Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/147

THE CITY OF GOD ill The movement spread before the close of the fourth century into Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia; and St. Basil introduced it among the Greeks. Spread in Symeon Stylites in Syria led a life like that of an the East Indian fakir, spending thirty-seven years on top of a pillar which was gradually raised from six to sixty feet in height. He was always covered with vermin, but took some exercise by bending his forehead until it touched his feet, a process which he would repeat so many successive times that observers lost count. Basil, on the other hand, organized communities of monks and gave them a more specific rule to live by than that of Pachomius. Some of the Greek mon- asteries founded then still survive to-day, isolated from the world on steep crags to which one can gain access only by climbing long rope ladders or by being drawn up in a basket, and in them the monks still live much the same life as their predecessors of fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. Athanasius, the great opponent of the Arian heresy, is also credited with the introduction of monasticism in the West. Later St. Jerome was a great advocate of Western the ascetic life. By the end of the fourth century monasticism monasteries and nunneries were numerous in Italy. In Gaul the movement was spread by the fame of St. Martin of Tours, and by the labor of Cassian at Marseilles after 410, where his two monasteries contained over five thousand monks and nuns, while his Institutes and Conferences were influential books on the subject. The missionaries, St. Patrick and St. Severinus, carried monasticism to Ireland and Noricum ; but in Spain and North Africa the movement seems to have been checked by the Visigothic and Vandal conquests. In Ireland entire clans turned themselves into monastic communities with their former chieftains as abbots. The word monk or monachos originally meant one who lives alone, but in the West the community found favor as against the hermit life, and " monasticism " is used to refer especially to life in monasteries, whereas "monach- ism " is a term covering the life both of hermits and of the members of monastic communities.