But all these communities accepted the rule of St. Basil, as the Western communities for many years accepted that of St. Benedict; and this feature, perpetuated and continued even to our own day, is surely a proof that the religious life, thus hardened in a single mould, was anything but intense!
Life means movement, and, besides, the motives ruling these communities had no connection, in many cases, with any longing for pious edification or for an ideal culture of the soul. Having exposed the face of the phenomenon, I must now turn to the reverse side. The facts to which I must refer are of universal notoriety, and have stirred a disapproval and caused a reaction even in the very bosom of the Church, the nature and origin of which I must describe, but which, in its results, has been powerless and wellnigh barren.
The ascetic idealists of this period, such as Maximus the Greek, Vassiane Kossoï, or Nil Sorski, closed their lives in a solitude other than that which they had chosen. All of them, like the heroic Phéodonite himself, to whose exploits I have already referred, and who expiated in a prison the crime of having set his contemporaries an example too sublime for them to follow, were attainted, anathematized, and driven beyond the pale of religion. Though the great majority of their fellow-monks wore the same garb, they were very far from reaching the same heights. Though not content with eating the fruits of their pious trade in idleness, if not in debauchery; though, as I have already shown, willing to give the poor their share, their horizon, none the less, was circumscribed within the limits of a narrow-minded devotion, confined to most material practices. Many archimandrites and priors followed still less worthy leanings, using the monastic possessions for purposes of fruitful speculation, and adapting the rule of their order to habits of sybaritic idleness. Life in common was quite an exception to the general rule. The common table only fed a few brothers with the remnants of the sumptuous repasts shared by the higher authorities, who swallowed up the common wealth, with their numerous guests—relations, friends, and wealthy gentlemen who elected to inhabit these luxurious solitudes. They led a gay life there, and drank deep. From the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, as Monsieur Prijov shows us in his 'History of Taverns' (1868, p. 53), the monasteries were the chief manufacturers and depositaries of beverages of every kind. The company frequenting them was numerous and gay. Ladies were frequent visitors in the monks' cells. Occasionally other visitors, too, were seen—little boys. In certain conventual establishments monks and nuns lived cheek by jowl.
The reforming current of the sixteenth century was destined
