沙漠的智慧.docx

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1、The Wisdom of the Desert IntroductionIEVERY kind of effort after good has found sympathy and help in Christianity. Nothing is more wonderful and nothing more suggestive of His divinity than the way in which the words and example of the Master have been found adaptable to the ideals which have posses

2、sed the souls of men in different ages and under various circumstances. There was a time when men were impelled to search for and express truth, the eternal truth of the nature and property of the Deity Himself. At that time the life of Christ presented itself primarily as a revelation. He set forth

3、, under the conditions of time and space, the mysterious God whose seat is amid clouds and darkness, and yet who baffles human inquiry chiefly by the garment of impenetrable light in which He has decked Himself. In another age the religious spirit took a lower flight and allowed its activities to be

4、 dominated by a political conception. Whole generations spent themselves in the effort to realize upon earth a veritable kingdom of God. To these men Christ appeared as a monarch, whose will it was their ambition to realize perfectly. The people crowded below the altar steps, and the priests from ab

5、ove proclaimed, pointing the Lord to them, Behold your King. He was, indeed, conceived of as very different from any earthly king. His crown was of thorns, His throne was a cross, His glory was humiliation. Yet it was essentially as a King that they conceived of Him. He was the Ruler of a visible ki

6、ngdom, the Head of a hierarchy of governors, the promulgator of a polity and laws. For men of yet another generation religion found itself in the aspiration after personal liberty. Fear and ignorance had tyrannised over the earth - fear, the daughter of superstition; ignorance, superstitions handmai

7、d. Minds which dared to question and doubt lived under a perpetual menace. Above all, the great tyrant was sin. Its fetters grew heavier on mens limbs, and checked the effort after progress. Then men came to think of Christ as a great liberator; their souls responded to the call, Christ shall make y

8、ou free. Since then the central point of religion has shifted again. In our time men no longer look to Christ to teach them truth. We have lost sight hopelessly of the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of the city of God upon earth. The naked individualism of the reformation period offers an

9、inadequate view of life. We are inclined to doubt about the very existence of such a thing as liberty. We have discovered in Christianity a great incentive to philanthropy. Christ is for us, perhaps the man, perhaps the God, at least the One who fed men and healed them and taught them as none other

10、ever did. Blindly sometimes, perplexedly always, we hurry to the hovels of the hungry and the bedsides of those who suffer even loathsomely; we build libraries and schools, being sure at least of this, that in doing these things we follow Him. To all these various ideals Christ has been found entire

11、ly responsive. Each has found in Him a starting-point from which to escape the bondage of materialism. It has never, of course, been true that one great purpose has possessed the followers of Christ to the exclusion of every other. The conception of the gospel liberty lay quite consciously behind th

12、e enthusiasm for pure truth. The most faithful statesmen of the mediaeval Kingdom of God washed the sores of lepers and cast their cloaks over the shoulders of beggars on the wayside. The dominating conception of religion has always been permeated, leavened, tempered with conceptions of the Masters

13、meaning which were strange to it. There has always been, besides, one great conception of religion which has existed along with each of the others in its turn. Christianity has always involved a hunger and thirst after righteousness. Always and everywhere Christians have felt the unquenchable desire

14、 to be good, and have seen in Christ the great example of perfection. There has been no age in the history of the Church in which the idea of imitating Christ has failed to make an appeal to the souls of the faithful. Yet even this desire has had its period of special intensity, its peculiar region

15、where it became for a while the expression of Christianity. During the fourth and fifth centuries, in, the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, the craving for perfection was more painful and more narrowly exclusive than ever elsewhere. Thousands of men and women, in response to a passionate hunger after

16、 righteousness, set themselves to become perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect. They were not, indeed, careless about right belief and the holding fast of the faith. The accusation of heresy was a thing which seemed to them wholly intolerable. Yet to them the supreme importance of being good w

17、as so felt that it seemed of necessity to bring with it a true faith. What is the faith? asked a brother once. The abbot Pimenion replied to him, It is to live always in charity and humility, and to do good to your neighbonr. Their absorption in the pursuit of holiness made speculation seem vain and

18、 impious. Oh, Antony, said the heavenly voice, turn your attention to yourself. As for the judgments of God, it is not fitting that you should learn them. Nor must we think of the hermits as disregarding the claims which the Church made upon their obedience; still less as neglecting the claims of th

19、e poor and suffering. We shall see, later, how they thought about the Church, and how unjust it is to call them selfish. Here, first of all, it is necessary to understand that they were not chiefly theologians, or churchmen, or philanthropists, but imitators of Christ. Their desire was to be good. T

20、hat they also believed rightly and did good followed - and these things, did follow - from their being good. This aim of theirs ought not to be strange to us. Indeed, it cannot be. In the midst of our multiplied activities there is something in us which responds to the ideal of being, as well as doi

21、ng, good. It is the WAY in which they sought to attain their end, and not the end itself, which is incomprehensible and generally repulsive to the modern mind. It is so, I think, mainly because it is so absolutely strange to us. Our imaginations refuse to aid us in the effort to realize a system of

22、religious life based upon complete isolation from the world. To us the activities of life - the getting and spending, the learning and teaching, philanthropy, intercourse, and the opportunities for influence - constitute life itself. It is as difficult for us to form a definite conception of a life

23、apart from the world, from business, society, and the movements of human thought, as it is to realize that life of disembodied waiting which we expect in Paradise. Yet this complete isolation was what the Egyptian hermits strove to attain; and if we are to appreciate the value of their teaching we m

24、ust, first of all, grasp the fact that they were real men on whom the sun shone and the winds blew, men with local habitations, and not phantoms or unsubstantial figures in a dream. If we conceive a fourth-century traveller starting as Palladius did from Alexandria, we may suppose that he would jour

25、ney due south, ad skirt at first the shores of what is now Lake Mariut. Along the barren and rocky margin of the lake, at spots as remote as possible from the track followed by caravans, he would find the hermitages of ascetics, who, like Dorotheus, maintained a comparatively close connection with t

26、he Alexandrian clergy. Leaving the lake and journeying still southwards over about forty miles of utterly desolate land, he would come to a long valley extending east and west between two ranges of mountains or table lands, covered with sandy flats, salt marshes, and dangerous rocks. This is the fam

27、ous Nitrian desert. Here St. Amon built the first solitary cell. Here Evagrius Pontikus lived for about two years. Here Nathaniel was visited by the bishops. Here the Long Brothers lived, one of whom was the companion of St. Athanasius when he went to Italy. At the end of the fourth century the Nitr

28、ian mountains were dotted over with hermits cells. The evenings were resonant with psalm-singing. On Saturdays and Sundays the brethren swarmed forth like bees for worship in their church. Five miles further south, still among the Nitrian mountains, lay a region so utterly desolate that it had not e

29、ven a name, till the monks built over it and christened it The Cells. Further south still and towards the west lay the Scetic desert. It was a days journey from The Cells. This is the most famous of all the monastic settlements. Its founder was St. Macarius the Great. We may reckon among the Scetic

30、monks his two namesakes, St. Macarius of Alexandria and Macarius the Young. Here also, for the most part, dwelt Pior, Moses the AEthiopian, Paul the Simple, and the hermit Mark.* South-eastward, past Lake Arsino and Herakleopolis, lay St. Antonys birthplace, Coma. Here, no doubt, might have been see

31、n the tombs into which he first shut himself, and across the river, the mountain on which he found his ruined fort. This mountain, which was called the outer mountain, formed the home of smaller and less famous groups of ascetics. South-east from this, within a few miles of the Red Sea, lay the oute

32、r mountain, to which St. Antony was guided by the heavenly voice. Perhaps this retreat was never shared with him by anyone except his chosen attendant and the few visitors who forced their way there in search of spiritual counsel. South from the outer mountain, along the river, lay Oxyrynchus. This,

33、 even if we discount the figures of contemporary writers, must have been a great monastic city. In it monasticism took in organised ecclesiastical form. The church was served by priest-monks, and great communities of men and women carried on works of charity and evangelisation. Still further south l

34、ay Lycopolis, the home of John the prophet. This man was celebrated as well for his wonderful obedience as for his spiritual gifts. Lycopolis may be reckoned the outpost of the monasticism of lauras and hermitages. Beyond it lay the organised monasteries of the disciples of St. Pachomius. During the

35、 lifetime of the founder of Tabennisi, nine monasteries carried out his rule. Of these the most famous was that which was ruled by Bgoul and afterwards by his nephew, Schnoudi. On the sea-coast, east of Alexandria, lay the settlements visited by Cassian. The Tannitic mouth of the Nile flows into wha

36、t is now Lake Menzaleh. In Cassians time this whole region was a desolate salt swamp. The sea flowed over it when the north wind blew, destroying all hope of fertility. On the hills, which came to look like islands, stood the ruins of villages forsaken by their inhabitants. It was a land - Sea satur

37、ate as with wine.Among the ruins and amid the surrounding desolation dwelt the monks who were the heroes of Cassians earlier Conferences. No scene has seemed to me to convey more vividly at once the pathos and the nobility of the monks renunciation of the world than this one. In Nitria and Scete the

38、 ascetic is at least remote from all remembrances of common life. On the islands of Menzaleh he kneels in solitary prayer within the very walls where women once laughed to see their children sport. He gazes over brine-soaked swamps, which once were harvest-fields thronged with reapers. Westward from

39、 Menzaleh lay Lake Burlus. Between it and the sea stretched a desolate spit of sandy land, given up by farmers as hopelessly barren. This was the Diolcos described in the Institutes, and the eighteenth Conference. Here Archebius and his fellow hermits struggled for life in their inhospitable home, h

40、usbanding even their water as no miser would husband the most precious wine. Thus we have five distinct and widely separated regions in which Egyptian monasticism existed and flourished during the fourth century. First, Nitria, with its offshoot The Cells; second, Scete; third, the region in Upper E

41、gypt which came under St. Antonys more immediate influence; fourth, Southern Egypt; fifth, the sea-coast of the Nile Delta. In very close connection with these, so as to be predominatingly Egyptian in the tone of their monasticism, were the hermitages and lauras of south-western Palestine and the se

42、ttlements in the Sinai peninsula. Outlying from the greater centres were single hermitages and small lauras, wherever the monks hoped to find solitude. In many places life was supported only with extreme difficulty. Sometimes water had to be obtained by collecting and storing the dew which fell at c

43、ertain seasons. Sometimes it was carried with immense toil from distant wells. There were districts where the hermits lived in constant dread of the irruption of barbarian tribes, which destroyed tranquillity and even threatened life itself. Bands of wandering robbers sometimes rifled the cells of t

44、heir miserable furniture, or captured, insulted, and injured the hermits. At other times the silence of these retreats became so awful, that the hermit was startled into uncontrollable emotion by the chance shout of some shepherd-boy who had driven his goats too far; or came to find the rustling of

45、dry reeds in the wind an almost insupportable noise. For the most part in the deserts north of the Thebaid the monks saw very little of each other. Even the inhabitants of grouped cells led almost solitary lives. On Saturdays and Sundays they met for public worship and perhaps a common meal, but dur

46、ing the rest of the week they lived alone in their cells, or with a single disciple. If the monk were wise, he worked. Sometimes he wove mats or baskets. These were afterwards exchanged by the hermit himself or his disciple for the necessities of life in some neighbouring village. If the cell lay to

47、o remote from human habitation to permit of such traffic, the mats or baskets were accumulated in piles, and in the end burnt. They had fulfilled their function, and were got rid of that way as well as in the markets; for the hermit was not a tradesman. He worked, not for wages, but lest the devil m

48、ight tempt him in his idle hours. Sometimes a garden was cultivated around the cell. The hermit struggled with drought and barrenness until he produced a little stock of vegetables. Sometimes his cell was happily placed where date palms grew. He watched his fruit against the depredations of wild bir

49、ds. Nothing is more striking than the insistence of the greater hermits on the necessity for labour of some sort. It was from their experience and their illuminated introspection that St. Benedict learnt the truth on which he built a great part of his rule - Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Besides working, the monks prayed. Hours every day were spent in prayer, which must have been more of the nature of meditation than intercession. In the intervals of prayer and work they sang or said psalms, and often repeated alo