You object another argument: monastic life was a form of life unknown to ancient Christianity, and therefore the Areopagite could not have mentioned it. You prove the antecedent on page 233: otherwise, before Paul, we would have some mention of monks living alone, or of hermits. “They would not have been silent,” you say, “all the ecclesiastical men who wrote from Justin Martyr down to Cyprian. Nor could there have been so many swarms of monks without their having, as Tertullian says, some token of fellowship with the Churches and Bishops. Finally, many testimonies about them would be extant among ecclesiastical writers. But none are extant. And the most ancient writer Tertullian makes it clear enough that in his age there were no dwellers in the wilderness. We are not, he says, forest-dwellers and exiles from life.”
You, however, in the manner of your party, argue negatively from authority. How weak that argument is, even beginners in logic know. “It is not written; therefore it was not done” is a defective consequence. The poet sings:
“Many brave men lived before Agamemnon,
but all, unwept and unknown,
are overwhelmed by long night,
because they lack a sacred bard.”
They existed, though they are not read to have existed. Next, you show yourself excessively hard to please toward the testimonies that do survive. So you people commonly behave toward everything by which your inventions are stripped bare. Dionysius writes to monks; at once you object that he is Pseudo-Dionysius. Eusebius judged that those Essenes were disciples of Mark and Christians, an opinion to which Jerome in the Life of Mark gives some support; and Epiphanius and Cassian thought they were monks. You wish all these men to have blundered childishly.
Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and Cassian hold that the Baptist was the prince of solitary monks. You do not accept the testimony of monks about monks, and you, a monk-hater, want to be believed. Athanasius, in the Life of Antony, teaches that there were many monks before Antony. Certainly Dionysius, the Roman Pontiff, sat a little after the two-hundredth year of Christ, and the Pontifical of Damasus writes that he was taken from among the monks.
Mention is made of abbots and monks in the first volume of the Councils, in the decrees of Pope Euthymianus, and in the first Nicene synod, canon 76. Therefore they already existed then. Tertullian, in On the Veiling of Virgins, chapter 3, and Cyprian after him in On the Dress of Virgins, recognize a distinction between virgins of men and virgins of God. Who are those virgins of God, if not women veiled by solemn rite and consecrated to God by profession of virginity, and therefore nuns, or female monks? If there were nuns then, why should it not be believed that there were monks as well?
Wilhelm Eisengrein discusses these matters more fully in Century 1, page 3, which concerns religious orders and cultivators of the religious life, distinction 1 and the five following; so does Matthaeus Galenus in On the Origin of Monasticism, chapter 5; and our Bellarmine in volume 1, book 2, On the Members of the Church, chapter 5.
Nevertheless, we do not say that before the times of Cyprian there were swarms of monks. We maintain only that before this institution there were certain men, some cultivating the eremitic life, some living in common. After Constantine the Great a vast accession was made to them, and fixed rules and laws were given by their several patriarchs. Something similar happened to the monks of Greece after Saint Basil, and to those of Italy after Saint Benedict.
Those few who then existed had a token of faith with the Church and the Bishops. But because they were so few, scarcely any testimonies about them are found among ecclesiastical writers. Yet some do exist, as I have said. When the number of monks was multiplied after the empire of Constantine, the testimonies too were multiplied; and even if you were to restrict their beginnings to that time, you would still have falsely inferred that monasticism was a form of life unknown to ancient Christianity. Christianity is certainly ancient when it is reckoned by more than twelve centuries. How great is the novelty of your faith, which has not yet lasted a single century?
Finally, maliciously, what Tertullian said about the whole Church, that is, about himself and all Christians universally, “We are not forest-dwellers and exiles from life,” you transferred to a few monks. He was denying that the Church was invisible, or that Christians were skulking men hidden in the forests so that the privacy of their morals might be concealed. He was contending that they lived openly in cities and before the eyes of all. Yet on that account he must not be said to deny that any Christians at all, renouncing the world, had lived in forests or desert places and had voluntarily made themselves exiles from the advantages of common and social life.
He wished only to show, from the greater part, that Christians were useful even in the affairs of the commonwealth. Thus he writes in the Apology against the Gentiles, chapter 42: “But we are also accused under another title of injuries, and are called unfruitful in business. How so, when we are men living with you, of the same food, clothing, equipment, and the same necessity of life? For we are not Brahmans or the gymnosophists of India, forest-dwellers and exiles from life.”
He is plainly speaking of himself and of those Christians who, as he adds, not without forum, not without market, not without baths, shops, workshops, inns, fairs, and other commerce, sailed, served as soldiers, farmed, and paid public taxes in this world with the Gentiles. What Septimius said of the Christians of his own time, the Greeks and Armenians living among the Turks and Persians could say today; among them, nevertheless, it is agreed that there are many monks or Caloyers.
From this Scaliger could have understood that this saying of Tertullian was a reed staff for him to lean on. Let these things suffice. For it is not now necessary to dispute more exactly about the antiquity of monasticism.