Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/738

Rh 710 MONACHISM by the natives, which, given fresh fuel by the Reformation, has lasted to the present day. 1 Mendi- Yet another fresh departure in the history of monachism, cant j n some respects the most momentous of all, was taken in orFriars t ^ ie ^ ^ Centui 7 by the institution of the Mendicant Orders, or Friars. Pope Innocent III., in the 13th of the 70 constitutions or canons he promulgated at the Lateran council in 1215, had expressly forbidden the foundation of any new orders, bidding all who desired to embrace the monastic life join some approved community, and similarly directing that such as desired to found new houses should take their rule and constitution from one of the recognized societies. But circumstances were too strong for him, and this very pope was destined himself to sanction two of the most remarkable societies which the Latin Church has ever produced. The time was an anxious one. The speculative activity of the age, coupled with the abuses in the church, was multiplying sects, formidable in numbers, and still more from the contrast their austere mode of life presented, not only to that of the secular society of the day, but to that of the ecclesiastics, notably those of rank, whose pomp and luxury gave rise to the first faint stirrings of a revolutionary spirit amongst the commons, which the great pope, who was then the most conspicuous figure in Europe, did not fail to observe. No effectual weapon of resistance seemed at hand ; the parochial clergy, yielding to the difficulties which an isolated rural life throws in the way of intellectual effort (far graver then than even now), had almost everywhere sunk into sloth and incapacity ; the monastic orders were content, in the better instances, with maintaining their own internal discipline, and had no surplus energy for external work, while in the worse examples (as in that of the Cistercians, just referred to) they served rather as beacons of warning than as patterns for imitation ; and, in short, there was an ever-increasing mass of home mission work to be done, and no one to do it. But the two men who were to do it were already at hand in the persons of Francis Bernardone of Assisi and Dominic Guzman of Osma. The ruling idea in the mind of the former was the elevation of poverty to the first place amongst Christian graces, as the most obvious way of conforming the life of a Christian to that of the founder of his faith ; the more intellectual Spaniard dreamed of an aggressive body of skilfully-trained preachers, able at once to grapple with the subtle dialectic of the enemies of the established creed, and to appeal in clear and homely language to the uneducated, amongst whom the Albigenses and other sectaries were making considerable conquests. Francis, the poet and devotee, in renouncing even the scantiest provision which the strictest orders of his time secured for their members, and bidding his followers to live on alms daily begged, taking, in the most literal sense, 1 There is a very curious letter from Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, to Pope Alexander III. (1159-1181), asking him to dissolve the Benedictine abbey of Grestain in that diocese, and to draft its inmates into other houses, which illustrates both the kind of abuses which were sometimes found and the desire of the authorities to suppress them. He charges the monks with lack of charity and hospitality, in that they reserved even the broken scraps from the common table as perquisites for their private friends ; that they habitually quarrelled, and wounded one another with their knives, being prevented from homicide only by the knife-blades having no point ; that one monk had actually murdered the cook, who had complained of his visits to the cook s wife ; that the abbot did not provide for the daily wants of the community, but allowed the monks to roam abroad, picking up food for themselves as best they might ; that some of them had caused the death of a sick woman by plunging her into ice-cold water under pretext of working a miraculous cure ; that the abbot was frequently absent on pretence of business, but really living a loose life ; that he had been thus two years in England, till recalled by the bishop, who was forced to send him away again, after appointing a deputy ; that this deputy, when drunk, had wounded two of the monks, who thereupon murdered him ; so that the house was practically past reformation, and ought to be dissolved. no thought for the morrow, appealed to the popular imagination, always ready to kindle at the sight of genuine self-sacrifice Dominic, with not less insight as a thinker whose first care was for doctrinal orthodoxy, as that of Francis was for personal piety, saw that there was a demand ready to spring up for more exact and intelligent religious teaching than could then be had, save in a few great cities. The occasion which urged him to the task he undertook is noteworthy. He had long been a canon of Osma, the strictest and sternest member of an ascetic community, when in 1203 he had to go on a journey with his bishop, which brought them into the very midst of the Albigenses in the county of Toulouse, where they saw how powerless the clergy were to contend against their rivals. On their road home the bishop and Dominic met the three papal legates returning discomfited from Languedoc, but attended with as much pomp as a triumphal progress would have justified. Dominic rebuked them sternly, tell ing them that it was not by splendid retinues and costly garb that the heretics won their converts, but by zealous preaching, by humility, by austerity, and by at least seeming holiness. Both the new founders sought and obtained at Rome, after some difficulty, the approval of their new institutes, and that in the very year 1215 which had seen the formal prohibition of all fresh orders. Francis speedily returned to his home, but Dominic, whose idea had by this time expanded from that of converting merely the Albigenses of Provence and Languedoc to that of influencing the whole world of nominal Christians and outer heathen, settled himself in Rome, where the pope appointed him to the important office of Master of the Sacred Palace, which has ever since been held by a Dominican, and carries with it the authority of chief censorship of the press. The two HCAV foundations borrowed from each other, Francis copying Dominic s scheme of itinerant preachers, and Dominic imposing on his disciples the mendicant poverty of Assisi. These two particulars, the total absence at any rate at first of such endowments as had proved a snare to the older societies, and the substitution of itinerancy for inclosure, are the features which distinguish the friars from the monks who preceded them. The Franciscan institute was a bold attempt to democratize the church ; Dominic s Friar Preachers, though recruited freely from men of a humble grade, have always had somewhat more of an aristocratic tone about them, due to their intellectual calling ; they have held a high place in Christian art, counting amongst them such names as Fra Angelico and Baccio della Porta ; and their reputation for orthodoxy and for a purer type of moral theology than the Jesuit one has always stood high. They also count amongst their members the two most eminent divines of the Middle Ages, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and they have been fruitful in producing zealous missionaries ; but the one great blot on their career is that they have been the directors and officials of the Inquisition ever since the formal constitu tion of that tribunal as a permanent organization. The Franciscans, less distinguished for mental triumphs than their competitors, have yet some famous names, chief of which are Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon for Bonaven- tura, though set by the Franciscans as the &quot;Seraphic Doctor&quot; in competition with Aquinas, the &quot;Angelic Doctor&quot; of the Dominicans, is scarcely entitled to very high intellectual rank and at one time they seemed likely to establish as firm a hold on the university of Oxford as the Dominicans did on that of Paris. The swiftest success and popularity attended the two new orders ; privileges and exemptions were showered on them from Rome ; wealth, in despite of their vow of mendicancy, was emulously thrust upon them by the laity ; and, above all,