The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

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  I ASKED Father Mercurius if I could see the library. He fished his iPhone from his gown.

  The librarian, Father Cyril, agreed to open it for me. It was not the dusty scriptorium I had expected but a cool, bright hall lined with bookcases and furnished with low institutional armchairs. The books were mostly in French, Arabic and Coptic. A few were in English. On the wall some lines in Coptic were framed (Coptic resembles Greek). I asked Father Cyril to translate. He laughed. “St. Epiphanius said, ‘Reading the scriptures is a great safeguard against sin.’ ” He agreed to let me spend an hour in the library. I took the opportunity to remind myself of the life of the monastery’s founder, St. Macarius. According to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, he was a trader of natron, of dubious character, travelling with the camel caravans that plied between the Nile and the Wadi Natrun. He was famous as a “lover beyond all other men of the desert, and had explored its ultimate and inaccessible wastes.” One day, arriving at the Wadi Natrun, unpopulated at the time, he was granted a vision in which a cherub told him that he and his followers would one day inhabit this impoverished land. Like Antony a century earlier, Macarius gave his possessions to the poor and settled alone in the desert. Of his appearance we know only what the chronicler Palladius wrote: “The only hair on his face was around his mouth and there was very little on his upper lip, the extremes of austerity to which he had subjected himself inhibiting the growth of beard on his chin.”

  Upon killing a mosquito, he “made up his mind to stay six whole months, naked and motionless, in one place in a swamp in Scete, situated in a dreary waste, where there are mosquitoes the size of wasps and with stings capable of piercing even the hide of wild boars. He thus reduced his body to such a state that when he returned to his cell everyone thought he was a leper.” From a modern-day, let alone secular, perspective his renunciations sometimes seem to descend into competitive farce:

  Learning also that a hermit ate only one pound of bread in a day, he crumbled the pieces of bread which he had and put them into a jar, resolved to take out only as much as he could extract with his fingers. Which is great austerity, for, as he readily explained to us, he could take hold of quite a few pieces but could not get them out, since the neck of the jar was so narrow.

  My instinctive response to the more extreme acts of the Desert Fathers has often been a sort of simmering repulsion. I’m not alone in having been stirred to contempt by their self-mortifications. There is vulgarity in self-denial. The anchorites of the Wadi Natrun, it was said, put the proper number of olives to be eaten daily at precisely seven. Eight was gluttony; but six was worse, six smacked of pride. Most eloquent among the scorners of the early Christian ascetics is Edward Gibbon, who saw the flight to the desert as a rejection of society and learning, which it was: “They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised,” he writes; “and the loudest applause was bestowed on this DIVINE PHILOSOPHY, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools.” And here is a disgusted William Lecky, author of a History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865):

  There is perhaps no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, distorted and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, spending his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato.

  Many of the most vivid descriptions of life in the Wadi Natrun come from Palladius, who lived there in the early fifth century. Reading his description of Cellia, you might have sympathy for Lecky’s characterisation of the movement as an epidemic. The monks’ cells, Palladius writes, were “like hyena holes, in which space was so restricted that it was impossible even to straighten out one’s legs.” Others had less salubrious sleeping arrangements. Father Sisoes “was in the habit of spending the night standing on the very edge of a precipice, so that one moment of unconsciousness would have hurled him to death.” Another stood at night with his beard nailed to a rafter, to keep his head from drooping. I pictured hairy-mouthed Macarius, in his hole, hand wedged in a jar—the epitome of the “distorted and emaciated maniac,” dignity cast off along with all but the minimum sustenance needful to maintain flesh.

  And yet how can we presume to know them, these men of the third and fourth centuries? In the desert—for escaped slave or terrified Christian—it was also surely possible to recover a dignity unavailable in the “world.” John Cassian, the monk credited with bringing Christian monasticism to Europe, lived in Scetis for seven years during the fourth century. “We have joy in this desolation, and to all delight do we prefer the dread vastness of this solitude, nor do we weigh the riches of your glebe against these bitter sands.”

  The desert was not merely tolerated, nor was it only a holy battleground. Take Father Sisoes. Having reluctantly given up the anchoritic life on account of his old age, and moved to a monastery, he is asked: “But what would you do in the desert, now that you are old?” He replies forlornly: “Was not the mere liberty of my soul enough for me in the desert?” The Wadi Natrun is also known as “Wadi Habib”: “beloved valley.” St. Antony too loved the desert—loved it for what it was and not only for what it was not; for what it gave and not only what it denied. Each evening in his dotage he took a stroll. We can picture him in the blessed twilight of the Eastern Desert, hands clasped behind his back, attended by a couple of ravens.

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  UNTIL SHELL BUILT the Red Sea highway from Suez to Ras Gharib in 1946, the usual way to St. Antony’s was across the Eastern Desert from the Nile, 130 kilometres, and pilgrims were few. In modern times, on a given feast day, two thousand visitors might pass through the gates. Leaving the coast at Zafarana, you follow the highway west along the centre of the Wadi Araba for sixty kilometres. The South Galala Mountains tower ahead of you, though they seem to get no closer. The twin gate-towers of the monastery become visible and you recognise the sheer size of the mountains, how insignificant the monastery is, really. At the centre of the complex, within the inner walls, stands the fifth-century Church of St. Antony, where “the Star of the Desert” is said to be buried. From outside it is unprepossessing among the cluster of pale buildings. Ecclesial grandeur requires an abundance of tall trees. The principal structural material is limestone from the mountains with a thick plaster of lime and gypsum. A little acacia and olive wood inside, carved for decoration. In its comparative lavishness the interior of the Church of St. Antony reminds me of nowhere so much as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. For all the austerity of monastic principles, it feels like a cry against the colourlessness of the desert; an illuminated page concealed in a blank manuscript.

  Until the wall paintings were renovated in the 1990s, the church was by all accounts a gloomy place; only a few shadowy features could be seen to emerge from walls stained black by smoke—smoke from centuries of candles and oil-lamps and incense, as well as from fires lit by the Bedouin during a period when the monastery was abandoned in the fifteenth century. Today, the smoke stains removed, it is one of the glories of the Coptic Church. Most of the paintings date from around 1232 and are the work of a Master Theodore (“Gift of God”). They represent a genealogy of Coptic monasticism: here, in the nave, is a rank-bearded Macarius accompanied by a being that resembles an owl–toddler hybrid, its wings decorated with eyes—the cherub who called him to abandon his life as a natron trader. Also lined up along the walls are the other founders of the Wadi Natrun monasteries: Maximus and Domitius, Moses the Black, Bishoi the Great, John the Little, Barsuma the Syrian. In the khurus, separating the nave from the sanctuary, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are pictured in paradise, and there is a pleasin
g addition, as if painted as an afterthought or commentary: outside the frame of the main paintings, a tiny figure of a man aflame, screaming, one hand outstretched in agony or pleading. A label in Arabic identifies him: Nineveh the Unmerciful. “He is begging Abraham for a drop of water,” one of the novitiates tells me cheerfully.

  Most affecting of all the paintings—it’s hard for me to say why I find it so moving—is a kind of double portrait of two old men. On the left is St. Antony, his hands lifted up at shoulder height, his palms facing us; next to him is his friend St. Paul. Antony is robed in black, Paul in dark red, though who knows how the pigments have changed over the centuries. Coptic iconographic convention gives all saints the same small rosebud lips (for silence) and large wide eyes (vigilance). St. Paul occupied a cave on the other side of the South Galala range, fifteen kilometres from the Red Sea. St. Antony’s sister monastery stands on the spot today, some fifty kilometres away as the crow flies. St. Jerome’s is the most influential version of Paul’s story, and was one of Felix Fabri’s sources for his twenty-part description of the desert in 1483. In Helen Waddell’s translation, Antony one night received a vision: “It was revealed to him that there was deep in the desert another better by far than he, and that he must make haste to visit him.” Paul was 113 years old; Antony was ninety-four. “Straightaway as day was breaking the venerable old man set out, supporting his feeble limbs on his staff, to go he knew not whither.” But he is directed across the desert by a succession of guides—a “Hippocentaur,” a faun, finally a she-wolf who leads him to St. Paul’s cave.

  Seldom is one saint pictured without the other; and their shared symbol is the creature that hovers above them. “A raven had settled on the branch of the tree, and softly flying down, deposited a whole loaf before their wondering eyes.” Behold, Paul tells his visitor: for the past sixty years the bird had delivered to him half a loaf each day—“but at thy coming, Christ hath doubled His soldiers’ rations.” The raven features in every painting and icon of the two. On the church wall it is as simple as a potato-print: an outline filled with black, its only feature a pale dash marking the eye. In its beak it holds a white disc stamped with a cross like a sacramental wafer.

  I wonder about the tenderness I feel towards it. Is it just that they mate for life? It hangs like a child’s mobile between the two saints. I remember that Bertram Thomas named his tame raven Suwaiyid, “little black one.” The bird in the painting is not only a supplier of sustenance or a symbol of God incarnate. It is also, I can’t help feeling, an intermediary, the spirit of communion between these two souls so remote from one another in the intensity of their embodiment.

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  ADJOINING THE CHURCH of St. Antony is the eighteenth-century Church of the Apostles. You can find it by looking for the dozens of pairs of shoes lined around the door and along the walls nearby. Here three times a week the Divine Liturgy is celebrated. It is also where I attend the Canonical Hours—matins at 4 a.m. and vespers at 5 p.m. The church is large, low and domed. In its openness, and the shoes left at the door, it reminds me of a mosque. Each night at 11 p.m. the monastery’s electricity is switched off, and until it is turned on again at 7 a.m. the sole lights are a single floodlight by the gate and those inside the church. As I walk to matins, tasbiha, one morning, the monastery is visible from across the car park only as a distant lit gateway, light pouring out of it into the darkness. Suddenly the defensive walls are illuminated too and my shadow staggers ahead of me—it’s Peter, coming up behind me, lighting his way with a torch. I wait for him, though I know that when we enter the church it will be as if we are strangers. As we pass through the gate into the monastery, the wind picks up, and there is the mewling of the monastery cats.

  The morning service lasts for two hours; you stand throughout. This is part of the monk’s work, this standing for perhaps eight hours each day. The service is in Arabic with some Coptic. I try to follow the liturgy and hymns in English but often I don’t know what is going on. In the absence of understanding, the dirge of sung verses and responses assumes a hypnotic influence. The narthex, where the monks stand, is divided in two: on the left stand the novitiates in white, on the right the fathers in black, though there is no strict division and the fathers mingle among the novitiates. When the singing begins, the novitiates sing a verse, and this is echoed by the fathers. Antiphonal psalmody. How do they differ, their voices? I close my eyes: the novitiates’ singing is more effortful, self-conscious; the fathers, when it is their turn, are louder, deeper: it is the difference between a geyser and a waterfall. I open my eyes. The novitiates, few of them older than thirty or younger than twenty, are glowing and bulky in their white vestments, the music of the cities still ringing in their ears; the fathers in black are diminished—diminished by the life: slim but not frail, slightly bent-backed, slower in their movements. There is something shrivelled about them. The life of the monk makes one monklike.

  Shrivelled, perhaps, but not joyless. What I am most aware of, in fact, is love: each man touches the hand of every other he meets, to bless him or take his blessing. There is much warm smiling: a hand on the shoulder or on the back as words are exchanged. Agape: “love,” from the Ancient Greek—the term used by Copts for the shared celebration of the Christian mysteries.

  The Lord’s Prayer: “Abana aladhi fi as-samaawaat…” Then the Litany of the Sick (I follow the English on an app on my phone): “Those who are afflicted by unclean spirits, set them all free. Those who are in prisons or dungeons, those who are in exile or captivity, or those who are held in bitter bondage, set them all free and have mercy upon them.” The Litany of the Travellers: “Straighten all their ways, whether by sea, rivers, lakes, roads, air, or by any means, that Christ our God may bring them back to their own homes in peace…”

  Accompanying the chanting is the quick rhythmic scraping of a pair of small hand-cymbals and the quick tinny chiming of a triangle. I remember the plainsong of the Cistercians in that cold abbey on Dartmoor, how it aspired to a choral sweetness, an agile purity of voice. This is something different. There is nothing musical about it. The effort of the monks, some of whom will have sung the same verses to the same tune tens of thousands of times, is tangible: the flagging then the rallying, a sense of the sheer labour of it. There is no attempt to re-create the songs of the angels; rather this is physical effort as an expression of praise. There’s little beauty in it, but when the cymbals and the triangle reach a certain crescendo and quickness, and the monks’ voices are raised to the fullness of their passion and volume, the sound has a power to stir and inspire that exceeds the most exquisite European choral music. A verse will be sung with suddenly renewed vigour, as if in acknowledgement that the energy was allowed to diminish.

  After half an hour of standing, my back is aching; after two hours it’s hard to concentrate on anything but the discomfort. Nor does it get easier, a novitiate tells me. The pain always. I want to sit down on the carpet. I’m not sure why I don’t. We join in with the Kyrie eleisons—“Lord have mercy”—repeated twenty-five times, the last iteration drawn out over twenty seconds, like a record played too slow, the stomach tightening until all breath’s gone.

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  FATHER LUCAS IS in his thirties, I guess; slender in his robe, with a black beard and a gently professorial air. He trained as a dentist before taking his vows two years ago. “There are very few dentist-monks,” he says. His surgery is in one of the monastery’s fifteenth-century outbuildings, crammed with state-of-the-art kit—X-ray machine, gleaming autoclave, a new supersonic drill for root-canal jobs. He treats not only his fellow monks but camel farmers, soldiers and Bedouin from all over the Eastern Desert. Prayer is not a monk’s only obligation. It’s he who tells me about the walk to St. Paul’s, the walk that St. Antony undertook when he visited the dying hermit. There are two routes, he explains as we sit in his waiting room drinking tea: the first takes
you over the mountains behind St. Antony’s; the second, much longer, is the one the elderly Antony probably took. It skirts the highest peaks, following a network of wadis before climbing the mountain above St. Paul’s. He warns against the first way at this time of year—too windy on those high peaks, and it’s easy to get lost.

  He invites Peter and me to attend midnight mass at the cave of St. Antony, the place where the saint is said to have lived during the third century, in the mountainside high above the monastery. At 10 p.m. we hear a honk outside the guest quarters, and he’s waiting in his truck. The three of us drive to the foot of the mountain and Peter and I follow Father Lucas up each of the thousand hand-railed steps. It’s a climb I know well by now. I often go to the cave after matins, while it’s still cool, to watch the sun rise. It was only when I had made the climb a few times that I realised the hillsides of limestone shale through which the path climbs were not bare as I’d assumed. I was reminded of those Rorschach blots where a pattern can emerge from an apparently random arrangement of blobs. The longer you look at the hillsides, the more crosses you become aware of: crosses laid out horizontally on a slope of the same stone from which they were formed. Once you see one you see another, then another—dozens, hundreds, created stone by stone by generations of pilgrims. Halfway up is the tiny modern Church of St. Paul (another St. Paul), its walls coated in Arabic graffiti, and all around it grey bricks—a surplus from its construction—have been stacked in such a way that they too form crosses, these ones standing upright. As you approach the terrace outside the cave, lengths of palm- and acacia-wood have been lashed together and set upright or lodged in natural nooks. The impression is of passing through a great forest or crowd of crosses, crosses of almost infinite number, in fact—the left arm of one being also the right arm of another.