FOOLS FOR GOD

by Richard North

Published by Collins, 1987

ISBN 0 00 217407 3

CONTENTS

Part I

INTRODUCTORY

1 The Cardinal's Room

2 The Making of Monks

3 The Wakeful

4 The Eccentrics

Part II

EGYPT

1 The Road to St Antony

2 The Religious Tradition

3 The First Monks

4 My First Dawn at St Antony's

5 The Movement Thrives

6 Baramus

7 Modern Coptic Monks

Part III

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

1 Very Civilized Vector

2 The Tradition

3 St Catherine's

4 The American Monk

5 Introducing Athos

6 Stavronikita

7 Xeropotamou

8 Simonos Petra

Part IV

WESTERN EUROPE

1 The Virus Spreads

2 The Northern Isles

3 Beginnings of Integration

4 The European Heartlands

5 Columbanus

6 Thoroughly Established

Part V

THE MAJOR REFORMS

1 The Hermits

2 Parkminster 1

3 Parkminster 2

4 Parkminster 3

5 Introducing the Cistercians

6 The Cistercian Machine

7 Citeaux

8 Nunraw

Part VI

THE HIGH BENEDICTINES

1 The Benedictine Scene

2 The Swiss

3 Solesmes

4 Santo Domingo de Silos

Part VII

THE MODERNS

1 Wilderness and Vatican 11

2 The New Spirit

3 Orthodoxy Transplanted

4 Tom Cullinan

5 Numbers

6 Merton and Knowles

7 Prayer and Purpose

Booklist

Acknowledgements

Part I

INTRODUCTORY

Zones of Silence

In a civilization which is more and more mobile, noisy and talkative, zones of silence and of rest become vitally necessary. Monasteries - in their original format - have more than ever, therefore, a vocation to remain places of peace and inwardness. Don't let pressures, either internal or external, affect your traditions and your means of recuperation. Rather, make yourself educate your guests and retreatants to the virtue of silence. You will know that I had occasion to remind the participants in the plenary session of the Congregation of Religious, on 7 March last, of the rigorous observance of monastic enclosure. I remembered the very strong words on this subject of my predecessor Paul VI:

'Enclosure does not isolate contemplative souls from communion of the mystical Body. More than that, it puts them at the very heart of the Church.'

Love your separation from the world, which is totally comparable to the biblical desert. Paradoxically, this longing is not for emptiness. It is there that the Lord speaks to your heart and associates himself closely with his work of salvation.

John Paul II, 198o

1

The Cardinal's Room

The Cardinal's room was light, airy and bare. There was a wash basin, hospital-style armchair in tubular steel, wooden office armchair, a large table, a public school sort of bed, an incongruous great cupboard, of a seaside boarding house type, a crucifix over the bed with an unmemorable Christ, plastic curtains which rustled at every motion of the wind, swing windows.

A timetable was on the table, as though the landlady of a hotel were advising her guests to be prompt to high tea. Luckily, I had no idea then that I had been put anywhere quite so grand as the smartest set of rooms in the place, or I might have left there and then.

The view from the window, in the south side of the modern Nunraw Abbey, looked out to gently sloping hills: conifers, grazing land and ripening corn. Beyond, the Lammermuirs high moorlands, reservoirs, and winding narrow roads. It was a stunning evening. A butterfly wandered in, fluttered around hazardously and found its way out again.

This is a Cistercian monastery, home to thirty- plus Trappist monks - Cistercians of the Strict Observance - sworn to poverty, chastity, obédience, stabilité, conversio morum (the continual struggle for personal change). Famously, the Cistercian is devoted to silence. The quiet of the place was periodically disturbed by the ringing of a phone or the slamming of a door. Every sound could swell itself along the bare, wide, high corridors. It was a hospital kind of noisiness. I sat on the bed and then on a chair at the table. I lay down, stood up, unpacked my toothpaste, thought about writing a letter, opened a book. There was nothing whatever that I had to do.

I had arrived down the road at the Old Abbey, now used as a guesthouse, earlier that day. After tea, a phone call had summoned me to meet the Abbot, up at the purpose-built monastery on the hill. I had given him a shopping list, downstairs in a big meeting room, which appeared to be neutral ground where the monks could meet the outside world. A few meals in the refectory - would that be possible? A talk with some of the monks? Coming to the night offices? Perhaps an insight into the work that the monks do? Reading in the library?

He cut me short after these questions and said that naturally I would have to live at the monastery proper if I were to do any of these things easily. A large, pink man, Abbot Donald McGIyn made any sort of timidity impossible. When a man reminds one of a farmer going about practical business, and requiring not to,be slowed in it by deferential nonsense, it becomes easy to state what is required, and to accept what is offered without anxiety.

Faced with something so unknown and unlikely as living with monks, and Trappist monks at that, I went into underdrive. It may feel like that to be an overweight woman checking into a health clinic: a very pleasurable shedding of responsibility. There was no point wondering how to pass my tirne with these Trappists: I had, for once, given up directing or pretending to direct - my life.

Something rather like this may happen to cheerful old recidivists as the doors of Pentonville Prison clang shut behind them on yet another Christrnas Eve, with them safely on the inside, when otherwise they would have to face the perils of a festive season with nothing to celebrate.

When I had come back from the guesthouse, the Prior (second in command) took a hand in things. Red-faced, sharp-featured, with razored white hair stubbling his skull, he had a keen look to him. Rather severe, I thought. He was wearing the Cistercian uniform: creamy rough wool habit and black scapula. He took my hand in a solid grip, and gave me a broad, conspiratorial wink. It seemed almost to be saying that this was an exceedingly rum place, and that he and I were quite probably the only sane people in it. This was kindly done. We drove round to the garages behind the monastery: it was slightly odd to find that one could do this so easily. Where the great whispering gates? Where the grille with a lurking, half-seen face?

Nunraw is built like an open prison without the fences. It is long and low and penitential in its demeanour. Coming on it from the village, from the north side, it turns out to be in a softly beige stone, rough cut, and a rather good mixture of the airy and the monumental. In the west side, where the visitors park their cars, there is a scruffy wall where there ought to be a brand new church, and at each end an inconspicuous door. One leads to the 'temporary' church, and the other to the noman's-land room, and the enclosure beyond.

A drive swirls round from the western side of the building to the southern. A small 'Private' sign is all that separates the sacred from the profane. There is a workshop and garage area which might belong to an army camp or a school, and from which runs a path through a little municipal-style lawn and flower beds, to a door which leads into the nether regions of the monastery. The whole place is perched on the brow of a hill. It is a very exposed position.

'Up here, the wind fairly cuts through you in winter', said the Prior, Brother Stephen, as we walked from the car. He insisted on carrying my suitcase. His step was lively. He installed me in my room, and showed me the route to the loos, the church, and the refectory. The rest, he said, could wait. The Abbot came and brought me some things to read: well chosen, useful books, and a doctorate thesis devoted to an American Trappist monastery, which had been printed as a kind of brochure. As I went down to Compline, Brother Stephen found me, and told me he would come and call me at 3.15 the next morning to go to Vigils. I told him not to bother but he said he had to get everyone up anyway, so it was no trouble.

I was famished, but the monks had had their supper, and knew that I had had tea and cupcakes at the guesthouse. It was 7.30 p.m. and the end of their long day. My biological clock wanted to go for a walk or have a drink or eat, but these things were not on offer. I had jumped onto their roundabout, and it had its own pace.

Compline dismissed any small temptation to grouse. Nunraw's church is a long, wide room. It has no great majestic height. All the way down one side there are floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor is richly polished hardwood, the ceiling, fine, light, varnished pine. The walls are white. The choir stalls and organ are in some hardwood, perhaps walnut. The linen of the altar, and that draped over the sacraments - as though over a domed parrot cage - is gleaming white. The ivory of the candles is warm by contrast with the starkness of the walls.

It is one of the most beautiful modern places I have ever seen, and the monks are not at all sure that they will ever bother to build the proper abbey church the architects have designed for them.

Gathered in the church when I arrived for my first service was quite a gang of people I recognized from tea in the guesthouse. Sister Breda was there: a girl in a nun's coif, and an ordinary, civvy-street skirt. She was wearing a tennis-style aertex shirt with short sleeves, and looked rather sexy in a sports girl kind of way. She was a nursery teacher. An older nun was sitting in the same row: she had a more orthodox and grim outfit, and had said that she liked Nunraw because she could walk in the monastery's farmlands in safety. It seemed somehow improbable that she would be particularly at risk even in rather less sacerdotal countryside. This religious seemed to think that rape and pillage is absolutely normal outside the priest's house and the church. It is a failing amongst the devout, and especially the enclosed, to believe that the outside world is falling apart.

The robust man who had responded to her at tea with the remark that the hills, even out of sight of the monastery, were still God's bills and perfectly safe, was also there, with his wife. Their children had turned up at home one day and told them to take a holiday. A weekend at Nunraw's guesthouse had seemed the best way of taking the time out of time. They were blissfully cheerful and gave me lots of smiles: this was a funny kind of place to take a holiday, but they made it seem rather splendid and logical - a pontifical Pontins.

I had met a sad man at tea, the kind of man whose air of sadness seems rather beautiful and dreadful. He was welldressed in slacks and leisure shirt, with a neat buckle to his belt and pretty shoes. His teenage son and daughter were with him, and dwarfed him. He seemed to be bowed down. He might, one thought, have lost his wife or seen her committed to an asylum. He might have just received news that he or someone near to him was dying.

He had said that Nunraw helped him with the difficult times of life. With decisions, for instance? someone had asked. With difficulties, he had stressed, and one could go no further. His children had come to him and whispered their plans for the evening - wanting him to be free of concern for them, yet worried, it seemed, that they might be bothering him unnecessarily by interrupting his thoughts. He turned to them in acknowledgement and dismissed them.

They treated him with respect and care, as though he had become temporarily a child. They left his presence with no sign of relief: his dignity seemed to wash over them. The girl was punkish and pretty, and the boy had the air of a sixth former with a future. I found him later inspecting the tyres of the smart family car. He could not quite allow the family's tragedy - I was convinced something hideous had befallen them - to interfere with his pleasure in a brand new Japanese car.

The sad father was in a pew, flanked by his children.

But there were two stars of the congregation. One was a spike-shouldered old lady who walked in just before the off . She was very thin and small, but soldier-erect. She went down the aisle, sashaying slightly, and took a place on the outside of the left-hand side of the front row. There she lowered herself to her knees. It looked a very great distance to go for so old a person. And then she simply hooked herself over the rail in front of her, flopping both arms over the bar and holding her service book in her dangling hands. She wore a black veil over her head, a strangely Spanish, black cobweb over her fine little white head.

A big woman next entered the church. She was very tall and quite broad, and she walked with a rolling gait, as a cruel actress might mimic an ungainly schoolgirl. She wore a cape and a beret and a lot of badges of one kind or another. I had seen her in the kitchen of the guesthouse, rolling pastry and laughing cheerily with a helper. She had obviously cobbled her uniform together for her own purposes and according to her own notions of suitability. She looked pretty fine and very eccentric. She strode down the aisle and took up her place on the righthand side of the aisle. Her position exactly mirrored that of the old lady: front row, outside place.

They were the lay sentinels, guarding their boys. There were various lesser mortals in the room: I think I recognized some of the men as being from the guesthouse, in indeterminate positions in the kitchens or whatever. One, a man who looked as though he had been left in a warm damp place for so long that he was slightly warped - not positively bent or crippled or even arthritic, but just exhibiting a slight lean here, and a slight twist there-held his little order of service sheet in front of him and stared at it long and hard. A small man with a deaf aid came in. Various more or less plain girls in shorts took up their stations and looked incongruous, but not somehow impertinent: the Catholic faith expects a good deal of rough and tumble in its adherents and doesn't seem to demand quite the same standards of dress and decorum as the polite upstart Church of England.

The lay congregation, then, had pretty well filled up the room behind the bar. A bell tolled. And then the monks came into their stalls. Behind the altar and at each side of it there were two doors, and there was another in the wall at the congregation's end of the choir stalls. The community filed in, and took places in two rows of stalls on each side, facing each other. One pair of rows had their backs to the windows, and the other to the wall. A postulant was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

The Abbot stood waiting for everyone to be in his place, and then leaned down into the stall in front of him and made a small tap with a device there. A monk at the organ began to play, and the toing and froing of the psalmody began. The old lady stayed on her knees throughout, whilst the monks' voices played against each other. The monks sat, stood, or faced the altar, moving together like a pair of sedate chorus lines, which they were. One monk was always, however, slightly ahead of the others as they stood up: just a touch too eager, I thought. The congregation mostly sat, but the woman in the cloak did exactly as the community did.

Sometimes the monks would bow low, and hang there, bent deeply from the waist, like pictures of Japanese geisha girls being super-polite. They looked very beautiful. And there was the lady in the cloak, standing or bowing, exactly as the monks did, and not minding at all that she was blocking the view of those seated behind: perhaps she did not know, or care, or thought that the rest of the crew could perfectly easily follow suit.

The light from the windows grew softer as the sun, which had been shining fiercely into the room, began to sink. Far away across fields and towns, the Firth of Forth seemed to be catching fire. The big, weird geological lumps which litter the landscape between Nunraw and the sea looked particularly stark.

Compline is one of the most lovely offices, thanking God for the day. I was paying some attention to it, but mostly allowed the prettiness of the music, and the thin, scratchy, weak singing of one of the monks whose job it was to sing the solo bits, to wash over me. I wanted to try to pin some of the faces in the choir stalls more firmly in my mind.

I can still hear the melodies, and still find singular resonance in the words sung each night: Keep us, Lord, as the apple of your eye; Hide us in the shelter of your wings.

When the service was over, the monks filed out, and I had to walk down the aisle from my place at the back to a door which was on the monks' side of the low, token barrier between the choir and the congregation. I opened it and wondered what to do next. I faced the altar and bowed my head for a moment. I found myself wiping my face with my hand, in a gesture which might just have had the makings of a fumbled crossing in it. I would have to sort out my entrances and exits better than that in future.

But I knew that I had found a place profoundly to my taste. And I understood something of why so many people felt drawn to it. I was often happy in the monasteries I visited, but that was a place where for the first time I very nearly tasted temptation of the monastic kind.

2

The Making of Monks

We do not know what makes people do quite ordinary things, but we do not have proportionately less chance of knowing what makes them become very extraordinary. It is no harder to understand why a soldier lays down his life in war than it is to make sense of the quiet endurance of the production line worker. In truth, both are incomprehensible. And both elude generalization. My pleasure in exploring the monastic enterprise has been the growing awareness that it is simply the most perfect exemplar of the inexplicability of man's actions and creations.

Monks themselves are not helpful in providing explanations. 'I was called by God': I have heard these simple, devastating words spoken by monks living in monasteries in the Egyptian desert, amongst the wooded slopes of northern Greece, or in the grasslands of eastern Scotland. It admits of no argument, sloughing off subsidiary lines of attack with a shrug. It is profoundly satisfactory to those most concerned. It is the necessary and sufficient explanation to the believer. It was used first so long ago that it seems to predate and upstage any sociological or psychological explanations, and will probably outlive them. It even embraces the prime purpose which a monk might think of himself achieving: obedience to the will of God for him. It provides sustenance at a logical altitude where there is no other food, and breathing where there is no oxygen. Believe it, and you - anyone of sufficient strength could stay in a monastery; the monk who doubts it for any length of time has been reclaimed by the world.

And of course, it won't do - at least, not for a sceptical nature and frame of mind which is determined to seek explanations, or the possibility of explanations, in the world.

And so one begins by assuming that a monk must b someone who is escaping from the world, with its unpleasantness, uncertainty and unnerving absence of rules. There must, we think, be such people: they join armies if they have a paradoxical taste for adventure but cannot bear to be autonomous, and they join monasteries in extreme cases of funk.

Immediately, one comes across a crucial divide, and it is as much mental as practical. A monastery is at one and the same time a place which is paradisical and penitential. This is crucial to monastic theology and possibilities. It poses dilemmas which are irreconcilable. Is a monk celebrating his Saviour's redemptive act for man? or is he imitating and mourning his Saviour's suffering? Perhaps, across an entire year, he can do both of these: he can begin with Christmas, in which the joy of hope is hardly tainted with the foreboding of suffering, and find in Eastertime the more densely complex strands of suffering and joy of the fall and redemption. Christian religious life would not have survived - inside or outside monasteries - if it did not mirror and match the depth and variety of personal experience and responses any of us is capable of across time, or the rather wide variety of sensibilities in the world.

A man may join a monastery with a nature seeking penance or one seeking joy, and find whichever he wants, or perhaps neither. He may be minded to expiate man's inherent sinfulness and the widespread indifference to the sufferings and redemptive power of Christ; or he may feel drawn to sing the praises of his maker. He may be an upbeat, or a downbeat, type.

More - suppose we meet a monk whom we believe to be escaping life. He might be aware of this failing in himself, and he might therefore be constantly pricked, in his monastic cell, with awareness that this is what he is doing and that he must be a superbly diligent monk in order to make up for the rather tarnished motives which made him one. But another man, also escaping life outside, might merely be delighted at his good fortune at being allowed to do so with the blessing and at the behest of his maker. A man might be a hard-working monk out of guilt, or out of gratitude that his lot was so perfect.

A man may conceive of himself as joining a monastery because of his personal need, or because the world needs monks; because his sins, or the world's, need expiation; because his, or the world's, good fortune in Jesus must be celebrated. He might join because he has conceived of monasticism as a grand human enterprise worth being attached to and promoting; or as satisfying the most intimate demands within his nature.

Actually, though, these will probably only be rationalizations, attempts at vocalizing what is inexpressible. What made this man a scientist and that an artist? What made this man become an explorer and that a librarian? This man a conservative and that a liberal? This a social worker and that an entrepreneur? Chance, self-deception, hope, fear, heredity, world-view all go into the motivational soup. The answers are no clearer in the case of vocations.

An Abbot receives an enquiry from a man and gets to know him as best he may. The Orders have a strict and quite tough routine of investigation and interrogation. In the end, barring extreme instability, obvious mental illness, some such knock-out blow, or the man himself scurrying away when things get serious, the Abbot will quite probably end up letting the man come forward and stay in the monastery for a while. A vocation is too mysterious a business to be tested on anything but this basis.

One Abbot I know says that the Abbot before him, on handing over, told him never to admit to the monastery a Pole or someone from a broken home: they were both likely to be disruptive. Of the latter, the statistician might also say that he has an increased chance of himself forming broken homes. So what? A woman would not likely refuse to marry the man on that probability account, nor the community refuse to admit him.

A man can no more be refused entry to a monastery because he is neurotic than he could be embraced solely for that reason. Monks say that they have their fair share of neurotics (taking neurosis' to be a name for persistent, unreasonable misery of one sort or another), and perhaps rather more than their fair share, amongst their number. Experienced monks say they can tell whether a man is neurotic in such a way that the monastery will make him worse: even so, they are inclined to let people try their vocation, in case the presupposition is wrong or can be made so by monastic life. But a monastic, just as an artistic or any other, vocation may feed on a neurosis, converting what might have been destructive, and maturing it into a force for devotion. The isolation and silence of the monastic life may, of course, drive the unstable to the brink of despair: monasteries see plenty of such cases.

If monasteries can create despair, so despair can produce monks. Wars make monks. Hardly surprisingly, a proportion of people who see great suffering offer themselves for monastic life. Perhaps it is the overwhelming evidence of the irrationality of war which brings men, exhausted, to monastic life in the hope of creating order. Monasteries are monuments to man's desire to make order. Perhaps it is a feeling that nothing can save a creature so absurd and self-destructive as man but prayer. Many of these war vocations - perhaps like war marriages - turn out to be short-lived. But amongst contemporary mature vocations, the monks who are now aged sixty or more, there are many who entered after the Second World War.

One elderly monk, now in his seventies, had as a child been put in a home when his mother died and his father wanted to remarry. 'That was a hard place', he said, with the kind of relish with which a soldier might recall a particular training barracks, or an old salt a difficult ship. He had had to break the ice of the communal trough in order to wash. He had gone on to be a monk, more or less placed in the monastery by his father: but it seems that the boy had hardly troubled to rebel against the placement. When the war came, it would have been easy enough to stay in the monastery, or to have used the opportunity to bolt. The youngster went off and fought, and then returned, with relief.

It is not pejorative to say that such a man has an old-fashioned peasant view of life: that it will be more less hard, but also that it will have fixed and reckonable points. It is the sort of mind which has produced many monks over the centuries. The life at home would have been hard enough, especially for the second and subsequent sons, with no hope

of the patrimony.

In the western world of the religious centuries, it would have been almost automatic that to devote oneself to Christ within a prosperous monastery would be satisfactory both as a matter of salvation and of sustenance. Thus, many monasteries - Cistercian particularly - were filled with Irish farmers' sons, striking a practical and profound bargain with their lot on heaven and earth. Deep faith was not in question; nor was

deep need.

But practical necessities of inherent faith and poverty will not describe many modem vocations, which grow out of an age which does not implant in many a deep-grained faith, nor thrust debilitating poverty on them. With such people, one is dealing with vocations which dawned on men out of a clear blue sky, and which often struck - like Cupid's darts - with a peculiar whimsicality.

I came across an American who had first discovered monasticism whilst on holiday in France. It had been a drastic encounter. He had visited the monastery of St Pierre at Solesmes, at the casual invitation of a fellow traveller. He was then aged twenty-two. 'I was, rationally, an agnostic. Within a year I had been baptized as an Anglican in New York. After that, I just felt a need to progress, to make something more of it than going to church on Sunday. I came back here, and asked if they would take an American: I didn't even mention that I wasn't a catholic. It didn't occur to me.' The Abbot asked him to look at some other monasteries and to consider further.

He did, and was in the monastery within six months, having learned scratch Latin so as to make better sense of some of the liturgy. He describes the experience as wholly unexpected, and as being very much to do, at first, with the place itself. Solesmes had drawn him; he had known that the French style interested him: but beyond that he had found something in the spirit and presence of that monastery that he wanted.

That was twelve years ago. The man is now a priest, and organist in one of the most famous monasteries in the world. He has gone from the culture in the world most obsessed with freedom to one in which he must ask permission to walk outside the enclosure, and where every minute of his day and night is ordered by a rule fifteen centuries old as interpreted by his Abbot and community. He has gone home once, and was struck by how his previous acquaintances had seemed, somehow, not to have moved on. By his own account, his life now is incomprehensible outside of his monkhood. He had been tempted by the idea of moving to a stricter monastery, one where there were other Americans, and had finally been given permission to go. The permission had shocked him into staying where he was, and he had not since troubled himself or others with the thought. He gave me the name of another American, who was a monk in a Spanish monastery.

This second man, I discovered when I visited his monastery, Santo Domingo de Silos, near Burgos, had been a clerkly figure in a Madrid business for twenty years. He had been, and had enjoyed being, an exile, on a small private income which had dried up in the end. He had realized that when his boss of many years' standing left the business, the replacement would be a man of a very different stamp: the time had come to consider a change. He had visited Montserrat (a famous pilgrimage monastery) one Christmas holiday, and been intensely moved by the mass of the Immaculate Conception. He had entered the church as a sceptic, a tourist. Inside, 'I knew this is what I have to do.' He was forty-eight when the experience hit him, and forty-nine when he entered his present monastery.

He had had a long talk with the Abbot, in which he had said, 'I want to be a monk, and I want to be a monk here', and had 'told him everything'. The discussion had resulted in the Abbot letting the foreigner come for a few months, to try his vocation. The basis of the vocation seemed to be that God had become the most important thing in his life. As simple as that. Now he stands his turn as duty doorman and salesman of monastic nick-knacks, in a monastic house founded when the Moors ruled Spain, and he plays the organ in church.

He is an almost stately, rather patrician, man, elegant in monastic black, and - caught off duty - rather shockingly shabby in his battered trousers and threadbare jersey. If he was introduced as a professor of Art History it would be no surprise. He is not a fit man, and battles against low blood pressure, which spoils his winter months. Was he lonely? 'No. Some people might be lonely here, but not me. The hardest thing, I think, is to be loving enough. I am amongst many people here, and required to love them all: that means really love them, individually. But that is not always easy. One cannot just shut one's door here: one must respond to people if they need you.' He had a powerful neatness about him, a slender élan. Only when I got to know him a little better did I realize that he was old, and notice that he stooped.

3

TheWakeful

I met a monk who had been a sailor for several years. He was large and round and cheerful. I wanted to try out on him a theory that I had been developing: that there was something rather similar between monks and deep-sea sailors. Part of the similarity is that both a ship and a monastery keep hours which are demanding upon their crew. A monastery does its most striking work in the small hours, when the rest of the world is asleep: the Matins and Lauds of the monastery is like the dogwatch, the dawn watch, at sea. Men are awake in both sorts of machine, both attending to the smooth running of ancient rhythms, both watchful and wakeful, 6oth likely to be engaged in some sort of contemplation and witness, more or less tainted with tiredness and ill-humour. Both are members of the 6lite of the wakeful, standing at the binnacle or the choir stall. The undertone murmuring of the night prayers can be like the distant beat of an engine. Bells are crucial to both, as summons and markers of the passing hours. I have felt the same longing for sleep amongst the green and orange flickerings of radar screens on a ship's bridge as amongst the dim lights in front of ikons during a night vigil in a monastery; and felt all around me the san-te presence of watchful men.

Anyway, the seaman monk, now sixty-two and youthful in the way that only monks can be, was one of the best cases of improbable callings one could hope for. He had been at sea for

five years, and seen time as a wireless operator in the war, when he came ashore, decided to work in electrical engineering and needed to do some swatting for an examination. A friendly priest ('He may have seen something, I don't know') suggested that he spend some time boning up in a monastery (as others still do). He simply noticed himself saying, 'This is it. I just found that I wanted to spend more and more time there', almost in spite of himself. 'My father kept asking, "What's he keep going off to that damn place for?"'

Well might he have enquired. The seaman monk says now, 'I never wanted to be a monk. But I knew that it was what God wanted for me, that's all. I wonder sometimes why God picked on me, though I know he does pick the oddest types. It's the last people you'd expect him to call. There are those types who rather fancy themselves walking in a cloister with their hands clasped: they haven't a hope. I think the artistic types have more difficulty: I'm a down-to-earth sort, and I think that helps.'

4

The Eccentrics

I have never enjoyed meeting people more than the monks I have come across in the past three years. Not that they could give me an enormous amount of time: they were for ever scurrying away to their prayers, or their meals, or their duties around the monastery. Nor that I could get close to them: visits to monasteries are expensive, since they are usually in far-flung, crazy, beautiful places, and I often had a hire car to take back to base, or a train or a bus-to catch.

Besides, sitting in a monastery guest room or a church or even strolling the grounds is not conducive to very discursive talks. A monk's monastery is his factory and his ancestral home and his waiting room for heaven. I did not visit the sort of monks who are notionally out of the world, but actually in it a good deal. With the contemplative monks I have been amongst, there is no slipping down to the pub. There is no time out of time, such as the rest of us have, in which we can try on different personae, and test the water of minor disloyalties. They do not have the limited carnival of a Friday night. Monks do not have time off. They are full time sandwichmen for God.

Men who wear the habit must be shy with their confidences: their doubts and dreads, whatever tedium and dissidence they feel, must be dealt with tactfully by them. They are, after all, voluntary prisoners in a system with which they must live harmoniously when the visitor's car has left for good.

I have seen Abbots frown their displeasure at the failings of a servant or one of their flock: seen it, and clung to it as a sign of fallibility in them. I have sometimes seen giggling fits.

Monks have always felt that hilarity might be a part of the calling (whilst some of their number have been powerfully cross with the others for their occasional gaiety). Otherwise: a monk wears his face as a sign of his dedication, his contentment.

It is part of the beauty of the profession of monasticism that it is unequivocal. A monk progresses with greater or lesser suffering, with more or less hard work, towards a way of life in which there is no requirement - indeed there is a requirement not - to thrash about in exploration of alternatives. A monk says to the world that in this one earthly life that he has, he has made a choice and will live it exclusively. The rest of us may live limited lives, but we seldom have to admit it so forcefully.

That is what a monk most seeks, this casting away of the muddled, multi-dimensional, vacillating, world of choice. A monk says that he will renounce choice in pursuit of his vision.

A monk will sometimes point out that choice is often over-advertised in the outside world. In the first place: choice, like the freedom of which it is the tangible representative, is seldom wide, or much exercised. Most people in the real world do not have much freedom, though their compliance in a way of life which demands much of them is supposed to be worthwhile, since they can choose between several brands of politicians and pet food. More: the freedom to choose is often little more than the freedom to rush headlong about the world, sniffing at mankind's many possibilities and exploring none. A monk does not throw away his freedom: instead he indulges in two of the great privileges afforded best by sound and liberal societies, that of eccentricity and extremism.

A monk is necessarily an eccentric, and not least in agreeing to conform to the rule of his Order so thoroughly. To some extent he will also be an extremist, but then so is any athlete, politician, actor. Come to that, so is anyone who achieves anything. To make progress in the world, one must be uni-dimensional. One must renounce. And then renunciation becomes its own intoxicant. Even indulgence becomes renunciation when it is more or less consciously taken so far that it is disabling. A monk is like a gambler, tossing his small freedoms, his wealth, into the equation, and expecting something bigger in exchange. A monk strikes a deal with life: going without freedom and forgoing choices, and expecting, more or less confidently, to gain in the process.

A monk's life is not merely limited, however. There is of course the refined hedonism of abstinence, which makes every moment of warmth, sleep food and alcohol delicious. There is the quality of a life filled with liturgy, itself beautiful. There is the aesthetic quality of a life amongst objects of talismanic power. The monk, who never leaves a cell or the precincts of a monastery, shares a good deal with the exotic traveller: both people have minds filled with sharp, exquisite images of paradise. Both are self-consciously on journeys involving discomfort and glamour. Both seem unable to live contently amongst their own, normal, familial, societies.

A monk has something in common with the actor: he dresses a part and speaks words written by other people, and is determined in a special kind of perpetual imitation, in his case of one small aspect of Christ, the Christ of the wilderness. Christ's perfection is unattainable by man, but Christ is God imitating man so that man might see what godliness in man would be like. A man can - a monk does - devote his life to going through the motions of being Christ-like, in the hopes that reverential mimicry may release the godliness in him.

There is something of the clerk or the accountant in the monk: both keep minute account of daily gains and losses. The liturgy is kept with the routine scruple that a ledger requires. His days and nights are spent tolling his way through scripts, and often in flicking through beads on a chain, which click like an abacus, marking prayers said and progress toward paradise made.

There is something soldierly in a monastic vocation. A monk chooses anonymity, and does it in the special way involved in wearing a uniform. People in uniforms merge with one another; but when they are out of each other's company, they stick out like sore thumbs. To become a monk is to merge into a vast army, historical and present, of men; yet it is the decision of a man who seeks extraordinariness.

It is a very singular and eccentric act. When you meet a monk, you stare into his eyes, hoping to get to the man inside the monk - perhaps to find the rebel, or the gossip, the weakling beyond the luminous blue or the limpid brown pupils - and you seldom do, because there is always the smile and the honest requirement to present his monkishness as complete, tattooed onto him, not water-transferred.

A monk may be large or small, ruddy or pale, but one is not sniffing for the scent of gin on the breath of a drunk; spotting the careful grooming of the vain; envying the smart suit of the

affluent: the man before you is just a monk, and you know a

lot about him without asking.

But you also can know rather little. He remains a mystery and very enigmatic. A monk's face is inscrutable. Its ruddiness does not betray a glutton, nor its pallor necessarily a great ascetic. It will usually merely be the face a genetic chance doled out. For however long that face has been in a monastery, it has been subject to very much the same exigencies and comforts that all the other monks endured. You cannot watch the face as it confronts things outside the monastery. You cannot travel with a monk and see how he responds to the troubles and delights outside the monastery. You cannot know whether or not the monk might have become a friend, because a friendship requires knocking about together, it requires the small tediums and irritations of life, and preferably travel or work, to be shared: with monks you may have long exhilarating discussions, but you will soon leave and they will stay.

And so you wonder about the real potentiality of the monk you have met and spoken to. You are taunted by wondering what might have become of a relationship with him. And wondering if he is representative of monks. A monastery is full of monks. You meet some of them, because they have asked the Abbot's permission to speak to this visitor,, or the Abbot has asked them to speak to the writer. But the others just mill about, in procession, or spotted at their benches or stools, or distant in their choirs, or stumbled across in a private meditation in the church, or bent over a furrow in a field, or - habit blowing in the wind - pruning a fruit tree. You see monks very often in archetypal, historic situations and locations: chanting from a lectern under a romanesque roof, perhaps. But you see them too at the wheels of cars, or tapping out words on a computer.

Many western monks have their heads shaved. They thus have the skull-presence which they think adds to their penitential lack of vanity and their anonymity. The people of the Gulag Archipelago have this zek-bleakness. So do people prepared for surgery, or the military. But we also live in the age of the skinhead, when to shave one's head is to show a theatrical or a dangerous dissidence, an affectation or assumption of that indifference which might make a man do anything.

A man with a shaved head is someone who has declared himself an outsider. He has a stigma. A skinhead is eschewing comforting symbols of conformity, he has said that he can save the asylum or prison barber the time to crop his hair: such a boy or man has declared himself already a prisoner, already in the Gulag, wherever he goes. If you want to think him mad, go ahead and do so. He has nothing to lose.

This is true of a monk as well as of a skinhead. There is a potential arrogance in his indifference to the world, in his determination to ignore it, and to define and develop other values than those of the street and market outside. The bluish-grey pates of a skinhead and a monk are interchangeable.

At Britain's only Carthusian monastery, a boy came to the gate at the summons of a big old-fashioned bell. He was the perfect punk-monk. He had a Visigoth coarseness, a farmyard ruggedness, the lowered eye and heavy brow of a bull about to charge, no hair at all on his head, which rolled in awkward bumps like a bruised farmscape. He did not smile: but why should a Carthusian, seeking escape from the vulgarities of the world, smile at a strange visitor? And what awkward youngster does smile at first meeting? This boy might have been fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years old. Over the vast hairy Carthusian habit he wore an even tougher looking apron. Poking out beneath, there were enormous boots, unlaced. For all I know, his heart and soul are more perfect repositories of the unsullied love of Christ than any I met anywhere. He spoke in an Irish accent: he wore a Visigothic exterior, but his interior spirit might have been full of Celtic enchantment and severity.

Besides, of course, there is sweetness in the punk and the monk alike. The punk turns out to be a confused youngster, ready enough to smile and laugh, and possessed of an adoring mother and an elder sister who taunts him and cuddles him. The monk, too, lets his skull break into a grin often enough, and is eager for company and an outsider's view of the monastery and monastic life, and for tales of the outside world, and for news of marriages and babies and advancement and bankruptcy.

Monks do not know the failures of the outside world. They do not know what it is to fail one's family, as a lover or as a father. But yet they have amongst them their fair share of faces which look well lived-in, witty, wry, sad, or glum, and it is the indoor recreation of the visitor to speculate how those expressions and impressions arrived on these cloistered brows. There you suspect self-pity, there self-opinionation; some faces you find attractive and welcoming, others alarming. And it becomes clear, of course, that human life is inevitably full of pitfalls, whether it is lived in monasteries or outside. This monk is aching to be Abbot, and this seeks to be moved from the laundry; this one is ill; this one longs for more time to pray. This one finds the loneliness of a crowded monastery, where idle chatter is discouraged, very hard to take; that one wonders if he is in love with the woman whom he meets sometimes on retreat. But which of these faces belongs to which of these aspirations? I know such longings are nurtured in monastic bosoms, but no monk has ever gossiped to me about another.

What a monk has set himself to do is not open to ordinary

analysis: his motives are impenetrable, finally. And his privacy seems very important. Normal investigation, ordinary interrogation, seemed out of place. There is such a deliberate privacy and quietness about a monk and his monastery that it seems impertinent to defy or diminish them. And sometimes the monks were shy and almost furtive: not in a way that made them less attractive, but in just such a way that one waited for them to offer conversation and friendliness before assuming that they ought to be on offer.

Part II

EGYPT

The monasteries of Egypt were seated in lonely and desolate places, on the summit of mountains or in the islands of the Nile; and the sacred horn or trumpet of Tabenne was the well-known signal which assembled several thousand robust and determined monks, who for the most part had been the peasants of the adjacent country. When their dark retreats were invaded by a military force which it was impossible to resist, they silently stretched out their necks to the executioner and supported their national character, that tortures could never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a secret which he was resolved not to disclose. The Archbishop of Alexandria, for whose safety they eagerly devoted their lives, was lost among a uniform and well-disciplined multitude; and on the nearer approach of danger he was swiftly removed by their officious hands from one place of concealment to another, till he reached the formidable deserts, which the gloomy and credulous temper of superstition had peopled with demons and savage monsters.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

Edward Gibbon, Penguin Books

The Queen of Sheba steps onto the carpets and advances towards Saint Antony. Her gown of golden brocade, cut across at regular intervals by falbalas of pearl, jet and sapphire, pinches her waist in a tight bodice, enriched with coloured appliquc. to represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. She wears very high pattens, one of them black with a sprinkling of silver stars, and a crescent moon - while the other, which is white, is covered in golden droplets with a sun in the middle.

Her wide sleeves, garnished with emeralds and birds' feathers, allow a bare view of her little round arm, ornamented at the wrist by an ebony bracelet, and her ring-laden hands are tipped with nails so sharp that her fingers finish almost like needles. A flat golden chain passing under her chin runs up along her cheeks, spirals around her blue-powdered hair, and then dropping down grazes past her shoulder and clinches over her chest on to a diamond scorpion, which sticks out its tongue between her breasts. Two large blonde pearls pull at her ears. The edges of her eyelids are painted black. On her left cheek-bone she has a natural brown fleck; and she breathes with her mouth open, as if her corset constricted her. In her progress she waves a green parasol with an ivory handle, hung round with silver-gilt bells; and twelve frizzy little negroes carry the long tail of her gown, held at very end by a monkey who lifts it up from time to time. She says: 'Ah! Fine hermit! Fine hermit! My heart swoons!'

The Temptation of Saint Antony, Gustave Flaubert, translated by Kitty Mrosovsky, Penguin Books

1

The Road to St Antony

The road to the premier shrine of St Antony, the Star of the desert who is credited with inventing monasticism, about two hundred years after the death of Christ, runs racketty and uneven out of Cairo, easterly and fast to Suez, and then on south down beside the Gulf of Suez, to Zafarana, a makeshift scrap of a town with a hand-cranked petrol pump and a shanty cafe called 'The Paradise of the Desert'. And then, right - westwards - into the desert proper, away from the sparkling sea and in the lee of the mountains. It was originally built by an oil company in the nineteen-thirties. Before it came, travellers arrived as did St Antony himself, to this his last home: on foot, or on a camel.

The Egyptians take no chances with the March weather, which was like an unblemished European summer day. At such a treacherous season, they prefer to wear long-johns under double jellabahs. The antique soldier at the obligatory road block at Zafarana was wearing a collection of warming jerkins and a balaclava as he came out to look at our papers and to mark down our destination, perhaps for our own safety as we proceeded into countryside littered with the relics of war, and into long stretches of empty roads. We took tea in the cafe, and chatted with a busload of air-conditioned Texan oilmen, on their insulated way from a Red Sea rig to Cairo and home. And then on, into the desert. A ribbon of perfect road, suddenly and often punctuated by stretches where you had to hurtle along the wrong side to avoid potholes. The occasional lorry or taxi (the latter always going at seventy, with figures at the window asleep in huddles of robes). Thirty kilometres on, and we missed the turning toward the hills and the Monastery of St Antony. Another hour before we turned back and discovered there wasn't one.

Eventually we found the point where motor tracks run fifteen kilometres across the hard-packed desert. We had by then become connoisseurs of the beige topographies. Often the Egyptian desert has the air of a building site: as though millions of bricks had been pummeled to dust and nuggets, and laid haphazardly about an uneven landscape.

It was like driving across tightly-packed corrugated iron. We saw gazelles, skipping in ones and twos away from the approaching car. It seemed incredible that they could get a living in such a bleak terrain, with only occasional stunted bushes - half stick, half cactus - for feed. No wonder they were lean.

The hills loomed larger as the kilometres rocked by. And with them, the dawning realization that we could see a wall far away in the distance. Was there the hint of greenery poking above it?

When we were perhaps a mile off, we stopped the car, swigged some water, changed into what we took to be respectful clothes, checked that we had our papers (precious ecclesiastical credentials), and set off on the very last lap. The sun would soon clip the top of the vast, featureless, treeless hills, and already there light beige was darkening.

There was no sign of life at the monastery. We were by no means confident that we would be allowed to stay overnight. We had been warned that, this being Lent, the monasteries might be on a rather strict regime.

There was a coach outside, and a large black Mercedes. Through the ancient gates, swung wide under an arch and a big ricketty, whited-wood veranda over the entrance, we could see a couple more, rather smaller, buses: but, peering in, we could see no people. There was some rubbish burning in a hollow just in front of the monastery, and two big wrecked water tanks.

For centuries men have lived and worshipped at this site, and - a few score kilometres across the hills, as the crow flies - St Paul's. St Antony's is commonly regarded as the birthplace of Christian monasticism. But actually it was definitely not the first monastery founded in Egypt, nor was Egypt necessarily the founding country of the movement.

The place has had a chequered history, and most of the structures date from the last few centuries, rather than from the early days. There may not have been anything like a real monastic community there until the fifth or sixth centuries.

Naturally, over the years it has grown a good deal, and there are some twentieth-century buildings. But you do not see them at first. This is a tiny fortified town whose sole business is prayer. The architecture is so simple and plain that it invites one to suspend ordinary, dull judgements about how old it is.

Inside the walls, there is an oasis garden, from which a cluster of tall palms rise up, waving in the slight breeze, surrounded by terraced walks: a wide square, then, built of terraces and houses on three sides, with the fourth being the eastern monastery wall, round a sunken irrigated garden. Ravens populate the trees, wheeling in the air as they settle for the evening.

To the left of the gate, a little shop: shut for the night. Stretching ahead, a small gravel and sand street, an adobe lane, with a church at the end. A woman in some sort of nun's clothes greeted us; and we told her that we would like to show someone our papers. We were shown into a refectory room, with one or two devotional pictures on bare walls. There were cushions on window seats, and metal window frames. One wanted to be out and wandering: but had no idea where a guest might venture.

Next door, we could hear children shouting and laughing. A cat came in through the open window. Out in the lane a dusty Arab boy beat a donkey. A crippled monk, not old, wearing black robes and a little, head-hugging cowl with white crosses embroidered on it, and a thin, single badger's stripe running for and aft, shuffled in and managed, in a series of jerks, to get himself onto the bench. Someone brought him something to eat. His eyes stared and darted around the room, barely controlled, but took a little notice of us. A light bulb in the ceiling flickered on and off, and his eyes latched on to it, fascinated. A child came in and climbed onto him for an embrace. Finally, a bearded monk arrived - a man with a slight cast in one eye, and whispy ginger hair. He looked at our papers with a little sigh and took them away. The Abbot was not available, he said when he returned, perhaps a quarter of an hour later. We said we wanted to stay, and had brought some food; was this possible? Yes. Could I go to the night liturgy? Yes.

He showed us to some guest dormitories which ran down the right-hand side of the street. There was no light in the rooms, and only some of them had small windows, formed of oil-drum cylinders set into the walls. The beds were concrete bunks with mattresses and blankets, occasionally with the remains of picnics littered upon them, being consumed by insects. Otherwise it was clean enough. Holdalls were scattered about some of the rooms, but after a while we were given a key to a dormitory of our own. There were rather smelly, but cleanish washrooms, with, I think no water. There was a lavatory and washroom along the lane beside the refectory: we should use those. We could see the church, if we liked.

All this was shown us with politeness, but also some weariness. I had the impression this was one monk who thought he had dealt with enough foreign visitors for one day. Our note had clearly made little impression. Whatever the treasures or charms of the library, the monks' refectory, or their cells, we were clearly not likely to see them.

The British conservationist Max Nicholson was visiting the monastery, on his way home from helping the Sudanese government with a proposed nature reserve. He was with an ornithologist. Our small group of pilgrims was invited to visit the church (though the bird authority astonished the monks by preferring to spot the monastic ravens). It was pitch dark inside the tiny rounded building, divided into various rooms, with carpet on the floor. Our guide's torch flashed up on murals and ikons. In one recess there was an ancient altar decorated with the figures from Revelation. 'A portrait of St Matthew, as Man; St Mark as the Lion; St Luke as the Ox; and St John as the Eagle. These are the Four Living Creatures. Each has six wings, two to cover the face, two to cover the legs, and two for flying. Each is named a cherubim "those who are full of eyes".' The guide books identify a mass of saints painted in the churches and its chapels: George, Theodorus, Menas, Victor, Claude, Thuon, Arsophonius, Bishoy, Samuel, Isaac, Mercurius. Christ Pantocrator is in one dome, and angels crowd other smaller domes.

'St Antony spent twenty years in his cave,' said the monk in the gloom, 'and established the monastery in 316. The first church dates from 316.' Only the monks believe it is quite that old, or that St Antony established the monastery. The thirteenth century is more likely the main period of building, though there was certainly a church there before that, and it is probably incorporated in the present building. The monk showed us a body in a shrine: it was a saint whose remains had been discovered last century, perfectly and miraculously preserved.

The original church of St Antony is now a part of a larger structure, whilst next door is the Church of the Apostles - the summer church - where services are held in the warmer months. Compared with the old church, it is roomy and airy, with a screen of wood and ivory inset crosses before the haykal, or altar.

And then a walk to the covered holy spring, with its enclosed stone basin, a few feet deep, on the mountain side of the oasis. 'Here', our guide said, 'there has been a flow of pure water, always the same unvarying amount: ten square metres, every day for thirteen centuries. The Lord brought St Antony to this place because of the water. We have had it analysed in Cairo: it is very pure, perfect mineral water.' We sipped some of the water. From the well flows an irrigation system, which we were later to see gardeners organizing: digging up little impromptu mud walls to direct the water from place to place.

The monk said that an angel had led St Antony to this water, and another had shown him the monastic habit (actually, it appears that some specialized monastic clothes preceded Antony).

Suddenly, our guiding monk was off. If there was no further service we needed, he said, he was off to bed. It was around eight o'clock. The sky became very dark. We Europeans joined the hubbub of Coptic faithful who were staying at the monastery. A limousine driver and his wife, from Cairo, were organizing strawberry-jam sandwiches in the room where we had heard the children calling. The place was in a state of subdued riot.

Outside the guest refectory - where everyone was gathered in their cardigans against the chill, sitting on the stone bench of the terrace, their backs to the garden - one monk was being greeted and asked to pose for photographs, embraced by the faithful. Flashbulbs popped around him. It was getting really quite cold. A moon hung over the waving palms. The children were in an ecstasy of expectation of supper.

A monk ticked off a mother for being cross with her child when he cried. Another seemed to be checking up on 'the Muslim', one of the visitors' bus drivers: I don't know whether it was a question of his being safely outside the gates for the night, or safely inside them. Setting up our beds, we heard Max and his friend debating whether pyjamas were worn in a monastery, and then they went to bed. We poured ourselves cocktails in the gloom: appalling Cairo gin ('Big Ben: The Heart of a Good Cocktail'), and the pulp of oranges and lemons. We dubbed it the 'St Antony Special', and were much cheered by it.

We slipped out of the gate and had a cigarette in the lea of the visiting Copts' bus. There were lights on in an army radio station near the monastery; it hummed in the night air. A transistor radio relayed a football game to a group of huddled soldiers from the radio station. When we came back in, things were quieter. The electric light, which had been fitfully flashing on in the guests' refectory, finally gave up altogether. A medical student and his wife and family, whom we'd met on the terrace, suggested that I have supper with them. We convened in a small, candle-lit room, where lovely messes of stew, and bread from the monastery, hard and dry, were on offer. I had read that in the nineteenth century, the monks made good white wine and gave it to distinguished visitors. Either they don't now make it, or we weren't distinguished enough.

None the less the party was convivial and jolly. The ladies were mildly flirtatious, and we discussed our families, and how many children we had between us. Finally, the ginger-haired monk came in and suggested that I be allowed to sleep. Perhaps it was that he wanted sleep for himself, perhaps it was that he thought I ought to want it, since he had arranged with me that I would go to the liturgy the next morning, at four a.m. Anyway, I crept off to my bed, with a torch he had given to me.

I set the alarm, and lay down on the bunk. Beyond the

partition walls, there were the male Egyptian lay Copts (their women and children were elsewhere in the monastery's guest quarters). And down the road, monks on their thin mattresses, up and praying. I listened to the dangerously intermittent buzzing of a mosquito for a while, and then covered my face in a big white scarf I had bought in the Kahn el Kahlil bazaar in Cairo, and crawled deeper into the blankets.

2

The Religious Tradition

To begin at the beginning. The Coptic tradition is that in 6I A. D. St Mark came to Alexandria, one of the great cities of the world and a turbulent meeting place of Greek, Jew and, of course, Egyptian, and he became its first Christian patriarch. But it is not much substantiated. Eusebius. (C260-C340), Bishop of Caesarea, and 'the father of church history', is the sole non-Egyptian source for this view, and it does not seem to be taken very seriously by modern scholars.

The Copts have it that on his arrival in this dynamic, argumentative and notoriously fun-loving city, St Mark converted a shoemaker to Christianity, and that there was thenceforth a Christian tradition and a separate Egyptian Christian church. Alexandria had many converts to the new faith.

The Copts believe that St Mark was threatened by the Alexandrian authorities, and left the country - having ordained the cobbler, Anianus, Bishop, thus starting what has been an unbroken succession of Patriarchs (or Popes) in Alexandria. (Later, the Byzantine Empire was to impose its own false patriarchs, but the Copts always adhered to a man of their own election.) Mark left him in charge of the flock, and joined Paul in Rome. When he returned, there was a thriving, more or less communist, Christian church, where people lived together in Christian villages, and shared possessions. The Copts believe that Mark wrote his gospel at their request, in Egypt.

The Coptic church- the name comes from the Greek word for

'Egyptian', and is redolent of an Egypt any time before the seventh-century Arab invasion of the country - is a proud backwater, sometimes clinging rather snobbishly to a nationalism in which the Pharaohs are more admired than anything quite so parvenu as an Arab.

It has always been an embattled church. In the earliest days, it endured waves of persecution from Roman emperors and from its disaffected neighbours at home. When Christianity became the Church of the Roman, and then the Creek, Empires it was usually enmired in controversies with Rome or Constantinople. When Alexandria became subject to the civil authority of Constantinople, there were debilitating rows with the emperors there. It has even been divided from the Greek Orthodox Church, with whose antiquity and preference for spiritual rather than intellectual life it has much in common, ever since the fifth century Council of Chalcedon declared its views at variance with those of Constantinople (home of Greek Orthodoxy), and, tacitly, with those of Rome (home of Roman Catholicism). In later times it lived under Arab rule, sometimes tolerated, sometimes under intense pressure.

Yet it cannot be dismissed as some quaint sect. Its early Fathers were major theologians, martyrs, church politicians and saints, and it can claim to have given Christian monasticism its form, or at least by far the most famous early pioneers, practitioners and propagandists of this most eccentric of enterprises. Historically and theologically, it has been consigned to something of a ghetto. But it can claim a powerful antiquity and integrity.

From the start, Christians were given to asceticism and communal life. Both by the nature of its faith and the scepticism with which it was greeted by outsiders, it was a religion which inspired personal devotion and good works, and, at least during persecutions, social cohesion. It was a religion which called the present world both bad and transient, and described paradise as being attainable through prayer and redemption. It called upon its followers to devote themselves to the imitation of a salvationist, Jesus. No wonder that, in common with some contemporary strands of Judaism, it inspired men and women to turn their backs on the world and take on the desert as ascetics.

It was a religion which extolled martyrdom, and which saw asceticism as a continuing, redeeming, martyrdom. Christ was, after all, the most constructive martyr of all. The Alexandrian church had been founded by a martyr: St Mark was killed by a pagan mob in 68 A. D., when Easter fell on the feast day of the cult figure Serapis.

It is a mark of the importance of monasticism to the Coptic Church, that all bishops, and therefore the Patriarch, or Pope, must be a monk of life-long celibacy (and the son of firstwedded parentage, and at least fifty years old). His title is 'Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St Mark'.

Pope Shenouda the Third, the one hundred and seventeenth successor of St Mark, spent the months from September I98I until January I985 in monastic exile in Wadi el-Natrun, on the desert road between Alexandria and Cairo. No one would say much about why he had been banished. There was a hint or two that the Muslim fundamentalists demanded it, others that Shenouda had been accused of meddling in politics under President Sadat. It was certainly in the long tradition of Coptic dissidence.

The Alexandrian branch was central to the early Church, alongside Rome, Antioch, and, later, Constantinople. A school was founded, intended to take its place in the Alexandrian tradition of learning, in which Christian, Greek and Jewish thought were all to be addressed. By the late first century, it was a major source of Christian theology and philosophy, in which the Jewish prophetic tradition and the Greek understanding of the Logos - the divine purpose at work in the world and man - were to be reconciled in Christ.

One of its early luminaries was Clement, the theologian (c150-c215). He was a man of eclectic learning and tried to defend Christianity from the Gnostic tradition in Christian and pre-Christian thought, whilst reconciling them where he could. For most Christians, the Gnostic tradition depended too much on knowledge of secrets rather than on faith in the gospels. It was also inclined to intellectualize. Worse, it suggested that Christ was a sort of emanation from God, rather than a Son who was thoroughly human but thoroughly divine. It was also deeply gloomy about the state of matter and of the world. Clement was later declared unorthodox by Roman Catholics, who thought he had been led astray by his speculations.

Clement was no extremist. and argued that extremes of poverty, vegetarianism and abstinence from drink are not for everyone. But his theology made a strong argument - in line with the Greeks he enjoyed so much - for the Christian need to overcome the passions. Christianity in its early days, and as he saw it, was deeply ascetic and world-denying. No wonder so many took it to the extreme - an entirely logical extreme by becoming monks.

The Church's activity, in Alexandria as elsewhere, was curtailed by the persecutions of Emperor Severus, but early in the second century a young high-flyer, Origen (c185-254), the son of a martyr, was appointed dean of the school, which became in his time a source of many martyrdoms. He was stripped of his priesthood, having been ordained Bishop in Palestine (in breach of Alexandrian rules), and, moreover, having perhaps taken rather too literally the words of St Matthew (19:12): ' . . . and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.' He is said to have castrated himself, though this may be a myth. It certainly contradicts his own stated view that this text, and many others in the Bible, should not be taken literally.

In arguments which are reflected in much modem theology, Origen insisted that people should not try to imagine actual images of God when they prayed, nor try to imagine what the Incarnation is like: to do so would be to fail to respect the incomprehensible in these ideas. Within a couple of centuries, monks were rioting in defence of their right to be 'anthropomorphite', and a long row about the use of symbols, ornamentation and representations of the deity was begun.

In exile, Origen founded a school at Caesarea, and even when his own pupils were Patriarchs in Alexandria, refused to return in glory. In 250, the Roman emperor Decius instituted a further wave of persecutions, during which Origen was severely tortured.

Much of his writing came to be seen as unorthodox within the next few centuries. There was controversy about his views on the relation of Christ with God (he held Christ to be divine, but less divine than God). He was a powerful exponent of martyrdom as crucial to Christianity. This stress on the legitimacy of self-denial, even of the ultimate self-denial, underpins one view of the monastic ideal. The monk, by devoting himself wholly to God and Christ, rather than to himself or the world, is supposed to be able to partake in the Holy Spirit; but also, in a special way, to share in Christ's martyrdom.

Origen also put forward a further theology of a man's relationship to God and the Word, which fuels the monastic duty. His commentary on the Song of Songs suggests that the Church is the bride of Christ. That much is traditional. But Origen also suggests that a man may take the Word as his bride. This goes towards a belief that the essential Christian will be alone, and exclusively devoted to his faith.

This is a Greek idea: it is in thorough accord with the stoic's belief in the denial of passion.

These early theologians - and others in Christian parts of the Roman Empire - were asking questions about the natures of man, God and Christ whose answers are by definition wholly speculative. The brilliant bishop, theologian and popularizer of the monastic way of life, Athanasius (c296-373), conducted a campaign against the heresy, promoted by Arius (259-336?), which claimed that Christ was not truly divine. The heresy itself spawned many subdivisions and compromise positions. The essence of the problem was, that Arianism claimed that God, seeing Jesus Christ to be good, conferred divine powers on him.

The orthodox position was hardening around the far fuller view of Christ that he was the Logos, the Word: that his divinity was inherent in him. He was given to the world as God-in-Man. This was confirmed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, a triumph for Athanasius (though he attended only as secretary to his bishop). Against a political background which saw the Emperor Constantine, and the vacillating Constantius, dithering between Arianism and the emerging orthodoxy, the heresy was often in the ascendancy, until the Council of Constantinople in 381 finally crushed it.

Either of the two main early heretical tendencies has its good sense. The Arians found it hard to see how Christ could be God, alongside and equal to his 'Father', and yet Christianity be monotheistic; whilst others found the human nature of Christ - his birth, ignorance, temptations and suffering - too undignified to be comparable with his divinity, which they stressed.

A century later, the Council of Chalcedon's statement (45:L) was properly alert to the need to nail both extremes. Its definition of the faith was that of 'one ... Christ ... in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation'. It insisted on not allowing either heretical tendency room for manoeuvre. The Coptic church had been identified with the anti-Arian extreme, and besides, the other religious capitals wanted to put Alexandria in its place: the Egyptian church was declared unorthodox and cut off from the rest of the Christian Church.

In a paper written in 1959, a Coptic theologian, Abba Gregorios, put the Coptic case.

We people of the east are most fearful of using philosophical terms to define divine meanings. The non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches believe in the deity of the Christ as well as in His humanity. But the Christ is to us One Nature. This may seem contradictory. Whatever the rational contradictions may be, our Church does not see any contradiction in her profession concerning the Nature of the Christ.

There is always a mystical and spiritual solution that dissolves and overcomes all contradictions. Because of this mystical experience we do not always ask why and how.

3

The First Monks

Meanwhile, whilst theologians argued and raged, as if in another world altogether, there were Christians for whom philosophical or even theological disputations were of rather small importance. There seems to have been quite a tradition of Christian - and pre-Christian - hermits. These were men, and women, who escaped into the desert, or at least to the fringes of towns, alike in good times and bad. In the former, they were slipping away from the secularized church, with its rich and powerful adherents; in the latter, they were escaping persecution. There had for many years been groups of women who left the world, widows especially, and lived in communities. And there were ascetic Christians who lived near villages, but apart from them.

In at least one case, there was a quite considerable body of people, the Essenes, who were Jewish, but concerned with the imminent coming of a messiah (which some of them came to believe Jesus to be). They flourished between the second century B.C. and the second century A.D. They were dissident: they refused to have anything to do with the Jewish Temple; they were divided between pacifists (refusing to bear arms at all) and 'resistance' fighters against Roman imperial influence in their country. They seem to have been like monks in believing in celibacy for full members of the group; they had a novitiate; they lived communally; they insisted on high standards of obedience; they held all property in common. Interestingly, they took a common, religious meal together, and it is habits such as this, which presage the Last Supper and the cornmunion meal, which the later monks were to continue. Early Christians, whether monks or not, placed great store in eating a religious meal together once a week. The Essenes rose early for a dawn liturgy (but it was to the rising sun, not the risen Son).

There was something of a pagan ascetic and monastic tradition, long before Christ, in Egypt. There is evidence of a body of recluses, in Serapeum at Memphis, in the Ptolemaic period. Apparently they could come and go from the community, but when there they lived on alms from the local villagers and lived in cells. Porphyry (c232-303), the anti-Christian writer, quotes an account he came across of there being a quasi-monastic community at Heliopolis, who lived in poverty and spent their time in devotions. They had ceased by the first century.

Philostrates quotes an account of the Gymnosophists who lived on very little food and devoted themselves to a life of denial of the passions. They were dedicatedly intellectual and non-religious. Philo (c20 BC-c50 AD) notes the existence of the Therapeutac (healers) in first-century Egypt and perhaps before. They were Jews, and may have become some sort of Christians. They lived an ascetic life. They lived for six days of the week in seclusion, and came out of it for common devotions of some kind on the seventh. Their 'sabbath' day certainly included prayer and a common meal. They had choirs and sometimes sang in harmony and sometimes antiphonally (as did the Essenes).

More firmly in the Christian tradition, by perhaps 150 A. D. (or a little later), St Frontus, or Frontonius, is credited with leading seventy brethren into the desert of Nitria (where we will soon return) 'thoroughly abhorring the common and public life'. There was a miraculous story of the way in which their early and extreme privations were relieved: a rich man woke one day with a visionary realization that he must load seventy camels and set them free into the desert. After a short while, they fetched up with the Frontonian community, who took half the goods thus providentially offered, and sent the remainder back to their owner. A yearly supply caravan ensued.

There must have been many hermits who retired to the desert, and by the very nature of their determination to be alone, were never seen again. The early Fathers we do know about often hint at characters who had been living the anchoretic life for many years before them. But the most famous of all the early exemplars, and the one who would become world famous, was St Paul the Hermit, who at the age of twenty-two, probably in 251, the year of Antony's birth, set off into the desert to escape the persecutions of the Emperor Decius, which had already driven the Alexandrian Pope Dionysius into exile (from where the Pope wrote a letter on martyrdom to Origen, himself in gaol and undergoing torture).

St Jerome, the great story-teller and controversialist, says Paul was wealthy and well-educated in both Christian and Creek literature. His sister's husband denounced him to the authorities, and she entreated him to escape. He lived entirely alone for ninety years, 'unknown and unheard of by man, but in complete communion with God'. Many years later, tradition says, he was to meet St Antony, when the latter was well over ninety, and St Paul perhaps a hundred and thirteen or so (privations never seem to have been detrimental to longevity).

St Antony of Egypt (or, the Great, 251?-356) was the son of wealthy parents in Coma (modem Bush, just downstream on the Nile from Beni Sueo, in Upper Egypt. At twenty, he sold all his possessions, arranged for his sister to have some sort of an allowance, and went to live with other local ascetics, on the fringe of the town. Then he moved further afield, into the village tombs. From around 286 until 306, he went to live in a deserted fort near Pispir (on the eastern side of the Nile, in the area of the Fayoum).

St Antony began to use his desert fort as a base for travelling, and accepted his role as educator and formulator of the monastic life. This period, somewhere around 306, was briefly free of persecutions, and perhaps a good time for propagandizing. The peace was short-lived. In 311 he went to Alexandria to encourage the persecuted Christians there, and apparently to offer himself for martyrdom. His pleadings were almost too successful, if he really wanted the martyr's crown: the judges said that monks were to be left unscathed henceforth.

What happened next seems to be the fate of charismatic hermits anywhere, and the dilemma which led to the formalized monasticism one suspects was actually inimical to many of the early Fathers, and especially those of an eremetical (hermit) disposition. A later decline in persecutions by the State allowed a flow of distinguished people to seek out Antony: it looks as though once a few senior officials and military people had shown the way, the commonality soon followed. St Antony took to his heels.

'Monk' means 'alone' (from the Creek mores). The early tension is clear: a man goes into the desert (or lives alone) and becomes famous for his spirituality. His devoted followers, inspired by him, find they cannot leave him alone, and clamour for him to teach them, help them, and perhaps set up a system of life more suitable to their numbers and weaker temperaments. Or he is simply sought out as a spiritual adviser.

In later monastic life, the tension remained and remains. Should monks be hermits? Should monks live and worship in common, or be, essentially, loners? Does a man (or woman) have a right to assert his spiritual inclinations over the needs of the community around him? And then, of course, there is the perhaps yet greater tension of doing works of some sort in the world, as against turning one's back on it.

Anyway, St Antony, around 313, went into the deep desert, a good week's walk from Pispir, to an oasis at the foot of the South Calala Plateau, where there was a cave about three-quarters of an hour away up in the sandstone hills. It was to be his base for the remaining forty-three years of his life. By one account, the monks in the fort at Pispir kept in touch with him, and he visited them there sometimes; people would apparently wait for him there, sometimes for up to a month or so, until his next visit.

From the cave and the oasis he seems to have led a life in which seclusion was well mixed with a good deal of travel. He was to live until 356, by which time there were very considerable communities of monks in Egypt.

4

My First Dawn at St Antony's

The alarm's buzzer brought me to in a predawn blackness. The monastery bell tolled clear and admonitory in the dark. I pulled on jumpers and reset the alarm for the birdman, who needed it as his own chorus, so that he could record the ravens when their own more ordinary dawn approached. And then a stumble out into the little lane which led to the summer church.

The clutter of shoes at the door pointed the way. Inside, I could see nothing. It must have been a few minutes after four a. m. when I creaked open the door, and took up a station in the church. No chairs. Just carpets and gloom. There was already in progress a low-voiced, very male, chanting. The constant Kyrie Eleisons ('Lord have mercy'), very fast and rhythmic at times, at others built themselves up to a rumble, like distant bombers in an old war movie.

A few candles gleamed - sentinel more than illuminating set before the simple ikons on the walls. A curtain was drawn in front of the iconostasis, which divides the holy of holies from the rest, of the church. There were two lecterns, wooden boxes at chest height. Three monks stood at each, with their backs to the body of the church. Dim lights hung over each of the lecterns. The backs of the monks were slightly hunched, and their feet and ankles, with solid socks on, poked beneath their black robes. I wondered who was singing, and whether I had met any of the voices. One or two dark figures loomed through the gloom: I spotted a monk leaning heavily against a wall, his elbow in a niche for support. On the floor, another was kneeling, his back arched, his forehead on the ground.

The monks at the lecterns shifted from foot to foot as the first hour wore on. There was chanting and reading, in a humming undertone, from the books on the lecterns. The noise was never loud, and seldom interrupted. There were occasional luminous little songs to the accompaniment of small symbols and a triangle, both of which gleamed very bright and cheerful in so dark a place. Every patch of light and relief became something longed-for. The music itself was sharp and fast, and seemed - in the slightly hallucinatory atmosphere - to be physically colourful. The instruments, catching the candle-glow, looked jewel-bright. They were played at a clippetty-clop pace, a little like a syncopated Jingle Bells. At times, as the second hour proceeded, I found myself nodding off, but never completely, and with the monks seeming to chant my own daydreams: I'd come to with a start, and find I couldn't for a second or two separate their continued noise from my own thoughts. It was a rather delirious and pleasant state. The pre-dawn hours are primitive and raw anywhere. No wonder monks have always wanted to haul their vulnerability before their maker at such a time, when worship is such a triumph of improbable will over cold, sleepiness, anxiety and tedium.

We were joined by a couple of laymen, who sat themselves comfortably, on the carpet, with a back to a pillar. And went to sleep. Their snores made a low accompanying undertone to the chanting.

A cock crowed. A steely grey light was coming to the small windows, high in the walls, until little by little one realized that the candles were unnecessary. A monk came and snuffed them out. The lecterns were sometimes moved, at one point so that they were joined together, and all the monks were in a single row. Sometimes, also, the curtain was opened, and one would see the monks toiling over the altar, like surgeons at an operation.

Sometimes, there would be vast billowings of incense, suffused with a dark golden light. I understood none of it at all.. By the time the service came to an end there were quite a few lay people around, and the priest passed amongst us with his hand-held cross, which people kissed and with which they were tapped on the head.

Sitting on the terrace, we ate a picnic breakfast, adding to it some of the monastic hard rolls saved from the night before. But then a woman came up and insisted that we go in for cornflakes.

We had been told to stay away from the monks' quarters. On the 'main' street there were doors leading to their minute maisonettes, with close wire mesh over the windows to keep the flies out.

In one enclosure, where the cock was making a tremendous noise, we found the ginger-haired monk with the cast in his eye: he was at work amongst the hens, in an orchard garden which did not look particularly well cared for. He shooed us away, saying we were to stay in the public areas.

And so we left, out to the west of the monastery, to find a track which wound its way amongst bare sandstone hills, rounded but crumbly. The route to the cave, as it rose the scarp, was first conveniently stepped, and then, when it became steeper, rather hair-raisingly made easier with ricketty catwalks. Before the cave itself, with its ledge, there was a much steeper angle to the ladders. The cave commanded an enormous view, out over the plain lying at the foot of the mountains. It was small, with a rug and some devotional books at its floor. We wriggled in and felt claustrophobic. Lord alone knows how St Antony managed to get up and down to the spot - it took us half an hour or so to do the walk from the monastery, with the efficient if eccentric engineering to help us. He must have carried water up, at the very least; and even he must have eaten something.

We drove over to St Paul's Monastery, having been told it would be open, at least for day visitors. By road (along a three-sided box: east to Zafarana, south beside the Gulf of Suez, then west again into the hills) it is an hour's drive: the walk over the hills takes a couple of days, and we did not believe our survival skills, or orienteering, were up to anything quite of the order of the desert Fathers!

By Jerome's account, St Antony was guided from his own cave, over the mountains, to St Paul's hermitage. The ancient saint had been nourished, according to legend, by a palm tree, and by a visiting 'crow' (a raven, presumably), who brought bread. He asked St Antony to go back and fetch the cloak the famous bishop, theologian and friend of monks, Athanasius, had given Antony. It was a four-day round trip, and when Antony was returning he saw St Paul floating up through the air to his Maker: he had died. Arrived at the hermit's cave, Antony was helped by two lions as he dug the saint's grave. A sceptical person might think that presumably St Paul must have received rather more visitors in his solitude than the hagiographical account suggests, or that he moved about a good deal more than was supposed by his more devout biographer. Unless, of course, the bird was very diligent indeed.

The road from the coast winds amongst bleak, low hills and cliffs. The monastery was closed, with a polite notice telling people that it would remain so for Lent. We went 'home' to St Antony's.

The monks were always punctilious, and keen to do any service. But they seemed busy: rushing about their business, to confer with one of the Arab servants or small boys, or going to their little houses. At first, their beards and uniform militated against identifying individuals, and besides this they were all small, spry, and possessed of jutting pot bellies. But Father Zecharius, the ginger-haired monk who shooed us away from the chicken runs, stood out. He had been at the monastery for two years. He was a graduate of a university's faculty of agricultural engineering, specializing in soil fertilization for sixteen years, and he yearned to make the gardens of the monastery bloom: 'The garden is poor,' he said: 'the land wants more nutrient.' He declared himself perfectly happy with his choice in life. He had been called by God: it was an imperative. 'I choose to live here in the monastic life: that is, in poverty, chastity and obedience. This is a life bare of the ranks of the priesthood; one is single all one's life; one selects poverty, and one lives here always under obedience to the spirit of the father, or abbot.'

Father Cyrillos was a small, lively man with special responsibility for guests. It was he who showed us the churches and the holy well, brought me a copy of Athanasius's Life of St Antony, and other references. He was an ex-steel worker, and in charge of the stoves, the electrics, and the ancient British, very beautiful, Blackstone diesel generator, which on the first evening had been misbehaving itself, but which he finally coaxed Into utility. They had a new generator under wraps, waiting to be connected, but he liked the old Blackstone.

Father Cyrillos, who had been in the monastery for nearly five years, told me of the visitors using the place as a shrine, and asking questions: 'Of course it is a problem. It is not good for monastic life. It disturbs the silence. The more time you spend with people the less time you spend with God.' He gave me the impression that he would quite like it if the Abbot could see fit to find him a less public job.

Then there was a pock-marked novice who laboured in the kitchen of the guests' refectory, not so much cooking for them as maintaining a steady flow of washed cups and bowls, and supervising the little Arab boy who worked there. This latter was a competent, directed little fellow, who presumably lived in the Arab encampment on a scarp some way from the monastery itself. He might have been about eleven, and was bossed around with brusque affection by the monks. The novice was shy and almost furtive: somehow rather dignified and grand, nevertheless. Though he spoke perfect English, he would scurry off and fetch a more authoritative figure if ever we asked him a question. He wore a lightweight, white monastic gown.

The other monks were mostly shadowy figures, whom we might meet briefly on the terrace, or pass in the street, but with whom we did not speak.

Early on the second morning, I was at my station again in the big church. Its geography was becoming familiar, even friendly: the area at the back predominantly used by women and strangers, a middle area where the laymen seemed to congregate, and then the area nearest the haykal and the screen, where the more devout would go.

This morning, one of the laymen took me by the elbow and led me quite near the front: emboldened, I stayed. Cyrillos and Zecharius were at their prayers with the others from the start, but people seemed to come and go a good deal, rustling in through the church to their station at the front. There were little conferences amongst the prayers, and someone else would detach himself and leave, with the continuum of the liturgy carrying on with a new line-up.

At eight o'clock, when the monastic liturgy was over, a big mass was beginning in St Antony's church. The place was packed: whole families stood or reclined comfortably at the back. The service was informal, with little discussions amongst the monks, priests and lay people as to who would read the next lesson. It was easy to imagine that this is how the early Church managed its liturgies.

However, one should not overdo the antiquity, or the unbroken tradition, of St Antony's, and the habits of life and worship there. Firstly, the Copts were far from the only people to inhabit it. In the seventh century, the monks were Melkite (sometimes, 'Melchite': they were the Egyptians and Syrians who accepted the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, and during Alexandria's Byzantine years became the official church, alongside and in competition with the dissident Copts).

In the next couple of centuries bedouin tribes raided it. It was reputedly razed in the eleventh century, and restored in the next, to be reinhabited by Copts. In the fifteenth century, the community's Arab servants revolted, massacred the monks and plundered the buildings (smoke damage in the ancient church is said to have been caused by their fires, themselves perhaps fuelled by the monastery's library books, which would have been priceless). Syrian monks were sent from other Egyptian monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century, and Copts, Syrians and Ethiopians inhabited it thereafter. It has often, however, been a powerfully influential place. A Coptic monk from St Antony's travelled to an early major international council; several of its monks became Popes - Patriarchs - of the whole Coptic Church.

It was not until the seventeenth century that European accounts of St Antony's were available. Vansleb visited in late 1672, and found the place in a state of virtual siege. There were two priests, one of them the Abbot, and seventeen aged and crippled monks. The bedouin exacted a tribute from the monks, and the Abbot wanted to leave the place with Vansleb. The monks were forced to wear a white and blue turban, in proof of the subjection of their religion to Is amic masters.

Coppin visited St Antony's in 1686, and found sixty-two monks living within ruinous walls, that he was told had once encircled three hundred monks. The monks he thought to be pious and hospitable: one of them was deputed to wash the visitors' feet on arrival. For music, the monks banged shaped stones together. The monastery fed them on lentils and linseed oil.

In 1711, the Jesuit, Sicard, finds fifteen monks and two novices at St Antony's. He speaks of the ignorance of the monks, and was less than thrilled when the acting Abbot would only discuss astrology and the theory of the transmutation of metals. The first Englishman to visit, Pococke, in 1743 found eight priests and twenty-three lay monks, and thought the two churches, 'small, dark and dirty'. By 1760, the great building works began, and went on under vigorous Abbots, some of them Patriarchs whose careers had began at St Antony's, for a hundred years. By lgol, there were forty-one monks, twenty of them priests.

In 1936, an Englishwoman, H. Rornilly Fedden, visited St Antony's, and wrote an elegant account of the place. She found ten priests and fifteen lay brothers. She had coffee in the modern guesthouse. There was a monthly corn supply from the monastery's eight hundred feddans over in the Nile valley. The monks earned some money from selling dates, and from stone quarries around them (there still are stone workings in these hills).

The monks ate alone at 3 pm: the old practice. On Sundays they ate communally, and the meal sometimes included meat. By her time the one hundred and fifty daily prostrations, with the sign of the cross between each, had died out: some monks still wore the hair shirt, though. The older monks still used sticks with a 'T'-shaped top for leaning on: this was the 'tau', which had in the medieval period of Coptic monasticism assumed an almost spiritual meaning, as well as being useful in church for the long liturgies. She dates the big new gates as having been installed in 1854, before which, rope and pulleys were the only means of access to the monastery.

5

The Movement Thrives

We begin with a movement in Upper Egypt, the Thebaid (the neighbourhood of Thebes, on the great bend in the Nile near Luxor), which has left no great monasteries still standing as testimony to its vigour, but which is really the birth place of the idea which would lead to the great monastic houses of the medieval world. its founder Pachomius (c290-346) had been a pagan conscript soldier, but became a Christian in 313, having come across those Christians who visited their co-religionists in an army camp at Luxor, in part of a pagan temple which had been pressed into service. The diligence with which early Christians visited one another, often with sacramental bread, always impressed the pagans.

Within seven years, he was founding monasteries. Within twenty-six years of his first monastery, he ruled over nine monasteries for men and two for women. All of these developments would have been well known to Athanasius.

Pachomius is credited with the traditional desire to be alone and anchoretic. He sought out an old ascetic loner, we are told in the Creek Vita Prima, as written by members of the Pachomian community within a generation or two of the great man. This mentor was Palamon, who told Pachomius that he would not be up to it, 'for this work of God is no simple matter', and outlined the routine of daily fasts in summer, food every other day in winter; nothing but bread and salt, no oil or wine, vigils for half the night, sometimes all night, in prayer and meditation. All this, he said, was as had been taught to him. Pachomius insisted, and was admitted by the

old man.

For reasons that are not clear, though perhaps it was just the soldier in him, Pachomius wanted to do something in the way of organizing a more social system of bringing people together for God's work. Wandering further afield than usual (these men were great wanderers: whatever their predilection for mortification, it did not seem to confine them to their cells), Pachomius came across an abandoned village called Tabennesis.

Whilst he prayed, a voice told him, 'Stay here and make a monastery: for many will come to thee to become monks.' It began as a trickle, but it must soon have become something of a flood. From the first, they were organized: disciples came, were clothed in the monastic habit, taught, and were set to work both material and spiritual. Antony was a visiting counsellor.

Pachomius was the nucleus, core, and motivator of community. The cenobetic (or communal) tradition is exemplified and pioneered. The Pachomian rule - a handbook setting out aims and laws has always been the sign of a great monastic founder - which may not have been coherent at first, has not been preserved. The orderly Pachomian rule we know about is a later synthesis.

Pachomius was not alone in perceiving the need for community life. Hilarion (291-371) was a Palestinian who learned about St Antony at school in Alexandria, and at fifteen settled near Gaza in Palestine; after twenty-two years he started a monastery some time around 330 - twenty-six years before the death of St Antony. Another Palestinian figure, St Epiphanus (c315-403), a follower of Hilarion, who also knew about Egyptian monks, set up at least one monastery at Eleuthropolis, between Gaza and Jerusalem (before being summoned to take up a bishopric). They were probably influenced by St Antony and Egyptian monasteries, and were certainly carrying on much the same conversion from strict anchoreticism to community life, though Palestine had its own local hero-loners, often in the caves of Calamon near the Dead Sea, imitating the tradition of Elijah, Elisha and John the Baptist.

Wholly independent of Egypt, and perhaps growing out of what may have been a powerful tradition in the Holy Land, there was also the founding work of Chariton, who may have been a Central Anatolian, from Iconium (modern Konya), and who is said to have come to Jerusalem, and, inspired by what he saw and thought about there, settled in the caves of the Jebel Fureidis. He is said to have settled monastic lavra in several Judean wildernesses. In the lavra system the monks lived in isolated caves, they had a common township where they would sell their produce, and then had the weekly communal meal and worship before returning to solitude.

If other dates marry up, it seems that Chariton was operating in the late third century: but the Chariton story comes to us from his own much later admirers, who may have liked to think he was an earlier figure than was the case. He would, by their account, predate Antony. The clearer evidence is at least that by the fourth century there were Charitonian monasteries, and that his original lavra were in use in the twelfth century.

Pachomius, however, was running enclosed communities. The best early account said that the Pachomian monastery had a wall, gate house, guesthouse, refectory, common-room for prayer, hospital, cells arranged in blocks (organized by the trade the monks within conducted). Within a generation or two, overcrowding led to monks living three to a cell. Farming was conducted outside the walls. It may have been the very fact that Pachomius settled his monasteries in the rich farmlands of the Nile that made the difference between this community life and the solitariness of the desert. It meant men could conduct their peasant, busy lives in a monastic setting.

The old soldier seems to have founded a monasticism suitable for men seeking an orderly life, both of the spirit and the body. He organized a system of chiefs and assistant chiefs in monasteries, and of links amongst neighbouring monasteries. He was setting out an administrative geography which served its time and would later be the model for vast Orders of monks. Pachomius himself would not allow himself to be set above the whole machinery: he seems to have delegated authority with real relief, and to have maintained his role as a preacher.

Remembering that monks have always often been poor peasants prepared to trade the luxury of freedom for the pleasantness of security, both on earth and in heaven - that is the story of the medieval and much later periods - the Pachomian system was to be thoroughly vindicated by history. The story and example of St Antony inspired the great idealism; it was the story, example and rule of Pachomius that made transcendent good sense to following generations of men in how to reconcile the heroic with the human.

Pachomius' first monastery set up a sister house at nearby Faou. Two monasteries which had been set up independently asked to be incorporated in the new, burgeoning system. A woman's convent and other establishments quickly followed, within sixty miles or so of the original settlement. At least one local landowner joined a community, and was to lead it.

There were perhaps three thousand members of the Pachomian community in his own lifetime, and Pailadius says it was seven thousand by his time. In 352, a famous visitor, Ammon, found six hundred people at Faou (Palladius gave it as one thousand three hundred when he wrote). The other monasteries seem to have had up to two or three hundred each. Did so many rather ordinary men want to join that the system had to relax to accommodate their weaker spirits, or did the easing of the rigours attract the new numbers? Or both?

Meanwhile, again some time around 313, yet another well-off parentless young Egyptian, Amoun, from the rich Lower Egypt country of the Delta, was moving towards a monastic pursuit of God. He had been bullied by his uncle into marrying that year, but spent his wedding night in hot persuasion of his wife that they should dedicate themselves to God, and not consummate their union. She at first- in fact for eighteen years - would only go so far as to agree that they would not make love, but should at least live together, as brother and sister.

Eventually, he went into the desert, at what was called the mountain of Nitria (though it is only a slightly elevated area).

He settled first at a place called El-Barnugi. This was the gateway to the desert: the place where caravan routes between the natron (a naturally-occurring impure carbonate of soda) trade of the desert proper and the Delta would pass. At that time, it was near a river, with valuable connections to Alexandria and the coast. It was a commercial centre, based on the natron deposits nearby (here, as elsewhere, they were

beside lakes).

At this site near worldly civilization, Amoun soon found around 338 or so - that the numbers of men who had gathered around him required some sort of organization. They also needed a new site, with some extra space. The eighty-seven-year-old St Antony was on hand, presumably in one of his wanderings amongst the monastic communities.

They dined together in the mid-afternoon, and then walked until sunset, around twelve miles, by one account. Then they prayed and planted a cross. This was to be the site of Cellia, or the Cells. The idea seems to have been that here people from the first settlement could get deeper into that solitariness which the first site's proximity to villages threatened, without being inconveniently far away for the purpose of provisioning and counselling.

A church was established at the Cells settlement. 'Church' at that time meant the community's buildings in general, including refectories (this was especially the case since the idea of the common eating of religious meals was very powerful, and may not even in the early years of the Church have been formalized into the symbolic consumption of the sacrament).

The cells were initially so placed that they were out of earshot of each other, but pressure of numbers soon did away with that idea. From their cells, the monks would come together for a weekly meal and worship. They made rope and linen for a living.

Within fifty years of Amoun's leaving the world, the community he founded at Nitria had attracted perhaps three thousand people to what were probably monastic houses of one sort of another. Palladius, writing at the end of the fourth century, noted around five thousand. The community had priests and an administrative structure (in one of the meeting places, whips hung from trees for monastic recalcitrants). Within twenty years of its foundation, a Nitrian abbot was being called to a bishopric (as had been other monks before him), and was reproved by Athanasius himself for preferring to retire to the desert. The practice was probably that a new monk would do a spell at the Nitrian headquarters, in preparation for the rigours of the anchoretic life at the Cells. Thus, Amoun does not seem to have been organizing a community life for its own value alone, but as a training ground for the desert proper.

It seems as though Amoun was designing a monasticism of a kind which still exists in the Creek Orthodox Church, and which the great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton was to hope would be allowed him in the USA: hermits with a more or less close connection with a more formal and communal 'mother' house.

Amoun's was not simply the 'enclosed' Pachomian system which would become the west European model over the next few centuries: rather, it offered an enclosed option for the new monk, and perhaps for the elderly one, too, whilst the more experienced or rigorous, and fit, man could go into the Cells.

By the end of the fourth century toing and froing amongst the monks of the Near East seems fairly common. Amoun's system attracted at least one foreigner who was already very well known and was to become extremely famous: Evagrius Ponticus (349-399), who became a monk in 382 following a love affair, and after a successful career as a preacher in Constantinople ended his days at Amoun's foundation. He spent some time at a monastic settlement founded by the historian Rufinius (c345-410) and a rich Roman widow, Melania (c342-C410), who ad been in Egypt and met many of the founding Fathers. Evagrius then went on to Amoun's settlements: classically, he went first to the coenobetic Nitria, and then on to the Cells, bringing with him a breath of the cosmopolitan, educated, Creek world.

His importance is that he wrote (probably before his Egyptian experience) books which combined patristic forcefulness with a literary style which was more elegant, and they therefore were to become widely read in the west. He wrote gnomic utterances for other ascetics to learn by heart, and he gave us a list of prohibitions which would emerge, somewhat amended by Gregory the Great (c540-604) and others, as The Seven Deadly Sins. Evagrius gave us eight: gluttony, fornication, avarice, dejection, anger, world-weariness, vain-glory and pride (the great Pope merged dejection and world-weariness and added envy: later they were tidied up to become pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth). When John Cassian (c360-435), a great western monastic founder, was drawing up his rule, he used Evagrius' catalogue.

Meanwhile, at about the time that Amoun was founding his monasteries, and at another, much more valuable natron trading area, Wadi el-Natrun (Scetis, or desert, as it would be called later), around forty miles deeper into the desert, there settled one Macarius (the Great, or the Egyptian, and sometimes 'of Scetis', and not to be confused with another Macarius, the Alexandrian, whom we will shortly meet).

It is thought that at some point he had been a camel-trader, and perhaps a smuggler: in later years it was said, in spite of his immense reputation as an ascetic, that he much preferred to be approached with interest about his shady past than with too much reverence for his holy fame.

On what model, if any, Macarius the Great founded the settlements in the deep desert of Wadi el-Natrun, it is not clear. They did not at first have priests, and Macarius himself would trek forty miles to Nitria to hear mass. He visited St Antony in his 'inner mountain' to seek his advice on the problem, and was later ordained priest himself. It is thought he may first have settled at what is now the Monastery of Bararnus, but then moved east to what became the Monastery of St Macarius. It seems that the monks made rope, and that they hired themselves out as labourers at harvest time.

He attracted enough people to have to start further settle-

ments (of which four remain: the monasteries of St Bishoi, St Macarius, the Syrians, and Baramus). Macarius the Great found that the word had spread. Two Romans, Maximus and Domatius, said by the Copts to be the sons of Emperor Valentine, are supposed to have been attracted to his monastic way.

6

Baramus

The day I drove to Baramus, the wind blew strongly from the west. It swirled up the sand, and scurried it across the road in serpent plumes.

There was a roadhouse at the side road to the monasteries. I stopped, and wended my way through a gang of Egyptian young to the vast coffee shop inside. But one youngster wanted to go on into the village, further up the track. 'My name is Anna', he said. One of his chums told me that Anna knew the way to Baramus and would show me. Visibility was down to a few hundred feet, and I was glad of some local savvy. We bounced along a track which is shown on no maps, took some turnings I tried to memorize for later, deeper and deeper into the unknown.

The monastery has the same more or less square, fortified appearance of St Antony's or St Paul's. Within the walls, however, it seemed neater, with a more domestic sort of gardening going on. It is the biggest of the Scetis monasteries. There was a trellised walk which seemed positively pretty, even in a wind which was keeling the palms over like yacht masts.

Anna and I were shown to a smart little reception room, and given tea. Anna did not look as though he was going to take a very active part in the proceedings.

A young, ardent German convert to the Coptic faith was there, with his Egyptian girlfriend. He said he had been into transcendental meditation, and had been a Roman Catholic. A fat priest, visiting the monastery with a thin lawyer friend, both of them Swiss, came in. A vigorous young Coptic monk, our host, settled himself into a chair amongst us. Had he converted the German, I asked? 'Not me, but the Holy Spirit, did it', he said, in a remark at once becomingly modest and grandly confident. There followed an occasionally rather heated discourse in which the monk, Gabriel, gave us a survey of the Coptic truths, and of the reasons why the other churches could not claim the Coptic authenticity of practice.

It began, as one might imagine it ought to, with the question of monophytism. 'We do believe that there are two natures in Christ', denying the ancient charge the rest of the world makes of the Copts.

'There are many heresies which appear. One heresy speaks about divine nature as dominant in Jesus Christ, and the human nature is somehow absorbed in it. Another heresy believes Jesus is a simple man with special gifts, and somehow intermediate between God and man. So the Alexandrian Church struggles against these two heresies. Copts believe that Jesus has two natures, divine and human, and that he is the incarnated God.

'Other groups of Christians misunderstand this union, thinking we believe that he has one nature. Monophysite we are not', he said firmly. 'Truly we are not monophysite, we believe in one nature of two natures. I will give you an example. It is like an iron rod put in the fire till it is red hot. The iron represents the human nature, and the fire the divine nature. A sort of union which happens. The red-hot rod cannot be called only iron. If I touch you with it, you will burn, and if I hammer it, the fire is not affected. Jesus was no longer simple man and no longer simple God.'

One of the Swiss asked what the consequence of this seemingly small distinction is (he asked it as though the Copts were being bolshie in their separateness, rather than having had it forced upon them). Gabriel said, 'I will tell you. If we believe in separate natures [I think he meant in the Catholic sense], what happened on the cross? When Christ is crucified, who is killed - the human or the divine? If the human is killed, then he who died is a simple man - this is of an utmost importance - who then can save?' The Swiss said something sensible about the Catholic theology encompassing that.

It looked as though the Copt no more understood the subtleties of the Catholic position than Catholics understand the Copts' own subtleties. So he went on: 'If I believe in separate natures, then who is there to save me? If it is the simple man who died we get nowhere. Saving humanity depends on the Incarnated God. The Incarnated God died, not just a man, nor God.

'We have been misunderstood. We believe in two natures united in one nature.' He was stating, by then, the exact Chalcedonian, Catholic Orthodoxy.

Then Gabriel launched into a Coptic anxiety that the Catholic church does not often give celebrants at mass anything other than the wafer, the bread or body of Christ, and that when on special occasions it does give both, the wafer is dipped into the wine. 'Jesus gave first bread and then wine. This is what is in the Bible. "Eat my broken body and drink my shed blood".'

'The Catholic may say that giving the blood to everyone is not possible, is not practical. But we do it, it is practical. Someone might say that to give everyone blood by a spoon is not hygienic. But if I believe that this is blood of Christ, no microbe can be transmitted. We do what Jesus practised, not with human modification,.'

He was not finished with us yet. Someone asked about the total immersion which the Copts practise at baptism. 'It is certain', said Cabriel, 'that baptism was of the whole body. It does not happen by putting some water on the head. Baptism is like dyeing with colour. You are colouring a new person. You cannot dye clothes by [he made an infinitely expressive, dismissive couple of baptismal flicks with his fingers] touf, touf. The other churches have lost the effect, the meaning . . .'

'Is that a question of quantity of baptismal water, then?' asked the Swiss priest. 'No', said Gabriel with finality. 'It is a question of procedure. We do as Jesus did. St Mark tells us how.'

He took us for a tour of the church. In the west end, on the north side, as far away from the altar as possible, there was a baptistry with a vast tank in the corner. Gabriel told us that its placing was symbolic of the catechumen's progress from outside the church towards the holy of holies, and to becoming part of the body of the Church.

The monastery brochure describes the layout of a Coptic

church, and its sections:

The first, just in front of the sanctuary, for Believers, those who would only take part in the whole worship and partake the Holy Communion. In this first section there are the relics of St Moses and his teacher St Isidore (though the Arabs who accompanied an eighteenth-century traveller told him that they were no more than camel bones collected in the desert).

The second: for hearers, or catechumen; those people who want to be Christians.

The third: for weepers or repentants who were prostrating themselves at the church doors, in mourning garments asking everyone to pray for them.

Gabriel took us to the refectory, built on to the church, with its massive stone table running the length of the room. And then to the roof of the church, from which ran a narrow drawbridge to the Kasr, the castle tower with its chapel of St Michael on the top floor, and floors below for storing provisions and living during raids on the monastery. All Coptic monasteries have such an arrangement, and all have St Michael's chapel on their top floor. From the parapets of this roof-top part of the monastery we watched out over the desert, and the deep, eerie pink patina which the glowering sun made of the continuing sandstorm.

Gabriel told me that he thought being a monk was more important than being a surgeon, his profession. God had called him, and that mattered more even than Egypt's need of good doctors. And what about the rather unintellectual life of the Coptic monk? 'It is like surgery', he said. 'You can learn so much from books, but books do not teach you how to make a good incision of the skin. That you must learn from experience. It is the same with being a monk'.

7

Modern Coptic Monks

Early on, some monks seemed to have been a kind of army for whatever orthodoxy they happened to favour. Rather in the manner of the later Dominicans, they were spiritual police~ men, but with a developed taste for rough-housing, and they were even accused of the occasional assassination. They knew the world did not like homosexuals, and would sometimes murder for sodomy men whose crime was actually heresy.

Bishops and theologians were inclined to arrive at councils with a gang of monks as bodyguards. And during the period of Julian the Apostate (332-363), an emperor who reinstated paganism, enraged monks smashed idols in their neighbourhood. By the early fifth century, the tough-minded Patriarch St Cyril (412-444) used a highly-organized monastic brotherhood, the phi ('those who disregard their own lives'), as a hit squad against schismatics and Jews alike.

In 451 the Council of Chalcedon had to include a Canon to deal with the problem:

Those who lead a true and genuine monastic life should be given the honour which is their due. There are some however who make the monastic state an excuse for causing trouble ... they wander aimlessly around the cities ... Monks everywhere . . . are to be under the authority of the bishop, devoting themselves to holy silence and giving all their attention to fasting and prayer in those places in which they renounced the world ...

Whilst there was widespread admiration for desert asceticism, especially perhaps amongst the ordinary people who might see it in almost pornographic terms, as a kind of peepshow, there were early voices warning against the more vulgar excess - and the way admiration of it might erode admiration of the episcopate.

The Coptic Church remains capable of dissidence, as is witnessed by Pope Shenouda's exile.

One dank November Saturday in 1984, I went down to the Coptic Church in Kensington. The Times had carried an announcement that there would be a service to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the enthronement of His Holiness Pope Shenouda III. The brochure we were all presented with, 'A Tribute' to the Pope, described him as exiled under armed guard since September 1981'. He was in the Monastery of Bishoi, Wadi el-Natrun. In his place, a committee of bishops ran the church (one of them, Bishop Samuel, had been killed along with Sadat by Arab extremists).

From around nine in the morning there was chanting and praying, leading up to mass at eleven. Small boys dressed as deacons stood beside their robed fathers, in gold and white tunics, and occasionally wandered away for a biscuit. Various 'white' people were there, some from branches of the Anglican church, but mostly and increasingly the place was filled by Egyptians.

After mass, various ecumenical notables talked of the privilege of visiting Shenouda in his desert monastery. Finally, His Eminence Anba (the Coptic way of saying Abba, or Abbot) Antonios Marcos, Coptic Bishop for African Affairs, who had come for this occasion, told us tlhat, as usual at this time of year, there were rumours of the Pope's being returned to his Cairo freedom. He would believe it when he saw it.

By January 1985 the Egyptian government had released Shenouda.

The story of Shenouda's exile betokens some extraordinary features of modern Coptic life. Whether in response to the rise in Muslim fundamentalism, as part of the general religious revival worldwide, or simply a special resurgence of the Spirit locally, there has been a great revival of interest amongst traditional Copts in the faith of their fathers. The movement is very much grassroots; it began fifteen or twenty years ago with very active Sunday Schools. We have seen that the monasteries have been attracting bright young people to the fold.

Two of these appear to have become bitterly estranged. One is the spiritual father of Macarius Monastery, in Wadi elNatrun. It had become badly run down, and by 1969 was inhabited by only six old monks. The vigorous Father Matta el Meskin (Matthew the Poor), a one-time pharmacist, and twelve monks moved in.

Father Matta had thrown up his career and spent fifteen years as a hermit in a desert cave, 'where I used to pass the night, for ten hours, in praying without ceasing: hymns, prayer, prostration, and then reading the Bible with the words going straight to my heart with new meaning.' He would sleep from dawn till the early afternoon, and lived on boiled beans, dry vegetables, lentils and honey. He is reluctant to talk about his religious experiences, but has said that Therese of Lisieux and the Virgin Mary appeared to him.

These educated people began a programme of rebuilding and farming which has transformed the place. Their farming is amongst the most advanced in Egypt, and experiments there may have a bearing on all farming in Egypt's deserts. President Sadat, whose relations with the church were to become very contentious, favoured the work to the point where he gave the monastery a thousand feddans (about a thousand acres) of land, and capitalized a good deal of equipment. Now, so far from monks going out to work with peasants for a living, the monks of Macarius employ several hundred peasants part-time.

The new wave of monastic vitality has led to a staggering turn around in the fortunes of the desert monasteries. St Antony's has about forty monks, and St Paul's between twenty and twenty-five. Baramus has forty and the other Alexandrian monasteries (Bishoi, Sourian and Macarius) over two hundred between them. In four other monasteries in Upper Egypt, there are probably another one hundred and fifteen. But these figures must be seen against a picture in which, in 1972, Bishoi had only five monks and now has seventy.

The man who gave me these figures was a one-time doctor, and now lived in Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland, looking after the hundred Coptic Egyptian families in that country. Surely Egypt had huge need of its doctors? 'Yes', he said. 'But I was called by God. And anyway, in my monastery, we have need of doctors, and we have a small clinic. Here, I am needed for other. work. I shall stay here until we have established a church, and then a married priest can come.'

In the Egypt of the 1950s and 1960s, a young theologian and historian was rising through the ranks of the church, having spent the years 1956-1962 in a monastery at Wadi el-Natrun, and in 1971 was elected Pope. Shenouda appears at the very least to have blown apart the fairly tidy relationship between church and state, in which President Nasser had privately conceded a good deal of freedom to the Coptic minority in his Muslim state.

It looks as though Shenouda was vigorously inviting Copts to have a sense of themselves, at exactly the moment when the Muslims' old antagonism to Christianity was being fuelled by fundamentalism. There were riots and killings in 1980 and 1981, once when Copts took matters into their hands, on hearing that some Coptic churches were scheduled to be turned into mosques. 'The mind replaced inspiration, and planning replaced prayer', Abba Meskeen is reported to have said.

Part III

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Until I settled in the 'desert' I did not really know the life of the Holy Mountain as a whole. It was only when I became spiritual counsellor to four monasteries and a great number of hermitages and isolated hermits that the hidden kernel of this astonishing place was opened up to me. I encountered seven monks to whom the vision of uncreated light had been vouchsafed - and there were surely others whom I did not hear of. I am eternally thankful to Providence for allowing me the undeserved happiness of living among such ascetics for twenty-two years. But the most important event in my life was to meet with Staretz Silouan who, after Christ's appearance to him, never ceased imploring God to grant to all mankind to know Him through the Holy Spirit. His attitude to other confessions was both courteous and liberal. There was no disdain; people must be allowed to serve God in their own fashion, although, as is crystal clear from his writings, he himself was heart and soul devoted to the Orthodox Church, and totally integrated with Orthodoxy.

Wisdom From Mount Athos, The Writings of Staretz Silouan I866-I938; Archimandrite Sophrony, translated by Rosemary Edmonds,

St Vladimir's Seminary Press,

Crestwood, New York

1

Basil: A Very Civilized Vector

Monasticism is a powerful virus: it takes only a very few men to pass it on; it can travel across vast distances provided the vector has the stamina to support it and himself whilst he goes. It is also remarkably catching. Amongst people fresh to it, it cuts a dramatic swathe, before cynicism and veneration have taken their opposite tolls of its early vitality, crudeness and charm.

We have seen that Egypt was the place where enough leaders of varying temperaments found enough adherents of sufficient loyalty to found the three main sorts of monastic house: the hermitage (for loners), the coenobium (for community-minded men) and the lavra (for those who wanted to combine the two).

This was a movement of the book within the people of the Book. For all that the early hermits and protomonks were often illiterate, it was literate men writing books which others could lead who most spread this form of life amongst the unsuspecting Christian world. We have seen Athanasius, writing his Life of St Antony. Other leaders and writers from the Mediterranean world went to Egypt and Palestine and, dazzled by what they saw, took the word into the wider world. In the east, it is convenient to take the emergence of the intelligent, educated, patrician Basil (c330-379), the most celebrated monastic founder of Asia Minor, as providing a rationale, if not anything like the complete explanation, for the spread of organized monasticism into the Eastern Roman Empire.

Egypt's ascetics made a mark on the great man. 'I admired their continence in living, and their endurance in toil; I wondered at their persistence in prayer and their triumph over sleep; subdued by no natural necessity, ever keeping their soul's purpose high and free, in hunger, in thirst, in cold, in nakedness, they never yielded to the body; always as though living in a flesh which was not theirs, they showed in every deed what it is to sojourn for a while in this life and what it is to have one's citizenship and home in heaven.'

Basil was, even by the standards of so remarkable a time, very extraordinary. Bishop and hermit; preacher and contemplative; traveller; theologian and scholar; anti-heresiarch (his anti-Arianism was effective and confirmed by the Council of Constantinople); social worker (he founded homes for the poor and for prostitutes, and was generous in famine relies; mystic and intellectual (to the great comfort of those Orthodox who deprecate the anti-intellectualism of some of their spiritual colleagues). He was also a controversial figure in a period when no views were expressed to gain consensus, but only ascendency.

Born into a family which was rich and pious, his grandmother, mother and father, two younger brothers, and best friend were all declared saints. He was educated at Caesarea, Constantinople and Athens. From his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties he lived a monastic life, first of all in Egypt and Syria and latterly near neo-Caesarea. But his hermitage was enlivened by the presence of friends and by his constant preaching to vast crowds. He was the earliest of the very busy monks, the public hermits, whom we shall often meet.

But his role can be overstated. Basil was a writer, and thus in retrospect can be seen very clearly as the inspirational force he undoubtedly was; he wrote a rule of sorts, and thus, again retrospectively, is seen as one of the formulators; he was, like Athanasius, a bishop and in a position to be a powerful friend of monks.

However, as we shall see with Benedict (with whom he is very often compared), founding a monastery or two, and formularizing the basis for monastic life can come to seem more formative than they actually were. The cases of Basil and Benedict are not, however, entirely similar. Benedict had small influence in his lifetime and an enormous influence long after it, especially by having set out a structure and described an esprit de corps; Basil was powerful in his own time, and was revered after it as a patristic figure; but his stamp is more on the spirituality than on the structure of monastic life in the east. Nor was his Rule complete, in the way that Benedict's is.

Indeed it would require the later work as writer and founder of Theodore the Studite (759-826) to put in place the model Orthodox monastery. He had reformed the monastery of Studios, in Constantinople, and stressed the need for manual work in a monk's life. Most monks, the solid majority for whom asceticism is too demanding, have preferred a role in which ordinary peasant activity is as important as prayer. Theodore added this earthier element.

Very senior Orthodox monks pledge themselves to a way of life which is much more in the manner of Antony than of Basil. The modern Greek Orthodox monks get cross with westerners who say their monasticism is 'Basilian': it allows the idea - alien to them - of monastic orders, operating at the behest and invention of individuals to be set up in distinction to the monks' preferred view that they are in a direct apostolic tradition, and owe quite as much to Antony and Paul as to any other more modern figure.

Basil is credited with being very firmly in favour of the coenobium, not least because it allows a man properly to express his love of his neighbour, and provides more opportunity to imitate Christ:

The solitary life has one aim, the service of the needs of the individual. But this is plainly in conflict with the law of love. The Lord for the greatness of His love was not content with teaching the word only, but that accurately and clearly he might give us a pattern of humility in the perfection of love, He girded Himself and washed the feet of His disciples in person. Whose then wilt thou wash? Whom wilt thou care for.... How will that good and pleasant thing, the dwelling of brethren together, be accomplished by dwelling solitarily?

And then again,

All of us who have been received in one hope of our calling are one body having Christ as head, and we are severally members one of another. But if we are not joined together harmoniously in the close links of one body in the Holy Spirit, but each of us chooses solitude, not serving the common welfare, in a way well pleasing to God but fulfilling the private desires of self-pleasing, how, when we are thus separated and divided off, can we preserve the mutual relation and service of the limbs one to another, or their subjection to one head, which is Christ. For it is impossible to rejoice with him that is glorified or to suffer with the sufferer when our life is thus divided, since it is impossible for the individual monk to know the affairs of his neighbour. In the next place, no single man is sufficient to receive all spiritual gifts, but according to the proportion of the faith that is in each man the supply of the Spirit is given; consequently, in the common life the private gift of each man becomes the common property of his fellows.

Even this emphasis seems actually to have been overstated by later commentators: Basil's great companion, Gregory of Nazianzus, says of him that his great achievement was to reconcile the coenobium with the hermitage. Basil admired and founded hermitages within reach of his monasteries. And this arrangement has come to be the system which most characterizes the eastern Christian monastic arrangement. In Palestine and Syria, for instance, all sorts of houses were in evidence, but the lavra seems to have been most favoured. There were saints galore in these obviously Bible lands.

Basil is a crucial link between the exigents and the potentates: he knew the desert and the palace equally well. His imprimatur on monastic life must have much encouraged the vacillating. Not that the people of the east seem to have needed much persuading. Basil was at work:in a time when the Christians flocked to the monastic life rather naturally.

It was part of his importance that he instituted and popularized a survivable monasticism. He legitimizes a monasticism in which saintly asceticism is accepted as being neither necessary nor sufficient for most monks. For some it was unattainable because too demanding; for others - an even worse crew - it was only too satisfactorily extreme, and pandered to their dementia.

He himself did not survive to see his half-century and may have blamed his illnesses on early excess.

During his hermitage phase, his friend Gregory wrote to him after one visit in high hilarity about the appalling food ('I have remembrance of the bread and of the broth - so they were named') which were entirely worthwhile in view of the 'luxury of suffering hardship with you ... who shall restore me to those psalmodies, and vigils, and departures to God through prayer?' In his rule, liturgy is to be the prime work of monks: he establishes the idea of regular hours and a varied liturgy 'because where there is monotony the soul often gets weary and is a prey to distraction'.

A monk should be obedient, but his master must be gentle and not censorious. The confessional is a place where a man may seek solace and guidance. Agriculture is the best work for a monk, providing a better waiting-room for heaven since it involves little marketing, and so rather little contact with the world of hassle and hussle.

He is also important as organizing monasticism well north of the Bible country, deep in the heart of the eastern empire. He was planting the virus at the heart of what would become Byzantium.

2

The Tradition

The Byzantine Empire was a piece of the ancient Roman Empire which would not go away. Even after the fall of Rome in the fifth century, it lasted for a thousand years as a rather odd smattering of the classical world, as won over to the Christian faith, in what was a surprisingly solid anachronism. It survived in some form the barbarian hordes and the rise of the Muslim world, until finally it was overtaken by the Turks in the fifteenth century. In that time, it had seemed alien enough to be plundered in 1204 by men of the Fourth Crusade from the Christian west.

It had been separated from the rest of the western world by politics and religious dispute, and had to fight Christianity's battles with the forces of the further-east, often alone in the front line. It struck the medieval west as bizarre, and more recently has seemed primitive in its special desire to elevate authenticity over sophistication in its way of worshipping and thinking about God. As a thoroughly modern Americo-Greek monk from one of its premier monasteries expressed himself forcefully, and with some of the slighted animosity of old: 'The Byzantine world is the black hole of history, so far as the west is concerned.'

It has indeed remained a great mystery to westerners, for whom both its past and its peculiar presence in parts of Near Eastern life now are a closed book. The unsettled, quizzical, abstract western :mind, relatively orderly and rational, has never been able to cope with the antiquity and the fundamentally different spirituality of the eastern Christian. We can think, marvelling, about the oriental mind. We can sometimes imagine that we have an inkling of the Arab mind. But there is something in the Levantine merging of practicality and spirituality which mystifies us. Its capacity for internecine argument, for boiling, suppressed resentment, is a byword: it characterized the Orthodox Church more than might be supposed from the single most absorbing feature of orthodoxy for us today, its unchanging, rooted nature.

This is a patristic religion, profoundly doubtful of the value of the intellect and always aware that it often leads to heresy.

H. A. L. Fisher, the historian of Europe, called the church

obscurantist, influential, and umbrageous': it was all those, and more.

The Byzantine was a very religious sort of government. Emperor, Patriarch, monk seem to have been even more bound together than they were, theoretically, in medieval Europe. Perhaps this was because there was no Pope to seem threatening to the temporal power: the priests seem to have known their place rather better, and the Emperor - to do him credit - often knew that his place was on his knees. One Emperor - Nicephorus (d 969) - actually tried to enter a monastery, and was in 963 instrumental in setting up the first really big monastery - the Grand Lavra (it was very much not a lavra, but a coenobium) - on the most famous Byzantine monastic site, Mount Athos, where he had intended to retire. While it was being built, he married an able but fallen woman and was murdered by her before he could fulfil the latter saintly ambition.

Emperors were prey to forceful women here as anywhere else, but this none the less was a holy empire in a way which was only talked about in western Europe.

In 518 an 'elderly, illiterate soldier' (Fisher's description) took the imperial throne. He persecuted Arians very viciously, but groomed his nephew, Justinian, to be an educated and sophisticated ruler. Justinian had the good fortune to marry a Cypriot beer-hall keeper's daughter, a courtesan and actress of wit, confidence, courage and piety, Theodora. From 27, when he formally took over the throne, Justinian and Theodora (who at least once saved the crown for her husband by counselling courage) set out to reassert the Byzantine Empire's scope and style.

To the west in parts of Italy, and down into Carthage, they had at least limited success, despite a corrupt governmental system within and constant harassment from without. It was an exhausting and doomed enterprise for Empire and Emperor, but it left two tangible monuments well outside the confines of what we think of Byzantium, both of which prove its enormous energy and demonstrate its spirituality: the frescoes of Ravenna, amongst them those of the monastic church of San Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna, and St Catherine's monastery in Sinai.

The significance of San Apollinare in Classe (beyond its becoming much later a Cluniac house, and providing a training ground for Saint Romuald who went on to found the Camaldoli monastery and tradition) is that it marks the revival of the fortunes of the kind of Christianity we think of as Orthodox (by the standards of Rome or Constantinople): namely, it was built by Christians with a properly Trinitarian tradition in an area which had only a decade before been dominated by Germanic 'barbarians', whose Christianity, recently adopted, was Arian (in which Christ is denied his full

deity).

The frescoes are a triumph of the Byzantine. Christ is pantocrator, ruler of the universe: foursquare as ruler and dispenser of power; grand and peasant and triumphant. In the apse, he is described in Creek and Latin, proof that the old Roman Empire, split hundreds of years before, could still inspire: ICTHUS, the Creek word for fish, whose letters make

the initials of Jesus Christ Son of God the Saviour, and the Latin Salus Mundi (the salvation of mankind). It symbolizes the period, when, for the first and only time, the eastern strand of Christianity colonized the western world.

Apart from a toehold maintained in the far south of Italy, after this period, Byzantium and its Christianity were confined to the east.

In Sinai, justinian had founded a monastery on the site of Moses' forty years in the wilderness, his revelations at the burning bush, and his subsequent receipt of God's Law. Thirty-three centuries separate the occasions when the oasis a few kilometres to the north-west on the road to Mount Horeb was the scene of bloody conflict between Jews and Egyptians: Moses can hardly have guessed what he started.

Elijah, another great desert wanderer, and precursor of the desert call for people of the book, also came here. Tradition has it that there were monks here very early in the Christian period, partly as a function of its holiness, and partly of its value as a safe refuge.

The Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena, had a church built (it is still intact) in the fourth century. justinian ordered that a proper fortified monastic complex be built, and provided soldiers to guard it.

3

St Catherine's

An elegant little plane flew a small party of us - some Italians and their wives, assorted tourists - from Cairo to St Catherine's, where there is an airstrip. Flew us to St Catherine's, but did not stop there as scheduled. It flew on to Sharm el Sheik, one of the funnier resort towns of the world, and a couple of hundred miles from where I needed to be. I hitched a ride in a coach, shared a taxi for a few score kilometres, enjoyed a handy bus ride, had a bottle of Fanta at a roadside hovel (a brick kennel and a man all but asleep beside it), hitched rides in a couple of government jeeps, and finally was dumped by a well and a small irrigation scheme in the desert, around four in the afternoon. A camel wandered about, unenergetically. I am not an intrepid traveller and yet I was not unduly concerned. The kindness of Egyptians is such that I did not bother to worry overmuch. I had noticed that these desert roads carry intermittent but definite traffic, and that people do not tend to leave strangers stranded for want of giving a ride. Besides, there was a hut nearby and signs of family life. I vaguely thought I could, if pressed, doss down in one of the abandoned cars in their

Eventually, a car came along. It did not stop at first, but slowed, and then halted a few hundred yards further on. I trotted down to it, to be greeted by an American voice, very doubtful. The woman said they didn't normally give rides ... And, why didn't I have a car? I told them what had happened. They were still doubtful. I told them to be on their

way, and not to trouble themselves: something would come along.

In the end, they said to hop in, and that they were Navigators, born again Christians from the States. This couple were employees, shedding the light and spreading the good news in the mid-east. It was OK about the lift, they decided, because, 'We had dedicated the car to the Lord anyway'.

The monastery was a little way up a bare and bleak valley, reached by a small road. There was a shanty town about a quarter of a mile from it, and a few cypress trees in its immediate vicinity. We pulled up in a yard near a low building which turned out to be a hostel. A notice directed us to assemble at a set time in front of the small door in the high monastery wall. Then and only then, Youth Hostel-like, would our accommodation be addressed.

Assorted pilgrims, including the Navigators and I, were

marshalled at the door of the monastery and then to the foot of some steps which led to the guest reception room. A tall, very dark, swift monk swept us up the steps, and briskly told us to sit down. Some of us were diffident about relaxing in such a place, and hovered about: rather impatiently, he commanded us, more headmasterly than hostly. We gathered there, round the walls of a wood-lined room: it had the look of a holiday chalet in a Swiss village. The cornices and the skirtings were painted in a little frieze of flowers.

Large portraits of large regal ladies of the Greek royal family smiled down at us, in their décolletages. A sailing ship in a bottle flew the Greek flag and plied the Red Sea, with Mount Sinai diagrammatically portrayed as a brownish lump between it and the Gulf of Akaba. There were some useful reminders of the mountain's biblical connections from scruffy corral. Thornas Nelson, the British publishers: prints depicting Moses receiving the Law; the burning bush, painted by R. Payton Reid in 1906; the worship of the Golden Calf; the parting of the Red Sea.

Presently the monk returned. He seemed quite forbidding

in his witty, wry, handsome smil ' es and strong welcome.

'Good evening', he said and the best of us responded heartily.

We were a long way from home and dusk was gathering. We wanted his hospitality, and were not yet guaranteed it. He and his robes managed to have the air of a presiding magistrate, combined with something of the dash of a maitre d'hôtel. The Navigators and another family were delighted to be told that they could have a family room, and less so when they realized that they would have to share it. Anyway, they were dispatched after a Muslim servant, who had been hovering in the doorway.

The rest of us approached the presence, one by one, and had the details of our passport taken. 'This is not for us', said the monk. 'The police require it.' He bestowed on each of us a small joke, which each received as though it were manna. A man from Limoges was complimented on the pottery of his birthplace, and responded with the delight of a man who had never before met such erudition. He got a bed. 'You know', said the monk, who had told us to general acclamation that his name was George, 'you are all welcome to use our hostel, but it is Lent and the monastery is closed completely for the time being.'

My heart sank. Someone asked for food. 'We are not a hotel, you know,' said George (before coming to St Catherine's he had taught ancient Greek at Alexandria, 'a nice town', he said), 'but we may be able to give you some olives and bread; I shall see.' I had brought some food with me, and felt suitably smug about it. These Levantines weren't catching me so easily. I approached the potentate, adopting an air which I hoped was supplicant whilst at the same time conveying seriousness of purpose.

'You have a problem', he said. I told him why I was late, and how I had a bus to catch on Monday, and a plane the next day. I told him how I had scoured both London and Cairo for advice as to how best to visit St Catherine's.

He sighed a little sigh; it was like the last breath leaving a small animal being crushed in a rough hand. But his briskness hardly left hirn, and he seemed as though he wanted to find solutions even to problems he did not want.

'What is it, exactly, that you want?'

I told him.

'I will try to find the monk who is responsible for such things. He is Father Makarios.' He left, and returning a few minutes later, told me to go to the hostel, and come back in half an hour for my talk with Makarios. Before I left, a young monk came in with a black bag, which was wriggling: he opened it and gave several tiny fluffy chicks had a pre-Easter romp in the palm of his hand.

I went down to the hostel, which was built as a brick bunkhouse. I claimed the lower of two bunks in a big room, and went to the little kitchen-cum-refectory where a Muslim guest master was showing us the facilities. Gathered in this improbable place were two priests (Roman Catholic), two German girls in voluminous shawls, and various others.

Outside, a US Army jeep pulled up. A chubby Captain jumped out, with a black lieutenant and two sergeants in tow. They were from the Multinational Force and Observers, a UN-inspired peace-keeping outfit, and had run up to the monastery because they admired it and liked to meet the monks and go to church there. 'This is the most important religious place in the world, apart from the Vatican', declared the Captain, who said he was from Arizona.

Worrying about the monks and their theological backing, the Captain said he and his little crew had been discussing, presumably as they bounced along the tracks on the way to the monastery, the way that Jesus Christ had commanded his followers to go forth and bear fruit. 'He said he would make them fishers of men. Not a lot fishing for men here', said one of the sergeants. But they loved the monks anyway.

I kept my appointment in the gatehouse office. Makarios was a handsome, dark man, in a smart woolly hat which might have been made for the Special Boat Service, a big mackintosh, and smokey-glass spectacles. He spoke with an American accent. His air was calm, reserved, capable. He had an openness about him which was almost challenging, except that it was somehow passive: it was a matter of service, offered by a man from whom one received the signal that he would have been just as happy, perhaps happier, to have been left alone. We sat opposite each other at the table, overlooked by King Konstantine and Queen Anna Maria. I took my notebook out, ready to remind myself of the conversation points I had jotted down, and to receive his pearls. He asked what he could do for me. How could he help? He was unsmiling, and incurious. He might have been a doctor. Worse, he might have been a psychologist. I told him first about the weeks of letter writing that had receded this visit, and the hopelessness of the information I had gathered and been offered. He laughed. 'That's important. You write down what happened. You think it's odd that there should be such chaos: actually, it's quite normal.'

Outside there were vast sandstone mountains and the gathering night, and beyond that an unseen desert and sea shore. Here, for some odd, monk-like reason, there was a young American, amused and periodically irritated by the eastern mentality. 'It's all part of the desert drama', he said. Could I attend the morning liturgy, I asked. Yes. 'No problem.' I said I would like to attend a meal in the refectory; was it in silence? Yes. Were there readings? Yes. Could I attend? No. I supposed it was impossible to visit the graveyard, the museum or the gardens? Yes, it was. But I had the liturgy to look forward to, and was to report at the small monastic door at a few minutes to four in the morning.

4

The American Monk

We settled to talk: about his own attachment to this extraordinary place, which he had first encountered in books as a magical picture whose reality he had no idea he would one day encounter so solidly; about the almost informal novitiate of two or three years a man must undergo to become an orthodox monk; about the way a personal crisis in any younger monk is managed by the older ones, who've seen most such upsets before.

We talked about the way a monk should in principle leave his monastery for only three reasons: 'If he's sick and cannot be given proper medical treatment in the monastery, or on business for the monastery, or if he's dead.' And not necessarily then, since several - St Catherine's very famously amongst them - have an ossiary within a charnel house, where skulls, and sometimes whole skeletons, remain on morbid display. At St Catherine's one of the most venerated is St Stephen the Porter, dressed in purple velvet and holding his staff, just as he used to do when, as a sixth-century guardian of the holy mountain, he checked that would-be communicants there had first confessed at the monastery.

We talked about the way a monk would be in touch with his parents, beyond the occasional letter, only if they came to his monastery.

I asked him what a monk did with whatever liveliness of mind he possessed. 'One must change one's perspective, and concentrate, rather than on many things, on few. Anything that doesn't pertain to God is meaningless here. One doesn't involve himself in reading science journals, for instance, or in computer wizardry, or anything not related to one's goal as a monk. One might be more concerned with learning as a monk in the west, but in the east it is devotion that matters. The way of life of the monk requires little reading outside the orthodox tradition: Holy Scripture and the history of Christianity. But we do read, but everything we do, we do as in prayer.'

I asked him to tell me why God, who made men diverse, intelligent, reproductive, should want creatures as narrow as monks. 'God doesn't need monks', he said. 'But God needs people who are able to remember and love him. Partly it's a matter of thanksgiving, and of having the presence of Christ in his flock in the eucharist: not superficially, or artificially, but the actual, real presence of Christ. Partly it's a matter of remembrance. Man was created by God for what purpose? The answer, so far as I understand it, is that men are the only creation of God endowed with speech. We are speechendowed sheep, whose real purpose, I think, is to praise him.

'The angels worship God continuously in heaven, and the monks try to do so here on earth. We are trying to obey Paul's injunction to pray unceasingly. There are some things a monk does which are natural, and some are unnatural, and many things which we ought to do which are supernatural. A monk is involved in the ascetical struggle, which is the attempt continuously to ascend to the supernatural, to transcend earthly things, to worship God who is unseen, unknown, and above nature. And yes, partly, it is proper that monks should do this all the time because others do it so little.'

We parted, and I went back to the hostel. A lively supper was being prepared, pooled from food provided by the monastery and various odds and ends which the pilgrims had brought in haversacks. The families had gone off to bed. The two Germans, the priests and I, overlooked by a kindly, rather worldly-looking old Muslim, settled down to eat. And then one of the Germans sang Stille Nacht, followed by the other who sang, beautifully and dramatically, a love song from Jacques Offenbach's La Grande Duchesse. We were rowdy, and I half expected a censorious monk to come out of the night at us.

Later, I had a nip of brandy on the terrace in the black of the night, and, wrapped in sleeping bags, talked a while with the Army Captain about the mountains (he said they were very like his own Arizona backyard), and his pleasure in his present posting, during which he had 'quadrupled my study time in terms of the Word'. He was a good man, I imagine, dreaming of his young family at home, and looking forward to getting back to his carpentry in his garage. He said that if the military should ever ask him to do something which was against the Lord's commandment, he would know which to obey, and hang the consequences. He thought that on the whole God has led him through the vale of tears rather well: 'I have been so well looked after', he said.

The next morning, I turned up at the door in the great wall, hanging around in the great darkness. Bells were ringing out over the valley. Dead on time, a monk came to the door, looking for me with a torch. We went in, through a courtyard to the great doors of the church. He let me in, and led me to a choir stall at the back. I could dimly see the gorgeous iconostasis, and, beside me, a big ikon full of figures: each of the church's twelve internal pillars marks a month, and on each is hung a calendar of holy people associated with that month. Mismanaging my hinged chair, it banged out through the silence. The next three and a half hours passed in an agreeable, sleepy blur of Kyrie eleisons, chanted at vanous speeds but always mesmerizing and lovely; the tinklings of little bells; processions of the great jewelled Bible, and of ikons; the lighting and snuffing of candles; billowing incense.

This was the Third Sunday of the Great Fast, just before Easter. It commemorates the Crucifixion, and encourages the faithful through the ardours of fasting. At five-thirty a table was ceremoniously placed in the centre of the church, and a crucifix in a garland of flowers was processed by it by a priest in blue vestments, and monks with candles and incense. Everyone - not me - queued to smell the flowers, kiss the priest's hand and make a metanoia (in which one crosses oneself, but with a bow to touch the floor).

The church is big and gorgeous, much more so than anything I had seen in Egypt (or would see on Mount Athos). The twelve pillars form two rows, dividing the church into a nave and two outer aisles. My place was at the most westerly of the southern row.

After the service we congregated in the reception room for coffee and liqueur with the Abbot, who addressed a few words in Creek to us. This was His Eminence Archbishop Damianos, Archbishop of Sinai, Faran and Raitho, Archbishop of the autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Sinai. Afterwards, I went out to the scrappy little village which was built in the time of the Israeli occupation: it looks as though it is going to become a slightly odd tourist centre. I bought sardines and corned beef - staple fare in the wastes of Egypt and some bread from a bakery. Then I stuffed an anorak into a haversack for the climb up Gebel Musa, Moses' Mountain.

The scene of Moses' triumph testifies, at the very least, to his stamina. This is hard and frightening country: half moonscape, and half Bible illustration. The mountains are substantial, vertiginous deserts. The main path to the peak three thousand feet up - is smooth and wide. Luckily, I did not know then what later I read - that an American, overenthusiastic, died of a heart attack after an ascent to the top in I927. I was in any case sufficiently anxious on account of one man - I think he was a German - who was carrying a holdall and walking very fast, keeping me rough company. As we got higher, we got colder; and he got bluer and bluer. He heaved and puffed, and I wondered what I would do if he needed carrying home. We exchanged biblical pleasantries, and I nearly prayed for his survival.

At the small ugly church on the top of the mountain the two priests - they were on their way to missionary work in Africa were photographing each other. We marvelled at the audacity of someone called Macdonald, who must have been very brave to reach out far enough to inscribe his name on an awesomely precipitous rock in 1845, and who, nothing daunted, returned to do so again in 1849. Graffiti can be very classy, and comforting as well.

It had been agreeably warm in the valley. Here the wind was piercing, and on neighbouring peaks one could see snow. I was glad to wander back down to the monastery, this time not by the broad camel track, but by a succession of narrow passages. gorges, and steep steps. It was a walk enlivened by the priests and their enjoyment of time out of time. The German had sworn he was feeling fine and would come down in his own time. On the way down, the monastery suddenly appeared, tiny and neat, distantly viewed between the walls of a ravine: beige, homely, orderly in such a scene of natural devastation, in which a lone tree seen down in the valley looked curiously luxurious.

The sight of a camel or person was very comforting: it taught me how little demand I have for serious wilderness, at least as a personal experience. The monastery is such a muscular jewel: walled (the present nearly square structure being built on massive sixth-century foundations), with a multi-storey series of verandas and terraces backed up against one wall. and the great church dominating the huddled square.

The mosque - presumably the only one such in a Christian enclosure anywhere - testifies to the oddity of the place which has survived Muhammadan, Israeli and Romish domination in its time, and been respected by all of them. Though for many years in its history it has periodically been abandoned (notably in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) it always seemed to bounce back, better endowed than before. It had always been a cynosure of the western world, a position it maintained even when Christendom was increasingly divided: its fabulous collection of ikons and their art testifies to the wealth of its patronage, especially, latterly, that of the Russian royal family.

Often, at the height of its powers, holding four hundred monks, the present community numbers about eighteen. But the big change is that the car, bus and plane have robbed it of its rarity value. Curious backpacking young flock there, as well as pilgrims of a more obviously religious sort. The monks warily accept that this must be so, and have found the guesthouse outside the monastery's enclosure a tolerable compromise for their peace: they are expanding its facilities.

I was due for more talk with Father Makarios. Again we met

in the monastic no-man's-land of the reception room. I asked him if monastic life wasn't very irritating. 'Perhaps, sometimes. But if you are letting someone get you down the proper monastic way to think about it is to see the fault in yourself, and not in the other person. Of course it is difficult at times. One could only tell if it was the life for him by trying it. The core of monastic life is experience. That's why we have a novitiate for monks: it wouldn't be right to ask someone to devote himself without his having had practical experience of what it will be like. Many come, of course; and many find it too uncomfortable and leave. And that's as it should be.'

What was the real motive for being a monk, I asked. 'A monk from here visited Mount Athos, and an Abbot there asked him what he wanted from monasticism. "Not to go to Hell', was the reply. "That's not the right way to think about it", said the Abbot. "Better to want to be in Paradise".'

I went out and clambered up some rocks across the valley from the monastery, where I basked like a lizard, and let its very great beauty sink in.

The next day, a gaggle of us left the monastery in the darkness to catch the bus which left at dawn. It was very nearly full: people from the monastic town, and pilgrims going back to Cairo. I settled into a seat at the back, and was joined by a young American woman I had not seen around the monastery. 'Good morning', she said. 'In addition to being a biochemist I am also a psychic.'

I snuggled down into my anorak and listened to my personal stereo: Bob Marley - the psalmodist of this century, singing 'Exodus'.

5

Introducing Athos

Only the Byzantine world could have produced Mount Athos, where geography, government and godliness are bound together. Athos is a forty-kilometre-long monastic peninsula. It is one of three which form Chalkidiki's fingers pointing into the Aegean. Athos is wooded: there are no female herd animals to graze it. There had been late eleventh-century scandals involving shepherds, whose offerings to the monks included their womenfolk: when they were banished many of the monks left too.

Legend at least has it that no female of the human species had been allowed in the peninsular for much longer: maybe as early as the late fifth century the Empress Pulcheria (a virgin, though technically married to the Emperor, and later a saint) found it. She wanted to commemorate the spot where her father had come safely ashore after a shipwreck, but was halted by an ikon of the Virgin Mary, which is supposed to have impressed on her that she should go no further: Athos did not need two Queens.

Even earlier, so the legend goes, Mary had landed on Athos after a ship carrying her to an appointment with Lazarus in Cyprus fetched up there. 'This shall be my portion', she said.

Athos, the most famously extensive Christian territory in the world, has stoutly pagan origins, being named after the god Poseidon's son, by whom it is supposed to have been picked up and hurled into the sea. It has a big marble mountain, Mount Athos (2033 metres), at its tip, which is swathed in mists and shiny-tipped with snow even in April, when down below spring flowers and quick fine showers make the air sweet. It is a storm-ridden spot.

There are authorities to say that Athos had become a place favoured by hermits since the seventh century. In the ninth, Peter the Athonite lived for fusty years in a cave in the cliffs. Later in that century, St Euthymios arrived and is said to have inspired many followers to live near his hermitage, whence he eventually agreed to become their leader in a lavra-style development. In the middle of the tenth century St Athanasius set the mountain on its present course by setting up the Great Lavra as a cenobium.

Since then this extraordinary place has been not merely full of monasteries, it is devoted to them, and run by them. Athos is a monastic state in rather the way that the Vatican is a clerical one. It was established by ancient decree of the Byzantine emperors, whose world it still perpetuates.

It has no ambassadors, and it does have a vast number of visitors. It is not a museum or a fossil, but proof of the vast eccentricity of mankind, and of men who are very nearly European - EC members, for instance - at that.

Partly because of its very great beauty, partly because it is so famous architecturally, partly because it is a great centre of religion and religiosity, it is a place of pilgrimage for devout Orthodox, and others who often tell small lies about, their godliness in order to be allowed the ecclesiastical visa. Without that there is no getting even to Athos's lone point of entry, the monastic port of Daphne, which is sometimes very busy, despite the inconvenience non-orthodox are put to in ever seeing it.

Each morning, a handsome white-painted boat pushes off from Ouranoupolis, at the north-west end of the peninsular and in secular territory. It cleaves those clear green-blue waters, sometimes accompanied by dolphins and flights of sea birds, and cruises busily down the western coast of Athos.

The passengers watch a succession of monasteries go by. Typically, they are four or five kflometres apart, and stand either on the shoreline or in the hillside above it. Between Ouranoupolis and Daphne monasteries pass as though on parade.

First, Dochiariou. It was founded well before the eleventh century, was much prone to pirate attacks, as were all these shoreline houses, possessor of a fragment of the true cross, Serbian for much of its history. Next, Xenophontos, which for centuries was a bastion of the cenobitic way, though it has a smaller hermitage nearby. Then, Panteleimonos, also known as Roussikon since this is a major Russian bastion. It has a barracks-style building close to the shore, built in the nineteenth century to accommodate an invasion of Russian monks. Each appear in turn, as do the ports - usually a stone jetty and a fortified tower, always called a citadel, and built to repel pirates - of other monasteries further inland.

The monasteries are deeply eccentric places, and probably the most lovely and informal - though grand - buildings the human eye is ever likely to see. Symmetry, which is the gift of most religious architecture to an unruly world, has no place here.

The Athonite monasteries are like weird chateaux whose occupants have grown weary of living inside walls: draped from most of the buildings are ricketty, narrow verandas with a dizzy toehold on the stones of the walls which support them via diagonal struts. Some of these verandas are several storeys high. The monasteries often have exquisite onion-dome roofs, since many of the founding religious were Russian or Slavonic (whose style itself is a mark of their having Byzantine origins, both as nations and styles). The churches in the midst of the monastic campuses are usually painted rust brown and readily assert themselves as the focus of the complex. The woodwork of the buildings is almost always painted, sometimes a lovely blue or terracotta, and they therefore look a little like fairground buildings which have been given a serious turn.

And so, to picture Athos you have to try to see a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and deep-forested slopes, a snowy peak in the distance, a dazzling shoreline of white pebbles and sparkling clear Aegean water, and the fairground forts in which rows of windows will temper with thoughts of penitentiaries and barracks any little imaginings that one is already in paradise.

The monks one meets first are a tonic for anyone who over admires Athos: not that they are dissolute or dim, but rather, they are so resolutely masculine. These characters wrap a perhaps very profound spirituality in exteriors as solid, active, gruff, as anything you would meet in the outside world. Except for their robes and beards they might be returning to work on a drilling rig, or - more likely - a whaling ship or lumber camp: - this last possibility is very real in a community which does well out of its forested slopes, themselves rare survivors in these Macedonian highlands.

I sat beside a typically impressive monkish type on the bus from Thessalonika to Ouranoupolis: he was a big, sad, weary, rather distinguished looking sort of fellow, in a serge jacket and jeans poking out beneath his none-too-clean monastic habit. His beard was long and straggly in front, and his hair, grey, wispy and in a pony tail behind. We messily ate flakey cheesepie from newspaper (bought at the terminus). He would not have been out of place as an extra in Moby Dick.

Athos is a surprisingly young place: it is the scene of energetic strands of monasticism in which modernity and antiquity reside together. In fact, it is the young men who have shaken Athos back to its traditions, and to its roots, in the past few decades. Monasteries by definition do not create new generations; they have to attract, them, and Athos, which might have looked dead on its aged feet in the fifties and early sixties, and with a lousy prognostication for its future, did succeed in sending out some sort of message to the outside world that it needed vocations. The message was answered.

The monastic life of Athos has for a thousand years replicated in one concentrated spot all the monastic styles which flourished in the Egyptian deserts, and about every possible variation of themes established there. At its tip are the terrifying giddy caves and huts (perched on minute crevices) of the most extreme hermits, fed by baskets of food lowered by rope from their mother monastery: here are the ascetical ways of an Antony. There are sketes, which are monastic villages of cottages, each inhabited by between three and six monks, with a common church: in effect, the lavra of Ammoun. There are kellia, which are really tiny monasteries in which there are not fewer than three and not more than six monks.

Then there are the twenty 'ruling monasteries', proper, on the Pachomian model.

Until recently much of the communal life of Athos had lost some of its monastic ardour, under a system which allowed individual monks to keep their earned or unearned income and to live pretty much an individual life - cooking for themselves in their rooms, for instance - in which quite often attendance at the services in the church seemed lackadaisical. This was the idiorhythmic style of monastic life, and it is now very much frowned on. The new monks, coming to Athos, or moving from hermitages into the coenobia, insisted that the way of life revert to the coenobitic.

But even more important was their revival of the tradition of the Hesychast (roughly translatable as Quietist, though the word has a rather different meaning from that attached to it in western theology). This is the notion of continuous prayer of the heart, normally associated with the Jesus Prayer: 'Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon me' (with 'a sinner' sometimes added). The prayer was and is usually said alone and silently, sometimes with breathing exercises working alongside it.

Its use goes back through a long line of Orthodox theology and mysticism, in which the ideas about God's ineffability, developed in the third century by Origen and Clem-ent, were orked up by later figures. These include Gregory of Nyssa (Basil's brother); Evagrius in the fourth; the anonymous fifthcentury writer (who was thought to be St Dionysius, and whose works are thus called Dionysian); and John Climacus in the sixth .

The doctrine of God's unknowability was crucial to Orthodox Christians. So too was the idea that a man might find a union with God, and Gregory of Nyssa set out to reconcile the unknowable God with the God who allows his grace to lift man into union with himself. There also developed a strand of thought which sought to reconcile man's soul with his body (which, as we have seen, was very unl the Origenist thinking of early Egypt): man's whole nature was seen to be created by God, and to be capable of worshipping him.

The Jesus Prayer of John Climacus is thus the prayer in which a man may ascend into union with the unknowable, God through the grace which can come from concentrating the whole being continuously on asking Jesus to have mercy upon him.

The Hesychast tradition was powerful in the tenth century when St Symeon the New Theologian (949-Io42) claimed that Hesychasm allowed certain people to see the divine light of God in as real a way as the three disciples had seen Our Lord's Transfiguration. This view was derided by many theologians, and it finally fell to the Athonite monk, Gregory Palamas (1269-1359) to develop a theology which satisfactorily (for religious, at any rate) reconciled the attributes of an unknowable and yet active and revealed God, and in particular man's experience of this unknowable God and his Divine Light by the use of the Hesychast tradition of worship. His defence depends on the divine within man being physical as well as mental: thus, with grace, our eyes can see Divine Light.

Visitors to Athos have a hefty rigmarole of paperwork to acquire before the monks will let them in. There is a moment - moments of this sort are never pleasant - when a sailor goes round the boat taking pilgrims to Daphne, collecting everyone's passport and other papers. He dumps them all in a plastic bag and hands them to a monk. The ship docks, rapidly, and we all gather at the stern, where a ramp has been lowered. The passports are whisked away, and we all climb aboard an oldish bus, knapsacks stowed in its bowels.

It is the last ride you take on Athos, unless you can hire a donkey or horse, and can also face riding it. The bus wends its way round hairpins, into the interior of the peninsular (always called 'the Mountain', though Mount Athos alone deserves the name). The bus curls its way down to Karyes, the administrative heart of the place, where there are meeting places, a big church, a kind of Town Hall (to which you are directed). There a queue, and, if you pass muster, a special passport, which you are to carry always.

Foreigners can stay four nights only. Everyone takes their chance as to whether the monastery he is headed for will take him for the night. It doesn't pay to arrive late in the day at the monastery of your choice; it may be full.

Before setting off to the first monastery, there was a treat to be had at Karyes. One wanders around the small town, with its tumbledown shops (one of them, a cobbler, had a fairytale dereliction, and one longed to go in: it was shut). There were stores whose aspect was more that of a ship's chandlers than anything else: faded shelves, wooden floors; maps (of Athos), supplies for a voyage, some of them in sacks. You could buy all the usual things, but I don't remember meat, and do seem to recall seeing a note somewhere saying that it should not be sold on the Holy Mountain.

And then to the hotel. It was not, actually, quite worth the name, if you care about things being bright and sprightly. But there it was, barely advertised and with no signs of any sort that I could see. Inside, like a party of youth hostellers with the stuffing and the heartiness taken out of them, there was gathered a party of men who were taking their last sustenance before tough events, as they might be, which lay ahead. We all ate, and there may have been nothing else on offer, soup and fish and salad and potatoes, and we drank - I certainly did quantities of wine. I aw no need to face the afternoon cold sober. I had smoked the last cigarette of my life, as I intended it to be, on the boat coming in, and was glowing with virtue from the knowledge that theie'd be no smoking here at least. It was a good lunch. And then I asked a monk to point me the way to the monastery of Stavronikita, which I had mapped out as being near enough to walk to in an afternoon and had seen from pictures to be good looking.

Also, I'd been tipped off in Saloniki that it was one of the places where Athos' revival was most evident. There was reason on the way to curse the new spirit in the place. The track, which scattered signs told one to follow, was all but impassable in places: the youngster-imonks had power-driven their jeeps and four-wheel drives along fragile earthen routes and turned them into a bland, beige quagmire, which tempted one in until there was no return. I rolled up my trousers and plodded on, feeling hot, wretched and pettish. Once I came across a monk on a donkey, and a couple of times I was overtaken by a Merc-load of youngsters. But it was a lovely day, and my shirt stuck agreeably to my sweaty back. I drank the half bottle of wine I had tucked away in my knapsack and ate some nuts I'd bought, and wondered whether I was greedy enough to eat the corned beef I had meant to save in case the food at the monastery was scarce, inedible or non-existent.

6

Stavronikita

I liked Stavronikita from the first. And to say one likes a monastery is more than saying one likes a particular hotel (it includes a hotel-assessing quality, of course). People say that each monastery has its own spiritual quality which a visitor must find for himself.

Anyway: I liked Stavronikita. Founded in 1574 it is the youngest, the poorest and the most junior of the twenty ruling monasteries. It had the air of a fortress which had never seriously had to fight off anything unpleasant. Its bastion quality looked joyful. I came swinging down the lane towards it, round a corner, past a tethered horse and a tended garden, and saw a terrace and a great grey building beside it. The monk at the door looked at my papers, and did not at first seem best pleased to see me. He left to find me a little something, the same little something everyone is always offered: a small, helpful liqueur, a glass of water, turkish delight.

He sat me down in his little outer office and let me drink in peace. And then in through the gate, to a cool, beautiful small square courtyard, with a tap and stone lavabo, and the church entrance. And on, up some wooden stairs - several flights of them - and along a shiplike corridor to the loveliest room I ever expect to see. It was the reading room of the guest area. It was as bright as a room well might be with waist to ceiling windows on two of its sides, especially with the two sides looking out over the sea, as though they were set in a lighthouse tower, itself set on a crag above the shore. Lovely, simple woodwork in the room, in its windows and its panelled, painted walls.

Down below, from the windows, one could hear the sea's subdued roar. Approach them, open one and look out, and the thing was terrifying. The room's seaward walls and floor hung out over the walls, veranda-wise. It was a crow's nest, of a biblioteque. The house was full, and this was to be my home. I determined that I would, in spite of my body's nervous reluctance, make my camp on the sofa which was, so to speak, hung out over the sea.

The only lighting was by paraffin stove: no one warned me, or fretted over me, about its use: one false move and I could send the entire monastery up in flames, always the historic terror of the entire peninsular. Wandering around between the guest wing and the church, one was never aware of places which the monks regarded as their own, though there were doors one dearly did not open. The enclosure was not defined by notices or regions, and it wasn't until later that it occurred to one that the overall effect was rather inviting and relaxed.

The huddle of the place was attractive: a window would look out over the glamorously mediterranean roofing tiles of the domed church, their sags and leanings producing swift, interrupted contours, like the swirls of a finger print. The wood work - beams, lintels, banisters - was scrubbed white by the wind and salt; and the views were all of green fields, or stone terraces. The church itself was very beautiful, and I did not see a finer one while I was on the holy mountain. It was small, but it seemed sunny, and the colours of the paintings were bright and lively. On the floor, there was a scattering of laurel leaves, and they scented the air. Visiting it, I felt very strongly the strength of the observation of Robert Byron (the young pre-war English Byzantologist whose The Station is a lovely account of a young man's visit to Athos in I927). 'The Athonite churches,' he wrote, in mitigation of the tedium he felt during the afternoon service, 'however modern, are not, with the exception of the Russian, ugly ... the majority are covered, and wholly covered, as tradition demands, with scenes from the life of the Virgin and her son, each occasion being divided from its neighbours by narrow bands of red and white. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, artistically valuable or not, their effect is invariably decorative.'

The invitation to attend my first service on Athos was friendly and courteous. We stood, the new arrivals, at the back. The stalls were those of Greek Orthodoxy everywhere: comfortable arrangements in which one can sit, or hoist the bench of the seat up, to form a perch for discreet slumping, or stand in one's place instead, with convenient arm rests should things prove wearisome. I had arrived in time for Vespers, at 5.30 (occidental time; the monasteries mostly use another system: their own is called justinian, and it is a mark of the Byzantine attitude to the outside world that they call the normal western time Frankish).

It began with the outer and inner churches divided, but the curtain was swept aside almost immediately, amidst 'Kyrie eleisons', and we were off. The service lasted for half an hour or so, and then we were gathered together for supper.

It was my first meal in a monastic refectory, and I recommend them highly. The food itself is usually delicious. It is also always hotly disputed, along with the other delights of the place: Robert Byron reckoned that the ordinary tourists ('the globetrotters', he called them) 'will shrink from the difficulty of the language, the nauseating victuals, the inhabitants of the bed - vile insects - the indescribable sanitation [both much improved in the eighties] and the absence of wheeled accommodation. And from his wife, at least, usually the worst of him, Athos is safe.'

Robert Byron enjoyed the curious Byzantine differentness, loved the art, adored the antiquity of Athos; to avoid its food he simply - like Evelyn Waugh, at about the same time visiting monasteries in Egypt and Ethiopia - ensured that he carried his own supplies, preferably from Fortnums, whose manager would share his tours of the store.

Robert, however, was happy enough, after a long day on foot or mule visiting Abbots and haggling with them over manuscripts, to eat what he called a 'good meagre dinner' here. Stavronikita has kept the same atmosphere he witnessed in 1839:

The monastery is in very good order, clean and well kept; and I had a comfortable frugal dinner there with some of the old monks, who seemed a cheerful and a contented set.

Now, many of the monks are young.

There is something wonderful about being read to by a man in a pulpit whilst one sits eating in silence oneself. The Abbot had the light behind him as he sat alone: his click at the table began the meal, and he drew it to a close pretty snappily: half an hour all told, and perhaps less. The tables, with their bench seats, were beautifully laid: napkin, spoon, fork, knife. A piece of bread for each. A dish of olives, an onion in its skin, and a clove of garlic; a vegetable mess of okra; an exquisite garlic and potato mess; water; a lemon.

I had met a young monk who spoke English. He was an Australian, had popping eyes, and a slightly dotty look which conveyed perpetual surprise. 'The Orthodox has ikons, and candles, and murals so that he can learn from them: everything symbolizes some aspect of his faith. Our whole life here is praying, the mysteries of the church, the work, and a little reading, perhaps. We grow spiritually from these things,

there's a oneness through them all, a unity which helps one feel the peace and the love of God. Here, we begin our day at about midnight, an hour before the services begin.'

He told me about the Jesus Prayer which was the traditional watchword of eastern monasticism, and which has been the rallying cry of the new revival, of which this young Australian is a part. 'One collects one's whole being around these words, it's a link with God. We believe that we can understand ourselves, God, the world, through prayer, and in a very practical way. To an Orthodox, experience is everything: a theologian is one who knows how to pray.

'There have been periods in recent history when the Church

had become overly influenced by the west, and had perhaps lost some of its ancient confidence in its spirituality. It had begun to read a bit too much, and to pray too little".

This was the time, after supper, when everyone gathers on the terrace between the monastery and the garden, to discuss God, and gossip a spell.

There was a priggish sort of a young Greek, wearing awesomely smart casual clothes: sharp grey trousers, an immaculate blazer, a neatly draped scarf. He was a classic of what I think is a genre in religious circles (certainly I saw enough of them): what one uncharitably came to recognize as a monastic groupie. A Holy Joe. At least, so one could not help imagining. He would engage this or that monk in earnest conversation, or go wandering off with his books under his arm. A spiritual swot. Then there was the restaurant owner over from Athens, who had come here every year in Holy Week to get his soul into some sort of order. Two youngsters are chatting with the guestmaster. The monastic horse chomps away on a gentle incline.

7

Xeropotamou

The Australian was just the first to stress to me that the Athonite way was very particular. It had its own immense weight of tradition. It had spawned no runaway offshoots, as all the great western Orders had. Not that the peninsular's history has been all God and glory. Early on there were constant rows between the hermits and the community monks, as to which tradition was the trtier and which should dominate the government of Athos. The monasteries won, but have often had to accept that it is the hermits who drive the spirituality of the place.

The hermitage is a better forcing house of spiritual heroism than the inherently more comfortable coenobium.

There have been periods of oppression, notably from the Christian west in the wake of the Fourth Crusade's atrocity at Constantinople (when the crusaders, weary of waiting to tackle the infidel, plundered the capital of the Christian world instead) and the subsequent division of Byzantium's spoils. There was the Byzantine emperor who sought to unite west and east again and was prepared, as legend has it, to beat Athos into conformity with his views (he failed).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the monks on Athos joined their Greek compatriots in rising against the Turkish master: but actually Turkey had treated Athos more kindly than anyone, and rather reluctantly imposed a Turkish army on the peninsular - to the crippling charge of the monks - as watchdogs. The monks themselves were of different nationalities, and spent a good deal of energy away from worship, in more or less squalid power politics. In particular, Russian and Greek Orthodox angled for superiority in the councils.

But monasticism here is just as subject to change as anywhere else in one sense: its numbers may rise and fall. Seven thousand all told looks to be about the highest population Athos ever held, in the late nineteenth century, when the Russians 'packed' the place to ensure the triumph of their national interest. Otherwise, nearer four thousand seems to have been the normal population for most of the previous centuries, apart from times of persecution, when it was lower.

In the early 1980s there were around three thousand monks, itself a significant rise over the figures for the post-war period, when the Holy Mountain's tradition must have seemed perilously close to extinction. In 19I3, there were about six and a half thousand monks, but that figure was halved by 1943, and the population was halved again to 1, 145 by 1971. In 1972 the total population increased by one for the first time since the ' war. And then at Stavronikita, where the situation looked desperate, there arrived a new Abbot, Father Vasileios, and four or five of his disciples.

The process was in the best traditions of the Fathers and the Holy Mountain. Vasileios had been a charismatic hermit, and now took command, with his geronda (elder, or spiritual adviser) settled nearby. But in one way he was a thoroughly modern Athonite: he had studied theology in Athens and Lyons. By 1979, there were twenty-two monks and three novices at Stavronikita: but it had come perilously close to going under before its recent and continuing renaissance.

Meanwhile, at Philotheou in 1968 there were seventeen older monks, and a revival was clearly very necessary. At hand, there was an illiterate senior monk, Joseph 'The Caveman': a dedicated man, he had been a strict adherent to the Jesus Prayer, and taught its method to his synodia of disciples, amongst whom was Ephraim (to become, 'The Senior'), who was his spiritual son (each orthodox monk seeks an older man as his spiritual adviser).

Joseph was a loner, and only late in his life settled in a skete and allowed a more formal monastic household to form around him. On his death, in 1959, all his disciples were themselves regarded as elders, and it is this group which became the motivators of a revival of both numbers and prayerfulness on much of the mountain. For a while they colonized a famous skete, the Provata, whence, when the call went out to revive the monastery of Philotheou, Ephraim Senior in 1973 set out and took the population there immediately to twenty-four.

By the late seventies there were eighty monks gathered round Ephraim Senior at Philotheou, and it was the most famously vibrant and busily prayerful place on the Holy Mountain. In 1979, thirteen monks were sent to Constamonitou; in 1980, twenty monks went to Xeropatamou (under the leadership of Ephraim Junior); and in 1983 twelve went to Karakalou.

One of the spiritual sons of Father Joseph was Father Haralambos, who became abbot of Dionysiou in 1978.

The problem seems to have been that until the reinvigoration by the present generation of youngsters - they are now in their mid-thirties, 'forties and 'fifties - the last remaining monks of Athos had become elderly and lax. Many of them had adopted the idiorhythmic form of monastic life, which seems to have become symptomatic of a certain laxity of observance which is whispered about now in regretful undertones, more hinted at than explained.

The conditions upon which the younger men agreed to rescue the old monasteries were absolute: yes, they would come, and take over the monasteries, but they insisted on a return to the old practices of strict monastic observance, fun communal life and property, and a new commitment to the Jesus Prayer. The new wave was composed mostly of educated men: there were engineers, lawyers, and so on, just as in Egypt. But in the midst of their secular education they had developed a taste for the paraduthis of their church.

Perhaps they had come to a realization of the ancient Athonite, Byzantine values by sensing the threat from the west - which may be final - to Greek culture and spirituality.

Anyway, these educated men have a great appetite for the patristic, the anecdotal, the miraculous way of life enshrined in the Jesus Prayer, and scorn - often with the knowledge of knowing it, unlike the illiterates of the past - the analytic and the intellectual.

At Stavronikita, I wandered down to the seashore. Stavronikita is on the east side of the peninsular. It is perched on its own crag of white volcanic rock, and at its feet there are cliffs and ledges which make wonderful scrambling terrain. Walking down there, and seeing the clear gently lapping water, and the notices saying that swimming was forbidden, made one want to shout out to the monks that they should shrug off their ridiculous robes, and swim. But they do not. I wonder if it isn't the tragedy of their way of life that it is so terrified of the trivial - which does not always corrupt.

I should have waited to see the Abbot, but there was promise of a late lunch at Karyes, if I hurried, and I found then and later that I never really did cultivate the attitude that having breakfast, lunch and supper, and a roof over one's head, were unimportant. This made me, I think, fail the crucial tests of monkhood: I could not be indifferent to material needs, present or future.

So the hotel gave me lunch for the second time, and then I walked on. Someone had told me that I should use the old monastic tracks, which visitors to Athos always used to say were one of its great joys. They are narrow pathways, just wide enough for a man or a donkey, and crudely cobbled. They used to be so much used that they were kept clear, and were worth repairing. Since the new spiritual ardents had come, though, they had brought with-it ideas about exploiting the forests of Athos and about getting around. They might get up in the middle of the night and pray their Jesus Prayer, as the Fathers had done; but they didn't think twice about first bulldozing and then wrecking new roads, whilst allowing the paths go to wrack and ruin. Anyway, there was this path in more or less good condition, was told. Weeks of rain had reduced northern Greece to a flood condition, and had brought on the spring flowers. The days I was there, Athos' skies blazed from dawn to dusk, and the bees and insects set-to making up for lost time. The path was soggy, but had held up pretty well.

And so to Xeropotamou, which struck one immediately as a vast, derelict army barracks, whose decay was so entrenched that it was practically defiant and deliberate. I didn't like the look of it, from the start, but got fonder of it when I began to understand the reasons for some of its unfriendliness.

Founded in the late ninth century, almost all the buildings of the vast pile date from within the last three centuries. Following various disasters, especially fires, its monks had had to travel through the kingdoms of the lower Danube raising money: emperors, sultans, kings and patriarchs all contributed to its upkeep, mostly because of its association with a fragment of the True Cross (which Robert Byron says.is thirteen inches long, and which the monks were so anxious to show him that they allowed him to enter the haykel beyond the iconostasis in their church, and be shown it by the officiating priest, who had found time whilst saying Vespers to bring it from the relicry). The fragment of the Cross was always the monastery's strongest fund-raising asset.

Arriving, I heard and then saw a monk on a tractor, catching up with some field work now it was dry. He was rotavating the rich, brown soil. Xeropotamou is inland, though it overlooks the sea. In one corner I found the door, and went through. A notice told me that one should not loiter in the monastery precincts, and not play any sort of game. Inside, there was a vast courtyard, with steps leading to various quarters, and a church, at whose doors was a sign telling visitors that only Orthodox could enter and worship. Another sign was rather ambiguous, but gave the impression that visitors would not be eating in the refectory either. I batteries down the emotional hatches. Clearly, I was not going to receive the vast dinners, almost riotous with wine, with which Robert Byron was regaled (admittedly at festival time, and before late twentieth-century austerities had taken hold). I was stuck with the place, unless I risked going on and arriving dangerously late somewhere else.

But actually, one was allowed in to supper. This place was somehow rather more perfunctory than Stavronikita - as though the soldiery must be fed, but there was less need for pomp - but it was here that I was given a fizzing glass of delicious, giddy-making retsina with supper.

Afterwards, a Greek who was on retreat - some sort of business man - and I smoked a cigarette on a derelict terrace. I seemed to be alone in my part of the guesthouse, and walking back there, I came across the Abbot, Father Ephraim (the junior) and a party of attendant monks. He was a rounded man, with close set blue eyes and a good smile. He carried a silver-topped cane, and seemed to be on some round of inspection of his vast, problematic property. The owner of a country house hotel might have the same sort of problems, and air about him, somehow. Or an occupying general, prioritizing his latest conquest. He smiled briefly and went on his way.

I did not see him again, but left a message that I would like to speak to him if ever he came to London. Six months later we met in the plush, subdued surroundings of an apartment block near the Edgware Road: there, beyond telling me the substance of the recent history of the Holy Mountain, he told me how important it was to recognize that Joseph had been 'a great spiritual Father. He managed to link the traditional mysticism of monasticism with modern monasticism. He led a very intense monastic life, and was able to leave the continuous prayer tradition behind him. He was of course completely illiterate: but very wise. Until Father Joseph, after the first thousand years of monastic life on the Holy Mountain there was a kind of hibernation. There had been a decline, there were no youngsters coming in.'

I asked him how it was that he, who had been brought up in this revived mystical tradition, had accommodated to becoming an Abbot, with the requirement to be a building manager, administrator, disciplinarian, accountant, as well as spiritual leader. When the translator told him this, he smiled enormously and nodded. He was extremely likable at this moment. 'You cannot always do exactly what you want. I did not want

to be in charge of people, didn't want to be elevated or have respect. I certainly didn't aim to be an Abbot. But monasticism is based on obedience; and my own elder told me to take over a monastery; I didn't want to, but I knew I must obey. But then one remembers that one's work is enclosed, enveloped in a spiritual world: that makes one's work easier than one would have thought; one's work becomes a pleasure because anything that is done is done for the love of our Lord.'

I asked him what his monastery lived on. He said that forestry was the major income; and hospitality. Some monasteries have property outside the mountain (though rather little is left after various secular predations). Most monasteries also have enough acreage of vineyard, olive groves and vegetable patch to manage well enough for those products; they buy wheat and rice, though. Those with fishing boats can manage well enough for sea food.

The time came for me to leave. I shook his hand in both of mine. With his free hand he rammed my forehead into the rough, musty cloth of his left shoulder. I took it as a mark of. affection and was delighted: it was a sign of his confidence. I heard that he's dead now, killed in a car accident (5 December 1984). Ephraim Senior is still alive, however.

After our first very brief encounter, I found my way in his barracks, up to a small dark complex of makeshift rooms where I had a bed in a room with several others, all unoccupied. Father Nikon, the guestmaster, came to my room, and we talked a bit. He gave me some things in English which he thought might help me. He told me that the injunction against worshippers who were not Orthodox being allowed into the church was regretted but necessary. The Byzantine Church does not formally allow the faithless to pray in their churches, and this monastery loved the church and wanted to obey its rules. 'When the rule changes,' he said, 'it will be with great gladness that we allow everyone to come and join us in prayer.' Until then, if other monasteries wanted to break the rules, that was their business.

I asked him if he ever doubted his vocation and the faith itself. 'The doubts are for younger monks one of the great weapons of the Evil One - but everyone very soon can see that the doubt has not a place in his life. When one finds he cannot be a monk, he can return to the world, but if he can stay, the doubts will vanish. There is a God who guides a man's steps here. It is not by chance that such a thing happens. But that does not mean that the demons give in easily.'

He was a student of chemistry who went on to economics, political science, theology. 'But here I started from the alphabet, so to speak. As does everyone.' And then - this was about eight o'clock - he said he must go because in four hours he would be getting up to pray for four hours before the service, which would itself last four hours.

That would get him to about eight in the morning, and still with twelve hours' work to do. This breed of youngsters do not take the business of God's work lightly.

I washed as best I could, bearing in mind the injunction on a piece of paper I had seen, which told me that I must not be completely naked, even in the bathroom. I was not sure whether this meant that I should not be naked, in the dark, alone in the enormous wing of a sleeping monastery, but I took no chances and washed my top bits first, before redressing and then taking on the lower regions.

Propped up in bed, I read the roneo-ed sheets which Nikon had given me. It was a 'Discourse' by Father Ephraim Junior, a rich testament to the continuing strength of the patristic mentality: it is an account of the father's bout with demons which happened 'last night', whilst he was visiting some monks away from his own monastery:

'Just as we read about them in books, that they are entities and assume some kind of form, I beheld them exactly like that: dark, with their tails, their horns, their glaring eyes thus wide-open, and we desperately went for each other tooth and claw, man to man.' Luckily, I had no such problems, and enjoyed a good sleep, as usual. And then, early next day, so as not to importune the monks with 'purposeless wandering inside their buildings',, specifically forbidden, I walked down to Daphne. It took around an hour and a quarter. There an old man, a burly vagrant, hovered around me expectantly, like the seagulls who flapped bossily at each other as they swooped down to take offal from a fishing boat. I opened a packet of cigarettes -,. lovely Greek ones, packed like old Du Maurier, in a lift-up lid pack - and he hovered a bit closer, establishing a proximity in which flight and plunder were rubbing shoulders. I gave myself a cigarette and, determined for the nth time that this would be my last, then gave him the rest of the packet. I drank a coffee, smoked my cigarette, felt at one with the world, and enjoyed the sun on my back and the small goings on at the cafe as it prepared itself for lunch and the day. Finding I wanted another cigarette, I surprised and disconcerted the old man by going back to him and begging my gift back from him. He thought I wanted the whole packet, and was probably mightily relieved when he found I did not.

Who were these laymen who ran the shops, hotel and cafe? A monk later told me some of them were ex-monks, peculiar men who could not bear to be monks and could not bear to leave Athos either. It was a comprehensible dilemma, and they surmounted it by serving the material needs of this place, in which worldly and unworldly seemed both to be very seriously encountered.

And then to my feet, for the road along to Simonos Petra. It was a delicious trek, high above the coastline, towards Mount Athos, and sometimes winding well inland to get around deeply engrained valleys with small thundering streams and cascades at their heart. At one point, a stream had done what all Athonite streams dream of doing: it had succeeded in bursting across the track. I slithered and hopped from stone to stone across the minor crisis, dreading dropping into the water and arriving with my notes, camera, clothes sopping.

At another spot, one went across using a makeshift bridge. But finally, after an hour and three-quarters, spent amongst wild flowers, I came in view of Simonos Petra. It required a quarter of an hour of solid staring to allow the place to exert itself properly on the mind's eye.

It is big, old and high. It rises out of the rocky pinnacle beneath it like a medieval castle which thinks it is a storm cloud. The path winds inland, away from the sea, before it can lead to the monastery itself. The crag turns out to be a kind of aerial peninsular. One passes an old house, a small chapel, and the outlying sketes which ascend the sio pes up and behind the monastery. And then along a kind of causeway with a beautiful derelict house on the right, its roof timbers exposed like the veins of a leaf, and an aqueduct on the left. A fire engine which used to work in Thessalonika stands, gleaming and sentinel, at the beginning of the

causeway.

Now the monastery rises above one. A gantry with a gleaming hoist-gear hangs out over the entrance.

This is a fourteenth-century foundation: the hermit Simon is supposed to have had a vision in which building a monastery on this impossible crag was commanded him. His followers mostly wanted to help, but some lost heart and wanted to leave during the building. Simon sent his servant, Isaiah, to them with a tray of restorative drinks, but he stumbled and fell over the. side of the rock. A minute or so later, he floated back up, with the drinks intact, unspilled. The recalcitrant brothers laboured on.

The monastery suffered terribly in sixteenth- and nineteenth-century fires.

A door leads in to shallow stairs which ascend to a courtyard. I went in and found myself sitting on a stone bench amongst the berry-stained droppings, like spilled blackberry yoghurt, of a nesting bird above my head. In the church, there was the murmuring of a service. I wandered around a little, and came across a balcony on which I dare not step, for fear both of trespass and its seeming insecurity. A monk went by, humming, and nodded. It was close to noon. An old man in several baggy V-necked sweaters and exquisite, battered velveteen trousers, and a distinguished desperate old overcoat, arrived briefly in the courtyard and then, as abruptly, left. Eventually, I was shown to the guest rooms, inside the Monastery. In a dim, beautiful hall with windows which looked out over the sea, I sat amongst mostly religious pictures and was given my little snack of welcome by the guestmaster.

He lisped and whispered and smiled. He conveyed, I am sure wholly without contrivance, a joyfulness which was exquisite.

When the monks had finished their service we all hung about in the courtyard, waiting to go in to lunch room, and we trooped in together to eat our lentils and pepper stew, with olives and apples and water. Before lunch two elderly men had come puffing up the hill from the monastic port and citadel, towards the monastery. A boat must just have delivered them there. They were massively out of breath, and wore handkerchiefs knotted around their necks. They produced towels and mopped themselves down, trying to flatten and organize the stray wisps of hair which were scattered across their flushed pates. Now they reappeared, smartly dressed in tweed jackets.

I had been told there was an Englishman at Simonos Petra. and I asked if I could speak with him.

8

Simonos Petra

We met on the main balcony of the monastery. It was the topmost of the four storeys on this part of the building (others boast seven storeys). I never did learn to lean on the balcony's taffrail, but down below one could see monks working in the terraced gardens.

Father Isaiah was tall and whiskery. He did not seem, at first, particularly English. He spoke the language in a way which was slightly archaic, as though drenched in Greek idiom, in what seemed a self-conscious or at any rate deliberate, expatriate way. He had been a monk on Athos since 1972. 'I first came as a layman. I was already an Orthodox, and I wanted to find a deeper vision. It made me become yet more Orthodox! Before I set out, I had read all the literature. From being a Byzantinologist, I became a Byzantine.

'That which marks the whole strength of the Byzantine way is the rhythm of the liturgical life, and it was always so. Everyone, from the emperor down, was involved in it. But the Byzantine style is the superficial side of life on Athos. The Paradosis is very important. This is a matter of tradition.

'But tradition is not just lineal, from one generation to the next,, it is a style of life, that which gives the lifestyle a maturing of the Holy Spirit at each point in history. My life here has become bound up with the place, with this monastery, with this spiritual family; the people amongst whom I live have become much more my family even than the family of the flesh.

'This life takes many people from many conditions, people of many different types. It's a bit like making bread: it takes a lot of ingredients. And it takes perhaps even the kneading process, and sweat and toil and patience. But it's not hard, really. I fact it's extremely easy if that which you are looking for is the monastic life; it would be impossibly difficult if you came here looking for what isn't here.

'People make very few mistakes of vocation. It doesn't happen. Firstly, it's not a question of just turning up and, signing on the dotted line: there is quite a long process before a man must make up his mind finally. It had above all to be their disposition to be in a spiritual family, and this spiritual family. You can't have someone who has his own plans.

'Of course there may be periods when a man asks himself doubtfully why he's here. But these thoughts are the product of a spiritual malaise, of negligence: they are more likely to come if there is a lax regime, which might make him lose his sense of purpose. A man comes here to make a renunciation of himself, and to fill himself up with God. That's of what the tonsure - which a man may take here after three years of stable life - is a seal. A man is God's after that. There is a pact between a monk and God. God pays the price and we make on our side a contribution of one tenth of one per cent.'

'I suppose I have a philosophical disposition, and enjoy history. But having an intellectual faculty is not to be made much of. There are very simple people here, and they five extremely well our simple style of life. There is perhaps a difference in the spiritual geography of the world. Somebody who is of the east is very much more concerned with the next life: even in Islam and the other ancient religions of the east, for instance, there's a great stress on it.

'As for the Orthodox monk, one simply makes and receives a gift of pure love: you give yourself over to God. Yes, of course it's true that God has no need of monks, or of creation, come to that. In order to be known, he creates. The act of creating is an act of love, and particularly there is an act of love in the making of man, since man is made in the image of God. So worshipping God is something to do with all your life: worship should be a criterion of all things in life, then vou are putting the stress in the right place.

'And this is how a monk has his usefulness. What could be more useful to the community than the worship of God? The monk is a hidden force for the Church. The Orthodox Church, not directly perhaps, but indirectly, relies very much on Athos. Here you have the prototype, the maximal style of life. This place of pilgrimage, tranquillity and traditional worship which has not changed over the millennium - is a place where you become healthy so that society around one, which is not healthy, can become healthy through you.

'This brotherhood of monks is a cell of the church. Everyone here is vital. One man works in the woodmill, others garden, clean, cook. People undertake various functions. But every voice that has breath is concerned to praise the Lord. This year, I am the typist, but I've been the guestmaster, I've helped make bread and helped in the kitchen.

'This is a very vigorous generation of monks. The Abbot himself has an extraordinary talent for administration, and yet at the same time he lives intensely the life of silence. He has an enormously strong mystical life. He studied law before he studied theology. One is astonished by his acuity. He has a legal precision: sometimes he makes me do and redo the same document, until it's just right.

'The revival here really started around ten years ago, and I suppose the monks who began it are having to change. We're no longer children, we're a little more stable. It's more interesting now that the pioneer work has been done, and we're having to settle down rather more. We were taking over from a generation who did not really know the value of what they had. They had allowed a style of community life which was rather lax; the younger men wanted more tension about it. Perhaps the previous period had been as it was because there were no great spiritual leaders here.

'Once there were spiritual leaders on Athos again, vigorous young men were attracted to the life. Some of them are very practical indeed. When it was decided that we must have the fire engine, there was enormous excitement about it: people were rushing off in it, and finding out how it works, as of some wonderful new toy.'

We talked about the peculiar status of the Orthodox Church in western minds. 'I think that the Roman Catholics really were a bit snooty for a time. And there was Gibbon, really rather,,, tiresome, who did not do much to make the western world think highly of the east.' And about how the Church, which had been so much of the Empire, and which remained much loved by many people in the east, had its headquarters in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in a Muslim country, Turkey.

That, as Father Isaiah says, 'is where it was put, and there it stays. It is the church of Constantinople. It is full of meaning that the first amongst the church's bishops occupies his throne as a seat of spiritual judgement, not at all of domination and power - it isn't even in Greece, where many of his adherents are. It shows the poverty of the Cross, and it allows a stronger mission to the poor, and those who suffer, the halt, the blind and the deaf. The Church is not seeking advantage. The present Patriarch, I should say, is characterized by extreme openness and extreme cordiality; he is very dignified, in that dignity of the human.'

If the church was put in Constantinople and now stays there, amongst the alien corn, so does this English monk who has not so much lost his Englishness that he cannot do a wonderful imitation of the late Richard Crossman. 'I feel no reason really to chase around. A year has gone by, I think, and I haven't left the walls of this place. Oh, perhaps I've gone a couple of bends along the track - that's all. But I have no feeling of being isolated. Therei s an adequate vision here, especially for what is spiritually important. I'm not particularly interested in war and rumours of war.'

The footwear of monks becomes an obsessive interest, being the one part of them which displays their temperament most perfectly. That night I noticed one fat old monk with his feet in slippers which were themselves enclosed in slippers. He enjoyed cracking his knuckles very much, and sometimes in church his stomach would emit a vast subterranean growl. After the meal we all filed out, and the monks whose job it had been to serve us would make a sort of doorway of their bows, whilst the Abbot raised his hand in blessing at us as we passed him.

Before I went to bed, I came across the guestmaster fretting over a schoolmaster who wanted to fast, and he laughed a great laugh at the exquisite lengths his guests would go to worship, amuse and delight their maker: he did his inadequate best to suppress his own mirth with his hand. A young Asian boy was visiting; he was always busy in his room writing, and said that he was staying there for some time. I think he was trying to test his vocation. One man asked me to wake him that night in time for the service at four in the morning. We all went to bed, I in a dormitory with four young Greeks, without much gratitude for the company, though without much minding it either. They were a somnolent crew, and I had nothing better to do than go immediately into a deep sleep.

The next morning, I saw the tall Englishman in his stall, at four o'clock. As each monk came in to the service, through the main door at the back, past us outsiders, he would kiss an ikon, blowing goldfish pouts at it, and then make a cross which swept right down to the floor. The liturgy passes majestically and easily; even with nothing to do but listen, I seldom went to sleep, but often found myself in a dream state, which I enjoyed a good deal.

I found the guestmaster in a most tremendous state of pleasure after church: he had been with a group of visitors on the balcony: 'We were listening to the birdies', he said. I had to get down to the port to catch a fishing boat which would be coming round the point and would take me to Daphne and the homeward ferry. 'Oh, but I wanted to offer you a coffee,' said the guestmaster, 'you have time.'With this sweetness, and at considerable strain to their patience, the sixty monks at Simonos Petra receive between three and four thousand visitors each year.

I walked down to the shore: a steep path, from which one could always turn and see the vast pile behind. The micro-port of Simonos Petra is perfect (a stone pier, citadel and a boathouse), and made one long to plunge into its clear waters. Right on time, a small boat with flush decks busied itself round the point, and paused beside the quay long enough to drop off a new visitor, and take me on board.

The various pilgrims stood or sat and caught up with each other's news. The Athos experience is a curious mixture of pilgrimage and ramble, and you feel a bogus familiarity with all those who arrived on the same boat, will probably leave together four days later, and whom you meet on the road Between monasteries, or in their guesthouses. One man seemed particularly Athonite, as far as a visitor Could. He was a tall man, and was clearly showing his much smaller companion around. He was an impressive type, in the Anthony Quayle mould. He wore a baseball cap embroidered with "USS Intrepid', Nike shoes, Casio watch, and the Komboskini - a beaded black cotton wrist band - which many Orthodox, monks or not, sport. (It is not to be confused with worry beads, which do not have religious significance.) The boat was as usual full, especially this day just before Easter, with people carrying things, especially candies, they had bought on Athos for their local church's festivities. It was a very Athonite boatload: heaped with talismans from the modem and ancient, Christian and lay worlds.

Part IV

WESTERN EUROPE

"One night one of the monks watched him creep out then followed him stealthily to see where he was going and what he was about. Down he went towards the beach beneath the monastery and out into the sea until he was up to his arms and neck in deep water. The splash of the waves accompanied his vigil throughout the dark hours of the night. At daybreak he came out, knelt down on the sand, and prayed. Then two otters bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur. They finished, received his blessing, and slipped back to their watery home. He was soon home and was in choir at the proper time with the rest of the monks. But the brother who had spied on him from the cliffs returned with faltering steps, fear-stricken and distressed. He prostrated himself before Cuthbert and, in tears, craved pardon for his stupidity and presumption, quite sure that Cuthbert knew the cause of his discomfort.

'Why, what is wrong, what have you done?' asked the saint. 'Have you been spying on my night's work? I will forgive you, but only if you promise not to tell anyone while I am still alive.'

The Age of Bede, edited by D. H. Farmer, translated by J. F. Webb, Penguin Books

1

TheVirus Spreads

Cannes is an implacable sort of place. The sun shines down hard there, and bronzes those who can keep paying to lie in it, and mocks very hard those who can't, but who only pretend to be able to. There are, naturally, most of the world's vanities there: some of them are very handsome, like the great yachts which are moored in the harbour being burnished by the paid hands; and some of them less so, like the old women who creak about the place, held together by hair lacquer and propelled forward by their horrid little poodles.

There is just the faintest remnant of an old Cannes, before it became a nineteenth-century mecca. In the castle, up above the town, there are old paintings of the place: palms and fishing boats and deserted hills around (where now there are heaped villas), and sailing boats with immensely tall masts, hovering in the foreground. An almost moorish scene, more Moroccan than French: marking the closeness of the place to North Africa.

There remains an old harbour, where there are a few working boats. Amongst them, ferries which take visitors out to the Isles des Lerins, which were famous when Cannes was unknown. On the smaller of the two islands, St Honorat, there was the second monastery in France (after that of Martin of Tours at Ligugd), and one of the earliest in all Europe. Yet, in its mingling of eastern and western traditions, it takes its place as a leading symbol of how complicated the progress of the monastic virus was.

The man at the quayside was surly and plump and sleek.

Yes, there might be a boat today. Yes, there was a timetable. No, the boat was not guaranteed. Come back at eleven and there might be a boat, he didn't know. And didn't care. The boat did go: and a monk, returning to the monastery which' has endured there for the most part of fifteen and a hall centuries, and a full load of tourists were gently tossed to and fro in surprisingly rough seas. The monk was large, solid and uninterested in his fellow travellers: he read some holy book throughout, whilst a young man - a potential novice? - Sat still at his side.

The Mistral was playing up. No one could say how hard it would blow, or when it would stop. It had been blowing for a few days now. If you had committed a crime in Provence on such a day, it is likely the judge would take a fight view of it. Anything can happen to people on the C6te d'Azur when that steady, hard wind comes to derange their lives.

The boat ploughed round the headland of St Marguerte the bigger of the two heath-and-pine islands - and settled itself beside a jetty in St Honorat. The skipper told everyone to be back in a couple of hours, since there would be no more boats that day.

He told me that there might be a boat tomorrow, or there might not. It was the nearest to uncertainty and tricky travelling I had come across in my monastic joumeyings.

The island historically attracted others than monks: raiders from Spain and elsewhere, as well as Corsican pirates, plagued the monks, and led them to build the extraordinary fortress monastery which still stands, perched on rocks which poke out into the south side of the island. Blinding beige stones, set to build a square tower, topped with creneflations. A path leads up to a small door. But inside, everything is radically different. More obviously a skeleton of a building: but the internal bones are clearly and wonderfully monastic. True, the cloister is tiny, but then it is constrained by having to cling to the inside of a fort.

The building has several floors. There is the cloister, with romanesque arches: it makes a square walkway inside, and a couple of storeys high. There are chapels, a refectory, a scriptorium, all of whose shapes are dictated by the fortress they all turn inward. But the monastery has had confines, and problems in the recent past, too. The French authorities suppressed most monasteries during and after the revolution,

Lerins amongst them.

Only in the last century were the monks invited back. This time, Lerins was colonized from one of the oldest monasteries in Provence, Senanque, which with Le Thoronet (which has become a Cistercian nunnery) makes up an important part of the Cistercian architectural tradition of the purpose-built, often small, prayer house.

A new monastery was built. It is a pretty place, somehow as I imagine a Roman palace might have been. The church is a little taller than is usual with Cistercian buildings, but it has the same simplicity. The guests in the retreat have their own cloister, set in three sides of a rectangle, the church in one corner, with six large palms providing shade for the stone garden furniture where one can sit and brood

One end of the cloister connects with a door into the church. The garden side of the cloister has romanesque arches. The overall effect is not exactly grand, but somehow statuesque and friendly. I was shown a room - gloomy and useful looking and the refectory for the guests. The other retreatants were an oddly assorted crew. A young couple who were absurdly handsome, and in love, used the place in the manner of prosperous youth hostellers; a devout-looking lady with many little prayer books, who looked as though she might just have lost a devoted and rich husband and had come here to regain her composure. A skinny youth with a thin neck which disappeared into a head which was no wider, and who had a dank air of sanctity about him. He had long legs, but somehow slid about, as though walking full stretch might be obscene.

People did not seem to hang about the monastery. It was so beautiful outside that they milled around the immediate clearing in the pine woods, or went for walks by the beach, where one or two tourists had found places sheltered from the wind, and out of the likely view of passing monks, and laid their profane brown bodies down amongst the pebbles.

A hundred yards away, members of this rather young community might be out in the fields, looking al lavender bushes which provide the bees with nectar for the famous monastic honey.

Father Giles, a man who had been studying philosophy when he felt drawn to the religious life, took me for a walk in the monastic fields one afternoon.

There was a distillery, with strange rusting equipment standing in the courtyard - ready enough, though, for its arcane work when the season came - and we came across a party of men, some in dungarees and some still in working habits, working amongst vines.

The place was very vigorous. Giles told me there were thirty-nine monks, seven of whom had arrived in the same year, during a period of revival. He himself had been a field-worker for four or five years, then in he guesthouse for four' years, and had then gone to Rome for three years to study theology.

The Cistercians here are called Cisterdans of the Common Observance: they are meat-eaters, were never quite as silent as the Strict Observance (Trappists, as they are usually called, though they hate the term). They rise a little later than ffle Strict Observers. Certainly, we ate rather well in their refectory, and I also found I had great difficulty with the red wine bottle which was left on the table for all-comers.

My memory of the liturgy at Lerins is affectionate. It began with the thrum and rumble of the bell-rope echoing in the vaults as latecomers were called. The singing in church was strong, amongst the many candles for Vespers; it seemed to carry something of the field work into the church with it. It seemed thoroughly of a piece with the wind-swept palm outside, and the lavender and honey. The seriousness of the Cistercian way of life - prayer, work, concentration, all vigilant and muscular - seemed strong here, even if they were monks of the 'common' observance.

It was not difficult to see how this place must have seemed in the year 400 (or maybe a little later) when Honoratus first came here. Then aged about thirty-five Honoratus was a Gaul (perhaps from Burgundy), and was - as almost all monastic founders were - of aristocratic background. He probably had met the monks of Egypt, and read Athanasius'Life of St Antony. His brother died in his arms, probably in Egypt, and ettle for the solitary life. He did so at Honoratus determined to

to settle for the solitary life. It was a time when the last vestiges of the Roman Empire's order were being swept away. The Goths sacked Rome (410) about this time. it was a good period for Christians - as Augustine reminded them in his The City of God - to bear in mind the transitoriness of earthly life and to concentrate on the one to come.

In accepting the Egyptian monasticism (rather than the monasticism which was emerging under Basil, with its n work, the wider community, and even good emphasis on work, the wider community, and even good works), Honoratus was bringing to the west the penitential, world-hating, alienated form of monastic life. One early visitor came away thinking these monks strange, scruffy and squalid. That may have been his prejudice, or inaccurate reporting: we can hardly know.

What is sure is that the eastern, ascetic, penitential monks of Lerins were immensely charismatic, and intelligent and educated men were soon visiting and staying amongst them. John Cassian, from Scythia, was a thoroughly desert monk, having immersed himself in the Egyptian and Palestinian traditions for years. But he was also a friend of the great: John Chrysostom and Pope Leo the Great, in Constantinople and Rome, had taught him. He was steeped in the theology of Origen and the prayerful discipline of Evagrius.

His Conferences and Institutes, accounts of the Egyptian monks and prescriptions for following their life, were delivered to the monks of Lerins and other monasteries in Provence, around 415 and in the following years. But Cassian's education shone through his fervour: he was a moderating influence, disliking superstition and what Henry Chadwick caus'miracle mongering'.

Not that this sort of moderation would do for another mysterious island territory to which monks and their fervour, would bring distinction and dissension.

2

The Northern isles

It used to be believed that the great St Patrick (c390-461?) himself had visited Lerins, and studied there: anywav, he seems to have learned about eastern monasticism somewhere in Gaul. He was a Briton who had been captured by Irish slave traders and made to work in Ireland: he had somehow escaped, or been freed, and then made his way to Gaul, perhaps to Auxerre or Lerins. Determined to bring Christianity to Ireland, he encouraged the budding of monasteries.

Early in the sixth century Christian monastery fever hit Ireland, in the same kind of way, and in much the same image, as it had taken Egypt by storm. There is no easy explanation for the way the religiosity of the desert so suited the people of the mists: perhaps there is something in the idea that both had been at the fringe of the glittering, proud Roman Empire.

Ireland was never part of it, and Egypt was never central to it. Both may have felt themselves somewhat the back of beyond: condemned to be outlandish, they might as well be extremist. Hugh Trevor Roper puts forward the view that fringe cultures may take on the religion of their powerful neighbours, but always in a dissident form.

There is also the possibility that the earlier pagan religions encouraged communities and groups, and that the pagan leaders had been great teachers. The earliest monastic settlements were centres of hugger-mugger erudition.

There was a good deal of toing and froing between the Ireland of the sixth century and the Mediterranean. Egyptian monks have told me that they believe some of the earliest Egyptian saints journeyed to Ireland in person. News doubtless filtered back to Ireland of the way real, authentic Christians lived, especially in their monasteries. Moreover, the Irish had trade contact with the valley of the Loire, itself a monastic centre under Martin of Tours and his followers and successors, and also, early on at least, prone to Egyptian severity.

In Ireland, the idea seemed to have caught on very powerfully, though with the interesting innovation that monasticism seems to have become tribal in that country. A chieftain would convert his entire family into some sort of monastic way of life. The Irish computed Easter's date as the Byzantines did, they wore Byzantine tonsures, and their ideas about what was beautiful to look at incorporated much that was Byzantine, and Coptic, too.

Elsewhere in mainland Europe, men were developing a more gentle sort of monasticism. Soon the two styles - one owing allegiance to what it believed to be its Gospel and patristic roots, the other beginning to be associated with the Roman Papacy - would be in bitter conflict.

These early Celtic monastic settlements were characteristically composed of a central church surrounded by 'beehive' stone huts or cells, all surrounded by a wall. They especially favoured small islands: islands on Loch Lome or in the sea proper at the Skerries. At Skellig Michael, on the coast of south-western Ireland, there are ruins of six stone beehive cells, and three small churches, all perched on a rock seven hundred feet tall, seven miles out in the Atlantic.

In the middle of the sixth century, St Brendan, not content with founding monasteries in Ireland, set off on a voyage to further shores. In the account of it which was written, or which at any rate surfaced, somewhat later, he describes volcanoes, making camp on a whale's back by mistake, and plenty of other adventures undertaken for the glory of God. In reality, it seems at least possible if not downright likely that he brought the Word to the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland and Newfoundland.

Amongst the greatest of the founders was St Columba (c521-597), who founded famous mainland Irish monasteries at Derry and Durrow.

It was entirely natural that when Columba (yet another princely figure) found Ireland uncongenial (he had had a row with his mentor, Finnian) he took himself off on a mission to the island Picts of Iona and Mull, and that the core of the enterprise would be, in 563, the setting up of a monastery on the island of Iona, which would be as famous as that on the Ile de St Honorat.

We have the basis of much of the monastic way already here: rows and controversy between these men of the cloth and the book; much travelling by men who set up monasteries. And a particularly Irish dimension, too: the way that setting up monasteries and evangelizing, proselytizing, politicking and occasional outright bullying and butchery all went together. These were not the sort of men who could keep the good news to themselves, nor easily accept the fact when pagans chose not to take the good news to their bosoms.

Columba crowned a convenient local king, and laid down concordats with another a little further away in Inverness.

He was famous for blessing everything in sight - the direction of the wind, the n-Wk from the cows on its way in buckets to his community - and for plunging into days of prayer and fasting. But holy man that he was, he is also believed to have led his monks into bloody hand-to-hand fighting against rival monks on at least three occasions. If Christianity was to make headway in Scotland, it needed men like this.

Doubtless, Iona was as peculiar a mixture as any of the others: great learning and great austerity, both conducted in places which were almost certainly desperately cold, draughty and wet, by men whose taste for fasting was probably well-matched with the difficulty of getting food. The men of the sand and sun in the Middle East would have understood something of these characters and institutions, though the wet and cold and granite might have struck them as very bizarre.

In such places men were learning to read and write the Latin language, and reading the patristic literature in it. Columba's row with Finnian was supposed to have been over which of them had the right to copy a manuscript of the Psalms. We already have glimmerings, amongst the vigour of mission, of the dedication to the Word which would summon forth the most extravagant and eccentric efforts of artistic and literary creation ever to come out of these northerly latitudes. Culture was being grafted on to courage.

The year that Columba died, St Augustine (died c604) was sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great. He had been sent to spread Roman Catholicism (not that it was called that yet) amongst the pagans. Just as importantly, he would be planting Roman monasteries wherever he could. The race was on, though no one would have accepted these terms, to decide whether Britain should be a frontier land with penitential religion, or become a part of Europe with the kind of monasticism which would grow with the institutions of the state and economy, rather than be perpetually opposed to the ways of the world. Was it to be a local and parochial affair, or imperial?

Augustine was very successful in the south of the country, though his mission faltered momentarily after his death. But shortly afterward, in the seemingly endless battles amongst small kingdoms and their royal families, much of the north of England fell under a family whose members were briefly persuaded to be not merely Christian, but Romish. However, their fortunes violently waned, and in 634 the second son of an earlier king emerged from the monastery of Iona, where he had been in exile, to reunite much of Northumbria. He was a northerner, and had fallen under the spell of Celtic Christianity.

When this new hero, Oswald, wanted to proceed with the unenviable task of weaning his subjects from paganism, it was natural that he should turn to Iona for missionaries.

The first man the Ionians sent was, apparently, too severe and grand to win people over to the new faith, whose milky kindness might be more calculated to attract the indifferent than the hell fire which backed up the resolve of potential backsliders.

The failed missionary went back to Iona, and Bede - a Romish historian, and not above a bit of hagiography for all that he is eulogized as the founding father of English history was delighted to be able to note that the next Iona monk to take on the Northumbrians was St Aidan.

Aidan chose as his base an island which was conveniently close to the chief citadel of the kingdom, at Bamborough, and to the royal villa at Yeavering. He even chose one which was, at least for twice a day, connected to the shore.

In his twice-daily island, Aidan established a school where many monastic founders and future bishops (including the invaluable St Chad, who founded Lichfield Cathedral) would be taught. Indeed there was a brief period when it looked as though Lindisfarne - especially after Aidan's death, and during the period of the aggressive Finan's abbacy and episcopacy of Lindisfarne - might make itself felt right through the British mainland with its Celtish ways.

Some of the monks were pretty tough with the royalty they came into contact with, and were generally highly regarded when they were so. One or two refused to eat with kings, and one made a king approach him on bended knee before he forgave his sins. The Celtic Abbots were extremely assertive: they alienated the rest of the Church by presuming their superiority over common or garden Bishops (this was one of the reasons for their downfall: they made too many enemies).

Not that the exclusivity of these monkly islands, or their deliberate unworldliness, made them despise the body politic. The early monks, as we have seen, were led by princely men, and whether in Egypt or here in the north, right from the start the monks were often in cahoots with the temporal rulers in their countries. In the end, it would have been impossible unless they were to live as guerrillas - for them to have been and done otherwise.

But the issue as to whether the Celtic or the Roman Easter date should be kept was coming to the surface. The Northern royal family was itself divided. One of Aidan's greatest protegées, the royal Princess and abbess, Hilda, at her monastery for men and women at Whitby, was particularly well placed to stage the debate that the king desired.

In 665, the issue was debated by the gentle old Abbot of Lindisfarne, Colman, and a one-time Lindisfarne monk, Wilfred, who had been travelling in Caul and Italy and was scornful of the primitive ways of the old Irish and Celts. He won the day for Rome in an almost unseemly triumph.

'Although your Fathers were holy men, do you imagine that they, a few men in a corner of a remote island, are to be preferred before the Universal Church of Christ throughout the world?' This was strong enough stuff to sink most opposition.

The argument which clinched it was that Wilfred was able to invoke the full weight of St Peter's having been given his mission by Jesus himself: 'Upon this rock I will build my church.' Before that kind of imprimatur, the Celtic tradition looked a little thin.

Lindisfarne represented the last bastion - it was bound to crumble - of the Celtic way of religious life, which simply could not hold out against Rome (though it managed to do so for a good while longer in Ireland than in Britain).

Rome - which would increasingly envy the stalwart asceticism of the east - could ill afford to denigrate the austere monkish tradition that it wanted to overwhelm and absorb.

The Celts were the awkward squad: awkward in their manners, and awkward in their authenticity. The gentler, more pragmatic amongst them knew that the strictness of their tradition was doomed. The world was moving too fast to allow these ghettoes of perfection.

The monks who could not stand the new dispensation went back to Iona, and then on to Ireland. St Colman eventually began his own island monastery at Inisbofin, off the west coast. Wilfred, for his part, went on to be a prince of the Church, and delighted in the pomp of his role, but overplayed his hand, it seems, and ended his life with a relatively minor northern bishopric.

The Celtic period of Lindisfarne had lasted thirty years. But luckily, there were Iona-orientated monks who, from practicality or principle, embraced the Roman ways, and it is from that cross-fertilization that we owe the great burst of monasticenergy which gave us the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels, and also the character of the British church.

At its best the new spirit was a distinct amalgam of the Roman and the Celtic. The Lindisfarne Gospels can stand as a symbol: Celtic in the intricate swirls and patterns of its letters, but Roman in its direct representation of saints. The spirit of Saint Cuthbert can be taken as the new accommodation in human form. He had been a thoroughly Celtic monk, and after much heart-searching adopted the ideas of the Council of Whitby. When Colman retired hurt to the West, Cuthbert was appointed prior of Lindisfarne. It was his job to bring the community round to the Romish rule. It would be a little premature to say that he was turning them all into Benedictines: but it was the ideas of men like St Benedict which were in the ascendant.

Cuthbert is eulogized by Bede for having achieved the task of reconciliation by dint of patience and not tyranny. But the man was not so much a manager and diplomat that he forgot that he most wanted to be a thorough-going ascetic. He wanted to be a hermit. At first, he satisfied himself by spending as much time as possible in a small sub-island of Lindisfarne. But he was tantalized by the idea of colonizing the Fame Islands, a couple of dozen real islands two miles off the Northumberland coast to the south-east of Lindisfarne. The largest of them, Farne Island, is less than twenty acres of bare rock and such tough grasses as can cling to the very few acres of soil the place boasts. Birds and hermits alone have thought much of the place, and many more of the former than the latter.

The island was inhabited by demons, but Cuthbert banished them. He had a certain rapprochement with the birds and the rest of nature, but he built himself the opposite of a bird-hide. It was a stone cell from which all he could see was a scrap of heaven directly above his head. A modern world, full of nature-worship and 'twitchers', could not comprehend such an ordinance of self-denial.

Bede records how God obligingly caused useful timber to be washed ashore, and how also the saint talked to the birds which threatened to eat his first crop of barley(his earlier crop of wheat had failed). They upped and left his crop intact. The view was held then that a saint earned his dominion over nature: it was his holiness that put him in tune with the rest of creation, whilst most post-lapsarians were stuck with being alienated from it.

At the very end of his life, Cuthbert was prevailed upon to be a bishop: he was not tremendously keen, but did his duty for a couple of years. And then he came home to his hermitage to die. His soul went, presumably to heaven, on 27th March 687, when he was aged about 53. His fellow churchmen and monks 'made immediate use of the rest of him. His incorrupted body was much celebrated throughout the north of England, and his relics were a major part of the immense appeal of Durham Cathedral.

In the solitude of his monastic life he set the kind of appallingly rigorous standard that people from every walk of life could respond to and admire. In his death he provided the kind of inspiration upon which an industry could be founded. Medieval faith was bolstered, and its administration funded, by the pilgrimage of the affluent to the shrines of the ascetic.

3

Beginnings of Integration

The thorough integration of the worlds of Lindisfarne and Britain with the rest of Europe, can be taken as symbolized by the emergence of Benedict Biscop (after whom a modem, and unwitting, hermit has named his hermitage).

Biscop was a Northumbrian nobleman and courtier who gave up the world when he was aged twenty-five. He established the important monasteries of Wearmouth (now known as Monkwearmouth) and jarrow. In so doing he made the two monastic homes of the monk-historian Bede. Bede joined Wearmouth, aged seven, in 680, and moved to jarrow when Biscop founded it, in 681.

Biscop knew Rome, and knew the Romish church and its grandees: on returning from one of his five sojourns there, he travelled back to England with the Creek Archbishop Theodore, on the way to the latter's new see of Canterbury. Biscop had learned his monasticism during two years at Lerins. It was hardly surprising that his foundations were going to sing the Roman liturgy, and be happily part of a Europe-wide aspiration for a monastic empire, owing allegiance to the Pope in Rome.

Under an extraordinary, Iona-educated, king, Aldfrith, the movement blossomed: lovely sculpture and carvings proliferated, including those on the oak coffm relicry made for St Cuthbert's remains in 698, many of them boasting classical, native and biblical scenes.

The Lindisfarne Gospels book is the product of this period. It is a copy of the four gospels, 258 pages of fine script amid lovely illuminations, made in Lindisfarne sometime in the late 69os, to celebrate the memory of Cuthbert. It was in part the work of the monk who would become Bishop Eadfrith, who commanded Bede to write his Life of Cuthbert.

4

The European Heartlands

No one has the smallest idea when monks first lived at the place now known as Santo Domingo de Silos, sixty kilometres southeast of Burgos, the great pilgrim city in northern Spain. But the present monastery - a perfect piece of eleventh- and twelfth century architecture and sculpture - is merely the latterday manifestation of a tradition planted in a place which must have appealed greatly to the daunting tastes of early Christians.

The monastery is at around three thousand feet, in a plateau of scrub and scree. In May, I could look out of my second-floor room in the guesthouse and watch a blizzard blot out the view over a magnificent pinetree out to what, on a clear day, are beautiful distant hills. I made a point that night of wandering out for a drink in a cafe in the tiny town, whose raison d'etre seems to be to supply the monastery with milk, monks (two of the Abbots of the last hundred years were local boys) and other necessaries.

I had a little killer of a liqueur at a table where local men were playing a rousing game of cards. Some of the most entertaining bars, perhaps excluding those in ports, are to be found at the gates of monasteries. Scuffing my way through the dusting of snow, with the glow of alcohol in my belly, on my way back to my comfortable, plain room for an early night before an early liturgy, seemed peculiarly easeful.

One afternoon, when the sun had warmed away the snow, I walked north, up what must have been another thousand feet or so, to the crest of the next sierra: there was a small town in the next shallow valley, more mountains, and that alternation could be repeated for a hundred miles in most directions.

Spain is a hard, high country, with thin soils: just the place where Christians would find a toehold for their dissident, difficult religion. Near the very lovely 'modern' monastery a sprightly nine hundred years old - there is a steep, deep gully in an enormous tumbling outcrop of rock. An eagle kept its eye on me as I walked to the spot. A busload of nuns, on a daytrip from Madrid, came giggling along the road. We were headed for La Yecla. A stream hurtles its way deep in a cleft. Set in a very dramatic kind of way in the cliff face, there is a walkway. The nuns and I - they louder and more confident than I - pursued this vertiginous concrete path for the quarter of a mile or so it winds above the cataract.

This was the site of Christian hermits, hiding, so the legend goes, from the Visigothic invasions that followed the period of Spain's inclusion in the Roman Empire.

Doubtless, the pictures could be repeated all over Europe. The steep highlands along the French mediterranean coast were certainly host to scattered groups of monks, as were the Appenines in Italy.

Such events go largely unrecorded. They may have been set in train by events such as Athanasius' exile in Triers (335-337), in the mid-fourth century a capital of the Roman Empire, where the bustling, controversial Bishop from Egypt would doubtless have been irrespressible in talking about his heroes, and his Life of St Antony, by then becoming one of the most famous texts in the newly-fashionable doctrine.

He may have planted monasteries: more likely he merely encouraged what seemed to be the natural tendency of early Christians to take to the hills.

The first homegrown continental European cult figures and monastic founders were Martin of Tours (c316-397), a protegé. of Hilary of Poitiers, the latter himself dubbed the Athanasius of the West for his attacks on the Arian heresy. A soldier who had become a pacifist, Martin lived as a hermit at Ligugé for about twelve years beginning in 360, and, partly in response to the popularity of his hermitage, and partly because he was made a bishop, started a monastery at Marmoutier.

At first, at least, he and his eighty companions lived in cells in the caves in the riverside. There have been troglodytes in the caves of the Loire valley right up to the present, where the bisexual and thoroughly unmonastic-sounding communities are regarded with wary tolerance by the local authorities.

Martin was in the classic abbatial mould: hermit, missionary, and monastic founder. He is credited with taking a very tough line with pagans, especially in uprooting their sacred trees. His monastic foundation - and his own cult - were firmly established. The basilica and monastery which bore his name, at Tours, developed into an immense shrine to his name and relics, was a noted stopping-off place on the great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in the Middle Ages, and a very famous scriptorium, producing exquisite books. It was largely destroyed during the French Revolution.

About the time when Martin became a hermit, John Cassian was born in Scythia. Because he knew Egypt well, having been a monk there, and because he wrote so clearly about what he saw there, he was well placed, when visiting Lerins, and later, starting a pair of monasteries near Marseffies, to formulate a set of rules by which monks might progress. They are still read in modern monasteries: they are the surest link between the Egyptian founders and everything that happened in a more established, institutionalized, European way in later years.

St Benedict (c480-c550), the ur-monk of the west, insisted that Cassian's Conferences on monastic life 'be read before Compline, and the occasion evolved into a kind of suppertime for monks. The Conferences were Collationes in Latin, hence a collation: a meal taken at an odd time of day (we still had such things at my public school in the early sixties, though Cassian was not read to us). Basil - the great easterner - and Cassian were the most important daily reading for the monk, according to Benedict.

The very mention of the name of Benedict makes one feel that the story has arrived at the moment of maturity: we see candlelit processions in vast cloisters, armies of disciplined monks commanding vast stretches of countryside, taking their complicated place beside kings, whilst commuting back to the cloister. But most of these facets of monastic life are two or three hundred years away from Benedict's day. Most importantly, he wrote a Rule that most clearly marks a kind of monasticism which could flourish amongst less than heroic, ordinary men in the west. He was, in this way, a kind of Pachomian figure. His Rule is famously a model of moderation: epitomized by his remark that monks probably should not drink wine, but since they all seem to like doing it and seem set in the way of drinking, let them at least agree not to drink more than a pint of wine a day.

Benedict was exactly the kind of character we have become used to seeing as a founder. He was reputed to have been a well-off and well-educated young man from Nursia, who had studied at Rome. But he felt the call of the hermitage, and left his studies to live alone at Subiaco. Inevitably - and in large numbers - young men clustered around his example and soon he was organizing them into small groups, perhaps twelve of them, each of them composed of ten people. He seems to have been well enough off to be able largely to fund the monastery from his own family property. When he wrote his Rule he was to some extent the man who paid the piper: no wonder he was free to call the tune.

There is every probability that Benedict was running fairly ordinary Italian monasteries of the day. His Rule incorporates the work of an earlier founder ('The Master'). The pattern seems to have been unremarkable: a smallish one-storey house, with dormitory, refectory and small church with simple benches. A small farm nearby. A workroom, and somewhere to read. There is nothing of the cloister, or the great monastic style which would develop later. The accommodation would be all that was needed for a simple community of perhaps a dozen men, living in obedience to their abbot.

Most historians seem to agree that the real success of the development which Benedict's Rule tacitly embodies is that it moved rnonasticism away from the particular and into the general: from this Italian system a monastery could develop into a school, a farm, a manuscript copying shop, or a centre of dedication to the liturgy. It was not penitential: there was no thought that a man would go to one of these monasteries in order to inflict suffering on himself. This was to be survivable monasticism. A man went there to be a monk, not a martyr.

But it is far from clear whether Benedict saw all this. He did not stress learning as necessary, though he did not rule it out. He did stress that monks should do manual work. Even agricultural self-sufficiency did not seem important in itself, but 'If local conditions or poverty require them to get in the crops themselves, let them not be distressed, for then they are truly monks if they live by the labour of their hands, as did our fathers and the Apostles. Let all be done with due moderation for the sake of the fainthearted.'

This small passage carries with it some of the keys to Benedict. He knew, for instance, of the ancient injunction to work for one's living: but there seems to have been no great compulsion in his monks to do so (unless local conditions or poverty required it). He accepts that he is writing for men who may think farm-work beneath them: perhaps because his monasteries were attracting some rather classy types.

More than this, he had already asserted the absolute importance of the liturgy. From now on in monastic history, it is very clear what a monk should be doing with the majority of his waking hours: he will be in choir singing and speaking the praise of his Lord, or quietly mulling over devotional literature, or engaged in private prayer.

The greatest historian of monastic life was David Knowles, the Benedictine monk. He reckoned that in such a monastery, the monks would begin the Night Office at two a.m., with Lauds at daybreak; Prime at five a.m., and Terce, Sext and None at three-hourly intervals thereafter. Vespers, Compline, and a reading from Cassian follow, beginning with the last hour of daylight. In summer there were two meals daily (noon and six p.m.), and in winter just one, though with a snack at dusk. Benedict legislated for a working spell in the morning, and a rest after lunch. But above all, the monastery is to be a school of the Lord's service. There was to be plenty of psalmody and Scripture, prayer and contemplation and reading: all of it directed at making sure that the individual monk got to heaven. He does not seem to have been enjoined to pray for all mankind, or because of all mankind's sin. He was not praying on commission' for others too busy or idle to pray, but rich enough to have someone else perform the task, as medieval monks would spend endless hours doing. He was not in training for a different sort of life, even in a hermitage; the Rule calls the cenobite 'the strongest kind of all' monks.

A monk under this regime was learning humility and obedience and prayerfulness: in a word, holiness. That way he could get to heaven. Maybe other men could too: but a monk's entry seems to have been more certain, simply by that dedication to the life of the gospels, as refined by those acknowledged saints and heroes, the Fathers in Egypt and the wider Middle East.

There are one or two peculiar clues in the Rule. One is that some of the advice is so detailed on the kinds of predicament which arise in monasteries that there is no question but that this was a mature institution by then: Benedict notes that /quite often it has happened that through the appointment of a Prior serious scandals arise in monasteries'. This implies a wide experience and plenty of disasters to learn from.

There are already children in monasteries: parents perhaps were bringing their sons to the monks to be educated, or simply to have them off their hands, or to obtain that measure of spiritual protection that might flow from having helped provide the next generation.

Even granted that this was Italy and not the wastelands of the north, a community which could afford a pint of wine per head per day must be assumed to have been at least mildly affluent. And we have already noted that monks there did not necessarily expect to pick their own crops: the monk as manager of outside labour is in view. Actually, this was a thoroughly Benedictine quality in later centuries.

Benedict was no twentieth century liberal: the children are to be thrashed if they make mistakes in choir and try to hide them, rather than honestly make retribution there and then.

Adults too stupid or bad to listen to reason should be whipped

into obedience if need be. On the other hand, the Abbot was to rule by example and exhortation rather than dictate.

Thirty years after Benedict's death in 547, his monks had to, leave Monte Cassino, where his final monastery was established, in the face of the advance of Lombardian invaders, They took themselves, and the Rule of their master, to Pope Gregory I (The Great, c540-604). Gregory (who coined the expression, of the Pope's job, 'The servant of the servants of God') was an ex-monk himself. Indeed, at first he had been a reluctant Pope, a keen monastic founder (like Benedict, using his own funds), and saw the value of the Rule immediately, He wrote a life of Benedict and sung the praises of the Rule whenever opportunity arose. Since his writings were to, become hugely popular all over Europe, it is hardly surprising that Benedict's reputation should grow with beds own.

Gregory was particularly keen that England should be evangelized, and it was he who sent St Augustine - with whom he had been a monk in the Monastery of St Andrew, on the Celian Hill in Rome - and a party of thirty monks to Kent in 597. It was the beginning of the movement which would ultimately overwhelm the Celtic tradition which had been planted in the north. But Augustine did not feel bound to promulgate the Rule of St Benedict: he was free to develop his own Rule for monasteries he founded.

Benedict himself did not start an Order (the very word 'Benedictine' as applied to a kind of monk is a tenth-century one). The notion of a disciplined, coherent ]body of monks living in community is, we have seen, much older than Benedict's Rule; it would be many years before the idea of a disciplined, coherent body of monasteries would take hold.