The Monks of the West

DEDICATION

TO POPE PIUS IX.
Most Holy Father,

I lay at the feet of your Holiness a book which, for many reasons, owes its homage to you. Intended to vindicate the glory of one of the greatest institutions of Christianity, this work specially solicits the benediction of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the supreme head and natural protector of the Monastic Order. Long and often interrupted, sometimes for the service of the Church and of yourself, these studies were taken up again at the voice of your Holiness, when, amid the enthusiasm not to be forgotten which hailed your accession, you declared, in a celebrated encyclical letter, the duties and rights of the Religious Orders, anc^recog-nised in them “ those chosen phalanxes of the army of Christ which have always been the bulwark and ornament of the Christian republic, as well as of civil society.”

Your Holiness is well aware, moreover, that this homage is in no way intended to withdraw from criticism or discussion a work subject to all human imperfections and uncertainties, and which assumes only to enter upon questions open to the free estimate of all Christians.

It is solely in consideration of the melancholy and singular circumstances in which we are placed, that you will deign, most Holy Father, to hear, and perhaps to grant, the desire of one of your most devoted sons, ambitious of imprinting upon the labour of twenty years the seal of his affectionate veneration for your person and your authority. What Catholic could, in our days, give himself up to the peaceful study of the past without being troubled by the thought of the dangers and trials by which the Holy See is at present assailed, without desiring to offer up a filial tribute to him in whom we revere not only the minister of infallible truth, but also the image of justice and good faith, of courage and honour, shamefully overpowered by violence and deceit?

Accept then, most Holy Father, this humble offering of a heart inspired by a sincere admiration for your virtues, an ardent and respectful sympathy for your sorrows, and an unshaken fidelity to your imprescriptible rights.

I am, with the deepest respect,

Your Holiness's

Most humble and most obedient

Servant and Son,

CH. DE MONTALEMBERT.
April 21, 1860.

ORIGIN OF THIS WORK

This work originated in a purpose more limited than its title implies. After having narrated, more than twenty years since, in the Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth, the life of a young woman in whom was epitomised the Catholic poetry of suffering and of love, and whose modest and forgotten existence belonged nevertheless to the most resplendent epoch of the middle ages, I had proposed to myself a task more difficult: I desired, in writing the life of a great monk, to contribute to the vindication of the monastic orders. Happy to have been able to attract some attention to an aspect of religious history too long obscured and forgotten, by justifying the action of Catholicism upon, the most tender and exalted sentiments of the human heart, I hoped, by a sketch of another kind, to secure the same suffrages in vindicating Catholic and historic truth upon the ground where it has been most misconstrued, and where it still encounters the greatest antipathies and prejudices.’

The name of St Bernard immediately recurs to any inquirer who seeks the most accomplished type of the Religious. No other man has shed so much glory over the frock of the monk. Yet, notwithstanding, strange to tell! none of the numerous authors who have written his history, excepting his first biographers, who commenced their work during his life, seem to have understood the fact which both governed and explained his career—his monastic profession. By consent of all, St Bernard was a great man and a man of genius; he exercised upon his age an ascendancy without parallel; he reigned by eloquence, virtue, and courage. More than once he decided the fate of nations and of crowns—at one time, even, he held in his hands the destiny of the Church. He was able to influence Europe, and to precipitate her upon the East; he was able to combat and overcome, in Abailard, the precursor of modern rationalism. All the world knows and says as much—by consent of all he takes rank by the side of Ximenes, of Richelieu, and of Bossuet. But that is not enough. If he was—and who can doubt it ?—a great orator, a great writer, and a great man; he neither knew it nor cared for it. He was, and above all wished to be, something entirely different; he was a monk and a saint; he lived in a cloister and worked miracles.

The Church has established and defined the sanctity of Bernard—but history remains charged with the mission of recounting his life, and of explaining the marvellous influence which he exercised upon his contemporaries.

But in proceeding to study the life of this great man, who was a monk, we find that the popes, the bishops, and the saints, who were then the honour and bulwark of Christian society, came, like him, all, or nearly all, from the monastic order. What were they, then, these monks?—from whence came they?—and what had they done till then to occupy so high a place in the destinies of the world? It is necessary, first of all, to resolve these questions.

And there is more. In attempting to judge the age in which St Bernard lived, we perceive that it is impossible either to explain or to comprehend it without recognising it as animated by the same breath which had vivified an anterior epoch, of which this was but the direct and faithful continuation.

If the twelfth century did homage to the genius and the virtue of the monk Bernard, it is because the eleventh century had been regenerated and penetrated by the virtue and the genius of the monk who was called Gregory VII. Neither the epoch nor the work of Bernard should be looked at apart from the salutary crisis which had prepared the one and made the other possible: a simple monk could never have been heard and obeyed as Bernard was, if his undisputed greatness had not been preceded by the contests, the trials, and the posthumous victory of that' other monk who died six years before his birth. It is, then, necessary not only to characterise by a conscientious examination the pontificate of the greatest of those popes who have proceeded from the monastic class, but also to pass in review the whole period which connected the last struggles of Gregory with the first efforts of Bernard, and to thus attempt the recital of the gravest and most glorious strife in which the Church ever was engaged, and in which the monks stood foremost in suffering as in honour.

But even that is not enough. Far from being the founders of the monastic order, Gregory VII. and Bernard were but produced by it, like thousands more of their contemporaries. That institution had existed more than five centuries when these great men learnt how to draw from it so marvellous a strength. To know its origin, to appreciate its nature and its services, it is necessary to go back to another Gregory—to St Gregory the Great, to the first pope who came from the cloister; and further still, to St Benedict, legislator and patriarch of the monks of the West. It is necessary at least to glance at the superhuman efforts made during these five centuries by legions of monks, perpetually renewed, to subdue, to pacify, to discipline, and to purify the savage nations amongst whom they laboured, and of whom t^wenty barbarous tribes were successively transformed into Christian nations. It would be cruel injustice and ingratitude to pass by in silence twenty generations of indomitable labourers, who had cleared the thorns from the souls of our fathers, as they cleared the soil of Christian Europe, and had left only the labour of the reaper to Bernard and his contemporaries.

The volumes of which I now begin the publication are destined to this preliminary task.

Ambitious of carrying my readers with me on the way which I have opened to myself, my intention by this long preamble has been to show what the Monastic Order was, and what it had done for the Catholic world, before the advent of St Bernard to the first place in the esteem and admiration of Christendom in his time. In a literary point of view, I know, it is unwise to diffuse thus over a long series of years, and a multitude of names for the most part forgotten, the interest which it would be so easy to concentrate upon one luminous point, upon one superior genius. It is an enterprise of which I perceive the danger. Besides, in showing thus so many great men and great works before coming to him who ought to be the hero of my book, I am aware that I enfeeble the effect of his individual grandeur, the merit of his devotion, the animation of the tale. I should take care to avoid this peril if I wrote only for success. But there is to every Christian a beauty superior to art—the beauty of truth. There is something which concerns us more closely than the glory of all the heroes and even of all the saints—and that is, the honour of the Church, and her providential progress through the midst of the storms and darkness of history. I was loth to sacrifice the honour of an august institution, too long calumniated and proscribed, to the honour of a single man. Had I even been thus tempted, that hero himself, Bernard, the great apostle of justice and of truth, would have resented my so doing—he would not pardon me for exalting himself at the expense of his predecessors and his masters.

The subject, thus developed, embraces but too vast a field—it belongs at once to the present and to the past. The links which attach it to all our history are numerous and manifest. When we look at the map of ancient France, or of any one of our provinces, no matter which, we encounter at each step the names of abbeys, of chapter-houses, of convents, of priories, of hermitages, which mark the dwelling-place of so many monastic colonies. Where is the town which has not been founded, or enriched, or protected by some religious community? Where is the church which owes not to them a patron, a relic, a pious and popular tradition ? Wherever there is a luxuriant forest, a pure stream, a majestic hill, we may be sure that Religion has there left her stamp by the hand of the monk. That impression has also marked itself in universal and lasting lines upon the laws, the arts, the manners—upon the entire aspect of our ancient society. Christendom, in its youth, has been throughout vivified, directed, and constituted by the monastic spirit. Wherever we interrogate the monuments of the past, not only in France but in all Europe— in Spain as in Sweden, in Scotland as in Sicily— everywhere rises before us the memory of the monk,—the traces, ill-effaced, of his labours, of his power, of his benefactions, from the humble furrow which he has been the first to draw in the bogs of Brittany or of Ireland, up to the extinguished splendours of Marmoutier and Cluny, of Melrose and the Escurial.

And there is also a contemporary interest by the side of this interest of the past. Universally proscribed and dishonoured during the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth the religious orders everywhere reappear. Our age has witnessed, at the same time, their burial and their resurrection. Here we have succeeded in rooting out their last remnants, and there they have already renewed their life. Wherever the Catholic religion is not the object of open persecution, as in Sweden— wherever she has been able to obtain her legitimate portion of modern liberty—they reappear as of themselves. We have despoiled and proscribed them—we see them everywhere return, sometimes under new names and appearances, but always with their ancient spirit. They neither reclaim nor regret their antique grandeur. They limit themselves to living—to preaching by word and by example— without wealth, without pomp, without legal rights, but not without force nor without trials—not without friends, nor, above all, without enemies.

Friends and enemies are alike interested to know from whence they come, and whence they have drawn the secret of a life so tenacious and so fruitful. I offer to the one as to the other a tale which shall not be a panegyric nor even an apology, but the sincere testimony of a friend, of an admirer, who desires to preserve the impartial equity which history demands, and who will conceal no stain that he may have the fuller right of veiling no glory.