The Wisdom of the Desert | Page 6

est, ut teneat homo os suum," which appears twice elsewhere as anonymous in the shorter form "Peregrinatio est tacere." It seems likely in this case that the longer form is the nearest to the words originally used. I have endeavoured to give the sense of this saying -- translation I take to be impossible -- in chapter xiv., number iii.
It is from the collections of these "words of the fathers," which have been published by Rosweyd and Migne, that the greater part of the translations in this volume are made. That they are genuine remains of the teaching of the early monks of the Egyptain and South Palestinian deserts I have no doubt whatever. At the same time, it is only fair to warn the reader that these collections have never been critically edited, and that other collections exist which have not yet been published. It is much to be desired that some competent scholar would undertake the labour of editing those which exist only in MS. and critically examining the whole mass of this literature.
In order to appreciate fully the marvellous spiritual beauty of their teaching, it is necessary for the modern reader, in the first place, to realize that the hermits were actual living men, and to make an effort to understand the kind of lives they lived. It is as a help to such effort that I offer the first part of this introduction. In the second place, the reader must try to clear his mind of certain prejudices which exist against the hermits and their way of life. It is to the consideration of these prejudices that I have given up the following portion of this introduction.
II
When the "sumptuous" repast, which I have just described, was finished, the abbot Serenus said to his guests, "Let us hear your question." One of them replied, "We want to know what is the origin of the great variety of hostile powers opposed to men and the difference between them." In reply, the monk discussed for several hours the nature of principalities and powers, of Beelzebub, of the Prince of Tyre mentioned by Ezekiel, of Lucifer, and of the crowds of evil spirits which hover in the atmosphere around us. Such questions and such discussions inevitably raise in our minds a prejudice against the men who engaged in them. We leap at once to the belief that there must have been in their minds a tendency to fantastic and entirely barren speculation. I am not inclined to either minimise or explain away the fact that the whole literature of early Egyptian monasticism is shot through and through with evidences of a belief in the reality, personality, and power of demons. The monks believed that every temptation which came to them was the work of a special demon. There was the demon of anger, who provoked brethren to quarrel with one another; there was the demon of despair, whose voice reminded the penitent of former sins, and urged the impossibility of his salvation; there was the demon who walked at noonday -- he lured the monk into the sin of accidie; there were demons of gluttony, of pride, of vainglory, of covetousness. The demons had the power of assuming appalling or seducing forms, of becoming visible and palpable. Monks heard them clamouring and roaring, felt their blows, smelt them when they were present. Victorious fiends who had terrified their victims into submission or lured them into sin vanished amid peals of derisive laughter. Defeated, they departed with lamentable and awe-inspiring shrieks. Men who had experienced the ferocity and insistence of these powers of evil cannot be accused of being unpractical or merely speculative when they discuss their nature. To the Egyptian monk the power of devils was, except only the power of God, the most practical and pressing question which could be discussed.
Yet, even if we grant this, our prejudice remains. The whole apparatus of these powers of evil is strange and incredible to us. Good and evil as tendencies or opposing principles we understand, or think we understand. We smile at what seems the rude anthropomorphism which sees a demon personally present in the natural cravings of a starved body, and hears a voice through the broken sleep of a long series of solitary nights. We dismiss such tales as no doubt meant to be true, but in reality only the delusions resulting from prolonged fasts and the morbid phenomena of hysterical enthusiasm. It would be possible, of course, to urge, in defence of the hermits' beliefs, that the apostles thought substantially as they did about the powers of evil. We might parallel even such stories as that of the beating of St. Antony from the book of the Acts of the Apostles. It might be urged that our Lord's