As little as we find in the life of Christ or his apos- tles any authority for the monastic life, so little do we find it represented in the life of primitive Christians generally. It is true in the infant Church, for a time, all things were in common, but even in this community of life, certainly the oldest or, rather, earliest phase of Christianity, monasticism finds no authority; for if it had been intended to serve as such, it would have been perpetuated. It failed because it was a social impossi- bility. "It gives a beautiful picture of what Christi- anity might be, when all are of one mind and one spir- it ;"' but it was incompatible with the general course of human affairs, and it ceased to be. While, therefore, not even the Christian primitive communism can have been the germ from which monachism in the Church started, the theory of the monastic institution may pos- sibly have been thereby suggested. Not even the as- ceticism of the infant Church can be made to account for this institution. Severe asceticism, it is true, was the religion of thousands throughout the Christian world, but those who practiced it neither separated themselves from the world nor from its social and political duties. They were simply a standing memorial of the solemn nature of the Christian baptismal vow in the heart of the families of the people. The most rigid monastic rule could have added neither severity to their self-dis- cipline nor higher temper to their chastened spirit (see Neander, Ch. Ilist. ii, 223 sq.).
But though monasticism was not a form of life that sprang originally and purely out of Christianity, yet there can be no doubt that by Christianity a new spirit was infused into this foreign mode of life, whereby with many it became ennobled and converted into an instru- ment of effecting much which could not otherwise have been effected by any such mode of living. Unless this view is taken, it would, as Dr. Schaflf has well said, "involve the entire ancient Church, with its greatest and best representatives both East and West — its Atha- nasius, its Chrysostom, its Jerome, its Augustine — in apostasy from the faith." And, as he aptly adds, " no one will now hold that these men, who all admired and commended the monastic life, were antichristian error- ists, and that the few and almost exclusively negative opponents of that asceticism, as Jovinian, Helvidius, and Vigilantius, were the sole representatives of pure Chris- tianity in the Nicene and next following age" (comp. Kingsley, Hermits, p. 14, 15). We shall come to con- sider the good and evil influences in another part of this article. Here we have to deal simply with its origin and relation to primitive Christianity. In the article AscETicisji it has been shown that a distinction must be made between it and the monastic life, which was not known until the 4th century. That class of ascet- ics known as Hermits flourished probably as early as the age succeeding Christ's stay on earth ; indeed, it is barely possible that its origin may be traced to John the Baptist and his surroundings. There were, no doubt, many in the early Church who, with a view to more complete freedom from the cares, temptations, and TI.— G o
business of the world, withdrew from the ordinary in- tercourse of life, and took up their abode in natural caverns or rudely formed huts in deserts, forests, moun- tains, and other solitary places. The pagan deprava- tion of manners must have in no small degree contrib- uted to it. Then there must naturally have been mul- titudes of outwardly professing Christians, especially in large cities, who sickened the heart of those earnest souls whose spirit and disposition led to a nearness with Christ. Hence we find that hermits are generally spoken of as emanating from large cities, which were seats of corruption, tliereby indicating clearly that in the prim- itive Church the ascetic desire was prompted by man's noblest impulses. In the writings of the Church fa- thers we can trace these germs of Christian monachism back to the middle of the 2d century. Thus writes Ricaut, when speaking of Mount Athos (^Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches [A.D. 1G78J, p. 218): "Though St. Basil was the first author and founder of the order of Greek monks, so that before his time there could be none who professed the strict way of living in convents and religious societies — I mean in Greece — yet certainly, before his time, the convenience of the place, and the situation thereof, might invite Hermites, and persons delighting in solitary devotions, of which the world, in the first and second century, did abound" (corap. Origen, Ep, ad Horn. c. iii; Mohler, Gesch. d. Monchthums in s. ersten Entstehung, etc., ia Vermischte Schriften, ii, 165 sq.). Yet it is as late as the midille of tlie 3d centurj', in which falls the Decian persecution (A.D. 249-251), that there are first brought to light numerous instances of a retirement of devoted Christians to the desert (comp. Sozomen, Hist. Eccles. lib. vi, cap. 43). But even these hermits were not mo- nastics in the modern sense of the word. They were accustomed to live singly, each according to his own inclination, without any specific form of union, and that u-ithin the precincts of the Church to which they sever- ally belonged, unless personal safety required removal to more distant parts. It was reserved for the 4th cen- tury— the very age which gave state aid and perpetu- ity to Christianity — to develop that branch of asceticism which has ever since contiinied to flourish in a part of the Church, and to this day figures in the history of Christian civilization, sometimes to advantage, and oft- entimes to great disadvantage.