Books: The Hermits

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This theory is probable enough, and will explain, doubtless, many
stories. It may even explain those of tamed wolves, who may have
been only feral dogs, i.e. dogs run wild. But it will not explain
those in which (in Ireland as well as in Gaul) the stag appears as
obeying the hermit's commands. The twelve huge stags who come out
of the forest to draw the ploughs for St. Leonor and his monks, or
those who drew to his grave the corpse of the Irish hermit Kellac,
or those who came out of the forest to supply the place of St.
Colodoc's cattle, which the seigneur had carried off in revenge for
his having given sanctuary to a hunted deer, must have been wild
from the beginning; and many another tale must remain without any
explanation whatsoever--save the simplest of all. Neither can any
such theory apply to the marvels vouched for by St. Athanasius, St.
Jerome, and other contemporaries, which "show us (to quote M. de
Montalembert) the most ferocious animals at the feet of such men as
Antony, Pachomius, Macarius, and Hilarion, and those who copied
them. At every page one sees wild asses, crocodiles, hippopotami,
hyaenas, and, above all, lions, transformed into respectful
companions and docile servants of these prodigies of sanctity; and
one concludes thence, not that these beasts had reasonable souls,
but that God knew how to glorify those who devoted themselves to his
glory, and thus show how all Nature obeyed man before he was
excluded from Paradise by his disobedience."

This is, on the whole, the cause which the contemporary biographers
assign for these wonders. The hermits were believed to have
returned, by celibacy and penitence, to "the life of angels;" to
that state of perfect innocence which was attributed to our first
parents in Eden: and therefore of them our Lord's words were true:
"He that believeth in me, greater things than these (which I do)
shall he do."

But those who are of a different opinion will seek for different
causes. They will, the more they know of these stories, admire
often their gracefulness, often their pathos, often their deep moral
significance; they will feel the general truth of M. de
Montalembert's words: "There is not one of them which does not
honour and profit human nature, and which does not express a victory
of weakness over force, and of good over evil." But if they look on
physical facts as sacred things, as the voice of God revealed in the
phenomena of matter, their first question will be, "Are they true?"

Some of them must be denied utterly, like that of St. Helenus,
riding and then slaying the crocodile. It did not happen. Abbot
Ammon {212a} did not make two dragons guard his cell against
robbers. St. Gerasimus {212b} did not set the lion, out of whose
foot he had taken a thorn, to guard his ass; and when the ass was
stolen by an Arabian camel-driver, he did not (fancying that the
lion had eaten the ass) make him carry water in the ass's stead.
Neither did the lion, when next he met the thief and the ass, bring
them up, in his own justification, {212c} to St. Gerasimus. St.
Costinian did not put a pack-saddle on a bear, and make him carry a
great stone. A lioness did not bring her five blind whelps to a
hermit, that he might give them sight. {212d} And, though Sulpicius
Severus says that he saw it with his own eyes, {212e} it is hard to
believe the latter part of the graceful story which he tells--of an
old hermit whom he found dwelling alone twelve miles from the Nile,
by a well of vast depth. One ox he had, whose whole work was to
raise the water by a wheel. Around him was a garden of herbs, kept
rich and green amid the burning sand, where neither seed nor root
could live. The old man and the ox fed together on the produce of
their common toil; but two miles off there was a single palm-tree,
to which, after supper, the hermit takes his guests. Beneath the
palm they find a lioness; but instead of attacking them, she moves
"modestly" away at the old man's command, and sits down to wait for
her share of dates. She feeds out of his hand, like a household
animal, and goes her way, leaving her guests trembling, "and
confessing how great was the virtue of the hermit's faith, and how
great their own infirmity."

This last story, which one would gladly believe, were it possible, I
have inserted as one of those which hang on the verge of
credibility. In the very next page, Sulpicius Severus tells a story
quite credible, of a she-wolf, which he saw with his own eyes as
tame as any dog. There can be no more reason to doubt that fact
than to ascribe it to a miracle. We may even believe that the wolf,
having gnawed to pieces the palm basket which the good old man was
weaving, went off, knowing that she had done wrong, and after a week
came back, begged pardon like a rational soul, and was caressed, and
given a double share of bread. Many of these stories which tell of
the taming of wild beasts may be true, and yet contain no miracle.
They are very few in number, after all, in proportion to the number
of monks; they are to be counted at most by tens, while the monks
are counted by tens of thousands. And among many great companies of
monks, there may have been one individual, as there is, for
instance, in many a country parish a bee-taker or a horse-tamer, of
quiet temper and strong nerve, and quick and sympathetic intellect,
whose power over animals is so extraordinary, as to be attributed by
the superstitious and uneducated to some hereditary secret, or some
fairy gift. Very powerful to attract wild animals must have been
the good hermits' habit of sitting motionless for hours, till (as
with St. Guthlac) the swallows sat and sang upon his knee; and of
moving slowly and gently at his work, till (as with St. Karilef,
while he pruned his vines) the robin came and built in his hood as
it hung upon a tree: very powerful his freedom from anger, and, yet
more important, from fear, which always calls out rage in wild
beasts, while a calm and bold front awes them: and most powerful of
all, the kindliness of heart, the love of companionship, which
brought the wild bison to feed by St. Karilef's side as he prayed
upon the lawn; and the hind to nourish St. Giles with her milk in
the jungles of the Bouches du Rhone. There was no miracle; save the
moral miracle that, in ages of cruelty and slaughter, these men had
learned (surely by the inspiration of God) how--

"He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

After all, let these old Lives of the Fathers tell their own tale.
By their own merits let them stand or fall; and stand they will in
one sense: for whatsoever else they are not, this they are--the
histories of good men. Their physical science and their daemonology
may have been on a par with those of the world around them: but
they possessed what the world did not possess, faith in the utterly
good and self-sacrificing God, and an ideal of virtue and purity
such as had never been seen since the first Whitsuntide. And they
set themselves to realize that ideal with a simplicity, an energy,
an endurance, which were altogether heroic. How far they were right
in "giving up the world" depends entirely on what the world was then
like, and whether there was any hope of reforming it. It was their
opinion that there was no such hope; and those who know best the
facts which surrounded them, its utter frivolity, its utter
viciousness, the deadness which had fallen on art, science,
philosophy, human life, whether family, social, or political; the
prevalence of slavery, in forms altogether hideous and
unmentionable; the insecurity of life and property, whether from
military and fiscal tyranny, or from perpetual inroads of the so-
called "Barbarians:" those, I say, who know these facts best will be
most inclined to believe that the old hermits were wise in their
generation; that the world was past salvation; that it was not a
wise or humane thing to marry and bring children into the world;
that in such a state of society, an honest and virtuous man could
not exist, and that those who wished to remain honest and virtuous
must flee into the desert, and be alone with God and their fellows.

The question which had to be settled then and there, at that
particular crisis of the human race, was not--Are certain wonders
true or false? but--Is man a mere mortal animal, or an immortal
soul? Is his flesh meant to serve his spirit, or his spirit his
flesh? Is pleasure, or virtue, the end and aim of his existence?

The hermits set themselves to answer that question, not by arguing
or writing about it, but by the only way in which any question can
be settled--by experiment. They resolved to try whether their
immortal souls could not grow better and better, while their mortal
bodies were utterly neglected; to make their flesh serve their
spirit; to make virtue their only end and aim; and utterly to
relinquish the very notion of pleasure. To do this one thing, and
nothing else, they devoted their lives; and they succeeded. From
their time it has been a received opinion, not merely among a few
philosophers or a few Pharisees, but among the lowest, the poorest,
the most ignorant, who have known aught of Christianity, that man is
an immortal soul; that the spirit, and not the flesh, ought to be
master and guide; that virtue is the highest good; and that purity
is a virtue, impurity a sin. These men were, it has been well said,
the very fathers of purity. And if, in that and in other matters,
they pushed their purpose to an extreme--if, by devoting themselves
utterly to it alone, they suffered, not merely in wideness of mind
or in power of judging evidence, but even in brain, till they became
some of them at times insane from over-wrought nerves--it is not for
us to blame the soldier for the wounds which have crippled him, or
the physician for the disease which he has caught himself while
trying to heal others. Let us not speak ill of the bridge which
carries us over, nor mock at those who did the work for us as seemed
to them best, and perhaps in the only way in which it could be done
in those evil days. As a matter of fact, through these men's
teaching and example we have learnt what morality, purity, and
Christianity we possess; and if any answer that we have learnt them
from the Scriptures, who but these men preserved the Scriptures to
us? Who taught us to look on them as sacred and inspired? Who
taught us to apply them to our own daily lives, and find comfort and
teaching in every age, in words written ages ago by another race in
a foreign land? The Scriptures were the book, generally the only
book, which they read and meditated, not merely from morn till
night, but, as far as fainting nature would allow, from night to
morn again: and their method of interpreting them (as far as I can
discover) differed in nothing from that common to all Christians
now, save that they interpreted literally certain precepts of our
Lord and of St. Paul which we consider to have applied only to the
"temporary necessity" of a decayed, dying, and hopeless age such as
that in which they lived. And therefore, because they knew the
Scripture well, and learned in it lessons of true virtue and true
philosophy, though unable to save civilization in the East, they
were able at least to save it in the West. The European hermits,
and the monastic communities which they originated, were indeed a
seed of life, not merely to the conquered Roman population of Gaul
or Spain or Britain, but to the heathen and Arian barbarians who
conquered them. Among those fierce and armed savages, the unarmed
hermits stood, strong only by justice, purity, and faith in God,
defying the oppressor, succouring the oppressed, and awing and
softening the new aristocracy of the middle age, which was founded
on mere brute force and pride of race; because the monk took his
stand upon mere humanity; because he told the wild conqueror, Goth
or Sueve, Frank or Burgund, Saxon or Norseman, that all men were
equal in the sight of God; because he told them (to quote
Athanasius's own words concerning Antony) that "virtue is not beyond
human nature;" that the highest moral excellence was possible to the
most low-born and unlettered peasant whom they trampled under their
horses' hoofs, if he were only renewed and sanctified by the Spirit
of God. They accepted the lowest and commonest facts of that
peasant's wretched life; they outdid him in helplessness,
loneliness, hunger, dirt, and slavery; and then said, "Among all
these I can yet be a man of God, wise, virtuous, pure, free, and
noble in the sight of God, though not in the sight of Caesars,
counts, and knights." They went on, it is true, to glorify the
means above the end; to consecrate childlessness, self-torture,
dirt, ignorance, as if they were things pleasing to God and holy in
themselves. But in spite of those errors they wrought throughout
Europe a work which, as far as we can judge, could have been done in
no other way; done only by men who gave up all that makes life worth
having for the sake of being good themselves and making others good.

THE HERMITS OF EUROPE

Most readers will recollect what an important part in the old
ballads and romances is played by the hermit.

He stands in strongest contrast to the knight. He fills up, as it
were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice, what is wanting in the
manhood of the knight, the slave too often of his own fierceness and
self-assertion. The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when
he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous duel, such as
was too common in days when any two armed horsemen meeting on road
or lawn ran blindly at each other in the mere lust of fighting, as
boars or stags might run. Sometimes he interferes to protect the
oppressed serf; sometimes to rescue the hunted deer which has taken
sanctuary at his feet. Sometimes, again, his influence is that of
intellectual superiority; of worldly experience; of the travelled
man who has seen many lands and many nations. Sometimes, again,
that of sympathy; for he has been a knight himself, and fought and
sinned, and drank of the cup of vanity and vexation of spirit, like
the fierce warrior who kneels at his feet.

All who have read (and all ought to have read) Spenser's Fairy
Queen, must recollect his charming description of the hermit with
whom Prince Arthur leaves Serena and the squire after they have been
wounded by "the blatant beast" of Slander; when--

"Toward night they came unto a plain
By which a little hermitage there lay
Far from all neighbourhood, the which annoy it may.

"And nigh thereto a little chapel stood,
Which being all with ivy overspread
Decked all the roof, and shadowing the rood,
Seemed like a grove fair branched overhead;
Therein the hermit which his here led
In straight observance of religious vow,
Was wont his hours and holy things to bed;
And therein he likewise was praying now,
When as these knights arrived, they wist not where nor how.

"They stayed not there, but straightway in did pass:
Who when the hermit present saw in place,
From his devotions straight he troubled was;
Which breaking off, he toward them did pace
With staid steps and grave beseeming grace:
For well it seemed that whilom he had been
Some goodly person, and of gentle race,
That could his good to all, and well did ween
How each to entertain with courtesy beseen.

* * * * *

"He thence them led into his hermitage,
Letting their steeds to graze upon the green:
Small was his house, and like a little cage,
For his own term, yet inly neat and clean,
Decked with green boughs, and flowers gay beseen
Therein he them full fair did entertain,
Not with such forged shews, as fitter been
For courting fools that courtesies would feign,
But with entire affection and appearance plain.

* * * * *

How be that careful hermit did his best
With many kinds of medicines meet to tame
The poisonous humour that did most infest
Their reakling wounds, and every day them duly dressed.

"For he right well in leech's craft was seen;
And through the long experience of his days,
Which had in many fortunes tossed been,
And passed through many perilous assays:
He knew the divers want of mortal ways,
And in the minds of men had great insight;
Which with sage counsel, when they went astray,
He could inform and them reduce aright;
And all the passions heal which wound the weaker sprite.

"For whilome he had been a doughty knight,
As any one that lived in his days,
And proved oft in many a perilous fight,
In which he grace and glory won always,
And in all battles bore away the bays:
But being now attached with timely age,
And weary of this world's unquiet ways,
He took himself unto this hermitage,
In which he lived alone like careless bird in cage."

This picture is not poetry alone: it is history. Such men actually
lived, and such work they actually did, from the southernmost point
of Italy to the northernmost point of Scotland, during centuries in
which there was no one else to do the work. The regular clergy
could not have done it. Bishops and priests were entangled in the
affairs of this world, striving to be statesmen, striving to be
landowners, striving to pass Church lands on from father to son, and
to establish themselves as an hereditary caste of priests. The
chaplain or house-priest who was to be found in every nobleman's,
almost every knight's castle, was apt to become a mere upper
servant, who said mass every morning in return for the good cheer
which he got every evening, and fetched and carried at the bidding
of his master and mistress. But the hermit who dwelt alone in the
forest glen, occupied, like an old Hebrew prophet, a superior and an
independent position. He needed nought from any man save the scrap
of land which the lord was only too glad to allow him in return for
his counsels and his prayers. And to him, as to a mysterious and
supernatural personage, the lord went privately for advice in his
quarrels with the neighbouring barons, or with his own kin. To him
the lady took her children when they were sick, to be healed, as she
fancied, by his prayers and blessings; or poured into his ears a
hundred secret sorrows and anxieties which she dare not tell to her
fierce lord, who hunted and fought the livelong day, and drank too
much liquor every night.

This class of men sprang up rapidly, by natural causes, and yet by a
Divine necessity, as soon as the Western Empire was conquered by the
German tribes; and those two young officers whom we saw turning
monks at Treves, in the time of St. Augustine, may, if they lived to
be old men, have given sage counsel again and again to fierce German
knights and kinglets, who had dispossessed the rich and effeminate
landowners of their estates, and sold them, their wives, and
children, in gangs by the side of their own slaves. Only the Roman
who had turned monk would probably escape that fearful ruin; and he
would remain behind, while the rest of his race was enslaved or
swept away, as a seed of Christianity and of civilization, destined
to grow and spread, and bring the wild conquerors in due time into
the kingdom of God.

For the first century or two after the invasion of the barbarians,
the names of the hermits and saints are almost exclusively Latin.
Their biographies represent them in almost every case as born of
noble Roman parents. As time goes on, German names appear, and at
last entirely supersede the Latin ones; showing that the conquering
race had learned from the conquered to become hermits and monks like
them.

ST. SEVERINUS, THE APOSTLE OF NORICUM

Of all these saintly civilizers, St. Severinus of Vienna is perhaps
the most interesting, and his story the most historically
instructive. {224}

A common time, the middle of the fifth century, the province of
Noricum (Austria, as we should now call it) was the very highway of
invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom in which
Huns, Alemanni, Rugi, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and
down and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once
been a happy and fertile province, each tribe striving to trample
the other under foot, and to march southward over their corpses to
plunder what was still left of the already plundered wealth of Italy
and Rome. The difference of race, in tongue, and in manners,
between the conquered and their conquerors, was made more painful by
difference in creed. The conquering Germans and Huns were either
Arians or heathens. The conquered race (though probably of very
mixed blood), who called themselves Romans, because they spoke Latin
and lived under the Roman law, were orthodox Catholics; and the
miseries of religious persecution were too often added to the usual
miseries of invasion.

It was about the year 455-60. Attila, the great King of the Huns,
who called himself--and who was--"the Scourge of God," was just
dead. His empire had broken up. The whole centre of Europe was in
a state of anarchy and war; and the hapless Romans along the Danube
were in the last extremity of terror, not knowing by what fresh
invader their crops would be swept off up to the very gates of the
walled towers which were their only defence: when there appeared
among them, coming out of the East, a man of God.

Who he was, he would not tell. His speech showed him to be an
African Roman--a fellow-countryman of St. Augustine--probably from
the neighbourhood of Carthage. He had certainly at one time gone to
some desert in the East, zealous to learn "the more perfect life."
Severinus, he said, was his name; a name which indicated high rank,
as did the manners and the scholarship of him who bore it. But more
than his name he would not tell. "If you take me for a runaway
slave," he said, smiling, "get ready money to redeem me with when my
master demands me back." For he believed that they would have need
of him; that God had sent him into that land that he might be of use
to its wretched people. And certainly he could have come into the
neighbourhood of Vienna at that moment for no other purpose than to
do good, unless he came to deal in slaves.

He settled first at a town called by his biographer Casturis; and,
lodging with the warden of the church, lived quietly the hermit
life. Meanwhile the German tribes were prowling round the town; and
Severinus, going one day into the church, began to warn the priests
and clergy and all the people that a destruction was coming on them
which they could only avert by prayer and fasting and the works of
mercy. They laughed him to scorn, confiding in their lofty Roman
walls, which the invaders--wild horsemen, who had no military
engines--were unable either to scale or batter down. Severinus left
the town at once, prophesying, it was said, the very day and hour of
its fall. He went on to the next town, which was then closely
garrisoned by a barbarian force, and repeated his warning there:
but while the people were listening to him, there came an old man to
the gate, and told them how Casturis had been already sacked, as the
man of God had foretold; and, going into the church, threw himself
at the feet of St. Severinus, and said that he had been saved by his
merits from being destroyed with his fellow-townsmen.

Then the dwellers in the town hearkened to the man of God, and gave
themselves up to fasting and almsgiving and prayer for three whole
days.

And on the third day, when the solemnity of the evening sacrifice
was fulfilled, a sudden earthquake happened, and the barbarians,
seized with panic fear, and probably hating and dreading--like all
those wild tribes--confinement between four stone walls instead of
the free open life of the tent and the stockade, forced the Romans
to open their gates to them, rushed out into the night, and in their
madness slew each other.

In those days a famine fell upon the people of Vienna; and they, as
their sole remedy, thought good to send for the man of God from the
neighbouring town. He went, and preached to them, too, repentance
and almsgiving. The rich, it seems, had hidden up their stores of
corn, and left the poor to starve. At least St. Severinus
discovered (by Divine revelation, it was supposed), that a widow
named Procula had done as much. He called her out into the midst of
the people, and asked her why she, a noble woman and free-born, had
made herself a slave to avarice, which is idolatry. If she would
not give her corn to Christ's poor, let her throw it into the Danube
to feed the fish, for any gain from it she would not have. Procula
was abashed, and served out her hoards thereupon willingly to the
poor; and a little while afterwards, to the astonishment of all,
vessels came down the Danube, laden with every kind of merchandise.
They had been frozen up for many days near Passau, in the thick ice
of the river Enns: but the prayers of God's servant (so men
believed) had opened the ice-gates, and let them down the stream
before the usual time.

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