Thursday, August 11, 2005

More Monkery

I am going to cite a few precepts from Jerome’s letters here in the space below, but before I do I would like to clarify why I am doing this. It is important for those who honor celibacy and virginity to understand what it was the repulsed Luther about monasticism. How can you refute the charge if you don’t know what it is? Likewise, fairness to Luther means demonstrating what the problems he had with it were.

From Jerome’s letter XXII to a young virgin:Instructing her avoid the company of married women, he writes, Why should you, who are God’s bride, hasten to visit the wife of a mortal man? In this regard you must learn a holy pride (superbiam sanctam); know that you are better than they (p. 85).

Rejecting the charge that he disparages wedlock, he writes It is not disparaging wedlock to prefer virginity. No one can make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil. Let married women take pride in coming next after virgins (p. 91).

I praise wedlock, I praise marriage; but it is because they produce me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorn, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the oyster (p. 95).

Letter XIV is addressed to a young Italian man who had pledged virginity and was now the sole support of his family and would not come out to the desert of Palestine with Jerome:

But, you will say, the Scripture bids us to obey our parents. Nay, whosoever loves his parents more than Christ loses his own soul. . . . Shall I desert from my army because of my father, to whom in Christ’s cause I owe no rites of burial, although in Christ’s cause I owe them to all men? . . . The battering-ram of affection must be beaten back by the wall of the Gospel: 'My mother and my brethren are these, whosoever do the will of my father which is in heaven' (pp. 33-35).

Jerome pictures the temptations Heliodorus will have to face in selling his property and leaving for Palestine, assuring him he had gone through the same:

Your widowed sister clings to you today with loving arms; the house slaves in whose company you grew to manhood, cry 'To what master are you leaving us?' [Who knew ‘selling all your property’ could include putting all your slaves on the auction block?] Your old nurse and her husband, who have the next claim to your affection after your own father, exclaim, 'Wait for a few months till we die and then give us burial.' . . . The love of Christ and the fear of hell easily break such bonds as these (p. 33).

Why are you such a timid Christian? Consider him who left his father and his nets, and how the publican rising from the receipt of custom became at once an apostle. 'The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,' and are you planning wide colonnades and spacious halls? Are you looking for an inheritance in this world, you who are joint-heir with Christ? (p. 39).

Addressing his feeling that he can serve the Lord just as well in Italy, Jerome rhetorically concedes, Perhaps you can do so in your own country, although the Lord could do no signs in His. He then explains that in your own country you will be despised which will create bad feelings in you that will be a distraction. Zeal will be lessened and when a thing is lessened it cannot be made perfect. We may sum up our account by saying that a monk cannot be perfect in his own country; and not to wish to be perfect is a sin (p. 43).

And this obsession with discipline influenced his whole understanding of Christian life. As an example, in letter CVII (as elsewhere), he demands teetotaling and vegetarianism for adult monks in this way: What Jewish superstition does in part, solemnly rejecting certain animals and certain products as food, what the Brahmans in India and the Gymnosophists in Egypt observe on their diet of only porridge, rice, and fruit, why should not Christ’s virgin do altogether? If a glass bead is worth so much, surely a pearl must have a higher value (p. 357). In other words, Jews and Hindus have food laws, so perfect Christian should have more and stricter food laws! If this is not what Paul denounces in Colossians 2-3 and 1 Timothy 4, then what is?

Why do people become monks and why do people admire monasticism? My overwhelming impression is that protest against Constantinianism or worldliness in the church, or even differing gifts of different people is not the core issue. Rather people (certainly Jerome, certainly Theodosius) become monks to literally fulfill the words of the Gospel as they understand them and so (they think) save their souls from hell:

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.

. . . every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

But if these commands are taken literally, as the monastic writers do, then they establish monasticism as an ideal for everyone, not a gift for a few. Those who give up all they have, those who abandon father and mother, are thus clearly more truly Christ’s disciples than those who don’t. And while modern defenders of monasticism may demur, the claim that monasticism is better is the natural result of this "monastic hermeneutic."

Jerome is reputed the third great Latin father, after Augustine and Ambrose, and one most closely associated with monasticism. When Luther decided monasticism was rotten to the core, this was the point of view he meant. If you think Jerome’s views are correct, then do not say monasticism is simply "another path" but go ahead and say it is the only perfect Christian path. On the other hand, if you believe monasticism is indeed simply another path, then admit that many of the most respected fathers would vehemently oppose that view, and their whole legacy needs to be looked at anew, and that part of that "looking anew" will involve paying serious attention to the Protestant, Lutheran critique.

Originally posted at Here We Stand

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Is This Admirable?

In my previous post Luther, Theologian of Filiality I raised the issue of whether monks are truly good sons and spoke of the "thinly veiled attack on 'bourgeois' family life and the glorification of adolescent rebellion" found in monastic saints’ lives. (At first I said "typically" found there, but that might be too strong, so I later struck that out and replaced it with "sometimes".) To take this out of the realm of the "he said, she said" assertion, I would like to share in summary a saints biography I found in Serge A. Zenkovsky’s Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (1974), pp. 116-134. It is the "Life of Our Blessed Father Theodosius," the abbot of Kiev’s Crypt Monastery, written by his pupil Nestor around 1075.

Theodosius early showed signs of holiness. He went every day to church and refused to play children’s games. He only wore "poor and patched" clothing. "His parents many times tried to force him to dress in clean clothing and go out to play with the children; but he did not obey them in this, but willed even more to be like one of the poor." He studied the Scriptures.

When he was thirteen, his father died, leaving his mother a widow with two sons, Theodosius and his younger brother. Theodosius responded by being "more persevering in his works" and going to live with the serfs. "But his mother would hinder him, not wishing him to do such things; and she would plead with him to dress again in clean clothing and to go out to play with his peers. For she would say to him thus: 'Going about in this fashion thou bringest shame upon thyself and thy kin.'" When he didn’t obey, she would beat him; Nestor ungallantly adds that she was as strong as a man and hardly like a woman at all.

Meanwhile, "considering how and in what manner he might be saved," Theodosius tried to run away to Jerusalem with some pilgrims, leaving his house in the dead of night. (Remember he was around thirteen.) After three days his mother found him and with many blows brought him back, scolding the pilgrims as well. She put a chain on his legs until Theodosius promised not to run away, for she said she "loved him very much . . . and could not bear living without him."

Theodosius, in addition to going every day to church, also began a business baking sacramental wafers (seemingly there was some shortage), grinding grain with his own hands and baking them until his face was blackened. Twelve years passed. People began to make fun of him and his mother could not bear to hear it and asked him to leave off, but he insisted. After a year she again begged him, caressing and beating him. He then ran away in the dead of night again (breaking his promise by the way). His mother grieved and found him again in the house of a priest in another city, bringing him back with beatings. She locked him up, but after a while was again allowed to go to church daily. She gave him clean garments as did the mayor of the city, but he gave them all away. He wore a chain around his loins under his clothes, which his mother tore off when she saw it from the blood stains on his outer clothes.

In church he heard the words "If one does not leave his father or his mother and follow after Me, he is not worthy of Me." He "became excited with godly zeal . . And he was considering how or where he might be tonsured and might conceal himself from his mother." So when his mother left for the country, he fled to the caves around Kiev far away to be tonsured. His mother "wept for him as one dead, beating her breast."

Four years later, she heard he was in Kiev. His mother then found his cave and begged her son's superior to see him. At first Theodosius "grieved greatly that he had not succeeded in concealing himself from her." But his mother threatened his superior that she would commit suicide on the spot if she was not allowed to see her son, and so he was brought out. She grieved to see his face ravaged by austerities and said "Come home child and do freely what thou requirest for the salvation of thy soul, only do not separate thyself from me. And when I die, bury my body and then return to this cave if thou wishest. For I cannot bear to live not seeing thee." But Theodosius insisted that if she wished to see him she must take the veil and become a nun: "Coming here in that fashion, thou wilt see me. And moreover thou wilt receive salvation for thy soul. If thou dost not do this, then I tell thee the truth: from this time forth thou wilt not see my face." After a day of stubborn insistence, his mother finally yielded and agreed to take the veil. (Many years later she told to Nestor, Theodosius’s pupil, this story).

Well there it is. Quite a story. What do you make of it? Did Theodosius please God in his dealings with his mother? Should his story have been written up, as it in fact was, as an exemplary life and a living out of the Gospel, fit to be admired by all youth? Is a church that glorifies this Theodosius in his dealings with his mother teaching the fourth commandment rightly?

Originally posted at Here We Stand

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