villagers who had assembled there had lighted near the entrance, where they were bivouacking for the night, attracted the attention of a Barbary corsair, then cruising off the island, and guided him to the spot unobserved. Suddenly and unexpectedly he and his crew, having stolen up the hill, burst upon the crowd of frightened Cretans. The Corsairs thereupon built up the entrance, and waited for day, the better to secure their captives for embarkation. But happily there was another exit from the cavern behind the altar, and by this the whole congregation escaped into another cave, and thence by a passage to a further opening, through which they stole out unobserved by the pirates.
The rock-hewn church of Dayn Aboo Hannes, “the convent of Father John,” in Egypt, near Antinoe, has its walls painted with subjects from the New Testament; the church is thought to date back to the time of Constantine.
The passion for associating grottoes with sacred themes is shown in the location of the site of the Nativity at Bethlehem. There is nothing in the Gospel to lead us to suppose that the event took place in a cave, though it is not improbable that it did so. The scene of the Annunciation was also a rock-hewn cave, now occupied by a half- underground church, out of which flows the Virgin’s Fountain.
In Gethsemane, “the chapel of the Tomb of the Virgin, over the traditional spot where the Mother of our Lord was buried by the Apostles, is mostly underground. Three flights of steps lead down to the space in front of it, so that nothing is seen above ground but the porch. But even after you have gone down the three flights of steps you are only at the entrance to the church, amidst marble pillars, flying buttresses, and pointed arches. Forty-seven additional marble steps, descending in a broad flight nineteen feet wide, lead down a further depth of thirty-five feet, and here you are surrounded by monkish sites and sacred spots. The whole place is, in fact, two distinct natural caves, enlarged and turned to their present uses with infinite care. Far below the ground you find a church thirty-one yards long and nearly seven wide, lighted by many lamps, and are shown the tomb of the father and mother of the Virgin, and that of Joseph and the Virgin herself. And as if this were not enough, a long subterranean gallery leads down six steps more to a cave eighteen yards long, half as broad, and about twelve feet wide, which you are told is the Cavern of the Agony.” [Footnote: Geikie (C.), “The Holy Land and the Bible,” Lond. 1887, ii.p.8.]
Stanley says: [Footnote: “Sinai and Palestine,” Lond. 1856, p.150.] “The moment that the religion of Palestine fell into the hands of Europeans, it is hardly too much to say that as far as sacred traditions are concerned, it became ‘a religion of caves,’ of those very caves which in earlier times had been unhallowed by any religious influence whatever. Wherever a sacred association had to be fixed, a cave was immediately selected or found as its home. First in antiquity is the grotto of Bethlehem, already in the second century regarded by popular belief as the scene of the Nativity. Next comes the grotto on Mount Olivet, selected as the scene of our Lord’s last conversation before the Ascension. These two caves, Eusebius emphatically asserts, were the first seats of the worship established by the Empress Helena, to which was shortly afterwards added a third–the sacred cave of the Sepulchre. To these were rapidly added the cave of the Invention of the Cross, the cave of the Annunciation at Nazareth, the cave of the Agony at Gethsemane, the cave of the Baptism in the Wilderness of S. John, the cave of the Shepherds of Bethlehem. And then again, partly perhaps the cause, partly the effect of the consecration of grottoes, began the caves of the hermits. There were the cave of S. Pelagia on Mount Olivet, the caves of S. Jerome, S. Paula, and S. Eustochium at Bethlehem, the cave of S. Saba in the ravine of Kedron, the remarkable cells hewn or found in the precipices of the Quarrantania or Mount of the Temptation above Jericho. In some few instances this selection of grottoes would coincide with the events thus intended to be perpetuated, as for example, the hiding-place of the prophets on Carmel, and the sepulchres of the patriarchs and of Our Lord. But in most instances the choice is made without the sanction, in some instances in defiance of, the sacred narrative.”
It is questionable whether Dean Stanley is right in attributing the identification of caves with sacred sites to Europeans, it is probable enough that the local Christians had already fixed upon some if not all of them. After the pilgrims or the Crusaders had come in their thousands and visited the holy sites, they returned to their native lands deeply impressed with the association of caves with everything that was held sacred, and this, added to the dormant sense of reverence for places underground consecrated to holy purposes that had come to them from their parents, must have tended to the multiplication of subterranean churches.
In some venerated caves and in certain crypts are springs of water that are held to be invested with miraculous properties. The crypts of S. Peter in the Vatican, S. Ponziana and S. Alessandro, have such flowing springs. In the crypt of the church of Gorlitz is a well, and from that of the cathedral of Paderborn issues one of the sources of the river Pader. The Kilian spring rises in the crypt of the New Minster in Wuerzburg. Out of the cave of the monastery of Brantome, to be described in another chapter, streams a magnificent source. Most of the water is employed for the town and for the washerwomen, but one little rill from it is conducted to an ornate fountain, that bears the name of S. Sicarius (Little Cut-throat), one of the Innocents of Bethlehem slain by order of Herod. It is explained that by some means or other Charlemagne obtained his bones, but how the infant of a Hebrew mother acquired a Latin name has not been attempted to be explained.
CHAPTER VIII
ROCK HERMITAGES
There is an account in the _Times’_ Correspondent’s record of Colonel Younghusband’s expedition to Lhasa that when read haunts the imagination. It is the description made by Mr. Landon of a Buddhist monastery, Nyen-de-kyl-Buk, where the inmates enter as little children and grow up with the prospect of being literally immured in a cave from which the light of day is excluded as well as the society of their fellow-men, there to spend the rest of their life till they rot. Horace may say:
Jubeas miserum esse, libenter Quatenus id facit;
but few Christians can feel this towards another human being, though of another race, religion, and under another clime.
“These men,” said the abbot to Mr. Landon, “live here in the mountain of their own free will; a few of them are allowed a little light whereby reading is possible, but these are the weaker brethren; the others live in darkness in a square cell partly hewn out of the sharp slope of the rock, partly built up, with the window just within reach of the upraised hand. There are three periods of immurement. The first is endured for six months, the second, upon which a monk may enter at any time he pleases, or not at all, is for three years and ninety-three days; the third and last period is for life. Only this morning,” said the abbot, “a hermit died after having lived in darkness for twenty- five years.” Mr. Landon goes on to say: “Voluntary this self-immolation is said to be, and perhaps technically speaking it is possible for the pluckier souls to refuse to go on with this hideous and useless form of self-sacrifice, but the grip of the Lamas is omnipotent, and practically none refuse.”
He describes a visit to the cell of one of those thus immured: “The abbot led us into a small courtyard which had blank walls all round it, over which a peach-tree reared its transparent pink and white against the sky. Almost on a level with the ground there was an opening closed with a flat stone from behind. In front of this window was a ledge eighteen inches in width with two basins beside it, and one at each end. The abbot was attended by an acolyte, who, by his master’s orders, tapped three times sharply on the stone slab. We stood in the little courtyard in the sun and watched that wicket with cold apprehension. I think, on the whole, it was the most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet. What on earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest. After half-a-minute’s pause the stone moved, or tried to move, but it came to rest again. Then, very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back, and a black chasm was revealed. There was a pause of thirty seconds, during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think that any other thing could have been so intensely pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightly wound piece of dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab moved noiselessly again across the opening. Once a day water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed for the prisoner upon that slab, the signal is given, and he may take it in. His diversion is over for the day, and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day, noon, sunset, and the dawn are all alike, the poor soul has thought that another day of his long penance was over.”
Here is another account from the pen of Sven Hedin.
He visited the monastery of Sumde-pu-pe, where was a hermitage consisting of a single room five paces each way, built over a spring that bubbles up in the centre. Inside the hermit had been walled up with only a tiny tunnel communicating with the outside world. Once inside, he was never again to see the light of day nor hear a human voice. The man Sven Hedin saw had been immured for sixty-nine years, and wished to see the sun again.
“He was all bent up as small as a child, and his body was nothing but a light-grey parchment-like skin and bones. His eyes had lost their colour, and were quite bright and blind. Of the monks who sixty-nine years before had conducted him to the cell not one survived…. And he had scarcely been carried out into the sunlight when he too, gave up the ghost.” [Footnote: “Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet,” Lond. 1910.]
S. Theresa once said that she had a vision of Hell. The torture did not consist of flames, but in being planted opposite a blank wall, on which to gaze through all eternity. The hermit in a Buddhist cell must have undergone this torture till all intelligence, all consciousness, save desire for food, was dead within him.
There have been horrible instances of voluntary immurement in Christian Europe, and above all in the Christian East; but not quite–though very nearly–as bad as this. Moreover, not one line, not a single word in the Scriptures inculcates such self-annihilation. Christ set the example of retirement from the world into the wilderness for forty days, to a mountain apart for one night, to teach men occasionally and for a limited period, to withdraw from the swirl of business and the clatter of tongues. And S. Paul retired from the society of men after his conversion to gather his thoughts together, and prepare for his great missionary work. But that was something altogether different from ascetic abnegation of life and flight from its responsibilities.
The peopling of the solitudes of Syria and Egypt by solitaries was due, not to flight from persecution, but to revulsion from the luxury of the great cities, and very largely as an escape from compulsory military service. It was not a new thing. Judaism had been impregnated with Buddhism, or at all events with Brahminism, and with ideas of asceticism. The Essenes and Therapeutae lived, the first in the time of the Maccabees upon the shores of the Dead Sea, and the last two centuries later, in Egypt. Both inhabited cells in the desert, preserving celibacy, renouncing property, pleasure, and delicate food, and consecrating their time to the study of the Scriptures, and to prayer. And yet celibacy was in violation of the principles of Judaism, which required every man to marry, in the hopes of becoming a progenitor of the Messiah. Further, they rejected the bloody sacrifices of the law, and would have nothing to do with the temple at Jerusalem. We can see by Philo’s “On the Contemplative Life” how completely Alexandrian Judaism had sucked in Buddhist doctrine, and how Therapeutic asceticism formed the bridge from Buddhism to Christian monachism. In the same places where Essenes and Therapeutae had been, there later we find Christian solitaries. “We can have no doubt,” says Ferdinand Delaunay, “that the Therapeutic Convents which perhaps gave the first signal for conversion to the new faith, served also as the cradle for Christian monachism. History shows us, hardly a century later, this flourishing in the same localities on the borders of the lake Mareotis, and on the heights of Nitrea. And we cannot doubt but that Christian solitaries continued at Alexandria the work of their Jewish predecessors, and endeavoured to make their oracles serve for the propagation of the Gospel.” [Footnote: Delaunay (F.), _Moines et Sibylles_, Paris, 1874, p. 316.]
The language in which Philo describes the Therapeutae might be applied to the Christian monks of Egypt. I must condense his rambling account. The Therapeutae abandon their property, their children, their wives, parents, and friends and homes, to seek out fresh habitations outside the city walls, in solitary places and in deserts. They pray twice in the day, at morning and evening, and the interval is wholly devoted to meditation on the Scriptures and elucidating the allegories therein. They likewise compose psalms and hymns to God, “and during six days each, retiring into solitude, philosophises, never going outside the threshold of the outer court, and indeed never looking out. But on the seventh day they all assemble, and sit down in order, and the eldest, who has the most profound learning, speaks with steadfast voice explaining the meaning of the laws.”
They wore but one garment, a shaggy hide for winter, and a thin mantle for summer. Their food was herbs and bread, and their drink water. Philo concludes his account thus: “This then is what I have to say of those who are called Therapeutae who have devoted themselves to the contemplation of nature, and who have lived in it, and in the soul alone, being citizens of heaven and of the world, and very acceptable to the Father and Creator of the universe because of their virtue; it has procured them His love as their most appropriate reward, which far surpasses all the gifts of fortune, and conducts them to the very summit and perfection of happiness.”
It was not among the Jews alone that the solitary life was cultivated. In the Serapium of Thebes were also heathen monks leading a very similar life. That Persian Manichaeism had infected Jews and heathen as well there can exist little doubt. [Footnote: Philo gives an account of the sacred banquets of the Therapeutae that strongly reminds us of the Agapae of the Early Christians.]
In 177, in Lyons, when S. Pothinus and others were arrested, thrown into prison, tortured and killed for the Faith, there was one of the martyrs who caused offence to the rest because “he had long been used to a very austere life, and to live entirely on bread and water. He seemed resolved to continue this practice during his confinement, but Attalus (another martyr), after his first combat in the theatre, understood by revelation that Alcibiades gave occasion of offence to others by seeming to favour the new sect of the Montanists (a Christian phase of Manichaeism), who endeavoured to recommend themselves by their extraordinary austerities. Alcibiades listened to the admonition, and from that time ate of everything with thanksgiving to God.” [Footnote: Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._, v. i.]
But, although Buddhism affected the lives of certain Christians, it in no way touched their faith–that life was the result of contact with Manichaeism, which taught that all matter was evil, and that the flesh must be subdued, as essentially ungodly. The Buddhist religion in its ethics is the absolute reverse of the Christian. The Buddhist prays and tortures, and stupefies himself for purely selfish reasons, so as to escape reincarnation in the form of a bug, a louse, or a worm, by the destruction within himself of all human passions and inclinations. His self-torture is undertaken for the object of absorption into Nirvana, only to be reached by reducing the mind and heart to absolute indifference to every animal desire, and thus to escape the eternal revolution of metempsychosis. “No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself,” is a maxim incomprehensible to a Buddhist. As Mr. Landon says: “The spiritual brigandage of the Lamas finds its counterpart in many other creeds, but it would be unjust not to record in the strongest terms the great radical difference that exists between Lamaism at its best and Christianity at its worst. There has never been absent from the lowest profession of our faith a full recognition of the half-divine character of self-sacrifice for another. Of this the Tibetians know nothing. The exact performance of their duties, the daily practice of conventional offices, and continual obedience to their Lamaic superiors is for them a means of escape from personal damnation in a form which is more terrible perhaps than any monk- conjured Inferno. For others they do not profess to have even a passing thought. Now this is a distinction which goes to the very root of the matter. The fact is rarely stated in so many words, but it is the truth that Christianity is daily judged by one standard, and by one standard only–its altruism, and this complete absence of carefulness for others, this insistent and fierce desire to save one’s own soul, regardless of a brother’s, is in itself something that makes foreign to one the best that Lamaism can offer.”
One day a gnat stung S. Macarius, and he killed it. To punish himself for this, he went to the marshes of Scete, and stayed there six months. When he returned to his brethren he was so disfigured by the bites of the insects that they recognised him only by the tone of his voice. A Brahmin would have been filled with remorse lest he had killed a reincarnation of his grandmother, but the Egyptian ascetic only because he had given way to momentary irritation.
One has but to read the sayings of the Fathers of the Desert to see that no vein of Brahminism or Buddhism had tinctured their faith, however deeply it may have coloured their practice. When plague raged in Alexandria, they were ready to quit their cells and hasten into the cities to minister to the sick and dying; when the faith, as they understood it, was menaced, to champion the truth.
That the Egyptian hermits, flying from association with the world, should betake themselves to caves, is hardly to be wondered at. In that land the rocks are pitted with artificial grottoes, which were the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and were commodious and to be had without asking leave of any one.
Twice was Athanasius obliged to fly from the fury of the Arians, and to take refuge among the solitaries in their caves. Once he was constrained to remain in concealment in his father’s tomb, also a cavern. When he was banished to Treves, tradition says that he would not occupy a house, but sought out a grotto in a hill beyond the Moselle, and made his abode therein.
The filiation between the Syrian and Egyptian solitaries with the hermits of Buddhism may be made out with some plausibility. In the East sanctity and asceticism are inseperable. The smug missionary who cannot preach the Gospel apart from a wife, mosquito curtains and a cottage piano, and who travels from one station to another in a palanquin borne by sweating natives, does not impress the imagination of an Oriental, and has small chance of making converts. It was possibly much the same with the barbarians who overwhelmed the Roman Empire. To strike their imagination and win them to the Cross, it may be that asceticism was a necessary phase of mission work. “The Spirit breatheth where He wills, and thou canst not tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth,” is the Vulgate rendering of S. John iii. 8. But if it was at one time a necessary phase, it ceased to be so when the effect required was produced; and from the close of mediaeval times the hermit was an anachronism. The life of S. Antony by Athanasius, and the _Historia Lausiaca_ or “Lives of the Fathers of the Desert,” by Palladius (died c. 430), were published in the West, and inflamed minds with the desire to emulate the ascetics of Syria and Egypt; and speedily there were zealots who sought out retreats in the dens of the earth, in which to serve God in simplicity.
Some anchorites [Footnote: Properly an _anchorite_ is a recluse, walled into his cell; a _monk_ is a solitary; and an _eremite_ or _hermit_ is a dweller in the desert.] are commemorated in both the Greek Menaea and the Roman Martyrology more worthy to be esteemed Buddhists than Christian saints. Theodoret, who wrote A.D. 440, describes the lives of two women of Beroea, whom he had himself seen. They lived in a roofless hovel with the door walled up and plastered over with clay, and with a narrow slit left for a window, through which they received food. They spoke to those who visited them but once in the year, at Pentecost; not content with the squalor and solitude of their hut, they loaded themselves with masses of iron which bent them double. Theodoret was wont to peer in through the chink at the revolting sight of the ghastly women, a mass of filth, crushed double with great rings and chains of iron. Thus they spent forty-two years, and then a yearning came on them to go forth and visit Jerusalem. The little door was accordingly broken open, and they crawled out, visited the Holy City, and crawled back again.
Another visited by Theodoret was Baradatus, who built himself a cabin on the top of a rock, so small that he was unable to stand upright in it, and was obliged to move therein bent nearly double. The joints of the stones were, moreover, so open that it resembled a cage and exposed him to the sun and rain. Theodosius, patriarch of Antioch, as a sensible man, ordered him to leave it. Then Baradatus encased himself in leather so that only his nose and mouth were visible. Nowhere was the imitation carried to such wild extravagance as in Ireland. S. Findchua is described as living like an Indian fakir. In his cell he suspended himself for seven years on iron sickles under his arm-pits, and only descended from them to go forth and howl curses on the enemies of the King of Leinster.
In England also there was extravagance. S. Wulfric, who died in 1154, encased himself in a coat of chain-mail worn next his skin even in winter, and occupied a cell at Hazelbury in Somerset. S. Edmund of Canterbury (died 1242) wore a shirt of twisted horsehair with knots in it, and bound a cart rope round his waist so that he could scarce bend his body. In Advent and Lent he wore a shirt of sheet-lead. Thomas a Becket, when slain, was found by the monks of Canterbury to be wearing a hair shirt and hair-cloth drawers, and their admiration became enthusiastic when they further discovered that this hair-cloth was “boiling over” with lice. That this species of sanctity is still highly approved and commended to the imitation of the faithful we may suppose from the fact that Pius IX. in 1850 beatified the Blessed Marianna, because she was wont to sleep in a coffin or on a cross, and on Fridays hung herself for two hours on a cross attached to it by her hair and by ropes. On broiling hot days she denied herself a drop of water to quench an almost intolerable thirst. Verily Manichaeism has eaten like a canker into the heart of the Latin Church.
But the early anchorites of Europe were not usually guilty of such extravagance. They were earnest men who sought by self-conquest to place themselves in a position in which they could act as missionaries. It was their means of preparing for the work of an evangelist. In most cases the apostle of a district sunk in paganism had no choice, he must take up his abode in a cave or in a hovel made of branches. In the Gallo-Roman cities the Christian bishops had gradually taken into their hands the functions of the civil governors. They were men of family and opulence, and lived in palaces crowded with slaves. They did nothing whatever towards the conversion of the country folk, the pagani. This was the achievement of the hermits. Till the peasants had been Christianised they would not invite the preacher of strange doctrines under their roofs, they looked on him with dislike or mistrust as interfering with their cherished superstitions and ancestral customs. He could not force his society on reluctant hosts.
S. Beatus, a British or Irish missionary, settled into a cave above the lake of Thun, dreaded by the natives as the abode of a dragon. He succeeded in his work, and died there at the advanced age of ninety. In 1556 the Protestant Government of Berne built up the mouth of the grotto and set soldiers to repel the pilgrims who came there. Now a monster hotel occupies the site, and those who go there for winter sport or as summer tourists know nothing or care less about the abode of the Apostle whence streamed the light of the Gospel throughout the land.
Below the terrace that surrounds the height on which Angouleme is built is the cave of S. Cybard (Eparchius died 581). An iron gate prevents access to it, and the path down to it is strewn with broken bottles and sardine tins. No one now visits it. But within, where are an altar and the mutilated statue of the saint, lived the hermit who in the sixth century did more than any other man to bring the people of the Angoumois out of darkness into light. But, as already said, when the work of evangelisation was done, then the profession of the hermit was no longer required, and such anchorites as lingered on in Europe through the Middle Ages to our own day were but degenerate representatives of the ancient evangelical solitaries.
A few years ago hermits abounded in Languedoc. They took charge of remote chapels on mountain tops, or in caves and ravines. They were always habited as Franciscan friars, but they were by no means a reputable order of men, and the French prefets in conjunction with the bishops have suppressed them.
They were always to be seen on a market day in the nearest town, not infrequently in the taverns, and in the evening festooning along the roads on their way back to their hermitages, trolling out convivial songs spiced with snatches of ecclesiastical chants. “Mon Dieu,” says Ferdinand Fabre, [Footnote: Barnabe, Paris, 1899] “I know well enough that the Free Brothers of S. Francis, as they loved to entitle themselves, had allowed themselves a good deal of freedom, more than was decorous. But as these monastically-habited gentry in no way scandalised the population of the South, who never confounded the occupants of the hermitages with the cures of the parishes, why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin.” The salt had lost its savour, wherewith could it be seasoned?
It was not in Southern France alone that the part of the hermit was played out. An amusing incident in the confession of Fetzer, head of a gang of robbers who infested the Rhine at the end of the eighteenth century, will go some way to show this. The gang had resolved on “burgling” a hermit near Lobberich. Had he been an eremite of the old sort, the last place in which robbers would have expected to find plunder would be his cell. But in the eighteenth century it was otherwise, and this particular hermit kept a grocer’s shop, and sold coffee, sugar, and nutmegs. The rogues approached the cell at night, and as a precaution one of them climbed and cut the rope of the bell wherewith the hermit announced to the neighbourhood that he was about to say his prayers. Then they broke open his door. In Fetzer’s own words, “The hermit was not at home, but as we learned, had gone a journey in connection with his grocery business. In the hermitage, however, we found several men placed there to keep guard over his goods. We soon settled them, beat them with our cudgels and cast them prostrate on the floor. Then we burst open all the chests and cupboards, but found little money. There was, however, plenty of tea and sugar. As we were about to leave, a fearful storm came on, and without more ado we returned into the hermitage to remain there till it was overpast. In order to dissipate the tedium, we ransacked the place for food, and found an excellent ham and wine in abundance. I assumed the place of host. Serve the meal! Bring more! I ordered, and we revelled and shouted and made as great a din as we liked. In the second room the hermit had a small organ. I seated myself at it; and to make the row more riotous I played as well as I was able. The laughter and the racket did not cease till morning broke. Then I dressed myself up in the hermit’s cowl and habit, and so went off with my comrades.” [Footnote: _Der neue Pitaval_, Leipzig, xviii. p. 182]
I remember visiting a hermit in 1868 who lived on a ledge in the cliff above S. Maurice in the Vallais, where was a cave that had been occupied by the repentant Burgundian King Sigismund. He cultivated there a little garden, and I have still by me a dried bouquet of larkspur that he presented to my wife on our leaving after a pleasant chat. A pilgrimage to the cave was due on the morrow, and he had just returned from the town whither he had descended to borrow mugs out of which the devotees might drink of the holy spring that issued from the cave.
The Wild Kirchlein, in Appenzell, is now visited rather by tourists than by pilgrims. A huge limestone precipice rises above the Bodmenalp, that is a paradise of wild flowers. A hundred and seventy feet up the cliff gapes a cavern, and at its mouth is a tiny chapel. It is reached by what is now a safe pathway and over a bridge cast across a chasm. But formerly the ascent could not be made without danger. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Alpine shepherds, who had reached the cave, reported that they had seen in it the remains of an altar. This aroused interest, and in the summer of 1621 a Capuchin named Tanner ascended to the cave, blessed, and consecrated it as a place of pilgrimage. He said mass there and preached. He was shortly afterwards called away to Freiburg, and for thirty years the cave was disregarded and neglected. But at the end of that time Tanner returned to Appenzell, and interested the parish priest Ulmann in it. When war broke out between Schwyz and Zurich in 1656, Ulmann concealed the treasures of the church in the cave. This drew attention to it, and shortly after an altar was furnished with what was needful, and on the Feast of S. Michael in 1657 mass was again said there. Various matters –loss of friends, and contests with the secular authorities–wearied Ulmann, and he resolved on retiring as a hermit to the cave in the cliff, taking with him, however, an attendant. The swallows left, the winter storms came on, yet he braved the wind and cold, and remained a tenant of the cave for two winters and as many summers; but then, by order of the Bishop, he left to act as chaplain to a convent in Lindau. There he spent nine years, till falling ill, he felt a craving for the purer air of his Appenzell home, and obtained leave to return and again re-tenant the beloved cave. In his last will he bequeathed the Upper Bodmen Alp that was his ancestral inheritance for the maintenance of the Holy Grotto. After his death the little chapel with its tower was built, and a Capuchin friar occupied the hermitage. In 1853, the last hermit there, Brother Antony Fassler, fell down the precipice whilst gathering herbs. Since then there has been no such picturesque object to lead the visitor through the recesses of the cavern and show the stalactites; that office is now performed by the innkeeper of the hotel on the Alp.
The cave of S. Verena is one of the favourite pilgrim resorts in Switzerland. It is near Soleure, and lies in a valley of a spur of the Jura. According to the received tradition she ran after the Theban legion–in modern parlance was a camp-follower, but deserted the soldiers here, and took up her abode in this grotto. There is no mention of this hermitage earlier than 1426, and the legend has grown up since. That the cave was much more ancient, and was invested with holy awe, is no doubt true. In fact, there is reason to believe that Verena was a German goddess. [Footnote: Rocholz, _Dei Gaugoettinnen_, Leipzig, 1870.] Her symbol is a comb, and in the wall are cut these words:
Pectore dum Christo, dum pectine servit egenis, Non latuit quondam sancta Verena cavo;
that is to say, serving Christ and combing the heads of the poor, the holy Verena lived unconcealed in this grotto.
The way to the chapel is through woods, the valley closing in till bold rocks are reached. In a niche is a statue of the Magdalen, with the inscription, “I sleep, but my heart waketh.” A few steps further is a representation of the Garden of Gethsemane. From this a long and steep stair leads up to the chapel, cut deep in the rock, with an altar in it. Behind this is the Holy Sepulchre carved in the stone, in the seventeenth century by the hermit Arsenius. On the other side of the chapel a long stone stair leads again into the open air. Under this stair is a hole in the rock into which the hand can be thrust. According to a “pious belief” the Saint one day was much tormented with the remembrance of the military, and longed to resume her pursuit of them, and she gripped the rock, which yielded like wax to her fingers.
Another Swiss rock hermitage is that of the Magdalen near Freiburg, in the cliff on the right bank of the Saane. At the close of the seventeenth century it was enlarged by a hermit, John Baptist Dupres, and his comrade John Licht. They worked at it for twenty years. Dupres dug a number of cells out of the sandstone, a kitchen with a chimney, a dining-room, a church, and a stable. The church measures 63 feet long, 30 feet wide, and is 22 feet high. He built a tower to his church, and gave his chimney the height of 90 feet so as to ensure that his fire should not smoke. The hermit Dupres was drowned in 1708 as he was rowing over the river a party of scholars who had come to visit him. No hermit lives there now. His residence is occupied by a peasant with his family.
On the Nahe, that flows into the Rhine, is the little town of Oberstein, whose inhabitants are nearly all employed in cutting and polishing agates, sardonyxes, and various other stones prized by ladies. Precipitous cliffs arise above the town, and contract the space on which houses could be raised, and these rocks are crowned by two ruined castles, the Older and the Newer Oberstein. About half-way up the face of the cliff, 260 feet above the river, can be seen a tiny church, to which ascent is made by flights of steps. The old castle rises above this, and stands 360 feet above the river, but its remains are reduced to a fragment of a tower. Separated from it by a notch in the rocks is the new castle that was destroyed by fire about thirty- five years ago.
In the old castle lived in the eleventh century two brothers, Wyrich and Emich von Oberstein. Both fell in love with the daughter of the knight of Lichtenberg, but neither confessed his passion to the other. At last, one day Emich returned to the castle to announce to his brother that he had been accepted by the fair maid; Wyrich, in an impulse of jealousy, caught his brother by the throat and hurled him down the precipice. His conscience at once spoke out, and in the agony of his remorse he had resort to a hermit who bade him renounce the world, grave for himself a cell in the face of the melaphyre clay–the hermit did not give to the rock its mineralogical name–and await a token from heaven that he was forgiven. Accordingly Wyrich von Oberstein scrambled up the face of the cliff as high as he could possibly go, and there laboured day after day till he had excavated for himself a grotto in which to live and expiate his crime. And a spring oozed out of the rock in his cave, and was accepted by him as the promised token of pardon. After a while he obtained that a little church should be consecrated which he had constructed at the mouth of his cave. On the day that the bishop came to dedicate the structure he was found dead.
What is supposed to be his figure, that of a knight in armour, is in the chapel. This latter was rebuilt in 1482, and the monument came from the older structure. The chapel has been handed over to the Calvinists for their religious services, which is the humour of it, as Nym would have said.
Beside the highroad (_route nationale_) from Brive to Cahors, but a very little way out of the town, is a mass of red Permian sandstone perforated with caves. In 1226 S. Anthony of Padua was at Brive, and resided for a while in one of them. Since then it has been held sacred and occupied by Franciscans, who erected a convent above it; in so doing they cut into and mutilated some very ancient artificial workings in the sandstone for the contrivance of rock habitations. The cave, however, was neglected when the Franciscans were expelled at the Revolution, but they returned in 1875 and rebuilt or greatly enlarged their convent, only to be expelled again in 1906. The grottoes, now converted into chapels to the number of four, are in a line under the superstructures, that in the middle the actual hermitage. This, moreover, has been cut out of the rock artificially, at a higher level than the others, that are natural and are untenable, owing to the incessant drip of water from the roofs. The first cave is dedicated to S. Francis of Assisi, but it is a rock shelter rather than a cave. It is natural, but in one corner a small water-basin has been scooped. The second cave is mainly natural, but partly artificial; it is dedicated to Notre Dame Auxiliatrice. The third, reached by steps, is wholly artificial, and before the stairs were built to lead to it, was inaccessible save by a short ladder. It placed the occupant in safety from invasion by wolves or other objectionable visitors. It measures 21 feet by 15 feet. This, which was the habitation of S. Anthony, communicated with the two lower caves, one on each side, by lateral openings.
The fourth cave is that of Des Fontaines, in which are basins of water cut in the rock, receiving the everlasting drip from above.
It is impossible to give one tithe of the hermitages in caves that are to be seen in Europe; but a few words may be devoted to La Sainte Beaume in Var, where, according to tradition, Mary Magdalen spent the end of her days. The tradition is entirely destitute of historical basis, and rests on a misconception. Scott has described the cave with tolerable accuracy in “Anne of Geierstein,” though he had not seen it himself.
The cave is in the range of cretaceous limestone that runs east and west to the north-east of Marseilles, and at La Beaume Sainte reaches the height of 3450 feet. The wild flowers, the fine forest, and the white rocks impart great interest to the visit without consideration of historical and legendary association. The botanist will find the globe flower, the anemone, the citisus, the man, the bee, the fly orchids, and the _Orchis militaris_ in considerable abundance; also banks of scented violets.
The grotto is at a considerable height above the valley. According to the legend, as already said, Mary Magdalen spent the close of her life here, and numerous anchorites settled in the caves around. In the fifth century Cassian placed monks in the grotto, but they were driven away by the barbarians, and La Sainte Beaume fell into complete oblivion till the thirteenth century.
The cave is lofty and spacious, not a little damp, and water drips from the roof. To protect the altar a baldachin has been erected over it. At the extreme end is a raised dais of natural rock, on which the saint is supposed to have made her bed. Another cave is that of the Holy Sepulchre, which was formerly occupied by the monks of S. Cassian. From the Sainte Beaume a path leads upwards to the Saint Pilon, the highest pinnacle of the rock which here rises to a point, out of which grow wild pinks and aromatic shrubs, and where falcons make their nest. According to the legend, Mary Magdalen was elevated by the hands of angels to this point seven times a day, there to say her prayers, which proceeding surely entitles her to a place as the patroness of aviation.
At Souge, on the Loir, a little below the troglodyte town of Troo already described, half-way up the cliff is the cave-chapel of S. Amadou. It is 45 feet deep and 15 feet wide. The altar is at the end surmounted by a niche containing a statue of the saint, and to this formerly pilgrimages were made from all the valleys round. But this is a thing of the past, for it is now private property and converted into a cellar. What is peculiar about this chapel is that it is surrounded by a gallery also rock-hewn, and it was customary for the pilgrims to pass round the chapel through this gallery before entering it.
At Villiers, near Vendome, is the chapel of S. Andrew, that was formerly inhabited by a hermit. It is divided into two chambers. That on the left is the chapel proper, with its altar. Above the other opening is a bas-relief of the Crucifixion. When levelling the floor of this hermitage a few years ago, so as to convert it into a commodious private dwelling, a number of skeletons were found in graves sunk in the rock.
[Illustration: Plan of the Chapel of S. Amadou.]
Montserrat is famous throughout Spain on account of its statue of the Virgin, which is supposed to have been made by S. Luke, and brought to Barcelona in the year 50 by S. Peter, which, of course, is nonsense. S. Luke never painted, and S. Peter never visited Spain. This extraordinary mountain derives its name from its saw-like appearance, _Mons serratus._ It consists of pudding-stone, “a strange solitary exiled peak, drifted away in the beginning of things from its brethren of the Pyrenees, and stranded in a different geological period.” Mr. Bayard Taylor thus describes the summit after a two hours’ climb. “Emerging from the thickets we burst suddenly upon one of the wildest and most wonderful pictures I ever beheld. A tremendous wall of rock arose in front, crowned by colossal turrets, pyramids, clubs, pillars, and ten-pin shaped masses, which were drawn singly, or in groups of incredible distinction, against the deep blue of the sky. At the foot of the rock the buildings of the monastery and the narrow gardens completely filled and almost overhung a horizontal shelf of the mountain, under which it again fell sheer away down, down into misty depths, the bottom of which was hidden from sight. In all the galleries of memory I could find nothing resembling it.” [Footnote: Taylor (B.), “Byways of Europe,” Lond. 1869, i. p. 23.]
The spires of rock range about 3300 feet high, jumbled together by nature in a sportive mood. Here and there, perched like nests of the solitary eagle, are the ruins of former hermitages, burnt by the French under Suchet in July 1811, when they amused themselves with hunting the hermits like chamois in the cliffs, hung the monks of the monastery, plundered it of all its contents, stripped the Virgin of her jewellery, and burnt the fine library. Hitherto the monks, when periodically dressing the image, had done so with modestly averted eyes, but Suchet’s soldiers had no such scruples. This image had been entrusted in the ninth century to a hermit, Jean Garin. Now Riguilda, daughter of the Count of Barcelona, was possessed by a devil, in another word, crazy, and was sent to be cured by the image or the hermit. A temptation similar to that of S. Anthony followed, but with exactly the opposite result. To conceal his crime, Jean Garin cut off Riguilda’s head, buried her, and fled. Overtaken by remorse he went to Rome, and confessed his sin to the Pope, who bade him become a beast, never lifting his face towards heaven until the hour when God himself would signify his pardon.
Jean Garin went forth from the Papal presence on his hands and knees, crawled back to Montserrat, and there lived seven years as a wild beast, eating grass and bark, and never looking up to heaven. At the end of this time his body was entirely covered with hair, and it so fell out that the hunters of the Count snared him as a wild animal, put a chain round his neck, and brought him to Barcelona. Here an infant of five months old, on beholding the strange beast, uttered a cry and exclaimed, “Rise up, Jean Garin, God has pardoned thee.” Then, to the amazement of all, the beast arose and spoke in a human tongue. Happily the story is no more true than that the image was made by S. Luke. It is an old Greek story of S. James the Penitent, with the penance of Nebuchadnezzar tacked on to it.
Forbes says: “The traveller should visit the ruined hermitages of Sta. Anna, San Benito, not forgetting La Roca Estrecha, a singular natural fissure; the highest and most interesting of all is the S. Jeronimo. These retreats satisfied the Oriental and Spanish tendency to close a life of action by repose, and atone for past sensualism by mortification. The hermitages were once thirteen in number; each was separate, and with difficulty accessible. The anchorite who once entered one, never left it again. There he lived, like things bound within a cold rock alive, while all was stone around, and there he died, after a living death to the world, in solitude without love. Yet they were never vacant, being sought for as eagerly as apartments in Hampton Court are by retired dowagers. Risco says that there were always a dozen expectants waiting in the convent the happy release of an occupant. To be a hermit, and left to live after his own fashion, exactly suited the reserved, isolated Spaniard, who hates discipline and subjection to a superior.” [Footnote: “Handbook of Spain,” Lond. 1845, p.496. A visit to the image is heavily indulgenced. Pope Paul V. granted remission of all his sins to any one who entered the confraternity of our Lady of Montserrat. Mr. B. Taylor says of the image: “I took no pains to get sight of the miraculous statue. I have already seen both the painting and the sculpture of S. Luke, and think him one of the worst artists that ever existed.”]
Above Cordova, also in the Sierra, are rock hermitages serving in Andalusia the same purpose that did those of Montserrat in Catalonia. These also never wanted a tenant, for in the Iberian temperament, _inedia et labor_, violent action alternating with repose is inherent.
In Italy, Subiaco must not be left without a notice. It was hither that S. Benedict fled when aged fourteen. He chose a cave as his abode, and none knew what was his hiding-place save a monk, Romanus, who let down to him from the top of the rock the half of the daily loaf allotted to himself, giving him notice of its being ready for him by ringing a little bell. Here, once, troubled by the passions of the flesh, Benedict cast himself into a thicket of thorns, and afterwards planted there two rose-trees which still flourish. This is now converted into a garden, and near by all the monks of Subiaco are buried.
Near La Vernia, a favourite retreat of S. Francis, is a deep cleft in the rocks, and a cave to which he was wont to retire at times. One friar only, Brother Leo, was permitted to visit him, and that once in the day with a little bread and water, and once at night; and when he reached the narrow path at the entrance, he was required to say _Domine labia mea aperies;_ when, if an answer came, he might enter and say matins with his master. In a second cave the saint slept. Outside this is the point of rock from which according to the _Fiorette:_ “Through all that Lent, a falcon, whose nest was hard by his cell, awakened S. Francis every night a little before the hour of matins by her cry and the flapping of her wings, and would not leave off till he had risen to say the office; and if at any time S. Francis was more sick than ordinary, or weak, or weary, that falcon, like a discreet and charitable Christian, would call him somewhat later than was her wont. And S. Francis took great delight in this clock of his, because the great carefulness of the falcon drove away all slothfulness, and summoned him to prayers; and moreover, during the daytime, she would often abide familiarly with him.”
The Warkworth hermitage in Northumberland was made famous by Bishop Percy’s ballad.
In “Rambles in Northumberland and on the Scottish Border,” 1835, it is thus described. “The hermitage of Warkworth is situated on the north bank of the Coquet, and about a mile from the castle. Leaving the castle yard and passing round the exterior of the keep, a footpath leads down the declivity on the north side of the river. Entering a boat and rowing a short distance along the river, the visitor is landed at the foot of a pleasant walk which leads directly to the Hermitage. This secluded retreat consists of three small apartments, hollowed out of the freestone cliff which overlooks the river. An ascent of seventeen steps leads to the entrance of the outer and principal apartment, which is about eighteen feet long, its width being seven feet and a half, and its height nearly the same. Above the doorway are the remains of some letters now illegible, but which are supposed when perfect to have expressed, from the Latin version of the Psalms, the words: Fuerint mihi lacrymae meae panes die ac nocte. The roof is chiselled in imitation of a groin, formed by two intersecting arches; and at the east end, where the floor is raised two steps, is an altar occupying the whole width of the apartment. In the centre, immediately above the altar, is a niche in which there has probably stood a figure either of Christ or of the Virgin.
“Near the altar, on the south side, there is carved in the wall a monumental figure of a recumbent female. In a niche near the foot of the monument is the figure of a man, conjectured to be that of the first hermit, on his knees, with his head resting on his right hand, and his left placed upon his breast. On the wall, on the same side, is cut a basin for the reception of holy water; and between the principal figure and the door are two small windows. At the west end is a third small window, in the form of a quatrefoil.
“From this apartment, which appears to have been the hermit’s chapel, a doorway opens into the corner one, about five feet wide, and having also an altar at the east end, with a basin for holy water cut in the wall. In the north wall of this inner chamber an arched recess is cut, the base of which is of sufficient length and breadth to admit a middle-sized man reclining. An opening, cut slantwise through the wall dividing the chamber, allows a person lying in this recess to see the monument in the chapel. In the same wall there is rather an elegantly- formed window, which admits the light from the outer apartment. To the north of the inner chamber is a third excavation, much smaller than the other two, which led to an outer gallery to the west, commanding a view of the river. This gallery, which has been much injured by the fall of a part of the cliff, is said to have been arched like a cloister. After returning from these dimly-lighted cells to open day, and passing through a stone archway, a flight of steps cut in the side of the rock leads to the hermit’s garden at the top.”
S. Robert of Knaresborough, who died 1218, was the son of one John Thorne of York, of which city his brother was mayor. Leland informs us that he forsook “the lands and goodes of his father to whom he was heire as eldest sonne.” Leaving his home he came to Knaresborough, where he found a certain knight ensconced in a cave scooped out of the rock by the side of the Nidd, and dignified by the name of S. Giles’s Chapel. But the knight had had enough of it, and _instante diabolo_ quitted his cave and made it over to Robert Thorne, and “returned like a dog to his vomit,” which is a monastic way of putting the fact that he returned to his wife and family.
[ILLUSTRATION: SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE. Representing S. Christopher and other saints, men in armour and ladies.]
Robert, however, did not spend an entire year in the cave, for certain _latrunculi_ having stolen _hys bred, hys chese,_ _hys sustenance_, he quitted the grotto–doubtless at the approach of winter–and estab- lished himself in much more comfortable quarters at Bramham. He was certainly a hermit who boiled his peas, for we are told that he maintained four men-servants; two were occupied in tilling his farm, one attended to his personal wants–was, in fact, his valet–and one went about with him on his begging expeditions.
The cave is 10 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 7 feet high. There is an image of a knight at the entrance, by some supposed to be more modern; it is, however, said that S. Robert did much himself to adorn and enlarge his chapel.
It was in this cave that Eugene Aram and Richard Housman murdered Daniel Clarke on 8th February 1745, for the sake of some jewellery and plate they had induced him to bring to S. Robert’s Chapel with him.
It was not till fourteen years after that the body of Clarke was found, and Mrs. Aram declared that her husband and Housman had murdered him; Housman turned King’s evidence, and Aram was hung on 16th August 1759.
Roche hermitage in Cornwall occupies a spire of rocks of schorl that shoots 100 feet above the surrounding moor. Built into the rocks is a little chapel, and beneath it is the hermit’s cell. This seems to have been occupied continuously down to the Reformation, and various stories are told of the tenants.
There was once a steward under the Duchy named Tregeagle. He was a peculiarly nefarious agent, and very hard upon the tenants. His spirit is still supposed to roam over the moors, and not to be able to find peace till he has dipped the water out of Dozmare Pool with a nutshell.
Once, pursued by devils, he fled for sanctuary to Roche, and thrust his head through the east window of the chapel, but, being a broad- shouldered spirit, could force his way in no further. The devils were baffled and withdrew. But Tregeagle’s position was not desirable. The wind, the rain, and the hail lashed that portion of his person that remained exposed, and he dared not withdraw his head from sanctuary lest the devils should be on him again. At every cutting blast he howled, and his howls so disturbed the hermit of Roche, that he found it impossible to sleep or to attend to his prayers on windy nights. Unable to liberate Tregeagle himself, he sent for the monks of Bodmin, and they imposed on the wretched steward the task aforementioned, and assured him immunity from pursuit whilst engaged upon it.
“Robin Hood’s Stable,” in Nottinghamshire, at Pappewick, of which Throsby gives an illustration in his “History of the County,” 1797, was in all probability a hermitage. Mr. W. Stevenson writes: “I am convinced, from its nearness to the great old road, its position due south, and its evidences of columns and arches, that it is an old cell or anchorite’s cave of equal, if not superior age, to the neighbouring abbey. The interior would make a good picture, as the dampness of the rock is favourable to green vegetation in sportive lines and patches on the warm colours and the shadows of the rock. It is an artist’s dream. Time, during the lapse of centuries, has made sad havoc with the entrance. Originally it had a level cutting running into the hill until a face of rock was won in which to make a door and hew an underground apartment.
“The hollow of this cutting has been raised, the banks rounded down, the roof over the door has fallen; the hand of destruction has worked back into the cave, and all evidence of the door and its whereabouts has vanished. The floor is loaded with sand and blocks fallen from the roof. The floor being so buried renders it difficult perfectly to judge of the depth of the apartment.” What a habitation for a rheumatic hermit! The “sportive lines and patches” of vegetation suggest sportive tweaks and twinges of the loins.
[ILLUSTRATION: SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE]
Two miles from Repton is Anchor Church, where are the remains of a hermitage in a singular rocky bank, rising abruptly above the pastures on the verge of the Trent. “The summit is clothed with overhanging woods, forming only a portion of the high grounds, but the suddenness of the change which the scenery derives from the appearance of precipitous and broken rocks, occurring in the midst of a soft and beautiful region of pastoral luxuriance, is very striking. A curious series of chambers, communicating with each other, has been at some distant period beyond tradition excavated in that portion of the rock which is most naked and precipitous; and from this circumstance the site has been designated Anchor Church, signifying the residence of a hermit. At a distance it bears a very close resemblance to a Gothic ruin; the rude openings formed to admit light into the several cells, and the ruggedly fashioned doorway aiding, at first sight, the appearance of an artificial pile of grey antiquity. The rock is found principally to consist of rough grit-stone, and of a congeries of sand and pebbles. The Trent, which now flows at a short distance, formerly ran close under the rock, as is indicated by a dead pool of water situate near its foot, and communicating with the channel of the river.
“A tall flight of steep steps rudely fashioned of large unshapen blocks of stone, conducted to the entrance of the hermitage, and the dim light within its hoary, moss-grown, sloping walls is admitted through irregularly formed apertures, pierced through the dense body of the rock, and command magnificent views of the subjacent scenery.” [Footnote: Bigsby (R.), “Historical and Topographical Description of Repton in the County of Derby,” Lond. 1854.]
In the month of August 1742, when occasion arose for setting a post in a “Mercat House” at Royston in Hertfordshire in order to place a bench on it for the convenience of the market women, the men in digging struck through the eye or central hole of a millstone, laid underground, and on raising this found that it occupied the crown of a cave sixteen feet deep, as appeared by letting down a plumb line. There was a descent into it of about two feet wide, with holes cut in the chalk at equal distances, and succeeding each other like the steps of a ladder. It was accurately circular. They let a boy down, and from his report of its passing into another cavity, a slender man with a lighted candle descended, and he confirmed the report, and added that the second cave was filled with loose earth, which, however, did not quite touch the wall, which he could see to right and left.
The people now conceived the notion that a great treasure was concealed here, and some workmen were employed to enlarge the passage of descent. Then with buckets and a well-kerb, they set to work to clear it, and drew up the earth and rubbish that filled the cave. When they came to the floor of the descending passage they ran a long spit downwards and found that the earth was still loose. The vast concourse of people now became troublesome, and the workmen were obliged to postpone further operations till night.
After much time and labour had been expended, the cave was cleared, but no really scientific examination of it was made till 1852, when Mr. Beldam drew up a report concerning it, which he presented to the Royal Society of Antiquaries. The cave is bell-shaped, and from the floor to the top of the dome measures 25-1/2 feet. The bottom is not quite circular, but nearly so, and in diameter is from 17 feet to 17 feet 6 inches. A broad step surrounds it, 8 inches wide and 3 feet from the floor. About 8 feet above the floor a cornice runs round the walls cut in a reticulated or diamond pattern two feet wide. Almost all the space between the step and this cornice is occupied with sculpture, crucifixes, saints, martyrs, and subjects not easy to explain. Vestiges of red, blue, and yellow are visible in various places, and the relief of the figures has been assisted by a dark pigment. In various parts of the cave, above and below the cornice, are deep cavities or recesses of various forms and sizes, some of them oblong, and others oven-shaped, of much the same character as those found in the French caves. High up are two dates cut in the chalk, in Arabic numerals, that have been erroneously read 1347 and “Martin 1350 February 18,” but these should be respectively 1547 and 1550, as Arabic numerals were not in use in England in the fourteenth century, and the name of Martin and the February are distinctly sixteenth century in character. The figure carving was not done by the same hand throughout.
Apparently the cave was originally a shaft for burial or for rubbish, and a hole in the side and floor that Dr. Stukeley took for a grave was nothing but a continuation downwards of the ancient shaft, as is proved by what has been found in it. But in mediaeval times the puticolus was enlarged and converted into a hermitage, and a hermit is known to have occupied it till the eve of the Reformation, for in the Churchwarden’s book of the parish of Bassingborne, under the date 1506, is the entry, _”Gyft of 20d. recd, off a Hermytt depting at Roiston in ys pysh”_ It is true that this entry does not absolutely fix the residence of the hermit at the cave, but it is hardly probable that there were two hermitages in so small a town.
The cave was probably filled in with earth in 1547 and 1550, when the inscribed dates were affixed. After which its existence was forgotten, and the Mercat House was erected over it before 1610. The carvings have been supposed to belong to the period of Henry II. and Richard Coeur-de- Lion, but it is not possible to put them earlier than the beginning of the sixteenth century, at all events such as represent the Crucifixion. It is possible, however, that some of the kingly or knightly figures may be somewhat earlier.
Stukeley was quite convinced that the Royston cave was the oratory of the Lady Rohesia, daughter of Aubrey de Vere, who succeeded his father in 1088, but there exists no evidence that she ever lived at Royston. The place takes its name from Rohesia, daughter of Eudo Dapifer.
In 1537, says Froude, while the harbours, piers, and fortresses were rising in Dover, “an ancient hermit tottered night after night from his cell to a chapel on the cliff, and the tapers on the altars before which he knelt in his lonely orisons made a familiar beacon far over the rolling waters. The men of the rising world cared little for the sentiment of the past. The anchorite was told sternly by the workmen that his light was a signal to the King’s enemies” (a Spanish invasion from Flanders was expected), “and must burn no more; and when it was next seen, three of them waylaid the old man on his way home, threw him down, and beat him cruelly.” [Footnote: “History of England,” vol. iii. p. 256.]
The following notice appeared in the _Daily Express_ of 9th June 1910. “A subterranean chamber with a spiral staircase at one end and a Gothic roof has been discovered at Greenhithe. It is believed to have been a hermit’s cell.”
The hermit left a pleasant memory behind him when he disappeared from England, perhaps just in time before complete degeneration set in as in France and Germany, Italy and Spain. Shakespeare, whenever he introduces him, does so in a kindly spirit, and represents him as a consoler of the afflicted and a refuge to the troubled spirit. By Spenser also he is treated with affection.
“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.”
[ILLUSTRATION: 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.]
[ILLUSTRATION: 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 assemblies, participated 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 Viaticum when dying, by the chance of a priest passing 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, assembling 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 asserted that there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the towns. The immense majority of these religious were cenobites; that is to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united under an elected head, the abbot. The cenobitical 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 municipal 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 passion 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 noble 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 passing away, and the lust thereof, and that only he who did the will of God could abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw that the wrath of God 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 God, 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 noble 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, assumed noble 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 God.” [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 hellebore 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 ass, sought every village and hamlet, to sow the seed of the Word of God, 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 shaggy hair, the bishops assembled to consecrate protested against the election. It was customary to choose a bishop from among the nobility 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, God 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. Gatianus, 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 massacred a hundred and sixteen of the monks. Only twenty-four escaped. In 982 Marmoutier was refounded by Eudo, Count of Blois, and the noble 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.
[ILLUSTRATION: 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.]
[ILLUSTRATION: 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. Gatianus 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 space 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.
[Illustration: 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.
The sculpture above described is not earlier than the sixteenth century. A few paces from it, in the same line and almost under the tower, is another grotto called _La Babayou_–that is to say “of the statue,” and it probably at one time enshrined an image of a saint. On the left of the subterranean church is the fountain of the little Cut-throat already mentioned. S. Sicarius, whose relics were the great “draw” to Brantome in the Middle Ages, was supposed to have been one of the Innocents slain by Herod; and the relics were also supposed to have been given to the abbey by Charlemagne. As there was no historic evidence that Charles the Great ever had a set of little bones passed off on him as those of the Innocent, or that he ever made a present to the abbey of a relic, it will be seen that a good deal of supposition goes to the story. As I have said before, how it was that the child of a Hebrew mother acquired a Latin name, and that one so peculiar, we are not informed.
Outside the town gate are other large excavations that are supposed to have formed a temple of Mithras, but this is mere conjecture. The largest is now employed as a _Tir_–a shooting gallery. That there were buildings connected with it is seen by the holes in the rock to receive rafters.
S. Maximus, Bishop of Riez, who died in 460, was born at Chateau Redon, near Digne, and he entered the monastic life on the isle of Lerins, under S. Honoratus, and when that saint was raised in 426 to the episcopal throne of Arles, Maximus succeeded him as Abbot of Lerins. But this monastery was becoming crowded, and Maximus pined for the solitary life, so one day he took a boat, crossed to the mainland, and plunged into the wild country about the river Verdon, that has sawn for itself a chasm through the limestone; where it debouches, he planted himself at a place since called Moustier-Ste-Marie. The lips of the crevasse are linked by a chain, with a gilt star hanging in the midst, little under 690 feet above the bed of the torrent. No one knows when this star was hung there, but it is supposed to have been an _ex voto_ of a chevalier, de Blac. Within the ravine, reached by a narrow goat-path, were caves in the cliffs, and into one of these Maximus retired in 434 and was speedily followed by other solitaries. The caves are still there, the faces walled up, but as at Liguge, and as at Marmoutier, and as at Brantome, so was it here. As the monastery grew rich, the solitaries crawled out of their holes into which the sun never shone, and erected their residence at the opening of the ravine. A chapel remains, founded by Charlemagne, but rebuilt in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, reached by a stair protected by a parapet.
Moustier was famous at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century for its faience, with elegant designs and good colouring. Specimens are now extremely scarce. Two vases of this ware may be seen on the altar of the chapel. The principal potters there were Pierre Fournier, Joseph Olery, Paul Rouse, and Feraud. They usually signed their work with their initials. Maximus was just a century later than Martin; the fever for imitating the lives of the Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt was then in full heat. His master, Honoratus, had been wont to escape from his island monastery and hide in a cave in the glowing red porphyry rocks of the Esterelle. I can understand his retiring thither, above a sea blue as the neck of a peacock, among glowing red rocks, and masses of pines, and heather, and arbutus, and every kind of fragrant herb, and where, when only snowdrops are appearing in England, the spires of white asphodel are basking in the sun.
[Illustration: CAVES OF LIGUGE
The primitive rock monastery of S. Martin. It was abandoned later when the monks moved to the further side of the river; but Felix, a disciple of S. Martin, remained and died in the cave, now inaccessible, below the cross.]
Near Nottingham are the “Popish Holes,” close to the river Lene. They are thus described by Stukeley. “One may easily guess Nottingham to have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. The church is like those in the rocks of Bethlehem and other places in the Holy Land; the altar is natural rock, and there has been painting upon the wall, a steeple, I suppose, where a bell hung, and regular pillars. The river winding about makes a fortification to it, for it comes at both ends of the cliff, leaving a plain in the middle. The way into it was by a gate cut out of the rock, and with an oblique entrance for more safety. Without is a plain with three niches, which I fancy their place of judicature, or the like. Between this and the castle is a hermitage of like workmanship.”
These remains pertain to a cell called S. Mary le Rock, a quarter of a mile west of the Castle, and belonged to Lenton priory. It was abandoned after the time of Edward IV., and is supposed to have come down in a perfect form to the time of the Civil War, when it was much injured by the Puritans as Papists’ holes. A good many illustrations exist of it after the Civil Wars, as a large folding plate in Throsby’s and Thoroton’s “History of Nottinghamshire,” 1797, but there is none to show what it was before.
It possesses a pigeonry much like that at Brantome, but on a smaller scale, that wiseacres have pronounced to be a Columbarium, not for doves, but for the reception of jars containing the ashes of the dead, and have attributed this dovecote to Roman times. Mr. William Stetton, a local antiquary, writing in 1806, stated that the excavation “appeared to have been made in the earliest ages of Christianity, when the converts resorted for secrecy and security to grottoes or caves, and similar places of retirement and seclusion. The style is evidently Roman. The whole interior appears to have been invested with a thin plastering, or perhaps, only a wash, which has been painted in various colours in mosaic devices. The altar still remains pretty perfect notwithstanding the ravages of time and wanton depredation. A Roman column still adorns the north side of it, but its corresponding one on the south side has long been destroyed.”
An architect, John Carter, in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1860, stated that the “arrangements of the excavations are monastical; and we, with much satisfaction, trace out the infirmary, refectory, dormitory, chapter-house, and the chapel. The latter place gives two aisles, divided by perforated arches, with headways in the manner of groins, and at the east end an altar.”
There can be no question now that although the original excavations were possibly enough Roman-British, the Papists’ holes, as we have them now, are truly, as Mr. Carter says, monastical.
How absurd old fashioned antiquaries were may be proved by the fact that the chimney that warmed the monks, and up which went the smoke from their kitchen, was pronounced to be a _bustum_, a flue employed for the cremation of the dead. As to the “Roman” column, that also is mediaeval.
Curzon, in his “Monasteries of the Levant,” 1849, says “the scenery of Meteora (Mt. Pindus in Albania) is of a very singular kind. The end of a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar- loaves, and some like vast stalagmites. These rocks are surrounded by a beautiful grassy plain, on three sides of which grow groups of detached trees, like those of an English park. Some of these rocks shoot up quite clean and perpendicularly from the smooth green grass, some are in clusters, some stand alone like obelisks. Nothing can be more strange and wonderful than this romantic region, which is unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. In Switzerland, Savoy, the Tyrol, is nothing at all to be compared to these extraordinary peaks. At the foot of many of these rocks there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism, whole flocks of hermits roosted in these pigeonholes. Some of these caves are so high up in the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them, whilst others are below the surface, and the anchorites who burrowed in them, like rabbits, frequently afforded rare sport to parties of roving Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting scenes seem to have been a fashionable amusement previous to the twelfth century. In early Greek frescoes and in small stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we see many frightful representations of men on horseback in Roman armour, with long spears, who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In these pictures the monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a kind of coarse matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are covered with hair; these, I take it, were the ones most to be admired, as in the Greek Church sanctity is always in the inverse ratio to beauty. All Greek saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much uglier, dirtier, and older than the rest. They must have been very fusty people beside, eating roots and living in holes like rats and mice.”
On the summit of these needles of rock are monasteries. Of these there were twenty-four, but now seven alone remain tenanted by monks. The sole access to them is by nets let down by ropes and hauled up by a windlass, or as an alternative in the case of that of S. Barlaam, by a succession of ladders.
As an example of a rock monastery and church in Egypt, I may quote the same author’s description of that of Der el Adra, or of the Pully, situated on the top of Gebel el Ferr, where a precipice about 200 feet in height rises out of the waters of the Nile.
The access to it is by a cave or fissure in the rock, the opening being about the size of the inside of a capacious chimney. “The abbot crept in at a hole at the bottom, and telling me to observe where he placed his feet, he began to climb up the cleft with considerable agility. A few preliminary lessons from a chimney-sweep would have been of the greatest service to me, but in this branch of art my education had been neglected, and it was with no small difficulty that I climbed up after the abbot, whom I saw striding and sprawling in the attitude of a spread eagle above my head. My slippers soon fell off upon the head of a man under me. At least twenty men were scrambling and puffing underneath him. Arms and legs were stretched out in all manner of attitudes, the forms of the more distant climbers being lost in the gloom of the narrow cavern up which we were advancing. Thence the climb proceeded up a path. At the summit beside the monastic habitations was the church cut out of the rock, to which descent is made by a narrow flight of steps.”
Mr. Curzon gives a plan of this church as half catacomb or cave, and one of the earliest Christian buildings which has preserved its originality.
The caves of Inkermann in the Crimea have been already alluded to. Here is a description of a subterranean abandoned monastery and church.
“Having traversed a passage about fifty feet long, we reached a church, or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. Beyond the church we found a large square apartment, entered by another passage, and looking over the valley of Inkermann. A few more cells, resembling those on the stairs, composed the whole of this series of excavated chambers, the arrangements of which at once proclaimed them to have been a monastery. These were the cells, the refectory, and the church. There is nothing in their construction as a work of art; yet there is an absence of that roughness and simplicity which exist in many caverns of the opposite mountain, and which indicate their being of a much earlier date than these.” [Footnote: Scott (C. H.), “The Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Crimea,” Lond. 1854, p. 280.]
CHAPTER X
CAVE ORACLES
Standing upon the pinnacle upon which is planted the marvellous Romanesque cathedral of Le Puy, and looking north, is seen in the distance the basaltic mass of Polignac crowned by a lofty donjon.
That mass of columnar basalt was occupied and held sacred in Roman times, and was dedicated to Apollo. In the courtyard of the castle is a well, l’Albime it is called, that descends to the depth of 260 feet, and there still exists an enormous stone mask of the solar god that closed it, and from the mouth of which oracles were given. How these were produced is now made clear. In the side of the well is a chamber cut out of the rock that concealed a confederate who uttered the response to the questioner, and the voice came up hollow and with reverberation betwixt the gaping lips of stone, to overawe and satisfy the inquirer.
“Before the old tribes of Hellas created temples to the divinities,” says Porphyry in his treatise ‘On the Cave of the Nymphs,’ “they consecrated caverns and grottoes to their service in the island of Crete to Zeus, in Arcadia to Artemis and Pan, in the isle of Naxos to Dionysos.”
And from caves issued the most famous Grecian oracles, and the mysteries were often celebrated in them. The cave in which Zeus as an infant was concealed on Mount Ida naturally became sacred. Kronos had received the Kingdom of the World on condition that he should rear no male children. Accordingly when one was born he ate it. But when Zeus arrived, his mother gave Kronos a stone to eat in place of the child, and hurried off the babe to Crete, where it was nourished in a cave by the Corybantes, who sounded cymbals and drums to drown his cries.
There was a Charonion at Hierapolis, an account of which we get from Apulaeus and Dio Cassius. It was deep. From the orifice, which was surrounded by a balustrade, escaped so dense a vapour that animals held in it died, and men who inhaled it were stupefied. The priests who ministered to the oracle professed to be immune, but Strabo tells us that they simply held their breath when they stooped over the fumes. He who desired to consult the oracle was for a while placed on a platform above the opening.
On the flank of Mount Citheron was a cave dedicated to the Nymphs. Those who desired to inquire of them entered the grotto, when it was supposed that the Nymphs inspired them with a knowledge of the future; and such persons were entitled _Nympholeptes_. The corresponding expression among the Latins was _lymphatici_, expressive of the pale and exhausted condition in which they were when they issued from the cave. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea says: “There are exhalations that produce drowsiness and procure visions;” and Apulaeus says: “Due to the religious fury they inspire, men remain without eating or drinking, and some become prophets and reveal future things.”
Apollo was the god of prophecy above all others. He was born at Delos, according to the poets; and it is there that the Homeric poems say was one of his most ancient sanctuaries. Thence, doubtless, issued the twenty famous oracles at the epoch of the colonisation. At Delphi the priestess was seated on a tripod over a crack in the rock, from which exhaled mephitic vapours that rendered her delirious, and her incoherent exclamations were reduced into hexameters by the attendant priests. But there was also at Delos the Manteion, the prophetic grotto. This has of late years been discovered along with the foundations of the temple. The Manteion is a gallery, naturally bored in the rock. The winds that penetrate it cause strange pipings and hollow moans, that served as an accompaniment to the oracles. But the most remarkable of these caverns was that of Trophonios in Beotia. Pausanius tells us the legend of its origin. The Beotians had suffered from drought for two years and sent to consult the oracle of Delphi. The reply received was that they must refer themselves to Trophonios at home. But who was the party? The Beotians had never heard of him. Then the oldest of their deputies recalled having once pursued a swarm of bees and followed it till it disappeared in a cave. That doubtless was the spot, and there, after the offering of sacrifices, Trophonios obligingly showed himself, and explained who he was and what were his powers. Since that time his oracle was much consulted, and happily an account of how he, or his priests, befooled visitors to the cave has been given us by Pausanius from his personal experience.
Those who wished to consult the oracle had first to purify themselves by spending some days in the sanctuary of the Guardian Spirit and of Fortune, to abstain from warm baths, but to bathe in the river Hercynia; they might eat as much as they liked of the meat offered in sacrifice. “You are conducted during the night to the river, where you are bathed and rubbed with oil by two boys of the age of thirteen. Then the priests take possession of you, and you are conducted to two fountains side by side. You drink of one, that of Oblivion, so as to disengage your thoughts from what is past, then that of Remembrance, to assure your recollecting what is about to take place. After having addressed your prayers to a statue, you go to the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic girded below the breast, and booted in the fashion of the country. The oracle is on the mountain above the sacred grove. It is surrounded by a marble wall, about the height of your waist. On this wall are planted twigs of copper linked together by copper filaments, and the gates are in this grating. Within this enclosure is a chasm, not natural, but excavated with a good deal of art and regularity, in form like a baker’s oven. There is no ladder there for descent into the cave, and one is brought, that is light and narrow. Once at the bottom you see on one side, between the ground and the masonry, a hole about large enough for a man to squeeze through. One lies on the back, and holding in one hand a honey-cake, thrust the feet in at the opening, and then work oneself till the legs are in up to the knees. Then, all at once, the rest of the body is dragged down with force and rapidity, just as if you were swept forward by an eddy in a river.
“Once arrived in the secret place, all do not learn the future in the same manner. Some see what is to befall them unrolled in vision, others hear it by the ear. Then you ascend by the same opening whereby you descended, going feet foremost. No one, it is said, has died in the cave, with the exception of one of the guardsmen of Demetrius, and he went down, not to consult the god, but in hopes of plundering the sanctuary of its gold and silver; his carcase, they say, was not ejected by the orifice that is sacred, but was found in another spot. On issuing from the cave of Trophonios the priests lay hold of you, and after having planted you on the seat of Remembrance, question you as to what you have seen and heard. When you have told them, they hand you over, overwhelmed with fear, and unrecognisable by yourself and others, to other ministers who convey you to the edifice dedicated to the Good Genius and to Fortune.”
Those issuing from the cave for long after remained dejected, pale, and melancholy. Pausanius says that after a while one who had gone through the ordeal could laugh; but Suidas tells us that those who returned from having made the descent never smiled again, and this gave occasion to a saying relative to a preternaturally grave personage, “He has consulted the oracle of Trophonios.”
Plutarch gives us some further particulars. The description made by one of the characters he introduces speaks of visions caught by inhaling a stupefying gas. Under its influence hallucinations were produced in which Trophonios himself was thought to appear, and the tortures of Tartarus were revealed. On emerging from the cave into fresh air, the questioner fell into fits of delirium, and thought he still saw strange visions. In the biography of Apollonios of Tyana, Philostratus tells us that the sage and wonder-worker was very desirous to penetrate into the cave, but that the priest raised objections and made difficulties, till at last his patience failed and he entered by main force and remained within seven days. So much in this semi-fictitious biography is true perhaps–that this hero did force his way in. It is also true that he had sufficient discretion not to tell what he had discovered of the tricks there perpetrated.
There was another of these caves at Acharaca, near Nysa, on the road to Tralles. The gas there exhaled had a medical healing virtue, and also gave occasion to the delivery of oracles. Persons suffering from an illness and placing confidence in the power of the gods, travelled thither and stayed some time with the priests, who lived near the cave. Those ministers of the gods then entered the cavern and spent a night in it. After that they prescribed to their patients the remedies revealed to them in their dreams. Often, however, they took their patients along with them into the cave, where they were expected to remain for several days fasting and falling into prophetic sleep.
About four centuries before the Christian era, there existed at Rome a temple dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, by the Tarquins, and beneath it was a subterranean chamber in which were preserved a collection of ancient oracles, the keeping of which was confided to his officers, the duumviri, and the penalty of death attached to the divulgation unlicensed, of their contents.
According to the legend, a strange woman, the sibyl of Cumae, brought to Tarquin the old nine books of oracles, and demanded for them three hundred pieces of gold. The king considered the price exorbitant, scoffed at the woman, and refused to buy. Thereupon the sibyl cast three of the volumes into the fire, and demanded the same sum precisely for the remaining six. Tarquin again declined to purchase. She then burnt three more, but still required for the remainder the original price. The king now thought that he had acted unwisely, and hastened to conclude the bargain and secure the oracles that contained prophecies relative to the destiny of the Roman people.
The oracles were written on palm-leaves in Greek, and with various signs and hieroglyphs, and the volumes were bundles of these leaves tied together.
In the year 671 of Rome, eighteen years before the Christian era, the old Temple of Jupiter, built by the Tarquins, was destroyed by fire, and with it perished the Books of Destiny. Six years after the temple was rebuilt, and an attempt was made to recover the Sibylline oracles, by sending throughout Italy for oracles reported to be Sibylline. The deputies sent brought back from Erythaea a thousand verses, but the collection rapidly increased in such quantities that Augustus ordered them to be examined, and such as proved to be worthless he burnt. After a second sifting, those that remained were put into two golden coffers and placed under the pedestal of the statue of the Palatine Apollo.
As is well known, there were in circulation a number of forged Sibylline oracles; some of these were the product of the Jewish Therapeutae, others of Christians. In his hatred of Christianity, the Emperor Julian ordered search to be made for these fictitious oracular books, that they might be destroyed. In 363 the Temple of the Palatine Apollo caught fire and was destroyed. The Christians charged Julian with having caused the fire so as to get rid of the Sibylline oracles hid under the statue of Apollo. But these had not been injured; the gold boxes in which they were, were opened, and to their confusion the Christians found that the oracles contained no prophecies concerning Christ, only _sortes_ celebrating the gods Zeus, Aphrodite, Hera, &c.
The accusation brought by the Christians against Julian recoiled upon them, for it was they who, later, by the hands of Stilicho, destroyed the collection. The order for the destruction was given by two Christian emperors, Honorius and Arcadius, on the plea that these oracles favoured and encouraged paganism.
Saul, it will be remembered went to consult a witch in the cave of Endor, where she conjured up before him the spirit of Samuel.
Isaiah rebukes the Jews for “lodging in the monuments,” doubtless to obtain oracles from the dead, to raise up the ghosts of the deceased, and exhort from them prophecies as to the future. As already pointed out, the dead and the pagan gods were one and the same. To consult a deity was to consult a hero or an ancestor of a former age.
There is a curious story in an Icelandic Saga of a shepherd, named Hallbjoern, on a farm where was a huge cairn over the dead scald or poet Thorleif. The shepherd, whilst engaged on his guard over his master’s flock, was wont to lie on the ground and sleep there. On one occasion he saw the cairn open and the dead man come forth, and Thorleif promised to endow him with the gift of poetry if he would compose his first lay in his, the dead man’s praise. And he further promised that Hallbjoern should become a famous scald and sing the praises of great chieftains. Thereupon the tenant of the tomb retired within again, and the shepherd on waking found himself endowed with poetic gift, and he sang a lay in honour of Thorleif. “And he became a famous scald, and went abroad, and sang songs in honour of many great men, and obtained high honour, and good gifts, and became very wealthy.” [Footnote: Fornmavma Soegur, Copenh. 1827, iii. pp. 102-3.]
It will be remembered that Saul’s interview was with the ghostly Samuel through the intervention of the witch. And there are many stories of living men endeavouring to obtain knowledge of the future through invocation of the spirits of the dead. Indeed spiritualists at the present day carry on the same business.
One thing that conduced to the belief that certain caves were inhabited by gods and spirits, was that strange sounds at times issued from them. These were caused by currents of air entering some of the apertures and vibrating through the passages, provoking notes as if these galleries were organ pipes. This is the explanation of the AEolian cavern of Terni, supposed to be the abode of spirits; and a cave near Eisenach was long reported to be an entrance to hell, because of the moans and sighs that were heard issuing from it.
The echo also was quite inexplicable to the ignorant, and was assumed to be the voice of some spirit or mountain gnome living in the heart of the rock, to whose habitation a cave gave access.
An abandoned mine with a pool at the bottom, on Dartmoor, is thought to be the abode of a spirit whose wails may be heard when the wind blows, and whence a voice issues calling out the name of that person who is next doomed to die in the parish of Walkhampton.
The most remarkable representative in the Middle Ages of the cave of Trophonios was that in Lough Derg in Ireland, the purgatory of S. Patrick as it was called. The origin is obscure, but it sprang into notoriety through the publication by a monk, Henry of Saltrey, of the descent of a knight Owain into it. Owain had been in the service of King Stephen, and he made his descent in the year 1153. Whether there ever were such a person as the knight Owain, or whether he was a mere invention of Henry of Saltrey is uncertain. Saltrey’s account is precise as to the various stages through which Owain passed, and it is a vulgar rendering of the common stories of visits to purgatory, of which Dante’s is the highest and most poetical version.
Lough Derg is among the dreary and barren mountains and moorlands in the south of the County of Donegal; in it is an island, with ribbed and curiously shaped rocks, and among these was supposed to be the entrance to purgatory.
Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote his “Topography of Ireland” in 1187, mentions the island in Lough Derg as among the wonders of Ireland. [Footnote: But there is no mention of it among the wonders of Ireland in the Irish Nennius.] It was, he says, divided into two parts, of which one was fair and pleasant, while the other part was wild and rough, and believed to be inhabited only by demons. In this part of the island, he adds, there were nine pits, in any one of which, if a person was bold enough to pass the night, he would be so much tormented by the demons that it was a chance if he were found alive in the morning; and it was reported that he who escaped alive would, from the anguish he suffered there, be relieved from the torments of the other world.