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Updated: May 29, 2025
This record of Enoch's piety teaches that the highest spirituality of nature is not found in avoiding the duties and cares of life, or in seeking a cloistered and solitary existence. The piety of monkery is not the crown of living. It is neither an experience of healthy joy nor of abundant fruitfulness.
But their obvious incapacity for civil affairs enabled them to venture on nothing more than a few coarse jests and clumsy demonstrations. At the Easter celebration at Notre Dame in honour of the ratification of the Concordat, one of them, Delmas by name, ventured on the only protest barbed with telling satire: "Yes, a fine piece of monkery this, indeed.
But two deviations from it, which the Papacy needed and used for the strengthening of its dominion, weakened and finally in the sixteenth century brought it nigh to destruction: monkery and the celibacy of the clergy.
The workmanship of all these rings has been dated to the commencement of the sixteenth century. We close our series with a wedding-ring, commemorative of a marriage which excited the marked attention of the entire Christian community, as a vigorous protest against monkery by that “solitary monk that moved the world” Martin Luther.
Monkery was broken up, like a ship dashed against the shores of the bay of Biscay. The ship was not only wrecked, but all its fragments continued to be tossed on the ceaseless surge. The Gallican church was flung loose over Europe, at a time when all Europe itself was in commotion. I own, to the discredit of my political foresight, that I thought its forms and follies extinguished for ever.
If the undistinguishing and immoral Autotheism of the playwrights, and the luxury and heathendom of the higher classes, first in Italy and then in England, were the natural revolt of the human mind against the Manichaeism of monkery: then the severity and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism.
At Venosa one thinks of Roman legionaries fleeing from Hannibal, of Horace, of Norman ambitions; Lucera and Manfredonia call up Saracen memories and the ephemeral gleams of Hohen-staufen; Gargano takes us back into Byzantine mysticism and monkery.
But to return to the clergy. While the monasteries and nunneries are going to the ground in superstition-saturated Spain; while eager workmen are demolishing the last hiding-places of monkery, and letting the daylight into places that have well kept the frightful secrets of three hundred years, and turning the ancient cloister demesne into public parks and pleasure-grounds, the Romish priesthood here, in free Bavaria, seem to imagine that they cannot only resist the progress of events, but that they can actually bring back the owlish twilight of the Middle Ages.
And I have been one of them myself that hath racked it, I cry God mercy for it; and have been one of them that have believed and expounded it against religious persons that would forsake their order which they had professed, and would go out of their cloister: whereas indeed it toucheth not monkery, nor maketh any thing at all for any such matter; but it is directly spoken of diligent preaching of the word of God.
We find him entreating Cromwell to prevent the suppression of Great Malvern, and begging that it may be allowed to remain, "Not in monkery, but any other ways as should seem good to the King's Majesty, as to maintain teaching, preaching, study, with praying and good housekeeping." Suppression of the Monasteries, p. 149. Late in his life, under Edw.
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