Basil did not condemn marriage, but he believed that it was incompatible with the highest spiritual attainments.  For the Kingdom of God’s sake it was necessary to forsake all.  “Love not the world, neither the things of the world,” embraced to his mind the married state.  By avoiding the cares of marriage a man was sure to escape, so he thought, the gross sensuality of the age.  He struck at the dangers which attend the possession of riches, by enforcing poverty.  An abbot was appointed over his cloisters to whom absolute obedience was demanded.  Everywhere men needed this lesson of obedience.  The discipline of the armies was relaxed.  The authority of religion was set at naught; laxity and disorder prevailed even among the monks.  They went roaming over the country controlled only by their whims.  Insubordination had to be checked or the monastic institution was doomed.  Hence, Basil was particular to enforce a respect for law and order.

Altogether this was an honest and serious attempt to introduce fresh power into a corrupt age and to faithfully observe the Biblical commands as Basil understood them.  The floods of iniquity were engulfing even the church.  A new standard had to be raised and an inner circle of pious and zealous believers gathered from the multitude of half-pagan Christians, or all was lost.

The subsequent history of Greek monachism has little interest.  In Russia, at a late date, the Greek monks served some purpose in keeping alive the national spirit under the Tartar yoke, but the practical benefits to the East were few, in comparison with the vigorous life of the Western monasticism.

Montalembert, the brilliant champion of Christian monasticism, becomes an adverse critic of the system in the East, although it is noteworthy he now speaks of monasticism as it appears in the Greek church, which he holds to be heretical; yet his indictment is quite true:  “They yielded to all the deleterious impulses of that declining society.  They have saved nothing, regenerated nothing, elevated nothing.”

We have visited the hermit in the desert and in the monastery governed by its abbot and its rules.  We must view the monk in one other aspect, that of theological champion.  Here the hermit and the monk of the monastery meet on common ground.  They were fighters, not debaters; fighters, not disciplined soldiers; fighters, not persuading Christians.  They swarmed down from the mountains like hungry wolves.  They fought heretics, they fought bishops, they fought Roman authorities, they fought soldiers, and fought one another.  Ignorant, fanatical and cruel, they incited riots, disturbed the public peace and shed the blood of foes.