The personal considerations tending to keep up
the flight from the world were numerous and active. It would be a
mistake to credit all the monks, and at some periods even a majority of
them, with pure and lofty purposes. Oftentimes criminals were pardoned
through the intercession of abbots on condition that they would retire
to a monastery. The jilted lover and the commercial bankrupt, the
deserted or bereaved wife, the pauper and the invalid, the social
outcast and the shirker of civic duties, the lazy and the fickle were
all to be found in the ranks of the monastic orders. Ceasing to feel any
interest in the joys of society, they had turned to the cloister as a
welcome asylum in the hour of their sorrow or disappointment. To some it
was an easy way out of the struggle for existence, to others it meant an
end to taxes and to military service, to still others it was a haven of
rest for a weary body or a disappointed spirit. Thus many specific,
individual considerations acted with the general desires for salvation
and solitude to strengthen and to perpetuate the institution.
_Beliefs Affecting the Causative Motives_
In the first chapter it was shown that a variety of views respecting the
relation of the body and the soul influenced the origin and development
of Christian monasticism. It will not now be necessary to repeat what
was there said. The essential teaching of all these false opinions was
that the body was in itself evil, that the gratification of natural
appetites was inherently wrong, and that true holiness consisted in the
complete subjection of the body by self-denial and torture.
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