Page:Introduction to the Assyrian church.djvu/240

234 HISTORY OF THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH influence rather than of law: and it may be broadly said that an eastern monastery had more of ascetictern, and far less of discipline, than its western counterpart. An incident recorded by Thomas of Marga will illustrate this. Some of the monks living in the "outer cells" at Mount Izla, brought women to stay with them there; and the abuse must have gone on for months, or even years, before it was brought to the notice of the abbot by a monk who happened to leave his cell at an unusual hour. Then, the guilty were expelled. Now, a Western monastery might be as corrupt as even Messrs. Legh and Layton would have us believe; but the existence of such a state of things as this, without the connivance of the abbot, would be a physical impossibility.

In the West the life of the monastery was, of course, cœnobitic. Monks lived in the common cloister, slept in the common dormitory, met in the common chapter-house. Prayer and fasting there might be in plenty, and study too; but "tranquillity" and silence hardly at all. A monastery was the barrack of a regiment organized for active service in the army of the Church.

In the East there was a certain amount of cœnobitic life; but this was far less of a "common life" than in the West, for each monk had a cell of his own, where he spent the greater part of each day in solitude; and the life of a monastery was simply a preparation for the life of absolute solitude in a cell (or frequently a cave) in the neighbourhood. The contrast between the buildings of monasteries of specially strict rule, like Fountains or Rievaulx, with great Eastern houses like Rabban Hormizd, or the monastery of the ark on Judi Dagh, shows the two ideals of monastic life. We all know the great English foundations, with chapter-house,

1 T. of M., Bk. I. ch. viii.