"Monasticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nonsense is talked about the "tyrannies" which the Monastic Age inflicted on Art. Of course, monasticism fostered fanaticism. It does not need the luminous genius that said it, to teach us that "whatever is necessary to what we make our sole object is sure, in some way or in some time or other, to become our master." And with ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... illusion was not difficult, since he led an existence that approached the life of a monk. Thus he had the advantages of monasticism without the inconveniences of its vigorous discipline, its lack of service, its dirt, its promiscuity and its monotonous idleness. Just as he had transformed his cell into a comfortable chamber, so had he made his life normal, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... flushed faces and red ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, the heresy of the Lampetians was condemned in most ancient times, which the heretic Jovinian attempted in vain to revive at Rome. Therefore, all things must be rejected which in this article have been produced against monasticism—viz. that monasteries succeeded vows. Of the nunneries it is sufficiently ascertained that, though pertaining to the weaker sex, how in most cloisters the holy nuns persevered far more constantly to vows once uttered, even under ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... monastic institutions is composed of three chapters, which may be briefly entitled: asceticism and missionary enterprise; wealth, luxury, and corruption; secularisation of property and decline. But between Eastern and Western monasticism there is at least one marked difference. The monasticism of the West made at various epochs of its history a vigorous, spontaneous effort at self-regeneration, which found expression in the foundation of separate Orders, each of which proposed ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Christian church, and especially to the institution of Monasticism, the preservation of so much of the ancient literature as we now possess, as well as the preservation of the spirit of learning and that impulse to create literature out of which grew the literatures of mediaeval and modern times. As has ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... said was non-committal, every movement was expostulatory. Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he always had such meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor. Monasticism had found, in a countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple. If Vessons ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... humanity—will be near at hand. Yet in no age—not the darkest and most corrupt Christendom has yet seen—have God and His Christ been without their witnesses to the higher truth,—witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine, yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it, arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose, and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... the rule of Basil the Great. The chief importance of the monastic rule and institute of St Basil lies in the fact that to this day his reconstruction of the monastic life is the basis of the monasticism of the Greek and Slavonic Churches, though the monks do not call themselves Basilians. St Basil's claim to the authorship of the Rules and other ascetical writings that go under his name, has been questioned; but the tendency now is to recognize as his at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... with the Gnostic asceticism, or restricting it to easy exercises. This is not the place for entering into the details. Shibboleths, such as [Greek: pheugete ou tas phuseis alla tas gnomas ton kakon], may have soon appeared. It may be noted here, that the asceticism which gained the victory in Monasticism, was not really that which sprang from early Christian, but from Greek impulses, without, of course, being based on the same principle. Gnosticism anticipated the future even here. That could be much ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... stuff. How much better to teach the elements of sociology and jurisprudence. The laws that regulate human intercourse; what could be more interesting? And physiology—the disrespect for the human frame is another relic of monasticism. In fact our whole education is tainted with the monkish spirit. Divinity! Has any purpose ever ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... solemnity of the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an ascetic regime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age, they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour of ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... father, brother, or some other man who could exercise authority over them. The first Church-sisterhood grew out of such beginnings, and gradually obtained the sanction of the Church. A recent remarkable work, "Women in Monasticism," shows how wide and powerful the system of religious sisterhoods had become as early as the fifth century, and traces its growing strength and enlargement until its decline, which ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... he replied in the simplicity of his heart, 'I have many children: I will leave it them, for they want it more.' We shall see how unyieldingly, when his son entered a convent, he insisted, as against all the value and usefulness of monasticism, on the paramount obligation of God's command, that children should obey their parents. Luther also tells us how his father once praised in high terms the will left by a Count of Mansfeld, who without leaving any property to the Church, was content to depart from ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... church, churchdom; ministry, apostleship^, priesthood, prelacy, hierarch^, church government, christendom, pale of the church. clericalism, sacerdotalism^, episcopalianism, ultramontanism^; theocracy; ecclesiology^, ecclesiologist^; priestcraft^, odium theologicum [Lat.]. monachism^, monachy^; monasticism, monkhood^. [Ecclesiastical offices and dignities] pontificate, primacy, archbishopric^, archiepiscopacy^; prelacy; bishopric, bishopdom^; episcopate, episcopacy; see, diocese; deanery, stall; canonry, canonicate^; prebend, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Catholic church before the age of Gregory VI. (Pope from 1073-1085). The priests lived like other men, members of families, and did not stand over the people, but among them and with them. But monasticism and celibacy rest upon the principle, that the senses are to be feared, which, like all fear, except the fear of God, is inwardly untrue. This principle is also unchristian. Christianity does not ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... as a man of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist is at least as solitary ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... greater or less, did not exhaust the impetus in favour of monasticism. Single houses and smaller Orders were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of which many attained a merely local importance. The common feature of the great Orders was that each of them formed a ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... already seen, had spent a part of his youth with the monks of the desert. It was his proudest boast that he had acted as acolyte to the great St. Antony. He resolved, therefore, to visit the district known as the Thebaid, where St. Pachomius, the father of monasticism in the East, had founded many monasteries and drawn up ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... God might have been the work of the devil. "I sit here," he continued, "eating and drinking but I would much prefer to be far from this spot." Luther tried to pacify him by reminding him of the godly character of monasticism, but the interruption was never forgotten by Luther himself or by ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth had they not at the same time been converted to Christianity. Nothing, moreover, contributed more to this than the effort, which was then the order of the day in the Christian world, to base the organisation of the Church on monasticism: from Italy this tendency spread to Germany, from South France to North, from thence to England, where it produced its greatest effect. Now the power of conversion is inherent only in sharply-defined doctrines; and it was precisely this tendency that penetrated the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... branch, "the Religious Orders," were of later institution. From the oriental deserts of the Thebaid, where Saint Anthony had early practised the austerities of monkish life, Saint Martin drew his inspiration for the monasticism of the West. But it was not until the last of the IV century that he founded, near Poitiers, the first great monastery in France. The success of this form of pious life, if not altogether edifying, was immediate. Devotional excesses ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... first instalment of a work in which one of the great lights of the Romish Church in our day proposes to recount the glories of Western Monasticism, and to narrate the lives of some of the remarkable men who successively passed from the cloister to the Papal throne, or in positions scarcely less conspicuous permanently affected the history of the Church. His original design, however, does not appear to have extended beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... it a cause of protest against God's will! And worst and strangest of all is this frenzied idea of yours to fly to the Church of Rome for shelter from yourself and your secret misery, and there give yourself over to monasticism and a silent, idolatrous worship,—not of Mary, the Mother of Christ,— but of the mere picture of the woman you loved! And you would pray to THAT?—you would kneel before THAT?—you would pass long ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli |
