The Wisdom of the Desert | Page 4

with its offshoot The Cells; second, Scete; third, the region
in Upper Egypt which came under St. Antony's more immediate
influence; fourth, Southern Egypt; fifth, the sea-coast of the Nile Delta.
In very close connection with these, so as to be predominatingly
Egyptian in the tone of their monasticism, were the hermitages and
lauras of south-western Palestine and the settlements in the Sinai
peninsula. Outlying from the greater centres were single hermitages
and small lauras, wherever the monks hoped to find solitude.
In many places life was supported only with extreme difficulty.
Sometimes water had to be obtained by collecting and storing the dew
which fell at certain seasons. Sometimes it was carried with immense
toil from distant wells. There were districts where the hermits lived in
constant dread of the irruption of barbarian tribes, which destroyed
tranquillity and even threatened life itself. Bands of wandering robbers
sometimes rifled the cells of their miserable furniture, or captured,
insulted, and injured the hermits. At other times the silence of these
retreats became so awful, that the hermit was startled into
uncontrollable emotion by the chance shout of some shepherd-boy who
had driven his goats too far; or came to find the rustling of dry reeds in
the wind an almost insupportable noise.
For the most part in the deserts north of the Thebaid the monks saw
very little of each other. Even the inhabitants of grouped cells led
almost solitary lives. On Saturdays and Sundays they met for public
worship and perhaps a common meal, but during the rest of the week
they lived alone in their cells, or with a single disciple. If the monk
were wise, he worked. Sometimes he wove mats or baskets. These were
afterwards exchanged by the hermit himself or his disciple for the

necessities of life in some neighbouring village. If the cell lay too
remote from human habitation to permit of such traffic, the mats or
baskets were accumulated in piles, and in the end burnt. They had
fulfilled their function, and were got rid of that way as well as in the
markets; for the hermit was not a tradesman. He worked, not for wages,
but lest the devil might tempt him in his idle hours. Sometimes a
garden was cultivated around the cell. The hermit struggled with
drought and barrenness until he produced a little stock of vegetables.
Sometimes his cell was happily placed where date palms grew. He
watched his fruit against the depredations of wild birds. Nothing is
more striking than the insistence of the greater hermits on the necessity
for labour of some sort. It was from their experience and their
illuminated introspection that St. Benedict learnt the truth on which he
built a great part of his rule -- "Idleness is the enemy of the soul."
Besides working, the monks prayed. Hours every day were spent in
prayer, which must have been more of the nature of meditation than
intercession. In the intervals of prayer and work they sang or said
psalms, and often repeated aloud long passages from the prophets.
Books were scarce among them, and we read of monks visiting. each
other for the purpose of learning off by heart fresh passages of Holy
Scripture. The attainment of unbroken monotony was a thing greatly to
be desired. Perfect quietness was the monk's opportunity for spiritual
communion with God. Therefore they regarded restlessness and the
wish for change as a sin to be fought against. Long periods of unbroken
monotony were liable to produce in the monk a spirit of irritable
peevishness and discontent with his surroundings, which was
recognised as subversive of true spirituality. They called this state of
mind "accidie" and held that it was the work of a special demon. The
monk felt its force chiefly during the long hours of daylight when he
grew weary of praying and shrank from the petty tasks which had to be
performed around and within his cell. The spirit which tempted him to
accidie was "the demon which walketh at noonday." It was chiefly in
order to conquer this sin that the monks worked as hard as they did at
even quite useless tasks. They knew that it was fatal to try to avoid the
attacks of accidie by seeking change of scene and fresh interests. Their
one hope lay in labour and remaining quietly in their own cells.

Sometimes the monotony of life was broken for the monk by the arrival
of a stranger. The more famous among them were so frequently visited,
that the quiet which was necessary for their own religious life was
seriously interfered with. St. Antony, for instance, was obliged to retire
to his remote "inner mountain" in order to avoid his numerous visitors;
and Arsenius made it a rule during one period of