The ascetic theory undoubtedly derived much support from the views held concerning the teachings of the Bible.  The Oriental monks frequently quoted from their sacred books to justify their habits and ideals.  In like manner, the Christian monks believed that they, and they alone, were literally obeying the commands of Christ and his apostles.  This phase of the subject will receive attention when the three vows of monasticism are considered.

In the West, two conditions, one political and social, the other religious, set in motion all these spiritual desires and ascetic beliefs tending toward monasticism.  One was the corrupted state, of Roman society and the approaching overthrow of the Roman Empire.  The other was the secularization of the church.

Men naturally cling to society as long as there exists any well-founded hope for its regeneration, but when every expectation for the survival of righteousness yields to a conviction that doom is inevitable, then the flight from the world begins.  This was precisely the situation in the declining days of Rome and Alexandria, when Christian monasticism came into being.  The monks believed that the end of the world was nigh, that all things temporal and earthly were doomed, and that God’s hand was against the empire.  “That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them,” says Kingsley, “contemporary history proves abundantly.  That they were correct, likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall on man, is proved by the fact that it did fall.”

So they fled to escape being caught in the ruins of society’s tottering structure,—­fled to make friends with the angels and with God.  If one cannot live purely in the midst of corruption, by all means let him live purely away from corruption, but let him never forget that his piety is of a lower order than that which abides uncorrupted in the midst of degenerate society.  There is much truth in the observation of Charles Reade in “The Cloister and the Hearth”:  “So long as Satan walks the whole earth, tempting men, and so long as the sons of Belial do never lock themselves in caves but run like ants, to and fro corrupting others, the good man that sulks apart, plays the Devil’s game, or at least gives him the odds.”

But the early Christian monks believed that their safety was only in flight.  It was not altogether an unworthy motive; at least it is easy to sympathize with these men struggling against odds, of the magnitude of which the modern Christian has only the faintest conception.

The conviction that the only true and certain way to secure salvation is by flight from the world, continued to prevail during the succeeding centuries of monastic history, and it can hardly be said to have entirely disappeared even at the present time.  Anselm of Canterbury, in the twelfth century, wrote to a young friend reminding him that the glory of this world was perishing.  True, not monks only are saved, “but,” says he, “who attains to salvation in the most certain, who in the most noble way, the man who seeks to love God alone, or he who seeks to unite the love of God with the love of the world?...  Is it rational when danger is on every side, to remain where it is the greatest?”