Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 149
the end he remained loyal to Rome, some of the works of his
early career, particularly in the period before Luther made
his protest, show how tenuous was his acceptance of the
orthodoxy into which he had been bom.
Among these works is a little treatise Contra υitam mona-
sticam written probably in 1515 or 1516. This is in the form
of a letter to a friend who Alciato had heard has entered a
monastic order. This step has so distressed Alciato that he
marshals all the arguments he can think of against the insti-
tution of monasticism in an effort to dissuade his young
friend from this decision. He attacks the issue on its most
fundamental basis by examining not only the abuses but the
very raison d’etre of the monastic vows. Although the times
he feels are such as to prevent him from being entirely frank,
he is willing to maintain that the life of Christians who live
in the world as Christians but free from sacred vows is more
acceptable to God than a separate order set apart from the
world and presumed to accumulate a special merit in heaven.
This is the original and striking note in Alciato’s argument;
he raises a question which was to find an answer in the revo-
lutionary rejection of monasticism by so many of tire leading
figures in his own and the immediately succeeding genera-
tion. An institution that had lasted more than a thousand
years in western Christendom crumbled in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, and many lesser figures re-
pudiated a conventual existence and in different ways pro-
claimed that the true Christian life could be realized in the
world. The letter of Alciato shows that this revolution was by
no means limited to those who had experienced the monastic
discipline.
The less original line of argumentation in the letter con-
trasts the early history of monasticism with its present mani-