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 33than 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 34affected 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 35ought 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, 36tired 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 37world 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 38foreigners, 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, 39political, 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 40in 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, 41to 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 42of 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 43truth, 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 44are 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, 45even 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 46more 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 47as 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.