Footnotes

1. Some blame and some ridicule such a title as this, as being a vicious pleonasm, since these two words differ only in the language from which each is borrowed, and mean exactly the same thing; as if canons were something different from regulars, or as if there were some canons who were regulars and others who were not. But it may be seen in John Bapt. Signy Lib. de Ord. Canon, B. ii., and Navarre, Com. I. de Regul. ad c. 12, Cui portio Deus, q. 1, where he shows that every pleonasm is not necessarily a battology. For in legal documents certain expressions or clauses are often repeated to give them more force. It is the same in Hebrew (Ps. lxxxvii. 5, Ps. lxviii. 12 Vulg. and lxx.). Oger was the first Dean of the Regular Canons of S. Nicholas des Pres, near Tournay. Picard states this upon the authority of Denis Viller, Canon and Chancellor of Tournay. ↩

2. Bernard had counselled him not to resign his abbacy, and this advice he had not followed. Hence is suggested the serious question: Is it lawful to lay down the pastoral charge, to withdraw one’s self from cares and business, for the purpose of serving God in peace and quiet, and caring for one’s own soul? The examples of so many holy men whom we know to have done this add to the difficulty of the question. Many might be cited among prelates of lower rank, not a few Bishops, Cardinals, and even some Popes. Bruno III., Count of Altena, and afterwards Bishop of Cologne, quitted his see, in 1119, and retired to the Cistercian monastery of Aldenberg. Eskilus, Archbishop of Lunden, in Denmark, came to live at Clairvaux as a simple monk; Peter Damian, who, from a Benedictine monk, became Cardinal and Bishop of Ostia, after he had rendered signal service to the Church for a number of years, with wonderful constancy, in the high office to which he had been raised, returned into his cell from love of solitude and quiet, and passed the rest of his days in profound peace, in the midst of his brethren; but was blamed by the Pope because he, a useful and able man, postponed public usefulness to his private safety. One remarkable fact is recorded of him, that the Pope imposed upon him a penance of a hundred years for quitting his Bishopric: he was to recite Ps. 1. [li.] and give himself the discipline every day for a hundred years; and this he completed entirely in the space of one year. This I remember to have read somewhere (Works, Vol. i. ep. 10, new ed., Vol. iii. opusc. 20). To Pope Alexander and Cardinal Hildebrand, who became Pope later under the name of Gregory VII., he tries to justify his quitting his see, and opposes numerous examples of conduct similar to his, to the blame of the Pope and the cardinals. But it is necessary to hold to what the law prescribes rather than to the examples of other persons. The Angelical Doctor says: “Every pastor is obliged by his function to labour for the salvation of others, and it is not permitted to him to cease to do so, not even to have leisure for peaceful meditation upon spiritual things. For the Apostle regards the obligation to occupy himself with the salvation of others who depend upon him as being of such importance that it must not be postponed even to heavenly meditation: *I know not what to choose,*he says, for I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better; nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you (Phil. i. 22–23). It may be added that the Episcopate being a state more perfect than that of the monk, it follows that just as it is not permitted to quit the second to re-enter the world, so it is not allowable to renounce the first in order to embrace the second, considering that the latter is less perfect than the former. That would precisely be to look back after having put one’s hand to the plough, and to show one’s self unfit for the kingdom of God” (S. Luke ix. 62). ↩

3. Exoneratus; exhonoratus. ↩

4. Because a monk, when he became an abbot, was freed from the control of his own abbot. ↩

5. S. Luke xxi. 2–4 ↩