Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe

by S. Baring-Gould

The peopling of the solitudes of Syria and Egypt by solitaries was due, not to flight from persecution, but to revulsion from the luxury of the great cities, and very largely as an escape from compulsory military service. It was not a new thing. Judaism had been impregnated with Buddhism, or at all events with Brahminism, and with ideas of asceticism. The Essenes and Therapeutæ lived, the first in the time of the Maccabees upon the shores of the Dead Sea, and the last two centuries later, in Egypt. Both inhabited cells in the desert, preserving celibacy, renouncing property, pleasure, and delicate food, and consecrating their time to the study of the Scriptures, and to prayer. And yet celibacy was in violation of the principles of Judaism, which required every man to marry, in the hopes of becoming a progenitor of the Messiah. Further, they rejected the bloody sacrifices of the law, and would have nothing to do with the temple at Jerusalem. We can see by Philo's "On the Contemplative Life" how completely Alexandrian Judaism had sucked in Buddhist doctrine, and how Therapeutic asceticism formed the bridge from Buddhism to Christian monachism. In the same places where Essenes and Therapeutæ had been, there later we find Christian solitaries. "We can have no doubt," says Ferdinand Delaunay, "that the Therapeutic Convents which perhaps gave the first signal for conversion to the new faith, served also as the cradle for Christian monachism. History shows us, hardly a century later, this flourishing in the same localities on the borders of the lake Mareotis, and on the heights of Nitréa. And we cannot doubt but that Christian solitaries continued at Alexandria the work of their Jewish predecessors, and endeavoured to make their oracles serve for the propagation of the Gospel." [Footnote: Delaunay (F.), Moines et Sibylles, Paris, 1874, p. 316.]

The language in which Philo describes the Therapeutæ might be applied to the Christian monks of Egypt. I must condense his rambling account. The Therapeutæ abandon their property, their children, their wives, parents, and friends and homes, to seek out fresh habitations outside the city walls, in solitary places and in deserts. They pray twice in the day, at morning and evening, and the interval is wholly devoted to meditation on the Scriptures and elucidating the allegories therein. They likewise compose psalms and hymns to God, "and during six days each, retiring into solitude, philosophises, never going outside the threshold of the outer court, and indeed never looking out. But on the seventh day they all assemble, and sit down in order, and the eldest, who has the most profound learning, speaks with steadfast voice explaining the meaning of the laws."

They wore but one garment, a shaggy hide for winter, and a thin mantle for summer. Their food was herbs and bread, and their drink water. Philo concludes his account thus: "This then is what I have to say of those who are called Therapeutæ who have devoted themselves to the contemplation of nature, and who have lived in it, and in the soul alone, being citizens of heaven and of the world, and very acceptable to the Father and Creator of the universe because of their virtue; it has procured them His love as their most appropriate reward, which far surpasses all the gifts of fortune, and conducts them to the very summit and perfection of happiness."

It was not among the Jews alone that the solitary life was cultivated. In the Serapium of Thebes were also heathen monks leading a very similar life. That Persian Manichæism had infected Jews and heathen as well there can exist little doubt. [Footnote: Philo gives an account of the sacred banquets of the Therapeutæ that strongly reminds us of the Agapæ of the Early Christians.]

In 177, in Lyons, when S. Pothinus and others were arrested, thrown into prison, tortured and killed for the Faith, there was one of the martyrs who caused offence to the rest because "he had long been used to a very austere life, and to live entirely on bread and water. He seemed resolved to continue this practice during his confinement, but Attalus (another martyr), after his first combat in the theatre, understood by revelation that Alcibiades gave occasion of offence to others by seeming to favour the new sect of the Montanists (a Christian phase of Manichæism), who endeavoured to recommend themselves by their extraordinary austerities. Alcibiades listened to the admonition, and from that time ate of everything with thanksgiving to God." [Footnote: Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., v. i.]

But, although Buddhism affected the lives of certain Christians, it in no way touched their faith—that life was the result of contact with Manichæism, which taught that all matter was evil, and that the flesh must be subdued, as essentially ungodly. The Buddhist religion in its ethics is the absolute reverse of the Christian. The Buddhist prays and tortures, and stupefies himself for purely selfish reasons, so as to escape reincarnation in the form of a bug, a louse, or a worm, by the destruction within himself of all human passions and inclinations. His self-torture is undertaken for the object of absorption into Nirvana, only to be reached by reducing the mind and heart to absolute indifference to every animal desire, and thus to escape the eternal revolution of metempsychosis. "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself," is a maxim incomprehensible to a Buddhist. As Mr. Landon says: "The spiritual brigandage of the Lamas finds its counterpart in many other creeds, but it would be unjust not to record in the strongest terms the great radical difference that exists between Lamaism at its best and Christianity at its worst. There has never been absent from the lowest profession of our faith a full recognition of the half-divine character of self-sacrifice for another. Of this the Tibetians know nothing. The exact performance of their duties, the daily practice of conventional offices, and continual obedience to their Lamaic superiors is for them a means of escape from personal damnation in a form which is more terrible perhaps than any monk- conjured Inferno. For others they do not profess to have even a passing thought. Now this is a distinction which goes to the very root of the matter. The fact is rarely stated in so many words, but it is the truth that Christianity is daily judged by one standard, and by one standard only—its altruism, and this complete absence of carefulness for others, this insistent and fierce desire to save one's own soul, regardless of a brother's, is in itself something that makes foreign to one the best that Lamaism can offer."

One day a gnat stung S. Macarius, and he killed it. To punish himself for this, he went to the marshes of Scete, and stayed there six months. When he returned to his brethren he was so disfigured by the bites of the insects that they recognised him only by the tone of his voice. A Brahmin would have been filled with remorse lest he had killed a reincarnation of his grandmother, but the Egyptian ascetic only because he had given way to momentary irritation.

One has but to read the sayings of the Fathers of the Desert to see that no vein of Brahminism or Buddhism had tinctured their faith, however deeply it may have coloured their practice. When plague raged in Alexandria, they were ready to quit their cells and hasten into the cities to minister to the sick and dying; when the faith, as they understood it, was menaced, to champion the truth.

That the Egyptian hermits, flying from association with the world, should betake themselves to caves, is hardly to be wondered at. In that land the rocks are pitted with artificial grottoes, which were the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and were commodious and to be had without asking leave of any one.

Twice was Athanasius obliged to fly from the fury of the Arians, and to take refuge among the solitaries in their caves. Once he was constrained to remain in concealment in his father's tomb, also a cavern. When he was banished to Trèves, tradition says that he would not occupy a house, but sought out a grotto in a hill beyond the Moselle, and made his abode therein.