The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  It didn’t take long before he was sought out by his followers even here, any life in the desert being conspicuous. When Hilarion, the founder of Palestinian monasticism, visited St. Antony, he made his excuses after a couple of months, unable to tolerate the crowds. This is the constant struggle of the Egyptian monk to this day: in his exceptionality he attracts followers. The faithful want to kiss his hand, to receive his blessing, his baraka. Merely to know of his existence is not enough; we must bathe in the grace of his presence.

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  SOME ANCIENT GREEK is helpful. Monakhós means “single” or “alone.” Anachorein means “to withdraw.” Érēmos is “a wilderness or desert.” From the first comes “monk,” from the second “anchorite,” from the third “hermit.”

  A centripetal force governed Egyptian monastic life in the years after Antony: to begin with, men (there were a few women too) resided in isolated cells, far from one another; these in turn coalesced over “generations” into laurae, small communities whose members came together for meals and prayer. Finally these became formalised monasteries, which at their height each numbered several hundred souls. The life of the anchorite gave way to communal, or coenobitic, monasticism. In a land of little water, where barbarians might attack at any moment, a communal life was only practical. Coenobitism came out of the harshness of the setting, a compromise with its dryness. Nevertheless, some individuals persisted in the solitary life, occupying caves or mud huts beyond the security of the monastery walls. They were the ones Peter most admired.

  It is a follower of Antony’s, Pachomius, a former Roman soldier, who is usually considered the true founder of coenobitic monasticism. He developed the first written rule, and in around 318 the first planned monasteries. About 380, some twenty-five years after Antony’s death, a young monk from Scythia Minor (today’s Bulgaria/Romania) visited the desert monasteries around the Wadi Natrun. His name was John Cassian, “John the Ascetic” (he who first described the symptoms of desert accidie). He would return to Europe to found the Abbey of St. Victor in Marseilles, which would serve as a model for further European monasteries. Cassian’s written reflections on the lives of the monks of Egypt, the Conferences of the Egyptian Monks and the Institutes of the Monastic Life, were central influences on Benedict of Nursia. As a hermit living in Subiaco, Italy, Benedict went on to found twelve monasteries. His “Rule,” based closely on the writings of Cassian, became the key text of Western monasticism.

  The life has not changed substantially since the German theologian and traveller Johann Michael Wansleben visited St. Antony’s in 1672: “The rule obliges them to give up marriage, all carnal desires and the relationship to their parents,” he writes. “They are not to possess anything; they are to live in the desert, to abstain from meat and wine…They are bound to recite the Canonical Hours, and before retiring at night they prostrate themselves 150 times.”

  The desert was the matrix in which Christian monasticism was formed. The motives of those who left the cities for the desert were varied, but for monks the desert was no peaceful refuge. On the contrary it was teeming—with satyrs, centaurs and demons and the uncounted millions of the Evil One’s foot-soldiers. You went there not only for liberty or meditative quiet, but as to a front line. To take yourself to the desert is not to pursue a new life but to renounce life. An elderly monk I befriend takes me to the concrete ossuary where the remains of the most prominent of St. Antony’s fathers are shelved: “We do not say ‘he has died’,” he tells me. “We say ‘he has lain down’. A monk is already dead.”

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  AS SOON AS I feel I’m becoming familiar with the monastery—that I know where this passageway or staircase leads, or which alleyway or door I must pass through to reach the old church from the new—I find myself somewhere unfamiliar, and have to retrace my steps. Sometimes it feels like the variety of new places concealed within the maze of alleyways, rooms and corridors is infinite. It is hard to date the monastery’s founding, because it evolved piece by piece, accreting shanty-like around a central church. The first record of a monastic establishment at the site dates from around 360, during the reign of Julian the Apostate, just a few years after Antony’s death. What we can be sure of is that the monastery’s twin hearts, always, were first the spot where that miraculous sweet spring flows out of the mountain, and second the place under the old church where St. Antony’s body is said to be interred. Once a wall had been built, the enclave became a citadel and the coenobitic life can be said finally to have prevailed over the anchoritic. Today the monastery still resembles a castle; the architecture of defence is unmistakable. Protruding over the modern gateway is the ancient winch-room. As recently as the 1930s there was no gate, and the only way in was to clamber into a basket and wait for the monks to haul you up. At the centre of the monastery, within the walls, is the qasr, a defensive keep for use if the walls were breached, with a wooden drawbridge leading to it from an adjacent building. Above all, belittling everything human, is the most sure wall of all, the South Galala Mountains.

  One day after vespers I sit with one of the older monks, Father Samwul, on a bench positioned on the gantry in front of his quarters. The bench is covered with a red rag-rug bleached pink by the sun. We look out at the monastery and the mountains beyond. He’s been here for thirty-eight years, he tells me. He must be in his seventies. When he arrived, there were only five monks and the monastery was near-derelict; today there are 130 including novitiates. But he doesn’t feel optimistic—which is to say he fears for the future of Christianity in Egypt. I ask him about Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the new Egyptian president. Surely for Christians he is preferable to the Muslim Brotherhood? “Yes, yes, on the outside,” he says. “But inside?” He looks at the monastery walls again. “You in Europe, let me tell you, you’re foolish!” He paid a visit to Britain a few years ago and passed through Rotherham. “I saw two churches, close to each other, and you will not believe me, but they were allowing one of them to be used as a mosque! A mosque! Only we, the Copts of Egypt, only we know what Islam truly is. Maybe in ten years you will understand. When London is Muslim.”

  The outer wall—beyond the original, inner wall—was built only twenty years ago. It’s about six kilometres long, an arm reaching out from the mountains to enfold the holy ground. Its purpose, I’ve been told, is to ensure the “peace” of the desert and keep out the camels (a mob of five or six hangs around a rubbish dump beyond the gates, drawn by the scent of water). But it is also a security measure, even if largely symbolic. Father Samwul, as we look out over the place where he has spent most of his adult life, tells me that ten years ago, while he and the other senior fathers were away at a conference in Alexandria, the army was sent to destroy the wall. The authorities claimed that the land (the empty desert) belonged to the state. “ ‘You haven’t paid for the land!’ they said. Paid for the land…! We’ve been here for fifteen hundred years!” The bulldozers were forced to withdraw before they did any damage. “The law says that any land within 150 metres of a site of antiquity belongs to the owner. Therefore the desert is ours; ours, as it has always been.”

  In the monastery’s gift shop, among the cheaply printed liturgies, I come across a prayer pamphlet in Arabic, with a familiar image on its cover. There is still a market for the orange jumpsuit. A line of men so dressed is being shepherded along a beach by a corresponding line of men, much taller, clad in black from head to foot. In 2015, twenty-one Egyptian Copts working in Libya were seized by ISIS and, as shown in the video from which the image was taken, beheaded on a beach. Blood and sand. A caption on the video called them “The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.” The murdered men were made saints by the Coptic Church.

  For Copts, the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 was less a cause of anxiety than a liberation from the Byzantine Christian rule that had curtailed their religious freedom almost as se
verely as the Romans. During the Fifth Crusade, Copts fought alongside Muslims against the Franks. Under the Mamluks in the fourteenth century, however, came a period of ferocious repression during which Coptism withered and the monasteries were abandoned. While this situation improved following the Turkish Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century, it was not until the early twentieth century that Copts were granted equal rights of national citizenship.

  Despite periods in which it flourished, Christianity was consistently viewed as a threat to pagan Rome. A series of anti-Christian persecutions hastened the monastic flight to the desert. The most bloody of these were carried out under the emperors Decius in 250, Diocletian in 303 and Maximinus in 311. So traumatic was Diocletian’s reign for Egypt’s Christians that the Coptic calendar begins on the day he came to power, the “year of the martyrs,” 29 August 284. At the height of Maximinus’s persecutions, Antony had yet to enter the inner desert, and was still living close to the Nile at Pispir (today’s Deir al-Maymun), the place known as the Outer Mountain. Far from remaining in this sanctuary, however, he was drawn by the slaughter of his coreligionists to temporarily return to the world to confront the regime in Alexandria. “He longed to suffer martyrdom,” Athanasius writes. So shaken were the Roman authorities by his fearlessness and zeal, “they commanded no monk should appear in the judgement hall,” and the persecutions effectively ceased. They had seen the radical power of the anchorite; it would only be fortified by martyrdom. Antony returned to the Outer Mountain, his faith strengthened, his discipline “much severer…he was ever fasting, and he had a garment of hair on the inside, while the outside was skin…And he neither bathed his body with water to free himself from filth, nor did he ever wash his feet.” Two years later, in his early fifties, he went to the Inner Mountain, today’s South Galala. While the Inner Mountain remains the spiritual heartland of the Coptic Church, monasticism’s coenobitic form was evolved and tested fifteen camel-days away on the edge of Egypt’s Western Desert. It was the life refined there that became the model for Coptic monasticism and the traditions that flowed out of Egypt across the world.

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  BEFORE COMING TO St. Antony’s, I travelled from Cairo to the Wadi Natrun, about a hundred kilometres north-west of the city, off the desert road to Alexandria. From the fourth century onwards, it was a centre of monasticism, with thousands of monks inspired by Antony and Pachomius occupying dozens of monasteries and hundreds of isolated cells in the vicinity of the shallow desert valley. Palladius, in 387, reckoned there were five thousand monks living there. The wadi, thirty-five kilometres long and eight wide, is named for the sodium-carbonate salts, natron, harvested from its lakebeds for use as a detergent and later in the chemical industry. The pharaohs used it in mummification on account of its desiccating and bacteriological properties. A few kilometres north were the mountain of Scetis, occupied by monks until the fifth century; and, deep in the Western Desert, Cellia, named for the scattered cells of the monks who held out there. Today, Cellia and Scetis are long abandoned and the natron-processing works founded in the nineteenth century is defunct, but in the Wadi Natrun four monasteries remain: the Monastery of St. Macarius, the Monastery of the Romans, the Monastery of St. Bishoi and the Monastery of the Syrians. It was the first of these that interested me, sacred as it was to the memory of the founder of monasticism in the Wadi Natrun.

  Among the most vivid modern travellers’ accounts of the region is Constantin von Tischendorf’s Travels in the East of 1847: “A powerful Arab carried me on his shoulder over the canal,” he tells us of his approach to the valley. The baron would have been something of a sight, as he walked (or was hefted) towards the monasteries: “double spectacles, each of which with its four blue glasses, shaded my eyes from the dangerous reflection of the sun on the sand; and my head was decorated with a large straw hat from which hung suspended an ample green veil.” He notes the chain of eight salt lakes that ran along the valley bottom, their “obscure reddish-blue waters” and the flamingos that rise from the reeds as his caravan passes. But the desert of those pioneers has gone. Beside the road to Alex, past the prison where the deposed president Morsi is held—“Bad, bad man,” says my taxi driver—stands “Wadi Natrun City,” dozens of closely built residential tower blocks funded by Sisi. A rutted dirt track leads from it through villages where sacks of fertiliser are heaped outside stores. The people barely raise their heads as we pass: they are used to outsiders. The access road to St. Macarius passes between fields of alfalfa, oranges, pomegranates and beets. We stop, the driver and I, to fill our pockets and the glove compartment with roadside dates. A healing sense of abundance. Birdsong, shrubs cascading with flowers, bright petals in the dust.

  The monastic desert, in fact, was never a very distant planet; more a moon circling close to the human world, close enough that it was accessible to the visitor (those nineteenth-century Europeans in their blue shades); close enough, above all, that the world the monks had renounced could not be forgotten. The Wadi Natrun was a prominence from which, on the one hand, to the east, the human world of the Nile and Alexandria continued to register, while, on the other, to the west, you looked out on the Sahara, the limit of the world, and the infinite beyond. In this sense the desert is a stage on which the eternal life of paradise is enacted for a worldly audience. The monks are witnesses to the world but not implicated in it. Hence they are trusted by the people.

  It was the Cairo–Alexandria road that transformed the Wadi Natrun, just as the Red Sea highway transformed St. Antony’s. The road turned the monasteries into sites of mass pilgrimage, altering the life of the monks forever. In photos taken before the “Alex Desert Road” was built in 1936, the Wadi Natrun monasteries stand in startling isolation, each a fortress on its treeless terrace of gravel and salt-encrusted rock, like a modern army’s forward operating base. Despite their isolation and apparent impenetrability, the monasteries were repeatedly sacked by tribes from the oases of the Western Desert. This sense of embattlement, of the monasteries as imperilled wellsprings of the faith, persists.

  At the Monastery of St. Macarius I met Father Mercurius. He was about forty, with the usual unkempt wiry black beard of the Coptic monk; the black robe and black skullcap, and the usual subdued voice. Today was neither a feast day nor a holiday, but the monastery was bustling with pilgrims from Cairo and Alexandria, each of them wishing to kiss his hand and receive his blessing as we walked. He never declined; never turned his back. “They believe we are saints,” he said.

  Children in particular loved the monks: they queued to kiss Mercurius’s hand, and to each he proffered first a hand placed on the top of the head then, from some cache secreted in his robe, a boiled sweet, or a prayer card bearing a picture of an icon of St. Macarius. The mutual warmth, so tangible, reminded me of a family reunion; such joy among the visitors, to be luxuriating in the presence of these men they loved, who had guarded the flame of Egyptian Christianity against every attack.

  Father Mercurius asked one of the monastery boys to bring us refreshments and led me to a bench shaded by a grape bower where we would not be disturbed by the pilgrims. Glasses of tea arrived on a tray and for a while the only noise was the breeze in the vines and our slurping. He leaned behind us to where a planter stood, and fondled the tender green shoots carpeting its soil. “How I love them! So small!” He stroked a flowering shrub growing beside them. “This I love, too,” he smiled; “but these little ones…!”

  I asked him how long he had been here: “A monk does not measure his life in years, you must understand, but in the quality of his heart.” Having donned black, he entered eternity; the years, in principle, ceased to register. But then he smiled: “For five years.”

  “I have observed,” he went on, “the similarities between our life here in Egypt and the life of the Buddhists. I once met a Buddhist monk, a Tibetan who was visiting us here, and I saw that he and I were like brothers. We had no
language in common, and yet our lives were the same: solitude, love, self-denial, work, obedience, virginity. Yes, yes, different forms of religion, but our days, our obligations…

  “There is a story told in our texts. Two monks come to a river and find a girl drowning. Now, you know—everybody knows—that a monk must not touch a girl, whether he is Coptic or Greek or Russian or Buddhist. But one of the monks immediately jumps into the water and rescues her. The other monk, afterwards, says, ‘How did you do that? How did you hold that girl? Did it not burn you?’ And the monk who went into the water says, ‘I held her only in my arms; you,’ ” Father Mercurius tapped his head twice—“ ‘you held her here.’ And this is what is interesting—” He put his tea down. “I was reading a Buddhist text recently and I found the same story! I don’t mean it was similar. It was identical. And so I ask myself: which was written first, and how did the story travel so far? Can it be that from similar lives the same stories will always be born?”

  It has been suggested that the Egyptian monastic obsession with abstinence, thus with childlessness, was an act of defiance against the Roman occupation. Others have called it an expression of mental crisis. The Alexandrian theologian Origen, like Abraham, resolved the question by bloodily detaching the offending organ from himself. St. Antony “repressed the body and kept it in subjection,” Athanasius tells us. Certainly the massed flight to the desert of third- and fourth-century Egypt represented a disruption of the social order—it is partly this that monasticism’s critics find objectionable. But abstinence in the service of God was hardly an invention of the Desert Fathers. Didn’t St. John believe that union between a man and a woman was a crime? Flesh, being evil, must be broken, and the desert could be a tool in its subdual.

  I thought back to those desert-bonneted, piss-drinking Nigels of the early twentieth century: “sexless” Wilfred Thesiger; self-lacerating T. E. Lawrence; the wooden bachelors of Central Asia with their little dogs: half in quest, half in flight, half loving the world and half hating it. Seeking to dissolve the body and become one with the infinite. But I thought about myself, too, and Amy: those days of joyful eating, drinking and swimming in California.