Chapter V.

The reason why those who give up the world, when they are received in the monasteries, must lay aside their own clothes and be clothed in others by the Abbot.

Wherefore each one on his admission is stripped of all his former possessions, so that he is not allowed any longer to keep even the clothes which he has on his back: but in the council of the brethren he is brought forward into the midst and stripped of his own clothes, and clad by the Abbot’s hands in the dress of the monastery, so that by this he may know not only that he has been despoiled of all his old things, but also that he has laid aside all worldly pride, and come down to the want and poverty of Christ, and that he is now to be supported not by wealth sought for by the world’s arts, nor by anything reserved from his former state of unbelief, but that he is to receive out of the holy and sacred funds of the monastery his rations for his service; and that, as he knows that he is thence to be clothed and fed and that he has nothing of his own, he may learn, nevertheless, not to be anxious about the morrow, according to the saying of the Gospel, and may not be ashamed to be on a level with the poor, that is with the body of the brethren, with whom Christ was not ashamed to be numbered, and to call himself their brother, but that rather he may glory that he has been made to share the lot of his own servants.⁷⁵⁹⁷⁵⁹    So the Rule of Pachomius (c. xxvi.) orders that on the admission of a monk “they shall strip him of his secular dress, and put on him the garb of the monks;” and that of S. Benedict (c. lviii.), “He shall then be clothed in the religious habit, and his secular clothes deposited in the wardrobe, that if, at the instigation of the devil, he should ever leave the monastery, they may be given back to him, and the religious dress be taken from him.”