The Monk

“ Slowly, slowly, its legs labored through the thin sand. At last it stopped some six inches from Monk's face.
It appeared immense, like a lumbering, scaly giant from the planet's billion-year-ago past.
It rubbed its claws together, threateningly. Its black mouth opened, closed, opened, closed. Its needle tongue twisted like a silver snake.
I am hungry, came the thought. So very hungry. But I should call the others.
Combined fear and hope hung over Monk like an omnipresent shower of fire and ice. Sweat dripped into his hot eyes, obscuring his vision. ”

“ The monk is every where except at his convent. Every thing is an attraction to him—bull-fights, cock-fights, gambling-tables, and theatres; every place gives him an opportunity of displaying his whims and oddities. ”

“ The motif of The Monk's Life is expressed in the poem beginning with the lines:
"I live my life in circles that grow wide
And endlessly unroll."
Through the grey cell of the young Monk there flash in luminous magnificence the colours of the great renaissance masters, for he feels in Titian, in Michelangelo, in Raphael the same fervour that animates him; they, too, are worshippers of the same God.
There are poems in The Book of Pilgrimage of the stillness of a whispered prayer in a great Cathedral and there are others that carry in their exultation the music of mighty hymns. ”

“ Perhaps they always will be. The wealthy monk falls a prey to pride and arrogance; he becomes luxurious in his habits, and lazy in the performance of duty. Vice creeps in and his moral ruin is complete. The transformation in the character of the monk is accompanied by a change in public opinion. The monk is now an eyesore; his splendid buildings are viewed with envy by some, with shame by others. Then arise the vehement cries for the destruction of his palatial cloister, and the heroic efforts of the remnant that abide faithful to reform the institution. ”

“ She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed. The weapon's point rested upon her left breast: and, oh! that was such a breast! The moon-beams darting full upon it enabled the monk to observe its dazzling whiteness: his eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb: a sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight; ”

“ Then the monk went back to his place, and he shut himself in, and never again undertook to talk with any man, except him that handed in to him his food through the little window of his cell, and there he remained until the end of his life, and he attained to a most exalted state of perfection. ”

“ And the monk went forth immediately, even as the head of the monastery told him, and pastured swine, and when those who had known him formerly, and those who had heard about him, saw him pasturing swine, they said, “Ye see the great monk about whom we have heard, behold, his heart hath gone mad, and a devil hath seized him, and he is [now] pasturing swine.” Then God, when He saw his humility, and that he was hearing and bearing the reproach of men, set him free so that he might go back where he had been formerly. ”

“ There is another kind of monk, with the marks of which we seem traditionally familiar: the monk with the rubicund face, sleek poll, good epigastric development, and slightly unsteady gait, with whom, in turn, we have connected a different phase of conventual discipline—fat capon and stubble goose, and midnight convivial chantings growing ever more fast and furious, but finally dying away in a heavy stertorous calm. Poetry, art, the drama, the novel, have each portrayed human nature in orders ”

“ The procession is out of sight, and fainter grow the sounds of the music and of the chanting. The last spectator to depart was a young monk, with a pale face and dreamy eyes, clad in the brown robes of his order, who during all this time had knelt on the cold stones at the monastery gate, his lips moving as his lean fingers grasped his rosary, and an expression of rapt devotion on his wan countenance, that would have done credit to some hermit saint of a thousand years ago when the crown of martyrdom was easy to find. ”

“ God give this monk a thousand cartloads of bad years! Aha! beware, fellows, of such a trick! The Monk put an ape in the man's hood, and in his wife's eke, by Saint Austin! Take no more monks unto your hearth. ”

“ The plan that the monk now devised for coming across to us—and a bold heart was required even to think of this daring enterprise—was that with the two ropes fastened about his body at one end, and held by all of us at the other, he should swing down into the chasm and far under the promontory of rock on which we stood, and then that we should haul him up to us. ”

“ They had gone rather more than a league and had begun to descry the first houses of the village, the red-tiled roofs of which stood out from the green trees which surrounded them, when, coming toward them mounted on a mule, they perceived a poor monk, whose large hat and gray worsted dress made them take him for an Augustine brother. ”

“ CLOISTERS OF MONTSERRAT.
All this may still be seen and heard now and then, but with the number of monks sadly curtailed. It is said that they now never exceed twenty. When their day of persecution came they escaped to their mountain fastness, climbing higher and ever higher like hunted deer, hiding in the cracks and crevices of the rocks; fear giving them strength to reach parts never yet trodden by the foot of man, whilst many a less active monk slipped and fell into the bottomless abyss, his last resting place, like that of Moses, remaining for ever unknown. ”

“ And the monk said unto his brother who was in the world, “Peradventure thou art in need of a little bread, O my brother?” And he said unto him, “Nay, my lord, whilst I took from thee that which used to enter into my house, I spent everything I had; but since I ceased to take anything from thee, God hath blessed me and hath had mercy upon me.” Then the monk went and informed the old man everything which had taken place, and the old man said unto him, “Knowest thou not that the labour of a monk is fire, and that wheresoever it entereth it consumeth? ”

“ There was then in the abbey a claustral monk, called Friar John of the funnels and gobbets, in French des entoumeures, young, gallant, frisk, lusty, nimble, quick, active, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, wide-mouthed, long-nosed, a fair despatcher of morning prayers, unbridler of masses, and runner over of vigils; and, to conclude summarily in a word, a right monk, if ever there was any, since the monking world monked a monkery: for the rest, a clerk even to the teeth in matter of breviary. ”

“ But the monk went to the chapel, and there he wrestled sore in prayer; and then he fasted and watched; but at last, wearied out, he fell asleep just before the dawn, and there came a dream to him. He dreamed that he stood in the castle yard, and he had in his hand two pots of flowers, one of lilies and one of roses; and there came to him a tall and strange man, with a look of command in his face, yet full of love; and the monk thought that he turned to the stranger and offered him the flowers, and the man laid his hand upon the roses; but the monk said, "Nay, my lord, rather take the lilies;" ”

“ The monk penetrates the forests of Germany and braves unknown dangers in his devotion to mother church; the crusader, no less of a devotee, lays down his life under a foreign sky, far removed from home and friends. ”

“ But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles of ignorance and despair. With the opening of the twelfth century light began to dawn upon the human mind. The intellectual monk, long accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those subjects which had occupied his thoughts,--on God and His attributes, on the nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the Saviour, on the power of the will to resist evil, and other questions that had agitated the early Fathers of the Church. ”

“ But a monk like this, with a face like a conqueror, set square in its whiteness, and yet so wretched to see in his poor patched frock and his bare feet; a monk, too, not acting love, but really and truly ready to die for a beautiful woman not thirty feet from him in the house; above all, a monk with a voice that speaks like the clarion call of the day of judgment in its wrath, and murmurs more plaintively and sadly in sorrow than ever the poor Peri sighed at the gates of Paradise—such a monk, what could he not make people feel? ”

“ Art toiled in the church, and whole generations of busy fingers worked patiently at the decoration of the temple of the Most High. The pale, thoughtful monk, upon whose brow genius had set her mark, wandered into the calm retirement of the library, threw back his cowl, buried himself in the study of philosophy, history, or divinity, and transferred his thoughts to vellum, which was to moulder and waste in darkness and obscurity, like himself in his lonely monk's grave, and be read only when the spot where he labored should be a heap of ruins, and his very name a controversy amongst scholars. ”

“ The true monk is a man, as his name implies, who whether in the city or in the desert, should always strive to be alone with God. In this sense the prophets Elias and Eliseus under the Old Law, like John the Baptist at the threshold of the New Law, were monks in the most perfect sense of the word. Then, again, the monk whether living alone in the desert, or in community with others, must follow those counsels of perfection, which have been set forth by the teaching and example of the Son of God Himself. ”

“ Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone! ”

“ On the way thither I learned the following from the monk: My niece took the veil to-day. According to the custom in such cases, she is to pass the night alone in prayer in the oratory of the Virgin, which is separated from the church of the convent by an enclosure of the cloister. Now, attention, my lads, to the directions that the monk gave me. The walls of the court-yard of the chapel run along St. Benoit's Alley. Just before sunset, I went over the place and examined the walls. They are not very high. We can easily scale them, while one of us will keep watch on the outside. ”

“ The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. ”

“ And doubtless the average monk, even when well-conducted himself and in a well-conducted monastery, was, like average men of every creed, rank, or occupation, a very common-place person, acting from very mixed and often very questionable motives; and valuing his shaven crown and his sheepskin cloak, his regular hours of prayer and his implicit obedience to his abbot, more highly than he valued the fear and the love of God. ”

“ One cannot conceive a married monk, nor one in the full enjoyment of his worldly fortune, nor one without a superior, except where he lives altogether alone with God, following His inspirations; and even then the bishop of the locality is always recognised by the Church as the Superior, whom he is bound to obey.
With these essential means of perfection were also combined silence, prayer and labour, whether manual or mental. Idleness is unknown to the monastic state; the monk should be always doing something pleasing to God. ”

“ Of the Monk’s Girdle.
As we are going to speak of the customs and rules of the monasteries, how by God’s grace can we better begin than with the actual dress of the monks, for we shall then be able to expound in due course their interior life when we have set their outward man before your eyes. A monk, then, as a soldier of Christ ever ready for battle, ought always to walk with his loins girded. ”

“ A monk, I’ll wager, if I have read past ecclesiastical architecture aright. And all lovers of the quaintly decorative are under great obligations to the unknown monk, for gargoyles offered an irresistible opportunity for the medieval craftsman to outwardly express his inmost fancies and the artistic spirit that consumed his soul, and must somehow be visibly revealed. ”

“ But except on the 1st and 15th of every moon and other holidays the novices are put on active service, the monks enjoying an unbroken idleness; they are apparently cursed with an unquenchable thirst, but as a fountain of perennial tea flows for them they are not to be pitied. I suppose you would ask the name of my friend with the neat boots; this would be an arch mistake and violation of good-breeding on your part. When a man shaves his tail and turns monk he cuts himself off from the whole world, including his family, whose name even he no longer bears. ”

“ The monks are not half bad old fellows. The Hegoumenos—that’s the abbot—has been trotting me round this morning to show me the church and the library and all the chapels, and at dinner last night he was full of the most infantile questions. Of course, he had to ask them all through Papa Athanasios, who is my particular monk, and what with his French and mine, the abbot must have amassed some wonderful information.”
“It’s all very well their being nice, but will they let us out?” broke in Zoe. ”