The Christian church set up an ideal of life which it was impossible to realize within her borders, and one which differed in many respects from the teachings of Jesus.  Her demands involved a renunciation of the world, a superiority to all the enticements of bodily appetites, a lofty scorn of secular bonds and social concerns.  A vigorous religious faith had conquered a mighty empire, but corruption attended its victory.  The standard of Christian morals was lowered, or had at least degenerated into a cold, formal ideal that no one was expected to realize; hence none strove to attain it but the monks.  When Roman society with its selfishness, lust and worldliness, swept in through the open doors of the church and took possession of the sanctuary, those who had cherished the ascetic ideal gave up the fight against the world, and the flight from the world-church began.  They could not tolerate this union of the church with a pagan state and an effete civilization.  In some respects, as a few writers maintain, many of these hermits were like the old Jewish prophets, fighting single-handed against corruption in church and state, refusing to yield themselves as slaves to the authority of institutions that had forsaken the ideals of the past.

Thus the conviction that the end of human society was nigh, and that the church could no longer serve as an asylum for the lovers of righteousness, with certain philosophical ideas respecting the body, the world and God, united to produce the assumption that salvation was more readily attainable in the deserts; and Christian monasticism, in its hermit form, began its long and eventful history.

Causes of Variations in Monasticism

Prominent among the causes producing variations in the monastic type was the influence of climatic conditions and race characteristics.

The monasticism as well as the religion of the East has always differed from the monasticism and the religion of the West.  The Eastern mind is mystical, dreamy, contemplative; the Western mind loves activity, is intensely practical.  Representatives of the Eastern faiths in the recent Parliament of Religions accused the West of materialism, of loving the body more than the soul.  They affected to despise all material prosperity, and gloried in their assumed superiority, on account of their love for religious contemplation.  This radical difference between the races of the East and West is clearly seen in the monastic institution.  Benedict embodied in his rules the spirit and active life of the West, and hence, the monastic system, then in danger of dying, or stagnating, revived and spread all over Europe.  Again, the hermit life was ill-adapted to the West.  Men could not live out of doors in Europe and subsist on small quantities of food as in Egypt.  The rigors of the climate in Europe demanded an adaptation to new conditions.