St. Jerome and others to moderate austerities, which frequently led to insanity and suicide, to check the turbulence of certain wandering monks, who were accustomed to defy the ecclesiastical authorities, and especially to suppress monastic mendicancy, which had appeared prominently among some heretical sects. The orthodox monks commonly employed themselves in weaving mats of palm-leaves; but, living in the deserts, with no wants, they speedily sank into a listless apathy; and the most admired were those who, like Simeon Stylites, and the hermit John, of whom I have already spoken, were most exclusively devoted to their superstition. Diversities of individual character were, however, vividly displayed. Many anchorites, without knowledge, passions, or imagination, having fled from servile toil to the calm of the wilderness, passed the long hours in sleep or in a mechanical routine of prayer, and their inert and languid existences, prolonged to the extreme of old age, closed at last by a tranquil and almost animal death. Others made their cells by the clear fountains and clustering palm-trees of some oasis in the desert, and a blooming garden arose beneath their toil. The numerous monks who followed St. Serapion devoted themselves largely to agriculture, and sent shiploads of corn for the benefit of the poor.1 Of one old hermit it is related that, such was the cheerfulness of his mind, that every sorrow was dispelled by his presence, and the weary and the heartbroken were consoled by a few words from his lips. More commonly, however, the hermit's cell was the scene of perpetual mourning. Tears and sobs, and frantic strugglings with imaginary dæmons, and paroxysms of religious despair, were the texture of his life, and the dread of spiritual enemies, and of that death which his superstition had rendered so terrible, embittered every hour of his existence. 3 The solace of intellectual occupations was rarely

2

' Palladius, Hist. Laus. lxxvi.

We have a striking illustra* Rufinus, Hist. Monach. xxxiii. tion of this in St. Arsenius. His

1

2

resorted to. 'The duty,' said St. Jerome, ' of a monk is not to teach, but to weep.' A cultivated and disciplined mind wa the least subject to those hallucinations, which were regarded as the highest evidence of Divine favour; and although in an age when the passion for asceticism was general, many scholars became ascetics, the great majority of the early monks appear to have been men who were not only absolutely ignorant themselves, but who also looked upon learning with positive disfavour. St. Antony, the true founder of monachism, refused when a boy to learn letters, because it would bring him into too great intercourse with other boys.3 At a time when St. Jerome had suffered himself to feel a deep admiration for the genius of Cicero, he was, as be himself tells us, borne in the night before the tribunal of Christ, accused of being rather a Ciceronian than a Christian, and severely flagellated by the angels. This saint, however, afterwards modified his opinions about the Pagan writings, and he was

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eyelashes are said to have fallen off through continual weeping, and he had always, when at work, to put a cloth on his breast to receive his tears. As he felt his death approaching, his terror rose to the point of agony. The monks who were about him said, "Quid fles, pater? numquid et tu times?" Ille respondit, "In veritate timeo et iste timor qui nunc mecum est, semper in me fuit, ex quo factus sum monachus. "'-Verba Seniorum, Prol. § 163. It was said of St. Abraham that no day passed after his conversion without his shedding tears. (Vit. Patrum.) St. John the dwarf once saw a monk laughing immoderately at dinner, and was so horrified that he at once began to cry. (Tillemont, Mém. de l'Hist. ecclés. tome x. p. 430.) St. Basil (Regulæ, interrog. xvii.) gives a remarkable

disquisition on the wickedness of laughing, and he observes that this was the one bodily affection which Christ does not seem to have known. Mr. Buckle has collected a series of passages to precisely the same effect from the writings of the Scotch divines. (Hist. of Civilisation, vol. ii. pp. 385-386.)

1 'Monachus autem non doctoris habet sed plangentis officium.'— Contr. Vigilant. xv.

2 As Tillemont puts it: 'Il se trouva très-peu de saints en qui Dieu ait joint les talens extérieurs de l'éloquence et de la science avec la grâce de la prophétie et des miracles. Ce sont des dons que sa Providence a presque toujours séparés.'-Mém. Hist. ecclés. tome iv. p. 315.

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3 St. Athanasius, Vit. Anton. Ep. xxii. He, says his shoulders were bruised when he awoke.

compelled to defend himself at length against his more jealous brethren, who accused him of defiling his writings with quotations from Pagan authors, of employing some monks in copying Cicero, and of explaining Virgil to some children at Bethlehem. Of one monk it is related that, being especially famous as a linguist, he made it his penance to remain perfectly silent for thirty years; 2 of another, that having discovered a few books in the cell of a brother hermit, he reproached the student with having thus defrauded of their property the widow and the orphan;3 of others, that their only books were copies of the New Testament, which they sold to relieve the poor.4

With such men, living such a life, visions and miracles were necessarily habitual. All the elements of hallucination were there. Ignorant and superstitious, believing as a matter of religious conviction that countless dæmons filled the air, attributing every fluctuation of his temperament, and every exceptional phenomenon in surrounding nature, to spiritual agency; delirious, too, from solitude and long continued austerities, the hermit soon mistook for palpable realities the phantoms of his brain. In the ghastly gloom of the sepulchre, where, amid mouldering corpses, he took up his abode; in the long hours of the night of penance, when the desert wind sobbed around his lonely cell, and the cries of wild

1

1 Ep. lxx.; Adv. Rufinum, lib. i. ch. xxx. He there speaks of his vision as a mere dream, not binding. He elsewhere (Ep. cxxv.) speaks very sensibly of the advantage of hermits occupying themselves, and says he learnt Hebrew to keep away unholy thoughts.

2 Sozomen, vi. 28; Rufinus, Hist. Monach. ch. vi. Socrates tells rather a touching story of one of these illiterate saints, named Pambos. Being unable to read, he came to some one to be taught a

psalm. Having learnt the single verse, 'I said I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,' he went away, saying that was enough if it were practically acquired. When asked, six months, and again many years, after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. (H. E. iv. 23.)

3 Tillemont, x. p. 61.

Ibid. viii. 490; Socrates, H. E. iv. 23.

beasts were borne upon his ear, visible forms of lust or terror appeared to haunt him, and strange dramas were enacted by those who were contending for his soul. An imagination strained to the utmost limit, acting upon a frame attenuated and diseased by macerations, produced bewildering psychological phenomena, paroxysms of conflicting passions, sudden alternations of joy and anguish, which he regarded as manifestly supernatural. Sometimes, in the very ecstasy of his devotion, the memory of old scenes would crowd upon his mind. The shady groves and soft voluptuous gardens of his native city would arise, and, kneeling alone upon the burning sand, he seemed to see around him the fair groups of dancinggirls, on whose warm, undulating limbs and wanton smiles his youthful eyes had too fondly dwelt. Sometimes his temptation sprang from remembered sounds. The sweet, licentious songs of other days came floating on his ear, and his heart was thrilled with the passions of the past. And then the scene would change. As his lips were murmuring the psalter, his imagination, fired perhaps by the music of some martial psalm, depicted the crowded amphitheatre. The throng and passion and mingled cries of eager thousands were present to his mind, and the fierce joy of the gladiators passed through the tumult of his dream. The simplest incident came at last to suggest diabolical influence. An old hermit, weary and fainting upon his journey, once thought how refreshing would be a draught of the honey of wild bees

'I have combined in this passage incidents from three distinct lives. St. Jerome, in a very famous and very beautiful passage of his letter to Eustochium (Ep. xxii.) describes the manner in which the forms of dancing-girls appeared to surround him as he knelt upon the desert sands. St. Mary of Egypt (Vite Patrum, ch. xix.) was especially tortured by the recollection of the

songs she had sung when young, which continually haunted her mind. St. Hilarion (see his Life by St. Jerome) thought he saw a gladiatorial show while he was repeating the psalms. The manner in which the different visions faded into one another like dissolving views is repeatedly described in the biographies.

of the desert. At that moment his eye fell upon a rock on which they had built a hive. He passed on with a shudder and an exorcism, for he believed it to be a temptation of the devil. But most terrible of all were the struggles of young and ardent men, through whose veins the hot blood of passion continually flowed, physically incapable of a life of celibacy, and with all that proneness to hallucination which a southern sun engenders, who were borne on the wave of enthusiasm to the desert life. In the arms of Syrian or African brides, whose soft eyes answered love with love, they might have sunk to rest, but in the lonely wilderness no peace could ever visit their souls. The Lives of the Saints paint with an appalling vividness the agonies of their struggle. Multiplying with frantic energy the macerations of the body, beating their breasts with anguish, the tears for ever streaming from their eyes, imagining themselves continually haunted by ever-changing forms of deadly beauty, which acquired a greater vividness from the very passion with which they resisted them, their struggles not unfrequently ended in insanity and in suicide. It is related that when St. Pachomius and St. Palamon were conversing together in the desert, a young monk, with his countenance distracted with madness, rushed into their presence, and, in a voice broken with convulsive sobs, poured out his tale of sorrows. A woman, he said, had entered his cell, had seduced him by her artifices, and then vanished miraculously in the air, leaving him half dead upon the ground;-and then with a wild shriek the monk broke away from the saintly listeners. Impelled, as they imagined, by an evil spirit, he rushed across the desert, till he arrived at the next village, and there, leaping into the open furnace of the public baths, he perished in the flames.2 Strange stories were told

1 Rufinus, Hist. Monach., ch. xi. This saint was St. Helenus.

2 Life of St. Pachomius (Vit Patrum), cap. ix.