Chapter VII: Part 7

Then all going out of the city of Antioch received the body of the holy Simeon on gold and silver, with psalms and hymns, and with many lamps brought it into the greater church, and thence to another church, which is called Penitence. Moreover, many virtues are wrought at his tomb, more than in his life; and the man who was made whole served there till the day of his death. But many offered treasures to the Bishop of Antioch for the faith, begging relics from the body: but, on account of his oath, he never gave them.

I, Antony, lowly and a sinner, have set forth briefly, as far as I could, this lesson. But blessed is he who has this writing in a book, and reads it in the church and house of God; and when he shall have brought it to his memory, he shall receive a reward from the Most High; to whom is honour, power, and virtue, for ever and ever. Amen.

* * * * *

After such a fantastic story as this of Simeon, it is full time (some readers may have thought that it was full time long since) to give my own opinion of the miracles, visions, dæmons, and other portents which occur in the lives of these saints. I have refrained from doing so as yet, because I wished to begin by saying everything on behalf of these old hermits which could honestly be said, and to prejudice my readers’ minds in their favour rather than against them; because I am certain that if we look on them merely with scorn and ridicule,—if we do not acknowledge and honour all in them which was noble, virtuous, and honest,—we shall never be able to combat their errors, either in our own hearts or in those of our children: and that we may have need to do so is but too probable. In this age, as in every other age of materialism and practical atheism, a revulsion in favour of superstition is at hand; I may say is taking place round us now. Doctrines are tolerated as possibly true,—persons are regarded with respect and admiration, who would have been looked on, even fifty years ago, if not with horror, yet with contempt, as beneath the serious notice of educated English people. But it is this very contempt which has brought about the change of opinion concerning them. It has been discovered that they were not altogether so absurd as they seemed; that the public mind, in its ignorance, has been unjust to them; and, in hasty repentance for that injustice, too many are ready to listen to those who will tell them that these things are not absurd at all—that there is no absurdity in believing that the leg-bone of St. Simon Stock may possess miraculous powers, or that the spirits of the departed communicate with their friends by rapping on the table. The ugly after-crop of superstition which is growing up among us now is the just and natural punishment of our materialism—I may say, of our practical atheism. For those who will not believe in the real spiritual world, in which each man’s soul stands face to face all day long with Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are sure at last to crave after some false spiritual world, and seek, like the evil and profligate generation of the Jews, after visible signs and material wonders. And those who will not believe that the one true and living God is above their path and about their bed and spieth out all their ways, and that in him they live and move and have their being, are but too likely at last to people with fancied saints and dæmons that void in the imagination and in the heart which their own unbelief has made.

Are we then to suppose that these old hermits had lost faith in God? On the contrary, they were the only men in that day who had faith in God. And, if they had faith in any other things or persons beside God, they merely shared in the general popular ignorance and mistakes of their own age; and we must not judge those who, born in an age of darkness, were struggling earnestly toward the light, as we judge those who, born in an age of scientific light, are retiring of their own will back into the darkness.

Before I enter upon the credibility of these alleged saints’ miracles, I must guard my readers carefully from supposing that I think miracles impossible. Heaven forbid. He would be a very rash person who should do that, in a world which swarms with greater wonders than those recorded in the biography of a saint. For, after all, which is more wonderful, that God should be able to restore the dead to life, or that he should be able to give life at all? Again, as for these miracles being contrary to our experience, that is no very valid argument against them; for equally contrary to our experience is every new discovery of science, every strange phenomenon among plants and animals, every new experiment in a chemical lecture.

The more we know of science the more we must confess, that nothing is too strange to be true: and therefore we must not blame or laugh at those who in old times believed in strange things which were not true. They had an honest and rational sense of the infinite and wonderful nature of the universe, and of their own ignorance about it; and they were ready to believe anything, as the truly wise man will be ready also. Only, from ignorance of the laws of the universe, they did not know what was likely to be true and what was not; and therefore they believed many things which experience has proved to be false; just as Seba or any of the early naturalists were ready to believe in six-legged dragons, or in the fatal power of the basilisk’s eye; fancies which, if they had been facts, would not have been nearly as wonderful as the transformation of the commonest insect, or the fertilization of the meanest weed: but which are rejected now, not because they are too wonderful, but simply because experience has proved them to be untrue. And experience, it must be remembered, is the only sound test of truth. As long as men will settle beforehand for themselves, without experience, what they ought to see, so long will they be perpetually fancying that they or others have seen it; and their faith, as it is falsely called, will delude not only their reason, but their very hearing, sight, and touch.

In this age we see no supernatural prodigies, because there are none to see; and when we are told that the reason why we see no prodigies is because we have no faith, we answer (if we be sensible), Just so. As long as people had faith, in plain English believed, that they could be magically cured of a disease, they thought that they or others were so cured. As long as they believed that ghosts could be seen, every silly person saw them. As long as they believed that dæmons transformed themselves into an animal’s shape, they said, “The devil croaked at me this morning in the shape of a raven; and therefore my horse fell with me.” As long as they believed that witches could curse them, they believed that an old woman in the next parish had overlooked them, their cattle, and their crops; and that therefore they were poor, diseased, and unfortunate. These dreams, which were common among the peasants in remote districts five-and-twenty years ago, have vanished, simply from the spread (by the grace of God, as I hold) of an inductive habit of mind; of the habit of looking coolly, boldly, carefully, at facts; till now, even among the most ignorant peasantry, the woman who says that she has seen a ghost is likely not to be complimented on her assertion. But it does not follow that that woman’s grandmother, when she said that she saw a ghost, was a consciously dishonest person; on the contrary, so complex and contradictory is human nature, she would have been, probably, a person of more than average intellect and earnestness; and her instinct of the invisible and the infinite (which is that which raises man above the brutes) would have been, because misinformed, the honourable cause of her error. And thus we may believe of the good hermits, of whom prodigies are recorded.

As to the truth of the prodigies themselves, there are several ways of looking at them.

First, we may neither believe nor disbelieve them; but talk of them as “devout fairy tales,” religious romances, and allegories; and so save ourselves the trouble of judging whether they were true. That is at least an easy and pleasant method; very fashionable in a careless, unbelieving age like this: but in following it we shall be somewhat cowardly; for there is hardly any matter a clear judgment on which is more important just now than these same saints’ miracles.

Next, we may believe them utterly and all; and that is also an easy and pleasant method. But if we follow it, we shall be forced to believe, among other facts, that St. Paphnutius was carried miraculously across a river, because he was too modest to undress himself and wade; that St. Helenus rode a savage crocodile across a river, and then commanded it to die; and that it died accordingly upon the spot; and that St. Goar, entering the palace of the Archbishop of Trêves, hung his cape on a sunbeam, mistaking it for a peg. And many other like things we shall be forced to believe, with which this book has no concern.

Or, again, we may believe as much as we can, because we should like, if we could, to believe all. But as we have not—no man has as yet—any criterion by which we can judge how much of these stories we ought to believe and how much not, which actually happened and which did not, therefore we shall end (as not only the most earnest and pious, but the most clear and logical persons, who have taken up this view, have ended already) by believing all: which is an end not to be desired.

Or we may believe as few as possible of them, because we should like, if we could, to believe none. And this method, for the reason aforesaid (namely, that there is no criterion by which we can settle what to believe and what not), usually ends in believing none at all.

This, of believing none at all, is the last method; and this, I confess fairly, I am inclined to think is the right one; and that these good hermits worked no real miracles and saw no real visions whatsoever.

I confess that this is a very serious assertion. For there is as much evidence in favour of these hermits’ miracles and visions as there is, with most men, of the existence of China; and much more than there, with most men, is of the earth’s going round the sun.

But the truth is, that evidence, in most matters of importance, is worth very little. Very few people decide a question on its facts, but on their own prejudices as to what they would like to have happened. Very few people are judges of evidence; not even of their own eyes and ears. Very few persons, when they see a thing, know what they have seen, and what not. They tell you quite honestly, not what they saw, but what they think they ought to have seen, or should like to have seen. It is a fact too often conveniently forgotten, that in every human crowd the majority will be more or less bad, or at least foolish; the slaves of anger, spite, conceit, vanity, sordid hope, and sordid fear. But let them be as honest and as virtuous as they may, pleasure, terror, and the desire of seeming to have seen or heard more than their neighbours, and all about it, make them exaggerate. If you take apart five honest men, who all stood by and saw the same man do anything strange, offensive, or even exciting, no two of them will give you quite the same account of it. If you leave them together, while excited, an hour before you question them, they will have compared notes and made up one story, which will contain all their mistakes combined; and it will require the skill of a practised barrister to pick the grain of wheat out of the chaff.

Moreover, when people are crowded together under any excitement, there is nothing which they will not make each other believe. They will make each other believe in spirit-rapping, table-turning, the mesmeric fluid, electro-biology; that they saw the lion on Northumberland House wagging his tail; {203} that witches have been seen riding in the air; that the Jews had poisoned the wells; that—but why go further into the sad catalogue of human absurdities, and the crimes which have followed them? Every one is ashamed of not seeing what every one else sees, and persuades himself against his own eye sight for fear of seeming stupid or ill-conditioned; and therefore in all evidence, the fewer witnesses, the more truth, because the evidence of ten men is worth more than that of a hundred together; and the evidence of a thousand men together is worth still less.

Now, if people are savage and ignorant, diseased and poverty-stricken; even if they are merely excited and credulous, and quite sure that something wonderful must happen, then they will be also quite certain that something wonderful has happened; and their evidence will be worth nothing at all.

Moreover, suppose that something really wonderful has happened; suppose, for instance, that some nervous or paralytic person has been suddenly restored to strength by the command of a saint or of some other remarkable man. This is quite possible, I may say common; and it is owing neither to physical nor to so-called spiritual causes, but simply to the power which a strong mind has over a weak one, to make it exert itself, and cure itself by its own will, though but for a time.

When this good news comes to be told, and to pass from mouth to mouth, it ends of quite a different shape from that in which it began. It has been added to, taken from, twisted in every direction according to the fancy or the carelessness of each teller, till what really happened in the first case no one will be able to say; {204} and this is, therefore, what actually happened, in the case of these reported wonders. Moreover (and this is the most important consideration of all) for men to be fair judges of what really happens, they must have somewhat sound minds in somewhat sound bodies; which no man can have (however honest and virtuous) who gives himself up, as did these old hermits, to fasting and vigils. That continued sleeplessness produces delusions, and at last actual madness, every physician knows; and they know also, as many a poor sailor has known when starving on a wreck, and many a poor soldier in such a retreat as that of Napoleon from Moscow, that extreme hunger and thirst produce delusions also, very similar to (and caused much in the same way as) those produced by ardent spirits; so that many a wretched creature ere now has been taken up for drunkenness, who has been simply starving to death.

Whence it follows that these good hermits, by continual fasts and vigils, must have put themselves (and their histories prove that they did put themselves) into a state of mental disease, in which their evidence was worth nothing; a state in which the mind cannot distinguish between facts and dreams; in which life itself is one dream; in which (as in the case of madness, or of a feverish child) the brain cannot distinguish between the objects which are outside it and the imaginations which are inside it. And it is plain, that the more earnest and pious, and therefore the more ascetic, one of these good men was, the more utterly would his brain be in a state of chronic disease. God forbid that we should scorn them, therefore, or think the worse of them in any way. They were animated by a truly noble purpose, the resolution to be good according to their light; they carried out that purpose with heroical endurance, and they have their reward: but this we must say, if we be rational people, that on their method of holiness, the more holy any one of them was, the less trustworthy was his account of any matter whatsoever; and that the hermit’s peculiar temptations (quite unknown to the hundreds of unmarried persons who lead quiet and virtuous, because rational and healthy, lives) are to be attributed, not as they thought, to a dæmon, but to a more or less unhealthy nervous system.

It must be remembered, moreover, in justice to these old hermits, that they did not invent the belief that the air was full of dæmons. All the Eastern nations had believed in Genii (Jinns), Fairies (Peris), and Devas, Divs, or devils. The Devas of the early Hindus were beneficent beings: to the eyes of the old Persians (in their hatred of idolatry and polytheism), they appeared evil beings, Divs, or Devils. And even so the genii and dæmons of the Roman Empire became, in the eyes of the early Christians, wicked and cruel spirits.

And they had their reasons, and on the whole sound ones, for so regarding them. The educated classes had given up any honest and literal worship of the old gods. They were trying to excuse themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies: but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own local beliefs and worships, generally of the most foul and brutal kind. The animal worship of Egypt among the lower classes was sufficiently detestable in the time of Herodotus. It had certainly not improved in that of Juvenal and Persius; and was still less likely to have improved afterwards. This is a subject so shocking that it can be only hinted at. But as a single instance—what wonder if the early hermits of Egypt looked on the crocodile as something diabolic, after seeing it, for generations untold, petted and worshipped in many a city, simply because it was the incarnate symbol of brute strength, cruelty, and cunning? We must remember, also, that earlier generations (the old Norsemen and Germans just as much as the old Egyptians) were wont to look on animals as more miraculous than we do; as more akin, in many cases, to human beings; as guided, not by a mere blind instinct, but by an intellect which was allied to, and often surpassed man’s intellect. “The bear,” said the old Norsemen, “had ten men’s strength, and eleven men’s wit;” and in some such light must the old hermits have looked on the hyæna, “bellua,” the monster _par excellence_; or on the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the poisonous snakes, which have been objects of terror and adoration in every country where they have been formidable. Whether the hyænas were dæmons, or were merely sent by the dæmons, St. Antony and St. Athanasius do not clearly define, for they did not know. It was enough for them that the beasts prowled at night in those desert cities, which were, according to the opinions, not only of the Easterns, but of the Romans, the special haunt of ghouls, witches, and all uncanny things. Their fiendish laughter—which, when heard even in a modern menagerie, excites and shakes most person’s nerves—rang through hearts and brains which had no help or comfort, save in God alone. The beast tore up the dead from their graves; devoured alike the belated child and the foulest offal; and was in all things a type and incarnation of that which man ought not to be. Why should not he, so like the worst of men, have some bond or kindred with the evil beings who were not men? Why should not the graceful and deadly cobra, the horrid cerastes, the huge throttling python, and even more, the loathly puff-adder, undistinguishable from the gravel among which he lay coiled, till he leaped furiously and unswerving, as if shot from a bow, upon his prey—why should not they too be kindred to that evil power who had been, in the holiest and most ancient books, personified by the name of the Serpent? Before we have a right to say that the hermits’ view of these deadly animals was not the most rational, as well as the most natural, which they could possibly have taken up, we must put ourselves in their places; and look at nature as they had learnt to look at it, not from Scripture and Christianity, so much as from the immemorial traditions of their heathen ancestors.

If it be argued, that they ought to have been well enough acquainted with these beasts to be aware of their merely animal nature, the answer is—that they were probably not well acquainted with the beasts of the desert. They had never, perhaps, before their “conversion,” left the narrow valley, well tilled and well inhabited, which holds the Nile. A climb from it into the barren mountains and deserts east and west was a journey out of the world into chaos, and the region of the unknown and the horrible, which demanded high courage from the unarmed and effeminate Egyptian, who knew not what monster he might meet ere sundown. Moreover, it is very probable that during these centuries of decadence, in Egypt, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, “the wild beasts of the field had increased” on the population, and were reappearing in the more cultivated grounds.

But these old hermits appear perpetually in another, and a more humane, if not more human aspect, as the miraculous tamers of savage beasts. Those who wish to know all which can be alleged in favour of their having possessed such a power, should read M. de Montalembert’s chapter, “Les Moines et la Nature.” {209} All that learning and eloquence can say in favour of the theory is said there; and with a candour which demands from no man full belief of many beautiful but impossible stories, “travesties of historic verity,” which have probably grown up from ever-varying tradition in the course of ages. M. de Montalembert himself points out a probable explanation of many of them:—An ingenious scholar of our times{210} (he says) has pointed out their true and legitimate origin—at least in Ancient Gaul. According to him, after the gradual disappearance of the Gallo-Roman population, the oxen, the horses, the dogs had returned to the wild state; and it was in the forest that the Breton missionaries had to seek these animals, to employ them anew for domestic use. The miracle was, to restore to man the command and the enjoyment of those creatures, which God had given him as instruments.

This theory is probable enough, and will explain, doubtless, many stories. It may even explain those of tamed wolves, who may have been only feral dogs, _i.e._ dogs run wild. But it will not explain those in which (in Ireland as well as in Gaul) the stag appears as obeying the hermit’s commands. The twelve huge stags who come out of the forest to draw the ploughs for St. Leonor and his monks, or those who drew to his grave the corpse of the Irish hermit Kellac, or those who came out of the forest to supply the place of St. Colodoc’s cattle, which the seigneur had carried off in revenge for his having given sanctuary to a hunted deer, must have been wild from the beginning; and many another tale must remain without any explanation whatsoever—save the simplest of all. Neither can any such theory apply to the marvels vouched for by St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, and other contemporaries, which “show us (to quote M. de Montalembert) the most ferocious animals at the feet of such men as Antony, Pachomius, Macarius, and Hilarion, and those who copied them. At every page one sees wild asses, crocodiles, hippopotami, hyænas, and, above all, lions, transformed into respectful companions and docile servants of these prodigies of sanctity; and one concludes thence, not that these beasts had reasonable souls, but that God knew how to glorify those who devoted themselves to his glory, and thus show how all Nature obeyed man before he was excluded from Paradise by his disobedience.”

This is, on the whole, the cause which the contemporary biographers assign for these wonders. The hermits were believed to have returned, by celibacy and penitence, to “the life of angels;” to that state of perfect innocence which was attributed to our first parents in Eden: and therefore of them our Lord’s words were true: “He that believeth in me, greater things than these (which I do) shall he do.”

But those who are of a different opinion will seek for different causes. They will, the more they know of these stories, admire often their gracefulness, often their pathos, often their deep moral significance; they will feel the general truth of M. de Montalembert’s words: “There is not one of them which does not honour and profit human nature, and which does not express a victory of weakness over force, and of good over evil.” But if they look on physical facts as sacred things, as the voice of God revealed in the phenomena of matter, their first question will be, “Are they true?”

Some of them must be denied utterly, like that of St. Helenus, riding and then slaying the crocodile. It did not happen. Abbot Ammon {212a} did not make two dragons guard his cell against robbers. St. Gerasimus {212b} did not set the lion, out of whose foot he had taken a thorn, to guard his ass; and when the ass was stolen by an Arabian camel-driver, he did not (fancying that the lion had eaten the ass) make him carry water in the ass’s stead. Neither did the lion, when next he met the thief and the ass, bring them up, in his own justification, {212c} to St. Gerasimus. St. Costinian did not put a pack-saddle on a bear, and make him carry a great stone. A lioness did not bring her five blind whelps to a hermit, that he might give them sight. {212d} And, though Sulpicius Severus says that he saw it with his own eyes, {212e} it is hard to believe the latter part of the graceful story which he tells—of an old hermit whom he found dwelling alone twelve miles from the Nile, by a well of vast depth. One ox he had, whose whole work was to raise the water by a wheel. Around him was a garden of herbs, kept rich and green amid the burning sand, where neither seed nor root could live. The old man and the ox fed together on the produce of their common toil; but two miles off there was a single palm-tree, to which, after supper, the hermit takes his guests. Beneath the palm they find a lioness; but instead of attacking them, she moves “modestly” away at the old man’s command, and sits down to wait for her share of dates. She feeds out of his hand, like a household animal, and goes her way, leaving her guests trembling, “and confessing how great was the virtue of the hermit’s faith, and how great their own infirmity.”

This last story, which one would gladly believe, were it possible, I have inserted as one of those which hang on the verge of credibility. In the very next page, Sulpicius Severus tells a story quite credible, of a she-wolf, which he saw with his own eyes as tame as any dog. There can be no more reason to doubt that fact than to ascribe it to a miracle. We may even believe that the wolf, having gnawed to pieces the palm basket which the good old man was weaving, went off, knowing that she had done wrong, and after a week came back, begged pardon like a rational soul, and was caressed, and given a double share of bread. Many of these stories which tell of the taming of wild beasts may be true, and yet contain no miracle. They are very few in number, after all, in proportion to the number of monks; they are to be counted at most by tens, while the monks are counted by tens of thousands. And among many great companies of monks, there may have been one individual, as there is, for instance, in many a country parish a bee-taker or a horse-tamer, of quiet temper and strong nerve, and quick and sympathetic intellect, whose power over animals is so extraordinary, as to be attributed by the superstitious and uneducated to some hereditary secret, or some fairy gift. Very powerful to attract wild animals must have been the good hermits’ habit of sitting motionless for hours, till (as with St. Guthlac) the swallows sat and sang upon his knee; and of moving slowly and gently at his work, till (as with St. Karilef, while he pruned his vines) the robin came and built in his hood as it hung upon a tree: very powerful his freedom from anger, and, yet more important, from fear, which always calls out rage in wild beasts, while a calm and bold front awes them: and most powerful of all, the kindliness of heart, the love of companionship, which brought the wild bison to feed by St. Karilef’s side as he prayed upon the lawn; and the hind to nourish St. Giles with her milk in the jungles of the Bouches du Rhône. There was no miracle; save the moral miracle that, in ages of cruelty and slaughter, these men had learned (surely by the inspiration of God) how—

“He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast;
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”

After all, let these old Lives of the Fathers tell their own tale. By their own merits let them stand or fall; and stand they will in one sense: for whatsoever else they are not, this they are—the histories of good men. Their physical science and their dæmonology may have been on a par with those of the world around them: but they possessed what the world did not possess, faith in the utterly good and self-sacrificing God, and an ideal of virtue and purity such as had never been seen since the first Whitsuntide. And they set themselves to realize that ideal with a simplicity, an energy, an endurance, which were altogether heroic. How far they were right in “giving up the world” depends entirely on what the world was then like, and whether there was any hope of reforming it. It was their opinion that there was no such hope; and those who know best the facts which surrounded them, its utter frivolity, its utter viciousness, the deadness which had fallen on art, science, philosophy, human life, whether family, social, or political; the prevalence of slavery, in forms altogether hideous and unmentionable; the insecurity of life and property, whether from military and fiscal tyranny, or from perpetual inroads of the so-called “Barbarians:” those, I say, who know these facts best will be most inclined to believe that the old hermits were wise in their generation; that the world was past salvation; that it was not a wise or humane thing to marry and bring children into the world; that in such a state of society, an honest and virtuous man could not exist, and that those who wished to remain honest and virtuous must flee into the desert, and be alone with God and their fellows.

The question which had to be settled then and there, at that particular crisis of the human race, was not—Are certain wonders true or false? but—Is man a mere mortal animal, or an immortal soul? Is his flesh meant to serve his spirit, or his spirit his flesh? Is pleasure, or virtue, the end and aim of his existence?

The hermits set themselves to answer that question, not by arguing or writing about it, but by the only way in which any question can be settled—by experiment. They resolved to try whether their immortal souls could not grow better and better, while their mortal bodies were utterly neglected; to make their flesh serve their spirit; to make virtue their only end and aim; and utterly to relinquish the very notion of pleasure. To do this one thing, and nothing else, they devoted their lives; and they succeeded. From their time it has been a received opinion, not merely among a few philosophers or a few Pharisees, but among the lowest, the poorest, the most ignorant, who have known aught of Christianity, that man is an immortal soul; that the spirit, and not the flesh, ought to be master and guide; that virtue is the highest good; and that purity is a virtue, impurity a sin. These men were, it has been well said, the very fathers of purity. And if, in that and in other matters, they pushed their purpose to an extreme—if, by devoting themselves utterly to it alone, they suffered, not merely in wideness of mind or in power of judging evidence, but even in brain, till they became some of them at times insane from over-wrought nerves—it is not for us to blame the soldier for the wounds which have crippled him, or the physician for the disease which he has caught himself while trying to heal others. Let us not speak ill of the bridge which carries us over, nor mock at those who did the work for us as seemed to them best, and perhaps in the only way in which it could be done in those evil days. As a matter of fact, through these men’s teaching and example we have learnt what morality, purity, and Christianity we possess; and if any answer that we have learnt them from the Scriptures, who but these men preserved the Scriptures to us? Who taught us to look on them as sacred and inspired? Who taught us to apply them to our own daily lives, and find comfort and teaching in every age, in words written ages ago by another race in a foreign land? The Scriptures were the book, generally the only book, which they read and meditated, not merely from morn till night, but, as far as fainting nature would allow, from night to morn again: and their method of interpreting them (as far as I can discover) differed in nothing from that common to all Christians now, save that they interpreted literally certain precepts of our Lord and of St. Paul which we consider to have applied only to the “temporary necessity” of a decayed, dying, and hopeless age such as that in which they lived. And therefore, because they knew the Scripture well, and learned in it lessons of true virtue and true philosophy, though unable to save civilization in the East, they were able at least to save it in the West. The European hermits, and the monastic communities which they originated, were indeed a seed of life, not merely to the conquered Roman population of Gaul or Spain or Britain, but to the heathen and Arian barbarians who conquered them. Among those fierce and armed savages, the unarmed hermits stood, strong only by justice, purity, and faith in God, defying the oppressor, succouring the oppressed, and awing and softening the new aristocracy of the middle age, which was founded on mere brute force and pride of race; because the monk took his stand upon mere humanity; because he told the wild conqueror, Goth or Sueve, Frank or Burgund, Saxon or Norseman, that all men were equal in the sight of God; because he told them (to quote Athanasius’s own words concerning Antony) that “virtue is not beyond human nature;” that the highest moral excellence was possible to the most low-born and unlettered peasant whom they trampled under their horses’ hoofs, if he were only renewed and sanctified by the Spirit of God. They accepted the lowest and commonest facts of that peasant’s wretched life; they outdid him in helplessness, loneliness, hunger, dirt, and slavery; and then said, “Among all these I can yet be a man of God, wise, virtuous, pure, free, and noble in the sight of God, though not in the sight of Cæsars, counts, and knights.” They went on, it is true, to glorify the means above the end; to consecrate childlessness, self-torture, dirt, ignorance, as if they were things pleasing to God and holy in themselves. But in spite of those errors they wrought throughout Europe a work which, as far as we can judge, could have been done in no other way; done only by men who gave up all that makes life worth having for the sake of being good themselves and making others good.

THE HERMITS OF EUROPE

MOST readers will recollect what an important part in the old ballads and romances is played by the hermit.

He stands in strongest contrast to the knight. He fills up, as it were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice, what is wanting in the manhood of the knight, the slave too often of his own fierceness and self-assertion. The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous duel, such as was too common in days when any two armed horsemen meeting on road or lawn ran blindly at each other in the mere lust of fighting, as boars or stags might run. Sometimes he interferes to protect the oppressed serf; sometimes to rescue the hunted deer which has taken sanctuary at his feet. Sometimes, again, his influence is that of intellectual superiority; of worldly experience; of the travelled man who has seen many lands and many nations. Sometimes, again, that of sympathy; for he has been a knight himself, and fought and sinned, and drank of the cup of vanity and vexation of spirit, like the fierce warrior who kneels at his feet.

All who have read (and all ought to have read) Spenser’s Fairy Queen, must recollect his charming description of the hermit with whom Prince Arthur leaves Serena and the squire after they have been wounded by “the blatant beast” of Slander; when—

“Toward night they came unto a plain
By which a little hermitage there lay
Far from all neighbourhood, the which annoy it may.

“And nigh thereto a little chapel stood,
Which being all with ivy overspread
Decked all the roof, and shadowing the rood,
Seemed like a grove fair branchèd overhead;
Therein the hermit which his here led
In straight observance of religious vow,
Was wont his hours and holy things to bed;
And therein he likewise was praying now,
When as these knights arrived, they wist not where nor how.

“They stayed not there, but straightway in did pass:
Who when the hermit present saw in place,
From his devotions straight he troubled was;
Which breaking off, he toward them did pace
With staid steps and grave beseeming grace:
For well it seemed that whilom he had been
Some goodly person, and of gentle race,
That could his good to all, and well did ween
How each to entertain with courtesy beseen.

* * * * *

“He thence them led into his hermitage,
Letting their steeds to graze upon the green:
Small was his house, and like a little cage,
For his own term, yet inly neat and clean,
Decked with green boughs, and flowers gay beseen
Therein he them full fair did entertain,
Not with such forgèd shews, as fitter been
For courting fools that courtesies would feign,
But with entire affection and appearance plain.

* * * * *

How be that careful hermit did his best
With many kinds of medicines meet to tame
The poisonous humour that did most infest
Their reakling wounds, and every day them duly dressed.

“For he right well in leech’s craft was seen;
And through the long experience of his days,
Which had in many fortunes tossèd been,
And passed through many perilous assays:
He knew the divers want of mortal ways,
And in the minds of men had great insight;
Which with sage counsel, when they went astray,
He could inform and them reduce aright;
And all the passions heal which wound the weaker sprite.

“For whilome he had been a doughty knight,
As any one that livèd in his days,
And provèd oft in many a perilous fight,
In which he grace and glory won always,
And in all battles bore away the bays:
But being now attached with timely age,
And weary of this world’s unquiet ways,
He took himself unto this hermitage,
In which he lived alone like careless bird in cage.”

This picture is not poetry alone: it is history. Such men actually lived, and such work they actually did, from the southernmost point of Italy to the northernmost point of Scotland, during centuries in which there was no one else to do the work. The regular clergy could not have done it. Bishops and priests were entangled in the affairs of this world, striving to be statesmen, striving to be landowners, striving to pass Church lands on from father to son, and to establish themselves as an hereditary caste of priests. The chaplain or house-priest who was to be found in every nobleman’s, almost every knight’s castle, was apt to become a mere upper servant, who said mass every morning in return for the good cheer which he got every evening, and fetched and carried at the bidding of his master and mistress. But the hermit who dwelt alone in the forest glen, occupied, like an old Hebrew prophet, a superior and an independent position. He needed nought from any man save the scrap of land which the lord was only too glad to allow him in return for his counsels and his prayers. And to him, as to a mysterious and supernatural personage, the lord went privately for advice in his quarrels with the neighbouring barons, or with his own kin. To him the lady took her children when they were sick, to be healed, as she fancied, by his prayers and blessings; or poured into his ears a hundred secret sorrows and anxieties which she dare not tell to her fierce lord, who hunted and fought the livelong day, and drank too much liquor every night.

This class of men sprang up rapidly, by natural causes, and yet by a Divine necessity, as soon as the Western Empire was conquered by the German tribes; and those two young officers whom we saw turning monks at Trêves, in the time of St. Augustine, may, if they lived to be old men, have given sage counsel again and again to fierce German knights and kinglets, who had dispossessed the rich and effeminate landowners of their estates, and sold them, their wives, and children, in gangs by the side of their own slaves. Only the Roman who had turned monk would probably escape that fearful ruin; and he would remain behind, while the rest of his race was enslaved or swept away, as a seed of Christianity and of civilization, destined to grow and spread, and bring the wild conquerors in due time into the kingdom of God.

For the first century or two after the invasion of the barbarians, the names of the hermits and saints are almost exclusively Latin. Their biographies represent them in almost every case as born of noble Roman parents. As time goes on, German names appear, and at last entirely supersede the Latin ones; showing that the conquering race had learned from the conquered to become hermits and monks like them.

ST. SEVERINUS, THE APOSTLE OF NORICUM

OF all these saintly civilizers, St. Severinus of Vienna is perhaps the most interesting, and his story the most historically instructive. {224}

A common time, the middle of the fifth century, the province of Noricum (Austria, as we should now call it) was the very highway of invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom in which Huns, Alemanni, Rugi, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile province, each tribe striving to trample the other under foot, and to march southward over their corpses to plunder what was still left of the already plundered wealth of Italy and Rome. The difference of race, in tongue, and in manners, between the conquered and their conquerors, was made more painful by difference in creed. The conquering Germans and Huns were either Arians or heathens. The conquered race (though probably of very mixed blood), who called themselves Romans, because they spoke Latin and lived under the Roman law, were orthodox Catholics; and the miseries of religious persecution were too often added to the usual miseries of invasion.

It was about the year 455–60. Attila, the great King of the Huns, who called himself—and who was—“the Scourge of God,” was just dead. His empire had broken up. The whole centre of Europe was in a state of anarchy and war; and the hapless Romans along the Danube were in the last extremity of terror, not knowing by what fresh invader their crops would be swept off up to the very gates of the walled towers which were their only defence: when there appeared among them, coming out of the East, a man of God.

Who he was, he would not tell. His speech showed him to be an African Roman—a fellow-countryman of St. Augustine—probably from the neighbourhood of Carthage. He had certainly at one time gone to some desert in the East, zealous to learn “the more perfect life.” Severinus, he said, was his name; a name which indicated high rank, as did the manners and the scholarship of him who bore it. But more than his name he would not tell. “If you take me for a runaway slave,” he said, smiling, “get ready money to redeem me with when my master demands me back.” For he believed that they would have need of him; that God had sent him into that land that he might be of use to its wretched people. And certainly he could have come into the neighbourhood of Vienna at that moment for no other purpose than to do good, unless he came to deal in slaves.

He settled first at a town called by his biographer Casturis; and, lodging with the warden of the church, lived quietly the hermit life. Meanwhile the German tribes were prowling round the town; and Severinus, going one day into the church, began to warn the priests and clergy and all the people that a destruction was coming on them which they could only avert by prayer and fasting and the works of mercy. They laughed him to scorn, confiding in their lofty Roman walls, which the invaders—wild horsemen, who had no military engines—were unable either to scale or batter down. Severinus left the town at once, prophesying, it was said, the very day and hour of its fall. He went on to the next town, which was then closely garrisoned by a barbarian force, and repeated his warning there: but while the people were listening to him, there came an old man to the gate, and told them how Casturis had been already sacked, as the man of God had foretold; and, going into the church, threw himself at the feet of St. Severinus, and said that he had been saved by his merits from being destroyed with his fellow-townsmen.

Then the dwellers in the town hearkened to the man of God, and gave themselves up to fasting and almsgiving and prayer for three whole days.

And on the third day, when the solemnity of the evening sacrifice was fulfilled, a sudden earthquake happened, and the barbarians, seized with panic fear, and probably hating and dreading—like all those wild tribes—confinement between four stone walls instead of the free open life of the tent and the stockade, forced the Romans to open their gates to them, rushed out into the night, and in their madness slew each other.

In those days a famine fell upon the people of Vienna; and they, as their sole remedy, thought good to send for the man of God from the neighbouring town. He went, and preached to them, too, repentance and almsgiving. The rich, it seems, had hidden up their stores of corn, and left the poor to starve. At least St. Severinus discovered (by Divine revelation, it was supposed), that a widow named Procula had done as much. He called her out into the midst of the people, and asked her why she, a noble woman and free-born, had made herself a slave to avarice, which is idolatry. If she would not give her corn to Christ’s poor, let her throw it into the Danube to feed the fish, for any gain from it she would not have. Procula was abashed, and served out her hoards thereupon willingly to the poor; and a little while afterwards, to the astonishment of all, vessels came down the Danube, laden with every kind of merchandise. They had been frozen up for many days near Passau, in the thick ice of the river Enns: but the prayers of God’s servant (so men believed) had opened the ice-gates, and let them down the stream before the usual time.

Then the wild German horsemen swept around the walls, and carried off human beings and cattle, as many as they could find. Severinus, like some old Hebrew prophet, did not shrink from advising hard blows, where hard blows could avail. Mamertinus, the tribune, or officer in command, told him that he had so few soldiers, and those so ill-armed, that he dare not face the enemy. Severinus answered, that they should get weapons from the barbarians themselves; the Lord would fight for them, and they should hold their peace: only if they took any captives they should bring them safe to him. At the second milestone from the city they came upon the plunderers, who fled at once, leaving their arms behind. Thus was the prophecy of the man of God fulfilled. The Romans brought the captives back to him unharmed. He loosed their bonds, gave them food and drink, and let them go. But they were to tell their comrades that, if ever they came near that spot again, celestial vengeance would fall on them, for the God of the Christians fought from heaven in his servants’ cause.

So the barbarians trembled, and went away. And the fear of St. Severinus fell on all the Goths, heretic Arians though they were; and on the Rugii, who held the north bank of the Danube in those evil days. St. Severinus, meanwhile, went out of Vienna, and built himself a cell at a place called “At the Vineyards.” But some benevolent impulse—Divine revelation, his biographer calls it—prompted him to return, and build himself a cell on a hill close to Vienna, round which other cells soon grew up, tenanted by his disciples. “There,” says his biographer, “he longed to escape the crowds of men who were wont to come to him, and cling closer to God in continual prayer: but the more he longed to dwell in solitude, the more often he was warned by revelations not to deny his presence to the afflicted people.” He fasted continually; he went barefoot even in the midst of winter, which was so severe, the story continues, in those days around Vienna, that wagons crossed the Danube on the solid ice: and yet, instead of being puffed-up by his own virtues, he set an example of humility to all, and bade them with tears to pray for him, that the Saviour’s gifts to him might not heap condemnation on his head.

Over the wild Rugii St. Severinus seems to have acquired unbounded influence. Their king, Flaccitheus, used to pour out his sorrows to him, and tell him how the princes of the Goths would surely slay him; for when he had asked leave of him to pass on into Italy, he would not let him go. But St. Severinus prophesied to him that the Goths would do him no harm. Only one warning he must take: “Let it not grieve him to ask peace even for the least of men.”