2dcty Nad lubert
BAACR
CA IS
Monks AND ALEX NADRIA
NoN- Fienon
Mouks aud
Hevanchiay -
Wanracidr Snopsis
Notes


Casa Campardi
53037 san Gimignano
(SIENA)
Italy
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MONKS
Dear Maurice,
The story of the monks should of course---but for a
better reason than that he started Chrintionity--bogin
with Christ. For a long time I have thought that he
brought so omething not simply new to Judah but of an ancient
origin, more ancient than Judah itself. When I first
began to sense this I knew nothing of the fact that there
were early trade routes between India and Mesopatamia,
and between India and Greece---perhaps as early as that
first oral tradition of Hinduism called the Vedas,
which some people put at about two thousand years before
Christ and others very much earlier indeed. Nor did I
know that the theory that man started in southern Africa
was being displaced by findings that a very much earlier
ancestral humanity was to be found at the northern tip
of India. We are told that Christ's mission was very
much the child of Greek influence, and it seems to me that
we can go further and supply the root not only of Greek
thought but of the Mesopatamian cradle of religion from
which Judah itself came. If/you look, for instance, at
a commentary on the Upanishads---S ome of which might be
called the Vedas written down---it is astonishing what
aptness some of them have to the ideas of Plato. But, for
the kind of book that you and I have in mind, the important
thing is that Christ pointed outside Judah to the kind of
renunciation never practised in Judha, namely a solitary
or monastic one. Buddha overcame the world east of India.
Christ ovrerceme the world west of India: and there are
parallels between their approaches--always to the poor,
the si imple, the neglected. And that, I am saying, has
a long monastic tradition in India behind it. This
should be the basis of the bo ok, in the sense that the


ILLUSTRAT lroivs
MONKS AND ALEXANDRIA
MAURICE ROWDON
luticluction
The book opens with a deseription of Alexandria
Intoduction
todayemeita sidestreets, the peeling walls of the banks,
the derelict harbour. Islam is now in control. The
Mlexendua
Greek element has ali but gone. J There are the monument ats:
Pompey's Pillar, the serapis statues in the museum, the
sitep of the serapis Tempie, the royal palace of the
lodey
Ptolemies and the Mouseion. outside the city, at Aboukir
(called canopus in anei ient times), there is another Serapis
temple, and Christian catacombs. In the Libyan desert four
Christian mom steries remain, at wady Natrun in the soetis
desert, where the strangely éoloured mineral lakes lie.
And there are the ruins of those first monasteries from the
time of Pachomius. At Abuma there are the remains of a
onee-flourishing Christian town, its ohurch
the Eeyptian Boldier martyred in AD
Abousir
DURFAURS 1s temple of Osiris, and a neeropolis from
the fourth century BC beloning to the aneient resort called
Plinthine.
ihen Alezander entered Memphis at the age of
I. Tue
3 five and founded this oity (BC 332) he was providing Angentr"
Frudatoi
only a capital for Egypt, which he had just conquered, but
) one for Greek eivilisation
a whole, with easy access
Alexanduc
across the Mediterrenean RdEs mother country, There were
limes stone quarries, a natural herbour, a pergeet olimate
and plenty of fresh water. He was saluted at the Nile
as the Son of God and the Master of the World by the priests
of Ammon, and he seemed to have found in
land of
priests---exeotly the setting he needed for E hermonising
of the Greek woria under one religion: he had arter all
eonquered Persia in oller to achieve this. Ee never saw his
And later, under the influence of sgyptian priests,
he aiThon was
exelusively Greek in his ideas: he wished to
harmonise the whole world. Perhaps he succeeded more then
éven he expected: Alexandria, combining Egyptian and Jewish
and Creek systems of religious thought, and physically
combining the busy Mediterranean city with the solitary
deserte--did bec ame the monastie and the intelleotual
birthplace of Christimity.
Alexandria was a city with a million inhabitants in
its ancient heyday, with wide avenues. It was divided into
five quarters oalled
the first five letters of the Greek
alphabet. Its port NAROTE ships from evry country.


Jews Sers
into the city from Jerusalem, occupying
mostly the ttewr a "D quaster. There were nearly a
million books in the royal libmary, Its influenee spread
as far as China, Ànd it was perhaps one of most sucéess-
ful states ever ereated.
It was built round a small
town elose
the
sea oalled Rhalsotis. This later eypteis the centre te
Alexandria's cult of serapis, a masterly Amalgam of Greek
and Reyptian divinities,
in his personality
osiris, Apis of Hemphis, iotinns Zeus, Dionysius,
Pluto.
2Te lule
After Alexander's death one of his generals, Ptoleny,
established himself as the 'son of Gode and professed with
2 Ike Plolemies
eansent a eonneetion with the Pharoshs. The
Se of the Ptolemies did achieve the kind of her mony
Alexander was after,
the domestie murders and
mwwreh)
intrigues. More doe torzie and hymms and
of love were produced than
other eity Elee Inown.
Under Philadelphus work was ARY ted on translating the
Bible into Greekes-the soecalled Septuagint vereion, the
wark of seventy rabbis, finished by BC 130. wit rather
than daring or originai thought
largely bee cause
the Ptalemies kept such a elose
on their seholars
and
Emtie
poets. Seienoe, being analytical, eeme off best.
Mathematics, geography,
medioine made extrae
ordinery developments, with ment, Eratosthenes (who knew
thet the earth was round and calouiated 1ts diameter to
within fifty miles of the
and Aristarehus of Samos
(who knew that the earth UTORA round the
Ptoleny
i1l made the so-called Alexandrian year of 365,
days
instead
of the Egyptien 365. And on this Alexandrimn
year, officialised by Julius caesar, we base our ovn Julim
oalendar. Eresistratus prectised vivisection, end e onne
eoted nervous breakdown with sezual disorders.
The Egyptien divinity osiris was understood by the
Greeks as being virtually synonymous with Dionysius, almost
another name far hime The Serapis eult spread like fire,
and there were soon shrines to him in every pert of the
Mediterranean, Some people see this oult as the last
stronghold of paganism ageinst Christianity, as it was in
the striet historical sense, but
it was the force
that helped Christ burst on the Heyelly mind 1ike a
cxm
sudden light,
all the fecets of the 'perfeet' man
Urming
that they hored 8T2
The first intervention in Alexandrian arrairs Seom,
outside was from
The rather logieal and othicably
minded Romans were Mrenried, or professed
be horrified,
at Alexandrion corruption. It was a cold terteo
and Romen Christianity as it later beeame was deeply
aifferent from those first warm Greek and Jewish expresseons


both in the oity and the desert. Perhaps two
Christianity are to be foundea-before and after Y7pes Roman
officialisation of the religion.
The Roman
Little by little the Alexandrian empire
Israel,
Cyprus and some of the Asia Minor coast) fell grentc Roman
alropton 2
hends, and over the next two centuries the hold inereased as
Alecandin
the Beyptian fleet fell more and more into decay. Rome was
declared "guerdiant of the Ptolemies,
was a
perfect image of the eity in her volotuous
her
mwurd)
daring end her cowardice. She intrigued against
own
brother and husband Ptoleny X1v, then made
love to caesar,
went to Rome with him and arter he was assassinated returned
to Alexandria to make love to Antony end turn his head with
delights unknown to the simpler and grosser Roman world.
Her son by Julius Caesar became Ptoleny XV1, and for a
moment the eity beeame the capital of the eastern empire
while cotavian ruled the western from Rome. But after
Cleopatra ts fleet virtually surrendered to cotavian's
Alexandria degenerated into the capital of a Roman provinee.
octavian, now the emperçr Augustus, hated it. Yet
Alexendria's developmentas the rspiritual eity' was
usintermupted-indoed it quiekened. For this was the
time of christ.
Te tinu
Tradition says that Christianity was brought into
Alexandria by st iark when he converted a Jewish shoemaker
Clmnslraus
called Annianus in AD 45: this men was
seventeen
Alexandia
years later for protesting against the cult cuttre Serapis.
The Romen emperors persecuted Christians less because they
disagreed with their beliefs or their faithee-the persecut-
ion of a man for beliefs was a virtually unknown idea in
the aneient worldee-then because they, seemed to represent
a danger to the State: Christianity looked like a Jewish
dootrine of subversion designed to upset the state of
Israel (a provinee of the
and even, in its later
stages, challenge the emperor cetey questioning his divinity.
Hadrian's lette about the Christians in Alexandria,
dated AD 134, deseribed them as seditious, vain and spiteful.
Above all, they were *badly
meaning that they
were reluetant to accept
In Alexendria
the a
TETNACT
onfliet between vacthEnL and the state was at its
most pointed. And perhaps the eity won the battle for the
orficialisation of the religion more then any other place
in the empire.
But confliet alone could not have converted such large
ne conven lo 6 numbers of other
There had to be some kind d
inspiration, and aorith lay perhaps in the eostasy, the striking
0 tepegau
Joy that shone from the eyes of Christiens even when they
were on their way to death or torture. That was what
remained in peopie's minds, and what was talked about.


The question is how this
came
and
exceeded the kind of
AntSdSY in the
osiris or
ontr.ced
Serapis. is was quite elearly a different
of experience. And in the end this
dirference is seen to
lie in the monastie discipline that eame in with Christ's
and which had been for a very long time crystallising
Emspapot. in
It amounted to a technique for the realisation of a
beyond any pleasure of the senses: and compared with
i8y none of the Serapis rites nor the image of Isis herself
(so close to that or the later Madonna) had a sustaining
power over the mind. The monastie discipline
on the knowledge that God was inside, ard had to looked
far inside: henee
LOETIOO
the importance of' a solitary retreat.
Te Lo Aaslie
Now this monastie ideal ar discipline was quite
disuplui uhanleal foreign to Mediterranean thoughts and ways of worship,
But it was the basis of Hinduism and Buddhism, and there
tm the Eust
is plenty of evidence that these had for
long exerted
their influenee in Israel, in Egypt and in Atho Greek
world, ao that Christ's appearance seemed to heve been
prepared for over the centuries, Buddhistie disciplines
may well have reached Egypt during the Persian invasion
of the Nile
between 525 and 405 BC. There were
large numbers Indians in the Persian arny in Greeee,
in 480 BC. Modelled heads of Indiens have been found
at Memphis from the same period, which seems to indicate a
settled community of Indien traders, There is evidonce of
an ascetie group of men in the desert behind the Fayum
province as eariy as 340 BC. Buddhim was aetively preached
in many parts of the Mediterrenean by 259 BG. The recluses
of Serapaion at Memphis appeered about 170 EO. The
Therapeutne were formed near Alexandria, a Jewish seot
remarkably elose to the later monasteries: its mon and women
lived in
cells, never touched wine or meat and spent
their lives MEEntO meditation. The Essenes of Ierael
have
derived from this seot, or airectly from a Buddhist
at Antioch. The power of Hinduism lay not only in its
disoipline---in the thoroughness of its technique which
amounted to something like a segiene eemmbut in its insistence X
on the 1dea that tail paths lead to Gode. For the Hindu it
was impossible to evade God, fer from Him being divided into
seots and authorities.
Te Numahc Brte
The Hermetie Books of Egypt are dated between 500 and
and these too show Indian influences: the Books
pegphlim -200 6c) in 0.m31 turn provided much of the basis for later Greek
Show Easta
and Jewish thought, and thus Christian thought in Alexandria
too.
Aflne
The Books promoted the idea of a Son of God, an


obvious forewarning of Christien doetrine. The Logos
is mentioned for the first time in the Books, Both the
Essenes and the Therapeatae followed the Books al osely in
their daily livos. The opening of the st John gospei puts
the Essene point of view exactly, with its mention of the
Word or Logos.
Also an important new view came into Egyptian thought
at the time of the Books, namely that if ta ray of God's
sun* shone on a man he was heneeforth free of his *demons',
which later terminology would call
all other men
were naturally driven by thei ir
The Hindu concept
curoess
"maya', that is the natural passion-driven world of
pleasure énd
olose to this: the "light' comes
through the -
shines through it---and
detachment from the eyole ay pleasure-pain for the Hsives
time. And the connection with the later Christian dootrine
is olear too. There was also mention in the
BODErOe of the *font of mind'esea baptism of the mind whieh
provided gnosis or divine knowledge. 'And now I am not
what I was before, but I am born in Mindo(tsecret Sermon) -
This theme of rebirth---deep in all Hindu thought---is
eohoed by Christ himself--ixoept a man be bom again he
cennot see the Kingdom of Heaven'.
2 Tre'Wischou
The so-called Wisdom literature began in Egypt about
200 years before Christ: and it comes straight from the
hitunlise 2mppt theme of the Logos and the reborn self. And it was almost
(200 Bc) sho 3 certainly familiar to the first Christians. The 'wisdom
of Solomon'was by an Alexandrian
written in Greek.
He alu iifleace, In it we find a softening of the gendoczatien Jehovah:
the writer has clearly studied Epicurean ideas. For the
Alexandrian, ready to accept any new religious idea, the
Jewish God was vaiid enough but lacked the common touch
A mediator of some kind--ea eantect with men---was toucaea,
and the whole theme of the *Word or the flight' or the
tmind' or the *Son of Goa came from this; they were
different ways of describing contact with God. Wisdom*
was the
of the diseriminating mind: it was the devotee ts
own aet des mediation, for himself.
Now the monastic diseipline underpinned this: the
Hindu of Buddhistie dootrine laid it down that divine bliss
could be experienced only
withdrawing the mind from the
senses (from "maya') and TATLTIA into the deepest self:
in the Self
in the seif we were all one. Henee
fam
Christ's, 'IS HY atl written, Ye are gods?' takes on a clear
meaning, as foreign to the spirit of Judah as mything could
be at the time.
For Christ himself
the
expressed
Eastern theme of
Chuiy
renuneiation as if he had been groomed in ito Greeks and
nuth
Persians and sgyptains had certainly influenced som
eus
ye brought the monastie message into the heart of' Judah,
ac t
2 Je L


for the first time in such a graphie and
the
dangerous
'If any men oome to me, Atar hate seatele not
father, and Kin mother and wife, and children, and brethren,
and sisters, yea, and his ovn lire also, he cannot be
diseiple (Luke 14,26), 'Go thpy way, seil whatsoever thoa
hast, and give to the
and thou shalt have treasure
in héaven' (Mark 10,21), yoorka 'Is it not written in your
law, I said, ye are gods? (John 10,34).
The Alexanduar
This message came to Alexandria through the resident
ochisy S) censr. Jews, and Christ was now their mediator--all that the iord
and the Mind and the Light had been. Alexandrian
tauif develyped was used to suoh language and absorbed it easily. thought And
tettone
above all there was Christ's presence, his divine humen ity:
that dug deep into Greek yearnings for the 'perfect' man.
And here the 'perfect' man meliated for God: an incarnation
(thie too e coneept from the sast).
The new Platonism flowered in Alezandria when the
Ptolemies, with their inferior hired philosophers, had died
The sehool was founded by Ammonius saccas, after he
ama'ie been converted to Christianity, His pupils were
Longinus, origen, Plotinus. The doetrine took the old
Platonie idea of the warld being en imperfect copy of an
ideal, and made this
a hollow, very nearly noneexistent
one. And here the ooy of illmdico--istarenly called
realaty---is seen egein. Plotinus himself took part in
a militery expedition against the Persians in order to learn
about Indien and Persian thought: it was efter this that
he went to Rome and lectured berore fashionable audiences.
The idea of God
'our true self' is eleer in his work,
together with the DCiDeLIRS of rebirth and the nystical
vision (samadhi).
Thus the neo-platonist refused to give sin and evil
an eternal reality. Clement of Alegandria called Greek
thought a 'preparation' for Christ. Here is the greatest
distinetion between Christien thought in its first
and
the post-Augustinian
which gave sin as Tapantnes a
place as it hed had in heschd Old Testament.
Te dexot rareh
Now the 'God is self* theme (the opposite of the later
Xian
Augustinian "the self is originally in a state of sin*) was
a finiptfplicls the basis of the first desert experience,, just as the schools
of Alexandria were the intellectual discipline behind
2 faslin Tedip The *philosopher' of the Greek world was very elose to ithe
wandering monk or * sannyasin of the Hindu world. In fact the
desert fathers often oailed themselves philosophers: the idea
of philosophy being an academic or intellectual pursuit
detached from life only cane about much lator as a result of
mediaeval soholastioism. origen, after becoming head of the
theological college in Alexandria, castrated himself:
thatvwas how real the philosophy was (though the bishop


of Alexandria did disown him for it and send him peoking).
ke The
anchoritie Three men and cenobitie integrated forms) monast: ticism into an (that organised is, both Church: the
desert the
Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, st Antany the hermit,
and pachomius the organdier of cenobitic or
forrs
Inss 2
hernitic 1ife. pachomius hed been a
Serapis of
cult.
aPELE
Clurh
Athanasius wrote the Life of Finte Antony from elose
personal knowledge.
st Antony (AD 251-356), arter twenty years alone in the
desert, was found in pertect physical condition, and with all
the teéth in his head. While Plotinus seemed necording to
a pupil to be tashamed of being ia a body* st Antony ohose
wonderful sites for his retreata, and loved the animals,
and appeared not to despise mattér at all. He told a
visi tor who wondered how he eoula do without books for so
long that God unfolded the marvel of His work for him
a Ingle day. Perfeetion for st Antony was a return to OVERY, man
natural or essential condition: "God is the self* egain.
For Antony the fall of Adam, and all sin, were unnatural and
not basie.
The first monke aid not reject matter as evil. This
was a line later developed by Ialam, and by a Christian
heresy, and to a great extent in praotice by the Church
itself. The attitude of the first monks (who ealled them-
selves tdevotees t in the Hindu style) was t mch more joyful X
and serene: in no other
ecula they influeneed other
Rau
The devotee got Teyece matter (the illusion cf
Eagpeey to God in order to return to it ard see it as a
wonder.
It is éven doubtful Whether the first hermits as
opposed to later fanaties, were unelean men. We lmow that
st Antony did not 1ike publie baths for their associations coilt
of lieenee in the ancient world. But no ma can live sound
in mind and limb to a great age in filthy conditions.
This too was in line with the Hinga abhorrence of excessive
asceticism. In the Lives of bothAntany and pacholmus
there is a sober leck or superatition, which refleets the
gast's dislike of ocoult praetices and irrationality. FOI
the Lives only a few works of healing are to be found.
Antony was the founder of the morasticiam that sproade
in the end infeoted---the desert round Alexandria, When
Christianity beeame the state religion officials poured intp
the desert to see him, and it was only now that the idea took
hold of solitude being an tescape from reality--eat that
time the reality of heavy taxes in Alexandria, and milatery
service.
Four of the morasteries of wadi el Naturn (the natron
lakes in the desert of seetis) have survived until today.


Abbot nacarius, en Alexandrian baker who was eonverted at
the age of forty, eettled there and introdue ed perhaps the
first note of ascetie rivalry (asoetic meant for any Greek-
minded person what we call athletie, tapt
E smmp - the
hakaly
of training). He
awake for twiety Whole
RcoEmA and went without cooked aatrood for seven years.
ta2. The deser
Athanasius in Alexandria encouraged monastie life.
taltes beious Gradually the mona steries spread. A convent came into beingo
famou a He The communities became disturbingly wealthy in boats end
land. The nanes of the bestelnom hernits were now housei
Roman erpire, hold names in Rome. Romans began to oome to Eeypt (Rufinus
and the lady Helanin) together with exiled bishops, The last
two decades of the fourth eontury were a sort of golden age
for the monka there. At the seme there were the first signs
of disruption, fron within end then from without. The
struggle betwéen letterod and unlettered monks appeared for
the first time. The dawn of wonder was gone in three
generations.
A aanstiams
Power-interests sterted as soon as Christianity was
officialised under Constantine at the beginning of the fourth
bewomer Preid century (by the end it was made compulsory). A
HANAMAAAL
over the nat ature of Christ (ani the nature onrt time)
Serena the embryonie Christian worla before it had had
time to mature in the inner sense. The violence of Christian
history may very largely be due to the uneertainty of its
roots--an uncertainty whioh showed in the chureh's decla-
ration that it was the only valid religious institution, and
Christianity the only velia belier. Arius, the petriareh
of Alexandria, was in dispute with his seoretary, Athanasius.
The Arian view comes straight from the Hermetie writingse-
the 1dea being that Kosmos the 'secondt God was ereated out
of the first and primal God (cr eternity) and was not himelf
eternel. The opposite, the Athanasian ereed, sakes
equally Egyptian
ageinst it, by seying that tho Son
was begotten Hearentin all timet. The argument was more than
a a omplieated essay on the nature of time and divinity:
Athanasius, with more of a political
then Arius, saw
that Christ was at once flung back to s status of the pagan
gods 1f he lost either his divinity a his humanity. He
could only speak to men about God le he had both. The
Council of Nicea in AD 325, consisting of two hundred and
fifty bishops and priests, decided with great violence
against Arius, and he was banished from Aloxandrie (but
so was Athanasius, no fewer than five times, for refusing
to have Arius back). The Nicene oreed was the first step
in creating an orthodoxy, and therefore heresy.
Tre Stale
After this the Alexandrian patriarch became a very
powerful mane Monles virtually ruled the eity. They
relepinn trics formed virtually military hordes, storming in from the
Le deser
desert whenever there wes a disagreement. They roamed
saper ce A an


the streets. one moneatie settlement was as near as nine
miles fron the eity.
Patriarch Theophilus led a erushing attack againat the
worship of Serapis. The temple at canopus (today Aboukir)
fell in 389. Two years later Alexandria was disturbe a by
an armed riot of the pagans, They established themselyes
in the cityts temple and seized several Christians. At
thdemperoris comand the temple was destroyed. And paganiem
was ghankundagy suppressed. The pagans were borrified at the
tine by the pige of monks who practised the most horrible
kinda of phynical asceticien, ana thought themselves virtuous
for it: these practices weré for the
ragainst the
divine: (and would perhaps have been roeEne the first desert
fathers).
1f The Clnistian
The persecution cf pagans eulminated in the murder of
Hypatia, who taught mathematios at the Mouseion, and was
besecalios 7
on her way from a leeture: she was torn from hér earriaga
by monks and beaten to death with tiles.
peganiny
ka nle 1 rte
with her death Greece was all but stifled in Alexandria,
mowes.
as an influenee. The Christian monks were strongly nation-
alistie, anti-Greek. Later they came to be called teoptas
or Copts, and their lenguage was ancient Egyptian written in
Greek chéree ters. They had a kind of nationalist theology
in the heresy of monophysiim or the isingle naturet
200-IB0s The reyptian ehurol came to ideatify itself
means of this
and to break away from the rest bz
Christianity because dotira it.
A monk murdered the imperial prefect, and the patriarch
Cyril canonised him for it. It wes Cyriits arny of monks
thet had murdered Hypatia. At the beinning of the fifth
century the first Barberian attacks in the desert began
and seemed to sane of the monks in the interior
ELO desert
be deserved. They fled from their retreets in
great number. macarius the Beyptian had said, *when you
see trees, it is at the
but when you see boys, take
up your mentle es ani LAdOEL That is to
homosexualisy
inerensed, together with the measures against Yt. A chila
immersed himself in a natron lake until he was distigured
beyond reeognition, so as to avoid calurmy (zacherius, son
of Carion). Sezual. obsessions followed the first fréshness
of the desert experienee as if brought alive by 1* in lesser
or weaker people. Pachomius too had fareseen the decadence.
A second Barbarian devastation happened ia
and the
oenobitie idoa of making automomous monastie tontitbkcond
took even stronger hold beoause of the need for seourity.
The walled monastery of the midale ages came into being.
16 The
Monophysien N or the *single nature' doetrine was really
egplian ceureh


the Coptio revolt against Byzantium or imperial Christianity.
Patrdarch Diosourus,
suecessor, founded the break-
away Feyptian ehureh, EAE the result was two patriarchs in
Alexandrie, one imperial and the other popular. It was this
division that made it easy for Islam to conquer the city later.
Timothy the Cat as he was ealled was Dioscurus's successor:
he hed the imperial patrierch Proterius lynched. He hinseir
was exiled in 400, but was restored fourteen years later.
A domestie violenée uninown under the Ptolemies became
perpetual now. The Tabennesite monastery ou the east of
Alexandria chose the imperial side, end the monastery of
the Ninth Milestone on the west of the city under the Abbot
Longinus chose the Coptie side.
huloual
The Coptio dootrine seid that
Christ was both
the Son of God and the Son of
taoweh he
onowe-a
chalcedou ereles divine---nature. Aga inst this b Council a Chalcedon
declared in 451 that Christts na ture was duel but that the
churck is Ko one nature was indivisible from the other. After this
Council no Greek was safe in Alexandria, and the reciel
d hakor Ilanic aifferences have continued until today. It made the Arab
invasion later in the seventh century a relatively easy
viching cesy
affair: the Egyptians
would not fight Ielam, espece
ially as it oame in a MeN, and tolerant form. HONKS
AND ALEXANDRIA should therefore end with the Couneil of
Chaleedon as the act whieh deoisively elosed Alexandriats
role as the rapiritual
and led to the extinction of
its Greek origins, An
should mention the Persien
attack on Alexandria in
whon a student oalled Peter
suuggled plan of the oity to the invaders: elso the
disestrous administration of the imperial envoy from Rome
which followed Persien cocupation-m-end whioh prepared the
way for Alexendria's total surrender to Amr, the Arab
general, when he entered the city in 642. Alexandria
fell into alow deoay un der mon who did not really understand
her history, just as she is doing nowe
FREVIOUS BOOKS a THE SUBJECT
seen
I haveano books on precisely this span of history or
precisely this sub ject. The Indian infiuenee is aeknowledged
frequently enough, but not oonnected with Christ ar the
desert fathers in the way I think right. Also the desert
fet hers are almost never seen as they were désoribed in
the Lives (exeept in the soholarly THE DESERT A CITY by
Derwas Chitty, CUP 1966, which says there is a dearth of
books on the subjeot).
No book I know conveys the richness of Christ as


he must have
to people eccustomed to the
riehness of tayreared serapis. The ans wer has to be
given, how he superseded them in so short a time, and
so far afield. And this cannot be understood in terms
of mediaeval Christianity with its interest in sin.
That was not
with the atmosphere of Alexandria
or the desert aiD10


THE AGE OF MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
(hafriol Scanuncis afp Cerin)
sLGune Thome.
The object of this book is to show that the
first Christian monks were the architects of our
thought and our society, and that their thought
and their society were one and the same thing in
their hands.
THE AGE OF MONKS will describe how a set of
passionateB
coverponeringemattitudes came
about first in a few people in Judah and the desert,
after the death of Christ, then in the form of SOCE comausids
seites round the Mediterranean, then finally as a
distinctive civilisation centred on seiptaaicread
Ahinem
It will trace the origins of this civilisation
---which means a way of thought---in the first
Christian monks, who were also the architects of the
sewgnisuls
first/society, their monastic settlements being the
embryo (quite consciously and deliberately) of the later
Clina 81, an
Christian city. I shall trace the development of
these settlements, togetker with the thought and
controversies that brought them into being, through
the first eight centuries after Christ, until their
climax in the Benedictine monastery, which became the
model of all monastic life in Europe during the
Middle Ages and indeed might be described as the
basis orémediaeval lioteder e heughts I shall there-
fore enda the book where the system of Christian
life (which is the same as the system of Christian
Monboy
h.p. thought) seems to have become completed.
FOT
Aerefer
AT Twards,
a 1a HLBL EE counterg
the idea of a 'dark ager',
because the
entire basis of the later society---what I shall call
the 'vast social operation 1' of converting the Barbar-
ians) to
Le, was laid/during
doun
that time. Fzr from being dark, thoE that age was
full of a light which we have great difficulty in
seeing/only because *h CaTet des ribe the Christian
ho w
experience/in historical, that is external, terms:
it is an inner expeferience. And only an under-
standing of this, which in a way is an understanding
ibed
of all genuine sonnsticime(--/tnt practisedby
espe cenll
people who never set foot in a mona stery)
some
onseious
wil 11 account for the fact that so many men were
prepared to die se horribly C
etves for i.
SO long- (What I am saying is that in theg first
martyrdoms and Erthese A
first actsof E
a ton
fuies Le
- FEF tesert a whole new world. was being pioneered
deset fcl Itan
which culminated in the conversaion of the wildest
and most unthinkably savage tribesct te meu I
shall suggest siso that this process is even now not
at all finished, and that Christian experience is still
at what might be called the beginner's stage, compared


whid wep. fally
a w
C cautunes
with the Eastern religionsglet
rolted
before the birth of Christ.
etri etion
or - ae
at h cruelties of the Crusades eould have been
akele
the collapse OrrChris LA
tial
pe rience
symplams 2
simply 7
stage# in e process
which
religions ast passed,
laday
wus
In order to lead to this inner pexperience Ishall
aga taxg
aeret ete begin THEAGE O MONKS by sugcesting/without Elsugh
dogmatic insistence,that the monastic tradition came
puteav
from India, and pravelled,brtore the birth of Christs
ulious 2
koug-before along the trade routes (or perhaps migratory
routes) from Inixxta the Ganges to Mesopatamia and
kellb-we Greece. I shall point out that Christ's whole mission
and story came from that, and that the horror felt by
Judah towards 5 - ST was essentially a a horror of the
Rim
monastic ideale humiten wasa opposite as anything could be
to the highly raciàl type of worship evolved in Judah,
which depended on the family and the blood-tie. It
was precisely the racial type of worship that Christ
attackedk and this was why his crucifixion was
a Social necessity, required 'for the people'.
TTAROO k las Hoyie
J fale
my Introduction will therefoze edesribe C
something
of the Indian background (the oral tradition of the Vedas
à che
and the written/Upanisheds) which I believe to have been
the model for the.Christian monk, especially for the first
hermipt of the desert. We have an excellent contemporary
accoutn of the sannyasin or monk in the life of Sri
Ramakrishna, who died towards the end of the last century.
adilion
andwas the teacher or-vivekeranday TIC C
lecturine in mhe ni ited ates and
teed
he e S te
me as a
take
nee af
S Christiar
one
ter
the pre-Christian models
of asceticism (the Essenes, the Therapeutae, the neo-
pe cl
Platonists of Alexandria), tetrace falway
Tl5
experience and-netas academic thougt
tieh
Ohr
C never was (and whkch 1t only beeame
a: e
devel pmenty
Xiun
At the same time theexperience must be described


This ail A pmu
tresz Jams Sagme
devzrile
Aie te Censiai refenin a
wire Ke ae
lem a ld
Sale /c ko v / % esp. h youy
u t way
5 puolip a seljion Shia
lite
Lova Kecoho ulllecie
we Sholetre
ne lc
evohe ke Iruf X42 etog e ecslanye
TEE o
the tov Cloislian dlisuphes
the thnstrui F fem Kue bee
urhie
Hhe pien cauler dh
Lom,


in its clash with the outside world.
This is the only
way to get over the ecstasy which it involved, and which
made the first maryrs cry with joy on their way to death.
It will mean decribing the state of Roman society at the
time of Christ, escpecially sange Judah might-bedesc ibed Oa
B a satellite of that society.
And of course the Roman
empire provided the new Christian feeling with a ready-made
vehicle of expansion. It made possible that 'vast social
operation' of converting the Barbarian tribes which -
wally teek-ever-tireiomptre, arter being IUS fedet sn
I believe that the story of this 'social oper, tion' has
never before been told properly. It is, the story not
solely of how our cosiety came about, ofour thgouth came
facame about, ofever the Christian faith came about,
but of how all thes three were a simultaneous and identical
ferment.
- My approach will be as chronological as possible, so
as to get the idea of a development, though not a 'progfess':
I will not be saying that mediaeval life was the crown of
an endaevour that had been going on, since the Desert,
but Hore/adtistillation of the tfesTeperionce, a distonct
watering-downg to make the
mass-convereplone poas ssible,
and to turn them into M'universal society
1 - the
1 t Middle
Te than
Acor
Embe,
R C pur
i1 Fhe working plan:
TIST
INTRODUCTION. The monstaic experience itself, with
reference back to the Vedas and the Upanishads and some
mention of Sri Ramakrishna.
The possible ways in which
theexperience could have reached Mesopatamia and Greece.
the-fact-tihet Mesopatamia was the craddi of the Near
Eastern religions, and Greete/a dominant eremtn inp Feurot
Afle L uen ce i though At Christ's
-Ospee
from thie Fierkte source
on the banks of the tamebeing
I 1. The crucifixion.
How Judah resisted the this
éxpressionof the_monastic ideal (give yp your goods,
Te Goypel.
your mother and father etc).42,The first Nasarene church
that came about in Jerusalem after the crucifixion.
The Jews were the first proponents of the Christian
experience. St-Paul-ste.
: F Ec
KeBra.
The state of
Thear rmy the whole basis
the
thoeupired
imperial structure.
lack
The
of Roman volunteers
(dur to the collapse of the middle class) means that bagiocara,
lgne now recuited from on the spot in various parts of
Europe from the barbarian tribes, which in turn began
to form autonomous (and lawless) settlements.
The collapse
of the slave market. Inflation, and sepculation at the
expense of the state. The centreof control broke up.
The towns began to surround themselves wiith walls.
A bureaucracy began to replace the army, and this in the
end came under the control of Christians, who showed the
most discipline and integrity. Antyhing like a
in Rome had dwindled into occultism. Ciristienity had
whp
seligioruee
ivlas E the 'mystery'religions. 7fhese had not the


3 ho Roua puneatoii ude N eno
DarutalAD 96) Tajan (98-117)
Haduan C17-33), trecaliee hen affun
cude Marus Anseluin
C161-8-), uuu ce
lilze the pofroun 2
too te Qot -
7 edd
6 kreh. Dece
aeel
thp
uidste
5 ve - Trpulo -
Te sstmishuse Core
5 Kiin leclary! Ke a
Kuerg, A subvensive doctue, muulan Judol Ti A dismpr tha efp *
Pae cs lani He Jospel whoad
agpfy lki
dolibrut
IV We Lo Jho bM à Caof
a cnoaduy
Jas
seclind
the
Memaity punn cial
Censliz upucde dous
166f I Hel busk.
luwe thmn 2 Jho wyr tre smy
Conilky
Macsdonia
Hr estallided aliei -
i Antoch,
serckiel S
la AD 70
Znsale -s
1 cerla,
Sphenen.
Xic
Tila, V
tesd.
be erpr
uary
iin
all t
H Uve
Xia Le Cu
Cenie
Rola eit 5
uyin citei 7he
nonos)
(ecclena),
mouky -
Icenel'
neube, 2 peaple,
Doun
a ma
Kiaui esue
tee 1
9 tton Ligegp
2utiv
ty Sacll wue
toe
4o belicued U tha Jecoud Cokry
k anron
he Amnt etterpe
Kre gnagogue.
Dern
chnol
Antocl
bra
prgl Ia plac -
reuer
Xiann - Danasenn
K Credle.
2ue e
rewa y
Pand.
the cnunio 2o1
hym


lru nin thv the
Ciistius seperis C
Ceme lezh
( te
wan diseplae:
7 Mitha elc
meystes slijuc,
did hol,
wo beconte Hae Koc
aperiu Ld
Le a Helien tradloc
not Le nicim
hcliel ie,
ICC -
devni cncen/ral lo
20 (itaolo
a thas
y mm ou hou l4 à 2
ali prinel
Lfe
chA
clazel
ad Lz
Locig -
houlai HU
Hhe:
Vechagie
laid doin i
lLa snd, 2
Grine tet


h uflue -
bhup
coeperll
prople
Bnoldas,
persuasive influence of the story of a single man,
whose presence seemed to dominate everything said
about him. Z The et
as ny aded simultaner ous
Christianity and Barbazism, and the violent inter-
breeding of the two opposite statesef mind roduced
the Middle Agese The 1
e LS in Rome. The
rst imperial persecutions of Chri -
saw
Ch ristishit as subversive sect of Iud
COSE ned
to overthrow the
OE eaf ane
ce the
impezial structure
3. A description of the Barbarian psychology. The
book here stands out against theidea ofbarbarians
on one side and-Christians on tieother. After the
first desert experience-the-struggle took place inside
the Barbarian or the pagan.
1e wasthe man in the
monastery. He fought the Barbarism-and the Paganism
(the one quite distinct from the other) in himself.
Pachomius (286-346) first organised the loose
of the sdesert into settlements inder
5/ober
a superior, with novices. The monastery in the Christ-
1an sense appears for the first time. I describe the
spread east of the Christian moanasciticsn, to Gaza,
Cyprus, Besanduc near Jerusalem. I trace a note of
doubt that enters the Christian experience. The first
light begins to flicker doubtfully. Epiphanius,
bishop of Cyprus, was always heresy hunting. I take
the increasing concern with heresy to be a sign of
increasing fear.
6. The first clear punitive element enters Christ-
ianity with Shenute (died 466): he once beat a hermit
to death. The rigour of the Syrian monks---especially
St Simeon-- (born 389) becomes an influence on the
state. The emperor in Constantinople consults him.
Here I note In this chapter I note thefirst sign of a
division between the ascetic school of monasticism
and that which a dvocates 'the ecstasy of the angels'
(in Hindu thought 'bahkti'). I see this in Nestorius
bishop of Constinople.
I later trace Pelagianism
back to this struglle.
These 'isms sound cold now
but THEAGE OF MONKS will show them to have dramatic
and vivid conflicts, often ending in gang-fights on
the streets between the monks. The monk' begins
to imply lack of discipline, and the state -the
emperor---begins to take social measures, which S erve
to strengthen the Chruch against the monastic element.
But I show that the Church was based on nothing but
this element.
f. The shift of the first monasticism from
first
Egypt
Palestine and then to Constantinople coinicdies with
the accumulation of social and political power by the
Christians., mainly because they became themost reliable


Hea mon lullavy Mhe / Cmeck' tlhr 2
He Cluel.
Muce 2 he, m ) ( C desrihel
aslem' Vh 1ho
Gtholee daith hecahe
lm cloel, lsfinesl Heua tha toir
h mun ze Xie trcly
Ll dour H4
Ide L ole,
>8 Paul He Hemiv Lettled in the Melaid daut
du; e En. S Anfouy 7 Mal Polgnas
he >clon Alexades, unth i- Culiialor
2 hidal ad Plet we tho
2 doyne
belid Ae desir x)
pei
pllogu
2h Gree h unld wo
1 prrciil
the desih
tha
kke 3 alo mouk:
cur clled pllophir
Lida 9
Ce acadonic y alallacsl
pleopy
Calre Llc bery
cintno
It -
Cennias
0 reslin # asdrasver
slolasticih.
(185.25+) wa C iplieog ph 1 Tyyp
Origen
uare nte rlond Mexacliis, Y cuo 9


servants of dtate.
bBasically this was res onsible
for the EXXXRYXINHXmxxmoXkNEXdkex**e adoption of Christianity
as the official religion of the empire by Constantine.
Now that monasticism was not essential to the
had done its main work it came under the control of
local bishops, by the Council of Chalcedon in 415.
The emperor Justinian ordered that monks' cells
should not be separate from the main monastic nucleus
of buildings. A social emphasis enters Christianity.
The monastic ideal of solidude is for the first time
seen as a possible source of unruliness, as it was
seen by the Romans in their persecutions.
The
'ecstatic' element begins to be squeezed out, and the
inner experience formalised for mass-uasage.
The
Second Synod (692) laid down that non one under 10
couad be a monk.
EZ The monastic tradition entered Otaly wity
Paulinus, who gave up social life in 395 when he was
40. Here is the first monastery as the seed of a
new civilisation, a lived culture. He was urbane,
wrote verses, read the ancient authors. It is here
that the classical world renews its influence, softens
both the rigours and the ecstasy of the first experience,
and begins to form thecivilisation which had its first
great climax of imagination in the Rennaissance.
The 'ecstasy' against the 'self-mortification' continues
to be themain rift of Christinity. St Augustine
(he left Milan in 384 to begin his work) epitomoises
the struggle in his doctrine of original sin, which
'defeated' the Pelagian doctrine that a man could
become virtually 'sinless'. Aufustine was for this
reason what might be called the first 'literary' Christian.
He advanced the experience as a body of thought, to
be written down. He began literature in the Christian
sense, and also th Schools of the mediaeval Schhols,
where the experience became a matter of rationalistic
discussion and analysis. His CITY OF GOD laid the
basis of the medivaeal psychology.
UFE The struggle to Christianise the Barbarian. K
Martin of Tours (361-397) was an imperial soldier
himself. KTh Here ibegin to talk-about-the 'vast
social operation' mentioned above.
St Jerome. fierce and quarrelsom, lived in Rome
Jerusalem, from which he fled
during a Barbarian
attack. He finished a,translation of the Bihle in
theyear of St Augustine S conversion (385). The
most brilliant and prolific of the Doctors of the Church,
Ke cuvedted te
Joulle
560, Brotop 2
Swalrar kif Cacaric
carelie Ie Visigols I 587.


Aneun 12 ua lche Ausui
the
)s prdiue e coafue
saule
llrota to ld 6-e Le srised
Nn Bilay
Jeue lon
li analtojle
ueralolls
un -
Celi do- -
dicol (430) he natc Gfn I cs
che Argustis
clonized S the Vandal, 3
wL bery
Iia
tre
lased
Bagee
sAnche s Gn
Afue
speisl
umitel
uovhole.
tui
wowat
Bagrn sie Je8.
thi Vodal)
Iach
horen
do-t
(eyy A Xia a
uith
Balani
rpi L
purplo
A Ananian auoy


As a result of the conversion of the Barbarians
Rome began to seem no longer the seat of past and dead
glories as it had been increasingly in the last centuries
but as the new centre of new Christian centre. The
distinction between priests and monks came to a head at
this time. The Chruch had an ibcreasing social su ceess.
St Mzrtin biographer talks about 'the luxury of the
priests'.
1. In the fifth century an embryo of the furutre
civilisation the future 'universal society' comes about
in Lérins in Provence, whe te novitiates came from Syria,
Greece, Spain, Africa, Egypt, Italy. Provence was I
shall argue for this reason the cradle of the future
humanism whichfirst expressed itself centuries later in
St Francis of Assisi adn was the body of the Rennaissance.
'art' in a chRistian sense develops from this. John
Cassianus had a cmonastery at Merseilles 0415): his
writings on the Dseert Fathers seem to me the first
example of the later manuscript, which in turn was the
seed of theprinted book.
It is the first clear example
of the literalisation of the Christian experience, that
is the use of the written word for epersuasion, event taually
for the persuasion of absent people. The book as a
source of the ferment of ideas comes into being. And
at the same time a certain intellectaualisation of the
religion sets in ith Jerome, Augustine and Cassianus.,
Xxatipoxkwzight I show that this too was part of the
great 'social operation' undretaken by the monks because
only the faculty of the intellect could cut through all
tribal differences and jealousies. This was a major
departure from the wo.k of the dese t fathers. God begins
to be a concept. Dogma and doctrine become important.
The Chruch, with its stupendous task of creating out
of the dildest tribes a settled order of h7 umanity
required a dogma that could be spelled out to every one,
entailing death or torture for its denial. I shall
argue among other things that the child-like re-etition
of Hail Maries as a punishment (or, to dress it up,
penance) for a kiss 2 a thought pr a burst of anger,
has a lot to do moreto do with the Barbarian need for
and belief in punishment than with religion. I shall
even argue that the adoptioj of the doctrine of heaven
and hell was a simple translation of the Barbarian
need for reward and revenge, and again not essentially
religious. They are 'beginner s' re;igion.
il Fifth century Christendom was as complicated as
possible, and will require a number of chapters on
the Byzantine-Rome struggle, which C mplicated the
Barbarian-kome struggle. Life in Rome and Constantinople
will also give us a breathing-space from the monks.
Constantinople was st till Greek learning, Rome was still
Latin. They were both stilleseentially ancient, and
will give us the chance to see how new the Christian
world was when it cameinto being, as well as what it
took from the ancient world. Being a Christian meant


at this time being modern.
15. The top of the crurve is reached in St
Benedict's monastery at Cassino (529) The meditation
of the desert (which was the haesychia of the Greek
philosophers') is here distilled into ruminatio or
reading aloud. All reading was of course reading-
aloud at t first; we apparently do it silently now, at
the back of our throats. A shcedule begins to impose
itself, that is a new sense of time comes into being:
the day is divided into duties and thoughts. This
was the only way---the way of regularity---to show the
meaning of discipline to the Barbarian mind.
From
this regularitycame the first concept of the clock in
the mediaeval monastery, that is a regular ticking-out
of time in fraction of equal length, with 'infinity'
(a frightening zone of emptiness and indiscipline)
lying outside this
The concept of zero---which is
reallt that of inficinity---came into being too in the
mediaeval monastery, and numbers began to incluse
noughts.
The 'imprisonment of mathematical time I
began to grip the Christian world, which explains the
attempts to why there re so many attempts now to pierce
it, largely by going back to the Indian monastic ideall,
in the form of yoga disciplines which have no reference
to intellectualy fractionalising.
16. Gregory the Great, the firs pope (590) in anything
like the modern sense was a Benetictine. He was also
in control of extensive church lands. He began to
think independently of Constantinople. He brought
about the new Christian empire based on Rome by sending
out Benetdcitine monks to every part of Europe, includ-
ing Ireland, where the earlier forms of monasticism were
hard to break in the interests of central orgnaisation.
The ancient Roman experience of how to handle foreign
peoples politically now reached fo ward into the new
Christian leadership. TRome as thenew centre was in
any case necessary when the Islamic invasions started
after the death of Mohammed (632) and cut the Christian
world into the western part under Rome and the eastern
part under Constantinople. and cut Constan tinople off
from the western parts. It was no longer iha position
to govern. The Gree and African worlds were stripped
of their Roman associations. They cameunder Baghdad.
Whil at one time the patriarchs of Constantinople,
Antioch, Jerusalem amd Alexandria had looked on the
people pope as simply another bishop, he now became
responsible for the entire western church, which was
nothing but'Europe'.


THE BATTLE OF THE MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
The General Theme
This book is about the first eight centuries of
Christendom---what could be called the age of the monks.
It is about their battles---against the elements and
their own temptations and voluptuous dreams (in the
Thebaid desert), against the first vagueness of a new
religious experience (Alexandria), against tyrannical
abbots (Syria), against each other in vituperous
writings on biblical interpretation (Jerusalem),
against animals in the arena and against pogroms
(Rome), against the 'fallen man' in themselves (Italy,
Africa), against other monks in street-brawls on points
of doctrine (Constantinople), against the barbarian
outside and sometimes inside themselves (northern
Europe), against the emperor, against the Church
that was based on their thoughts and their struggles
and now wished to disown them, against the increasing
orthodoxy that protected the Church on the one hand
and the increasing 'heresy' that caused and resulted
from the orthodoxy on the other.
The book will counter the idea of a later 'dark
age', because the entire basis of mediaeval society
was laid down then, carefully and even systematically,
by the monks. The first eight centuries of Christen-
dom were the incubation period before the emergence
of something like a Christian order in the middle
ages. Everything from the walled city to agricultural
implements were prepared then, and the classical
modes of writing and worshipping and reasoning trans-
formed to new uses.
The monastery became in fact
the nucleus and heart of the new world. Thus the
incubation went on in the monks. Their centres were
the onlyavailable means of continuity from the time
of the crucifixion through the fall of the Roman
empire to its dismemberment by the barbarian tribes:
they made out of this prolonged turmoil a new thought
and a new society, the one the mirror of the other.


THE BATTLE OF THE MONKS if the story of that struggle,
and the ferment that made the later society possible,
and which drove deep into the Christian psychology a
sense of sin.
The 'dark age' is actually the story (one that has
never been properly told before) of what the book will
call the 'vast social operation' of converting the bar-
barian. It was the climax of the period treated in
this book, not an eclipse or a collapse. In the first
martyrs, the first fathers of the desert and the doctors
of the Church, a whole new world was pioneered and
fought out, and the remarkable conversion of savage
tribes in every part of the European and Mediterranean
worlds was the result of that.
THE BATTLE OF THE MONKS will suggest that the
monastic tradition came from India, and travelled long
before the birth of Christ along the trade routes (or
perhaps migratory routes) from the Ganges to Mesopatamia
and Greece. It will suggest that Christ's whole mission
and story came from that, and that the horror felt by the
Jews towards him was essentially a horror of the monastic
ideal as a force destructive of social life.
The battle
of the monks was a fierce and prolonged effort to cope
with new spiritual demands made in Christ's teaching,
which brought trouble with Roman and later Christian
emperors, and then the Church itself, for the same reason
that it had brought trouble in Judah.
The book will describe something of the Indian
background (the oral tradition of the Vedas and the
written tradition of the Upanishads) which was perhaps
the model for the Christian monk.
We have a good
account of the sannyasin or monk in nineteenth-century
Hindu writings, which will provide us with fresh terms
by means of which to understand the monastic experience,
while Christian terms would sound stale and played-out
to most ears.
The approach will be as chronological as possible,
so as to get theidea of a development, thought not a
'progress': the book will not be saying that mediaeval
life was the crown of an endeavour that had been going
on since the crucifixion.
It was more a distillation
of the first experience, a distinct (even an argued)
watering-down to make mass-conversion possible.


The Working Plan
INTRODUCTION
What it meant to be a monk, with reference back
to the Vedas and the Upanishads, and some mention of
the work of Sri Ramakrishna in the late nineteenth
century. The possible ways in which this discipline
could have reached Mesopatamia and Greece. The
methods of this discipline: the fight against desire
and the 'illusions of Maya'. The terror and distraught
sense of deprivation in the early stages. Then, foll-
owing the influence through to Christ, thefact that
Greek thought (perhaps the transmitter of the discipline)
was a dominant influence in the Judah of Christ's day.
The extraordinary identity of views expressed in Pla to,
Pythagoras and in the Upanishads.
The pre-Christian
models of asceticism (the 'transmitters') were the
Essenes, the Therapeutae and the neo-Platonists of
Alexandria.
1. The crucifixion: how Judah resisted the monastic
ideal.
The gospel and its clear laying-down of the
new monastic discipline. The failure of the disciples
to understand Christ at the Last Supper was their un-
familiarity with the spiritual discipline he had in
mind.
2. The first Nasarene church that came about after
the crucifixion: the story of these men-- --the first
proponents of the Christian experience.
They were
Jews who believed in the Second Coming though they
still went to the synangogue. The first attempt to
convert other peoples took place in Antioch, where
Jews preached to Greeks. There were Christians in
Damascus even before the conversion of St Paul. It
was St Paul who took the gospel abroad in something
like a conscious and planned way.
It was he who
prevented itfrom remaining provincial or sectual.
A century after Christ there were Christian communities
in all the major cities of the Roman empire.
Still
a 'church' (meaning assembly of people, ecclesia) was
not the contradiction of 'monk' (man by himself). The
groups were collections of monks.
That is to say,
the monastic discipline wasinherent in the Christian
teaching: the first hermits were renouncing the world
in the sense of abandoning the 'illusions of Maya' and


accepting reality.
The monastic ideal described the
world as unreal: the real only transpired in solitude.
It was not a renuciation of society. The solitude
could as well be practised in society, and the Indian
teachings had in fact never advocated avoiding other
men. The desert was only a fit place for the maximum
concentration, the maximum self-purifcation from pagan
(meaning worldly) environments in the cities. The
idea that in religion there was a necessary friction
between the one-man ideal and the society-ideal only
grew up later, when the Church and the state began to
identify themselves with each other.
It is for this
reason that history books tend to make 5o little of the
whole period, and especially of the 'dark age', because
only the social development is noticed, and not the
experiences of the men who made it possible.
3. The Roman persecutions of Christians under Nero
(AD 64), Domitian (AD 96), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian
(117-38). They became mass-affairs much like the
pogroms of this century, under Marcus Aurelius (161-80).
Christianity was seen as a 'Jewish heresy', a subversive
doctrine designed to overthrow Judah and therefore to
bring disturbance into the empire. The fact that the
martyrs wept with joy on their way to death struck so
many people as mad that it began to have a compelling
force which no amount of consciou conversion could
equal.
4. St Paul the hermit settled in the Thebaid desert
in the third century. St Antony on Mount Qolzum.
The school of Alexandria with its combination of Jud ah
and Plato was the system of thought behind the desert
experience. The 'philosopher' of rhe Greek world was
precisely the wandering monk, the sannyasin, of the
Hindu world. The desert fathers were called 'philosoph-
ers'. The idea of philosophy as academic and intellect-
ual only came into being centuries later as a result
of mediaeval scholasticism, which tried to throw the
whole Christian experience up into the head, so to
speak.
Origen (185-254) was a philosopher' of Egypt.
He was master of the school of Alexandria, andone of
the most brilliant of the 'Greek' fathers of the Church.
Much of his work was described as 'error' when the
catholic faith became more clearly defined.
5. The state of the Roman empire in the third century.
Army whole basis of imperial structure. Lack of Roman
volunteers meant that legionaries now recruited from the
barbarian tribes. Collapse of slave market, inflation.
The Christian experience broke through the mystery religions
(Mithras etc) because of the monastic discipline behind it.


leadership.
This rationalisation so to speak of
Christianity under Rome would naturally end THE BATTLE
OF THE MONKS, but another fact split Christianity
into two and rendered Constantinople inaccessible--
the Islamic invasions.
In the seventh century the
Greek and African worlds came under Baghdad.
While at
one time the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch,
Jerusalem, Alexandria had looked on the pope simply as
anotherilike themselves, they now had to see him as the
man responsible for the entire western church, for
Europe. And that was the work of the monks.
Length: about 126,000 words.


THE AGE OF MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
(The First Eight Centuries after Christ)
The General Theme
The object of this book is to show that the first
Christian monks were the architects of our thought and
our society, and that their thought and their society
were one and the same thing in their hands.
THE AGE OF MONKS will describe how a set of pass-
ionate attitudes came about in a few people in Judah
and the desert after the crucifixion, then in the form
of communities round the Mediterranean, then finally as
a distinctive civilisation centred on Rome.
It will trace the origins of this civilisation--
which means a way of thought---in the first Christian
monks, who were also the architects of the first recog-
nisably Christian society, their monastic settlements
being the embryo (quite consciously and deliberately)
of the later Christian city. I shall trace the devel-
opment of these settlements, together with the thought
and controversies that brought them into being, through
the first eight centuries, until their climax in the
Benedictinenonastery, which became the model for all
monastic life in Europe during the Middle Ages and indeed
might be described as the basis of the mediaeval world.
I shall therefore end the book where the system of Christ-
ian life (which is the same as the system of Christian
thought) seems to have been completed.
[THE AGE OF MONKS will therefore counter the idea
of a 'dark age', because the entire basis of the later
society---what I shall call the 'vast social operation'
of converting the Barbarians---was laid down during that
time.J Far from being dark, that age was full of a light
which we have great difficulty in seeing now only because
the Christia n experience (or religious experience gener-
ally) cannot be described in historical, that is external,
terms: it is an inner experience. It has to be evoked.
And only an understanding of this experience will account
for the fact that so many men were prepared to die horr-
ibly for it.
In the first martyrs, in the lives of the desert
b - fathers, a whole new world was being. pioneered which
culminated in the conversion of unthimkebls savage
shall suggest that this
is even
process
now
not at
finished, and that Christian experience is
sobeedi


still at what might be called the beginner's stage,
compared with the Eastern religions, which were fully
evolved many centuries before Christ's birth.
The
cruelties of the Crusades were symptoms of this immat-
urity. And so are the mass-wars of this century.
I trace the first appearance of these things in the
lives and thought of the monks.
Thus my book will
constantly reach forward to modern times, particularly
to the time of the protestant revolutions in the sixteen-
th century, where I see the early struggle between
Pelagianism and the doctrine of original sin brought
to a climax of refinement and bitternesso When hist-
orians find that the modern state (nationalism and a
money-based society) were born at this time, they are
saying that these basically theological struggles had
burst out of the Church and engulfed the whole of life.
But none of this can hake sense unless that first
inner experience is understood. And to lead to this
Lbheli-begin THE oath OF MONKS by suggesting (without
dogmatic insistencé) that the monastic tradition came
from India, and travelled long before the birth of
Christ along the trade routes (or perhaps migratory
routes) from the Ganges to Mesopatamia and Greece.
I shall point out that Christ's wholenission and story
came from that, and I shall say that/horror felt by
/hal
the Jews towards him was essentially a horror of the
monastic ideal ( a hopror later felt by Rome---first
imperialf Rome and then the Church of Rome), as a
force destructive of social life. The monastic ideal
was as opposite as anything could be to the highly
racial type of worship evolved in Judah, which depended
on the family and the bood-tie for its survival. It
was precisely the racial type of worship that Christ
attacked (give up your mother and father, give up your
riches etc), and this was why his crucifixion was a
social necessity, 'for the people'. It was this that
the Roman Pontius Pilate failed to understand: he saw
merely an innocent and sincere man condemned. He had
to be told that tolerating Christ would mean the ruin
of the state. To lallee 2 Le mouks LG F 6
bstme
In pursuing this line of thought oIntroduction
will describe something of the Indian
fire
background (the
- Rp
oral tradition of the Vedas and the written tradition
brs
of the Upanishads) which tbelieve to have been/uhe
model for the Christian monk, especially for the first
hermits of the Thebaid desert. We have an excellent
contemporary account of the sannyasin or monk in the
life of Sri Ramakrishna, who died towards the end of
the last cintury. This will
us with
provide
fresh
u terms by means of which to understand the experience,
where Christian terms would sound stale to most---
especially to young---ears.
And THE AGE OF MONKS
is after all being written in a world where the Hindu
A influence is obvious, especially in the form of yoga
disciplines. I shall be describing the Christian
experience as an astonishing discovery: like yoga
today, it moved some people to alter their lives a
Xn U.
shge t The 8al I Itetclund)


little, while to others it gave an astonishing
ecstasy which nothing in life had hitherto led them
to expect. Nothing less than this, I am saying,
would make men go death or torture with tears of joy
pouring down their faces. Much argument went on in
our period about the 'ecstasy of the angels' talked
about by the desert fathers.
At the same time the Christian experience must
be talked about in terms of its clash with the outside
world. It will mean# describing the state of Roman
society at the time of Christ, especially as Judhh was
a satellite of Rome. And of course the Roman empire
provided the new Christian feeling with a ready-made
vehicle of expansion. It made possible the 'vast social
operation' of converting the Barbarian tribes. I
believe that the story of this 'social operation' has
never before been told properly. It is the story of
how the sight of ecstasy in a tiny number of people
excited the hope of it among great hordes. St Simeon
on his pillar, we must remember, exercised a vast
influence on the eastern empire, even on the emperor
himself, without descending from his place.
My approach will be as chronological as possible,
so as to get the idea of a development, though not a
'progress': I will not be saying that mediaeval life
was the crown of an endeavour that had been going on
since the crucifixion.
It was more a distillation of
the first experience, a distinct (even an argued) water-
ing-down, to make mass-conversion possible, and to turn
tribes into the 'universal society' of the Middle Ages.
Ahwe al, - a iuemendou, tunan stay.
(wams, Pla)
staleta mraar
Mmani
d ke telliy 7hkis Mn
The working Plan
INTRODUCTION.
The monastic ideal, with reference back to the
Vedas and the Upanishads, and some mention of the work
of Sri Ramakrishna. The possible ways in which this
discipline could have reached Mesopatamia and Greece.
The fact that Greek thought was a dominant influence
in Christ's day. The extraordinary idefity of views
expressed in Plato, Pythagoras and in the Upanishads.
The pre-Christian models of asceticism were the Essenes,
the Therapeutea, the neo-Platonists of Alexandria.
1. The crucifixion.
How Judah resisted the monastic
ideal. The Gospel and its clear laying down of the
monastic discipline. The failure of the disciples to
understand Christ was their unfamiliarity aith the spir-
itual dsscipline he had in mind.


2. The first Nasarene church that came about after
the crucifixion. The Jews were the first proponents
of the Christian experience. 'Church' means 'assembly
of people' (ecclesia) and 'monk' a 'man by himself'
(monos). The first Christians were Jews who believed
in the Second Coming though they still went to the syn-
agogue. The first attempt to convert other peoples
took place in Antioch, where Jews preached to Greeks.
There were Christians in Damascus even before the con-
version of St Paul. It was St Paul who took the gospel
abroad inanything like a conscious and planned way.
It was he who prevented it from remaining provincial
or sectual. A century after Christ there were Christian
communities in all the major cities of the Roman empire.
3. The Roman persecutions of Christians under Nero
(AD 64), Domitian (AD 96), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian
(117-38). They became mass-affairs much iike the
pogroms of this century under Marcus Aurelius (161-80).
Christinity was seen as a 'Jewish heresy', a subversive
doctrine designed to overthrow Judah and therefore to
bring disturbance into the em pire.
4. The state of the empire, infanocinsdaboxstistant the
third century after Christ. The army the whole basis
of the imperial structure. The lack of Roman volunteers
(due to the collapse of the middle class) means that
legionaries were now recruited on the spot from Barbarian
tribes all over Europe, which began to form autonomous
(and lawless) settlements. The collapse of the slave
market. Inflation, andspeculation at the expense of
the state. The centre of control broke up. Towns
began to surround themselves with walls. A bureaucracy
began to replace army leadership, and this came under
Christian control. Christians showed the most discipline
and integrity. Anything like a religion in Rome had
dwindled into occultism. There were the 'mystery'
religions (that of Mithras etc). I shallmargue that the
Christian experience survived these rivals because of
the monastic ideal behind it, the divine concentration
through solitude.
5. St Paul the Hermit sttled in the Thebaid desert in
the third century. St Antony on Mount Qolzum. The
school of Alexandria with its combination of Judah and
Plato was the system of thought behind the desert exper-
ience. The philosopher' of the Greek world was pre-
cisely the wandering monk, the sannyasin of the Hindu
world. The desert fathers were called philosophers'.
The idea of philosophy as academic and intellectual
only came into being centuries later as a result of
mediaeval scholasticism, which tried to throw the whole
Christian experience up into the head so to speak.
Origen (185-254) was a 'philosopher' of Egypt.
He was master of the school of Alexandria, and one of
the most brilliant of the 'Greek' fathers of the Church.
Much of his work was described as 'error' when the
Catholic faith became more closely defined.


hedam 2 the Clunian isfenice
m tine Clnoliai Juoub,
Hny Clustiuns corke - l heip
hi hith 2 clistian
Mee hot 2 censtianils
a hint 2 clpstan fooliy
Ae Clnstian
Stale 0 Mind
Me Bine Ager
*2 Sregl 2 à te Daste Ao
The finv bulijhenhee
Te Lieke D*Dork Pre
he powip lifer


Milask Aes Trinph
>To Tnimph DAe Dt Rey
he Achievense 2 thaD Deppt
Tei D-k Acus 2 Ape
Tee Jecreey tD AEz
Our Rostr iu Maastic Taditoi
H T7 - te
Ow Muaste Rooly
h Mmestie mrisis 2n Jo ais
Ous Mineste ongis
mi Stgple Behind He Doe Atz
Tre Saype A dvvivol ApH Cluisr
he bneftaneen e DaskAeL -
he hong Inculaton


TLe hag Inculaton
he Finr Enljhentar
he Secrela keDat Arys
he Trimph helind ke D2A
MiDate Arez tops
he Finv Mmk,
Manles a,
Piorcer
herinr Monbs? ta Wasr
he Wews Lndo Mmk,
hi fatten 2 u INl
MENAK
Megack
anaadibn
Me Gwrot RDaukhr
Pre Patk Beliree te Cell


Oue paDer
ouDeur Ancesa
kfahsgdw Rore
recay ainte Desnt
Our geger anjie
On Detar Ancerta


THE BATTLE OF THE MONKS
The story of the monks should of course---but for a
better reason than that he started Christianity--begin
with Christ. For a long time I have thought that he
brought something not simply new to Judah but of an ancient
origin, more ancient than Judah itself. When I first
began to sense this I knew nothing of the fact that there
were early trade routes between India and Mesopatamia,
and between India and Greece---perhaps as early as that
first oral tradition called the Vedas, which some people
put at about two thousand years before Christ and others
very much earlier indeed. Nor did I know that the theory
that man started in southern Africa was being displaced
by findings that a very much earlier 'ancestral humanity'
was to be found at the northern tip of India. We are
told that Christ's mission was very much the child of
Greek influence, and it seems to me that we can go further
and supply the root not only of Greek thought but of the
Mesopatamian cradle of feligion from which Judah itself
came. If you look, for instance, at a commentary on
the Upanishads---some of which might be called the Vedas
written down---it is astonishing what aptness some of them
have to the ideas of Plato. But, for the kind of book
I have in mind, the important thing is that Christ
pointed outside Judah to the kind of renunciation
never practised in Judah, namely a solitary or monastic
one. Buddha overcame the world east of India. Christ
overcame the world west of India: and there are parallels
between their spproaches--always to the poor, the
the neglected. And that, I am saying, has a long sdopicic
tradition in India behind it. This should be the basis
of the book, the key to its story, in the sense that the


Upanishads and the behaviour of the sannyasin or monk
should be cast back to all the time, especially when we are
talking about the first monks of the desert. It will
certainly, among other things, give us a much clearer
unders tanding of why the Jews detested Christ so mchs he
was digging înto the very 80 ources that had made the survival
of Judah---the bare survival, not even its victoriesem-
possible, namely the race itself, the idea of the race.
'If any man cone to me, and hate not his father, and his
mother, and wi fe, and children, and trtehren, and sisters,
yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke,
14.86), 'Go thy
sell whatsouver thou hast, and give to
the
and thou hoeyahnl have treasure in heaven (Mark,
10,21) anesd 'Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are
gods? (John, 10.34)---these I take to be the thrée key state-
ments towards a monastic tradition quite contrary to Judaism
not to say the running of Israel, In them the tamily (seed
and guarentor of the
wealth (power of the
essential to and BentIrRd with the race) and the asala
hierarchy (which made it not S imply blasphemy but social
blaspheny to declare oneself a messiah let alone a
and therefore equal to the highest) were hit very
This
Atspa
is vhy his trial was
and why Pontius Pilete
could see nothing wrong in him
nothing of the factsees
different
quite
from Roman factse--that held the state of
Israel together), and above all why Christ's death should seem
to have been thought a political necessity, 'for the people
More even than this, the eastern parallel (or, as I
shall maintain, background) cang give us a much cléarer
pioture of what Christ was doing, and how
ple were listening
to him, than we oould have with S imply the Pmardo nerrative
of events in the four books of the apostles. With the record
before us of the holy men of India, talking quietly in people s
homes, moving about the country with a group of devotees
(the nearest record to us 1s the day-to-day aco ount of Sri
Ramakrishna's life at the end of the last
we can
capture not only remarkable parallels between dentuAt they
said, and how they influenced the people closest to them,
but élso a definition of the whole thing as a tradition
going far back in time beyond Judah and beyond the first
Mesopatamian stirrings of religion. And perhaps we ahall
find that Hinduism, being the oldest of the religions and
the one based not on a book or books but cn traal and error
over many centuries, had far more opportunity to extend itself
across continents than any kind of doctrine: and its basic
tenet, that the paths leading to God are very mry, and that
God has very nany nane summerised its utter lack' of doctrinal
emtentiousness. ube, with its urgent need to survive,
could apparently not afford this kind of toleranc e: and
certainly the society that grew out of its trial of Christ
and established itseif eventually in every part of the
Med: iterraneen, and then superseded the Romen empire, and
became the new Roman empire, had the same urgent need to a


greater extent, and could afford to be as little tolerant.
We shall see only the beginnings of this in the book, but
they are all we need to know in order to understand how the
later orusades, inquisition, and religious wars and persecutions
came about.
The question as to why Christ alone of many ohhets and
many people of divine presence came not only to
lives long after his death but to
peoplets
Hatrobbo
to create a new society, has not really change to an my entire knowledge empire, been and
examined properly. The Charch, with her insistence on the
immaculate birth, her deep horror of the Arian heresy, has
up as much obstacle as possible to a realls careful explanation put
that wants to delve into any deeper background than the fact
of Christts divinity and the destiny that brouhgt him into
being, The fact to my mind 1s that Christ introduced mon-
asticism---that is to say, the
experience as basie to
all divine awareness---to the Greek arCITE Roman worlds with a
devastating effeet that supported and accompanied and endorsed
the sense of his divinity that the books of the apostles
us. He gave a world thoroughly ignorant
it-a-he
HPE
society ignorant
iteethe sugge gestion of a technique.
And this, coinciding with the Greek tradition of the philos opher
as one who wandered and humbled himself mch 1ike the eastern
sannyasin (the first desert monks were ealled 'philosophers'),
provided the beginning of Christianity.
I think therefore that a book of this kind is worthless if
it tries simply to be a narrative of events without looking
into the experience itself, the technique itself, the "path'
itself, lauriae or otherwise. I think there is more awaree
ness now-w-certainly than in the nineteenth century---tha t far
from having created sane an enviable eivilisation, far from
having based a civilisation on a religion, we have really and
truly hardly begun the work of producing éither, in comparisan
with certain examples we can find in the east. Chinese
scholars, Max miller, the lectures of Vivekenanda in this
country and above ali the States, the translations from the
sanskrit, the interest in Yoga and Buddhism are what I am
thinking of---together of course with two world wars which
have samewhat shaken the sense of a clear and rising path.
It will also be neeessary to distinguish between 'pagan*
and "barbarian' and "Christian'. Here again the Church has
had a certain formative influence, towards deflating the
ancient world, or pagan world, to below the level of religion,
which is wrong, and also to putting 1t on the same level as
the barbarian world, which is wronger. I have even seen
an Italian guidebook---mich written by the ecclesiastical arm-e
that described the Etruscans as berbarians. They were quite
distinot psychologies. And it was only pos sible to equate
them because the Roman warld degenerated into Lueretian
mat terialism, and the body-bound barbarian seemed not so distant
from that. It tooks years of enoming--doliberate and


increasingly systematie---to produce a society as self-
sufficient as mediaeval society, not to mention the turbulent.
(but no longer distinetly barbarian or pagen) society that
followed it. For a thousand years after the fall of Rome
monasticism was the most important force in the western
world (in which I include what was onee called the teastern'
world, namely what became comprised in the Muslim and the
Greek Orthodox faiths). (so far from our society being
the most *secular € that has ever existed, it is based quite
as squarely and minutely on religious argument as any other
that has ever been. A book might very usefully clear up a
lot of ignorance of nineteonth-centaury origin here.
There is the questian of whether the asceticism that
came very neer to Greek athleticism în some of the first
Egyptian solitaries was not already a departure from or a
degeneration from eastern practice. Again and aga: in in
the Upanishads the idea is sounded that self-mordirication
is bad. The arguent behind this is that the degree of
pain is to the degree of the ple asure in 110r, and that a
concentration on either the pleasure or the pain will have
the same effect of missing the blisseeethe best pleasure of
allee-that is beyond isth the pleasure-pain eyole. This
is not the whole story. Asceticism has always been prac to
1sed in India, and as exaggerated as that in the Thebaid
desert. The Vedas had nothing to do.with it--nei ther
asceticism nor renunciation, and it looks as though these
were already prizedto(an Indian civilisation before the Jpacbilly
Aryan invasion of India that 1s said to have agxanglct come
about about two thousand years before Christ (the Vedas
were the tradition of the Aryans). And the marriage of
the two peoples produced Hinduisme That events and thoughts
far away in India were not at all irrelevant to what happened
in ancient Greece and
much less in the Thebaid,
is shown by the fact that AYt Vedic god of the sky,
is clearly the same as the Greek Zeus and the Roman kprekr,
while the Mithra cult that became diffused in the Roman
empire during the third and fourth centuries after Christ
has its obvious root in the Hindu god Mitra, or sun god,
(seeninduts RE
R enE via the Persian empire.
Anslenti
Dorotheus of Thebes (Egypt) was asked why he was
destroying the body so determined dly and he replied, "Because
1t is destroying met. He tried not to sleep. Hé never lay
down. He rarely allowed himself even to sit in a relaxed
position. Buddha on the other hand simply sat under a tree
and concentrated, and swore that he would not leave his
position until the body had been subdued. But Buddha was
born in the sixth century before Christ, that is under the
influence of the Upanishads and long after the Vedas and
the first ascetic traias of the original Indian peoples.
What I am saying is that when a religion is being tried for
the first
when its endowment of ecstasy is discovered
by numbers afie people who have grown up unaware of it and,


more, who have grown up in a society more or less closed
and when it is also disc overed that this ecstasy is
tott. in return for a certain self-denial, there is a
terrifie desire to leave the old body of ignorance behind,
scorned and lashed, its old tendency to self-indulgence
beaten out of it, and to prepare in onseself a wholly new
psychology for génerations of other people to inherit.
I think this, above any other, is the réason for that extra-
ordinary zeai in the first monks. Something was being
done that had been done in India thousands of years before,
perhaps many thousands of years before, to make Buddhats
concentration (which means his influenée on millions of
people) possible without the slightest self-mortification.
The ease and harmony that all forms of Yoga insist
fact, as the essential of concentration,are perhaps a
lessons learned from thousands of years of intense psycholog-
ical effort.
Some explanation of terms is always umeful. Ascetie
comes from the Greek for texercise', and implies no rigour
in itself. Exercise is the basis too of mioh of the eastern
tradition, whether it is the physical exercise of Hatha
or the act of meditation itself. The gréat diffaculty Eeea
Christianity was that it lacked
form of exercise, and
there was the danger that liturgy aryafo spoken prayer and read-
ing aloud would take the place of real c oncentration. It
is interesting, for exampie, that while we have the words
ascetic and monk intact from the first Greek root, the word
for meditation---hesyehiaesyehia---has disappeared, and we shall
have to look at the problem of whether the tradition of
meditation, firmly established in Hinduism and inherited
by the desért fathers, did not at some point drop out, and
where this point
and why. Partly this will become
olearer in the rest arter this synopsis.
The stories of how the solitary creatures of the Thebaid
lived peacefully with wild animals---the ineidence of animals
in the first story of st Antony visiting the cave of st Paul
the Hermit---are în exact accordance with the stories of holy
men in the east, before whom the wildest creatures are still.
There are meny stories from every epoch including our own
of the sannyasin who stays a tiger or an elephant by remain-
ing still. But the desert fathers were always struggling,
with devils, who took various
They tended # acting
under a commnder-in-chier, the ohapedr himseif, and their
opbjective wes to bring as much fret and annoyance into the
life of the monk as possible, besidex the obvious function
of tempting him to greed and fornication. This in the
Hindu tradition---and here we see a close resemblance to the
Platonic and Pythagorian doctrines---is simply nature with
its coils of pleasure and
That is to
left un-
bridled either outside or Inilde a man, nature Yh1 lead
quite implabably to chaos. It will even be seen to work


end--and with a special the accelerating force of its own t owards that
some of the desert fathers had the feeling
that there were vast armies of spirits at work with no
other job to do than dise oncert and degrade. Nature, in
the eastern tradition, does its work by blinding its victim,
especially with the lilusion of permanence, which is called'
maya, the veil of space and time or freality' which is not
the true reality at all but seems to the victim
This is the reas on for exercises, worked out over inescapable. cent turies
or thousands of years. They represent a technique, so to
speak, for undoing the coils of maya with its everlasting
cyele of pleasure-and-pain: that is the function of medit-
ation, the eseential act of throwing off the illusion. At
once the reason for solitary living will be seen: in those
who are just starting out on the journey it is essential.
The finding of a method was the whole work of the desert
fathers. Failure to understand this involves one (it seems
to have involved most of the historians) in the idea that
they were simply the rather selfish precursors of the later
cenobitic arrangements, looking after their own salvation
but nobody else's. The desert was really a search for free-
dom-e-for when maya would loosen its chains--eand/a 'still
+ wlen
seat' would at Iast be found, requiring and fearing nothing,
and the recluse would know that he was the brief expression
of some thing everlasting, and that in the dual possession of
the brief and the eternai inside the same body WEB his struggle. layh
And the devils were so to speak a pagan nature being exorcised.
How was it that Christianity took hold of the Roman
empire? Gibbon asks this, and the fifth of his reasons
is the most immediately convineing, that the Christians fored
a disciplined republic ins ide the empire, and eventually the
only discipline there was. But the dirticulty of making a
clear XEGED answer, at least for historians, 1s that there is
little visible to work on, in those first centuries of
Christianity, while the empire was still flourish ing.
True that the best man for the job inereas ingly became the
Christian, because he was reliable, vigourous and optimistic.
But the power that made him so was very invisible---I say
very' because the non-Christians, when they saw how
the martyrs were to suffer and to die, and to provoke 2ERBY
greatest cruelty with the utmost serenity, thought them
simply idesparatebreatures---they had no further use for
life: that is to'say, they saw only a frantic external
behaviour, and the light inside was as hidden to them as
could be. In fact, the Christian had inherited two things,
which exercised themselves in tme way# that secured the fali
of the empire to Christianity when it happened: they had
all the strength of Mosaic law in them but, as Gibbon
*delivered from the weight of its fetters', and they LaRys,
what can only be called a new souree of
and the two
played an overlapping role, s ometi times in ooitexd one
the same
All the way through the early history of Christianity
porecaa the first Nazarene church in Jerusalem to the slow


Alexandrda, displacement of that church as the sole authority
Antioch,
Rome, Ephesus, Corinth--ewe shall see %o most
ecstatic zéal (to be burned, to be eaten alive by lions, to
be mocked and spat at) combining with the quiet taking over
of the key positions of state, until with the conversion of
Constantine in the fourth century (coinciding with the first
Pachomian monasteries) Christianity becomes the religion of
an empire. But my point here also is that the
tov 18g
of the first Christian martyrs like Ignatius, and apparent the fact hunger A
that the Roman persecutions under Nero and Domitian and
only stirred Christ ian feeling to greater zeal,
Trajan the
story of an astonishing state of reckless eostasy ta/simply that
erek
when a man had seen as a whole new experience that far happened
death being the story of the eepmuption/of the body and from of
pleasures (and of pains as well, Cicerosaid, to ease the
melancholy of
FitOe
and
it) into-dust was only an exchange of condition,
no barrier at allrin fact a complete taste of the ecstasy
BOBA so far just hinted ata And what we have in the desert
the Thebaid is 8 imply a different technique se-to-speak of
getting rid of the body-e-the pagan body, that eraved pleasure
and (other side of the same coin) feared desth. My point also
is that Christian arganisation--the fact that many bishops
became *defenders of the city'---and the increasing conversions
in high places were not enough in themselves on which to base
the actual Christian society that did come
or even the
actual Church that did came about. It was SOPEt the martyrs,
and then the monks, who did this. It was quite logioally the
Benedic tine monks
at the climax so to speak of the whole
operation, were sent emoto unify all Europe (that is, all the
monasteries of Europe) under one head.
The first Christian asceticism is said to have came
about---as a doctrine,' distinet from the spontaneous asceticism
of the first martyrs---at Alexandra, in a school of thought
that combined Platonie and Judaistic ideas. It was for this
reason that the first asceties were often called philosophers,
because of the Platonic distinetion between the life of nature
and the life (esgentially contemplative) above nature. Te
first actual movement towards the desert of the Nile (Paul,
Antony and Ammon) seems to have taken place towards the end
of the third century, at the time of the Decian persecutions,
which sti imulated these men to imitate the martyrs but by leaving
the world altogether, as a polluted area, very much on the
lines of Alexandrian thought. And this movement later spread
beyond the Nile no doub t vecause of the existence of other
sects, in Syria and Asia Minor and Italy, which similarly saw
the world as by definition polluted. st paul settled in Thebes
(Egypt)
towards the middle of the third century
and iived Sy in solitude for one hundred and thirteen
Ieaving-hahind Aeoertelin. The story says aheers.
a crow fed him for sixty years, and thet he was ciothed in
palm leaves. at Antony settled finally in Mount Qolzum,
same miles from the Red Sea, after visiting paul and being


present at his death. He and Ammon after him left increas
numbers of desert disciples.
ing
It was not all a matter of suecessful concentration.
There are some entrancing and some funny stories. Macarius
the in his Egyptian bed instead solved of the his probleme wife by of a man the who horse had found a horse
his wife again.
on this low turning level, was involved back into
with the armies of AERt. The desert of course attracted together all
sorts. There was also something of the competitive
of the Olympiad. When Macarius the Alexandrian heard atmosphere of any
in self-mortification the end he held more a sort extreme of desert than recorde lis he imitated There is so that
that his
was
stay
i'nao
way
lost for him by demons but tha t he sucked the
udders of an antelope for food and the antelope then
back to his cell. In other words an atmosphere that guided some would him
call madness and same would call ecstasy ("the ecstasy of the
lone angels ') hangs rond the persons of the first monks, and it all
eypun
becomes extravagan t legend when told by eyewitnesses, especially
the ones who do not quite understand. There is
a hermit
hardly
cammunity in the world that hasn t had tall stories tola about it.
Whoh
But, more important than that, there is hardly one to which strange
things have failed to happen, so that it seems as if a certain
desov
kind of concentration produces unworldly results, as certainly
as another kind of concentration produces warldly results.
Peafel. So we ahall have to piok our way through these stories trying
seleely topick-out the actual real, but not unsternge, event. Ànd cn
top of this we have to remember the eastern injunetion that
the powers of concentration are not to be tampered with lightly,
and can lead in the unwary and the unprepared to madness.
There was probably plenty of madness too.
But here the book might usefully dispose of the idea that
the monk was a complete men standing alone
waves of
paganism or barbarism, according to the
and place he lived
în. He was himself the pagan, himself
barbarian, and
his awareness came precisely from the
conflict inside him.
One can say that the monasteries (whether of one monk or meny)
were the only so urces of light in the darkness of the decay
of Rome, but the decay was being fought inside those monasteries
and not outside. That and that alone was the reason for the
light. Therefore we should expect to see signs of great
conflict in the first monks, especially the solitaries.
They were so often exorcising the ir own ignorance. The abbot
Serenus told Cassianus that the spac e between heaven and earth
was filled with invis ible spirits whose entire preoccupation
was causing trouble, but that he thought they had a lot less
power then in earlier times. Here we have to rememb er-wmin
case we think that entirely a joke---that nature before it is
temper ed and controlled by thought, before the new order of
thought displaces the decayed
bofore the things outside
begin to look 1ike a reflection d8 the things inside, NadNEE
can give a man that feeling of a hostile magnetism always about
to burst, partly through being unknownand untried. Above all


we have to realise that the psychology which sees the
possibility of a clement order in the world outside has to
be made: we who have inherited it find it aiffieult to
believe not only that once people did not have it but that
it had to be made with exacting patience and trial.
The ceobitic or oommunity form of the monastery grew
quite naturally from the first anchorites of the desert.
st Antony organised his followers somewhat. In the wastes
of Nitria there are said to have been about five thousand
hermits, with a church, a couneil of elders, and a vhip for
punishment. It was from this first laure, which means
literally the path', referring both. to the path that went
between the hermitst huts and the path of truth, 'the only
path'. It was Pachomius (286-346) who first organised the
ioose a ammunities into settlements under a superior who
guided the weak and the novices. He became an anchorite in
307, ha ving been baptised at Thebes. He built his monk's
viliage at Tabennesi, end surrounded/with high walls against
desert brigands, vho were frequent visitors. When the
settlement got going, after some years of trial and error,
the first real method set in---three monks to a cell, and
inside the settlement a complete self-sufficient population
of bakers, potters and so on. They ate vegetables, olives
and cheese, and some wine was allowed. There was oamplete
silence during meals. There were periods of prayer for those
who were not yet the telect' (Am/could be left alone to practise
their own meditation. They were not priests, and rachomius
was careful not to allow any serse of a social hierarchy to
creep ino As c ommunity-life developed from the Pachofmian
seed the *pollution' ? of the world came in, and there were
quarrels and even persecution. Among some pachomian nuns
there was a
wamen taken to be madrf by the rest of the
community, azaIne persecuted as such. But a male priest,
happening to visit them, and disliking what he saw, declared
her tobe not mad but a saint. The women promptly began wor-
Rrl
shippingh, which drove her away: clearly she had taken and
perhaps éncouraged the persecution as her form of self-
mortification.
Many of the hermits came to the desert from other motives
than holy ones: some wanted to escape army service, others
were on the run fran the police, who never ventured into the
desert. And there were those who s: imply could not face
persecution any more. The desert fathers had tremedous
difficulty with sexual temptation, like all devotees everywhere.
The voluptuous woman in the mind was one of the most frequent
of the demons, and his visits were the longest. A vast amdunt
of effort was spent on a passion that seemed only to thrive
on any attention, whe ther rejection or indulgence. One
anchorite told a woman in a burst of indulgence that he could
deal with ten of her.
left the desert together, but
she led him such a life tmat he came back after a few months.


There was something of the later Islamic
about
a few of the superiors. Shenute, who died in
insisted
on absolute
rlou
obedience to his rule, and blindness to any but
his word. He used to beat his monks-w-and once beat a man
to death. He followed Pachomius to the letter except that
he reversed his compassionate firmess. Thus the first seed
of community gave rise to the element of something like civil
war, which was never quite to leave Christian society at any
timé, except in brief localised patohes of civilisation soon
rased by war again. It was this seed among the first
Egyptian devoteesrsthat led, from small beginnings in the
form of group ee attacks on idol worshippers, to the erusades
many centuries later. A punitive, a disastrously aggressive
note entered Christianity early and made it perhaps the most
destructive civilisation ever known. The actual person of
Christ was early left behind (perhaps in that first Nazarene
church established
days after his death) for what looks
like now a gigantic fertyt operation using his name, to unite
and order all the barbarian and pagan races, and ultimately
all the races of the world, until some kind'of global unity
was established. That, after all, may be the hidden meaning
of Christts/to bring not peace but the sword.
other
kpmuise
hand,
cannot say that this global operation tincee
function of Christianity, since Christianity came from a root,
the same one as Islam, and when we examine the root we shall
find something of the same
to work beyond the frontier
until the concept of the Frontier itself was broken down.
The movement had spread east from Egypt early. St
Hilarion, an itinerant monk, lived among other places at
Gaza (307), and died in Cyprus. His friend Epiphanius
(bishop of salamis) had a Pachomian settlement at Besanduc
near Jerusalem. Epiphanius, said to be a quarrelsome man,
given to anger and heresy-hunting, became bishop of Cyprus.
This early we get a shadow of the later Inquisition. În
that first form it looks like a tendenoy to fix orthodox
systams out a quite justifiable fear. In the case of the
later Spaniards, the fear was of Jews and Moors. In the
case of Epiphanius the fear
as perhaps all fear
in self-doubt. And perhaps 1YA (nquisition was the AorAs
of the self-doubt that ran all thw uay thr ough Christianity.
Epiphanius even denouneed his friend John Chrysostom, the'
bishop of Constantinople, and had him banished. He had st
Jeromets brother consecrated by foree---gagged and bound:
and he failed to understand what all the fuss was about after-
wards.
In Syria the rigour was greater even than in
The monks staggered under heavy loads of iron or ameypt.
Some lived in trees (the Dendrites), others in the forest
(the Grazers). st
born in 389, first lived
in a cistern and once aregna to PEiE himself walled up without
food for the whole of Lent: he was walled up according to


his wish but food was put inside, though he did not
touch it. He was released after
at the last
gasp. And he repeated this every Tont
From
his
ArEALIE
colum, where he spent thirty-seven years, he exercised
an astonishing influence over the whole countryside, and
was asked again and again to use this influence in affairs
of state. But he rerused to answer the emperor, and left
the quarrels over Nestorianism (Nestorius was Chrysostom's
predecessor as bishop of Constantinople, and the "heresy*
of his name was similar to that of the Briton gukgtus
Pelagius) that were bothering not only heads 1ike John
Cassianus's and st Augustine's but those of the secular
imperial court as well. All in all, the brawling over
creeds that went on, the wild gang-fights that were the later
religious wars in embryo, should perhaps be treated without
the awe usually
to theological discussion and seen
in terms of the gavearier and pagan appetites that un-
avoidably engulded the gospel.
The shift of the first monasticism goes from Egypt
to Palestine, and then up to Constantinople, seeming to
correspond with a & gradual shift of political and social
power înto the hands of the Christians: and perhaps the
brawls, spoken or written or fought out with knives,
were a symptom of this change. st. Chrysostom among
others tried to
the monks going into the cities,
and he was hated stop reviled by both the monks and the
priests far this; and perhaps in this/ttrak criticism
tteirk
of Chrysostom---that he didn't
int-mewe can hear
the first note of that element afots blame that began under
Christianity to be attached to solitude, with the paraellel
commendation of anything communal, which has reached its
climax in our epoch.
st Basil marks the shift of monasticism into the
Greek world. He lived roughly between 329 and 379.
The desert fathers were expected to be
at rhetoric. me
which word was not the empty one it is gord us today. It
really meant knowing how/expound a system of thought, and
therefore how to think. st Basil wrote a book called
'To Young Men on the Uses of Hellenism'. He e was int-
erested in the Pachomian form of monastery but thought it
SBuril
too much like a town, while the superior was too much like
an administArator. He devised a smaller version of the
same thing where contact between the monk and his superior
would be easy and daily. It was a mich more workadey
affair than ever before, and already we begin to see the
first solitaryc oncentration in a distilled form. Austerities
were discouraged. Prayer and study were as much part of
the
as manual work. st Basilts simple Rule
EEROEY the Byzantine world. He ran schools for
one
antuo-
type for those who were going to be monks, and another
for those who were going into the world.


St Basil, in choosing his Cappadocian site, seems to
have had sometning like a monastic concept in the mediaeval
sense: that is, he chose a (far him) pleasant spot and not
a scrap of desert as barren as
ible. That his friend
Gregory thought the place damp paees squalid makes no difference
to the new idea of clemency that seems to enter with the
Byzantine influence. He rejected solitary asceticism
because the monk in solitude had a tendency to see himself
as perfect too easily, having no means of comparison: he
guil all" too often needed someone to love him and therefore guide
and sustain hime st Basil advooated a community of thirty
or forty monks, not the vast establishments of Nitria;
they were to bé no more than e ould be served by 'one iamp and
one fire'. He gave absolute
of decision to the
superior. There was nothing fiwer the demooracy which the
later monast eries practis ed. But the soholars among the
Basilian monks couid tell the superior off if they felt
it necessery, and the lower monk could appeal to them.
Extreme self-mortifiention was discouraged. But on the
other hand St Basil allowed far the necessity tosone of the
solitary element by providing cells, though these were not
too far dispersed from each other. This if anything was
cteeer closer to eastern doctrine then the extredme austerity
of the desert anchorites: the doetrine being that the act of
meditation is the necessary thing, and the presence close or
far of other people is irrelevant to this. The utterly
solitary life does not seem to be favoured in the Upanishads
as that likeliest to achieve purity. In bringing about his
changes st Basil brought the monasteries further înto the
organisation of the church, and whatever concentration was
lost resulted more from this than from his changes in them-
selves.
Monastic discipline was tightened further when it camer
(by the Council of chalcedon in 415) under the control of the
local bishop. Monks were definitély forbidden by this council
to dabble in secular or even ecelesiastical affairs. They
were too much seen in the cities. And some of them 1iked
a brawl. Later in the sixth century Justinian ordered that
cells should always be incorporated în the main nucleus
of monastic buildings, and that the bishop must supervise
the monxattux election of the abbot: thts early do we find
3an active hostile attatude towards solitary practises by
the Second
Shadion
authority. At
Synod to take piace in the Trullan
teaclion chamber of the imperial palace at Constantinople in 692
it was laid down that no one under ten years of age could be
a monk and that a monk had to have three years in the
aprin community before being allowed a cell of his OWn. The
Jlilay
hermits were also to keep off the streets. Theodorets
reform of the studion monastery (the tsleepless P monks)
ideal
hundreds of years later in the eighth
was much 1ike
the self-reform of the Church after Luther OEFERY the hands of
the Jesuits. It was provoked, that is, by criticism from


outside. Steodore had read st Basil's writings on
asceticism and emphasised c ommunity work--ebut for the
community outside the monastery now, in the form of
hospi ital care for the sick and food for the
This
new discipline spread to the great centres
monastic ism
at Kiev
CoomA
and Mount Athos. This latter is the oldest of
the monastic states, so to speak: in the tenth century
a monk called Athanasius organised the community on studion
lines, and the hermits lost caste even further. The
community even tried to claim independence from the outside
world (that is, from the patriarch of Constantinople).
They were successful, and only in 1312 was this permiss: ion
revoked by the emperor. The shift we I are noticing here is
towards making the monastery an embryo-city: something of
the social operation, to produce a world outside that would
perfectly reflect the faith ins ide, had begun. But also
this was part of a fight that developed between the monks
and the secular arm, which more and more, through the
bishops, and exercis ing control even over the habits of
hermits, tried to control every aspect of the Church, SXSE
including its monastic outsiders, for political and social
purposes. The monks put up more fight than the clergy,
and Theodore's work ass an aspect of this fight.
In Paulinus, who gave up social life in Rome and a
vast property to become a monk, in 395 when he was just
turned far ty, gas/perhaps one of the first hints of a
wekare/
distinet Christian civilisation in Burope, still in the
vague glow of Greece and brought up in a Rome where it
was thought inconceivable that its greatness could ever
wane. He began a monastery at Nola in the Campania,
He remained urbane and kin ndly, wrote verse, continued to
read Lucretdus and Virgil and Horace. He drew devotees
from Gaul,
the Balkans and the rest of Italy.
In him the Spoat asceticism was tempered to something
like a classical refinement: the exercises were no less
than those of the desert but they were
inst a formed
background of olive groves and Plnnpro.bcat
To the west, in the outer reaches of the Roman empire
where barbarism and the Church sometimes seemed not so
different, some effort was made to introduce asceticism,
but a vigorous action nipped it in the bud. Priscill: 1én, a
wealthy Spaniard, was squashed by the Synod of saragossa
(386) which ordered that a priest who became a monk should
be shut outside the church on grounds of pride. It also
ordered that no virgin could take the veil under the age of
forty. And here, in Europe, we enter a different s story
from the other oné of the desert and the teastern' Church.
There are new forces of a tribal kind, quite different from
the background supplied by ancient Gréece and Rome. st
Martin of Tours, for instance, was an imperial soldier
before he became a monk and founded a monastery in Milan.
He worked among the sick-e-the story of his dividing the


8r Mau loun
cloak epitomises his life (361-397). He was living among
Barbarians, and at once we see that the 'social
I have been talking of had to be different in the operation north of
from that in the pagan world: conversion stretched
Puroger into behaviour and manners and the minutest conduct of
daily life. The cities established by the Romans were at
best distant affairs, with their suggestion of refinements,
and bel onged to a former warld. Martin could not stop the
usurper Maximus putting the monk Priscillian to death, but he
complained loudly. He was aware of the need of the desert
traditions. And above all he was aware of the fact that the
business of persuasion and e anversion among his om kind,
namely the Berbarians, took away from the personal
that
as solitary life endows. He said once that as a powers he had
much less 'power' than he had had as a monk: as bishop a bishop he
raised one man from the dead, as a monk two. Here was the
kernel of the conflict---I mean the conflict inside one and the
same man-e-that a was more or less forgotten in the next thousand
years of Christianisation for the outside conflict, that 'social
operation*. In the eastern tradition there is a clear distinct
ion between the "householder* as he is called and the monk.
The "householder* has his special tasks, which if
are
anything
more difficult than those of the monk because he is mixed:
up all the t ime in the frets of the world. But in Christian-
ity nothing like the discipline es of self-purifioation to be
found in Hinduism awaited the ordi ainary "householder'. The
Church, not to
the monas teries, became more and more
institutions as Yt went on, and it is difficult to see
how it could have been otherwise, given the task--enot of
turning everyone into one of Christ's disciples, so to speak,
but of producing a more or less presentable human being.
The apparently mechnical nature of the whole thing---the fact
that the monasteriés
hold of peoplets manners end evolved
a quite new society, Eot necessarily without the deep universal
conversion to spiritual awareness $hat all disciples hope for-e
was what made Luther and men like him do what they did nany
centuries later. Luther suddenly became anxious for his own
soul-e-one can put it like that: he realised that in himself
there was no unquestioning assumption that the Church could
satisfactorily be left to look after its own. His action
looks like a sudden
measure to recapture the earlier
ascetic model that "rarta fallen out: that
not the practices
of self-mortification but the degree of otonotionr and purity.
st Augustine too, when he left Milan in 384 to travel
other parts of Italy, preferred the cenobitic monastery to
Apepelins the solitary cell becai ause of the work that had to be done.
And the nature of this work was recognised bn kis monasteries
which were centres not of conversion on the one hand and
personal salvation on the
nor of contemplation on the
one hand and outside duties SEFTAS on
other, but of the active.
pursuit of ideas. Here the mediaeval monastery takes form, and
it is easy to see how his writings dominated it. The
ideas, the studies---these were the new form of a solitary


act for the Christian warld, the transmutation of the literary
act of the Roman world into not only a new but a vh ole exper-
ience, involving not only the divine but the attempt to permeate
the whole world with this divinity, thr ough the writing and the
thinking. Really and truly that was a new definition of lit-
erature, samething far removed from what the ancient authors had
been doing: we all know the sense in which literature to be real
for us has to be rcommitted', and how being called 'literary'
is tantamount to being called artificial or irrelevant. The
peculiar inter-involvement of writing and thinking and living,
the e onstruction of asociety, that came tobe assumed under
the heading of literature, Eierthmomntrins, had-coased-to
be vartually the-government of-life, originated in the period
we are talking about. In other words, Augustine is often
called 'the first humanist', but that is a hare best avoided,
since the title is given to so many, and begs further definition.
It is interesting that Augustine's first inkling of what
his life would have to be came to him as a result of a certain
disgust with himself as a 'merchant of words'. Therefore he
belonged to the classical tradition: he was born in a Roman
colony (Hippo). Virgil brought tears to his eyes. His job
was to bring back the philosophy, and the writing, but as the
arts of contemplation. His first monastery was a centre of
eantemplation, conversion, study and parochial duty all in one.
And his type of monastery grew out of a series of discussions
that took
first at Cassiciacum near Milan and then at
Thagastus IORe, Africa. The meals, especially at his establish-
ment at
were filling. The monks could drink wine, and
sometimes Hipget was eaten, as well as succulent dishes now and
then sent over by the nuns. Sometimes there could be talk at
the table. Like all other monasteries, his ra ther frowned
on ablutions of any kind: the classicai baokground---the
association of the baths with scandalous behaviour-e-accounts
for this close companianship, that can be traced right through
the centuries, between filth and Christian feeling.
His Çity of God
laid the basis of mediaeval life
more cons Giously than parbegthdes writing. The two cities-e-
the celest ial city and Aye terrestrial city---are in fact not
states of the body politic at all but of the soul: A christian,
for ins tance, couid easily be of the terrestrial city while a
heathen could be cl ose to the celestial city. The actual
political state, the real city, lay unsatisfactorily between
the two, its peace necessarily uncertain and much lile the rest-
lessness of the soul. And the Church (with the Roman organ-
isation of political life close hehind it, prompting) took
this to mean that she herself was the city celestial and the
state the city terrestrial, which gave her the right of the
terrestrial control of everything. It is difficult to see
how that, too, could have been avoided, given the nature of
the job in hand.


st Jerome, St Augustine's eontemporary (he finished
translating the Bible-e-in 385-wethe year before Augustine's
conversion) had in one important way the same funetion as
Augustine, and that was to take monasticism a further---one
might almost say/sophisticated---step away from the desert
traditions. His writings from Bethiehem gave a vivid
picture of the last days of the Roman empire ****xut and
he is the one doctor of the Chureh who freely uses Roman
history in his theological studies. He knew Virgil by
heart. We have to remembe er that for men like him the
future did not at all look as if it would contain, af all
things, a Christian empire or even a Christian state. For
one thing, few people could imagine the fall of Rome after
six centuries of power. But more than that, a thought like
the 'Christian empiret must have seemed a contradiction in
terms. Measured against this idea, we can see what sort of
change August tinets wark, particulariy his City of God, brought
about, by its association of Christian feeling with status
quo. st Jerome had to fly from Bethlehem during a barbarian
attack: to a scholar it must have seemed that the Gospel
would have little to do with tempering their actions in the
future. On the whole masses of people do not take to the
ldvel of truth represented in the story of Christ: they tend
to go for easier prizes. It was nothing sh ort of a marvel.
It altered the lives of the apparently most unsuitable people.
St Jerome himself was to be found in the best Roman society
at one time. He denounced marriage savagely, but had many
friendships with women. Some of them turned' their salons
on the Aventine into places of medisation, much like monasteries,
un der his guidance. The doctrine worked in and out of life
in the most extraordinerily fertile way which we are in
danger of not seeing because the ground has been gone over so
many ties. st Jerome never mastered his ovn hatreds, and
therefore never fulfilled the first and preliminary state before
the act of meditation, according at least to the eastern
tradition, namely a wave of good will towards all creatures.
The battle was going on in him in other terms: he was
grappling with the pagan in himself. He was brilliant and
turbulent. He worked enough for ten men. He learre d Hebrew
simply in order to give the world a translation not from the
Greek versions of the Bible, but from the original tongue:
and he translated the Old Testanent as well so that the Jews
could not say that their Book was a mystery closed to the rest
of mankind. Rome was a Babylon---a etwo-footed donkey'---for
him. He hes/lavishly vivid deseriptions of the women trying
Wrotel to look younger than they were, and of the clergy, waving their
hair. His attacks made life in Rome so hot for him that he
had to leave. Not only this but his working life das
did/
opposite of fulfilling the eastern injune tion, *never datend.
He contended with contending people. He knew the level an
which they had to be addressed, and scolded. Thus it looks
as if the needs of Christianity, to fill every available crack
in life at that time, brought into being its own specialists


in every quarter.
At this time, towards the end of the fourth century,
perhaps the most widely read monk, never sanctified, was
origen, one of the earlier (185-254) 'philosophers of
master of the school of Alexandria and often called
lt most brilliant of the Greek Fathers of the Church.
He and Tertullian (the Latin father) came in for a lot of
reserve, and the general Church attitude seems to be one
of gratitude but regret about the terroris'. pachomius
once flung a piece orgien into the water and said that
he would have flung Y, into the fire had it not contaire d
the name of God. Origen himself had reserves too, about
the nature of some of the asceticism practised: hé was in
doubt about the idea of the stuff of life being by its
nature polluted. He thought asceticism was right for
discipline, but that the idea of condemning things finnocent
in themselvest was wrong. It will be cleer that this ran
into, trouble withthe Augustinian doctrine of original sin
later, which won-aeas far as Church orthodoxy goes---over
its opposite, the Pelagian dootrine, which no doubt derived
a lot of benéfit fram the oragen writings. origen was the
first to organise Christian teaching into sore thing 1ike a
system, so that a book of this kind mist start talking about
him very early. Jerome called him *the naster of the Church
after the Apostles'. But when origen was declared
a lot
of people a heretie, Jerome omptly dropped hime Xa
because his friend Rufinus FEFURE to do this Jerome concen-
trated his always very fierce attacks on him, calling him among
other things a hypooritgand a swine. One of the re asons
why he was so quiek to find heresy in himself was his sentiv-
ity about the very classical learning he loved: he once had
a dream in which God told him that he was more a Ciceronian
than a Christien. The doubts he had partly account for the
terrifie energy of his work. The farmer Greek version of
the Bible that was studied everywhere---the work of Alexandrine
Jews who had lost a lot of their Hebrew in exile-ena took
second
to his, venerated as it was. And of course in *
the doere of Trent in 1546 Jerome 's was declared the offic-
1a version. Yet he always talked longingly about the
22 desert fathers (Lite/paul, Life of Malchus, Life of Hilarion).
If there is an equivalent for him in the eassern traditions
at all it would be the so-called karna yoga, whose discipline yogi
is work, whose self-puridication is work: "work as "destiny'
The struggle between the Romen churoh and Arianism (I
wish to keep clear of the words 'orthodox and "herettcal")
was really thestruggle between the old empire and the newly
converted Barbarians. Yet the Barbarian doctrine wasa
platonde interpresetion of the doctrine of the
and held that only God was divine, and Christ imtctrine
(rather like the Sumerian
Golgemesh). It was condemned
in the Couneil of Nicea Tasoi, which made it clear that the


Roman doetrine of the Trinity, with its suggestion of three
divine powers in one, was the more attractive one for people
of imperial background rather than EE tribalvane. I am in
danger here of over-simplifying. But what I want to do is
to keep that kind of
about three-in-ane or just
half-a-one, on the 1TE it belongs
namely seet-warfare.
A lot of Christian bishops testified % the faot that some
of the Vandals far instance showed more Christianity than
their own pe ople. And the dootrinal struggle was fought
out in terms of power. When Augustine died (430) his rtive
Africa was being colonised by the Vandals. St Fulgencius,
one of Augustine's followers, was banished by them to
sardinia for his Roman views. And there he denounce/their
clergy for ignorance, their soldiers for brutality. By
the time of his death (533) the imperial struet ture, based
on the Byzantine world, which had temporarily got the upper
hand and wrested Africa back from the Vandals, and paciried
Italy, was apparently safe.
The imperial structurewas in fact having a double and
eantraduetory effeot on the monasteries. Imperial protection
made life in the monasteries safe, whether at Hippo or in
the Campania, but at the same time it was derining monastie
life as definitely exterior not only to administration, which
was obvious, but to the Church. Here it is useful to hark
back to the story of Priscillian. He was brought down
the gossip of two Spanish bishops (who Were later found 02s
and flung into a gaol in Naples, but after Priscillian's
execution) and handed over toa tribunal of the empire.
It was the first time the Church had failed to deal with one
of its own querrels, and it was the shape of
to come.
Priscillian was torured for heresy, a concept EAREO of course
increased pregeisely with that of orthodoxy, and sentenc ed
(385). Now this meant not at all that the Church had bec ome
weak but that its quarrels were now important enough, its
hierarchy public and influential enough, to be regarded as
a state affair. That 1s what I mean by saying that the idea
of heresy developed with that of orthodoxy.
Priseillian's followers---who continued to flourish
long after his death, in fact for nearly two centuries---
were hunted down. The monks---notably Martin and Ambrose-ee
complained bitterly, and said that heresy should not be
punished physically under any cireumstances. The fact
that the two bishops Ithacus and Hydacus were banished to
a Neapolitan
on had---like all exonerations post mortem--
no effect on ERanc precedent. The long birth of Christienity
in the world was not a pretty business.
the Vandals were superseded by the Swabians
and the Sactectes, *federals' of the empire (no less a part
of the empire than Rome) and Arian by persuasion. It was
their conversion to Roman doctrine---un dertaken by men like
the monk (not the saint) Martin, who started a monastery at


Malin ke Mank
Dumio in'Spain (560) and converted the Swabian king
Cacaricg--that produced a new kind of paperial patriotism,
and the possibility of an imperial Christianity for the
first time. The bishop of Seville converted the Visigoths
(587). The canversion also involved the surrender of
pagan habits, such as the sacrifice and the tacit acknowledge-
ment of ancient
in holidays and certain rituals.
This new epatrgnes was still towards Rome, but no longer
back-looking, to the ancient glories: it saw Rome as the
Christian city. And the Visigoths and Swabians and the
other federals were those who provided the backbone. In
fact Martin's brother Idadore, who became bishop of seville,
wrote that the Gothic nation 'has raised you (Rome) up in
the splendour of its power*. Here is the séed of the
Holy Roman Empire that would later have its seat in Frank-
furt. Like those of the Moors later in the eighth century,
the Barbarian attacks, the Barbarian savagery, in some way
stimulated and homogenised Christian
so much that
they themselves, even in victory, amicinat to it.
The success of the Church---as against that of the monks---
was increasingly of a social nature. That
must be
made. st Martin's biographer Sulpicius padgotnt made the
point (in a manuseript that sped through Europe and the
Byzantine world) that priests all too often preferred well-
padded carriages to the donkey, marble halls to cells and
extravagant robes to simple habits. The struggle against
barbarism (namely a form of behaviour) was waged either in
the form of a new society not uniike the Rome that was in
decline, heavily inclining towards luxury and refinement,
or else inside one and the same man, so that his very boorish-
ness cried out to him to be transtormed. There is no better
example of the latter than st Martin, who had been a high-
ranking cavalry officer in one of the federal armies before
the famous
of the cloak took place. The miracles
credited to rnee by Severus (apart from Severus s's own incl in-
ation to surround the saint with a certain barbarian
glamour) were half of them gauche and crude in atmosphere.
He once found a group of peasants apparently practising
some heathen rite and decided with his divine magic to make
them all so stiff that the most they C ould do was to twist
round on their heels ridiculously like puppets. Then he
realised it was a perfectly Christian burial, and q ickly
unstiffened them ail. When the emperor refused to receive him
he simply walked into the palace, presumably stiffening the
guards too,, and when valentimian failed to rise from his
throne Martin had it hotted up far a few moments to scorch
his backside. Naturally the emperor jumped up with a yell.
The important thing here is the
of the barbarian
still centred on revenge PISY the crude reduction
tretausionds people into archetypes, frightened or good or bad,


and good or bad according to whether they assented to
your will or not. În the end one cannot doubt how it was
that the Roman doctrine of the Trinity won over the Arian
doc trine, despite the fact that the number of Arians out-
numbered the Romans
far: there was everything for the:
barbarian to admire % the refinement both of mind and be-
haviour-e-the simple power of being able to grasp a situation
in all its subtletion--hich for good or for evil the Roman
could command. Martin travelled everywhere denouncing pagan
idol worship, which was officially forbidden by the imperial
government at about this time, and his erudeness of delivery
was the very thing that won hordes of peasants over to him.
It is said that because of him alone certain roads in Gaul
mmk
were littered with ascetios and processions. The later st
Gregory of Tours (he died in 598) was quite as uncouth, and
himeny
could hardly form a decent sentence. But he elaimed (rightly)
that while few people un derstood an orator many understood
Sthsan an uncouth creature like himself. This is the double action .
Ida going on all the time---erude conversions, and refinement wait-
îng to scoop the victory up.
hwr Dtte
During the fifth century perhaps the most fertile settle-
ment in Europe was that formed at Lérins in Provene e
hab P Honoratius, and in its fertility (the fact that it abz people
from
Greece, Spain, Africa, Egypt and Italy) we can see
the bEi society of the chansons, the seed of chivalry itself,
from which st Franc is drew in his laude, those first hyms of
humanism. A kind of embryo Christendom quickly formed round
Honoratius. The fact that his suecessor Hilary (later
canonised) was summoned to Rome by pope Leo and
into
for sacking the bishop of
shows to
extent
EFOL this ime the bare structure SEERAETA of the
empire was
beginning to show itself. By the time of st Francis, in the
twelfth
communication between Frovence and Italy is
easy and
since precisely the same
spiritual
and
pérmeated life in both places, aoreEna Latin has
been accepted as the common Christian
ianguage.
All these roots have to be pointed forward to their
later maturity. Although I see the book as not
beyond the Benedictine era, some looking forward ECIRE mediaeval
practise will bring out the vhole meaning. We are looking
into how a civilisation (if we went to call Christendom that,
and I myself would not be quite happy about doing Som-but
that wiil be one of the problems faced) came into being out
of a religious experience: this I see as the whole character
of the book.
There was another monastery in Provence, started at about
the same time (415) in Merseilles by John Cassianus. Now
Cassienus brought to Europe the clearest exposé of desert
life, an eye-witness aceount which show a great fascination
with the anchorites but an implicit rejection of them. He was
first a monk in Bethlehem before going with his friend
Germanus on a tour of Egypt. He sp oke to many monks along


the Nile and wrote down what they said, though he did not
kef go to/Thebaid desert itself. Then he settled in Merseilles
and died there in 433. His Conferences became the classie
basis for conventual life, more Chan St Athanasiusts Life of
st Antony. His authority was very
had travelled
among the desert monks not only of ETH Nile but of Syria and
Palestine and Mesopatamia for twenty years: he left the desert
at the time when there was fierce controversy over the
writings of Origen, and the vhole questian of solitary ascet-
icism was in question. He did perhaps more against it than
any single man. And apert from that his Conferenees and
Institutions were an interesting development in themselves,
quite apart from the fact that they presented to the Roman
world for the first time a compact acc ount of the articulate
wisdom of the desert: the point is that this early religious
life is being articulated in a written form at all, and the
future market in manuseripts so to Speak (requiring supplies
of papyrus brought from Egypt syrian merchants), not to
mention the later accoleration % the hand-to-hand manuseript
into the compact and more easily marketablg form of the book,
that in turn required supplies of paper and the first printing
presses, seem to originate in Cassianusts epoch. Cassianus s
aot alone in itself was important and deeisive. If Marshall
MoLuhan were writing this book (I moan this seriously) he would
no doubt make this his focal point, leading events forward and
back towards it. The whole literalisation of the religious
experience, which is one of the most striking developments
quite unparalleled in any other form of
society, OMPAIALTL seems
show a first clear beginning towards the
end of the fourth century with the work of Jerome, Augus tine
and Cassianus. Cassianus was a Barbarian by origin, a
Soythian from Dobrudja. It will be noticed that none of
the three men I have mentioned are actually Romans. But
the classical influence is clear,and perhaps
was all the
stronger in these men because it représented HhEn of a
civilisation that was not only far from the world they lived
in but far from themselves too. I tentatively offer the
suggestion that the Augustinian doctrine of original sin
had mich to cammend it-e-with its hint of an indelible
shame and also punitive action---to berbarians. And that
this went with a certain intallootualiontion of the religion
may not seem strange. The intellect is the most shared
faculty, in that 1t alone can cut through tribal differences.
This intellectuolisation became more and more evident, until
we reach the Sohools of the middle ages. It reached perhaps
its climax in st Thomas Aquinas. The existence of God is
reasoned. It is a major departure from the first very
markedly eastern traditions followed in the desert, which
made no bones about God being a concept accessible to reason,
or indeed'a concept at all, but an experience to be had then
and there. In the eastern tradition God can be none other
then
and all exercises, written or otherwise,
articulate caerchnsel or
are nothing but methods to capture
this experience. Thus the Upenishads offer the advice that


in the end they themselves have to be thrown away. The
mind, far from being stimlated to reason with itself,
is asked to become still. Reason is not seen as a guide:
only when it is stilled can it be seen to be the function
it really isee-the instrument of something beyond it and
som thing infinitely stronger. And in some it is never
stilled: this was the vast danger that Christianity ran
into, that the religious experience would finally be made
impossible by the weight of intellect etuality. No one could -
say that the religious experienoe---8s a ready faculty avail-
abie to people almost by inheritanoe---survived that.
Allthe loud argument that surrounded
too
showed the same tendency to strain away from
first desert
LoPlEdTiEn
experience to formula that could be seized upon
the mind, which had before it, after all, the urgent
antiz
creating society out of a doxen differént races and languages
and traditions ranging from the primitive to the over-refined.
Pelagius, à a Breton or Englishman, and a contemporary of
Cassianus, laid it down that a man could attain by exercises
to a state where he was virtually incapable of sinning. He
could do it by his own effart. It depended on his will.
This had a long and deep influence in Britain, right up to the
time of Augustine' of Canterbury's arrival as àn emissary of
Greg gory the Great. The doctrine was the purest distiliation
of eastern doct trine, in its emphasis on the will and therefore
freedom. The notions of brahmen and atman, namely God that
pervades everything and God that is the essence of the man,
reducible to the same thing (Chandogya Upanishad v1 12-13),
are surely there somewhere. The whole idea, too, of unveliing
the light ins ide by an act of will is implicit. And the whole
Hindu attitude to sin, as a basically extraneous
confliet in the journéy towerds the divine, and Tsett inher-
ent existence, as little as the body itself, and belonging to
the body and not the true self, seems to have found its way
into the Pelagian doctrine. Ând of course the Augus tinian
doctrine of original sin is quite foreign to its serene
accapetance of all life as an expression of God alone. Such
an idea was one of utmost blasphemy for what one might call
the African school.
Yet at the same time the Upanishad theme that tall paths
lead to Godt makes itself felt in the faot that éven Pegianiea Pelagianm
and Augstinianism ean be reconciled, once it is seen that
'predestined Godts will is precisely the menaing of free
will, if God by the seat of self, is the self in
essenc e.
Or rather, Pelagius and Augustine could no doubt Faverte been
rec one iled, had it not been for the struggle going on about
them, which made little of the religious experience"in itself,
compared to what I have called the social operation.
Unlike in the east, where such ideas (that is dualism
against non-dualism) have been discussed for thousands of
years, and caused divisions for thousands of years, in the


west they were turned into a state affair, where the politios
of the Church required a dogma that could be spelled out to
everyone, entailing torture or death in the case of its denial.
It 1s impossible not to recognise the heavy Barbarien hand
here.
Augustine waged war on Pelagius politely, and recognised
the sincerity and even devoutness of Pelagius and his followers.
Jerome waged wer on him, as he did on everyone rudely. And
in 417 Pelagius was condemned. soriginal sint was
and the terrart was rejected.
It is easy to see why,
affairs
1ike
nevoypod,
were
this in_the fifth century, at the virgin
dawn of Christian feeling, the history of Christianity should
have been one of endless bitter invective, involving burnings
and the usec of the most subtle ins truments of torture, and
witch-hunting, and the perseeution of intelligence, and
Chureh-endarsed pillagings (the Crusades), not to say the long
religi ous wars themselves.
And
it cannot be
in terms of the doctrine
itself,
not in terms Lerdotere the doctrine of original sin iin
e St Augustine writings, Something like the same 1dea has
its place in eassern teaching: maya binds us in
and time
from earliest childhood, and only the exercise of 21800 will
may unloose its coils. What is absent from the eastern idea
is the over-rational zeal of the Christian thealogians, with
its sideways look at the organisation of life, at the terms of
power. st Augustine said when Pelegius was condemned, *The
case is over. May the error also be over, as 1f a battle was
under discussion. Again we camot afford to underestimate
the atmosphere of fear in which the first Christien feeling
geww up. It looks as if even the great men coula not afford
to recognise any idea not strictly in accordance with their
own experience, in case their experience was invalidated.
There is something distinetly pre-civilised in the tone of
Augustinets remark. This atmosphere o8 restless and suspic ious
producing a reluctance to discuss, and a tendenoy to
fotfa a massive library of doctrine and commentary, almost as
if to persuade us that one man alone could never get to the
bottom of it, never really left the Church. Yet it has to be
shown also that the kind of social operation that had to be put
thr ough required centuries of vigilfance sRl pported by a strong
arme The nature of the social operation can be put si mply:
it was the christianisation of slaves and brutos. And to my
mind---I am not asking for disciples-e-this process has not so
much as reached its half-way mark. It is interesting in this
context that whatever enlse may be said about the Church,
when it got real control of Italy in the sixteenth century,
the nightmare of endléss war between villages and towns ceased
under its sleepy hand.
Some mention will have to be made of the passion fa
relios which was alive as early as the fifth
and
seems to have escaped the Church as a perfect
the continuation of pagan idol-worship. st
of Gaul


(she died in 587) shared this passion. Her ancestors
had fought under Attila the Hun. But, more than a survival
of old habits, idlic-hunting was a symptom of the anxiety and
insecurity in which the first doctrines of Christianity
were conceived: people felt the need to have something in
the hand at the end of a pilgrimage, tactile evidence of
an experience of the divine whichheymay have felt none too
sure of in/ihtmselfe, with belief in the visible and the visible
alone almost written in/thterblood. st Radegund sent to
the emperor Julian in Constantinople for a peice of the
true cross, and actually got it. She had itbrought to
her monastery in Poitiers. And she even persuaded king
Sigisbut to instal a new bishop, because the old one refused
to be present at the ceremony. And Barbarian ineptitudes
of this kind tend to
not diminish, as the power
of the Church inereased. deoEi they were not entirely in-
eptitudes, given the yearning for a sign, which
elided
bedevilled éven Christ's deloiples. They were Faaiy a
indulged to the point of a roaring tribal rarket.
Once we have read the horrorstories of how the
Merovingians or Frankish kings (and their Christian priests)
lived, in the History of the Franks St Gregory of Tours,
we shall know quite enough about the Zal of temperament
Christianity had to deal with, the kind of soul it so
successfully and astonishingly entered not only in spite
of but by means of theoruelty and bestial insentience to
everything but the appetite felt at the moment. It even
begins to look as if Christ came into being when he did
to prevent a race of monsters engulfing the wh ole world.
His influence was just ripe enough when the barbarian
invasions were at their height; and it was established
by the time Barbarian rule was.
At same point in describing this long and painful
social operation (mostly called the Derk Ages by historians
in the dark as to what was going on) we shall have to ask
whether the idea of punishment is not absolutely foreign
to a religion. The smallest glance at the Upanishads
or the Bhagavad Gita
convince us that it is.not
What I am saying is thy perhaps in these fearful tales
of hell, these sometimes artfui and sometimes ecstatic
promises of heaven (I am not referring to the desert
fathers, muoh less to the mertyrs), and in the concepts
berar
of heavén and hell themselves, there is the old Barbarian
rave - 6 Linsistence on revengs and punishment, taken up and
failt
resolved into something like an imitat ion of spiritual
terms. The child-like repetition of Hail Maries as a
2 punishment
to dress it
a penance) for a kiss,
a thought in Ltio dark or a LUPyE of anger may have a iot
to do with the social operation but as little as poss ible
with religion. And this is not an attack on the Hail
Maries, which achieved miracles of change: it is simply C
a description of the process by which the Barbarian


U EA BRIA
imagination, with its need to punish and its
need to be punished, required a certain type
and how this shaped the
conversion,
aprrosrondinr,
form of the religion, until the
whole question of the religion itself (nemely the experience
of the divine) was lost and, by the sixteenth
nationalism and the development of vernaculars had
Latin, and
satihod
nothing Charles V or Philip 11 could do could
hold any kind of spiritual commonwealth together. The
Church, I am saying, served its term, in the form it had:
and the term was limited because it bel onged to a definite
funetion which turned out to be, paradoxically enough,
not even primarily religious in scope, except in the very
long run.
Fifth-century Christendom was as complicated as
possible. Not only were the Barbarians aivided from Rome,
but there was the schism between Byzantium and Rome that
lasted thirty years or more, The actual Romen people were
divided between the Arian king Theodoric the Ostrogoth (who
succeeded Odoacer, who had deposed Romets last *llttle
emperor* Marcellinus in 476) and the emperor in Constantinople.
The emperor Julian virtually outlawed the Arians in
Constantinople and closed their churches. Barbarian troops
serving under By@gntine officers tried to wrest Italy back
from the Barbarians, in a war that went on up and down the
peninsula for twenty years or more, producing carnage and
femine. Which brings us to the fact that life in Rome and
Constantinople kxu has to be described, not omly to give
the two poles of the embryo Christian
so to speak,
but to point up the disgust the monk tariete when he lert them,
or heard about them, end his sense that the warld as it vas
could not be relied on to receive Christianity without special
efforts of meditation and
on his pert. He was
affected
decisions taken YE these capitals, and
the
constant r.dect of
Rome veered betweén 11L7 and
over-refihement on Ramveie one hand and the surrender of civil
life (as at the end of Theodorie ts reign) to pillege and
murder
factions on the other. We must of co urse picture
a Rome tufe as yet had none of those squat, self-c oncentrated
buildings with slits for wind ows that came about in the middle
ages. ut was still ancient Rome, tall and marbled and full
of vistas,and crumbling to piec es. And Constantinople was
the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium: when people went to
school they learned in the classical manner. Rhetorie was
still the mark of a man's mind. Anything that could be called
a Chris tian literature was only being begun, and did not in
any case include a method of teaching mathematios or logic.
Theodorie was surrounded
learned (and of course Christien,
often Catholie) Romans, by hoped through him to save what
they could of italy: men like Boethius, cassiodorus.
It is clear that conversion to Christianity in the cities
was very much an aot of assent towards the new administration.
But it is not so clear that the force behind these conversions,


however slight or expedient some of them may have
was the work of the desert fathers, who are often
as selfish because
becclivod
they looked aftér their own salvation
andno one else's: but this was precisely the
of their
influence, as it radiated thrcugh the 'western" POanE feastern'
Churches, that they never expressed themselves in power
but developed the experience itself to where it could be terms,
carried from pers an to person and even articulated. This
is difficult to convey---we have the nineteenth century with
its enthronement of the idea that something mst always be
dane close behind ut-e-but it is the kernel of the book.
By the time we reach St Benedict's third and most
successful experiment on Monte Cassino (529) it looks as if
the desert experience has been distilled to a safe comunity
form, compared to which even the previous cenobitie or lauriac
forms of monastery are made to look solitary and ascetic.
It would be easy to say so. But the desert fathers had
quite different problems before them than monks four or ire
centuries later, at a time when the empire was occupied by
Barbariansn and when the monks themselves were invariably
Barbarians. The desert fathers abandoned cities which were
firmly flourishing or firmly decaying. But the Italian
countryside at the time of Benediet was very much as parts of
it are at this moment---sbendoned, the olive trees and the
vines 'gone wild', and vipers in the ascendancy. The
human creature was in a similar sense abandoned too: he was
not a formed and thinking being like those men of an earlier
empire, who SI poke Greek or Coptic or Syriac; he had nothing
like background of *philosophy 9 like the desert
MORE ignorent they might have been, however mch NTEA like
Antony, innocent of any read ing. When one of Benedict's
monks was seen to be always fidgetting in church he was taken
outside and given a good
and a 'little black boyt
Benedicl was seen to run out from OETEL under
habit, and after that he
was all right. That was the level of belief and
among the men Benediet was training for Christianity. aeroption
a training could never have been in terms of the si mple
exercise of re ditation, given the kind of Barb erian psych ology
that had to be slo owly and patiently unravelled. Benedict's
way was not, for that reason, the hard way. He had tried
the hard way in youth---and his monks had tried to poison
him. At Cassino he was mellowed and tolerant. He asked
not for silence at meals but at least *the spirit of silence'.
He was, as superior, the father of a family, And here lay
perhaps his greatest single contribution: the family was to
be the new affiliation, but under a father as much like
Christ as possi ible, no longer the absolute, power-hungry
father of either the pagan or the barbarien worlds. He
kept a loose rein on the
and whatever punishment he
exacted was always understood aoerto be in the nature of a medical
cure---some weakness had to be driven out. He allowed his
monks nine hours sleep in the winter---an extraordinary


number for the monastic XNREEE world. But he caloulated
that people were easier to live with---that the family woula
be more harmonious---if people/got
of sleep. In the:
Hosl
summér there were five h aurs sleep phenty, a siesta in the after-
noon. He had the monks working in the fields, reclaiming
bene
the land. He drew outsiders to the family---there was a
diilie
special lodging house for visitors. The act of mediettion
în the desert--the haesychia---now becames reading aloud
hrstk, or ruminatio (*chewing overva
and this erude and
primitive version became common
in the mediaeval
monasteries,
Doauten
That was how the Barbarian ch ild, so to speak,
learned---he had to say the words over and over
end
this gradually set up a sense of schedule in his
and
there is
esia:
nothing better for controlling wild appetites than
a regular schedule. It is not at all an accident that our
sense of time, out of which. the clock
ticking out
the
hme
moments regularly and mechincally, was pors in the mediaeval
monastery.
divide
seyule Ate
The potential monster not only had to be
nile he had to be treated with respect too: that
learn
sincindarets
respect. He had to learne--far from acts of self-
nedliaeval mortifioation---hom to treat his ovn body with respect.
This is emphasised in the Benedictine Ruie. The vengeance
mimaslany enacted by the desert fathers ontheir own bodies was simply
not understood in the Barbarisn bontext. The mind had to be
henlae taken off all kinds of bloodshed and mortification, even if
cinltt
it meant being acoused---and the Benedic tire s were and always
have been-oeof *luxury'. The monks had two habits, one for
winter and one for summer. They had a muig of wine with
their ne als, although Benedict himself felt that wine was unsuit able
for the monk. And their relati onahips among themselves were
A emphasised:
bent on self-mortirication simply could hst
Xiin hmd have "made the reoplo of meditating family that Benedict had in
mind. Thus while the first desert experience was distilled
nyant miy some thing fram even further east was retrieved--nenely, the
o hrv -ele
idea that the degradation of the body is nothing more nor less
than the degradation of Godts carefui work, A steady self-
morteol in
denial took its place. The monastic tradition of, vegetarianism
was kept; 1ike the peasants round
the'monkerould have
Hai
felt the lack of wine more tha that atOP meat.
Benedict required of himself a quite different perform-
ance. He was nearit fifty when he st tarted the Cassino
monastery, and had practised forms of asceticism since at
least the age of twenty, when he had turned away from the
temptations of Roman lire. And from his earliest years he
had an extraordinary influence on pe ople. Mothers brought
their children to him to be educated. At one time he had
had to leave a community of ascetics near Rome because some-
thing happened---the story is a vague one, but probably involves
something miraculous--hich threatened to make him proud:
he had to get away from the a dmiration of the others. That
is, some sign of unusual spiritual power made the others turn


to him with awe, and perhaps it was his ov first inkling
of it too. He had what among the Hindus has always been
a distinguishing mark of the genuine yogi, namely the
ability to divine the life-story of anyone standing before
him, however much a stranger. And this ability was what
made people offer their lives to Benedict again and again:
and the monastery he made was by reason of this ability a kind
of stable for Barbarians; just because he knew the subtlest
needs of each of his men. One of the qualities he tried
to oultdtate---and that least to be found in the Barbarian
or even the pagan psychology--- was pudore, which is not exact-
ly shame or exactly modesty but something in between and of
the nature of self-examination, He once said---apparently
perfectly conscious of the social operation going on---that
all he was out to achieve was a change in behaviour. He
wanted to make people honest---and that word carries a sense
not only of its modern meaning of sincerity but the more
ancient one of integrity. He has been cailed the inventor
of Christian civilisation because his home---as Cassino was
for its monko-roprosented a rescue from the darkness and
uncertainty all round it, in the Roman countryside, not to
say Rome itself. Monasteries like his began to proliferate
in every part of Europe: they did the same
reclaiming
abandoned' lands, so that the actual appearance RTEy the monastery
and the fields round it would be a mirror of what was going
on inside the cells. It was Benedict who again turned
certainly Italy, into a garden, after the pioneering
DUPOTOE work Ancient Rome.
Forty years after he. started the Cassino settlement, and
twenty-one years after his death, there was a fresh wave of
Barbarian invasions into Italy, after it had Roome to seem
that some form of life might be possible under the Byzantines.
These new Barbarians were the Lombards. Few of them were
Christians. In a short time they secured for themselves an
unprecedented reputation for heartlessess end bloodlust.
They established themselves in two capit als, Spoleto and
Benevento, and hoped to dislodge the Byzantines completely:
wherever they found them in positions of puwer they threw
them cuta But again the story is that no army more effective
than Christ ian feeling was ever found to work against them.
They destroyed Monte Cassino (577) but built it again
after they had been converted nearly a century Theben
Thus. wave after wave of Barbarians, intent oniy on extending
terror of themselves as an end in itsetf, end leying claim
to as mch pro
were drawn into the Church
with its'gospel Cyonre the BonEb bioe terror and the denial of
And this particuler neventh-century operat ion
propenky't muchto do with the single effort of Benedict.
Gregory the Great, the first pope in anything like a
modern sense, namely hendling a western Church and an
impressive wealth (iends in
Africa, Corsica,
Daimatia, Gaul and sardinia) 103AE2 to
and cajole and


sometimes plainly bribe was the means by w hich this was
possible. He was a monk, and a Benedictine monk. He
followed Benedietts injunétion to govern with firmess and
compassion combined, always with an eye to what
couid be expected to do. Every aspect of the
the
Soreostr
smallest details of its property-- interested him.
He built it---parad loxically, given the morestic tone of
his ideas---far the first time into a reoognisable
a political and social body capable of purveying a statois law
its own. And this was done during one of the most terrible
invasions and occupations Italy had ever hed. It was
made possible by the fact that when the Lombards
ravage the country the Benedictine experience was
an example of the best
*The
Mte
art of all arts,
Gregory said, 'is governing onvions.
He became pope in 590,, the first monk in that
and
the Lombards were just establishing themselves.
did was to use
AEdeeg
them as his means of establishing a Church
independent of Byzantium, whose help had necessarily become
a cipher, since its troops were everywhere being nopped upe
He began to make do without Constantinople far the first a
time. Gradually he pushed thextiun into the past the idea
that the pope was simply bishop of Rome and of" only provincial
importance. He re-established Rome, as a capital not of
sanething glorious and dead but of an organism the like of
which no one, Jast of all the Barbarians, had seen before,
namely an empire held together not by armies but by an at
least nominai religious assent.
Five years later he sent Augustine, the su perior of
st Andrewts monast ery in Rome, to Britain on a missionary
enterprise. The ancient Romans had never penetrated as
far as Irelend. caesar had raided Britain in 55 BC, and
then Claudius and Agricola had reconquered it between 43
and 85 AD. In Italy it was thought of as the land of fog
and megio (or monsters). Augustire wes sc terrified by
the stories he heard of it at the Lérins monastery in
Provence that he turned back and had to be given new courage
by Gregory, who told him that the st ories were simply not
true. In fact, Christian settlements had begun to appear
in Britain from the beginning of the fourth century. The
Roman roads of cours e provided missionaries (native ones)
with the ir means of travel; and the Roman cities seem to
have given people that glimpse of givil behaviour vhich was
always useful în the matter of quiek e onversion. Across à
the water în Ireland the fog was thicker, and so was the
magic. Patrick (born at Daventry in 589) had a great
struggle with the Druids. Some of the stories make
faroical reading. Patrick was a fighting monk, and the
fact that his story was vritten centuries after his death
may account far the farcical element. At least, some
struggle went on between Christians with their magio end
the Druids with theirs. In a rationalist or would-be


rationalist epoch like ours it is difficult to evoke
quite the atmosphere it must have had, that struggle:
where the two sides bring an enormous concentration:to bear
on the other's rout and railure. They had 'tests taee
cameted with each other. Perhaps Voodoo is the ne arest
equivalent we have in the world today. The Druidical
background 1s quite different from the Barbarian one, and
not only ratrick but st Columba of Iona and st Brendan
(both sixth gentury) are quite dis tinct, to judge from the
stories told about them, from the *Roman' or desert saints.
The Iruidical struggle perhaps accounts for the hardness
and
above all the "exelusive isolation of Celtio
monachism nklatzs it developed. St Brendan and his disciples
had a gryphon fly over their boat, as big as an OX and with
the beak and claws of an eagle. They moored
on a tiny
island that appeared to be covered not with dours or moss
but skin, and only dascovered when they lit a fire and the
skin began to twitch that it was a huge fish. st Columba
had his famous fight with the abbot of Moville
his f armer
for a psalter of priceless worth
had been
EonseRet
brough testah the way from Rome. He maneged to get
to the cell where the psalter
and a monk was sent to spy
on hime Colkumba had no candle aY8 read the manuscript
but light poured out of all his fingers.
God endowed Ylia
Irish saints with megic equal to that of the Druids. In
the pitched battle outside the monastery for possession of
the aakek psalter (the saint overlooked that it wasn t his)
there were three thousend dead on the abbot's and---because
of God's supporte--only one an Columbats, and that was because
the silly chap disobeyed orders. Something of this atmosphere
persists even in the story of St Columban (born about 540),
though his work was consistently practical, and he set
monasteries on the continent whieh were the closest Mo13.
to Benediotine models/that existed. He was appalled
the
state of affairs in Gaul, when he travelled through E
The ancient sooiety had all but disappeared, under the Frankish
occupation. He saw that while there was a certain element
of Christian awareness in the cities, the countryside was
barren of
a desert of pagan and Barbarian superstitions.
Like st TantLer he saw his work as an approach to behaviour.
Like most other monasteries his had penitential lists-
to deal with mirder, fornication, drunkenness, greed; one
of the punishments was to be shut
with a corpse for a number
of nights. They were harder than "acth of the Benedictine
Rule to the degree to which the populations they, were designed
to handle were harder. While in the Campania the Roman
background was more ar less intect, in Gaul it was a matter
of the past. The Columban EmEkERERES monasteries were
really agricultural settlements, reclaiming the land, and
their influence in Gaul was greét bec cause---as the Frankish
kings saw-methe ir discipline was in healthy contrast to the
laxity all round them. Columban first set himself up in
at Luxeuil: he was banished eve ntually for differ-
DseunYtn ences
the local bishops, whose permission he was wareful
never to ask for anything. He went down to Italy and est-


ablished a monastery at st Gall on the way, and another
at Bobbio near the Po. It is worthwhile pointing out
here that Britain and Ireland exercised in these years a
certain preserving effect on the Latin tongue, simply by
being cut off from the continent (where it was languaihing
under Barbarien ocoupation) and keeping it as a dead language,
with the awe due to dead languages. It was also alive to
the extent of being the only way of communicating with Rome.
It was this that made Gregory hopeful of bringing the Britons
and eventually the Celts under Rome.
In 407 the Romans had withdrawn from Britain, leaving
the country opeh to Barbariant---Sazons, Jutes, Angles, who
were now free tosettle there. The Britons proper were
pushed to the west---Cornwall and Wales---and some contact was
made with the Irish monasteries. By the time Augustine,
Gregory's emissary, arrived (on the Isle of Thanet in the
Thames) there was samething iike stability. The king of
Kent, Ethelbert, was converted, though this did not mean the
conversion of the Anglo-Saxon péople. A monastery was est-
ablished at Canterbury, and the Roman liturgy was cleverly
adapted to local expectations. The Angl-saxon temples were
taken over. It was done in that blandly tolerant but firm
way that only Rome knew how to command. In 617 the monks
went north as far as Northumberland. And they went to Ireland,
where they faced a people nurtured
isolation to an
obstinacy and deternination they MayA hardly have expected
after their British experience. They came to the Ceits to
establish among other things the Roman calendar as far as
Easter was concersed (this difference of date was one of the
reas ans why Columben was banished from Burgundy) and the
Roman liturgy of the baptism, as well as the Roman way of
consecrating bishops. And the tonsure by which Celtic monks
were everywhere recognised---a half-crescent band of hair
at the front of the head---mould have to for the accepted
complete tonsure favoured by Rome and tFoA 'st
or at least the tonsure of the crown, called *st are.
August ine met a
of Irish priests at Bristol and
tried to persuade them EFOOT help Christianise the Anglo-Saxons.
And with real Roman astuteness he suggested a kind of test
of faith between them, showing that he unders tood the Draidical
background thoroughly: they were to try to give a blind man
sight. Augustine won. on the other hand, he failed on
diplomacy. Some Irish bishops asked a wisé man, an abbott,
whe ther they should submit to his proposals, and' were told
that they should do so only if he rose to méet them when
they arrived for the conference. He did not---a hint that
Rome looked on its leadership of the Church with s ome of the
arrogance of the ancient empire. As a result the Romans
became, literally, funtouchablest for the Celts---they woula
not touch any utensil or food that the Romans had used.
But gradually the appeal to them to convert others became
stronger than their însularity, and the Celts began to join


in the work on the mainland. In fact a monk from Iona,
st Aidan, set up a monastery in the northern part of North-
umberlend (s8)---lindissarne or Holy Island. And it was
the abbot of Lindisfarne, Colman, who retired into silence
when the Romans---using a erude argumentum ad hominem suit-
able to the erude mind of the men they were trying to convert
to their litungy--persuaded King Oswin to go over to their
side.
Now this whole story is really one of the spread of
Benedictinism, not simply because of Gregory's decision to
unify the Celtic and Roman churches at ail costs, but beca use
the missionaries themselves were Benedietine monks, who made
it the ir busine ss to understand the kind of minds they were
dealing with, and to appeal to them in their own terms.
Illuminated manuscripts, libraries came with this influence.
Even the Colmban estabiishments gave way to the Benedictine
Rule eventually. It
as Pirenne
ta masterpiece
of tact, reas on and Tsorncd Perhaps TRd, paradoxically,
the first universal monastic Rule in the western territories
of the Roman empire produced the first suggestion that Rome-ee
the new, the Christian Rome-eewas a power again, a soveriegn
state, éven an empire. Further than this, it might be that
the success of Benedictinism brought about an universal
intellectualisation of Christian feeling which made the
printed book centuries later a
for the simple
reason that a method of intellectual AOERTILES c
was the surest
way of mustering the Barbarian nature. The reading/renders eyok
the life it reads about cool, detached; and the intellect,
when developed excessivady, tends to freeze the
0290109 faculties into inaction.
St Benedict and the success of Benedictinism would
alone of themselves round off an epoch that begins with the
desert fathers and ends with the establishment of a western
(and therefore teastern") church, were it not for the fact
that something far more devastating, far less expected
rounded it off by cutting it off: namely, Islam. Mohammed
died in 632. He called into action-e- în a sense called into
being---the Arab race. They had simply not been noticed
bef ore. They now disrupted the Persian empire (637-644).
Syria, Egypt, Africa and Spain went the same way. The
Mediterran ean world wes eut in half far the first time.
I have used the word teastern' to mean mostly India, Chira.
But bef ore Islam the Medieerraneen world had its ova east
and westee-the east of course being Constantinople, Egypt,
Palestire, Syria. It had denoted the Hellenised éreas.
Now these areas were stripped of the ir Hellenic past.
The African provinces lost their Roman background. Now
they all came under Beghdad. The implication for the Church
of Rome was obvious. While the patriarchs of Const tantinople,
Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria had regarded the pope
simply as an equal, it was now clear that Rome alone could


be responsible for Christianity in the non-Islamic
part of the Mediterranean and in Europe, even apart from
Gregory the Great's clever use of the monasteries to bring
about a vestige of unity, for the first time, based on
Roman usages.
One might call Islam the second eruption in the
desert after the Fathers.
There was clearly an astonish-
ing ferment stemming from the Mediterranean area, and
we cannot overlook the fact that the roots of Islam
might have been precisely those, in the furthest and
deepest sense, of Judah and Christianity. The sense
of the world being through and through polluted, of the
human being suffering this pollution until he got divine
assistance, which accounts for much of the early Christ-
ian asceticism, is clearly the basis of Islamic fervour
too---and of the breathtaking sweep of its onslaught,
the unhesitating unity of its soldiers, theecstatic
heartlessness with which they murdered. And this had
much to do with producing an answering holy murder
centuries later, organised this time by the Burgundians
and the Venetians, in the first Crusade.
From the seventh century to the eleventh century
(when the mediaeval form of monastery, and mediaeval
life, were established) Islam was the master of the Med-
iterraneant all the trade between the Straits of
Gibraltar and the Indian Ocean was theies, while the
Christian world of the west lay closed in on itself,
as if destiny had decided to force unity on it by means
of a universally felt outside threat which even divided
bartarians could share, and with it a concentration on
ideas necessary for a wholly new society. And my book
will have to describe those ideas onn which they con-
centrated at that time, during their long incubation
from the first century onwards. We shall be able to
see what an as stonishing achievement mediaeval society
was, and how a light was poured on to it---far from
darkness---from the first centuries of Christianity.
This does not mean to say that THE BATTLE OF THE
MONKS will be a discussion of ideas (the Alexandrian
school, Nestorianism, original sin etc) current at the
time, but a dramatic narrative of events that will
take these ideas up as part of the story, not as a
separable intellectual activity. No ideas between
the first and the eighth centuries were that. The
battle of the monks was fierce and prolonged, and on
all fronts.


THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
Introduction
Something like an infection began to grip the
ancient world about the time of Christ. This was
a desire for absolute renunciation. Even the Jews-
who had never had monks or advocated the solitary
ideal---had developed two sects of recluses, the
Essenes near the Dead Sea and the Therapeutae near
Alexandria. In fact, Christ seems to have emerged
from and, expressed this new need, rather than pro-
voked it. Both the Greek and the Egyptian worlds
had known something of the solitary ideal---the belief
that perfection was only achieved
prolonged
solitude. Both worlds had had Ly ascetics and
hermits, their holy men who went from place to place.
But after Christ the need seemed to quicken, until
it became a movement that/engulfed the Roman empire.
sprad Mumgel It started as far as we know in the Egyptian desert,
with lone men who retreated into solitude for years
on end. But there is evidence of Christian hermits
settling near the Dead Sea in caves during the second
century after Christ, so that some form of monastic
tradition may have bridged the years between the
crucifixion and the first known settlements in the
Egyptian desert around 250. Paul and Antony, the
first two famous monks, both of them Egyptians,
begin the story precisely because of their fame:
it was their influence on other men, first on other
Egyptians and then on people as far away as Rome
and Constantinople, that turned the solitary need
into a great movement, and brought the words 'monk'
and 'monastery' into the Greek vocabulary for the
first time. It was this influence, beginning from
the utmost solitude, that spread with remarkable
speed throughout Egypt and Greece and Israel until
it had laid hold of the whole Roman empire, and led
in the end, through many stages and
to the
highly developed Benedictine monastery cportie the sixth
century, where solitude had become a communal thing.
Much had been lost by this time of the original
concentration achieved by those first men in the


desert---Antony and Pachomius and Amoun---but then
a new order had been created out of the ruins of
the Greek and Roman empires which stretched from
Ireland to Kiev and included much of the Balkans
and the Mediterranean lands, in which the monastery
was the essential organ.
1. Antony the Great (AD 251-356), a hermit of
the Egyptian desert, was the first great monk of
Christianity. Paui of Thebes (7-341) may have
preceded him in the same area close to the Red Sea
atvi the time of the Decian persecutions in AD 251.
The custom of retreating into the 'desert' or
deserted countryside behind Alexandria seems to
have begun at this time among a number of men,
There had always been 'philosophers' in the Greek
world who had W andered from place to place: today
we would call them holy men. They were ascetics:
the Greek word 'askeo' meant simply exercise, and
implied a rigorous course of self-training. In
Christian times this tradition was kept by men-
usually old---who lived in villages but kept sol-
itary habits and received devotees. Paul and
Antony certainly learned the Scriptures from these
men, and the way to fast, meditate and pray.
antony like all the other ascetics worked with his
hands, in or near Alexandria--rope- or mat-making.
He 'trained' himself before retiring into the desert,
shutting himself in a tomb for long periods in order
to defeat fear and doubt (called 'demons' in the
records of the early fathers). He was 35 when he
went to live in an abandoned fort between the Nile
and the Red Sea. He stayed there for twenty years
(his "father', the ascetic who had taught him
everything, refused to follow him). 'Bread'
(probably sacks of grain). was brought to him twice
a year, and for the rest he grew his own food.
At all stages of monasticism a vegetarian diet
was considered the basis of physical purity, and
meat and wine stimulants of desire (we find this
in the pre-Christian sects too). Antony emerged
from his retreat shining with health, "God-borne -
and apparently all the better for his protracted
fasts.
News of these men travelled to Alexendria and
as far as Rome. The desire to imitate them moved
many others to leave their homes, and communities
began to form in the desert behind Alexandria. The
word 'monastery' was used by Athanasius in his bio-
graphy of Antony to mean a monk's cell, and the em-


phasis in his use of both 'monk' and 'monastery'
was on the single or solitary (monos) man in search
of perfection, though he might still share his life
with other solitaries. The ancient Greek world was
used to men initiating themselves into 'mysteries'
in this way. Thus the new religion did not come
into the ancient world as a disturbing revolutionary
force: it was persecuted by the Romans simply for
what appeared to be its subversive side---above all
for its treasonable refusal to believe in the divinity
of the emperor. The monks had little to do with
this. They believed in persuasion by other--
invisible and silent---means. Antony did go to
Alexandria to plead for Christian martyrs in the law
courts, in the first years of the fourth century,
but he did not protoke the judges in
was by this time (about 306) the tachoy.or of many
solitary men in the desert. The courts ordered that
no 'monks' should appear. Thus at least fourteen
years before the first organised group- g-enebitie
monasteries solitary men were felt to have a power in
themselves, quite unrelated to wealth, position or
numbers. Their role in the conversion of the empire
(the last persecutions were in about 313) was a basic
if not the principal one.
Pachomius (AT286-346) organised the loose
communities of the desert into settlements under a
superior for the first time at Tabennesis (AD 320),
far south along the Nile valley. It was an abandoned
village, and at first only he and his 'father' Palamon
had celis there. His brother joined him later but
was against accepting other followers. Pachomius
went through the same self-training as Antony to defeat
the demons of pride, shame and fear, in order to rely
with utter confidence on the will of God. He too was
a rush-maker, and presumably his products were taken
up the Nile to Alexandria by boat. His community
quickly grew. Bricks for his buildings were made on
the banks of the Nile and dried in the sun as they are
still today. The design for his nonastery was prob-
ably influenced by his previous military career: it
was surrounded by a wali with a gatehous se, and had a
refectory, hospital, kitchen and halls or houses
containing twenty to thirty monks each. These halls
had their own stewards, who organised the work of the
men under them. Some monks worked the fertile land
round the monastery, others cooked or baked or cleaned,
and others managed commercial relations with the out-
side world. The first monastery in our sense was
thus a self-suppgrting and self-protecting unit.
There was alwaysAcertain amount of danger from brigands,
though nothing like what threanened the later monast-
eries in Barbarian times.


Pachomius taught his followers the techniques
of the night-vigil, the fast, and prayer and meditat-
ion, which had already been developed by the desert
hermits. Amoun (AD 283-352) founded another settle-
ment at Nitria ('the gateway to the desert' from
Alexandria) and Macarius the Egyptian founded one at
Scetis close by, both in about 330. It meant that
Cells were now within easy access of the city. The
so-called 'Cells' themselves were founded as a second
Nitrian community in 338, so great was the number of
new followers: there were six hundred cells spaced
so as to be out of earshot of each other. It was
designed as a place for the Nitrian monks to pass on
to, when they had proved themselves ready for solitude.
The monastery had thus become an instiution for
the first time, and the monk a member of what would
much later be known as an
namely a fraternity
bound together by a common optent: Thus already at
the desert-stage the monk was ceasing to be a hermit
pure and simple. The idea of a discipline or rule
binding him not only to a faith and a God but a comm-
unity was growing. The new development was necess-
arily fraught with contradictions, which only showed
clearly centuries later.
The Scetis monks, apart from their work producing
rope and baskets, hired themselves out as labourers
at hervest-time. The natron-miners in the area often
acted as their agents in the sale of their products,
when the natron camel-trains returned to Terenuthis
on the Nile, and their goods were loaded on to boats.
It was usual for laymen to 'minister' to monks
in their cells. They could come from town to collect
their work and take it away for sale. And they would
bring food and clothing, no doubt for a commission on
the sales they made.
The monk's greatest inner struggle was naturally
against sex desire. A great proportion of the stories
about the desert fathers (and the desert
deal
with their success or failure in this
A certain
taranie
young monk troubled with lust, his mind
'obscured
the heaviness and visions of the nights',
went to A (an old man/now) for advice.
Pachomius told him tht there was nothing unusual
in it---certainly nothing brought on by negligence
on the young monk's part. He implied that lust
could be the result of both robust health and the
most extreme austerities. He added that he himself,
when fifty years old, began to be wracked by the most
violent lustful desire which did not leave him night
or day for twelve years. The girl of his sexual
daydreams was a young Ethiopian he had seen gather-
ing canes' one summer long before. In the daydreams
she would come and sit on his knee and they would
begin making love, but when he was on the point of


a climax she would lift herself off him and 'fly
away'. He decided to offer himself to the beasts,
and one night lay down naked outside a cave of hyenas.
They licked him all over during the night but other-
wise did not molest him. He felt this as a reprieve
from God and returned to his cell in a calm state of
mind. But the desire came back, only more powerfully.
His hand felt polluted for two hours after he had
'touched' the Ethiopian girl in his daydraam. He
tried to committ suicide by pressing asps to his hand
but they would not suck his blood. And then in his
sixty-second year (though this contradicts his official
dates) he found peace. A voice told him that God had
inflicted lust on him to show that he was not 'mighty'
or 'perfect' as he might think.
Others were less successful in the warfare.
A monk after years of austerity returned to the city
and fornicated almost to madness. He caught a
horrifying disease and had to have his sex organ
removed. A virgin of Jerusalem Awas in sackcloth
for three years but then 'opened her window' to the
man who ministered to her, and made love to him. She
never returned to her solitary life, and her cell
became a whore's bedroom. There was the nun seduced
by a 'singer of psalms' who starved herself to such
an extent that she almost died. She prayed that her
child by this man would not live, and it did not.
She mortified herself implacably for thirty years
before feeling a mild sense of forgiveness. A
'holy virgin' who had won over desire was found lying
helpless in a cave in the Scetis area
monks.
She told them that/had been living in te cave,
skek
'eating grass', for thirty-five years and had not
set eyes on a man in all that time. There is the
story of the bishop who 'fell into fornication' and
lay down at the porch of his church so that his
congregation could walk over him on their way out.
Some stories are ugly. There was the herdsman who
saw a pregnant woman pass him in the desert and was
curious to know what her child looked like. He
ripped her open, killing both her and the child.
He became a monk soon afterwards. He mortified
himself for thirty years, before
been
achievingisense
having
forgiven the double murder.
Thus not all the monks were of the quality of
Antony and Pachomius and Amoun. Many came to the
desert to escape conscription and Alexandria's ex-
Eessivaly heavy taxes. Many went in for what the
Hindus sometimes call 'monkey-renuneiation'. w--one of
show. One monk, seeing a woman pass his cell,
rushed out to teil her that given the chance he could
deal with ten of her. She took him at his word and
they lived together in Alexandria for several monthse
He returned to the desert exhausted.
Something of a competitive atmosphere started


up among the more austere monks. Macarius the
Alexandrian held a kind of desert record in self-
mortification, and imitated any new austerity he
heard about (he died at the age of 100). There was
a lot of superstition, and 'demons' began to be the
name of spirits more external than fear and pride
and shame. The same Macarius once said that demons
had taken him off the right road in the desert and
that he would have been lost forever had he not
found an antelope and sucked her udders: she then
guided him home. He also claimed that a man had
come to him with the story that he had found a horse
in bed with him one morning instead of his wife:
Macarius had changed her back to human form again.
The abbot Serenus told John Cassianus, who kept a
record of all his conversations with the desert
hermits, that the space between heaven and earth
was filled with invisible spirits whose only interest
was causing trouble, but that these were many fewer
than in earlier times. For men who had lived most
of their lives in towns and villages the uninhabited
areas had a genuinely evil atmosphere. It was to
defeat this false trust in other men's company that
the monk chose solitude as the basis of his training.
But with the influx of great numbers of men it was
perhaps inevitable that the communal forms of mon-
astic life should become emphasised at the expense
of the solitary, especially when the movement began
to spread abroad.
Monasticism spread east from Alexandria to
Israel, Cyprus, Syria, Constantinople. Hilarion
was born near Gaza in AD 293 and went to school in
Alexandria, where he heard of Amtony and met him.
He spent 22 years in a hut near Gaza, until about
330, when other monks joined him. There is evidence
of very early anchoritic life near the Dead Sea,
not oniy among Christians in the second century after
Christ but among the Jews long before Christ. An
interest in monastic life seems to have come about
long before the Roman empire was in crisis, perhaps
as a result of Buddhist missions in various parts
of the Mediterrenean as early as the third century
before Christ, and the presence of Indians in the
Persian army.
Epiphanasius was another monk who learned his
disciplines in Alexandria: he founded a Pachomian
monastery between Gaza and Jerusalem, at Besanduk,
before becoming bishop of Cyprus in 367. He wasa
quarrelsome man, with a hint of the future inquisitor.
He is said to have consecrated Jerome's brother by
force: the man was bound and gagged by other monks,
and dragged to the fount.
Basil of Cappadoccia in Anatolia (AD 329-379)
was baptised a Christian in 397, and then began a


tour of Egyptian and Israelite cells. He founded
the first Greek community at Cappadocia but returned
to the pre-Pachomian, simpler model, where contact
between superior and monk was easy. He discouraged
great austerities. He even ran schools, and his
simple Rule spread throughout the Byzantine world.
He also discouraged solitary life on the grounds
that the devotee could find himself 'perfect' too
easily, through lack of comparison. The Studion
monastery emphasised care for_ the sick, and became
the model for other great monastic centres at Kiev
and liount Athos. In the Greêk or Basilian monastery
the idea took shape of prayer and solitude being the
springboerd forfzind of mystical participation in
the life outside. Helping the sick, teaching the
young, sheltering the destitute and hopeless were
the new forms of self-abnegation. One did not bind
oneself in chains, or starve almost to death. One's
austerity was seen in and through the sick world all
round in which one worked. Not for nothing is Pall-
adius's history of the desert fathers called The Book
of Paradise. That early sense of paradise in the
Egyptian desert gave place to something less meditative
and less solitary, precisely as monastic forms moved
from the more or iess clement desert areas to the
wilds of Anatolia and places north of the Alps. It
was not a matter of the weather, however. Egypt
had for centuries been the home of religious feeling.
Alexander the Macedonian had after all chosen the
Egyptian coast near Memphis as the site for his new
city for this reason above any other---that the air
seemed full of God, Whereas one visitor described
Basil's site in Cappadocia as 'a damp and squalid
place'. Others described it as sweet and serene.
It depended how you felt: but in
religious
thought seemed-to have become phpser:
In Syria, a country not unlike Egypt from a
geographical point of view, the sttelements were
in the strict desert-tradition, only rigorous to
an almost suicidal degree. Monks
under
loads of iron or sand. Shenute (died aNdPICES! a
superior, beat one of his monks to death, St Simeon
(AD 359-459) frequently had himself walled up without
food for long periods, before he retreated to his
column, where he spent 37 years. A meagre and plain
diet, and long periods of fasting, were found aids to
health and long life. Thus by the fifth century
plainly ascetic and solitary forms existed side by
side ix with communal ones,
4. Monasticism spread to Italy with Paulinus,
who gave up a vast
to found a settlement at
Nola south of Rome Erogants 395. And here monastic life
entered one more phase of devélopment. It was not
only a public institution now. It was a place where


a certain type of public behaviour was desirable.
For the first time attention was paid to the way
monks lived together---to their states of mind
outside the religious context, and to the atmosphere
they created within the monastery walls. With
Paulinus the monastery became a nucleus of civilisation e
He himself continued to read the classical authors,
and he drew followers from Gaul, Spain and the
Balkans. The new role was partly explained by the
Barbarian invasions which vere nowothreatening the
survival not simply of the Church but of all memory
of the ancient world. Alaric sacked Rome in 410,
the Vandals again in 455. St Augustine left Milan
in 385 to establish monasteries which were further
removed from the original desert pattern than any
before. They were centres of conversion, in a
wozld dominated by Barbarians. He allowed his monks
on certain occasions to eat meat, drink wine and
talk at table. When he died in 430 Africa, his
birthplace, was being colonised by the Vandals.
One of the fascinating aspects of this book will
be its research into the way these new monks lived
together behind the monasteryvwalls. The stories
are quite different from those of the desert fathers.
We know less of the private desires and conflicts
of these new men, and more about the public frictions
between them. But where there are quarrels between
one monk and another which require the interfernce
of the superior it is often possible to read a
private stress between the lines. And there was
much work to do, of a kind that tended to discourage
physical austerities on one side and meditation on
the other. The fields round the monastery had to
be ploughed and planted, and defences had to be built
against passing Barbarian armies. Sometimes whole
monasteries were wiped out. This was a phase which
chenged the monastic tradition more than any other
before or since: a monk's life was now precarious,
and concentration difficult. This was so in Italy,
in Ireland and Scotlandynorthern Europe, wherever
Franks or Ostrogoths or Vandals were to be found.
The wild stories about St Patrick and St Columba and
St Brendan in the sixth century may be largely
apocryphal but they give a hint of the warfare that
went on between monk and monk, monastery and monastery,
quite apart from that wi th marauding tribes. St
Columba had numberless pitched ba ttles with a neigh-
bouring monastery over a precious psalter which he
claimed to be his.
Christianity had become the official religion
of the Roman empire in 323. This too altered both
the prestige and the behaviour of the monks. Power-
interests started among them. A great dispute over
the nature of Christ divided the embryonic Christian


world. The protagonists were Arius, the patriarch
of Alexandria, and Athanasius (his secretary). The
Athanasian creed won, after much violence. It was a seal
schim, the first of many bitter tnoologkeet struggles which
often ended in street brawls and even battles, for
the simple reason that they were power-issues as
well. Athanasius saw the political disadvantages
of the Arian description of Christ as of 'like'
substance to God but not the 'same' subs tance: it
tended to reduce Christ to the status of the pagan
gods, with one foot on the earth. Church authority
might easily diminish with this divisionnof Christ
from the Godhead.
John Chrysostom, made bishop of Constaninople
in 398, tried to stop monks entering the city, on
account of their unruliness. Monks now all but
ruled Alexandria, They murdered Hypatia, the last
protagonist of Greek learning, dragging her from her
carriage and beating her to death with tiles. A
monk murdered the imperial prefect from Rome. The
first Barbarian attacks in the Egyptian desert began
in 407, and monks fled from their retreats in great
number. Some of the wisest felt that it was deserved.
There was a second Barbarian devastation in 434.
The Egyptian settlements degenerated fast, and
homosexuality became widespread. A fifth-century
Macarius said, 'When you see trees, it is at the
door, but when you see boys, take up your mantles
and withdraw.' A child (Zacharius, son of Carion)
immersed himself in a natron lake until he was totally
disfigured, out of fear of being taken as a monk's
boy.
New monasteries in Franceon the other hand
(Lérins in Provence, and that 'of John Cassianus in
Marseilles) were flourishing as centres of cultivation
and learning. Initiates came to them from every
part of the Mediterranean and Europe. Cassianus's
Conferences and Instiltions became the classic basis
of monastic life in Lurope (he wrote his history of
the desert fathers in the second decade of the fifth
century). The monastery was now a storage-house
of the Christian and classical past, amid the general
darkness of the age. There was increasing schism
between Rome and Constantinople on points of doctrine,
and most Barbarians clung to the Arian theology which
was declared heretical by St Augustine. The one
stable element in all this was still the monastery---
but now in Europe.
In the sixth century the long and difficult
social operation of converting (and thereby taming)
the Barbarians gave Rome a new splendour as the
western centre of the Church, no longer the museum
of a fallen empire. The Swabian king Cacaric aws
converted in 560, the Visigoths in 587. Rome's
last 'little empéror' Marcellinus had been deposed


by the converted Ostrogoths in 476. The monk of
these times, living among Barbarians, was himself
invariably a Barbarian too. He tended to teach
a simplified, in some cases brutalised, religion.
Gregory of Tours, who died in 596, could hardly
form a
sentende, and claimed that this was
precisely proper reason poeple followed him. An
orat tor would have made them feel excluded, he said;
whereas he showed them their own uncouthness in
the new language of Christianity. St Martin too
had a crude delivery, which he used for the ends of
conversion. Hordes of
went over to
Christianity because of Rapentcy simple message. It
was said that the roads of Gaul were 'littered'
with processions and pilgrimages also due to him
alone. The erude doctrines of heaven and hell
and retigbution which dominated the later mediaeval
psychology may well have had their roots in the
Barbarian craving for revenge and punishment. and
reward. The penitential telling of hail maries
may have sprung from a simple need for regularity
and repetition. Gregory of Tours in his History
of the Franks describes this race as the most
unthinkably cruel one that ever existed. And it
was these men that the monks (Franks themselves,
in many cases) had to influence, so that some
colouring of the doctrine should be expected.
All monasteries at this time had penitential lists
to' deal with murder, fornication, greed and drunk-
enness (the most common vices). St Columban in
Ireland shut up his monks with a corpse for nights
on end if they got too unruly. In fact the Columban
settlements were essentially agricultural settle-
ments, rigidly disciplined, and their success with
the Franks was due to their exemplary hardness, in
contrast with the social collapse ali round them.
A certain luxury entered the Church at this
time. A safely established priesthood drawn from
the Barbarian tribes was, according to St Martin's
biographer Sulpicius Sverus, 'all too often happier
with well-padded carriages than the donkey, with
marble halls rather than cells and with extravagant
robes rather than simple habits'.
St Benedict founded his third and most
successful monastery at Cassino in 529: in it the
new communal form of monastic life reached its
climax. The solitary act of meditation--haesychie
as it had been called in the Greek of the desert
fathers---now became reading aloud or ruminatio,
suitable for the untamed Barbarian mind which was
such different material from the Greek and Jewish
and Coptic mind on which the Christian faith had
first fallen. A new thought t-system had to be
created, under the guidance of monks who knew some-


thing of both the ancient world and the fathers of
the desert. The concept of zero and also our (perhaps
rather odd) concept of time as being ticked away reg-
ularly in seconds came into being in the mediaeval
monastery. The outer world---its silences and voids
fearful to the Barbarian mind--- had to be tamed too
into some kind of order: and that this order was
rather mathematical may not seem odd in the light of
the Barbarian craving for safe foreseeable events
and therefore regular laws. 'Christian' mathematics
was for that reason distinct from ancient (Greek or
Alexandrian) mathematics, though it was rooted in
both. Christianity brought about in the deepest
sense a 'new order' after the Roman collapse, and
this was pre-eminently the work of thinking monks.
The attempts today to 'pierce the imprisonment of
mathematical time' are perhaps efforts to release
the mind from a Barbarian-based regularity.
Under St Benedict conversion became a carefully
planned operation. He once said that all he was out
to achieve in his monks was a change of behaviour.
He had much Barbarian superstition to deal with.
When one of his monks was seen to be fidgetting about
in church he was taken outside and beaten until
'a little black boy' was seen to run out from under
his habit. St Benedict allowed his monks an unusual
nine hours sleep in the winter months andxsiesta in
the summer. The monastery was now virtually a self-
supporting little town, the seed of the later walled
city of the middle ages. Its monks reclaimed the
land all round, and visitors were given lodgings.
There was less sense of a retreat than ever before,
and moze sense of an immediate and even social
function. The participation of the monks in the
life of the country round them was perhaps lacking
in the mysticism that the Greek or Basilian monks
had brought to it. The Benedictine settlement was
a practical and above all rational concern, It
flourished in an abandoned and dangerous countryside,
more a desert in the real s ense than Nitria or even
Scetis. There was constant danger from Barbarian
armies passing northwards or southwards. There was
danger to the health. The monastery now had a clear
practical task---to reclaim the land and with it the
civilisation: so clear that it seemed to exclude
much of the mystical side. The Church had to be
made safe. The Christian had to be created not
simply as a man of a cértain faith but as a man of
a certain civilisation, recognisable as much the
same kind of man from Bari to Northumberland. It
was even something of an imperial ideal, and it
explains the important social role (unashamedly
rational and public-minded) of the mediaeval monastery
that sprung from the Benedictine model in evez ry part
of Europe.


St Gregory the Great, who became pope in 590,
was a Benedictine monk. He made Rome independent
of Constantinople and sent Benedictine monks to
every part of Europe (st Augustine of Cantberbury
was one of them) not only to convert men from tribal-
ism or Arianism but to integrate the former Roman
empire north of the Alps under one Roman Church.
These monks underwent great hardship, settling among
the Angles or Celts or Franks as missionaries-cum-
ambassadors, in which work they had been trained at
the blandest school of government in the west,
namely Rome. In Ireland Augustine had to deal
with the Druidical magic that still tended to under-
pin monastic life there. But even the implacably
exclusive Columban settlements accepted the Bendict-
ine rule in the end.
The Islamic invasions which diszupted first the
Persian empire and then the whole of the Mediterrenean
began in 637, and completed the process of dividing
Rome from Constantinople and producing an eastern
and western church. The entire Hellenic world from
Alexandria to Constantinople came under Baghdad.
Rome was back to something like its ancient position.
By 650 the monastery had developed. its utmost public
function. It was now a walled city--a model for
the world round it. And all the monastic orders
that developed later, including even the Jesuit order
in the sixteenth century, were only veriations on it.
The monastery became a basic social instiution of the
middle ages, and the contradiction that this involved
with the original solitary ideal may have brought
about its later dissolution as an influence on life.
This book will be concerned less with theological
argument than the lives of the monks themselves, how
they looked after themselves, how they divided their
days, how they got on with each other, how the world
round them saw them. Nothing could be falser than
thelidea of a monk's life being necessarily 'unevent-
The sources are enormously rich. No TV company
today could have done the amount of interviewing
carried out by Palladius among the desert hermits.
For twenty years he travelled from cell to cell in
Egypt, Syria and Israel. His work has been trans-
lated from the Syriac by E.A.Wallis Budge (nearly a
thousand pages of it) and from the original Greek
by Dom Cuthbert Butler.
But even for Budge most of what the hermits
'believed' in was superstition. This sensible
Victorian churchman gave no credence to the stories
of how the hermits 'attained' to taming wild beasts


and foretelling the future and healing the sick
and surviving the most terrible physical tests.
Today we know much more about Eastern experiences
of hermit life. At least two film companies have
shown yogis walking on red-hot coals. Once we
reject the idea of the first monks as somehow
"primitive' their stories come alive in the most
vivid way. Their so-called war against sex-desire
becomes as anguished as it was for them, when seen
in the light of the Hindu doctrine of the kundalini
or sex-area.
And the later 'war' against the Barbarian becomes
more real too. This was no less an inner war than
the earlier one. And it was squarely based on the
now sacred memory of the desert fathers.
We have a mass of eye-witness accounts
(Cassianus's Institutions of the Desert Fathers is
one of them) and biographies (of Pachomius and his
follower Theodor, of Macarius and Shenute and Simeon),
with endless maxims collected from the earliest
hermits. Whole books have been devoted to the Fayoum
and Nitrian monasteries, notably those of N. Abbott
and Evelyn White, apart from the later Benedictine
literature.
OTHER BOOKS
There seem to be few books on this subject---
apart from the sources, that is. The nearest,
though he stops before the Benedictine period, is
Jacques Lacarrière's THE GOD-POSSESSED (a bad trans-
lation of the excellent original French title of
MEN DRUNK WITH GOD) published in Britain by Allen
and Unwin in 1963. Though always accurate, its
approach is rather intellectual. There is the same
aisbelief as in Budge towards the 'illusions' of the
hermits.
THE DESERT A CITY by Derwas Chitty (Blackwell
1966) is an archaeological study and treats only Egypt
and Israel, It mentions the dearth of books--'At
the moment even such an introduction is sadly needed'.
The reason seems to be that books on monks have been
relegated to Church History---and written that way too.


THE FIRSI CHRISTIAN MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
Introduction
Something like an infection began to grip the
ancient world about the time of Christ. This was
a desire for absolute renunciation. Even the Jews--
who had never had monks or advocated the solitary
ideal---had developed two sects of recluses, the
Essenes near the Dead Sea and the Therapeutae near
Alexandria. In fact, Christ seems to have emerged
from and expressed this new need, rather than pro-
voked it. Both the Greek and the Egyptian worlds
had known something of the solitary ideal---the belief
that perfection was only achieved
prolonged
solitude. Both worlds had had dy ascetics and
hermits, their holy men who went from place to place.
But after Christ the need seemed to quicken, until
it became a movement that/6agalted the Roman empire.
sesbongs It started as far as we know in the Egyptian desert,
with lone men whà retreated into solitude for years
on end. But there is evidence of Christian hermits
settling near the Dead Sea in caves during the second
century after Christ, so that some forn of monastic
tradition may have bridged the years between the
crucifixion and the first known settlements in the
Egyptian desert around 250. Paul and Antony, the
first two famous monks, both of them Egyptians,
begin the story precisely because of their fame:
it was their influence on other men, first on other
Egyptians and then on people as far away as Rome
and Constantinople, that turned the solitary need
into a great movement, and brought the words 'monk'
and 'monastery' into the Greek vocabulary for the
first time. It was this influence, beginning from
the utmost solitude, that spread with remarkable
speed throughout Egypt and Greece and Israel until
it had laid hold of the whole Roman empire, and led
in the end, through many stages and changes, to the
highly devéloped Benedictine monastery of the sixth
century, where solitude had become a communal thing.
Much had been lost by this time of the original
concentration achieved by those first men in the


desert---Antony and Pachomius and Amoun---but then
a new order had been created out of the ruins of
the Greek and Roman empires which stretched from
Ireland to Kiev and included much of the Balkans
and the Mediterranean lands, in which the monastery
was the essential orgen.
1. Antony the Great (AD
a hermit of
the Egyptian desert, was the 1353-35621 great monk of
Christianity. Paui of Thebes (7-341) may have
preceded him in the same area close to the Red Sea
atvi the time of the Decian persecutions in AD 251.
The custom of retreating into the 'desert' or
deserted countryside behind Alexandria seems to
have begun at this time among a number of men.
There had always been 'philosophers' in the Greek
world who had w andered from place to place: today
we would call them holy men. They were ascetics:
the Greek word 'askeo" .
meant simply exercise, and
implied a rigorous course of self-braining. In
Christien times this tradition was kept by men-
usually old---who lived in villages but kept sol-
itary habits and received devotees. Paul and
Antony certainly learned the Scriptures from these
men, and the way to fast, meditate and pray.
intony like all the other ascetics worked with his
hands, in or near Alexandria-rope- or mat-making.
He 'trained' himself before retiring into the desert,
shutting himself in a tomb for long periods in order
to defeat fear and doubt (called 'demons' in the
records of the early fathers). He was 35 when he
went to live in an abandoned fort between the Nile
and the Red Sea. He stayed there for twenty years
(his "father', the ascetic who had taught him
everything, refused to follow him). "Bread'
(probably sacks of grain) was brought to him twice
a year, and for the rest he grew his own food.
At all stages of monasticism a vegetarian diet
was considered the basis of physical purity, and
meat and wine stimulants of desire (we find this
in the pre-Christien sects too). Antony emerged
from his retreat shining with health, 'God-borne'
and apparently all the better for his protracted
fasts.
News of these men travelled to Alexendria and
as far as Rome. The desire to imitate them moved
many others to leave their homes, and communities
began to form in the desert behind Alexandria. The
word 'monastery' was used by Athanasius in his bio-
graphy of Antony to mean a monk's cell, and the em-


phasis in his use of both 'monk' and 'monastery'
was on the single or solitary (monos) man in search
of perfection, though he might still share his life
with other solitaries. The ancient Greek world was
used to men initiating themselves into 'mysteries'
in this way. Thus the new religion did not come
into the ancient world as a disturbing revolutionary
force: it was persecuted by the Romans simply for
what appeared to be its subversive side---above all
for its treasonable refusal to believe in the divinity
of the emperor. The monks had little to do with
this. They believed in persuasion by other-
invisible and silent---means. Antony did go to
Alexandria to plead for Christian martyrs in the law
courts, in the first years of the fourth century,
but he did not provoke the judges in any, way. He
was by this time (about 306) the 'father' of many
solitary men in the desert. The courts ordered that
no 'monks' should appear. Thus at least fourteen
years before the first organised group- gr-cenohitie
monasteries solitary men were felt to have a power in
themselves, quite unrelated to wealth, position or
numbers. Their role in the conversion of the empire
(the last persecutions were in about 313) was a basic
if not the principal one.
Pachomius (Ar286-346) organised the loose
communities of the desert into settlements under a
superior for the first time at Tabennesis (AD 320),
far south along the Nile valley. It was an abandoned
village, and at first only he and his 'father' Palamon
had cells there. His brother joined him later but
was against accepting other followers. Pachomius
went through the same self-training as Antony to defeat
the demons of pride, shame and
in order to rely
with utter confidence on the will fgot God. He too was
a rush-maker, and presumably his products were taken
up the Nile to Alexandria by boat. His community
quickly grew. Bricks for his buildings were made on
the banks of the Nile and dried in the sun as they are
still today. The design for his monastery was prob-
ably influenced by his previous military career: it
was surrounded by a wali with a gatehouse, and had a
refectory, hospital, kitchen and halls or houses
containing twenty to thirty monks each. These halls
had their own stewards, who organised the work of the
men under them. Some monks worked the fertile land
round the monastery, others cooked or baked or cleaned,
and others managed commercial relations with the out-
side world. The first monastery in our sense was
thus a self-suppgrting and self-protecting unit.
There was always/certain amount of danger from brigands,
though nothing like what threatened the later monast-
eries in Barbarian times.


Pachomius taught his followers the techniques
of the night-vigil, the fast, and prayer and meditat-
ion, which had already been developed by the desert
hermits. Amoun (AD 283-352) founded another settle-
ment at Nitria ('the gateway to the desert' from
Alexandria) and Macarius the Egyptian founded one at
Scetis close by, both in about 330. It meant that
Cells were now within easy access of the city. The
so-called 'Cells' themselves were founded as a second
Nitrian community in 338, so great was the number of
new followers: there were six hundred cells spaced
so as to be out of earshot of each other. It was
designed as a place for the Nitrian monks to pass on
to, when they had proved themselves ready for solitude.
The monastery had thus become an
for
the first time, and the monk a member Aposderion of
would
much later be known as an 'order', namely a fraternity
bound together by a common 'rule'.
Thus already at
the desert-stage the monk was ceasing to be a hermit
and simple. The idea of a discipline or rule
EAOARES him not only to a faith and a God but a comm-
unity was growing. The new development was necess-
arily fraught with contradictions, which only showed
clearly centuries later.
The Scetis monks, apart from their work producing
rope and baskets, hired themselves out as labourers
at hervest-time. The natron-miners in the area often
acted as their agents in the sale of their products,
when the natron camel-trains returned to Terenuthis
on the Nile, and their goods were loaded on to boats.
It was usual for laymen to 'minister' to monks
in their cells. They could come from town to collect
their work and take it away for sale. And they would
bring food and clothing, no doubt for a commission on
the sales they made.
The monk's greatest inner struggle was naturally
against sex desire. A great proportion of the stories
about the desert fathers (and the desert nuns), deal
with their success or failure in this 'warfare'.
A certain young monk troubled with lust, his mind
'obscured by the heaviness and visions of the nights',
went to Pachomius (an old man/jnow) for advice.
Pachomius told him th,t there' was nothing unusual
in it---certainly nothing brought on by negligence
on the young monk's part. He implied that lust
could be the result of both robust health and the
most extreme austerities. He added that he himself,
when fifty years old, began to be wracked by the most
violent lustful desire which did not leave him night
or day for twelve years. The girl of his sexual
daydreams was a young Ethiopian he had seen 'gather-
ing canes' one summer long before. In the daydreams
she would come and sit on his knee and they would
begin making love, but when he was on the point of


a climax she would lift herself off him and 'fly
away'. He decided to offer himself to the beasts,
and one night lay down naked outside a cave of hyenas.
They licked him all over during the night but other-
wise did not molest him. He felt this as a reprieve
from God and returned to his cell in a calm state of
mind. But the desire came back, only moze powerfully.
His hand felt polluted for two hours after he had
'touched' the Ethiopian girl in his daydraam. He
tried to committ suicide by pressing asps to his hand
but they would not suck his blood. And then in his
sixty-second year (though this contradicts his official
dates) he found peace. A voice told him that God had
inflicted lust on him to show that he was not 'mighty'
or 'perfect' as he might think.
Others were less successful in the warfare.
A monk after years of austerity returned to the city
and fornicated almost to madness. He caught a
horrifying disease and had to have bis sex organ
removed. A virgin of Jerusalem Awas in sackcloth
for three years but then 'opened her window' to the
man who ministered to her, and made love to hime She
never returned to her sclitary life, and her cell
became a whore's bedroom. There was the nun seduced
by a 'singer of psalms' who starved herself to such
an extent that she almost died. She
that her
child by this man would not live, and raa not.
She mortified herself implacably for thirty years
before feeling a mild sense of forgiveness. A
'holy virgin' who had won over desire was found lying
helpless in a
the Scetis area
monks.
She told them are-dna been living in the cave,
'eating grass', for thirty-five years and had not
set eyes on a man in all that time. There is the
story of the bishop who 'fell into fornication' and
lay down at the porch of his church so that his
congregation could walk over him on their way out.
Some stories are ugly. There was the herdsman who
saw a pregnant woman pass him in the desert and was
curious to know what her child looked like. He
ripped her open, killing both her and the child.
He became a monk soon afterwards. He mortified
himself for thirty years, before
been
achieving,sense
having
forgiven the double murder.
Thus not all the monks were of the quality of
Antony and Pachomius and Amoun. Many came to the
desert to escape conscription and Alexandria's ex-
Eessivaly heavy taxes. Many went in for what the
Hindus sometimes call 'monkey-renunciation' 'mmone of
show. One monk, seeing a woman pass his cell,
rushed out to tell her that given the chance he could
deal with ten of her. She took him at his word and
they lived together in Alexandria for several months.
He returned to the desert exhausted.
Something of a competitive atmosphere started


up among the more austere monks. Macarius the
Alexandrian held a kind of desert record in self-
mortification, and imitated any new austerity he
heard about (he died at the age of 100). There was
a lot of superstition, and 'demons' began to be the
name of spirits more external than fear and pride
and shame. The same Macarius once said that demons
had taken him off the right road in the desert and
that he would have been lost forever had he not
found an antelope and sucked her udders: she then
guided him home. He also claimed that a man had
come to him with the story that he had found a horse
in bed with him one morning instead of his wife:
Macarius had changed her back to human form again.
The abbot Serenus told John Cassianus, who kept a
record of all his conversations with the desert
hermits, that the
between heaven and earth
was filied with 12.0180610 spirits whose only interest
was causing trouble, but that these were many fewer
than in earlier times. For men who had lived most
of their lives in towns and villages the uninhabited
areas had a genuinely evil atmosphere. It was to
defeat this false trust in other men's company that
the monk chose solitude as the basis of his training.
But with the influx of great numbers of men it was
perhaps inevitable that the communal forms of mon-
astic life should become emphasised at the expense
of the solitary, especially when the movement began
to spread abroad.
Monasticism spread east from Alexandria to
Israel, Cyprus, Syria, Constantinople. Hilarion
was born near Gaza in AD 293 and went to school in
Alexandria, where he heard of Antony and met him.
He spent 22 years in a hut near Gasa, until about
330, when other monks joined him. There is evidence
of very eazly anchoritic life near the Dead Sea,
not only among Christians in the second century after
Christ but among the Jews long before Christ. An
interest in monastic life seems to have come about
long before the Roman empire was in crisis, perhaps
as a result of Buddhist missions in various parts
of the Mediterranean as early as the third century
before Christ, and the presence of Indians in the
Persian arny.
Epiphanasius was another monk who learned his
disciplines in Alexandria: he founded a Pachomian
monastery between Gaza and Jerusalem, at Besanduk,
before beconing bishop of Cyprus in 367. He
quarrelsome man, with a hint of the future
He is said to have consecrated
antivon
Jerome's brother
force: the man was bound and gagged by other
and
Proxe,
dragged to the fount.
Basil of Cappadoccia in Anatolia (AD 329-379)
was baptised a Christian in 397, and then began a


tour of Egyptian and Israelite cells. He founded
the first Greek community at Cappadocia but returned
to the pre-Fachomian, simpler model, whore contact
between superior and monk was easy. He discouraged
great austerities. He even ran schools, and his
simple Rule spread throughcut the Byzantine world.
He also discouraged solitary life on the grounds
that the devotee could find himself 'perfect' too
easily, through lack of comparison. The Studion
monastery emphasised care for_the sick, and became
the model for other great monastic centres at Kiev
and liount Athos. In the Greêk or Basilian monastery
the idea took
of prayer and solitude being the
springboard
of mystical participation in
the life
Helping the sick, teaching the
and
young, sheltering the destitute
hopeless were
the new forms of self-abnegation. One did not bind
oneself in chains, or starve almost to death. One's
austerity was seen in and through the sick world all
round in which one worked. Not for nothing is Pall-
adius's history of the desert fathers called The Book
ofParadise. That early sense of paradise in the
Egyptian desert gave place to something less meditative
and less solitary, precisely as monastic forms moved
from the more or iess clement desert areas to the
wilds of Anatolia and places north of the Alps. It
was not a matter of the weathez, however. Egypt
had for centuries been the home of religious feeling.
Alexander the Macedonian had after all chosen the
Egyptian coast near Memphis as the site for his new
city for this reason above any other---that the air
seemed full of God. Whereas one visitor described
Basil's site in Cappadocia as 'a damp and squalid
place'. Others described it as sweet and serene.
It depended how you felt: but in Egypt religious
thought seemed to have become physical.
In Syria, a country not unlike Egypt from a
geogrephical point of view, the sttelements were
in the strict desert-tradition, only rigorous to
an almost suicidal degree. Monks staggered under
loads of iron or sand. Shenute (died 466), a
superior, beat one of his monks to death. St Simeon
(AD 359-459) frequently had himself walled up without
food for long
before he retreated to his
column, where Esripine spent 37 years. A meagre and plain
diet, and long periods of fasting, were found aids to
health and long life. Thus by the fifth century
plainly ascetic and solitary forms existed side by
side kx with communal onese
4. Monasticism spread to Italy with Paulinus,
who gave up a vast property to found a settlement at
Nola south of Rome in 395. And here monastic life
entered one more phase of development. It was not
only a public institution now. It was a place where


a certain type of public behaviour was desirable.
For the first time attention was paid to the way
nonks lived together---to their states of mind
outside the religious context, and to the atmosphere
they created within the monastery walls. with
Paulinus the monastery became a nucleus of civilisation 1 e
He himself continued to read the classical authors,
and he drew followers from Gaul, Spain and the
Balkans. The new role was partly explained by the
Barbarian invasions which were nowbt othreatening the
survival not simply of the Church but of all memory
of the ancient worid. Alerie sacked Rome in 410,
the Vandals again in 455. St Augustine left Milan
in 385 to establish monasteries which were further
removed from the original desert pattern than any
before. They were centres of conversion, in a
world dominated by Barbarians. He allowed his monks
on certain occasions to eat meat, drink wine and
talk at table. When he died in 430 Africa, his
birthplace, was being colonised by the Vandals.
One of the fascinating aspects of this book will
be its research into the way these new monks lived
together behind the monasteryvwells, The stories
are quite different from those of the desert fathers.
We know less of the private desires and conflicts
of these new men, and more about the public frictions
between them. But where there are quarrels between
one monk and another which require the interfernce
of the superior it is often possible to read a
private stress between the lines, And there was
much work to do,, of a kind that tended to discourage
physical austerities on one side and meditation on
the other. The fielde round the monastery had to
be ploughed and planted, and defences had to be built
against passing Barbarian armies, Sometimes whole
monasteries were wiped out. This was a phase which
changed the monastic tradition more than any other
before or since: a monk's life was now precarious,
and concentration difficylt. This was so in Italy,
in Ireland and Bcotlandanorthorn Europe, wherever
Franks or Ostrogoths or Vandals were to be found.
The wild stories about St Patzick and St Columba and
St Brendan in the sixth century may be largely
apocryphal but they give a hint of the warfare that
went on between monk and monk, monastery and monastery,
apart from that wi th marauding tribes. St
BOlUoLGO had numberless pitched ba ttles with a neigh-
bouring monastery over a precious psalter which he
claimed to be his.
Christianity had become the official religion
of the Roman empire in 323. This too altered both
the prestige and the behaviour of the monks. Powez-
interests started among them. A great aispute over
the nature of Christ divided the embryonic Christian


world. The protagonists were Arius, the patriarch
of Alexandria, and Athanasius (his secretary). The
Athanasian creed won, after much violence. It was a veals Schism
the first of many bitter thuelogieat struggles which
often ended in street brawls and even battles, for
the simple reason that they were power-issues as
well. Athanasius saw the political disadvantages
of the Arian description of Christ as of 'like'
substance to God but not the 'same' substance: it
tended to reduce Christ to the status of the pagan
gods, with one foot on the earth. Church authority
easily diminish with this divisionnof Christ
Hieht the Godhead.
John Chrysostom, made bishop of Constaninople
in 398, tried to stop monks entering the city, on
account of their unruliness. Monks now all but
ruled Alexandria, They murdered Hypatia, the last
protagonist of Greek learning, dragging her from her
carriage and beating her to death with tiles. A
monk murdered the imperial prefect from Rome. The
first Barbarian attacks in the Egyptian desert began
in 407, and monks fled from their retreats in great
number. Bome of the wisest felt that it was deserved.
There was a second Berbarian devastation in 434.
The Egyptian settlements degenerated fast, and
homosexuality became widespread. A fieth-century
Macarius said, 'when you see trees, it is at the
door, but when you see boys, take up your mantles
and wit thdraw.' A child (Zacharius, son of Carion)
immersed himself in a natron lake until he was totally
disfigured, out of fear of being taken as a monk's
boy.
New monasteries in Francepn the other hand
(Lérins in Provence, and that 'of John Cassianus in
Marseilles) were flourishing as centres of cultivation
and learning. Initiates came to them from every
part of the Mediterranean and Europe. Cassianus's
Conferences and Instiations became the classic basis
of monastic life in Lurope (he wrote his history of
the desert fathers in the second decade of the fifth
century). The monastery was now a storage-house
of the Christian and classical past, amid the general
darkness of the
There was increasing schism
between Rome and. acistentenopie on points of doctrine,
and most Barbarians clung to the Arian theology which
was declared heretical
St Augustine. The one
stable element in all hia was still the monastery-
but now in Europe.
In the sixth century the long and difficult
social operation of converting (and thereby taming)
the Barbarians gave Rome a new splendour as the
western centre of the Church, no longer the museum
of a fallen empire. The Swabien king Cacaric dus
converted in 560, the Visigoths in 587. Rome's
last 'little empéror' Marcellinus had been deposed


by the converted Ostrogoths in 476. The monk of
these times, living among Barbarians, was himself
invariably a Barbarian too. He tended to teach
a simplified, in some cases brutalised, religion.
Gregory of Tours, who died in 596, couid hardly
form a
sentende, and claimed that this was
precisely proper reason poeple followed him. An
or, tor would have made them feel excluded, he said;
whereas he showed them their own uncouthness in
the new language of Christianity. 8t Martin too
had a crude delivery, which he used for the ends of
conversion. Hordes of peasants went over to
Christianity because of his simple message. It
was said that the roads of Gaul were 'littered'
with processions and pilgrimages also due to him
alone. The erude doctrines of heaven and hell
and retaebution which dominated the later mediaeval
psychology may well have had their roots in the
Barbarian craving foz revenge and punishment and
reward. The penitential telling of hail meries
have sprung from a simple need for regularity
and repetition. Gregory of Tours in his History
of the Franks describes this race as the most
unthinkably cruel one that evez existed. And it
was these men that the monks (Franks themselves,
in many cases) had to influence, so that some
colouring of the doctrine should be expected.
All monasteries at this time had penitential lists
to deal with murder, forhication, greed and drunk-
enness (the most common vices). St Columban in
Ireland shut up his monks with a corpse for nights
on.end if they got too unruly. In fact the Columban
settlements were essentially agricultural settle-
ments, zigidly disciplined, and their success with
the Franks was due to their exemplary hardness, in
contrast with the social collapse ali round them.
A certain luxury entered the Church at this
time. A safely established priesthood drawd from
the Barbarian tribes
according to St Martin's
biographer Sulpicius Sohuace 'all too often happier
with well-padded carriages than the donkey, with
marble halls rather than cells and with extravagant
robes rather than simple habits'.
St Benedict founded his third and most
successful monastery at Cassino in 529: in it the
new communal form of monastic life reached its
climax. The solitary act of meditation--dmesxohia
as it had been called in the Greek of the desert
fathers---now became reading aloud or ruminatio,
suitable for the untamed Barbarian mind which was
such different material from the Greek and Jewish
and Coptic mind on which the Christian faith had
first fallen. A new thought-system had to be
created, under the guidance of monks who knew some-


thing of both the ancient world and the fathers of
the desert. The concept of zero and also our (perhaps
rather odd) concept of time as being ticked away reg-
ularly in seconds came into being in the mediaeval
monastery. The outer world---its silences and voids
fearful to the Barbarian mindo had to be tamed too
into some kind of order: and that this order was
rather mathematical may not seem odd in the light of
the Barbarian craving for safe foreseeable events
and therefore regular laws. 'Christian' mathematics
was for that reason distinet from ancient (Greek or
Alexandrian) mathematics, though it was rooted in
both. Christianity brought about in the deepest
sense a 'new order' after the Roman collapse, and
this was pre-eminently the work of thinking monks.
The attempts
to 'pierce the imprisonment of
mathematical today are perhaps efforts to release
the mind from a Barbarien-based regularity.
Under St Benedict conversion became a carefully
planned operation. He once said that all he was out
to achieve in his monks was a change of behaviour.
He had much Barbarian superstition to deal with.
when one of his monks was seen to be fidgetting about
in church he was taken outside and beaten until
'a little black boy' was seen to run out from under
his habit. St Benedict allowed his monks an unusual
nine hours sleep in the winter months andrsiesta in
the summer. The monastery was now virtually a self-
supporting little town, the seed of the later walled
city of the middle ages. Its monks reclaimed the
land all round, and visitors were given lodgings.
There was less sense of a retreat than ever before,
and more sense of an immediate and even sucial
function. The participation of the monks in the
life of the country round them was perhaps lacking
in the mysticism that the Greek or Basilian monks
had brought to it. The Benedictine settlement was
a practical and above all rational concern. It
flourished in an abandoned and dangerous countryside,
more a desert in the real sense than Nitria or even
Bcetis. There was constant danger from Barbarian
arnies passing northwards or southwards. There was
danger to the health. The monastery now had a clear
practical task---to reclaim the land and with it the
civilisation: 80 clear that it seemed to exclude
much of the mystical side. The Church had to be
made safe. The Christian had to be created not
simply as a man of a certain faith but as a man of
a certain civilisation, recognisable as much the
same kind of men from Bari to Horthumberland, It
was even something of an imperial ideal, and it
explains the important social role (unashamedly
rational and public-minded) of the mediaeval monastery
that sprung from the Benedictine model in every part
of Europe.


St Gregory the Great, who became pope in 590,
was a Benedictine monk. He made Rome independent
of Constantinople and sent Benedictine monks to
evezy part of Europe (st Augustine of Cantberbury
was one of them) not only to convert men from tribal-
ism or Arianism but to integrate the former Roman
empire north of the Alps under one Roman Church.
These monks underwent great hardship, settling among
the Angles or Celts or Franks as missionarieg-cum-
ambassadors, in which work they had been trained at
the blandest school of government in the west,
namely Rome. In Ireland Augustine had to deal
with the Druidical magic that still tended to under-
pin monastic life there. But even the implacably
exclusive Columban settlements accepted the Bendict-
ine rule in the end.
The Islamic invasions which disrupted first the
Persian empire and then the whole of the Mediterrenean
began in 637, and completed the process of dividing
Rome from Constantinople and producing an eastern
and western church. The entire Hellenie world from
Alexandria to Constantinople came under Baghdad.
Rome was back to something like its ancient position.
By 650 the monastery had developed its utmost public
function. It was now a walled city---a model for
the world round it. And all the monastic orders
that developed later, including even the Jesuit order
in the sixteenth century, were only variations on it.
The monastery became a basic social instiution of the
midale ages, and the contradiction that this involved
with the original solitary ideal may have brought
about its later dissolution as an influence on life.
This book will be concerned less with theological
argument than the lives of the monks themselves, how
they looked after themselves, how they divided their
days, how they got on with each other, how the world
round them saw them. Nothing could be falser than
theidea of a monk's life being necessarily 'unevent-
The sources are enormously rich. No TV company
today could have done the amount of interviewing
carried out by Palladius among the desert hermits.
For twenty years he travelled from cell to cell in
Egypt, Syria and Israel. His work has been trans-
lated from the Syriac by EaA.Wallis Budge (nearly a
thousand pages of it) and from the original Greek
by Dom Cuthbert Butler.
But even for Budge most of what the hermits
'believed' in was superstition. This sensible
Victorian churchman gave no credence to the stories
of how the hermits 'attained' à to taming wild beasts


and foretelling the future and healing the sick
and surviving the most terrible physical tests.
Today we know much more about Eastern experiences
of hernit life. At least two film companies have
shown yogis walking on red-hot coals. Once we
reject the idea of the first monks as somehow
'primitive' their stories come alive in the most
vivid wayo Their so-called war against sex-desire
becomes as anguished as it was for them, when seen
in the light of the Hindu doctrine of the kundalini
or sex-area.
And the later 'war' against the Barbarian becomes
more real too. This was no less an inner war then
the earlier one. And it was squarely based on the
now sacred memory of the desert fathers.
we have a mass of eye-witness accounts
(Cassianus's Institutions of the Desert Fathers is
one of them) and biographies (of Pachomius and his
follower Theodor, of Macarius and Shenute and Simeon),
with endless maxims collected from the earliest
hermits. Whole books have been devoted to the Fayoum
and Nitrian monasteries, notably those of N. Abbott
and Evelyn White, apart from the later Benedictine
literature.
OTHER BOOKS
There seem to be few books on this subject-
apart from the sources, that is. The nearest,
though he stops before the Benedictine period, is
Jacques Lacarrière's THE GOD-FOSSESSED (a bad trans-
lation of the excellent criginal French title of
MEN DRUNK WITH GOD) published in Britain by Allen
and Unwin in 1963. Though always accurate, its
is rather intellectual. There is the same
approncar as in Budge towards the 'illusions' of the
hermits.
THE DASERT A CITY by Derwas Chitty (Blackwell
1966) is an archaeological study and treats only Egypt
and Israel. It mentions the dearth of books---'At
the moment even such an introduction is sadly needed'.
The zeason seems to be that books on monks have been
relegated to Church History---and written that way too.


TEE BATTLE OF THE MONKS
MAURICE ROWDON
The General Theme
This book ie about the first eight centuries of
Christendom--what could be called the age of the monks.
It is about their battles---against the elements and
their own tempiations and voluptucus dreams (in the
Thebaid desert), aga ainst the first vagueness of a new
religious experience (Alexandria), against tyrannical
abbots (Suria), against each other in vituperous
writings on biblical interpretacion (Jerusalem),
against animals in the arena and against pogroms
(home), against the 'fallen man' in themselves (Italy,
Africa), against other monks in street-brawls on points
of doctrine (Constantinople), against the barbarian
outside and sometimes inside themselves (northern
Europe), against the emperor, against the Church
that W as based on their thoughts and their struggles
and now wished to disown them, against the increasing
orthodoxy that protected the Church on the one hand
and the increasing 'heresy' that caused and resulted
from the orthodoxy on the other.
The book will counter the idea of a later 'dark
age', because the entire basis of mediaeval society
was laid down then, carefully and even systematically,
by the monks. The first eight centuries of Christen-
dom were the incubation period before the emergence
of something like a Christian order in the middle
ages.
Everything from the walled city to agricultural
implements were prepared then, and the classical
modes of writing and worshipping and reasoning trans-
formed to new uses.
the monastery became in fact
the nucleus and heart of the e new world. Thus the
incubetion went on in the monks.
iheir centres were
the onlyavailable means of continuity from the time
of the crucifixion through the fall of the homan
empire to its dismemberment by the barbarian tribes:
they made out of this prolonged turmoil a new thought
and a new society, the one the mirror of the other.


THE BATTLE OF THE MONKS is the story of that struggle,
and the ferment that made the later society possible,
and which drove deep into the Christian psychology a
sense of sine
The 'dark age' is actually the story (one that has
never been properly told before) of what the book will
call the 'vast SOC ial operation' of converting the bar-
barian. It was the climax of the period treated in
this book, not an eclipse or a collapse. In the first
martyrs, the first fathers of the desert and the doctors
of the Church, a whole new world was pioneered and
fought out, and the remarkable conversion of savage
tribes in every part of the European and Mediterranean
worlds was the result of that.
THE EATTLE OF THE MONKS will suggest that the
monastic tradition came from India, and travelled long
before the birth of Christ along the trade routes (or
perhaps nigratory routes) from the Ganges to Hiesopatamia
and Greece. It will suggest that Christ's whole mission
and story came from that, and that the horror felt by the
Jews towards him was essentially a horror of the monastic
ideal as a force destructive of social life.
The battle
of the monks was a fierce and prolonged effort to cope
with new spiritual demands made in Christ's teaching,
which brought trouble with Roman and later Christian
emperors, and then the Church itself, for the same reason
that it had brought trouble in Judah.
The book will describe something of the Indian
background (the oral tradition of the Vedas anx the
written tradition of the Upanishads) which was perhaps
the model for the Christian monk.
we have a good
account of the sannyasin or monk in nineteenth-century
Hindu writings, which will provide us with fresh terms
by means of which to understand the monastic experience,
while Christian terms would sound stale and played-out
to most earso
The approach will be as chronological as possible,
so as to get theidea of a development, thoughf not a
'progress': the book will not be saying that nediaeval
life was the crown of an endeavour that had been going
on since the cructfixion.
It was more a distillation
of the first experience, a distinct (even an argued)
watering-down to make mass-conversion possible.


lle
The Working Plan
INTRODUCTION
What it meant to be a monk, with reference back
to the Vedas and the Upanishads, and some mention of
the work of Sri Ramakrishna in the late nineteenth
century. The possible ways in which this discipline
could have reached Fiesopatamia and Greece. The
methods of this discipline: the fight against desire
and the 'illusions of laya'. The terror and distraught
sense of deprivation in the early stages. Then, follo
owing the influence through to Christ, thefact that
Greek thought (perhaps the transmitter of 'the discipline)
was a dominant influence in the Judah of Christ's day.
The extraordinary identity of views expressed. in Pla to,
Pythagoras and in the Upanishads.
The pre-Christian
models of asceticisn (the 'transmitters') were the
Essenes, the Therapeutae and the neo-Platonists of
Alexandria.
The crucifixion: how Judah resisted the monastic
ideal.
The gospel and its clear laying-down of the
new monastic discipline. The failure of the disciples
to understand Christ at the Last Supper was their un-
familiarity with the spiritual discipline he had in
mind.
2. The first Nasarene church that came about after
the crucifixion: the story of these men---the first
proponents of the Christian experience.
They were
Jews who believed in the Second Coming though they
still went to the synufgogue. The first atiempt to
convert' other peoples took place in Antioch, where
Jews preached to Greeks. There were Christians in
Damascus even before the conversion of St Paul. It
was St Paul who took the gospel abroad in something
like a cons cjous and planned way. It was he who
prevented itfrom remaining provincial or sectual.
A century after Christ there were Christian communities
in all the major cities of the Roman empire.
Still
a 'church' (meaning assembly of people, ecclesia) was
not the contradiction of 'monk' (man by himseli). The
groups were collections of monks.
That is to say,
the monastic discipline waginherent in the Christian
teaching: the first hermits were renouncing the worid
in the sense of abandoning the 'illusions of Maya' and


accepting reality.
The nonastic ideal described the
world as unreal: the real only transpired in solitude.
It was not a renuciation of society. The solitude
could as well be practised in society, and the Indian
teachings had in fact never advocated avoiding other
meno The desert was only a fit place for the maximum
concentration, the maximum self-purisoation irom pagan
(meaning worldly) environments in the cities. The
idea that in religion there was a necessary friction
between the one-man ideal and the society-ideal only
erew up laters when the Church and the state began to
identify themselves with each other.
It is for this
reason that history books tend to nake so little of the
whole period, and especially of the 'dark age', because
only the social development is noticed, and not the
experiences of the men who made it possiblee
The Roman persecutions of Christians under Nero
tin 64), Domitian (AD 96), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian
(117-38). They became mass-affairs much like the
pogroms of this century, under Marcus Aurelius (161-80).
Christianity was seen as a 'Jewish heresy', a subversive
doctrine designed to overthrow Judah and thereforo to
bring disturbance into the empire.
The fact that the
martyrs wept with joy in their way to death struck so
many people as mad that it began to have a compelling
force which no amount of consciousconversion could
equal.
4. St Paul the hermit settled in the Thebaid desert
in the third century. St Antony on Mount colzumo
The school of Alexandria with its combination of Jud ah
and Plato was the system of thought behind the desert
experience. The 'philosopher' of rhe Greek world was
precisely the wandering monk, the sannyasin, of the
Hindu world. The desert fathers were called 'philosoph-
ers'. The idea of philosophy as academic and intellect-
ual only came into being centuries later as a result
of mediaeval scholasticism, which tried to throw the
whole Christian experience up into the head, so to
speak.
Origen (185-254) was a 'philosopher' of Egypt.
He was master of the school of Alexandria, andone of
the most brilliant of the 'Greek' fathers of the Church.
Much of his work was described as 'error' when the
catholic faith became more clearly defined.
5. The state of the Roman empire in the third century.
Army whole basis of imperial structure. Lack of Roman
volunteers meant that legionarics now recruited from the
barbarian tribes. Collapse of slave market, inflation.
The Christian experience broke through the mystery religions
(Mithras etc) because of the monastic discipline behind it.


5 sn
6. Pachomius (286-346) first organised the loose
communities of the desert into settlements under a
superior, with novices.
The monastery in the Christian
sense appears for the first time. I describe the spread
east of Christian monasticism---to Gaza, Cyprus, back
again to Jerusaleme
The first light begins to flicker.
Epiphanius, bishop of Cyprus, was a heretic-hunter, per-
haps the firsto I take the increasing concern with
heresy to be a sign of fear caused by dcubtn I trace
the most bitter conflicts of later times to this doubt
that grew as the number of Christians grewo
Es The first clear punitive element enters Christianity
with Shenute (died 466). He once beat another hermit to
death. The rigour of the Syrian monksa
St Simeon (born
389) was one of these.
7. The shift of the first monas ticism from Egypt to
Palestine and then Constantinople.
This coincided with
the accumulation of social and political power by the
Christians.
They were the most reliable servants of
the state. Basically this was respoasible for the adopt-
ion of Christianity as the empire's official religion by
Constantine (323).
8. Now that monasticism was not essential it came
under the control of local bishops by the Council of
Chalcedon (415). The emperor Justinian ordered the monk's
cell to be within the main nucleus of a monastic building.
A social emphasis enters Christianity. The monastic
ideal of solitude is for the first time seen as the source
of possible unruliness. And the monks were often unruly.
They had gang fights on points of doctrine.
9. The monastic tréaition entered Italy with Paulinus
(395). Here is the first monastery as the seed of a
new civilisation.
The classical world here softens the
rigour and also the ecstasy of the first experience,
and begins something that will centuries later find a
powerful imaginative expression in the Renfaissai ce.
In 384 St Augustine left Milan to begin hi's work.lle
was thefirst perhaps to advance the Christian experience
as some'thing to be written down, as a body of thought.
His CITY OF GOD, where so to speak the mediaeval psych-
ology is Sewn. His doctrine of original sin defeated
the Pelagian doctrine that man could so perfect himself
as to become incapable of sin. Thus the development
of a recognisably western cr European Christianity,
the beginning of a Christian literature and the state-
ment of faith as dogma backed by the state came about
in the same epoch.
St Jerome.
Fierce and quarrelsome, lived in Rome
and Jerusalem, from which hevfled during a Barbarian
attack. He finished a translation of the bible in the
year of Augustine's conversion (385). Here Christian
'doctrine' forms with argumentative brilliance, and the
punitive element is clear.
The desire to liquidate


anyone who disagrees is strong. Here are the first
mental battles of what became the horrifying catholic-
protestant struggle over a thousand years later.
ll. The struggle to Christianise the Barbarian.
St Martin of Tours (361-397) was an imperial soldier
himself.
when Augus tine died (430) NXs Africa was
being colnnised by the Vandals. By 533 the imperial
structure was based on the Byzantine rule and no longer
Rome. Byzantium wrested Africa back from the Vandals.
St Martin convertcd the Swabian king Cacaric (560).
The bishop of Seville converted the Visigoths (587).
The Barbarians nursed the 'heresy' of Arianism, which
saw God alone as divine. The battle against Arianism
by men like Augustine was the struggle to produce a
composite Christian, who would be recognised as the
same man in Consuantinople or Britanny. The 'universal
society' of the Middle Ages was here being fought fore
12. As a result of the conversion of the Barbariens
Rome (controlled by them) began to seem no longer the
seat of a past and dead glory but B3 the new centre of
Christian power. The distinction between priests and
monks came to a head at this time. The Church was
having an increasing social success. Its 'luxury' begins
to be talked of.
13. In the fifth century an embryo of the future
civilisation was realised in Lérins in Provence, to
which novitiates came from Egypt, Italy, Africa, Spain
and Greece.
Provence was for this reason, I shall
argue, the cradle of the humanism which first showed
itself as a new clear attitude in St Francis of Assisi,
the 'little Frenchman'.
John Cassianus had a monastery at Merseilles (415).
His writings on the Desert Fathers seem to me the first
clear example together with the work of St Augustine
of the 'literalisation' of the Christian experience---
the use of the written word for persuasion, eventually
(when the printed book grew out of the manuscript) for
the persuasion of absent people. The book began its
life here---as the source of a ferment of ideas. A
certain intellectualisation of the religion sets in at
this time.
I show that this too was part of the vast
'social operation' undertaken by the monks because only
the faculty of the intellect could cut through El tribal
differences. This was a major departure from the work
of the Desert Fathers. 'God' begins to be a concept.
Dogma and doctrine become important.
The Church, with
its task of creating out of the wildest tribes a settled
humanity, required a dogma that could be spelled out to
everyone, entailing death or torture for its denial. I
will thus say that the existence of dogna at all is a
Sign of immaturity, implying a social more than a religious
struggle.
I shall also argue that the repetition of
hail maries as a penance has more to do with the Barbarian
need for and belief in punishment than with religion dir-
ectlyo I shall argue that the adoption of the doctrine


7 aa
of heaven and hell was not essentially religious, and
that such a doctrine cennot be religious, and that it
was required by the Barbarian noed for reward and revengee
we have to realise that while 'the ecstasy of the angels'
converted a tiny few, a different and worldlier method
was necessary for the nosto
140 Fifth-century Christendon was as complicated as
possible, and will require a number of chapters. The
Eyzantine-Rome strucgle complicated the Barbarian-iome
struceleo Life in Conetantinople and kiome will also
give us a breathing-spac: from the monks, although the
monks make a turbulent-enough story on their owne
Constantinople was Greel learning, Rome was S till Latino
They were essentially still ancient, they looked the
same as in ancient times: this will give us a chance to
see how new Chruianity looked against the background, and
how much it took from the ancient world as wello Being
Christian at
this time meant being moderno
15. The top of the curve is reached in St Benedict's
monastery at Cassino (529). The meditation (haesychia
of the Greek 'philosopherst) was here distilled into
ruminatio or reading aloud. Things were repeated.
That is, a schedule begins to impose itselfo The day
is divided into duties and thoughts.
This too was a
method of discipling the rough-shod Barbarian. His
mind responded to regularity, lacking strong initiating
powers of its own, just as habit binds aninals. There
was a. great development from this single factor (a devo
elopment often quite wrongly called civilization).
The
first concept of time as a ticking-off in fractions of
equal length cane about in the mediaeval monastery, as
a ready transference from this by now long tradition of
regularity: that is, the clock.
And the conept of zero
Spacy
was the formless/outside, so to spes ak, I this closed-
in time: that too---in the form of a nought added to
numbers for the first time---came about in the SUTOTETO nemastery.
The attempts today to pierce 'the imprisonment of mathem-
atical time' are the efforts to release the mind frcm
this Barbarian-besed regularity, which has nolv fixed
itself into the nervous system to the detriment of the
religious facultyo The yoga disciplines (even the
simplest form of Hatha or physical yoga) are ways out
of this system: the Barbarian fear of the void ('infinity')
falls away with the clock which tried to be a protection
against ito Christianity through immaturity lacks the
disciplines comparable to yogao
16. Gregory the Great, the first pope in anything like
the modern S ense (590) was a benedictine. He was in
control of extensive church lands. He began to think and
act independently of Constantinople.
He prought about
a new Christian empire based on nome by sening out Benedict-
ine missionaries to every part of Europe including Ireland,
where the monks were the lipst Edisposed to yield to Roman
guidance. But the ancient Roman experience of how to
handle foreign peoples reached forward into the new Christian
LREGEAEPF


leadership.
This rationalisation so to speak of
Christianity under Rome would nat turally end THE BATTLE
CF THE MONKS, but another fact split Christianity
into two and rendered Constantinople inaccessible--
the Islamic invasions. In the seventh century the
Greek and African worlds came under Baghdad.
While at
one time the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch,
Jerusalem, Alexandria had looked on the pope simply as
another like themselves, they now had to see him as the
man responsible for the entire western church, for
Europe. And that was the work of the monks.
Length: about 126,000 words.