Chapter 10
For indeed in no northern country can such situations be found for the monastic cell as can be found in those great deserts which stretch from Syria to Arabia, from Arabia to Egypt, from Egypt to Africa properly so called. Here and there a northern hermit found, as Hilarion found, a fitting home by the seaside, on some lonely island or storm-beat rock, like St. Cuthbert, off the coast of Northumberland; like St. Rule, on his rock at St. Andrew’s; and St. Columba, with his ever-venerable company of missionaries, on Iona. But inland, the fens and the forests were foul, unwholesome, depressing, the haunts of fever, ague, delirium, as St. Guthlac found at Crowland, and St. Godric at Finkhale. {130} The vast pine-woods which clothe the Alpine slopes, the vast forests of beech and oak which then spread over France and Germany, gave in time shelter to many a holy hermit. But their gloom, their unwholesomeness, and the severity of the climate, produced in them, as in most northern ascetics, a temper of mind more melancholy, and often more fierce; more given to passionate devotion, but more given also to dark superstition and cruel self-torture, than the genial climate of the desert produced in old monks of the East. When we think of St. Antony upon his mountain, we must not picture to ourselves, unless we, too, have been in the East, such a mountain as we have ever seen. We must not think of a brown northern moorland, sad, savage, storm-swept, snow-buried, save in the brief and uncertain summer months. We must not picture to ourselves an Alp, with thundering avalanches, roaring torrents, fierce alternations of heat and cold, uninhabitable by mortal man, save during that short period of the year when the maidens in the sennhutt watch the cattle upon the upland pastures. We must picture to ourselves mountains blazing day after day, month after month, beneath the glorious sun and cloudless sky, in an air so invigorating that the Arabs can still support life there upon a few dates each day; and where, as has been said,—“Man needs there hardly to eat, drink, or sleep, for the act of breathing will give life enough;” an atmosphere of such telescopic clearness as to explain many of the strange stories which have been lately told of Antony’s seemingly preternatural powers of vision; a colouring, which, when painters dare to put it on canvas, seems to our eyes, accustomed to the quiet greys and greens of England, exaggerated and impossible—distant mountains, pink and lilac, quivering in pale blue haze—vast sheets of yellow sand, across which the lonely rock or a troop of wild asses or gazelles throw intense blue-black shadows—rocks and cliffs not shrouded, as here, in soil, much less in grass and trees, or spotted with lichens and stained with veins; but keeping each stone its natural colour, as it wastes—if, indeed, it wastes at all—under the action of the all but rainless air, which has left the paintings on the old Egyptian temples fresh and clear for thousands of years; rocks, orange and purple, black, white, and yellow; and again and again beyond them {131} glimpses, it may be, of the black Nile, and of the long green garden of Egypt, and of the dark blue sea. The eastward view from Antony’s old home must be one of the most glorious in the world, save for its want of verdure and of life. For Antony, as he looked across the blue waters of the Gulf of Akaba, across which, far above, the Israelites had passed in old times, could see the sacred goal of their pilgrimage, the red granite peaks of Sinai, flaming against the blue sky with that intensity of hue which is scarcely exaggerated, it is said, by the bright scarlet colour in which Sinai is always painted in mediæval illuminations.
But the gorgeousness of colouring, though it may interest us, was not, of course, what produced the deepest effect upon the minds of those old hermits. They enjoyed Nature, not so much for her beauty, as for her perfect peace. Day by day the rocks remained the same. Silently out of the Eastern desert, day by day, the rising sun threw aloft those arrows of light, which the old Greeks had named “the rosy fingers of the dawn.” Silently he passed in full blaze almost above their heads throughout the day; and silently he dipped behind the western desert in a glory of crimson and orange, green and purple; and without an interval of twilight, in a moment, all the land was dark, and the stars leapt out, not twinkling as in our damper climate here, but hanging like balls of white fire in that purple southern night, through which one seems to look beyond the stars into the infinite abyss, and towards the throne of God himself. Day after day, night after night, that gorgeous pageant passed over the poor hermit’s head without a sound; and though sun and moon and planet might change their places as the year rolled round, the earth beneath his feet seemed not to change. Every morning he saw the same peaks in the distance, the same rocks, the same sand-heaps around his feet. He never heard the tinkle of a running stream. For weeks together he did not even hear the rushing of the wind. Now and then a storm might sweep up the pass, whirling the sand in eddies, and making the desert for a while literally a “howling wilderness;” and when that was passed all was as it had been before. The very change of seasons must have been little marked to him, save by the motions, if he cared to watch them, of the stars above; for vegetation there was none to mark the difference between summer and winter. In spring of course the solitary date-palm here and there threw out its spathe of young green leaves, to add to the number of those which, grey or brown, hung drooping down the stem, withering but not decaying for many a year in that dry atmosphere; or perhaps the accacia bushes looked somewhat gayer for a few weeks, and the Retama broom, from which as well as from the palm leaves he plaited his baskets, threw out its yearly crop of twigs; but any greenness there might be in the vegetation of spring, turned grey in a few weeks beneath that burning sun; and be rest of the year was one perpetual summer of dust and glare and rest. Amid such scenes they had full time for thought. Nature and man alike left it in peace; while the labour required for sustaining life (and the monk wished for nothing more than to sustain mere life) was very light. Wherever water could be found, the hot sun and the fertile soil would repay by abundant crops, perhaps twice in the year, the toil of scratching the ground and putting in the seed. Moreover, the labour of the husbandman, so far from being adverse to the contemplative life, is of all occupations, it may be, that which promotes most quiet and wholesome meditation in the mind which cares to meditate. The life of the desert, when once the passions of youth were conquered, seems to have been not only a happy, but a healthy one. And when we remember that the monk, clothed from head to foot in woollen, and sheltered, too, by his sheepskin cape, escaped those violent changes of temperature which produce in the East so many fatal diseases, and which were so deadly to the linen-clothed inhabitants of the green lowlands of the Nile, we need not be surprised when we read of the vast longevity of many of the old abbots; and of their death, not by disease, but by gentle, and as it were wholesome natural decay.
But if their life was easy, it was surely not ill-spent. If having few wants, and those soon supplied, they found too much time for the luxury of quiet thought, those need not blame them, who having many wants, and those also easily supplied, are wont to spend their superfluous leisure in any luxury save that of thought, above all save that of thought concerning God. For it was upon God that these men, whatever their defects or ignorances may have been, had set their minds. That man was sent into the world to know and to love, to obey and thereby to glorify, the Maker of his being, was the cardinal point of their creed, as it has been of every creed which ever exercised any beneficial influence on the minds of men. Dean Milman in his “History of Christianity,” vol. iii. page 294, has, while justly severe upon the failings and mistakes of the Eastern monks, pointed out with equal justice that the great desire of knowing God was the prime motive in the mind of all their best men:—
“In some regions of the East, the sultry and oppressive heat, the general relaxation of the physical system, dispose constitutions of a certain temperament to a dreamy inertness. The indolence and prostration of the body produce a kind of activity in the mind, if that may properly be called activity which is merely giving loose to the imagination and the emotions as they follow out the wild train of incoherent thought, or are agitated by impulses of spontaneous and ungoverned feeling. Ascetic Christianity ministered new aliment to this common propensity. It gave an object, both vague and determinate enough to stimulate, yet never to satisfy or exhaust. The regularity of stated hours of prayer, and of a kind of idle industry, weaving mats or plaiting baskets, alternated with periods of morbid reflection on the moral state of the soul, and of mystic communion with the Deity. It cannot indeed be wondered that this new revelation, as it were, of the Deity, this profound and rational certainty of his existence, this infelt consciousness of his perpetual presence, these as yet unknown impressions of his infinity, his power, and his love, should give a higher character to this eremitical enthusiasm, and attract men of loftier and more vigorous minds within its sphere. It was not merely the pusillanimous dread of encountering the trials of life which urged the humbler spirits to seek a safe retirement; or the natural love of peace, and the weariness and satiety of life, which commended this seclusion to those who were too gentle to mingle in, or who were exhausted with, the unprofitable turmoil of the world; nor was it always the anxiety to mortify the rebellious and refractory body with more advantage. The one absorbing idea of the Majesty of the Godhead almost seemed to swallow up all other considerations. The transcendent nature of the Triune Deity, the relation of the different persons of the Godhead to each other, seemed the only worthy object of men’s contemplative faculties.”
And surely the contemplation of the Godhead is no unworthy occupation for the immortal soul of any human being. But it would be unjust to these hermits did we fancy that their religion consisted merely even in this; much less that it consisted merely in dreams and visions, or in mere stated hours of prayer. That all did not fulfil the ideal of their profession is to be expected, and is frankly confessed by the writers of the Lives of the Fathers; that there were serious faults, even great crimes, among them is not denied. Those who wrote concerning them were so sure that they were on the whole good men, that they were not at all afraid of saying that some of them were bad,—not afraid, even, of recording, though only in dark hints, the reason why the Arab tribes around once rose and laid waste six churches with their monasteries in the neighbourhood of Scetis. St. Jerome in like manner does not hesitate to pour out bitter complaints against many of the monks in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem. It is notorious, too, that many became monks merely to escape slavery, hunger, or conscription into the army: Unruly and fanatical spirits, too, grew fond of wandering. Bands of monks on the great roads and public places of the empire, Massalians or Gyrovagi, as they were called, wandered from province to province, and cell to cell, living on the alms which they extorted from the pious, and making up too often for protracted fasts by outbursts of gluttony and drunkenness. And doubtless the average monk, even when well-conducted himself and in a well-conducted monastery, was, like average men of every creed, rank, or occupation, a very common-place person, acting from very mixed and often very questionable motives; and valuing his shaven crown and his sheepskin cloak, his regular hours of prayer and his implicit obedience to his abbot, more highly than he valued the fear and the love of God.
It is so in every creed. With some, even now, the strict observance of the Sabbath; with others, outward reverence at the Holy Communion; with others, the frequent hearing of sermons which suit heir own views; with others, continual reading of pious books (on the lessons of which they do not act), covers, instead of charity, a multitude of sins. But the saint, abbot, or father among these hermits was essentially the man who was not a common-place person; who was more than an ascetic, and more than a formalist; who could pierce beyond the letter to the spirit, and see, beyond all forms of doctrine or modes of life, that virtue was the one thing needful.
The Historia Lausiaca and the Pratum Spirituale have many a story and many a saying as weighty, beautiful, and instructive now as they were fifteen hundred years ago; stories which show that graces and virtues such as the world had never seen before, save in the persecuted and half-unknown Christians of the first three centuries, were cultivated to noble fruitfulness by the monks of the East. For their humility, obedience, and reverence for their superiors it is not wise to praise them just now; for those are qualities which are not at present considered virtues, but rather (save by the soldier) somewhat abject vices; and indeed they often carried them, as they did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that as the becoming a monk at all was an assertion of self-will and independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling which some have found not degrading, but ennobling; and the parent, not of servility, but of true freedom. And as for the obsolete virtue of humility, that still remains true which a voice said to Antony, when he saw the snares which were spread over the whole earth, and asked, sighing, “Who can pass safely over these?” and the voice answered, “Humility alone.”
For the rest, if the Sermon on the Mount mean anything, as a practical rule of life for Christian men, then these monks were surely justified in trying to obey it, for to obey it they surely tried.
The Words of the Elders, to which I have already alluded, and the Lausiaca of Palladius likewise, are full of precious scraps of moral wisdom, sayings, and anecdotes, full of nobleness, purity, pathos, insight into character, and often instinct with a quiet humour, which seems to have been, in the Old world, peculiar to the Egyptians, as it is, in the New, almost peculiar to the old-fashioned God-fearing Scotsman.
Take these examples, chosen almost at random.
Serapion the Sindonite was so called because he wore nothing but a sindon, or linen shirt. Though he could not read, he could say all the Scriptures by heart. He could not (says Palladius) sit quiet in his cell, but wandered over the world in utter poverty, so that he “attained to perfect impassibility, for with that nature he was born; for there are differences of natures, not of substances.”
So says Palladius, and goes on to tell how Serapion sold himself to certain play-actors for twenty gold pieces, and laboured for them as a slave till he had won them to Christ, and made them renounce the theatre; after which he made his converts give the money to the poor, and went his way.
On one of his journeys he came to Athens, and, having neither money nor goods, starved there for three days. But on the fourth he went up, seemingly to the Areopagus, and cried, “Men of Athens, help!” And when the crowd questioned him, he told them that he had, since he left Egypt, fallen into the hands of three usurers, two of whom he had satisfied, but the third would not leave him.
On being promised assistance, he told them that his three usurers were avarice, sensuality, and hunger. Of the two first he was rid, having neither money nor passions: but, as he had eaten nothing for three days, the third was beginning to be troublesome, and demanded its usual debt, without paying which he could not well live; whereon certain philosophers, seemly amused by his apologue, gave him a gold coin. He went to a baker’s shop, laid down the coin, took up a loaf, and went out of Athens for ever. Then the philosophers knew that he was endowed with true virtue; and when they had paid the baker the price of the loaf, got back their gold.
When he went into Lacedæmon, he heard that a great man there was a Manichæan, with all his family, though otherwise a good man. To him Serapion sold himself as a slave, and within two years converted him and his wife, who thenceforth treated him not as a slave, but as their own brother.
After awhile, this “Spiritual adamant,” as Palladius calls him, bought his freedom of them, and sailed for Rome. At sundown first the sailors, and then the passengers, brought out each man his provisions, and ate. Serapion sat still. The crew fancied that he was sea-sick; but when he had passed a second, third, and fourth day fasting, they asked, “Man, why do you not eat?” “Because I have nothing to eat.” They thought that some one had stolen his baggage: but when they found that the man had absolutely nothing, they began to ask him not only how he would keep alive, but how he would pay his fare. He only answered, “That he had nothing; that they might cast him out of the ship where they had found him.”
But they answered, “Not for a hundred gold pieces, so favourable was the wind,” and fed him all the way to Rome, where we lose sight of him and his humour.
To go on with almost chance quotations:—
Some monks were eating at a festival, and one said to the serving man, “I eat nothing cooked; tell them to bring me salt.” The serving man began to talk loudly: “That brother eats no cooked meat; bring him a little salt.” Quoth Abbot Theodore: “It were more better for thee, brother, to eat meat in thy cell than to hear thyself talked about in the presence of thy brethren.”
Again: a brother came to Abbot Silvanus, in Mount Sinai, and found the brethren working, and said, “Why labour you for the meat which perisheth? Mary chose the good part.” The abbot said, “Give him a book to read, and put him in an empty cell.” About the ninth hour the brother looked out, to see if he would be called to eat, and at last came to the abbot, and asked, “Do not the brethren eat to-day, abbot?” “Yes.” “Then why was not I called?” Then quoth Abbot Silvanus: “Thou art a spiritual man: and needest not their food. We are carnal, and must eat, because we work: but thou hast chosen the better part.” Whereat the monk was ashamed.
As was also John the dwarf, who wanted to be “without care like the angels, doing nothing but praise God.” So he threw away his cloak, left his brother the abbot, and went into the desert. But after seven days he came back, and knocked at the door. “Who is there?” asked his brother. “John.” “Nay, John is turned into an angel, and is no more among men.” So he left him outside all night; and in the morning gave him to understand that if he was a man he must work, but that if he was an angel, he had no need to live in a cell.
Consider again the saying of the great Antony, when some brethren were praising another in his presence. But Antony tried him, and found that he could not bear an injury. Then said the old man, “Brother, thou art like a house with an ornamented porch, while the thieves break into it by the back door.”
Or this, of Abbot Isidore, when the devil tempted him to despair, and told him that he would be lost after all: “If I do go into torment, I shall still find you below me there.”
Or this, of Zeno the Syrian, when some Egyptian monks came to him and began accusing themselves: “The Egyptians hide the virtues which they have, and confess vices which they have not. The Syrians and Greeks boast of virtues which they have not, and hide vices which they have.”
Or this: One old man said to another, “I am dead to this world.” “Do not trust yourself,” quoth the other, “till you are out of this world. If you are dead, the devil is not.”
Two old men lived in the same cell, and had never disagreed. Said one to the other, “Let us have just one quarrel, like other men.” Quoth the other: “I do not know what a quarrel is like.” Quoth the first: “Here—I will put a brick between us, and say that it is mine: and you shall say it is not mine; and over that let us have a contention and a squabble.” But when they put the brick between them, and one said, “It is mine,” the other said, “I hope it is mine.” And when the first said, “It is mine, it is not yours,” he answered, “If it is yours, take it.” So they could not find out how to have a quarrel.
Anger, malice, revenge, were accursed things in the eyes of these men. There was enough of them, and too much, among their monks; but far less, doubt not, than in the world outside. For within the monastery it was preached against, repressed, punished; and when repented of, forgiven, with loving warnings and wise rules against future transgression.
Abbot Agathon used to say, “I never went to sleep with a quarrel against any man; nor did I, as far as lay in me, let one who had a quarrel against me sleep till he had made peace.”
Abbot Isaac was asked why the devils feared him so much. “Since I was made a monk,” he said, “I settled with myself that no angry word should come out of my mouth.”
An old man said, “Anger arises from these four things: from the lust of avarice, in giving and receiving; from loving one’s own opinion; from wishing to be honoured; and from fancying oneself a teacher and hoping to be wiser than everybody. And anger obscures human reason by these four ways: if a man hate his neighbour; or if he envy him; or if he look on him as nought; or if he speak evil of him.”
A brother being injured by another, came to Abbot Sidonius, told his story, and said, “I wish to avenge myself, father.” The abbot begged him to leave vengeance to God: but when he refused, said, “Then let us pray.” Whereon the old man rose, and said, “God, thou art not necessary to us any longer, that thou shouldest be careful of us: for we, as this brother says, both will and can avenge ourselves.” At which that brother fell at his feet, and begged pardon, promising never to strive with his enemy.
Abbot Pœmen said often, “Let malice never overcome thee. If any man do thee harm, repay him with good, that thou mayest conquer evil with good.”
In a congregation at Scetis, when many men’s lives and conversation had been talked over, Abbot Pior held his tongue. After it was over, he went out, and filled a sack with sand, and put it on his back. Then he took a little bag, filled it likewise with sand, and carried it before him. And when the brethren asked him what he meant, he said, “The sack behind is my own sins, which are very many: yet I have cast them behind my back, and will not see them, nor weep over them. But I have put these few sins of my brother’s before my eyes, and am tormenting myself over them, and condemning my brother.”
A brother having committed a fault, went to Antony, and his brethren followed, upbraiding him, and wanting to bring him back; while he denied having done the wrong. Abbot Paphnutius was there, and spoke a parable to them:—
“I saw on the river bank a man sunk in the mud up to his knees. And men came to pull him out, and thrust him in up to the neck.”