Twelve Years in a Monastery/Chapter I

by Joseph McCabe

TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Monasticism, inseparable as it is from every great religious system, seems to emanate spontaneously from the fundamental religious idea. China, India, and Europe, despite their marked divergence in conceiving the ultimate objects of religious belief, and the distinct racial and territorial influences that have affected their development, have been equally prolific in monastic institutions—they seem to be evoked by the simple rudimentary story which is common to them all. And, indeed, we cannot wonder that that story has engendered an organised abdication of earthly joys such as the monastic system embodies. From the earliest ages, changing with their changes and ever growing with their measured roll, religion has taught men that the world about them was but a veil that hid a brighter world from their gaze, that, amidst the dreary ebb and flow of life, a spark of immortality dwells in the human breast, an inseverable bond with the unseen.

The story has been ratified by the acceptance of countless generations; it has crystallised into a thousand definite theological systems; it has inspired a wealth of sacred literature in every civilised nation. If then philosophers, from Crates to Fichte, on their cold reasonings, have been led to despise the changeful forms for the enduring realities their mind was thought to have glimpsed, it is not strange that the warmer, more vibrant tone of religion should have taught the same theme with yet deeper effect. For religion has gone far beyond the abstract results of philosophy, and has depicted to the imagination, with presumptuous but impressive vividness, the higher power and the larger life in which we are said to be enfolded. Men have gazed on the clear entrancing vision—its fair integrity and its unchanging joy mocking the precarious fulfilment of their soul’s desire here below—until the attitude of hope and expectancy has satisfied them even now. In the hermit’s cell or in the cloistered abbey they have withdrawn from earth and awaited, with the constancy of the hallucinated, the removal of the veil.

But the religious mind, at least in the western world, has entered upon a more troubled phase of its development. Physical and economical science have drawn its attention more eagerly to its present home: a growing self-consciousness has made it more careful and introspective; the vision of hereafter has become blurred and indistinct. A large part—if not the larger part—of our latter day prophets, either abandon all hope of ever grasping the fading and intangible vision, or, at the most, pronounce it to be the unfaithful and distorted mirage of an inexplorable region. For the vast majority it has lost all the sharpness of outline and all the warmth of colour that once made it so potent an agency in human life. Compromise is the word. It may be true: and if the churches will temper their strictures so that they do less violence to present aims and ideals—well, like Pascal, men will remain on the safe side. But the age of martyrs, the age of Crusaders, the age of public penance, and even of private mortification, must hope for no revival. The sterner dictates of supernaturalism must be explained away as unsuited to a more sensitive and a more energetic age, or as a blunder in exegetics on the part of a less enlightened generation.

Hence, when, a few years ago, Dr. St. George Mivart, a writer of much eminence and erudition, confessed that he looked forward to a rejuvenescence of the religious orders of the thirteenth century, he was greeted with a smile of incredulity outside the narrow sphere of his own co-religionists. That Dr. Mivart, ardent evolutionist^[1] as he is, should cling to the old dispensation was surprising enough; though, indeed, it was suspected that he had his own mode of conceiving Catholicism, which, if the holy office had not put a prompt 'closure' upon him, might have been duly unfolded to the world. However, it seemed incredible that so broad-minded an interpreter of events should predict a revival of the great monastic orders; and (such is the irony of the relation between clergy and laity in the Roman Church), at that very time it was being whispered in ecclesiastical circles that Rome was thinking of suppressing most of the religious orders.

Outside the Church of Rome the thought, if it was noticed at all, was treated with quiet disregard, and attributed to a spasmodic attack of zeal on the part of its author. Monasticism was dying—not in the odour of sanctity. Men visited the venerable ruins of abbeys and monasteries, and re-peopled in spirit the deserted cells and dreary cloisters and the roofless chapel with a kindly archæological interest; smiled at their capacious refectories and wine-cellars; dwelt gratefully on the labours of the Benedictines through the Age of Iron; conjured up the picturesque life and fervent activity of the Grey Friars before their corruption, and shuddered at the zeal of the White Friars in Inquisition days. But people would as soon have thought to see the dead bones of the monks re-clothed with flesh as to see any great revival of their institutions. No doubt the system would die hard in countries that had resisted the angry Teutonic rebellion against Roman authority, but even in the warm lands of the South it was visibly decaying; never more would a Savonarola or a Jacobo della Marchia strike fire in the hearts of a multitude. Ecclesiasticism had become a profession, like the priesthood in later Judea or Greece or Rome, and it must be conducted on sober business lines at the risk of becoming distasteful.

In point of fact, however, there has been a revival of monastic institutions in our midst, proportionate to the revival of Roman Catholicism. A hundred years ago England flattered itself that the monastic spirit—if not Popery itself—was extinguished for ever within its ocean frontiers: the few survivors of the old orders were still proscribed and crept stealthily about the land in strange disguises. Then the French refugees surreptitiously re-introduced it—just as they brought over large quantities of the hated 'Popish baubles' in their huge boxes, which, on the king's secret instructions, passed the custom house untouched. The long Irish immigration set in, and the zeal of the aliens kept pace with growing British tolerance. The removal of Catholic disabilities, the Oxford movement, and the establishment of the hierarchy followed in quick succession, and, as Catholicism spread rapidly through the land, the Continental branches of the monastic orders grasped the opportunity of once more planting colonies on the fruitful British soil.

At the present day every order and congregation is represented amongst us, and the vast army of monks and nuns is many thousand strong. London, true to its encyclopædic character, embraces them all. Monasteries and convents are found in every large city in England, and often enough as one glides through our loveliest shires one sees from the train, nestling in the quiet valleys as in days of old, the severe quadrangular structure of some modern monastery. Any important ecclesiastical function in London attracts numbers of monks in their quaint mediæval costumes. After three long centuries they have started from their graves and are walking amongst us once more.

It is true that the fact is not much appreciated outside their own sphere, for the modern monks are not wholly unaffected by the world-evolution. The Benedictine does not bury himself with dusty tomes far from the madding crowd: he is found daily in the British Museum and nightly in comfortable hotels about Russell Square. The Grey Friar, erstwhile (and at home, even now) bareheaded and barefooted, flits about Suburbia in silk hat and patent leather boots and silver-headed cane. The irrepressible Jesuit is again found everywhere. Still, whatever be their inconsistency, they come amongst us with the same stereotyped profession, the same archaic customs and costumes of their long-buried brethren.

Their reappearance has provoked several controversies of actual interest. When the monks last vanished from the stage in England they left behind them a dishonourable record which their enemies were not slow to publish. Are modern monasteries and convents the same whitened sepulchres as their predecessors on whom the scourge of the Reformation fell so heavily? A strong suspicion is raised against them by their former history. The suspicion is confirmed by a number of 'escaped' monks and nuns who have traversed the land proclaiming that such is the case; although, it must be borne in mind, they usually come from that distant land which is not remarkable for the accuracy of its contributions to our literature. The impenetrable secrecy of monastic life is also far from reassuring.

On the other hand Roman Catholics appeal to their monastic institutions as an eloquent proof of their undying spiritual vitality. From the schismatic churches (such as the Anglican), the detached branches of the great tree of Christianity, the life has naturally departed; it flows on with perennial youth in the mother church of Rome. Rome alone can now inspire moral heroism, but Rome can do it, in spite of the rapid beat of time and the corroding forces of a sceptical age. She still holds up the loftiest Christian ideals to humanity, and her children embrace them in thousands.

And the monastic orders have been dragged also into the seething waters of the social problem. Now that Socialism has forced its way through the serried ranks of theologians and philosophers into the arena of honourable discussion, it has met with the usual solemn consecration from the Church, like Darwinism or the Higher Criticism. Christ is discovered to have been a Socialist: the early Church a model Socialistic community. And in proof that the Church did not abandon the Socialistic teaching of its founder under the shadow of imperial patronage and in the possession of regal power, monasticism is held up as an object lesson in Socialism that has never been absent from the Church. No doubt it is strange that the monks themselves, twenty or thirty years ago, anathematised Socialistic ideas as fervently as the rest of the faithful, but monks have never been the wisest section of the Church.

The most unpromising feature of the controversies that have thus arisen with regard to monasticism is that the disputants on both sides are deplorably ignorant of the true condition of monasteries. The Catholic layman, to whom the task of defending them is usually committed—it would be indelicate for the monks and nuns to defend themselves—usually knows as much of the interior and the régime of English monasteries as he does of those of Thibet. The monks preserve the most jealous secrecy about their inner lives: their constitutions strictly forbid them to talk of internal matters to outsiders, and their secular servants are enjoined a like secrecy with regard to the little that falls under their observation. Roman Catholics who live under the very shadow of monasteries for many years are usually found, in spite of a most ardent curiosity, to be completely ignorant of the ways of conventual life.

In such circumstances there is, perhaps, occasion for an ex-monk to contribute his personal experiences. The writer, after spending twelve years in various monasteries of the Franciscan Order, found himself compelled in the early part of last year to secede from the Roman Catholic priesthood. During those years, besides a long familiarity with the tenor of monastic life, a large experience of Catholic educational, polemical, and administrative methods has been accumulated, and it may not be inopportune to set it forth in simple narrative.

The religious order to which I had the good or evil fortune to belong is a revival of the once famous Province of Grey Friars, the English section of the Order of Saint Francis. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, immediately after the foundation of the Order, Agnellus of Pisa successfully introduced it into England. The English province (each national section of the order is called a province) flourished vigorously until the sixteenth century, and has put several distinguished names, such as those of Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon, on the rolls of English history. Of its later corruption and final overthrow at the Reformation it is unnecessary to treat; but, contrary to popular supposition, the Grey Friars (for they wore a grey habit in pre-Reformation days) were never really extinguished. From a monastery in France friars were sent over in various disguises, almost continuously up to the middle of the present century. About forty years ago the Belgian province of the same order, seeing that all hope of martyrdom in England was finally extinct, sent a colony for the purpose of reviving the order. Besides the rich spiritual emolument there were many attractions in the independent missionary life, and the Belgian friars offered themselves generously for the work. English novices were obtained, churches and monasteries erected, and ten years ago the English province found itself strong enough to form a detached organism. To-day it numbers eight large monasteries and more than a hundred religious in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, seeing the success of the brown-robed Belgian friars, the yellow-robed friars of the French province invaded the country from the south-west corner, and are also creeping apace. Each section claims to be the real successor of the original Grey Friars, and treats its rival as a usurper, whilst Rome, ever tactful and diplomatic, calmly encourages their rivalry for the ultimate growth of the Franciscan Order. A further complication arises from the fact that there is a third body claiming to be the original children of St. Francis—the bearded Franciscans or Capuchins.

Whatever may be the merits of their warmly-contested claims the Franciscan Order is largely represented by them in England. The Jesuit Society is still more numerous; the Benedictine, Dominican, Carmelite, and Carthusian Orders are also well represented, together with the minor congregations—Passionists, Marists, Redemptorists, Oblates, Servites, &c., and the infinite variety of orders and congregations of women. In the following pages I shall give such items of interest concerning them (and the Church of Rome at large) as may have fallen under my experience. As the narrative follows, for the sake of convenience, the course of the writer’s own life, it is necessary to commence with the means of recruiting the religious orders and the clergy in general.

1. Ardent, that is to say, from the Catholic point of view: his co-religionists have for years regarded his views as perilous, and important manuals of theology stigmatise them in the strongest terms. He is, however, anti-Darwinian, and does not admit the evolution of the human mind.