IV. THE CHRISTIAN EAST
1. The Monks of the East
As the Church ceased to be a set of devotees and became an institution governing millions of men, she tended to adopt a more lenient view of human frailty, and to tolerate, sometimes to share, the pleasures of this world. A minority of Christians held such condescension to be treason to Christ; they resolved to gain heaven by poverty, chastity, and prayer, and retired completely from the world. Possibly Ashoka’s missionaries (c. 250 B.C.) had brought to the Near East the monastic forms as well as the theory and ethics of Buddhism; and pre-Christian anchorites like those of Serapis in Egypt, or the Essene communities in Judea, may have transmitted to Anthony and Pachomius the ideals and methods of the strictly religious life. Monasticism was for many souls a refuge from the chaos and war of the barbarian invasions; there were no taxes in the monastery or the desert cell, no military service, no marital strife, no weary toil; ordination to the priesthood was not required of a monk; and after a few years of peace would come eternal bliss.
Egypt, whose climate almost invited monasticism, teemed with anchoritic and cenobitic monks, following the solitary habits of Anthony, or the community life that Pachomius had established at Tabenne. The Nile was banked with monasteries and convents, some containing as many as 3000 monks and nuns. Of the anchorites Anthony (c. 251–356) was by far the most renowned. After wandering from solitude to solitude he fixed his cell on Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea. Admirers found him out, imitated his devotion, and built their cells as near to his as he would permit; before he died the desert was peopled with his spiritual progeny. He seldom washed, and lived to the age of 105. He declined an invitation from Constantine, but at the age of ninety he journeyed to Alexandria to support Athanasius against the Arians. Only less famous was Pachomius, who (325) founded nine monasteries and one nunnery; sometimes 7000 monks who followed his rule gathered to celebrate some holy day. These cenobites worked as well as prayed; periodically they sailed down the Nile to Alexandria to sell their products, buy their necessities, and join in the ecclesiastical-political fray.
Among the anchorites a keen rivalry arose for the austerity championship. Macarius of Alexandria, says the Abbé Duchesne, “could never hear of any feat of asceticism without at once trying to surpass it.” If other monks ate no cooked food in Lent, Macarius ate none for seven years; if some punished themselves with sleeplessness, Macarius could be seen “frantically endeavoring for twenty consecutive nights to keep himself awake.” Throughout one Lent he stood upright night and day, and ate nothing except, once a week, a few cabbage leaves; and during this time he continued to work at his basket-weaving trade.32 For six months he slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to poisonous flies.33 Some monks excelled in feats of solitude; so Serapion inhabited a cave at the bottom of an abyss into which few pilgrims had the hardihood to descend; when Jerome and Paula reached his lair they found a man almost composed of bones, dressed only in a loincloth, face and shoulders covered by uncut hair; his cell was barely large enough for a bed of leaves and a plank; yet this man had lived among the aristocracy of Rome.34 Some, like Bessarion for forty, Pachomius for fifty, years, never lay down while they slept;35 some specialized in silence, and went many years without uttering a word; others carried heavy weights wherever they went, or bound their limbs with iron bracelets, greaves, or chains. Many proudly recorded the number of years since they had looked upon a woman’s face.36 Nearly all anchorites lived—some to a great age—on a narrow range of food. Jerome tells of monks who subsisted exclusively on figs or on barley bread. When Macarius was ill someone brought him grapes; unwilling so to indulge himself, he sent them to another hermit, who sent them to another; and so they made the rounds of the desert (Rufinus assures us) until they came back intact to Macarius.37 The pilgrims who flocked from all quarters of the Christian world to see the monks of the East credited them with miracles as remarkable as those of Christ. They could cure diseases or repel demons by a touch or a word, tame serpents or lions with a look or a prayer, and cross the Nile on the back of a crocodile. The relics of the anchorites became the most precious possession of Christian churches, and are treasured in them to this day.
In the monasteries the abbot required absolute obedience, and tested novices with impossible commands. One abbot (story says) ordered a novice to leap into a raging furnace; the novice obeyed; the flame, we are informed, parted to let him pass. Another monk was told to plant the abbot’s walking stick in the earth and water it till it flowered; for years he walked daily to the Nile, two miles away, to draw water to pour upon the stick; in the third year God took pity on him and the stick bloomed.38 Work was prescribed for the monks, says Jerome,39 “lest they be led astray by dangerous imaginings.” Some tilled fields, some tended gardens, wove mats or baskets, carved wooden shoes, or copied manuscripts; many ancient classics were preserved by their pens. Most Egyptian monks, however, were innocent of letters, and scorned secular knowledge as a futile conceit.40 Many of them considered cleanliness hostile to godliness; the virgin Silvia refused to wash any part of her body except her fingers; in a convent of 130 nuns none ever bathed, or washed the feet. Towards the end of the fourth century, however, the monks became resigned to water, and the abbot Alexander, scorning this decadence, looked back longingly to the time when monks “never washed the face.”41
The Near East rivaled Egypt in the number and marvels of its monks and nuns. Jerusalem and Antioch were meshed with monastic communities or cells. The Syrian desert was peopled with anchorites; some of them, like Hindu fakirs, bound themselves with chains to immovable rocks, others disdained so settled a habitation, and roamed over the mountains eating grass.42 Simeon Stylites (390?–459), we are told, used to go without food through the forty days of Lent; during one Lent he was, at his own insistence, walled up in an enclosure with a little bread and water; on Easter he was unwalled, and the bread and the water were found untouched. At Kalat Seman, in northern Syria, about 422, Simeon built himself a column six feet high and lived on it. Ashamed of his moderation, he built and lived on ever taller columns, until he made his permanent abode on a pillar sixty feet high. Its circumference at the top was little more than three feet; a railing kept the saint from falling to the ground in his sleep. On this perch Simeon lived uninterruptedly for thirty years, exposed to rain and sun and cold. A ladder enabled disciples to take him food and remove his waste. He bound himself to the pillar by a rope; the rope became embedded in his flesh, which putrefied around it, stank, and teemed with worms; Simeon picked up the worms that fell from his sores, and replaced them there, saying to them, “Eat what God has given you.” From his high pulpit he preached sermons to the crowds that came to see him, converted barbarians, performed marvelous cures, played ecclesiastical politics, and shamed the moneylenders into reducing their interest charges from twelve to six per cent.43 His exalted piety created a fashion of pillar hermits, which lasted for twelve centuries, and, in a thoroughly secularized form, persists today.