pose which they had sought in the cloister was disturbed by tardy repentance, profane doubts, and guilty desires; and, while they considered each natural impulse as an unpardonable sin, they perpetually trembled on the edge of a flaming and bottomless abyss. From the painful struggles of disease and despair these unhappy victims were sometimes relieved by madness or death; and, in the sixth century, an hospital was founded at Jerusalem for a small portion of the austere penitents, who were deprived of their senses.[1] Their visions, before they attained this extreme and acknowledged term of frenzy, have afforded ample materials of supernatural history. It was their firm persuasion that the air which they breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumerable dæmons, who watched every occasion, and assumed every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams.[2]
The Cœnobites and Anachorets The monks were divided into two classes: the Cœnobites, who lived under a common and regular discipline; and the Anachorets, who indulged their unsocial, independent fanaticism.[3] The most devout, or the most ambitious, of the spiritual brethren renounced the convent, as they had renounced the world. The fervent monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were surrounded by a Laura,[4] a distant circle of solitary cells;
- ↑ Fleury, Hist. Ecclésiastique, tom. vii. p. 46. I have read somewhere, in the Vitæ Patrum, but I cannot recover the place, that several, I believe many, of the monks, who did not reveal their temptations to the abbot, became guilty of suicide.
- ↑ See the seventh and eighth Collations of Cassian, who gravely examines why the dæmons were grown less active and numerous since the time of St. Antony. Rosweyde's copious index to the Vitæ Patrum will point out a variety of infernal scenes. The devils were most formidable in a female shape.
- ↑ For the distinction of the Cœnobites and the Hermits, especially in Egypt, see Jerom (tom. i. p. 45, ad Rusticum), the first Dialogue of Sulpicius Severus, Rufinus (c. 22, in Vit. Patrum, l. ii. p. 478), Palladius (c. 7, 69, in Vit. Patrum, l. viii. p. 712, 758), and, above all, the eighteenth and nineteenth Collations of Cassian. These writers, who compare the common and solitary life, reveal the abuse and danger of the latter.
- ↑ Suicer. Thesaur. Ecclesiast. tom. ii. p. 205, 218. Thomassin (Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. i. p. 1501, 1502) gives a good account of these cells. When Gerasimus founded his monastery, in the wilderness of Jordan, it was accompanied by a Laura of seventy cells.
Inigo, or Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits (Vie d'Inigo de Guiposcoa, tom. i. p. 29-38), may serve as a memorable example.
