ON the south shore of the Black Sea, eastward of Sinope, there dwelt in
those days, at the mouth of the River Iris, a hermit as gentle and as
pure as Ephrem of Edessa. Beside a roaring waterfall, amid deep glens
and dark forests, with distant glimpses of the stormy sea beyond, there
lived on bread and water a graceful gentleman, young and handsome; a
scholar too, who had drunk deeply at the fountains of Pagan philosophy
and poetry, and had been educated with care at Constantinople and at
Athens, as well as at his native city of Cæsaræa, in the heart of Asia
Minor, now dwindled under Turkish misrule into a wretched village. He
was heir to great estates; the glens and forests round him were his own:
and that was the use which he made of them. On the other side of the
torrent, his mother and his sister, a maiden of wonderful beauty, lived
the hermit life, on a footing of perfect equality with their female
slaves, and the pious women who had joined them.
Basil’s austerities—or rather the severe climate of the Black Sea
forests—brought him to an early grave. But his short life was spent well
enough. He was a poet, with an eye for the beauty of Nature—especially
for the beauty of the sea—most rare in those times; and his works are
full of descriptions of scenery as healthy-minded as they are vivid and
graceful.
In his travels through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, he had seen the
hermits, and longed to emulate them; but (to do him justice) his ideal of
the so-called “religious life” was more practical than those of the
solitaries of Egypt, who had been his teachers. “It was the life” (says
Dean Milman {163}) “of the industrious religious community, not of the
indolent and solitary anchorite, which to Basil was the perfection of
Christianity. . . . The indiscriminate charity of these institutions was
to receive orphans” (of which there were but too many in those evil days)
“of all classes, for education and maintenance: but other children only
with the consent or at the request of parents, certified before
witnesses; and vows were by no means to be enforced upon these youthful
pupils. Slaves who fled to the monasteries were to be admonished and
sent back to their owners. There is one reservation” (and that one only
too necessary then), “that slaves were not bound to obey their master, if
he should order what is contrary to the law of God. Industry was to be
the animating principle of these settlements. Prayer and psalmody were
to have their stated hours, but by no means to intrude on those devoted
to useful labour. These labours were strictly defined; such as were of
real use to the community, not those which might contribute to vice or
luxury. Agriculture was especially recommended. The life was in no
respect to be absorbed in a perpetual mystic communion with the Deity.”
The ideal which Basil set before him was never fulfilled in the East.
Transported to the West by St. Benedict, “the father of all monks,” it
became that conventual system which did so much during the early middle
age, not only for the conversion and civilization, but for the arts and
the agriculture of Europe.
Basil, like his bosom friend, Gregory of Nazianzen, had to go forth from
his hermitage into the world, and be a bishop, and fight the battles of
the true faith. But, as with Gregory, his hermit-training had
strengthened his soul, while it weakened his body. The Emperor Valens,
supporting the Arians against the orthodox, sent to Basil his Prefect of
the Prætorium, an officer of the highest rank. The prefect argued,
threatened; Basil was firm. “I never met,” said he at last, “such
boldness.” “Because,” said Basil, “you never met a bishop.” The prefect
returned to his Emperor. “My lord, we are conquered; this bishop is
above threats. We can do nothing but by force.” The Emperor shrank from
that crime, and Basil and the orthodoxy of his diocese were saved. The
rest of his life and of Gregory’s belongs, like that of Chrysostom, to
general history, and we need pursue it no further here.
I said that Basil’s idea of what monks should be was never carried out in
the East, and it cannot be denied that, as the years went on, the hermit
life took a form less and less practical, and more and more repulsive
also. Such men as Antony, Hilarion, Basil, had valued the ascetic
training, not so much because it had, as they thought, a merit in itself,
but because it enabled the spirit to rise above the flesh; because it
gave them strength to conquer their passions and appetites, and leave
their soul free to think and act.
But their disciples, especially in Syria, seem to have attributed more
and more merit to the mere act of inflicting want and suffering on
themselves. Their souls were darkened, besides, more and more, by a
doctrine unknown to the Bible, unknown to the early Christians, and one
which does not seem to have had any strong hold of the mind of Antony
himself—namely, that sins committed after baptism could only be washed
away by tears, and expiated by penance; that for them the merits of him
who died for the sins of the whole world were of little or of no avail.
Therefore, in perpetual fear of punishment hereafter, they set their
whole minds to punish themselves on earth, always tortured by the dread
that they were not punishing themselves enough, till they crushed down
alike body, mind, and soul into an abject superstition, the details of
which are too repulsive to be written here. Some of the instances of
this self-invented misery which are recorded, even as early as the time
of Theodoret, bishop of Cyra, in the middle of the fifth century, make us
wonder at the puzzling inconsistencies of the human mind. Did these poor
creatures really believe that God could be propitiated by the torture of
his own creatures? What sense could Theodoret (who was a good man
himself) have put upon the words, “God is good,” or “God is love,” while
he was looking with satisfaction, even with admiration and awe, on
practices which were more fit for worshippers of Moloch?
Those who think these words too strong, may judge for themselves how far
they apply to his story of Marana and Cyra.
Marana, then, and Cyra were two young ladies of Berhœa, who had given up
all the pleasures of life to settle themselves in a roofless cottage
outside the town. They had stopped up the door with stones and clay, and
allowed it only to be opened at the feast of Pentecost. Around them
lived certain female slaves who had voluntarily chosen the same life, and
who were taught and exhorted through a little window by their mistresses;
or rather, it would seem, by Marana alone: for Cyra (who was bent double
by her “training”) was never to speak. Theodoret, as a priest, was
allowed to enter the sacred enclosure, and found them shrouded from head
to foot in long veils, so that neither their faces or hands could be
seen; and underneath their veils, burdened on every limb, poor wretches,
with such a load of iron chains and rings that a strong man, he says,
could not have stood under the weight. Thus had they endured for
two-and-forty years, exposed to sun and wind, to frost and rain, taking
no food at times for many days together. I have no mind to finish the
picture, and still less to record any of the phrases of rapturous
admiration with which Bishop Theodoret comments upon their pitiable
superstition.