The Ethiopie version of the Bible was about this time made for their use. It was translated out of the Greek from the Alexandrian copies, as the Greek version was held in such value that it was not thought necessary to look to the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. But these well-meant efforts did little at the time towards making the Hexumitæ Christians. Distance and the Blemmyes checked their intercourse with Alexandria. It was not till two hundred years later that they could be said in the slightest sense to be converted to Christianity.
Though the origin of monastic life has sometimes been claimed for the Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea, yet it was in Egypt that it was framed into a system, and became the model for the Christian world. It took its rise in the serious and gloomy views of religion which always formed part of the Egyptian polytheism, and which the Greeks remarked as very unlike their own gay and tasteful modes of worship, and which were readily engrafted by the Egyptian converts into their own Christian belief. In the reigns of Constantine and his sons, hundreds of Christians, both men and women, quitting the pleasures and trials of the busy world, withdrew one by one into the Egyptian desert, where the sands are as boundless as the ocean, where the sunshine is less cheerful than darkness, to spend their lonely days and watchful nights in religious meditation and in prayer. They were led by a gloomy view of their duty towards God, and by a want of fellow-feeling for their neighbour; and they seemed to think that pain and misery in this world would save them from punishment hereafter. The lives of many of these Fathers of the Desert were written by the Christians who lived at the same time; but a full account of the miracles which were said to have been worked in their favour, or by their means, would now only call forth a smile of pity, or perhaps even of ridicule.
“Prosperity and peace,” says Gibbon, “introduced the distinction of the vulgar and the ascetic Christians. The loose and imperfect practice of religion satisfied the conscience of the multitude. The prince or magistrate, soldier or merchant, reconciled their fervent zeal, and implicit faith, with the exercise of their profession, the pursuit of their interest, and the indulgence of their passions; but the ascetics, who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired by the severe enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and the pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage, chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness. The ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the first Christians of Jerusalem, they resigned the use, or the property, of their temporal possessions; established regular communities of the same sex and a similar disposition, and assumed the names of hermits, monks, or anchorites, expressive of their lonely retreat in a natural or artificial desert. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised, and the loudest applause was bestowed on this divine philosophy, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend with the Stoics in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death; the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile discipline; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves, all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this divine philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the desert; and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which had been instituted by the Essenians, in Palestine and Egypt. The philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary people who dwelt among the palm trees near the Dead Sea; who subsisted without money, who were propagated without women, and who derived from the disgust and repentance of mankind a perpetual supply of voluntary associates. Antony, an illiterate youth of the lower part of The-baid, distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, and executed his monastic penance with original and intrepid fanaticism. After a long and painful novitiate among the tombs and in a ruined tower, he boldly advanced into the desert three days’ journey to the eastward of the Nile; discovered a lonely spot, which possessed the advantages of shade and water, and fixed his last residence on Mount Colzim near the Red Sea, where an ancient monastery still preserves the name and memory of the saint. The curious devotion of the Christians pursued him to the desert; and, when he was obliged to appear at Alexandria, in the face of mankind, he supported his fame with discretion and dignity. He enjoyed the friendship of Athanasius, whose doctrine he approved; and the Egyptian peasant respectfully declined a respectful invitation from the Emperor Constantine. The venerable patriarch (for Antony attained the age of 105 years) beheld the numerous progeny which had been formed by his example and his lessons. The prolific colonies of monks multiplied on the sands of Libya, upon the rocks of the Thebaid, and in the cities of the Nile. To the south of Alexandria, the mountain and adjacent desert of Nitria were peopled by five thousand anchorites; and the traveller may still investigate the ruins of fifty monasteries, which were planted in that barren soil by the disciples of Antony. In the Upper Thebaid, the vacant island of Tabenna was occupied by Pachomius and fourteen hundred of his brethren. That holy abbot successively founded nine monasteries of men and one of women; and the festival of Easter sometimes collected fifty thousand religious persons, who followed his angelic rules of discipline. The stately and populous city of Oxyrrhynchos, the seat of Christian orthodoxy, had devoted the temples, the public edifices, and even the ramparts, to pious and charitable uses, and the bishop, who might preach in twelve churches, computed ten thousand females and twenty thousand males of the monastic profession.”
The monks borrowed many of their customs from the old Egyptian priests, such as shaving the head; and Athanasius in his charge to them orders them not to adopt the tonsure on the head, nor to shave the beard. He forbids their employing magic or incantations to assist their prayers. He endeavours to stop their emulation in fasting, and orders those whose strength of body enabled them to fast longest not to boast of it. But he orders them not even to speak to a woman, and wishes them not to bathe, as being an immodest act. The early Christians, as being a sect of Jews, had followed many Jewish customs, such as observing the Sabbath as well as the Lord’s day; but latterly the line between the two religions had been growing wider, and Athanasius orders the monks not to keep holy the Jewish Sabbath. After a few years their religious duties were clearly laid down for them in several well-drawn codes.
One of the earliest of these ascetics was Amnion, who on the morning of his marriage is said to have persuaded his young wife of the superior holiness of a single life, and to have agreed with her that they should devote themselves apart to the honour of God in the desert. But, in thus avoiding the pleasures, the duties, and the temptations of the world, Amnion lost many of the virtues and even the decencies of society; he never washed himself, or changed his garments, because he thought it wrong for a religious man even to see himself undressed; and when he had occasion to cross a canal, his biographer tells us that attendant angels carried him over the water in their arms, lest, while keeping his vows, he should be troubled by wet clothes.
In the religious controversies, whether pagan or Christian, Rome had often looked to Egypt for its opinions; Constans, when wanting copies of the Greek Scriptures for Rome, had lately sent to Alexandria, and had received the approved text from Athanasius. The two countries held nearly the same opinions and had the same dislike of the Greeks; so when Jerome visited Egypt he found the Church holding, he said, the true Roman faith as taught by the apostles. Under Didymus, who was then the head of the catechetical school, Jerome pursued his studies, having the same religious opinions with the Egyptian, and the same dislike to Arianism. But no dread of heresy stopped Jerome in his search for knowledge and for books. He obtained copies of the whole of Origen’s works, and read them with the greatest admiration. It is true that he finds fault with many of his opinions; but no admirer of Origen could speak in higher terms of praise of his virtues and his learning, of the qualities of his head and of his heart, than Jerome uses while he timidly pretends to think that he has done wrong in reading his works.
At this time—the end of the eleventh century after the building of the city—the emperor himself did not refuse to mark on his Roman coins the happy renewal of the years by the old Egyptian astrological fable of the return of the phoenix.
From the treatise of Julius Fermicus against the pagan superstitions, it would seem that the sacred animals of the Egyptians were no longer kept in the several cities in which they used to be worshipped, and that many of the old gods had been gradually dropped from the mythology, which was then chiefly confined to the worship of Isis and Osiris. The great week of the year was the feast of Isis, when the priests joined the goddess in her grief for the loss of the good Osiris, who had been killed through jealousy by the wicked Typhon. The priests shaved their heads, beat their breasts, tore the skin off their arms, and opened up the old wounds of former years, in grief for the death of Osiris, and in honour of the widowed Isis. The river Nile was also still worshipped for the blessings which it scatters along its banks, but we hear no more of Amon-Ra, Chem, Horus, Aroëris, and the other gods of the Thebaid, whose worship ceased with the fall of that part of the country.