Holy hippies

They don’t work. They don’t wash. 

They roam across the country, preaching sanctimoniously about peace and love, despite being dangerously ill-informed. They dress in a way that is somehow shabby and pretentious at the same time. Worst of all, they have no respect for government or power structures.

Clearly, something has to be done about these ‘monks’.

Weirdos 

For an Anglo-Saxonist like me, there’s nothing weird about monks. Right through the Anglo-Saxon period, monasteries were at the heart of the church – indeed, it was founded by Irish and Roman monks. For the Anglo-Saxons, it would have been weird to have a church without monks.

The respectable face of Christianity: Santa Sabina, Rome

But it wasn’t always like this.

Let’s pretend to be a typical Christian in late Roman Gaul, circa 430.

The church, like everything in civilised life, is based around the city. It has tidy structures of bishops and priests and deacons, and congregations of ordinary people. It’s staffed by educated, cultured men from the middle and upper classes.

It’s clean, respectable.

Yes, far away in the east, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, there have always been oddballs who go out in the wilderness and live in caves.

Saint Antony in the desert

The Greeks call them monachoi – ‘those who dwell alone’. They starve themselves to the point of madness and then claim to have visions and miraculous powers.

Yes, some of these weirdos get reputations as ‘holy men’, and attract followers from the more gullible segment of society. Some even group into small communities.

A bunch of fanatical zealots bunched up together, obsessed with the end of the world? That’s fine, as long as they keep themselves to themselves.

The problem is, they don’t. Monachoi are spreading from east to west like diseased rats, infecting the whole Mediterranean with their pernicious teachings.

And now the disease is spreading into the Gallic church itself.

 

Martin

The warning signs have been there since the 360s. An illiterate, obnoxious young Pannonian called Martin, who had been dishonourably discharged from the army and kicked out of more than one city for stirring up trouble, tried to set himself up as a monachos on Gallinara, a tiny island off the north-west coast of Italy.

Having no idea what he was doing, the idiot almost killed himself by eating a poisonous plant. Undeterred, he came to Gaul and latched onto Bishop Hilary of Poitiers – another rabble-rouser who had just returned from exile.

After a few years, Hilary and his buddies engineered the election of Martin as bishop of Tours, even though he was completely unsuited to the post. He preferred to spend his time living in a shack beside the river Loire, where (of course) he quickly attracted a bunch of hangers-on – dozens of pious layabouts, disillusioned posh types who thought the best way to respond to the world’s problems was to bury their heads in the sand.

The modern Abbey of Marmoutier, successor to Martin's original hermitage

Oh, sure, they were just like those brave monachoi who lived in the depths of the desert. That is, if by ‘depths of the desert’ you mean a half-hour stroll along the banks of the Loire. They they lived in caves, true, but it’s not like they were willing to get their hands dirty: all the manual labour was done by the servants they brought with them!

They’re also famous for wearing camel-hair shirts, just like the desert monachoi. How did they come by camel-hair shirts in Gaul, you might ask? Why, they were so devoted to simplicity and poverty that they had them specially hand-crafted and imported from the across the Mediterranean.

Naturally, all this would be bad enough. But when Martin wasn’t sitting in his shack, he was traipsing around the countryside with his fanatical thugs, looking for innocent pagans to terrorise. Are monachoi not meant to be devoted to peace? It's hardly surprising that when Martin died, there was an ugly squabble between the monachoi of Tours and Poitiers over which community would get to keep his corpse.

‘Swollen with black bile’

Unfortunately this Martin started a trend. Even a former imperial governor and consul – a consul, the highest dignitary in the empire! – was brainwashed into following his footsteps, becoming a housebound monachos.

This man, the illustrious Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus, retired (with his wife, I might add) to one of his estates in Spain, where he kept himself busy weaving baskets and eating porridge, cutting himself off from all his friends except to write them pompous letters about how pious he was.

Then there’s the self-made man, Claudius Postumus Dardanus, a former prefect of Gaul. I hardly know where to start with this character. After a career of treachery, back-stabbing and murder, he didn’t just retire, but went and built himself a fortified enclave in the mountains where he now rules as a sort of robber king.

It's accessible only up a narrow, winding valley, at the top of which is a gate and an inscription proclaiming his achievements and holiness. Theopolis, he calls it – ‘the City of God’. Is there anything more offensive, more hypocritical, than this?

Google Earth image of Theopolis, near Sisteron, France - a natural fortress enclosed by 500-foot cliffs

Inscription on the road leading into Theopolis

At least Paulinus still lived a civilised life. These days it seems that every lump of rock off the coast is crowded with scruffy monachoi. Rutilius Namatianus wrote about them in the poem about his voyage from Rome to Gaul. Here’s what he says about Capraria:

"The island is a mess, filled with men who flee from the light. They call themselves monachoi, a Greek name, because they want to live by themselves, with no one to see them. They are afraid of fortune’s gifts, even while they fear the harm she causes. Who would avoid being miserable by choosing to be miserable? [...] I don’t know whether they are trying to punish themselves for their deeds with a prison or whether their melancholy insides are swollen with black bile."

And about the island of Gorgona:

"I turn away from the cliffs, monument to a recent calamity. Here a fellow countryman was lost in a living death. For not long ago one of our youths, rich in ancestry with property and a wife to match, was driven by the furies to abandon home and society and entered a shameful retreat, a credulous exile. The unfortunate fellow thought that filth is conducive to heavenly endeavours and inflicted on himself more cruelty than would offended gods."

 
He really hits the nail on the head. You must be filled with twisted self-loathing to punish yourself like some of these monachoi do.

The monastic master plan

And what can we say about the island of Lérins? Of all the monachoi, these are the worst. They’re taking the legacy of Martin to the next level. They don’t just want a comfortable retirement home: they want to take over the entire Gallic church.

The island of St-Honorat, with the modern monastery of Lérins

Given their wealth and resources, this is frighteningly possible. One of the founders of Lérins, Honoratus, has already managed to bully his way into the bishopric of Arles. Bishop Proculus of Marseilles is just as bad; he’s been squatting in his see for years, ignoring papal rulings whenever he feels like it. He’s even been implicated in the murder of the previous bishop of Arles!

The tomb of John Cassian in the church of Saint Victor, Marseilles

And he’s now sheltering John Cassian, a smug, self-styled ‘expert’ on eastern monachoi who is trying to make the Gallic variety even more extreme. There is no end to the self-absorbed callousness one finds in his writings.

What will happen if we let such men usurp every bishopric in Gaul? Pope Celestine has recently written a letter in a desperate attempt to avert this disaster. He makes some good points about their ridiculous ‘desert fancy-dress’ of wooden staffs, and camel-hair shirts girded at the loins.

"What is this get-up doing in the Gallic Church, so that the custom of so many years and so many bishops is now turned into another form of dress? The laiety and others are to recognise us by our teaching, not our garments; by our way of life, not our costume; by purity of mind, not custom. For if we begin to follow novelties, we trample underfoot the order given to us by our fathers, to create a place of pointless superstition."

‘Pointless superstition’ – the words of the bishop of Rome himself! Not that these monachoi will pay any attention to him, since they never have in the past.

They will ignore his complaint about their silly costumes, just as they will ignore his complaints that they deny absolution to the dying, that they harbour wanted criminals, that they violate the territory of other bishops, that they impose foreign bishops on unwilling cities, that they ordain unqualified men to holy orders, and that they accept bribes for doing so.

The monachoi consider themselves above criticism by any power on earth. They are radical zealots, detached from reality, unwilling to compromise, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness.

Heaven help us if they ever come to rule the church!

All images from Wikipedia Commons unless otherwise stated