"Towards night they came unto a plaine By which a little hermitage there lay, Far from all neighbourhood, the which annoy it may.
And nigh thereto a little chappel stoode, Which being all with ivy overspred Deckt all the roofe, and, shadowing the roode, Seem"d like a grove faire braunched over hed: Therein the hermit, which his life here led In streight observance of religious vow, Was wont his hours and holy things to bed; And therein he likewise was praying now, Whenas these knights arrived, they wist not where nor how."
[ILl.u.s.tRATION: CHaTEAU DE RIGNAC. A renaissance chateau on the Vezere, built partly into and partly out of the overhanging cliff.
Since the sketch was made a portion of the first archway has fallen.]
[ILl.u.s.tRATION: ROYSTON CAVE. A section. The entrance with steps at the side is a modern addition.]
I do not recall any harsh words spoken of the departed hermit. After the Reformation it was felt that a factor in life was gone that could be ill spared.
In these days when we live in a hurricane of new ideas, in the stress of business, we cannot understand the attractiveness of the peace of a cell away from the swirl of the storm, or the value of the hermits as guides of life. When the hermit was swept away, into his place as counsellor of the troubled stepped the witch, and to her those had recourse who had previously sought the eremite. The influence of the witch was always for evil, that of the hermit was usually good. The troubled soul desires a confidant and an adviser. The parish priest is not always spiritually minded, and is not always disinterested. What is hid from the wise and prudent is revealed to babes, and for the guidance of distracted consciences, the healing of wounded spirits, the words of the childlike hermit were a boon. However, he is gone past recall, and into his room have stepped the lawyer who demands six-and- eightpence for a word of advice, and the doctor whose charges are proportionate to the rental of our houses.
CHAPTER IX
ROCK MONASTERIES
The early Syrian and Egyptian hermits would have become a sect of manichaean heretics but for the popularity of the profession and the Arian persecution. In quitting the world they cut themselves off from the churches. They no more took part in its a.s.semblies, partic.i.p.ated in the sacraments, nor observed the sacred seasons. Paul, the first hermit, deserted the society of men when aged fifteen, and lived till the age of a hundred and ten in solitude without ever having partaken of the Bread of Life. S. Mary of Egypt spent forty-seven years in the Wilderness, stark naked, covered with hair like a wild beast, and only received the Viatic.u.m when dying, by the chance of a priest pa.s.sing that way. A fifteenth century statue of her, nearly life-size, is in the National Museum at Munich, removed from the Cathedral of Augsburg as indelicate. S. Antony spent twenty years in a sort of cistern, and only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the roof. Certainly all that time he was voluntarily excommunicate. If S.
Hilarius ever made sacramental communion we are not told, but we do know that he was for ever hiding himself from where were his fellow- men, in wilds and oases, and where there were no Christian churches.
In the desert, times and seasons slipped away, and became confounded, so that by the first hermits neither Easter nor the Lord"s Day were observed. In the Gospel, the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and prisoners, are appointed as the means of deserving a reward in heaven, but the anchorites neglected every one, cut themselves adrift from the chance of performing them, and sought to merit heaven in their own way.
Christ declared, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you," but they wilfully lived apart from the sacramental life as surely as any modern Quaker.
But when crowds of refugees from the duties and pleasures of life sought the desert, they ceased to be solitaries, and organisation on a monarchical system under an abbot became necessary; and when bishops and priests fled to them, or were banished and sought them, during the Arian persecution, they came to plume themselves as champions of orthodoxy, and conformed to Catholic usage, a.s.sembling on the Lord"s Day for prayers and the Eucharist. When the fashion set in for deserting the world, floods of men, women, and children threw themselves into it, and flowed into the desert during a century with resistless force. Pachomius, who died at fifty-six, reckoned three thousand monks under his rule; the monasteries of Tabenna soon included seven thousand, and S. Jerome affirms that as many as fifty thousand were present at the annual gathering of the general congregation of monasteries that followed his rule.
There were five thousand on the mountain of Nitria; near Arsinoe the Abbot Serapion governed ten thousand. It has even been a.s.serted that there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the towns. The immense majority of these religious were cen.o.bites; that is to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united under an elected head, the abbot. The cen.o.bitical life rapidly and necessarily superseded that of the solitary. In fact the monks were now no more solitaries than are the jackdaws in a cleft, or the bees in a hive, but unlike the jackdaws, they were under discipline, and unlike bees were without a sting.
It was not mere love of an indolent life and a desire to escape from military service that swelled the numbers in the desert. The condition of the decaying Roman world led men to despair of the Commonwealth, and of the possibility of their being able to save their own souls in the midst of the general corruption. "The people were exhausted by compulsory taxes, to be spent in wars which did not concern them, or in Court luxury in which they had no share. In the munic.i.p.al towns liberty and justice were dead. The curials, who were responsible for the payment of the public moneys, tried their best to escape the unpopular office, and when compelled to serve wrung the money in self-defence out of the poorer inhabitants by every kind of tyranny. Private profligacy among all ranks was such as cannot be described in any modern pages.
The regular clergy of the cities were able to make no stand against the general corruption of the age because--at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom--they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and luxury; and, as a background to all these seething heaps of decay, misrule and misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, waxing stronger and stronger so that the wisest Romans saw clearly as the years rolled on, they would soon be the conquerors of the Caesars and the masters of the Western world.
"No wonder, if in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a pa.s.sion akin to despair, which ended in a new and grand form of suicide. It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which had led in past ages more than one n.o.ble Roman to slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. That the world--such at least as they saw it then--was doomed, Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe, but saw, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation around them, that the world was pa.s.sing away, and the l.u.s.t thereof, and that only he who did the will of G.o.d could abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw that the wrath of G.o.d was revealed from Heaven against all unrighteousness of men. Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed world, and try to be alone with G.o.d, if by any means they might save each man his own soul in that dread day."
[Footnote: Kingsley (C.), "The Hermits," Lond. 1868.]
In the year 336 Athanasius was in exile at Treves. He is traditionally held to have there occupied a cave beyond the Moselle. The Bishop Maximinus received him with honour. Early in his episcopate Athanasius had visited the congregation of monks on the Upper Nile, and he was enthusiastic in his admiration of their manner of life. It is supposed that whilst at Treves he began to write the "Life of S. Anthony," if indeed he was the author of that popular work. Here he is thought to have been visited by Maxentius, Bishop of Poitiers, and brother of the Bishop of Treves, bringing with him Martin, then a friend and pupil of S. Hilary, this latter at the time a wealthy n.o.ble of Poitiers. And from the discourse of Athanasius, if this meeting actually took place, the imagination of Martin was fired with ambition to reproduce in Europe the life of the fathers of the desert in Egypt.
Anyhow, to this residence of Athanasius at Treves, "one may trace the introduction into the Western Church of the principle and laws of ascetic self-renunciation, which, though they had run to great extremes in the Nitrian desert and in the valley of the Nile, a.s.sumed n.o.ble form when the idea took possession of the more phlegmatic temperament and practical energies of the West. Without discussing the vexed question of the authorship of the "Life of S. Anthony," which is referred by many traditional testimonies to Athanasius, we think it obvious, from the "Confessions" of Augustine, that the religious circles at Treves had been strongly moved by the self-abandonment and entire consecration to the religious life of the exiled bishops. It was here, while reading the "Life of S. Anthony" that the friends of Augustine at length yielded themselves to G.o.d." [Footnote: Reynolds (H. R.), "Athanasius, his Life and Life-work," Lond., R.T.S., 1889, p. 54.]
Martin was at Poitiers in 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat h.e.l.lebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and obtained his cheerful consent. Some way up the Clain, five miles from Poitiers, the little river glides through a broad valley, with meadows on its left bank often overflowed, but with a ridge of conglomerate rocks pierced with caves on the right bank. Here Martin settled, and there can exist no manner of doubt that his first settlement was in one of these grottoes, though at a later period the monastery was moved to the further side of the river, when the caves proved inadequate to harbour all the candidates for the religious life who placed themselves under his direction. One of his monks, however, named Felix, refused to quit his cave that is now shown, and in which he died perhaps, in an inaccessible cliff that is surmounted by a cross.
The friable conglomerate has yielded to storm and rain, and much of it has crumbled down; but the openings to the caves are visible from below, where the slopes are purple and fragrant with violets and, later, pink with primulas, and the rocks are wreathed with clematis. A pure spring bursts forth at the foot and works its way through beds of forget-me-not and marsh marigold to the Clain.
Martin had been ordained exorcist and then priest.
His most trusted disciples were Felix, Macarius, and Florentius. As already said, except in the Gallo-Roman cities, Christianity did not exist. The country-folk were pagans. Martin lifted up his eyes and saw that the fields were white to harvest. He preached throughout Poitou and La Vendee, and visited the coast to the isles of Yeu and Re. He travelled on foot, or mounted on an a.s.s, sought every village and hamlet, to sow the seed of the Word of G.o.d, and where he could not go himself, he sent his disciples. Liguge, his monastery, became a centre of evangelisation to the country round. It was the first monastery planted on Gaulish soil. It was ruined by the Saracens in 732, and again by the Normans in 848. It was rebuilt in 1040. But Liguge never had a worse enemy than one of its abbots, Arthur de Cosse. He made public confession of Calvinism; gave up the abbey to be pillaged, sold its lands for his own advantage, and did everything in his power to utterly ruin it. It owed its restoration to the care of Francois de Servier, Bishop of Bayonne.
Liguge was, however, destroyed at the French Revolution. In 1864 it was acquired by the Benedictines, and rebuilt on a large scale. It was enriched with a valuable library, and became a nursery of Christian art and literature. But the law of 1901 banished the monks, and the vast building is now empty, as the State has not so far found any use for it.
In the year 971 the episcopal throne of Tours was vacant, and the citizens at once decided on securing Martin as their bishop. But when he arrived on foot, dust-covered, with s.h.a.ggy hair, the bishops a.s.sembled to consecrate protested against the election. It was customary to choose a bishop from among the n.o.bility and the wealthy.
Defensor, the Bishop of Angers, signalised himself by his opposition.
He absolutely refused to consecrate the poor dishevelled monk. But when the lector opening the psalter at hazard read out the words, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy and the defender"
(defensor), [Footnote: So in the old Gallican Version; in the Vulgate the word is _Ultor_.] the people raised a great shout, G.o.d himself had spoken, and the bishops had to yield to the popular will.
Martin was then aged fifty-four.
No sooner was he installed than he cast about him to establish on the banks of the Loire a monastic colony such as he had founded at Liguge.
He found a place where in later times rose the great abbey of Marmoutier, the wealthiest in France, and with a church that was called the Gem of Touraine. But then it was merely a chalk cliff rising above the Loire on its right bank, two miles above Tours, and on the summit had stood the old Gaulish city of Altionos. The Romans had transferred the capital of the Turones to its present site, and had given it the name of Caesarodunum. But Althionos was probably not wholly abandoned, poor Gauls still dwelt there in their huts, and nothing had been done to bring them into the fold of Christ"s Church.
The cliff with its caves had already been sanctified. It had been a refuge in time of persecution, and there S. Gatia.n.u.s, the first Bishop of Tours, in the third century had sheltered. But now Martin and his disciples set to work to enlarge and remodel the subterranean habitations; they scooped out a chapel, and they formed a baptistry.
In 853 the Northmen came up the Loire and ma.s.sacred a hundred and sixteen of the monks. Only twenty-four escaped. In 982 Marmoutier was refounded by Eudo, Count of Blois, and the n.o.ble basilica built below the rock was consecrated by Pope Urban II in 1095. The vast wealth of the abbey led to enlargements and splendour of architectural work; but in 1562 the Huguenots wrecked it, burned the precious library with all its MSS., broke down the altars, and shattered the windows. Its complete destruction, however, was due to the Revolution, when in 1791 it was completely pulled down, nothing left of the splendid church but the tower and a portion of the northern transept that was glued to the rock. The oratory of S. Martin was levelled to the rock on which it stood.
[ILl.u.s.tRATION: LE TROU BOUROU. A cave fortress on the Beune. The hole through which the man is peering was used for defence of the steep ascent to the entrance. Note the arrangement for barring the door.]
[ILl.u.s.tRATION: ROCK BAPTISTERY OF S. MARTIN, MARMOUTIER. Elevated and occupied by S. Martin, Bishop of Tours, A.D. 371-396. On the right- hand side is the well, on the left the font for immersion. The niches in the wall are for the holy oils. ]
But the fact of the transfer of the monastery to the flat land below the cliff had this effect, that the old caves, the original cradle of Marmoutier, were neglected and forgotten. They were overgrown by brambles, crumbled away, and none visited them.
In 1859 the oratory in which S. Martin had prayed was restored or rather rebuilt from its foundations.
One night when Martin was engaged therein in reading the Scriptures, the door was burst open and in broke a party of masqueraders. They had disguised themselves as Jupiter, Minerva, and Mercury, and some damsel devoid of modesty presented herself before the startled modesty of the bishop without disguise of any sort, as Venus rising from the foam of the sea. Some were dressed as Wood Druses very much like the devils of popular fancy. Mercury was a sharp, shrewd wag, and bothered the saint greatly, as he admitted to Sulpicius, his biographer, but Jupiter was a "stupid sot." At the rebuke of Martin the whole gang good-humouredly withdrew.
I was in this cell on Mid Lent Sunday, when hearing a noise outside, I looked forth and saw a party of masqueraders frolic and frisk past on their way to a tavern where was to be a costume ball. So goes the world. Some fifteen hundred and thirty years ago the Gospel was being preached in Tours, as it is now, men and women were striving to follow its precepts as now, and tomfoolery was rampant in Tours fifteen hundred and thirty years ago as it is now.
And now, as to the remains in the rock of the primitive Marmoutier. The grottoes of S. Gatia.n.u.s and of the disciples of S. Martin have been cleared out. There is a little arcade of three round-headed unadorned arches cut in the cliff that served as a cloister, and there is the old baptistry where Martin admitted his converts into the Christian Church, sunk in the rock for adult and complete submersion, and the niches in the wall for the sacred oils. Adjoining is the cave in which the neophyte unclothed and afterwards reclothed himself. There are graves sunk in the rock, where some of his disciples were laid, and there is the chapel partly in the rock and partly rebuilt, dedicated later by Gregory of Tours to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, but of which in after times a different story was told--namely that seven brothers who had been devoted disciples of Martin prayed him when he was dying that they might speedily follow, and on the anniversary of his death they all seven fell asleep.
There is another cave that escaped destruction at the Revolution, though opening out of the transept of the church. It is that of the Penitence of Brice.
Brice had been adopted as a child by Martin, and brought up by him to be a monk. But Brice had no liking for the religious life, and was very disrespectful to his master. One day a sick man came to see Martin and asked of Brice where the saint was. "The fool is yonder," answered he, "staring at the sky like an idiot."
One day Martin rebuked Brice for buying horses and slaves at a high price, and even providing himself with beautiful young girls. Brice was furious, and said. "I am a better Christian than you. I have had an ecclesiastical education from my youth, and you were bred up amidst the license of a camp."
On the death of S. Martin, the people of Tours, tired of having a saint at their head, with proverbial fickleness chose Brice as his successor because rich--he was said to have been the son of the Count of Nevers-- and because he was anything but a saint. As bishop he showed little improvement, and gave great scandal. Lazarus, Bishop of Aix, accused him before several councils. At last a gross outrage on morals was attributed to him, and caused his flight. A nun gave birth to a child, and confessed that she had been seduced by the bishop. Brice either ran away from Tours or was deposed. A priest named Justinian was elected in his room. On the death of Justinian, Armentius succeeded him. Brice remained in exile till the death of Armentius, and then ventured back to Tours to reclaim his episcopal throne. He was allowed to reascend it, and he occupied it for seven years; and the cave in which he did penance for his frailties and the scandal he had caused is intact to this day. He died, after having been nominally bishop for forty-seven years, the greater portion of which time he had spent in exile. The Church of Rome is certainly very charitably disposed in numbering him among the saints. Why he should be regarded as the patron of wool- combers one cannot see, [Footnote: The following prayer is recommended by the Archbishop of Tours to the faithful for use. "Nous vous supplions, Seigneur, par l"intercession de S. Brice, Eveque et Confesseur, de conserver votre peuple qui se confie en votre amour; afin que, par les vertues de notre Saint Pontife, nous meritions de partager avec lui les joies celestes." The virtues of Brice!] but as such he enjoyed some popularity.
There is yet another cave in the Marmoutier rocks that may be mentioned; it is that of S. Leobard. Leobard was a saint of the sixth century, a native of Auvergne, who, coming to pray at the tomb of S.
Martin, resolved on spending the rest of his days in one of the cells of Martin"s monastery in the rocks. He settled into an untenanted cave, which he enlarged, and lived in it for twenty-two years. At the extremity he dug a deep pit in which he desired to be buried standing with his face to the East, thus to await the coming of the Lord. But although his desire was fulfilled, the monks of Marmoutier would not let his body rest there, but hauled it up, that it might become an object of devotion to the faithful.
The Abbey of Brantome on the Dronne (Dep. Dordogne) was originally, like Marmoutier, a cavern monastery, and like those of Marmoutier, the monks waxing fat, they kicked and abandoned the grottoes for a stately structural monastery. The beautiful Romanesque tower of the church stands on top of a rock that is honeycombed with their cells. The church, consisting of nave only, is of marvellous beauty, early pointed, and built on a curve, as there was but little s.p.a.ce to spare between the river and the cliffs. Unhappily church and cloister were delivered over to be "restored" by that arch-wrecker, Abbadie, who has done such incalculable mischief in Perigord and the Angoumois, and his hoof-mark is visible here. The monks, not content with a sumptuous Gothic abbey, pulled it down and built one in the baroque style, and had but just completed it when the Revolution broke out "and the flood came and swept them all away." In the court behind this modern structure is to be seen the cliff perforated with caves; it has, however, been cut back to the detriment of these, so that we have them shorn of their faces. Nevertheless they are interesting. The old monolithic chapel of the monastery remains, turned into a pigeonry, and with the steps left that gave access to the pulpit, and two pieces of sculpture on a very large scale, cut out of the living rock. One represents the Crucifixion with SS. Mary and John; the other has been variously explained as the Last Judgment or the Triumph of Death. It perhaps represents the Triumph of Christ over Death. His figure and the kneeling figures of His Mother and the Beloved Disciple were, however, never completed, and remain in the rough.
Beneath the figure of Christ is Death, figured by a head surmounted by a crown of bones, and a crest representing a spectre armed with a club.
On each side is an angel blowing a trumpet. Below are ranged a dozen heads of popes, bishops, princes, knights, and ladies, in boxes to represent graves.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TRIUMPH OF CHRIST OVER DEATH
Sculpture in the cave monastery of Brantome. The figure of Christ was never completed. Below is a head crowned with bones, for Death, with Time as crest. Below, in boxes, are the dead, of various degrees.]
In the front of this huge piece of sculpture are trestles planted in the ground to support planks to serve as tables when the Brantomois desire to have a banquet and a dance.