The Effects of Solitude Upon the Individual.

It has already been shown that some solitude is essential to our richest culture.  Our higher nature demands time for reflection and meditation.  But the monks carried this principle to an extreme, and they overestimated its benefits.  “Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires,” says Montaigne, “do not leave us because we forsake our native country, they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, nor hair shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them.”

Besides these passions, which the monks carried with them, their solitary life tended to foster spiritual pride, contract sympathy, and engender an inhumane spirit.  True, there were exceptions; but the sublime characters which survive in monastic history are by no means typical of its usual effects.  Seclusion did not benefit the average monk.  Indeed there is something wanting in even the loftiest monastic characters.  “The heroes of monasticism,” says Allen, “are not the heroes of modern life.  All put together, they would not furnish out one such soul as William of Orange, or Gustavus, or Milton.  Independence of thought and liberty of conscience, they renounced once for all, in taking upon them the monastic vow.  All the larger enterprises, all the broad humanities, which to our mind make a greater career, were rigidly shut off by a barrier that could not be crossed.  All the warmth and wealth of social and domestic life was a field of forbidden fruit, to be entered only through the gate of unpardonable sin.”

Thus self-excluded from a normal life in society, often the subject of self-inflicted pain, it is no wonder that the monk impaired all the nobler and manlier feelings of the soul, that he became strangely indifferent to human affection, that bigotry and pride often sat as joint rulers on the throne of his heart.  He who had trampled on all filial relations would scarcely recognize the bonds of human brotherhood.  He who heard not the prayer of his own mother would not be likely to listen to the cry of the tortured heretic for mercy.  Man as man was not reverenced.  It was the monk in man who was esteemed.  As Milman puts it, “Bigotry has always found its readiest and sternest executioners among those who have never known the charities of life.”

Nor is it a matter of surprise that the monk was spiritually proud.  He was supposed to stand in the inner circle, a little nearer the throne of God than his fellow-mortals.  When dead, he was worshiped as a saint and regarded as an intercessor between God and his lower fellow-creatures.  His hatred of the base world easily passed over into a sense of superiority and ignoble pride.