Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours, a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world.
Thus in Russia, as in Western Europe, the history of monastic institutions is composed of three chapters, which may be briefly entitled: asceticism and missionary enterprise; wealth, luxury, and corruption; secularisation of property and decline. But between Eastern and Western monasticism there is at least one marked difference.
What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good and devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule? A free, plain-spoken, practical race like these Lombards; living by their own laws; disbelieving in witchcraft; and seemingly doing little for monasticism, were not likely to find favour in the eyes of popes.
Turning now to Christian monasticism, it will be found that, as in the case of Oriental monasticism the yearning for victory over self was uppermost in the minds of the best Christian monks.
It was organized according to the method of feudalism. It continued until the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187. THE MILITARY ORDERS. The principal supporters of the new kingdom at Jerusalem were the orders of knights, in which were united the spirit of chivalry and the spirit of monasticism.
In the year 529 a great stronghold of Paganism in these wild regions gave way to Benedict's faith. Upon the ruins of a temple to Apollo, and in a grove sacred to Venus, arose the model of Western monasticism, the cloister of Monte Cassino, which was to shine resplendent for a thousand years.
One must admit that here and there in the writings of the period, there are references to this worldliness in some monasteries; but whatever may have been the state of things at a later date, there does not seem to be evidence of graver misdeeds in these early years of monasticism in England.
Gnosticism would work out salvation by abstractions, by ascetic severities, by a renunciation of the pleasures of the world. Hence it is the real father of monasticism that spirit of seclusion and self-abnegation which became so prevalent in the third and fourth centuries, and which remained in the church through the mediaeval period.
Brie is interesting to us as forming one of the links between Continental and English monasticism at this time.
There is, in the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate, and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind, and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the human wall! From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism is condemned.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking