CHAPTER XVI LEIGHTON AND MONASTICISM "If there are refuges for the health of the body, ah ! permit religion to have such also for the health of the soul, which is still more subject to sickness, and the infirmities of which are so much more sad, so much more tedious and difficult to cure."-M. DE CHATEAUBRIAND. "In the history of most saints, who have exercised a reformatory and lasting influence upon monastic institutions, the name and influence of some holy woman is almost invariably found associated with their work and devotedness. . . . To instance only the greatest: Macrina is seen at the side of St. Basil, and the names of Monica and Augustine are inseparable as in later ages are those of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clara, St. Francis de Sales and St. Jeanne de Chantal.”– MONTALEMBERT. I1 T is impossible to study the early centuries of Christian civilization, and the earlier part of mediaeval history, and not be impressed with the civilizing and religious forces which monasticism created, developed and sustained. It is improbable that any one, who has an acquaintance with the first fifteen centuries of the Christian Church, Protestant though he be, can refuse to sympathize with Montalembert's glowing history of the rise and progress of the Monastic Orders. But it is also improbable that any one can consider their condition prior to the Reformation, and not realize that in England and Scotland at least they had served their day, and could plead no further reason for continued existence. All that was best in them had been assimilated into the civilization which the Orders had helped to bring about most effectually in their purest days. The contrast between their beginning and their end is a very striking one, and openness to the glory of the former should not blind us to the darkness of the latter. In the Reformation era itself the monastic bodies had sunk so low in the estimation of even the rulers of the Church, that one clause in the report of the committee of cardinals, appointed by Pope Paul III (a body composed of Sadolet, Contarini, Reginald Pole, Gilberti, Fregoso, Badia, Aleandro and Caraffa, afterwards Paul IV), delivered in 1538, was worded as follows: Another abuse which needs correction is in the religious orders, because they have deteriorated to such an extent that they are a grave scandal to seculars, and do the greatest harm by their example. We are of opinion that they should be all abolished, not so as to injure (the vested interests of) any one, but by forbidding them to receive novices: for in this wise they can be quickly done away with without wrong to any one, and good religious can be put in their place. At present we think the best thing to be done is to dismiss all the unprofessed youths from their monasteries." As this document shows the current of high Ecclesiastical opinion towards the Orders, so the lay view took expression in the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, by Ulrich von Hutten, which were to the Dominicans of the sixteenth century as the Provincial Letters were to the Jesuits of the seventeenth. The Orders also came under the delicate scalpel of Erasmus' wit, and he did not spare them, either in his Colloquies or Praise of Folly. The objections raised were not wholly new, for the defence of monasticism by Thomas Aquinas makes it clear, that they were used in the thirteenth century. The interests involved, however, were too vast and complicated to allow of any such sweeping measure of reform as that proposed by the Cardinals to be carried out. The enactments of some partial corrections by the Council of Trent (not touching any principle but apparently saying something because public opinion required it to be said), and the creation of the new Order of the Jesuits in 1534, represent the total action taken by the Church of Rome during the actual crisis of the Reformation. Now Leighton sympathized too much with the Jansenists, who sought to reform the Church of Rome from within in doctrine and discipline:1 he loved the idea of the Port-Royal too much, where was gathered together a religious community, fettered by no vows, but united voluntarily, and serving as a religious seminary, a missionary centre, a literary academy and a pastoral college. Protestant though he was, he could speak of the errors of the Reformation, and see so much good in some of the ideas and institutions it had renounced, as to be conscious that in renouncing all the forms of monasticism, the Reformed Church had lost much, which it might have retained to its own advantage. And so he is to be numbered among some of the many distinguished men of the Reformed Church, who from the days of Latimer downwards, have lamented the absence of some kind of monasteries in her communion, "Like that same peaceful hermitage, Where Milton long'd to spend his age." Such ideas were not uncommon to men of earnest minds and quiet habits, and Leighton may not inappropriately be called a Protestant monk. There was always a good deal of the cloister atmosphere about him, and his own family at Usan had given distinguished Bishops, Abbots and even KnightTemplars to the Church. The forms that were no more, and the days that were gone, would lead him to treasure much that was beloved for the fathers' sake, but with all this he never wavered from the fundamental principles of the Reformed Church. He only desired to make it more comprehensive and useful to minds of a meditative type. He recognized the eternal necessity to the religious life of being apart for a season, and amidst the turmoils of his day could say, as Edward Irving said amid the storms of a later time: "Ah me! I could almost wish myself transported back to Iona, 1 1 See p. 82 et seq. 2 * See pp. 107, 206. 3 See chapter i. and living amongst the presbyters of Columba their life of piety and love." In other words, Leighton would have retained some reformed religious houses as a help to the work and life of the Reformed Church of Scotland. While seeing in Popery "much of the wisdom that was earthy, sensual and devilish," and little "of that wisdom that was from above, and was pure and peaceable," Leighton, according to Burnet, " did think the corruptions and cruelties of Popery were such gross and odious things, that nothing could have maintained that Church under those just and visible prejudices but the several Orders among them that had such an appearance of mortification and contempt of the world that with all the trash that was among them, this maintained a face of piety and devotion. He also thought the great and fatal error of the Reformation was, that more of those houses and of that course of life, free from the entanglements of vows and other mixtures, was not preserved: so that the Protestant churches had neither places of education, nor retreat for men of mortified tempers." "2 His evident desire was to retain these houses as retreats for prayer and meditation, and connect them with the work of the Church. It is not unlikely that he was thinking of a Reformed German monastery, like that at Loccum, near Hanover, or of the religious house instituted at Little Gidding by Nicholas Ferrar, the friend of George Herbert. Ferrar founded it in 1626, and while he remained loyal to the Church of England, thought that England in the fury of her Protestantism had parted unnecessarily with some elements of her old monastic life that might have been profitably retained. Walton states that " many of the clergy, that were more inclined to practical piety and devotion than to doubtful and needless disputations, did often come to Gidden Hall and make themselves a part of this happy society, and stay a 1 Works, vol. i. p. 565. 'History of His Own Times, i. 246. week or more, and then join with Mr. Ferrar and the family in these devotions and assist and ease him or them in their watch by night." Some such house or houses like this Leighton may have had in his mind as helpful accessories to the life and work of the Church of Scotland, but the main source of his conviction was Port-Royal, the resort of Arnauld and Pascal, who combined religious meditation with religious service. In this respect, as in many others, he was as one "born out of due time," and it is interesting to notice that so earnest a Protestant as Professor Harnack has recently pleaded for the same institution as Leighton desired in the seventeenth century.1 "The Reformation abolished monasticism, and was bound to abolish it. It rightly affirmed that to take a vow of life-long asceticism was a piece of presumption; and it rightly considered that any worldly vocation, conscientiously followed in the sight of God, was equal to, nay, was better than, being a monk. But something now happened which Luther neither foresaw nor desired : 'Monasticism, of the kind that is conceivable and necessary in the evangelical sense of the word, disappeared altogether. But every community stands in need of personalities living exclusively for its ends. The Church, for instance, needs volunteers who will abandon every other pursuit, renounce the world,' and devote themselves entirely to the service of their neighbour; not because such a vocation is 'a higher one,' but because it is a necessary one, and because no church can live without also giving rise to this desire. But in the evangelical churches the desire has been checked by the decided attitude which they have been compelled to adopt towards Catholicism. It is a high price we have paid: nor can the price be reduced by considering, on the other hand, how much simple and unaffected religious fervour has been kindled in home and family life. We may rejoice, however, that in the past century a beginning has been made in the direction of recouping this loss. In the institution of deaconesses and many cognate phenomena the evangelical Churches are getting back what they once ejected through their inability to recognize it in the form which it then took. But it must undergo a much ampler and more varied development." 2 1 Cf. pp. 105-110. A.L. What is Christianity? pp. 287, 288. 35 |