Books: The Hermits

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And seeing that he did not answer, I thought to tell no one; for I
feared to touch him: and, standing about half an hour, I bent down,
and put my ear to listen; and there was no breathing: but a
fragrance as of many scents rose from his body. And so I understood
that he rested in the Lord; and, turning faint, I wept most
bitterly; and, bending down, I kissed his eyes, and clasped his
beard and hair, and reproaching him, I said: "To whom dost thou
leave me, lord? or where shall I seek thy angelic doctrine? What
answer shall I make for thee? or whose soul will look at this
column, without thee, and not grieve? What answer shall I make to
the sick, when they come here to seek thee, and find thee not? What
shall I say, poor creature that I am? To-day I see thee; to-morrow
I shall look right and left, and not find thee. And what covering
shall I put upon thy column? Woe to me, when folk shall come from
afar, seeking thee, and shall not find thee!" And, for much sorrow,
I fell asleep.

And forthwith he appeared to me, and said: "I will not leave this
column, nor this place, and this blessed mountain, where I was
illuminated. But go down, satisfy the people, and send word
secretly to Antioch, lest a tumult arise. For I have gone to rest,
as the Lord willed: but do thou not cease to minister in this
place, and the Lord shall repay thee thy wages in heaven."

But, rising from sleep, I said, in terror, "Master, remember me in
thy holy rest." And, lifting up his garments, I fell at his feet,
and kissed them; and, holding his hands, I laid them on my eyes,
saying, "Bless me, I beseech thee, my lord!" And again I wept, and
said, "What relics shall I carry away from thee as memorials?" And
as I said that his body was moved; therefore I was afraid to touch
him.

And, that no one might know, I came down quickly, and sent a
faithful brother to the Bishop at Antioch. He came at once with
three Bishops, and with them Ardaburius, the master of the soldiers,
with his people, and stretched curtains round the column, and
fastened their clothes around it. For they were cloth of gold.

And when they laid him down by the altar before the column, and
gathered themselves together, birds flew round the column, crying,
and as it were lamenting, in all men's sight; and the wailing of the
people and of the cattle resounded for seven miles away; yea, even
the hills, and the fields, and the trees were sad around that place;
for everywhere a dark cloud hung about it. And I watched an angel
coming to visit him; and, about the seventh hour, seven old men
talked with that angel, whose face was like lightning, and his
garments as snow. And I watched his voice, in fear and trembling,
as long as I could hear it; but what he said I cannot tell.

But when the holy Simeon lay upon the bier, the Pope of Antioch,
wishing to take some of his beard for a blessing, stretched out his
hand; and forthwith it was dried up; and prayers were made to God
for him, and so his hand was restored again.

Then, laying the corpse on the bier, they took it to Antioch, with
psalms and hymns. But all the people round that region wept,
because the protection of such mighty relics was taken from them,
and because the Bishop of Antioch had sworn that no man should touch
his body.

But when they came to the fifth milestone from Antioch, to the
village which is called Meroe, no one could move him. Then a
certain man, deaf and dumb for forty years, who had committed a very
great crime, suddenly fell down before the bier, and began to cry,
"Thou art well come, servant of God; for thy coming will save me:
and if I shall obtain the grace to live, I will serve thee all the
days of my life." And, rising, he caught hold of one of the mules
which carried the bier, and forthwith moved himself from that place.
And so the man was made whole from that hour.

Then all going out of the city of Antioch received the body of the
holy Simeon on gold and silver, with psalms and hymns, and with many
lamps brought it into the greater church, and thence to another
church, which is called Penitence. Moreover, many virtues are
wrought at his tomb, more than in his life; and the man who was made
whole served there till the day of his death. But many offered
treasures to the Bishop of Antioch for the faith, begging relics
from the body: but, on account of his oath, he never gave them.

I, Antony, lowly and a sinner, have set forth briefly, as far as I
could, this lesson. But blessed is he who has this writing in a
book, and reads it in the church and house of God; and when he shall
have brought it to his memory, he shall receive a reward from the
Most High; to whom is honour, power, and virtue, for ever and ever.
Amen.

After such a fantastic story as this of Simeon, it is full time
(some readers may have thought that it was full time long since) to
give my own opinion of the miracles, visions, daemons, and other
portents which occur in the lives of these saints. I have refrained
from doing so as yet, because I wished to begin by saying everything
on behalf of these old hermits which could honestly be said, and to
prejudice my readers' minds in their favour rather than against
them; because I am certain that if we look on them merely with scorn
and ridicule,--if we do not acknowledge and honour all in them which
was noble, virtuous, and honest,--we shall never be able to combat
their errors, either in our own hearts or in those of our children:
and that we may have need to do so is but too probable. In this
age, as in every other age of materialism and practical atheism, a
revulsion in favour of superstition is at hand; I may say is taking
place round us now. Doctrines are tolerated as possibly true,--
persons are regarded with respect and admiration, who would have
been looked on, even fifty years ago, if not with horror, yet with
contempt, as beneath the serious notice of educated English people.
But it is this very contempt which has brought about the change of
opinion concerning them. It has been discovered that they were not
altogether so absurd as they seemed; that the public mind, in its
ignorance, has been unjust to them; and, in hasty repentance for
that injustice, too many are ready to listen to those who will tell
them that these things are not absurd at all--that there is no
absurdity in believing that the leg-bone of St. Simon Stock may
possess miraculous powers, or that the spirits of the departed
communicate with their friends by rapping on the table. The ugly
after-crop of superstition which is growing up among us now is the
just and natural punishment of our materialism--I may say, of our
practical atheism. For those who will not believe in the real
spiritual world, in which each man's soul stands face to face all
day long with Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
are sure at last to crave after some false spiritual world, and
seek, like the evil and profligate generation of the Jews, after
visible signs and material wonders. And those who will not believe
that the one true and living God is above their path and about their
bed and spieth out all their ways, and that in him they live and
move and have their being, are but too likely at last to people with
fancied saints and daemons that void in the imagination and in the
heart which their own unbelief has made.

Are we then to suppose that these old hermits had lost faith in God?
On the contrary, they were the only men in that day who had faith in
God. And, if they had faith in any other things or persons beside
God, they merely shared in the general popular ignorance and
mistakes of their own age; and we must not judge those who, born in
an age of darkness, were struggling earnestly toward the light, as
we judge those who, born in an age of scientific light, are retiring
of their own will back into the darkness.

Before I enter upon the credibility of these alleged saints'
miracles, I must guard my readers carefully from supposing that I
think miracles impossible. Heaven forbid. He would be a very rash
person who should do that, in a world which swarms with greater
wonders than those recorded in the biography of a saint. For, after
all, which is more wonderful, that God should be able to restore the
dead to life, or that he should be able to give life at all? Again,
as for these miracles being contrary to our experience, that is no
very valid argument against them; for equally contrary to our
experience is every new discovery of science, every strange
phenomenon among plants and animals, every new experiment in a
chemical lecture.

The more we know of science the more we must confess, that nothing
is too strange to be true: and therefore we must not blame or laugh
at those who in old times believed in strange things which were not
true. They had an honest and rational sense of the infinite and
wonderful nature of the universe, and of their own ignorance about
it; and they were ready to believe anything, as the truly wise man
will be ready also. Only, from ignorance of the laws of the
universe, they did not know what was likely to be true and what was
not; and therefore they believed many things which experience has
proved to be false; just as Seba or any of the early naturalists
were ready to believe in six-legged dragons, or in the fatal power
of the basilisk's eye; fancies which, if they had been facts, would
not have been nearly as wonderful as the transformation of the
commonest insect, or the fertilization of the meanest weed: but
which are rejected now, not because they are too wonderful, but
simply because experience has proved them to be untrue. And
experience, it must be remembered, is the only sound test of truth.
As long as men will settle beforehand for themselves, without
experience, what they ought to see, so long will they be perpetually
fancying that they or others have seen it; and their faith, as it is
falsely called, will delude not only their reason, but their very
hearing, sight, and touch.

In this age we see no supernatural prodigies, because there are none
to see; and when we are told that the reason why we see no prodigies
is because we have no faith, we answer (if we be sensible), Just so.
As long as people had faith, in plain English believed, that they
could be magically cured of a disease, they thought that they or
others were so cured. As long as they believed that ghosts could be
seen, every silly person saw them. As long as they believed that
daemons transformed themselves into an animal's shape, they said,
"The devil croaked at me this morning in the shape of a raven; and
therefore my horse fell with me." As long as they believed that
witches could curse them, they believed that an old woman in the
next parish had overlooked them, their cattle, and their crops; and
that therefore they were poor, diseased, and unfortunate. These
dreams, which were common among the peasants in remote districts
five-and-twenty years ago, have vanished, simply from the spread (by
the grace of God, as I hold) of an inductive habit of mind; of the
habit of looking coolly, boldly, carefully, at facts; till now, even
among the most ignorant peasantry, the woman who says that she has
seen a ghost is likely not to be complimented on her assertion. But
it does not follow that that woman's grandmother, when she said that
she saw a ghost, was a consciously dishonest person; on the
contrary, so complex and contradictory is human nature, she would
have been, probably, a person of more than average intellect and
earnestness; and her instinct of the invisible and the infinite
(which is that which raises man above the brutes) would have been,
because misinformed, the honourable cause of her error. And thus we
may believe of the good hermits, of whom prodigies are recorded.

As to the truth of the prodigies themselves, there are several ways
of looking at them.

First, we may neither believe nor disbelieve them; but talk of them
as "devout fairy tales," religious romances, and allegories; and so
save ourselves the trouble of judging whether they were true. That
is at least an easy and pleasant method; very fashionable in a
careless, unbelieving age like this: but in following it we shall
be somewhat cowardly; for there is hardly any matter a clear
judgment on which is more important just now than these same saints'
miracles.

Next, we may believe them utterly and all; and that is also an easy
and pleasant method. But if we follow it, we shall be forced to
believe, among other facts, that St. Paphnutius was carried
miraculously across a river, because he was too modest to undress
himself and wade; that St. Helenus rode a savage crocodile across a
river, and then commanded it to die; and that it died accordingly
upon the spot; and that St. Goar, entering the palace of the
Archbishop of Treves, hung his cape on a sunbeam, mistaking it for a
peg. And many other like things we shall be forced to believe, with
which this book has no concern.

Or, again, we may believe as much as we can, because we should like,
if we could, to believe all. But as we have not--no man has as yet-
-any criterion by which we can judge how much of these stories we
ought to believe and how much not, which actually happened and which
did not, therefore we shall end (as not only the most earnest and
pious, but the most clear and logical persons, who have taken up
this view, have ended already) by believing all: which is an end
not to be desired.

Or we may believe as few as possible of them, because we should
like, if we could, to believe none. And this method, for the reason
aforesaid (namely, that there is no criterion by which we can settle
what to believe and what not), usually ends in believing none at
all.

This, of believing none at all, is the last method; and this, I
confess fairly, I am inclined to think is the right one; and that
these good hermits worked no real miracles and saw no real visions
whatsoever.

I confess that this is a very serious assertion. For there is as
much evidence in favour of these hermits' miracles and visions as
there is, with most men, of the existence of China; and much more
than there, with most men, is of the earth's going round the sun.

But the truth is, that evidence, in most matters of importance, is
worth very little. Very few people decide a question on its facts,
but on their own prejudices as to what they would like to have
happened. Very few people are judges of evidence; not even of their
own eyes and ears. Very few persons, when they see a thing, know
what they have seen, and what not. They tell you quite honestly,
not what they saw, but what they think they ought to have seen, or
should like to have seen. It is a fact too often conveniently
forgotten, that in every human crowd the majority will be more or
less bad, or at least foolish; the slaves of anger, spite, conceit,
vanity, sordid hope, and sordid fear. But let them be as honest and
as virtuous as they may, pleasure, terror, and the desire of seeming
to have seen or heard more than their neighbours, and all about it,
make them exaggerate. If you take apart five honest men, who all
stood by and saw the same man do anything strange, offensive, or
even exciting, no two of them will give you quite the same account
of it. If you leave them together, while excited, an hour before
you question them, they will have compared notes and made up one
story, which will contain all their mistakes combined; and it will
require the skill of a practised barrister to pick the grain of
wheat out of the chaff.

Moreover, when people are crowded together under any excitement,
there is nothing which they will not make each other believe. They
will make each other believe in spirit-rapping, table-turning, the
mesmeric fluid, electro-biology; that they saw the lion on
Northumberland House wagging his tail; {203} that witches have been
seen riding in the air; that the Jews had poisoned the wells; that--
but why go further into the sad catalogue of human absurdities, and
the crimes which have followed them? Every one is ashamed of not
seeing what every one else sees, and persuades himself against his
own eye sight for fear of seeming stupid or ill-conditioned; and
therefore in all evidence, the fewer witnesses, the more truth,
because the evidence of ten men is worth more than that of a hundred
together; and the evidence of a thousand men together is worth still
less.

Now, if people are savage and ignorant, diseased and poverty-
stricken; even if they are merely excited and credulous, and quite
sure that something wonderful must happen, then they will be also
quite certain that something wonderful has happened; and their
evidence will be worth nothing at all.

Moreover, suppose that something really wonderful has happened;
suppose, for instance, that some nervous or paralytic person has
been suddenly restored to strength by the command of a saint or of
some other remarkable man. This is quite possible, I may say
common; and it is owing neither to physical nor to so-called
spiritual causes, but simply to the power which a strong mind has
over a weak one, to make it exert itself, and cure itself by its own
will, though but for a time.

When this good news comes to be told, and to pass from mouth to
mouth, it ends of quite a different shape from that in which it
began. It has been added to, taken from, twisted in every direction
according to the fancy or the carelessness of each teller, till what
really happened in the first case no one will be able to say; {204}
and this is, therefore, what actually happened, in the case of these
reported wonders. Moreover (and this is the most important
consideration of all) for men to be fair judges of what really
happens, they must have somewhat sound minds in somewhat sound
bodies; which no man can have (however honest and virtuous) who
gives himself up, as did these old hermits, to fasting and vigils.
That continued sleeplessness produces delusions, and at last actual
madness, every physician knows; and they know also, as many a poor
sailor has known when starving on a wreck, and many a poor soldier
in such a retreat as that of Napoleon from Moscow, that extreme
hunger and thirst produce delusions also, very similar to (and
caused much in the same way as) those produced by ardent spirits; so
that many a wretched creature ere now has been taken up for
drunkenness, who has been simply starving to death.

Whence it follows that these good hermits, by continual fasts and
vigils, must have put themselves (and their histories prove that
they did put themselves) into a state of mental disease, in which
their evidence was worth nothing; a state in which the mind cannot
distinguish between facts and dreams; in which life itself is one
dream; in which (as in the case of madness, or of a feverish child)
the brain cannot distinguish between the objects which are outside
it and the imaginations which are inside it. And it is plain, that
the more earnest and pious, and therefore the more ascetic, one of
these good men was, the more utterly would his brain be in a state
of chronic disease. God forbid that we should scorn them,
therefore, or think the worse of them in any way. They were
animated by a truly noble purpose, the resolution to be good
according to their light; they carried out that purpose with
heroical endurance, and they have their reward: but this we must
say, if we be rational people, that on their method of holiness, the
more holy any one of them was, the less trustworthy was his account
of any matter whatsoever; and that the hermit's peculiar temptations
(quite unknown to the hundreds of unmarried persons who lead quiet
and virtuous, because rational and healthy, lives) are to be
attributed, not as they thought, to a daemon, but to a more or less
unhealthy nervous system.

It must be remembered, moreover, in justice to these old hermits,
that they did not invent the belief that the air was full of
daemons. All the Eastern nations had believed in Genii (Jinns),
Fairies (Peris), and Devas, Divs, or devils. The Devas of the early
Hindus were beneficent beings: to the eyes of the old Persians (in
their hatred of idolatry and polytheism), they appeared evil beings,
Divs, or Devils. And even so the genii and daemons of the Roman
Empire became, in the eyes of the early Christians, wicked and cruel
spirits.

And they had their reasons, and on the whole sound ones, for so
regarding them. The educated classes had given up any honest and
literal worship of the old gods. They were trying to excuse
themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them
into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did
Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the
Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies:
but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own
local beliefs and worships, generally of the most foul and brutal
kind. The animal worship of Egypt among the lower classes was
sufficiently detestable in the time of Herodotus. It had certainly
not improved in that of Juvenal and Persius; and was still less
likely to have improved afterwards. This is a subject so shocking
that it can be only hinted at. But as a single instance--what
wonder if the early hermits of Egypt looked on the crocodile as
something diabolic, after seeing it, for generations untold, petted
and worshipped in many a city, simply because it was the incarnate
symbol of brute strength, cruelty, and cunning? We must remember,
also, that earlier generations (the old Norsemen and Germans just as
much as the old Egyptians) were wont to look on animals as more
miraculous than we do; as more akin, in many cases, to human beings;
as guided, not by a mere blind instinct, but by an intellect which
was allied to, and often surpassed man's intellect. "The bear,"
said the old Norsemen, "had ten men's strength, and eleven men's
wit; "and in some such light must the old hermits have looked on the
hyaena, "bellua," the monster par excellence; or on the crocodile,
the hippopotamus, and the poisonous snakes, which have been objects
of terror and adoration in every country where they have been
formidable. Whether the hyaenas were daemons, or were merely sent
by the daemons, St. Antony and St. Athanasius do not clearly define,
for they did not know. It was enough for them that the beasts
prowled at night in those desert cities, which were, according to
the opinions, not only of the Easterns, but of the Romans, the
special haunt of ghouls, witches, and all uncanny things. Their
fiendish laughter--which, when heard even in a modern menagerie,
excites and shakes most person's nerves--rang through hearts and
brains which had no help or comfort, save in God alone. The beast
tore up the dead from their graves; devoured alike the belated child
and the foulest offal; and was in all things a type and incarnation
of that which man ought not to be. Why should not he, so like the
worst of men, have some bond or kindred with the evil beings who
were not men? Why should not the graceful and deadly cobra, the
horrid cerastes, the huge throttling python, and even more, the
loathly puff-adder, undistinguishable from the gravel among which he
lay coiled, till he leaped furiously and unswerving, as if shot from
a bow, upon his prey--why should not they too be kindred to that
evil power who had been, in the holiest and most ancient books,
personified by the name of the Serpent? Before we have a right to
say that the hermits' view of these deadly animals was not the most
rational, as well as the most natural, which they could possibly
have taken up, we must put ourselves in their places; and look at
nature as they had learnt to look at it, not from Scripture and
Christianity, so much as from the immemorial traditions of their
heathen ancestors.

If it be argued, that they ought to have been well enough acquainted
with these beasts to be aware of their merely animal nature, the
answer is--that they were probably not well acquainted with the
beasts of the desert. They had never, perhaps, before their
"conversion," left the narrow valley, well tilled and well
inhabited, which holds the Nile. A climb from it into the barren
mountains and deserts east and west was a journey out of the world
into chaos, and the region of the unknown and the horrible, which
demanded high courage from the unarmed and effeminate Egyptian, who
knew not what monster he might meet ere sundown. Moreover, it is
very probable that during these centuries of decadence, in Egypt, as
in other parts of the Roman Empire, "the wild beasts of the field
had increased" on the population, and were reappearing in the more
cultivated grounds.

But these old hermits appear perpetually in another, and a more
humane, if not more human aspect, as the miraculous tamers of savage
beasts. Those who wish to know all which can be alleged in favour
of their having possessed such a power, should read M. de
Montalembert's chapter, "Les Moines et la Nature." {209} All that
learning and eloquence can say in favour of the theory is said
there; and with a candour which demands from no man full belief of
many beautiful but impossible stories, "travesties of historic
verity," which have probably grown up from ever-varying tradition in
the course of ages. M. de Montalembert himself points out a
probable explanation of many of them:--An ingenious scholar of our
times{210} (he says) has pointed out their true and legitimate
origin--at least in Ancient Gaul. According to him, after the
gradual disappearance of the Gallo-Roman population, the oxen, the
horses, the dogs had returned to the wild state; and it was in the
forest that the Breton missionaries had to seek these animals, to
employ them anew for domestic use. The miracle was, to restore to
man the command and the enjoyment of those creatures, which God had
given him as instruments.

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