The Hermits

by Charles Kingsley

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.