III.

MOLESME DEGENERATES.

 

The community of Molesme seemed now to be in a fair way of becoming the head of a new and flourishing congregation of the Benedictine order. It might even have rivalled Cluny, for many abbots prayed St. Robert to grant them some of his monks, by way of introducing into their own monasteries the reform of Molesme. It would have become what Citeaux was afterwards, had not the folly of the monks frustrated the designs of God. The various steps by which the change was effected in the convent, are not marked in the scanty annals of the time.

The brethren appear at first in the story as saints in perfection, and a little farther on are represented as degenerate. The change, however, took place on an increase of numbers and of wealth in the community; it does not, therefore, at all follow that the original monks degenerated; it was rather the second generation who broke in upon the strictness of the first. Again, it must be remembered, that strong expressions may be used, and rightly, about the corruption of monks, without implying the existence of gross impurity. A convent may degenerate into a lax and formal way of performing its duties, or it may be ruined by internal dissensions, without falling into vicious excesses.

The most common commencement of corruption was a violation of the rule of poverty, and this seems to have been the case at Molesme. The wealth which had accrued to them from the bounty of the faithful, had done away with the necessity of manual labour, and they refused to obey their abbot, who wished to keep it up as a portion of the discipline enjoined by the rule. Again, they insisted on keeping possession of parochial tithes, and they assumed habits of a richer and warmer sort than the rule allowed. They grounded their arguments on the general practice of monasteries about them, though it was opposed to the rule which they professed to follow. From the general state of monasticism at the period, it was quite evident that these dispensations, though sanctioned by precedent, and in themselves not incompatible with strictness of life, led in most cases in the end to laxity.

On these grounds St. Robert opposed these innovations; and his opposition led to further resistance from the monks; they had first begun by despising the poverty of Christ, and they ended by disobeying their abbot. Poverty and obedience are the very soul of monasticism, and a convent which has once transgressed these two portions of the vow, is in a state next to hopeless. St. Robert saw that his presence only irritated his refractory children, and he determined on leaving them, as St. Benedict and other saints had set him the example of doing, and retired to a place called Aurum, the habitation of certain hermits. This was a severe trial to Stephen; he had come to Molesme, because there he could serve Christ better than anywhere else, and he had for a time rejoiced in being able to follow the steps of his Divine Master. But he had gradually seen his brethren become worse and worse, till at last through their misconduct he was now abandoned by his spiritual guide. It is true, he did not himself follow the laxity which he saw around him, but this, though it might set bis own conscience at rest, could not restore the peace of the brotherhood.

The very object of the coenobitic life is, that all should obey the same rule, and do the same things, so that the zeal of one may kindle the other. The bond of charity was now broken, and the convent was in effect ruined. To add to his trial, he now found that a great portion of the charge of this unruly community was on his hands, for Alberic, who as prior naturally took the government of the abbey in the absence of the abbot, invested him with a portion of his authority. He therefore set about his hopeless task; but how far he succeeded we may guess, from the treatment which the monks inflicted on his colleague. They seized on Alberic, who still endeavoured to carry out Robert's principles, beat him severely, and thrust him into a dungeon.

On his release, Alberic determined to quit the monastery, and he was followed by Stephen and one or two other monks. Thus was Stephen cast upon the world, deprived of all the guides which Providence had put into his way; so true is it, that we must not set our hearts, in this world, even on the good which God allows us to work. Good is to be loved, not because it is ours, but because it is to God's glory; when He wills that it should perish, we must not murmur, but keep our hearts still fixed upon Him, ready to do His will.

Stephen was now, it may be said, his own master; the authorities of his convent, by abandoning it, had released him from his vow of obedience. He, however, did not choose for himself an easy lot; he again sought the desert, and retired with Alberic and the other monks to a solitary place called Vivicus, now Vivier, near Landreville, about four leagues from Molesme. God, however, did not leave His servant in this solitude. After he had been there for some time, gathering strength by prayer and fasting for the work which he was soon called upon to perform, it pleased Him to call him back from his retreat, to his old monastery. The monks soon discovered that the flower of the community was gone, and that they could not govern themselves without Robert. It is probable that they were not thoroughly bad; they did not wish to give up the strict abstinence enjoined by the rule; it was rather the poverty which scandalized them; they did not like the coarse habit and the hard manual labour, and wished to be like their neighbours. They therefore began to long for Robert's return, and knew not how to win him back from his retreat, after once driving him away by their misconduct, and then grossly ill-treating their prior in his absence. They at last determined to apply to the holy see, and succeeded in obtaining an order commanding Robert to resume the command of the monastery. The holy see appears to have been the great court of appeal of Christendom; monks good and bad, bearded hermits, and mitred abbots, all brought their causes to Rome; and if he could not afford to travel in any other way, the poor brother trudged manfully across the Alps with his wallet on his back to obtain justice from the papal court. The jurisdiction of bishops over abbots was ill-defined, as may be seen by the independent way in which superiors left their monasteries, without apparently consulting their bishop. None, therefore, but a power, which held its seat at a distance from the scene of action, and could not be accused of selfish views, was able to step in when ordinary authority failed. A mandate from Rome Robert could not refuse to obey, and he again put himself at the head of the refractory monks.

Stephen and Alberic, with the other monks who had retired to Vivier, followed the example of their abbot, and the whole brotherhood was again united within the cloister of Molesme. The monks who had before rebelled, had either grown wiser, or been frightened into submission, and were ready to obey their abbot; on the other hand, Robert had learned to deal more gently with them now that they were disposed to be submissive. The command of the pope had rendered it impossible to quit them a second time, without permission from Rome itself, or from a legate; so that it was clearly his duty to manage their unruly spirits as best he could, and by concession in some particulars to win them to keep the more essential portions of the rule. The monastery began again to flourish, and new convents were even placed under the jurisdiction of the abbot, and filled by monks of his choosing, who were to model the new community according to the reform introduced by him.

Though, however, the harmony of the convent was thus restored, and external decency preserved, yet it was far from being a place where those who aspired after perfection could rest in peace; the charm of holy poverty was gone, and many of the brethren of Molesme in secret regretted the changes which had taken place. The convent had ceased to be to them what it had been before; the alms of the faithful had enriched it, and they regretted the wooden huts and oratory, and the poverty which had obliged them to work in the heat and in the cold, as is the appointed lot of poor men. The foremost of their party was Stephen. Every morning the rule of St. Benedict was read in chapter, and he mourned in secret over the many departures from its holy dictates, of which the convent was guilty. To the generality of the world many of the commandments of Christ are precepts of perfection; but to monks who have sworn to quit the world, they are precepts of obligation. In token of this, a monk in some convents was buried in his habit, with the rule of St. Benedict in his hand, to show that by that rule he was to stand or fall at the last day. For a long time, however, Stephen and his companions made no formal complaint, but bore their sorrows in silence. Much might be said against taking any steps to remedy the state of things which they saw around them. It was not by their fault that they transgressed their rule; besides this, peace had but lately been restored to the monastery, and it was an invidious thing again to disturb the consciences of their brethren, which had so lately been set at rest. Again, each of them might think that the feelings which actuated him were merely the effect of his own restlessness, in which case it would be a far greater merit to obey in silence, than to afflict their bodies with fasting, and to walk about in coarse garments.

Gradually, however, by comparing his views with those of his neighbour, each man found that he was not singular in thus feeling acutely the misery of their situation. Stephen is said to have been the first to break the subject to Alberic; his abhorrence of the dispensations and indulgences which the other monks claimed, may appear to be merely the restless feelings of one accustomed to live in the wild solitudes of nature, but they derive a meaning from the state of monasticism in his time. St. Benedict had in his rule left a power with the superior of altering or tempering the rule according to the circumstances of the convent. The natural course of things had led abbots to take advantage of this provision, and their alterations had in time considerably changed the monastic state. It does not at all follow that any one was to blame in this.

An abbot was at first the superior of a few poor brethren, who worked for their own livelihood amongst the rocks of some wilderness, or in some hidden valley, and who only differed from common labourers in their singing psalms day and night, in their fasting every day, and praying every hour; but the case was widely different when the same abbot was ruler over two or three hundred monks, and when the bounty of the faithful had made him the steward of the poor, by giving him wide lands and fair manors. The abbot became a temporal lord, with vassals under his command; he had, moreover, to sit in councils, ecclesiastical and civil, besides going to Rome on the business of the abbeys and making a progress to visit his estates. Again, my lord abbot, leading a solemn service with music and chanting under the canopy of his carved stall, or blessing the people from the altar with a jewelled mitre on his head, and a ring on his finger, was a very different person from the poor lord of a few acres in a desert, ruling over a few monks with a wooden staff like a shepherd's crook. Another change in monasteries was their application to learned purposes: St. Benedict's rule implies that many of the monks did not know how to read, and learnt the Psalter and divine office by heart; but monasteries, naturally, became the chief seats of learning, and often contained two schools, one within the cloister for the novices, the other without it, for secular pupils. This involved a library and an establishment for copying manuscripts, so that manual labour might, in process of time, with propriety give place to literary labors. None of these changes involved a violation of the rule; the abbot often wore a hair shirt under his splendid vestments, and slept upon a hard mattress of straw, stretched by the side of the magnificent state bed in his chamber. He was often really poor amidst the great wealth of the abbey, because the whole of the revenues which could be spared from the convent were given to the poor. In this way Cluny, in St. Hugh's time, seems to have been a wonderful and stately seminary, from which proceeded; the great men of the age, rulers of churches, and even of the world, through their sanctity of life. Still with its magnificent church, and great revenues, it was not what it was before, the poor and simple religious house. It would be absurd to depreciate it on this account; as well might one precious stone be blamed for not being another; still it was a fact that it was changed; there were dispensations from manual labour, and pittances in the refectory, and a stud of horses for the abbot and for the prior, even for each dean to ride away when he would, to visit his charge.

Innocent as all this was, when such an abbot as St. Hugh governed Cluny, still it was a dangerous state; a dispensing power is necessarily beside the law; its limits are undefined, for it quits the broad line of fact and precedent, and introduces moral questions, in which it is always difficult to determine the precise point where good begins to mix with evil. Thus the very next abbot to St. Hugh ruined Cluny for a time, and in Stephen's time very many monasteries were in a miserable state, on account of the laxity introduced by abbots under the name of dispensations. Stephen lived during the whole of the long struggle between the popes and the secular power; and we shall see proofs in the subsequent actions of his life, that in the state of perplexity and confusion which ensued during that most momentous contest, pomp and luxury had power to invade even the cloister. Many were the innovations introduced under the name of dispensations, till hardly a vestige of the monastic character remained. Simony again brought with it intercourse with princes, pride, and luxury. We must not, therefore, wonder at Stephen's hatred of the very name of dispensation.

Furthermore, we must recollect that Stephen had been a dweller in the wilderness and forest; he aspired to the highest Christian perfection, so that he would not have been contented even with Cluny. Though a man of learning, he wished to become foolish for Christ's sake; he wished to be perfectly destitute, and to depend for his daily bread, and his coarse habit, on God's providence. No record remains of any action or saying of his against the stately order of Cluny, but his vocation lay another way. God had kindled a divine love in his heart, and it was fire in his bones, and would not let him rest till he had accomplished the work which he was sent on earth to perform. God's saints are His workmanship, and the same Almighty goodness which has made the lilies, and also given its own beauty to the rose, which  has created  flowers, precious stones, and animals, each with a different glory, has also in the creation of His grace variously moulded the souls of his saints. Stephen's lot was to be of those who, by their utter destitution of human helps, most of all illustrate the new order of things, which our blessed Lady celebrated in the Magnificat. Out of weakness he was to be made strong; with his perfect poverty, his coarse and tattered garment, his body bowed down by labour and mortification, he was to bring in an order of men into the Church, who beat down pomp and luxury, intellect and power. His wooden staff was more powerful than the sceptre of kings, and his fragile frame was the centre, around which the whole of the saintly prelates of the Church, who fought against luxury and simony in the Church, clustered and arranged their battle; the preeminence which God gave to His saint in after-life, is a full vindication of his conduct in these his first years, when he was a poor despised monk, treated by his brethren as an enthusiast and fanatic.

 

REMOVAL FROM MOLESME.