The second important fact which belongs to the same epoch, is the development of the monastic order in the West. It was at the commencement of the sixth century that Saint Benedict instituted his order amongst the monks of the West, who were then very few in number, but who subsequently multiplied prodigiously. The monks were not, up to that period, members of the clerical body, but were still regarded as laymen. No doubt priests and even bishops had been sought out amongst them; but it was not until the end of the fifth, and the beginning of the sixth century, that the monks in general were considered as forming part of the clergy, properly so called. After that, matters were reversed; priests and bishops became monks, conceiving that they thereby made a new progress in the religious life. Thus the monastic order took all at once an excessive development in Europe. The monks struck the imagination of the barbarians more forcibly than the secular clergy; their numbers, as well as the singularity of their lives, had an imposing effect upon them. The secular clergy, indeed--the bishop and the simple priest--were less reverently looked upon by the barbarians, accustomed as they were to see, maltreat, and despoil them. An attack on a monastery, on so many holy men congregated in one holy place, was a much more serious affair. Thus the monasteries were, during the barbarian epoch, places of asylum for the church, as she herself was a resort for refuge to the laity. Pious men flocked to them for shelter, as in the East they fled to the Thebaide to escape a worldly life and the contamination of Constantinople. Such are the two great facts which appertain to the barbarian epoch in the history of the church: on the one hand, the development of the principle of the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers; and on the other, the development of the monastic system in the West. Towards the end of the barbarian epoch, there was a new attempt to resuscitate the Roman Empire made by Charlemagne. The church and the civil sovereign contracted once more a strict alliance. It was a period of great docility, and therefore of great advancement to the Papacy. The attempt at resuscitation again failed; the Empire of Charlemagne fell, but the advantages that the church had drawn from its alliance remained with her. The Papacy was definitively planted at the head of Christianity. {118}