Chapter 8
At Alexandria, Antony met one Didymus, most learned in the Scriptures, witty, and wise: but he was blind. Antony asked him, “Art thou not grieved at thy blindness?” He was silent: but being pressed by Antony, he confessed that he was sad thereat. Quoth Antony, “I wonder that a prudent man grieves over the loss of a thing which ants, and flies, and gnats have, instead of rejoicing in that possession which the holy Apostles earned. For it is better to see with the spirit than with the flesh.”
A Father asked Antony, “What shall I do?” Quoth the old man, “Trust not in thine own righteousness; regret not the thing which is past; bridle thy tongue and thy stomach.”
Quoth Antony, “He who sits still in the desert is safe from three enemies: from hearing, from speech, from sight: and has to fight against only one, his own heart.”
A young monk came and told Antony how he had seen some old men weary on their journey, and had bidden the wild asses to come and carry him, and they came. Quoth Antony, “That monk looks to me like a ship laden with a precious cargo; but whether it will get into port is uncertain.” And after some days he began to tear his hair and weep; and when they asked him why, he said, “A great pillar of the Church has just fallen;” and he sent brothers to see the young man, and found him sitting on his mat, weeping over a great sin which he had done; and he said, “Tell Antony to give me ten days’ truce, and I hope I shall satisfy him;” and in five days he was dead.
Abbot Elias fell into temptation, and the brethren drove him out. Then he went to the mountain to Antony. After awhile, Antony sent him home to his brethren; but they would not receive him. Then the old man sent to them, and saying, “A ship has been wrecked at sea, and lost all its cargo; and, with much toil, the ship is come empty to land. Will you sink it again in the sea?” So they took Elias back.
Quoth Antony, “There are some who keep their bodies in abstinence: but, because they have no discretion, they are far from God.”
A hunter came by, and saw Antony rejoicing with the brethren, and it displeased him. Quoth Antony, “Put an arrow in thy bow, and draw;” and he did. Quoth Antony, “Draw higher;” and again, “Draw higher still.” And he said, “If I overdraw, I shall break my bow.” Quoth Antony, “So it is in the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure, they fail.”
A brother said to Antony, “Pray for me.” Quoth he, “I cannot pity thee, nor God either, unless thou pitiest thyself, and prayest to God.”
Quoth Antony, “The Lord does not permit wars to arise in this generation, because he knows that men are weak, and cannot bear them.”
Antony, as he considered the depths of the judgments of God, failed; and said, “Lord, why do some die so early, and some live on to a decrepit age? Why are some needy, and others rich? Why are the unjust wealthy, and the just poor?” And a voice came to him, “Antony, look to thyself. These are the judgments of God, which are not fit for thee to know.”
Quoth Antony to Abbot Pastor, “This is a man’s great business—to lay each man his own fault on himself before the Lord, and to expect temptation to the last day of his life.”
Quoth Antony, “If a man works a few days, and then is idle, and works again and is idle again, he does nothing, and will not possess the perseverance of patience.”
Quoth Antony to his disciples, “If you try to keep silence, do not think that you are exercising a virtue, but that you are unworthy to speak.”
Certain old men came once to Antony; and he wished to prove them, and began to talk of holy Scripture, and to ask them, beginning at the youngest, what this and that text meant. And each answered as best they could. But he kept on saying, “You have not yet found it out.” And at last he asked Abbot Joseph, “And what dost thou think this text means?” Quoth Abbot Joseph, “I do not know.” Quoth Antony, “Abbot Joseph alone has found out the way, for he says he does not know it.”
Quoth Antony, “I do not now fear God, but love Him, for love drives out fear.”
He said again, “Life and death are very near us; for if we gain our brother, we gain God: but if we cause our brother to offend, we sin against Christ.”
A philosopher asked Antony, “How art thou content, father, since thou hast not the comfort of books?” Quoth Antony, “My book is the nature of created things. In it, when I choose, I can read the words of God.”
Brethren came to Antony, and asked of him a saying by which they might be saved. Quoth he, “Ye have heard the Scriptures, and know what Christ requires of you.” But they begged that he would tell them something of his own. Quoth he, “The Gospel says, ‘If a man smite you on one cheek, turn to him the other.’” But they said that they could not do that. Quoth he, “You cannot turn the other cheek to him? Then let him smite you again on the same one.” But they said they could not do that either. Then said he, “If you cannot, at least do not return evil for evil.” And when they said that neither could they do that, quoth Antony to his disciples, “Go, get them something to eat, for they are very weak.” And he said to them, “If you cannot do the one, and will not have the other, what do you want? As I see, what you want is prayer. That will heal your weakness.”
Quoth Antony, “He who would be free from his sins must be so by weeping and mourning; and he who would be built up in virtue must be built up by tears.”
Quoth Antony, “When the stomach is full of meat, forthwith the great vices bubble out, according to that which the Saviour says: ‘That which entereth into the mouth defileth not a man; but that which cometh out of the heart sinks a man in destruction.’”
[This may be a somewhat paradoxical application of the text: but the last anecdote of Antony which I shall quote is full of wisdom and humanity.]
A monk came from Alexandria, Eulogius by name, bringing with him a man afflicted with elephantiasis. Now Eulogius had been a scholar, learned, and rich, and had given away all he had save a very little, which he kept because he could not work with his own hands.
And he told Antony how he had found that wretched man lying in the street fifteen years before, having lost then nearly every member save his tongue, and how he had taken him home to his cell, nursed him, bathed him, physicked him, fed him; and how the man had returned him nothing save slanders, curses, and insults; how he had insisted on having meat, and had had it; and on going out in public, and had company brought to him; and how he had at last demanded to be put down again whence he had been taken, always cursing and slandering. And now Eulogius could bear the man no longer, and was minded to take him at his word.
Then said Antony with an angry voice, “Wilt thou cast him out, Eulogius? He who remembers that he made him, will not cast him out. If thou cast him out, he will find a better friend than thee. God will choose some one who will take him up when he is cast away.” Eulogius was terrified at these words, and held his peace.
Then went Antony to the sick man, and shouted at him, “Thou elephantiac, foul with mud and dirt, not worthy of the third heaven, wilt thou not stop shouting blasphemies against God? Dost thou not know that he who ministers to thee is Christ? How darest thou say such things against Christ?” And he bade Eulogius and the sick man go back to their cell, and live in peace, and never part more. Both went back, and, after forty days, Eulogius died, and the sick man shortly after, “altogether whole in spirit.”
HILARION
I WOULD gladly, did space allow, give more biographies from among those of the Egyptian hermits: but it seems best, having shown the reader Antony as the father of Egyptian monachism, to go on to his great pupil Hilarion, the father of monachism in Palestine. His life stands written at length by St. Jerome, who himself died a monk at Bethlehem; and is composed happily in a less ambitious and less rugged style than that of Paul, not without elements of beauty, even of tragedy.
PROLOGUE
Remember me in thy holy prayers, glory and honour of virgins, nun Asella. Before beginning to write the life of the blessed Hilarion, I invoke the Holy Spirit which dwelt in him, that, as he largely bestowed virtues on Hilarion, he may give to me speech wherewith to relate them; so that his deeds may be equalled by my language. For those who (as Crispus says) “have wrought virtues” are held to have been worthily praised in proportion to the words in which famous intellects have been able to extol them. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian (whom Daniel calls either the brass, or the leopard, or the he-goat), on coming to the tomb of Achilles, “Happy art thou, youth,” he said, “who hast been blest with a great herald of thy worth”—meaning Homer. But I have to tell the conversation and life of such and so great a man, that even Homer, were he here, would either envy my matter, or succumb under it.
For although St. Epiphanius, bishop of Salamina in Cyprus, who had much intercourse with Hilarion, has written his praise in a short epistle, which is commonly read, yet it is one thing to praise the dead in general phrases, another to relate his special virtues. We therefore set to work rather to his advantage than to his injury; and despise those evil-speakers who lately carped at Paul, and will perhaps now carp at my Hilarion, unjustly blaming the former for his solitary life, and the latter for his intercourse with men; in order that the one, who was never seen, may be supposed not to have existed; the other, who was seen by many, may be held cheap. This was the way of their ancestors likewise, the Pharisees, who were neither satisfied with John’s desert life and fasting, nor with the Lord Saviour’s public life, eating and drinking. But I shall lay my hand to the work which I have determined, and pass by, with stopped ears, the hounds of Scylla. I pray that thou mayest persevere in Christ, and be mindful of me in thy prayers, most sacred virgin.
THE LIFE
HILARION was born in the village of Thabatha, which lies about five miles to the south of Gaza, in Palestine. He had parents given to the worship of idols, and blossomed (as the saying is) a rose among the thorns. Sent by them to Alexandria, he was entrusted to a grammarian, and there, as far as his years allowed, gave proof of great intellect and good morals. He was soon dear to all, and skilled in the art of speaking. And, what is more than all, he believed in the Lord Jesus, and delighted neither in the madness of the circus, in the blood of the arena, or in the luxury of the theatre: but all his heart was in the congregation of the Church.
But hearing the then famous name of Antony, which was carried throughout all Egypt, he was fired with a longing to visit him, and went to the desert. As soon as he saw him he changed his dress, and stayed with him about two months, watching the order of his life, and the purity of his manner; how frequent he was in prayers, how humble in receiving brethren, severe in reproving them, eager in exhorting them; and how no infirmity ever broke through his continence, and the coarseness of his food. But, unable to bear longer the crowd which assembled round Antony, for various diseases and attacks of devils, he said that it was not consistent to endure in the desert the crowds of cities, but that he must rather begin where Antony had begun. Antony, as a valiant man, was receiving the reward of victory: he had not yet begun to serve as a soldier. He returned, therefore, with certain monks to his own country; and, finding his parents dead, gave away part of his substance to the brethren, part to the poor, and kept nothing at all for himself, fearing what is told in the Acts of the Apostles, the example or punishment, of Ananias and Sapphira; and especially mindful of the Lord’s saying—“He that leaveth not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”
He was then fifteen years old. So, naked, but armed in Christ, he entered the desert, which, seven miles from Maiuma, the port of Gaza, turns away to the left of those who go along the shore towards Egypt. And though the place was blood-stained by robbers, and his relations and friends warned him of the imminent danger, he despised death, in order to escape death. All wondered at his spirit, wondered at his youth. Save that a certain fire of the bosom and spark of faith glittered in his eyes, his cheeks were smooth, his body delicate and thin, unable to bear any injury, and liable to be overcome by even a light chill or heat.
So, covering his limbs only with a sackcloth, and having a cloak of skin, which the blessed Antony had given him at starting, and a rustic cloak, between the sea and the swamp, he enjoyed the vast and terrible solitude, feeding on only fifteen figs after the setting of the sun; and because the region was, as has been said above, of ill-repute from robberies, no man had ever stayed before in that place. The devil, seeing what he was doing and whither he had gone, was tormented. And though he, who of old boasted, saying, “I shall ascend into heaven, I shall sit above the stars of heaven, and shall be like unto the Most High,” now saw that he had been conquered by a boy, and trampled under foot by him, ere, on account of his youth, he could commit sin. He therefore began to tempt his senses; but he, enraged with himself, and beating his breast with his fist, as if he could drive out thoughts by blows, “I will force thee, mine ass,” said he, “not to kick; and feed thee with straw, not barley. I will wear thee out with hunger and thirst; I will burden thee with heavy loads; I will hunt thee through heat and cold, till thou thinkest more of food than of play.” He therefore sustained his fainting spirit with the juice of herbs and a few figs, after each three or four days, praying frequently, and singing psalms, and digging the ground with a mattock, to double the labour of fasting by that of work. At the same time, by weaving baskets of rushes, he imitated the discipline of the Egyptian monks, and the Apostle’s saying—“He that will not work, neither let him eat”—till he was so attenuated, and his body so exhausted, that it scarce clung to his bones.
One night he began to hear the crying {108} of infants, the bleating of sheep, the wailing of women, the roaring of lions, the murmur of an army, and utterly portentous and barbarous voices; so that he shrank frightened by the sound ere he saw aught. He understood these to be the insults of devils; and, falling on his knees, he signed the cross of Christ on his forehead, and armed with that helmet, and girt with the breastplate of faith, he fought more valiantly as he lay, longing somehow to see what he shuddered to hear, and looking round him with anxious eyes: when, without warning, by the bright moonshine he saw a chariot with fiery horses rushing upon him. But when he had called on Jesus, the earth opened suddenly, and the whole pomp was swallowed up before his eyes. Then said he, “The horse and his rider he hath drowned in the sea;” and “Some glory themselves in chariots, and some in horses: but we in the name of the Lord our God.” Many were his temptations, and various, by day and night, the snares of the devils. If we were to tell them all, they would make the volume too long. How often did women appear to him; how often plenteous banquets when he was hungry. Sometimes as he prayed, a howling wolf ran past him, or a barking fox; or as he sang, a fight of gladiators made a show for him: and one of them, as if slain, falling at his feet, prayed for sepulture. He prayed once with his head bowed to the ground, and—as is the nature of man—his mind wandered from his prayer, and thought of I know not what, when a mocking rider leaped on his back, and spurring his sides, and whipping his neck, “Come,” he cries, “come, run! why do you sleep?” and, laughing loudly over him, asked him if he were tired, or would have a feed of barley.
So from his sixteenth to his twentieth year, he was sheltered from the heat and rain in a tiny cabin, which he had woven of rush and sedge. Afterwards he built a little cell, which remains to this day, four feet wide and five feet high—that is, lower than his own stature—and somewhat longer than his small body needed, so that you would believe it to be a tomb rather than a dwelling. He cut his hair only once a year, on Easter-day, and lay till his death on the bare ground and a layer of rushes, never washing the sack in which he was clothed, and saying that it was superfluous to seek for cleanliness in haircloth. Nor did he change his tunic, till the first was utterly in rags. He knew the Scriptures by heart, and recited them after his prayers and psalms as if God were present. And, because it would take up too much time to tell his great deeds one by one, I will give a short account of them.
[Then follows a series of miracles, similar to those attributed to St. Antony, and, indeed, to all these great Hermit Fathers. But it is unnecessary to relate more wonders which the reader cannot be expected to believe. These miracles, however, according to St. Jerome, were the foundations of Hilarion’s fame and public career. For he says, “When they were noised abroad, people flowed to him eagerly from Syria to Egypt, so that many believed in Christ, and professed themselves to be monks—for no one had known of a monk in Syria before the holy Hilarion. He was the first founder and teacher of this conversation and study in the province. The Lord Jesus had in Egypt the old man Antony; he had in Palestine the young Hilarion . . . He was raised, indeed, by the Lord to such a glory, that the blessed Antony, hearing of his conversation, wrote to him, and willingly received his letters; and if rich people came to him from the parts of Syria, he said to them, ‘Why have you chosen to trouble yourselves by coming so far, when you have at home my son Hilarion?’ So by his example innumerable monasteries arose throughout all Palestine, and all monks came eagerly to him . . . But what a care he had, not to pass by any brother, however humble or however poor, may be shown by this; that once going into the Desert of Kadesh, to visit one of his disciples, he came, with an infinite crowd of monks, to Elusa, on the very day, as it chanced, on which a yearly solemnity had gathered all the people of the town to the Temple of Venus; for they honour her on account of the morning star, to the worship of which the nation of the Saracens is devoted. The town itself too is said to be in great part semi-barbarous, on account of its remote situation. Hearing, then, that the holy Hilarion was passing by—for he had often cured Saracens possessed with dæmons—they came out to meet him in crowds, with their wives and children, bowing their necks, and crying in the Syrian tongue, ‘Barech!’ that is, ‘Bless!’ He received them courteously and humbly, entreating them to worship God rather than stones, and wept abundantly, looking up to heaven, and promising them that, if they would believe in Christ, he would come oftener to them. Wonderful was the grace of the Lord. They would not let him depart till he had laid the foundations of a future church, and their priest, crowned as he was, had been consecrated with the sign of Christ.”
* * * * *
He was now sixty-three years old. He saw about him a great monastery, a multitude of brethren, and crowds who came to be healed of diseases and unclean spirits, filling the solitude around; but he wept daily, and remembered with incredible regret his ancient life. “I have returned to the world,” he said, “and received my reward in this life. All Palestine and the neighbouring provinces think me to be worth somewhat; while I possess a farm and household goods, under the pretext of the brethren’s advantage.” On which the brethren, and especially Hesychius, who bore him a wondrous love, watched him narrowly.
When he had lived thus sadly for two years, Aristæneta, the Prefect’s wife, came to him, wishing him to go with her to Antony, “I would go,” he said, weeping, “if I were not held in the prison of this monastery, and if it were of any use. For two days since, the whole world was robbed of such a father.” She believed him, and stopped. And Antony’s death was confirmed a few days after. Others may wonder at the signs and portents which he did, at his incredible abstinence, his silence, his miracles: I am astonished at nothing so much as that he was able to trample under foot that glory and honour.
Bishops and clergy, monks and Christian matrons (a great temptation), people of the common sort, great men, too, and judges crowded to him, to receive from him blessed bread or oil. But he was thinking of nothing but the desert, till one day he determined to set out, and taking an ass (for he was so shrunk with fasting that he could hardly walk), he tried to go his way. The news got wind; the desolation and destruction of Palestine would ensue; ten thousand souls, men and women, tried to stop his way; but he would not hear them. Smiting on the ground with his staff, he said, “I will not make my God a liar. I cannot bear to see churches ruined, the altars of Christ trampled down, the blood of my sons spilt.” All who heard thought that some secret revelation had been made to him: but yet they would not let him go. Whereon he would neither eat nor drink, and for seven days he persevered fasting, till he had his wish, and set out for Bethulia, with forty monks, who could march without food till sundown. On the fifth day he came to Pelusium, then to the camp Thebatrum, to see Dracontius; and then to Babylon to see Philo. These two were bishops and confessors exiled by Constantius, who favoured the Arian heresy. Then he came to Aphroditon, where he met Barsanes the deacon, who used to carry water to Antony on dromedaries, and heard from him that the anniversary Antony’s death was near, and would be celebrated by a vigil at his tomb. Then through a vast and horrible wilderness, he went for three days to a very high mountain, and found there two monks, Isaac and Pelusianus, of whom Isaac had been Antony’s interpreter.
A high and rocky hill it was, with fountains gushing out at its foot. Some of them the sand sucked up; some formed a little rill, with palms without number on its banks. There you might have seen the old man wandering to and fro with Antony’s disciples. “Here,” they said, “he used to sing, here to pray, here to work, here to sit when tired. These vines, these shrubs, he planted himself; that plot he laid out with his own hands. This pond to water the garden he made with heavy toil; that hoe he kept for many years.” Hilarion lay on his bed, and kissed the couch, as if it were still warm. Antony’s cell was only large enough to let a man lie down in it; and on the mountain top, reached by a difficult and winding stair, were two other cells of the same size, cut in the stony rock, to which he used to retire from the visitors and disciples, when they came to the garden. “You see,” said Isaac, “this orchard, with shrubs and vegetables. Three years since a troop of wild asses laid it waste. He bade one of their leaders stop; and beat it with his staff. ‘Why do you eat,’ he asked it, ‘what you did not sow?’ And after that the asses, though they came to drink the waters, never touched his plants.”
Then Hilarion asked them to show him Antony’s grave. They led him apart; but whether they showed it to him, no man knows. They hid it, they said, by Antony’s command, lest one Pergamius, who was the richest man of those parts, should take the corpse to his villa, and build a chapel over it.