Books: The Hermits

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Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE HERMITS

INTRODUCTION

St. Paphnutius used to tell a story which may serve as a fit
introduction to this book. It contains a miniature sketch, not only
of the social state of Egypt, but of the whole Roman Empire, and of
the causes which led to the famous monastic movement in the
beginning of the fifth century after Christ.

Now Paphnutius was a wise and holy hermit, the Father, Abba, or
Abbot of many monks; and after he had trained himself in the desert
with all severity for many years, he besought God to show him which
of His saints he was like.

And it was said to him, "Thou art like a certain flute-player in the
city."

Then Paphnutius took his staff, and went into the city, and found
that flute-player. But he confessed that he was a drunkard and a
profligate, and had till lately got his living by robbery, and
recollected not having ever done one good deed. Nevertheless, when
Paphnutius questioned him more closely, he said that he recollected
once having found a holy maiden beset by robbers, and having
delivered her, and brought her safe to town. And when Paphnutius
questioned him more closely still, he said he recollected having
done another deed. When he was a robber, he met once in the desert
a beautiful woman; and she prayed him to do her no harm, but to take
her away with him as a slave, whither he would; for, said she, "I am
fleeing from the apparitors and the Governor's curials for the last
two years. My husband has been imprisoned for 300 pieces of gold,
which he owes as arrears of taxes; and has been often hung up, and
often scourged; and my three dear boys have been taken from me; and
I am wandering from place to place, and have been often caught
myself and continually scourged; and now I have been in the desert
three days without food."

And when the robber heard that, he took pity on her, and took her to
his cave, and gave her 300 pieces of gold, and went with her to the
city, and set her husband and her boys free.

Then Paphnutius said, "I never did a deed like that: and yet I have
not passed my life in ease and idleness. But now, my son, since God
hath had such care of thee, have a care for thine own self."

And when the musician heard that, he threw away the flutes which he
held in his hand, and went with Paphnutius into the desert, and
passed his life in hymns and prayer, changing his earthly music into
heavenly; and after three years he went to heaven, and was at rest
among the choirs of angels, and the ranks of the just.

This story, as I said, is a miniature sketch of the state of the
whole Roman Empire, and of the causes why men fled from it into the
desert. Christianity had reformed the morals of individuals; it had
not reformed the Empire itself. That had sunk into a state only to
be compared with the worst despotisms of the East. The Emperors,
whether or not they called themselves Christian, like Constantine,
knew no law save the basest maxims of the heathen world. Several of
them were barbarians who had risen from the lowest rank merely by
military prowess; and who, half maddened by their sudden elevation,
added to their native ignorance and brutality the pride, cunning,
and cruelty of an Eastern Sultan. Rival Emperors, or Generals who
aspired to be Emperors, devastated the world from Egypt to Britain
by sanguinary civil wars. The government of the provinces had
become altogether military. Torture was employed, not merely, as of
old, against slaves, but against all ranks, without distinction.
The people were exhausted by compulsory taxes, to be spent in wars
which did not concern them, or in Court luxury in which they had no
share. In the municipal towns, liberty and justice were dead. The
curials, who answered somewhat to our aldermen, and who were
responsible for the payment of the public moneys, tried their best
to escape the unpopular office, and, when compelled to serve, wrung
the money in self-defence out of the poorer inhabitants by every
kind of tyranny. The land was tilled either by oppressed and
miserable peasants, or by gangs of slaves, in comparison with whose
lot that even of the American negro was light. The great were
served in their own households by crowds of slaves, better fed,
doubtless, but even more miserable and degraded, than those who
tilled the estates. Private profligacy among all ranks was such as
cannot be described in these or in any modern pages. The regular
clergy of the cities, though not of profligate lives, and for the
most part, in accordance with public opinion, unmarried, were able
to make no stand against the general corruption of the age, because-
-at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom--
they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and
luxury, intrigue and party spirit, and had become the flatterers of
fine ladies, "silly women laden with sins, ever learning, and never
coming to the knowledge of the truth." Such a state of things not
only drove poor creatures into the desert, like that fair woman whom
the robber met, but it raised up bands of robbers over the whole of
Europe, Africa, and the East,--men who, like Robin Hood and the
outlaws of the Middle Age, getting no justice from man, broke loose
from society, and while they plundered their oppressors, kept up
some sort of rude justice and humanity among themselves. Many, too,
fled, and became robbers, to escape the merciless conscription which
carried off from every province the flower of the young men, to shed
their blood on foreign battle-fields. In time, too, many of these
conscripts became monks, and the great monasteries of Scetis and
Nitria were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers
from the neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who
had entered the "spiritual warfare" to escape the earthly one. And
as a background to all this seething heap of decay, misrule, and
misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes
from whom we derive the best part of our blood, ever coming nearer
and nearer, waxing stronger and stronger, learning discipline and
civilization by serving in the Roman armies, alternately the allies
and the enemies of the Emperors, rising, some of them, to the
highest offices of State, and destined, so the wisest Romans saw all
the more clearly as the years rolled on, to be soon the conquerors
of the Caesars, and the masters of the Western world.

No wonder if that, in such a state of things, there arose such
violent contrasts to the general weakness, such eccentric protests
against the general wickedness, as may be seen in the figure of
Abbot Paphnutius, when compared either with the poor man tortured in
prison for his arrears of taxes, or with the Governor and the
officials who tortured him. No wonder if, in such a state of
things, the minds of men were stirred by a passion akin to despair,
which ended in a new and grand form of suicide. It would have ended
often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which
had led in past ages more than one noble Roman to slay himself, when
he lost all hope for the Republic. Christianity taught those who
despaired of society, of the world--in one word, of the Roman
Empire, and all that it had done for men--to hope at least for a
kingdom of God after death. It taught those who, had they been
heathens and brave enough, would have slain themselves to escape out
of a world which was no place for honest men, that the body must be
kept alive, if for no other reason, at least for the sake of the
immortal soul, doomed, according to its works, to endless bliss or
endless torment.

But that the world--such, at least, as they saw it then--was doomed,
Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely
believe, but see, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and
degradation around them, that all that was in the world, the lust of
the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, was not of
the Father, but of the world; that the world was passing away, and
the lust thereof, and that only he who did the will of God could
abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw, that the
wrath of God was revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of
men; and that the world in general--above all, its kings and rulers,
the rich and luxurious--were treasuring up for themselves wrath,
tribulation, and anguish, against a day of wrath and revelation of
the righteous judgment of God, who would render to every man
according to his works.

That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them,
contemporary history proves abundantly. That they were correct,
likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall
on man, is proved by the fact that it did fall; that the first half
of the fifth century saw, not only the sack of Rome, but the
conquest and desolation of the greater part of the civilized world,
amid bloodshed, misery, and misrule, which seemed to turn Europe
into a chaos,--which would have turned it into a chaos, had there
not been a few men left who still felt it possible and necessary to
believe in God and to work righteousness.

Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed
world, and try to be alone with God, if by any means they might save
each man his own soul in that dread day.

Others, not Christians, had done the same before them. Among all
the Eastern nations men had appeared, from time to time, to whom the
things seen were but a passing phantom, the things unseen the only
true and eternal realities; who, tormented alike by the awfulness of
the infinite unknown, and by the petty cares and low passions of the
finite mortal life which they knew but too well, had determined to
renounce the latter, that they might give themselves up to solving
the riddle of the former; and be at peace; and free, at least, from
the tyranny of their own selves. Eight hundred years before St.
Antony fled into the desert, that young Hindoo rajah, whom men call
Buddha now, had fled into the forest, leaving wives and kingdom, to
find rest for his soul. He denounced caste; he preached poverty,
asceticism, self-annihilation. He founded a religion, like that of
the old hermits, democratic and ascetic, with its convents, saint-
worships, pilgrimages, miraculous relics, rosaries, and much more,
which strangely anticipates the monastic religion; and his
followers, to this day, are more numerous than those of any other
creed.

Brahmins, too, had given themselves up to penance and mortification
till they believed themselves able, like Kehama, to have gained by
self-torture the right to command, not nature merely, but the gods
themselves. Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the
Therapeutae in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former
more "practical," the latter more "contemplative:" but both alike
agreed in the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of
poverty and simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless
philosophic sects of Asia, known to ecclesiastical writers as
"heretics," more than one had professed, and doubtless often
practised, the same abstraction from the world, the same contempt of
the flesh. The very Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, while they
derided the Christian asceticism, found themselves forced to affect,
like the hapless Hypatia, a sentimental and pharisaic asceticism of
their own. This phase of sight and feeling, so strange to us now,
was common, nay, primaeval, among the Easterns. The day was come
when it should pass from the East into the West. And Egypt, "the
mother of wonders;" the parent of so much civilization and
philosophy both Greek and Roman; the half-way resting-place through
which not merely the merchandise, but the wisdom of the East had for
centuries passed into the Roman Empire; a land more ill-governed,
too, and more miserable, in spite of its fertility, because more
defenceless and effeminate, than most other Roman possessions--was
the country in which naturally, and as it were of hereditary right,
such a movement would first appear.

Accordingly it was discovered, about the end of the fourth century,
that the mountains and deserts of Egypt were full of Christian men
who had fled out of the dying world, in the hope of attaining
everlasting life. Wonderful things were told of their courage,
their abstinence, their miracles: and of their virtues also; of
their purity, their humility, their helpfulness, and charity to each
other and to all. They called each other, it was said, brothers;
and they lived up to that sacred name, forgotten, if ever known, by
the rest of the Roman Empire. Like the Apostolic Christians in the
first fervour of their conversion, they had all things in common;
they lived at peace with each other, under a mild and charitable
rule; and kept literally those commands of Christ which all the rest
of the world explained away to nothing.

The news spread. It chimed in with all that was best, as well as
with much that was questionable, in the public mind. That men could
be brothers; that they could live without the tawdry luxury, the
tasteless and often brutal amusements, the low sensuality, the base
intrigue, the bloody warfare, which was the accepted lot of the
many; that they could find time to look stedfastly at heaven and
hell as awful realities, which must be faced some day, which had
best be faced at once; this, just as much as curiosity about their
alleged miracles, and the selfish longing to rival them in
superhuman powers, led many of the most virtuous and the most
learned men of the time to visit them, and ascertain the truth.
Jerome, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Sulpicius Severus, went to see them,
undergoing on the way the severest toils and dangers, and brought
back reports of mingled truth and falsehood, specimens of which will
be seen in these pages. Travelling in those days was a labour, if
not of necessity, then surely of love. Palladius, for instance,
found it impossible to visit the Upper Thebaid, and Syene, and that
"infinite multitude of monks, whose fashions of life no one would
believe, for they surpass human life; who to this day raise the
dead, and walk upon the waters, like Peter; and whatsoever the
Saviour did by the holy Apostles, He does now by them. But because
it would be very dangerous if we went beyond Lyco" (Lycopolis?), on
account of the inroad of robbers, he "could not see those saints."

The holy men and women of whom he wrote, he says, he did not see
without extreme toil; and seven times he and his companions were
nearly lost. Once they walked through the desert five days and
nights, and were almost worn out by hunger and thirst. Again, they
fell on rough marshes, where the sedge pierced their feet, and
caused intolerable pain, while they were almost killed with the
cold. Another time, they stuck in the mud up to their waists, and
cried with David, "I am come into deep mire, where no ground is."
Another time, they waded for four days through the flood of the Nile
by paths almost swept away. Another time they met robbers on the
seashore, coming to Diolcos, and were chased by them for ten miles.
Another time they were all but upset and drowned in crossing the
Nile. Another time, in the marshes of Mareotis, "where paper
grows," they were cast on a little desert island, and remained three
days and nights in the open air, amid great cold and showers, for it
was the season of Epiphany. The eighth peril, he says, is hardly
worth mentioning--but once, when they went to Nitria, they came on a
great hollow, in which many crocodiles had remained, when the waters
retired from the fields. Three of them lay along the bank; and the
monks went up to them, thinking them dead, whereon the crocodiles
rushed at them. But when they called loudly on the Lord, "the
monsters, as if turned away by an angel," shot themselves into the
water; while they ran on to Nitria, meditating on the words of Job,
"Seven times shall He deliver thee from trouble; and in the eighth
there shall no evil touch thee."

The great St. Athanasius, fleeing from persecution, had taken refuge
among these monks. He carried the report of their virtues to Treves
in Gaul, and wrote a life of St. Antony, the perusal of which was a
main agent in the conversion of St. Augustine. Hilarion (a
remarkable personage, whose history will be told hereafter) carried
their report and their example likewise into Palestine; and from
that time Judaea, desolate and seemingly accursed by the sin of the
Jewish people, became once more the Holy Land; the place of
pilgrimage; whose ruins, whose very soil, were kept sacred by
hermits, the guardians of the footsteps of Christ.

In Rome itself the news produced an effect which, to the thoughtful
mind, is altogether tragical in its nobleness. The Roman
aristocracy was deprived of all political power; it had been
decimated, too, with horrible cruelty only one generation before,
{12} by Valentinian and his satellites, on the charges of
profligacy, treason, and magic. Mere rich men, they still lingered
on, in idleness and luxury, without art, science, true civilization
of any kind; followed by long trains of slaves; punishing a servant
with three hundred stripes if he were too long in bringing hot
water; weighing the fish, or birds, or dormice put on their tables,
while secretaries stood by, with tablets to record all; hating
learning as they hated poison; indulging at the baths in conduct
which had best be left undescribed; and "complaining that they were
not born among the Cimmerians, if amid their golden fans a fly
should perch upon the silken fringes, or a slender ray of the sun
should pierce through the awning;" while, if they "go any distance
to see their estates in the country, or to hunt at a meeting
collected for their amusement by others, they think that they have
equalled the marches of Alexander or of Caesar."

On the wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp--and not
half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier
Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here--the news
brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency.

Women of the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life
was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment
and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to
whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose
infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a
world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves;
they gave away their wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor;
and in voluntary poverty and mean garments they followed such men as
Jerome and Ruffinus across the seas, to visit the new found saints
of the Egyptian desert, and to end their days, in some cases, in
doleful monasteries in Palestine. The lives of such women as those
of the Anician house; the lives of Marcella and Furia, of Paula, of
the Melanias, and the rest, it is not my task to write. They must
be told by a woman, not by a man. We may blame those ladies, if we
will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at the
weaknesses--the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity--which we
fancy that we discover. We may lament--and in that we shall not be
wrong--the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them--
the example and precursor of so much which has since then been
ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the
fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands,
and brothers; we must confess that in these women the spirit of the
old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been so long dead, flashed
up for one splendid moment, ere it sunk into the darkness of the
Middle Age; that in them woman asserted (however strangely and
fantastically) her moral equality with man; and that at the very
moment when monasticism was consigning her to contempt, almost to
abhorrence, as "the noxious animal," the "fragile vessel," the cause
of man's fall at first, and of his sin and misery ever since, woman
showed the monk (to his naively-confessed surprise), that she could
dare, and suffer, and adore as well as he.

But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and
spread irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached,
practised, by every great man of the time. Athanasius, Basil,
Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine,
Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of
Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours, Salvian, Caesarius of Arles,
were all monks, or as much of monks as their duties would allow them
to be. Ambrose of Milan, though no monk himself, was the fervent
preacher of, the careful legislator for, monasticism male and
female. Throughout the whole Roman Empire, in the course of a
century, had spread hermits (or dwellers in the desert), anchorites
(retired from the world), or monks (dwellers alone). The three
names grew afterwards to designate three different orders of
ascetics. The hermits remained through the Middle Ages those who
dwelt in deserts; the anchorites, or "ankers" of the English Middle
Age, seem generally to have inhabited cells built in, or near, the
church walls; the name of "monks" was transferred from those who
dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular communities, under a fixed
government. But the three names at first were interchangeable; the
three modes of life alternated, often in the same man. The life of
all three was the same,--celibacy, poverty, good deeds towards their
fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of every
kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after
baptism: and the mental food of all three was the same likewise;
continued meditation upon the vanity of the world, the sinfulness of
the flesh, the glories of heaven, and the horrors of hell: but with
these the old hermits combined--to do them justice--a personal faith
in God, and a personal love for Christ, which those who sneer at
them would do well to copy.

Over all Europe, even to Ireland, {15} the same pattern of Christian
excellence repeated itself with strange regularity, till it became
the only received pattern; and to "enter religion," or "be
converted," meant simply to become a monk.

Of the authentic biographies of certain of these men, a few
specimens are given in this volume. If they shall seem to any
reader uncouth, or even absurd, he must remember that they are the
only existing and the generally contemporaneous histories of men who
exercised for 1,300 years an enormous influence over the whole of
Christendom; who exercise a vast influence over the greater part of
it to this day. They are the biographies of men who were regarded,
during their lives and after their deaths, as divine and inspired
prophets; and who were worshipped with boundless trust and
admiration by millions of human beings. Their fame and power were
not created by the priesthood. The priesthood rather leant on them,
than they on it. They occupied a post analogous to that of the old
Jewish prophets; always independent of, sometimes opposed to, the
regular clergy; and dependent altogether on public opinion and the
suffrage of the multitude. When Christianity, after three centuries
of repression and persecution, emerged triumphant as the creed of
the whole civilized world, it had become what their lives describe.
The model of religious life for the fifth century, it remained a
model for succeeding centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his
compeers were founded the whole literature of saintly biographies;
the whole popular conception of the universe, and of man's relation
to it; the whole science of daemonology, with its peculiar
literature, its peculiar system of criminal jurisprudence. And
their influence did not cease at the Reformation among Protestant
divines. The influence of these Lives of the Hermit Fathers is as
much traceable, even to style and language, in "The Pilgrim's
Progress" as in the last Papal Allocution. The great hermits of
Egypt were not merely the founders of that vast monastic system
which influenced the whole politics, and wars, and social life, as
well as the whole religion, of the Middle Age; they were a school of
philosophers (as they rightly called themselves) who altered the
whole current of human thought.

Those who wish for a general notion of the men, and of their time,
will find all that they require (set forth from different points of
view, though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de
Montalembert's "Moines d'Occident," in Dean Milman's "History of
Christianity" and "Latin Christianity," and in Ozanam's "Etudes
Germaniques." {17a} But the truest notion of the men is to be got,
after all, from the original documents; and especially from that
curious collection of them by the Jesuit Rosweyde, commonly known as
the "Lives of the Hermit Fathers." {17b}

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