Books: The Hermits

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The holy man Hesychius heard this in Palestine; reached Cyprus; and
pretending, in order to prevent suspicion on the part of the
neighbours, who guarded the spot diligently, that he wished to dwell
in that same garden, he, after some ten months, with extreme peril
of his life, stole the corpse. He carried it to Maiuma, followed by
whole crowds of monks and townsfolk, and placed it in the old
monastery, with the shirt, hood, and cloak unhurt; the whole body
perfect, as if alive, and fragrant with such strong odour, that it
seemed to have had unguents poured over it.

I think that I ought not, in the end of my book, to be silent about
the devotion of that most holy woman Constantia, who, hearing that
the body of Hilarion, the servant of God, was gone to Palestine,
straightway gave up the ghost, proving by her very death her true
love for the servant of God. For she was wont to pass nights in
watching his sepulchre, and to converse with him as if he were
present, in order to assist her prayers. You may see, even to this
day, a wonderful contention between the folk of Palestine and the
Cypriots, the former saying that they have the body, the latter that
they have the soul, of Hilarion. And yet, in both places, great
signs are worked daily; but most in the little garden in Cyprus;
perhaps because he loved that place the best.

Such is the story of Hilarion. His name still lingers in "the place
he loved the best." "To this day," I quote this fact from M. de
Montalembert's work, "the Cypriots, confounding in their memories
legends of good and of evil, the victories of the soul and the
triumph of the senses, give to the ruins of one of those strong
castles built by the Lusignans, which command their isle, the double
name of the Castle of St. Hilarion, and the Castle of the God of
Love." But how intense must have been the longing for solitude
which drove the old man to travel on foot from Syria to the Egyptian
desert, across the pathless westward waste, even to the Oasis and
the utmost limits of the Egyptian province; and then to Sicily, to
the Adriatic, and at last to a distant isle of Greece. And shall we
blame him for that longing? He seems to have done his duty
earnestly, according to his own light, towards his fellow-creatures
whenever he met them. But he seems to have found that noise and
crowd, display and honour, were not altogether wholesome for his own
soul; and in order that he might be a better man he desired again
and again to flee, that he might collect himself, and be alone with
Nature and with God. We, here in England, like the old Greeks and
Romans, dwellers in the busy mart of civilized life, have got to
regard mere bustle as so integral an element of human life, that we
consider a love of solitude a mark of eccentricity, and, if we meet
any one who loves to be alone, are afraid that he must needs be
going mad: and that with too great solitude comes the danger of too
great self-consciousness, and even at last of insanity, none can
doubt. But still we must remember, on the other hand, that without
solitude, without contemplation, without habitual collection and re-
collection of our own selves from time to time, no great purpose is
carried out, and no great work can be done; and that it is the
bustle and hurry of our modern life which causes shallow thought,
unstable purpose, and wasted energy, in too many who would be better
and wiser, stronger and happier, if they would devote more time to
silence and meditation; if they would commune with their own heart
in their chamber, and be still. Even in art and in mechanical
science, those who have done great work upon the earth have been men
given to solitary meditation. When Brindley, the engineer, it is
said, had a difficult problem to solve, he used to go to bed, and
stay there till he had worked it out. Turner, the greatest nature-
painter of this or any other age, spent hours upon hours in mere
contemplation of nature, without using his pencil at all. It is
said of him that he was seen to spend a whole day, sitting upon a
rock, and throwing pebbles into a lake; and when at evening his
fellow painters showed their day's sketches, and rallied him upon
having done nothing, he answered them, "I have done this at least:
I have learnt how a lake looks when pebbles are thrown into it."
And if this silent labour, this steadfast thought are required even
for outward arts and sciences, how much more for the highest of all
arts, the deepest of all sciences, that which involves the
questions--who are we? and where are we? who is God? and what are we
to God, and He to us?--namely, the science of being good, which
deals not with time merely, but with eternity. No retirement, no
loneliness, no period of earnest and solemn meditation, can be
misspent which helps us towards that goal.

And therefore it was that Hilarion longed to be alone; alone with
God; and with Nature, which spoke to him of God. For these old
hermits, though they neither talked nor wrote concerning scenery,
nor painted pictures of it as we do now, had many of them a clear
and intense instinct of the beauty and the meaning of outward
Nature; as Antony surely had when he said that the world around was
his book, wherein he read the mysteries of God. Hilarion seems,
from his story, to have had a special craving for the sea. Perhaps
his early sojourn on the low sandhills of the Philistine shore, as
he watched the tideless Mediterranean, rolling and breaking for ever
upon the same beach, had taught him to say with the old prophet as
he thought of the wicked and still half idolatrous cities of the
Philistine shore, "Fear ye not? saith the Lord; Will ye not tremble
at my presence who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea,
for a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it? And though the
waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they
roar, yet can they not pass over. But this people has a revolted
and rebellious heart, they are revolted and gone." Perhaps again,
looking down from the sunny Sicilian cliffs of Taormino, or through
the pine-clad gulfs and gullies of the Cypriote hills upon the blue
Mediterranean below,

"And watching from his mountain wall
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawl,"

he had enjoyed and profited by all those images which that sight has
called up in so many minds before and since. To him it may be, as
to the Psalmist, the storm-swept sea pictured the instability of
mortal things, while secure upon his cliff he said with the
Psalmist, "The Lord hath set my feet upon a rock, and ordered my
goings;" and again, "The wicked are like a troubled sea, casting up
mire and dirt." Often, again, looking upon that far horizon, must
his soul have been drawn, as many a soul has been drawn since, to
it, and beyond it, as it were into a region of boundless freedom and
perfect peace, while he said again with David, "Oh that I had wings
like a dove; then would I flee away and be at rest!" and so have
found, in the contemplation of the wide ocean, a substitute at least
for the contemplation of those Eastern deserts which seemed the
proper home for the solitary and meditative philosopher.

For indeed in no northern country can such situations be found for
the monastic cell as can be found in those great deserts which
stretch from Syria to Arabia, from Arabia to Egypt, from Egypt to
Africa properly so called. Here and there a northern hermit found,
as Hilarion found, a fitting home by the seaside, on some lonely
island or storm-beat rock, like St. Cuthbert, off the coast of
Northumberland; like St. Rule, on his rock at St. Andrew's; and St.
Columba, with his ever-venerable company of missionaries, on Iona.
But inland, the fens and the forests were foul, unwholesome,
depressing, the haunts of fever, ague, delirium, as St. Guthlac
found at Crowland, and St. Godric at Finkhale. {130} The vast pine-
woods which clothe the Alpine slopes, the vast forests of beech and
oak which then spread over France and Germany, gave in time shelter
to many a holy hermit. But their gloom, their unwholesomeness, and
the severity of the climate, produced in them, as in most northern
ascetics, a temper of mind more melancholy, and often more fierce;
more given to passionate devotion, but more given also to dark
superstition and cruel self-torture, than the genial climate of the
desert produced in old monks of the East. When we think of St.
Antony upon his mountain, we must not picture to ourselves, unless
we, too, have been in the East, such a mountain as we have ever
seen. We must not think of a brown northern moorland, sad, savage,
storm-swept, snow-buried, save in the brief and uncertain summer
months. We must not picture to ourselves an Alp, with thundering
avalanches, roaring torrents, fierce alternations of heat and cold,
uninhabitable by mortal man, save during that short period of the
year when the maidens in the sennhutt watch the cattle upon the
upland pastures. We must picture to ourselves mountains blazing day
after day, month after month, beneath the glorious sun and cloudless
sky, in an air so invigorating that the Arabs can still support life
there upon a few dates each day; and where, as has been said,--"Man
needs there hardly to eat, drink, or sleep, for the act of breathing
will give life enough;" an atmosphere of such telescopic clearness
as to explain many of the strange stories which have been lately
told of Antony's seemingly preternatural powers of vision; a
colouring, which, when painters dare to put it on canvas, seems to
our eyes, accustomed to the quiet greys and greens of England,
exaggerated and impossible--distant mountains, pink and lilac,
quivering in pale blue haze--vast sheets of yellow sand, across
which the lonely rock or a troop of wild asses or gazelles throw
intense blue-black shadows--rocks and cliffs not shrouded, as here,
in soil, much less in grass and trees, or spotted with lichens and
stained with veins; but keeping each stone its natural colour, as it
wastes--if, indeed, it wastes at all--under the action of the all
but rainless air, which has left the paintings on the old Egyptian
temples fresh and clear for thousands of years; rocks, orange and
purple, black, white, and yellow; and again and again beyond them
{131} glimpses, it may be, of the black Nile, and of the long green
garden of Egypt, and of the dark blue sea. The eastward view from
Antony's old home must be one of the most glorious in the world,
save for its want of verdure and of life. For Antony, as he looked
across the blue waters of the Gulf of Akaba, across which, far
above, the Israelites had passed in old times, could see the sacred
goal of their pilgrimage, the red granite peaks of Sinai, flaming
against the blue sky with that intensity of hue which is scarcely
exaggerated, it is said, by the bright scarlet colour in which Sinai
is always painted in mediaeval illuminations.

But the gorgeousness of colouring, though it may interest us, was
not, of course, what produced the deepest effect upon the minds of
those old hermits. They enjoyed Nature, not so much for her beauty,
as for her perfect peace. Day by day the rocks remained the same.
Silently out of the Eastern desert, day by day, the rising sun threw
aloft those arrows of light, which the old Greeks had named "the
rosy fingers of the dawn." Silently he passed in full blaze almost
above their heads throughout the day; and silently he dipped behind
the western desert in a glory of crimson and orange, green and
purple; and without an interval of twilight, in a moment, all the
land was dark, and the stars leapt out, not twinkling as in our
damper climate here, but hanging like balls of white fire in that
purple southern night, through which one seems to look beyond the
stars into the infinite abyss, and towards the throne of God
himself. Day after day, night after night, that gorgeous pageant
passed over the poor hermit's head without a sound; and though sun
and moon and planet might change their places as the year rolled
round, the earth beneath his feet seemed not to change. Every
morning he saw the same peaks in the distance, the same rocks, the
same sand-heaps around his feet. He never heard the tinkle of a
running stream. For weeks together he did not even hear the rushing
of the wind. Now and then a storm might sweep up the pass, whirling
the sand in eddies, and making the desert for a while literally a
"howling wilderness;" and when that was passed all was as it had
been before. The very change of seasons must have been little
marked to him, save by the motions, if he cared to watch them, of
the stars above; for vegetation there was none to mark the
difference between summer and winter. In spring of course the
solitary date-palm here and there threw out its spathe of young
green leaves, to add to the number of those which, grey or brown,
hung drooping down the stem, withering but not decaying for many a
year in that dry atmosphere; or perhaps the accacia bushes looked
somewhat gayer for a few weeks, and the Retama broom, from which as
well as from the palm leaves he plaited his baskets, threw out its
yearly crop of twigs; but any greenness there might be in the
vegetation of spring, turned grey in a few weeks beneath that
burning sun; and be rest of the year was one perpetual summer of
dust and glare and rest. Amid such scenes they had full time for
thought. Nature and man alike left it in peace; while the labour
required for sustaining life (and the monk wished for nothing more
than to sustain mere life) was very light. Wherever water could be
found, the hot sun and the fertile soil would repay by abundant
crops, perhaps twice in the year, the toil of scratching the ground
and putting in the seed. Moreover, the labour of the husbandman, so
far from being adverse to the contemplative life, is of all
occupations, it may be, that which promotes most quiet and wholesome
meditation in the mind which cares to meditate. The life of the
desert, when once the passions of youth were conquered, seems to
have been not only a happy, but a healthy one. And when we remember
that the monk, clothed from head to foot in woollen, and sheltered,
too, by his sheepskin cape, escaped those violent changes of
temperature which produce in the East so many fatal diseases, and
which were so deadly to the linen-clothed inhabitants of the green
lowlands of the Nile, we need not be surprised when we read of the
vast longevity of many of the old abbots; and of their death, not by
disease, but by gentle, and as it were wholesome natural decay.

But if their life was easy, it was surely not ill-spent. If having
few wants, and those soon supplied, they found too much time for the
luxury of quiet thought, those need not blame them, who having many
wants, and those also easily supplied, are wont to spend their
superfluous leisure in any luxury save that of thought, above all
save that of thought concerning God. For it was upon God that these
men, whatever their defects or ignorances may have been, had set
their minds. That man was sent into the world to know and to love,
to obey and thereby to glorify, the Maker of his being, was the
cardinal point of their creed, as it has been of every creed which
ever exercised any beneficial influence on the minds of men. Dean
Milman in his "History of Christianity," vol. iii. page 294, has,
while justly severe upon the failings and mistakes of the Eastern
monks, pointed out with equal justice that the great desire of
knowing God was the prime motive in the mind of all their best men:-
-

"In some regions of the East, the sultry and oppressive heat, the
general relaxation of the physical system, dispose constitutions of
a certain temperament to a dreamy inertness. The indolence and
prostration of the body produce a kind of activity in the mind, if
that may properly be called activity which is merely giving loose to
the imagination and the emotions as they follow out the wild train
of incoherent thought, or are agitated by impulses of spontaneous
and ungoverned feeling. Ascetic Christianity ministered new aliment
to this common propensity. It gave an object, both vague and
determinate enough to stimulate, yet never to satisfy or exhaust.
The regularity of stated hours of prayer, and of a kind of idle
industry, weaving mats or plaiting baskets, alternated with periods
of morbid reflection on the moral state of the soul, and of mystic
communion with the Deity. It cannot indeed be wondered that this
new revelation, as it were, of the Deity, this profound and rational
certainty of his existence, this infelt consciousness of his
perpetual presence, these as yet unknown impressions of his
infinity, his power, and his love, should give a higher character to
this eremitical enthusiasm, and attract men of loftier and more
vigorous minds within its sphere. It was not merely the
pusillanimous dread of encountering the trials of life which urged
the humbler spirits to seek a safe retirement; or the natural love
of peace, and the weariness and satiety of life, which commended
this seclusion to those who were too gentle to mingle in, or who
were exhausted with, the unprofitable turmoil of the world; nor was
it always the anxiety to mortify the rebellious and refractory body
with more advantage. The one absorbing idea of the Majesty of the
Godhead almost seemed to swallow up all other considerations. The
transcendent nature of the Triune Deity, the relation of the
different persons of the Godhead to each other, seemed the only
worthy object of men's contemplative faculties."

And surely the contemplation of the Godhead is no unworthy
occupation for the immortal soul of any human being. But it would
be unjust to these hermits did we fancy that their religion
consisted merely even in this; much less that it consisted merely in
dreams and visions, or in mere stated hours of prayer. That all did
not fulfil the ideal of their profession is to be expected, and is
frankly confessed by the writers of the Lives of the Fathers; that
there were serious faults, even great crimes, among them is not
denied. Those who wrote concerning them were so sure that they were
on the whole good men, that they were not at all afraid of saying
that some of them were bad,--not afraid, even, of recording, though
only in dark hints, the reason why the Arab tribes around once rose
and laid waste six churches with their monasteries in the
neighbourhood of Scetis. St. Jerome in like manner does not
hesitate to pour out bitter complaints against many of the monks in
the neighbourhood of Bethlehem. It is notorious, too, that many
became monks merely to escape slavery, hunger, or conscription into
the army: Unruly and fanatical spirits, too, grew fond of
wandering. Bands of monks on the great roads and public places of
the empire, Massalians or Gyrovagi, as they were called, wandered
from province to province, and cell to cell, living on the alms
which they extorted from the pious, and making up too often for
protracted fasts by outbursts of gluttony and drunkenness. And
doubtless the average monk, even when well-conducted himself and in
a well-conducted monastery, was, like average men of every creed,
rank, or occupation, a very common-place person, acting from very
mixed and often very questionable motives; and valuing his shaven
crown and his sheepskin cloak, his regular hours of prayer and his
implicit obedience to his abbot, more highly than he valued the fear
and the love of God.

It is so in every creed. With some, even now, the strict observance
of the Sabbath; with others, outward reverence at the Holy
Communion; with others, the frequent hearing of sermons which suit
heir own views; with others, continual reading of pious books (on
the lessons of which they do not act), covers, instead of charity, a
multitude of sins. But the saint, abbot, or father among these
hermits was essentially the man who was not a common-place person;
who was more than an ascetic, and more than a formalist; who could
pierce beyond the letter to the spirit, and see, beyond all forms of
doctrine or modes of life, that virtue was the one thing needful.

The Historia Lausiaca and the Pratum Spirituale have many a story
and many a saying as weighty, beautiful, and instructive now as they
were fifteen hundred years ago; stories which show that graces and
virtues such as the world had never seen before, save in the
persecuted and half-unknown Christians of the first three centuries,
were cultivated to noble fruitfulness by the monks of the East. For
their humility, obedience, and reverence for their superiors it is
not wise to praise them just now; for those are qualities which are
not at present considered virtues, but rather (save by the soldier)
somewhat abject vices; and indeed they often carried them, as they
did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be
remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed
superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that as
the becoming a monk at all was an assertion of self-will and
independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their
abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right
to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling
which some have found not degrading, but ennobling; and the parent,
not of servility, but of true freedom. And as for the obsolete
virtue of humility, that still remains true which a voice said to
Antony, when he saw the snares which were spread over the whole
earth, and asked, sighing, "Who can pass safely over these?" and the
voice answered, "Humility alone."

For the rest, if the Sermon on the Mount mean anything, as a
practical rule of life for Christian men, then these monks were
surely justified in trying to obey it, for to obey it they surely
tried.

The Words of the Elders, to which I have already alluded, and the
Lausiaca of Palladius likewise, are full of precious scraps of moral
wisdom, sayings, and anecdotes, full of nobleness, purity, pathos,
insight into character, and often instinct with a quiet humour,
which seems to have been, in the Old world, peculiar to the
Egyptians, as it is, in the New, almost peculiar to the old-
fashioned God-fearing Scotsman.

Take these examples, chosen almost at random.

Serapion the Sindonite was so called because he wore nothing but a
sindon, or linen shirt. Though he could not read, he could say all
the Scriptures by heart. He could not (says Palladius) sit quiet in
his cell, but wandered over the world in utter poverty, so that he
"attained to perfect impassibility, for with that nature he was
born; for there are differences of natures, not of substances."

So says Palladius, and goes on to tell how Serapion sold himself to
certain play-actors for twenty gold pieces, and laboured for them as
a slave till he had won them to Christ, and made them renounce the
theatre; after which he made his converts give the money to the
poor, and went his way.

On one of his journeys he came to Athens, and, having neither money
nor goods, starved there for three days. But on the fourth he went
up, seemingly to the Areopagus, and cried, "Men of Athens, help!"
And when the crowd questioned him, he told them that he had, since
he left Egypt, fallen into the hands of three usurers, two of whom
he had satisfied, but the third would not leave him.

On being promised assistance, he told them that his three usurers
were avarice, sensuality, and hunger. Of the two first he was rid,
having neither money nor passions: but, as he had eaten nothing for
three days, the third was beginning to be troublesome, and demanded
its usual debt, without paying which he could not well live; whereon
certain philosophers, seemly amused by his apologue, gave him a gold
coin. He went to a baker's shop, laid down the coin, took up a
loaf, and went out of Athens for ever. Then the philosophers knew
that he was endowed with true virtue; and when they had paid the
baker the price of the loaf, got back their gold.

When he went into Lacedaemon, he heard that a great man there was a
Manichaean, with all his family, though otherwise a good man. To
him Serapion sold himself as a slave, and within two years converted
him and his wife, who thenceforth treated him not as a slave, but as
their own brother.

After awhile, this "Spiritual adamant," as Palladius calls him,
bought his freedom of them, and sailed for Rome. At sundown first
the sailors, and then the passengers, brought out each man his
provisions, and ate. Serapion sat still. The crew fancied that he
was sea-sick; but when he had passed a second, third, and fourth day
fasting, they asked, "Man, why do you not eat?" "Because I have
nothing to eat." They thought that some one had stolen his baggage:
but when they found that the man had absolutely nothing, they began
to ask him not only how he would keep alive, but how he would pay
his fare. He only answered, "That he had nothing; that they might
cast him out of the ship where they had found him."

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