ST. PAPHNUTIUS used to tell a story which may serve as a fit introduction
to this book. It contains a miniature sketch, not only of the social
state of Egypt, but of the whole Roman Empire, and of the causes which
led to the famous monastic movement in the beginning of the fifth century
after Christ.
Now Paphnutius was a wise and holy hermit, the Father, Abba, or Abbot of
many monks; and after he had trained himself in the desert with all
severity for many years, he besought God to show him which of His saints
he was like.
And it was said to him, “Thou art like a certain flute-player in the
city.”
Then Paphnutius took his staff, and went into the city, and found that
flute-player. But he confessed that he was a drunkard and a profligate,
and had till lately got his living by robbery, and recollected not having
ever done one good deed. Nevertheless, when Paphnutius questioned him
more closely, he said that he recollected once having found a holy maiden
beset by robbers, and having delivered her, and brought her safe to town.
And when Paphnutius questioned him more closely still, he said he
recollected having done another deed. When he was a robber, he met once
in the desert a beautiful woman; and she prayed him to do her no harm,
but to take her away with him as a slave, whither he would; for, said
she, “I am fleeing from the apparitors and the Governor’s curials for the
last two years. My husband has been imprisoned for 300 pieces of gold,
which he owes as arrears of taxes; and has been often hung up, and often
scourged; and my three dear boys have been taken from me; and I am
wandering from place to place, and have been often caught myself and
continually scourged; and now I have been in the desert three days
without food.”
And when the robber heard that, he took pity on her, and took her to his
cave, and gave her 300 pieces of gold, and went with her to the city, and
set her husband and her boys free.
Then Paphnutius said, “I never did a deed like that: and yet I have not
passed my life in ease and idleness. But now, my son, since God hath had
such care of thee, have a care for thine own self.”
And when the musician heard that, he threw away the flutes which he held
in his hand, and went with Paphnutius into the desert, and passed his
life in hymns and prayer, changing his earthly music into heavenly; and
after three years he went to heaven, and was at rest among the choirs of
angels, and the ranks of the just.
This story, as I said, is a miniature sketch of the state of the whole
Roman Empire, and of the causes why men fled from it into the desert.
Christianity had reformed the morals of individuals; it had not reformed
the Empire itself. That had sunk into a state only to be compared with
the worst despotisms of the East. The Emperors, whether or not they
called themselves Christian, like Constantine, knew no law save the
basest maxims of the heathen world. Several of them were barbarians who
had risen from the lowest rank merely by military prowess; and who, half
maddened by their sudden elevation, added to their native ignorance and
brutality the pride, cunning, and cruelty of an Eastern Sultan. Rival
Emperors, or Generals who aspired to be Emperors, devastated the world
from Egypt to Britain by sanguinary civil wars. The government of the
provinces had become altogether military. Torture was employed, not
merely, as of old, against slaves, but against all ranks, without
distinction. The people were exhausted by compulsory taxes, to be spent
in wars which did not concern them, or in Court luxury in which they had
no share. In the municipal towns, liberty and justice were dead. The
curials, who answered somewhat to our aldermen, and who were responsible
for the payment of the public moneys, tried their best to escape the
unpopular office, and, when compelled to serve, wrung the money in
self-defence out of the poorer inhabitants by every kind of tyranny. The
land was tilled either by oppressed and miserable peasants, or by gangs
of slaves, in comparison with whose lot that even of the American negro
was light. The great were served in their own households by crowds of
slaves, better fed, doubtless, but even more miserable and degraded, than
those who tilled the estates. Private profligacy among all ranks was
such as cannot be described in these or in any modern pages. The regular
clergy of the cities, though not of profligate lives, and for the most
part, in accordance with public opinion, unmarried, were able to make no
stand against the general corruption of the age, because—at least if we
are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom—they were giving
themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and luxury, intrigue and
party spirit, and had become the flatterers of fine ladies, “silly women
laden with sins, ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the
truth.” Such a state of things not only drove poor creatures into the
desert, like that fair woman whom the robber met, but it raised up bands
of robbers over the whole of Europe, Africa, and the East,—men who, like
Robin Hood and the outlaws of the Middle Age, getting no justice from
man, broke loose from society, and while they plundered their oppressors,
kept up some sort of rude justice and humanity among themselves. Many,
too, fled, and became robbers, to escape the merciless conscription which
carried off from every province the flower of the young men, to shed
their blood on foreign battle-fields. In time, too, many of these
conscripts became monks, and the great monasteries of Scetis and Nitria
were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers from the
neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who had entered
the “spiritual warfare” to escape the earthly one. And as a background
to all this seething heap of decay, misrule, and misery, hung the black
cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes from whom we derive the best
part of our blood, ever coming nearer and nearer, waxing stronger and
stronger, learning discipline and civilization by serving in the Roman
armies, alternately the allies and the enemies of the Emperors, rising,
some of them, to the highest offices of State, and destined, so the
wisest Romans saw all the more clearly as the years rolled on, to be soon
the conquerors of the Cæsars, and the masters of the Western world.
No wonder if that, in such a state of things, there arose such violent
contrasts to the general weakness, such eccentric protests against the
general wickedness, as may be seen in the figure of Abbot Paphnutius,
when compared either with the poor man tortured in prison for his arrears
of taxes, or with the Governor and the officials who tortured him. No
wonder if, in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a
passion akin to despair, which ended in a new and grand form of suicide.
It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual
despair as that which had led in past ages more than one noble Roman to
slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. Christianity
taught those who despaired of society, of the world—in one word, of the
Roman Empire, and all that it had done for men—to hope at least for a
kingdom of God after death. It taught those who, had they been heathens
and brave enough, would have slain themselves to escape out of a world
which was no place for honest men, that the body must be kept alive, if
for no other reason, at least for the sake of the immortal soul, doomed,
according to its works, to endless bliss or endless torment.
But that the world—such, at least, as they saw it then—was doomed,
Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe,
but see, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation
around them, that all that was in the world, the lust of the flesh, the
lust of the eye, and the pride of life, was not of the Father, but of the
world; that the world was passing away, and the lust thereof, and that
only he who did the will of God could abide for ever. They did not
merely believe, but saw, that the wrath of God was revealed from heaven
against all unrighteousness of men; and that the world in general—above
all, its kings and rulers, the rich and luxurious—were treasuring up for
themselves wrath, tribulation, and anguish, against a day of wrath and
revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who would render to every
man according to his works.
That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them,
contemporary history proves abundantly. That they were correct,
likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall on
man, is proved by the fact that it did fall; that the first half of the
fifth century saw, not only the sack of Rome, but the conquest and
desolation of the greater part of the civilized world, amid bloodshed,
misery, and misrule, which seemed to turn Europe into a chaos,—which
would have turned it into a chaos, had there not been a few men left who
still felt it possible and necessary to believe in God and to work
righteousness.
Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed world,
and try to be alone with God, if by any means they might save each man
his own soul in that dread day.
Others, not Christians, had done the same before them. Among all the
Eastern nations men had appeared, from time to time, to whom the things
seen were but a passing phantom, the things unseen the only true and
eternal realities; who, tormented alike by the awfulness of the infinite
unknown, and by the petty cares and low passions of the finite mortal
life which they knew but too well, had determined to renounce the latter,
that they might give themselves up to solving the riddle of the former;
and be at peace; and free, at least, from the tyranny of their own
selves. Eight hundred years before St. Antony fled into the desert, that
young Hindoo rajah, whom men call Buddha now, had fled into the forest,
leaving wives and kingdom, to find rest for his soul. He denounced
caste; he preached poverty, asceticism, self-annihilation. He founded a
religion, like that of the old hermits, democratic and ascetic, with its
convents, saint-worships, pilgrimages, miraculous relics, rosaries, and
much more, which strangely anticipates the monastic religion; and his
followers, to this day, are more numerous than those of any other creed.
Brahmins, too, had given themselves up to penance and mortification till
they believed themselves able, like Kehama, to have gained by
self-torture the right to command, not nature merely, but the gods
themselves. Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the
Therapeutæ in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former more
“practical,” the latter more “contemplative:” but both alike agreed in
the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of poverty and
simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless philosophic sects
of Asia, known to ecclesiastical writers as “heretics,” more than one had
professed, and doubtless often practised, the same abstraction from the
world, the same contempt of the flesh. The very Neo-Platonists of
Alexandria, while they derided the Christian asceticism, found themselves
forced to affect, like the hapless Hypatia, a sentimental and pharisaic
asceticism of their own. This phase of sight and feeling, so strange to
us now, was common, nay, primæval, among the Easterns. The day was come
when it should pass from the East into the West. And Egypt, “the mother
of wonders;” the parent of so much civilization and philosophy both Greek
and Roman; the half-way resting-place through which not merely the
merchandise, but the wisdom of the East had for centuries passed into the
Roman Empire; a land more ill-governed, too, and more miserable, in spite
of its fertility, because more defenceless and effeminate, than most
other Roman possessions—was the country in which naturally, and as it
were of hereditary right, such a movement would first appear.
Accordingly it was discovered, about the end of the fourth century, that
the mountains and deserts of Egypt were full of Christian men who had
fled out of the dying world, in the hope of attaining everlasting life.
Wonderful things were told of their courage, their abstinence, their
miracles: and of their virtues also; of their purity, their humility,
their helpfulness, and charity to each other and to all. They called
each other, it was said, brothers; and they lived up to that sacred name,
forgotten, if ever known, by the rest of the Roman Empire. Like the
Apostolic Christians in the first fervour of their conversion, they had
all things in common; they lived at peace with each other, under a mild
and charitable rule; and kept literally those commands of Christ which
all the rest of the world explained away to nothing.
The news spread. It chimed in with all that was best, as well as with
much that was questionable, in the public mind. That men could be
brothers; that they could live without the tawdry luxury, the tasteless
and often brutal amusements, the low sensuality, the base intrigue, the
bloody warfare, which was the accepted lot of the many; that they could
find time to look stedfastly at heaven and hell as awful realities, which
must be faced some day, which had best be faced at once; this, just as
much as curiosity about their alleged miracles, and the selfish longing
to rival them in superhuman powers, led many of the most virtuous and the
most learned men of the time to visit them, and ascertain the truth.
Jerome, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Sulpicius Severus, went to see them,
undergoing on the way the severest toils and dangers, and brought back
reports of mingled truth and falsehood, specimens of which will be seen
in these pages. Travelling in those days was a labour, if not of
necessity, then surely of love. Palladius, for instance, found it
impossible to visit the Upper Thebaid, and Syene, and that “infinite
multitude of monks, whose fashions of life no one would believe, for they
surpass human life; who to this day raise the dead, and walk upon the
waters, like Peter; and whatsoever the Saviour did by the holy Apostles,
He does now by them. But because it would be very dangerous if we went
beyond Lyco” (Lycopolis?), on account of the inroad of robbers, he “could
not see those saints.”
The holy men and women of whom he wrote, he says, he did not see without
extreme toil; and seven times he and his companions were nearly lost.
Once they walked through the desert five days and nights, and were almost
worn out by hunger and thirst. Again, they fell on rough marshes, where
the sedge pierced their feet, and caused intolerable pain, while they
were almost killed with the cold. Another time, they stuck in the mud up
to their waists, and cried with David, “I am come into deep mire, where
no ground is.” Another time, they waded for four days through the flood
of the Nile by paths almost swept away. Another time they met robbers on
the seashore, coming to Diolcos, and were chased by them for ten miles.
Another time they were all but upset and drowned in crossing the Nile.
Another time, in the marshes of Mareotis, “where paper grows,” they were
cast on a little desert island, and remained three days and nights in the
open air, amid great cold and showers, for it was the season of Epiphany.
The eighth peril, he says, is hardly worth mentioning—but once, when they
went to Nitria, they came on a great hollow, in which many crocodiles had
remained, when the waters retired from the fields. Three of them lay
along the bank; and the monks went up to them, thinking them dead,
whereon the crocodiles rushed at them. But when they called loudly on
the Lord, “the monsters, as if turned away by an angel,” shot themselves
into the water; while they ran on to Nitria, meditating on the words of
Job, “Seven times shall He deliver thee from trouble; and in the eighth
there shall no evil touch thee.”
The great St. Athanasius, fleeing from persecution, had taken refuge
among these monks. He carried the report of their virtues to Trêves in
Gaul, and wrote a life of St. Antony, the perusal of which was a main
agent in the conversion of St. Augustine. Hilarion (a remarkable
personage, whose history will be told hereafter) carried their report and
their example likewise into Palestine; and from that time Judæa, desolate
and seemingly accursed by the sin of the Jewish people, became once more
the Holy Land; the place of pilgrimage; whose ruins, whose very soil,
were kept sacred by hermits, the guardians of the footsteps of Christ.
In Rome itself the news produced an effect which, to the thoughtful mind,
is altogether tragical in its nobleness. The Roman aristocracy was
deprived of all political power; it had been decimated, too, with
horrible cruelty only one generation before, {12} by Valentinian and his
satellites, on the charges of profligacy, treason, and magic. Mere rich
men, they still lingered on, in idleness and luxury, without art,
science, true civilization of any kind; followed by long trains of
slaves; punishing a servant with three hundred stripes if he were too
long in bringing hot water; weighing the fish, or birds, or dormice put
on their tables, while secretaries stood by, with tablets to record all;
hating learning as they hated poison; indulging at the baths in conduct
which had best be left undescribed; and “complaining that they were not
born among the Cimmerians, if amid their golden fans a fly should perch
upon the silken fringes, or a slender ray of the sun should pierce
through the awning;” while, if they “go any distance to see their estates
in the country, or to hunt at a meeting collected for their amusement by
others, they think that they have equalled the marches of Alexander or of
Cæsar.”
On the wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp—and not half
their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus
Marcellinus describes it, has been told here—the news brought from Egypt
worked with wondrous potency.
Women of the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life was
given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment and
tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to whom they
had been wedded in loveless marriages _de convenance_, whose infidelities
they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a world which had
sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves; they gave away their
wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor; and in voluntary poverty
and mean garments they followed such men as Jerome and Ruffinus across
the seas, to visit the new found saints of the Egyptian desert, and to
end their days, in some cases, in doleful monasteries in Palestine. The
lives of such women as those of the Anician house; the lives of Marcella
and Furia, of Paula, of the Melanias, and the rest, it is not my task to
write. They must be told by a woman, not by a man. We may blame those
ladies, if we will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we
will, at the weaknesses—the aristocratic pride, the spiritual
vanity—which we fancy that we discover. We may lament—and in that we
shall not be wrong—the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over
them—the example and precursor of so much which has since then been
ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the fault lay
not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands, and brothers;
we must confess that in these women the spirit of the old Roman matrons,
which seemed to have been so long dead, flashed up for one splendid
moment, ere it sunk into the darkness of the Middle Age; that in them
woman asserted (however strangely and fantastically) her moral equality
with man; and that at the very moment when monasticism was consigning her
to contempt, almost to abhorrence, as “the noxious animal,” the “fragile
vessel,” the cause of man’s fall at first, and of his sin and misery ever
since, woman showed the monk (to his naïvely-confessed surprise), that
she could dare, and suffer, and adore as well as he.
But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and spread
irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached, practised, by every
great man of the time. Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory of
Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius,
Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours,
Salvian, Cæsarius of Arles, were all monks, or as much of monks as their
duties would allow them to be. Ambrose of Milan, though no monk himself,
was the fervent preacher of, the careful legislator for, monasticism male
and female. Throughout the whole Roman Empire, in the course of a
century, had spread hermits (or dwellers in the desert), anchorites
(retired from the world), or monks (dwellers alone). The three names
grew afterwards to designate three different orders of ascetics. The
hermits remained through the Middle Ages those who dwelt in deserts; the
anchorites, or “ankers” of the English Middle Age, seem generally to have
inhabited cells built in, or near, the church walls; the name of “monks”
was transferred from those who dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular
communities, under a fixed government. But the three names at first were
interchangeable; the three modes of life alternated, often in the same
man. The life of all three was the same,—celibacy, poverty, good deeds
towards their fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of
every kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after
baptism: and the mental food of all three was the same likewise;
continued meditation upon the vanity of the world, the sinfulness of the
flesh, the glories of heaven, and the horrors of hell: but with these the
old hermits combined—to do them justice—a personal faith in God, and a
personal love for Christ, which those who sneer at them would do well to
copy.
Over all Europe, even to Ireland, {15} the same pattern of Christian
excellence repeated itself with strange regularity, till it became the
only received pattern; and to “enter religion,” or “be converted,” meant
simply to become a monk.
Of the authentic biographies of certain of these men, a few specimens are
given in this volume. If they shall seem to any reader uncouth, or even
absurd, he must remember that they are the only existing and the
generally contemporaneous histories of men who exercised for 1,300 years
an enormous influence over the whole of Christendom; who exercise a vast
influence over the greater part of it to this day. They are the
biographies of men who were regarded, during their lives and after their
deaths, as divine and inspired prophets; and who were worshipped with
boundless trust and admiration by millions of human beings. Their fame
and power were not created by the priesthood. The priesthood rather
leant on them, than they on it. They occupied a post analogous to that
of the old Jewish prophets; always independent of, sometimes opposed to,
the regular clergy; and dependent altogether on public opinion and the
suffrage of the multitude. When Christianity, after three centuries of
repression and persecution, emerged triumphant as the creed of the whole
civilized world, it had become what their lives describe. The model of
religious life for the fifth century, it remained a model for succeeding
centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his compeers were founded the
whole literature of saintly biographies; the whole popular conception of
the universe, and of man’s relation to it; the whole science of
dæmonology, with its peculiar literature, its peculiar system of criminal
jurisprudence. And their influence did not cease at the Reformation
among Protestant divines. The influence of these Lives of the Hermit
Fathers is as much traceable, even to style and language, in “The
Pilgrim’s Progress” as in the last Papal Allocution. The great hermits
of Egypt were not merely the founders of that vast monastic system which
influenced the whole politics, and wars, and social life, as well as the
whole religion, of the Middle Age; they were a school of philosophers (as
they rightly called themselves) who altered the whole current of human
thought.
Those who wish for a general notion of the men, and of their time, will
find all that they require (set forth from different points of view,
though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de
Montalembert’s “Moines d’Occident,” in Dean Milman’s “History of
Christianity” and “Latin Christianity,” and in Ozanam’s “Etudes
Germaniques.” {17a} But the truest notion of the men is to be got, after
all, from the original documents; and especially from that curious
collection of them by the Jesuit Rosweyde, commonly known as the “Lives
of the Hermit Fathers.” {17b}
After an acquaintance of now five-and-twenty years with this wonderful
treasury of early Christian mythology, to which all fairy tales are dull
and meagre, I am almost inclined to sympathise with M. de Montalembert’s
questions,—“Who is so ignorant, or so unfortunate, as not to have
devoured these tales of the heroic age of monachism? Who has not
contemplated, if not with the eyes of faith, at least with the admiration
inspired by an incontrollable greatness of soul, the struggles of these
athletes of penitence? . . . . Everything is to be found there—variety,
pathos, the sublime and simple epic of a race of men, _naïfs_ as
children, and strong as giants.” In whatever else one may differ from M.
de Montalembert—and it is always painful to differ from one whose pen has
been always the faithful servant of virtue and piety, purity and
chivalry, loyalty and liberty, and whose generous appreciation of England
and the English is the more honourable to him, by reason of an utter
divergence in opinion, which in less wide and noble spirits produces only
antipathy—one must at least agree with him in his estimate of the
importance of these “Lives of the Fathers,” not only to the
ecclesiologist, but to the psychologist and the historian. Their
influence, subtle, often transformed and modified again and again, but
still potent from its very subtleness, is being felt around us in many a
puzzle—educational, social, political; and promises to be felt still more
during the coming generation; and to have studied thoroughly one of
them—say the life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius—is to have had in our
hands (whether we knew it or not) the key to many a lock, which just now
refuses either to be tampered with or burst open.
I have determined, therefore, to give a few of these lives, translated as
literally as possible. Thus the reader will then have no reason to fear
a garbled or partial account of personages so difficult to conceive or
understand. He will be able to see the men as wholes; to judge
(according to his light) of their merits and their defects. The very
style of their biographers (which is copied as literally as is compatible
with the English tongue) will teach him, if he be wise, somewhat of the
temper and habits of thought of the age in which they lived; and one of
these original documents, with its honesty, its vivid touches of
contemporary manners, its intense earnestness, will give, perhaps, a more
true picture of the whole hermit movement than (with all respect, be it
said) the most brilliant general panorama.
It is impossible to give in this series all the lives of the early
hermits—even of those contained in Rosweyde. This volume will contain,
therefore, only the most important and most famous lives of the Egyptian,
Syrian, and Persian hermits, followed, perhaps, by a few later
biographies from Western Europe, as proofs that the hermit-type, as it
spread toward the Atlantic, remained still the same as in the Egyptian
desert.
Against one modern mistake the reader must be warned; the theory, namely,
that these biographies were written as religious romances; edifying, but
not historical; to be admired, but not believed. There is not the
slightest evidence that such was the case. The lives of these, and most
other saints (certainly those in this volume), were written by men who
believed the stories themselves, after such inquiry into the facts as
they deemed necessary; who knew that others would believe them; and who
intended that they should do so; and the stones were believed
accordingly, and taken as matter of fact for the most practical purposes
by the whole of Christendom. The forging of miracles, like the forging
of charters, for the honour of a particular shrine, or the advantage of a
particular monastery, belongs to a much later and much worse age; and,
whatsoever we may think of the taste of the authors of these lives, or of
their faculty for judging of evidence, we must at least give them credit
for being earnest men, incapable of what would have been in their eyes,
and ought to be in ours, not merely falsehood, but impiety. Let the
reader be sure of this—that these documents would not have exercised
their enormous influence on the human mind, had there not been in them,
under whatever accidents of credulity, and even absurdity, an element of
sincerity, virtue, and nobility.