ht falling in your heat has suddenly given you awareness of God, flooding your soul in a way that makes you love God and despise the world and all material things, this obscure and fleeting image can help you understand the state of the just who rejoice in God with peaceful and unending happiness. This joy is sometimes bestowed by the Providence of God, but rarely, so that this little taste may lead you to the remembrance of the good things which you do not possess."As we have looked into the causes of monasticism, the development of monasticism and the history behind some of its practices. We can start to understand whom these hooded little men really are and what they stood for. We can see that this movement was truly needed. Monasticism aided in the rapid development of a hierarchical, centralized organization in the church because the monks were bound to obedience to superiors who in turn owed their allegiance to the pope. We do admire the fine contributions the monks made to medieval life. This was not only a movement in the history of Christianity, but it is still practiced today. One author defined monasticism as such: "Monasticism did not begin by being passed one to another but arose like spontaneous eruptions, or like a spring gushing forth in different places from a source underground."...
