18.6. Women and the Monastic System
While the monastic system was in its primitive unorganised state it lent itself to certain obvious abuses. Anyone who chose could become a hermit and live according to his own devices. Impostors and charlatans under the guise of pretended austerities deceived the simple and lived upon alms received on false pretences. These abuses seem to have attained a great magnitude in Syria at the middle of the fifth century, if we may judge from the vigorous protests of Isaac of Antioch; but they existed everywhere. They led to the gradual regulating of the monastic life and the subjecting of the monks to the authority of the bishops. In this way a body of legislation, both ecclesiastical and civil, grew up, which restricted the voluntariness of the system, and made it an integral part of the general polity of both Church and State. This "ecclesiasticising" of the monks is often deplored; but it was part of the inevitable march of events and a condition of the continued existence of the institution. In the fifth and sixth centuries other tendencies made themselves felt, and the monks in great numbers became embroiled in the ecclesiastical politics and the theological controversies of the time.
Sometimes they were on the orthodox side, sometimes on the heterodox; but on whatever side they stood, they were only too often violent and fanatical, and some of the most discreditable episodes of Church history in those days were the work of Eastern monks — as the murder of Flavian at the Robber Synod of Ephesus.
Before we pass to the West, it will be well to speak of the nuns in Egypt and the East. It has already been said at the beginning of this chapter, when speaking of the pre-monastic Christian ascetics, that communities of women existed at an earlier date than communities of men — in Egypt as early as the middle of the third century. The records of Egyptian monachism agree in representing women as taking part in great numbers in every phase of the monastic movement. There were women who lived as hermits and as recluses, shut up in tombs; there are various stories of women disguising themselves as men and living in monasteries, and being discovered only after death. Pachomius founded two nunneries, one, under his sister, at Tabennisi, the other, which numbered 400 nuns, near Panopolis (Akhmlm); and after his death many others were founded in his order.
The famous Coptic abbot Senuti of Atripe governed a great community of nuns in addition to the monks of the White Monastery. We learn from Palladius that at the end of the fourth century there were numerous nunneries in all parts of monastic Egypt, and the glimpses he lets us see of their inner life are graphic and interesting. He tells us of one Dorotheus who had the spiritual charge of a nunnery, and used to sit at a window overlooking the convent, "keeping the peace among the nuns"; also of an old nun, Mother Talis, superioress of a convent at Antinoe, so beloved by her nuns that there was no need of a key in that convent, as in others, to keep the nuns from wandering, "as they were fast tied by love of her."
In Syria there were at the beginning of the fourth century Daughters of the Covenant analogous to the Sons of the Covenant, spoken of above. Whether they led a full community life is uncertain; but in one of Rabbula's regulations, at the beginning of the fifth century, it is prescribed that " Sons or Daughters of the Covenant who fall from their estate be sent to the monasteries for penance," which implies the existence of convents of women. In all probability there were in Syria, as elsewhere, fully organised nunneries, though there is not much Syrian evidence concerning them. Certainly in Palestine at this time there were many convents of women, including those established under the influence of the Roman ladies Paula and Eustochium and the Melanias. When St Basil began his monastic life about 360, his mother and sister were already living in a community of nuns in the immediate vicinity, with a river between them; and throughout Greek-speaking Christendom, in Asia Minor and above all in Constantinople, women practised the monastic life hardly less than men. No Eastern nuns, however, have at any time devoted themselves to external works of charity like the modern active congregations of women in the West.
There is a considerable body of evidence shewing that the ascetical life was pursued in the West — notably at Carthage and Rome — as in the East, before the introduction of monasticism proper; but there is no sufficient reason for questioning the tradition that attributes the knowledge of the monastic life in Western Europe to the influence of St Athanasius. In the year 339 he came to Rome, accompanied by two Egyptian monks, and thus spread in the City and its neighbourhood the knowledge of the manner of life that was then being practised in Egypt.
Many candidates presented themselves, and we learn from Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine that in the last quarter of the fourth century there were numerous monasteries of men and of women in Rome. Among the high-born patrician ladies the movement had a great vogue and became so fashionable that an agitation against it arose, of which St Jerome had to bear the brunt. These ladies, brought up in every luxury, gave up all things and surrendered themselves to lives of hardship and devotional exercises. The most famous of them, as Paula and Melania, even left Rome and went to the Holy Land, where they established sisterhoods. Monasteries rapidly spread over Central and Southern Italy, and the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea were peopled by hermits. In North Italy, too, monasteries existed by the end of the fourth century at the chief cities — at Aquileia, where Rufinus and Jerome were trained in the monastic life; at Milan, where Ambrose had a great monastery of men; at Ravenna and Pavia and many other towns.
Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli (d. 371), introduced a change in the idea of the monastic life that merits for him a more prominent place among monastic legislators than is commonly accorded to him: he combined the clerical and monastic states, making the clerics of his cathedral live together in community according to the monastic rule. This was the starting-point of the practice destined to prevail both in West and East, whereby monks as by ordinary rule become priests, though it was several centuries before the custom was established.
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