The Hermits | Page 5

by, with tablets to record all; hating learning as they hated poison; indulging at the baths in conduct which had best be left undescribed; and "complaining that they were not born among the Cimmerians, if amid their golden fans a fly should perch upon the silken fringes, or a slender ray of the sun should pierce through the awning;" while, if they "go any distance to see their estates in the country, or to hunt at a meeting collected for their amusement by others, they think that they have equalled the marches of Alexander or of Caesar."
On the wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp--and not half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here--the news brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency.
Women of the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves; they gave away their wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor; and in voluntary poverty and mean garments they followed such men as Jerome and Ruffinus across the seas, to visit the new found saints of the Egyptian desert, and to end their days, in some cases, in doleful monasteries in Palestine. The lives of such women as those of the Anician house; the lives of Marcella and Furia, of Paula, of the Melanias, and the rest, it is not my task to write. They must be told by a woman, not by a man. We may blame those ladies, if we will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at the weaknesses--the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity--which we fancy that we discover. We may lament--and in that we shall not be wrong--the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them-- the example and precursor of so much which has since then been ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands, and brothers; we must confess that in these women the spirit of the old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been so long dead, flashed up for one splendid moment, ere it sunk into the darkness of the Middle Age; that in them woman asserted (however strangely and fantastically) her moral equality with man; and that at the very moment when monasticism was consigning her to contempt, almost to abhorrence, as "the noxious animal," the "fragile vessel," the cause of man's fall at first, and of his sin and misery ever since, woman showed the monk (to his naively-confessed surprise), that she could dare, and suffer, and adore as well as he.
But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and spread irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached, practised, by every great man of the time. Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours, Salvian, Caesarius of Arles, were all monks, or as much of monks as their duties would allow them to be. Ambrose of Milan, though no monk himself, was the fervent preacher of, the careful legislator for, monasticism male and female. Throughout the whole Roman Empire, in the course of a century, had spread hermits (or dwellers in the desert), anchorites (retired from the world), or monks (dwellers alone). The three names grew afterwards to designate three different orders of ascetics. The hermits remained through the Middle Ages those who dwelt in deserts; the anchorites, or "ankers" of the English Middle Age, seem generally to have inhabited cells built in, or near, the church walls; the name of "monks" was transferred from those who dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular communities, under a fixed government. But the three names at first were interchangeable; the three modes of life alternated, often in the same man. The life of all three was the same,--celibacy, poverty, good deeds towards their fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of every kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after baptism: and the mental food of all three was the same likewise; continued meditation upon the vanity of the world, the sinfulness of the flesh, the glories of heaven, and the horrors of hell: but with these the old hermits combined--to do them justice--a personal faith in God, and a personal love for Christ, which those who sneer at them would do well to copy.
Over all Europe, even to