18.8. Why St. Benedict's Rule Came to Dominate Monastic Life
Gaul is the country of Western Europe in which early monachism was most widely propagated and flourished most, and for which the records of pre-Benedictine monachism are the most abundant. It is said that St Athanasius introduced the knowledge of the monastic life at Trier during his exile there (336-7) ; and the well-known story of St Augustine's conversion shews that before the end of the century there were monks living an eremitical life there.
But it is with the name of St Martin of Tours that the beginnings of Gallic monachism are rightly associated. A Pannonian by race, born early in the fourth century, he had practised the monastic life for some years before becoming bishop of Tours in 373. Nearly ten years earlier he had established a monastery near Poitiers, and on becoming bishop of Tours he formed one just outside of his episcopal city, at the place afterwards called Marmoutier Here he gathered together eighty monks, and lived with them a life of great solitude and austerity. They dwelt singly in caves and huts, meeting only for the church services and for meals; t hey fasted rigorously and prayed long — it was indeed a reproduction of the life of the Egyptian monks. Our information concerning this earliest Gallic monachism is m ainly derived from the writings of St Martin's biographer, Sulpitius Severus, and from his correspondence with St Paulinus of Nola.
From these sources we learn that by the end of the fourth century monasteries and monks and nuns were already numerous not only in the province of Tours, but in Rouen and the territory that afterwards became Normandy and Picardy.
The beginning of the fifth century witnessed the inauguration of monachism in Provence, at Marseilles under the influence of John Cassian, and in the island of Lerins under that of Honoratus. From Lerins went forth a number of monk-bishops, who throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, by the monasteries they set up in their episcopal cities, and by the monastic rules they composed for their government, spread far and wide through southeastern Gaul the influence and ideas of Lerins. In other parts of Gaul, too, monasteries arose in the fifth century, the most famous being Condat in the Jura mountains.
After the Frankish conquest of Gaul and under the early Mero-vingian kings the monastic movement continued throughout the sixth century to spread all over Frankland. A twofold tendency set in — one towards relaxation of life and observance; the other towards the eremitical life and the extremest forms of asceticism, such as are met with among the Syrian hermits. Gregory of Tours gives numerous examples of hermits, especially in Auvergne, who in their fantastic austerities equalled those of Syria; and his evidence is corroborated by other documents. It was not till the seventh century that Benedictine monachism got a foothold in Gaul, and about the same time St Columbanus imported his Rule and manner of life from Ireland.
For a time the three forms of monachism — the old Gallic, the Columbanian, and the Benedictine — existed side by side in Gaul. In order to understand why the Benedictine gradually and inevitably supplanted the earlier monachisms in France, in Italy, and in England, and was destined to become the only monachism of Teutonic Europe, it is necessary to survey the character of the earlier types. The early African and Spanish monachisms were swept away by Vandals and Moors; the Irish remained insular and isolated from the great currents of monastic development; so that Italy, France and England are the countries in which the transformation of the earlier types of Western monachism into the Benedictine was worked out.
It has to be remembered that in those days neither in the West nor in the East, outside the Pachomian system, was there anything resembling the present Western idea of different orders of monks — there was only the monastic order. Monasteries were autonomous, each having its own practices and its own rule, or selection of rules, depending mainly on the abbot's choice. Before St Benedict's time there were current in the West translations of certain Eastern rules — that of Pachomius, translated by Jerome; that of Basil, translated by Rufinus; and a rule attributed to Macarius. There was a rule made up out of the writings of Cassian; there was St Augustine's Letter (No. 211) on the government of a nunnery. It is doubtful whether Honoratus of Lerins wrote a rule. The only extant Western rules, properly so called, which are certainly earlier than St Benedict's, are that of Caesarius of Aries for monks and his somewhat longer rule for nuns; but these are quite short, and not one of the rules that came into contact with St Benedict's in his own time, or for a century afterwards, not even the Rule of Columbanus, could claim to be an ordered and practical code of laws regulating the life and working of a monastery. This St Benedict's Rule pre-eminently was; and the fact that it supplied so great a want doubtless was one of the chief reasons why it supplanted all its rivals.
But there was another and still more powerful reason: St Benedict was the man who adapted monasticism to Western ideas and Western needs. Monasticism in Italy and Gaul was an Eastern importation, and up to St Benedict it bore the marks of its origin. The life of the hermits of the Egyptian deserts, with their prolonged fasts and vigils and their other bodily austerities, was looked upon as the highest ideal — the true ideal — of tie monastic life; a nd the monks of Italy and Gaul endeavoured to emulate a manner of life hard enough in oriental climes, but doubly hard in Western Europe, This straining after severe bodily austerities can clearly be discerned in the fragmentary records that have survived of pre-Benedictine monachism in Italy and France, where the practice of a purely eremitical life was very common.
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