Edward Cuthbert Butler

“ Basil formed his monastery in the neighbourhood of Neocaesarea in Pontus, he deliberately set himself against these tendencies. He declared that the cenobitical life is superior to the eremitical; that fasting and austerities should not interfere with prayer or work; that work should form an integral part of the monastic life, not merely as an occupation, but for its own sake and in order to do good to others; and therefore that monasteries should be near towns. All this was a new departure in monachism. ”

“ From one point of view, it may be regarded as a compromise between the primitive Benedictine system, whereby each abbey was autonomous and isolated, and the complete centralization of Cluny, whereby the abbot of Cluny was the only true superior in the body. Cîteaux, on the one hand, maintained the independent organic life of the houses—each abbey had its own abbot, elected by its own monks; its own community, belonging to itself and not to the order in general; its own property and finances administered by itself, without interference from outside. ”

“ The key-note of the movement was the imitation of the public life of Christ, especially the poverty of Christ. Francis and his disciples were to aim at possessing nothing, absolutely nothing, so far as was compatible with life; they were to earn their bread from day to day by the work of their hands, and only when they could not do so were they to beg; they were to make no provision for the morrow, lay by no store, accumulate no capital, possess no land; their clothes should be the poorest and their dwellings the meanest ”

“ On this occasion Philip de Comines in his Memoirs says: “I never saw any man living so holily, nor out of whose mouth the Holy Ghost did more manifestly speak.” He remained with Louis till his death, and Louis’ successor, Charles VIII., held him in such high esteem that he kept him in Paris, and enabled him to found various houses of his order in France; in Spain and Germany, too, houses were founded during Francis’s lifetime. He never left France, and died in 1507 in the monastery of his order at Plessis-les-Tours. ”

“ These fourteen are the only monasteries of which we have any knowledge as being founded before St Benedict’s death; for the mission of St Placidus to Sicily must certainly be regarded as mere romance, nor does there seem to be any solid reason for viewing more favourably the mission of St Maurus to Gaul. There is some ground for believing that it was the third abbot of Monte Cassino who began to spread a knowledge of the Rule beyond the circle of St Benedict’s own foundations. ”

“ The domestic tradition in the Windesheim Congregation, and in Mount St Agnes itself, has a weight that cannot be legitimately avoided or evaded. Indeed the external authority for Thomas’s authorship is stronger than that for the authorship of most really anonymous books—such, that is, as neither themselves claim to be by a given author, nor have been claimed by any one as his own. A large proportion of ancient writings, both ecclesiastical and secular, are unquestioningly assigned to writers on far less evidence than that for Thomas’s authorship of the Imitation. ”

“ In the monk attachment to his own one monastery is a virtue; in the friar detachment is the ideal. The monk, or the canon, normally exercises his influence on the world in and through his community, not as an individual but as a member of a corporate body. The friar’s sphere of work is normally outside his convent, and he works and influences directly and as an individual. Lastly, in regard to the object aimed at there was an important difference, for the professed object of the friars was to be clerical helpers of the parochial clergy in meeting the specifically religious needs of the time. ”

“ In the 17th another great effort at a general reform was made, promoted by the pope and the king of France; the general chapter elected Richelieu (commendatory) abbot of Cîteaux, thinking he would protect them from the threatened reform. In this they were disappointed, for he threw himself wholly on the side of reform. So great, however, was the resistance, and so serious the disturbances that ensued, that the attempt to reform Cîteaux itself and the general body of the houses had again to be abandoned, and only local projects of reform could be carried out. ”

“ The members took no vows and were free to leave when they chose; but so long as they remained they were bound to observe chastity, to practise personal poverty, putting all their money and earnings into the common fund, to obey the rules of the house and the commands of the rector, and to exercise themselves in self-denial, humility and piety. The rector was chosen by the community and was not necessarily a priest, though in each house there were a few priests and clerics. The majority, however, were laymen, of all kinds and degrees—nobles, artisans, scholars, students, labouring men. ”

“ The life is very nearly eremitical: except on Sundays and feasts, the Carthusians meet only three times a day in the church—for the Midnight Office, for Mass and for Vespers; once a week, on Sundays (and feasts) they have their meal in the refectory, and once a week they have recreation together and a walk outside enclosure. All the rest of their time is passed in solitude in their hermitages, which are built quite separate from one another. Each hermitage is a house, containing living-room, bedroom and oratory, workshop and store-room, and has a small garden attached. ”

“ The clerics preached and instructed the people, working chiefly among the poor; they also devoted themselves to the copying of manuscripts, in order thereby to earn something for the common fund; and some of them taught in the schools. Of the laymen, the educated copied manuscripts, the others worked at various handicrafts or at agriculture. After the religious services of the morning the Brothers scattered for the day’s work, the artisans going to the workshops in the city,—for the idea was to live and work in the world, and not separated from it, like the monks. ”

“ When these figures were considered, and when one contemplates the vastness of the works in progress during any decade of the century 1680–1780; and still more, when not only the quantity but the quality of the work, and the abiding value of most of it is realized, it will be recognized that the output was prodigious and unique in the history of letters, as coming from a single society. ”

“ It is probably true to say that no one has ever set himself so seriously to imitate the life of Christ and to carry out so literally Christ’s work in Christ’s own way. This was the secret of his love of poverty as manifested in the following beautiful prayer which he addressed to our Lord: “Poverty was in the crib and like a faithful squire she kept herself armed in the great combat Thou didst wage for our redemption. ”

“ With the assistance of Florentius Radewyn, who resigned for the purpose a canonry at Utrecht, he was able to carry out a long-cherished idea of establishing a house wherein devout men might live in community without the monastic vows. ”

“ The Carthusians have always lived thus wholly cut off from the outer world, each one in almost entire isolation. They introduced and have kept up in western Europe a life resembling that of the early Egyptian monks, as under St Anthony’s guidance monasticism passed from the utter individualism of the first hermits to the half eremitical, half cenobitical life of the Lauras (see Monasticism) . Owing to certain resemblances in external matters to the Benedictine rule and practice, the Carthusians have sometimes been regarded as one of the offshoots from the Benedictines ”

“ Regular clerks are by their institute clerics and priests, and they are devoted to some particular work or works as their own special object—as education, the preaching of missions and retreats, or the going on missions to the heathen. They carry still further the tendencies that differentiate the friars from the monks; and in particular, in order to be more free in devoting themselves to their special works, the orders of regular clerks have commonly given up the choral celebration of the canonical office, which had been maintained by the friars. ”

“ They were one of the chief factors in the Catholic Counter-reformation, working assiduously among the poor, preaching, catechizing, confessing in all parts, and impressing the minds of the common people by the great poverty and austerity of their life. ”

“ Lastly, he introduced the idea of stability, whereby monk and community were bound to each other for life, the normal thing for the Benedictine being to live and die in the monastery of his profession: thus the power hitherto enjoyed by monks, of wandering from monastery to monastery, was cut away, and the Benedictine community was made into a family whose members were bound to one another by bonds that could not be severed at will. ”

“ In time a tendency set in for members of the Third Order to live together in community, and in this way congregations were formed who took the usual religious vows and lived a fully organized religious life based on the Rule of the Third Order with supplementary regulations. These congregations are the "Regular Tertiaries" as distinguished from the "Secular Tertiaries," who lived in the world, according to the original idea. The Regular Tertiaries are in the full technical sense "religious," and there have been, and are, many congregations of them, both of men and of women. ”

“ It was as agriculturists and horse and cattle breeders that, after the first blush of their success and before a century had passed, the Cistercians exercised their chief influence on the progress of civilization in the later middle ages: they were the great farmers of those days, and many of the improvements in the various farming operations were introduced and propagated by them ”

“ A lay brother was never ordained, and never held any office of superiority. It was by this system of lay brothers that the Cistercians were able to play their distinctive part in the progress of European civilization. But it often happened that the number of lay brothers became excessive and out of proportion to the resources of the monasteries, there being sometimes as many as 200, or even 300, in a single abbey. On the other hand, at any rate in some countries, the system of lay brothers in course of time worked itself out ”

“ Grant that the distinctive mark of our Order may be never to possess anything as its own under the sun for the glory of Thy name, and to have no other patrimony than begging” (in the Legenda 3 Soc.) . This enthusiastic love of poverty is certainly the keynote of St Francis’s spirit; and so one of his disciples in an allegorical poem (translated into English as The Lady of Poverty by Montgomery Carmichael, 1901) , and Giotto in one of the frescoes at Assisi, celebrated the “holy nuptials of Francis with Lady Poverty.” ”

“ The rest of the day is filled up with a round of work and reading. Work, and in St Benedict’s time it was predominantly field work, took an even more recognized and integral place in the life than was the case under St Pachomius or St Basil, occupying notably more time than the church services. St Benedict introduced too into the monastic life the idea of law and order, of rule binding on the abbot no less than on the monks ”

“ Martène tells us that in the early years of the 18th century in the monastery of Baume, one of Berno’s original group of Cluny houses—indeed the parent house of Cluny itself—no one was admitted as a monk who had not sixteen quarterings in his coat of arms. A reform movement took root in the Cluny congregation, and during the last century of its existence the monks were divided into two groups, the Reformed and the Unreformed, living according to different laws and rules, with different superiors, and sometimes independent, and even rival, general chapters. ”

“ We learn from Palladius that by the end of the 4th century nunneries were numerous all over Egypt, and they existed also in Palestine, in Italy and in Africa—in fact throughout the Christian world. It is a curious coincidence that the sister of each of the three great cenobitical founders, Pachomius, Basil and Benedict, was a nun and ruled a community of nuns according to an adaptation of her brother’s rule for monks. In the West the Benedictine nuns played a great part in the Christian settlement of north-western Europe. ”

“ As women are debarred from exercising the spiritual functions of the ministry, it follows that nuns have to devote themselves either to a more purely contemplative life, or else to a more wholly active one, than is usual among the orders of men, who commonly, in virtue of their priesthood, have been able to find a mixed form of life between the two extremes. The nuns belonging to the older orders tend to the contemplative idea, and they still find recruits in sufficient numbers, in spite of the modern rush to the active congregations. ”