ROCK MONASTERIES
The early Syrian and Egyptian hermits would have become a sect of
manichæan heretics but for the popularity of the profession and the
Arian persecution. In quitting the world they cut themselves off from
the churches. They no more took part in its assemblies, participated in
the sacraments, nor observed the sacred seasons. Paul, the first
hermit, deserted the society of men when aged fifteen, and lived till
the age of a hundred and ten in solitude without ever having partaken
of the Bread of Life. S. Mary of Egypt spent forty-seven years in the
Wilderness, stark naked, covered with hair like a wild beast, and only
received the Viaticum when dying, by the chance of a priest passing
that way. A fifteenth century statue of her, nearly life-size, is in
the National Museum at Munich, removed from the Cathedral of Augsburg
as indelicate. S. Antony spent twenty years in a sort of cistern, and
only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the
roof. Certainly all that time he was voluntarily excommunicate. If S.
Hilarius ever made sacramental communion we are not told, but we do
know that he was for ever hiding himself from where were his fellow-
men, in wilds and oases, and where there were no Christian churches.
In the desert, times and seasons slipped away, and became confounded,
so that by the first hermits neither Easter nor the Lord's Day were
observed. In the Gospel, the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving
drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and
prisoners, are appointed as the means of deserving a reward in heaven,
but the anchorites neglected every one, cut themselves adrift from the
chance of performing them, and sought to merit heaven in their own way.
Christ declared, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink
His blood, ye have no life in you," but they wilfully lived apart from
the sacramental life as surely as any modern Quaker.
But when crowds of refugees from the duties and pleasures of life
sought the desert, they ceased to be solitaries, and organisation on a
monarchical system under an abbot became necessary; and when bishops
and priests fled to them, or were banished and sought them, during the
Arian persecution, they came to plume themselves as champions of
orthodoxy, and conformed to Catholic usage, assembling on the Lord's
Day for prayers and the Eucharist. When the fashion set in for
deserting the world, floods of men, women, and children threw
themselves into it, and flowed into the desert during a century with
resistless force. Pachomius, who died at fifty-six, reckoned three
thousand monks under his rule; the monasteries of Tabenna soon included
seven thousand, and S. Jerome affirms that as many as fifty thousand
were present at the annual gathering of the general congregation of
monasteries that followed his rule.
There were five thousand on the mountain of Nitria; near Arsinoë the
Abbot Serapion governed ten thousand. It has even been asserted that
there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the
towns. The immense majority of these religious were cenobites; that is
to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united under an
elected head, the abbot. The cenobitical life rapidly and necessarily
superseded that of the solitary. In fact the monks were now no more
solitaries than are the jackdaws in a cleft, or the bees in a hive, but
unlike the jackdaws, they were under discipline, and unlike bees were
without a sting.
It was not mere love of an indolent life and a desire to escape from
military service that swelled the numbers in the desert. The condition
of the decaying Roman world led men to despair of the Commonwealth, and
of the possibility of their being able to save their own souls in the
midst of the general corruption. "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 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. Private profligacy
among all ranks was such as cannot be described in any modern pages.
The regular clergy of the cities 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; and, as a background to all
these seething heaps of decay, misrule and misery, hung the black cloud
of the barbarians, waxing stronger and stronger so that the wisest
Romans saw clearly as the years rolled on, they would soon be the
conquerors of the Caesars and the masters of the Western world.
"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. 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 saw, in
the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation around them,
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. 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."
[Footnote: Kingsley (C.), "The Hermits," Lond. 1868.]
In the year 336 Athanasius was in exile at Trèves. He is traditionally
held to have there occupied a cave beyond the Moselle. The Bishop
Maximinus received him with honour. Early in his episcopate Athanasius
had visited the congregation of monks on the Upper Nile, and he was
enthusiastic in his admiration of their manner of life. It is supposed
that whilst at Trèves he began to write the "Life of S. Anthony," if
indeed he was the author of that popular work. Here he is thought to
have been visited by Maxentius, Bishop of Poitiers, and brother of the
Bishop of Trèves, bringing with him Martin, then a friend and pupil of
S. Hilary, this latter at the time a wealthy noble of Poitiers. And
from the discourse of Athanasius, if this meeting actually took place,
the imagination of Martin was fired with ambition to reproduce in
Europe the life of the fathers of the desert in Egypt.
Anyhow, to this residence of Athanasius at Trèves, "one may trace the
introduction into the Western Church of the principle and laws of
ascetic self-renunciation, which, though they had run to great extremes
in the Nitrian desert and in the valley of the Nile, assumed noble form
when the idea took possession of the more phlegmatic temperament and
practical energies of the West. Without discussing the vexed question
of the authorship of the 'Life of S. Anthony,' which is referred by
many traditional testimonies to Athanasius, we think it obvious, from
the 'Confessions' of Augustine, that the religious circles at Trèves
had been strongly moved by the self-abandonment and entire consecration
to the religious life of the exiled bishops. It was here, while reading
the 'Life of S. Anthony' that the friends of Augustine at length
yielded themselves to God." [Footnote: Reynolds (H. R.), "Athanasius,
his Life and Life-work," Lond., R.T.S., 1889, p. 54.]
Martin was at Poitiers in 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to
his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the
eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off
the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to
eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the
Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and
obtained his cheerful consent. Some way up the Clain, five miles from
Poitiers, the little river glides through a broad valley, with meadows
on its left bank often overflowed, but with a ridge of conglomerate
rocks pierced with caves on the right bank. Here Martin settled, and
there can exist no manner of doubt that his first settlement was in one
of these grottoes, though at a later period the monastery was moved to
the further side of the river, when the caves proved inadequate to
harbour all the candidates for the religious life who placed themselves
under his direction. One of his monks, however, named Felix, refused to
quit his cave that is now shown, and in which he died perhaps, in an
inaccessible cliff that is surmounted by a cross.
The friable conglomerate has yielded to storm and rain, and much of it
has crumbled down; but the openings to the caves are visible from
below, where the slopes are purple and fragrant with violets and,
later, pink with primulas, and the rocks are wreathed with clematis. A
pure spring bursts forth at the foot and works its way through beds of
forget-me-not and marsh marigold to the Clain.
Martin had been ordained exorcist and then priest.
His most trusted disciples were Felix, Macarius, and Florentius. As
already said, except in the Gallo-Roman cities, Christianity did not
exist. The country-folk were pagans. Martin lifted up his eyes and saw
that the fields were white to harvest. He preached throughout Poitou
and La Vendée, and visited the coast to the isles of Yeu and Ré. He
travelled on foot, or mounted on an ass, sought every village and
hamlet, to sow the seed of the Word of God, and where he could not go
himself, he sent his disciples. Ligugé, his monastery, became a centre
of evangelisation to the country round. It was the first monastery
planted on Gaulish soil. It was ruined by the Saracens in 732, and
again by the Normans in 848. It was rebuilt in 1040. But Ligugé never
had a worse enemy than one of its abbots, Arthur de Cossé. He made
public confession of Calvinism; gave up the abbey to be pillaged, sold
its lands for his own advantage, and did everything in his power to
utterly ruin it. It owed its restoration to the care of François de
Servier, Bishop of Bayonne.
Ligugé was, however, destroyed at the French Revolution. In 1864 it was
acquired by the Benedictines, and rebuilt on a large scale. It was
enriched with a valuable library, and became a nursery of Christian art
and literature. But the law of 1901 banished the monks, and the vast
building is now empty, as the State has not so far found any use for
it.
In the year 971 the episcopal throne of Tours was vacant, and the
citizens at once decided on securing Martin as their bishop. But when
he arrived on foot, dust-covered, with shaggy hair, the bishops
assembled to consecrate protested against the election. It was
customary to choose a bishop from among the nobility and the wealthy.
Defensor, the Bishop of Angers, signalised himself by his opposition.
He absolutely refused to consecrate the poor dishevelled monk. But when
the lector opening the psalter at hazard read out the words, "Out of
the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because
of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy and the defender"
(defensor), [Footnote: So in the old Gallican Version; in the Vulgate
the word is _Ultor_.] the people raised a great shout, God
himself had spoken, and the bishops had to yield to the popular will.
Martin was then aged fifty-four.
No sooner was he installed than he cast about him to establish on the
banks of the Loire a monastic colony such as he had founded at Ligugé.
He found a place where in later times rose the great abbey of
Marmoutier, the wealthiest in France, and with a church that was called
the Gem of Touraine. But then it was merely a chalk cliff rising above
the Loire on its right bank, two miles above Tours, and on the summit
had stood the old Gaulish city of Altionos. The Romans had transferred
the capital of the Turones to its present site, and had given it the
name of Cæsarodunum. But Althionos was probably not wholly abandoned,
poor Gauls still dwelt there in their huts, and nothing had been done
to bring them into the fold of Christ's Church.
The cliff with its caves had already been sanctified. It had been a
refuge in time of persecution, and there S. Gatianus, the first Bishop
of Tours, in the third century had sheltered. But now Martin and his
disciples set to work to enlarge and remodel the subterranean
habitations; they scooped out a chapel, and they formed a baptistry.
In 853 the Northmen came up the Loire and massacred a hundred and
sixteen of the monks. Only twenty-four escaped. In 982 Marmoutier was
refounded by Eudo, Count of Blois, and the noble basilica built below
the rock was consecrated by Pope Urban II in 1095. The vast wealth of
the abbey led to enlargements and splendour of architectural work; but
in 1562 the Huguenots wrecked it, burned the precious library with all
its MSS., broke down the altars, and shattered the windows. Its
complete destruction, however, was due to the Revolution, when in 1791
it was completely pulled down, nothing left of the splendid church but
the tower and a portion of the northern transept that was glued to the
rock. The oratory of S. Martin was levelled to the rock on which it
stood.
[ILLUSTRATION: LE TROU BOUROU. A cave fortress on the Beune. The hole
through which the man is peering was used for defence of the steep
ascent to the entrance. Note the arrangement for barring the door.]
[ILLUSTRATION: ROCK BAPTISTERY OF S. MARTIN, MARMOUTIER. Elevated and
occupied by S. Martin, Bishop of Tours, A.D. 371-396. On the right-
hand side is the well, on the left the font for immersion. The niches
in the wall are for the holy oils. ]
But the fact of the transfer of the monastery to the flat land below
the cliff had this effect, that the old caves, the original cradle of
Marmoutier, were neglected and forgotten. They were overgrown by
brambles, crumbled away, and none visited them.
In 1859 the oratory in which S. Martin had prayed was restored or
rather rebuilt from its foundations.
One night when Martin was engaged therein in reading the Scriptures,
the door was burst open and in broke a party of masqueraders. They had
disguised themselves as Jupiter, Minerva, and Mercury, and some damsel
devoid of modesty presented herself before the startled modesty of the
bishop without disguise of any sort, as Venus rising from the foam of
the sea. Some were dressed as Wood Druses very much like the devils of
popular fancy. Mercury was a sharp, shrewd wag, and bothered the saint
greatly, as he admitted to Sulpicius, his biographer, but Jupiter was a
"stupid sot." At the rebuke of Martin the whole gang good-humouredly
withdrew.
I was in this cell on Mid Lent Sunday, when hearing a noise outside, I
looked forth and saw a party of masqueraders frolic and frisk past on
their way to a tavern where was to be a costume ball. So goes the
world. Some fifteen hundred and thirty years ago the Gospel was being
preached in Tours, as it is now, men and women were striving to follow
its precepts as now, and tomfoolery was rampant in Tours fifteen
hundred and thirty years ago as it is now.
And now, as to the remains in the rock of the primitive Marmoutier. The
grottoes of S. Gatianus and of the disciples of S. Martin have been
cleared out. There is a little arcade of three round-headed unadorned
arches cut in the cliff that served as a cloister, and there is the old
baptistry where Martin admitted his converts into the Christian Church,
sunk in the rock for adult and complete submersion, and the niches in
the wall for the sacred oils. Adjoining is the cave in which the
neophyte unclothed and afterwards reclothed himself. There are graves
sunk in the rock, where some of his disciples were laid, and there is
the chapel partly in the rock and partly rebuilt, dedicated later by
Gregory of Tours to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, but of which in
after times a different story was told--namely that seven brothers who
had been devoted disciples of Martin prayed him when he was dying that
they might speedily follow, and on the anniversary of his death they
all seven fell asleep.
There is another cave that escaped destruction at the Revolution,
though opening out of the transept of the church. It is that of the
Penitence of Brice.
Brice had been adopted as a child by Martin, and brought up by him to
be a monk. But Brice had no liking for the religious life, and was very
disrespectful to his master. One day a sick man came to see Martin and
asked of Brice where the saint was. "The fool is yonder," answered he,
"staring at the sky like an idiot."
One day Martin rebuked Brice for buying horses and slaves at a high
price, and even providing himself with beautiful young girls. Brice was
furious, and said. "I am a better Christian than you. I have had an
ecclesiastical education from my youth, and you were bred up amidst the
license of a camp."
On the death of S. Martin, the people of Tours, tired of having a saint
at their head, with proverbial fickleness chose Brice as his successor
because rich--he was said to have been the son of the Count of Nevers--
and because he was anything but a saint. As bishop he showed little
improvement, and gave great scandal. Lazarus, Bishop of Aix, accused
him before several councils. At last a gross outrage on morals was
attributed to him, and caused his flight. A nun gave birth to a child,
and confessed that she had been seduced by the bishop. Brice either ran
away from Tours or was deposed. A priest named Justinian was elected in
his room. On the death of Justinian, Armentius succeeded him. Brice
remained in exile till the death of Armentius, and then ventured back
to Tours to reclaim his episcopal throne. He was allowed to reascend
it, and he occupied it for seven years; and the cave in which he did
penance for his frailties and the scandal he had caused is intact to
this day. He died, after having been nominally bishop for forty-seven
years, the greater portion of which time he had spent in exile. The
Church of Rome is certainly very charitably disposed in numbering him
among the saints. Why he should be regarded as the patron of wool-
combers one cannot see, [Footnote: The following prayer is recommended
by the Archbishop of Tours to the faithful for use. "Nous vous
supplions, Seigneur, par l'intercession de S. Brice, Evêque et
Confesseur, de conserver votre peuple qui se confie en votre amour;
afin que, par les vertues de notre Saint Pontife, nous méritions de
partager avec lui les joies celestes." The virtues of Brice!] but as
such he enjoyed some popularity.
There is yet another cave in the Marmoutier rocks that may be
mentioned; it is that of S. Leobard. Leobard was a saint of the sixth
century, a native of Auvergne, who, coming to pray at the tomb of S.
Martin, resolved on spending the rest of his days in one of the cells
of Martin's monastery in the rocks. He settled into an untenanted cave,
which he enlarged, and lived in it for twenty-two years. At the
extremity he dug a deep pit in which he desired to be buried standing
with his face to the East, thus to await the coming of the Lord. But
although his desire was fulfilled, the monks of Marmoutier would not
let his body rest there, but hauled it up, that it might become an
object of devotion to the faithful.
The Abbey of Brantôme on the Dronne (Dep. Dordogne) was originally,
like Marmoutier, a cavern monastery, and like those of Marmoutier, the
monks waxing fat, they kicked and abandoned the grottoes for a stately
structural monastery. The beautiful Romanesque tower of the church
stands on top of a rock that is honeycombed with their cells. The
church, consisting of nave only, is of marvellous beauty, early
pointed, and built on a curve, as there was but little space to spare
between the river and the cliffs. Unhappily church and cloister were
delivered over to be "restored" by that arch-wrecker, Abbadie, who has
done such incalculable mischief in Perigord and the Angoumois, and his
hoof-mark is visible here. The monks, not content with a sumptuous
Gothic abbey, pulled it down and built one in the baroque style, and
had but just completed it when the Revolution broke out "and the flood
came and swept them all away." In the court behind this modern
structure is to be seen the cliff perforated with caves; it has,
however, been cut back to the detriment of these, so that we have them
shorn of their faces. Nevertheless they are interesting. The old
monolithic chapel of the monastery remains, turned into a pigeonry, and
with the steps left that gave access to the pulpit, and two pieces of
sculpture on a very large scale, cut out of the living rock. One
represents the Crucifixion with SS. Mary and John; the other has been
variously explained as the Last Judgment or the Triumph of Death. It
perhaps represents the Triumph of Christ over Death. His figure and the
kneeling figures of His Mother and the Beloved Disciple were, however,
never completed, and remain in the rough.
Beneath the figure of Christ is Death, figured by a head surmounted by
a crown of bones, and a crest representing a spectre armed with a club.
On each side is an angel blowing a trumpet. Below are ranged a dozen
heads of popes, bishops, princes, knights, and ladies, in boxes to
represent graves.
[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST OVER DEATH
Sculpture in the cave monastery of Brantôme. The figure of Christ was
never completed. Below is a head crowned with bones, for Death, with
Time as crest. Below, in boxes, are the dead, of various degrees.]
In the front of this huge piece of sculpture are trestles planted in
the ground to support planks to serve as tables when the Brantômois
desire to have a banquet and a dance.
The sculpture above described is not earlier than the sixteenth
century. A few paces from it, in the same line and almost under the
tower, is another grotto called _La Babayou_--that is to say "of
the statue," and it probably at one time enshrined an image of a saint.
On the left of the subterranean church is the fountain of the little
Cut-throat already mentioned. S. Sicarius, whose relics were the great
"draw" to Brantôme in the Middle Ages, was supposed to have been one of
the Innocents slain by Herod; and the relics were also supposed to have
been given to the abbey by Charlemagne. As there was no historic
evidence that Charles the Great ever had a set of little bones passed
off on him as those of the Innocent, or that he ever made a present to
the abbey of a relic, it will be seen that a good deal of supposition
goes to the story. As I have said before, how it was that the child of
a Hebrew mother acquired a Latin name, and that one so peculiar, we are
not informed.
Outside the town gate are other large excavations that are supposed to
have formed a temple of Mithras, but this is mere conjecture. The
largest is now employed as a _Tir_--a shooting gallery. That there
were buildings connected with it is seen by the holes in the rock to
receive rafters.
S. Maximus, Bishop of Riez, who died in 460, was born at Château Redon,
near Digne, and he entered the monastic life on the isle of Lerins,
under S. Honoratus, and when that saint was raised in 426 to the
episcopal throne of Arles, Maximus succeeded him as Abbot of Lerins.
But this monastery was becoming crowded, and Maximus pined for the
solitary life, so one day he took a boat, crossed to the mainland, and
plunged into the wild country about the river Verdon, that has sawn for
itself a chasm through the limestone; where it debouches, he planted
himself at a place since called Moustier-Ste-Marie. The lips of the
crevasse are linked by a chain, with a gilt star hanging in the midst,
little under 690 feet above the bed of the torrent. No one knows when
this star was hung there, but it is supposed to have been an _ex
voto_ of a chevalier, de Blac. Within the ravine, reached by a
narrow goat-path, were caves in the cliffs, and into one of these
Maximus retired in 434 and was speedily followed by other solitaries.
The caves are still there, the faces walled up, but as at Ligugé, and
as at Marmoutier, and as at Brantôme, so was it here. As the monastery
grew rich, the solitaries crawled out of their holes into which the sun
never shone, and erected their residence at the opening of the ravine.
A chapel remains, founded by Charlemagne, but rebuilt in the fourteenth
or fifteenth century, reached by a stair protected by a parapet.
Moustier was famous at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of
the eighteenth century for its faience, with elegant designs and good
colouring. Specimens are now extremely scarce. Two vases of this ware
may be seen on the altar of the chapel. The principal potters there
were Pierre Fournier, Joseph Olery, Paul Rouse, and Féraud. They
usually signed their work with their initials. Maximus was just a
century later than Martin; the fever for imitating the lives of the
Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt was then in full heat. His master,
Honoratus, had been wont to escape from his island monastery and hide
in a cave in the glowing red porphyry rocks of the Esterelle. I can
understand his retiring thither, above a sea blue as the neck of a
peacock, among glowing red rocks, and masses of pines, and heather, and
arbutus, and every kind of fragrant herb, and where, when only
snowdrops are appearing in England, the spires of white asphodel are
basking in the sun.
[Illustration: CAVES OF LIGUGÉ
The primitive rock monastery of S. Martin. It was abandoned later when
the monks moved to the further side of the river; but Felix, a disciple
of S. Martin, remained and died in the cave, now inaccessible, below
the cross.]
Near Nottingham are the "Popish Holes," close to the river Lene. They
are thus described by Stukeley. "One may easily guess Nottingham to
have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper
tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer
themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was
a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is
not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is
formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out
into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. The church is like
those in the rocks of Bethlehem and other places in the Holy Land; the
altar is natural rock, and there has been painting upon the wall, a
steeple, I suppose, where a bell hung, and regular pillars. The river
winding about makes a fortification to it, for it comes at both ends of
the cliff, leaving a plain in the middle. The way into it was by a gate
cut out of the rock, and with an oblique entrance for more safety.
Without is a plain with three niches, which I fancy their place of
judicature, or the like. Between this and the castle is a hermitage of
like workmanship."
These remains pertain to a cell called S. Mary le Rock, a quarter of a
mile west of the Castle, and belonged to Lenton priory. It was
abandoned after the time of Edward IV., and is supposed to have come
down in a perfect form to the time of the Civil War, when it was much
injured by the Puritans as Papists' holes. A good many illustrations
exist of it after the Civil Wars, as a large folding plate in Throsby's
and Thoroton's "History of Nottinghamshire," 1797, but there is none to
show what it was before.
It possesses a pigeonry much like that at Brantôme, but on a smaller
scale, that wiseacres have pronounced to be a Columbarium, not for
doves, but for the reception of jars containing the ashes of the dead,
and have attributed this dovecote to Roman times. Mr. William Stetton,
a local antiquary, writing in 1806, stated that the excavation
"appeared to have been made in the earliest ages of Christianity, when
the converts resorted for secrecy and security to grottoes or caves,
and similar places of retirement and seclusion. The style is evidently
Roman. The whole interior appears to have been invested with a thin
plastering, or perhaps, only a wash, which has been painted in various
colours in mosaic devices. The altar still remains pretty perfect
notwithstanding the ravages of time and wanton depredation. A Roman
column still adorns the north side of it, but its corresponding one on
the south side has long been destroyed."
An architect, John Carter, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1860,
stated that the "arrangements of the excavations are monastical; and
we, with much satisfaction, trace out the infirmary, refectory,
dormitory, chapter-house, and the chapel. The latter place gives two
aisles, divided by perforated arches, with headways in the manner of
groins, and at the east end an altar."
There can be no question now that although the original excavations
were possibly enough Roman-British, the Papists' holes, as we have them
now, are truly, as Mr. Carter says, monastical.
How absurd old fashioned antiquaries were may be proved by the fact
that the chimney that warmed the monks, and up which went the smoke
from their kitchen, was pronounced to be a _bustum_, a flue
employed for the cremation of the dead. As to the "Roman" column, that
also is mediaeval.
Curzon, in his "Monasteries of the Levant," 1849, says "the scenery of
Meteora (Mt. Pindus in Albania) is of a very singular kind. The end of
a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some
earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of
twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred
feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar-
loaves, and some like vast stalagmites. These rocks are surrounded by a
beautiful grassy plain, on three sides of which grow groups of detached
trees, like those of an English park. Some of these rocks shoot up
quite clean and perpendicularly from the smooth green grass, some are
in clusters, some stand alone like obelisks. Nothing can be more
strange and wonderful than this romantic region, which is unlike
anything I have ever seen before or since. In Switzerland, Savoy, the
Tyrol, is nothing at all to be compared to these extraordinary peaks.
At the foot of many of these rocks there are numerous caves and holes,
some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial;
for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism, whole flocks of
hermits roosted in these pigeonholes. Some of these caves are so high
up in the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever
get up to them, whilst others are below the surface, and the anchorites
who burrowed in them, like rabbits, frequently afforded rare sport to
parties of roving Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting scenes seem to have
been a fashionable amusement previous to the twelfth century. In early
Greek frescoes and in small stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we
see many frightful representations of men on horseback in Roman armour,
with long spears, who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In
these pictures the monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a
kind of coarse matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are
covered with hair; these, I take it, were the ones most to be admired,
as in the Greek Church sanctity is always in the inverse ratio to
beauty. All Greek saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much
uglier, dirtier, and older than the rest. They must have been very
fusty people beside, eating roots and living in holes like rats and
mice."
On the summit of these needles of rock are monasteries. Of these there
were twenty-four, but now seven alone remain tenanted by monks. The
sole access to them is by nets let down by ropes and hauled up by a
windlass, or as an alternative in the case of that of S. Barlaam, by a
succession of ladders.
As an example of a rock monastery and church in Egypt, I may quote the
same author's description of that of Der el Adra, or of the Pully,
situated on the top of Gebel el Ferr, where a precipice about 200 feet
in height rises out of the waters of the Nile.
The access to it is by a cave or fissure in the rock, the opening being
about the size of the inside of a capacious chimney. "The abbot crept
in at a hole at the bottom, and telling me to observe where he placed
his feet, he began to climb up the cleft with considerable agility. A
few preliminary lessons from a chimney-sweep would have been of the
greatest service to me, but in this branch of art my education had been
neglected, and it was with no small difficulty that I climbed up after
the abbot, whom I saw striding and sprawling in the attitude of a
spread eagle above my head. My slippers soon fell off upon the head of
a man under me. At least twenty men were scrambling and puffing
underneath him. Arms and legs were stretched out in all manner of
attitudes, the forms of the more distant climbers being lost in the
gloom of the narrow cavern up which we were advancing. Thence the climb
proceeded up a path. At the summit beside the monastic habitations was
the church cut out of the rock, to which descent is made by a narrow
flight of steps."
Mr. Curzon gives a plan of this church as half catacomb or cave, and
one of the earliest Christian buildings which has preserved its
originality.
The caves of Inkermann in the Crimea have been already alluded to. Here
is a description of a subterranean abandoned monastery and church.
"Having traversed a passage about fifty feet long, we reached a church,
or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which
these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this
curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its
corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek
sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple
dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might
have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into
lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. Beyond the church we found
a large square apartment, entered by another passage, and looking over
the valley of Inkermann. A few more cells, resembling those on the
stairs, composed the whole of this series of excavated chambers, the
arrangements of which at once proclaimed them to have been a monastery.
These were the cells, the refectory, and the church. There is nothing
in their construction as a work of art; yet there is an absence of that
roughness and simplicity which exist in many caverns of the opposite
mountain, and which indicate their being of a much earlier date than
these." [Footnote: Scott (C. H.), "The Baltic, the Black Sea, and the
Crimea," Lond. 1854, p. 280.]