The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  To turn on, hound and hunt your fellows in this way was not to harm them. No, Chrysostom reiterated, it was to save them. To turn another soul back from sin was the greatest thing that a Christian could do, better than fasting or even feeding the poor. In fiery prose, Chrysostom urged his congregation on: “Let us,” he declared—you can imagine those famous flashing eyes glinting as he spoke—“take our wives, children, and households and go out after this game and quarry. Let us drag from the snares of the Devil those whom he has made captive to his will.”35

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  “Merciful Savagery”

  There is no cruelty in regard for God’s honour.

  —St. Jerome, Letter 109.32

  IT HAD ALL SEEMED so simple: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Render unto God what is God’s. As the fourth century drew to its close and the fifth century opened, caveats were added, complications brought to bear. What, asked some of the most powerful preachers, if God and Caesar both laid claim to the same thing? Well, said the great thinkers of the first Christian century, in that case God took precedence. As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled “to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently.”1 Everything—man, law and even bureaucracy—was now to give way to God. Or rather, to His Church. And if this meant some sticky moments on earth then so be it, for, argued another aggressive Christian cleric, the greatest wrong that one could do was not to disobey the law but to disobey God. “It is better to be deprived of empire, than to become guilty of impiety.”2

  One of those who policed the law of God most fiercely of all was the infamous Egyptian monk—now saint—Shenoute.

  One night, at the turn of the fifth century, some hours after the blazing desert sun had set, there was a small bustle of activity outside Shenoute’s monastery in Egypt. Usually at this time all would be quiet and the hundreds of monks behind the walls of the White Monastery would be asleep, enjoying the brief liturgical respite between final prayers and the knocking of the wooden bell that roused them from their beds just before dawn.

  But if you had been standing outside the White Monastery on this particular night, you might have seen something unusual. Suddenly, in the stillness, there was movement. The door of the monastic gatehouse opened and a group of monks appeared. As they moved briskly away, the gate closed again behind them, shutting in the remaining monks, shutting out the demonic world. The small group moved away from the monastery, on down towards the river. Look closely, and you would have seen that there were eight of them. Look closer still, and your eye would almost certainly have been caught by one of them. Gaunt from constant fasting, his skin seemed to cling too closely to his bones. His deep-socketed eyes were as dark and sunken as holes in a stone wall—it was said that he did not sleep all night until daybreak, and only then for a moment. When he was awake, people said he wept constantly, tears as sweet as honey falling from his eyes, turning them black with his holy sorrow. This was Shenoute.

  One should not, however, mistake weeping for weakness. Shenoute might weep for the sins of the earth but he walked with the angels—and smote demons. This was a man who, it was said, conferred with John the Baptist, spoke with Jesus Christ and had personally wrestled demons to the ground. Shenoute was a man to respect—and a man to fear. Under his charismatic leadership, male and female monks flocked in vast numbers to join the monastery’s three communities, swelling its numbers into hundreds, perhaps even thousands. Once in his care, these men and women faced stringent discipline. Beatings were administered to those who strayed from the monastery’s numerous rules. A nun who “stealthily took things” received twenty blows of the rod. Another who ran after a sister “in friendship and with fleshly desire” received fifteen.3 More pain was added by the humiliating method in which such beatings were delivered: elder nuns held their errant sister down while a monk beat the soles of her feet.

  On this particular night, the gaze of Shenoute’s black, tear-washed eyes was not directed at those within his monastery, but at a man outside it. In the stillness of the desert dark, Shenoute and his seven fellow monks hurried towards the Nile and crossed it. Later it was said that they had not needed any boat or sailor for this crossing: divine providence alone had carried them, miraculously, to the other bank. Whatever the conveyance, once they reached the other side, they moved on once again towards the city of Panopolis.

  If any locals had seen the dark-robed group as they moved through the darkness they might well have felt the stirrings of fear. Monks—anonymous, rootless, untraceable—were able to commit atrocities with near impunity. “Our angels” some Christians called them. Rubbish, said non-Christians. They were not angels but ignorant, boorish thugs, men in appearance only who “led the lives of swine, and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes.” As the author Eunapius wrote with sardonic distaste: “in those days every man who wore a black robe and consented to behave in unseemly fashion in public, possessed the power of a tyrant, to such a pitch of virtue had the human race advanced!”4 Even a wholeheartedly Christian emperor mutedly observed that “the monks commit many crimes.”5

  And on that night, these monks were about to commit another. Shenoute’s target was not, this time, one of his monks but one of the wicked, godless pagans. In sermon after furious sermon Shenoute had turned his famously fiery prose on these people. Their hearts were “the nests of the spirits of wickedness.”6 If disturbed then these evil people would spit out poison.7 The Bible, Shenoute told his congregants, said that those who set up pagan images should be killed.8 As he put it in one particularly vigorous sermon, God wished His people to “remove the abominations from His presence.” The emperors, Shenoute thundered, had declared that the entire earth must be cleansed of perversions. No stone was to be left on top of any other stone of any pagan temple.9 Not one. In the entire earth.

  But on that particular night Shenoute and his seven companions would start small. They would start with the house of one single man: a local named Gessius.

  It was still pitch dark when the monks arrived outside the entrance to Gessius’s house. Gessius—to give him his full, grandly Roman name, Flavius Aelius Gessius—was a Roman citizen, a prominent landowner and a former governor, as Pliny had been. Gessius was an enviable member of the empire’s tiny elite ruling class. He was also, on that night, a marked man. For this Gessius, uncowed by Shenoute’s blustering, had committed several unpardonable crimes. On one occasion he had been overheard bluntly declaring that “Jesus was not divine.”10 On another, he had gone into a recently ruined pagan temple and, despite the laws forbidding it, had made a sacrificial offering by scattering roses. This was not only a crime, it was, perhaps more importantly, an insupportable snub to the area’s most powerful Christian, Shenoute.

  And so, on that dark night, Shenoute was going to make Gessius pay. The monks gathered round Gessius’s heavy, locked front door—and opened it. If that seems a rather simple gloss on what must have been a complicated or at the very least physically demanding procedure, then that is because Shenoute said afterwards that it was simple. The monks, he said, did not open the front door: God did.

  Shenoute and his monks then entered the dark house—which, Shenoute later explained, was not merely dim with the darkness of night but black with the darkness of evil. Despite such logistical difficulties, the monks’ progress never wavered and they moved on, through the atrium and up the stairs into the heart of Gessius’s home. Again, if the claim that a band of eight monks managed not only to break into and enter a locked house, but also to move through its Stygian gloom without rousing anyone or taking a wrong turn seems improbable, then Shenoute had an explanation for that too: God was guiding them.11

  Their divine fixer helped them once again when they finally came to Gessius’s locked private chamber. There was no need for them to put their shoulders to the door or bash it open: it merely “popped out” when Shenou
te grasped it, and fell off its hinges of its own accord, allowing the monks to carry it away easily. Later it would become clear that not everyone in the town was wholly convinced by this account. Indeed, impious tongues seem to have wagged, disparaging the idea that “the doors opened by themselves” as “big claims.” Shenoute defended himself hotly: “We did not say that they opened [for us] by themselves,” he blustered, “but rather we opened them as the Lord ordained.” A somewhat Jesuitical distinction that may not have gone a long way to reassuring his doubters.12

  Afterwards, Shenoute would speak of what happened in the next moments inside Gessius’s house with revulsion. Being in that room, he said, was like being in a pagan temple once again, back in those dark days before the righteous emperors had ordered them to be laid waste. For as they went through the door, the monks found themselves in a room whose air was heavy with incense and where the light of numerous lamps glimmered on countless carved surfaces: they were in a chamber full of heathen idols. Here was a statue of the lecherous parricide Zeus; there was one of Zeus’s father, Kronos; there was the deceitful Hecate . . .

  The entire room—or so he later claimed—was crowded by “lewd and licentious” deities. Incense smoldered on small altars; lamps, lit by a reverential hand, cast flickering light over the faces of the pagan gods. A terrible sight for a devoted Christian monk to behold. But it is hard to imagine that, as the light caught Shenoute’s own hollow-eyed face, there was not at least a small flicker of victory on it. For Shenoute—an arch-self-publicist—would have known well that if this was an awful moment then it was also a magnificent one. He had caught his enemy in the act of pagan worship. In the dim light, the dark figures of the monks moved about the room, gathering up the accursed statues, before hurrying out of the house, helped once again, of course, by God.13

  In the street outside the house, the deep blue of the Egyptian night must have seemed almost light by comparison. The monks set off, back to the river, and standing on the banks of the Nile, they smashed the statues and threw the broken fragments in. The waters swirled, then swallowed the remnants of Gessius’s paganism without a trace. A nest of Satan had been emptied.

  Later, when Shenoute was criticized for breaking and entering into another man’s house, he was utterly intransigent. “There is no crime,” he declared, “for those who have Christ.”14

  The laws of the land may not have mattered to Shenoute. The laws of his monastery were, on the other hand, to be obeyed at all times. And there were a lot of them. More than five hundred rules circumscribed every aspect of Shenoute’s monks’ lives from the moment they got up, just before dawn, to the moment that they went to sleep, and everything they did in between. There were rules on what the monks wore; what they ate (precious little, mainly bread); when they ate (infrequently); when they prayed (relentlessly); how they prayed (audibly); where they had their hands when they prayed (emphatically, for some reason, not near their ribs); how they slept (alone and without erotic desire); how they washed (infrequently, without looking at one another’s bodies or their own); whether or not they shaved (absolutely not, except with permission, for: “Cursed shall be any who shaves himself . . .”); and even where they defecated. As one rule (that perhaps raises more questions than it answers) explained: if anyone needs to “defecate into a pot or a jar or any other vessel . . . they shall ask the Male Eldest.”15

  Once inside a monastery, the monk’s life was no longer his own. Certainly his property was not. Even clothes had to be given up and left outside so that the monks might obtain equality “in all things and desire might not find a place among foolish people.” The monastery itself, however, not only desired possessions but categorically demanded them: a condition of entering was that each monk and nun must sign all their earthly possessions over to the monastery, in writing, within three months of joining. If they did not, then for this too they would find themselves, in the words of the rules, “cursed.”16

  The lands of these simple monks, naturally, began to spread. Soon the monastery grounds took in not just the monks’ buildings but also palm groves, orchards, vegetable gardens, farm animals, fields . . . The monastery even controlled minds—or attempted to. From the moment of waking, monks in Shenoute’s monastery were rarely at rest, their days filled with a punishing regime of physical work and prayer. They were even more rarely silent. Lest their minds wander onto ungodly paths as they performed the tedious basket-weaving that was a monk’s lot, they were encouraged to chant constantly—prayers, or passages of scripture—anything at all. Just as the weaving chained hands, keeping them from sin, so the chanting chained wandering minds. It has been said that the monastery at work would have sounded like nothing so much as a swarm of bees in flight.17

  Why did people sign up for such an unappealing life? It is possible that they didn’t know the full extent of its austerity when they joined. Monks who entered Shenoute’s monastery were not presented with a comprehensive contract at the door, or read their rights upon arrival. Instead, monastic discipline was more of a revealed religion, the full extent of the White Monastery laws being only slowly explained to each new entrant, little by little, once they were already inside. This may have been less Machiavellian than it sounds: to hear all the laws in one go would have made for a long evening. Nevertheless, by the time monks fully realized the form of their new life they would—now bereft of their money, their land and even their own clothes—have been almost powerless to leave it.

  Once a monk had given himself to his new monastic master he had to obey him—or face the consequences. Numerous rules begin with the formulation “Cursed be . . . ” Cursed were those who didn’t give all their wealth to the monastery; cursed were those who shaved without having been ordered to; cursed were those who looked at another monk with desire. If a monk ate, say, the forbidden fruit of cucumber at the wrong time then, the law informed him, “he sins.” At least sixty of the rules were devoted to sexual transgressions. Looking desirously at the nakedness of your neighbor while he washed was wrong; as was staring “with desirous feeling” at your own nakedness; those who sat “close to one’s neighbour with a filthy desire in their heart” were also “cursed.”18

  Note that last one: “with a filthy desire in their heart.” No sin had been committed. The mere intention of sin was now a sin in itself. In Shenoute’s monastery even thoughts were policed. “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him?” the Lord had asked.19 The answer from the White Monastery at least was a resounding no. As this new generation of hard-line Christian preachers constantly reminded their congregations in fierce, hectoring speeches, there was nowhere to hide from the all-seeing eyes of the Lord.

  Shenoute conducted frequent verbal inquiries and physical searches of those in his care. A period of four weeks every year was given over to a public examination of the monks. During this time, all the monks would gather together and publicly “scrutinize our words and deeds.” This was supplemented by frequent physical inspections during which an official would search the cell of each monk. As the monastic rules declared with precision: “Twelve times per year—once a month—the Male Eldest shall enter all the Houses of the congregation and inspect all the cells within them.” Man looks upon your face; God sees into your soul. Shenoute looks into your room.20

  It is clear that Shenoute’s monks were terrified of him. He was determined that the monks behind his walls—hundreds, possibly thousands of them—were to be as one: they were to work at the same time, pray at the same time, pause at the same time. There was a time to rise, a time to pray, a time to eat, a time to sleep . . . A time to be obedient. The monks were to move with one mind, as one body; a single swarm rather than a collection of individuals. The possessive pronoun was forbidden: one could not say “my bread” as all things belonged to everyone—and to no one. All must obey the clacking of the wooden monastic bell instantly—and woe betide anyone who did not. The bell was sounded twice: the first sounding indicated that the monks should
stop what they were doing and pause; the second that they should move on to the next activity. Once, one of Shenoute’s monks happened to be putting wood into the oven in the monastery’s bakery when the first bell went. Obediently, the monk waited, hand in the heat, until the bell sounded again—whereupon he finally removed his ruined hand.21

  It wasn’t only monks who felt Shenoute’s anger. He could vent the righteous wrath of God on anyone who he felt deserved it, including demons. One evening, a bureaucrat was due to inspect the White Monastery—possibly to investigate the terrible disciplinary violence that was rumored to be inflicted against erring monks. Shenoute saw the figure entering the monastery without knocking. According to legend, the official then grabbed Shenoute, whereupon Shenoute wrestled back, finally overcoming the man by putting him in a scissor hold between his thighs. This, Shenoute realized, was not some local official or an angel: it was a demon. In another retelling, the figure is the Devil himself, while Shenoute’s wrestling becomes even more athletic: the anecdote concludes with Shenoute hurling the demon to the ground and putting his foot on his head.22

  Religious intensity was not new. Greece and Rome had known those who took religion to extremes and who had gone about their lives feeling humbled and crushed by fear of the gods. Generally, though, religious fervor had been a private passion—and it had kept within the confines of the law. But as Christianity gained control, religiosity started to become a public duty and would, with self-righteous pride, overstep the boundaries of the law. Some of the most important thinkers of the era supported such behavior. If necessary, one must make oneself obnoxious. One must stop at nothing—even harming other people—in the service of the Lord. There is, after all, no crime for those who have Christ.