Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/176

158 THE CLASSICAI. HEKITAGE [chaf. power, often directed anew by the intelligence and energies and devotion within itself. In the moral life also, Western monasticism orders and systematizes its rules. Humility, obedience, chas- tity, and other Christian virtues had been inculcated and practised in the East. But in the West, moral precepts take form as a regular and possible code of daily living for every monk, and a code constituting a systematic education in the Christian life. Moreover, Western monasticism becomes more completely Chris- tian than its Eastern prototype, which contained much Hellenism, and sometimes was regarded as a philos- ophy, or as a way of life based on knowledge and wisdom. Western monasticism tends to omit the Hel- lenism, while it codifies the Christian principles of Eastern monasticism, and completes them with more absolute conceptions of Christian faith and love, such as came to Augustine and to those he influenced. Ascetic tendencies began early in Latin Christianity. A wide interest in the celibate or virgin life, led in retirement, arose in Eome near the time of Athana- sius' sojourn as an exile there, about the year 340. There was much material for monasticism whenever the movement should seek the solitude of the waste places. These modes of ascetic living were encouraged by the three great Latin Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, with whom, two hundred years after- ward, Gregory the Great is ranged as the fourth great Father of the Latin Church, and arch-laborer in the establishment of monasticism. Of these great leaders of Latin Christianity in the fourth century, Ambrose directed a cloister of monks