§ 61. THE REVIVAL OF MONASTIC1SM. 323
testimony to that effect, so now also did different voices. Ivo of Chartres (d. 1116) condemns the monks who were filled with the leaven of pride and boast of their ascetic practices and refers to such passages as 1 Tim. 4 : 8 and Rom. 14 : 17. The solitudes of the mountains and forests, he says, will not make men holy, who do not carry with them rest of soul, the Sabbath of the heart, and eleva tion of mind. Peter of Cluny wrote to a hermit that his separation from the world would not profit unless he built a strong wall against evil in his own heart, and that wall was Christ the Saviour. Without this protec tion, retirement to solitude, mortifications of the body, and journeyings in distant lands, instead of availing, would bring temptations yet more violent. Every mode of life, lay and clerical, monastic and eremitic, has its own temptations, if
But prosperity was invariably followed by rivalry, arro gance, idleness, and low morals. If Otto of Freising gives unstinted praise to the cloistral communities, his contempo rary, Anselm of Havelberg,1 condemns the laziness and gossip of the monks within and without the convent walls. Eliza beth of Schonau and Hildegard of Bingen, while they looked upon the monastic life as the highest form of earthly exist ence, saw much that was far from ideal in the lives of monks and nuns.2 There is a chronique scandaleuse of the convents as dark and repulsive as the chronique scandaleuse of the papacy during the pornocracy, and under the last popes of the Middle Ages. In a letter to Alexander III., asking him to dissolve the abbey of Grestian, the bishop of the diocese, Arnulf, spoke of all kinds of abuses, avarice, quarrelling,
1 Hauck, IV. 312.
2 Hauck, IV. 401 sqq., says that there were not many abbesses in Germany like Hildegard and Elizabeth of Schonau. The complaints of corrupt monks and nuns came from Saxony, Swabia. Lorraine, the Rhine land, and Switzer land. See quotations in Hauck.
324 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
murder, profligacy. William of Malmesbury,1 writing in 1125, gives a bad picture of the monks of Canterbury. The convent of Brittany, of which Aboelard was abbot, revealed, as he reports in his autobiography, a rude and shocking state of affairs. Things got rapidly worse after the first fervor of the orders of St. Francis and Dominic was cooled. Teachers at the universities, like William of St. Amour of Paris (d. 1270), had scathing words for the monkish inso lence and profligacy of his day, as will appear when we con sider the mendicant orders. Did not a bishop during the Avignon captivity of the papacy declare that from personal examination he knew a convent where all the nuns had car nal intercourse with demons ? The revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1375), approved at the councils of Constance and Basel, reveal the same low condition of monastic virtue. Nicolas of Clemanges (d. 1440) wrote * vigorous protests against the decay of the orders, and describes in darkest colors their waste, gluttony, idleness, and profligacy. He says a girl going into a convent might as well be regarded as an abandoned woman at once. It was true, as Caesar of Heisterbach had said in a homily several centuries before, "Religion brought riches and riches destroyed religion."2
The institution of monasticism, which had included the warmest piety and the highest intelligence of the Middle Ages in their period of glory, came to be, in the period of their decline, the synonym for superstition and the irrecon cilable foe of human progress, v And this was because there is something pernicious in the monastic method of attempting
1 Gesta pontificum, Rolls Series, p. 70, as quoted by Taunton, I. 22. William says, " The monks of Canterbury, like all then in England, amused themselves with hunting, falconry, and horse racing. They loved the rattle of dice, drink, and fine clothes, and had such a retinue of servants that they were more like seculars than monks."
2 Eeligio peperit divitias, divitice religionem destruxerunt, Horn. III. 96. Jessopp, Coming of the Friars, says that in England the monks of the thir teenth century were better than their age, which is not difficult of belief.