The Wisdom of the Desert | Page 7

from the
book of the Acts of the Apostles. It might be urged that our Lord's own

teaching forces us to believe in just such personal, audible, and
palpable spirits of evil as the hermits say they strove against.
Unfortunately such appeals to authority, even to the supreme authority
of all, are of comparatively little use to us. They may result in an
irritated assent to the conclusions of a syllogism, or check the utterance
of words of contemptuous incredulity; they can neither compel our
sympathy nor silence the protests of our imagination. It seems better, if
we wish to get into spiritual touch with the hermits, to approach these
demon stories in another way. We must be conscious that we have
never hungered and thirsted after righteousness with such intensity as
these early monks did. We have not been driven, as they were, into a
divine madness by the unsatisfied desire for perfection. Until we have
felt as they did, struggled as they did, forced our way into the region of
spiritual effort in which they lived, have we any right to feel sure that
our interpretation of their experiences is the true one? It may be, too,
that we allow ourselves to be prejudiced against the hermits' version of
what they endured by the bald simplicity with which the tales are told.
St. Athanasius' doctrine, so far as the reality and, personality of the
powers of evil are concerned, is in no way different from that of St.
Antony. It is because he philosophises in the light of history, instead of
narrating experiences, that his doctrine does not shock us. We are not
irritated by the conception to which the poet Milton has given utterance
in his Ode.
Peor and Baalim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-battered God of Palestine;
And moond Ashtaroth,
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn,

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.
They feel from Juda's land
The dreaded infant's hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind their dusky eyn
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show His Godhead true,
Can in His swaddling bands control the damnd crew.
Milton's demons are in no way essentially different from those which
attacked the hermits in the deserts. Yet, because his conception is
expressed in gorgeous words and sonorous rhyme, our imaginations do
not refuse to rise to it. Neither the speculations of the great father nor
the language of the poet are any argument for the reality of the demons
they describe; but the fact that we can enter sympathetically into their
thought does seem to suggest that it is not the substance, but the
manner of the hermits' demon stories, which revolts us. It is, after all,
quite in accordance with the spirit of the apostolic age to conceive of
the ancient gods as demons, whom Christ had driven from the images
where they lurked and the temples in which they were worshipped. It
requires but a simple application of the Lord's words to enable us to
think of these malevolent beings trooping in mortified disgust to desert
places, there to wander, seeking in vain for rest. It was along some such
line that the thoughts of the hermits moved. St. Antony and the others
went into the wilderness with the belief that they were entering upon a
region still the property of demons, as the whole world had been before
the coming of the Lord, In their journeyings along the reaches of the
Nile they stumbled upon the ruins of once gigantic temples. Huge
images frowned upon them, painted figures, "delicate and desirable,"

smiled to allure them. Amid the vast monotony of the desert, where
man's insignificance is impressed upon him, nothing seemed strange
because it was supernatural. The monks conceived themselves as
fighting a final Armageddon with the already broken forces of the
Prince of this world; or, when the ascetic conception of St. Paul
appealed to them, as "filling up that which was lacking in the sufferings
of Christ," and consummating the final expulsion of that kind which
goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. Along such lines of thought it
is perhaps impossible for our minds to move with a sense of
comfortable security. Yet our imagination ought not to be wholly
incapable of making such an effort to appreciate their view of life as
will enable us to understand their teaching and sympathise with their
effort.
Another prejudice against the hermits and their teaching arises from our
extreme dislike of their severe physical asceticism. We are disgusted by
the details of their war against the flesh, and we rise in revolt against
their ideal