That evening, at Fr. Dioscuros's invitation, I attended vespers with the monks.
Walking into the great abbey church was like entering a tunnel. Outside the monastery compound was all bright glare; inside, past the long lines of monastic sandals left mosque-like at the porch, it was so dark that the sanctuary candles and oil lamps blazed like fireflies in the soupy stygian gloom. The darkness drained the church of colour, the shadows of its rigorously simple lines appearing stern and impressive in the glimmering half-light.
As my eyes adjusted, I took in the number of monks drawn up in ranks at the front of the nave. So far in my stay I could not have seen more than a dozen of the brethren. Although I knew the monastery to be bursting with new recruits, the echoing monastic quiet conspired to make St Antony's feel strangely deserted: after the bustle and noise of Alexandria and Cairo, here one could hear every shutter creak as it was blown in the wind, every snatch of whispered monastic dialogue echoing around the ancient mud walls.
Now, as if from nowhere, at least sixty monks had materialised in the nave and all were chanting loudly in a deep, rumbling bass plainchant quite different from the elusive, bittersweet melodies of Gregorian Chant or the angular, quickfire vespers of the Greeks. Individually the gentlest of men, the Copts at prayer made a massive, dense, booming sound, each stanza sung by the monastic cantor echoed by a thundering barrage of massed male voices. The wall of sound reverberated around the church, bouncing off the squinches of the dome, crashing onto the mud-brick roof then down again like a lead weight into the nave. Yet despite its heaviness, there was nothing harsh or brutal about the Coptic chant, the swelling notes of the refrain resolving to give the whole threnody a tragic, desolate air, as if all the distilled deprivations of generations of monks were being enunciated and offered up, at once an agonised atonement for the sins of mankind and an exorcism forestalling the terrors of the night to come.
The service - like all the liturgies of desert Egypt - was conducted in Coptic, a direct descendant of the ancient tongue of the Pharaohs. The same tongue that had sung the praise of the Christian God in this church for more than one and a half thousand years had been used in the great Pharaonic temples of Thebes to praise Isis and Horus for the three thousand years preceding that: of the sacred tongues of the world, only Sanskrit has a comparable antiquity. It is a strange and exotic language whose elliptical conflation of syllables sounded as though they had been specially designed for the uttering of incantations: 'In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen,' became
'Khenevran emeviot nem ipshiri nembi ebnevma esoweb enowti enowti ami
..
.'
There was a moment of silence as the monks marched from the middle of the nave, through the swirling incense, to a long lectern near the sanctuary where a line of ancient bound vellum lectionaries lay open. There the brethren split into groups. Quietly at first, those on the north began singing a verse of the psalm of the day, those to the south answering them, the volume gradually rising, the stiff, illuminated pages of the service books all turning together as the chant thundered on into the late evening, accompanied now by an occasional clash of cymbals or an ecstatic ringing of triangles. As the service progressed and the tempo of the singing rose, novices swung their thuribles and the great cumulus clouds of frankincense coagulated into a thick white fog in the body of the nave.
Gradually, as the liturgy stretched on into its third hour, the fog of incense grew so thick that the monastic presence at the front of the nave became dim. From my place at the rear all I could see was the distant image of a line of dark figures standing at the lectern, and a little behind them a gaggle of novices in white
gelabiyas
prostrating themselves on the ground. Around me a group of large, black-clad peasant women from Upper Egypt arranged themselves in a circle, earnestly scribbling prayers and petitions onto scraps of paper. Their children and grandchildren were then dispatched to post them in the letterbox attached to the velvet-covered shrine of St Antony. At the very back of the nave another small group of Coptic pilgrims were now circling the icons, touching the face of a saint then kissing his fingers, or attempting to use saliva to stick piastre coins onto the glass of the icon-frame.
As I watched the pilgrims at work, I found myself increasingly distracted by the various images and icons of St Antony which dotted the church. Although they clearly dated from many different periods, their iconography was fixed and consistent. St Antony was shown as an old man whose white beard stretched down to his knees. He was barefoot and wore only a simple monastic habit, belted at the waist; in some icons the habit appeared to be made of animal pelts. Often the saint was shown in the company of his friend St Paul the Hermit: while St Antony was held by the Copts to be the first monk, St Paul was said to be the first hermit. When the two were shown together they were always accompanied by a raven who, according to St Jerome's version of the legend, diligently brought a loaf of bread every day to their cave. In some icons the two men were also accompanied by a pair of lions, again a reference to St Jerome's
Life of St Paul the First Hermit,
which tells how the lions helped St Antony bury his friend:
Even as St Antony pondered how he was to bury his friend, two lions came coursing, their manes flying from the inner desert, and made towards him. At the sight of them, he was at first in dread: then turning his mind to God, he waited undismayed, as though he looked on doves. They came straight to the body of the Holy Paul, and halted by it wagging their tails, then couched themselves at his feet, roaring mightily; and Antony knew well they were lamenting him, as best they could. Then, going a little way off, they began to scratch up the ground with their paws, vying with each other to throw up the sand, till they had dug a grave roomy enough for a man
...
The reason for my particular interest in the icons of St Antony was that during the Dark Ages the saint was also a favourite subject for the Pictish artists of my native Scotland, as well as for those across the sea in Ireland. The Celtic monks of both countries consciously looked on St Antony as their ideal and their prototype, and the proudest boast of Celtic monasticism was that, in the words of the seventh-century Antiphonary of the Irish monastery of Bangor:
This house full of delight Is built on the rock And indeed the true vine Transplanted out of Egypt.
Moreover, the Egyptian ancestry of the Celtic Church was acknowledged by contemporaries: in a letter to Charlemagne, the English scholar-monk Alcuin described the Celtic Culdees as
'pueri egyptiaci',
the children of the Egyptians. Whether this implied direct contact between Coptic Egypt and Celtic Ireland and Scotland is a matter of scholarly debate. Common sense suggests that it is unlikely, yet a growing body of scholars think that that is exactly what Alcuin may have meant. For there are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other Western Churches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than mitres and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent place in ritual, so much so that in early Irish sculpture clerics are distinguished from lay persons by placing a clochette in their hand. The same device performs a similar function on Coptic stelae - yet bells of any sort are quite unknown in the dominant Greek or Latin Churches until the tenth century at the earliest. Stranger still, the Celtic wheel cross, the most common symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth century, three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland.
Certainly there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that contact between the Mediterranean and the Celtic fringe was possible. Egyptian pottery - perhaps originally containing wine or olive oil - has been found during excavations at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, the mythical birthplace of King Arthur. The Irish Litany of Saints remembers 'the seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig' on the west coast of Ireland. But the fullest account of direct contact is given by none other than Sophronius himself. In his
Life of John the Almsgiver
(the saintly Patriarch with whom he and Moschos fled Alexandria in
614
a.d
.), Sophronius tells the story of an accidental voyage to Britain - more specifically, in all likelihood, to Cornwall - undertaken by a bankrupt young Alexandrian aristocrat to whom the Patriarch has lent money:
We sailed for twenty days and nights [reported the man on his return] and owing to a violent wind we were unable to tell in what direction we were going either by the stars or by the coast. But the only thing we knew was that the steersman saw [an apparition of] the Patriarch [ John the Almsgiver] by his side, holding his tiller and saying to him: 'Fear not! You are sailing quite right.' Then, after the twentieth day, we caught sight of the islands of Britain, and when we had landed we found a famine raging there. Accordingly, when we told the chief man of the town that we were laden with corn, he said, 'God has brought you at the right moment. Choose as you wish either one "nomisma" for each bushel or a return freight of tin.' And we chose half of each. Then we set sail again and joyfully made once more for Alexandria, putting in on our way at Pentapolis [in modern Libya].
I was still thinking over all these curious links joining the Celts with the Copts when vespers finally drew to a close. There was a last procession of the monks around the nave, then slowly the brethren began to file out of the doors into the fresh air and pale evening light.
As I stood outside the church, Fr. Dioscuros came over and introduced me to the Abbot. As we chatted, I happened to mention how St Antony had once been a highly revered and much sculpted figure in my home country. Surprised, the Abbot questioned me closely about the Pictish images of his patron saint, and I described to him the scene shown on a particularly beautiful seventh-century Pictish stone from St Vigeans (near Dundee) which illustrates the scene in St Jerome's
Life of St Paul the First Hermit
where the two saints meet for the first time. They eat together but cannot agree which of them should break the bread. Each defers to the other, until finally they 'agreed that each should take hold of the loaf and pull towards himself, and let each take what remained in his hands'. In the Pictish version of the scene, the two saints are shown in profile as they sit in high-backed chairs facing each other, with one hand each stretched out to hold a round loaf. It was a very different image, I said, from any I had seen in the monastery, all of which showed St Antony standing full-frontal, staring into the eyes of the onlooker, in the classic Byzantine manner.
'You are wrong,' said the Abbot, smiling enigmatically. "We have your image as well. Come, I will show you.'
We walked through the darkening monastery, the Abbot leading, staff in hand. As we made our way through the maze of mud-brick buildings, monks would emerge rustling from the shadows to touch the Abbot's feet. Eventually we arrived at a stucco-covered building. The Abbot drew a bunch of keys from his habit, selected one and turned it in the lock. The door was stiff, but he pushed it open and led me inside.
The library was narrow, long and ill-lit. On either side stretched glass cabinets, seven shelves high, stacked with a riot of heavy old liturgical books, leather-bound folios and great rolls of charters and manuscripts. Without hesitation, the Abbot walked straight over to a pillar in the middle of the room. On it was hung a framed picture.
'Here,' said the Abbot.
My heart sank. I had dreamed of stumbling across some ancient but unnoticed Coptic icon, a copy of which might have made its way to Dark Age Scotland, there to inspire the Pictish images of St Antony and St Paul I knew so well. But the picture at which the Abbot was pointing was not only a conventional Byzantine-inspired image of a full-frontal standing figure, it was also clearly very late: perhaps seventeenth or eighteenth century.
'But that's just St Antony,' I said. 'It's not Paul and Antony breaking bread. It's not in profile. It's not even
...'