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Thomas
Dudley Fosbrooke
BRITISH MONACHISM or MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MONKS AND NUNS OF ENGLAND. London. 1817. Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. for barnesandnoble.com Reviewer: patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), researching Sir Walter Scott, May 24, 2007 Reviewer's Rating of BRITISH MONACHISM: * * * THREE STARS Title of this review: A Dull Resurrecting of British Monks and Nuns Centuries after Henry VIII Seized their Properties At 620 pages, including quite a few illustrations, in its recent reprint by Kessinger Publishing, BRITISH MONACHISM is and feels very long. Four-fifths or more of text is dry as dust meticulously sourced narrative description of lifestyles and rules of British and other monks and nuns, translations from Latin and learned footnotes. It is notable that the few passages of personal commentary and asides make it clear that Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke, author of the 1817 reprinted edition, does not like monasticism. It is at heart, he judges, a mistake. His ideal Christianity is Bible-rooted, simple, unpretentious, chaste but not celibate, not very speculative and recognized in good deeds by Christians. Fosbrooke Christianity is centered between two extremes: endless wallowing in the senses and the flesh on the one side and austere trying too hard on the other. Monks and nuns, in principle and to the extent that they honor the rules of their founders, pursue rigor, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, poverty, chastity and obedience. At best this is harmless. But monasticism arose out of both ancient and medieval superstitions and ignorance and its practitioners exhibited a general tendency to fall away from their ideals, especially when it came to good eating. In his Preface (vii) Fosbrooke points out the overriding fatal temptation to monks and nuns everywhere: wealth. For many centuries the faithful, including monarchs, made generous donations of land to men and women vowed to poor life styles. There were only so many schools, orphanages, candles, manuscripts and the like that a rich monastery or nunnery could spend coins on. Therefore no small number succumbed to temptation and opted for a relatively rich personal life style -- despite seemingly endless efforts at self-reform. BRITISH MONACHISM traces the history of the impulse among Christian men and women to retreat from the world to an orderly life in community of prayer and mortification. The author begins with similar inclinations among pagans and Jews of the near east, then moves through such seminal figures as Saints Anthony of Egypt and Benedict of Italy through British manifestations till the time of Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries. He also notes the few communities of monks and nuns recently given refuge in Britain because of upheavals in Napoleonic France. For the most part the quality of prose is somewhat more exciting than a telephone directory. This is not a book for a general reader. Who is likely to read it? I took it up because it is a source used by Sir Walter Scott for his novels THE MONASTERY, THE ABBOT and possibly IVANHOE and other medieval tales. It is detailed but seems to miss the forest for the trees. This is a book for historians and literary critics. More power, then, to Sir Walter Scott who was able to bring to life after reading BRITISH MONACHISM flesh and blood characters like Friar Tuck, the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert and three abbots of the Cistercian monastery of Saint Mary at Melrose in Scotland. -OOO- Also recommended: Sir Walter Scott, THE MONASTERY, THE ABBOT, IVANHOE, THE TALISMAN. Thomas Merton, THE SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN. G. K. Chesterton, THE DUMB OX, SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- II. For Amazon.com Reviewer's Rating of BRITISH MONACHISM: * * * THREE STARS Title of this review: Monasticism: "Prayers, scanty food, and immersion in water up to the shoulders." May 25, 2007 In 1817 Reverend Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke delighted to see in print a new enlarged edition of his BRITISH MONACHISM: or MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MONKS AND NUNS OF ENGLAND. There had been objections to an earlier edition. One critic thought that Fosbrooke had been too much the antiquarian, simply selecting ancient documents and translating them from Latin or modernizing their English. Why had he, as a Protestant clergyman, not thundered at greater length against monks and nuns? These objections he now disposed of in a Preface and in Chapter One, "Principles of Monachism." Rev. Fosbrooke added a few "philosophizing" paragraphs to the 1817 edition so as to be perfectly clear upon how dreadful a misunderstanding of human nature the monastic impulse rested-- no matter how sincerely intended by individually virtuous nuns and monks. Christianity, Fosbrooke asserted, is a religion of spouses, parents, friends, neighbors and citizens. Its characteristics are prudence and virtue. Hope in a better future after death gives us all the necessary basic norms for good behavior in this life. We should neither give way to imagination and sensuality and wallow in bestiality nor, on the other hand, strive unreasonably for superhuman perfection (Ch I,1). Monks and nuns, for the sincerest of reasons, are fanatics, exaggerators, and have always attempted the impossible. They are also handicapped by their way of life having been thought up by their earliest founders (Anthony of Egypt, Augustine, Benedict) in an age of superstition and darkness. Even if individual monks and nuns from time to time rose above the herd in levels of achieved goodness, they remained children of their age. Future monks and nuns, like everyone else, grew up in societies glorying in war, superstition, belief in demons and fairies, guardian angels, visions, trances, omens, astrology, magic, sorcery, lives of saints, holy fountains, ghosts, fortune telling, mind reading, luxury and pleasure. (p.15) No wonder then that good Christians wanted to withdraw from such a world. The world's loose living would be countered by austere living in protected environments. The ordinary poor people of any nation and time have no choice but to live austerely. A day's gambling could lose their life savings. The rich, by contrast, can survive a few years of improvidence. Religious leaders usually spring from the poor and therefore emphasize austerity (p. 3). Christianity came to be in a world of superstitious barbarians. It would take Christians many centuries (till the Reformation?) to grow out of barbarism. The best Christian leaders would consciously and realistically tolerate superstition among the masses, leading them, if they could, from lower to higher forms of mistaken beliefs. Meanwhile many of their best, most religious men and women went monastic. Monastic methods were rude but worked for (pre-Reformation?) barbarians: "Much
reading, prayers, scanty food, confinement to the Monastery, and
immersion in water up to the shoulders, even in the most rigorous
seasons, till the whole Psalter had been sung through ..." (p. 17).
Having got that criticism out of his system, Fosbrooke spends another 600 pages laying out the origins and development of worldwide monasticism or monachism. He carries his story forward in Britain through Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. He notes the reintroduction of a few nunneries into England made up of refugees from religious persecution during the French Revolution. In immense detail and on the basis of ancient documents Fosbrooke describes the training of novices, the garment of nuns and monks, their education, services to the public, approach to prayer and work. He shows that the alms which they accepted to give them time to pray for souls in Purgatory ultimately grew into lands and other worldly possessions far too large to be compatible with their vows of poverty. Fosbrooke's BRITISH MONACHISM for all its anti-Catholic bias and ponderous style had a wide readership in early 19th Century England and Scotland. Sir Walter Scott drew heavily on it for his two novels of the reformation in Scotland, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT. Outside Ireland, most Britons in 1817 had never seen an unruined monastery or known a monk or a nun. They soon would, both Catholic and Protestant abbeys and nuns -- thanks to the Oxford Movement within the Church of England and the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850. But in 1817, Fosbrooke gave to the many a kind of zoo or waxworks for reconstructing, imagining and shaking their heads over merrie England's primitive religious past. For 21st Century readers of English, BRITISH MONACHISM is long obsolete, a thing of beauty only to specialized scholars. A general reader who wants to grasp the monastic impulse would do better to start with Thomas Merton's THE SEVEN STORY MOUNTAIN about his calling to Gethesemani Abbey in Kentucky. -OOO- Your tags: thomas dudley fosbrooke, monasticism, celibacy, nuns, monks, abbeys, nunneries III. Reviewed for epinions.com Reviewer's Rating of BRITISH MONACHISM: * * * THREE STARS TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Do, Brother Melancthon, let God govern the World as he thinks best!" (Martin Luther) May 25 '07 Pros Drawings of medieval monks and nuns. How their rules arose and what they commanded. Cons Anti-Catholic bias. Wooden writing style. More a static anatomy lesson than history. The Bottom Line If you are a specialist looking into sources used by Sir Walter Scott for IVANHOE, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT, go for BRITISH MONACHISM. Otherwise find something up to date. Full Review To a non-scholar looking for a popular, lively book about historic contributions of monks and nuns to architecture, poetry, art, letters, philosophy, music, hymns and theology, BRITISH MONACHISM is a disappointment. Where are Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and other pioneering Dominicans who brought Aristotle back to the West, thanks to Persian and Arab scholars? Where are the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts? Why do we not read of the Venerable Bede, Hildegard of Bingen, Catharine of Sienna, Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon? BRITISH MONACHISM dwells on lesser lights like Pachomius, Fulgentius, Saint Severus and the origin of hot-cross buns. BRITISH MONACHISM may be weak in mighty deeds, but it is full to exess of wimples, hair-shirts, choir-girls, cowls, penances, pilgrimages, head-shavings and vigils. And its author's way of writing up these things is not much livelier than a telephone directory. This book is not about life or living organisms. It is like a textbook on human anatomy or on how to dissect corpses, though its author claims historical accuracy as well as religious and psychological insights. BRITISH MONACHISM is a mechanical "check-list" sort of book focusing on externals of a way of life long vanished in 1817 from Britain and Scotland: lingering over clothing, diet, rules, abuses and anything but the historic positive contributions of monks and nuns over hundreds of years. One good thing can be said for Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke's 1817 enlarged edition of BRITISH MONACHISM. Good 19th Century people read and profited from it. They included Sir Walter Scott who used Fosbrooke for background materials in his 1820 novels THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT on the last days of the Cistercian Melrose Abbey in southern Scotland. Fosbrooke argues that monasticism grew out of an impulse of poor persons disgusted with worldly preoccupations of the late Roman Empire. The earlier caste of non-monastic priests was often distinguished for piety and learning. But poor, downtrodden Christians could not compete with clerics in wisdom and wealth. So they decided to find a "more excellent way" of Christianity which people possessing nothing were capable of embracing and following upwards into novel forms of sanctity even more exalted than those of the "secular" clergy. Over centuries, following rules sketched out by such great, creative saints as Anthony of Egypt, Augustine of North Africa and Benedict of Italy, poor little Christian nobodies, really no more than superstitious barbarians, found security through retreating from politics, warfare, marriage and family into walled monasteries and nunneries. There they were celibate, prayed, fasted, kept regular hours, wore uniform clothing, scourged their bodies and voluntarily subordinated their wills to those of their Abbots and Abbesses and to the rules of their order. These poor little people were, Fosbrooke judges, better than their late Roman and early medieval milieux, but not immensely so. Monastic leaders accepted novices who had been raised superstitious, who believed in divination by dreams and were gullible. As pragmatic realists, leading nuns and monks tried to bring their followers to God as well as those little people could bear it. But this meant step by step and by degrees, replacing perverse pagan superstitions by merely silly Christian ones. " ... as
they did not invent, but received their system of Religion ... they
were rather passive agents in its promotion, than knaves. If they
limited the propagation of virtue to mechanical, rather than
intellectual processes, they only adopted methods best fitted to the
mind of the subjects upon which they were to act. ... As Providence
undoubtedly permitted Barbarism to exist (whether Monks had ever been
or not) Luther's reply to Melancthon should be considered. The latter
was complaining of the Times. 'Do,' says he, 'Brother
Melancthon, let God govern the World as he thinks best' "(p.
18).
Luther, of course, had been a monk and was qualified to comment on monasticism. But then so too were more orthodox intellects or geniuses like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Fra Angelico, Francis of Assisi and hundreds of others who did more than simply replace inferior superstitions with less defective ones. BRITISH MONACHISM had its day. It had a good run. But it ran its course 150 years ago. Composed from an evangelical Protestant English perspective, BRITISH MONACHISM preserved, as in a wax museum, unlifelike images of Britain's pre-Henry the Eighth Christianity. Henry and his daughter Elizabeth had destroyed monastic buildings and driven monks and nuns underground. Their anti-Catholic and anti-Monastic laws remained on the books until grudgingly repealed in 1778, 1791 and 1828. But within another quarter century the Church of England by-law-established was populating monasteries and nunneries and a Roman Catholic hierarchy was in place serving nearly a million English Roman Catholics. Mildly polemical 18th and 19th Century tomes like Fosbrooke's reverberated with undertones of "Aren't you glad those monks and nuns are no more?" and "Know thy enemy!" Still, Fosbrooke and other like-minded antiquarians first preserved and selectively showcased skeletons, not-unimportant external aspects of celibate life in religious community. Then imaginative writers like Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Frances Trollope and others mined them for nuggets to scatter about in their great novels. -OOO- Recommended: No http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/fosbrooke_monachism.html |