solitude. But it happens again and again
that man gets a surfeit of society--he is thrown with those who
misunderstand him, who thwart him, who contradict his nature, who bring
out the worst in his disposition: he is sapped of his strength, and then
he longs for solitude. He would go alone up into the mountain. What is
called the "monastic impulse" comes over him--he longs to be
alone--alone with God.

The monastic impulse can be traced back a thousand years before Christ:
the idea is neither Christian, Jewish, Philistine nor Buddhist. Every
people of which we know have had their hermits and recluses.

The communal thought is a form of monasticism--it is a getting away from
the world. Monasticism does not necessarily imply celibacy, but as
unrequited or misplaced love is usually the precursor of the monastic
impulse, celibacy or some strange idea on the sex problem usually is in
evidence.

Monasticism has many forms: College Settlements, Zionism, Deaconesses'
Homes, Faith Cottages, Shakerism, Mormonism, are all manifestations of
the impulse to get away from the world, and still benefit the world by
standing outside of it. This desire to get away from the world and still
mix in it shows that monasticism is not quite sincere--we want society
no less than we want solitude. Very seldom, indeed, has a monk ever gone
away and remained: he comes back to the world, occasionally, to beg, or
sell things, and to "do good."

The rise of the Christian monastery begins with Paul the Hermit, who in
the year Two Hundred Fifty withdrew to an oasis in the desert, and lived
in a cave before which was a single palm-tree and a spring.

Other men worn with strife, tired of stupid misunderstanding,
persecution and unkind fate, came to him. And there they lived in
common. The necessity of discipline and order naturally presented
itself, so they made rules that governed conduct. The day was divided up
into periods when the inmates of this first monastery prayed, communed
with the silence, worked and studied.

Within a hundred years there were similar religious communities at fifty
or more places in Upper Egypt.

Women have always imitated men, and soon nunneries sprang up here and
there. In fact, the nunnery has a little more excuse for being than the
monastery. In a barbaric society an unattached woman needs protection,
and this she gets in the nunnery. Even so radical a thinker as Max
Muller regarded the nunnery as a valuable agent in