
   existence of which, it is true, he is himself to some degree
   responsible.

   In wide circles the Confessions' are viewed as the portrait of a
   Prodigal Son, of a man who, after a wild and wasteful career, suddenly
   comes to himself and repents, or else as the picture of a heathen who,
   after a life of vice, is suddenly overcome by the truth of the
   Christian religion. No view can be more mistaken. Rather do the
   Confessions' portray a man brought up from youth by a faithful mother
   in the Christian, that is, in the Catholic, faith; who yet, at the same
   time, from his youth, by the influence of his father and of the mode of
   culture into which he was plunged, received an impulse towards the
   highest secular aims. They depict a man on whose mind from childhood
   the name of Christ has been ineffaceably imprinted, but who, as soon as
   he is roused to independent thought, is informed by the impulse to seek
   truth. In this effort, like us all, he is held down by ambition,
   worldliness, and sensuality; but he struggles unceasingly against them.
   He wins, at last, the victory over self, but in doing so he sacrifices
   his freedom of purpose to the authority of the Church, because in the
   message of this Church he has experienced the power of breaking with
   the world and devoting himself to God.

   In his external life this change presents itself as a breach with his
   past; and it is in this view that he has himself depicted it. To him
   there is here nothing but a contrast between the past and the present.
   But in his inner life, in spite of his own representations, everything
   appears to us a quite intelligible development. It is true--and we
   understand the reason--that he was unable to judge himself in any other
   way. No one who has passed from inner unrest to peace, from slavery to
   the world to freedom in God and dominion over himself, can possibly, in
   surveying the path he trod in the past, call it the way of truth. But
   others, both contemporary and later, may judge differently; and in this
   case such a judgment is made specially easy. For the man who here
   speaks to us is, against his will, compelled to give evidence that,
   even before his conversion, he strove unceasingly after truth and moral
   force; and, on the other hand, the numerous writings he produced
   immediately after his break with the past,' prove that that break was
   by no means so complete as the Confessions'--written twelve years
   afterwards--would have us believe. Much of what only came to maturity
   in him during those twelve years, he has unconsciously transferred to
   the moment of conversion. At that time he was no ecclesiastical
   theologian. Spite of his resolve to submit himself to the Church, he
   was still living wholly in philosophical problems. The great break was
   limited entirely to worldly occupations and to his renunciation of the
   flesh; the interests that had hitherto occupied his mind it did not
   affect. Thus it is not hard to refute Augustine out of Augustine, and
   to show that he has in his Confessions' antedated many a change of
   thought. Yet, at bottom, he was right. His life, essentially, had but
   two periods--one, that which he paints in the words, " In distraction I
   fell to pieces bit by bit, and lost myself in the Many"; the other,
   that in which he found in God the strength and unity of his being.

   The former of these periods lies before us in his Confessions.' These
   have been repeatedly compared with those of Rousseau and Hamann, but
   really belong to a totally different class. In spite of the most
   deep-seated differences, I can compare Augustine's book with no other
   except Goethe Faust.' In the Confessions' we meet a living Faust, whose
   end is, of course, not that of the Faust of the poem. There is much
   affinity between the two, nevertheless. All those anguished revelations
   in the early scenes of Faust,' from the "Alas, I have explored
   Philosophy," to the resolve on suicide ("Say thy firm farewell to the
   sun") appear in the Confessions.' With heart-stirring emphasis
   Augustine cries again and again, "O truth, how the very marrow of my
   soul sighs after thee!" How often, like Faust, does he complain that
   the "hot struggle of eternal study" has left him no wiser than before.
   How often does he compassionate his pupils that he, a drunken teacher,
   has given them the wine of error. How painfully, too, falls from his
   lips the confession--"And now, to feel that nothing can be known, this
   is a thought that burns into my heart." "Could dog, were I a dog, so
   live?" says Faust; and Augustine, with the most savage envy, envies the
   ragged but cheerful beggar. He too, "to magic, with severe and patient
   toil, has now applied, despairing of all other guide, that from some
   spirit he may hear deep truths, to others unrevealed, and mysteries
   from mankind sealed"; and in his soul, too, there rises the enticing
   question, "whether Death, when it dissolves all feeling, dissolves and
   takes away all sorrows too."

   Even the solution which Goethe gives to his poem, the way by which
   Faust attains release, is not quite without its parallel in Augustine.
   Faust, we read, is saved by heavenly love:


   "Upward rise to higher borders!

   Ever grow, insensibly,

   "As, by pure eternal orders,

   God's high presence strengthens ye:

   Such the Spirit's sustentation,

   With the freest ether blending;

   Love's eternal revelation

   To Beatitude ascending."

   And again:


   "As, up by self-impulsion driven,

   The tree its weight suspends in air,

   To love, almighty love, tis given

   All things to form, and all to bear."

   All this is precisely in the spirit of Augustine; and the idea of the
   wonderful concluding scene of the second part of Faust rests on one of
   his conceptions, little as Goethe was conscious of the fact. It is
   unlikely that Goethe had any direct acquaintance with Augustine; he
   probably knew him only at secondhand. That in this world of illusion
   and error, love, divine love, alone is strength and truth; that this
   love alone, in fettering, frees and blesses--this is the fundamental
   thought of the Confessions' and of most of Augustine's later works. The
   righteousness which avails with God is the love with which He fills us;
   and therefore the beginning of love, which is righteousness, is the
   beginning of blessedness, and perfected love is perfected blessedness.
   Such is the knowledge to which the struggling philosopher has attained,
   after seeking in vain elsewhere for rest and peace.

   Nevertheless, there is a great gulf between the Faust of the poem and
   this Faust of reality. The former, in all his struggles, stands with a
   foot firmly planted on this earth. The God who has given him over for
   the time being to the devil, is not the good for the possession of
   which he strives; the inner battle with one's own weakness and sin is
   scarcely hinted at. To Augustine, on the contrary, the strife for truth
   is the strife for a supernatural good, for the holy and the high--in a
   word, for God. It is for this reason that the conclusion of Faust has
   about it an air of strangeness; we are in no degree prepared for this
   sudden turn. In Augustine the conclusion follows by an inner necessity.
   His wanderings prove to be, the very paths along which he has been led
   directly to this aim--blessedness through divine love.

   Let us, in a few touches, draw a picture of these paths. Interesting in
   themselves, they are further interesting because they are typical of
   the time. Augustine entered into the closest sympathy with all the
   great spiritual forces of his age. His personality became actually
   enlarged till it embraced that of the whole existing world; and his
   individual advance therefore shows us how that world passed from
   heathenism and philosophy into Catholicism.

   Born at Tagasta, a country town of Northern Africa, Augustine showed as
   a boy good but not brilliant capacity. After he had studied in the
   school of his native town and at Madaura, his father with some
   difficulty found the means to have him educated at Carthage. This
   father was in the ordinary way respectable, but weak in character, and
   in his private life not free from reproach. He had no higher aim for
   his son than a career of worldly prosperity. He was himself a heathen;
   but his wife was a Christian--a relation not uncommon in the middle of
   the fourth century; it was the women who spread Christianity in the
   family. To his mother Augustine has raised a noble monument, not only
   in his Confessions,' but elsewhere in his works. He tells how she
   taught him to pray, and with what passion he drank in her lessons:
   often, he tells us, he fervently prayed to God that at school he might
   escape the ferule. Later in life he recalled how as a boy, in the
   delirium of fever, he cried out furiously for baptism; and, in all his
   wanderings, one relic of childhood remained with him never to be
   extinguished--reverence for Christ. Again and again in his Confessions'
   he tells us that all wisdom left him unsatisfied that was not somehow
   connected with the name of Christ. Thus the recollections of youth
   became of the highest significance to the man. Faust says:

     "O once, in boyhood's happy time, Heaven's love
     Showered down upon me, with mysterious kiss Hallowing the stillness
     of the Sabbath day!
     Yearnings for something that I knew not of,
     Deep meanings in the full tones of the bells."

   How often, with wonderful variations, is this same thought heard
   resounding in the Confessions' of Augustine!

   Till the boy's seventeenth year imagination and youthful pleasure
   predominated in his mind. He had at first little taste for learning,
   although he mastered his lessons with ease. His only delight was to
   joke and play with his friends. To his mothers grief, also, he early
   fell into the sins of youth--sins which to his father and to society
   were no sins at all. At this time, in Carthage, one of Cicero's
   writings, the Hortensius,' came into his hands; and it is from this
   moment that he reckons the beginning of a new and higher effort. The
   Hortensius' no longer exists; but we can clearly make out its spirit
   from the remaining works of the man: a high moral flight, a serious
   interest in the pursuit of truth, but on an uncertain foundation,
   stimulating rather than strengthening the principles; a book well
   adapted to wean a youthful mind from the wild life of a student to
   introspection and the study of the highest questions. And this it
   actually accomplished for Augustine; he severed himself henceforward
   from his boon companions, in order with absolute devotion to search for
   truth. But the book gave him no power over his sensual desires; and he
   soon found that he had outgrown a tuition which did not satisfy his
   understanding, left his religious feeling still hungry, and gave him no
   power of self-mastery. He had learned to know Cicero, the philosopher
   and moralist, and had become no better than before. But what Cicero did
   for him--leading him from an empty and trifling existence to serious
   self-examination and to the search for truth--moralists like Cicero did
   for the world of that time generally. Augustine remained, as the
   earliest books he wrote as a Catholic Christian prove, far more
   powerfully and permanently influenced than he is willing to allow. He
   now turned to Manichæism, a doctrine which then exercised a great
   attraction on the deeper spirits. Anyone who had gained some
   impressions from the contents of the Bible, but held the ecclesiastical
   interpretation of the Bible as a false one--especially if he could not
   surmount the stumbling-blocks of the Old Testament; anyone who was
   determined to cast aside leading-strings and examine things freely for
   himself; anyone who sought to know what inner principle holds the world
   together; anyone who strove from the physical to grasp the constitution
   of the spiritual world and the problem of evil--became in those days a
   Manichæan. Again, this sect, partly from necessity, partly by an inward
   impulse, surrounded itself like our freemasons with secrets, and formed
   at the same time a firm inner ring within the society of the age.
   Finally, its members exhibited a serious way of life; and the neophyte,
   in mounting step by step to ever higher and narrower circles, found
   himself at last in a company of saints and redeemers. Into this society
   Augustine entered, and to it he belonged for the nine years preceding
   this twenty-eighth year of his life. What attracted him to it was the
   fact that it allowed Christ a high rank, and yet assured to its
   disciples a reasonable solution of the riddle of the world. Hungry as
   he was, he flung himself greedily upon this spiritual nourishment. The
   doctrine that evil and good are alike physical forces--that the
   struggle in man's breast is only the continuation of the great struggle
   in nature between light and darkness, sun and cloud--struck him as
   profound and satisfactory. In place of a shallow ethic he found here a
   deep metaphysic. Nevertheless, after but a few years--he had meanwhile
   become a professor in Carthage--he began to have his doubts. It was the
   astrological knowledge, which he had sought along with the
   metaphysical, that first appeared to him as mere deception. Next, a
   deeper study of Aristotle sobered his view of the Manichæan physics.
   His clear intelligence began to perceive that the whole Manichæan
   wisdom reposed on a physical mythology. The inborn turn of his mind
   towards the experimental and real gained the victory as soon as it was
   reinforced by the influence of Aristotle, the great logician and
   natural scientist of the ancient world. It was he that led back
   Augustine, like so many before and after, to a calm and sober thinking.
   Of all fables, the Manichæan now seemed to him the worst, because
   absolutely nothing in the world of the actual corresponds to them. But
   the actual was his aim; and he made no secret of his rising doubts to
   his brethren in the society. At the time there was living in Rome a
   renowned Manichæan teacher, named Faustus. The friends who found
   themselves unable to solve the doubts of Augustine consoled him with
   the name of Faustus. " Faustus will make it all right," they said;
   "Faustus will come and explain it all." Augustine allowed himself to be
   thus consoled for some time. At last, however, Faustus came in the
   flesh. The only section of the Confessions' over which lies a breath of
   humour, is that in which is painted the belauded Faustus, the perfect
   drawing-room professor, who yet was honest enough to confess, when
   Augustine alone was by, his own ignorance. Thenceforward, in his heart
   of hearts, Augustine was done with Manichæism.

   But what next? Aristotle, it is true, had brought emancipation; but he
   was able to give no hint upon the questions to which Augustine sought
   an answer. It was here that Augustine began again to draw near the
   Church. But the Church forbade free inquiry; she maintained the fables
   of the Old Testament; she proclaimed, as Augustine thought, a God with
   eyes and ears, and made Him out to be the creator of evil. It was
   impossible that she should be the depositary of truth. Then, he
   decided, there can be no truth at all; we must doubt everything. To
   this view he now resigned his soul, and fortified it by the reading of
   sceptical philosophers. He sought for a ready-made truth, and yet was
   unwilling to stifle his restless longing for it. No wonder that he fell
   into scepticism; he felt himself, in his heart of hearts, poor and
   without a stay. Yet more, he had long laid upon himself the obligation
   to cast aside all immorality and obtain entire dominion over himself:
   an aim which, as he himself unwillingly confesses, he did in some
   regards attain. To the common frivolities and trivialities, to the
   theatres and plays, he had bidden farewell; and he was conscientious in
   the discharge of his professorial duties. But the love of fame and of
   honour among men was a different matter; and above all he was unable to
   free himself from a connection which he already regarded as immoral.
   Little as it contravened the social laws of the age, to him this
   relation caused a deep breach and cleavage in his personality. He saw
   himself severed from the good and holy, and from God; in spite of all
   his good resolutions, he saw himself entangled with the world and with
   sensuality; and, as he confesses later, he would not let himself be
   healed, because his sickness was dear to him. Yet, as in his serious
   contemporaries, pure moral feeling and artificiality even then were in
   him closely interwoven. A holy life appeared to him to be nothing but a
   life of most utter renunciation; and to lead such a life he was still
   without the strength. In these perplexities, and in the mood of a
   sceptic, he left Carthage in order to work in Rome as a professor of
   rhetoric. The Carthaginian students with their loose manners had given
   him a distaste for his native Africa. But in Rome also he had some bad
   experiences with his pupils, and accordingly but a few months passed
   before he took a public professorship at Milan. The Manichæans, with
   whom he still maintained constant relations, since "nothing better had
   as yet appeared," had secured him this post by their recommendations to
   the influential Symmachus.

   Here in Milan the transformation was at last completed, slowly it is
   true, but with extraordinary transparency and dramatic sequence.
   Augustine recognised with growing clearness that man can gain a solid
   hold in the highest questions only by serious unintermitting
   self-discipline; and he was now to prove that man gains moral force by
   freely giving himself up to a personality far surpassing his own. In
   Milan he met Bishop Ambrose. Hitherto he had fallen in with no Catholic
   Christian capable of impressing him. Such a one he was now to know. If
   at first it was perhaps the kindliness and extraordinary eloquence of
   Ambrose that captivated him, it was soon the matter of the Bishop's
   sermons that drew his attention. He himself tells us in the
   Confessions' that the highest service Ambrose did him was to remove the
   stumbling-blocks of the Old Testament. Certainly the Greek method of
   interpretation, of which Ambrose was an exponent, exerted a strong
   influence on Augustine as on every cultivated mind of the age. But the
   really dominating force in Ambrose was the personality that lay behind
   his words. It was here that Augustine broke openly with Manichæism. If
   truth is to be found anywhere, it must be in the Church; to this
   acknowledgment he was brought by the influence of the great Bishop. The
   picture of Christ which his mother had been the first to show him, rose
   again before his soul, and he never afterwards lost it.

   But Ambrose had no time to trouble himself about a man who, though he
   would willingly have believed, was nothing but a sceptic; and even yet
   there remained a fundamental stumbling-block to be removed. Augustine
   could not bring himself to believe that there can be an active
   spiritual being without material substance. The spiritual conception of
   God and the idealistic view of the world seemed to him unprovable,
   impossible. But while he thus struggled in vain for certainty, his
   despair at finding himself still a slave to the world and sense, and
   unable to attain the mastery over himself, was much deeper than before.
   Fear of his Judge and fear of death lay like a dead-weight on his soul.
   He thirsted for strength; already he would have given all for
   this--honour, calling, nay even understanding itself. But like the
   sleeper that strives to rise, he sank back again and again. The most
   various plans fluttered before his mind: along with congenial friends
   and pupils, he hugged himself in the idea of withdrawing altogether
   from the world, and living, far from the madding crowd, a common life
   of personal training and of the search for truth. But the decision had
   as yet no force; its execution was hindered by the calls of wife and
   business. What essentially he was already seeking in his theoretical
   and practical doubts was but one thing--intercourse with the living
   God, who frees us from sin. But God did not appear to him, and he did
   not find Him.

   Help came to him from an unexpected quarter. He was reading some
   writings of the Neoplatonic school--a school in which Greek philosophy
   spoke its last word, and uttered its last testament. Like a dying man
   who only under compulsion, in the midst of his agonies, busies himself
   with the things of this world, Greek philosophy directed all her
   thoughts to the highest, to the holy, to God. Everything lofty and
   noble that she had gained in the course of a long toil, she compacted
   into a bold idealistic system, and a practical direction to the holy
   life. In Neoplatonism she taught that we must follow the authority of
   revelation, and that there is only one reality, God, and only one aim,
   to mount up to Him; that evil is nothing but separation from God, and
   the world of sense only an unreal appearance; that we can only attain
   to God by self-discipline and selfrestraint, by contemplation ever
   rising from lower to higher spheres, and finally by an indescribable
   intoxication, an ecstasy,' in which God Himself embraces the soul and
   sends His light upon her:


   "All things transitory

   But as symbols are sent:

   Earth's insufficiency

   Here grows to event:

   The Indescribable,

   Here it is done."

   These concluding words of Faust' are Neoplatonism all over. The
   Neoplatonic philosophy had more and more renounced the dry light' of
   science; it had thrown itself into the arms of revelation, in order to
   raise men above themselves. This, the last product of the proud Greek
   mind, did not disdain even Christian writings in its desire to learn
   from them. St John's Gospel was read and highly valued in Neoplatonic
   circles. It was in this philosophy that Augustine now steeped himself;
   it was this that solved for him his theoretical riddles and doubts; it
   was this that drew him out of scepticism and subjugated him for ever.
   The reality of spiritual values, the spiritual conception of God,
   became for him now a certainty. The keen criticism which he formerly
   had applied to the theoretical groundwork of philosophical systems here
   failed him. Scepticism had dulled his critical faculty; or rather--he
   sought above all for guidance to the blessed life, and for an authority
   which might guarantee to him the living God. What he sought he
   transferred to the new philosophy: for the holy being to which he
   wished to give himself up, and whose nearness he wished to feel, was
   not, as he imagined it, given to him by Neoplatonism. The true
   difference he did not fail to see; but in its deepest meaning he
   penetrated it neither now nor later. That there existed a philosophy on
   to which he could fasten what his soul longed for, was to him important
   before all else. Neoplatonism became to him, as to many before and
   after, a pathway to the Church; by its means he acquired confidence in
   the fundamental ideas of the ecclesiastical theology of the time. It is
   remarkable how speedily, how imperceptibly he passed from Neoplatonism
   to the recognition of the Bible in its entirety and of the Catholic
   doctrine; or rather, how he came to see Neoplatonism as true, but not
   as the whole truth. There was wanting to it, above all, one item--the
   recognition of redemption through the incarnate God, and thereby the
   right way to truth. These philosophers, said he, see the Promised Land
   like Moses, but they know not how to enter in and possess it. This he
   fancied that he now knew: by the subjection of the understanding to
   Christ. But Christ, as he had learnt from Ambrose, is only where the
   Church is. We must therefore believe, and believe what the Church
   believes. Augustine in his Confessions' allows us no doubt that the
   decision to submit ourselves to authority is the condition of the
   attainment of the truth. This decision he made, and thus became a
   Catholic Christian. In this inner transformation the causes are
   wonderfully linked together--the Neoplatonic influence, the enduring
   impression of the Person of Christ, strengthened by the perusal of
   Paul's Epistles, and the grand authority of the Church.

   He was now a Catholic Christian by conviction and will; but he himself
   describes his state of mind in the words: "Thus I had found the pearl
   of great price, but I still hesitated to sell all I had; I delighted in
   the law of God after the inward man, but I found another law in my
   members." No theory, no doctrine, could here avail him: only
   overpowering personal impressions could subject him or carry him away.
   And such impressions arrived. First, it was the news of a famous
   heathen orator in Rome, who had suddenly renounced a brilliant career
   and publicly professed himself a Catholic; a report that stirred him to
   his depths. Then, a few days later, a fellow-countryman, happening to
   visit him, told him an event that had recently taken place in Trèves. A
   few young imperial officials had gone a walk in the gardens on the
   city-walls, and there fallen upon the hut of a hermit. In the hut they
   found a book, the Life of St Antony. One of them began to read it; and
   the book exerted such a fascination upon them that they forthwith
   resolved to leave all and follow Antony. The narrator told this story
   with flaming enthusiasm; he had himself been present and a witness of
   the sudden transformation. He did not see what an impression his tale
   made on his listener. A fearful struggle arose in Augustine's mind:
   "Where do we allow ourselves to drift? Why is this? The unlearned take
   the kingdom of heaven by force, and we with our heartless learning
   still wallow in flesh and blood!" In the conflict of his feelings, no
   longer master of himself, he flung into the garden. The thought of that
   which he was to renounce struggled in him with the might of a new life.
   He fainted; and only awoke to consciousness as he heard in a
   neighbouring house a child's voice, probably in play, repeating again
   and again the words, Take and read, take and read.' He hurried back to
   the house, and, remembering the story of St Antony, opened his Bible.
   His eye fell on the passage in Romans, "Not in rioting and drunkenness,
   not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye
   on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to
   fulfil the lusts thereof." "I would not read further, nor was there
   need; for as I finished the passage there immediately streamed into my
   heart the light of peaceful certainty, and all the darkness of
   indecision vanished away." At this moment he broke with his past: he
   felt in himself the power to renounce the sinful habit, and to lead a
   new and holy life in union with his God. This he vowed to do, and kept
   his vow.

   A proof that it was an inner transformation which he had undergone lies
   in the fact that while he thenceforward renounced his wife and his
   public occupation as an evil, he in no degree for the present gave up
   his studies or the circle of his interests. So far from it, that he
   removed with his friends and his mother to an estate near Milan, in
   order there to devote himself undisturbed to philosophy and to serious
   intercourse with his companions, and to pursue his philosophical
   speculations as he had pursued them hitherto. His ideal and that of his
   friends was not St Antony, but a society of wise men, as conceived by
   Cicero, Plotinus, and Porphyry. No obtrusive Church dogmas as yet
   disturbed the philosophical dialogues of the friends; but their minds
   were ruled by a sure belief in the living God; and in place of the old
   uncertainties about the starting-point and aim of all knowledge of
   truth, they now lived in the assurance given by the revelation of God
   in Christ and by the authority of the Church. The question whether
   happiness is secured by the search for truth or by the possession of
   truth, was mooted by Augustine in the circle of these friends, and
   decided in favour of the latter hypothesis. He resolved to pursue his
   unceasing investigations further; but the last and highest truth he
   sought no more, convinced that he had found it in subjection to the
   authority of God as proclaimed by the Church.

   In this narrative I have attempted to follow the Confessions,' and only
   toward the end have I corrected their representations from those more
   trustworthy sources, the books written by Augustine immediately after
   his conversion. You will not have failed to feel the problem offered by
   this life. On the one side, a development from within outward by
   incessant toil, an ascent from a fettered and distracted existence to
   freedom and stability in God; on the other, the development into the
   belief laid down by authority, repose upon the Church, and the monkish
   conception of marriage and work. Even if we keep in mind the state of
   the times, how strange is it nevertheless that this rich and untiring
   spirit, striving after personal Christian piety, should only attain it
   by submitting to the authority of the Church!

   These two things are henceforward inseparably interwoven in Augustine's
   life and thought. On the one side he speaks in a new fashion--but on
   the lines of the Church-of God and divine things. From the experience
   of his heart he witnesses of sin and guilt, repentance and faith, God's
   power and God's love. In place of a sterile morality he sets up a
   living piety, life in God through Christ. To this life he summons the
   individual; he shows him how poor and wretched he is, with all his
   knowledge and all his virtue, so long as he is not penetrated by the
   love of God. He shows him that the natural man is swayed by
   selfishness, that selfishness is slavery and guilt, and that every man
   is by nature a link in an infinite chain of sin. But he also teaches
   him that God is greater than our heart, that the love of God as
   revealed in Christ is stronger than our natural impulses, and that
   freedom is the blessed necessity of what is good. Wherever in the
   following millennium and later the struggle has arisen against a
   mechanical piety, self-righteousness, or jejune morality, there the
   spirit of Augustine has been at work. But, at the same time, no one
   before Augustine has, in so decided and open a fashion, established
   Christianity on the authority of the Church, or confused with the
   authority of institutions the living authority of saintly persons, who
   engender a life like their own.

   The forces which were inseparably conjoined in his own experiences and
   life have continued to affect the Church through his influence; his
   significance in the formation of Catholic ecclesiasticism and in the
   rule of the Church is no less than his critical significance, or than
   the power given him to arouse individual piety and personal
   Christianity.

   The solution of this problem I shall not here attempt; it must suffice
   to observe that fundamentally it is by no means astonishing. Religion
   and the faith dependent on authority, different as they are, are
   severed by a narrow partition; and, where faith is imagined as first of
   all a matter of knowledge, the partition vanishes entirely. At this
   point Luther stepped in and undertook to establish the Christian on a
   foundation from which he must view the authority of institutions, and
   monasticism, as a degenerate form of belief.

   But every age has received from God its content, and every spirit its
   measure. Augustine's limits are at the same time his strength and the
   conditions of his activity. Within his limitations, in the forty-three
   years of his Catholic life, he raised himself to a personality whose
   sublimity and humility are amazing to us. A stream of truthfulness,
   kindness, and benevolence, and on the other hand of living ideas and
   deep conceptions, runs through his writings, by means of which he
   became the great teacher of the West. True, he was left behind at the
   Reformation, though that very Reformation he helped to call into
   existence; and his religious view of the world failed to hold its
   ground against the scientific knowledge to which we have since Leibnitz
   attained. True, Catholicism strove to stifle his still surviving
   influence at the Council of Trent, in the contest with Jansenism, and
   by the Vatican Decrees. But he is, in spite of all, no dead force; what
   he has been to the Church of Christ will not vanish, and even to the
   Romish Church he will leave no rest.

   From Easter 387 to Easter 1887 fifteen hundred years have passed since
   Augustine was baptised and started on the service of the Church. No one
   has celebrated the day; no monument has been set up to the teacher of
   the Church. But he has the noblest of all memorials: his name stands
   written in imperishable characters on the leaves of Western history
   from the days of the great migrations to our own.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [1]4  [2]5  [3]6  [4]9  [5]10  [6]11  [7]12  [8]13  [9]14  [10]15
   [11]16  [12]17  [13]18  [14]19  [15]20  [16]21  [17]22  [18]23  [19]24
   [20]25  [21]26  [22]27  [23]28  [24]29  [25]30  [26]31  [27]32  [28]33
   [29]34  [30]35  [31]36  [32]37  [33]38  [34]39  [35]40  [36]41  [37]42
   [38]43  [39]44  [40]45  [41]46  [42]47  [43]48  [44]49  [45]50  [46]51
   [47]52  [48]53  [49]54  [50]55  [51]56  [52]57  [53]58  [54]59  [55]60
   [56]61  [57]62  [58]63  [59]64  [60]65  [61]66  [62]67  [63]68  [64]69
   [65]70  [66]71  [67]72  [68]73  [69]74  [70]75  [71]76  [72]77  [73]78
   [74]79  [75]80  [76]81  [77]82  [78]83  [79]84  [80]85  [81]86  [82]87
   [83]88  [84]89  [85]90  [86]91  [87]92  [88]93  [89]94  [90]95  [91]96
   [92]97  [93]98  [94]99  [95]100  [96]101  [97]102  [98]103  [99]104
   [100]105  [101]106  [102]107  [103]108  [104]109  [105]110  [106]111
   [107]112  [108]113  [109]114  [110]115  [111]116  [112]117  [113]118
   [114]119  [115]120  [116]121  [117]122  [118]123  [119]124  [120]125
   [121]126  [122]127  [123]128  [124]129  [125]130  [126]131  [127]132
   [128]133  [129]134  [130]135  [131]136  [132]137  [133]138  [134]139
   [135]140  [136]141  [137]142  [138]143  [139]144  [140]145  [141]146
   [142]147  [143]148  [144]149  [145]150  [146]151  [147]152  [148]153
   [149]154  [150]155  [151]156  [152]157  [153]158  [154]159  [155]160
   [156]161  [157]162  [158]163  [159]164  [160]165  [161]166  [162]167
   [163]168  [164]169  [165]170  [166]171  [167]172
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

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