IN the last chapter I dealt with the beginnings of a systematic doctrine of prayer within the Christian Church. Naturally, that doctrine was derived from and founded upon the revelation of the nature of prayer contained in Holy Scripture. But we hardly, I hope, need to be reminded nowadays that the term "revelation," at any rate as applied to the Holy Scriptures, does not imply an exact and ordered system of doctrine. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has most adequately described it as a Divine communication to the prophets "by divers portions and in divers manners," culminating in the still more immediate manifestation of His nature and His attitude towards men through His Son. There the personal and occasional character of revelation is exactly indicated. It is to His prophets that God speaks, to those who have the most intimate and intuitive feeling of the deepest needs of their own times and of how those needs may best be satisfied. And His perfected and inclusive revelation is through His Son not through an exact and comprehensive statement of His [29] truth addressed to men's minds, but through the living presence and contact of His personal self in an with the spirits and the affairs of men. We may expect, then to find in Holy Scripture materials for the construction of every doctrine of God and man and of their mutual relation, and to find those materials in inexhaustible abundance. But reflection upon these materials and their systematisation into exact doctrines are tasks reserved for the mind of man, working in such independence as we can at all predicate of that mind.

      As we have seen, the formation of a Christian doctrine of prayer in a more or less systematic manner was first undertaken by S. Clement of Alexandria. I do not, indeed, forget or undervalue the almost contemporary attempts of Tertullian and Origen. But Tertullian's treatment, though valuable and interesting, is by comparison with Clement's superficial and rhetorical, while Origen merely continues or at most supplements his master. And in any case, it was Clement, and not either Tertullian or Origen, who left a permanent impress upon the further exposition of the doctrine. The next great stage in that exposition was reached just two centuries after Clement's time. At the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries prayer, as Clement conceived it, had become the motive and the nerve-centre of a great Christian economy of life. It was out of the increasing desire to make prayer, according to the Christian conception of it, a [30] reality that the monastic discipline arose. And it is significant that it was just in Egypt, the country most influenced by the Alexandrian theology that monasticism first appeared. I do not, indeed, wish to suggest that early Egyptian monasticism owed anything consciously to a learned theology. It was as essentially a popular religious movement, entirely unsophisticated by theology, as was early Franciscanism or the Salvation Army in our own day. Nor do I forget that its appearance in Egypt rather than elsewhere was probably largely due to the accident that the Decian persecution was felt with peculiar violence in Alexandria and the Egyptian province. Yet it remains that the roots of early monasticism found their most favourable soil in Egypt. And the inference is not unwarranted that it was the popular and spontaneous expression of a type of religion which had its learned counterpart in the Alexandrian theology. Superficially the Gnostic of Clement and the hermit of the Nitrian Desert are poles apart. On a nearer inspection the outward contrast which they present will prove to be less important than their inward resemblance. However wide their differences, they agree in conceiving of religion almost exclusively as the life of prayer.

      It will not a necessary for me to sketch, however hurriedly, the history of early monasticism. But I must at least try to show how a purely popular religious movement came to influence so widely the Christian literature of the fifth century. [31] As I have already hinted, the first impulse to the monastic life came from the stress of the Decian persecution in Egypt. The beginnings of monasticism date, therefore, from the mid-year of the third century. And it is to that year, 250, that the birth of S. Anthony, the chief figure of the early stages of the movement, is usually assigned. Whether the story of the flight of Paul the hermit to a mountain by the Red Sea, where he is represented as having spent the rest of his life in absolute solitariness, be legendary or historical, it is, at any rate, certain that during the twenty years which followed the Decian persecution many Christians left the cities and villages of the Nile Valley and lived the ascetic life in solitary huts which they built with their own hands in the deserts and mountains of Egypt. Somewhere about the year 270, Anthony, then apparently in his twentieth year, adopted this life, and seems to have maintained the régime of absolute solitude for a period of thirty-five years. This solitary hermit life, each recluse dwelling apart in his own cave or hut, was the first stage of monachism. But in the year 305 S. Anthony, impressed with the dangers of this purely solitary discipline, came forth from his cave and began to organise a common life for the numerous disciples that gathered round him. In this second stage the ascetics, or spiritual athletes, as they were called, lived in a kind of loose community, each member still inhabiting his own but or cave, but all assembling twice a week, on the Sabbath [32] and the Sunday, for common worship in the church of the community. Somewhere about the year 320 a third stage was reached with the foundation at Tabennisi on the Upper Nile of the first Christian monastery in the modern sense. This development was due to Pachomius, whose Rule became the basis and model of all later monastic rules both in East and West, of all the rules which derive from S. Basil on the one hand and S. Benedict on the other. The fourth Christian century, which is pre-eminently for us the decisive period of conflict with the Arian heresy, is perhaps still more significant for the inner development of Christianity as the period during which monachism was rapidly spreading over the East, in Palestine, in Mesopotamia, in Asia, in Constantinople itself, and was preparing for its reception in the West both through Roman Africa, influenced by its local nearness to Egypt, and through traditional centres of Greek culture like Marseilles and its immediate neighbourhood. With the beginning of the fifth century, a whole century before S. Benedict, the monastic discipline had not only struck root in every Christian country, but--what is much more important--had won its way into all that was soundest in the heart and mind of Christendom. The very considerable literature which it inspired is certainly of unequal worth, but much of it, at least, must be reckoned among the finest spiritual treasure of the Christian religion. The great monastic centres of Egypt--Scete, the Nitrian Desert, the [33] Thebaid, Tabennisi--became places of pilgrimage for the devout from the remotest regions of Christendom. Theologians in the intervals of their lifelong warfare on behalf of the faith, great bishops driven from their sees by the political persecutions which were one of the incidents of the theological conflict, Christian scholars aware of inner needs which scholarship could not satisfy and sometimes even threatened to eliminate, great Roman ladies tired of outward greatness and longing for inner peace--all these from time to time sought the paradise of the desert. It is from their accounts that we have learned the history of that purposeful negation of history, of that vast and prolonged silence of the human soul. The excavator of our day is only now helping to break the spell of that silence. And perhaps it is his example that has renewed our interest in a literature which might have admitted us to its secrets long ago, but which the Christian historian has too long overlooked as hardly worthy of serious study. The reproach, however, is being rapidly removed. The labours of Dom Cuthbert Butler of Downside and of Sir Wallis Budge, to mention English scholars only, have concentrated attention upon this field of study and revealed both its importance and its fascination. But it is not, after all, the rather gossipy reminiscences of his ten years' life in the desert left to us by Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia, friend and fellow-sufferer of S. John Chrysostom, in his Lausiac History, nor the Historic [34] Monachorum, nor even S. Athanasius' Life of S. Anthony, nor the contemporary Lives of the two Melanias, nor the graphic account of Egyptian monachism contained in the first dialogue of Sulpicius Severus, that are most important for our immediate purpose. That distinction must be accorded to the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian.

      Cassian, though described by Gennadius in his continuation of S. Jerome's catalogue of great Christian writers as a Scythian, was far more probably a son of that land of Gaul, in which he permanently settled and to which he was the first to give a fully organised monastic system. While still quite young he resolved to adopt the life of a cœnobite, and in fulfilment of his purpose entered, with his friend Germanus, a monastery at Bethlehem. Cassian and Germanus, however, resolved to visit Egypt as the nursery of monachism and as the special home of its anchoritic variety. Having with difficulty obtained leave from the brethren of their own monastery, they paid two protracted visits, the first lasting seven years, to that country. They seem never to have penetrated so far as the Thebaid, much less to the district of Tabenna, but to have spent their time among the anchorites of the Delta, of the Nitrian Valley, and of the desert of Scete. Cassian's Conferences are his reports of conversations which he and Germanus held with some of the most celebrated of these anchorites on various aspects of the religious life. The part, however, [35] played by the two Bethlehem monks in these conversations is for the most part confined to asking questions and raising points of difficulty, while the main part of each Conference is a formal discourse delivered by the anchorite who is being interviewed on the special subject designated by the interviewers. As the Conferences were not reduced to their permanent literary form till some thirty years after Cassian's stay in Egypt, it is impossible to say how far they represent the actual opinions of the speakers to whom they are attributed, and how far those of the writer himself in the stage of intellectual and spiritual maturity at which he actually wrote them. But to us it is immaterial whether the discourses on prayer attributed to Abbot Isaac were actually spoken by him at some period between 380 and 400, or represent Cassian's own matured reflection on the subject somewhere between 420 and 428. The truth, no doubt, is that the form is Cassian's, and that the substance of the thought was common to both.

      It was probably in the last year of the fourth century that Cassian left Egypt. Whether he returned to Bethlehem or not is doubtful, but if he did return he cannot have remained there long, as we next hear of him at Constantinople as an attached adherent of S. John Chrysostom during the years of persecution to which that saint was subjected through the intrigues of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria. Cassian was ordained deacon by Chrysostom, and was afterwards sent, [36] with his friend Germanus, by the clergy who adhered to their saintly bishop to convey to Pope Innocent a statement of the wrongs which Chrysostom had to endure. It would appear that Cassian must have remained some years in Rome, and was there raised to the priesthood by Innocent. It was, at any rate, in Marseilles that he permanently settled, and there he was inevitably called to the work of organising on the authentic Egyptian model, or at least in the authentic Egyptian spirit, the monastic institutes which were beginning to spring up throughout Provence. Cassian has no doubt, been dwarfed by the greater fame of Benedict of Nursia, but he was almost as much the founder of Western monasticism as the great saint who gave to the West its perfected monastic Rule. The most hurried comparison of the Rule of S. Benedict with the Institutes of Cassian is sufficient to show how much the former owed to the latter. And Benedict generously acknowledged the debt when he enjoined upon the brethren of his Order the daily reading of the Conferences of Cassian. Those Conferences, indeed, have remained ever since they were written the classical authority for all writers on mystical theology and the classical guide for all who have attempted to follow the religious life. They have even, mirabile dictu, ensured their author from at least the extreme rigour of the odium theologicum under which he fell in his later years through his resistance to the exaggerated Augustinianism of Prosper and Hilary. [37] Like the chapters on prayer in the Seventh Book of Clement's Miscellanies, the two conferences of the Abbot Isaac may most adequately be described as a sermon, or a series of sermons, on the text, "Pray without ceasing." Cassian's, conception, like Clement's, is that the life of the Christian must be a permanent and increasingly perfect prayer, if genuine and worthy acts of prayer are to be offered. Prayers are not real, they do not rise to God, if they are but incidental and occasional acts of a life which is not itself a constant and uninterrupted effort towards harmony with the Divine will. Abbot Isaac illustrates his teaching by a striking figure. "The nature of the soul," he says, "is not inaptly compared to a very fine feather or very light wing, which, if it has not been damaged or affected by any moisture falling upon it from without or entering into its substance, is borne aloft almost naturally to the heights of heaven by the lightness of its nature and with the aid of the slightest breath: but if it is weighted by any moisture falling upon it and penetrating into it, it will not only not be carried upwards by its natural lightness, but will actually be borne down to the depths of the earth by the weight of the moisture it has received. So also our soul, if it is not weighted with faults that touch it and the cares of this world, or damaged by the moisture of injurious lusts, will be raised as it were by the natural blessing of its own purity and borne aloft to the heights by the light breath [38] of spiritual meditation; and leaving things low and earthly will be transported to those that are heavenly and invisible." The monastic rule, therefore, does not aim merely at the most frequent possible repetition of prayers. It aims primarily and before everything else at the formation of a constant and trustworthy character or inner habit of life, from which prayer will issue as its natural and spontaneous expression. Prayer, for Cassian and for the whole monastic ideal, is a discipline in the liberal ancient sense, not in the truncated modern one--that is to say, it is the generous or satisfying practice of the inclusive art of life, not merely the occasional acts of self-correction which may be contributory to that practice. That such acts are contributory and constantly necessary to the formation of the true discipline of life is one of the most universal certainties of our human experience. But they are not that discipline inclusively. They are, at best, but the clumsy methods by which we prepare ourselves for it, or by which we may hope to attain to a more careful, humbled, and sustained practice of it. Yet life, as we experience it, is not a clear-cut scheme of nicely regulated means and ends. The instrument is never merely an instrument which may be thrown away once the end has been achieved, and that chiefly perhaps because the end is never completely achieved. But that is not the whole account of the matter. In the chemistry of life there is nothing which is merely instrumental or merely final. If what [39] we call the instrument helps to achieve the end, the achievement of the end, however partial, of itself helps to perfect the instrument. Life is a great system of action and reaction in which everything may, in turn, play the rôle both of means and of end. This, of course, would not be so if the end of life were something outside it. But because the end of life is its own perfection, the achievement or recovery of the Divine image by which alone it can be at one with God, and because the means to that end must always be some inner effort, itself the product and expression of a Divine assistance, both means and end can interpenetrate each other as elements of the same vital movement. This Cassian abundantly recognises where he represents Isaac as saying, "Just as the crown of the building of all virtues is the perfection of prayer, so unless everything has been united and compacted by this [i. e., by prayer] as its crown, it cannot possibly continue strong and stable. There is between these two a sort of reciprocal and inseparable union." In other words, if the perfect life constitutes the perfect prayer, it will never itself be perfected save through prayer.

      Yet, while Cassian fully recognises this, he will not transact with those who would try to escape from the means by which alone the perfect rectitude and purity of prayer can be assured. He no doubt schematises overmuch, as we all do when we have to reduce the baffling interconnection of vital facts to exact statement. But his [40] schematism, after all, is needed to indicate the natural order of spiritual growth. "In order that prayer may be offered up," he says, "with that earnestness and purity with which it ought to be, we must by all means observe these rules. First all anxiety about carnal things must be entirely got rid of: next we must leave no room for not merely the care but even the recollection of any business affairs, and in like manner must lay aside all backbitings, vain and incessant chattering, and buffoonery; anger above all, a disturbing moroseness, must be entirely destroyed, and the deadly taint of carnal lust and covetousness be torn up by the roots. And so when these and such like faults which are also visible to the eyes of men are entirely removed and cut off, and when such a purification and cleansing as we spoke of has first taken place, which is brought about by pure simplicity and innocence, then first there must be laid the secure foundations of a deep humility which may be able to support a tower that shall reach the sky; and next the spiritual structure of the virtues must be built up upon them, and the soul kept free from all conversation and from roving thoughts that thus it may by little and little begin to rise to the contemplation of God and to spiritual insight." Now, that diagrammatic way of representing spiritual growth with its steady movement from point to point may seem to us almost fantastic. But Cassian is here recording the profound and general experience of those who have most [41] consistently striven to attain that growth; and, poor as our own experience in this kind may be, I think we shall feel that the general sequence of experience is as he represents it. Before any kind of spiritual building, to use his figure, can be erected, we must first of all pull down the shambling structure which the natural self has hurriedly and almost by instinct thrown up for the comfortable housing and protection of its own loose and inordinate desires. We must, I say, pull down that structure and also clear away the encumbering rubbish which it will leave upon the surface of the soul, if we are ever to lay the rock-foundation of humility, of a genuine self-emptying for the sake of God. On that foundation alone can the structure of the true virtues which will assimilate us to God be raised. That is the ordered sequence which, in general outline, declares itself in all spiritual growth, even though, in fact, we find that long after the spiritual building has begun to rise we may be called upon to strengthen its foundations continually, and find, too, that like a mushroom-growth the loose structures of the passions which we thought we had demolished are rising up again and encroaching upon its air and light.

      But it is unnecessary to press this point, for no men were ever more aware of the difficulty of the spiritual way and the deceitfulness of the human heart than the men who founded the various monastic rules. It was to help themselves and others to overcome the difficulties that they [42] formed those rules out of the very stuff of their own experience. And yet none knew better than they that no rules could ever be sufficient, just as no experience was ever exhaustive. The monastic life might, by its mere outward conditions, ensure against the grosser forms of temptation. But temptation found occasion by this partial interference with its free activity to assume subtler and, as the great spiritual writers are always insisting, more dangerous forms--more dangerous because less readily recognisable. It is on this account that the great masters of the spiritual life never grow tired of uttering their warnings against spiritual presumption, and of insisting on humility as the root of all virtues. Humility is for them the indispensable condition of the life of prayer, and the condition the most difficult of attainment. Humility is difficult because it is the complete unconsciousness of self. In trying to attain it directly, we must almost inevitably miss it. If we think we have attained it, we may be sure that we do not possess it. Humility conscious of itself is the negation of humility, is pride. There is danger in the very attempt to enjoin the virtue of humility, as we must all know from the unreality with which talk about it usually impresses us. Yet it is the virtue of virtues. And it was the supreme merit of monachism, not only that it recognised that, but that it prescribed the only rules which were at all likely to procure it as a fixed habit of character. It approached this great vital problem [43] indirectly. It framed a discipline of life which might unconsciously lead to the unconsciousness of self, the apaqeia, which humility essentially was. That discipline consisted positively of work and prayer, negatively of obedience and abstinence from judgment of others. And all these together contributed to form the life of prayer. The Institutes of Cassian, the Rule of S. Benedict, are the formal exposition of this discipline. The Conferences of Cassian are a kind of inspired commentary upon it. Work, manual or intellectual work, constant, useful, interesting, or rather creating positive interests, is the discipline which the body as an instrument of the spirit needs, without which it will never become a healthy and obedient instrument of the spirit. Yet work must never be more than disciplinary. It must not create interests of its own which may become autonomous, and, instead of serving the spirit, encroach upon its domain. The limits of the disciplinary value of work are marked out by nature in the measure of its necessity. "Anything," says Abbot Isaac, "which goes beyond the necessities of daily food and the unavoidable needs of the flesh belongs to worldly cares and anxieties, as, for example, if, when a job bringing in a penny would satisfy the needs of our body, we try to extend it by a longer toil and work in order to get twopence or threepence."

      Of the disciplinary value of obedience Cassian says less, though it is, of course, implied in his whole conception of life as subjected to a [44] self-imposed rule. But on the moral danger of passing judgment upon one's fellows he is especially insistent. The condemnation of others is always for him the sure evidence of laxity or partiality in self-judgment. Certainly one of the most pleasing traits of the monastic character at its best is its moral understanding and sympathy, its refusal to be shocked by the worst excesses of our human nature, its almost natural belief in the redeemability of the worst, its greater hopefulness of the victims of natural passion than of those who have yielded to the hardening delusions of spiritual pride. It is the surest evidence and ripest fruit of the self-knowledge which brings men and keeps them authentically near to God. The literature of spiritual monasticism is full of the most exquisite stories illustrative of this virtue--stories which I am afraid would often shock us by their apparent excess of readiness to tolerate the grosser forms of evil. Such stories do not, of course, express toleration at all, but a wise and just understanding and a belief that the evil which can be seen to be evil is less dangerous than the evil which can impose upon him who suffers from it and upon others as a form of good. The monastic attitude has here left a profound impress upon the common populations of the old Catholic countries, and it is the lack of this special stamp upon our national character that lays us open to the imputation of hypocrisy at their hands. They cannot understand how good people can be hard, how those who have learned [45] in their own experience the difficulties of being and of keeping good can be without a wise and just understanding of and sympathy for those who have been tragically overcome by those difficulties.

      But the greatest element in the monastic discipline is prayer, just as the total result is the life of prayer. Work, obedience, genuine self-knowledge with its corollary of spiritual sympathy--or perhaps I ought rather to say, the practice of spiritual sympathy, which will aid self-knowledge and fortify self-judgment--these are already forms of self-mastery, and of almost unconscious self-mastery. They are the gentlest of handmaidens leading us into the familiar presence of God. They are already forms of prayer training us towards the habitual contemplation of His perfection--which is also our perfection. There at last we are on the way to being delivered from the obsession of ourselves, to entering into the joy and freedom of the religious life. But of this state of contemplation I shall have more to say in succeeding chapters. I will only add now that, if the monastic institute was not equal to all the requirements of the progressive social life of man, if it unduly simplified the problem of living for God in this world, if it attempted to solve the problem by an artificial limitation of human activities and interests which could not endure, it nevertheless established firmly and with a practical permanence the spiritual conditions and principles which must always regulate men's attempt to live in communion with God. [46]

[PCT 27-46]