Books: Suffering Saints

MEN POSSESSED BY GOD by Jacques Lacarrière. 237 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

In an age that jokes about masochism, the 4th century ascetics of Egypt and Syria are hard to take seriously: St. Maron, who spent eleven years in a hollowed-out tree trunk; St. Acepsimas, who wore so many chains he had to crawl on all fours; Macarius the Younger, who felt so guilty about swatting an insect that he sat naked in a swamp for six months until mosquito bites made him look like a leper.

But there was method to their masochism. Jacques Lacarrière, a French historian who spent some time in surviving desert monasteries, has written a tender, subtle account of the hermits. Their existence, as Lacarriere unfolds it, was not so strange as it seems at first glance; and it was perhaps a reasonable alternative to the world they left behind.

Crabs of the Desert. Throughout the upheaval and persecutions of the late Roman Empire, Christians believed that the end of the world must be imminent; and they happily practiced a life of denial. But paradoxically, it was not so much persecution as acceptance that finally drove Christians to solitary life in the desert. When Constantine established Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion, the faithful needed a new enemy to remain in tension with this world, and they discovered it in themselves. The martyr-saint who had been thrown to the lions was replaced by the ascetic-saint who was beset by private visions of demons. In the “barrenness and calm abstraction of the desert,” man could come to grips with his true nature, writes Lacarrière. Life’s superfluities dropped away; the moral choices were starkly clear. Ascetics went for years without seeing or talking to another person. They hacked out inaccessible niches in cliffs or burrowed in the sand like crabs.

The stylites, as they were called, perched on platforms as high as 80 feet; lived on olives; occasionally were struck by lightning. Stylites like St. Simeon found “refuge in a tree as Noah found it in an ark, so as to avoid contact with a condemned world in its last agony and lead the life of a bird in the branches and the wind, a bird possessed of God and the thought of Heaven.”

Society of Angels. The ascetics, Lacarrière thinks, were not really alone. By conquering temporal time, they had gained a kind of eternity. By taking to the desert, writes Lacarrière, the ascetic joined a brotherhood that “made him one with all men of the past, since Adam. There were angels and demons, then the dead with whom he frequently spoke—the saints and martyrs of early Christian times, and also the dead of a distant past, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, whispering in the darkness of the tombs. All these surrounded the ascetic and constituted his true society, his millions of unseen companions.”