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 83regulars, 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 84with 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 85monasticism 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 86realising 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 87world 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 88now 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 89austerity 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 90monastic 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. 91Western 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.