The Wisdom of the Desert | Page 7

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 of crucifying their bodies. In our time the popular conscience has come to have an almost morbid dread of pain. Perhaps the fact that our religion is largely dominated by the