in the present generation recovered. The Jesuits were suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. in 1773, and restored by Pius VII. in 1814. As the result of the ecclesiastical policy of the emperor Joseph II. nearly all religious houses of all kinds were suppressed throughout the Austrian dominions (1780). The French Revolution swept them out of France and caused the secularization of the great majority in central Europe and Italy. In Portugal and Spain they were dissolved in 1834–1835; in Italy in 1866; in the Prussian dominions in 1871. The last half of the 19th century, and more especially the last quarter, witnessed a remarkable revival of vitality and growth in most of the older orders in nearly every country of western Europe, and besides, an extraordinary number of new congregations, devoted to works of every sort, were founded in the 19th century: Heimbucher (op. cit., §§ 118, 134–140) numbers no fewer than seventy of these new congregations of men. In the new countries, especially in the United States and Australia, but also in South Africa, orders and congregations of all kinds are most thriving. The chief set-back has come again in France, where, by the Association Laws of 1903, the religious orders have nearly all been suppressed and expelled and their property confiscated.
15. The Nuns.—In the foregoing sketch nothing has been said concerning the nuns; and yet in all ages women, hardly less than men, have played their part in monasticism. In the earliest Christian times the veiled virgins formed a grade or order apart, more formally separated from the community than were the male ascetics. There is reason for believing that there were organized convents for women before there were any for men; for when St Anthony left the world in 270 to embrace the ascetic life, the Vita says he placed his sister in a nunnery (παρθενών). We learn from Palladius that by the end of the 4th century nunneries were numerous all over Egypt, and they existed also in Palestine, in Italy and in Africa—in fact throughout the Christian world. It is a curious coincidence that the sister of each of the three great cenobitical founders, Pachomius, Basil and Benedict, was a nun and ruled a community of nuns according to an adaptation of her brother’s rule for monks. In the West the Benedictine nuns played a great part in the Christian settlement of north-western Europe. As the various monastic and mendicant orders arose, a female branch was in most cases formed alongside of the order; and so we find canonesses, and hermitesses, and Dominicanesses, and Franciscan nuns [or Clares (q.v.)]—requisite information will be found in the respective articles. Then there were the “double orders” of Sempringham (see St Gilbert) and Fontevrault, in which the nuns were the predominant, or even the dominant, element. Of the modern orders of men only a few include nuns. But on the other there are a vast number of purely female orders and congregations. The great majority of these modern congregations of women follow the Augustinian rule, supplemented by special constitutions or by-laws; such are the Brigittines, the Ursulines and the Visitation nuns: others follow the rule of the third order of the Franciscans or other Mendicants (see Tertiaries). In early times nuns could go out of their enclosure on occasion; but in the later middle ages, up to the council of Trent, the tendency was to keep them more and more strictly confined within their convent precincts. In 1609 an English lady, Mary Ward, founded at Munich the “Institute of Mary,” the nuns of which were not bound to enclosure. This new departure, or rather, return to old ideas, encountered vehement opposition and difficulties that nearly wrecked it; but it has survived, and has been the pioneer in the extraordinary development of institutes of women devoted to external good works of every kind. St Vincent of Paul soon followed; in 1633 he established the Sisters of Charity, bound only by yearly vows, and wholly given up to works of charity—chiefly nursing in hospitals and in the homes of the poor, and primary education in poor schools.
As women are debarred from exercising the spiritual functions of the ministry, it follows that nuns have to devote themselves either to a more purely contemplative life, or else to a more wholly active one, than is usual among the orders of men, who commonly, in virtue of their priesthood, have been able to find a mixed form of life between the two extremes. The nuns belonging to the older orders tend to the contemplative idea, and they still find recruits in sufficient numbers, in spite of the modern rush to the active congregations. These latter exist in wondrous number and variety, exercising every imaginable form of good work—education, both primary and secondary; the care of hospitals, orphanages, penitentiaries, prisons; of asylums for the blind, the deaf and dumb, the insane; of refuges for the aged poor and the destitute.
See the works of Helyot and Heimbucher, referred to below under “Literature”; also Lina Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism (1896); and for information on the various orders of women, J. N. Murphy, Terra incognito (1873); and F. M. Steele, Convents of Great Britain and Ireland (1902).
16. Conclusion.—Few phenomena are more striking than the change that has come over educated Protestant opinion in its estimate of monasticism. The older Protestantism uncompromisingly judged the monastic ideal and life to be both unchristian and unnatural, an absolute perversion deserving nothing but condemnation. But now the view of the critico-historical school of Protestant thought, of which Dr Adolf Harnack is so representative a spokesman, is that the preservation of spiritual religion in Catholic Christianity, both Eastern and Western, has been mainly, if not wholly, due to monasticism (see Harnack’s early tractate Das Mönchtum, translated under the title Monasticism, by E. E. Kellett, 1901; also the lectures on Greek and Roman Catholicism in Das Wesen des Christentums, translated by Bailey Saunders, 1902; the first-named work is the most suggestive general aperçu of the whole subject—though written from a frankly hostile standpoint, it is in large measure a panegyric).
The views of the new Protestantism concerning monasticism are probably no less excessive than those of the old. The truth probably lies somewhere between them. It may perhaps be agreed that not the least of the services rendered to the Christian people at large by monasticism is this: Into every life the spirit of renunciation must enter; in most lives there are crises in which the path of mere duty can be followed only in virtue of a great renunciation; if we are able to make these ordinary and necessary renunciations, it is in some measure owing to the fact that the path has been made easier for us by those who (like the author of the Imitation of Christ) have shown the example, and thereby been able to formulate the theory, of renunciation in a supreme degree.
Literature.—The literature on monasticism is immense. The chief repertory for information on the historical side is Helyot’s Histoire des ordres religieux (8 vols., 1714; 2nd ed. 1792; digested in dictionary form by Migne, 1860). This information has been condensed and brought up to date by Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (2 vols., 1896–1897; a 2nd ed. in 3 vols., 1907)—this most useful handbook is equipped throughout with an excellent and well chosen bibliography. Otto Zöckler’s Askese und Mönchtum (1897), also covers the whole ground, and is written more from the point of view of theory. The inner spirit and working of the older monasticism is well portrayed in F. A. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life (1904); more popular accounts are given in H. J. Feasy’s Monasticism (1898), and F. M. Steele’s Monasteries and Religious Houses of Great Britain and Ireland (1903). The rules of the various orders are collected in Brockie’s edition of Holsten’s Codex regularum (6 vols., 1759). The article Mönchtum in Herzog-Hauck Realencyclopädie (3rd ed.), and in Wetzer und Welte Kirchenlexicon (2nd ed.) go over the same general ground as the present article, in the earlier portion entering into greater detail as to facts, but in the later dealing much more summarily. The relevant separate articles in these two great dictionaries, Protestant and Catholic respectively, will supply adequate information and ample references on most points. The Catholic Dictionary contains useful articles on most of the subjects here touched on; and an extensive Catholic Encyclopaedia is in course of preparation at the Catholic University of Washington. The habits and dress of the various orders may be seen in Helyot’s Histoire, which abounds in plates, coloured, in the ed. of 1792. There are plates representing members of the chief orders in Dugdale’s Monasticon, and in the books of Gasquet and Steele mentioned above; also (coloured) in Tuker and Malleson, Handbook to Christian Rome, pt. iii (1900). (E. C. B.)
MONASTIR, or Bitolia, the second city of Macedonia, and
the capital of the vilayet of Monastir in European Turkey, on
the Salonica-Monastir railway, 400 m. W. of Constantinople.
Pop. (1905), about 60,000. Monastir is situated at an altitude
