Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

130 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM.
It may be asked, had not Europe to pay a terrible
price for the advantages she gained through the labours
of the monks ? Was not the principle underlying monachism
one that in its essence was really destructive of
social life ? Were not many of the dearest and most
sacred interests of society trampled in the dust by the
celibate ? Could they have fully wrought out their will
would they not have made life a purgatory and the
world a waste ? There is this side of the question to be
looked at, and the truth which underlies the charge is
fatal to the monastic life as a permanent
and universal
Christian institution, but by no means conclusive against
it as a thing of virtue and use in its own times. Looking
at the domestic affections, it is
easy to pronounce stern
judgment on a system which wrought in tender hearts
such an unnatural hardness as we find sometimes cultivated
under the ascetic rule. There are, however, some startling
words in the Gospels about a man hating father and
mother for the sake of Christ. We have seen that the
ascetic tried to lift himself into the sphere of Divine
experience, through a partial and often mistaken outward
imitation of the Lord, and this may explain the attitude
of monachism towards this side of human nature. There
is however another point of view. It may fairly be
urged that some such isolation and sublimation of the
domestic affections was essential to the realisation, after
the struggles and self-mortifications of ages, of that purity,
delicacy and spiritual beauty,
holy charm to the perfection
which in modem life lend a
of wedded and kindred love.
In other words, so ensnaring, so debasing, had been, in the
ancient world, the influence of the flesh on the domestic and
social relations, that men under the overpowering attraction of
the new spiritual life felt
compelled to cut themselves off
completely from this lower sphere. The separation, however,