26. Gibbon's thirty-seventh chapter professes to give an account of the 'Institution of the Monastic Life' in the third century. But the monastic life had been instituted somewhat earlier, and by many prophets and kings. By Jacob, when he laid the stone for his pillow; by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before he had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom dependent on His guidance.[1]
The form which the monastic spirit took in later times depended far more on the corruption of the common world, from which it was forced to recoil either in indignation or terror, than on any change brought about by Christianity in the ideal of human virtue and happiness.
- ↑ I should myself mark as the fatallest instant in the decline of the Roman Empire, Julian's rejection of the counsel of the Augurs. "For the last time, the Etruscan Haruspices accompanied a Roman Emperor, but by a singular fatality their adverse interpretation by the signs of heaven was disdained, and Julian followed the advice of the philosophers, who coloured their predictions with the bright hues of the Emperor's ambition." (Milman, Hist, of Christianity, chap, vi.)
