Volume 1

Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars.

Date:
1908-1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    36/932
    ABBOT everything and man nothing. But man thus abased before God is no proper or rationai worshipper of Him. There is a want of proportion in this sort of religion. God who is everything is not really so much as if He allowed the most exalted free agencies to exist side by side with Him’ {Ufe of Jmuett, by Abbott and Campbell, vol. u. p. 161. London : Murray, 1897). But this should not blind us to the fact that prayer and the religions of prayer seem bound up with the belief that man depends on God, and does not merely exist side by side with Him. Now, in the last analysis, humility and the abasement that is its intenser form appear as a reflexion in conduct and emotion of this belief. The sense that man does no good thing of himself alone, but always as flinging himself on the Eternal Love, is, in especial, a leading characteristic of Christianity. The re- pentant Publican is set above the moral Pharisee precisely because he would not attempt to justify himself (Lk 18®- Even those religions—those systems of aspira- tion and effort—which do not recognize this kind of dependence, would still find room for some abase- ment in the recognition of the gap between what the individual is and what he wishes to be. But, from their point of view, why should not a man pride himself on such good as he has already attained? Yet to the religious consciousness of many the presence of this pride would appear to vitiate it all. The theoretic justification for this must lie in the conviction that man does depend for his goodness on something greater than him- self. To a certain extent, no doubt, this might be found in the good elements of the order that has produced and surrounds the individual. But the Christian hatred of self-complacency seems to go further still, and to imply a belief that in the very assimilation by the individual of these good elements another power than himself is active. It would be idle to deny the difficulties in this conception, or to pretend that they have ever yet been solved. The paradox of St. Paul—‘ Work out your own salvation . . . for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to work ’ (Ph 2^®- —has remained a paradox even for those who maintain it. But conviction of some truth in the paradox is, at bottom, the same as the conviction of Buskin that, if the Greeks were great at Thermop- ylae, greater still were the Hebrews at the Bed Sea, trusting not in the resolution they had taken, but in the hand they held (see Modern Painters, Part III. § i. ch. 7). F. M. Stawell. ABBOT (Christian).—‘Abbot,’ in Latin abba or abbas (Old Eng. by-form 12th to 17th cent. abbat], from the Syriac meaning ‘father’ (cf. Mk 14®®, Bo 8’®, Gal 4®), was used in the earliest religious communities for the older or more vener- ated monks (cf. Jerome in Gal. 4® and in Matt. 23®, vol. vii. 451, 185, and the Collationes of Cassian, passim). The superior was not called abbot, but wpoea-rds, i.px'-yoi.vSplT’ps or ijyodixevos, and in the West prcepositus ((jassian, etc.). The prevailing Byzan- tine term was ■pyoip.evo^ (transit, igumenus in Latin), while an archimandrite was often a superior kind of abbot, and this title was also given to various ecclesiastical functionaries (see d’Arch. Chrit. et de Lit. s.v. ‘Archimandrite,’ 1906). In the East &j3/3as appears as a tr. from the Latin, or as an honorific title, e.g. in the Acts of St. Maximus Conf. in the 7th century. In the West, however, abbas must have become the regular title of the superior of a monastery during the 5th cent., since this sense is taken for granted by St. Benedict in the first half of the 6th cent., and from that period this usage became universal. St. Benedict assumes that prcepositus will be understood of the second in command, who was later always called prior, even by Benedictines. The name abbas is also applied, it seems, by Gregory of Tours to Avhat we should call a rector with many curates, and it was extended in Merovingian times to chaplains of the king, the army, etc. {abbas curice, palatinus, castrensis, etc.). A layman holding an abbey in commendam in the 9tn or 10th cent, was called abhacorms or abbots miles. When considerable dignity had come to attach to the name, the heads of smaller communities were called priors. The Camaldolese branch of Benedictines called their superior major, and neither the Carthusians nor any of the orders of friars which arose in the 13th cent., nor any subsequent religious congregation, have ever taken up the title of abbot, though ‘abbess’ was retained in the second order of Franciscans (Poor Clares). At the present day the Benedictines (black monks), with their branches, the Cistercians, reformed and unreformed, and the black and white canons regular (canons reg. of the Lateran and Premonstratensians) are governed by abbots. The first mention of an abbess {abbatissa) is said to be in an inscription set up by an Abbess Serena at St. Agnes extra muros in 514. Some heads of congregations have the title abbot general, archabbot, abbot president. The Abbot of Montecassino has the honorific title of archabbot, and in the Middle Ages, when head of a congregation, was called Abbas Abbatum. A new title, Abbas Primas, was given in 1893 to the Abbot of St. Anselmo, Borne (built by Leo Xlii.), as presi- dent of the new union of all black Benedictines. The government of an abbot or an abbess is strictly monarchical. Before St. Benedict (c. 530) the abbot was the living rule, guided, if he chose, by the traditions of the Fathers of the desert, by the rules of Pachomius, or Basil, or Augustine, or by the customs of Lerins or Marmoutier, From St. Benedict’s time (whose Buie was propagated in Italy by Gregory the Great, and became approxi- mately universal soon afterwards) the abbot’s government is constitutional, for he is bound by the Buie {Regula, cap. 64), which was gradually supplemented by decrees of popes, and of councils, and by regulations like those in England of Lan- franc. When branch congregations were formed (as Cluniaes, Cistercians, Camaldolese, etc.) of many monasteries, or congregations of black monks (as those of Bursfeld, St. Justina, etc.), the Buie was supplemented by constitutiones or commentaries on portions of the Buie, and by the regulations enforced by visitors or general chapters. All this applies also mutatis mutandis to the govern- ment of the canons regular. But the supremacy of the abbot was never seriously weakened, and the monarchical character of abbatial government is the distinguishing feature of the older orders as compared with the later friars, clerks regular, brothers, etc. As it gradually became customary for many monks to be clerics, it also became the rule for abbots to be priests—^in the East from the 5th cent., in the West from about the 7th. A council under Eugenius n. at Rome in 826 made this obligatory (Mansi, Cone. xiv. 1007). It seems that by ordinatio abbatis St. Benedict meant the ‘ appointment,’ not the ‘ ordination,’ i.e. ‘blessing’ of an abbot. St. Gregory the Great speaks of a bishop ‘ordaining’ an abbot (Ep. ix. 91), and also of the decision as to the ordination of an abbot being made by the abbot of another monastery {Ep. xi. 48). The latter had changed his mind and appointed another man in the after- noon of the same day. Gregory orders him to invite a bishop to ‘ ordain ’ the monk first designated during the celebration of Mass. St. Theodore of Canterbury orders that an abbot shall be ‘ ordained ’ by a bishop, who must sing the Mass, in the presence of two or three of the abbot’s (not the bishop’s) brethren, et donet ei baculum et pedules. This is the earliest form of the abbatial blessing. The Pontifical of Egbert of York (732-766) gives a consecratio Abbatis vet Abbatissce. There are now two forms provided in the Roman Pontifical for the blessing of an abbot, one for an Abbas simplex, the other for a mitred abbot. The former appears to be no longer used. The latter is largely modelled on the order of consecration of a bishop, and the officiating bishop is assisted by two mitred abbots. The blessing of an abbess is permitted to a priest by Theodore.