§ 61. THE REVIVAL OF MONASTICISM. 313
centres of missionary and civilizing agencies. When there was little preaching, the monastic community preached the most powerful sermon, calling men's thoughts away from riot and bloodshed to the state of brotherhood and religious reflection.1 The motto aratro etcruce, "by the cross and the plough," stood in their case for a reality. The monk was a pioneer in the cultivation of the ground, and, after the most scientific fashion then known, taught agriculture, the culture of the vine and fish, the breeding of cattle, and the culture of wool. He built roads and the best buildings. In intellec tual and artistic concerns the convent was the chief school of the times. It trained architects, painters, and sculptors. There the deep problems of theology and philosophy were studied ; there manuscripts were copied, and when the universities arose, the convent furnished them with their first and their most renowned teachers. In northeastern Ger many and other parts of Europe and in Asia it was the outer citadel of church profession and church activity.
So popular was the monastic life that religion seemed to be in danger of running out into monkery and society of being transformed into an aggregation of convents. The Fourth Lateran sought to counteract this tendency by forbidding the establishment of new orders.2 But no council was ever more ignorant of the immediate future. Innocent III. was scarcely in his grave before the Dominicans and Franciscans received full papal sanction.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the important change was accomplished whereby all monks received priestly ordination. Before that time it was the exception for a monk to be a priest. Extreme unction and absolu tion had been administered in the convent by unordained
1 Montalembert lays stress upon intercessory prayer as the chief service rendered by the monastery of the West. " They prayed much, they prayed always for those whose prayers were evil or who prayed not at all." Monks of the West, Engl. trans., I. 42 sq. 2 Canon 13.
314 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1204.
monks.1 With the development of the strict theory of sacerdotalism, these functions were forbidden to them, as by the ninth oecumenical council, 1123. The synod of Nisrnes, thirty years earlier, 1096, thought it answered objections to the new custom sufficiently by pointing to Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, and Augustine as cases of monks who had priestly ordination. On the other hand the active move ment within the convents to take a larger part in the affairs of society was resisted by (ecumenical councils, as, for ex ample, the Second Lateran, 1139, which forbade monks practising as physicians or lawyers.
.The monastic life was praised as the highest form of earthly existence. The convent was compared to Canaan2 and treated as the shortest and surest road to heaven. The secular life, even the life of the secular priest, was compared to Egypt. The passage to the cloister was called conversion, and the monks converts, conversi, or the religious.3 They reached the Christian ideal. Renouncing the vow was pro nounced turning to the company of the lost, to the lion's mouth, and to the realm of blackness and death.*
1 This has been sufficiently shown by Lea, Absolution Formula of the Templars, in Papers of Am. Soc. of Ch. Hist., vol. V.; also Hefele, V. 381. As late, however, as the thirteenth century there were monks in England who had not received priestly ordination. See Stevenson, Life of Grosseteste, 158. In the fifth century the consecration of the monk was treated in some quarters as a distinct sacrament.
2 It would be difficult to find more attractive pictures of earthly happiness than are given in the descriptions of mediaeval convents by eye-witnesses, as of the convent of Clairvaux by William of St. Thierry, Migne, 185, 248, and Peter de Roy a, Migne, 182, 710.
3 It was even compared to the conversion of St. Paul. See Eicken, 324. Csesar of Heisterbach devotes a chapter of his Dialogus to conversion, that is, the assumption of the monastic vow. Canon 13 of the Fourth Lateran, Mansi, XXII. 1002, speaks of monastics as " the religious," of the orders as "religions," and of entering a convent as " being converted to religion." So Martin V. at the Council of Constance, 1418, charges Wyclif with declaring that " all religions owe their origin to the devil," that is, all orders. Mirbt, Quellen, 158.
4 St. Bernard, Ep., 112 ; Migne, 182, 255 sq.