The Hermits eBook

Thus ends this strange story.  What we are to think of the miracles and wonders contained in it, will be discussed at a later point in this book.  Meanwhile there is a stranger story still connected with the life of St. Antony.  It professes to have been told by him himself to his monks; and whatever groundwork of fact there may be in it is doubtless his.  The form in which we have it was given it by the famous St. Jerome, who sends the tale as a letter to Asella, one of the many noble Roman ladies whom he persuaded to embrace the monastic life.  The style is as well worth preserving as the matter.  Its ruggedness and awkwardness, its ambition and affectation, contrasted with the graceful simplicity of Athanasius’s “Life of Antony,” mark well the difference between the cultivated Greek and the ungraceful and half-barbarous Roman of the later Empire.  I have, therefore, given it as literally as possible, that readers may judge for themselves how some of the Great Fathers of the fifth century wrote, and what they believed.

THE LIFE OF SAINT PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT

BY THE DIVINE HIERONYMUS THE PRIEST. (ST. JEROME.)

PROLOGUE

Many have often doubted by which of the monks the desert was first inhabited.  For some, looking for the beginnings of Monachism in earlier ages, have deduced it from the blessed Elias and John; of whom Elias seems to us to have been rather a prophet than a monk; and John to have begun to prophesy before he was born.  But others (an opinion in which all the common people are agreed) assert that Antony was the head of this rule of life, which is partly true.  For he was not so much himself the first of all, as the man who excited the earnestness of all.  But Amathas and Macarius, Antony’s disciples (the former of whom buried his master’s body), even now affirm that a certain Paul, a Theban, was the beginner of the matter; which (not so much in name as in opinion) we also hold to be true.  Some scatter about, as the fancy takes them, both this and other stories; inventing incredible tales of a man in a subterranean cave, hairy down to his heels, and many other things, which it is tedious to follow out.  For, as their lie is shameless, their opinion does not seem worth refuting.

Therefore, because careful accounts of Antony, both in Greek and Roman style, have been handed down, I have determined to write a little about the beginning and end of Paul’s life; more because the matter has been omitted, than trusting to my own wit.  But how he lived during middle life, or what stratagems of Satan he endured, is known to none.

THE LIFE OF PAUL

Under Decius and Valerius, the persecutors, at the time when Cornelius at Rome, and Cyprian at Carthage, were condemned in blessed blood, a cruel tempest swept over many Churches in Egypt and the Thebaid.