Even amid the delights of human fellowship, and surrounded by so much that ministers to restfulness of soul, it is often hard to repress a longing to shatter the fetters of custom, to flee from the noise and confusion of this hurrying, fretful world, and to pass one’s days in a coveted retirement, far from the maddening strife and tumult.  Montalembert’s profound appreciation of monastic life was never more aptly illustrated than in the following declaration:  “In the depths of human nature there exists without doubt, a tendency instinctive, though confused and evanescent, toward retirement and solitude.  What man, unless completely depraved by vice or weighed down by care and cupidity, has not experienced once, at least, before his death, the attraction of solitude?”

While the motives just described were unquestionably preeminent among the causative factors in monasticism, it should not be taken for granted that there were no others, or that either or both of these motives controlled every monk.  The personal considerations tending to keep up the flight from the world were numerous and active.  It would be a mistake to credit all the monks, and at some periods even a majority of them, with pure and lofty purposes.  Oftentimes criminals were pardoned through the intercession of abbots on condition that they would retire to a monastery.  The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt, the deserted or bereaved wife, the pauper and the invalid, the social outcast and the shirker of civic duties, the lazy and the fickle were all to be found in the ranks of the monastic orders.  Ceasing to feel any interest in the joys of society, they had turned to the cloister as a welcome asylum in the hour of their sorrow or disappointment.  To some it was an easy way out of the struggle for existence, to others it meant an end to taxes and to military service, to still others it was a haven of rest for a weary body or a disappointed spirit.  Thus many specific, individual considerations acted with the general desires for salvation and solitude to strengthen and to perpetuate the institution.

Beliefs Affecting the Causative Motives

In the first chapter it was shown that a variety of views respecting the relation of the body and the soul influenced the origin and development of Christian monasticism.  It will not now be necessary to repeat what was there said.  The essential teaching of all these false opinions was that the body was in itself evil, that the gratification of natural appetites was inherently wrong, and that true holiness consisted in the complete subjection of the body by self-denial and torture.  Jerome distinctly taught that what was natural was opposed to God.  The Gnostics and many of the early Christians believed that this world was ruled by the devil.  The Gnostics held that this opposition of the kingdom of matter to God was fundamental and eternal.  The Christians, however, maintained that the antagonism was temporary, the Lord having given the world over to evil spirits for a time.  The prevailing opinion among almost all schools was that a union with God was only possible to those who had extinguished bodily desires.