Chapter VII: The Fall of the Monasteries (2)

But these and other just and honorable concessions in the interests of truth, which are to be found on the pages of eminent Protestant historians, are made to prove too much. It must be said that writers favorable to monasticism take an unfair advantage of these admissions, which simply testify to a spirit of candor and a love of truth, but do not contain the final conclusions of these historians. Employing these witnesses to confirm their opinions, the defenders of monasticism proceed with fervid, glowing rhetoric, breathing devotion and love on every page, to paint the sorrows and ruin of the Carthusian Fathers, and the abbots of Glastonbury and Reading. They ask, "Is this your boasted freedom, to slay these men in cold blood, not for immorality, but because they honestly did not acknowledge what no Protestant of to-day admits, viz.: that King Henry was the Supreme Head of the Church?" Having pointed out the exaggerations in the charges against the monks and having made us weep for the aged fathers of the Charterhouse, they skillfully lead the unwary to the conclusion that the suppression should never have taken place. This conclusion is illogical. The case is still open.

Furthermore, if one cared to indulge in historical reminiscences, he might justly express astonishment that Rome should object to an investigation conducted by men whose minds were already made up, or that she should complain because force was employed to carry out a needed reform. Did the commissioners take a few altar-cloths and decorate their horses? Did Rome never adorn men in garments of shame and parade them through streets to be mocked by the populace, and finally burned at the stake? Were the altar-cloths dear to Catholic hearts? Were not the Bibles burned in France, in Germany, in Spain, in Holland, in England, dear to the hearts of the reformers? But however justifiable such a line of argument may be, there is little to be gained by charging the sins of the past against the men of to-day. Nevertheless, if these facts and many like them were remembered, less would be said about the cruelties that accompanied the suppression of the monasteries.

Were the charges against the monks true? It seems impossible to doubt that in the main they were, although it should be admitted that many monasteries were beyond reproach. Eliminating gross exaggerations, lies and calumnies, there still remains a body of evidence that compels the verdict of guilt. The legislation of the church councils, the decrees of popes, the records of the courts, the reports of investigating committees appointed by various popes, the testimony of the orders against each other, the chronicles, letters and other extant literature, abound in such detailed, specific charges of monastic corruption that it is simply preposterous to reject the testimony. All the efforts at reformation, and they were many, had failed. Many bishops confessed their inability to cope with the growing disorders. It is beyond question that lay robbers were encouraged to perpetrate acts of sacrilege because the monks were frequently guilty of forgery and violence. Commenting upon the impression which monkish lawlessness must have made upon the minds of such men as Wyclif, Pike says: "They saw with their own eyes those wild and lawless scenes, the faint reflection of which in contemporaneous documents may excite the wonder of modern lawyers and modern moralists." The legislation of church and state for a century before Henry VIII. shows that the monks were guilty of brawling, frequenting taverns, indulging in licentious pleasures and upholding unlawful games.

Bonaventura, the General of the Franciscan Order in its earliest days, and its palmiest, for the first years of a monastic order were always its best years--this mendicant, their pride and their glory, tells us that within fifty years of the death of its founder there were many mendicants roaming around in disorderly fashion, brazen and shameless beggars of scandalous fame. This unenviable record was kept up down to the days of Wyclif, who charged the begging friars with representing themselves as holy and needy, while they were robust of body, rich in possessions, and dwelt in splendid houses, where they gave sumptuous banquets. What shall one say of the hysterical ravings against Henry of the "Holy Maid of Kent," whose fits and predictions were palmed off by five ecclesiastics, high in authority, as supernatural manifestations? What must have been the state of monasteries in which such meretricious schemes were hatched, to deceive silly people, thwart the king and stop the movements for reform?

Moreover, the various attempts to reform or to suppress the monasteries prior to Henry's time show he was simply carrying out what, in a small way, had been attempted before. King John, Edward I. and Edward III., had confiscated "alien priories." Richard II. and Henry IV. had made similar raids. In 1410, the House of Commons proposed the confiscation of all the temporalities held by bishops, abbots and priors, that the money might be used for a standing army, and to increase the income of the nobles and secular clergy. It was not done, but the attempt shows the trend of public opinion on the question of abolishing the monasteries. In 1416, Parliament dissolved the alien priories and vested their estates in the crown. There is extant a letter of Cardinal Morton, Legate of the Apostolic See, and Archbishop of Canterbury, to the abbot of St. Albans, one of the mightiest abbeys in all England. It was written as the result of an investigation started by Innocent VIII., in 1489. In this communication the abbot and his monks were charged with the grossest licentiousness, waste and thieving. Lina Eckenstein, in her interesting work on "Woman Under Monasticism," says: "It were idle to deny that the state of discipline in many houses was bad, but the circumstances under which Morton's letter was penned argue that the charges made in it should be accepted with some reservation." In 1523, Cardinal Wolsey obtained bulls from the pope authorizing the suppression of forty small monasteries, and the application of their revenues to educational institutions, on the ground that the houses were homes neither of religion nor of learning.

What Henry did, every country in Europe has felt called upon to do in one way or another. Germany, Italy, Spain, France have all suppressed monasteries, and despite the suffering which attended the dissolution in England, the step was taken with less loss of life and less injury to the industrial welfare of the people than anywhere else in Europe[J].

[Footnote J: Appendix, Note J.]

Hooper, who was made a bishop in the reign of Edward VI., expressed the Protestant view of Henry's reforms in a letter written about the year 1546. "Our king," he says, "has destroyed the pope, but not popery.... The impious mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy, the invocation of saints, auricular confession, superstitious abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present moment." In other words, the independence of the Church of England was secured by those who, if they were not Roman Catholics, were certainly closer in faith to Rome than they were to Protestantism. The Protestant doctrines did not become the doctrines of the Church of England until the reign of Edward VI., and it was many years after that before the separation from Rome was complete in doctrine as well as respects the authority of the pope.

These facts indicate that there must have been other causes for the success of the English Reformation than the greed or ambition of the monarch. Those causes are easily discovered. One of them was the hostility of the people to the alien priories. The origin of the alien priories dates back to the Norman conquest. The Normans shared the spoils of their victory with their continental friends. English monasteries and churches were given to foreigners, who collected the rents and other kinds of income. These foreign prelates had no other interest in England than to derive all the profit they could from their possessions. They appointed whom they pleased to live in their houses, and the monks, being far away from their superiors, became a source of constant annoyance to the English people. The struggle against these alien priories had been carried on for many years, and so many of them had been abolished that the people became accustomed to the seizure of monasteries.

Large sums of money were annually paid to the pope, and the English people were loudly complaining of the constant drain on their resources. It was a common saying in the reign of Henry III., that "England is the pope's farm." The "Good Parliament," in 1376, affirmed "that the taxes paid to the church of Rome amounted to five times as much as those levied for the king; ... that the brokers of the sinful city of Rome promoted for money unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices of the value of a thousand marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty." Various laws, heartily supported by the clergy as well as by the civil authorities, were enacted from time to time, aimed at the abuses of papal power. So steadfast and strong was the opposition to the interference of foreigners in English affairs, it would be possible to show that there was an evolution in the struggle against Rome that was certain to culminate in the separation, whether Henry had accomplished it or not. What might have occurred if the monks had reformed and the pope withdrawn his claims it is impossible to know. The fact is that the monks grew worse instead of better, and the arrogance of foreigners became more unendurable. "The corruption of the church establishment, in fact," says Lea, "had reached a point which the dawning enlightenment of the age could not much longer endure.... Intoxicated with centuries of domination, the muttered thunders of growing popular discontent were unheeded, and its claims to spiritual and temporal authority were asserted with increasing vehemence, while its corruptions were daily displayed before the people with more careless cynicism." In view of this condition of affairs, the existence of which even the adherents of modern Rome must acknowledge, one cannot but wonder that the ruin of the monasteries should be attributed to Henry's desire "to overthrow the rights of women, to degrade matrimony and to practice concubinage." Such an explanation is too superficial; it ignores a multitude of historical facts.

The monasteries had to fall if England was to be saved from the horrors of civil war, if the hand of the pope was to remain uplifted from her, if the insecure gains of the Reformation were to become established and glorious achievements; if, in fact, all those benefits accompanying human progress were to become the heritage of succeeding ages.

Whatever benefits the monks had conferred upon mankind, and these were neither few nor slight, they had become fetters on the advancement of freedom, education and true religion. They were the standing army of the pope, occupying the last and strongest citadel. They were the unyielding advocates of an ideal that was passing away. It was sad to see the Carthusian house fall, but in spite of the high character of its inmates, it was a part of an institution that stood for the right of foreigners to rule England. It was unfortunate they had thrown themselves down before the car of progress but there they were; they would not get up; the car must roll on, for so God himself had decreed, and hence they were crushed in its advance. Their martyrdom was truly a poor return for their virtues, but there never has been a moral or political revolution that has furthered the general well-being of humanity, in which just and good men have not suffered. It would be delightful if freedom and progress could be secured, and effete institutions destroyed or reformed, without the accompaniment of disaster and death, but it is not so.

The monks stood for opposition to reform, and therefore came into direct conflict with the king, who was blindly groping his way toward the future, and who was, in fact, the unconscious agent of many reform forces that concentrated in him. He did not comprehend the significance of his proceedings. He did not take up the cause of the English people with the pure and intelligent motive of encouraging free thought and free religion. He did not realize that he was leading the mighty army of Protestant reformers. He little dreamed that the people whose cause he championed would in turn assert their rights and make it impossible for an English sovereign to enjoy the absolute authority which he wielded. Truly "there is a power, not ourselves," making for freedom, progress and truth.

Thus a number of causes brought on the ruin of the monasteries. Henry's need of money; the refusal of the monks to sign the acts of supremacy and succession; the general drift of reform, and the iniquity of the monks. They fell from natural causes and through the operation of laws which God alone controls. As Hill neatly puts it, "Monasticism was healthy, active and vigorous; it became idle, listless and extravagant; it engendered its own corruption, and out of that corruption came death."

Richard Bagot, a Catholic, in a recent article on the question, "Will England become Catholic?" which was published in the "Nuova Antologia," says: "Though it is impossible not to blame the so-called Reformers for the acts of sacrilege and barbarism through which they obtained the religious and political liberty so necessary to the intellectual and social progress of the race, it cannot be denied that no sooner had the power of the papacy come to an end in England than the English nation entered upon that free development which has at last brought it to its present position among the other nations of the world." Mr. Bagot also admits that "the political intrigues and insatiable ambition of the papacy during the succeeding centuries constituted a perpetual menace to England."

The true view, therefore, is that two types of religious and political life, two epochs of human history, met in Henry's reign. The king and the pope were the exponents of conflicting ideals. The fall of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle. "The Catholics," says Froude, "had chosen the alternative, either to crush the free thought which was bursting from the soil, or to be crushed by it; and the future of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic graces of medieval saints."

The problem is reduced to this, Was the Reformation desirable? Is Protestantism a curse or a blessing? Would England and the world be better off under the sway of medieval religion than under the influence of modern Protestantism? If monasticism were a fetter on human liberty and industry, if the monasteries were "so many seminaries of superstition and of folly," there was but one thing to do--to break the fetters and to destroy the monasteries. To have succeeded in so radical a reform as that begun by King Henry, with forty thousand monks preaching treason, would have been an impossibility. Henry cannot be blamed because the monks chose to entangle themselves with politics and to side with Rome as against the English nation.

_Results of the Dissolution_

Many important results followed the fall of the monasteries. The majority of the House of Lords was now transferred from the abbots to the lay peers. The secular clergy, who had been fighting the monks for centuries, were at last accorded their proper standing in the church. Numerous unjust ecclesiastical privileges were swept aside, and in many respects the whole church was strengthened and purified. Credulity and superstition began to decline. Ecclesiastical criminals were no longer able to escape the just penalty for their crimes. Naturally all these beneficent ends were not attained immediately. For a while there was great disorder and distress. Society was disturbed not only by the stoppage of monastic alms-giving, but the wandering monks, unaccustomed to toil and without a trade, increased the confusion.

In this connection it is well to point out that some writers make very much of the poverty relieved by the monks, and claim that the nobles, into whose hands the monastic lands fell, did almost nothing to mitigate the distresses of the unfortunate. But they ignore the fact that a blind and undiscriminating charity was the cause, and not the cure, of much of the miserable wretchedness of the poor. Modern society has learned that the monastic method is wholly wrong; that fraud and laziness are fostered by a wholesale distribution of doles. The true way to help the poor is to enable the poor to assist themselves; to teach them trades and give them work. The sociological methods of to-day are thoroughly anti-monastic.

On the other hand, the infidel Zosimus, quoted by Gibbon, was not far wrong when he said "the monks robbed an empire to help a few beggars." The fact that the religious houses did distribute alms and entertain strangers is not disputed; indeed it is pleasant to reflect upon this noble charity of the monks; it is a bright spot in their history. But it is in no sense true that they deserve all the credit for relieving distress. They received the money for alms in the shape of rents, gifts and other kinds of income. Hallam says, "There can be no doubt that many of the impotent poor derived support from their charity. But the blind eleemosynary spirit inculcated by the Romish church is notoriously the cause, not the cure, of beggary and wickedness. The monastic foundations, scattered in different countries, could never answer the ends of local and limited succor. Their gates might, indeed, be open to those who knocked at them for alms.... Nothing could have a stronger tendency to promote that vagabond mendicity which severe statutes were enacted to repress."

It seems almost ungracious to quote such an observation, because it may be distorted into a criticism of charity itself, or made to serve the purposes of certain anti-Romanists who cannot even spare those noble women who minister to the sick in the home or hospital from their bigoted criticisms. Small indeed must be the soul of that man who permits his religious opinions to blind his eyes to the inestimable services of those heroic and self-sacrificing women. But even Roman Catholic students of social problems must recognize the folly of indiscriminate alms-giving. "In proportion as justice between man and man has declined, that form of charity which consists in giving money has been more quickened." The promotion of industry, the repression of injustice, the encouragement of self-reliance and thrift, are needed far more than the temporary relief of those who suffer from oppression or from their own wrong-doing.

Some of those who deplore the fall of the monasteries make much of the fact that the modern world is menaced by materialism. "With very rare exceptions," cries Maitre, a French Catholic, "the most undisguised materialism has everywhere replaced the lessons and recollections of the spiritual life. The shrill voice of machinery, the grinding of the saw or the monotonous clank of the piston, is heard now, where once were heard chants and prayers and confessions. Once the monk freely undid the door to let the stranger in, and now we see a sign, 'no admittance,' lest a greedy rival purloin the tricks of trade." Montalembert, referring to the ruin of the cloisters in France, grieves thus: "Sometimes the spinning-wheel is installed under the ancient sanctuary. Instead of echoing night and day the praises of God, these dishonored arches too often repeat only the blasphemies of obscene cries." The element of truth in these laments gives them their sting, but one should beware of the fervid rhetoric of the worshipers of medievalism. This century is nobler, purer, truer, manlier, and more humane than any of the centuries that saw the greatest triumphs of the monks. They, too, had their blasphemies, often under the cloak of piety; they, too, had their obscene cries. Their superstitions and frauds concealed beneath those "dishonored arches" were infinitely worse than the noise of machinery weaving garments for the poor, or producing household comforts to increase the happiness of the humblest man.

There is much that is out of joint, much to justify doleful prophecies, in the social and religious conditions of the present age, but the signs of the times are not all ominous. At all events, nothing would be gained by a return to the monkish ideals of the past. The hope of the world lies in the further development and completer realization of those great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that the monasteries could not minister to that development of liberty, truth and justice, which constitute the indispensable condition of human happiness and human progress. Unable to adjust themselves to the new age, unwilling to welcome the new light, rejecting the doctrine of individual freedom, the monks were forced to retire from the field.

So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived on English soil. "The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt and lovely adoration before the altar." Its majestic and solemn ruins proclaim its departed grandeur. Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts with kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its virtues and its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its poverty, all are gone. Silence and death keep united watch over cloister and tomb. We should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings; we should be untrue if, ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to life that which God has laid in the sepulcher of the dead.

"Where pleasant was the spot for men to dwell,
Amid its fair broad lands the abbey lay,
Sheltering dark orgies that were shame to tell,
And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way,
All in their convent weeds of black, and white, and gray.

From many a proud monastic pile, o'erthrown,
Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled;
The web, that for a thousand years had grown
O'er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread."

--_Bryant_.