Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/174

156 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. nasticism look forward to its career of world-Christian- ization and world-dominance. Moreover, some features which were to characterize Western monasticism had previously shown themselves in the East. For example, monastic life in the West was to be temperate, and not extravagant in its austeri- ties. The wild asceticism and mortification of the flesh which had distinguished the monks of Egypt and Syria never flourished in the West.^ But it had been condemned in the East by Pachomius and Basil before the West possessed communities of monks. Again, the West is active and practical. Western monks were soon to be drawn from their cloisters to episcopal, even papal, duties. But this had previously happened in the East. Basil the Great, the great monk-bishop, preceded Gregory the Great, the great monk-pope, by two hundred and fifty years. In fine, in Western monasticism there are not to be BO that monks could do acts of charity. He was also less stringent in forbidding intercourse with nuns. See Basil's Regula A, Cap. 33; Regula B, 108-111; also Zockler, op. cit., p. 290; Griitzmacher, Bedeutung Benedikts, etc., pp. 42, 43. 1 Many groups of Eastern hermits have received their names from special ascetic practices; e.g., the Omophagi, who ate no cooked food, Cassian, IV, 22; the Grazers (/5oo->coOi Sozomen, Hist. £cc., VI, 33; or the Stylites, those who imitated St. Symeon Sty- lites by dwelling on tops of pillars; see Vita Sancti Simeonis, Migne, Pair. Lat. ,Yol. 73, col. 326 ; Delehaye, '* Le» Stylites, Saint Symeon et ses imitateurs," Revue des questions historiques, Vol. 57 (181)5), pp. 52-103. These people, to be sure, are hermits, rather than monks ; yet they constitute groups, and no group of hermits or monks was ever in the West called after any special form of asceticism practised by them, for the reason that extreme and remarkable forms of asceticism were not practised in the West. 2 See Basil, Regula A, 18-20; B, 128-133.