16C THIBD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
pressly distingaisliiiig liiinself thereby from Jolin, tlie repruseutative of the old covenant ; and Paul recommends to us to use the gifts of God temperately, with cheerful and childlike gratitude.' But the renowned anchoret and presbyter Isidore of Alexandi'ia (whom Athanasius ordained) touched no meat, never ate enough, and, as Palladius relates, often burst into tears at table for shame, that he, who was destined to eat angels' food in paradise, should have to eat material stntf like the irrational brutes. Macarius the elder, or the Great, ibr a long time ate only once a week, and slept standing and leaning on a stalf. The equally celebrated younger JMacarins lived three years on four or five ounces of bread a day, and seven years on raw herbs and pulse. Ptolemy spent three years alone in an unwatered desert, and quenched his thirst with the dew, which he collected in December and January, and preserved in earthen vessels ; but he fell at last into skejiticism, madness, and debauchery.^ Sozomen tells of a certain Batthaeus, that by reason of his extreme abstinence, worms crawled out of his teeth ; of Alas, that to his eightieth year he never ate bread ; of Heliodorus, that he spent many nights without sleep, and fasted without interruption seven days.^ Synieon, a Christian Diogenes, spent six and thirty years praying, fasting, and preaching, on the top of a pillar thirty or forty feet high, ate only once a week, and in fast times not at all. Such heroism of abstinence was possible, however, only in the torrid climate of the East, and is not to be met with in the West.
Anchoretism almost always carries a certain cynic roughness and coarseness, which, indeed, in the light of that age, may be leniently judged, but certainly have no affinity with the morality of the Bible, and offend not only good taste, but all sound moral feeling. The ascetic lioliness, at least according to the Egyptian idea, is incompatible with cleanliness and decency, and delights in filth. It reverses the maxim of sound evangelical morality and modern Christian civilization, that cleanliness is next to godliness. Saints Anthony and Hilariou,
» Comp. Matt. xi. 18, 19; 1 Tim. iv. 3-5. " Comp. Hist. Laus. c. 33 and ffi
' Hist. Eccles. lib. vL cap. 34.
§ 32. LIGHTS AND SHADES OF MONASTIC LIFE. 167
as tlieii* admirers Athanasius the Great and Jerome tlia Learned, tell ns, scorned to comb or cut their liair (save once a year, at Easter), or to wash their hands or feet. Other hermits went ahnost naked in the w^ilderness, like the Indian fryumosophists.' The younger Macarius, according to the account of his disciple Palladius, once lay six months naked iu the morass of the Scetic desert, and thus exposed himself to the incessant attacks of the gnats of Africa, '' whose sting can pierce even the hide of a wild boar." He wished to punish himself for his arbitrary revenge on a gnat, and was there so badly stung by gnats and wasps, that he was thought to bo smitten with leprosy, and was recognized only by his voice.'' St. Symeon the Stylite, accordmg to Theodoret, suffered himself to be incessantly tormented for a long time by twenty enormous bugs, and concealed an abscess full of W'Orms, to exercise himself in patience and meekness. In Mesopotamia there was a peculiar class of anchorets, who lived on grass, spending the greater part of the day in prayer and singing, and then turning out like beasts uj^on the mountain.' Theodoret relates of the mu(;h lauded Akepsismas, in Cyprus, that he spent sixty years in the same cell, without seeing or speaking to any one, and looked so wdld and shaggy, that he was once actually taken for a wolf by a shepherd, who assailed him with stones, till he discovered his error, and then worshipped the hermit as a saint." It was but a step from this kind of moral sublimity to beastly degradation. Many of these saints were no more than low sluggards or gloomy misanthropes, who would rather company with wild beasts, with lions, wolves, and hyenas, than with immortal men, and above all shunned the face of a woman more carefully than they did tiie devil.
^ These latter themselves were not absolutely naked, but wore a covering over the middle, as Augustine, in the passage above cited, De civit. Dei, 1. xiv. c. 11, and later tourists tell us. On the contrary, there were monies who were very scrupulous on this point. It is said of Ammon, that he never saw himself naked. The monks ui Tabennoe, according to the rule of Pachomius, had to sleep always in their clothes.
• Comp. Hist. Lausiaca, c. 20, and Tillemont, tom. viii. p. 633.
' The fiocTKoi or pabulatores. Comp. Sozom. H. E. 1. vi. 33. Ephraim Syrus de" livered a special eulogy on them, cited in Tillemont, Mem. tom. viii. p. 292 sq.
* Hist. rel. cap. (vita) xv. (Opera omnia, ed Par. iii. 843 sqq.).