Transcribed from the 1891 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE HERMITS

BY
CHARLES KINGSLEY

ILLUSTRATED

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1891

The Right of Translation is Reserved

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.

First printed in parts 1868.

Reprinted in 1 Volume, Crown 8vo. 1871, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1890, 1891.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“And having committed his sister to known and faithful virgins, and given to her wherewith to be educated in a nunnery,” &c.

“For entering the cave he saw, with bended knees, erect neck, and hands spread out on high, a lifeless corpse. And at first, thinking that it still lived,” &c.

INTRODUCTION

St. Paphnutius used to tell a story which may serve as a fit introduction to this book. It contains a miniature sketch, not only of the social state of Egypt, but of the whole Roman Empire, and of the causes which led to the famous monastic movement in the beginning of the fifth century after Christ.

Now Paphnutius was a wise and holy hermit, the Father, Abba, or Abbot of many monks; and after he had trained himself in the desert with all severity for many years, he besought God to show him which of His saints he was like.

And it was said to him, “Thou art like a certain flute-player in the city.”

Then Paphnutius took his staff, and went into the city, and found that flute-player. But he confessed that he was a drunkard and a profligate, and had till lately got his living by robbery, and recollected not having ever done one good deed. Nevertheless, when Paphnutius questioned him more closely, he said that he recollected once having found a holy maiden beset by robbers, and having delivered her, and brought her safe to town. And when Paphnutius questioned him more closely still, he said he recollected having done another deed. When he was a robber, he met once in the desert a beautiful woman; and she prayed him to do her no harm, but to take her away with him as a slave, whither he would; for, said she, “I am fleeing from the apparitors and the Governor’s curials for the last two years. My husband has been imprisoned for 300 pieces of gold, which he owes as arrears of taxes; and has been often hung up, and often scourged; and my three dear boys have been taken from me; and I am wandering from place to place, and have been often caught myself and continually scourged; and now I have been in the desert three days without food.”

And when the robber heard that, he took pity on her, and took her to his cave, and gave her 300 pieces of gold, and went with her to the city, and set her husband and her boys free.

Then Paphnutius said, “I never did a deed like that: and yet I have not passed my life in ease and idleness. But now, my son, since God hath had such care of thee, have a care for thine own self.”

And when the musician heard that, he threw away the flutes which he held in his hand, and went with Paphnutius into the desert, and passed his life in hymns and prayer, changing his earthly music into heavenly; and after three years he went to heaven, and was at rest among the choirs of angels, and the ranks of the just.

This story, as I said, is a miniature sketch of the state of the whole Roman Empire, and of the causes why men fled from it into the desert. Christianity had reformed the morals of individuals; it had not reformed the Empire itself. That had sunk into a state only to be compared with the worst despotisms of the East. The Emperors, whether or not they called themselves Christian, like Constantine, knew no law save the basest maxims of the heathen world. Several of them were barbarians who had risen from the lowest rank merely by military prowess; and who, half maddened by their sudden elevation, added to their native ignorance and brutality the pride, cunning, and cruelty of an Eastern Sultan. Rival Emperors, or Generals who aspired to be Emperors, devastated the world from Egypt to Britain by sanguinary civil wars. The government of the provinces had become altogether military. Torture was employed, not merely, as of old, against slaves, but against all ranks, without distinction. The people were exhausted by compulsory taxes, to be spent in wars which did not concern them, or in Court luxury in which they had no share. In the municipal towns, liberty and justice were dead. The curials, who answered somewhat to our aldermen, and who were responsible for the payment of the public moneys, tried their best to escape the unpopular office, and, when compelled to serve, wrung the money in self-defence out of the poorer inhabitants by every kind of tyranny. The land was tilled either by oppressed and miserable peasants, or by gangs of slaves, in comparison with whose lot that even of the American negro was light. The great were served in their own households by crowds of slaves, better fed, doubtless, but even more miserable and degraded, than those who tilled the estates. Private profligacy among all ranks was such as cannot be described in these or in any modern pages. The regular clergy of the cities, though not of profligate lives, and for the most part, in accordance with public opinion, unmarried, were able to make no stand against the general corruption of the age, because—at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom—they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and luxury, intrigue and party spirit, and had become the flatterers of fine ladies, “silly women laden with sins, ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth.” Such a state of things not only drove poor creatures into the desert, like that fair woman whom the robber met, but it raised up bands of robbers over the whole of Europe, Africa, and the East,—men who, like Robin Hood and the outlaws of the Middle Age, getting no justice from man, broke loose from society, and while they plundered their oppressors, kept up some sort of rude justice and humanity among themselves. Many, too, fled, and became robbers, to escape the merciless conscription which carried off from every province the flower of the young men, to shed their blood on foreign battle-fields. In time, too, many of these conscripts became monks, and the great monasteries of Scetis and Nitria were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers from the neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who had entered the “spiritual warfare” to escape the earthly one. And as a background to all this seething heap of decay, misrule, and misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes from whom we derive the best part of our blood, ever coming nearer and nearer, waxing stronger and stronger, learning discipline and civilization by serving in the Roman armies, alternately the allies and the enemies of the Emperors, rising, some of them, to the highest offices of State, and destined, so the wisest Romans saw all the more clearly as the years rolled on, to be soon the conquerors of the Cæsars, and the masters of the Western world.

No wonder if that, in such a state of things, there arose such violent contrasts to the general weakness, such eccentric protests against the general wickedness, as may be seen in the figure of Abbot Paphnutius, when compared either with the poor man tortured in prison for his arrears of taxes, or with the Governor and the officials who tortured him. No wonder if, in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a passion akin to despair, which ended in a new and grand form of suicide. It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which had led in past ages more than one noble Roman to slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. Christianity taught those who despaired of society, of the world—in one word, of the Roman Empire, and all that it had done for men—to hope at least for a kingdom of God after death. It taught those who, had they been heathens and brave enough, would have slain themselves to escape out of a world which was no place for honest men, that the body must be kept alive, if for no other reason, at least for the sake of the immortal soul, doomed, according to its works, to endless bliss or endless torment.

But that the world—such, at least, as they saw it then—was doomed, Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe, but see, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation around them, that all that was in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, was not of the Father, but of the world; that the world was passing away, and the lust thereof, and that only he who did the will of God could abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw, that the wrath of God was revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men; and that the world in general—above all, its kings and rulers, the rich and luxurious—were treasuring up for themselves wrath, tribulation, and anguish, against a day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who would render to every man according to his works.

That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them, contemporary history proves abundantly. That they were correct, likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall on man, is proved by the fact that it did fall; that the first half of the fifth century saw, not only the sack of Rome, but the conquest and desolation of the greater part of the civilized world, amid bloodshed, misery, and misrule, which seemed to turn Europe into a chaos,—which would have turned it into a chaos, had there not been a few men left who still felt it possible and necessary to believe in God and to work righteousness.

Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed world, and try to be alone with God, if by any means they might save each man his own soul in that dread day.

Others, not Christians, had done the same before them. Among all the Eastern nations men had appeared, from time to time, to whom the things seen were but a passing phantom, the things unseen the only true and eternal realities; who, tormented alike by the awfulness of the infinite unknown, and by the petty cares and low passions of the finite mortal life which they knew but too well, had determined to renounce the latter, that they might give themselves up to solving the riddle of the former; and be at peace; and free, at least, from the tyranny of their own selves. Eight hundred years before St. Antony fled into the desert, that young Hindoo rajah, whom men call Buddha now, had fled into the forest, leaving wives and kingdom, to find rest for his soul. He denounced caste; he preached poverty, asceticism, self-annihilation. He founded a religion, like that of the old hermits, democratic and ascetic, with its convents, saint-worships, pilgrimages, miraculous relics, rosaries, and much more, which strangely anticipates the monastic religion; and his followers, to this day, are more numerous than those of any other creed.

Brahmins, too, had given themselves up to penance and mortification till they believed themselves able, like Kehama, to have gained by self-torture the right to command, not nature merely, but the gods themselves. Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the Therapeutæ in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former more “practical,” the latter more “contemplative:” but both alike agreed in the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of poverty and simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless philosophic sects of Asia, known to ecclesiastical writers as “heretics,” more than one had professed, and doubtless often practised, the same abstraction from the world, the same contempt of the flesh. The very Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, while they derided the Christian asceticism, found themselves forced to affect, like the hapless Hypatia, a sentimental and pharisaic asceticism of their own. This phase of sight and feeling, so strange to us now, was common, nay, primæval, among the Easterns. The day was come when it should pass from the East into the West. And Egypt, “the mother of wonders;” the parent of so much civilization and philosophy both Greek and Roman; the half-way resting-place through which not merely the merchandise, but the wisdom of the East had for centuries passed into the Roman Empire; a land more ill-governed, too, and more miserable, in spite of its fertility, because more defenceless and effeminate, than most other Roman possessions—was the country in which naturally, and as it were of hereditary right, such a movement would first appear.

Accordingly it was discovered, about the end of the fourth century, that the mountains and deserts of Egypt were full of Christian men who had fled out of the dying world, in the hope of attaining everlasting life. Wonderful things were told of their courage, their abstinence, their miracles: and of their virtues also; of their purity, their humility, their helpfulness, and charity to each other and to all. They called each other, it was said, brothers; and they lived up to that sacred name, forgotten, if ever known, by the rest of the Roman Empire. Like the Apostolic Christians in the first fervour of their conversion, they had all things in common; they lived at peace with each other, under a mild and charitable rule; and kept literally those commands of Christ which all the rest of the world explained away to nothing.

The news spread. It chimed in with all that was best, as well as with much that was questionable, in the public mind. That men could be brothers; that they could live without the tawdry luxury, the tasteless and often brutal amusements, the low sensuality, the base intrigue, the bloody warfare, which was the accepted lot of the many; that they could find time to look stedfastly at heaven and hell as awful realities, which must be faced some day, which had best be faced at once; this, just as much as curiosity about their alleged miracles, and the selfish longing to rival them in superhuman powers, led many of the most virtuous and the most learned men of the time to visit them, and ascertain the truth. Jerome, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Sulpicius Severus, went to see them, undergoing on the way the severest toils and dangers, and brought back reports of mingled truth and falsehood, specimens of which will be seen in these pages. Travelling in those days was a labour, if not of necessity, then surely of love. Palladius, for instance, found it impossible to visit the Upper Thebaid, and Syene, and that “infinite multitude of monks, whose fashions of life no one would believe, for they surpass human life; who to this day raise the dead, and walk upon the waters, like Peter; and whatsoever the Saviour did by the holy Apostles, He does now by them. But because it would be very dangerous if we went beyond Lyco” (Lycopolis?), on account of the inroad of robbers, he “could not see those saints.”

The holy men and women of whom he wrote, he says, he did not see without extreme toil; and seven times he and his companions were nearly lost. Once they walked through the desert five days and nights, and were almost worn out by hunger and thirst. Again, they fell on rough marshes, where the sedge pierced their feet, and caused intolerable pain, while they were almost killed with the cold. Another time, they stuck in the mud up to their waists, and cried with David, “I am come into deep mire, where no ground is.” Another time, they waded for four days through the flood of the Nile by paths almost swept away. Another time they met robbers on the seashore, coming to Diolcos, and were chased by them for ten miles. Another time they were all but upset and drowned in crossing the Nile. Another time, in the marshes of Mareotis, “where paper grows,” they were cast on a little desert island, and remained three days and nights in the open air, amid great cold and showers, for it was the season of Epiphany. The eighth peril, he says, is hardly worth mentioning—but once, when they went to Nitria, they came on a great hollow, in which many crocodiles had remained, when the waters retired from the fields. Three of them lay along the bank; and the monks went up to them, thinking them dead, whereon the crocodiles rushed at them. But when they called loudly on the Lord, “the monsters, as if turned away by an angel,” shot themselves into the water; while they ran on to Nitria, meditating on the words of Job, “Seven times shall He deliver thee from trouble; and in the eighth there shall no evil touch thee.”

The great St. Athanasius, fleeing from persecution, had taken refuge among these monks. He carried the report of their virtues to Trêves in Gaul, and wrote a life of St. Antony, the perusal of which was a main agent in the conversion of St. Augustine. Hilarion (a remarkable personage, whose history will be told hereafter) carried their report and their example likewise into Palestine; and from that time Judæa, desolate and seemingly accursed by the sin of the Jewish people, became once more the Holy Land; the place of pilgrimage; whose ruins, whose very soil, were kept sacred by hermits, the guardians of the footsteps of Christ.

In Rome itself the news produced an effect which, to the thoughtful mind, is altogether tragical in its nobleness. The Roman aristocracy was deprived of all political power; it had been decimated, too, with horrible cruelty only one generation before, [12] by Valentinian and his satellites, on the charges of profligacy, treason, and magic. Mere rich men, they still lingered on, in idleness and luxury, without art, science, true civilization of any kind; followed by long trains of slaves; punishing a servant with three hundred stripes if he were too long in bringing hot water; weighing the fish, or birds, or dormice put on their tables, while secretaries stood by, with tablets to record all; hating learning as they hated poison; indulging at the baths in conduct which had best be left undescribed; and “complaining that they were not born among the Cimmerians, if amid their golden fans a fly should perch upon the silken fringes, or a slender ray of the sun should pierce through the awning;” while, if they “go any distance to see their estates in the country, or to hunt at a meeting collected for their amusement by others, they think that they have equalled the marches of Alexander or of Cæsar.”

On the wives, widows, and daughters of men of this stamp—and not half their effeminacy and baseness, as the honest rough old soldier Ammianus Marcellinus describes it, has been told here—the news brought from Egypt worked with wondrous potency.

Women of the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves; they gave away their wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor; and in voluntary poverty and mean garments they followed such men as Jerome and Ruffinus across the seas, to visit the new found saints of the Egyptian desert, and to end their days, in some cases, in doleful monasteries in Palestine. The lives of such women as those of the Anician house; the lives of Marcella and Furia, of Paula, of the Melanias, and the rest, it is not my task to write. They must be told by a woman, not by a man. We may blame those ladies, if we will, for neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at the weaknesses—the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity—which we fancy that we discover. We may lament—and in that we shall not be wrong—the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them—the example and precursor of so much which has since then been ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands, and brothers; we must confess that in these women the spirit of the old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been so long dead, flashed up for one splendid moment, ere it sunk into the darkness of the Middle Age; that in them woman asserted (however strangely and fantastically) her moral equality with man; and that at the very moment when monasticism was consigning her to contempt, almost to abhorrence, as “the noxious animal,” the “fragile vessel,” the cause of man’s fall at first, and of his sin and misery ever since, woman showed the monk (to his naïvely-confessed surprise), that she could dare, and suffer, and adore as well as he.

But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and spread irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached, practised, by every great man of the time. Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine, Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours, Salvian, Cæsarius of Arles, were all monks, or as much of monks as their duties would allow them to be. Ambrose of Milan, though no monk himself, was the fervent preacher of, the careful legislator for, monasticism male and female. Throughout the whole Roman Empire, in the course of a century, had spread hermits (or dwellers in the desert), anchorites (retired from the world), or monks (dwellers alone). The three names grew afterwards to designate three different orders of ascetics. The hermits remained through the Middle Ages those who dwelt in deserts; the anchorites, or “ankers” of the English Middle Age, seem generally to have inhabited cells built in, or near, the church walls; the name of “monks” was transferred from those who dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular communities, under a fixed government. But the three names at first were interchangeable; the three modes of life alternated, often in the same man. The life of all three was the same,—celibacy, poverty, good deeds towards their fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of every kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after baptism: and the mental food of all three was the same likewise; continued meditation upon the vanity of the world, the sinfulness of the flesh, the glories of heaven, and the horrors of hell: but with these the old hermits combined—to do them justice—a personal faith in God, and a personal love for Christ, which those who sneer at them would do well to copy.

Over all Europe, even to Ireland, [15] the same pattern of Christian excellence repeated itself with strange regularity, till it became the only received pattern; and to “enter religion,” or “be converted,” meant simply to become a monk.

Of the authentic biographies of certain of these men, a few specimens are given in this volume. If they shall seem to any reader uncouth, or even absurd, he must remember that they are the only existing and the generally contemporaneous histories of men who exercised for 1,300 years an enormous influence over the whole of Christendom; who exercise a vast influence over the greater part of it to this day. They are the biographies of men who were regarded, during their lives and after their deaths, as divine and inspired prophets; and who were worshipped with boundless trust and admiration by millions of human beings. Their fame and power were not created by the priesthood. The priesthood rather leant on them, than they on it. They occupied a post analogous to that of the old Jewish prophets; always independent of, sometimes opposed to, the regular clergy; and dependent altogether on public opinion and the suffrage of the multitude. When Christianity, after three centuries of repression and persecution, emerged triumphant as the creed of the whole civilized world, it had become what their lives describe. The model of religious life for the fifth century, it remained a model for succeeding centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his compeers were founded the whole literature of saintly biographies; the whole popular conception of the universe, and of man’s relation to it; the whole science of dæmonology, with its peculiar literature, its peculiar system of criminal jurisprudence. And their influence did not cease at the Reformation among Protestant divines. The influence of these Lives of the Hermit Fathers is as much traceable, even to style and language, in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as in the last Papal Allocution. The great hermits of Egypt were not merely the founders of that vast monastic system which influenced the whole politics, and wars, and social life, as well as the whole religion, of the Middle Age; they were a school of philosophers (as they rightly called themselves) who altered the whole current of human thought.

Those who wish for a general notion of the men, and of their time, will find all that they require (set forth from different points of view, though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de Montalembert’s “Moines d’Occident,” in Dean Milman’s “History of Christianity” and “Latin Christianity,” and in Ozanam’s “Etudes Germaniques.” [17a] But the truest notion of the men is to be got, after all, from the original documents; and especially from that curious collection of them by the Jesuit Rosweyde, commonly known as the “Lives of the Hermit Fathers.” [17b]

After an acquaintance of now five-and-twenty years with this wonderful treasury of early Christian mythology, to which all fairy tales are dull and meagre, I am almost inclined to sympathise with M. de Montalembert’s questions,—“Who is so ignorant, or so unfortunate, as not to have devoured these tales of the heroic age of monachism? Who has not contemplated, if not with the eyes of faith, at least with the admiration inspired by an incontrollable greatness of soul, the struggles of these athletes of penitence? . . . . Everything is to be found there—variety, pathos, the sublime and simple epic of a race of men, naïfs as children, and strong as giants.” In whatever else one may differ from M. de Montalembert—and it is always painful to differ from one whose pen has been always the faithful servant of virtue and piety, purity and chivalry, loyalty and liberty, and whose generous appreciation of England and the English is the more honourable to him, by reason of an utter divergence in opinion, which in less wide and noble spirits produces only antipathy—one must at least agree with him in his estimate of the importance of these “Lives of the Fathers,” not only to the ecclesiologist, but to the psychologist and the historian. Their influence, subtle, often transformed and modified again and again, but still potent from its very subtleness, is being felt around us in many a puzzle—educational, social, political; and promises to be felt still more during the coming generation; and to have studied thoroughly one of them—say the life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius—is to have had in our hands (whether we knew it or not) the key to many a lock, which just now refuses either to be tampered with or burst open.

I have determined, therefore, to give a few of these lives, translated as literally as possible. Thus the reader will then have no reason to fear a garbled or partial account of personages so difficult to conceive or understand. He will be able to see the men as wholes; to judge (according to his light) of their merits and their defects. The very style of their biographers (which is copied as literally as is compatible with the English tongue) will teach him, if he be wise, somewhat of the temper and habits of thought of the age in which they lived; and one of these original documents, with its honesty, its vivid touches of contemporary manners, its intense earnestness, will give, perhaps, a more true picture of the whole hermit movement than (with all respect, be it said) the most brilliant general panorama.

It is impossible to give in this series all the lives of the early hermits—even of those contained in Rosweyde. This volume will contain, therefore, only the most important and most famous lives of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Persian hermits, followed, perhaps, by a few later biographies from Western Europe, as proofs that the hermit-type, as it spread toward the Atlantic, remained still the same as in the Egyptian desert.

Against one modern mistake the reader must be warned; the theory, namely, that these biographies were written as religious romances; edifying, but not historical; to be admired, but not believed. There is not the slightest evidence that such was the case. The lives of these, and most other saints (certainly those in this volume), were written by men who believed the stories themselves, after such inquiry into the facts as they deemed necessary; who knew that others would believe them; and who intended that they should do so; and the stones were believed accordingly, and taken as matter of fact for the most practical purposes by the whole of Christendom. The forging of miracles, like the forging of charters, for the honour of a particular shrine, or the advantage of a particular monastery, belongs to a much later and much worse age; and, whatsoever we may think of the taste of the authors of these lives, or of their faculty for judging of evidence, we must at least give them credit for being earnest men, incapable of what would have been in their eyes, and ought to be in ours, not merely falsehood, but impiety. Let the reader be sure of this—that these documents would not have exercised their enormous influence on the human mind, had there not been in them, under whatever accidents of credulity, and even absurdity, an element of sincerity, virtue, and nobility.

SAINT ANTONY

The life of Antony, by Athanasius, is perhaps the most important of all these biographies; because first, Antony was generally held to be the first great example and preacher of the hermit life; because next, Athanasius, his biographer, having by his controversial writings established the orthodox faith as it is now held alike by Romanists, Greeks, and Protestants, did, by his publication of the life of Antony, establish the hermit life as the ideal (in his opinion) of Christian excellence; and lastly, because that biography exercised a most potent influence on the conversion of St. Augustine, the greatest thinker (always excepting St. Paul) whom the world had seen since Plato, whom the world was to see again till Lord Bacon; the theologian and philosopher (for he was the latter, as well as the former, in the strictest sense) to whom the world owes, not only the formulizing of the whole scheme of the universe for a thousand years after his death, but Calvinism (wrongly so called) in all its forms, whether held by the Augustinian party in the Church of Rome, or the “Reformed” Churches of Geneva, France, and Scotland.

Whether we have the exact text of the document as Athanasius wrote it to the “Foreign Brethren”—probably the religious folk of Trêves—in the Greek version published by Heschelius in 1611, and in certain earlier Greek texts; whether the Latin translation attributed to Evagrius, which has been well known for centuries past in the Latin Church, be actually his; whether it be exactly that of which St. Jerome speaks, and whether it be exactly that which St. Augustine saw, are questions which it is now impossible to decide. But of the genuineness of the life in its entirety we have no right to doubt, contrary to the verdicts of the most distinguished scholars, whether Protestant or Catholic; and there is fair reason to suppose that the document (allowing for errors and variations of transcribers) which I have tried to translate, is that of which the great St. Augustine speaks in the eighth book of his Confessions.

He tells us that he was reclaimed at last from a profligate life (the thought of honourable marriage seems never to have entered his mind), by meeting, while practising as a rhetorician at Trêves, an old African acquaintance, named Potitanius, an officer of rank. What followed no words can express so well as those of the great genius himself.

“When I told him that I was giving much attention to those writings (the Epistles of Paul), we began to talk, and he to tell, of Antony, the monk of Egypt, whose name was then very famous among thy servants: [23] but was unknown to us till that moment. When he discovered that, he spent some time over the subject, detailing his virtues, and wondering at our ignorance. We were astounded at hearing such well-attested marvels of him, so recent and almost contemporaneous, wrought in the right faith of the Catholic Church. We all wondered: we, that they were so great; and he, that we had not heard of them. Thence his discourse ran on to those flocks of hermit-cells, and the morals of thy sweetness, and the fruitful deserts of the wilderness, of which we knew nought. There was a monastery, too, at Milan, full of good brethren, outside the city walls, under the tutelage of Ambrosius, and we knew nothing of it. He went on still speaking, and we listened intently; and it befell that he told us how, I know not when, he and three of his mess companions at Trêves, while the emperor was engaged in an afternoon spectacle in the circus, went out for a walk in the gardens round the walls; and as they walked there in pairs, one with him alone, and the two others by themselves, they parted. And those two, straying about, burst into a cottage, where dwelt certain servants of thine, poor in spirit, of such as is the kingdom of heaven; and there found a book, in which was written the life of Antony. One of them began to read it, and to wonder, and to be warned; and, as he read, to think of taking up such a life, and leaving the warfare of this world to serve thee. Now, he was one of those whom they call Managers of Affairs. [24] Then, suddenly filled with holy love and sober shame, angered at himself, he cast his eyes on his friend, and said, ‘Tell me, prithee, with all these labours of ours, whither are we trying to get? What are we seeking? For what are we soldiering? Can we have a higher hope in the palace, than to become friends of the emperor? And when there, what is not frail and full of dangers? And through how many dangers we do not arrive at a greater danger still? And how long will that last? But if I choose to become a friend of God, I can do it here and now.’ He spoke thus, and, swelling in the labour-pangs of a new life, he fixed his eyes again on the pages and read, and was changed inwardly as thou lookedst on him, and his mind was stripped of the world, as soon appeared. For while he read, and rolled over the billows of his soul, he shuddered and hesitated from time to time, and resolved better things; and already thine, he said to his friend, ‘I have already torn myself from that hope of ours, and have settled to serve God; and this I begin from this hour, in this very place. If you do not like to imitate me, do not oppose me.’ He replied that he would cling to his companion in such a great service and so great a warfare. And both, now thine, began building, at their own cost, the tower of leaving all things and following thee. Then Potitianus, and the man who was talking with him elsewhere in the garden, seeking them, came to the same place, and warned them to return, as the sun was getting low. They, however, told their resolution, and how it had sprung up and taken strong hold in them, and entreated the others not to give them pain. They, not altered from their former mode of life, yet wept (as he told us) for themselves; and congratulated them piously, and commended themselves to their prayers; and then dragging their hearts along the earth, went back to the palace. But the others, fixing their hearts on heaven, remained in the cottage. And both of them had affianced brides, who, when they heard this, dedicated their virginity to thee.”

The part which this incident played in St. Augustine’s own conversion must be told hereafter in his life. But the scene which his master-hand has drawn is not merely the drama of his own soul or of these two young officers, but of a whole empire. It is, as I said at first, the tragedy and suicide of the old empire; and the birth-agony of which he speaks was not that of an individual soul here or there, but of a whole new world, for good and evil. The old Roman soul was dead within, the body of it dead without. Patriotism, duty, purpose of life, save pleasure, money, and intrigue, had perished. The young Roman officer had nothing left for which to fight; the young Roman gentleman nothing left for which to be a citizen and an owner of lands. Even the old Roman longing (which was also a sacred duty) of leaving an heir to perpetuate his name, and serve the state as his fathers had before him—even that was gone. Nothing was left, with the many, but selfishness, which could rise at best into the desire of saving every man his own soul, and so transform worldliness into other-worldliness. The old empire could do nothing more for man; and knew that it could do nothing; and lay down in the hermit’s cell to die.

Trêves was then “the second metropolis of the empire,” boasting, perhaps, even then, as it boasts still, that it was standing thirteen hundred years before Rome was built. Amid the low hills, pierced by rocky dells, and on a strath of richest soil, it had grown, from the mud-hut town of the Treviri, into a noble city of palaces, theatres, baths, triumphal-arches, on either side the broad and clear Moselle. The bridge which Augustus had thrown across the river, four hundred years before the times of hermits and of saints, stood like a cliff through all barbarian invasions, through all the battles and sieges of the Middle Age, till it was blown up by the French in the wars of Louis XIV., and nought remains save the huge piers of black lava stemming the blue stream; while up and down the dwindled city, the colossal fragments of Roman work—the Black Gate, the Heidenthurm, the baths, the Basilica or Hall of Justice, now a Lutheran church—stand out half ruined, like the fossil bones of giants amid the works of weaker, though of happier times; while the amphitheatre was till late years planted thick with vines, fattening in soil drenched with the blood of thousands. Trêves had been the haunt of emperor after emperor, men wise and strong, cruel and terrible;—of Constantius, Constantine the Great, Julian, Valentinian, Valens; and lastly, when Potitianus’s friends found those poor monks in the garden [27] of Gratian, the gentle hunter who thought day and night on sport, till his arrows were said to be instinct with life, was holding his military court within the walls of Trêves, or at that hunting palace on the northern downs, where still on the bath-floors lie the mosaics of hare and deer, and boar and hound, on which the feet of Emperors trod full fifteen hundred years ago.

Still glorious outwardly, like the Roman empire itself, was that great city of Trêves; but inwardly it was full of rottenness and weakness. The Roman empire had been, in spite of all its crimes, for four hundred years the salt of the earth: but now the salt had lost its savour; and in one generation more it would be trodden under foot and cast upon the dunghill, and another empire would take its place,—the empire, not of brute strength and self-indulgence, but of sympathy and self-denial,—an empire, not of Cæsars, but of hermits. Already was Gratian the friend and pupil of St. Ambrose of Milan; already, too, was he persecuting, though not to the death, heretics and heathens. Nay, some fifty years before (if the legend can be in the least trusted) had St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, returned from Palestine, bearing with her—so men believed—not only the miraculously discovered cross of Christ, but the seamless coat which he had worn; and, turning her palace into a church, deposited the holy coat therein: where—so some believe—it remains until this day. Men felt that a change was coming, but whence it would come, or how terrible it would be, they could not tell. It was to be, as the prophet says, “like the bulging out of a great wall, which bursteth suddenly in an instant.” In the very amphitheatre where Gratian sat that afternoon, with all the folk of Trêves about him, watching, it may be, lions and antelopes from Africa slaughtered—it may be criminals tortured to death—another and an uglier sight had been twice seen some seventy years before. Constantine, so-called the Great, had there exhibited his “Frankish sports,” the “magnificent spectacle,” the “famous punishments,” as his flattering court-historians called them: thousands of Frank prisoners, many of them of noble, and even of royal blood, torn to pieces by wild beasts, while they stood fearless, smiling with folded arms; and when the wild beasts were gorged, and slew no more, weapons were put into the hands of the survivors, and they were bidden to fight to the death for the amusement of their Roman lords. But fight they would not against their own flesh and blood: and as for life, all chance of that was long gone by. So every man fell joyfully upon his brother’s sword, and, dying like a German man, spoilt the sport of the good folk of Trêves. And it seemed for a while as if there were no God in heaven who cared to avenge such deeds of blood. For the kinsmen, it may be the very sons, of those Franks were now in Gratian’s pay; and the Frank Merobaudes was his “Count of the Domestics,” and one of his most successful and trusted generals; and all seemed to go well, and brute force and craft to triumph on the earth.

And yet those two young staff officers, when they left the imperial court for the hermit’s cell, judged, on the whole, prudently and well, and chose the better part when they fled from the world to escape the “dangers” of ambition, and the “greater danger still” of success. For they escaped, not merely from vice and worldliness, but, as the event proved, from imminent danger of death if they kept the loyalty which they had sworn to their emperor; or the worse evil of baseness if they turned traitors to him to save their lives.

For little thought Gratian, as he sat in that amphitheatre, that the day was coming when he, the hunter of game—and of heretics—would be hunted in his turn; when, deserted by his army, betrayed by Merobaudes—whose elder kinsfolk were not likely to have kept him ignorant of “the Frankish sports”—he should flee pitiably towards Italy, and die by a German hand; some say near Lyons, some say near Belgrade, calling on Ambrose with his latest breath. [29] Little thought, too, the good folk of Trêves, as they sat beneath the vast awning that afternoon, that within the next half century a day of vengeance was coming for them, which should teach them that there was a God who “maketh inquisition for blood;” a day when Trêves should be sacked in blood and flame by those very “barbarian” Germans whom they fancied their allies—or their slaves. And least of all did they fancy that, when that great destruction fell upon their city, the only element in it which would pass safely through the fire and rise again, and raise their city to new glory and power, was that which was represented by those poor hermits in the garden-hut outside. Little thought they that above the awful arches of the Black Gate—as if in mockery of the Roman Power—a lean anchorite would take his stand, Simeon of Syracuse by name, a monk of Mount Sinai, and there imitate, in the far West, the austerities of St. Simeon Stylites in the East, and be enrolled in the new Pantheon, not of Cæsars, but of Saints.

Under the supposed patronage of those Saints, Trêves rose again out of its ruins. It gained its four great abbeys of St. Maximus (on the site of Constantine’s palace); St. Matthias, in the crypt whereof the bodies of the monks never decay; [30] St. Martin; and St. Mary of the Four Martyrs, where four soldiers of the famous Theban legion are said to have suffered martyrdom by the house of the Roman prefect. It had its cathedral of St. Peter and St. Helena, supposed to be built out of St. Helena’s palace; its exquisite Liebfrauenkirche; its palace of the old Archbishops, mighty potentates of this world, as well as of the kingdom of heaven. For they were princes, arch-chancellors, electors of the empire, owning many a league of fertile land, governing, and that kindly and justly, towns and villages of Christian men, and now and then going out to war, at the head of their own knights and yeomen, in defence of their lands, and of the saints whose servants and trustees they were; and so became, according to their light and their means, the salt of that land for many generations.

And after a while that salt, too, lost its savour, and was, in its turn, trodden under foot. The French republican wars swept away the ecclesiastical constitution and the wealth of the ancient city. The cathedral and churches were stripped of relics, of jewels, of treasures of early art. The Prince-bishop’s palace is a barrack; so was lately St. Maximus’s shrine; St. Martin’s a china manufactory, and St. Matthias’s a school. Trêves belongs to Prussia, and not to “Holy Church;” and all the old splendours of the “empire of the saints” are almost as much ruinate as those of the “empire of the Romans.” So goes the world, because there is a living God.

“The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

But though palaces and amphitheatres be gone, the gardens outside still bloom on as when Potitianus his friends wandered through them, perpetual as Nature’s self; and perpetual as Nature, too, endures whatever is good and true of that afternoon’s work, and of that finding of the legend of St. Antony in the monk’s cabin, which fixed the destiny of the great genius of the Latin Church.

The story of St. Antony, as it has been handed down to us, [32] runs thus:—

The life and conversation of our holy Father Antony, written and sent to the monks in foreign parts by our Father among the saints, Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria.

You have begun a noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt, having determined either to equal or even to surpass them in your training towards virtue; for there are monasteries already among you, and the monastic life is practised. This purpose of yours one may justly praise; and if you pray, God will bring it to perfection. But since you have also asked me about the conversation of the holy Antony, wishing to learn how he began his training, and who he was before it, and what sort of an end he made to his life, and whether what is said of him is true, in order that you may bring yourselves to emulate him, with great readiness I received your command. For to me, too, it is a great gain and benefit only to remember Antony; and I know that you, when you hear of him, after you have wondered at the man, will wish also to emulate his purpose. For the life of Antony is for monks a perfect pattern of ascetic training. What, then, you have heard about him from other informants do not disbelieve, but rather think that you have heard from them a small part of the facts. For in any case, they could hardly relate fully such great matters, when even I, at your request, howsoever much I may tell you in my letter, can only send you a little which I remember about him. But do not cease to inquire of those who sail from hence; for perhaps, if each tells what he knows, at last his history may be worthily compiled. I had wished, indeed, when I received your letter, to send for some of the monks who were wont to be most frequently in his company, that I might learn something more, and send you a fuller account. But since both the season of navigation limited me, and the letter-carrier was in haste, I hastened to write to your piety what I myself know (for I have often seen him), and what I was able to learn from one who followed him for no short time, and poured water upon his hands; always taking care of the truth, in order that no one when he hears too much may disbelieve, nor again, if he learns less than is needful, despise the man.

Antony was an Egyptian by race, born of noble parents, [33] who had a sufficient property of their own: and as they were Christians, he too was Christianly brought up, and when a boy was nourished in the house of his parents, besides whom and his home he knew nought. But when he grew older, he would not be taught letters, [34] not wishing to mix with other boys; but all his longing was (according to what is written of Jacob) to dwell simply in his own house. But when his parents took him into the Lord’s house, he was not saucy, like a boy, nor inattentive as he grew older; but was subject to his parents, and attentive to what was read, turning it to his own account. Nor again (as a boy who was moderately well off) did he trouble his parents for various and expensive dainties, nor did he run after the pleasures of this life; but was content with what he found, and asked for nothing more. When his parents died, he was left alone with a little sister, when he was about eighteen or twenty years of age, and took care both of his house and of her. But not six months after their death, as he was going as usual to the Lord’s house, and collecting his thoughts, he meditated as he walked how the Apostles had left all and followed the Saviour; and how those in the Acts brought the price of what they had sold, and laid it at the Apostles’ feet, to be given away to the poor; and what and how great a hope was laid up for them in heaven. With this in his mind, he entered the church. And it befell then that the Gospel was being read; and he heard how the Lord had said to the rich man, “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all thou hast, and give to the poor; and come, follow me, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Antony, therefore, as if the remembrance of the saints had come to him from God, and as if the lesson had been read on his account, went forth at once from the Lord’s house, and gave away to those of his own village the possessions he had inherited from his ancestors (three hundred plough-lands, fertile and very fair), that they might give no trouble either to him or his sister. All his moveables he sold, and a considerable sum which he received for them he gave to the poor. But having kept back a little for his sister, when he went again into the Lord’s house he heard the Lord saying in the Gospel, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and, unable to endure any more delay, he went out and distributed that too to the needy. And having committed his sister to known and faithful virgins, and given to her wherewith to be educated in a nunnery, he himself thenceforth devoted himself, outside his house, to training; [35] taking heed to himself, and using himself severely. For monasteries were not then common in Egypt, nor did any monks at all know the wide desert; but each who wished to take heed to himself exercised himself alone, not far from his own village. There was then in the next village an old man, who had trained himself in a solitary life from his youth. When Antony saw him, he emulated him in that which is noble. And first he began to stay outside the village; and then, if he heard of any earnest man, he went to seek him, like a wise bee; and did not return till he had seen him, and having got from him (as it were) provision for his journey toward virtue, went his way. So dwelling there at first, he settled his mind neither to look back towards his parents’ wealth nor to recollect his relations; but he put all his longing and all his earnestness on training himself more intensely. For the rest he worked with his hands, because he had heard, “If any man will not work, neither let him eat;” and of his earnings he spent some on himself and some on the needy. He prayed continually, because he knew that one ought to pray secretly, without ceasing. He attended, also, so much to what was read, that, with him, none of the Scriptures fell to the ground, but he retained them all, and for the future his memory served him instead of books. Behaving thus, Antony was beloved by all; and submitted truly to the earnest men to whom he used to go. And from each of them he learnt some improvement in his earnestness and his training: he contemplated the courtesy of one, and another’s assiduity in prayer; another’s freedom from anger; another’s love of mankind: he took heed to one as he watched; to another as he studied: one he admired for his endurance, another for his fasting and sleeping on the ground; he laid to heart the meekness of one, and the long-suffering of another; and stamped upon his memory the devotion to Christ and the mutual love which all in common possessed. And thus filled full, he returned to his own place of training, gathering to himself what he had got from each, and striving to show all their qualities in himself. He never emulated those of his own age, save in what is best; and did that so as to pain no one, but make all rejoice over him. And all in the village who loved good, seeing him thus, called him the friend of God; and some embraced him as a son, some as a brother.

But the devil, who hates and envies what is noble, would not endure such a purpose in a youth: but attempted against him all that he is wont to do; suggesting to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, relation to his kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of luxury, and the other solaces of life; and then the harshness of virtue, and its great toil; and the weakness of his body, and the length of time; and altogether raised a great dust-cloud of arguments in his mind, trying to turn him back from his righteous choice. But when the enemy saw himself to be too weak for Antony’s determination, but rather baffled by his stoutness, and overthrown by his great faith, and falling before his continual prayers, then he attacked him with the temptations which he is wont to use against young men; . . . . but he protected his body with faith, prayers, and fastings, . . . setting his thoughts on Christ, and on his own nobility through Christ, and on the rational faculties of his soul, . . . and again on the terrors of the fire, and the torment of the worm, . . . and thus escaped unhurt. And thus was the enemy brought to shame. For he who thought himself to be equal with God was now mocked by a youth; and he who boasted against flesh and blood was defeated by a man clothed in flesh. For the Lord worked with him, who bore flesh on our account, and gave to the body victory over the devil, that each man in his battle may say, “Not I, but the grace of God which is with me.” At last, when the dragon could not overthrow Antony even thus, but saw himself thrust out of his heart, then gnashing his teeth (as is written), and as if beside himself, he appeared to the sight, as he is to the reason, as a black child, and as it were falling down before him, no longer attempted to argue (for the deceiver was cast out), but using a human voice, said, “I have deceived many; I have cast down many. But now, as in the case of many, so in thine, I have been worsted in the battle.” Then when Antony asked him, “Who art thou who speakest thus to me?” he forthwith replied in a pitiable voice, “I am the spirit of impurity.”. . .

Then Antony gave thanks to God, and gaining courage, said, “Thou art utterly despicable; for thou art black of soul, and weak as a child; nor shall I henceforth cast one thought on thee. For the Lord is my helper, and I shall despise my enemies.” That black being, hearing this, fled forthwith, cowering at his words, and afraid thenceforth of coming near the man.

This was Antony’s first struggle against the devil: or rather this mighty deed in him was the Saviour’s, who condemned sin in the flesh that the righteousness of the Lord should be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. But neither did Antony, because the dæmon had fallen, grow careless and despise him; neither did the enemy, when worsted by him, cease from lying in ambush against him. For he came round again as a lion, seeking a pretence against him. But Antony had learnt from Scripture that many are the devices of the enemy; and continually kept up his training, considering that, though he had not deceived his heart by pleasure, he would try some other snares. For the dæmon delights in sin. Therefore he chastised his body more and more, and brought it into slavery, lest, having conquered in one case, he should be tripped up in others. He determined, therefore, to accustom himself to a still more severe life; and many wondered at him: but the labour was to him easy to bear. For the readiness of the spirit, through long usage, had created a good habit in him, so that, taking a very slight hint from others, he showed great earnestness in it. For he watched so much, that he often passed the whole night without sleep; and that not once, but often, to the astonishment of men. He ate once a day, after the setting of the sun, and sometimes only once in two days, often even in four; his food was bread with salt, his drink nothing but water. To speak of flesh and wine there is no need, for such a thing is not found among other earnest men. When he slept he was content with a rush-mat: but mostly he lay on the bare ground. He would not anoint himself with oil, saying that it was more fit for young men to be earnest in training, than to seek things which softened the body; and that they must accustom themselves to labour, according to the Apostle’s saying, “When I am weak, then I am strong;” for that the mind was strengthened as bodily pleasure was weakened. And this argument of his was truly wonderful. For he did not measure the path of virtue, nor his going away into retirement on account of it, by time; but by his own desire and will. So forgetting the past, he daily, as if beginning afresh, took more pains to improve, saying over to himself continually the Apostle’s words, “Forgetting what is behind, stretching forward to what is before;” and mindful, too, of Elias’ speech, “The Lord liveth, before whom I stand this day.” For he held, that by mentioning to-day, he took no account of past time: but, as if he were laying down a beginning, he tried earnestly to make himself day by day fit to appear before God, pure in heart, and ready to obey his will, and no other. And he said in himself that the ascetic ought for ever to be learning his own life from the manners of the great Elias, as from a mirror. Antony, having thus, as it were, bound himself, went to the tombs, which happened to be some way from the village; and having bidden one of his acquaintances to bring him bread at intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and, shutting the door upon himself, remained there alone. But the enemy, not enduring that, but rather terrified lest in a little while he should fill the desert with his training, coming one night with a multitude of dæmons, beat him so much with stripes, that he lay speechless from the torture. For he asserted that the pain was so great that no blows given by men could cause such agony. But by the providence of God (for the Lord does not overlook those who hope in him), the next day his acquaintance came, bringing him the loaves. And having opened the door, and seeing him lying on the ground for dead, he carried him to the Lord’s house in the village, and laid him on the ground; and many of his kinsfolk and the villagers sat round him, as round a corpse. But about midnight, Antony coming to himself, and waking up, saw them all sleeping, and only his acquaintance awake, and, nodding to him to approach, begged him to carry him back to the tombs, without waking any one. When that was done, the doors were shut, and he remained as before, alone inside. And, because he could not stand on account of the dæmons’ blows, he prayed prostrate. And after his prayer, he said with a shout, “Here am I, Antony: I do not fly from your stripes; yea, if you do yet more, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.” And then he sang, “If an host be laid against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid.” Thus thought and spoke the man who was training himself. But the enemy, hater of what is noble, and envious, wondering that he dared to return after the stripes, called together his dogs, and bursting with rage,—“Ye see,” he said, “that we have not stopped this man by the spirit of impurity; nor by blows: but he is even growing bolder against us. Let us attack him some other way.” [41] For it is easy for the devil to invent schemes of mischief. So then in the night they made such a crash, that the whole place seemed shaken, and the dæmons, as if breaking in the four walls of the room, seemed to enter through them, changing themselves into the shapes of beasts and creeping things; [42] and the place was forthwith filled with shapes of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and snakes, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of them moved according to his own fashion. The lion roared, longing to attack; the bull seemed to toss; the serpent did not cease creeping, and the wolf rushed upon him; and altogether the noises of all the apparitions were dreadful, and their tempers cruel. But Antony, scourged and pierced by them, felt a more dreadful bodily pain than before: but he lay unshaken and awake in spirit. He groaned at the pain of his body: but clear in intellect, and as it were mocking, he said, “If there were any power in you, it were enough that one of you should come on; but since the Lord has made you weak, therefore you try to frighten me by mere numbers. And a proof of your weakness is, that you imitate the shapes of brute animals.” And taking courage, he said again, “If ye can, and have received power against me, delay not, but attack; but if ye cannot, why do ye disturb me in vain? For a seal to us and a wall of safety is our faith in the Lord.” The dæmons, having made many efforts, gnashed their teeth at him, because he rather mocked at them, than they at him. But neither then did the Lord forget Antony’s wrestling, but appeared to help him. For, looking up, he saw the roof as it were opened and a ray of light coming down towards him. The dæmons suddenly became invisible, and the pain of his body forthwith ceased, and the building became quite whole. But Antony, feeling the succour, and getting his breath again, and freed from pain, questioned the vision which appeared, saying, “Where wert thou? Why didst thou not appear to me from the first, to stop my pangs?” And a voice came to him, “Antony, I was here, but I waited to see thy fight. Therefore, since thou hast withstood, and not been worsted, I will be to thee always a succour, and will make thee become famous everywhere.” Hearing this, he rose and prayed, and was so strong, that he felt that he had more power in his body than he had before. He was then about thirty-and-five years old. And on the morrow he went out, and was yet more eager for devotion to God; and, going to that old man aforesaid, he asked him to dwell with him in the desert. But when he declined, because of his age, and because no such custom had yet arisen, he himself straightway set off to the mountain. But the enemy again, seeing his earnestness, and wishing to hinder it, cast in his way the phantom of a great silver plate. But Antony, perceiving the trick of him who hates what is noble, stopped. And he judged the plate worthless, seeing the devil in it; and said, “Whence comes a plate in the desert? This is no beaten way, nor is there here the footstep of any traveller. Had it fallen, it could not have been unperceived, from its great size; and besides, he who lost it would have turned back and found it, because the place is desert. This is a trick of the devil. Thou shalt not hinder, devil, my determination by this: let it go with thee into perdition.” And as Antony said that, it vanished, as smoke from before the face of the fire. Then again he saw, not this time a phantom, but real gold lying in the way as he came up. But whether the enemy showed it him, or whether some better power, which was trying the athlete, and showing the devil that he did not care for real wealth; neither did he tell, nor do we know, save that it was real gold. Antony, wondering at the abundance of it, so stepped over it as over fire, and so passed it by, that he never turned, but ran on in haste, until he had lost sight of the place. And growing even more and more intense in his determination, he rushed up the mountain, and finding an empty inclosure full of creeping things on account of its age, he betook himself across the river, and dwelt in it. The creeping things, as if pursued by some one, straightway left the place: but he blocked up the entry, having taken with him loaves for six months (for the Thebans do this, and they often remain a whole year fresh), and having water with him, entering, as into a sanctuary, into that monastery, [44] he remained alone, never going forth, and never looking at any one who came. Thus he passed a long time there training himself, and only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the roof. But those of his acquaintance who came to him, as they often remained days and nights outside (for he did not allow any one to enter), used to hear as it were crowds inside clamouring, thundering, lamenting, crying—“Depart from our ground. What dost thou even in the desert? Thou canst not abide our onset.” At first those without thought that there were some men fighting with him, and that they had got in by ladders: but when, peeping in through a crack, they saw no one, then they took for granted that they were dæmons, and being terrified, called themselves on Antony. But he rather listened to them than cared for the others. For his acquaintances came up continually, expecting to find him dead, and heard him singing, “Let the Lord arise, and his enemies shall be scattered; and let them who hate him flee before him. As wax melts from before the face of the fire, so shall sinners perish from before the face of God.” And again, “All nations compassed me round about, and in the name of the Lord I repelled them.” He endured then for twenty years, thus training himself alone; neither going forth, nor seen by any one for long periods of time. But after this, when many longed for him, and wished to imitate his training, and others who knew him came, and were bursting in the door by force, Antony came forth as from some inner shrine, initiated into the mysteries, and bearing the God. [45] And then first he appeared out of the inclosure to those who were coming to him. And when they saw him they wondered; for his body had kept the same habit, and had neither grown fat, nor lean from fasting, nor worn by fighting with the dæmons. For he was just such as they had known him before his retirement. They wondered again at the purity of his soul, because it was neither contracted as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor possessed by laughter or by depression; for he was neither troubled at beholding the crowd, nor over-joyful at being saluted by too many; but was altogether equal, as being governed by reason, and standing on that which is according to nature. Many sufferers in body who were present did the Lord heal by him; and others he purged from dæmons. And he gave to Antony grace in speaking, so that he comforted many who grieved, and reconciled others who were at variance, exhorting all to prefer nothing in the world to the love of Christ, and persuading and exhorting them to be mindful of the good things to come, and of the love of God towards us, who spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all. He persuaded many to choose the solitary life; and so thenceforth cells sprang up in the mountains, and the desert was colonized by monks, who went forth from their own, and registered themselves in the city which is in heaven.

And when he had need to cross the Arsenoite Canal (and the need was the superintendence of the brethren), the canal was full of crocodiles. And having only prayed, he entered it; and both he and all who were with him went through it unharmed. But when he returned to the cell, he persisted in the noble labours of his youth; and by continued exhortations he increased the willingness of those who were already monks, and stirred to love of training the greater number of the rest; and quickly, as his speech drew men on, the cells became more numerous; and he governed them all as a father. And when he had gone forth one day, and all the monks had come to him desiring to hear some word from him, he spake to them in the Egyptian tongue, thus—“That the Scriptures were sufficient for instruction, but that it was good for us to exhort each other in the faith.” . . .

[Here follows a long sermon, historically important, as being the earliest Christian attempt to reduce to a science dæmonology and the temptation of dæmons: but its involved and rhetorical form proves sufficiently that it could not have been delivered by an unlettered man like Antony. Neither is it, probably, even composed by St. Athanasius; it seems rather, like several other passages in this biography, the interpolation of some later scribe. It has been, therefore, omitted.]

And when Antony had spoken thus, all rejoiced; and in one the love of virtue was increased, in another negligence stirred up, and in others conceit stopped, while all were persuaded to despise the plots of the devil, wondering at the grace which had been given to Antony by the Lord for the discernment of spirits. So the cells in the mountains were like tents filled with divine choirs, singing, discoursing, fasting, praying, rejoicing over the hope of the future, working that they might give alms thereof, and having love and concord with each other. And there was really to be seen, as it were, a land by itself, of piety and justice; for there was none there who did wrong, or suffered wrong: no blame from any talebearer: but a multitude of men training themselves, and in all of them a mind set on virtue. So that any one seeing the cells, and such an array of monks, would have cried out, and said, “How fair are thy dwellings, O Jacob, and thy tents, O Israel; like shady groves and like parks beside a river, and like tents which the Lord hath pitched, and like cedars by the waters.” He himself, meanwhile, withdrawing, according to his custom, alone to his own cell, increased the severity of his training. And he groaned daily, considering the mansions in heaven, and setting his longing on them, and looking at the ephemeral life of man. For even when he was going to eat or sleep, he was ashamed, when he considered the rational element of his soul; so that often, when he was about to eat with many other monks, he remembered the spiritual food, and declined, and went far away from them; thinking that he should blush if he was seen by others eating. He ate, nevertheless, by himself, on account of the necessities of the body; and often, too, with the brethren, being bashful with regard to them, but plucking up heart for the sake of saying something that might be useful; and used to tell them that they ought to give all their leisure rather to the soul than to the body; and that they should grant a very little time to the body, for mere necessity’s sake: but that their whole leisure should be rather given to the soul, and should seek her profit, that she may not be drawn down by the pleasures of the body, but rather the body be led captive by her. For this (he said) was what was spoken by the Saviour, “Be not anxious for your soul, what ye shall eat; nor for your body, what ye shall put on. And seek not what ye shall eat, nor what ye shall drink, neither let your minds be in suspense: for after all these things the nations of the world seek: but your Father knoweth that ye need all these things. Rather seek first his kingdom; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

After these things, the persecution which happened under the Maximinus of that time, [49] laid hold of the Church; and when the holy martyrs were brought to Alexandria, Antony too followed, leaving his cell, and saying, “Let us depart too, that we may wrestle if we be called, or see them wrestling.” And he longed to be a martyr himself, but, not choosing to give himself up, he ministered to the confessors in the mines, and in the prisons. And he was very earnest in the judgment-hall to excite the readiness of those who were called upon to wrestle; and to receive and bring on their way, till they were perfected, those of them who went to martyrdom. At last the judge, seeing the fearlessness and earnestness of him and those who were with him, commanded that none of the monks should appear in the judgment-hall, or haunt at all in the city. So all the rest thought good to hide themselves that day; but Antony cared so much for the order, that he all the rather washed his cloak, and stood next day upon a high place, and appeared to the General in shining white. Therefore, when all the rest wondered, and the General saw him, and passed by with his array, he stood fearless, showing forth the readiness of us Christians. For he himself prayed to be a martyr, as I have said, and was like one grieved, because he had not borne his witness. But the Lord was preserving him for our benefit, and that of the rest, that he might become a teacher to many in the training which he had learnt from Scripture. For many, when they only saw his manner of life, were eager to emulate it. So he again ministered continually to the confessors; and, as if bound with them, wearied himself in his services. And when at last the persecution ceased, and the blessed Bishop Peter had been martyred, he left the city, and went back to his cell. And he was there, day by day, a martyr in his conscience, and wrestling in the conflict of faith; for he imposed on himself a much more severe training than before; and his garment was within of hair, without of skin, which he kept till his end. He neither washed his body with water, nor ever cleansed his feet, nor actually endured putting them into water unless it were necessary. And no one ever saw him unclothed till he was dead and about to be buried.

When, then, he retired, and had resolved neither to go forth himself, nor to receive any one, one Martinianus, a captain of soldiers, came and gave trouble to Antony. For he had with him his daughter, who was tormented by a dæmon. And while he remained a long time knocking at the door, and expecting him to come to pray to God for the child, Antony could not bear to open, but leaning from above, said, “Man, why criest thou to me? I, too, am a man, as thou art. But if thou believest, pray to God, and it comes to pass.” Forthwith, therefore, he believed, and called on Christ; and went away, with his daughter cleansed from the dæmon. And many other things the Lord did by him, saying, “Ask, and it shall be given you.” For most of the sufferers, when he did not open the door, only sat down outside the cell, and believing, and praying honestly, were cleansed. But when he saw himself troubled by many, and not being permitted to retire, as he wished, being afraid lest he himself should be puffed up by what the Lord was doing by him, or lest others should count of him above what he was, he resolved to go to the Upper Thebaid, to those who knew him not. And, in fact, having taken loaves from the brethren, he sat down on the bank of the river, watching for a boat to pass, that he might embark and go up in it. And as he watched, a voice came to him: “Antony, whither art thou going, and why?” And he, not terrified, but as one accustomed to be often called thus, answered when he heard it, “Because the crowds will not let me be at rest; therefore am I minded to go up to the Upper Thebaid, on account of the many annoyances which befall me; and, above all, because they ask of me things beyond my strength.” And the voice said to him, “Even if thou goest up to the Thebaid, even if, as thou art minded to do, thou goest down the cattle pastures, [52a] thou wilt have to endure more, and double trouble; but if thou wilt really be at rest, go now into the inner desert.” And when Antony said, “Who will show me the way, for I have not tried it?” forthwith it showed him Saracens who were going to journey that road. So, going to them, and drawing near them, Antony asked leave to depart with them into the desert. But they, as if by an ordinance of Providence, willingly received him; and, journeying three days and three nights with them, he came to a very high mountain; [52b] and there was water under the mountain, clear, sweet, and very cold; and a plain outside; and a few neglected date-palms. Then Antony, as if stirred by God, loved the spot; for this it was what he had pointed out who spoke to him beside the river bank. At first, then, having received bread from those who journeyed with him, he remained alone in the mount, no one else being with him. For he recognised that place as his own home, and kept it thenceforth. And the Saracens themselves, seeing Antony’s readiness, came that way on purpose, and joyfully brought him loaves; and he had, too, the solace of the dates, which was then little and paltry. But after this, the brethren, having found out the spot, like children remembering their father, were anxious to send things to him; but Antony saw that, in bringing him bread, some there were put to trouble and fatigue; and, sparing the monks even in that, took counsel with himself, and asked some who came to him to bring him a hoe and a hatchet, and a little corn; and when these were brought, having gone over the land round the mountain, he found a very narrow place which was suitable, and tilled it; and, having plenty of water to irrigate it, he sowed; and, doing this year by year, he got his bread from thence, rejoicing that he should be troublesome to no one on that account, and that he was keeping himself free from obligation in all things. But after this, seeing again some people coming, he planted also a very few pot-herbs, that he who came might have some small solace after the labour of that hard journey. At first, however, the wild beasts in the desert, coming on account of the water, often hurt his crops and his tillage; but he, gently laying hold of one of them, said to them all, “Why do you hurt me, who have not hurt you? Depart, and, in the name of the Lord, never come near this place.” And from that time forward, as if they were afraid of his command, they never came near the place. So he was there alone in the inner mountain, having leisure for prayer and for training. But the brethren who ministered to him asked him that, coming every month, they might bring him olives, and pulse, and oil; for, after all, he was old. And while he had his conversation there, what great wrestlings he endured, according to that which is written, “Not against flesh and blood, but against the dæmons who are our adversaries,” we have known from those who went in to him. For there also they heard tumults, and many voices, and clashing as of arms; and they beheld the mount by night full of wild beasts, and they looked on him, too, fighting, as it were, with beings whom he saw, and praying against them. And those who came to him he bade be of good courage, but he himself wrestled, bending his knees, and praying to the Lord. And it was truly worthy of wonder that, alone in such a desert, he was neither cowed by the dæmons who beset him, nor, while there were there so many four-footed and creeping beasts, was at all afraid of their fierceness: but, as is written, trusted in the Lord like the Mount Zion, having his reason unshaken and untost; so that the dæmons rather fled, and the wild beasts, as is written, were at peace with him.

Nevertheless, the devil (as David sings) watched Antony, and gnashed upon him with his teeth. But Antony was comforted by the Saviour, remaining unhurt by his craft and manifold artifices. For on him, when he was awake at night, he let loose wild beasts; and almost all the hyænas in that desert, coming out of their burrows, beset him round, and he was in the midst. And when each gaped on him and threatened to bite him, perceiving the art of the enemy, he said to them all, “If ye have received power against me, I am ready to be devoured by you: but if ye have been set on by dæmons, delay not, but withdraw, for I am a servant of Christ.” When Antony said this, they fled, pursued by his words as by a whip. Next after a few days, as he was working—for he took care, too, to labour—some one standing at the door pulled the plait that he was working. For he was weaving baskets, which he used to give to those who came, in return for what they brought him. And rising up, he saw a beast, like a man down to his thighs, but having legs and feet like an ass; and Antony only crossed himself and said, “I am a servant of Christ. If thou hast been sent against me, behold, here I am.” And the beast with its dæmons fled away, so that in its haste it fell and died. Now the death of the beast was the fall of the dæmons. For they were eager to do everything to bring him back out of the desert, but could not prevail.

And being once asked by the monks to come down to them, and to visit awhile them and their places, he journeyed with the monks who came to meet him. And a camel carried their loaves and their water; for that desert is all dry, and there is no drinkable water unless in that mountain alone whence they drew their water, and where his cell is. But when the water failed on the journey, and the heat was most intense, they all began to be in danger; for going round to various places, and finding no water, they could walk no more, but lay down on the ground, and they let the camel go, and gave themselves up. But the old man, seeing them all in danger, was utterly grieved, and groaned; and departing a little way from them, and bending his knees and stretching out his hands, he prayed, and forthwith the Lord caused water to come out where he had stopped and prayed. And thus all of them drinking took breath again; and having filled their skins, they sought the camel, and found her; for it befell that the halter had been twisted round a stone, and thus she had been stopped. So, having brought her back, and given her to drink, they put the skins on her, and went through their journey unharmed. And when they came to the outer cells all embraced him, looking on him as a father. And he, as if he brought them guest-gifts from the mountain, gave them away to them in his words, and shared his benefits among them. And there was joy again in the mountains, and zeal for improvement, and comfort through their faith in each other. And he too rejoiced, seeing the willingness of the monks, and his sister grown old in maidenhood, and herself the leader of other virgins. And so after certain days he went back again to the mountain.

And after that many came to him; and others who suffered dared also to come. Now to all the monks who came to him he gave continually this command: To trust in the Lord and love him, and to keep themselves from foul thoughts and fleshly pleasures; and, as is written in the Parables, not to be deceived by fulness of bread; and to avoid vainglory; and to pray continually; and to sing before sleep and after sleep; and to lay by in their hearts the commandment of Scripture; and to remember the works of the saints, in order to have their souls attuned to emulate them. But especially he counselled them to meditate continually on the Apostle’s saying, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath;” and this he said was spoken of all commandments in common, in order that not on wrath alone, but on every other sin, the sun should never go down; for it was noble and necessary that the sun should never condemn us for a baseness by day, nor the moon for a sin or even a thought by night; therefore, in order that that which is noble may be preserved in us, it was good to hear and to keep what the Apostle commanded: for he said: “Judge yourselves, and prove yourselves.” Let each then take account with himself, day by day, of his daily and nightly deeds; and if he has not sinned, let him not boast, but let him endure in what is good and not be negligent, neither condemn his neighbour, neither justify himself, as said the blessed Apostle Paul, until the Lord comes who searches secret things. For we often deceive ourselves in what we do, and we indeed know not: but the Lord comprehends all. Giving therefore the judgment to Him, let us sympathise with each other; and let us bear each other’s burdens, and examine ourselves; and what we are behind in, let us be eager to fill up. And let this, too, be my counsel for safety against sinning. Let us each note and write down the deeds and motions of the soul as if he were about to relate them to each other; and be confident that, as we shall be utterly ashamed that they should be known, we shall cease from sinning, and even from desiring anything mean. For who when he sins wishes to be harmed thereby? Or who, having sinned, does not rather lie, wishing to hide it? As therefore when in each other’s sight we dare not commit a crime, so if we write down our thoughts, and tell them to each other, we shall keep ourselves the more from foul thoughts, for shame lest they should be known. . . . And thus forming ourselves we shall be able to bring the body into slavery, and please the Lord on the one hand, and on the other trample on the snares of the enemy.” This was his exhortation to those who met him: but with those who suffered he suffered, and prayed with them. And often and in many things the Lord heard him; and neither when he was heard did he boast; nor when he was not heard did he murmur: but, remaining always the same, gave thanks to the Lord. And those who suffered he exhorted to keep up heart, and to know that the power of cure was none of his, nor of any man’s; but only belonged to God, who works when and whatsoever he chooses. So the sufferers received this as a remedy, learning not to despise the old man’s words, but rather to keep up heart; and those who were cured learned not to bless Antony, but God alone.

For instance, one called Fronto, who belonged to the palace, and had a grievous disease (for he gnawed his own tongue, and tried to injure his eyes), came to the mountain and asked Antony to pray for him. And when he had prayed he said to Fronto, “Depart, and be healed.” And when he resisted, and remained within some days, Antony continued saying, “Thou canst not be healed if thou remainest here; go forth, and as soon as thou enterest Egypt, thou shalt see the sign which shall befall thee.” He, believing, went forth; and as soon as he only saw Egypt he was freed from his disease, and became sound according to the word of Antony, which he had learnt by prayer from the Saviour . . .

[Here follows a story of a girl cured of a painful complaint: which need not be translated.]

But when two brethren were coming to him, and water failed them on the journey, one of them died, and the other was about to die. In fact, being no longer able to walk, he too lay upon the ground expecting death. But Antony, as he sat on the mountain, called two monks who happened to be there, and hastened them, saying, “Take a pitcher of water, and run on the road towards Egypt; for of two who are coming hither one has just expired, and the other will do so if you do not hasten. For this has been showed to me as I prayed.” So the monks going found the one lying dead, and buried him; and the other they recovered with the water, and brought him to the old man. Now the distance was a day’s journey. But if any one should ask why he did not speak before one of them expired, he does not question rightly; for the judgment of that death did not belong to Antony, but to God, who both judged concerning the one; and revealed concerning the other. But this alone in Antony was wonderful, that sitting on the mountain he kept his heart watchful, and the Lord showed him things afar off.

For once again, as he sat on the mountain and looked up, he saw some one carried aloft, and a great rejoicing among some who met him. Then wondering, and blessing such a choir, he prayed to be taught what that might be; and straightway a voice came to him that this was the soul of Ammon, the monk in Nitria, [60] who had persevered as an ascetic to his old age; and the distance from Nitria to the mountain where Antony was, is thirteen days’ journey. Those then who were with Antony, seeing the old man wondering, asked the reason, and heard that Ammon had just expired, for he was known to them on account of his having frequently come thither, and many signs having been worked by him, of which this is one. . . .

[Here follows the story (probably an interpolation) of Ammon’s being miraculously carried across the river Lycus, because he was ashamed to undress himself.]

But the monks to whom Antony spoke about Ammon’s death noted down the day; and when brethren came from Nitria after thirty days, they inquired and learnt that Ammon had fallen asleep at the day and hour in which the old man saw his soul carried aloft. And all on both sides wondered at the purity of Antony’s soul; how he had learnt and seen instantly what had happened thirteen days’ journey off.

Moreover, Archeleas the Count, finding him once in the outer mountain praying alone, asked him concerning Polycratia, that wonderful and Christ-bearing maiden in Laodicea; for she suffered dreadful internal pain from her extreme training, and was altogether weak in body. Antony, therefore, prayed; and the Count noted down the day on which the prayer was offered. And going back to Laodicea, he found the maiden cured; and asking when and on what day her malady had ceased, he brought out the paper on which he had written down the date of the prayer. And when she told him, he showed at once the writing on the paper. And all found that the Lord had stopped her sufferings while Antony was still praying and calling for her on the goodness of the Saviour.

And concerning those who came to him, he often predicted some days, or even a month, beforehand, and the cause why they were coming. For some came only to see him, and others on account of sickness, and others because they suffered from dæmons, and all thought the labour of the journey no trouble nor harm, for each went back aware that he had been benefited. And when he spoke and looked thus, he asked no one to marvel at him on that account, but to marvel rather at the Lord, because he had given us, who are but men, grace to know him according to our powers. And as he was going down again to the outer cells, and was minded to enter a boat and pray with the monks, he alone perceived a dreadfully evil odour, and when those in the boat told him that they had fish and brine on board, and that it was they which smelt, he said that it was a different smell; and while he was yet speaking, a youth, who had an evil spirit, had gone before them and hidden in the boat, suddenly cried out. But the dæmon, being rebuked in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, went out of him, and the man became whole, and all knew that the smell had come from the evil spirit. And there was another man of high rank who came to him, having a dæmon, and one so terrible, that the possessed man did not know that he was going to Antony, but [showed the common symptoms of mania]. Those who brought him entreated Antony to pray over him, which he did, feeling for the young man, and he watched beside him all night. But about dawn, the young man, suddenly rushing on Antony, assaulted him. When those who came with him were indignant, Antony said, “Be not hard upon the youth, for it is not he, but the dæmon in him; and because he has been rebuked, and commanded to go forth into dry places, he has become furious, and done this. Glorify, therefore, the Lord for his having thus rushed upon me, as a sign to you that the dæmon is going out.” And as Antony said this, the youth suddenly became sound, and, recovering his reason, knew where he was, and embraced the old man, giving thanks to God. And most of the monks agree unanimously that many like things were done by him: yet are they not so wonderful as what follows. For once, when he was going to eat, and rose up to pray about the ninth hour, he felt himself rapt in spirit; and (wonderful to relate) as he stood he saw himself as it were taken out of himself, and led into the air by some persons; and then others, bitter and terrible, standing in the air, and trying to prevent his passing upwards. And when those who led him fought against them, they demanded whether he was not accountable to them. And when they began to take account of his deeds from his birth, his guides stopped them, saying, “What happened from his birth upwards, the Lord hath wiped out: but of what has happened since he became a monk, and made a promise to God, of that you may demand an account.” Then, when they brought accusations against him, and could not prove them, the road was opened freely to him. And straightway he saw himself as if coming back and standing before himself, and was Antony once more. Then, forgetting that he had not eaten, he remained the rest of the day and all night groaning and praying, for he wondered when he saw against how many enemies we must wrestle, and through how many labours a man must traverse the air; and he remembered that it is this which the Apostle means with regard to the Prince of the power of the air; for it is in the air that the enemy has his power, fighting against those who pass through it, and trying to hinder them. Wherefore, also he especially exhorts us: “Take the whole armour of God, that the enemy, having no evil to say about us, may be ashamed.” But when we heard this, we remembered the Apostle’s saying, “Whether in the body I cannot tell, or out of the body I cannot tell: God knoweth.” But Paul was caught up into the third heaven, and, having heard unspeakable words, descended again; but Antony saw himself rapt in the air, and wrestling till he seemed to be free.

Again, he had this grace, that as he was sitting alone in the mountain, if at any time he was puzzled in himself, the thing was revealed to him by Providence as he prayed; and the blessed man was, as Scripture says, taught of God. After this, at all events, when he had been talking with some who came to him concerning the departure of the soul, and what would be its place after this life, the next night some one called him from without, and said, “Rise up, Antony; come out and see.” So coming out (for he knew whom he ought to obey), he beheld a tall being, shapeless and terrible, standing and reaching to the clouds, and as it were winged beings ascending; and him stretching out his hands; and some of them hindered by him, and others flying above him, and when they had once passed him, borne upwards without trouble. But against them that tall being gnashed his teeth, while over those who fell, he rejoiced. And there came a voice to Antony, “Consider what thou seest.” And when his understanding was opened, he perceived that it was the enemy who envies the faithful, and that those who were in his power he mastered and hindered from passing; but that those who had not obeyed him, over them, as over conquerors, he had no power. Having seen this, and as it were made mindful by it, he struggled more and more daily to improve. Now these things he did not tell of his own accord; but when he was long in prayer, and astonished in himself, those who were with him questioned him and urged him; and he was forced to tell; unable, as a father, to hide anything from his children; and considering, too, that his own conscience was clear, and the story would be profitable for them, when they learned that the life of training bore good fruit, and that visions often came as a solace of their toils.

But how tolerant was his temper, and how humble his spirit; for though he was so great, he both honoured exceedingly the canon of the Church, and wished to put every ecclesiastic before himself in honour. For to the bishops and presbyters he was not ashamed to bow his head; and if a deacon ever came to him for the sake of profit, he discoursed with him on what was profitable, but in prayer he gave place to him, not being ashamed even himself to learn from him. [65] For he often asked questions, and deigned to listen to all present, confessing that he was profited if any one said aught that was useful. Moreover, his countenance had great and wonderful grace; and this gift too he had from the Saviour. For if he was present among the multitude of monks, and any one who did not previously know him wished to see him, as soon as he came he passed by all the rest, and ran to Antony himself, as if attracted by his eyes. He did not differ from the rest in stature or in stoutness, but in the steadiness of his temper, and purity of his soul; for as his soul was undisturbed, his outward senses were undisturbed likewise, so that the cheerfulness of his soul made his face cheerful, and from the movements of his body the stedfastness of his soul could be perceived, according to the Scripture, “When the heart is cheerful the countenance is glad; but when sorrow comes it scowleth.” . . . And he was altogether wonderful in faith, and pious, for he never communicated with the Meletian [66a] schismatics, knowing their malice and apostasy from the beginning; nor did he converse amicably with Manichæans or any other heretics, save only to exhort them to be converted to piety. For he held that their friendship and converse was injury and ruin to the soul. So also he detested the heresy of the Arians, and exhorted all not to approach them, nor hold their misbelief. [66b] In fact, when certain of the Ariomanites came to him, having discerned them and found them impious, he chased them out of the mountain, saying that their words were worse than serpent’s poison; and when the Arians once pretended that he was of the same opinion as they, he was indignant and fierce against them. Then being sent for by the bishops and all the brethren, he went down from the mountain, and entering Alexandria he denounced the Arians, saying, that that was the last heresy, and the forerunner of Antichrist; and he taught the people that the Son of God was not a created thing, neither made from nought, but that he is the Eternal Word and Wisdom of the Essence of the Father; wherefore also it is impious to say there was a time when he was not, for he was always the Word co-existent with the Father. Wherefore he said, “Do not have any communication with these most impious Arians; for there is no communion between light and darkness. For you are pious Christians: but they, when they say that the Son of God and the Word, who is from the Father, is a created being, differ nought from the heathen, because they worship the creature instead of God the Creator. [67] Believe rather that the whole creation itself is indignant against them, because they number the Creator and Lord of all, in whom all things are made, among created things.” All the people therefore rejoiced at hearing that Christ-opposing heresy anathematized by such a man; and all those in the city ran together to see Antony and the Greeks, [68a] and those who are called their priests [68b] came into the church, wishing to see the man of God; for all called him by that name, because there the Lord cleansed many by him from dæmons, and healed those who were out of their mind. And many heathens wished only to touch the old man, believing that it would be of use to them; and in fact as many became Christians in those few days, as would have been usually converted in a year. And when some thought that the crowd troubled him, and therefore turned all away from him, he quietly said that they were not more numerous than the fiends with whom he wrestled on the mountain. But when he left the city, and we were setting him on his journey, when we came to the gate a certain woman called to him: “Wait, man of God, my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil; wait, I beseech thee, lest I too harm myself with running after thee.” The old man hearing it, and being asked by us, waited willingly. But when the woman drew near, the child dashed itself on the ground; and when Antony prayed and called on the name of Christ, it rose up sound, the unclean spirit having gone out; and the mother blessed God, and we all gave thanks: and he himself rejoiced at leaving the city for the mountain, as for his own home.

Now he was very prudent; and what was wonderful, though he had never learnt letters, he was a shrewd and understanding man. Once, for example, two Greek philosophers came to him, thinking that they could tempt Antony. And he was in the outer mountain; and when he went out to them, understanding the men from their countenances, he said through an interpreter, “Why have you troubled yourselves so much, philosophers, to come to a foolish man?” And when they answered that he was not foolish, but rather very wise, he said, “If you have come to a fool, your labour is superfluous, but if ye think me to be wise, become as I am; for we ought to copy what is good, and if I had come to you, I should have copied you; but if you come to me, copy me, for I am a Christian.” And they wondering went their way, for they saw that even dæmons were afraid of Antony.

And again when others of the same class met him in the outer mountain, and thought to mock him, because he had not learnt letters, Antony answered, “But what do you say? which is first, the sense or the letters? And which is the cause of the other, the sense of the letters, or the letters of the sense?” And when they said that the sense came first, and invented the letters, Antony replied, “If then the sense be sound, the letters are not needed.” Which struck them, and those present, with astonishment. So they went away wondering, when they saw so much understanding in an unlearned man. For though he had lived and grown old in the mountain, his manners were not rustic, but graceful and urbane; and his speech was seasoned with the divine salt, so that no man grudged at him, but rather rejoiced over him, as many as came. . . .

[Here follows a long sermon against the heathen worship, attributed to St. Antony, but of very questionable authenticity: the only point about it which is worthy of note is that Antony confutes the philosophers by challenging them to cure some possessed persons, and, when they are unable to do so, casts out the dæmons himself by the sign of the cross.]

The fame of Antony reached even the kings, for Constantinus the Augustus, and his sons, Constantius and Constans, the Augusti, hearing of these things, wrote to him as to a father, and begged to receive an answer from him. But he did not make much of the letters, nor was puffed up by their messages; and he was just the same as he was before the kings wrote to him. And he called his monks and said, “Wonder not if a king writes to us, for he is but a man: but wonder rather that God has written his law to man, and spoken to us by his own Son.” So he declined to receive their letters, saying he did not know how to write an answer to such things; but being admonished by the monks that the kings were Christians, and that they must not be scandalized by being despised, he permitted the letters to be read, and wrote an answer; accepting them because they worshipped Christ, and counselling them, for their salvation, not to think the present life great, but rather to remember judgment to come; and to know that Christ was the only true and eternal king; and he begged them to be merciful to men, and to think of justice and the poor. And they, when they received the answer, rejoiced. Thus was he kindly towards all, and all looked on him as their father. He then betook himself again into the inner mountain, and continued his accustomed training. But often, when he was sitting and walking with those who came unto him, he was astounded, as is written in Daniel. And after the space of an hour, he told what had befallen to the brethren who were with him, and they perceived that he had seen some vision. Often he saw in the mountain what was happening in Egypt, and told it to Serapion the bishop, who saw him occupied with a vision. Once, for instance, as he sat, he fell as it were into an ecstasy, and groaned much at what he saw. Then, after an hour, turning to those who were with him, he groaned and fell into a trembling, and rose up and prayed, and bending his knees, remained so a long while; and then the old man rose up and wept. The bystanders, therefore, trembling and altogether terrified, asked him to tell them what had happened, and tormented him much, that he was forced to speak. And he groaning greatly—“Ah! my children,” he said, “it were better to be dead before what I have seen shall come to pass.” And when they asked him again, he said with tears, that “Wrath will seize on the Church, and she will be given over to men like unto brutes, which have no understanding; for I saw the table of the Lord’s house, and mules standing all around it in a ring and kicking inwards, as a herd does when it leaps in confusion; and ye all perceived how I groaned, for I heard a voice saying, ‘My sanctuary shall be defiled.’”

This the old man saw, and after two years there befell the present inroad of the Arians, [72a] and the plunder of the churches, when they carried off the holy vessels by violence, and made the heathen carry them: and when too they forced the heathens from the prisons to join them, and in their presence did on the holy table what they would. [72b] Then we all perceived that the kicks of those mules presignified to Antony what the Arians are now doing without understanding, like the brutes. But when Antony saw this sight, he exhorted those about him, saying, “Lose not heart, children; for as the Lord has been angry, so will he again be appeased, and the Church shall soon receive again her own order and shine forth as she is wont; and ye shall see the persecuted restored to their place, and impiety retreating again into its own dens, and the pious faith speaking boldly everywhere with all freedom. Only defile not yourselves with the Arians, for this teaching is not of the Apostle but of the dæmons, and of their father the devil: barren and irrational and of an unsound mind, like the irrational deeds of those mules.” Thus spoke Antony.

But we must not doubt whether so great wonders have been done by a man; for the Saviour’s promise is, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say to this mountain, Pass over from hence, it shall pass over, and nothing shall be impossible to you;” and again, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, if ye shall ask my Father in my name, he shall give it you. Ask, and ye shall receive.” And he himself it is who said to his disciples and to all who believe in him, “Heal the sick, cast out devils; freely ye have received, freely give.” And certainly Antony did not heal by his own authority, but by praying and calling on Christ; so that it was plain to all that it was not he who did it, but the Lord, who through Antony showed love to men, and healed the sufferers. But Antony’s part was only the prayer and the training, for the sake whereof, sitting in the mountain, he rejoiced in the sight of divine things, and grieved when he was tormented by many, and dragged to the outer mountain.

For all the magistrates asked him to come down from the mountain, because it was impossible for them to go in thither to him on account of the litigants who followed him; so they begged him to come, that they might only behold him. And when he declined they insisted, and even sent in to him prisoners under the charge of soldiers, that at least on their account he might come down. So being forced by necessity, and seeing them lamenting, he came to the outer mountain. And his labour this time too was profitable to many, and his coming for their good. To the magistrates, too, he was of use, counselling them to prefer justice to all things, and to fear God, and to know that with what judgment they judged they should be judged in turn. But he loved best of all his life in the mountain. Once again, when he was compelled in the same way to leave it, by those who were in want, and by the general of the soldiers, who entreated him earnestly, he came down, and having spoken to them somewhat of the things which conduced to salvation, he was pressed also by those who were in need. But being asked by the general to lengthen his stay, he refused, and persuaded him by a graceful parable, saying, “Fishes, if they lie long on the dry land, die; so monks who stay with you lose their strength. As the fishes then hasten to the sea, so must we to the mountain, lest if we delay we should forget what is within.” The general, hearing this and much more from him, said with surprise that he was truly a servant of God, for whence could an unlearned man have so great sense if he were not loved by God?

Another general, named Balacius, bitterly persecuted us Christians on account of his affection for those abominable Arians. His cruelty was so great that he even beat nuns, and stripped and scourged monks. Antony sent him a letter to this effect:—“I see wrath coming upon thee. Cease, therefore, to persecute the Christians, lest the wrath lay hold upon thee, for it is near at hand.” But Balacius, laughing, threw the letter on the ground and spat on it; and insulted those who brought it, bidding them tell Antony, “Since thou carest for monks, I will soon come after thee likewise.” And not five days had passed, when the wrath laid hold on him. For Balacius himself, and Nestorius, the Eparch of Egypt, went out to the first station from Alexandria, which is called Chæreas’s. Both of them were riding on horses belonging to Balacius, and the most gentle in all his stud: but before they had got to the place, the horses began playing with each other, as is their wont, and suddenly the more gentle of the two, on which Nestorius was riding, attacked Balacius and pulled him off with his teeth, and so tore his thigh that he was carried back to the city, and died in three days. And all wondered that what Antony had so wonderfully foretold was so quickly fulfilled. These were his warnings to the more cruel. But the rest who came to him he so instructed that they gave up at once their lawsuits, and blessed those who had retired from this life. And those who had been unjustly used he so protected that you would think he and not they was the sufferer. And he was so able to be of use to all; so that many who were serving in the army, and many wealthy men, laid aside the burdens of life and became thenceforth monks; and altogether he was like a physician given by God to Egypt. For who met him grieving, and did not go away rejoicing? Who came mourning over his dead, and did not forthwith lay aside his grief? Who came wrathful, and was not converted to friendship? What poor man came wearied out, and when he saw and heard him did not despise wealth and comfort himself in his poverty? What monk who had grown remiss, was not strengthened by coming to him? What young man coming to the mountain and looking upon Antony, did not forthwith renounce pleasure and love temperance? Who came to him tempted by devils, and did not get rest? Who came troubled by doubts, and did not get peace of mind? For this was the great thing in Antony’s asceticism, that (as I have said before), having the gift of discerning spirits, he understood their movements, and knew in what direction each of them turned his endeavours and his attacks. And not only he was not deceived by them himself, but he taught those who were troubled in mind how they might turn aside the plots of dæmons, teaching them the weakness and the craft of their enemies. How many maidens, too, who had been already betrothed, and only saw Antony from afar, remained unmarried for Christ’s sake! Some, too, came from foreign parts to him, and all, having gained some benefit, went back from him as from a father. And now he has fallen asleep, all are as orphans who have lost a parent, consoling themselves with his memory alone, keeping his instructions and exhortations. But what the end of his life was like, it is fit that I should relate, and you hear eagerly. For it too is worthy of emulation. He was visiting, according to his wont, the monks in the outer mountain, and having learned from Providence concerning his own end, he said to the brethren, “This visit to you is my last, and I wonder if we shall see each other again in this life. It is time for me to set sail, for I am near a hundred and five years old.” And when they heard that they wept, and embraced and kissed the old man. And he, as if he was setting out from a foreign city to his own, spoke joyfully, and exhorted them not to grow idle in their labours or cowardly in their training, but to live as those who died daily, and (as I said before) to be earnest in keeping their souls from foul thoughts, and to emulate the saints, and not to draw near the Meletian schismatics, for “ye know their evil and profane determinations, nor to have any communion with the Arians, for their impiety also is manifest to all. Neither if ye shall see the magistrates patronising them, be troubled, for their phantasy shall have an end, and is mortal and only for a little while. Keep yourselves therefore rather clean from them, and hold that which has been handed down to you by the fathers, and especially the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ which ye have learned from Scripture, and of which ye have often been reminded by me.” And when the brethren tried to force him to stay with them and make his end there, he would not endure it, on many accounts, as he showed by his silence; and especially on this:—The Egyptians are wont to wrap in linen the corpses of good persons, and especially of the holy martyrs, but not to bury them underground, but to lay them upon benches and keep them in their houses; [77] thinking that by this they honour the departed. Now Antony had often asked the bishops to exhort the people about this, and in like manner he himself rebuked the laity and terrified the women; saying that it was a thing neither lawful nor in any way holy; for that the bodies of the patriarchs and prophets are to this day preserved in sepulchres, and that the very body of our Lord was laid in a sepulchre, and a stone placed over it to hide it, till he rose the third day. And thus saying he showed that those broke the law who did not bury the corpses of the dead, even if they were holy; for what is greater or more holy than the Lord’s body? Many, then, when they heard him, buried thenceforth underground; and blessed the Lord that they had been taught rightly. Being then aware of this, and afraid lest they should do the same by his body, he hurried himself, and bade farewell to the monks in the outer mountain; and coming to the inner mountain, where he was wont to abide, after a few months he grew sick, and calling those who were by—and there were two of them who had remained there within fifteen years, exercising themselves and ministering to him on account of his old age—he said to them, “I indeed go the way of the fathers, as it is written, for I perceive that I am called by the Lord.” . . .

[Then follows a general exhortation to the monk, almost identical with much that has gone before, and ending by a command that his body should be buried in the ground.]

“And let this word of mine be kept by you, so that no one shall know the place, save you alone, for I shall receive it (my body) incorruptible from my Saviour in the resurrection of the dead. And distribute my garments thus. To Athanasius the bishop give one of my sheepskins, and the cloak under me, which was new when he gave it me, and has grown old by me; and to Serapion the bishop give the other sheepskin; and do you have the hair-cloth garment. And for the rest, children, farewell, for Antony is going, and is with you no more.”

Saying thus, when they had embraced him, he stretched out his feet, and, as if he saw friends coming to him, and grew joyful on their account (for, as he lay, his countenance was bright), he departed and was gathered to his fathers. And they forthwith, as he had commanded them, preparing the body and wrapping it up, hid it under ground: and no one knows to this day where it is hidden, save those two servants only. And each (i.e. Athanasius and Serapion) having received the sheepskin of the blessed Antony, and the cloak which he had worn out, keeps them as a great possession. For he who looks on them, as it were, sees Antony; and he who puts them on, wears them with joy, as he does Antony’s counsels.

Such was the end of Antony in the body, and such the beginning of his training. And if these things are small in comparison with his virtue, yet reckon up from these things how great was Antony, the man of God, who kept unchanged, from his youth up to so great an age, the earnestness of his training; and was neither worsted in his old age by the desire of more delicate food, nor on account of the weakness of his body altered the quality of his garment, nor even washed his feet with water; and yet remained uninjured in all his limbs: for his eyes were undimmed and whole, so that he saw well; and not one of his teeth had fallen out, but they were only worn down to his gums on account of his great age; and he remained sound in hand and foot; and, in a word, appeared ruddier and more ready for exertion than all who use various meats and baths, and different dresses. But that this man should be celebrated everywhere and wondered at by all, and regretted even by those who never saw him, is a proof of his virtue, and that his soul was dear to God. For Antony became known not by writings, not from the wisdom that is from without, not by any art, but by piety alone; and that this was the gift of God, none can deny. For how as far as Spain, as Gaul, as Rome, as Africa, could he have been heard, hidden as he was in a mountain, if it had not been for God, who makes known his own men everywhere, and who had promised Antony this from the beginning? For even if they do their deeds in secret, and wish to be concealed, yet the Lord shows them as lights to all, that so those who hear of them may know that the commandments suffice to put men in the right way, and may grow zealous of the path of virtue.

Read then these things to the other brethren, that they may learn what the life of monks should be, and may believe that the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour will glorify those who glorify him, and that those who serve him to the end he will not only bring to the kingdom of heaven, but that even if on earth they hide themselves and strive to get out of the way, he will make them manifest and celebrated everywhere, for the sake of their own virtue, and for the benefit of others. But if need be, read this also to the heathens, that even thus they may learn that our Lord Jesus Christ is not only Lord and the Son of God, but that those who truly serve him, and believe piously on him, not only prove that those dæmons whom the Greeks think are gods to be no gods, but even tread them under foot, and chase them out as deceivers and corrupters of men, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be glory and honour for ever and ever. Amen.

Thus ends this strange story. What we are to think of the miracles and wonders contained in it, will be discussed at a later point in this book. Meanwhile there is a stranger story still connected with the life of St. Antony. It professes to have been told by him himself to his monks; and whatever groundwork of fact there may be in it is doubtless his. The form in which we have it was given it by the famous St. Jerome, who sends the tale as a letter to Asella, one of the many noble Roman ladies whom he persuaded to embrace the monastic life. The style is as well worth preserving as the matter. Its ruggedness and awkwardness, its ambition and affectation, contrasted with the graceful simplicity of Athanasius’s “Life of Antony,” mark well the difference between the cultivated Greek and the ungraceful and half-barbarous Roman of the later Empire. I have, therefore, given it as literally as possible, that readers may judge for themselves how some of the Great Fathers of the fifth century wrote, and what they believed.

THE LIFE OF SAINT PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT
BY THE DIVINE HIERONYMUS THE PRIEST.
(ST. JEROME.)

PROLOGUE

Many have often doubted by which of the monks the desert was first inhabited. For some, looking for the beginnings of Monachism in earlier ages, have deduced it from the blessed Elias and John; of whom Elias seems to us to have been rather a prophet than a monk; and John to have begun to prophesy before he was born. But others (an opinion in which all the common people are agreed) assert that Antony was the head of this rule of life, which is partly true. For he was not so much himself the first of all, as the man who excited the earnestness of all. But Amathas and Macarius, Antony’s disciples (the former of whom buried his master’s body), even now affirm that a certain Paul, a Theban, was the beginner of the matter; which (not so much in name as in opinion) we also hold to be true. Some scatter about, as the fancy takes them, both this and other stories; inventing incredible tales of a man in a subterranean cave, hairy down to his heels, and many other things, which it is tedious to follow out. For, as their lie is shameless, their opinion does not seem worth refuting.

Therefore, because careful accounts of Antony, both in Greek and Roman style, have been handed down, I have determined to write a little about the beginning and end of Paul’s life; more because the matter has been omitted, than trusting to my own wit. But how he lived during middle life, or what stratagems of Satan he endured, is known to none.

THE LIFE OF PAUL

Under Decius and Valerius, the persecutors, at the time when Cornelius at Rome, and Cyprian at Carthage, were condemned in blessed blood, a cruel tempest swept over many Churches in Egypt and the Thebaid.

Christian subjects in those days longed to be smitten with the sword for the name of Christ. But the crafty enemy, seeking out punishments which delayed death, longed to slay souls, not bodies. And as Cyprian himself (who suffered by him) says: “When they longed to die, they were not allowed to be slain.” In order to make his cruelty better known, we have set down two examples for remembrance.

A martyr, persevering in the faith, and conqueror amid racks and red-hot irons, he commanded to be anointed with honey and laid on his back under a burning sun, with his hands tied behind him; in order, forsooth, that he who had already conquered the fiery gridiron, might yield to the stings of flies.

* * * * *

In those days, in the Lower Thebaid, was Paul left at the death of both his parents, in a rich inheritance, with a sister already married; being about fifteen years old, well taught in Greek and Egyptian letters, gentle tempered, loving God much; and, when the storm of persecution burst, he withdrew into a distant city. But

“To what dost thou not urge the human breast
Curst hunger after gold?”

His sister’s husband was ready to betray him whom he should have concealed. Neither the tears of his wife, the tie of blood, or God who looks on all things from on high, could call him back from his crime. He was at hand, ready to seize him, making piety a pretext for cruelty. The boy discovered it, and fled into the desert hills. Once there he changed need into pleasure, and going on, and then stopping awhile, again and again, reached at last a stony cliff, at the foot whereof was, nigh at hand, a great cave, its mouth closed with a stone. Having moved which away (as man’s longing is to know the hidden), exploring more greedily, he sees within a great hall, open to the sky above, but shaded by the spreading boughs of an ancient palm; and in it a clear spring, the rill from which, flowing a short space forth, was sucked up again by the same soil which had given it birth. There were besides in that cavernous mountain not a few dwellings, in which he saw rusty anvils and hammers, with which coin had been stamped of old. For this place (so books say) was the workshop for base coin in the days when Antony lived with Cleopatra.

Therefore, in this beloved dwelling, offered him as it were by God, he spent all his life in prayer and solitude, while the palm-tree gave him food and clothes; which lest it should seem impossible to some, I call Jesus and his holy angels to witness that I have seen monks one of whom, shut up for thirty years, lived on barley bread and muddy water; another in an old cistern, which in the country speech they call the Syrian’s bed, was kept alive on five figs each day. These things, therefore, will seem incredible to those who do not believe; for to those who do believe all things are possible.

But to return thither whence I digressed. When the blessed Paul had been leading the heavenly life on earth for 113 years, and Antony, ninety years old, was dwelling in another solitude, this thought (so Antony was wont to assert) entered his mind—that no monk more perfect than he had settled in the desert. But as he lay still by night, it was revealed to him that there was another monk beyond him far better than he, to visit whom he must set out. So when the light broke, the venerable old man, supporting his weak limbs on a staff, began to will to go, he knew not whither. And now the mid day, with the sun roasting above, grew fierce; and yet he was not turned from the journey he had begun, saying, “I trust in my God, that he will show his servant that which he has promised.” And as he spake, he sees a man half horse, to whom the poets have given the name of Hippocentaur. Seeing whom, he crosses his forehead with the salutary impression of the Cross, and, “Here!” he says, “in what part here does a servant of God dwell?” But he, growling I know not what barbarous sound, and grinding rather than uttering, the words, attempted a courteous speech from lips rough with bristles, and, stretching out his right hand, pointed to the way; then, fleeing swiftly across the open plains, vanished from the eyes of the wondering Antony. But whether the devil took this form to terrify him; or whether the desert, fertile (as is its wont) in monstrous animals, begets that beast likewise, we hold as uncertain.

So Antony, astonished, and thinking over what he had seen, goes forward. Soon afterwards, he sees in a stony valley a short manikin, with crooked nose and brow rough with horns, whose lower parts ended in goat’s feet. Undismayed by this spectacle likewise, Antony seized, like a good warrior, the shield of faith and habergeon of hope; the animal, however, was bringing him dates, as food for his journey, and a pledge of peace. When he saw that, Antony pushed on, and, asking him who he was, was answered, “I am a mortal, and one of the inhabitants of the desert, whom the Gentiles, deluded by various errors, worship by the name of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi. I come as ambassador from our herd, that thou mayest pray for us to the common God, who, we know, has come for the salvation of the world, and his sound is gone out into all lands.” As he spoke thus, the aged wayfarer bedewed his face plenteously with tears, which the greatness of his joy had poured forth as signs of his heart. For he rejoiced at the glory of Christ, and the destruction of Satan; and, wondering at the same time that he could understand the creature’s speech, he smote on the ground with his staff, and said, “Woe to thee, Alexandria, who worshippest portents instead of God! Woe to thee, harlot city, into which all the demons of the world have flowed together! What wilt thou say now? Beasts talk of Christ, and thou worshippest portents instead of God.” He had hardly finished his words, when the swift beast fled away as upon wings. Lest this should move a scruple in any one on account of its incredibility, it was corroborated, in the reign of Constantine, by the testimony of the whole world. For a man of that kind, being led alive to Alexandria, afforded a great spectacle to the people; and afterwards the lifeless carcase, being salted lest it should decay in the summer heat, was brought to Antioch, to be seen by the Emperor.

But—to go on with my tale—Antony went on through that region, seeing only the tracks of wild beasts, and the wide waste of the desert. What he should do, or whither turn, he knew not. A second day had now run by. One thing remained, to be confident that he could not be deserted by Christ. All night through he spent a second darkness in prayer, and while the light was still dim, he sees afar a she-wolf, panting with heat and thirst, creeping in at the foot of the mountain. Following her with his eyes, and drawing nigh to the cave when the beast was gone, he began to look in: but in vain; for the darkness stopped his view. However, as the Scripture saith, perfect love casteth out fear; with gentle step and bated breath the cunning explorer entered, and going forward slowly, and stopping often, watched for a sound. At length he saw afar off a light through the horror of the darkness; hastened on more greedily; struck his foot against a stone; and made a noise, at which the blessed Paul shut and barred his door, which had stood open.

Then Antony, casting himself down before the entrance, prayed there till the sixth hour, and more, to be let in, saying, “Who I am, and whence, and why I am come, thou knowest. I know that I deserve not to see thy face; yet, unless I see thee, I will not return. Thou who receivest beasts, why repellest thou a man? I have sought, and I have found. I knock, that it may be opened to me: which if I win not, here will I die before thy gate. Surely thou shalt at least bury my corpse.”

“Persisting thus he spoke, and stood there fixed:
To whom the hero shortly thus replied.”

“No one begs thus to threaten. No one does injury with tears. And dost thou wonder why I do not let thee in, seeing thou art a mortal guest?”

Then Paul, smiling, opened the door. They mingled mutual embraces, and saluted each other by their names, and committed themselves in common to the grace of God. And after the holy kiss, Paul sitting down with Antony thus began—

“Behold him, whom thou hast sought with such labour; with limbs decayed by age, and covered with unkempt white hair. Behold, thou seest but a mortal, soon to become dust. But, because charity bears all things, tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? whether new houses are rising in the ancient cities? by what emperor is the world governed? whether there are any left who are led captive by the deceits of the devil?” As they spoke thus, they saw a raven settle on a bough; who, flying gently down, laid, to their wonder, a whole loaf before them. When he was gone, “Ah,” said Paul, “the Lord, truly loving, truly merciful, hath sent us a meal. For sixty years past I have received daily half a loaf, but at thy coming Christ hath doubled his soldiers’ allowance.” Then, having thanked God, they sat down on the brink of the glassy spring.

But here a contention arising as to which of them should break the loaf, occupied the day till well-nigh evening. Paul insisted, as the host; Antony declined, as the younger man. At last it was agreed that they should take hold of the loaf at opposite ends, and each pull towards himself, and keep what was left in his hand. Next they stooped down, and drank a little water from the spring; then, immolating to God the sacrifice of praise, passed the night watching.

And when day dawned again, the blessed Paul said to Antony, “I knew long since, brother, that thou wert dwelling in these lands; long since God had promised thee to me as a fellow servant: but because the time of my falling asleep is now come, and (because I always longed to depart, and to be with Christ) there is laid up for me when I have finished my course a crown of righteousness; therefore thou art sent from the Lord to cover my corpse with mould, and give back dust to dust.”

Antony, hearing this, prayed him with tears and groans not to desert him, but take him as his companion on such a journey. But he said, “Thou must not seek the things which are thine own, but the things of others. It is expedient for thee, indeed, to cast off the burden of the flesh, and to follow the Lamb: but it is expedient for the rest of the brethren that they should be still trained by thine example. Wherefore go, unless it displease thee, and bring the cloak which Athanasius the bishop gave thee, to wrap up my corpse.” But this the blessed Paul asked, not because he cared greatly whether his body decayed covered or bare (as one who for so long a time was used to clothe himself with woven palm leaves), but that Antony’s grief at his death might be lightened when he left him. Antony astounded that he had heard of Athanasius and his own cloak, seeing as it were Christ in Paul, and venerating the God within his breast, dared answer nothing: but keeping in silence, and kissing his eyes and hands, returned to the monastery, which afterwards was occupied by the Saracens. His steps could not follow his spirit; but, although his body was empty with fastings, and broken with old age, yet his courage conquered his years. At last, tired and breathless, he arrived at home. There two disciples met him, who had been long sent to minister to him, and asked him, “Where hast thou tarried so long, father?” He answered, “Woe to me a sinner, who falsely bear the name of a monk. I have seen Elias; I have seen John in the desert; I have truly seen Paul in Paradise;” and so, closing his lips, and beating his breast, he took the cloak from his cell, and when his disciples asked him to explain more fully what had befallen, he said, “There is a time to be silent, and a time to speak.” Then going out, and not taking even a morsel of food, he returned by the way he had come. For he feared—what actually happened—lest Paul in his absence should render up the soul he owed to Christ.

And when the second day had shone, and he had retraced his steps for three hours, he saw amid hosts of angels, amid the choirs of prophets and apostles, Paul shining white as snow, ascending up on high; and forthwith falling on his face, he cast sand on his head, and weeping and wailing, said, “Why dost thou dismiss me, Paul? Why dost thou depart without a farewell? So late known, dost thou vanish so soon?” The blessed Antony used to tell afterwards, how he ran the rest of the way so swiftly that he flew like a bird. Nor without cause. For entering the cave he saw, with bended knees, erect neck, and hands spread out on high, a lifeless corpse. And at first, thinking that it still lived, he prayed in like wise. But when he heard no sighs (as usual) come from the worshipper’s breast, he fell to a tearful kiss, understanding how the very corpse of the saint was praying, in seemly attitude, to that God to whom all live.

So, having wrapped up and carried forth the corpse, and chanting hymns of the Christian tradition, Antony grew sad, because he had no spade, wherewith to dig the ground; and thinking over many plans in his mind, said, “If I go back to the monastery, it is a three days’ journey. If I stay here, I shall be of no more use. I will die, then, as it is fit; and, falling beside thy warrior, Christ, breathe my last breath.”

As he was thinking thus to himself, lo! two lions came running from the inner part of the desert, their manes tossing on their necks; seeing whom he shuddered at first; and then, turning his mind to God, remained fearless, as though he were looking upon doves. They came straight to the corpse of the blessed old man, and crouched at his feet, wagging their tails, and roaring with mighty growls, so that Antony understood them to lament, as best they could. Then not far off they began to claw the ground with their paws, and, carrying out the sand eagerly, dug a place large enough to hold a man: then at once, as if begging a reward for their work, they came to Antony, drooping their necks, and licking his hands and feet. But he perceived that they prayed a blessing from him; and at once, bursting into praise of Christ, because even dumb animals felt that he was God, he saith, “Lord, without whose word not a leaf of the tree drops, nor one sparrow falls to the ground, give to them as thou knowest how to give.” And, signing to them with his hand, he bade them go.

And when they had departed, he bent his aged shoulders to the weight of the holy corpse; and laying it in the grave, heaped earth on it, and raised a mound as is the wont. And when another dawn shone, lest the pious heir should not possess aught of the goods of the intestate dead, he kept for himself the tunic which Paul had woven, as baskets are made, out of the leaves of the palm; and returning to the monastery, told his disciples all throughout; and, on the solemn days of Easter and Pentecost, always clothed himself in Paul’s tunic.

I am inclined, at the end of my treatise, to ask those who know not the extent of their patrimonies; who cover their houses with marbles; who sew the price of whole farms into their garments with a single thread—What was ever wanting to this naked old man? Ye drink from a gem; he satisfied nature from the hollow of his hands. Ye weave gold into your tunics; he had not even the vilest garment of your bond-slave. But, on the other hand, to that poor man Paradise is open; you, gilded as you are, Gehenna will receive. He, though naked, kept the garment of Christ; you, clothed in silk, have lost Christ’s robe. Paul lies covered with the meanest dust, to rise in glory; you are crushed by wrought sepulchres of stone, to burn with all your works. Spare, I beseech you, yourselves; spare, at least, the riches which you love. Why do you wrap even your dead in golden vestments? Why does not ambition stop amid grief and tears? Cannot the corpses of the rich decay, save in silk? I beseech thee, whosoever thou art that readest this, to remember Hieronymus the sinner, who, if the Lord gave him choice, would much sooner choose Paul’s tunic with his merits, than the purple of kings with their punishments.

This is the story of Paul and Antony, as told by Jerome. But, in justice to Antony himself, it must be said that the sayings recorded of him seem to show that he was not the mere visionary ascetic which his biographers have made him. Some twenty sermons are attributed to him, seven of which only are considered to be genuine. A rule for monks, too, is called his: but, as it is almost certain that he could neither read nor write, we have no proof that any of these documents convey his actual language. If the seven sermons attributed to him be really his, it must be said for them that they are full of sound doctrine and vital religion, and worthy, as wholes, to be preached in any English church, if we only substitute for the word “monk,” the word “man.”

But there are records of Antony which represent him as a far more genial and human personage; full of a knowledge of human nature, and of a tenderness and sympathy, which account for his undoubted power over the minds of men; and showing, too, at times, a certain covert and “pawky” humour which puts us in mind, as does the humour of many of the Egyptian hermits, of the old-fashioned Scotch. These reminiscences are contained in the “Words of the Elders,” a series of anecdotes of the desert fathers collected by various hands; which are, after all, the most interesting and probably the most trustworthy accounts of them and their ways. I shall have occasion to quote them later. I insert here some among them which relate to Antony.

SAYINGS OF ANTONY, FROM THE “WORDS OF THE ELDERS.”

A monk gave away his wealth to the poor, but kept back some for himself. Antony said to him, “Go to the village and buy meat, and bring it to me on thy bare back.” He did so: and the dogs and birds attacked him, and tore him as well as the meat. Quoth Antony, “So are those who renounce the world, and yet must needs have money, torn by dæmons.”

Antony heard high praise of a certain brother; but, when he tested him, he found that he was impatient under injury. Quoth Antony, “Thou art like a house which has a gay porch, but is broken into by thieves through the back door.”

Antony, as he sat in the desert, was weary in heart, and said, “Lord, I long to be saved, but my wandering thoughts will not let me. Show me what I shall do.” And looking up, he saw one like himself twisting ropes, and rising up to pray. And the angel (for it was one) said to him, “Work like me, Antony, and you shall be saved.”

One asked him how he could please God. Quoth Antony, “Have God always before thine eyes; whatever work thou doest, take example for it out of Holy Scripture: wherever thou stoppest, do not move thence in a hurry, but abide there in patience. If thou keepest these three things, thou shalt be saved.”

Quoth Antony, “If the baker did not cover the mill-horse’s eyes he would eat the corn, and take his own wages. So God covers our eyes, by leaving us to sordid thoughts, lest we should think of our own good works, and be puffed up in spirit.”

Quoth Antony, “I saw all the snares of the enemy spread over the whole earth. And I sighed, and said, ‘Who can pass through these?’ And a voice came to me, saying, ‘Humility alone can pass through, Antony, where the proud can in no wise go.’”

Antony was sitting in his cell, and a voice said to him, “Thou hast not yet come to the stature of a currier, who lives in Alexandria.” Then he took his staff, and went down to Alexandria; and the currier, when he found him, was astonished at seeing so great a man. Said Antony, “Tell me thy works; for on thy account have I come out of the desert.” And he answered, “I know not that I ever did any good; and, therefore, when I rise in the morning, I say that this whole city, from the greatest to the least, will enter into the kingdom of God for their righteousness: while I, for my sins, shall go to eternal pain. And this I say over again, from the bottom of my heart, when I lie down at night.” When Antony heard that, he said, “Like a good goldsmith, thou hast gained the kingdom of God sitting still in thy house; while I, as one without discretion, have been haunting the desert all my time, and yet not arrived at the measure of thy saying.”

Quoth Antony, “If a monk could tell his elders how many steps he walks, or how many cups of water he drinks, in his cell, he ought to tell them, for fear of going wrong therein.”

At Alexandria, Antony met one Didymus, most learned in the Scriptures, witty, and wise: but he was blind. Antony asked him, “Art thou not grieved at thy blindness?” He was silent: but being pressed by Antony, he confessed that he was sad thereat. Quoth Antony, “I wonder that a prudent man grieves over the loss of a thing which ants, and flies, and gnats have, instead of rejoicing in that possession which the holy Apostles earned. For it is better to see with the spirit than with the flesh.”

A Father asked Antony, “What shall I do?” Quoth the old man, “Trust not in thine own righteousness; regret not the thing which is past; bridle thy tongue and thy stomach.”

Quoth Antony, “He who sits still in the desert is safe from three enemies: from hearing, from speech, from sight: and has to fight against only one, his own heart.”

A young monk came and told Antony how he had seen some old men weary on their journey, and had bidden the wild asses to come and carry him, and they came. Quoth Antony, “That monk looks to me like a ship laden with a precious cargo; but whether it will get into port is uncertain.” And after some days he began to tear his hair and weep; and when they asked him why, he said, “A great pillar of the Church has just fallen;” and he sent brothers to see the young man, and found him sitting on his mat, weeping over a great sin which he had done; and he said, “Tell Antony to give me ten days’ truce, and I hope I shall satisfy him;” and in five days he was dead.

Abbot Elias fell into temptation, and the brethren drove him out. Then he went to the mountain to Antony. After awhile, Antony sent him home to his brethren; but they would not receive him. Then the old man sent to them, and saying, “A ship has been wrecked at sea, and lost all its cargo; and, with much toil, the ship is come empty to land. Will you sink it again in the sea?” So they took Elias back.

Quoth Antony, “There are some who keep their bodies in abstinence: but, because they have no discretion, they are far from God.”

A hunter came by, and saw Antony rejoicing with the brethren, and it displeased him. Quoth Antony, “Put an arrow in thy bow, and draw;” and he did. Quoth Antony, “Draw higher;” and again, “Draw higher still.” And he said, “If I overdraw, I shall break my bow.” Quoth Antony, “So it is in the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure, they fail.”

A brother said to Antony, “Pray for me.” Quoth he, “I cannot pity thee, nor God either, unless thou pitiest thyself, and prayest to God.”

Quoth Antony, “The Lord does not permit wars to arise in this generation, because he knows that men are weak, and cannot bear them.”

Antony, as he considered the depths of the judgments of God, failed; and said, “Lord, why do some die so early, and some live on to a decrepit age? Why are some needy, and others rich? Why are the unjust wealthy, and the just poor?” And a voice came to him, “Antony, look to thyself. These are the judgments of God, which are not fit for thee to know.”

Quoth Antony to Abbot Pastor, “This is a man’s great business—to lay each man his own fault on himself before the Lord, and to expect temptation to the last day of his life.”

Quoth Antony, “If a man works a few days, and then is idle, and works again and is idle again, he does nothing, and will not possess the perseverance of patience.”

Quoth Antony to his disciples, “If you try to keep silence, do not think that you are exercising a virtue, but that you are unworthy to speak.”

Certain old men came once to Antony; and he wished to prove them, and began to talk of holy Scripture, and to ask them, beginning at the youngest, what this and that text meant. And each answered as best they could. But he kept on saying, “You have not yet found it out.” And at last he asked Abbot Joseph, “And what dost thou think this text means?” Quoth Abbot Joseph, “I do not know.” Quoth Antony, “Abbot Joseph alone has found out the way, for he says he does not know it.”

Quoth Antony, “I do not now fear God, but love Him, for love drives out fear.”

He said again, “Life and death are very near us; for if we gain our brother, we gain God: but if we cause our brother to offend, we sin against Christ.”

A philosopher asked Antony, “How art thou content, father, since thou hast not the comfort of books?” Quoth Antony, “My book is the nature of created things. In it, when I choose, I can read the words of God.”

Brethren came to Antony, and asked of him a saying by which they might be saved. Quoth he, “Ye have heard the Scriptures, and know what Christ requires of you.” But they begged that he would tell them something of his own. Quoth he, “The Gospel says, ‘If a man smite you on one cheek, turn to him the other.’” But they said that they could not do that. Quoth he, “You cannot turn the other cheek to him? Then let him smite you again on the same one.” But they said they could not do that either. Then said he, “If you cannot, at least do not return evil for evil.” And when they said that neither could they do that, quoth Antony to his disciples, “Go, get them something to eat, for they are very weak.” And he said to them, “If you cannot do the one, and will not have the other, what do you want? As I see, what you want is prayer. That will heal your weakness.”

Quoth Antony, “He who would be free from his sins must be so by weeping and mourning; and he who would be built up in virtue must be built up by tears.”

Quoth Antony, “When the stomach is full of meat, forthwith the great vices bubble out, according to that which the Saviour says: ‘That which entereth into the mouth defileth not a man; but that which cometh out of the heart sinks a man in destruction.’”

[This may be a somewhat paradoxical application of the text: but the last anecdote of Antony which I shall quote is full of wisdom and humanity.]

A monk came from Alexandria, Eulogius by name, bringing with him a man afflicted with elephantiasis. Now Eulogius had been a scholar, learned, and rich, and had given away all he had save a very little, which he kept because he could not work with his own hands.

And he told Antony how he had found that wretched man lying in the street fifteen years before, having lost then nearly every member save his tongue, and how he had taken him home to his cell, nursed him, bathed him, physicked him, fed him; and how the man had returned him nothing save slanders, curses, and insults; how he had insisted on having meat, and had had it; and on going out in public, and had company brought to him; and how he had at last demanded to be put down again whence he had been taken, always cursing and slandering. And now Eulogius could bear the man no longer, and was minded to take him at his word.

Then said Antony with an angry voice, “Wilt thou cast him out, Eulogius? He who remembers that he made him, will not cast him out. If thou cast him out, he will find a better friend than thee. God will choose some one who will take him up when he is cast away.” Eulogius was terrified at these words, and held his peace.

Then went Antony to the sick man, and shouted at him, “Thou elephantiac, foul with mud and dirt, not worthy of the third heaven, wilt thou not stop shouting blasphemies against God? Dost thou not know that he who ministers to thee is Christ? How darest thou say such things against Christ?” And he bade Eulogius and the sick man go back to their cell, and live in peace, and never part more. Both went back, and, after forty days, Eulogius died, and the sick man shortly after, “altogether whole in spirit.”

HILARION

I would gladly, did space allow, give more biographies from among those of the Egyptian hermits: but it seems best, having shown the reader Antony as the father of Egyptian monachism, to go on to his great pupil Hilarion, the father of monachism in Palestine. His life stands written at length by St. Jerome, who himself died a monk at Bethlehem; and is composed happily in a less ambitious and less rugged style than that of Paul, not without elements of beauty, even of tragedy.

PROLOGUE

Remember me in thy holy prayers, glory and honour of virgins, nun Asella. Before beginning to write the life of the blessed Hilarion, I invoke the Holy Spirit which dwelt in him, that, as he largely bestowed virtues on Hilarion, he may give to me speech wherewith to relate them; so that his deeds may be equalled by my language. For those who (as Crispus says) “have wrought virtues” are held to have been worthily praised in proportion to the words in which famous intellects have been able to extol them. Alexander the Great, the Macedonian (whom Daniel calls either the brass, or the leopard, or the he-goat), on coming to the tomb of Achilles, “Happy art thou, youth,” he said, “who hast been blest with a great herald of thy worth”—meaning Homer. But I have to tell the conversation and life of such and so great a man, that even Homer, were he here, would either envy my matter, or succumb under it.

For although St. Epiphanius, bishop of Salamina in Cyprus, who had much intercourse with Hilarion, has written his praise in a short epistle, which is commonly read, yet it is one thing to praise the dead in general phrases, another to relate his special virtues. We therefore set to work rather to his advantage than to his injury; and despise those evil-speakers who lately carped at Paul, and will perhaps now carp at my Hilarion, unjustly blaming the former for his solitary life, and the latter for his intercourse with men; in order that the one, who was never seen, may be supposed not to have existed; the other, who was seen by many, may be held cheap. This was the way of their ancestors likewise, the Pharisees, who were neither satisfied with John’s desert life and fasting, nor with the Lord Saviour’s public life, eating and drinking. But I shall lay my hand to the work which I have determined, and pass by, with stopped ears, the hounds of Scylla. I pray that thou mayest persevere in Christ, and be mindful of me in thy prayers, most sacred virgin.

THE LIFE

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.

To go on with almost chance quotations:—

Some monks were eating at a festival, and one said to the serving man, “I eat nothing cooked; tell them to bring me salt.” The serving man began to talk loudly: “That brother eats no cooked meat; bring him a little salt.” Quoth Abbot Theodore: “It were more better for thee, brother, to eat meat in thy cell than to hear thyself talked about in the presence of thy brethren.”

Again: a brother came to Abbot Silvanus, in Mount Sinai, and found the brethren working, and said, “Why labour you for the meat which perisheth? Mary chose the good part.” The abbot said, “Give him a book to read, and put him in an empty cell.” About the ninth hour the brother looked out, to see if he would be called to eat, and at last came to the abbot, and asked, “Do not the brethren eat to-day, abbot?” “Yes.” “Then why was not I called?” Then quoth Abbot Silvanus: “Thou art a spiritual man: and needest not their food. We are carnal, and must eat, because we work: but thou hast chosen the better part.” Whereat the monk was ashamed.

As was also John the dwarf, who wanted to be “without care like the angels, doing nothing but praise God.” So he threw away his cloak, left his brother the abbot, and went into the desert. But after seven days he came back, and knocked at the door. “Who is there?” asked his brother. “John.” “Nay, John is turned into an angel, and is no more among men.” So he left him outside all night; and in the morning gave him to understand that if he was a man he must work, but that if he was an angel, he had no need to live in a cell.

Consider again the saying of the great Antony, when some brethren were praising another in his presence. But Antony tried him, and found that he could not bear an injury. Then said the old man, “Brother, thou art like a house with an ornamented porch, while the thieves break into it by the back door.”

Or this, of Abbot Isidore, when the devil tempted him to despair, and told him that he would be lost after all: “If I do go into torment, I shall still find you below me there.”

Or this, of Zeno the Syrian, when some Egyptian monks came to him and began accusing themselves: “The Egyptians hide the virtues which they have, and confess vices which they have not. The Syrians and Greeks boast of virtues which they have not, and hide vices which they have.”

Or this: One old man said to another, “I am dead to this world.” “Do not trust yourself,” quoth the other, “till you are out of this world. If you are dead, the devil is not.”

Two old men lived in the same cell, and had never disagreed. Said one to the other, “Let us have just one quarrel, like other men.” Quoth the other: “I do not know what a quarrel is like.” Quoth the first: “Here—I will put a brick between us, and say that it is mine: and you shall say it is not mine; and over that let us have a contention and a squabble.” But when they put the brick between them, and one said, “It is mine,” the other said, “I hope it is mine.” And when the first said, “It is mine, it is not yours,” he answered, “If it is yours, take it.” So they could not find out how to have a quarrel.

Anger, malice, revenge, were accursed things in the eyes of these men. There was enough of them, and too much, among their monks; but far less, doubt not, than in the world outside. For within the monastery it was preached against, repressed, punished; and when repented of, forgiven, with loving warnings and wise rules against future transgression.

Abbot Agathon used to say, “I never went to sleep with a quarrel against any man; nor did I, as far as lay in me, let one who had a quarrel against me sleep till he had made peace.”

Abbot Isaac was asked why the devils feared him so much. “Since I was made a monk,” he said, “I settled with myself that no angry word should come out of my mouth.”

An old man said, “Anger arises from these four things: from the lust of avarice, in giving and receiving; from loving one’s own opinion; from wishing to be honoured; and from fancying oneself a teacher and hoping to be wiser than everybody. And anger obscures human reason by these four ways: if a man hate his neighbour; or if he envy him; or if he look on him as nought; or if he speak evil of him.”

A brother being injured by another, came to Abbot Sidonius, told his story, and said, “I wish to avenge myself, father.” The abbot begged him to leave vengeance to God: but when he refused, said, “Then let us pray.” Whereon the old man rose, and said, “God, thou art not necessary to us any longer, that thou shouldest be careful of us: for we, as this brother says, both will and can avenge ourselves.” At which that brother fell at his feet, and begged pardon, promising never to strive with his enemy.

Abbot Pœmen said often, “Let malice never overcome thee. If any man do thee harm, repay him with good, that thou mayest conquer evil with good.”

In a congregation at Scetis, when many men’s lives and conversation had been talked over, Abbot Pior held his tongue. After it was over, he went out, and filled a sack with sand, and put it on his back. Then he took a little bag, filled it likewise with sand, and carried it before him. And when the brethren asked him what he meant, he said, “The sack behind is my own sins, which are very many: yet I have cast them behind my back, and will not see them, nor weep over them. But I have put these few sins of my brother’s before my eyes, and am tormenting myself over them, and condemning my brother.”

A brother having committed a fault, went to Antony, and his brethren followed, upbraiding him, and wanting to bring him back; while he denied having done the wrong. Abbot Paphnutius was there, and spoke a parable to them:—

“I saw on the river bank a man sunk in the mud up to his knees. And men came to pull him out, and thrust him in up to the neck.”

Then said Antony of Paphnutius, “Behold a man who can indeed save souls.”

Abbot Macarius was going up to the mountain of Nitria, and sent his disciple on before. The disciple met an idol-priest hurrying on, and carrying a great beam: to whom he cried, “Where art thou running, devil?” At which he was wroth, and beat him so that he left him half dead, and then ran on, and met Macarius, who said, “Salvation to thee, labourer, salvation!” He answered, wondering, “What good hast thou seen in me that thou salutest me?” “Because I saw thee working and running, though ignorantly.” To whom the priest said, “Touched by thy salutation, I knew thee to be a great servant of God; for another—I know not who—miserable monk met me and insulted me, and I gave him blows for his words.” Then laying hold of Macarius’s feet he said, “Unless thou make me a monk I will not leave hold of thee.”

After all, of the best of these men are told (with much honesty) many sayings which show that they felt in their minds and hearts that the spirit was above the letter: sayings which show that they had at least at times glimpses of a simpler and more possible virtue; foretastes of a perfection more human, and it may be more divine.

“Better,” said Abbot Hyperichius, “to eat flesh and drink wine, than to eat our brethren’s flesh with bitter words.”

A brother asked an elder, “Give me, father one thing which I may keep, and be saved thereby.” The elder answered, “If thou canst be injured and insulted, and hear and be silent, that is a great thing, and above all the other commandments.”

One of the elders used to say, “Whatever a man shrinks from let him not do to another. Dost thou shrink if any man detracts from thee? Speak not ill of another. Dost thou shrink if any man slanders thee, or if any man takes aught from thee? Do not that or the like to another man. For he that shall have kept this saying, will find it suffice for his salvation.”

“The nearer,” said Abbot Muthues, “a man approaches God, the more he will see himself to be a sinner.”

Abbot Sisois, when he lay dying, begged to live a little longer, that he might repent; and when they wondered, he told them that he had not yet even begun repentance. Whereby they saw that he was perfect in the fear of the Lord.

But the most startling confession of all must have been that wrung from the famous Macarius the elder. He had been asked once by a brother, to tell him a rule by which he might be saved; and his answer had been this:—to fly from men, to sit in his cell, and to lament for his sins continually; and, what was above all virtues, to keep his tongue in order as well as his appetite.

But (whether before or after that answer is not said) he gained a deeper insight into true virtue, on the day when (like Antony when he was reproved by the example of the tanner in Alexandria) he heard a voice telling him that he was inferior to two women who dwelt in the nearest town. Catching up his staff, like Antony, he went off to see the wonder. The women, when questioned by him as to their works, were astonished. They had been simply good wives for years past, married to two brothers, and living in the same house. But when pressed by him, they confessed that they had never said a foul word to each other, and never quarrelled. At one time they had agreed together to retire into a nunnery, but could not, for all their prayers, obtain the consent of their husbands. On which they had both made an oath, that they would never, to their deaths, speak one worldly word.

Which when the blessed Macarius had heard, he said, “In truth there is neither virgin, nor married woman, nor monk, nor secular; but God only requires the intention, and ministers the spirit of life to all.”

ARSENIUS

I shall give one more figure, and that a truly tragical one, from these “Lives of the Egyptian Fathers,” namely, that of the once great and famous Arsenius, the Father (as he was at one time called) of the Emperors. Theodosius, the great statesman and warrior, who for some twenty years kept up by his single hand the falling empire of Rome, heard how Arsenius was at once the most pious and the most learned of his subjects; and wishing—half barbarian as he was himself—that his sons should be brought up, not only as scholars, but as Christians, he sent for Arsenius to his court, and made him tutor to his two young sons Honorius and Arcadius. But the two lads had neither their father’s strength nor their father’s nobleness. Weak and profligate, they fretted Arsenius’s soul day by day; and, at last, so goes the story, provoked him so far that, according to the fashion of a Roman pedagogue, he took the ferula and administered to one of the princes a caning, which he no doubt deserved. The young prince, in revenge, plotted against his life. Among the parasites of the Palace it was not difficult to find those who would use steel and poison readily enough in the service of an heir-apparent, and Arsenius fled for his life: and fled, as men were wont in those days, to Egypt and the Thebaid. Forty years old he was when he left the court, and forty years more he spent among the cells at Scetis, weeping day and night. He migrated afterwards to a place called Troe, and there died at the age of ninety-five, having wept himself, say his admirers, almost blind. He avoided, as far as possible, beholding the face of man; upon the face of woman he would never look. A noble lady, whom he had known probably in the world, came all the way from Rome to see him; but he refused himself to her sternly, almost roughly. He had known too much of the fine ladies of the Roman court; all he cared for was peace. There is a story of him that, changing once his dwelling-place, probably from Scetis to Troe, he asked, somewhat peevishly, of the monks around him, “What that noise was?” They told him it was only the wind among the reeds. “Alas!” he said, “I have fled everywhere in search of silence, and yet here the very reeds speak.” The simple and comparatively unlearned monks around him looked with a profound respect on the philosopher, courtier, scholar, who had cast away the real pomps and vanities of this life, such as they had never known. There is a story told, plainly concerning Arsenius, though his name is not actually mentioned in it, how a certain old monk saw him lying upon a softer mat than his fellows, and indulged with a few more comforts; and complained indignantly of his luxury, and the abbot’s favouritism. Then asked the abbot, “What didst thou eat before thou becamest a monk?” He confessed he had been glad enough to fill his stomach with a few beans. “How wert thou dressed?” He was glad enough, again he confessed, to have any clothes at all on his back. “Where didst thou sleep?” “Often enough on the bare ground in the open air,” was the answer. “Then,” said the abbot, “thou art, by thy own confession, better off as a monk than thou wast as a poor labouring man: and yet thou grudgest a little comfort to one who has given up more luxury than thou hast ever beheld. This man slept beneath silken canopies; he was carried in gilded litters, by trains of slaves; he was clothed in purple and fine linen; he fed upon all the delicacies of the great city: and he has given up all for Christ. And what hast thou given up, that thou shouldst grudge him a softer mat, or a little more food each day?” And so the monk was abashed, and held his peace.

As for Arsenius’s tears, it is easy to call his grief exaggerated or superstitious: but those who look on them with human eyes will pardon them, and watch with sacred pity the grief of a good man, who felt that his life had been an utter failure. He saw his two pupils, between whom, at their father’s death, the Roman Empire was divided into Eastern and Western, grow more and more incapable of governing. He saw a young barbarian, whom he must have often met at the court in Byzantium, as Master of the Horse, come down from his native forests, and sack the Eternal City of Rome. He saw evil and woe unspeakable fall on that world which he had left behind him, till the earth was filled with blood, and Antichrist seemed ready to appear, and the day of judgment to be at hand. And he had been called to do what he could to stave off this ruin, to make those young princes decree justice and rule in judgment by the fear of God. But he had failed; and there was nothing left to him save self-accusation and regret, and dread lest some, at least, of the blood which had been shed might be required at his hands. Therefore, sitting upon his palm-mat there in Troe, he wept his life away; happier, nevertheless, and more honourable in the sight of God and man than if, like a Mazarin or a Talleyrand, and many another crafty politician, both in Church and State, he had hardened his heart against his own mistakes, and, by crafty intrigue and adroit changing of sides at the right moment, had contrived to secure for himself, out of the general ruin, honour and power and wealth, and delicate food, and a luxurious home, and so been one of those of whom the Psalmist says, with awful irony, “So long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of thee.”

One good deed at least Arsenius had seen done—a deed which has lasted to all time, and done, too, to the eternal honour of his order, by a monk—namely, the abolition of gladiator shows. For centuries these wholesale murders had lasted through the Roman Republic and through the Roman Empire. Human beings in the prime of youth and health, captives or slaves, condemned malefactors, and even free-born men, who hired themselves out to death, had been trained to destroy each other in the amphitheatre for the amusement, not merely of the Roman mob, but of the Roman ladies. Thousands sometimes, in a single day, had been

“Butchered to make a Roman holiday.”

The training of gladiators had become a science. By their weapons and their armour, and their modes of fighting, they had been distinguished into regular classes, of which the antiquaries count up full eighteen: Andabatæ, who wore helmets without any opening for the eyes, so that they were obliged to fight blindfold, and thus excited the mirth of the spectators; Hoplomachi, who fought in a complete suit of armour; Mirmillones, who had the image of a fish upon their helmets, and fought in armour with a short sword, matched usually against the Retiarii, who fought without armour, and whose weapons were a casting-net and a trident. These, and other species of fighters, were drilled and fed in “families” by Lanistæ; or regular trainers, who let them out to persons wishing to exhibit a show. Women, even high-born ladies, had been seized in former times with the madness of fighting, and, as shameless as cruel, had gone down into the arena to delight with their own wounds and their own gore the eyes of the Roman people.

And these things were done, and done too often, under the auspices of the gods, and at their most sacred festivals. So deliberate and organized a system of wholesale butchery has never perhaps existed on this earth before or since, not even in the worship of those Mexican gods whose idols Cortez and his soldiers found fed with human hearts, and the walls of their temples crusted with human gore. Gradually the spirit of the Gospel had been triumphing over this abomination. Ever since the time of Tertullian, in the second century, Christian preachers and writers had lifted up their voice in the name of humanity. Towards the end of the third century, the Emperors themselves had so far yielded to the voice of reason, as to forbid by edicts the gladiatorial fights. But the public opinion of the mob in most of the great cities had been too strong both for saints and for emperors. St. Augustine himself tells us of the horrible joy which he, in his youth, had seen come over the vast ring of flushed faces at these horrid sights; and in Arsenius’s own time, his miserable pupil, the weak Honorius, bethought himself of celebrating once more the heathen festival of the Secular Games, and formally to allow therein an exhibition of gladiators. But in the midst of that show sprang down into the arena of the Colosseum of Rome an unknown monk, some said from Nitria, some from Phrygia, and with his own hands parted the combatants in the name of Christ and God. The mob, baulked for a moment of their pleasure, sprang on him, and stoned him to death. But the crime was followed by a sudden revulsion of feeling. By an edict of the Emperor the gladiatorial sports were forbidden for ever; and the Colosseum, thenceforth useless, crumbled slowly away into that vast ruin which remains unto this day, purified, as men well said, from the blood of tens of thousands, by the blood of one true and noble martyr.

THE HERMITS OF ASIA

The impulse which, given by Antony, had been propagated in Asia by his great pupil, Hilarion, spread rapidly far and wide. Hermits took possession of the highest peaks of Sinai; and driven from thence, so tradition tells, by fear of those mysterious noises which still haunt its cliffs, settled at that sheltered spot where now stands the convent of St. Catharine. Massacred again and again by the wild Arab tribes, their places were filled up by fresh hermits, and their spiritual descendants hold the convent to this day.

Through the rich and luxuriant region of Syria, and especially round the richest and most luxurious of its cities, Antioch, hermits settled, and bore, by the severity of their lives, a noble witness against the profligacy of its inhabitants, who had half renounced the paganism of their forefathers without renouncing in the least, it seems, those sins which drew down of old the vengeance of a righteous God upon their forefathers, whether in Canaan or in Syria itself.

At Antioch, about the year 347, was born the famous Chrysostom, John of the Golden Mouth; and near Antioch he became a hermit, and dwelt, so legends say, several years alone in the wilderness: till, nerved by that hard training, he went forth again into the world to become, whether at Antioch or at Constantinople, the bravest as well as the most eloquent preacher of righteousness and rebuker of sin which the world had seen since the times of St. Paul. The labours of Chrysostom belong not so much to this book as to a general ecclesiastical history: but it must not be forgotten that he, like all the great men of that age, had been a monk, and kept up his monastic severity, even in the midst of the world, until his dying day.

At Nisibis, again, upon the very frontier of Persia, appeared another very remarkable personage, known as the Great Jacob or Great St. James. Taking (says his admiring biographer, Theodoret of Cyra) to the peaks of the loftiest mountains, he passed his life on them, in spring and summer haunting the woods, with the sky for a roof, but sheltering himself in winter in a cave. His food was wild fruits and mountain herbs. He never used a fire, and, clothed in a goats’ hair garment, was perhaps the first of those Boscoi, or “browsing hermits,” who lived literally like the wild animals in the flesh, while they tried to live like angels in the spirit.

Some of the stories told of Jacob savour of that vindictiveness which Giraldus Cambrensis, in after years, attributed to the saints in Ireland. He was walking one day over the Persian frontier, “to visit the plants of true religion” and “bestow on them due care,” when he passed at a fountain a troop of damsels washing clothes and treading them with their feet. They seem, according to the story, to have stared at the wild man, instead of veiling their faces or letting down their garments. No act or word of rudeness is reported of them: but Jacob’s modesty or pride was so much scandalized that he cursed both the fountain and the girls. The fountain of course dried up forthwith, and the damsels’ hair turned grey. They ran weeping into the town. The townsfolk came out, and compelled Jacob, by their prayers, to restore the water to their fountain; but the grey hair he refused to restore to its original hue unless the damsels would come and beg pardon publicly themselves. The poor girls were ashamed to come, and their hair remained grey ever after.

A story like this may raise a smile in some of my readers, in others something like indignation or contempt. But as long as such legends remain in these hermit lives, told with as much gravity as any other portion of the biography, and eloquently lauded, as this deed is, by Bishop Theodoret, as proofs of the holiness and humanity of the saint, an honest author is bound to notice some of them at least, and not to give an alluring and really dishonest account of these men and their times, by detailing every anecdote which can elevate them in the mind of the reader, while he carefully omits all that may justly disgust him.

Yet, after all, we are not bound to believe this legend, any more than we are bound to believe that when Jacob saw a Persian judge give an unjust sentence, he forthwith cursed, not him, but a rock close by, which instantly crumbled into innumerable fragments, so terrifying that judge that he at once revoked his sentence, and gave a just decision.

Neither, again, need we believe that it was by sending, as men said in his own days, swarms of mosquitos against the Persian invaders, that he put to flight their elephants and horses: and yet it may be true that, in the famous siege of Nisibis, Jacob played the patriot and the valiant man. For when Sapor, the Persian king, came against Nisibis with all his forces, with troops of elephants, and huge machines of war, and towers full of archers wheeled up to the walls, and at last, damming the river itself, turned its current against the fortifications of unburnt brick, until a vast breach was opened in the walls, then Jacob, standing in the breach, encouraged by his prayers his fellow-townsmen to stop it with stone, brick, timber, and whatsoever came to hand; and Sapor, the Persian Sultan, saw “that divine man,” and his goats’-hair tunic and cloak seemed transformed into a purple robe and royal diadem. And, whether he was seized with superstitious fear, or whether the hot sun or the marshy ground had infected his troops with disease, or whether the mosquito swarms actually became intolerable, the great King of Persia turned and went away.

So Nisibis was saved for a while; to be shamefully surrendered to the Persians a few years afterwards by the weak young Emperor Jovian. Old Ammianus Marcellinus, brave soldier as he was, saw with disgust the whole body of citizens ordered to quit the city within three days, and “men appointed to compel obedience to the order, with threats of death to every one who delayed his departure; and the whole city was a scene of mourning and lamentation, and in every quarter nothing was heard but one universal wail, matrons tearing their hair, and about to be driven from the homes in which they had been born and brought up; the mother who had lost her children, or the wife who had lost her husband, about to be torn from the place rendered sacred by their shades, clinging to their doorposts, embracing their thresholds, and pouring forth floods of tears. Every road was crowded, each person struggling away as he could. Many, too, loaded themselves with as much of their property as they thought they could carry, while leaving behind them abundant and costly furniture, which they could not remove for want of beasts of burden.” [159]

One treasure, however, they did remove, of which the old soldier Ammianus says nothing, and which, had he seen it pass him on the road, he would have treated with supreme contempt. And that, says Theodoret, was the holy body of “their prince and defender,” St. James the mountain hermit, round which the emigrants chanted, says Theodoret, hymns of regret and praise, “for, had he been alive, that city would have never passed into barbarian hands.”

There stood with Jacob in the breach, during that siege of Nisibis, a man of gentler temperament, a disciple of his, who had received baptism at his hands, and who was, like himself, a hermit—Ephraim, or Ephrem, of Edessa, as he is commonly called, for, though born at Nisibis, his usual home was at Edessa, the metropolis of a Syrian-speaking race. Into the Syrian tongue Ephrem translated the doctrines of the Christian faith and the Gospel history, and spread abroad, among the heathen round, a number of delicate and graceful hymns, which remain to this day, and of which some have lately been translated into English. [160] Soft, sad, and dreamy as they were, they had strength and beauty enough in them to supersede the Gnostic hymns of Bardesanes and his son Harmonius, which had been long popular among the Syrians; and for centuries afterwards, till Christianity was swept away by the followers of Mahomet, the Syrian husbandman beguiled his toil with the pious and plaintive melodies of St. Ephrem.

But Ephrem was not only a hermit and a poet: he was a preacher and a missionary. If he wept, as it was said, day and night for his own sins and the sins of mankind, he did his best at least to cure those sins. He was a demagogue, or leader of the people, for good and not for evil, to whom the simple Syrians looked up for many a year as their spiritual father. He died in peace, as he said himself, like the labourer who has finished his day’s work, like the wandering merchant who returns to his fatherland, leaving nothing behind him save prayers and counsels, for “Ephrem,” he added, “had neither wallet nor pilgrim’s staff.”

“His last utterance” (I owe this fact to M. de Montalembert’s book, “Moines d’Occident”) “was a protest on behalf of the dignity of man redeemed by the Son of God.”

“The young and pious daughter of the Governor of Edessa came weeping to receive his latest breath. He made her swear never again to be carried in a litter by slaves, ‘The neck of man,’ he said, ‘should bear no yoke save that of Christ.’” This anecdote is one among many which go to prove that from the time that St. Paul had declared the great truth that in Christ Jesus was neither bond nor free, and had proclaimed the spiritual brotherhood of all men in Christ, slavery, as an institution, was doomed to slow but certain death. But that death was accelerated by the monastic movement, wherever it took root. A class of men who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister to others; who prided themselves upon needing fewer luxuries than the meanest slaves; who took rank among each other and among men not on the ground of race, nor of official position, nor of wealth, nor even of intellect, but simply on the ground of virtue, was a perpetual protest against slavery and tyranny of every kind; a perpetual witness to the world that, whether all men were equal or not in the sight of God, the only rank among them of which God would take note, would be their rank in goodness.

BASIL

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.

SIMEON STYLITES

Of all such anchorites of the far East, the most remarkable, perhaps, was the once famous Simeon Stylites—a name almost forgotten, save by antiquaries and ecclesiastics, till Mr. Tennyson made it once more notorious in a poem as admirable for its savage grandness, as for its deep knowledge of human nature. He has comprehended thoroughly, as it seems to me, that struggle between self-abasement and self-conceit, between the exaggerated sense of sinfulness and the exaggerated ambition of saintly honour, which must have gone on in the minds of these ascetics—the temper which could cry out one moment with perfect honesty—

“Although I be the basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin;”

at the next—

“I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold
Of saintdom; and to clamour, mourn, and sob,
Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer.
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.
Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
* * * * * *
A sign between the meadow and the cloud,
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne
Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;
And I had hoped that ere this period closed
Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs
The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.
O take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe,
Not whisper any murmur of complaint.
Pain heaped ten hundred-fold to this, were still
Less burthen, by ten-hundred-fold, to bear
Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crush’d
My spirit flat before thee.”

Admirably also has Mr. Tennyson conceived the hermit’s secret doubt of the truth of those miracles, which he is so often told that he has worked, that he at last begins to believe that he must have worked them; and the longing, at the same time, to justify himself to himself, by persuading himself that he has earned miraculous powers. On this whole question of hermit miracles I shall speak at length hereafter. I have given specimens enough of them already, and shall give as few as possible henceforth. There is a sameness about them which may become wearisome to those who cannot be expected to believe them. But what the hermits themselves thought of them, is told (at least, so I suspect) only too truly by Mr. Tennyson—

“O Lord, thou knowest what a man I am;
A sinful man, conceived and born in sin:
’Tis their own doing; this is none of mine;
Lay it not to me. Am I to blame for this,
That here come those who worship me? Ha! ha!
The silly people take me for a saint,
And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:
And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here),
Have all in all endured as much, and more
Than many just and holy men, whose names
Are register’d and calendar’d for saints.
Good people, you do ill to kneel to me.
What is it I can have done to merit this?
It may be I have wrought some miracles,
And cured some halt and maimed: but what of that?
It may be, no one, even among the saints,
Can match his pains with mine: but what of that?
Yet do not rise; for you may look on me,
And in your looking you may kneel to God.
Speak, is there any of you halt and maimed?
I think you know I have some power with heaven
From my long penance; let him speak his wish.
Yes, I can heal him. Power goes forth from me.
They say that they are heal’d. Ah, hark! they shout,
‘St. Simeon Stylites!’ Why, if so,
God reaps a harvest in me. O my soul,
God reaps a harvest in thee. If this be,
Can I work miracles, and not be saved?
This is not told of any. They were saints.
It cannot be but that I shall be saved;
Yea, crowned a saint.” . . .

I shall not take the liberty of quoting more: but shall advise all who read these pages to study seriously Mr. Tennyson’s poem if they wish to understand that darker side of the hermit life which became at last, in the East, the only side of it. For in the East the hermits seem to have degenerated, by the time of the Mahomedan conquest, into mere self-torturing fakeers, like those who may be seen to this day in Hindostan. The salt lost its savour, and in due tune it was trampled under foot; and the armies of the Moslem swept out of the East a superstition which had ended by enervating instead of ennobling humanity.

But in justice, not only to myself, but to Mr. Tennyson (whose details of Simeon’s asceticism may seem to some exaggerated and impossible), I have thought fit to give his life at length, omitting only many of his miracles, and certain stories of his penances, which can only excite horror and disgust, without edifying the reader.

There were, then, three hermits of this name, often confounded; and all alike famous (as were Julian, Daniel, and other Stylites) for standing for many years on pillars. One of the Simeons is said by Moschus to have been struck by lightning, and his death to have been miraculously revealed to Julian the Stylite, who lived twenty-four miles off. More than one Stylite, belonging to the Monophysite heresy of Severus Acephalus, was to be found, according to Moschus, in the East at the beginning of the seventh century. This biography is that of the elder Simeon, who died (according to Cedrenus) about 460, after passing some forty or fifty years upon pillars of different heights. There is much discrepancy in the accounts, both of his date and of his age; but that such a person really existed, and had his imitators, there can be no doubt. He is honoured as a saint alike by the Latin and by the Greek Churches.

His life has been written by a disciple of his named Antony, who professes to have been with him when he died; and also by Theodoret, who knew him well in life. Both are to be found in Rosweyde, and there seems no reason to doubt their authenticity. I have therefore interwoven them both, marking the paragraphs taken from each.

Theodoret, who says that he was born in the village of Gesa, between Antioch and Cilicia, calls him that “famous Simeon—that great miracle of the whole world, whom all who obey the Roman rule know; whom the Persians also know, and the Indians, and Æthiopians; nay, his fame has even spread to the wandering Scythians, and taught them his love of toil and love of wisdom;” and says that he might be compared with Jacob the patriarch, Joseph the temperate, Moses the legislator, David the king and prophet, Micaiah the prophet, and the divine men who were like them. He tells how Simeon, as a boy, kept his father’s sheep, and, being forced by heavy snow to leave them in the fold, went with his parents to the church, and there heard the Gospel which blesses those who mourn and weep, and calls those miserable who laugh, and those enviable who have a pure heart. And when he asked a bystander what he would gain who did each of these things, the man propounded to him the solitary life, and pointed out to him the highest philosophy.

This, Theodoret says, he heard from the saint’s own tongue. His disciple Antony gives the story of his conversion somewhat differently.