Of the ten Basilean convents that grew up in the surroundings of Rossano the most celebrated was that of S. M. del Patir. Together with the others, it succeeded to a period of eremitism
of solitary anchorites whose dwellings honeycombed the warm slopes that confront the Ionian. . . .
The lives of some of these Greco-Calabrian hermits are valuable documents. In the Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum of O. Caietanus (1657) the student will find a Latin translation of the biography of one of them, Saint Elia Junior. He died in 903. It was written by a contemporary monk, who tells us that the holy man performed many miracles, among them that of walking over a river dryshod. And the Bollandists (Acta Sanctorum, 11th September) have reprinted the biography of Saint Elia Spelaeotes—the cave-dweller, as composed in Greek by a disciple. It is yet more interesting. He lived in a “honesta spelunca” which he discovered in 864 by means of a flight of bats issuing therefrom; he suffered persecutions from a woman, exactly after the fashion of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife; he grew to be 94 years old; the Saracens vainly tried to burn his dead body, and the water in which this corpse was subsequently washed was useful for curing another holy man’s toothache. Yet even these creatures were subject to gleams of common sense. “Virtues,” said this one, “are better than miracles.”
How are we to account for these rock-hermits and their inelegant habits? How explain this poisoning of the sources of manly self-respect?
Thus, I think: that under the influence of their creed they reverted perforce to the more bestial traits of aboriginal humanity. They were thrust back in their development. They became solitaries, animalesque and shy—such as we may imagine our hairy progenitors to have been. Hence their dirt and vermin, their horror of learning, their unkempt hair, their ferocious independence, their distrust of sunshine and ordered social life, their foul dieting, their dread of malign spirits, their cave-dwelling propensities. All bestial characteristics!
This atavistic movement, this retrogression towards primevalism, must have possessed a certain charm, for it attracted vast multitudes; it was only hemmed, at last, by a physical obstacle.
The supply of caves ran out.
Not till then were its votaries forced to congregate in those unhealthy clusters which afterwards grew to be monasteries. Where many of them were gathered together under one roof there imposed itself a certain rudimentary discipline and subordination; yet they preserved as much as they could of their savage traits, cave-like cells and hatred of cleanliness, terror of demons, matted beards.
