Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe

by S. Baring-Gould

ROCK MONASTERIES

The early Syrian and Egyptian hermits would have become a sect of manichæan heretics but for the popularity of the profession and the Arian persecution. In quitting the world they cut themselves off from the churches. They no more took part in its assemblies, participated in the sacraments, nor observed the sacred seasons. Paul, the first hermit, deserted the society of men when aged fifteen, and lived till the age of a hundred and ten in solitude without ever having partaken of the Bread of Life. S. Mary of Egypt spent forty-seven years in the Wilderness, stark naked, covered with hair like a wild beast, and only received the Viaticum when dying, by the chance of a priest passing that way. A fifteenth century statue of her, nearly life-size, is in the National Museum at Munich, removed from the Cathedral of Augsburg as indelicate. S. Antony spent twenty years in a sort of cistern, and only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the roof. Certainly all that time he was voluntarily excommunicate. If S. Hilarius ever made sacramental communion we are not told, but we do know that he was for ever hiding himself from where were his fellow- men, in wilds and oases, and where there were no Christian churches.

In the desert, times and seasons slipped away, and became confounded, so that by the first hermits neither Easter nor the Lord's Day were observed. In the Gospel, the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and prisoners, are appointed as the means of deserving a reward in heaven, but the anchorites neglected every one, cut themselves adrift from the chance of performing them, and sought to merit heaven in their own way. Christ declared, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you," but they wilfully lived apart from the sacramental life as surely as any modern Quaker.

But when crowds of refugees from the duties and pleasures of life sought the desert, they ceased to be solitaries, and organisation on a monarchical system under an abbot became necessary; and when bishops and priests fled to them, or were banished and sought them, during the Arian persecution, they came to plume themselves as champions of orthodoxy, and conformed to Catholic usage, assembling on the Lord's Day for prayers and the Eucharist. When the fashion set in for deserting the world, floods of men, women, and children threw themselves into it, and flowed into the desert during a century with resistless force. Pachomius, who died at fifty-six, reckoned three thousand monks under his rule; the monasteries of Tabenna soon included seven thousand, and S. Jerome affirms that as many as fifty thousand were present at the annual gathering of the general congregation of monasteries that followed his rule.

There were five thousand on the mountain of Nitria; near Arsinoë the Abbot Serapion governed ten thousand. It has even been asserted that there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the towns. The immense majority of these religious were cenobites; that is to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united under an elected head, the abbot. The cenobitical life rapidly and necessarily superseded that of the solitary. In fact the monks were now no more solitaries than are the jackdaws in a cleft, or the bees in a hive, but unlike the jackdaws, they were under discipline, and unlike bees were without a sting.

It was not mere love of an indolent life and a desire to escape from military service that swelled the numbers in the desert. The condition of the decaying Roman world led men to despair of the Commonwealth, and of the possibility of their being able to save their own souls in the midst of the general corruption. "The people were exhausted by compulsory taxes, to be spent in wars which did not concern them, or in Court luxury in which they had no share. In the municipal towns liberty and justice were dead. The curials, who were responsible for the payment of the public moneys, tried their best to escape the unpopular office, and when compelled to serve wrung the money in self-defence out of the poorer inhabitants by every kind of tyranny. Private profligacy among all ranks was such as cannot be described in any modern pages. The regular clergy of the cities were able to make no stand against the general corruption of the age because—at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom—they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and luxury; and, as a background to all these seething heaps of decay, misrule and misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, waxing stronger and stronger so that the wisest Romans saw clearly as the years rolled on, they would soon be the conquerors of the Caesars and the masters of the Western world.

"No wonder, if in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a passion akin to despair, which ended in a new and grand form of suicide. It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which had led in past ages more than one noble Roman to slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. That the world—such at least as they saw it then—was doomed, Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe, but saw, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation around them, that the world was passing away, and the lust thereof, and that only he who did the will of God could abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw that the wrath of God was revealed from Heaven against all unrighteousness of men. Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed world, and try to be alone with God, if by any means they might save each man his own soul in that dread day." [Footnote: Kingsley (C.), "The Hermits," Lond. 1868.]

In the year 336 Athanasius was in exile at Trèves. He is traditionally held to have there occupied a cave beyond the Moselle. The Bishop Maximinus received him with honour. Early in his episcopate Athanasius had visited the congregation of monks on the Upper Nile, and he was enthusiastic in his admiration of their manner of life. It is supposed that whilst at Trèves he began to write the "Life of S. Anthony," if indeed he was the author of that popular work. Here he is thought to have been visited by Maxentius, Bishop of Poitiers, and brother of the Bishop of Trèves, bringing with him Martin, then a friend and pupil of S. Hilary, this latter at the time a wealthy noble of Poitiers. And from the discourse of Athanasius, if this meeting actually took place, the imagination of Martin was fired with ambition to reproduce in Europe the life of the fathers of the desert in Egypt.

Anyhow, to this residence of Athanasius at Trèves, "one may trace the introduction into the Western Church of the principle and laws of ascetic self-renunciation, which, though they had run to great extremes in the Nitrian desert and in the valley of the Nile, assumed noble form when the idea took possession of the more phlegmatic temperament and practical energies of the West. Without discussing the vexed question of the authorship of the 'Life of S. Anthony,' which is referred by many traditional testimonies to Athanasius, we think it obvious, from the 'Confessions' of Augustine, that the religious circles at Trèves had been strongly moved by the self-abandonment and entire consecration to the religious life of the exiled bishops. It was here, while reading the 'Life of S. Anthony' that the friends of Augustine at length yielded themselves to God." [Footnote: Reynolds (H. R.), "Athanasius, his Life and Life-work," Lond., R.T.S., 1889, p. 54.]

Martin was at Poitiers in 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and obtained his cheerful consent. Some way up the Clain, five miles from Poitiers, the little river glides through a broad valley, with meadows on its left bank often overflowed, but with a ridge of conglomerate rocks pierced with caves on the right bank. Here Martin settled, and there can exist no manner of doubt that his first settlement was in one of these grottoes, though at a later period the monastery was moved to the further side of the river, when the caves proved inadequate to harbour all the candidates for the religious life who placed themselves under his direction. One of his monks, however, named Felix, refused to quit his cave that is now shown, and in which he died perhaps, in an inaccessible cliff that is surmounted by a cross.