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Updated: June 11, 2025
The modernists talk a great deal of development, and they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism, Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give out the full and exact note of the New Testament.
MONACHISM—The superiority of the monastic over the secular clergy—Reasons for it—Orders of monks—The Carthusians—Their advancement in agriculture and love of the fine arts—Their seclusion and mode of living—Only learned men admitted to their order—Their form of salutation—Curious adventure of a lady found in the cell of a Carthusian—The Hieronimites—The Mendicant orders—“Pious works”—The Questacion—Decline of Spain accounted for—Vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience—How vow of poverty eluded—La honesta—Vicar-general of the Franciscan orders—His immense income—Religious orders have produced many great and good men—Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros—His celebrated Bible—Corruption of monastic orders—Insubordination of friars to the bishops—The Jesuits—Deplorable reputation of their literature—Pascal, Escobar, Sanchez, and Mariana—Suppression of the Jesuits by Charles III.—Their subsequent expulsion by Espartero under Isabella II.—Nunneries, though spared on suppression of religious houses, utterly useless—The Pope’s attempt to perpetuate them by concordat—The lives of the nuns described—Their means of subsistence is now precarious—Convent de las Huelgas.
It is impossible to regard these as either Greek or Christian; they indicate a pathological state of society, which can be partly but not entirely accounted for by the conditions of the time. After a few centuries a far more wholesome type of monachism supplanted the hermits; the anchorites of the Middle Ages retained the solitary life, but were very unlike the crazy savages of the Thebaid.
All the power, all the influence, and all the riches of the secular clergy, such as we have described them in the preceding chapter, would not have been sufficient completely to enslave the Spanish nation under the baneful dominion of Rome, if its unwearied ambition for command and power had not found out an instrument, much more efficacious, in the institution of Monachism, the establishment of which propagated itself on the Spanish soil with more rapidity and in greater numbers than in any other Catholic nation.
In the same places where Essenes and Therapeutae had been, there later we find Christian solitaries. "We can have no doubt," says Ferdinand Delaunay, "that the Therapeutic Convents which perhaps gave the first signal for conversion to the new faith, served also as the cradle for Christian monachism.
By assuming that the secluded life was holier than that of the world they have tended to put a stigma of unholiness on the latter. Buddhism taught that only the monk could attain the highest sanctity and receive the highest reward, and such has generally been the teaching in those forms of Christianity in which monachism exists.
Is he to be ever marking passages? if so, he has the real trouble of being editor, not I. Naturam expellas furca, &c. Is the Pope's supremacy the only point on which no opinion is to be expressed? if so, why? It is not more against the Articles to desire it than to desire monachism. Will it offend more than others?
Monachism, then, has entirely disappeared from Spain, where only two convents remain for the instruction of those who are destined for the priesthood in the Philippine Islands. These men live within the cloisters according to the ancient regime; but they are forbidden to appear in public in the costumes of their respective orders.
Part of it is laid out in cabbages and lettuce, over which a rubicund brother, with his frock tucked up, was bending with a solicitude which he interrupted to remove his skullcap and greet me with the unsophisticated sweet-humoured smile that every now and then in Italy does so much to make you forget the ambiguities of monachism.
It has assumed definite shape only in the higher religions and not in all of these it is foreign to Semitic, Persian, Chinese, and Greek peoples. Austerity there has been and abstention from certain things but not with the aim of ministering to spiritual life. +1122+. The birthplace of monachism proper was India.
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