Authors: Sara Maitland
In any event, in a surprisingly short time this new faith threw off the aura of faint suspicion in which silence had been wrapped and adopted it with enthusiasm. It is hard now to understand what a profound and radical shift this idea of silent and interior prayer was.
Each day, I took up into the rocks with me Helen Waddell’s translation of
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
, a collection of the things that hermits said about the eremitical life, which were collected by various contemporaries and became immensely influential in the Church for many centuries; and
The Life of Antony
, by Athanasius, a pugnacious bishop and politician who nonetheless wrote an immensely moving account of Anthony’s life. I tried to sit still and listen to these accounts in the silence of the desert itself, and think about their experiences and how they might relate to my own.
It is tricky to do this honestly, because these writers had such a very different mindset from mine. Two particular differences get in the way of a straightforward comparison between a modern silence seeker and Anthony. The first is that his culture on the whole had very few problems with asceticism and physical penance. The kind of ascetic practices we might see as self-hatred or even masochism, were seen – following Paul in his epistles – not so much as penitential but as training, as for an athlete or soldier; and training for a prize well worth winning. We now believe that fasting and sleep deprivation, for example, produce some very particular physiological results that have little or nothing to do with holiness as we understand it. We would probably diagnose a substantial number of the famous and highly regarded saints of this tradition as suffering from ‘eating disorders’.
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The second difference is the very straightforward belief in devils – or demons or Satan himself. This went way beyond a belief in the ‘forces of evil’ as an abstraction and pre-dates the Augustinian
idea that people have a predisposition to sin and a split, divided will. This belief meant that effects like auditory hallucinations, boundary confusions and a consciousness of risk have a totally different meaning and value. Of course they were all at risk – there is nothing that stirs up devils so much as watching a hermit trying to control his or her passions. The demons were continually there, malignant, assiduous and cunning.
Even when I was able to recognise these differences, there remained a sense in which the sources we have for the hermits of the desert are, in modern terms, ideologically contaminated. Athanasius’s beautiful and moving ‘biography’ of Anthony, for example, was written in part for political reasons. Athanasius was well aware of Anthony’s immense popular prestige. It was crucial to him to demonstrate that Anthony was a rigorous anti-Arian in order to mobilise popular enthusiasm for his own lifelong struggle against this widely received Christological heresy. However, it is well-nigh impossible to work out anyone’s academic theology if he lives in complete silence and never says anything. Athanasius manages, rather cleverly, to present Anthony as silent all the time
except when he
was sounding off about orthodoxy
. For this cause he was apparently always willing to break his silence, even to leave the desert and come to Alexandria and speak out. Of course this may be exactly and precisely true, but knowing Athanasius
(contra mundum
they nicknamed him: ‘against the world’, ‘against everyone’), one can’t help having some doubts.
Modern biography – trying to discern and then explain the true inner life or nature of a famous person – did not develop as a literary form until the Enlightenment.
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Augustine’s attempts to write autobiography in the modern sense in
The Confessions
were extremely ill-received by his contemporaries. Athanasius, like other commentators on the early saints, was not attempting biography in the sense we would understand, but hagiography (writings about the lives of holy individuals), a separate genre with its own codes. One of the ‘rules’ of hagiography, at least until the nineteenth century, was that the saints should be exceptional and extreme in whatever way of life
they are engaged with. Their sins prior to repentance are always the worst the writer can think of; their penances eccentrically abject; their virtues miraculous in their intensity. Christian hagiography dotes on penitents (ideally young beautiful females whose sins have been sexual); Buddhist ‘hagiography’ seems to prefer rich, nobly born young men. Practically no one in this literature goes off to be a hermit because they think they might like it. They are driven – at best by a desire to atone for hideous sins, but failing that by a fierce and painful renunciation of a sinful world.
The life of St Mary of Egypt (seventh century, from an oral tradition) provides an early model for this sort of narrative. Zozimos (fifth century
CE
), himself a famous ascetic, used to spend Lent in the desert; there by chance he met a woman, naked but wrapped in her own hair. She told him that at twelve she became a prostitute, not for money but for ‘unbridled lust’. (I find this detail intriguing. A modern morality would tend to treat taking money for sex as more sinful than indulging genuine sexual desire. I am not sure when this shift in consciousness took place.) At twenty-nine she took a pleasure cruise to Jerusalem, which she paid for by selling sex to the sailors. However, once there she was miraculously unable to enter the church. An icon of Our Lady taught her that this was because of her sins – so she instantly repented and rushed out into the desert, where she had lived for the last forty-seven years on ‘what this wild and uncultivated solitude afforded’, before Zozimos stumbled upon her. She had lived in complete silence for all this period and had undergone agonising temptations and equally agonising mortifications, and now her ‘mind was restored to perfect calm’. She had been taught the Scriptures directly by God, as she could not read. She asked Zozimos to bring her the sacrament,
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which he did once, but when he came back again the following year he found her dead and a handy lion helped him bury her. This is an exemplary hagiographic account and it reveals some of the problems in discussing the tradition of silence.
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Nonetheless, with all these caveats in place, I wanted to brood on the contemporary accounts of the hermits in the hope of understanding this desert spirituality better. I chose
The Life of Antony
because Anthony is seen as the founder of the monastic tradition and the first of the Desert Fathers. He was not the first individual to experiment with silence as an aid to spiritual growth – we know that he himself sought instruction from some already practising hermits – but partly, indeed, because of Athanasius’s hagiography, his influence and importance, both in his own day and in the development of Christian monastic life ever since, cannot be underestimated.
Anthony was born in Egypt and, while still quite young, sold all his possessions and started to live as a hermit. Subsequently he barricaded himself into a ruined fort in the desert west of the Nile for twenty years in total solitude. (His friends posted him food through a small aperture.)
Adam Nicolson, drawing on his own experiences in the Shiants, comments on the early stages of Anthony’s spiritual development:
All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisers, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding … A hermit will force himself to confront that crowd of critics. The followers of the great St Anthony, the third-century founder of Christian monasticism, who immured himself for twenty years in the ruins of a Roman fort in the Egyptian desert, could hear him groaning and weeping as the demons tested him one by one.
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After twenty years, however, his friends and admirers broke their way into Anthony’s fortress and forcibly ended that phase of his silence. They were surprised to find that he was neither emaciated
nor mad, but fit, well and serene; ‘his mind was calm and he maintained a well-balanced attitude in all situations’, although he manifested ‘an aura of holiness’.
He then moved to the eastern desert and spent the next period of his life training and supporting other would-be hermits, teaching, healing and developing his ideas on silence and self-discipline. He was illiterate so he has left us no first-person accounts or theology, but he was widely quoted and his thoughts were recorded by a number of his disciples and visitors. However, ‘the arrival of so many people was a nuisance to him for they deprived him of the silence he desired’, so he persuaded some travelling merchants to take him with them deeper into the desert.
After a journey lasting three days and nights they came to a very high mountain at the foot of which flowed a spring of sweet water; on a small strip of flat land encircling the mountain there grew a few untended palm trees. Anthony fell in love with this spot. He accepted some bread from his fellow travellers and he remained alone on the mountain. He lived there as though he recognised that place as his own home.
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Although he made an occasional trip back to his settlements, and received visits and supplies from his brother monks, ‘he was pleased to be able to live in the desert by the work of his own hands, without troubling anyone else’. And he died there aged 105.
This pattern – first a long period of discipline and asceticism, followed by a teaching stage and ending with a second gentler withdrawal – is a very common trajectory, not only in Christianity, but in many religious traditions. Buddhist monks may not take a permanent vow of silence because, if they are successful in finding enlightenment, they will have an obligation to teach others their way. Nonetheless, reading about the final phase of Anthony’s life on his Inner Mountain, as it came to be called, while myself sitting on a mountain in the desert, moved me deeply. It opened up a kind of longing, a first awareness that Weatherhill was not going to be
enough
– that I too was looking for an inner mountain and possibly even a self-emptying that would make that possible.
As I have indicated, Athanasius was not a sweet or compliant man himself – he was an energetic, argumentative and fairly unscrupulous ecclesial politician with a remarkable lack of humility. Yet even allowing for the fact that he wanted Anthony’s prestige for his anti-Arian campaign, it is impossible to read
The Life
without realising that he saw in Anthony, whom he had met, great warmth, sanity, serenity as well as courage and self-mastery. Athanasius liked Anthony. I began to agree with Athanasius; I was encountering an extraordinarily attractive individual – wise, self-ironic, generous, integrated, happy; at peace with himself and with his fellow human beings. This was holiness; not simply a consequence or effect of silence, but the fruit of silence. Suddenly the unspeakable harshness of his life, the disciplines of silence, the long struggle to destroy his ego and empty himself of self, made a new emotional sense. I wanted to be more like Anthony.
Anthony started a major movement. I am not here going to explore the whole history of Christian hermits or silent spirituality; the ground is well covered already.
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But, briefly, during the next three centuries, thousands of Christians moved into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts to become hermits. Two different traditions emerged, although there seems to have been little dispute or competition between them. The hermits were either eremitic (solitary) or cenobitic (community based). Both these approaches to silent prayer spread fairly quickly throughout the Christian world; before Benedict established the formal basis for monastic communities in Italy, there were hermits on Mount Athos from at least the fourth century and John Cassian, who trained in the Egyptian desert, had founded a community in France in the early fifth century. Although communities are likely to leave more enduring footprints, we can be certain that there were also solitary hermits in the Sinai Desert, all over the near Middle East, in Greece, Italy, Spain and, remarkably quickly, even in Ireland. The Islamic conquest of Roman Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the mid seventh century inevitably speeded up this dispersal.
On the whole the desert hermits did not write much about their theological thinking – indeed, they did not write much about anything, even those of them who were literate. Most of what we know about their lives and their intentions we know at second hand, through extremely popular and widely disseminated collections of their ‘apothegms’, their ‘sayings’. These were often responses to questions that visitors asked them, and were frequently ascribed to the most famous of the hermits, or presented as something ‘an Old Man once said’. In the 1930s Helen Waddell, the poet and scholar, translated and edited various collections of the apothegms as
The
Sayings of the Desert Fathers
and they have since become fairly widely known in the English-speaking world.
Waddell’s collection read very immediately and freshly in Sinai. There is a lapidary quality to many of the sayings – as though they were tiny gifts given to the reader to think about and use, rather than a sustained argument. Of course, not all of them are about silence; this desert spirituality was about various ways of emptying oneself of pride, of ego, of desire for anything except God. But silence was a basic requirement for that self-exploration and self-discipline, the more intense the silence the better:
At one time Abba Arsenius
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came to a certain place and there was a bed of reeds, and the reeds were shaken by the wind. And the old man said to the brethren, ‘What is this rustling?’ and they said, ‘It is the reeds.’ The old man said to them, ‘Verily if a man sits in quiet and hears the voice of a bird, he hath not the same quiet in his heart: how much more shall it be with you, that hear the sound of these reeds?’
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