philosophy, had to absorb all that lay in the philosophy of the East, in
the religions of Egypt and Greece, and of the Jews. Thanks to the
hermits, Christianity took to itself all that was vital in all extant
ideas. By the life and death of Jesus the seed of Christianity was sown,
thrown into the spiritual life of the world, and instead of springing up
immediately and bearing fruit, it sent its strength downward like the
seed of a mighty tree; it grew deeper into the spiritual world rather
than higher, became more mysterious and secret rather than manifest and
clear.
To-day Christianity is of different portent. But in those days the
enthusiasts, visionaries, and saints did not clearly know what
Christianity was: Christianity was not clear to them; they sensed it, it
had possession of them, they were in a state of exaltation because of
it. Christianity was growing through them, growing deeper. Their
intellectual conceptions of what Christianity was and was not were often
quite mistaken—but the vision they could not express was authentic. The
new idea was in the air. Hence, for instance, the gift of tongues.
People listening to the apostles were caught by the idea, even though
the language spoken was foreign to them. Christianity was imparted by
enthusiasm alone, by the gait, the gesture, the expression of
countenance of the believer, the living hieroglyphic; and it did not
matter that the apostles spoke one language and the listener another.
The spirit of truth sat in the faces of the apostles like tongues of
fire and spoke for them. In those days many who had never seen an
apostle dreamed and became Christians, heard a voice from heaven, were
struck blind by the heavenly vision like Saul, whose mind on the way to
Damascus was far from Christianity, but whose soul was so near that even
at the stoning of Stephen there could have been but the thinnest
partition between him and the great splendour. Many people in those days
went about in strange apprehension—as if the world were coming to an
end, and quite truly a world, that of the Romans, was coming to an
end—and suddenly they were aware of the mystery, and without a word of
proselytism gave up everything and went to the desert.
Needless to say, the number of Christians grew, and the reputation of
the Christians grew. Persecution soon ceased, and presently it became
such a mark of distinction to be a Christian that all the mundane crowd
came in and called itself Christian. Some of them were Christian in name
only, and their children in superstitious obedience. Even till to-day
Christianity is cumbered about with the descendants of this mass of
people, the great crowd who vaguely assent to the term Christian but
have only a remote conception of what Christianity really is. The
riotous and lascivious population of Alexandria supporting worldly
Cyril, though Christian in name, was nothing less than an obstacle to
Christianity, an opaque mass between the light shining in the desert and
the north whither the light should shine. Still, when “the world” came
in and called itself Christian there were a great many who took their
conversion seriously, and of these, many went to the desert and schooled
themselves to become hermits, tried the life to see what it was like.
Ammon and his bride were dressed, ready for their nuptial festivities,
when the revelation came to them, and on their wedding-day they resolved
to forego the worldly tie of marriage and live in the desert as holy
bachelor and virgin. They dwelt in Nitria and entertained thousands of
young men and women of the rich and cultured world and meditated on the
hermit’s life, Ammon receiving the men at his cell, his bride the women
at hers. After some time Ammon, who was rich, founded a monastery, and
he and his bride agreed to part, she going to a distant place to
continue her work, he remaining to establish his. Ammon became abbot of
the monastery, and under him were four thousand monks; this was in the
evil-smelling swamp of Nitria, on the fringe of the Sahara, some forty
miles west of what is now the Alexandria-Soudan railway. People began to
flock to the desert. There were tens of thousands of hermits and monks
and consecrated virgins waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom of the
Church. These Christian converts gave to the desert the largest human
population it has ever had. There were four hundred monasteries in the
desert of Nitria alone. It was possible to invent such an anecdote about
the younger Macarius the anchorite as that some one gave him a bunch of
grapes and he, being so altruistic, took it to a neighbouring anchorite,
that anchorite to another, and so on, till the grapes had made the whole
circuit of the Sahara and came back to Macarius again, preserved all the
way by the virtue of the self-denying hermits.
The desert had an atmosphere of Christianity. Many aged solitaries like
Arsenius and Paphnutius took to the road with sacred missions. The
hermit’s life was not always continuous cave-dwelling. St. Arsenius, a
gracious genius, went to the councils of Emperors; we read of men like
Paphnutius returning to “the world” at the obedience of the heavenly
vision and saving people whom the Lord needed. Thaïs, the courtesan of
Alexandria, was taken from the midst of her gay life and brought to a
cell in the desert. The anchorites found for her this beautiful prayer,
“Thou who formed’st me have mercy,” and Thaïs was saved, though she
died. And she was numbered among the Marys. No hermit setting out upon
the road took away money with him or had thought for the morrow. That
was a golden rule in their ways; money counted for nothing. Serapion the
Sindonite sold himself as a slave in order that he might save those who
were slaves of the world; and he put the money he received as the price
of himself in a pit and covered it with earth. He was a perfect servant,
and by his humility and sweetness touched the heart of his master and
mistress, who soon learned to say the Lord’s Prayer with him and were
converted to Christianity. One day they said to Serapion: “We are
unworthy that you should be our servant and slave, take back, we pray
you, your freedom!”
Serapion replied that he thanked God for the day when his mission was
accomplished, and thanked his master and mistress for his freedom. Then
he went to the pit where the purchase money was buried and brought it to
his two converted friends. They were much astonished, and implored
Serapion to keep the money. But he refused though they wept, and he set
off for the desert once more, cared for by the Lord.
Nothing counted in Egypt except Christianity. Monasteries and churches
sprang up all over the land. The rich women who gave up all for Christ’s
sake gave their jewels to the adornment of the screens and altars in the
desert churches, and it was thought to be the best place for jewels,
_fruitlessly sacrificed_ to the spiritual. The wealthy bequeathed their
estates to the Church, hoping thereby to find grace in heaven; and the
Church employed the wealth so gained for the building of new monasteries
and the employment of Byzantine painters and metal workers, for the
upkeep of their institutions, and for alms. It seems the new wealth did
not altogether spoil the life in the desert. Egypt was particularly
suited to be the mysterious source of contemplative Christianity and its
spiritual power—the greatest deserts in the world, the emptiest
landscape, the incomprehensible Nile coming out of the depths of
mysterious and untrodden Africa, the ancient monuments of religion, the
Sphinx, the pyramids, the obelisks ... the oldest domain of man, a land
of tombs. But for the Mohammedan hordes Egypt must have remained the
true holy land of Christianity. As it is, the life lived in Egypt at
that time is certainly the spiritual inspiration of the Eastern Church
till this day.
It is somewhat astonishing to reflect that in the early centuries of our
era Christianity in Egypt was alone with the ancient monuments of Egypt,
and that those monuments were in a considerably greater state of
grandeur that they are to-day. There was very little robbing of the
tombs and destruction of old buildings before the coming of
Saracens—those terrible robbers and destroyers. Egypt has now become
associated with Mohammedanism in a secondary way. But in the days of the
hermits there were none of those mosques which guides delight to show
one now as part of the interest of Egypt—the alabaster mosque, the
mosque of Sultan Hassan, all built with stolen stones. But Christianity
and the worship of Isis were side by side, the Egyptian religion of
death side by side with the Christian religion of death to the world. No
wonder that the early Christians embalmed their dead, and that they
painted the faces on wood as the Egyptians had painted the faces of the
dead on the cases of the mummies, or that regarding hieroglyphics they
began to paint Christian hieroglyphics—the frescoes peculiar to the
Eastern Church. Paphnutius flinging a stone at the Sphinx learned his
mistake when he saw a look of sadness come over the face, and the lips
seemed to murmur to him the name of Christ.
The influence of Egypt went northward. As the gospel is read facing the
north, and the belfries of Eastern Churches calling the people to
worship are put northward of the holy building, so the whole Church
looked northward. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern World.
The embalmed bodies of the saints who had died in the desert were taken
thither, the faces of the dead were painted into the fresco and the
ikon. Hermits appeared in all the desolate mountains and rocks of Greece
and Bulgaria and Asia Minor. Christianity crossed the Black Sea, and
hermits appeared in the Caucasus, and stately cathedrals were built on
the shores of the sea. Christianity sailed up the Russian rivers and hid
in the Russian forests. Only in the year 988 was Russia officially
converted to Christianity, but long before that the Christian hermits
and missionaries had appeared. St. Andrew himself is said to have been
the first to come to Russia. The religion that came in was the religion
of the hermit, and the faces on the ikons were the faces of anchorites
who had died in Egypt or Asia Minor. Christianity took various aspects,
but its vital source was the spiritual life of the hermit in the
wilderness.
Anon, Egypt was overrun by the Turks. The jewels were plucked from the
screens and ikon-frames, the monasteries and churches were pulled down,
the monks and hermits put to the sword, and practically the whole
material evidence of the existence of Christianity was swept away as if
a storm of the dead sand itself had come over it. One year the desert
was a-tinkle with Christian bells, choric with Christian psalms; the
next year all was desolation, and when an ancient hermit missed by the
Arabs came to Nitria he found not one human being there, and he lived
amongst the ruins of monasteries and chapels as if the place were the
remotest and most solitary in which a world-forsaker could dwell. In its
turn, also, Constantinople fell, and the Hellespont and Bosphorus, the
issue to Russia, became Mohammedan. Eastern Christianity receded to
Greece, was shut away in Russia. And Greece and Russia, and especially
Russia, have preserved the direct traditions of the early Church and
what Christianity originally meant. With them has remained the spiritual
fervour of the hermits.
III
IN THE DESERT
Between the Nile and the Red Sea lay the desert of the Thebaid, and the
remote monastery of St. Anthony is now reached after two days’ camel
ride from the station Beni Suef. The desert of Scete where Arsenius
lived—the desert where Philammon the hero of “Hypatia” learned to be a
monk—is on the Upper Nile. What was Nitria is now Wadi el Natrun, and is
reached by three days’ camel ride from the Pyramids, or _via_ Khatadba,
one of the stations on a loop of the Cairo-Alexandria railway. The
shrines of the hermits are in the hands of the Copts, a simple Christian
people, said to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The
Coptic Church is an Eastern one, and it is the lineal descendant of the
Church of Egypt that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity.
Only whereas the Church of Egypt was a brightly living church, the
Coptic Church is going on in a tradition. What is valuable in the Coptic
Church to-day is that it has slept through many centuries unchanging,
that it has never been rich and pompous, never erudite, never
pleasure-loving. It has withstood the Arabs through dwelling in the
wilderness and fortifying its churches and monastery walls and being
hard. It has never had the opportunity to thrive. So it has preserved
the traditions and something of the spirit of early Christianity, and in
the half-ruined temples of the desert you may see the stigmata of
Christ.
* * * * *
I had some difficulty finding out about the monasteries: no one goes to
Egypt to visit Christian shrines, so my desire to know where the ancient
hermits had lived sounded strange and unwonted in the ears of most
people. But at length, through the Bishop of Jerusalem and Marcus Bey
Simaika, the leader of the Coptic community in Cairo, I got a letter
from the Patriarch and full directions as to how to reach the desert
shrines. I chose to go to Nitria.
* * * * *
Out of sight of the grey triangles of the Pyramids, out of sight of
everything, and over the even, empty desert, white, yellow, burning,
rose-lined on the horizon, glaring ... heat and light beat upward from
the sand on which and into which the terrible and splendid sun drives
its armies all day. The air is so dry and light that one seems to have
lost weight. There is a feeling of unusual exhilaration.
I came on horseback to an oasis, not a bountiful and delectable oasis
with shade of palm trees, fruit to pluck above the head, and cold water
bubbling from a spring below, but a poisonous marsh overgrown with reeds
full of reptiles and blood-sucking flies. There are good and evil oases.
This was the marsh that gave its name to Nitria—the soda marsh. The
hermits chose it because it was even worse than the desert. My black
horse prances along on somewhat doubtful turf, and then once more to the
loose and heavy sand blown into waves and undulating like the sea. On
the horizon lies the strange blunt silhouette of the first of the
monasteries, and without a trace to follow, we plunge through the sand
towards it. We come up to it at last, an enigmatical-looking building
which has the shapelessness and silence of a ruin. How silent it is!
What a deathly and unearthly silence! It seems hardly possible that
human beings are living there. The cream-coloured walls are lined,
patched, broken, gigantic. It is a rectangular fortress. There is but
one entrance, and that is a small one and heavily barred. There are no
steps in the sand; if yesterday had any footfalls the wind has smoothed
them away, and the breathless silence is one which it seems almost
possible to hold in one’s hand.
From the high yellow battlement an old loose rope hangs down, and is
evidently connected with a bell.
Jingle-jangle-jangle! I ring the bell and wait expectantly. There is a
long silence and I ring again, jingle-jangle, jangle-jangle-jangle! Then
some one comes and laboriously undoes the little door, and a
dishevelled, bare-footed monk appears. I present the letter which I bear
from the Patriarch, and am admitted. The monks are pleased; all shake
hands. I sit on one divan, and five of them on another. One novice
washes my hands, another brings me a glass of a brown-coloured drink—it
is medlar juice and water, and is full of the fibre of the fruit. This
finished, he brings me a glass of pink sugar water, then coffee all
round, thimble-fulls of sweet coffee. The abbot, a fine-looking fellow
with regular features, broad face, black moustache and beard, and with
an open space showing the freshness of the lower lip, is talkative. He
has a towel wrapped round his brows for turban, and fingers black beads
as he talks. Next to him is a comfortable-looking monk in a blue smock
and white knitted skull-cap on his head. Next to him, an old fellow with
wizened bare legs and feet, old yellow rags on his grizzled head, ragged
black cassock over his grey underclothes.
“What do you do all day?” I asked.
“Pray, read, sing,” they answered.
“What do you think of the war?”
“The war does not touch us. If they come and kill us, we don’t mind, but
we pray each day that God will bring it soon to a close.”
“If the Arabs come, what will you do?”
“If they shoot at us we will throw bread to them, that will be our
reply.”
“Do you have many visitors?”
“Not many.”
“Do the Russian pilgrims come here to pray?”
“Yes, some.”
“Are you content to live out here in the Sahara whilst all sorts of
great events are happening in the world, and content to have no news and
never mix with the people of the city? In England we’re too busy, one
couldn’t escape to a place like this even if one wanted to.”
The abbot gave me a remarkable reply:
“I think there is room for everybody: one seeks money, that is his way;
another prays, that is his way; another does his duty and ploughs, that
is his way. There are many ways. You know of Martha and Mary. Martha was
right, but Mary’s good part was right also.”
How touching it was for me to get this true reply in this remote
monastery, and to hear of Martha and Mary in the first half-hour of
conversation with the monks. My mind was preoccupied with the ideas of
Martha and Mary, and here was this simple Coptic abbot using almost the
same terms to express himself as I might use myself.
There were in this monastery about sixteen monks, and in the desert
altogether there may be about one hundred and fifty. Once there were
thousands of holy men and hundreds of monasteries. There was gold in the
monasteries, there were jewels and pictures. Not an inch of the little
desert temples but was covered with Byzantine fresco.
But the Saracen came and murdered the cultured clergy, and tore away the
jewels, as was fit, and rolled down many a wall, wrecked many an altar.
There was a sixty years’ gap in the Christian history of the desert.
Then a wilder type of Christian took possession, Arabs who had been
converted, or enslaved Copts who had forgotten their own language and
learned that of their masters. They brought Arabic gospels and
liturgies. They repaired some of the ruins of the old monasteries and
churches, and they put up Arabic inscriptions and painted out the old
Coptic frescoes and hieroglyphics with frescoes of their own conception.
They built round their temples impregnable fortress walls with
draw-bridges at a height of forty feet above the level of the desert.
They withstood sieges and persisted ... to this day.
The abbot showed me round the monastery. The buildings were all a
patchwork of ruins and repairs and changes. The frescoes had been
white-washed out in nearly every part. The old stained glass, broken and
shapeless, was mortared in with new glass. And yet there was a real
odour of antiquity in the place. The patterns in the ikons were but dust
patterns, and the face of the Virgin crumbled away as the abbot took the
picture down to show me. In a niche here and there left by accident were
the original frescoes in wonderful purple and crimson, pictures of the
choric saints, their faces and bodies all of that unearthly and mystical
shape and colour by which the early Christians loved to represent
citizenship of heaven and denial of the world.
The lectern had a nail on which to fix the candle. The communion cup was
swathed in the oldest vestments of the monastery. In an ordinary
cupboard with easy-swinging wooden door I was shown the mummies of the
sixteen Patriarchs of the Coptic Church. Sixteen Patriarchs in a
cupboard, each wrapped in his robes and tied up compactly! The Abbot
unwrapped one a little and showed me the dried brown flesh. The
seventeenth Patriarch, he from whom I had my letter, will find a place
in this cupboard in his turn.
In one of the churches I was shown the box with the sacred remains of
Macarius, the primitive hermit in whose name the monastery had been
founded.
They showed me the books from which the service is read, all hand-copied
volumes. I wondered especially at a copy of the New Testament, written
ages ago in Coptic and now spattered on every page and every paragraph
with new and ancient spots of candle grease.
From the vault of one of the churches hang seven old dusty ostrich eggs
by long strings. A monk explained to me that as the ostrich looks to its
egg as the most precious thing in life, so they look to God in their
prayers—at least, the egg is to remind them.
We went into the fortress church, the only entrance to which is at a
height of forty feet by a bridge from the outer rampart. They showed me
how the bridge could be drawn in and the monks be secure from assault of
arms. Up on the ramparts a novice had his duty beside a pile of bread
and a stoup of water. When Bedouin beggars ring the monastery bell, he
lowers them bread and water in a basket. “We give away twice as much as
we eat ourselves,” said the Abbot, showing me the bakery. Here were
hundreds of wheaten loaves in long stone receptacles, good bread, but
made dirty so that the monks should not get to prize it. They showed me
illuminated books a thousand years old, showed me the scrivener’s cell
where among many quills a monk still copies the Scriptures day by day.
They showed me one chapel the whole floor of which was covered with
chillies drying, showed me the long room where every evening all the
monks gather about the Abbot to read the gospel and discuss its
meanings, showed me the massive doors, two feet thick, of wood and iron,
meant to resist the Arab. In one room was a small cask, and the Abbot
took a tin mug and drew me a little wine—communion wine. I drank half;
he finished.
The monks were most kind, simple and loving. It was an amusing spectacle
at lunch. I lunched; every one else waited on me. A beautiful Abyssinian
boy washed my hands, two monks shelled eggs all the time and filled my
plate, two others stripped cucumbers for me, another kept helping me to
hot milk soup in which slabs of sugar were dissolving. The Abbot stood
above me with a feather-brush waving the flies off me. Every one was
talking. There was especial interest in the questions which the
Abyssinian boy who had washed my hands was continually trying to put. He
was a beautiful stripling who could have been posed for Christ Himself,
but for the fact that he was black. He was tall and gentle, with large
liquid eyes. He was not a monk, but a pilgrim stranded in the desert. He
had been on his way to Jerusalem, and had been turned back from Port
Said because of the War. He was anxious to hear from me whether I knew
of any way of getting to Jerusalem now. The Abbot was the only one who
knew Abyssinian, and he interpreted. Alas! I could give him no hope of
getting through to the Holy Sepulchre.
I lunched, and slept a little, and the brethren of the monastery slept.
Then my horse was brought out to me and I rode away across the sand.
Before going, I went to the western side of the monastery and looked out
over the Desert. Thousands of miles it went on, level, empty, burning,
and yet mysterious. Some Coptic hermits have wandered forth into its
mystery and are living the antique life of the anchorite out there. At
least, so the Abbot told me, though he couldn’t say where they are or
how they live. Only now and again, at rare intervals, some one of them
comes back to the monastery to communion and then disappears once more.
* * * * *
I rode away to Bir Hooker, where I stayed the night. That is on the
other side of the salt marshes. There an enterprising British company is
producing thousands of tons of caustic soda annually. The antique
hermits chose this spot in the Desert because of the death-dealing
odours which intensified their denial of the world, but in another era,
behold British business men doing in the way of trade and worldly gain
or duty what these others do in the name of denial of the world. As the
Abbot said: There are various ways of serving God, the way of Martha and
the way of Mary.