ART. II.-1. Les Moines d'Occident, depuis Saint Benoît jusqu'à Saint Bernard. Par le CoмTE DE MONTALEMBERT. Tomes I. II. Paris: 1860.

2. The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard. By the COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT, &c. Authorised Translation. 2 vols. Edinburgh: 1861.*

AT

T a time when the representative of Gregory the Great and of Hildebrand is clinging with a desperate tenacity to the shrunk remnant of his temporal power, M. de Montalembert has given to the world a history of the Monastic Orders, to whom the more vigorous predecessors of Pius the Ninth were almost wholly indebted for the greatest of their victories. Few lessons can be more impressive than that which is furnished by the position, both of the author and of the Pontiff to whom his pages are dedicated. The grand vision of a sacerdotal empire which to the fervent longings of the first Gregory far outweighed all merely temporal power-the image, less beautiful though more colossal, of an infinite dominion over all kings and rulers, which stirred the heart of Gregory the Seventh, has no kindred charm for their feeble successor. Without the power of comprehending the real greatness of the men who raised the fabric of Papal Supremacy, the Vicegerent of Christ, whose standard was borne on to victory by Jerome and Augustine, by Benedict and Bernard, is risking his true inheritance of spiritual authority for the maintenance of an earthly state which would scarcely place him in the third or fourth rank of secular princes. Contradictions not less momentous are exhibited in the personal history of M. de Montalembert. In England his name is as highly honoured as it is widely known, for his determined opposition to a rigid and centralising despotism; but, born in an age of experiments, in which revolution has given place to legitimacy, and a monarchy set up by the people has been swept away in the flood of republicanism, he has failed to apprehend the true nature of that freedom to which he clings with the most passionate devotion. It could hardly indeed have been otherwise. No constitution such as that of England has ever sprung from mere theory. The idea which Englishmen have of liberty could never have been realised by

The following pages were already in type when the translation reached us. We have therefore not been able to avail ourselves of it; but it appears to be executed with spirit and accuracy.

the experience of a single generation. To this atmosphere of theory and experiment must be traced that inconsistency in word and action, which marks the career of M. de Montalembert. The defence of monasticism comes from the unflinching admirer of English liberty: nay, in this monasticism he professes to discern that very principle of freedom which was uprooted by the overthrow of the Ancien Régime.' With such contradictions as these, we cease to wonder that the writer who seeks in England a purer air than the tainted atmosphere of French servility, should accept unreservedly the social results of the first Revolution, and that his adhesion to the doctrine of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity should have been followed by the ominous welcome with which he hailed the advent of that despotism, of which he has since felt the sting.

On the minds of Englishmen the idea of monasticism leaves the impression, not of obedience to a principle of law, but of servile prostration before an idolised rule. It exhibits to them a system which rigidly limits the exercise of mental powers, while it is the grave of all natural affection; a system which fostered the keenest intellectual subtlety the more effectually to crush the slightest movement in any forbidden direction. Yet it is no subject of regret that M. de Montalembert should come forward as the advocate of a system which in its legitimate results we hold to be fatal to the true growth of the mind, as well as to all genuine political freedom. The examination of first principles may be dull or wearisome; but there is a hope of detecting the fallacies, perhaps of weakening the convictions, of a writer, when he lays bare the secrets of his philosophy. Whatever inconsistency we may see in M. de Montalembert, may also be found in every page of monastic history. Freedom and oppression, the love of truth and the dread of investigation, the thoughtful search after living laws, and the barren enunciation of traditionary dogmas, appear to us to characterise in a larger or less degree all the great monastic heroes. If the attempt to trace out these contradictions fail of carrying conviction to M. de Montalembert, it may at the least show that a true appreciation of the idea of freedom as understood by Englishmen, and a real knowledge of their constitution, cannot be attained by one whose mind is preoccupied by the principles of monasticism. Meanwhile, his pages will serve to overthrow some errors prevalent amongst ourselves, and to bring out in clearer light the real strength and weakness of the monastic orders, and of that system of Latin Christianity, of which they were pre-eminently the pioneers and champions. His volumes, in the judgment of friend and foe alike, must be allowed to up

hold a power which, if not wholly spiritual, is certainly not bound by material conditions. They plead the cause of men who, whatever we may think of their type of Christianity, were assuredly no weak and idle dreamers. They set forth the history of great leaders, who saw the end of their labours, and with an unflinching resolution took the wisest, if not the purest means for attaining it.

The

Monasticism and the Papacy are two distinct powers. course of their fortunes seems now to be diverging indefinitely; and the main prop of earlier pontiffs serves but little to uphold the waning glory of the popedom. But for at least a thousand years their fortunes were inextricably united. With the rise or the degeneracy of the great orders also rose and fell the dignity and power of the popes; and with a true instinct the successors of St. Peter took into their special favour the men whom they knew to be the chief bulwarks and champions of their supremacy. And in its turn, the character of the popes, or rather of their designs, and the condition of their spiritual empire, exercised a corresponding influence on the Monastic Orders. The vast interval which separates the disciples of Loyola from those of Dominic and Francis, points to a distinc tion not less great between the Papacy under Innocent the Third and the Papacy after the great ecclesiastical revolution of the West. Almost from the pontificate of Innocent himself, the temporal head of the heavenly empire of Augustine began to sink more and more into the secular prince, in proportion as pretensions not less unbounded were enforced by a weaker will and a more interested policy. The seventy years' captivity' at Avignon converted the popes into mere puppets to the treacherous intrigues of French kings. Later generations saw in them simply men who sought by family alliances to secure their greatness as temporal princes, and to whom the welfare of the Church was as nothing in the balance. It is a fit retribution that the spiritual power, when restricted to men of Italian birth, should forfeit the greatness which pontiffs of other races had strengthened, if not created,-that the throne which has been filled by many an illustrious pontiff of Teutonic race, Suidger and Bruno, Otto, and the English Nicolas, should become contemptible when confined to Italians, destitute of the mental and moral strength which distinguished Gregory and Hildebrand, Benedict and Columba.

Of monasticism, under all its legitimate forms and developements, M. de Montalembert comes forward as the determined, and, in his own belief, impartial champion. And assuredly, if partiality be measured by a concealment or extenuation of abuses

and evils, no one could be more triumphantly acquitted of the slightest tendency to such unfairness. For the real degeneracy of the system none could pronounce a more stern and uncompromising condemnation; for the far more venial offences of a rule simply relaxed or modified he is a judge harsher and more severe than we should be, and for an obvious reason. His ideal of monasticism is found where we see simply the working of a false philosophy; in his eyes the system is already on the decline when alone, or most of all, we believe that it was fulfilling a high mission, and winning a title to the gratitude of all ages. By giving our reasons for this belief, we may perhaps remove some of the difficulties which encircle the question; and if we may not hope to convince M. de Montalembert, we trust that we shall at the least make our meaning plain. There is between us so much of common ground in thought and feeling: we sympathise so thoroughly in his hatred of despotism, his love of freedom; we have so hearty an admiration for the great monks of Western Christendom, so firm a belief in the greatness and goodness of their achievements, that our entire divergence in other things points to an essential difference in principle, which no mere appeals to authority will serve either to explain

or to remove.

To the present volumes, which, after a sketch of monasticism in the East, and of its beginnings in the West, under Athanasius, Jerome, and Ambrose, bring us to the confluence of the great rules of Benedict and Columba, is prefixed an elaborate Introduction, which is at once a complete exposition of all the good, and a condemnation of all the evil in the monastic systems of the West. It aspires to do more: it attempts to determine the highest ideal of Christianity, not less than to review the history and principles of all monasticism.

At the outset of his task, M. de Montalembert hastens to overthrow the modern popular notions of monastic life. It is not surprising that these should be as imperfect or as absurd as the popular notions of Greek or Roman civilisation or philosophy. Yet there is something almost ludicrous, after a patient study of the career of Lanfranc or Bernard, of Boniface or Columba, to hear the monastic state spoken of as a mere refuge for broken hearts, where the memory of shattered hopes and crushed affection may be softened into a chronic tranquillity, not cheerful perhaps, yet not intolerable. Disappointment and calamity may in all ages have sent some men into the cloister; but the vast majority of those who abandoned what they called the life of the world were made of sterner stuff and ready for harder work than this.

In truth, the most prominent characteristic of the Western monks is power. Whether in self-discipline, or in the rule of others, they exhibit no vacillation or feebleness of will. In their devotion there is no mere dreaming: in their meditation no mere inaction. The greatest ascetics become the most vigorous of missionaries; the sternest self-tormentors are the most diligent and successful of teachers. In the most trivial detail they believed that there was a work to be done the hours of silent contemplation prepared them the better to accomplish it.

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But with this power and force of character were united all other qualities which might win the reverence or the love of mankind. In the full determination of a matured will, with the masculine strength of a vigorous mind, the soldier, to whom the cell was to be as much a battle-field as the world could have been, gave himself solemnly to the life of active prayer and works of mercy. Labouring earnestly in his ceaseless intercession, he was not less earnest in relieving the physical, still more the spiritual, wants of all around him. To the poor of Christ his gates were always open: for their perplexities his counsel was always ready. The temporal aid, which modern states have been obliged to render compulsory, flowed naturally and spontaneously from an inexhaustible charity. Among his fellows were those who had been kings and chieftains, peasants or slaves; and with him all stood on an absolute equality before God. With them he was united by the rule of an unlimited and unquestioning obedience to a spiritual chief, by an entire renunciation of all worldly goods, down to the very clothes which he wore, and the pen with which he wrote. Under the spell of his unwearying labour, savage deserts and unwholesome marshes were changed into blooming gardens and waving corn fields. The peaceful home, on which he lavished every epithet of the most intense affection, became the nucleus of happy homesteads and contented hearths. The hamlets of his dependants clustered peacefully around the great conventual church, which was sometimes the very embodiment of a severe simplicity, more often a storehouse of the highest glories of Christian art. If the fields without bore witness to his bodily industry, his cloister was not less the scene of the most subtle or the most beneficent of intellectual triumphs. From his cell went forth the letters which were to cheer or counsel the vicar of Christ, to rebuke kings and statesmen, to warn and guide the faithful, to recall the wanderer to the fold, and to confound the unbeliever. The intensity of his meditation did not close his senses to the beauties of earth and heaven, the fragrance of