From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  ' [Many months later] the camel-driver who had taken the ass came back to the Holy City with the animal loaded up with the grain he hoped to sell there. Having crossed the Holy Jordan, he suddenly found himself face to face with the lion. When he saw the beast, he left his camels and took to his heels. Recognising the ass, the lion ran to it, seized its leading rein in its mouth just as it had been' trained to do, and led away not only the ass, but also the three camels. It brought them to the elder, rejoicing and roaring. The elder now realised that the lion had been falsely accused. He named the lion Jordanes and it lived with the elder in the lavra, never leaving his side for five years.

  'When Abba Gerasimos departed to the Lord and was buried by the fathers, by the providence of God the lion could not be found. A little later the lion returned, searching for the elder, roaring mightily. When Abba Sabbatios and the rest of the fathers saw it, they stroked its mane and said to it: "The elder has gone away to the Lord and left us," yet even saying this did not succeed in silencing its cries and lamentations. Then Abba Sabbatios said to it: "Since you do not believe us, come with me and I will show you where Gerasimos lies." He took the lion and led it to where they had buried the elder, half a mile from the church. Abba Sabbatios said to the lion: "See, this is where our friend is," and he knelt down. When the lion saw how he prostrated himself, it began beating its head against the ground and roaring. Then it promptly [rolled over and] died, there on the elder's grave.'

  Mar Saba, 28 October

  Over the days that followed I explored many of the caves, cells and chapels which honeycomb the cliffs within the great boundary walls of Mar Saba. Earthquakes and Bedouin raids have led to much rebuilding over the centuries, but if you look hard enough, many fragments of the Byzantine monastery known to John Moschos still survive. The great cave chapel 'Built by God' stands as bare and austere as it would have done in the early Byzantine period. The only obvious additions are some late-medieval icons, a line of eighteenth-century choirstalls and the four hundred stacked skulls of the monks slaughtered in the seventh-century Persian invasion. In another grotto, the Retreat of St Sabas, the floor is still covered with the fragmentary tesserae of a simple geometric mosaic dating from the late sixth century. But the most interesting chapel of all is that built around the tomb and hermitage of St John Damascene.

  John Damascene is probably the most important figure ever to have taken the habit at Mar Saba. He was the grandson of the last Byzantine Governor of Damascus, a Syrian Arab Christian named Mansour ibn Sargun. Ibn Sargun was responsible for surrendering the city to the Muslim General Khalid ibn Walid in 635, just three years after the death of Mohammed. Despite the change from Christian to Islamic rule, the family remained powerful. John's father, Sergios ibn Mansour, rose to become a senior figure in the financial administration of the early Umayyad Caliphate, whose accounts, significantly enough, continued for many decades to be kept in Greek. Because of this John grew up as a close companion of the future Caliph al-Yazid, and the two youths' drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the new Islamic capital. In due course John assumed his father's post in the administration, and he remained throughout his life a favourite of the Caliph. This relationship made him one of the very first Arab Christians capable of acting as a bridge between Christianity and Islam, even if, like so many who attempt to bring together two diverging cultures, he eventually ended up being regarded with suspicion by both: dismissed from his administrative job after Caliph Yazid's death and falsely accused of collusion with the Byzantine Emperor, he was nevertheless regarded with great mistrust in the Byzantine capital, where he was dubbed Sarakenophron, or Saracen-Minded.

  John was in an excellent position to write the first ever informed treatise on Islam by a Christian, and when he retired to Mar Saba he dedicated his declining years to writing doctrinal homiles and working on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled The Fount of Knowledge. The book contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ). It never seems to have occurred to John that Islam might be a separate religion, and although he looked on it with considerable suspicion, he nevertheless applauds the way Islam converted the Arabs from idolatry, and writes with admiration of its single-minded emphasis on the unity of God.

  If a theologian of the stature of John Damascene was able to regard Islam as a new - if heretical - form of Christianity, it helps to explain how Islam was able to convert so much of the Middle Eastern population in so short a time, even if Christianity remained the majority religion until the time of the Crusades. Islam was as much a product of the intellectual ferment of late antiquity as Gnosticism, Arianism and Monophysitism, and like those heresies it had its greatest success in areas disgruntled with Byzantine rule. Many Syrians expressed opposition to Byzantium and its ruthless attempt to impose its rigid imperial theology by converting en masse to the heterodox Christian doctrine of Monophysitism; later they greeted the conquering Arab armies as liberators and many converted again, this time to Islam. No doubt they regarded the Arabs' new creed as a small step from Monophysitism; after all, the two faiths started from a similar position: that God could not become fully human without somehow compromising his divinity.

  Whatever the reason for its success, Islam certainly appealed to the former Monophysites, and within a century of the Arab conquest Syria was a mainly Muslim country. By contrast, the inhabitants of Palestine, who had done well out of Byzantine patronage of the Holy Places, never showed much interest in converting either to Monophysitism or to Islam, and Jerusalem remained a predominantly Orthodox Christian city until the Crusaders conquered it in 1099.

  In Damascene's own lifetime, however, the most influential part of The Fount of Knowledge was not the section on Islam, but his attack on the heresy of Iconoclasm. For at the same time as John was becoming a monk, Byzantium was being engulfed by a wave of image-smashing. All the icons in the Empire were ordered to be destroyed, and their painting was henceforth banned. The reason for this may well have been the rise of Islam and the profound soul-searching which the loss of the Levant provoked in Byzantium. Many came to the conclusion that God was angry with the Byzantines for their idolatry, and thus gave the iconoclastic Muslims success in their wars.

  Just as John's public life demonstrates the astonishing political tolerance of the Umayyad Caliphate in its willingness to employ a Christian in a senior administrative role, despite almost continuous hostilities with the rest of the Christian World, so his retirement demonstrates the surprising degree of intellectual freedom it permitted. For under the Umayyads John was able to do what no Byzantine was permitted to attempt: to write and distribute a systematic defence of images, in which he provided the fundamental theological counterblast to iconoclasm. John argued that although no man has seen God at any time, nevertheless, since Christ deigned to take upon himself the human form, it was necessary to worship the human face of God in the sacred icon. Moreover he demonstrated that not only was their cult based on reason, but that it was sanctioned by ancient precedent:

  Paintings are the books of the illiterate. They instruct those who look at them with a silent voice and sanctify life . . . Since not everyone knows how to read, or has the leisure for reading, the Fathers of the Church saw fit that the Incarnate Christ be represented by images, like deeds of prowess, to serve as reminders. Often when we are not thinking of the Lord's passion, we see the image of the crucifixion, and being reminded of that salutary passion, we fall to our knees and revere ... If I have no books I go to church, pricked as by spines by my thoughts; the flower of painting makes me look, charms my eyes as does a flowering meadow and softly distils the glory of God in my soul.

  This afternoon, after I had woken from a siesta, Theophanes took me to John Damascene's old cell. We walked along the narrow staircases and winding paths that connect t
he different platforms of the monastery. Eventually we came to a small chapel backing onto the rock wall. 'This chapel was where St John's body used to lie,' said Theophanes, 'before your Pope's Crusaders came and stole him.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'In Venice,' said Theophanes. 'One of the world capitals of body-snatching and criminal Freemasonry.'

  Inside the chapel hung a line of icons, and over the spot where the tomb used to lie, a fresco showing the death of St John Damascene, an icon clutched firmly to his breast. Below this a narrow wooden staircase led down into a tiny cave, its ceiling cut so low as to make standing virtually impossible.

  'St John spent thirty years in that place,' said Theophanes. 'Although he could not stand he hardly ever went out of it. He believed he had become too proud because of his high position in the court in Damascus, so he chose this cave in which to live as a monk. He said it was very humbling - very good for the soul - to live in such a place for many years.'

  'After an hour in there you must feel like a hunchback,' I said.

  'Better hunchbacked than damned,' replied the monk.

  While Theophanes stood by the empty tomb, contemplating, no doubt, the damnation of the Papist body-snatchers, I clambered down the wooden stairs into the gloom of the saint's cave. On either side two stone benches had been cut from the rock, while ahead stood a low shelf that had once acted as the saint's writing desk. Beyond was a small shrine: at the far end of the cave stretched a recess, four feet high, six feet deep, which John Damascene had used as a bed. A small Byzantine icon of the Madonna hung from the wall; otherwise the cell was almost impossibly austere.

  It seemed strange that a book of such breathtaking sophistication as The Fount of Knowledge could be produced in so astonishingly crude and primitive a cave. It was certainly an unlikely setting for the writing of one of the most important tracts ever to be penned in defence of artistic freedom. What Damascene wrote in this cave was largely responsible for saving Byzantium from the ban against sacred art that has always been a part of Islam and Judaism. Without Damascene's work, Byzantine ars sacra would never again have been permitted, Greek painters might never have been able to pass on their secrets to Giotto and the Siennese, and the course of the Renaissance, if it had happened at all, would have been very different.

  Sometime in the late 1960s, soon after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, the number of monks at Mar Saba fell for the first time below twenty. At this time the Abbot of the monastery had been persuaded by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem to cease trying to be self-sufficient. He should sell Mar Saba's ancient lands to the Israeli government, advised the Patriarch; the Orthodox hierarchy would invest the money and in return send to the monastery all the cheese and fish the monks could possibly need. The Abbot acceded to the Patriarch's wishes, and ever since then the monks' food has been brought in by van from Jerusalem once a week. The van was due on the last day of my stay at Mar Saba, and Fr. Theophanes promised to arrange that it should take me back to Jerusalem on its return journey.

  There were still many Byzantine remains in the valley below the monastery that I had not seen, and I woke early on my final morning, in the hope of seeing some of the more distant cells and grottoes before I was collected later that afternoon.

  I was let out by Fr. Cosmas, the gatekeeper, who slid back the heavy medieval bolts of the gate behind me. Outside I found the old path down the cliff-face into the valley. It led off from the top of the cliff beside the Byzantine tower built by the Empress Eudoxia; it had once been home to a small convent of nuns, but was now abandoned and quite deserted. I picked my way down the hairpin bends, stopping to pluck a sprig of wild rosemary from a bush and squeeze it between my thumb and forefinger. As I was standing there, a dun-coloured desert fox darted from its shelter in an abandoned cell and shot off behind a bend in the wadi.

  At the bottom of the valley I forded the dark waters of the heavily polluted river. It was a steep climb up the other side of the valley, but the reward was a breathtaking view of the monastery. Indeed it was only from the opposite lip of the chasm that the full strangeness of Mar Saba's position became apparent: the great tumble of lavender domes and egg-shaped cupolas were perched precariously on the narrowest of ledges and overhangs. All this was enclosed by the near-vertical wall built soon after the Persian massacre whose massive strength had, for nearly 1,400 years, successfully protected the monks from human and natural calamities.

  Looking down the steep slope on which I was standing, I saw that the rockface was pockmarked by the entrances to monks' cells, all of which were now deserted. Some of these cells were little more than burrows; others, perched on ledges above the gorge, were relatively sophisticated conical beehives, intriguingly similar in design to the cells of the Celtic monks of the same period preserved in the more remote corners of Ireland, such as the coastal island of Skellig Michael. Like their Irish counterparts, these cells were drystone, built without mortar, and rose to steeply pitched gables; like the cells of Skellig Michael they were usually bare and unornamented but for an arched prayer niche on the east wall; like them they had the same low entrance capped with a monolithic lintel.

  There were also other quite distinct cell-types. Some were partially-walled-up caves. A few were elaborate multi-storeyed affairs containing cisterns, living quarters and oratories; like the kelli of modern Athos, these were clearly designed not for single hermits but for the use of small groups of monks: perhaps a superior and four or five of his disciples, or a party from some distant and distinct ethnic group - say Georgians or Armenians - who wished to keep together. In some of the chapels and oratories attached to these more elaborate cells there were still traces of mosaic floorings and even fragments of simple geometric frescoes on the walls: floral patterns created by overlapping circles, or designs of intermeshing crosses.

  Different as they were, all the monks' cells in the valley had two things in common. One was that nearly all had been attacked at some stage by treasure hunters who had dug great holes in their floors, presumably in search of buried coins or precious chalices. The other was the prayer niche, a small arched cut in the eastern wall of the cell indicating the proper direction for prayer. As I passed from cell to cell, I realised that the prayer niche must be another of those features of the early Christian world which has been lost to modern Western Christianity, yet which is still preserved in Islam. No mosque is complete without its mihrab pointing in the direction of Mecca; yet how many Western churches today contain prayer niches? Certainly all are still orientated towards the east, but the idea of a niche emphasising this fact is now quite forgotten. Just as St John Damascene's life stressed the close relationship between Christianity and early Islam - a kinship and proximity that is now forgotten by both faiths - so the prayer niches contained in the cells around Damascene's old monastery seemed to emphasise how much Islam inherited from the Byzantine world.

  As at Cyrrhus, I was left pondering the probability that if John Moschos came back today, he would be likely to find as much that was familiar in the practices of Islam - with its fasting, prostrations, prayer niches and open prayer halls, as well as its emphasis on the wandering holy man - as in those of modern Western Christendom. In an age when Islam and Christianity are again said to be 'clashing civilisations', supposedly 'irreconcilable and necessarily hostile', it is important to remember Islam's very con-

  siderable debt to the early Christian world, and the degree to which it has faithfully preserved elements of our own early Christian heritage long forgotten by ourselves.

  Mar Saba, i November

  Fr. Theophanes brought me my lunch on a tray and announced that the van would soon be ready to carry me to Jerusalem. He stood by as I ate, like a maitre d'hote waiting to see a diner's reaction to some especially delicate souffle. This precipitated something of an etiquette problem.

  Lunch at Mar Saba was never a very ritzy affair at the best of times, but towards the end of the week, when the bread baked days earli
er had hardened to the texture of pumice, and the feta cheese had begun to smell increasingly like dead goat, eating Fr. Theophanes's offerings became something of a penitential exercise, and sounding sincere in one's appreciation of the monks' culinary abilities was a task that needed advanced acting skills. I looked at the lump of rock-bread and the festering cheese, and tried to think of something nice to say about them. Then I had a flash of inspiration.

  'Mmm,' I said, taking a sip from the glass. 'Delicious water, Fr. Theophanes.'

  This, oddly enough, went down very well.

  'The water here is very sweet.' The monk allowed himself a brief smile.

  'Very sweet, Fr. Theophanes.'

  'During this summer we had a drought. Our cisterns were beginning to run dry. August went by. Then September. One after another our cisterns gave up. We were like the Children of Israel in the wilderness. But St Sabas takes care of us. We are never without some drinking water. We always have the spring.'

  'The spring?'

  'The spring of St Sabas. He prayed and it came. You do not know the story?' 'Tell it to me.'

  'In the days of St Sabas more and more monks were joining the lavra to be with the saint. Eventually the number of brethren grew to seven hundred, and there was not enough water to go around. So St Sabas prayed. For thirty days and thirty nights he prayed on the roof of his cell, refusing to eat in the hope that our Lord would look down with mercy on his people. Finally, at the end of the thirty days and thirty nights, it happened to be a full moon. St Sabas went onto the roof for the last time to beg the Lord for mercy. He began to pray when all of a sudden he heard the beating of a wild ass's hooves in the valley below. He looked out and saw the animal. It was charging down the valley as if sent by the Angel Gabriel himself. Then it stopped, looked around and began digging deep into the gravel. It dug for twenty minutes, then it bent down and began to drink.