THE SEEKERS

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Four respectable pagan deputations begged Gratian’s successor, Emperor Valentinian II, to restore the Altar of Victory, symbol of the gods under whom Rome had flourished. They set the stage for a classic confrontation between the old religion of the greatness of Rome and the new religion of Christ and Constantine. Spokesman for restoring the pagan altar was the eloquent Symmachus, a wealthy and noble senator, prefect of the city, a pontiff and augur, and proconsul of Africa, who reported on the affair to Emperor Valentinian II. His moving plea for tradition was also a surprisingly liberal diatribe against ideology. “Grant, I implore you,” urged Symmachus, “that we who are old men may leave to posterity that which we received as boys.” The ancestral Roman polytheism had kept people honest, and would continue to do so. “All things,” he declared, “are full of God, and no place is safe for perjurers, but the fear of transgression is greatly spurred by the consciousness of the very presence of deity.” Then Symmachus quoted the Eternal City herself (aeterna Roma) begging the emperors:

  Let me use my ancestral ceremonies, she says, for I do not repent me of them. Let me live after my own way; for I am free. This was the cult that drove Hannibal from the walls of Rome and the Gauls from the Capitolium. Am I kept for this, to be chastised in my old age? . . . I do but ask peace for the gods of our fathers, the native gods of Rome. It is right that what all adore should be deemed one. We all look up at the same stars. We have a common sky. A common firmament encompasses us. What matters it by what kind of learned theory each man looketh for the truth? There is no one way that will take us to so mighty a secret. All this is matter of discussion for men of leisure. We offer your majesties not a debate but a plea.

  The answer to Symmachus is also eloquent, but more surprising. It is given by Saint Ambrose (340-397), who had brought Saint Augustine to Christianity. Apologizing for his homely words, Ambrose deals respectfully with Symmachus’ arguments in a simple paean to progress, a translation of the Gospel message of Good News to the people of Rome:

  Why cite me the examples of the ancient? It is no disgrace to pass on to better things (nullus pudor est ad melora transire). Take the ancient days of chaos when elements were flying about in an unorganized mass. Think how that turmoil settled into the new order of a world and how the world has developed since then, with the gradual invention of the arts and the advances of human history. I suppose that back in the good old times of chaos, the conservative particles objected to the advent of the novel and vulgar sunlight which accompanied the introduction of order. But for all that, the world moved. And we Christians too have grown. Through wrongs, through poverty, through persecution, we have grown; and the great difference between us and you is that what you seek in surmises, we know. How can I put faith in you when you confess that you do not know what you worship?

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  Islands of Faith: Monasteries

  Of all the institutions created by Christian Seekers, none was more influential in its time nor more obscured in the currents of later history than the monasteries. All the great world religions have found a place for the monk. Monasticism is generally based on a belief that the world is evil and that withdrawal will somehow open the way to higher truth. Withdrawal has commonly included celibacy (escape from physical passions and family ties), obedience to a superior (escape from the selfish will), and poverty (escape from the material world). The Hindus from earliest times had monasteries where monks shared a life of mortification and study of sacred texts. The Gautama Buddha elevated the Hindu doctrine of deliverance and withdrawal into the only path to Nirvana, and provided more than two hundred rules for his monks. In Tibet after the seventeenth century Buddhist monasteries became major state institutions. Before the Communist conquest there, monks were said to form a fifth of the population and the government was controlled by the chief abbot, the Dalai Lama.

  The Old Testament religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—give monasticism a lesser role. In Judaism, withdrawal from the world to seek union with Jehovah would be blasphemous. Still, the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to record rules for the monastic life of the Essenes. Mohammed declared that there were no monks in Islam, and did not mention them in the Koran. Nor does monasticism seem to have been essential to Christian practice. We know of no Christian monks until at least two centuries after the death of Jesus. And withdrawal never became as integral to Christianity as it was to Buddhism. But Christianity developed its own fertile monastic institutions. Although only one form of Christian life, the monastic way attracted some of the most eloquent, persuasive, and constructive of the faithful, and it became a vehicle and catalyst of Western culture.

  The story of Christian efforts at withdrawal dramatizes the problems man makes for himself by efforts to separate the quest for meaning from experience of the world. The monasteries that would shape Christian life in Europe in the Middle Ages found their unlikely origins in the Egyptian desert. The Church, which, as we have seen, organized and had given power to the faithful, created a new need for escape. Escape from the oppressive powers of the community into the sacrificing Christlike self, and from the burdens of the material world. And the ascetic spirit took the form of monasticism.

  The ironies of this monastic search for meaning have made monks in the West an attractive target for criticism. They provided Edward Gibbon with the subject for one of his most vivid and acerbic chapters. “The Ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world, to perpetual solitude, or religious society” but “soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised.” The monks with poverty and self-denial “trod the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness. . . . Time continually increased, and accidents could seldom diminish, the estates of the popular monasteries . . . and in the first century of their institution, the infidel Zosimus has maliciously observed that, for the benefit of the poor, the Christian monks had reduced a great part of mankind to a state of beggary.” For the worldly, Gibbon’s monastic history revealed the futility of the effort to flee from the community and the material world into the security of the self.

  The legendary founder of Christian monasticism, usually called the first Christian monk, was a Coptic Christian, Saint Anthony of Egypt (c. 250-355), who had inherited wealth. He became an ascetic at the age of twenty and at thirty-five retired to solitude in the desert. For the next twenty years he remained in retreat in a ruined fortress, then instructed others who followed his example. So he set the style and suggested the name “hermit” (from the Greek word for desert) for those who (in Gibbon’s phrase) sought “lonely retreat in a natural or artificial desert.”

  Saint Anthony’s own career was a parable of the impossibility of retreat. Athanasius’ classic life of Anthony recounted how he had read Jesus’ command to the rich young man to “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Son of a wealthy landed peasant, Anthony had chosen the desert for his experiment because it was the proverbial habitat of the demons against whom the hermits would wage war. The “Demonology” of the New Testament was a rich and vivid inheritance from Jewish apocalyptic literature, recounting the many forms that Satan took to seduce mankind. Athanasius reported how Satan, having failed to tempt Anthony by the joys of the family he had given up, then took ingenious guises—monks with bread when he was fasting, women, beasts. All these Anthony repelled with prayer and the sign of the cross. These Christian efforts to ward off evil spirits led the emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363) to declare that “the quintessence of their theology [was] to hiss at demons and make the sign of the cross on their foreheads.” The struggles of Saint Anthony would enrich Western art with the visions of Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, and Max Ernst.

  Anthony’s fame attracted visitors and disciples. During his lifetime others made their retreats into the desert, where they followed the tenets of Egyptian monasticism—manual labor, prayer, and reading Scripture. They favored the region around Luxor in Upper Egypt and areas west of the Nile Delta
in Lower Egypt. Commonly they settled in huts near the cell of a seasoned saintly hermit. Many were illiterate peasants who had to memorize passages of Psalms and the New Testament for recitation and meditation. But they managed somehow, assisted by their literate fellows.

  The fourth century saw a wide variety of ascetic experiments from Egypt and neighboring regions. The monk (from monachos, Greek for one who lives alone) sought isolation from ordinary social relations, but not necessarily from other ascetics. The retreating monk imposed chastity on himself along with a strict routine of prayer and Scripture reading. Scholars speculate that in the year 1000, when the population of the Byzantine Empire was about 15 million, the empire may have held more than 150,000 monks and some seven thousand monastic establishments. Emperors aiming to prohibit new monasteries recited the excessive numbers already in existence.

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  The two different styles of asceticism that appeared in late-third-century Egypt would mark the traditions of Western monasteries for following centuries. One was the individualist, the tradition of the hermit, or anchorite (from the Greek for withdrawal), of which Saint Anthony was the founder and patron. The other was the communal, or cenobitic (from Greek koinos bios for living a common life), of which Saint Pachomius was the father. Pachomius, born in Upper Egypt about 287, when in his twenties was guided by an older man to try the solitary life. After seven years as a hermit, he had discovered the trials of the solitary life and he founded a community of monks on the right bank of the Nile north of Thebes. There the monks lived a “cenobitic” life grouped in houses (each holding thirty to forty men) within a circling wall. They gathered for prayer and meals and followed a rule of 194 chapters devised by Pachomius. At his death in 346 there were nine of his monasteries for men with several thousand monks and two for women. Then there developed the laura (or lavra), combining features of the hermitage and the monastery in a collection of the cells of individual hermits who gathered on regular occasions.

  Enthusiastic ascetic Seekers exhausted their imaginations in quest of personal ways up “the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness.” With diabolical ingenuity they devised obstacles on the angelic path. The most famous of these was Saint Simeon Stylites, a passionate shepherd born about 390 near modern Aleppo in Syria and who died in 459. When his strict ascetic habits made him unwelcome in his monastery, he became a hermit and was soon venerated for his miracles. Then what Gibbon called his “singular invention of an aerial penance” helped him escape people demanding his blessing, and punished him at the same time that it separated him from importunate admirers. To pursue his divine meditations without interruption, he began living on top of a single column, and so acquired the name of “Stylites” (from the Greek for pillar dweller). At first the column was only six feet high but was gradually extended till it reached about fifty feet. There, beginning about 420, he is said to have remained day and night until his death in 459. The narrow platform surrounded by a railing was exposed to the elements and too small for him to do anything but stand or sit. While the railing prevented him from falling, a ladder communicated with the ground where acolytes brought small gifts of food. Only occasionally would he descend to give pilgrims his blessing or his counsel. Awe at his performance converted many visitors to Christianity and was said to have persuaded the Eastern Roman Emperor Leo I to the orthodox view of the dual nature of Christ. Simeon’s example inspired other ascetics.

  Simeon Stylites was only the most ingenious and conspicuous of the self-mortifying hermits, Seekers desperate to separate themselves from the common life. The Dendrites lived in trees or in hollow tree trunks. The “Browsers” subsisted on roots and grass. Some dwelt in tombs or in huts with roofs so low that it was impossible to stand inside. Others loaded themselves with chains.

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  The later history of monasticism reminds us again and again of the moderating influence of community on the excesses of self-regarding virtue. Saint Basil of Caesarea (329-379), rare among the Church Fathers in doubting the possibility of a good solitary life, insisted that only in community could fallen mankind repair human weakness by the works of charity. His “Rules” declared “That it is necessary with a view to pleasing God to live with like-minded persons, and that solitude is difficult and dangerous.”

  Quest for the good monastic life produced Saint Benedict’s Rule, one of the most remarkable documents of Seekers in Western Christendom and one of the most durable institutions of Western communal life. The leader and creator of the movement of moderate communal asceticism, Saint Benedict came from Umbria, northeast of Rome. Here was another story, like that of Saint Anthony and Saint Thomas Aquinas, of a rich man’s son seeking through Christian withdrawal to escape the meaningless world of dissipation. The transformation of Western monasticism was a legacy of this Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547).

  Most of what we know of Benedict’s life comes from the Dialogues of his admiring disciple Saint Gregory the Great (540-604; pope, 590-604). Gregory, himself a rich man’s son, had given away his landed inheritance to establish a half-dozen monasteries and fled into the retreat of a monastery. In 590 he was reluctantly summoned by acclamation of the people of Rome from his monastic cell to the throne of Saint Peter. Architect of the medieval papacy, he also left the Gregorian chant as his legacy. His Dialogues report the life and miracles of Saint Benedict, which would endure in Christian tradition.

  Benedict lived when Theodoric and his Ostrogoths were conquering the cities of northern Italy. Totila, king of the Goths, repeatedly besieged Rome and finally took the city in 549. Sent to Rome for a liberal education, Benedict was repelled by the dissipation and decadence he saw. “He withdrew the foot he had just placed in the entry to the world; and despising the pursuit of letters, and abandoning his father’s home and property, desiring to please God alone, he determined to become a monk.” Benedict tried living in a village (Enfide) about thirty miles from Rome. There when one day by earnest prayer he miraculously mended an earthenware tray that had been shattered, he attracted a throng of visitors. To find a more secure retreat, Benedict, under the influence of a holy man nearby, settled into a desolate cave in a rocky cliff, where he remained isolated for three years. He was fed only the bread that the holy man drew up in a basket and let down in a rope over the rock. When shepherds discovered him, clothed in the skin of beasts, they first took him for a wild animal. As his reputation spread people brought him food and asked his blessing and his advice.

  In these years, Gregory reports, Benedict was repeatedly besieged by Satan. “The tempter came in the form of a little blackbird, which began to flutter in front of his face. It kept so close that he could easily have caught it with his hand. Instead he made the sign of the Cross and the bird flew away. . . . The evil spirit recalled to his mind a woman he had once seen, and before he realized it his emotions were carrying him away. . . . Almost overcome in the struggle, he was on the point of abandoning the lonely wilderness when suddenly with the help of God’s grace he came to himself.” To defeat temptation he suddenly threw off his clothes and flung himself into a nearby patch of nettles and briars. “There he rolled and tossed till his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain off the poison of temptation from his body.” He never again suffered a temptation of this kind.

  Benedict’s reputation for holiness brought him the invitation to become abbot of a nearby rock-hewn monastery. But when the monks found his discipline too strict, they tried to get rid of him by poisoning his wine. “A glass pitcher containing this poisoned drink,” Saint Gregory reports, “was presented to the man of God for customary blessing. As he made the sign of the Cross over it with his hand, the pitcher was shattered even though it was well beyond his reach at the time. It broke at his blessing as if he had struck it with a stone.” He organized the disciples attracted by his “signs and wonders” into twelve monasteries with an abbot and twelve mon
ks in each in the neighborhood of Subiaco about fifty miles east of Rome.

  In 529, when a jealous local priest drove him away, he moved eighty miles south of Rome to Monte Cassino, where he built his famous monastery on the site of a pagan temple he destroyed. (Menaced by Lombards and Saracens, and shaken by earthquakes, this was the key point in the German defensive line in World War II, blocking the Allied advance on Rome, but it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. It has since been rebuilt.) At first Benedict seems to have lived at Monte Cassino as a hermit. Later he no longer put his disciples in separate houses, but collected them under his supervision. And here he wrote his famous Rule, his prescription for the communal monastic life, initially for the monks of Monte Cassino, but eventually to become a norm for monasteries in the West. So Benedict’s good sense attracted many into Christian faith and opened the gates of the Western Heritage to other Seekers. His Benedictine Rule was an inspired treaty of otherworldly faith with the demands of this world. A pact between asceticism and common sense, it was the farthest cry from the self-flagellating hermits of the Egyptian desert.

  Benedict’s “little Rule for beginners” we can read today in a pamphlet of seventy-three chapters, less than a hundred pages. “We are about to open a school for God’s service,” the Prologue announces, “in which we hope nothing harsh or oppressive will be directed.” He opposes all self-inflicted pain, assuming that the world itself will provide enough. Having heard that a monk in a cave near Monte Cassino had chained his foot to the rock, Benedict sent him a message, “If you are truly a servant of God, chain not yourself with a chain of iron but with the chain of Christ.”

  Benedictine asceticism was moderate. Except, perhaps, for the classic monastic rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it was not an unsuitable life for the devout layman. The Fathers of the Egyptian desert who made sleeplessness a virtue took their rest on bare ground with rocks for pillows. But Benedict’s Rule allowed eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for most of the year, with “mattress, coverlet, blanket and pillow.” There was no fetish of bare feet. Shoes were to be provided and “suitable clothing . . . dependent on the climate.” Not starvation, but frugality, was the dietary rule, and wine was drunk sparingly. “Idleness is an enemy of the soul,” prescribed Chapter 48. “Therefore the brothers should be occupied according to schedule in either manual labor or holy reading.”