From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Passing the last village, we entered the desert; the locus horrendae et vastae solitudinis of the Bible. Below us the barren shale hills fell away towards the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea, a quivering drop of mercury in the far distance. Straight ahead, in the distance a pair of small rectangular Byzantine watchtowers rose vertically against the lip of a deep wadi. In the forty miles of landscape visible from the hilltop, those two towers were the only buildings in sight.

  It was only when we passed underneath the machicolation of the nearest tower that we caught our first glimpse of the great monastery that lay hidden in the lee of the sheer cliff-face below. It was the most extraordinary sight. The two towers are linked by a jagged wall which sweeps audaciously down in a near-vertical plunge to enclose the monastery's great spread of turquoise domes and cupolas, balconies and cave-cells, staircases and platforms, all propped up on narrow artificial ledges by great ranks of heavy, stepped buttresses. Despite its massive rocky solidity, the monastery's implausible position on a cliff-face in the midst of the wilderness somehow gives the whole place a fantastic, almost visionary appearance, like one of those castles in children's fairy tales capable of vanishing in the blink of an eye.

  At the time of John Moschos, the wastes of Judaea had become so densely filled with monks and monasteries that, according to one chronicler, 'the desert had become a city'. Yet of the 150 monasteries founded during the Byzantine rule, only six are still lived in, and of those only one, Mar Saba, still supports enough monks to really qualify as a living monastery. It has been occupied continuously since its foundation in the late fifth century: since the two-week hiatus following the massacre of the monks by the Persians in 614 a.d. - the same raid that devastated St Theodosius - divine office has been sung in the rock chapel of St Sabas every morning for the last 1,380 years. As in St Theodosius, the skulls of the hundreds of monks killed by the Persians, along with those subsequently murdered by marauding Bedouin, have been carefully kept in the abbey church, stacked in neat rows as nonchalantly as other churches might stack their hymn books.

  Mar Saba, I quickly discovered, remains the most austere of monasteries. The monks rise at two in the morning and sing the office for five hours, until dawn begins to break over the iconostasis of the abbey church. The fathers then rest until eleven, when they eat their one meal of the day: bread (baked once a week, palatable enough for three days but increasingly hard and stale thereafter), thin soup, boiled vegetables and strong feta cheese. They do not eat meat, and allow themselves fish and oil (for dressing the vegetables) only on Sundays and feast days. After their meal they retire to their caves and cells for the rest of the day, emerging only to sing vespers and compline at the appointed times.

  If Mar Saba is now remarkable mainly for the terrible severity of its asceticism, it was once famous for its scholarship, and despite the monastery's extreme isolation it was nevertheless one of the intellectual and philosophical powerhouses of Byzantium. When the Anglo-Saxon pilgrim St Willibald visited it in the early eighth century he remarked on the fact that all the monks were busy copying out manuscripts and composing hymns and poems. The monastery's library, now kept in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchal Palace in Jerusalem, is almost unrivalled amongst medieval collections in the esoteric breadth of its interests and the number of languages represented; it is also evidence of the extraordinary quality of the copying and calligraphy produced in the Mar Saba scriptorium.

  Here Cyril of Scythopolis wrote his History of the Monks of Palestine, an unusually critical and intelligent work of hagiography. Mar Saba's hymnography, the work among others of Romanos the Melodist, was, according to the great Byzantine scholar Breh-ier, 'the most original manifestation of the poetic genius of the medieval Greeks'. Moreover it was in a cell in Mar Saba that St John Damascene wrote his great Fount of Knowledge, probably the most sophisticated and encyclopedic work of theology produced anywhere in Christendom until the time of Thomas Aquinas; indeed, Aquinas drew heavily on John's theology, and wrote that he read a few pages of John Damascene's work every day of his adult life. But the scope of the monastery's manuscript collection, and the erudition of John Damascene, is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by one of his more unusual productions, the Romance of Barlaam and Joasaph, an Indian tale of the Buddha reworked in Christian form; it was later translated from Greek into Latin and widely circulated in the West. But you would never guess any of this from talking to Mar Saba's current inhabitants.

  'So, you're a writer, are you?' asked Fr. Theophanes when he brought me my supper on a tray after vespers that evening. 'I've stopped reading books myself

  'Oh yes?'

  'The Divine Liturgy contains all the writing I need. Once you've read the Word of God everything else becomes very dull.'

  'They say books are like food,' pointed out Fr. Evdokimos, the Deputy Archimandrite. 'They feed your brain.'

  'But Father,' said Theophanes quietly, 'monks should try to eat as little as possible.'

  It was nearly dark. We were sitting out on the terrace, watching the last of the light begin to fade from the sky. As we talked, Theophanes took out a box of matches and began to light a pair of battered old paraffin storm lanterns: there is no electricity in Mar Saba.

  'Look at those clouds in the east,' said Fr. Evdokimos. 'There may be rain tomorrow. What do you think, Theophanes?'

  'The rains here in Palestine are not like the rains of Greece,' replied the other monk. 'There we get big rains - proper cloudbursts.' He smiled happily at the memory. 'Ah, the rains of Greece,' he said. 'They are a reminder of the Deluge.'

  'What did you do in Greece before you became a monk?' I asked Theophanes.

  ‘I was a policeman, in Athens,' he replied, looking up from the lanterns, whose wicks he was engaged in trimming. 'I came here for the first time on a pilgrimage. As soon as I saw this monastery I recognised it as my true home. I went back to Athens, handed in my resignation and said goodbye to my mother. A week later I was back here. Since then I've never left.'

  'Never?'

  'I went back only once. For forty days.' 'Was that difficult?'

  'My mother cried sometimes. But otherwise, no. Things change very quickly. I hardly recognised my old city. My people had suddenly become rich from your European Community. There were so many new buildings. New buildings and new crimes.'

  'And you don't miss anything of your old life?'

  'What is there to miss? I have everything here.'

  'But this must have been quite a change from your previous work.'

  'Not so different,' replied the monk. 'Now I am the policeman of my soul. Demons are very like criminals. Both are very stupid. Both are damned.'

  The lanterns were alight now, and the flickering of their flames threw shadows over the terrace and across the face of Fr. Theophanes.

  'You believe in demons?' I asked. 'Of course. They are in the Bible.'

  'Sometimes, when we are praying, the demons make strange noises,' added Fr. Evdokimos, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, stroking his beard. 'At first I thought it was just the animals of the desert. But then I noticed the noises came most loudly when I was praying. It is the demons trying to distract us.'

  'Each demon has its own personality,' said Theophanes. 'They live in the desert and come to the cities to make men into criminals and Roman Catholics.'

  'They can work miracles and make false prophecies,' said Evdokimos.

  'They are worse than criminals,' said Theophanes. 'But here, within the walls of Mar Saba, we are protected.' 'What do you mean?'

  'St Sabas is alive here. He protects his monastery. I have experienced it myself.' 'How?'

  'Three years ago on a windy night in winter I was praying in my cave. I had not lit a lamp so my cell was pitch black. As I prayed I heard footsteps coming up the corridor. It was the noise of a monk walking: I could hear the rustling of his habit. The footsteps came closer and closer and then stopped outside my room. I waited for the monk to speak, but nothing happe
ned.

  'Suddenly I heard very clearly the noise of many feet tripping down the stairs from the opposite direction. They were like madmen, jumping down the steps very quickly - loud, irregular footsteps: there were maybe nine or ten of them, all running. I thought: the Bedouin have climbed the walls and broken in and now they want to kill us all. I froze behind my door, but nothing happened. Five minutes passed. Still they didn't come in. So very slowly I opened the door and went out.

  'It was a full moon that night. I could see clearly that the corridor was empty. There was silence in the monastery. I walked up to the courtyard and at that moment I saw Fr. Evdokimos's light moving from the latrines to his room. So I went up and said: "Father - there are thieves in the monastery." He asked: "You are sure?" I said I was. "All right," he said, "we'll look together." So we both took sticks and for an hour we went all around. We searched in the church, in the towers, inside the deepest caves. Nothing: the door was secure and no one had come in over the wall.'

  'It was only later,' said Fr. Evdokimos, 'when we discussed the matter with the Archimandrite, that we understood what had happened. The first set of footsteps were those of St Sabas. The rabble were demons coming to turn Fr. Theophanes into a Freemason. St Sabas knew what they were planning, so he stood in front of Fr. Theophanes's door to guard it. Then he chased the demons away.'

  'The Devil will capture everyone if he gets the chance,' said Theophanes gravely. 'But the saints protect us. In this monastery I feel secure, although it is in the middle of the desert, with Bedouin all around us. We are protected.'

  It was late, and the monks began to drift off to their cells carrying their lanterns. Theophanes showed me to mine and promised to wake me for matins at two.

  All night, it seemed, bells were pealing. At one o'clock a monk began to knock the wooden simandron to call the brethren from their beds; he rang it again at one-thirty and at five to two. At two I was treated to a full-scale bell-ringing display: the bells in the campanile assisted by a selection of handbells, one rung very loudly at the door of my cell by Fr. Theophanes. But as soon as silence had returned I fell asleep again, and it was nearly four a.m. before I finally pulled myself out of bed. It was pitch dark and very cold. I dressed by the light of the lantern, then picked my way down through the empty stairways and corridors of Mar Saba, towards the deep swell and eddy of monastic chant.

  In the church all the lamps were lit, casting a dim glow over the basilica. The monastic kyries echoed around the dome. Only the occasional creak of a misericord gave away the position of the singers; the monks themselves were invisible in their black robes as they roosted in the choirstalls. Every so often a breeze would swing one of the chandeliers, rotating it slightly so that shadows raced around the church, the returning flash of candlelight picking out the highlights in the frescoes: the wings of angels and the long white beards of the desert fathers. The chant eddied out across the narrow valley, echoed and amplified by the domes and cupolas. As I sat at the back, I kept thinking that the very same sound would have been heard by John Moschos over fourteen hundred years ago.

  Towards six o'clock first light began to filter in, gently illuminating the Christ Pantocrator in the dome. Half an hour later, with the sun now rising over the desert, I began to be able to pick out the monks themselves, black bearded, black robed, hooded and veiled in their stalls. What I had initially taken to be a low table near the lectern turned out to be Fr. Evdokimos, kneeling, bent forward on the ground in a long prostration before the iconostasis.

  One by one the monks glided from the church, each stopping to kiss images of the saints on the frescoes and icons as they went. I returned to my bed and slept until noon, when Fr. Theophanes woke me with a tray of food: a lump of strong-smelling feta cheese, some coarse monastic bread and, sitting proudly on its own on a white plate, a small round chocolate.

  'It is the feast of St Methodius the Stylite,' said Fr. Theophanes gravely. 'This is for you to celebrate it with.'

  I spent the afternoon in my cell reading John Moschos's stories of the monks of the Judaean desert. Together, the stories in The Spiritual Meadow form a detailed picture of one of the strangest periods in the region's history. For around two hundred years the deserts of the Holy Land were filled not only with 150 fully functioning monasteries, but also with countless cave-dwelling hermits and great herds of 'grazers', nomadic monks who, according to Moschos, 'wander in the desert as if they were wild animals: like birds they fly about the hills; they forage like goats. Their daily round is inflexible, always predictable, for they feed on roots, the natural products of the earth.'

  Today it seems inexplicable that so many people - many of them highly educated - from across the width of the civilised Byzantine world would give up everything and travel for thousands of miles to live a life of extreme hardship in the discomfort of the desert; yet to the Byzantine mind nothing could have been more logical. In one of Moschos's stories, a stranger visits the renowned holy man Abba Olympios in his monastery in the heat and humidity of the Jordan Valley. 'How can you stay in this place with its burning heat and so many insects?' he asks. The holy man gives a simple answer: 'I put up with the insects to escape from what scripture calls "the worm that sleeps not". Likewise, I endure the burning heat for fear of the eternal fire. The one is temporary, but of the other there is no end.'

  Yet this was not the whole story. While Moschos never underestimates the hardship involved in the life of the desert fathers, he is also well aware of its joys. Indeed one of the principal themes of his writing is that by living in utter simplicity and holiness, the monks were returning to the conditions of the Garden of Eden, in harmony with both the natural world and its Creator. This is particularly true of the grazers, who like Adam ate without planting and were supposed to have command over the wild animals. 'With Christ,' wrote the early Christian traveller Sulpicius Severus, 'every brute beast is wise, and every savage creature gentle.' The close relationship of beasts and saints was not a new theme in monastic literature: the early Coptic Life of St Pachomius, for example, tells how the saint summoned crocodiles to ferry him across the Nile, rather as today one might call a cab from a taxi rank. Moreover The Paradise of the Fathers, one of Moschos's principal literary models, contains a number of stories on this theme:

  'There was an old man who dwelt by the Jordan practising asceticism. One day he went into a cave to escape from the heat, and there he found a lion. It began to gnash its teeth at him and to roar. So the old man said to it, "Why are you annoyed? There is room here to take me and to take you also. If you do not wish to abide with me, arise and go!" And the lion did not carry him off but instead went out.'

  Moschos first introduces this theme in a story told by Abba Agathonicos, the Abbot of Castellium, once the sister monastery to Mar Saba, now a ruin five miles further down the Kedron Valley:

  'One day,' Abba Agathonicos tells Moschos, 'I went down to Rouba to visit Abba Poemon the Grazer. When I found him, I told him the thoughts which troubled me. When night fell he left me in a cave. It was winter and that night it got very cold indeed. I was freezing. When the elder came at dawn, he said to me: "What is the matter, child? I did not feel the cold." This amazed me, for he was naked. I asked him of his charity to tell me how he did not feel the cold. He said: "A lion came down and lay beside me; he kept me warm."'

  But perhaps the most memorable fable of the Eden-like closeness of monks and beasts in the desert is Moschos's famous tale of St Gerasimos and the lion. Centuries later in the West, the story was mistakenly grafted onto the life of St Jerome, apparently through the ignorance of Latin-speaking pilgrims. In the Eastern Church, however, the tale has remained correctly attributed to St Gerasimos, and is still one of the most popular Orthodox saints' tales. Moreover, it is one of the few of Moschos's tales to have entered the repertoire of Byzantine art, and is occasionally found frescoed on Orthodox monastery walls: in Athos, for example, I saw several scenes from the story painted in the porch of the abbey church of
the Monastery of Xenophontos. The story is set in St Gerasimos's monastery, 'about a mile from the Holy Jordan'.

  'When [Sophronius and I] were visiting the monastery,' writes Moschos, 'the residents told us that St Gerasimos was walking one day by the banks of the Holy Jordan when he met a lion, roaring mightily because of the pain in its paw. The point of a reed was deeply embedded in it, causing inflammation. When the lion saw the elder, it came to him and showed him the foot, whimpering and begging some healing from him. When the elder saw the lion in such distress, he sat down and, taking the paw, he lanced it. The point was removed and also much pus. He cleansed the wound well, bound it up and dismissed the beast. But the healed lion would not leave the elder. It followed him like a disciple wherever he went. The elder was amazed at the gentle disposition of the beast and, from then on, he began feeding it, throwing it bread and boiled vegetables.

  'Now the lavra had an ass which was used to fetch water for the needs of the elders, for they drink the water of the Holy Jordan which lies about one mile away from the monastery. The fathers used to hand the ass over to the lion, to pasture it on the banks of the Jordan. One day when the ass was being taken to pasture by the lion, it went away some distance from its keeper. Some camel-drivers on their way from Arabia found the ass and took it away to their country. Having lost the ass, the lion came back to the lavra and approached Abba Gerasimos, very downcast and dismayed. The Abba thought the lion had devoured the ass. He said to it: "Where is the ass?" The beast stood silent, very like a man. The elder said to it: "Have you eaten it? From now on [as a punishment] you will perform the same duties the ass performed." From then on, at the elder's command, the lion used to carry the saddlepack containing four earthenware vessels and bring water.