United States or Uzbekistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A discipline of penalties, confinement, fasting, whipping, and, at a later period even mutilation, was inflexibly administered. From Egypt and Syria monachism spread like an epidemic. It was first introduced into Italy by Athanasius, assisted by some of the disciples of Anthony; but Jerome, whose abode was in Palestine, is celebrated for the multitude of converts he made to a life of retirement.
The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch of monachism, had never, to extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet.... St.
Subject to correction from the greatest of England's great historians and subject to correction, too, from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable eminence, are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this subject I venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century was also the golden age of English Monachism.
If the latter, I should imagine that much remains to be done, in the way of raising the general tone of our Church in matters of faith and practice, before it can be fit to deal with such a question; and though you think monachism, miracles, and Popery inseparably allied, yet I feel convinced that there are many minds prepared to consider the two former which have no disposition to the latter.
Still more was this the case with men of Humanistic culture, whose temporary alliance with Luther had been dictated more by the interest they felt in the arts and letters threatened by the old monastic spirit, and by the open scandal caused by the outrageous abuses of the clergy and monachism, than by any sympathy with his religious principles and ideas.
In the third century, Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, accused the Patriarch of Alexandria of error in points of faith, but the Patriarch vindicated his orthodoxy. Eastern monachism arose about 300; the Church of Armenia was founded about the same year; and the Church of Georgia or Iberia in 340.
I would gladly, did space allow, give more biographies from among those of the Egyptian hermits: but it seems best, having shown the reader Antony as the father of Egyptian monachism, to go on to his great pupil Hilarion, the father of monachism in Palestine. His life stands written at length by St.
The monks were enjoined to shun the very presence of women. If they carried the system of non-intercourse too far, and became hard and unsympathetic, it was to avoid the great scandal of the age, a still greater evil. To the monk was denied even the blessing of the marriage ties. Celibacy became a fundamental law of monachism.
It is this organization that has made the institution a power in religious history. Buddha's associations were open to all, without distinction of social position or sex. From India monachism passed into all the lands that were occupied by Buddhism.
The rule of all the early Irish monasteries and convents was framed upon an original constitution, which St. Patrick had obtained in France from St. Martin of Tours, who in turn had copied after the monachism of Egypt and the East. It is called by ecclesiastical writers the Columban rule, and was more rigid in some particulars than the rule of St. Benedict, by which it was afterwards supplanted.
Word Of The Day