A.D. 370. CENOBITES AND ANACHORETS. 319 every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams.64 Anachorets. The monks were divided into two classes: the Coenobites, who lived under a common and regular discipline; and the The CœnoAnachorets, who indulged their unsocial, independent fana- bites and ticism.65 The most devout, or the most ambitious, of the spiritual brethren, renounced the convent, as they had renounced the world. The fervent monasteries of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, were surrounded by a Laura,66 a distant circle of solitary cells; and the extravagant penance of the Hermits was stimulated by applause and emulation.67 They sunk under the painful weight of crosses and chains; and their emaciated limbs were confined by collars, bracelets, gauntlets, and greaves of massy and rigid iron. All superfluous incumbrance of dress they contemptuously cast away; and some savage saints of both sexes have been admired, whose naked bodies were only covered by their long hair. They aspired to reduce themselves to the rude and miserable state in which the human brute is scarcely distinguished above his kindred animals; and the numerous sect of Anachorets derived their name from their humble practice of grazing in the fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd.68 They often usurped the den of some wild beast whom they affected to resemble; they buried themselves in some gloomy cavern, which art or nature had scooped out of the rock; and the marble quarries of Thebais are still inscribed with the monuments of their penance. The most perfect Hermits are supposed to have passed 69 64 See the seventh and eighth Collations of Cassian, who gravely examines why the dæmons were grown less active and numerous since the time of St. Antony. Rosweyde's copious index to the Vita Patrum will point out a variety of infernal scenes. The devils were most formidable in a female shape. 65 For the distinction of the Coenobites and the Hermits, especially in Egypt, see Jerom (tom. i. p. 45, ad Rusticum [Ep. 125, tom. i. p. 932, ed. Vallars.]), the first Dialogue of Sulpicius Severus, Rufinus (c. 22, in Vit. Patrum, 1. ii. p. 478), Palladius (c. 7, 69, in Vit. Patrum, 1. viii. p. 712, 758), and, above all, the eighteenth and nineteenth Collations of Cassian. These writers, who compare the common and solitary life, reveal the abuse and danger of the latter. 66 Suicer. Thesaur. Ecclesiast. tom. ii. p. 205, 218. Thomassin (Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. i. p. 1501, 1502) gives a good account of these cells. When Gerasimus founded his monastery, in the wilderness of Jordan, it was accompanied by a Laura of seventy cells. 67 Theodoret, in a large volume (the Philotheus in Vit. Patrum, 1. ix. p. 793-863) has collected the lives and miracles of thirty Anachorets. Evagrius (1. i. c. 21) more briefly celebrates the monks and hermits of Palestine. 68 Sozomen, 1. vi. c. 33. The great St. Ephrem composed a panegyric on these Borxo, or grazing monks (Tillemont, Mém. Ecclés. tom. viii. p. 292). The P. Sicard (Missions du Levant, tom. ii. p. 217-233) examined the caverns of many days without food, many nights without sleep, and many years without speaking; and glorious was the man (I abuse that name) who contrived any cell, or seat, of a peculiar construction, which might expose him, in the most inconvenient posture, to the inclemency of the seasons. Simeon Among these heroes of the monastic life, the name and genius of Simeon Stylites70 have been immortalised by the singular invention of an aërial penance. At the age of thirteen the young Syrian deserted the profession of a shepherd, and threw himself into an austere monastery. After a long and painful noviciate, in which Simeon was repeatedly saved from pious suicide, he established his residence on a mountain, about thirty or forty miles to the east of Antioch. Within the space of a mandra, or circle of stones, to which he had attached himself by a ponderous chain, he ascended a column, which was successively raised from the height of nine, to that of sixty, feet from the ground." In this last and lofty station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross; but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh72 might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired without descending from his column. A prince, who should capriciously inflict such tortures, would be deemed a tyrant; but it would surpass the power of a tyrant to impose a long and miserable existence on the reluctant victims of his cruelty. This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility both of the mind and body; nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves are susceptible the Lower Thebais with wonder and devotion. The inscriptions are in the old Syriac character, which was used by the Christians of Abyssinia. 70 See Theodoret (in Vit. Patrum, 1. ix. p. 848-854), Antony (in Vit. Patrum, 1. i. p. 170-177), Cosmas (in Asseman. Bibliot. Oriental. tom. i. p. 239-253), Evagrius (1. i. c. 13, 14), and Tillemont (Mém. Ecclés. tom. xv. p. 347-392). 71 The narrow circumference of two cubits, or three feet, which Evagrius assigns for the summit of the column, is inconsistent with reason, with facts, and with the rules of architecture. The people who saw it from below might be easily deceived. 72 I must not conceal a piece of ancient scandal concerning the origin of this ulcer. It has been reported that the Devil, assuming an angelic form, invited him to ascend, like Elijah, into a fiery chariot. The saint too hastily raised his foot, and Satan seized the moment of inflicting this chastisement on his vanity. A.D. 395-451. MIRACLES AND WORSHIP OF THE MONKS. 321 of any lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel, unfeeling temper has distinguished the monks of every age and country: their stern indifference, which is seldom mollified by personal friendship, is inflamed by religious hatred; and their merciless zeal has strenuously administered the holy office of the Inquisition. Miracles and the monks, 73 The monastic saints, who excite only the contempt and pity of a philosopher, were respected and almost adored by the prince and people. Successive crowds of pilgrims from Gaul and worship of India saluted the divine pillar of Simeon; the tribes of Saracens disputed in arms the honour of his benediction; the queens of Arabia and Persia gratefully confessed his supernatural virtue ; and the angelic Hermit was consulted by the younger Theodosius in the most important concerns of the church and state. His remains were transported from the mountain of Telenissa, by a solemn procession of the patriarch, the master-general of the East, six bishops, twenty-one counts or tribunes, and six thousand soldiers; and Antioch revered his bones as her glorious ornament and impregnable defence. The fame of the apostles and martyrs was gradually eclipsed by these recent and popular Anachorets; the Christian world fell prostrate before their shrines; and the miracles ascribed to their relics exceeded, at least in number and duration, the spiritual exploits of their lives. But the golden legend of their lives 3 was embellished by the artful credulity of their interested brethren; and a believing age was easily persuaded that the slightest caprice of an Egyptian or a Syrian monk had been sufficient to interrupt the eternal laws of the universe. The favourites of Heaven were accustomed to cure inveterate diseases with a touch, a word, or a distant message ; and to expel the most obstinate dæmons from the souls or bodies which they possessed. They familiarly accosted, or imperiously commanded, the lions and serpents of the desert; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk; suspended iron on the surface of the water; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile ; and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace. These extravagant tales, which display the fiction, without the genius, of poetry, have seriously affected the reason, the faith, and the morals of the Christians. Their credulity Superstition debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. Every mode of of the age. 73 I know not how to select or specify the miracles contained in the Vita Patrum of Rosweyde, as the number very much exceeds the thousand pages of that voluminous work. An elegant specimen may be found in the Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus and his Life of St. Martin. He reveres the monks of Egypt; yet he insults them with the remark that they never raised the dead; whereas the bishop of Tours had restored three dead men to life. VOL. IV. Y religious worship which had been practised by the saints, every mysterious doctrine which they believed, was fortified by the sanction of divine revelation, and all the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks. If it be possible to measure the interval between the philosophic writings of Cicero and the sacred legend of Theodoret, between the character of Cato and that of Simeon, we may appreciate the memorable revolution which was accomplished in the Roman empire within a period of five hundred years. II. The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious II. CON VERSION OF and decisive victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire; and over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the empire and embraced the religion of the Romans. The Goths were the foremost of these savage proselytes; and the nation was indebted for its conversion to a countryman, or at least to a subject, worthy to be ranked among the inventors of useful arts who have deserved the remembrance and gratitude of posterity. A great number of Roman provincials had been led away into captivity by the Gothic bands who ravaged Asia in the time of Gallienus; and of these captives many were Christians, and several belonged to the ecclesiastical order. Those involuntary missionaries, dispersed as slaves in the villages of Dacia, successively laboured for the salvation of their masters. The seeds which they planted of the evangelic doctrine were gradually propagated; and before the end of a century the pious work was achieved by the labours of Ulphilas, whose ancestors had been transported beyond the Danube from a small town of Cappadocia.a apostle of the Goths, 74 Ulphilas, the bishop and apostle of the Goths, acquired their Ulphilas, love and reverence by his blameless life and indefatigable zeal, and they received with implicit confidence the doctrines A.D. 360, &c. of truth and virtue which he preached and practised. He executed the arduous task of translating the Scriptures into their native tongue, a dialect of the German or Teutonic language; but he prudently suppressed the four books of Kings, as they might tend to irritate the fierce and sanguinary spirit of the barbarians. The 74 On the subject of Ulphilas and the conversion of the Goths, see Sozomen, 1. vi. c. 37; Socrates, 1. iv. c. 33; Theodoret, l. iv. c. 37; Philostorg. l. ii. c. 5. The heresy of Philostorgius appears to have given him superior means of information. "This is the statement of Philostorgius; but it is very suspicious, since Philostorgius was both a Cappadocian and an Arian, and may therefore have been naturally anxious to make Ulphilas a countryman. See Aschbach, Geschichte der Westgothen, p. 31.-S. A.D. 360. ULPHILAS, APOSTLE OF THE GOTHS. 323 rude, imperfect idiom of soldiers and shepherds, so il qualified to communicate any spiritual ideas, was improved and modulated by his genius; and Ulphilas, before he could frame his version, was obliged to compose a new alphabet of twenty-four letters; four of which he invented to express the peculiar sounds that were unknown to the Greek and Latin pronunciation." But the prosperous state of the Gothic church was soon afflicted by war and intestine discord, and the chieftains were divided by religion as well as by interest. Fritigern, the friend of the Romans, became the proselyte of Ulphilas ; while the haughty soul of Athanaric disdained the yoke of the empire and of the Gospel. The faith of the new converts was tried by the persecution which he excited. A waggon, bearing aloft the shapeless image of Thor, perhaps, or of Woden, was conducted in solemn procession through the streets of the camp, and the rebels who refused to worship the god of their fathers were immediately burnt with their tents and families. The character of Ulphilas recommended him to the esteem of the Eastern court, where he twice appeared as the minister of peace; he pleaded the cause of the distressed Goths, who implored the protection of Valens; and the name of Moses was applied to this spiritual guide, who conducted his people through the deep waters of the Danube to the Land of Promise.76 The devout shepherds, who were attached to his person and tractable to his 75 A mutilated copy of the four Gospels in the Gothic version was published A.D. 1665, and is esteemed the most ancient monument of the Teutonic language, though Wetstein attempts, by some frivolous conjectures, to deprive Ulphilas of the honour of the work. Two of the four additional letters express the W and our own Th. See Simon, Hist. Critique du Nouveau Testament, tom. ii. p. 219-223. Mill. Prolegom. p. 151, edit. Kuster. Wetstein, Prolegom. tom. i. p. 114.b 76 Philostorgius erroneously places this passage under the reign of Constantine; but I am much inclined to believe that it preceded the great emigration. This is the Moso-Gothic alphabet, of which many of the letters are evidently formed from the Greek and Roman. M. St. Martin, however, contends that it is impossible but that some written alphabet must have been known long before among the Goths. He supposes that their former letters were those inscribed on the runes, which being inseparably connected with the old idolatrous superstitions were proscribed by the Christian missionaries. Everywhere the runes, so common among all the German tribes, disappear after the propagation of Christianity. St. Martin, iv. p. 97, 98.-M. b This manuscript, called the Codex Argenteus, found in the sixteenth century at Werden, in Westphalia, and now preserved at Upsal, contains rather more than half of the four Gospels. In 1762 Knettel discovered and published from a Palimpsest MS. four chapters of the Epistle to the Romans: they were reprinted at Upsal, 1763. M. Mai has since that time discovered further fragments, and other remains of Moso-Gothic literature, from a Palimpsest at Milan. See Ulphilæ partium ineditarum in Ambrosianis Palimpsestis ab Ang. Maio repertarum specimen. Milan, 4to. 1819.-M. and S. Though there can be little doubt that Ulphilas made such a version, it is considered by many critics extremely doubtful whether it is contained in the MS. at Upsal, or even whether the language of that MS. is genuine Old Gothic. It is maintained that it is a century and a half later than the time of Uiphilas. See Aschbach, Gesch. der Westgothen, p. 35 seq. -S. |