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Updated: May 11, 2025
When Voltaire writes an article on monasticism, he has nothing to say about how it arose and developed; he neither knows nor cares anything about that.
For the ideas which now reigned in the Church pervaded the new education as they did the new monasticism. There was hardly a source, indeed, from which the student could learn any other doctrine, as there has remained none in the learning of the Roman Church to the present day.
But on this point, one important distinction needs to be made; and that is, between the self-denial which has no other aim than mere self-mortification, and that which is exercised to secure greater good to ourselves and others. The first is the foundation of monasticism, penances, and all other forms of asceticism; the latter, only, is that which Christianity requires.
When this celebrated missionary landed on the island of Thanet, he found monasticism had preceded him. But what was the nature of this British monasticism? On that question Rome and England are divided.
Even among the Christians there were hostile as well as friendly critics of monasticism; Jovinian, whom Neander compares to Luther, is a type of the former. Although a monk himself, he disputed the thesis that any merit lay in celibacy, fasting or poverty. He opposed the worship of saints and relics, and believed that one might retain possession of his property and make good use of it.
There are even objections, to many an honest man, serious objections, that may be brought up and become legitimate matter for discussion. We take it for granted that intelligent men do not oppose an institution as venerable as monasticism without reasons.
Again in the seventeenth century, in the Irene of Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, the Argenis, in its whole conception of the religious life, of monasticism, as in its idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics. We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke.
The hope of the world lies in the further development and completer realization of those great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that the monasteries could not minister to that development of liberty, truth and justice, which constitute the indispensable condition of human happiness and human progress.
From some source perhaps the Buddhist mission of Asoka the ascetic life of recluses was established in the Ptolemaic times, and monks of the Serapeum illustrated an ideal to man which had been as yet unknown in the West. This system of monasticism continued, until Pachomios, a monk of Serapis in Upper Egypt, became the first Christian monk in the reign of Constantine.
On our left was another sitting statue placed on a pedestal, elaborately carved, with a great deal of carved-work on the wall behind it. All these statues were of Buddha, the different attitudes being intended to represent his calm and contemplative character. "What is Monasticism but Buddhism under a slightly different form? What are hermits but Buddhists?
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