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 77the 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 78after 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 79regarded 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 80again 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 81to 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.