§ 62. MONASTICISM AND THE PAPACY. 325
to secure holiness, and something false in its ideal of holi ness. The monks crushed out the heretical sects arid resented the Renaissance. Their example in the period of early fervor, adapted to encourage thrift, later promoted laziness and insolence. Once praiseworthy as educators, they became champions of obscurantism and ignorance. Chaucer's prior, who went on the pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas a Becket, is a familiar illustration of the popular opinion of the monks in England in the fourteenth century: —
" He was a lord full fat and in good point ;
His eyen stepe and rolling in his head / That stemed as a fornice of a led ; * His botes souple, his hors in gret estat, Now certainly he was a sayre prelat. He was not pale as a f orpined gost ; A fat swan loved he best of any rost ; His palfrey was as broune as is a bery."
And yet it would be most unjust to forget the services which the monastery performed at certain periods in the history of mediaeval Europe, or to deny the holy purpose of their founders. The hymns, the rituals, and the manuscripts prepared by mediseval monks continue to make contribution to our body of literature and our Church services. An age like our own may congratulate itself upon its methods of Church activity, and yet acknowledge the utility of the dif ferent methods practised by the Church in another age. We study the movements of the past, not to find fault with methods which the best men of their time advocated and which are not our own, but to learn, and become, if possible, better fitted for grappling with the problems of our own time.
§ 62. Monasticism and the Papacy.
Monasticism and the papacy, representing the opposite extremes of abandonment of the world and lordship over the world, strange to say, entered into the closest alliance. The monks came to be the standing army of the popes,
326 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
and were their obedient and valorous champions in the battles the popes waged with secular rulers. Some of the best popes were monastic in their training, or their hab its, or both. Gregory VII. was trained in the Benedictine convent on the Aventine, Victor III. proceeded from Monte Cassino, Urban II. and Pascal II. from Cluny, Adrian IV. from St. Albans. Eugenius III., the pupil of St. Bernard, con tinued after he was made pope to wear the shirt of the monks of Citeaux next to his body. Innocent III. wrote the ascetic work, Contempt of the World.1
One monastic order after the other was founded from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The organizing instinct and a pious impulse dotted Christendom with new convents or rebuilt old ones from Mt. Carmel to northern Scotland.2 Innocent III., after the manner in which the modern Protestant justifies the denominational distinctions of Protestantism, likened these various orders to troops clad in different kinds of armor and belonging to the same army. " Such variety," he said, "does not imply any division of alle giance to Christ, but rather one mind under a diversity of form." 3 So Peter of Blois writing to the abbot of Eversham said, that as out of the various strings of the harp, harmony comes forth, so out of the variety of religious orders comes unity of service. One should no less expect to find unity among a number of orders than among the angels or heav enly bodies. A vineyard bears grapes both black and white. A Christian is described in Holy Writ as a cedar, a cypress, a rose, an olive tree, a palm, a terebinth, yet they form one group in the Lord's garden.4
1 Monks were declared by the synod of Nismes, 1096, to be better qualified for ruling than the secular clergy. Hefele, V. 244.
2 For lists, see Helyot and Dr. Littledale's art. Monachism, "Enc. Brit."
3 Ep., III. 38 ; Migne, 214, 921.
4 Ep., 97 ; Migne, 207, 304 sq. Speaking of the variety of expression which Christ allows, he says in a way worthy of a modern advocate of the Evan gelical Alliance, ipsa varietas est uniformitatis causa.