The Xerophagia, or “dry eatings,” were the days on which nothing was eaten but bread and salt. This was in very early times. Innovators added pulse, herbs, and fruits—no unpleasant fare in hot countries. The Montanists made this fast obligatory, and were very much censured in consequence. The Essenes, who, whether as Jews or Jewish Christians in Alexandria, were singularly strict observers of the Sabbath, carrying their strictness to a point which my readers may find in Jortin, if they are curious thereupon, observed also this fast very rigidly, and on the stated days ate nothing with their bread but salt and hyssop.
Most of the saints recorded on the canon roll of Rome, appear to have maintained very indifferent tables, and to have considerably marred thereby their strength and efficiency. Saint Fulgentius abstained from everything savoury, and even drank no wine, says his biographer; which looks as if the good men generally did take some for their stomach’s sake; and indeed Fulgentius himself took a little negus when he was indisposed to plain water; and “small blame to him” for so harmless a proceeding. St. Eugenius never broke his fast till sunset; and when a bunch of grapes was sent to a sick monk of the desert, he forwarded it to a second, and a second to a third, and so on to a twentieth, until this health-inspiring offering, made for man by God, was withered and nasty. These monks did not pray like Pope:—
“The blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away,
For God is paid when man receives,—
To enjoy is to obey.”
But this is a sentiment in the opposite extreme, or might be easily carried in that direction. Palladius says of one of these desert monks, St. Macarius, that for years together he lived only on raw herbs and pulse; that during three consecutive years he existed on four or five ounces of bread daily; and that he consumed but one small measure of oil in a twelvemonth—a substitute for the gallons of sack with which profaner men washed down their modicum of bread. St. Macarius, however, surpassed himself in Lent; and an alderman might be excused for fainting at the idea of a human being passing forty days and nights in a standing position, with no more substantial support than a few raw cabbage-leaves on a Sunday! St. Geneviève was hardly inferior in austerity, and only ate twice in the week, on Sundays and Thursdays, and then only beans and bread. When she grew old and infirm, and she was prematurely both, she indulged in a little fish and milk. Simeon Stylites surpassed both in culpable austerity. He spent an entire Lent without allowing anything to pass his lips; and at other seasons this slow suicidal saint never ate but on Sundays. His chief occupation upon the pillar, which looks much more like a column of pride than a monument of humility, was in praying and bowing. An admiring monk, who must have had as little of active usefulness to employ his time with as poor Simeon, exultingly records, that he did not eat once during the day, but that he made one thousand two hundred and forty-four bows of adoration in that time. Oh, Simeon! well for thee, poor fellow-mortal, if those reverences be not accounted rather as homage to thyself, than to Him to whom homage is due.
It is extremely difficult for the human mind to realize the idea of a Bishop of London never breaking his fast till the evening, and then being satisfied with a solitary egg, an inch of bread, and a cup of milk and water; such, however, is said to have been the daily fare of St. Cedd, a predecessor of Dr. Blomfield in the metropolitan diocese. “How unlike my Beverly!” St. Severinus, an Austrian prelate, had a more indifferent table than St. Cedd, especially in Lent, when he ate but once a week. St. William of Bourges never tasted meat after he was ordained. St. Theodosius, the Cenobiarch, was more frugal still, and bread often lacked, we are told, even for the holy offices of the Church. This would seem to intimate, however, that the officers of the Church may have eaten it. Be this as it may, when bread was needed for the sacrament, a string of mules miraculously appeared in the desert, bearing the necessary provision. “Necessary provision,” may be well said, for if the Cenobites consumed little themselves, they presided at tables where occasionally sat a hundred hungry guests, who must have much needed a dinner, seeing that they crossed the desert to obtain it.
Some of the most self-denying saints, like St. Felix of Nola, if they declined wine in its liquid form, took it in pills,—swallowing grapes. St. Paul, the first hermit, lived on the fruit of a tree which produced a fresh supply daily, the bread to temper which was brought every morning by a raven. The diet was sufficiently invigorating to give strength to the modest man to bite off his own tongue, and spit it in the face of a lady who tried to tempt him, as the Irish nymph tempted the uncourteous St. Kevin of Glendalough. He was, in abstinence, only second to St. Isidore, who, when hungry, burst into tears, not because God had mercifully provided him wherewith to satisfy lawful appetite, but because, sinful man that he was, he dared to eat at all!
I have spoken of the abstinence of a Bishop of London; there was a Bishop of Worcester, Wulstan, who is worthy of being mentioned with him. Wulstan was rather fond of savoury viands, but he was one day, during mass, so distracted by the smell of meat roasting in a kitchen, which must have been very close to his church, that he made a vow to abstain from meat for ever. But I do not know if he kept his vow. St. Euthymius was a more rational man, for he taught his monks that to satisfy hunger was no crime, but that to abuse appetite and God’s gifts too, was an offence. St. Macedonius, the Syrian, did not discover this truth until he had so impaired his powers by long fasts, that it was impossible to restore them—as he tried to do on a diet of dry bread. And yet he was so prematurely gifted, that his own birth is said to have been the result of his own prayers!