HILARION was born in the village of Thabatha, which lies about five miles
to the south of Gaza, in Palestine. He had parents given to the worship
of idols, and blossomed (as the saying is) a rose among the thorns. Sent
by them to Alexandria, he was entrusted to a grammarian, and there, as
far as his years allowed, gave proof of great intellect and good morals.
He was soon dear to all, and skilled in the art of speaking. And, what
is more than all, he believed in the Lord Jesus, and delighted neither in
the madness of the circus, in the blood of the arena, or in the luxury of
the theatre: but all his heart was in the congregation of the Church.
But hearing the then famous name of Antony, which was carried throughout
all Egypt, he was fired with a longing to visit him, and went to the
desert. As soon as he saw him he changed his dress, and stayed with him
about two months, watching the order of his life, and the purity of his
manner; how frequent he was in prayers, how humble in receiving brethren,
severe in reproving them, eager in exhorting them; and how no infirmity
ever broke through his continence, and the coarseness of his food. But,
unable to bear longer the crowd which assembled round Antony, for various
diseases and attacks of devils, he said that it was not consistent to
endure in the desert the crowds of cities, but that he must rather begin
where Antony had begun. Antony, as a valiant man, was receiving the
reward of victory: he had not yet begun to serve as a soldier. He
returned, therefore, with certain monks to his own country; and, finding
his parents dead, gave away part of his substance to the brethren, part
to the poor, and kept nothing at all for himself, fearing what is told in
the Acts of the Apostles, the example or punishment, of Ananias and
Sapphira; and especially mindful of the Lord’s saying—“He that leaveth
not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”
He was then fifteen years old. So, naked, but armed in Christ, he
entered the desert, which, seven miles from Maiuma, the port of Gaza,
turns away to the left of those who go along the shore towards Egypt.
And though the place was blood-stained by robbers, and his relations and
friends warned him of the imminent danger, he despised death, in order to
escape death. All wondered at his spirit, wondered at his youth. Save
that a certain fire of the bosom and spark of faith glittered in his
eyes, his cheeks were smooth, his body delicate and thin, unable to bear
any injury, and liable to be overcome by even a light chill or heat.
So, covering his limbs only with a sackcloth, and having a cloak of skin,
which the blessed Antony had given him at starting, and a rustic cloak,
between the sea and the swamp, he enjoyed the vast and terrible solitude,
feeding on only fifteen figs after the setting of the sun; and because
the region was, as has been said above, of ill-repute from robberies, no
man had ever stayed before in that place. The devil, seeing what he was
doing and whither he had gone, was tormented. And though he, who of old
boasted, saying, “I shall ascend into heaven, I shall sit above the stars
of heaven, and shall be like unto the Most High,” now saw that he had
been conquered by a boy, and trampled under foot by him, ere, on account
of his youth, he could commit sin. He therefore began to tempt his
senses; but he, enraged with himself, and beating his breast with his
fist, as if he could drive out thoughts by blows, “I will force thee,
mine ass,” said he, “not to kick; and feed thee with straw, not barley.
I will wear thee out with hunger and thirst; I will burden thee with
heavy loads; I will hunt thee through heat and cold, till thou thinkest
more of food than of play.” He therefore sustained his fainting spirit
with the juice of herbs and a few figs, after each three or four days,
praying frequently, and singing psalms, and digging the ground with a
mattock, to double the labour of fasting by that of work. At the same
time, by weaving baskets of rushes, he imitated the discipline of the
Egyptian monks, and the Apostle’s saying—“He that will not work, neither
let him eat”—till he was so attenuated, and his body so exhausted, that
it scarce clung to his bones.
One night he began to hear the crying {108} of infants, the bleating of
sheep, the wailing of women, the roaring of lions, the murmur of an army,
and utterly portentous and barbarous voices; so that he shrank frightened
by the sound ere he saw aught. He understood these to be the insults of
devils; and, falling on his knees, he signed the cross of Christ on his
forehead, and armed with that helmet, and girt with the breastplate of
faith, he fought more valiantly as he lay, longing somehow to see what he
shuddered to hear, and looking round him with anxious eyes: when, without
warning, by the bright moonshine he saw a chariot with fiery horses
rushing upon him. But when he had called on Jesus, the earth opened
suddenly, and the whole pomp was swallowed up before his eyes. Then said
he, “The horse and his rider he hath drowned in the sea;” and “Some glory
themselves in chariots, and some in horses: but we in the name of the
Lord our God.” Many were his temptations, and various, by day and night,
the snares of the devils. If we were to tell them all, they would make
the volume too long. How often did women appear to him; how often
plenteous banquets when he was hungry. Sometimes as he prayed, a howling
wolf ran past him, or a barking fox; or as he sang, a fight of gladiators
made a show for him: and one of them, as if slain, falling at his feet,
prayed for sepulture. He prayed once with his head bowed to the ground,
and—as is the nature of man—his mind wandered from his prayer, and
thought of I know not what, when a mocking rider leaped on his back, and
spurring his sides, and whipping his neck, “Come,” he cries, “come, run!
why do you sleep?” and, laughing loudly over him, asked him if he were
tired, or would have a feed of barley.
So from his sixteenth to his twentieth year, he was sheltered from the
heat and rain in a tiny cabin, which he had woven of rush and sedge.
Afterwards he built a little cell, which remains to this day, four feet
wide and five feet high—that is, lower than his own stature—and somewhat
longer than his small body needed, so that you would believe it to be a
tomb rather than a dwelling. He cut his hair only once a year, on
Easter-day, and lay till his death on the bare ground and a layer of
rushes, never washing the sack in which he was clothed, and saying that
it was superfluous to seek for cleanliness in haircloth. Nor did he
change his tunic, till the first was utterly in rags. He knew the
Scriptures by heart, and recited them after his prayers and psalms as if
God were present. And, because it would take up too much time to tell
his great deeds one by one, I will give a short account of them.
[Then follows a series of miracles, similar to those attributed to St.
Antony, and, indeed, to all these great Hermit Fathers. But it is
unnecessary to relate more wonders which the reader cannot be expected to
believe. These miracles, however, according to St. Jerome, were the
foundations of Hilarion’s fame and public career. For he says, “When
they were noised abroad, people flowed to him eagerly from Syria to
Egypt, so that many believed in Christ, and professed themselves to be
monks—for no one had known of a monk in Syria before the holy Hilarion.
He was the first founder and teacher of this conversation and study in
the province. The Lord Jesus had in Egypt the old man Antony; he had in
Palestine the young Hilarion . . . He was raised, indeed, by the Lord to
such a glory, that the blessed Antony, hearing of his conversation, wrote
to him, and willingly received his letters; and if rich people came to
him from the parts of Syria, he said to them, ‘Why have you chosen to
trouble yourselves by coming so far, when you have at home my son
Hilarion?’ So by his example innumerable monasteries arose throughout
all Palestine, and all monks came eagerly to him . . . But what a care he
had, not to pass by any brother, however humble or however poor, may be
shown by this; that once going into the Desert of Kadesh, to visit one of
his disciples, he came, with an infinite crowd of monks, to Elusa, on the
very day, as it chanced, on which a yearly solemnity had gathered all the
people of the town to the Temple of Venus; for they honour her on account
of the morning star, to the worship of which the nation of the Saracens
is devoted. The town itself too is said to be in great part
semi-barbarous, on account of its remote situation. Hearing, then, that
the holy Hilarion was passing by—for he had often cured Saracens
possessed with dæmons—they came out to meet him in crowds, with their
wives and children, bowing their necks, and crying in the Syrian tongue,
‘Barech!’ that is, ‘Bless!’ He received them courteously and humbly,
entreating them to worship God rather than stones, and wept abundantly,
looking up to heaven, and promising them that, if they would believe in
Christ, he would come oftener to them. Wonderful was the grace of the
Lord. They would not let him depart till he had laid the foundations of
a future church, and their priest, crowned as he was, had been
consecrated with the sign of Christ.”
* * * * *
He was now sixty-three years old. He saw about him a great monastery, a
multitude of brethren, and crowds who came to be healed of diseases and
unclean spirits, filling the solitude around; but he wept daily, and
remembered with incredible regret his ancient life. “I have returned to
the world,” he said, “and received my reward in this life. All Palestine
and the neighbouring provinces think me to be worth somewhat; while I
possess a farm and household goods, under the pretext of the brethren’s
advantage.” On which the brethren, and especially Hesychius, who bore
him a wondrous love, watched him narrowly.
When he had lived thus sadly for two years, Aristæneta, the Prefect’s
wife, came to him, wishing him to go with her to Antony, “I would go,” he
said, weeping, “if I were not held in the prison of this monastery, and
if it were of any use. For two days since, the whole world was robbed of
such a father.” She believed him, and stopped. And Antony’s death was
confirmed a few days after. Others may wonder at the signs and portents
which he did, at his incredible abstinence, his silence, his miracles: I
am astonished at nothing so much as that he was able to trample under
foot that glory and honour.
Bishops and clergy, monks and Christian matrons (a great temptation),
people of the common sort, great men, too, and judges crowded to him, to
receive from him blessed bread or oil. But he was thinking of nothing
but the desert, till one day he determined to set out, and taking an ass
(for he was so shrunk with fasting that he could hardly walk), he tried
to go his way. The news got wind; the desolation and destruction of
Palestine would ensue; ten thousand souls, men and women, tried to stop
his way; but he would not hear them. Smiting on the ground with his
staff, he said, “I will not make my God a liar. I cannot bear to see
churches ruined, the altars of Christ trampled down, the blood of my sons
spilt.” All who heard thought that some secret revelation had been made
to him: but yet they would not let him go. Whereon he would neither eat
nor drink, and for seven days he persevered fasting, till he had his
wish, and set out for Bethulia, with forty monks, who could march without
food till sundown. On the fifth day he came to Pelusium, then to the
camp Thebatrum, to see Dracontius; and then to Babylon to see Philo.
These two were bishops and confessors exiled by Constantius, who favoured
the Arian heresy. Then he came to Aphroditon, where he met Barsanes the
deacon, who used to carry water to Antony on dromedaries, and heard from
him that the anniversary Antony’s death was near, and would be celebrated
by a vigil at his tomb. Then through a vast and horrible wilderness, he
went for three days to a very high mountain, and found there two monks,
Isaac and Pelusianus, of whom Isaac had been Antony’s interpreter.
A high and rocky hill it was, with fountains gushing out at its foot.
Some of them the sand sucked up; some formed a little rill, with palms
without number on its banks. There you might have seen the old man
wandering to and fro with Antony’s disciples. “Here,” they said, “he
used to sing, here to pray, here to work, here to sit when tired. These
vines, these shrubs, he planted himself; that plot he laid out with his
own hands. This pond to water the garden he made with heavy toil; that
hoe he kept for many years.” Hilarion lay on his bed, and kissed the
couch, as if it were still warm. Antony’s cell was only large enough to
let a man lie down in it; and on the mountain top, reached by a difficult
and winding stair, were two other cells of the same size, cut in the
stony rock, to which he used to retire from the visitors and disciples,
when they came to the garden. “You see,” said Isaac, “this orchard, with
shrubs and vegetables. Three years since a troop of wild asses laid it
waste. He bade one of their leaders stop; and beat it with his staff.
‘Why do you eat,’ he asked it, ‘what you did not sow?’ And after that
the asses, though they came to drink the waters, never touched his
plants.”
Then Hilarion asked them to show him Antony’s grave. They led him apart;
but whether they showed it to him, no man knows. They hid it, they said,
by Antony’s command, lest one Pergamius, who was the richest man of those
parts, should take the corpse to his villa, and build a chapel over it.
Then he went back to Aphroditon, and with only two brothers, dwelt in the
desert, in such abstinence and silence that (so he said) he then first
began to serve Christ. Now it was then three years since the heaven had
been shut, and the earth dried up: so that they said commonly, the very
elements mourned the death of Antony. But Hilarion’s fame spread to
them; and a great multitude, brown and shrunken with famine, cried to him
for rain, as to the blessed Antony’s successor. He saw them, and grieved
over them; and lifting up his hand to heaven, obtained rain at once. But
the thirsty and sandy land, as soon as it was watered by showers, sent
forth such a crowd of serpents and venomous animals that people without
number were stung, and would have died, had they not run together to
Hilarion. With oil blessed by him, the husbandmen and shepherds touched
their wounds, and all were surely healed.
But when he saw that he was marvellously honoured, he went to Alexandria,
meaning to cross the desert to the further oasis. And because since he
was a monk he had never stayed in a city, he turned aside to some
brethren known to him in the Brucheion {115} not far from Alexandria.
They received him with joy: but, when night came on, they suddenly heard
him bid his disciples saddle the ass. In vain they entreated, threw
themselves across the threshold. His only answer was, that he was
hastening away, lest he should bring them into trouble; they would soon
know that he had not departed without good reason. The next day, men of
Gaza came with the Prefect’s lictors, burst into the monastery, and when
they found him not—“Is it not true,” they said, “what we heard? He is a
sorcerer, and knows the future.” For the citizens of Gaza, after
Hilarion was gone, and Julian had succeeded to the empire, had destroyed
his monastery, and begged from the Emperor the death of Hilarion and
Hesychius. So letters had been sent forth, to seek them throughout the
world.
So Hilarion went by the pathless wilderness into the Oasis; {116} and
after a year, more or less—because his fame had gone before him even
there, and he could not lie hid in the East—he was minded to sail away to
lonely islands, that the sea at least might hide what the land would not.
But just then Hadrian, his disciple, came from Palestine, telling him
that Julian was slain, and that a Christian emperor was reigning; so that
he ought to return to the relics of his monastery. But he abhorred the
thought; and, hiring a camel, went over the vast desert to Parætonia, a
sea town of Libya. Then the wretched Hadrian, wishing to go back to
Palestine and get himself glory under his master’s name, packed up all
that the brethren had sent by him to his master, and went secretly away.
But—as a terror to those who despise their masters—he shortly after died
of jaundice.
Then, with Zananas alone, Hilarion went on board ship to sail for Sicily.
And when, almost in the middle of Adria, {117a} he was going to sell the
Gospels which he had written out with his own hand when young, to pay his
fare withal, then the captain’s son was possessed with a devil, and cried
out, “Hilarion, servant of God, why can we not be safe from thee even at
sea? Give me a little respite till I come to the shore, lest, if I be
cast out here, I fall headlong into the abyss.” Then said he, “If my God
lets thee stay, stay. But if he cast thee out, why dost thou lay the
blame on me, a sinner and a beggar?” Then he made the captain and the
crew promise not to betray him: and the devil was cast out. But the
captain would take no fare when he saw that they had nought but those
Gospels, and the clothes on their backs. And so Hilarion came to
Pachynum, a cape of Sicily, {117b} and fled twenty miles inland into a
deserted farm; and there every day gathered a bundle of firewood, and put
it on Zananas’s back, who took it to the town, and bought a little bread
thereby.
But it happened, according to that which is written, “A city set on an
hill cannot be hid,” one Scutarius was tormented by a devil in the
Basilica of St. Peter at Rome; and the unclean spirit cried out in him,
“A few days since Hilarion, the servant of Christ, landed in Sicily, and
no man knows him, and he thinks himself hid. I will go and betray him.”
And forthwith he took ship with his slaves, and came to Pachynum, and, by
the leading of the devil, threw himself down before the old man’s hut,
and was cured.
The frequency of his signs in Sicily drew to him sick people and
religious men in multitudes; and one of the chief men was cured of dropsy
the same day that he came, and offered Hilarion boundless gifts: but he
obeyed the Saviour’s saying, “Freely ye have received; freely give.”
While this was happening in Sicily, Hesychius, his disciple, was seeking
the old man through the world, searching the shores, penetrating the
desert, and only certain that, wherever he was, he could not long be hid.
So, after three years were past, he heard at Methone {118} from a Jew,
who was selling old clothes, that a prophet of the Christians had
appeared in Sicily, working such wonders that he was thought to be one of
the old saints. But he could give no description of him, having only
heard common report. He sailed for Pachynum, and there, in a cottage on
the shore, heard of Hilarion’s fame—that which most surprised all being
that, after so many signs and miracles, he had not accepted even a bit of
bread from any man.
So, “not to make the story too long,” as says St. Jerome, Hesychius fell
at his master’s knees, and watered his feet with tears, till at last he
raised him up. But two or three days after he heard from Zananas, how
the old man could dwell no longer in these regions, but was minded to go
to some barbarous nation, where both his name and his speech should be
unknown. So he took him to Epidaurus, {119a} a city of Dalmatia, where
he lay a few days in a little farm, and yet could not be hid; for a
dragon of wondrous size—one of those which, in the country speech, they
call boas, because they are so huge that they can swallow an ox—laid
waste the province, and devoured not only herds and flocks, but
husbandmen and shepherds, which he drew to him by the force of his
breath. {119b} Hilarion commanded a pile of wood to be prepared, and
having prayed to Christ, and called the beast forth, commanded him to
ascend the pile, and having put fire under, burnt him before all the
people. Then fretting over what he should do, or whither he should turn,
he went alone over the world in imagination, and mourned that, when his
tongue was silent, his miracles still spoke.
In those days, at the earthquake over the whole world, which befell after
Julian’s death, the sea broke its bounds; and, as if God was threatening
another flood, or all was returning to the primæval chaos, ships were
carried up steep rocks, and hung there. But when the Epidauritans saw
roaring waves and mountains of water borne towards the shore, fearing
lest the town should be utterly overthrown, they went out to the old man,
and, as if they were leading him out to battle, stationed him on the
shore. And when he had marked three signs of the Cross upon the sand,
and stretched out his hands against the waves, it is past belief to what
a height the sea swelled, and stood up before him, and then, raging long
as if indignant at the barrier, fell back little by little into itself.
All Epidaurus, and all that region, talk of this to this day; and mothers
teach it their children, that they may hand it down to posterity. Truly,
that which was said to the Apostles, “If ye believe, ye shall say to this
mountain, Be removed, and cast into the sea; and it shall be done,” can
be fulfilled even to the letter, if we have the faith of the Apostles,
and such as the Lord commanded them to have. For which is more strange,
that a mountain should descend into the sea; or that mountains of water
should stiffen of a sudden, and, firm as a rock only at an old man’s
feet, should flow softly everywhere else? All the city wondered; and the
greatness of the sign was bruited abroad even at Salo.
When the old man discovered that, he fled secretly by night in a little
boat, and finding a merchantman after two days, sailed for Cyprus.
Between Maleæ and Cythera {121} they were met by pirates, who had left
their vessels under the shore, and came up in two large galleys, worked
not with sails, but oars. As the rowers swept the billows, all on board
began to tremble, weep, run about, get handspikes ready, and, as if one
messenger was not enough, vie with each other in telling the old man that
pirates were at hand. He looked out at them and smiled. Then turning to
his disciples, “O ye of little faith,” he said; “wherefore do ye doubt?
Are these more in number than Pharaoh’s army? Yet they were all drowned
when God so willed.” While he spoke, the hostile keels, with foaming
beaks, were but a short stone’s throw off. He then stood on the ship’s
bow, and stretching out his hand against them, “Let it be enough,” he
said, “to have come thus far.”
O wondrous faith! The boats instantly sprang back, and made stern-way,
although the oars impelled them in the opposite direction. The pirates
were astonished, having no wish to return back-foremost, and struggled
with all their might to reach the ship; but were carried to the shore
again, much faster than they had come.
I pass over the rest, lest by telling every story I make the volume too
long. This only I will say, that, while he sailed prosperously through
the Cyclades, he heard the voices of foul spirits, calling here and there
out of the towns and villages, and running together on the beaches. So
he came to Paphos, the city of Cyprus, famous once in poets’ songs, which
now, shaken down by frequent earthquakes, only shows what it has been of
yore by the foundations of its ruins. There he dwelt meanly near the
second milestone out of the city, rejoicing much that he was living
quietly for a few days. But not three weeks were past, ere throughout
the whole island whosoever had unclean spirits began to cry that Hilarion
the servant of Christ was come, and that they must hasten to him.
Salonica, Curium, Lapetha, and the other towns, all cried this together,
most saying that they knew Hilarion, and that he was truly a servant of
God; but where he was they knew not. Within a month, nearly 200 men and
women were gathered together to him. Whom when he saw, grieving that
they would not suffer him to rest, raging, as it were to revenge himself,
he scourged them with such an instancy of prayer, that some were cured at
once, some after two or three days, and all within a week.
So staying there two years, and always meditating flight, he sent
Hesychius to Palestine, to salute the brethren, visit the ashes of the
monastery, and return in the spring. When he returned, and Hilarion was
longing to sail again to Egypt,—that is, to the cattle pastures, {123a}
because there is no Christian there, but only a fierce and barbarous
folk,—he persuaded the old man rather to withdraw into some more secret
spot in the island itself. And looking round it long till he had
examined it all over, he led him away twelve miles from the sea, among
lonely and rough mountains, where they could hardly climb up, creeping on
hands and knees. When they were within, they beheld a spot terrible and
very lonely, surrounded with trees, which had, too, waters falling from
the brow of a cliff, and a most pleasant little garden, and many
fruit-trees—the fruit of which, however, Hilarion never ate—and near it
the ruin of a very ancient temple, {123b} out of which (so he and his
disciples averred) the voices of so many dæmons resounded day and night,
that you would have fancied an army there. With which he was exceedingly
delighted, because he had his foes close to him; and dwelt therein five
years; and (while Hesychius often visited him) he was much cheered up in
this last period of his life, because owing to the roughness and
difficulty of the ground, and the multitude of ghosts (as was commonly
reported), few, or none, ever dare climb up to him.
But one day, going out of the little garden, he saw a man paralytic in
all his limbs, lying before the gate; and having asked Hesychius who he
was, and how he had come, he was told that the man was the steward of a
small estate, and that to him the garden, in which they were, belonged.
Hilarion, weeping over him, and stretching a hand to him as he lay, said,
“I say to thee, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, arise and walk.”
Wonderful was the rapidity of the effect. The words were yet in his
mouth, when the limbs, strengthened, raised the man upon his feet. As
soon as it was known, the needs of many conquered the difficulty of the
ground, and the want of a path, while all in the neighbourhood watched
nothing so carefully, as that he should not by some plan slip away from
them. For the report had been spread about him, that he could not remain
long in the same place; which nevertheless he did not do from any
caprice, or childishness, but to escape honour and importunity; for he
always longed after silence, and an ignoble life.
So, in the eightieth year of his age, while Hesychius was absent, he
wrote a short letter, by way of testament, with his own hand, leaving to
Hesychius all his riches; namely, his Gospel-book, and a sackcloth-shirt,
hood, and mantle. For his servant had died a few days before. Many
religious men came to him from Paphos while he was sick, especially
because they had heard that he had said that now he was going to migrate
to the Lord, and be freed from the chains of the body. There came also
Constantia, a high-born lady, whose son-in-law and daughter he had
delivered from death by anointing them with oil. And he made them all
swear, that he should not be kept an hour after his death, but covered up
with earth in that same garden, clothed, as he was, in his haircloth
shirt, hood, and rustic cloak. And now little heat was left in his body,
and nothing of a living man was left, except his reason: and yet, with
open eyes, he went on saying, “Go forth, what fearest thou? Go forth, my
soul, what doubtest thou? Nigh seventy years hast thou served Christ,
and dost thou fear death?” With these words, he breathed out his soul.
They covered him forthwith in earth, and told them in the city that he
was buried, before it was known that he was dead.
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
mediæval 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 Lacedæmon, he heard that a great man there was a
Manichæan, 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.”
But they answered, “Not for a hundred gold pieces, so favourable was the
wind,” and fed him all the way to Rome, where we lose sight of him and
his humour.