Egypt, the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first exp.mple, strictly speaking, of the monastic life. The first and most noted of the solitaries was Paul, a native of Thebes, who, in the time of Atha- nasius, distributed his patrimony, deserted his fam- ily and house, and took up his residence among the tombs and in a ruined tower. After a long and pain- ful novitiate, he at length advanced three days' jour- ney into the desert, to the eastward of the Nile, where, discovering a lonely spot which possessed the advantages of shade and water, he fixed his last abode. His example and his lessons infected others, whose curiosity pursued him to the desert ; and before he quitted life, which was prolonged to the term of one hundred and five years, he lieheld a numerous progeny imitiiting his original. The prolific colonies of monks multijilied with rapid increase on the sands of Lj'bia, upon the rocks of Thebais, and the cities of the Nile. But there were no bodies or communities of men em- bracing this life, nor anj' monasteries built, until Pachomius, who flourished in the peaceable reign of Constantino, caused some to be erected [see jMonas- tery]. Once the custom established, thej' soon mul- tiplied, and even to the present day tlie traveller may explore the ruins of fifty monasteries which were planted to the south of Alexandria by the disciples of Pachomius. Inflamed by tliis example, a Syrian youth, whose name was Hilarion, fixed his dreary abode on a sandy bcacb, between the sea and a morass, about seven miles from Gaza. The austere penance in which he persisted for forty-eight years diffused a similar enthusiasm, and innumerable monasteries were soon distributed over all Palestine. Not long after, Eustathius, bishop of Sebastia, Ijrought monks into Ar- • mcnia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus. While Macarius, the Egyptian, peopled the deserts of Scethis with monks, Gregorj-, the apostle of Armenia, did the like in tliat country. But St. Basil is generally considered as the great father and patriarch of the Eastern monks. It was he who reduced the monastic life to a fi.xed I state of uniformit}-; who united the anchorets and coenoliites, and obliged them to engage themselves by I solemn vows. It was St. Basil who prescribed rules |
for the government and direction of the monasteries, to which most of the disciples of Anthony, Pachomius, Macarius, and the other ancient fathers of the deserts submitted ; and to this day all the Greeks, Nestorians, Melchites, Georgians, Mingrelians, and Armenians fol- low the rule of St. Basil. In the AVest, Alhanasiua (about A.D. 340) taught the anchorets of Italy to live in societies; and a little later Martin of Tours, "a soldier, a hermit, a bishop, and a saint," established the monasteries of Gaul, and the progress of monkery is said not to have been less rai)id or less universal than that of Christianity itself. Every province, and at last every city of the empire, was filled witii their increasing multitudes. The disciples of Pachomius spread themselves wherever Christianity found a foot- hold. The Council of Saragossa, in Spain (A.I). '■j>*0), in condemning the practice of clergymen who atlected to wear the monastical habits, aftords proof that there were monks in that kingdom in the 4th century, be- fore St. Donatus went thither out of Africa, with sev- enty disciples, and founded the Monastery of Sirliita. Augustine, sent into England by Gregory the Great, in the year 596, to preach the faith, at that time intro- duced the monastic state into British territory, and it made so great a progress there that, within the space of two hundred years, there were thirty kings and queens who preferred the religious habit to their crowns, and founded stately monasteries, where they ended their days in retirement and solitude. The monastery of Bangor, in Flintshire, a few miles south of Wrexham, contained above two thousand monks, and from thence a numerous colony was dispersed among the barbarians of Ireland, where St. Patrick is regarded as the founder of monasticism ; and so readily did the monasteries multiply there that it was called" "the Island of Saints." lona, also, one of the western isles of Scotland, which was planted by the Irish monks, diffused over all northern regions a ray of science and superstition.
The ancient monks were not, like the modern, dis- tinguished into orders, and denominated from the founders of them ; but they had their names from the places which they inhabited, as the monks of Scethis, Tahennesus, Kitra, Canopiis, in Egypt, etc., or else were distinguished by their different ways of living. Of these, the most remarkable were : 1. The anchorets, so called from their retiring from society and living in private cells in the wilderness. 2. The coenol)ites, so denominated from their living together in common. All monks were originally no more than laymen ; nor could the}- well be otherwise, being confined by tlieir own rules to solitary retreats, where there could be no room for the exercise of the clerical functions. Ac- cordingly, St. Jerome tells us the office of monk is not to teach, but to mourn ; and St. Anthony himself is re- ported to have said that " the wilderness is as natural to a monk as water to a fish, and therefore a monk in a city is quite out of his element, like a fish u])(in dry land." Theodosius actually enacted that all who made profession of the monastic life should bo obliged by the civil magistrate to betake themselves to the wilderness, as their proper habitation. Justinian also made laws to the same purpose, forbidding the East- ern monks to appear in cities except to defend Ciiris- tianity from heretics (as was done e. g. by Anthony, to confute Arianism), and to despatch their secular af- fairs, if they had any, through their apnrrisdrii or re- sponsdles— that is, their proctors or syndics, which ev- er}' monastic company was allowed for that purpose. The Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) expressly distin- guishes the monks from the clerg\-, and reckons them witii the laymen. Gratian (A.D. 1150) himself, the noted Benedictine writer, who is most interested for the moderns, owns it to be plain from ecclesiastical history that, to the time of i)opes Siricius (.\.D. 324- 398) and Zosimus (died 418) the monks were only sim- ple monks, and not of the clergy. In some cases, how-