Content provided in partnership with
The call of the wilderness
UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1994 by Jean-Claude Carriere
Ascetics have always been drawn to life in the desert, far from the world and the pleasures of the flesh. Some of them became a prey to strange forces and malign spirits...
THREE calls come from the desert. The first is the call of God, who manifests himself in the wilderness, as he did to Moses. It is in the desert--or so the early Christians believed--that we can really make contact with the other, supernatural, transcendent world. It is there that the essential word can be heard.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
The second call is one of disgust and contempt for the world and for a corrupt, condemned society in which God's presence is obliterated by commerce, by the family and by a thousand and one mundane, pernicious desires. In contrast, the solitude and aridity of the desert seem pure, unsullied. Ironically, despite the lack of vegetation, the desert is where the last traces of paradise can be found.
The third call is sounded by the trumpets of the apocalypse. During the early centuries of the Church, the founding fathers of Christianity were certain that the end of the world was nigh. At any moment the heavens might split asunder and exterminating angels with flashing swords surge forth. When that terrible vision came to pass, woe betide those caught in a state of sin or even of forgetfulness; they would be hurled forever into Gehenna. When the end of the world comes, we should be in a state of retreat and prayer, as near to God as possible. That is why the desert is there.
A hotbed of temptation
Early in the Christian era, many people were drawn by these three calls to arid lands, in Syria but above all in the Thebaid, the desert around Thebes in Egypt. They soon became legendary figures. The most famous of them was St. Anthony, who lived in Egypt to the age of a hundred and five. His experiences showed that if the desert is a sacred place it is also a hotbed of temptation where the devil and evil forces can rise up in the form of strange, whirling shapes ready to drag into the abyss anyone bold enough to turn his back on worldly comforts and the reassuring relationships of social life.
This ardent, perilous life in a remote place and in absolute poverty--a practice that Luther and the Protestants would later denounce as stultifying--gave rise to extreme forms of behaviour that appear extraordinary to us today. The desert teems with images that came to obsess these holy men, driving them to the brink of madness and even beyond: it is a land of wonders and hallucinations because of the burning sun; its aridity is an allegory of the soul's separation from God; it is a powerful symbol of unity; sand and wind are symbolic elements inseparable from the eternal theme of the vanity of all things, while rock symbolizes permanence; baptism is performed with the water of life, all the more precious in the desert because of its scarcity; it is the haunt of tireless, aggressive, wandering demons, seemingly stirred by the hermits' asceticism and self-denial. The Church kept these men at arm's length, sometimes pointing out that they were not following the example set by Christ, who had chosen to live and die among people. Nevertheless, a multitude of Lives of the Desert Fathers related their exploits in great detail.
It is no exaggeration to talk of physical exploits or even of competitions or championships, for the desert fathers strove to outdo each other in fasting and praying. Some hid their faces, others flagellated and mortified themselves. St. Macarius the Egyptian remained standing "for sixty years", from time to time running through the desert carrying a heavy basket of sand. When asked what he was doing, he replied, "I am tormenting him who torments me".
St. Paul the Hermit, who recited 300 prayers a day (he counted them with pebbles), was "humiliated" when he learned that a virgin in a neighbouring village recited 700. St. Elpid, who lived near Jericho in the fourth century, never faced the west and never looked at the sky after six in the evening--for reasons known to him alone. Others lived covered with chains, surrounded by sharpened branches or wearing strange helmets from which stones that kept them from falling asleep were suspended (because God may come "like a thief in the night"). They never washed, out of scorn for the flesh. Live maggots crawled from the mouth of a Greek ascetic named Matthew. The hermit Meletius was covered with running sores, and whenever a maggot fell out of one he carefully put it back so that it would not suffer.
Perhaps the most extraordinary of all were the stylites, who lived on top of pillars in order to be closer to heaven. According to legend, St. Simeon Stylites, the best known among them, stayed on a column for over forty years. He inspired a poem by Tennyson and Luis Bunuel's film Simon of the Desert (1965).
Simeon ate nothing but a few blades of grass hauled up to him in a basket attached to a rope; his excrement was black pellets. He had numerous visitors, and several rulers even sought his advice, bearing gifts, which he refused. On one occasion, he thought he saw an angel of light swoop down in a chariot of fire to take him to heaven, but just as he raised his foot to climb in, the vision faded. As a punishment he condemned himself to stand on one foot for the rest of his life. (He died a year later.)
