repasts, of the afternoon and of the evening. It was esteemed a merit, and almost a duty, to abstain from the boiled vegetables which were provided for the refectory; but the extraordinary bounty of the abbot sometimes indulged them with the luxury of cheese, fruit, salad, and the small dried fish of the Nile.[1] A more ample latitude of sea and river fish was gradually allowed or assumed; but the use of flesh was long confined to the sick or travellers; and, when it gradually prevailed in the less rigid monasteries of Europe, a singular distinction was introduced; as if birds, whether wild or domestic, had been less profane than the grosser animals of the field. Water was the pure and innocent beverage of the primitive monks; and the founder of the Benedictines regrets the daily portion of half a pint of wine, which had been extorted from him by the intemperance of the age.[2] Such an allowance might be easily supplied by the vineyards of Italy; and his victorious disciples, who passed the Alps, the Rhine, and the Baltic, required, in the place of wine, an adequate compensation of strong beer or cyder.
Their manual labour The candidate who aspired to the virtue of evangelical poverty abjured, at his first entrance into a regular community, the idea, and even the name, of all separate or exclusive possession.[3] The brethren were supported by their manual labour; and the duty of labour was strenuously recommended as a penance, as an exercise, and as the most laudable means of securing their daily sustenance.[4] The garden and fields, which the industry of the monks had often rescued from the forest or the morass, were diligently cultivated by their hands. They performed,
- ↑ See the banquet to which Cassian (Collation viii. 1) was invited by Serenus, an Egyptian abbot.
- ↑ See the Rule of St. Benedict, No, 39, 40 (in Cod. Reg. part ii. p. 41, 42). Licet legamus vinum omnino monachorum non esse, sed quia nostris temporibus id monachis persuaderi non potest; he allows them a Roman hemina, a measure which may be ascertained from Arbuthnot's Tables.
- ↑ Such expressions as my book, my cloak, my shoes (Cassian. Institut. l. iv. c. 13) were not less severely prohibited among the Western monks (Cod. Regul. part ii. p. 174, 235, 288), and the Rule of Columbanus punished them with six lashes. The ironical author of the Ordres Monastiques, who laughs at the foolish nicety of modern convents, seems ignorant that the ancients were equally absurd.
- ↑ Two great masters of ecclesiastical science, the P. Thomassin (Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. iii. p. 1090-1139) and the P. Mabillon (Etudes Monastiques, tom. i. p. 116-155), have seriously examined the manual labour of the monks, which the former considers as a merit, and the latter as a duty.
each, had obtained the name of Paximacia (Rosweyde, Onomasticon, p. 1045). Pachomius, however, allowed his monks some latitude in the quantity of their food; but he made them work in proportion as they ate (Pallad. in Hist. Lausiac. c. 38, 39, in Vit. Patrum, l. viii. p. 736, 737). [Biscuit in modern Greek is παξημάδι.]
