I. THE AUTHOR AND HIS BOOK
IN the fourth and fifth centuries of our era Egypt had come to be regarded with great reverence throughout Christendom as a Holy Land of piety. Pilgrims came from all parts to visit the saints who lived there, and several wrote descriptions of what they saw and heard, which are among the most interesting documents of the early Church. Palestine was so near that it was usually included in their tour; the glamour of its sacred sites, which remains with us still when that of Egypt has faded into oblivion, was already potent. But Palestine was clearly second to Egypt in the affections of the pilgrims.
The prevailing sentiment was expressed by Chrysostom with admirable clearness (Hom. in Matt. viii.). It was eminently appropriate, he explains, that the child Jesus should be taken to Egypt to escape Herod. Palestine persecutes Him, Egypt receives Him. This typifies the position Egypt was to occupy in the development of the Church. The land which had oppressed the children of Israel, had known a Pharaoh, had worshipped cats, was destined to be more fervent than any other, to have its towns and even its deserts peopled by armies of saints living the life of angels, and to boast the greatest, after the apostles, of all saints, the famous Antony.
Palladius, the author of our book, who was destined |16 to be Chrysostom's devoted adherent, made a pilgrimage to this holy land, like so many others, and stayed there many years. The following is an outline of his life, with the dates as established by Butler.
He was born in Galatia in 363 or 364, and dedicated himself to the monastic life in 386 or a little later. In 388 he went to Alexandria; as Paul went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, James, and John, so, he says in the Prologue, did he go to Egypt to see the saints for himself. About 390 he passed on to Nitria, and a year later to a district in the desert known as Cellia from the multitude of its cells, where he spent nine years, first with Macarius and then with Evagrius. At the end of the time, his health having broken down, he went to Palestine in search of a cooler climate. In 400 he was consecrated bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia, and soon became involved in the controversies which centred round St. John Chrysostom. The year 405 found him in Rome, whither he had gone to plead the cause of Chrysostom, his fidelity to whom resulted in his exile in the following year to Syene and the Thebaid, where he gained first-hand knowledge of another part of Egypt. In 412-413 he was restored, after a sojourn among the monks of the Mount of Olives. His great work was written in 419-420 and was called the Lausiac History, being composed for Lausus, chamberlain at the court of Theodosius II. Palladius was also in all probability the author of the Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom. He died some time in the decade 420-430.
The character of the man stands out clearly in the History, He was sincere, simple-minded and not a little credulous. His deep religious fervour, of the ascetic type, needless to say, appears throughout the book, and especially in the concluding chapter, which almost attains eloquence. But he had a fund of good |17 sense, so we learn from the Prologue, which predisposes us to a favourable judgment on the rest of the book. What could be saner, for example, than his summing up of the question of teetotalism: "To drink wine with reason is better than to drink water with pride" (Prol. 10)? We need not attach much importance to the accusation of Origenism which has been the slur on his reputation. If he admired Origen, that great and original thinker, it will hardly redound to his discredit to-day. And he was in good company in his own day. Saints such as Basil, the two Gregories and Chrysostom shared his tendencies; if Chrysostom the master is forgiven his Origenism, Palladius the disciple may be forgiven also.
II. THE TEXT OF THE HISTORY
It has been the lot of many a scholar to grapple with the difficulties of an ancient text so successfully that the result of his labours has been accepted as substantially representing the original work of the author: few editors indeed can be credited with an achievement equal to that of Abbot Butler, who brought order out of confusion and rescued for the historian a document which had been regarded with the utmost suspicion. His conclusions were at once recognized as correct, and much that had been written on early monasticism became obsolete, based as it was on an erroneous estimate of the original authorities.
Butler was confronted by three main documents, each with its own textual history.
A. The document which was accepted till recently as the Lausiac History, called by Butler the Long Recension. It appears in a Latin form in Rosweyd's Vitae |18 Patrum (1615 and 1628), and includes the History of the Monks in Egypt (see C below). In 1624 a Greek text was published by du Duc purporting to be the original of Rosweyd's Latin, though in reality it was patched up from various sources. This is the text which, with some additions, is reprinted in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, xxxiv.
B. Butler's Short Recension, called originally Paradisus Heraclidis, printed by Rosweyd in his appendix.
C. The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, which was till recently supposed to have been written in Latin by Rufinus, but turns out to be Rufinus' translation of a Greek original compiled by an anonymous writer and describing a visit paid by a party of seven, in which Rufinus was not included, to the Egyptian ascetics in 394-395. The Greek text has been edited by Preuschen, and a text of Rufinus' Latin version forms part of the Long Recension, as stated above.
Tillemont long ago had seen the lines on which the problem was to be solved, but subsequent investigators dismissed his suggestion as impossible, and it was left for Butler to show with a wealth of argument the true relations of the documents.
His solution is briefly this: A (the Long Recension) = B (the Short Recension) + C (Historia Monachorum). B is not an abridgment of A, nor is A Palladius' second edition of B. In Sozomen, who used the Lausiac History (see Hist. Eccl. I. 13 f., III. 14, VI. 28 ff., etc.), there are clear traces of B, also of C, none whatever of A. The early versions, especially the Latin and Syriac, confirm these results. There is no reason |19 to think that Palladius used Greek documents, or that he translated from the Coptic.
Having established this fact, that the Latin version in Rosweyd's appendix represents substantially the work of Palladius, Butler proceeds to discuss which is the best text of the Greek original of this. He finds that the MSS. are divided as follows:
(i) The B group, giving the Short Recension as hitherto printed.
(ii) A shorter and simpler text, which he calls the G group.
(iii) An A group, which is composite of B and G.
Ruling out the A group according to the rules of textual criticism, as between B and G, he pronounces in favour of the latter, which is supported by Sozomen and the versions, and is superior intrinsically as well. B is a "metaphrastic" text, says Preuschen, and Butler styles it "rhetorical, turgid and overladen."
It remains to discover the best examples of the G text. Butler finds these in a MS. in the National Library at Paris (P) and one at Christ Church, Oxford (W). The latter was not available until more than half of the text, had been printed, and therefore to get Butler's mature judgment on the text of the earlier part a number of readings from W given in the appendix must be substituted for those of the text. The two MSS. are the offspring of a common ancestor. "It is clear that P and W have to serve as the basis of the text, pre-eminently W where it is extant." Other MSS. are used in the main to eliminate the eccentricities of P and W. Occasionally neither are extant, and the printed text is Butler's critical reconstruction from the other sources. |20
III. EARLY MONASTICISM
The story of Egyptian monasticism is inevitably an oft-told tale, and need not be repeated here, since summaries of it are readily accessible. All that will be attempted is the emphasising of some points that might be overlooked.
Asceticism was inherent in Christianity from the first; it could hardly have been otherwise among the disciples of Him Who had not where to lay His head. In 1 Corinthians St. Paul teaches that in view of the shortness of the time before the end the unmarried state is preferable to the married. St. John, convinced that it was the last hour, bade his little children keep themselves from idols, a command which in practice involved renunciation of the world. We are therefore not surprised to find asceticism a strong force in the early post-apostolic age. There was as yet no formal separation from the world; devotees of both sexes lived at home and were described as bearing "the whole yoke of the Lord." When monasticism underwent its great development in the early part of the fourth century, it was but a making explicit of what had been implicit in the Church from its early days, and even, so it would seem, in the teaching and example of our Saviour.
Two questions may be asked at this point: Why did monasticism begin when it did? Why did Egypt witness its beginning rather than some other land such as Asia |21 Minor, which was perhaps the most Christian part of the empire at that time?
In answering the first question one would be inclined to attach importance to the tradition which connects the origin of monasticism with the Decian persecution (c. 250), when many Christians fled from the settled parts of Egypt to the surrounding deserts and remained there for some time (Dionysius of Alexandria ap. Eus. H.E. VI. 42). Some at least of these must have been living the ascetic life at home, which they would naturally continue in the desert under more rigorous conditions. When a later tradition affirms that certain of these remained in the desert permanently and became the first Christian hermits, it is intrinsically so probable that one is justified in concluding that the Decian persecution was the historic occasion which led to the origin of monasticism.