When we see the nations crowd to the solitaries the most eminent for their sanctity, to implore from their wisdom a remedy for suffering and a consolation in misfortunes; when we see these venerable men impart, together with the unction of the Gospel, the sublime lessons which they had learned during long years of meditation and prayer in the silence of solitude, it is impossible not to understand how much these communications must have contributed to correct and elevate ideas relating to religion and morality, and to amend and purify morals. Let us not forget that the human mind was, as it were, materialized by the corruption and grossness of the pagan religion. The worship of nature, of sensible forms, was so deeply rooted that, in order to raise minds to the conception of superior things, a strong and extraordinary reaction was required; it was necessary in some measure to annihilate matter in order to present to man only the mind. The life of the solitaries was the best adapted to produce this effect. In reading the history of these times, we seem to find ourselves transported out of this world; the flesh has disappeared, and there remains nothing but the spirit; and the force which has been employed in order to subdue the flesh is such – they have insisted so much on the vanity of earthly things – that reality itself is changed into illusion, and the physical world vanishes to make way for the moral and intellectual; all the ties of earth have been broken; man puts himself in intimate communication with Heaven. Miracles multiply exceedingly in these lives; apparitions continually appear; the abodes of the solitaries are arenas where earthly means are nothing; good angels struggle against demons, heaven against hell, God against Satan: the earth is there only to serve as a field of battle; the body exists no longer except to be consumed as a holocaust on the altars of virtue, in the presence of the demon who struggles furiously to render it the slave of vice.
What has become of the idolatrous worship which Greece paid to sensible forms, that adoration which it offered to nature by deifying all that was delicious and beautiful, all that could interest the senses and the heart? What a profound change! the same senses are subjected to the most severe privations; they are most strictly circumcised in heart; and man, who then scarcely attempted to raise his mind above the earth, now keeps it constantly fixed on Heaven. It is impossible to form an idea of what we are attempting to describe, without having read the lives of these solitaries; to understand all the effect of their great prodigies, it is necessary to have spent many hours over these pages, where, so to speak, nothing is found which follows the natural course of things. It is not enough to imagine pure lives, austerities, visions, and miracles; it is necessary to see all this collected together, and carried to the most wonderful extent in the path of perfection.
If you refuse to acknowledge the action of grace in facts so surprising; if you will not see any supernatural effect in this religious movement; I say more, if you go so far as to suppose that the mortification of the flesh and the elevation of the soul are carried to blamable exaggeration, still you cannot help allowing that such a reaction was very likely to spiritualize ideas, to awaken the moral and intellectual forces in man, and to concentrate all within himself, by giving him the sentiment of that interior, intimate, and moral life, with which, until then, he had not been occupied. The forehead which, till then, had been bent towards the earth, was raised towards the Divinity; something nobler than material enjoyments was offered to the mind, and the brutal excesses authorized by the example of the false divinities of paganism, at length appeared an offence against the high dignity of human nature.
In the moral order, the effect must have been immense. Man, until then, had not even imagined that it was possible to resist the impetuosity of his passions. There were found, it is true, in the cold morality of a few philosophers, certain maxims intended to restrain the dangerous passions; but this morality was only in the books, the world did not regard it as practicable, and if some men attempted to realize it, they did so in such a manner that, far from giving it credit, they rendered it contemptible. What did it avail to abandon riches and profess freedom from all earthly things, as some philosophers did, if at the same time they appeared so vain, so full of themselves, that it was evident that they only sacrificed on the altar of pride? It was to overturn all the idols in order to place themselves on the altar, and reign there without rival gods; this was not to direct the passions, to subject them to reason, but to create a monster passion surpassing and devouring all. Humility, the foundation-stone whereon the solitaries raised the edifice of their virtue, placed them immediately in a position infinitely superior to that of the ancient philosophers who were distinguished for a life more or less severe. In fine, men were taught to avoid vice and practise virtue, not for the futile pleasure of being regarded and admired, but for superior motives founded on the relations of man with God, and the destinies of eternity. From that moment man knew that it was not impossible for him to triumph over evil, in the obstinate struggle which he felt continually going on within himself. At the sight of so many thousands of persons of both sexes who followed a rule of life so pure and austere, mankind took fresh courage, and were convinced that the paths of virtue were not impracticable for them.
The generous confidence with which man was inspired by the sight of such sublime examples, lost nothing of its strength in presence of the Christian dogma, which does not allow actions meritorious of eternal life to be attributed to man himself, and teaches him the necessity of divine aid, if he wishes to escape the paths of perdition. This dogma, which, on the other hand, accords so well with the daily lessons of experience as to human frailty, far from destroying the strength of the mind or diminishing its courage, on the contrary, animates it more and more to persevere in spite of all obstacles. When man thinks himself alone, when he does not feel himself supported by the powerful hand of Providence, he walks with the tottering steps of infancy; he wants confidence in himself, in his own strength; the object he has in view seems too distant, the enterprise too arduous, and he is discouraged. The dogma of grace, as it is explained by the Catholic Church, is not that fatalist doctrine, the mother of despair, which has hardened the heart among Protestants, as Grotius laments. It is a doctrine which, leaving man all his free will, teaches him the necessity of superior aid; but that aid will be abundantly furnished him by the infinite goodness of God, who has shed His blood for him in torments and ignominy, and has breathed out for him His last sigh on Mount Calvary.
It seems as if Providence had been pleased to choose a climate where mankind could make a trial of their strength vivified and sustained by grace. It was under a sky apparently the most fatal for the corruption of the soul, in countries where the relaxation of the body naturally leads to relaxation of mind, and where even the air that they breathed inclined to pleasure, – it was there that the greatest energy of mind was displayed, that the greatest austerities were practised, and the pleasures of the senses were proscribed and banished with the greatest severity. The solitaries fixed their abodes in deserts within the influence of the balmy breezes of the neighboring lands; from their mountains and sandy hills their eyes could distinguish the peaceful and smiling countries which invited to pleasure and enjoyment; like the Christian virgin who abandoned her obscure cave to go and place herself in the hollow of a rock, whence she saw the palace of her fathers overflowing with riches, pleasures, and delights, while she herself lamented like a solitary dove in the holes of the rock. From that time all climates were good for virtue; austerity of morals did not at all depend on the proximity of the equatorial line; the morality of man, like man himself, could live in all climates. When the most perfect continence was practised in so wonderful a manner under the sky which we have described, the monogamy of Christianity could well be established and preserved. When, in the secrets of the Eternal, the time had arrived for calling a people to the light of truth, it mattered not whether they lived amid the snows of Scandinavia, or on the burning plains of India. The spirit of the divine laws was not to be confined within the narrow circle which the Esprit des Lois of Montesquieu has attempted to assign it.
CHAPTER XL.
ON RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS IN THE EAST
The influence exercised by the lives of the solitaries of the East over religion and morality is beyond a doubt; in truth it is not easy to appreciate it in all its extent and in all its effects; but it is not the less true and real on that account. It has not marked the doctrines of humanity like those thundering events the effects of which are often inadequate to their promises; but it is like a beneficial rain which, diffusing itself gently over the thirsty earth, fertilizes the meadows and the fields. If it were possible for man to comprehend and distinguish the vast assemblage of causes which have contributed to raise his mind, to give him a lively consciousness of his immortality, and to render a return to his ancient degradation almost impossible, perhaps it would be found that the wonderful phenomenon of the Eastern solitaries had a considerable share in that immense change. Let us not forget that from thence did the great men of the East receive their inspiration; St. Jerome lived in a cave at Bethlehem, and the conversion of St. Augustine was accompanied by a holy emulation excited in his mind by reading the life of St. Anthony the Abbot.
The monasteries which were founded in the East and West in imitation of these early establishments of the solitaries, were a continuation of them, although with many differences, in consequence of times and circumstances. Thence came the Basils, the Gregories, the Chrysostoms, and so many distinguished men, the glory of the Church. If a miserable spirit of dispute, ambition, and pride, sowing the seeds of discord, had not prepared the rupture which was to deprive the East of the vivifying influence of the Roman See, perhaps the ancient monasteries of the East would have served, like those of the West, to prepare a social regeneration, by forming one people out of the conquerors and the conquered.
It is evident that the want of unity was one of the causes of the weakness of the East; I will not deny that their position was very different from ours; the enemy opposed to them did not at all resemble the barbarians of the North; but I am not sure that it was easier to subdue the latter than it was to rule the nations by whom the East was conquered. In the East, the victory remained with the aggressors, as with us; but a conquered nation is not dead; its defeat does not take from it all the great advantages which are able, by giving it a moral ascendency over the conquerors, to prepare, in silence, their transformation, if not their expulsion. The northern barbarians conquered the South of Europe; but the South, in its turn, triumphed over them by the Christian religion; the barbarians were not driven out, but they were transformed. Spain was conquered by the Arabs, and the Arabs could not be transformed; but they were driven out in the end. If the East had preserved unity, if Constantinople and the other episcopal sees had remained subject to Rome like those of the West; in a word, if all the East had been contented to be a member of a great body, instead of having the ambitious pretensions of being a great body itself, I consider it certain that, after the conquest of the Saracens, a struggle, at once intellectual, moral, and physical, would have been engaged in; a profound change would have been worked in the conquered nation, or the struggle would have ended by the conquering barbarians being driven back to their deserts.
It will be said that the transformation of the Arabs was the work of ages. But was not that of the barbarians of the North so likewise? Was this great work finished by their conversion to Christianity? A considerable part of them were Arians; and besides, they understood the Christian ideas so ill, they found the practice of Gospel morality so difficult, that for a long time it was almost as difficult to treat with them as with nations of a different religion. On the other hand, let us not forget that the irruption of the barbarians was not a solitary event; an event which, when once finished, did not recur; it was continued for ages. But the force of the religious principle in the West was such, that all the invading nations were compelled to retire, or were forced to bend to the ideas and manners of the countries they had recently acquired. The defeat of the hordes of Attila, the victories of Charlemagne over the Saxons and the other nations beyond the Rhine, the successive conversion of the various idolatrous nations of the North by means of the missionaries sent from Rome, – in fine, the vicissitudes and the final result of the invasions of the Normans, and the ultimate triumph of the Christians of Spain over the Moors after a war of eight centuries, are so many decisive proofs of what I have just laid down – viz. that the West, vivified and fortified by Catholic unity, had had the secret of assimilating and appropriating to itself all that it was not able to reject, and the force to reject all that it could not make its own.
This is what was wanting in the East: the enterprise was not more difficult there than in the West. If the West alone was able to liberate the Holy Sepulchre, the West and East together would never have lost it; or, at least, after having freed it, they would have kept it for ever. The same cause prevented the monasteries of the East from attaining to the same vitality and energy which distinguished those of the West; therefore, they have always been seen to grow weak with time, without producing any thing great, and capable of preventing social dissolution, of silently preparing and slowly elaborating regeneration for posterity, after the calamities with which it pleased Providence to afflict ancient times. He who has seen in history the brilliant commencement of the Eastern monasteries, cannot behold without pain the decline of their strength and splendor in the course of ages, after the ravages caused by invasion, wars, and finally, the deadly influence of the schism of Constantinople; the ancient abodes of so many men illustrious for science and sanctity gradually disappeared from the page of history like expiring lamps, or the dying fires of an abandoned camp.
Immense injury was done to all the branches of human knowledge by this decline, which, after having rendered the East barren, ended by destroying it. If we pay attention, we shall see that, amid the great shocks and revolutions which disturbed Europe, Africa, and Asia, the natural refuge for the remains of ancient knowledge, was not the West, but the East. It was not in our monasteries that the books, and other intellectual riches, of which quieter and happier generations were one day to enjoy the benefit, should naturally have been preserved; this, it would seem, belonged to the monasteries of the eastern countries; those lands, where the most different civilizations were brought together and commingled as on neutral ground; those regions, where the human mind had displayed the greatest activity, and taken the highest flights; where the most abundant treasures of tradition and sciences, and the beauties of art were accumulated; in a word, it was in this vast mart of all the riches of the civilization and refinement of all nations, – it was in this sanctuary and museum of antiquity, that the intellectual patrimony of future generations ought to have been preserved.
Let it not, however, be supposed that the monasteries of the East were of no service to the human mind; the science and literature of Europe are still mindful of the impulse which was communicated to them, by the arrival of the precious materials thrown upon the coasts of Italy, after the taking of Constantinople: but even these riches, brought to Europe by a few men, driven upon our shores by a tempest, came to us, like the remains of a shipwrecked crew, who, after having with difficulty saved their lives from the fury of the waves, have only preserved in their benumbed hands some gold and a few precious stones.
For this reason, precisely, do we lament, because from the example we have adduced, we are enabled the better to understand the immense riches of the vessel which was lost; this makes us grieve the more bitterly that the early times of the illustrious cenobites of the East have not been brought down to our day by a continued chain. When we see their works overflow with sacred and profane learning, when their labors show us proofs of indefatigable activity, we think with sorrow of the inestimable treasures which their libraries must have contained.
Yet, in spite of the justness of the melancholy reflections we have here made, it must be allowed that the influence of these monasteries never ceased to be extremely useful to the preservation of knowledge. The Arabs, in the times of their success, showed themselves to be intelligent and cultivated; and Europe, in many respects, is indebted to them for much advancement. Bagdad and Grenada, during the middle ages, are two brilliant centres of intellectual movement and art, which serve not a little to diminish the sombre effect of the barbarities of Islamism: they are two tranquil and pleasing features in a frightful picture. If it were possible to follow the history of intellectual development among the Arabs, through the transformations and catastrophes of the East, perhaps we should find in the sciences of the nations which they conquered or destroyed the origin of much of their progress. It is certain that their own civilization did not contain any vital principle favorable to the development of the mind; we have a proof of this in their religious and social organization, and in the small results which they obtained, after having been for so many centuries peacefully established in the conquered countries. Their whole system, with respect to letters and intellectual cultivation, is founded on that stupid maxim, uttered by one of their chiefs, when he condemned an immense library to the flames: "If these books are contrary to the Alcoran, they should be burnt as pernicious; if they are not contrary to it, they should be burnt as useless."
We read in Palladius, that the monks of Egypt did not content themselves with working with rude and simple objects, but that they devoted themselves to labors of all kinds. These thousands of men, who, belonging to all classes and to all countries, embraced the solitary life, must have brought to the desert a large treasure of knowledge. We know how far the human mind can go when left to itself, and applied to a fixed occupation; there is always some reason for thinking that a great part of the valuable ideas on the secrets of nature, the utility and properties of certain ingredients, the principles of some of the arts and sciences, knowledge which formed the rich patrimony of the Arabs at the time when they appeared in Europe, were nothing but the remains of ancient learning, gathered by them in countries which had formerly been inundated by men from all parts. We must remember that at the time of the first invasions of the northern barbarians, when Spain, the south of France, Italy, the north of Africa, and all the islands adjacent to these countries, were ravaged by these terrible men, the East became a refuge, an asylum, for all those who could undertake the voyage. Thus the treasures of Western science accumulated every day in these countries; this emigration from all the Western regions may have contributed, in an extraordinary manner, to convey to the East the remains of ancient knowledge, which afterwards came to us transformed and disfigured by the hands of the Arabs.
Deeply convinced of the nothingness of the world by so long a succession of heavy misfortunes, these unfortunate men felt the religious sentiment strengthened in their hearts; the fugitives assembled in the East listened with lively emotion to the energetic words of the solitary of the cave of Bethlehem. A great many of them retired into the monasteries, where they found relief for their wants, and consolation for their souls; thus did the Eastern monasteries gain a great addition of valuable knowledge and information of all sorts.
If European civilization one day become complete mistress of the countries which now groan under the Mussulman yoke, perhaps it will be given to the history of science to add a noble page to its labors, when, through the obscurities of the times, and by means of manuscripts discovered by curiosity or chance, she shall have found the thread which shall lead to a knowledge of the connection of Arabian science with that of antiquity. The succession of transformations will then be displayed, and we shall understand how the science of the sons of Omar has appeared to have a different origin in our eyes. The archives of Spain contain, in documents relating to the dominion of the Saracens, riches, the examination of which may be said not yet to be commenced; perhaps they will throw some light on this point. There is no doubt that they afford matter for careful investigation, extremely curious for appreciating these two very different civilizations, the Mohammedan and the Christian.