De Statu et Ruina Monastici Ordinis

On the State and Ruin of the Monastic Order

Trithemius, Johannes On the State and Ruin of the Monastic Order, with the author's dedicatory letter to Blasius Scheltrub, abbot of Hirsau, 21 April 1493 The mournful book of Johannes of Trittenheim, abbot of Sponheim, of the Order of Saint Benedict, of the Bursfeld Observance, on the state and ruin of the monastic order, no less useful than pleasing to religious and devout men.

Hain *15626 B.

To the venerable and most beloved father, lord Blasius, abbot of the monastery of Hirsau: brother Johannes, called abbot in Sponheim, sends greeting and charity.

Although your request and that of your brothers, dearest father, far exceeds the powers of my talent, nevertheless I have preferred to undertake the arduous burden rather than fail, as far as I can, to satisfy your charity. For the love of God, zeal for the order, and fervor for discipline make you worthy that I should deny you nothing when you ask for the honor of God. You asked me, when I was present, by words; when I was absent, by frequent letters; and in a certain way you compelled me by the authority of your presidency to write something to you about the calamity of our order, so that you might summon the fathers, to be assembled with you in chapter, to compassion for it.

The request is holy, but the difficulty of obeying is great. I know that I shall be torn by the teeth of the envious, who will judge me either presumptuous or excessive. But with my ears stopped I shall pass by them as if deaf, provided that this work, such as it is, may please holy and learned men. I do not recall having written anything in it that rivals can tear apart, but rather true things, manifest things, and things that lie open to the eyes of all. If they do not wish these things to be written, let them grieve that they were done as well. In this work only elegance of speech is lacking, and for this I do not fear being blamed among religious men. What then? Is truth to be despised because it is not clothed in the ornament of eloquence? Away with that. Plain and true speech is better than ornate and false speech. But these matters are nothing to the point. I therefore submit this little work to your examination, so that, if you judge it worthy, it may be read to the brothers; but if unworthy, it may flee the eyes of the lords. Farewell. In the year of the Lord 1493, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of May.

Here begins the deeply sorrowful book of lord Johannes, abbot of Sponheim, on the ruin of the order of our holy father Benedict

When I call back to mind the former beauty of our order, I grieve vehemently over the deformity which it now suffers, so that I would rather shed tears than form a mournful discourse. For who would not weep over its ruin, if he weighs its ancient glory? O, if only we would at some time recall to memory the once golden ages of this most sacred order, when, like a river of paradise in doctrine and holiness, it watered the whole Church throughout the world, we would easily perceive that its present condition is nothing. Indeed our observance, which we call regular, when compared with the institutions of the ancients, is found not only lesser, but in many respects more lax. How the gold has grown dim; how the finest color has changed! The splendor of extraordinary holiness, once gleaming, has been darkened by desire for earthly things; the standard of honor has yielded to the enticements of pleasures. Therefore let my eyes bring forth tears by day and by night, and let them not be silent, because the religion of my people has been crushed with a great crushing, with a very grievous wound. If I go out to the fields, behold the idle and vain; if I enter the monasteries, behold those wasted by pleasures. For I find many professors of the rule of father Benedict; I discern few walking according to his tradition. “You have multiplied the nation,” says the prophet to the Lord, “you have not increased the joy,” because, since the holy exercises of monks fail in many, corrupt hearts do not admit the true joy that is born of virtue. If only we would awaken, even late at last, after the destruction of so many souls, which, despising the yoke of regular observance, have descended into the abyss of damnation. If only we feared the sentence of Benedict our lawgiver, who so often strikes the madness of a hard abbot with the account that must be rendered to God.

I complain of your spiritual ruin.

Now therefore my speech must be directed to you, most reverend fathers, who celebrate the chapters of the order by apostolic authority; who receive the power to compel the rebellious to discipline; who have zeal for our order according to knowledge. And so I address you; to you I shall strive, according to my strength, to urge that you aid the order, now nearly collapsing, and I exhort you with all earnestness to do this. Consider, fathers, the miserable state of our religion, and aid its calamity as much as you can, if indeed you desire to endure to the end. You are not unaware of the wickedness of many who, so that they may be able to escape the discipline of the order, labor to tear themselves away from it. Their rashness must be resisted firmly, lest the unpunished malice of a few provide many with boldness for sinning. And the wickedness of a few, when deferred, always grows. Although the public body ought not to be corrupted by the evil of one person, nevertheless the ignorant crowd blames everyone because of the offense of a few. Therefore superiors who do not punish the wicked, who by their deformity cloud the reputation of the good, strengthen them. And so it pertains to you, fathers, to correct deformed monks as far as you can; it is the duty of your office to preserve the order in its vigor. And because a fool is not corrected by speech, what our hierophant set down almost monastically against the incorrigible should be applied generally to these men. Rise up now, fathers, for it is time; arm yourselves with zeal for regular discipline; I beg you, defend the inheritance of holy father Benedict; drive out the proud; correct the rebellious; rebuke the hard. Fight bravely for the preservation of our order. Arm yourselves with the armor of God and love of the order, intending to fight not so much by your own labors as by the help of Christ. His grace will provide you aid, if with purity of heart you pour out devoted prayers to him. Why then do you dissemble? Why do you not defend the portion of Saint Benedict? How long will the efforts of the wicked prevail against the holy order? Truly, fathers, truly the great necessity of the order demands a swift remedy. Look closely at the conduct of irregular abbots and monks, and weigh how wickedly they kick against the discipline of the order. Apart from the habit, and this itself disordered in many, nothing honorable in them either of honor or of religion. But reserving these matters for their assigned places, let us hasten on to what we intended.

On the Most Holy Primitive State of Our Order. Chapter 2

I somewhat doubt whether I shall be doing a thing pleasing to everyone if I commend in a few words the earlier state of our order, since I judge that, by praising the ancients, I have shown too little regard for the monks of our own time. For there are some who think themselves either the best monks, or dare to compare themselves with those excellent fathers who preceded us. However they measure themselves, let them not be angry with me if I do not dare to make our observance equal to that of the ancients. For if we contemplate their life in a proper light, we shall scarcely be able to compare the best among us, as he is regarded, with a good monk of that time.

Indeed, their holy way of life, bright with virtues, approved by signs, and illustrious through knowledge of all the Scriptures, earned favor with God and with men. For, hearing the voice of the Lord saying, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me,” they flew to monasteries in contempt of the world; and, placing their necks beneath the yoke of the rule, they humbly accepted the norm of obedience. Loving God with their whole heart, they sought nothing worldly in this life; but, despising all perishable things and being tested in the furnace of poverty, they happily came to the heavenly kingdom.

They were mature men, zealous and most learned: firm in faith, robust in hope, shining with twofold charity; pure in mind, outstanding in devotion, and adorned with the honor of every virtue. They had no care for earthly things; no enticement of pleasure was within them. Rather, turned toward God with all their strength, they conquered the world with its vanities. Hence kings and princes of this age, devout men and dear to God, because of the monks’ most holy way of life, became lovers of the order and magnificently exalted it with gifts and largesses.

They rejoiced that, in their times, the holy studies of monks were spreading and extending with glory into the farthest regions of the world. For the more the holy monks loved God, the more they were also loved by men. And the less they sought earthly things, the more, by God’s providence, they abounded in the necessities of the body. For to those who love God, the whole world is riches.

O how becoming was the face of your youth, holy religion of Benedict; how beautiful your appearance; how adorned with the splendor of all virtues your majesty. Who could be capable of weighing your worthily? You show to the people of God, freed from the servitude of Pharaoh in the desert, the way of three days, when you persuade men, rescued from the darkness of the world, to come for the love of God to the desert of cenobitic life through the three substantial vows of religion.

Blessed are the professors who, departing from the Egypt of this age, yearn with all their desires through this way of three days toward the land of eternal promise. This is the threefold cord of holy religion, which is not easily broken, which is adorned with the splendor of obedience, chastity, and poverty; which calls its lovers back to the heavenly homeland; which presents its devotees rejoicing to the supreme emperor, Christ Jesus. For although many things are necessary for regular observance, nevertheless I would dare to say that whoever has kept these three inviolate stands secure in the order, like a threefold cord. For all the statutes of the order were made for the preservation of these substantial things.

The holy monks of antiquity, carefully considering this, observed this way of the three substantial things with the greatest zeal: poor in spirit through contempt of all worldly things; continent through chastity of mind and body; obedient through humble subjection; and rich in every virtue. They shone forth as most renowned in doctrine and holiness, and by word as much as by example they turned many from injustice. Hence, as their merits advanced, many of them were promoted to the governance of churches; and the higher they had been placed, the more renowned they became in virtues. What church would not seek a priest from the order of Benedict? What people devoted to the Christian name would not desire a teacher from the company of monks? For for many years monks also in the order of the holy father Benedict, men most outstanding in every learning and holiness, have shone forth, as almost all who have written the old histories testify. And indeed, to speak without envy, the holy religion of Benedict easily surpasses all orders, if one considers its dignity, its widely extended dominion throughout the world, its men distinguished in learning and holiness, and finally their multitude. For this venerable plant has produced eighteen supreme pontiffs, more than two hundred cardinals, sixteen hundred archbishops, and three thousand five hundred bishops. But if anyone calls this total of illustrious prelates excessive and brings it into doubt, let him turn over the chronicles and old deeds, and he will find a few named out of many. Yet no one should think that the former beauty of the order is to be measured by the present, since ours bears no equal comparison to that, when in our times monks do not shine, as once they did, either in knowledge of the Scriptures or in holiness of conduct. Perhaps even now you will find devout monks, though few, but simple men. Yet for the governance of souls in this time devotion is not enough, if knowledge of the Scriptures is lacking. But if our monks are neither devout nor learned, they are rightly judged unworthy of the governance of churches. Many, indeed, walk well as subjects; but if they are raised to the government of others, they have never remained in the tranquility of their former life. And, to say briefly what I think, neither are monks worthy of churches, nor churches of monks, in this time. The reason, however, is not hidden from the prudent; it will have to be brought into the light hereafter, in its own time. Now, if you please, let us inquire briefly what the present condition of our order is.

On the lamentable present condition of our order. Chapter III

My eyes have failed because of tears; my bowels are truly troubled; my liver is poured out upon the earth over the destruction of my order, since the humble little child has fainted within it, since, cast down without honor, it lies open to the hands of the enemy. Let no one despise me as I grieve; let no one accuse my sorrow. I do not seek earthly honors; I do not covet ecclesiastical dignities, but I groan that learning and holiness have fallen away from my order. What have we to do with vain honors, we who seek our life in heaven? Alas, the crown has fallen from our head; monastic devotion has grown lukewarm; charity has grown cold; the honor of regular discipline has very greatly failed. Where now in our order is the devotion once so abundant in its most sacred men? Where is the venerable erudition in every variety of the Scriptures? Where is the solicitude of abbots for the care of the Lord’s flock? We see many monasteries founded according to the rule of Saint Benedict, in which, apart from the name and the habit, we see no trace of regular discipline. Over this, fathers, take up lamentation; deplore the ruin of our most holy order, if perhaps God may turn to mercy and leave a blessing behind him. And you transgressors, who are the cause of these tears, return at last, even late, to your heart; return, and fear the indignation of your blessed lawgiver. Attend to the desolation of the order that you bring on by your evil; fear the wrath of the Almighty, which you provoke by your crimes. Woe to us. The city of our religion is being destroyed by enemies all around us; the house of discipline is being reduced to nothing; and no one is found to resist, no one to set himself as a wall for the house of God. We all seek the things that are our own; we all conceal the common necessity of the order, until little by little we too fail. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our houses to foreigners. Monasteries consecrated as dwellings for monks are now becoming stables for clerics and fortresses for fighting soldiers. What shall I say? I am ashamed to utter what men without conscience are not ashamed to perpetrate in the cloisters of monks, men who disturb the privacy of religious persons and turn houses of prayer into dwellings of merchants. I suffer with your calamities, O venerable religion of Benedict; I groan that you have been exposed to plunder by every passerby. There is no one to console you among all your dear ones, because those who could help you are unwilling to succor you; those who wish to help you cannot. O with what beautiful grace you once flourished in the Church of God, when you brought forth men distinguished by every holiness and learning, and, as one younger, strong and steadfast, you used to drive away from yourself every dishonorable way of life. But now, as if wearied by old age and the oppression of many days, you have failed, and the strength of your youth has been taken away, so that your beauty is no longer in you. Where now is your zeal? Where is the comeliness of your face; where your honor, where the power once spread throughout the whole world? Where are your sons around your table, men most learned and most holy? Where is that study of letters, venerable to God and the angels, whose fervor once made you exalted above all orders? For they have failed, and you have been reduced almost to nothing; you have lost the beauty of your youth, and the strength of your adolescence has been scattered. To whom shall I compare you, or to whom shall I liken you, secluded daughter? To whom shall I make you equal and console you, mother of monks? Great as the sea is your crushing sorrow; who will heal you? O, if you had guarded against this ruin which you now experience, how blessed all nations would have called you. But you said in your abundance: I shall not be moved forever. Plenty has made you poor, and the abundance of temporal things has stripped you of all your adornment. You have brought forth perverse sons, disobedient, rebellious against holy institutions, who, hiding beneath the cloak of your honor, have stripped you of all your beauty. Alas, mother and virgin, you have grown old in a foreign land; you are counted with the dead; there is no appearance of your beauty. Rise now, blessed Benedict, most holy prince of monks, and see your order which you established, and your inheritance which you planted. Look upon the monks forgetful of your profession, immersed in earthly things, given over to pleasure, full of every outpouring of vices. You once gave them the best precepts for living; you commanded them to be free from the cares of secular affairs; you ordered their hearts to be stretched out toward the love of God alone. Rise, I say, most blessed father, and see the desolation of your order, which is confounded within by its own sons and scattered without by enemies. Monks despise the institutions of your piety; alien men seize the monasteries of your order. There is no one to defend the honor of your name, no one to guard the beauty of your most holy order. Rise also, O great pope Gregory, who under anathema forbade places consecrated to God for monks to be transferred to the uses of secular men, and see monks expelled from the monasteries and worldly clerics thrust in. You, once the chief of all churches, used to devote the greatest care to monastic honor, taking anxious precaution that nothing be presumed in the sacred order beyond the rule of Benedict. Now behold the ways of monks, most reverend bishop, bare of all honor and full of every disgrace. See how monasteries dedicated to your order are handed into the hands of clerics, and those that once could be compared to angelic choirs now become brothels of prostitutes. Rise, most glorious emperor and unconquered defender of the Christian faith, Charles, glory of the Germans, and see the calamity of the monks, you who once made the order of Father Benedict glorious and, by your zeal, spread it through almost the whole world. See now that the monasteries which you once founded have all been exposed to the plundering of enemies. You who once venerated the monastic order as the camp of God, now have compassion, holy prince, on it as despised by all and stripped of its goods. You once used, with great care, to bring tepid abbots and monks back to the observance of regular discipline, and, once reformed, to defend them with great solicitude from every harassment by your own men or by anyone else. Rise also, Berno, abbot of the monastery of Cluny, with your successors, you who in ancient times magnificently restored the holy order as it was collapsing and brought it back everywhere to its former beauty. Rise now, I say, and see how the iniquity of monks abounds: fury rules, crime overflows, and pleasure makes almost all of them mad. The beauty of reform has been taken away; discipline has collapsed; zeal for holy conduct has perished; humility has breathed its last. Rise, William, most reverend father, abbot of the monastery of Hirsau, who renewed the Cluniac restoration in Germany after its lapse, who provided abundant statutes for monastic conduct, who by your precepts strengthened the limbs of the weak, who by teaching and holiness illumined it like a most brilliant star. like a most brilliant star, you illumined it. Rise also, O most excellent fathers, authors of the various reforms, and see that your labors have now perished: your constitutions neglected, your exhortations despised, the protests of your solicitude held in contempt. By life and teaching you made the monastic order glorious, beloved by God, venerable to angels, holy to yourselves, and reverend to men. Where now are those merits? Where now are those labors of the saints?

Alas, venerable mother Religion, to what great calamity you have come. Those who once glorified you now despise you; those who honored you now hold you in contempt. You have abandoned the commands of your lawgiver; you have cast away the study of the Scriptures; therefore you have become contemptible. The sons whom you bore have done this evil to you. For as soon as monks began to savor earthly things, to neglect sacred reading, and to put inward things after outward, your excellent color was changed into filth. But what then? One who falls often sets himself to rise again; but you, once fallen, have never risen up completely.

What could Cluny, what Hirsau, what Melk, what the very recent Bursfelde, and whatever other reforms there may have been besides these, do for the whole order spread throughout the world? For although Cluny poured out the light of its integrity through all the provinces of the world, still it left many monasteries in various kingdoms in their former deformity. Indeed, from the time when our religion first fell, there has never been any general reform. O how easy is the descent to Avernus; how ready is the will to sin; how great, after a fall, is the difficulty of rising again to uprightness. All, so to speak, have fallen; few have risen from their deformity; many rot away in their pleasures.

I grieve over you, O flower of monastic beauty. I grieve, and very deeply indeed; and if I cannot help you otherwise, I pour out tears, hot and most bitter, for your contrition. But you too, O most reverend fathers, who love the honor of your order, who grieve over the contrition of our mystical Joseph, who desire to come to the eternal inheritance: attend to the state of our religion, look upon its desolation, think upon a remedy. See, wealthy monasteries are being snatched away in turn from the hands of Saint Benedict; see, cloisters of monks are becoming dwellings of clerics, and monks are being transferred from bad pursuits to the worst. You err, O prudence of the world; you are deceived, O piety of the age. Never will you be able to make a good canon out of a bad monk.

But you also, transgressors, pay attention; apostates from the order, listen. What madness drives you to destroy for Saint Benedict monasteries that you did not build? Do you think yourselves free from damnation if, after casting off the monastic habit, you sin as clerics? In the strict examination, will a presumed license to sin save you? Perhaps in another habit you will be unknown among monks? We shall see whether God approves your transfer, when you are in that dreadful judgment, where no order but everlasting horror dwells. For what other dwelling he is to receive, who has become a worse canon from being a bad monk, I do not sufficiently understand.

Senseless men, enemies to your very selves, who will teach you to flee from the wrath to come? Who will be able, or dare, to defend your wicked cause against Saint Benedict in that dreadful examination? Whom will you have as advocate for your rashness? Saint Benedict, prince of monks, will stand as witness against you; he will accuse you and condemn you. Who will excuse you? Do not flatter yourself, wicked despiser of the regular vow; do not soothe your conscience. If you have Benedict as your adversary, you will find none of the saints as your friend. For whoever offends one citizen of the heavenly homeland [offends all]; where there is highest and blessed tranquillity, there too will be the indivisible unity of souls.

Who, then, will be able to deliver you from the hand of the Lord, if all the saints stand against you? Call upon those who now deceive you, who take from you the habit of the order, who lead you away with flattering words, who become collaborators in your apostasy, so that they may defend you from the tribulation that is at hand. For if the righteous will scarcely be saved, where will the apostate and destroyer of the holy order appear? In that day the justice of a saint will not free the wicked man, nor will it bring help to itself or to another. Rather, those very men whom you now win over to yourself with gifts and presents as collaborators in such presumption will then be witnesses of your unhappiness, and companions as well. of your unhappiness, and companions as well. There will be no defender there of a depraved action, no advocate of iniquity; for where all things will be laid bare, there each person’s own accusing conscience will be enough for condemnation. There the army of the saints will stand against those who have wickedly profaned the dwellings of monks, who have impiously destroyed the order of the holy fathers.

But the authors of these things, which I seem to myself justly to have called iniquitous, try to excuse their deed by saying: “The corruption of monks, driving monasteries to extreme poverty, cannot be corrected and amended unless it is transferred into another state,” on account of many reasons which they devise for themselves, and which, God granting, we shall show in what follows to be empty. Finally, they say: “To correct bad monks by transfer not only is free from sin, but is also a great part of justice and piety.” But where can these things be distinguished? How will you prove by what has been said that they are true? To convert bad monks to goodness is praiseworthy and holy; but to make them canons is not to amend monks, but to have corrupted them. A bad monk will never be a good canon. A good monk, moreover, will not cast off the order that is his, but will cherish, cultivate, and love it.

I do not now wish to contend with words; I do not wish to be too severe or vehement; I do not wish to depict the effect of this transfer, which I do not doubt will gradually come to light. If you wanted to make bad monks into canons, why did you not put good monks back in their place? A change that is presumed to be made for the worse is not without transgression of a vow. Woe to you, deserters, who, so that satisfaction may be given to your pleasures, despise the order, deny the vow, and confound the rule of equity. We shall all stand before the tribunal of Christ, as the Apostle says, so that each one may receive according to what he has done in his body. What will the destroyers of monasteries receive there, who do not defer to the honor of the Almighty, who violate an agreement, who nullify the wills of the saints, who despise the decrees of law? If it is good to found monasteries, it is evil, let no one doubt, to destroy them. A contrary action will receive only a contrary reward. Finally, if no one dares to infringe the last will of a dead man in legacies made to any human being whatever, why do lovers of the world presume to usurp for themselves what has been offered to God and the saints?

If one who violates a man’s testament is guilty of a crime, what punishment does he deserve who wickedly changes to alien uses the foundations of monasteries made by bishops and princes with their approval? For indeed kings, princes, prelates, and the rest of the faithful who founded monasteries for the honor of God are proved to have wished this above all: that the foundations of this institution should obtain an inviolable effect. If they had wished to have canons in the monasteries, they would not have placed monks there.

But the blind ambition of men has gained such strength that it thinks of nothing less than future things, and loves nothing more than perishable things. O wretched condition of human frailty, O damnable forgetfulness ever of God’s commandments. Laws have consented to sins, and what is public has begun to be permitted. Crimes blaze everywhere, and far and wide, in a manifold kind of sinning, wicked ingenuity works harmful deceits and frauds through corrupt minds. This man confounds an order; that one utterly destroys it. This man withdraws the will of the saints; that one writes false allegations of dismemberment. Here monks are barred from monasteries; there the goods of one order are given to another. The enemy incites the restless; the slanderer attacks; the false witness defames. Already to be innocent among the guilty is a crime. What love of honesty, what integrity could there be in minds where the purpose of the order is abandoned, where the vow made to God is revoked? What shame about things remains there, what virtue can possibly stand firm, where divine right is violated, where there is no fear of laws, no dread of the judge? What can be called more inhuman, what more cruel, than to wish to usurp divine right for oneself, to confound what is lawful, to break a vow, to withdraw the worship owed to God?

O that day, fearful and dreadful to all mortals, when the wrath of God, long tolerating these evils of monks, will be avenged; when apostates will feel their due punishment, because as adversaries of the holy order they will pay the vengeance for their rashness. What then will it profit you to have denied the vow made to God, to have extinguished the sacred order, to have enjoyed a brief and shameful pleasure in the flesh? When the Lord begins to count his worshipers, to reward true monks with the promised prizes, to separate the good from the evil, to divide the truthful from the false, what place will you receive, what seat will you have?

...the outcome, you who deny the holy purpose of religion, who break your vows, who despise the order, who violate your faith. Would that you weighed the brevity of this life; would that you feared the examination of future retribution; would that, pierced by saving teachings, you heeded the voice of the Lord calling you to repentance and saying: “I do not desire the death of the one who is dying, but that he turn back and live.” And through the prophet: “Return to the Lord your God, for he is merciful and loving, patient and of great mercy, and he revokes his sentence,” if only you would wash away your guilt with tears.

But you do not fear the judgment of God; you spurn his clemency; you despise the patience of his long-suffering. Therefore the Apostle says to each of you: “Do you not know that the patience of God leads you to repentance? But according to your hardness and impenitent heart you store up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgment of God, who will render to each one according to his works.” He said that the judgment of God is just because it is late, because he delays long and greatly, so that the long patience of God may take counsel for you unto life. But how will you do penance, you who do not acknowledge guilt? You will grieve, but too late, when there is no longer a place for repentance, but only the repayment of vengeance. Then punishment will pay back the impious man and the sinner, when repentance for sin can no longer be of use.

O how such men will burn then; how wretched, how unhappy those who, for the briefest pleasure of this age, have made themselves deserters of God and rebels against the command of God, and have done the will of the devil, so that they must be tormented with him in inextinguishable fire. Would that these things clung in their hearts; would that those who desert their order, who break their vow, who so boldly lie both to God and to his saints, thought on these things. But we strive in vain. They in no way receive our words, who despise the words of God and of the Church and of Saint Benedict. Therefore this cause of the order must be carried on not with words, but with deeds.

Let us therefore arm ourselves, fathers, with all our strength, and let us prepare for the contest with an uncorrupted mind, devoted virtue, and firm constancy, against those who desire to destroy our order, who strip off the monk, who take away monasteries, who desert the rule, who stand as rebels against their visitors. Let us arm ourselves, I beseech you, fathers, with zeal for regular discipline and for the honor of the order, sparing no labors and no expenses, lest this pernicious plague, through our silence, gradually infect the whole order.

Never has so great a necessity lain upon our order; never has it been entangled in so many evils. Behold, monks strip off the habit; monasteries are transferred into dwellings of clerics; and while we are absorbed in private advantages, while we flee labors, while we spare expenses, while we take counsel for our own avarice, the order perishes, religion passes away, the worship of God vanishes. Already many monasteries, by the malice of the times, not to say by our own sloth, have been transferred away from the order; and unless we keep watch in another way, the rashness of wicked men threatens that greater losses will be inflicted on us. Indeed, where the audacity of fools is not immediately restrained, an occasion for presuming similar things is offered to the rest.

What shall I say of the monks whom we still have in the order only by habit and tonsure? And, lest we place the members before the head, what is more unhappy in this wretched time than deformed abbots? They care for nothing less than the rule; they pursue nothing more eagerly than lust, avarice, pleasure, pride, and the vanity of the world. Thus, when the head is infected, all the members of the body are corrupted. Now in monasteries where the rule is despised, where discipline is not observed, what else is seen but a kind of spring of all vices? No obedience, no poverty, no chastity is maintained among them for love of virtue; among them, to live without crime is itself a crime. They are corrupt men, perverse monks, artificers of deceit, authors of fraud, ministers of iniquity, friends of crime, who flee discipline, now despise observance, destroy the order, and confound unity.

And truly, fathers, unless you swiftly provide remedies for these evils, in a short time you will see the order diminished and will grieve over it. But perhaps you say: “Our vigilance has never been lacking; our diligence has never ceased. We have always opposed the rashness of the wicked; we have always tried to prevent the dismemberment of monasteries, and we have never accomplished anything. What do our labor, our efforts, our heavy expenses achieve, when princes and rulers of churches oppose themselves so powerfully?” I know, fathers, that what you say is true; I know what has been done, and I know it has been continuous. But I beseech you, do not be willing to take my words in a bad sense if I dare to respond to these objections. Your vigilance in the causes of the order is known to me; your labors are evident; the magnitude of your expenses is proven; the continuation always applied in these matters is known.

But I should like you to remember, fathers, two verses of Horace in which he says: “There is a measure in things; there are, finally, fixed limits, beyond and short of which the right cannot stand.” We have many adversaries, and of different kinds. We must not fight against all in one way, but in different ways, in varied ways, and with discernment. We are monks, professors of humility; our struggle must be begun with prayers, entreaties, and supplications. High Jupiter is not to be provoked with savagery; judgment is not to be brought rashly against the gods. Divine powers are appeased by prayers, not by threats.

But enough of this. For I believe, fathers, that you understand what I mean. Nor are these matters to be explained indiscriminately to everyone, but only to those who have zeal for the order and the power to carry it out.

Against those who transfer themselves from the order, or have already long since transferred themselves. Chapter iii

Whether I am justly moved enough against those who try to tear themselves away from our order, I do not quite know; and even if I knew, I would scarcely dare to say, since the patience of the Almighty tolerates them so long and scourges them so slowly. But when I look upon the end of those who have already long since torn themselves away from the order, I consider this long-suffering of God’s patience to have been avenged with a sufficiently severe punishment. For, as we have learned from the report of those who knew many of them, few of those who cast off the monk died a good death. Rather, called suddenly from this life without signs of penitence and without the sacraments of the Church, they gave manifest proof of their unhappiness.

What then shall we say to these things? Shall we rejoice in the perdition of the dying? Far be it. The Lord is the one who tolerates sinners here for a long time so that they may be converted; he is also the one who condemns the unconverted more harshly. But we fear his sentence with the prophet, saying: You are just, Lord, and your judgment is right. And the just man, whatever death may overtake him, will be in refreshment. But concerning the impious the prophet says: The death of sinners is most evil. We recall the wicked men’s destruction for this reason: so that at least by fear we may call the rest back from the evil they have begun.

But how will they receive our words, they who mock both those above and those below? Unless deeds are added to words, exhortations accomplish nothing among malicious minds. Still the stiff-necked people murmurs in the desert; still the impious race blasphemes its lawgiver; still the shameless nation deliberates returning to Egypt. They fear dying in solitude, when they should have feared this alone: dying outside solitude.

O hard mind of men, O destructive liberty of monks, how far does your cruelty rage, which does not know how to spare even those whom it has as authors and friends? He who is worthless to himself, to whom will he be good? O unheard-of zeal of monks; O monstrous crime: to mock God, to deny what was promised to him, to break faith, to withdraw the service that is owed. What is more cruel than this impiety, what more wicked than this sacrilege?

O perverse monk, O wicked apostate, O most criminal perjurer, how long will you set yourself against the kindness of God? How long will you mock the mercy of the Almighty? You are a monk; you will also be judged as a monk, even if you have put off the skin along with the habit. Why do you depart from the holy order? Why do you lie to God? Believe me: the Almighty will not give his honor to another; he will not remit to you forever what he once solemnly accepted as offered. Before you promised God, you were free and of your own judgment; but after you promised, you began to belong to God. Now it is not permitted to you to give up what belongs by right to God. Your voice bound you to God: either you will be saved as a monk, or otherwise you will not be saved.

Behold, before your eyes are the way of life and the way of death; choose whichever you wish. If you keep faith with God, if you fulfill your promise, you will have a reward; if you deny it, you will receive punishment for your contempt. Hence Paul admonishes you, saying: Brothers, do not be deceived; God is not mocked. For whatever a man has sown, that also he will reap. What do you presume you will receive, you who sow in the flesh? For he says: Those who sow in the flesh will also reap from the flesh. But the fruit of the flesh has no share in the inheritance of the saints.

Why then do you deceive yourself; why do you trust vainly in vanity? Why do you transgress the ancient boundaries that the holy fathers set? You deny the vow that you solemnly made to God, and you expect a portion with God’s elect as though you were just.

There is no share for the impious with the sons of God. See, you squander the inheritance of the Lord; you enrich strangers from the goods of the holy father Benedict; you deny your promise; and, so that you may sin without restraint, you heap falsehoods upon truths. If you are a good monk, do not abandon your purpose; do not turn away from the seclusion of the monastery. But if you are a bad monk, you will never be a good canon. For one who is not good is bad; and one who is bad is not as he ought to be, and therefore is unjust. The unjust have no share in the kingdom of God. And it matters little where you are, so long as, being bad everywhere, you are tormented everywhere in misery. Unless perhaps you wish to be liable to a double condemnation: that, while you are a bad monk and an unrighteous canon, guilty and false in both places, you should claim the reward of both.

Do not put before me the dispensation of the Roman pontiff; unless God approves it, it will by no means excuse you. Not everything that is done on earth through the supreme pontiff is pleasing to God. Now if you cry out and are angry with me, as though I were judging the deeds of the vicar of Christ, I answer: I truly embrace, honor, and venerate the supreme pontiff as the vicar of Christ, and I in no way censure his deeds; but I know that he is a man, and that as a man he can both be deceived and deceive. No wonder: amid so great a care for all the churches, amid so great an occupation with affairs, when false things are reported as true, a mind distracted in many directions is easily deceived. But you, apostate from the holy order, who think yourself safe because of the bull of dispensation, see that after death, as the common saying goes, you do not meet an illiterate demon, who does not know letters, who does not defer to an appeal, who despises the pleas for your immunity. Believe me: there is no cleverness that can deceive God.

O wretched, unhappy, senseless apostate, what will you answer to Saint Benedict concerning the profession that you spurn? What will you answer to almighty God concerning the vow that you despise? Whom will you be able to appoint as advocate for your case in that fearful judgment, where nothing can be hidden? There all things, all things, will be naked and open; there no place for saving repentance is any longer left; there the opportunity for excuse is denied to all. What will that dispensation, rashly presumed here, profit you there, when it will be permitted neither to prove it by testimony nor to defend it by law? Then you will see, O perverse monk; then you will understand what strength a license fraudulently obtained contains in itself, when you have felt the vengeance of the eternal judge in punishment. Why do you allege dispensation to me, when you proclaim a license to sin? Do you think that by the authority of the supreme pontiff you can escape the wrath of God? I dare say it: the pope's dispensation will profit you nothing if it has been obtained by fraud, by deceit, by lying, or unjustly. It is not good, it is not just, what is acquired by evil arts. For a dispensation to be just, four things are required, without which a dispensation will by no means save you. What are they? Necessity, suitability, usefulness, and propriety. But you, perjured monk, who are led by will alone, who despise God and the order, invent necessity, display false suitability, lie about usefulness, and compose propriety by fraud. Let the necessity be evident and manifest, the suitability true, the usefulness not private but public, the propriety not fictive but proper; otherwise the dispensation will be unjust.

There is certainly nothing for which I am angry at the supreme pontiff in this dispensation; I censure nothing in his deeds, since I know well that he has been circumvented by the false reports of monks. You are the guilty ones, you the deceitful, you who must be marked with iniquity, O perverse monks, wicked apostates, who by lying, deceit, and fraud seek what you despair of obtaining by just prayers. What necessity drives you to desert the order and pass into the state of secular life? What suitability persuades you to break what, once promised to God, no one is permitted to revoke? What usefulness is there in laying aside the monastic habit, deserting the order, denying one's purpose, transferring the monastery, and not only breaking but utterly casting away the vow made to God before all the saints? Or what propriety is there for a monk dedicated to God to return to the world, break faith, commit perjury, and perpetrate sacrilege? O transgressors and impious men, how will you ever be able to excuse so unspeakable a presumption? None of these four accords with your transfer; none of them confirms your dispensation. For what necessity could have driven you to this rashness? What cause of this dismemberment could you allege before the vicar of Christ? The poverty and ruin of monasteries. But you could quickly have restored this, if you had lived according to the Rule of Saint Benedict.

For a dispensation to be just, four things, etc.

For you have been made poor by wicked habits; by holy conduct you would be made rich again. Look around you at monasteries restored to regular observance, how, after extreme poverty, by the Lord’s generosity they are once more advancing toward their former wealth. And indeed this is quite just. For the Lord promised us in the Gospel, saying: First seek the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be added to you. But you put aside the love of God, neglect his worship, give yourselves to games, feasts, drunkenness, and gluttony, and do not attend to the work of the Lord. You care nothing for regular observance; therefore, because spiritual things have been neglected, by the just judgment of God temporal things too have failed you. False, then, is the necessity which you invent, and insufficient the dispensation which you allege.

But perhaps you say: We are not sons of peasants, but of nobles; we are noble, delicate, and weak. We cannot keep the observance of servants, farmers, and shepherds; fasts, abstinence, vigils, disciplines, and the other exercises which it contains are unbearable for us, and we neither can nor ought to imitate them. What then? Are you not a monk because you are noble, because you are delicate, because you are weak? There is no way for you to defend yourself against Saint Benedict, who in the Rule made ample provision for every condition, every rank, every age, and who with the greatest discretion assists the delicate and the weak. Are you alone, from among the noble, tender, and delicate, to have professed the monastic order? Many most noble young men, sons of emperors, kings, dukes, and princes, have shone in our order at various times by holiness and learning under regular observance. They, nobler, more delicate, and more tender than you, yet keeping cenobitic discipline inviolate, will stand against you as a testimony, readily showing to those who love God what, full of pride, you cast away as unbearable.

Nor do I bid you imitate the observance which you despise as that of peasants, but the Rule which you promised, which you vowed, which you pledged yourself before God to keep. If anything in our way of life displeases you, you have the Rule: fashion your life according to its precepts. No one demands more from you; no one requires more. The exercises of monks which you condemn in observers of the Rule, the Rule itself teaches, the Rule itself commands. If you are unwilling to imitate them, you have condemned yourself by the sentence of your own mouth.

For conversion of morals according to the Rule of Saint Benedict enjoins on its professors fasts, abstinence, vigils, disciplines, obedience, patience, humility, poverty, and the other exercises of monastic discipline, which you judge hard and heavy; yet they belong so properly to the Rule that without them no one deserves to be called a monk. Tell me, I ask you, transgressor of your vow and of your order, tell me: do you also wish to live blessedly? Do you also hope that you can come to eternal life? You will answer: This question you ask is foolish. Who does not wish to live blessedly? Who does not hope to come to eternal life? Therefore I both desire to be blessed, and I trust that I can come to the heavenly homeland.

If, then, this is so, if you trust that you will receive the blessed life, why do you desert, spurn, and despise the way that leads to it? You err, wretched unhappy man; you are deceived. One does not come to the kingdom except through humility, nor to rest except through labor, through abstinence, through obedience, through poverty. For Scripture says: Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God. But you, unhappy apostate, who reject the order, spurn humility, refuse obedience, hate poverty, and despise patience, with what rashness do you presume to such heights? If the mouth that lies kills the soul, unless you do penance you have no part in the kingdom of Christ and of God: you who lie not to man but to God, who violate the covenant, who deny faith, who withdraw the vow of religion made to God.

The dispensation of the Roman pontiff will not save you, I dare say, when you seek it by fraud, report it by lies, and extort it by importunate petitions. For the four things which we said make a due dispensation are clearly seen not to have come together at all in your frauds. For that transfer which you make from the holy order is neither useful nor necessary, and therefore it is unfitting and dishonorable. In it, indeed, will is put in place of necessity, pleasure in place of usefulness, carnality in place of fittingness, impiety in place of honor. Is this the proper occasion for your dispensation? Keep for yourself your little letters obtained by fraud; keep the instruments of denial and apostasy. It is good for me to remain under the Rule of the most loving father Benedict, in which, if I have sinned in anything through weakness, I trust that I have him as a kindly advocate before the strict judge, whose order, while I love, venerate, and guard it with all the diligence I can. But I do not know whom you will have as patron, since you cast aside the order, offend all the saints, and publicly lie to God. For the Rule shows that anyone who, after profession of the order, lives otherwise than he promised is to be condemned as one who mocks almighty God. For it says: Therefore, if he should act otherwise, let him know that he will be condemned by him whom he mocks.

Hear this, sons of Belial; pay attention, deserters of the order, and if there is any sense in you, shudder. “Let the monk,” it says, “know that he will be condemned by him whom he mocks.” What greater mockery is there, what crime more wicked, than to deny the faith promised to God, to set aside the vow, to lie to him, and to withdraw service from him? I wonder, and indeed very greatly, whether such criminal apostates can ever, even for an hour, have true gladness amid the confusion of conscience and the remorse of synderesis. But, to confess simply what I think, I cannot be induced by anyone’s persuasions to believe that they will henceforth live at any time without the gravest torment of their conscience.

We have learned by probable experience that the monks of whom we are speaking, after the transfer of their order, become almost mad, prone to every shameful work, desperate, without devotion, without affection, without piety, without conscience, without honor, senseless, disturbed, foolish, and obstinate, so that they care nothing for God, for his kingdom, for purgatory, for hell, for death, for virtue, or for conversion; they attend to nothing and wish to hear nothing. And in them is fulfilled that saying of the wise man: “When the impious man has come into the depth of evils, he despises.” And, with a troubled conscience, he always presumes that saying upon himself.

Hence such apostates, as if freed from a long prison, boldly cast themselves into every vice, and compensate for the shortness of time by the magnitude of their crimes. They are offended if anyone wishes to speak in their presence about the love of God, the study of the Scriptures, or the honorableness of life. Nor is it surprising if they cannot hear God’s words, since after so unspeakable an apostasy they exist as unbelievers. They hate the one who rebukes at the gate; they do not admit words of salvation; they despise the admonition of penitence. Therefore the wise man says: “Consider the works of God, because no one can correct the one whom he has despised.” If God could ever despise any men, these, or men like them, are foremost: those who, after their vow, become unfaithful to him. Therefore, being for this reason despised, they rarely flee to penitence. So let them know that they are condemned by him whom they mock. For they are guilty of a double sacrilege, because they unjustly take themselves away from God and their monasteries from Saint Benedict. And whoever has furnished occasion, favor, counsel, or help for these dismemberments has done irrecoverable harm to the order and to Saint Benedict. For the rule of law says: “He who gives occasion for damage is seen to have caused the damage.” Therefore such men are liable to the holy lawgiver of monks and bound to restitution. Let them see how, at the last judgment, they will answer God and his saints, whose temporal goods they unjustly usurp for themselves or for others.

Woe to those who unjustly take what belongs to others, things which they can never restore either in this life or in the life to come. Woe also to you, apostate and renegade monks, who confound right, despise equity, and violate faith and covenant. Woe also to you abbots, who do not correct the evil pursuits of your monks, who consent to their apostasy, and who yourselves apostatize from the order along with them.

O abbot, shepherd and idol, you who make wolves from sheep and secular men from monks, what answer will you give to the highest shepherd when you are compelled to render an account of your stewardship? What will you say to Saint Benedict when he demands his sheep back from you? He will require monks from you, not canons. What then will you answer him? Are canons monks?

When that day comes, to be dreaded by the guilty among mortals, on which the just Judge will repay each person according to his works, Benedict, the lawgiver of monks, do not doubt it, will accuse you gravely. Against you he will produce as witnesses all true monks of his order, who with one voice will cry out to the Judge: “Just Judge, Jesus Christ, who attend to all that is ours, behold the madness, crime, sacrilege, and cruelty of this apostate, who destroyed the holy order, called monks back to the world, broke faith, and with unheard-of presumption violated the vow made to you and to us.”

Wretched man, what will you do, so gravely accused? Where will you flee from the face of the Lord’s fury? To whom will you flee? There will be no place for flight, but you will stand before the tribunal of Christ to receive a harsh sentence, unless by penitence you first make amends for these things. and tears you have taken care to come before the face of the Lord. No room for excuse will be granted when you have been accused in the judgment of him who knows all things. For whatever you wish to say will be nothing, because, accused outwardly and inwardly by the testimony of your conscience, you will be judged worthy of condemnation. You seize what belongs to divine right, though you had been appointed guardian of it; therefore you will hear the Lord saying, “Pay what you owe.” That is: return the monks whom he entrusted to your faith; return the monastery which you received to govern; return faith, return the vow, return holiness, return gain, return merit, return honor. Pay what you owe.

I appointed you shepherd of my sheep, that you might preserve them in holy religion, teach them, instruct them, amend them, correct them when they sinned. But you hated discipline and cast my words behind you; if you saw a thief, you ran with him, and with adulterers you set your portion. Intent on the pleasures of the flesh, you did not guard my sheep; therefore pay what you owe. After monks have come from the world to religion, they have become subject to my right, and it is not lawful for them to return any further to the world. But you were appointed minister of my sheep, not their lord; nor was it lawful for you in any way to alienate, usurp, or plunder anything of what is mine by right. You were guardian of my goods, not their owner. What had been acquired you ought faithfully to have preserved; what had been scattered you ought faithfully to have sought out again. But you, forgetful of me, have squandered my inheritance and scattered the sheep; indeed, from sheep you have made beasts, from servants enemies, from confederates infidels. Now, therefore, pay what you owe.

I entrusted monks to you, whom you ought to have preserved in their holy purpose: to raise up those lying fallen, to care for the weak, to restore those failing, to kindle the sluggish with charity, to stir up the negligent, to rebuke sinners, to correct the disobedient, to restrain the dissolute, and to hold back the perverse from their evil pursuits. But you cared for none of the things that belonged to your office. Given over to greed, luxury, and gluttony, you not only permitted monks to return to the world, but, utterly forgetful of pastoral care, you became the leader and companion of their apostasy. Now therefore pay what you owe: restore what he entrusted to your faith, not to say your faithlessness. But because you will not be able to restore it, you will be cast into a dark prison, covered with the gloom of death; from there you will not come out until you pay the debt, which you will never pay. There not only will you receive punishment for your own deeds, but also for all the sins of those whom, committed to your rule, you neglected to correct. For so Saint Benedict says in the Rule: “Let the abbot know that the fault of the shepherd will lie upon him if the head of the household can find any lack of profit in his sheep.”

Therefore, abbot, whoever you are, if you are wise, if you understand, if at last you believe in the future judgment, if you desire to escape the torments of hell, do not consent to the depraved desires of monks; do not agree to criminal dismemberments. What does pleasure in this very brief life profit you, for which you will be compelled to receive eternal punishments? Do not, I beg you, do not inflict so great an injury on Saint Benedict; do not take from him monasteries which not even all your parents built. Let it be enough for you that you are abbot, that you live from his patrimony. Do not desert the order; do not consent to diabolical suggestions; do not make your monks seculars; do not resign the monastery committed to you into the hands of outsiders. Recognize yourself as a man subject to death, of brief life upon the earth. Do not do so ruinous a thing; do not commit this crime; do not perpetrate so inestimable a sacrilege. Remain in the holy order, and do not desert your purpose, if you desire to come to eternal life.

For the Lord says: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Behold, you have put your hand to the plow; behold, with Lot you have gone out from Sodom. If you look back, if you corrupt your purpose, if you return to the world, you are not fit for the kingdom of God, and you will by no means deserve to receive it. But if you persevere in your renewal, if you keep a good will, if you have the charity of God in your heart, believe me: even if you have lived negligently in some things, you will find a merciful intercessor before God in the saint for whose love, though you could have done so, you refused to desert the order. Remember, I beseech you, the covenant of the Lord which, when you entered the order, you made with him; and do not be unfaithful to your redeemer. Do not break your vow; do not violate the pact by so criminal a perjury. Consider the pact, attend to the condition, and beware lest you prove false to God. Before you promised him, you were free; but after you promised, you were no longer free, but became the servant of God. Henceforth it is not lawful for you to desert this servitude voluntarily undertaken; it is not lawful for you nor, after profession, to return anywhere to the world. But if you corrupt your purpose, if you deny your vow, if you return to the world, God will not keep you in that rank in which he would previously have kept you, before you entered the monastery. For before your entrance into religion you were, as it were, of the Lord’s household, among his subjects and laborers. You were, I say, God’s creature; you were his servant, his slave; but you were not his friend, his officer, his intimate, his secretary. But after you became a monk, you promised fidelity to the Lord, that you would cling to him continually, that where the Lord is, there you too would be as his minister. He chose you as a friend and, so to speak, as guardian of his body, so that in his sight you might always minister to him and fulfill his will in all things. For this is what you promised.

Therefore, if you withdraw from him to whom you vowed yourself, if you are found unfaithful and a despiser of your vow, he will not have you in his household as before, before you became a monk, but certainly he will shun you as faithless, a prevaricator, perjured, and lying. For the monk who denies his vow denies Christ. For blessed Jerome says: I, who seem to be a monk, if I corrupt my purpose, have denied Christ. But you prevaricators, who, despising the sacred order, have been made canons from monks, you, I say, have not only corrupted your purpose, but, what is more criminal, have utterly destroyed it. Now, therefore, either you have denied Christ, or what Jerome says is false. But since what so great a man taught cannot be false, it remains that you are deniers of Christ, perjured and unfaithful.

Would that at least late, at last, you would undergo the remedies of repentance, you who stand in such great dangers. If he has denied Christ who violates the monastic purpose, who defrauds the whole order and all the saints of their due, what does he deserve? If he always burns who unjustly occupies the professions of men, of what punishment is he worthy who usurps for himself goods dedicated to God and the saints? If, according to ecclesiastical tradition, he sins mortally who unjustly claims for his own use another’s house or field, how great a crime is he guilty of who turns the house and possessions of God and the saints into dwellings for secular persons? And if a man is bound to make restitution to another man for things wrongly taken away, how much more are those who take monasteries away from God and Saint Benedict bound to restitution?

If a sin is not forgiven unless what has been taken away is restored, when will those be able to be absolved from guilt who turn the dwellings of God’s servants to alien uses? For monasteries once taken away will never be restored to the order. Woe to those who did not fear to make for themselves this testament, which they will not be able to revoke by any satisfaction whatsoever.

O monk, O abbot, you who revoke your vow solemnly made to God, who cast aside the habit of holy religion, who transfer monasteries consecrated to Saint Benedict into the hands of clerics: what will you answer when accused before almighty God? Perhaps you will say: You changed your vow for the better. Indeed, they do not know the difference between vows. To live as a canon is good and holy, if someone has been called by God to that state. But if someone has been called to the grade of monastic perfection, it will never be lawful for him to descend to the canonicate. For no one doubts that canons are inferior to monks.

Tell me, whoever you are who stand as a cooperator in the depravity of monks, who transfer them from their order, who defend unjust causes against God and Saint Benedict, who are regarded as the supporter and patron of their apostasy. Tell me, then: what do you think? Is it lawful for monks professed in a holy order to put off the habit and become secular canons? If it is lawful, why do you obtain a dispensation from the Roman pontiff at such great expense, labor, weariness, and through such importunate princes? For lawful things do not need dispensation. But if it is unlawful, who will make it lawful? A dispensation? I very much doubt it. Whether the pope can dispense in this matter or cannot is not for me to discuss, since it is agreed that he has the fullness of power. Far be it from me, therefore, to derogate even in the least from the authority of the supreme pontiff. For he is the vicar of Christ, and it is not lawful for a man to judge anything concerning him.

Are you therefore secure if he does what he seems able to do? Believe me, you are not secure, because you gave a false account of the reason for your transfer; you fraudulently deceived the vicar of Christ, because both the narrative was lying and the petition, not to say the extortion, was importunate. Finally, the bull of your transfer, carefully and cautiously written, does not absolve you from the order, nor take away the vow, nor remove religion, nor consent to your laying aside the monastic habit. Do you think that the supreme Do you suppose that the supreme pontiff would wish to involve his conscience in your sins? Read the bull attentively. Consider its words. Note the intention of the one dispensing, and you will find that even after the dispensation you are still a monk before God and the Church. For I myself have both seen and read the bull concerning this transfer. In it the pope consents that the monks may have prebends and benefices, and nevertheless commands that they render to Saint Benedict what they have vowed. He grants them the habit of a canonicate, but by no means removes the monastic form. See how secure you are, you who overstep the limits of the indult, who invent falsehoods in place of truths, who lie to the vicar of Christ, who no less extort bulls than obtain them.

In matters that belong to positive law, dispensation makes lawful what otherwise was not lawful, if a reasonable cause requires it. But you are commanded by divine law to render a vow made to God; and from this the pope never intends to absolve you without necessity. But tell me, I ask, what is the cause of your transfer? Perhaps you will answer what all those so transferred are accustomed to answer: There are many causes that necessarily drove me to this. What, then, are they? The poverty of the monastery; the attacks of ravagers; the exactions of princes; the bad government of abbots. These are the causes of our transfer. But a net woven from spiders’ blood is easily broken if any weight is placed upon it.

You apostates, however, recount falsehoods as truths, and under the fiction of poverty you deceive the vicar of Christ, indeed, even yourselves. Would that your poverty were real, as you allege; would that you had less earthly substance, as you mendaciously pretend. Why do you allege poverty, you who possess very great riches? Who does not know that the condition of the monastery of Saint Alban in temporal goods was most abundant before the transfer? What shall I say of Ellwangen, once a distinguished monastery, whose riches could have sufficed for a prince? Surely the monastery of Saint Burkhard ought not to have been transferred on account of poverty, since even to the present day it surpasses all the monasteries of that province in riches? What shall I say of Seltz, what of Klingenmünster, monasteries very abundant in relation to a moderate standard? Could poverty truly have been alleged in their transfer? C iij O betrayers of your order and transgressors of your vow, do you believe that lying words can remain hidden? Your deceits are not concealed from us, nor are we ignorant of the riches that you deny. If you were poor in the way you pretend, some of you could not spend two thousand florins, others four thousand, and some even more, for your transfer. Why, then, do you allege poverty, when you are not poor? Why do you say that you have nothing from which you can live as monks, when you can spend such great sums of money in order to become canons?

Finally, if the poverty of the monasteries oppresses you, why do you not undertake reform? Why do you not bring private possessions, contrary to the Rule, back to common use? For as long as each man loves his own little provision, the condition of the community falls. But if you lived without property according to the Rule you have professed, with the Lord providing, you would abound in all riches. But you, neglecting spiritual things, devote your labor to the pleasure of the flesh; for that reason you have come down to lack of temporal goods. I would say this against those who, through contempt of spiritual goods, also suffer want of temporal goods.

But those who transferred themselves from the order, if they had been poor, would have remained in it. For many expenses, costs, and perquisites are required, which the poor could never have paid. Therefore those who take poverty as the cause of their transfer are lying. And as for the fact that they allege wars, battles, and devastations by enemies in defense of their dismemberment, every prudent man knows that this is frivolous, empty, and insufficient. For all the things they recount can be hostile no less to canons than to monks.

And because they call the government of abbots a cause, this is rightly ascribed to the fault of those whose election sets a bad rector over the monastery. Nor unjustly: as the monks are, so is the monks’ abbot. For bad monks are judged unworthy of a good abbot. Finally, if the abbot is bad, how does a good provost come forth? Other remedies should have been sought by you from experienced men, by which you might have advanced in the order without complaint. But he seeks an occasion who wishes to depart from a friend; he invents countless causes who desires to dismember himself from the order. Now he has alleged the debts of the monastery, now he falsely claims hostility. D “If such a monastery,” he says, “most blessed father, is transferred into a secular church, the divine worship will be greatly increased by it. It will make the princes obedient to the Roman Church, peace for the surrounding peoples, and will procure the greatest honor for the Christian name.” O deceitful tongue, O lying lip, O contriver of deceit, O inventor of fraud, O minister of iniquity, who tell false things for true, evil things for good, sacrilegious things for holy ones. Kings and princes were accustomed to build monasteries, not also to destroy them; you ought not mendaciously to have alleged them as patrons of your perfidy. For if they seek the praise of God, they never consent that monasteries be transferred away from the holy order. But if they wished to attend to their own advantages, they would know that they receive more profit from monasteries than from collegiate churches. Whence, then, comes such unheard-of presumption in you, that before the vicar of Christ you lie that a thing is pleasing to princes, when it is known to be contrary to them? Thus you act, thus you deceive the vicar of Christ, teacher of evil, deviser of deceit, inventor of falsehood, author of crime, craftsman of iniquity, you who live by fraud, who fortify yourself with impiety, who attack religion, who gape after profits, who are fed by pleasure, to whom everything depends on crime and nothing on the love of God.

Far be it from faithful princes that they should take away from Saint Benedict the monasteries which their devout forefathers once built for him. Woe to you, perverse monk, who presume to inflict so great a disgrace on the order that you destroy monasteries which neither you nor your parents built. Woe also to you who offer patronage to wicked matters against God and his saints, who entangle yourself in the sins of others, who sell your tongue, who for a paltry price incur the indignation of God and of all the saints. Woe to you, I say, advocate of reprobate monks, who do injury to God, who wickedly mock the works of his saints, who deny the right of equity, who urge monks by words and deeds to return to the world. O what will you answer to almighty God when an account of all your works is demanded from you?

When you are accused by Saint Benedict as the destroyer of his order, what then will you set against the accusation of the saints? What will you answer? How will you excuse yourself? Who will have a distinct oration before the judge for your deliverance? Whom will you then be able to have as advocate, you who are now the advocate of the wicked against God? Would that you were wise and understood; would that you provided for your last things and did not entangle yourself in the sins of others. But, inflamed by the torches of greed, you think only of the profits of this life, and show clearly that you have no understanding at all of future calamities. Therefore, just as birds are caught in a snare, so you will be caught, when you do not expect it, in your sins and in the sins of those whom you have made apostatize from the order. What a harsh sentence they will receive by whose counsel monks have despised their order.

You have lied that there is great benefit in the supplication, when this alone is your purpose: that you may be able shamefully to empty out the honor of the order. Is the worship of God increased in this way? Is this the peace promised to people in the surrounding region? You will never make bad monks into good canons. But one who makes men bad, what does he deserve except the reward of the bad? Those monks are bad who, despising the order, return to the world. For unless they were bad and sinful, they would by no means have deserted the holy order. No one hates the good except an evil man; no one withdraws from the holy purpose that he vowed except a perverse man. But one who presents himself as patron of the perverse in evil causes makes himself a participant in the sins of others.

To be a canon in the Church of God is good and holy, but to be a monk for the love of God belongs to greater perfection. A canon is permitted to pass over to the monks as to a higher rank, but a monk is forbidden to descend to the canons. Nor will a dispensation make lawful what has been obtained by false narratives. If there is necessity in the supplication, integrity in the intention of the petitioner, and honesty in the use of the dispensation, I boldly say that the pope can dispense with a monk so that he may become a canon, yet in such a way that he is not absolved without necessity from that by which he is known to be bound to God. For I am certain that the supreme pontiff intends to absolve no one from any approved religious order without evident common advantage and manifest necessity. But advocates of apostates...

The advocates of apostates set forth false causes as true; they invent necessity; they falsely allege usefulness; they pretend to an honorableness which they flee. The root and cause of all this evil is founded solely in pleasure and hatred of discipline. But when the stated cause is false, the dispensation does not free the petitioner but condemns him. The supreme pontiff, after hearing the statements of petitioners, has been accustomed to reply cautiously, saying: “If it is as is stated, let what is requested be done, in the manner and form that follows.” He replies cautiously, grants secretly, and dispenses under fixed limits. But when the monks have received bulls in that fashion, they do not remain within the limits of the dispensation, but transgress its measure, considering not what they have obtained but what they wished to obtain.

O wretched, senseless, unhappy men, why do you deceive your very selves? Why do you willingly destroy your souls? The intention of the one dispensing does not absolve you from what you promised to Saint Benedict. You usurp more for yourselves than the pope has granted; indeed, without license you assume the whole of what you illicitly desired to obtain. It is true what a certain man, still living, said about some of us, when by apostolic commission he had stripped them of the monastic habit: “Even if I have removed the habit from them, nevertheless, according to the tenor of the bull, they are still monks before God.”

Unhappy apostates, who will free you from the hand of the living God? Who will be able to defend you from the accusation of Saint Benedict? What will it profit you that here, without hindrance, you have been made canons out of monks, if in the last judgment of God you should happen to be numbered with the reprobate? Indeed, unless Saint Benedict, prince of monks, consents, no dispensation excuses you. Your transfer does not look to its proper end, and for that reason it will be inexcusable. Question your consciences, and consider with what intention you withdrew from the order. If for love of God, if from desire for the heavenly homeland, if for the salvation of souls, if for progress in virtues and for a holier state of life you took off the habit, God will approve the deed you have done. But in all these things your intention was contrary; therefore your transfer from the order is rightly judged alien to the will of God. For you cast off the habit so that you might live without law, without obedience, without humility, without poverty. This was your first intention. The fear of God is not before your eyes. You think nothing of the salvation of souls; you understand nothing of eternal life; you desire to walk in the pleasure of the flesh alone. All the causes and reasons that you stated in your petition are fabricated and false. How, then, will the dispensation be legitimate? How will the authority of the supreme pontiff excuse you, when you did not fear to circumvent it by lying, fraud, deceit, and importunate prayers?

What should be thought about you is made clear when your conduct is examined. For in the Gospel the Lord says about ravening wolves: “By their fruits you will know them.” Never among you is a mind truly joyful in God seen; never can conscience be secure, but it is always anxious about its guilt, always troubled, since you have as inciter to despair the devil, by whose impulse you withdrew from the order. Hence it is that you are not at all concerned with the love of God and the salvation of souls, but, intent on earthly vanities and carnal desires, you think of nothing less than eternal life.

By what spirit this transfer was made in you, your way of life shows. For those who are led by the Spirit of God have crucified their flesh with its vices and desires. But you are not so. For as soon as you cast off the habit of religion, like wanton oxen freed from the yoke of subjection, you plunge yourselves into every disgrace as though licitly. You cast off every honorableness; you make a pact with vices and wage war with virtues. The charity of God is not in your hearts. You despise mercy and piety. You love vanity, and have become vain. You are evil to all good people, worse to monks, worst to yourselves.

No transfer has been made for the better when it has opened the way to vices. Deserters of the love of God and of the order, enemies of honorableness, adversaries of piety: if you love God, if you are good, if you love religion, why do you hate monks? And you especially hate those who persevere in the order from which you have fallen, because, when you now see them standing firmly in their vocation, you fear their testimony against you in judgment. Therefore all monks in holy observance will stand in the strict examination to bear testimony against you. persevering in holy conduct; by their works they will show that all the stories and reasons for your apostasy, now cloaked here in fraudulent words, are false and empty. You hate the monks of your order because, as you know yourselves truly to be, so you judge others to be; and the good that you do not see in yourselves, you envy also in others. We do not marvel at your heart's madness against monks, when we consider the injury and insult that you have inflicted on God and on your holy lawgiver. For one who does not love God, who breaks a vow solemnly made to him, who casts off the habit of religion, is not surprisingly one who hates monks, his servants. Every apostate, indeed, is the adversary and despiser of his own order. But I beg, I exhort, I advise all of you who have deserted your order: abandon your fury, soften your rage, cease raging against monks, lest those whom you now pursue with hatred be witnesses and judges against you at the judgment. Do penance for this impiety of yours while you have time, lest sudden death seize you unprepared. I beg you, do not raise the horn of wickedness against Saint Benedict; do not wish by your transfers to destroy his venerable order; do not despise the opportunity for repentance, if you desire to reach eternal life. You have built no monastery for Saint Benedict. I beg and exhort you not to transfer to secular uses the things built for him by others. Remember how brief the present life is, how certain death is, and how severe the judge is; and do not place upon your necks so heavy a burden of sacrilege that you will never be able to make fitting restitution by any satisfaction. Do not stir up Saint Benedict as your adversary, if you desire to find the friendship of the other saints. For if one is offended, none of the rest will be your friend. Consider the end of those who long ago transferred themselves from the holy order, and fear likewise for your own. Where are the abbots and monks who once withdrew from the order and handed over the monasteries of holy father Benedict into the hands of secular men? They are either all dead or will die shortly. You also who are still living, who have withdrawn from the order after the example of those who went before, if you do not take precautions, will go to those whose imitators you are.

Would that you feared for yourselves from another's danger, and, while there is time, took up penance with your whole heart. I have heard from many with what great bitterness of mind, at the point of death, many transgressors of the order were constrained: those who had been made canons from monks, or even those who had been the authors of transfers of this sort. For they said that they grieved over no sin so much as over this one, that they knew they had given consent or help to the transfer from the order. If the transfer of monasteries from the order is good, why did those who had done it grieve when they were dying? But if it is evil, why do you do and undertake it? Let all who occupy monasteries of monks remember how harsh an anathema they are marked with by blessed Pope Gregory, those who do not fear to turn things consecrated to God in monasteries to alien uses. Let Thietgang, once archbishop of Trier, be an example to them: when he had received from Pope Adrian, in the city of Rome, the monastery of Saint Andrew in Maestricht, and had been warned a third time in a vision by that same apostle and by Saint Gregory not to occupy the dwellings of monks any longer, yet disregarded the command to withdraw, he died a harsh death with all his companions. Whether those who occupy the monasteries of monks are secure before God, we leave to their consciences. But a man who possesses another man's goods without that man's will is bound to restitution. Let the one who occupies the goods of some saint against his will consider for himself what he deserves. We have now used a sufficiently long discourse against the transgressors of our order; let us now come to what remains.

Chapter V

How these dismemberments by apostate monks are to be resisted.

Although both my mind and the very necessity imposed upon us offer abundant material for inveighing against the destroyers of our order, nevertheless, since those who might be recalled to repentance by exhortations are not present, I think enough has been said to them. For those who so wickedly crush the honor of their own order are senseless; I judge that they must be resisted not with words only, but with deeds. For those who do not fear God will by no means acquiesce in our exhortations. Come now, most reverend fathers, who have assembled in chapter for the adornment of the order of our order, you who have assembled in chapter, who labor for its restoration: bring back to mind its former condition, and consider into what great calamity it has now fallen. See, monasteries are being snatched from the hands of Saint Benedict; our order is being destroyed all around by the enemies of God; monks are returning to the world; impious men are tearing apart our religion; strangers are being endowed with our goods. Why should I speak of internal wars? What should I report about civil evils? It is no wonder, fathers, pay attention, if we are confounded from without, since we are torn apart within by our own people. Our abbots kick against discipline, tear apart the unity of the order, neglect the statutes of the chapters, spurn visitations, and despise your censures, O fathers. Unless you strive to bring them back to regular observance as quickly as possible, you will not be able to keep them long under the order.

Why, then, do you dissemble? How long will you sleep? When will you wake up? When will you fight for the inheritance of Saint Benedict? O fathers, arm yourselves with zeal for God, for the order, and for discipline, because it is time. Fight for your rightful possessions; defend the rights of holiness; stand manfully against transfers of the order. See, already in the province of Mainz alone six monasteries have been transferred from our order in our own times, and unless we keep watch in another manner, we shall suffer heavier losses day by day. While we dissemble in this way, not to say grow sluggish, the order is gradually diminished, until at last it will be wholly scattered. Why do we not meet such dangers? When the others are perishing, do we wisely trust in our own security? Did not the poet speak truly: it is your own affair when the nearest wall is burning? Yesterday danger like this threatened them; tomorrow it will threaten us. Each one of you, I do not doubt, loves his own monastery and would in no way consent for it to be transferred from the order, so that he desires not only its present but also its future happiness to be extended for eternal years. Why, then, do you not defend in common what each of you separately fears to lose?

I fear, fathers, that in this most wretched dissembling our stinginess is being exposed. We love money and lose a monastery. We fear small expenses and lose broad dwellings. We do not wish to spend a little money, and we allow the most abundant monasteries to pass from the order to outsiders. We put private advantage before the common good and do not care to preserve the honor of the order. We say many things; we make many resolutions for the useful defense of the order, but we are afraid to spend all the coins. O weak zeal, which greed makes useless. If we will not give money for our brothers, when will we risk our life? If we do not contribute small expenses for the preservation of the order, when will we give our bodies? One who is tight-fisted in a small matter, when will he be generous in a great one?

I shall now speak to you, fathers, who dissemble while the order is placed in such great dangers. Blessed Benedict made you rich from poor men; now he asks alms from you, and, shameful to say, he does not receive them. See how many are found among us, if I may say so by your leave, who distribute their substance to frivolous persons, prepare banquets for birds and dogs, enrich their parents and relatives from the goods of the monastery, and squander the rest in vain pleasures. Few are those who grieve over the desolation of our order; fewer think about a remedy; very few supply assistance.

Is the sacred order of Benedict, once the most excellent among all, thus not defended from the attack of enemies? Wake up, fathers, while vigilance is useful, and do not repent too late that you have slept. Look at the superiors of other orders, how carefully, how zealously, how steadfastly they defend the rights, privileges, and monasteries of their religion, sparing neither expenses nor labors nor contributions, so that they may preserve their orders in vigor. Are you inferior to them? Are you poorer than the mendicants? If one should like to consider the number of monasteries in the order, we are more numerous; if the substance of temporal goods, richer; if power and authority, undoubtedly more distinguished. What do we lack, except zeal and constancy, that they possess?

Why, then, do we hesitate? Why are we torpidly entangled in idleness? Why do we not keep watch for the defense of the order? Do you not know, O fathers, how the laws assist those who are vigilant? That patience is not good by which the honor of God is neglected, the worship owed to him is diminished, and the integrity of the holy order is violated. What shall I say? You grieve over monasteries already transferred, and yet you do not undertake to preserve those about to be transferred. You put private matters before common ones; for that reason your zeal bears little fruit. Each one of us, as I see it, thinks himself safe if, while the house is burning, Therefore, fathers, if we wish to keep our own houses unharmed by fire, let us meet the fire with water while it is still far away. For if the flame is allowed to pass as far as the neighbors, thought is taken for a remedy much too late. Hence the poet says: “Resist beginnings; medicine is prepared too late, when evils have grown strong through long delays.” Dangers, when dissembled, are strengthened by time; and what at the beginning easily admits a cure gradually becomes an incurable wound.

At the same time, take care that an error neglected now may not, with the passage of time, grow immeasurably, when no one is found who will stand firmly against it on behalf of the order. But if you say that opposition has always been made to the authors of dismemberment, and that they nevertheless have prevailed, I answer with that saying of Virgil: “because the ploughmen came too late.” After the confirmation of letters, a sentence once issued is not easily revoked. For if Pilate did not wish to change what he had once written, how will the supreme pontiff, the vicar of Christ, easily revoke what he has once decreed? A sentence is more easily prevented than revoked. Moreover, he who neglects his own right yields it to his adversary.

Everyone must keep watch in a cause that touches everyone, because what is snatched from one is judged to have been taken from all. Whenever a monastery is torn away from our order, our common inheritance is dissipated in part. If someone attempts to occupy your house or your field, you at once accuse him before the judge, at once seek an injunction, and until you win you do not cease from litigation against your adversary. Why, then, do we not all do in the public causes of the order what each person does in his private affairs? Surely what one man does will not be impossible for many, unless perhaps where there is a multitude there is also confusion, so that what is entrusted to several is preserved more negligently. For we gladly embrace what each person judges to be nearest to himself. But while, with the whole body drawn in from every side like a hedgehog, we turn our own concerns over within ourselves, we cast aside care for the order.

Therefore now, reverend fathers, with the goodwill that is fitting I admonish you, and with all the earnestness I can I ask you: come to the aid of your order, which is almost falling, and oppose these dismemberments as quickly as possible. Do not put money before such great necessities; do not love coins more than the order. Shameful is the keeping of riches by which the commonwealth is not helped in necessity. What will your insatiable desire for gold profit you if the desolation of your order, so holy, so venerable, so glorious, gains the upper hand? If our ancestors had not kept watch for the order with greater care than we do, the name of our religion would long since have failed in many monasteries. Let us therefore imitate the constancy of those whose inheritance we have received. If we love God, if we love the honor of the order, if we desire to preserve it, let us think of a remedy in time. Let us contribute a little to the preservation of the order, so that we may deserve to receive much; let us spend a part, so that we may be able to preserve the whole; let us offer cheap things, so that we may be able to acquire precious ones; let us give earthly things, so that we may possess heavenly ones. Let us spend money, and let us also spend prayer, since by the former man is appeased, by the latter God.

Whatever we have belongs to the right of our holy father Benedict; when, for the preservation of the order, we spend anything on him, we do not give him what is ours, but return to him what is his. Indeed, we are bound to him not only for the souls committed to us, but also obliged to render account for the property of the monastery. Moreover, a steward is never rendered safer concerning his account than when money is suitably spent in the causes of the Lord. But if money is spared in the Lord’s necessity, suspicion arises concerning the servant’s unfaithfulness.

At the beginning of this chapter we set down the title concerning the manner of resisting the dismemberments brought about by wicked men. Lest we seem to have passed over it untouched, let us explain it briefly. And although this treatment does not pertain to me, nevertheless, since I too am a fellow-nursling of your order and a lover of the chapter, the advice of a disciple will not, as I think, be burdensome to you. It is yours, fathers, to discern the true from the false; it is enough for me to have explained what I think.

The manner of opposing the presumptions of monks is easily learned if it is turned from example into practice. Look at the other orders, and from their diligence it will be recognized what you must do. They appoint procurators of their own in the city of Rome, who manfully resist the beginnings of evils and do not allow anything against their order to gain strength. And you, fathers, unless you do something similar, will in future suffer grave losses. you will suffer in the future. Therefore, if it can be done, if it seems good, let someone be chosen from the order, a man zealous, devout, learned, and experienced, who will fight no less with favor than with zeal; who will not prefer his own advantages to the public good; who will not flee from labors; who will attempt nothing by his own rashness contrary to the commission entrusted to him; and who, once appointed procurator of the order in the city, will always watch diligently over the aforesaid matter. I believe that, if such a man were available, he would forestall many dangers to the order. For it is very great foresight if the procurator in the city can denounce before the pope the false and fictitious things that perverse monks lie about as though they were true, for the sake of their own dismemberment. And this is not a work of great difficulty. For all the causes they allege are full of fear and falsehood. But when the vicar of Christ, who grants transfers of monks more from importunity than favor, sees that their allegations have been refuted by the diligence of our procurator, he will rejoice to have found an occasion for denying what he grants unwillingly. For he himself also fears the judgment of his Lord. Therefore, if we were vigilant, we would have him as defender and advocate of our order. Our negligence alone is accused; our stinginess alone is condemned.

Against those who uselessly consume the goods of monasteries and disdain to give help to the order even in a small measure.

Chapter VI

But now I am pleased to turn the force of my words against those who do not deign to assist the holy order, even slightly, in such great necessities. These are worldly abbots, useless men, given over to pleasures, who, as Mantuan says, neglecting the worship of those above and scorning the command of the Thunderer, indulge Bacchus and serve Venus. They carry sacred vessels in gold; they build many altars with money; with gold they pour out wines; with gold their ceilings shine. They cover harlots with gems; they set banquets before dogs; enriched from the goods of the poor, made wealthy by plunder, puffed up by success, they laugh at those above and at Acheron alike. They have no care for the salvation of souls, no love of God, no reverence for sacred things, no practice of the virtues. These are the abbots rebellious against your chapter, who neglect statutes, spurn sanctions, contemn the rule. From abject men they have been made great, but they impiously despise the order that honors them. Saint Benedict, ungrateful abbot, raised you up; he made you rich; he received you as a monk; he appointed you shepherd of his brothers. Why, then, do you not acknowledge the generosity of your lawgiver? Why do you not repay his benefits in return? What do you have that you did not receive from his rule? Who endowed the monastery entrusted to you? Was it not the devotion of princes and the alms of faithful peoples? Why, then, are you ungrateful for such great benefits? See, you think nothing less than of regular observance; you reject discipline; you scorn God; you despise his precepts; and you presume upon security. See, contrary to the rule you amuse yourself with the birds of the sky; see, contrary to the law of clerics, you hunt with unclean dogs; see, contrary to honor, you delight in the pleasures of the flesh; see what is most shameful: with the oath of chastity despised, you consume the substance of Saint Benedict with prostitutes and pimps. You are not afraid to spend thirty or forty gold coins in the bath, and yet to offer Saint Benedict even one coin, never. I lie if I have not known abbots who consumed more than fifty florins at the baths, among whom some are the first to resist the subsidies of the chapter. Others too, from among those who wish to be called observant, impatient of seclusion and quiet, unable to remain long in the monastery, judge every occasion suitable by which they can migrate here and there at great expense. What shall I say of destructive, curious, and superfluous things, which are no less liable to rebuke than to expense? Walls are adorned with paintings; pinnacles shine with gold; windows are marked with monuments. The poor cry at the door; the sacred order, pressed hard, asks for help; and no one deigns to assist. O abbot, servant of the belly, worshiper of vanity, enemy of piety, who shamefully pours out the substance of the monastery, who pours out wines with gold, who denies subsidy to your order: how will the account of your stewardship be rendered to Saint Benedict? If the rich feaster was buried in hell because he did not give Lazarus help from his own goods for God’s sake, where will the abbot be buried who denied to his own lord goods that belonged to another? If he who did not give alms from his own goods will burn forever, what does the abbot deserve who will have committed robbery. What do you have, O abbot, that you have not received? For everything you possess belongs to the right of Saint Benedict. Moreover, it is a moral principle for all that whoever lives by the support of justice must not dare to deny anyone what is just. The definition of justice is to render to each person what is owed to him by right. But we, established in the monastery, have nothing of our own; rather, in good faith we possess what belongs to another. What belongs to another, however, is judged liable to restitution. For the property that princes and faithful peoples have conferred on monasteries for the support of monks is remembered as having been handed over to Saint Benedict. If therefore you have dissipated his substance, if you have scorned to return to him what is his, you will be subject to a double condemnation, since you will be judged guilty of sacrilege for faithlessness, and criminal for faith denied.

Therefore render to each person what is his, and do not usurp for yourself what is not yours. Give to your lawgiver what you owe him, who conferred everything on you. Why do you deny a little to him from whom you have received much? Can you plead the poverty of your monastery, you who so shamefully consume so much? I am ashamed to say what many abbots are not at all ashamed to do: submerged in the pleasures of the flesh, not so much as mad with them, they preserve nothing of monastic honesty and omit nothing of worldly shamefulness. They think all things lawful for themselves, since they seek out not what is fitting, but what is pleasing.

Behold, one abhors monastic quiet and seeks comfort in the world through wandering excursions. Another, impatient of regular seclusion, proceeds pompously in public. A third, disparaging the discipline of honesty, sits all day drunk at feasts with frivolous persons. This one, scorning the meekness of the saints, entangles himself in lawsuits between disputants. Another sits at gaming tables; another, wholly absorbed, dances to the drum. What do ambitious abbots not presume? What pleasure do the intemperate leave untried? At the servants’ meal knees are bent. As he passes through churches, carpets are spread. As he goes forth in public, a huge crowd of servants follows him. You will find, I do not lie, even among those who boast in the name of reform an abbot whose ambition is so great that he does not wish to be called inferior to a bishop; who sits at table with such great display that the abundance of vessels, the variety of food and drink, and the multitude of servants could suffice for any prince. Finally, if you should meet this man as he proceeds through a city, and should see him surrounded by so great a multitude of servants, you would think not that an abbot but that an archbishop was passing by. If they did not pretend to be poor but actually were poor, they would by no means overflow in so great a solemnity of vanity. For I am certain that this crowd follows plunder, not a man. Who would choose to find plunder among the poor?

O abbot, fugitive shepherd, ungrateful and faithless steward of the goods of your Lord, you who spend the substance of the monastery so uselessly, who live pleasurably and shamefully: who will help you in the final examination? Whom will you appoint as advocate when the account must be rendered? Behold, you consume the goods of Saint Benedict in pleasure; you support your relatives from them; you lavish gifts on shameful people; you distribute presents to your flatterers; you serve gluttony and drunkenness day and night. You eat the fattest things of the earth and drink the best wines; poor monks live in want; humble brothers eat the bread of sorrow; the sheep entrusted to you are fed on cheap things.

O vain shepherd, who neglects the Lord’s flock, who scorns the necessities of your brothers, remember to whom you are going to render account; recall how dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God, who does not regard a person’s status, who repays each one his reward according to his works. But hear my counsel and do penance, and redeem your sins with alms; rather, discharge them by paying what is owed, so that before the eternal judge you may deserve to find mercy. Put down your arrogance; cast off pomp; abandon vanity. Be abbot to your brothers according to the Rule; be a shepherd in solicitude, a father in charity. Feed them with the word; feed them by example; feed them with nourishment. If you omit one of these, you will be a useless shepherd. For without spiritual things, temporal things accomplish nothing for eternal salvation; without the aid of temporal things, spiritual things do not subsist long in this life.

If therefore you wish to be a good shepherd, do not deny that the care of both kinds of feeding, namely spiritual and bodily, has been laid upon you. I had said that your sins must be released by paying what is owed. What debt? That, plainly, by which you are judged bound to Saint Benedict. What is that? Everything that you have. For you have it from him, because you are a monk; from him that you are an abbot; from him that you are wealthy. Now, therefore, the one from whom you have all these things knocks at your door; in the necessity of his order he asks for help; he desires to receive the least part of the very great things he entrusted to you. Why do you deny him his own goods? Why, when they are demanded from you, do you not immediately return what was entrusted to you? Divine Scripture gives this command: “If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise your own flesh.” Behold, your order is naked; behold, your torn mother cries out; she asks alms, seeks what is hers, and looks for help. If there are any inward parts of pity in you, any sweetness in your heart, any love for your order, any love of God, do not despise your own flesh and do not scorn so great a public bond of kinship. Honor the one who first honored you. Give alms to the one who raised you up. Bestow a little upon the one who made you rich in many things. However much you give him, nothing at all will be diminished for you, provided only that you bring a good will. You will give a little and receive much; you will generously bestow earthly things and hope for heavenly ones.

Nor should it escape you that, as people commonly say, whatever is withheld from honor is reserved for disgrace. For the jurist of sentences says: “The treasury takes what Christ does not receive.” He is not free from the guilt of crime who sets greed before the order of piety. Those who despise the words of God: what wonder is it if they scorn ours? Though I may speak much, say much, and urge excellent things, I shall never bend by words those who rebel against contributing to the order. Indeed, unless your authority, O presiding lords, intervenes, the speech of one who warns labors in vain. It therefore belongs to your office to bend the rebellious; to you it is entrusted to humble the disobedient; ours is humbly to obey your sanctions. Therefore, if you desire to defend our order from the assaults of the depraved, take care first to recall the abbots to obedience, because unless unanimity is restored to the order, the impiety of its adversaries will easily prevail. For the Lord says in the Gospel: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and house falls upon house.” Division alone confounds the order.

How disobedient and rebellious abbots are to be compelled to aid the order. Chapter vii

If judges lack the authority to restrain rebels, legislation will be made in vain. For we always strive after what is forbidden, and unless compelled, we resist commands. For where there is no fear of power, the condition of law is quickly despised. The preservation of law, therefore, is fear of authority. But where laxness of authority turns a blind eye, the vigor of the law wavers. For a statute, however holy or necessary, is quickly carried off into oblivion if there is no authority by which contempt may be punished. Take away power, and the commonwealth will be nothing other than a confusion full of sedition. For rustic savagery is not led by reason; it is not calmed by gentleness. Among our own men too, may God correct it, there are many abbots and monks rougher than rustics, more implacable than beasts, who are not bent by gentleness to the observance of the commandments of God and the rule, nor are they ever persuaded by exhortations, however holy. If the authority of those who preside does not oppose these men, they will never be led to any obedience to the chapter.

For this reason the supreme pontiffs, founders of this most sacred provincial chapter, established many suitable remedies for us, by which we can compel the abbots subject to the chapter to support the order. We have authority; we hesitate over power. And what is authority worth without power? If you wish, most honorable fathers, that I speak more plainly what I have wished to express figuratively about the power of authority, you will pardon me if I have noted your faintheartedness, not to say negligence. Behold, we have known 127 abbeys placed under our provincial chapter, but we do not receive from all of them the subsidies of the contribution that is due. Why is this? We have received the authority to demand, but we do not exercise the power. We receive what is offered voluntarily; we are afraid to compel the disobedient. For I am certain that many abbots of our province contribute nothing to the support of the order; indeed, if they are asked, they contradict us as though on the basis of prescription. What is it that we are doing? Why do we keep silent for so long? We apply spurs to the one who runs of his own accord, while the one who lies down, indeed kicks back— ...to one who wanders we do not even apply blows. From this contempt for our statutes is born; the authority of the chapter is despised; the inheritance of the order is laid waste on every side. These things must be brought against you, O fathers, who neglect to subdue rebels at the beginning. Consider what this dissimulation will at last bring forth; and if you love your order, think as quickly as possible about a remedy. A body is weak and very near dissolution when it is deprived of the support of its own members. Behold, out of one hundred twenty-seven abbots, how few you see in the present chapter, though by statute all ought to have been present. Where are the rest? Where are the proctors of all the absent? Few have contributed to the necessity of the order; fewer observe the statutes of the order; very few have come to the chapter. Where are the letters of excuse from those who did not send proctors? Where are the double expenses of the rebels? Which of the absent and rebellious has ever, in many years, been compelled to pay the penalty of double amount? What good are statutes to us? What do laws help? What do the privileges of the supreme pontiffs help, if in time of necessity they are not put into practice? Behold, Pope Benedict XII provided for us in all necessary things when he promulgated the restraints of censure to be imposed against the obstinate and rebellious. Why, then, do we delay? Why do we not put into practice against the disobedient the remedies granted to us?

Truly, fathers, this dissimulation of ours, which we practice, is not praiseworthy. For the rebellion of a few, if overlooked, will become an occasion for many to resist. But if a few are compelled to obedience by discipline, the boldness of the multitude is restrained by fear. For a kingdom divided against itself will be desolated, and every religious body at variance with itself is gradually dissipated. There is no fair hope for the order where confusion makes a tumult against unity. For in every commonwealth the first road to desolation is the disobedience of subjects. Therefore, venerable fathers, if you desire to continue the provincial chapter; if you wish to resist the dismemberments of the monks; if, finally, you desire to defend your order from the hands of enemies, take care first of all to recall the obstinate to obedience, lest what you acquire outwardly by effort you lose inwardly through division among subjects. This indeed must first be attempted with the gentlest exhortations; but if they scorn these with hardened neck, they must be pursued with harsher rebukes.

But if they care for neither gentle words nor severe ones, then ecclesiastical censure is promulgated against them. For fools are not amended by exhortations, but become proud. Yet in these matters measure and necessary discretion must be used, without which no rebellion is ever softened. For it is better to have all weak things than none at all. But who is so capable as to preserve discretion everywhere? It is difficult to apply measure to all deeds. Yet one who wishes to cure sick souls must be both severe and kind, and tempered as though by a certain mean between the two, so that severity is not excessive nor kindness slack. For the one breaks; the other loosens. The fairest manner of restraining rebels and the obstinate is that which the long experience of elders commends.

On Celebrating the Provincial Chapter. Chapter VIII

When we come together as one, most excellent fathers, let us carefully investigate what the celebration of the provincial chapter requires. For the greatest strength of our stability is placed in it, if it is celebrated properly. It is the one stronghold of our order; without it our whole religious life would be thrown into confusion, as appears among those who for many years have held no chapters. For the chapter is the preservation of the order, the increase of regular discipline, the uniting of unity. In it, indeed, integrity is given to morals; purity is increased in minds; the quality of regular life is renewed. But what is required for it to be celebrated properly? Hear what its sincere celebration demands. It requires zeal; it requires knowledge; it requires piety. Without these three the celebration of the chapter has no value. For if zeal is lacking, who will rebuke offenders? If knowledge is lacking, what fruit will excessive zeal bear? Again, if piety is lacking, zeal does not sharpen, knowledge does not direct, and piety produces no fruit. Without zeal, knowledge remains cold; without piety, fruitless. Likewise, zeal without knowledge becomes excessive and unprofitable. undiscerning, and without gentleness, hateful. But gentleness is useful for all things, although without zeal and knowledge it is not sufficient for the government of souls. For it pleases everyone, but it benefits only the humble when kept apart. Therefore the whole matter of celebrating a chapter consists in the appointment of those presiding, which requires men who are zealous, learned, and gentle. For if they are lax, if inexperienced, if cruel and impious, how then will they reform others to gentleness? If the man who sits as one about to punish crimes admits crimes himself, whom will he correct among those like himself? Therefore this fault must be referred to you, fathers, if you have chosen deformed and vicious abbots for the presidency. With the greatest solicitude, then, see to it that you appoint such men to preside over the chapter as an irreproachable life commends, the zeal of holy religion sharpens, and the training of saving knowledge tempers. For it is proper that the one who presides over others be a man upright in morals, mature in conduct, instructed in knowledge of the Scriptures, adorned with gentleness. Such a man, O fathers, is deservedly to be preferred by us, one whose life provides an example and whose teaching provides an increase of virtue. If the presidents of the chapter are such men, those subject to them will easily be brought back to obedience. For those will be suitable for presiding who can instruct the teachable by word, the untrained by example, and the contumacious by authority. In these ways, indeed, the chapter will be celebrated duly, and the souls of the subjects will also be edified.

The other things that make presidents suitable I am not permitted to describe on this occasion, since I believe none of you is ignorant what sort of men they ought to be. To you, therefore, O fathers, I turn again; you who have assembled in this place for the celebration of the chapter I address, I exhort, that you direct your intention to the restoration of the order, and carefully consider why the chapter was instituted. Do you wish to know why chapters were instituted? Seek out the decrees of the supreme pontiffs, and you will learn the cause of their institution. But lest either laziness or occupation impede the understanding of this matter, I shall briefly explain the cause of the establishment of the chapter. The principal cause of the chapter, then, is the preservation of the regular institution. For the Roman pontiffs and the presidents of general councils, seeing that our order could not long subsist in observance without a special remedy, resolved to aid it through the provincial chapter, in which, by the diligence of the presidents, all would be instructed to live according to the Rule, and no one could deviate from the reform once begun. For in a chapter of abbots vices are to be corrected and exhortations to virtues are to be made, so that the bad may find what they should fear and the good may hear what will make them better. Therefore various things are read for edification, so that increases may always be present to good minds. There the abbot is instructed concerning his governance; there he is warned about the danger of pastoral care; there he is commanded what he should do, and, for the love of God, forbidden what he should avoid. In short, when we come together in this way for chapter, many useful things arise for us, which, if we seek the salvation of souls, are very necessary.

For, to pass over the rest, mutual acquaintance in charity is conceived there, and experience shows how much this contributes to love of regular observance. There, from acquaintance, fraternal charity is both preserved and increased; otherwise it would quickly grow lukewarm if it did not have the nourishment of mutual recognition. Here easy access to uniformity lies open, where, from the conference of the fathers, a mutual kindling is prepared in honorable conduct, and from their common life an example of holiness is provided. These are the camps of God, O fathers, and the bulwarks of our order, by which all the contrivances of our adversaries are reduced to nothing.

But one sincerity is not present in all, nor does equality of conduct appear among you. Whence could such great disparity of manners have arisen in one order, where the unity of a chapter is seen? Who has divided you from the Rule of Saint Benedict, O fathers with locks grown thick upon your heads? Why do you not look toward uniformity, you who celebrate a gathering of unity? If you love the holy order that you profess, why do you not love uniformity in it? What is the use to you of the shadow of a hairy head? What ornament do you think the crown of a curled scalp bears? Believe me, fathers: a face covered with hair is judged a disgrace in a monk, not an honor. O how beautiful this assembly would be if, as it ought, it came together in one discipline of regular observance. What shall I say? I praise the gathering, but I rebuke the deformity in its members. For because of the confusion of the order, the presence of unity grows cheap. The outward habit judges that the life of many is in ...the inner garment reproves. Truly, fathers, this disparity of morals and habits gravely offends the provincial chapter, which is known to have been instituted for this reason: that equality of life might be preserved before all. For outward discord is a sign of inward discord. Therefore, so that we may be of one mind in the observance of regular discipline, let us strive first to be conformable in habit and tonsure.

How necessary a diligent reform of the monasteries in our province would be. Chapter IX

How necessary a diligent reform of the monasteries in our province may be, you yourselves know, fathers, since you are not ignorant of the condition of the monks of this time. It is newly known to you with what great labors, expenses, and sweats the fathers once reformed our order; of these efforts we find few and weak monuments in our age.

Among all the reforms of our order in our province, three have most recently shone forth above the rest: namely the Castellan reform, taking its name from Castell; the Melk reform, from Melk; and the Bursfelde reform, from Bursfelde. All of these, just as they were fervent in the beginning, so by gradually growing lukewarm they are drawing near to an end. For the first two, as if worn out by age, have been contracted into a small number. The last, however, which is also later, because it is still younger, seems also to be more constant. Yet even it now seems in some of its members to be growing lukewarm and to be declining again into the laxity of its earlier life.

So once the Cluniac reform, known throughout the whole world, when it spread itself far and wide, gradually failed, as though its strength had been lost through its expansion. For it is said in a proverb: Everything that grows old is near destruction. For any reform, however celebrated or holy it may have been, unless it is often renewed by the diligence of the fathers, gradually vanishes. For the more it grows in extent, the more it is diminished in fervor. For when those had passed away who showed zeal for the order in their works, new abbots arose after them who, neglecting the holy fervor of reform, fell back into their former deformities.

And, to touch upon things nearer at hand: where is that reform which Nicholas of Cusa, cardinal and legate, began with incredible zeal? Where are those terrible oaths of all the abbots of our province, by which they bound themselves to regular observance in the hands of that same cardinal, before the altar of Saint Stephen at Wurzburg? Where is the promised regular observance? Behold, fathers, you have one hundred twenty-seven abbeys under your chapter; of these, from the three observances already mentioned, scarcely seventy have remained under reform.

Yet there are, I do not doubt, some who think themselves excellently reformed, but their conduct denies it. Would that the abbots paid attention to the warning of our holy lawgiver, repeated so often, by which he says that the governance of souls is subject to the strictest accounting. Would that they drove the sheep entrusted to them to the pastures of heavenly life, lest they themselves perish eternally with the sheep.

Look at the conduct, both of abbots and of monks, smoking all around without the law of monastic honesty; of this, though known to me, I am ashamed to speak, and you, most reverend fathers, would be horrified to hear. For they care no more for the three vows of religion, which because of their excellence are called substantial, than if they had never promised to observe them. They confound everything, profane everything, presume everything.

If we look to divine worship, they perform it so confusedly, so disorderly, so dissolutely, that neither the words give forth sense nor the melody its proper tone. For they are without all learning in the good arts, so that they understand absolutely nothing of what they sing. Hence it happens that, without affection, without devotion, without the savor of inward sweetness, they do not so much discharge the canonical hours as confound them.

In their hands the book of divine Scripture is never seen. The practice of edifying speech is never taken up. No account is ever taken of the formation of morals. The whole day is consumed in obscene rumors. All time is enslaved to games and banquets. No mention is ever made of reform. The rage of those who are at discord with one another rages, and among the cloaks, peace broken, the monastery joins insane quarrels, the law held in contempt. There the spear and the sword are ready, so that one would not believe it a monastery... but a stronghold of men at war. As witnesses to their private possession, contrary to statutes, contrary to laws, contrary to the Rule, they each inhabit separate houses; in them they practice not the studies of monks but those of clerics. They neither fear nor love God; they think nothing of the life to come, since they put the concerns of the soul after the pleasures of the flesh. They do not read the Rule of monks; they pay no attention to the statutes; they despise the decrees of the fathers. They spurn the vow of poverty; they do not know chastity; they make light of obedience. And would that, since they refuse to be chaste, they at least deigned to be continent. The dung of vices smokes all around, and what everyone knows, we alone, who are ordered to correct it, ignore.

Why should I use many words? So many, so great, so varied are the unlawful things they commit against the Rule of Saint Benedict that I would judge it easier to train a monk from the beginning than to be able to amend the life of these men. For nothing of monastic honor has remained inviolate among them; instead, everything lies neglected, everything spurned, everything despised and torn. Angers, quarrels, dissensions, envies, slanders, curses, oaths, insults, and things like these are not judged among them to be sins, because what is public has begun to be lawful. A place lies open to vices and crimes; virtue alone does not deserve admission. They laugh if anyone begins to speak before them about repentance, and, as Mantuanus says, they despise those above and Acheron alike: there is no fear of punishment, no fear of the Judge. You would see among them, as though in a spring of all vices, pride, greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, anger, hatred, and every pleasure of the flesh abounding; if they can seize it, they rejoice; if they cannot, nevertheless they eagerly desire it. They have rotted like beasts in their own dung, and, as if reason had been lost, they do not wish to be recalled to repentance.

O good God, to what great calamity has the order once so exalted been brought, an order which deservedly could be preferred to all orders. O holy father Benedict, you who once were so solicitous for your religion, why do you abandon us to the end? Why do you not look upon your inheritance? Why do you not aid your order, now already falling? Have you cast off care for it?

Or has your soul loathed your sons? Help, assist, bring aid, for never has your religion been surrounded by such grave evils. Behold, it is destroyed from without by lovers of the world; behold, it is torn apart within by perverse monks, so that no one can easily discern which is the greater crime: for monasteries to be transferred into the hands of secular clerics, or to remain longer under the hands of such wicked monks.

Alas, holy father, what shall I say? When you once established abbots, you commanded them to be solicitous about weak monks. Now shepherds have no care for the sheep, no diligence for the salvation of souls; all seek the things that are their own, not those of Jesus Christ. Behold, your sons, father, having zeal, desire to help, but they accomplish nothing, hindered by the rashness of the wicked.

Who, then, amid these things, is to help? The bishop? But he cares for his own affairs, seeks his own, despises ours. The prince? But he sells favor, rejects discipline, seeks temporal things. There is no one who grieves over the crushing of your order; no one who helps; no one who gives assistance. All who can restore it neglect it; others who seem to have zeal for discipline try to help, but cannot.

O abbots, abbots, who are the occasion of all evils in your monasteries, who, given over to vanities, do not at once correct monks who offend: how harsh a sentence of condemnation you will receive. To you, believe me, to you will be imputed the damnation of your monks; for, having been placed as their rulers, you neglected to form their morals. Woe to you. It would be better if you had never been abbots. You, occupied with greed and lust, neglect the work of the Lord; you despise the care of souls; you think nothing of the path of observance. You who ought to correct the vices of monks commit vices, and, lest your own be reproved, you dissemble those of others.

You see, most honored fathers, what the condition of your order is, what the abbots are, what the monks are: those who would correct the wicked are lacking, and among them only those who need correction are found. Why, then, do you delay? Why do you not think about the reform of such men? Why do you not restrain the wicked pursuits of monks? Their ill repute confounds us; their examples scandalize us, because the more numerous they are, the more they are believed by those who do not know them to be better in conduct.

...they are considered by the ignorant to be the more important in action. Rise up, fathers, for the days are evil, short, and bad. Reform, as far as you are able, the deformed order; raise up the cast down; restore what has collapsed. For unless you apply a remedy quickly, you will soon suffer grave loss.

For dissolute monks and enemies of regular discipline always aspire to worse things, and, lest they be saved within the order, they labor to abandon it. For beginning the reform you have the aids of law; you have the Rule; you have statutes. This alone is required of you: that you put them into practice. Therefore, if you love your order, indeed because you love it, do not neglect this, do not delay, for necessity presses very greatly, since the impiety of wicked monks presumes everywhere. Behold, the rich of the world violently seize the goods of monasteries; behold, worshipers of greed invade the order’s possessions; behold, secular clerics receive the abbeys of Saint Benedict in commendam. None of these things would happen if abbots and monks had persevered in regular observance. Let what we suffer, then, be imputed to us, since we did not resist the rashness of the wicked from the beginning. To us, I say, this fault is justly ascribed, since, intent on our own advantages, we do not care for the harms of the order, as though they were someone else’s.

Let us rise up, I beg you, fathers; let us rise up at last, even if late, after so many losses, so many perils, so much ruin of souls, and let us do what lies in us, henceforth asking the mercy of God to supply what is lacking in us, to direct our zeal, and to bring holy efforts to completion. And if we cannot bring the whole order back to the unity of good conduct, let us strive at least to reform those monks who are in our own province. But if complete conformity cannot be had in all things, let them at least be reformed in the three substantial matters, without which the life of monks must be reckoned nothing other than the shameful brothel of an unfaithful soul.

Reform, however, must begin with the abbots and then be continued among the monks. For unless the shepherd has been brought back to sincerity, the health of the sheep will not last long. For it is commonly said: When the head is sick, the other members suffer. Therefore every adornment of the body must begin from the head. There are certain deformed abbots who wish to compel their monks to reform, while they themselves are unwilling to submit to regular observance even in the least thing. They hate in themselves the good that they love in others, and they are not ashamed to do themselves what they forbid their subjects. Do not trust such men, O fathers; for they are the very ones who confound us. They spurn visitations; they contemn the decrees of chapters. Let experience make us cautious, whom zeal without knowledge has at times made penitent.

That visitors ought to be solicitous for the reform of our order. Chapter 10

The greatest part of reform, however, is placed almost entirely in the diligence of those who are to carry it out. Therefore it is said in the constitutions of the fathers that suitable men should be appointed to the office of visitation, who can effectively instruct those to be visited in honorable conduct by word and example.

For a visitor must be learned in divine law; he must be holy and irreproachable in life, so that he may teach the teachable by word and instruct the obstinate by example. For one without the other will not suffice in a ruler of souls. If he is ignorant, how will he form others? If his conduct does not offer those visited an example of good action, how will he compel them to reform? He will surely hear the objection of the proverb that says: Physician, heal yourself. And not undeservedly. For by what presumption are you led, O talkative visitor, to attempt to reform others, when you still lie in your own deformity? You are polluted by the filth of vices, and will you be able to cleanse others? Believe me: the Holy Spirit will not give power to your words when you offend his grace by a contrary life. A discourse lacks efficacy in the heart of the hearer when the preacher’s conduct rebukes it. What shall I say? I would be lying if I said that the contumacious man does not often rebuke the contumacious, the shameful man defame the shameful, and believe that he has escaped his own conscience, as though conscience were not enough. There are, I say, vicious men among those who denounce vices, accusers in public; in secret, guilty parties. accusers in public; in secret, guilty parties; against themselves, both censors and offenders. They condemn outwardly what they practice inwardly. They willingly admit what, once they have admitted it, they denounce as a crime. This is a boldness fit for the abusive, and an impudence suited to the shameless. Often the greedy man rebukes the avaricious, the luxurious man the impure, the proud man the haughty, the criminal man the base. What do you think, fathers? Can such deceivers be found even among the visitors themselves? I do not dare say it; yet I have experience of it. Many say many things; few show in deeds what they say. They cannot reform themselves and their own, and yet they strive to force others into observance. They say great things and do very little. Foolish presumption, which neglects its own affairs and rushes off to those of others. He who is not sufficient for himself: for whom will he have abundance? He who cannot bring himself and his own to amendment of life: when will he be able to amend others? I have said this against those who are such men, who condemn in others what they scorn to amend in themselves.

As for zealous, good, and suitable visitors, of whom I have known several, I would not wish anything to have been said to their injury. But you, most excellent fathers, who must choose visitors, take care to appoint better men to that office, if you desire to bring monks to regular observance. For the sum of regular discipline lies with the visitors: when it is continued, it grows; when it is neglected, it fails. Indeed, if visitors diligently fulfill their office, they will preserve reformed monasteries in regular observance and will easily bring deformed ones back to a better state. But if they are negligent, even what others have well begun will quickly be destroyed. For nothing so confounds unity, nothing so disturbs peace, nothing so injures charity, as the ignorance of visitors, when it grows heated not by reason but by undiscerning will. Experience has very often taught us what great disturbances, dissensions, anger, quarrels, slanders, and hatreds unskilled visitors have stirred up in congregations of monks, men for whom everything consists in authority, and nothing in knowledge and charity. But I have said enough about this, lest I seem to accuse those whom, because of the dignity of their office, we are commanded to treat with honor.

How Dangerous the Governance of Souls Is. Chapter 11

If we considered how dangerous a thing the governance of souls is, how heavy the burden of pastoral care, how subject it is to strict examination, it would be a wonder if our heart ever presumed upon security in this life. For Scripture says that the harshest judgment will be made against those who are in charge. For, as blessed Benedict declares in the Rule, the abbot will have to render an account to God for the souls of all the monks committed to him. Therefore he says: Let the abbot who has been ordained always consider what burden he has taken up, and to whom he will render an account of his stewardship. It is certainly a heavy and dangerous burden to render account for the souls of many, when each person can scarcely answer for himself.

O what will abbots devoted to earthly things answer to the supreme Shepherd, they who destroy the souls of their brothers by bad example and feed them neither by word nor by deed? What shall I say about certain abbots of our order, who neither read the Rule of Saint Benedict which they profess, nor, if they do read it, understand it? I would be lying if I said I did not know abbots established under our chapter who are wrapped in such darkness of ignorance that they do not understand even the least sentence from the Rule. They neither know nor love the divine Scriptures; submerged in the vanities of the world, they vanish away; they serve the desires of the flesh, not of the spirit. According to the command of our lawgiver, the abbot must be learned in divine law, so that he may know and have a source from which to bring forth things new and old; chaste, sober, merciful, and the rest.

What will these men say? What will they teach? What exhortation will they give, when they understand nothing of the holy Scriptures and nothing of regular discipline? O good God, to what misery our order has come, which once was full of the most learned and most holy men. Where now is the love of regular observance? Where is the study of the Scriptures? Where do we find the traces of honorable conduct? Our abbots, with few exceptions, are either given over to avarice or drawn away by the vanities of the world; they think of nothing less than knowledge of the Scriptures, although many may consider them learned.

... many may consider them learned. But the learning of their mind is known from their works. Now the greedy man is believed to be learned; now the man who joins field to field is called religious: the one who keeps watch over earthly profits, who lets his appetite loose in gathering riches. But believe me, fathers, for I am about to say what is true: temporal riches do not make discipline stable in the order. O what a terrible sentence abbots will undergo: those who neglect the Rule, who do not go before their monks in word and example of holiness, who despise spiritual exercises, who devote themselves to earthly profits, who scorn the discipline of monastic honor. Would that they were wise and understood and looked ahead to their last things, and either governed the burden of so great a rule with care, or, if they could not, humbly laid it down. Happy is he who stands carefully upon his own watch, who always does the will of the Lord, who lives without pretense according to the purity of the Rule.

But for the present, the things we have said about the state and reformation of our order are, I believe, sufficient; and since their reading is at the end of the chapter, let it also receive an end. Moreover, each and every thing that I have written, or shall write, either in this treatise or in others, I submit to the examination of the sacrosanct Roman Church, whose faith, doctrine, and definition, as long as I live, I always and everywhere wish to preserve, teach, and defend. But if anything, God forbid, has been said by me otherwise than what she holds, teaches, and believes, by these presents I now simply revoke it, and wish it to be regarded as not having been said. I wish and judge the Supreme Pontiff, the vicar of Christ, to be in all things, by this my protestation, the judge and moderator of my faith and doctrine.

The present treatise was read at table in the provincial chapter of the Order of Saint Benedict of the province of Mainz, held at Hirsau, in the year of the Lord 1493, on Jubilate Sunday and on the following days until the end. And with all the abbots gathered there willing and consenting, it was decreed that it should be printed and in future provincial chapters always read publicly at table, as is clear in the statutes.

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