Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/401

CHAP. XVI"such intelligence as God had set in me, I should write and commend for use a Commentary on the Psalms. Overcome with terror, I could only respond: so let it be, so let it be.' For this reason the holy man made a Commentary on the whole Psalter; and although its grammar was bad, its sense was sound and clear.'"

Various attempts were made in the Middle Ages to render the hermit life practicable, through permitting a limited intercourse among a cluster of like-minded ascetics, as well as to regulate it under the direction of a superior. In Italy, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the picturesque energy of the individual hermit is prodigious, while in the north, as in the establishment of the Carthusian Order, the organization is better, the result more permanent, but the imaginative and consistent extravagance of personality is not there. In the hermit communities founded by Romuald there was a prior or abbot, invested with some authority. Yet the organization was less complete than in coenobitic monasteries; for Romuald's hermit methods sought to minimize the intercourse among the brethren, to an extent which was scarcely compatible with effective organization. An idea of these communities may be had from Damiani's description of one of them:

"'Such was the mode of life in Sytrio, that not only in name but in fact it was as another Nytria. The brethren went barefoot; unkempt and haggard; they were content with the barest necessaries. Some were shut in with doomed doors (damnatis januis), seemingly as dead to the world as if in a tomb. Wine was unknown, even in extreme illness. The attendants of the monks (famuli monachorum) and those who kept the cattle, fasted and preserved silence. They made regulations among themselves, and laid penances for speaking.'"

For seven years Romuald lived at Sytrio as an inclusus, shut up in his cell, and preserving unbroken silence. Yet though his tongue was dumb his life was eloquent. He lived on, setting a shining example of squalor and austerity, eating only vile food, and handing back untouched any savoury morsel. His conflicts with the devil continued; nor