CHAPTER VI

THE DEMONIAC

The mountain-range of Amanus was full of fissures and ravines, and as he crossed one of the deepest and darkest of these a strange and almost naked figure, as of one of the demoniacs of Gadara, sprang out before his path.

‘Away! away, Macedonius!’ it cried, with wild gesticulations. ’I know thee, Crithophagus. Hast thou come to torment me? Am I not wretched enough, lost enough? Away, away!’

Macedonius at once recognised him, though in his dark hour he was but rarely seen by human eyes. It was the miserable Stagirius, before whom the pillar of life had once moved in golden fire, with its dark side undreamed of. The favourite son of a father of wealth and noble birth, everything seemed to smile upon his early years. His parents were Christians. He might have served God honourably in Church and State. But a vein of pride in his disposition, urging him to something exceptional, combined with an extraordinary veneration for the life of the desert solitaries, had led him to defy the wishes of his father, and to leave his rich home at Antioch for the grim life of the hills. A very short experience made it intolerable to him. He hated the nightly vigils, he grew utterly weary of the long studies and meditations. He felt no better, but rather, and in all senses, worse than he had done in the daily life of the city. His miserable soul was torn by struggling self-conceit and self-disgust, but false pride kept him from acknowledging what he felt to have been a fatal error. Thinking that other employment 41 might help him, his brother-monks set him to tend a garden and an orchard; and, feeling the uselessness of his misdirected life, he would sometimes ask them in fierce petulance whether his noble hands were thus meant to load dung-carts and dig at roots. Then, perhaps, the penances and discipline would subdue him for a time to humblest self-prostration. The severity of the inward tempest was too much for an ill-balanced temperament and a frame delicately nurtured. He had become liable to convulsions and fits of epilepsy, which all men mistook, and which the wretched youth himself mistook, for demoniac possession. In vain he travelled to the most esteemed saints and the most celebrated martyries. He had his lucid intervals, but he never got over the effects of his disordered body and haunted imagination. In vain Chrysostom, whose own health had been for ever shattered by the unnatural privations of his hermitage, had written to warn him against this satiety of penitence, this wantonness of despairing misery. Stagirius continued to be the frequent victim of fits of frenzy and fierce impulses to blasphemy and suicide.

At this moment Stagirius was in one of his wildest paroxysms. How he lived no one knew. He had not even the garment of skin-and-hair over a linen tunic which most of the solitaries wore. He only had a coarse cincture of goatskin round his loins. His eyes glared with the light of madness through the dirty and matted locks which streamed over his shoulders. The sun smote him by day and the moon by night, and the dews dropped on his nakedness. Like Nebuchadnezzar, he ate grass, his hair grew like birds’ feathers, and his nails like wild beasts’ claws, and he tore up roots for his sustenance. He looked scarcely human, and the terrified hermits sometimes heard his screams reverberated by the mountain rocks, as he fancied himself to be wrestling with troops of demons. His nights were haunted by frightful visions, and many a time he had attempted self-destruction. And this was the gay Stagirius, once the favourite of fortune, the envy of the youths of Antioch for his beauty and his wealth!

Macedonius paused irresolutely, for he was unnerved by privations, and he had a horror of the madness which he attributed to the presence of malignant devils. As Stagirius 42 approached him with yells and threatening gestures, he drew back, made the sign of the cross, and muttered the formulæ of exorcism. They produced no effect. Stagirius seized him by the arm, and cried, ‘I know thee! Away! away! lest the demon who has possession of me tear thee limb from limb!’

‘Lord Jesus, save me!’ cried Macedonius. At the name a convulsive spasm passed through the frame of the unhappy maniac; his face became purple, his eyes were distorted, he foamed at the mouth, and fell writhing on the stones of the ravine, where he lay as dead.

Macedonius was lost in pity and horror. He knelt by the unconscious sufferer, sprinkled water over him, and supported his head upon his breast. After a short time Stagirius opened his eyes. Macedonius gently spoke to him by his name, and pressed him to eat some of the barley-cake which he had carried with him. Then the hermit prayed for the trembling maniac, and left him sane and comforted, though terribly shaken. He offered to take Stagirius back to his own cavern, though he was loth that Philip should see so deplorable a spectacle. But Stagirius refused. ‘Leave me to my misery,’ he feebly moaned. ’The sun has set. To-morrow I will go to Diodore. After a short time I will make my way to Egypt, and see the saintly Nilus. It may be that he will be able to drive out these demons that have seized the temple of my soul.’

Weeping and deeply troubled, Macedonius blessed him. It was night before he reached his own cave, inexpressibly wearied with the exertions and emotions of the day.

As he entered, the flickering embers of the wood-fire showed him that Philip had gathered himself a bed of dry leaves, and lay there in the peaceful slumbers of his youth.

Moving very gently, he took his little earthenware lamp, and, lighting it at the feeble flames, shaded the light with his hand as he gazed at the sleeping boy. There he lay carelessly outstretched on the leaves, his head with its dark curls resting on his arm, while his breast rose and fell with the regular breathing of deep and placid slumber. He was the picture of ruddy health and strength and life, and the hermit involuntarily made the sign of blessing over him. Usually he scourged himself before his nightly 43 orisons, but he world not do so now lest the whistling cords should waken the sleeping boy. But his prayer that night was full of doubt and agony. Had he, after all, done right in the adoption of a life so far removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity? Was there this unbridged abyss between the secular and the religious? Was selfishness the less selfish by being expanded to infinitude? Had not God, who placed us in the world, intended us to work in it, and, being in it without being of it, to use it without abusing it? Why should not the boy who lay so sweetly slumbering there grow up to be a useful, happy, Christian man, with all the innocent joy of home about him, meeting the heavy trials which would come to him as they come to all, but not increasing them by self-invented tortures?

Then the wild vision of Stagirius came before his mind. What a deplorable shipwreck of high hopes! What a triumph of the impure demons was there! And he himself—Macedonius—what had he really gained by his will-worship and voluntary humility? Had his severity to the body been of any real value against the indulgence of the flesh? It seemed to him too late to alter his career. This, however, he determined to do—to make his life more useful to others. That vow he offered to God in his long prayers that night.

Next morning he went with Philip over the mountains, and entrusted him to the care of the abbot who had succeeded Diodore. There the boy was happy. They employed him in rustic occupations, and gave him all such innocent gladness as was in their power. For the teachings of Diodore had made them a large-hearted community, and the young novices were under gentle and loving training. Mingling with these youths, seeing their quiet dutifulness, sharing in their lessons, Philip gradually learnt something of the essential truths of Christianity. Almost without knowing it, the grace of God took gradual hold of his heart.

But he became in nowise enamoured of the monastic, and still less of the eremitic, ideal; and this was chiefly due to the dislike, almost the repulsion, forced upon his mind by one of the youngest of the novices. His name 44 was Simeon, and he afterwards grew up to be the celebrated pillar-saint. Simeon was a short, strong, good-looking boy, entirely uneducated, who had spent most of his life as a shepherd tending the flocks of his parents. His head was full of fantastic perversions as to the nature of duty, largely mingled with the signs of degeneracy, which in these days would be called egomania and megalomania. He had been in a monastery in which the Abbot Heliodorus had lived from earliest childhood, and Simeon thought it was an almost miraculous merit that the Abbot ’had never once in his life seen either a pig or a cock!’ Philip did not feel at all edified by the merit, and made Simeon positively morose with the way in which he ridiculed his vain anecdotes about himself. Simeon told the novices how he once wanted to buy some fish, and when the fish-girl said falsely that she had none, the fish leapt out and began to jump about Simeon’s feet, till he quieted them by a word! The story caused an involuntary burst of laughter—the first laugh which Philip enjoyed since his recent troubles. Simeon’s pride was severely hurt by this way of receiving his supernatural narratives. He was still more displeased when Philip expostulated with him about the dirtiness of his person, asking him what religion there could be in that, and reminding him of a verse which he had heard one of the monks read: ’ Having our minds sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.’ As for the visions which this strange shepherd-boy constantly narrated, Philip called them mere indigestion. He disliked Simeon’s way of wearing a cord tied round his naked waist till it grew into his flesh, and his habit of keeping himself awake by leaning on a round piece of wood, which slipped under him if he gave way to drowsiness. When the Abbot heard of these extravagances he forbade them. He warned Simeon that such meaningless austerities might only be a sign of overweening pride. Simeon was so much offended that he ran away and hid himself. After long search and anxiety he was found in an empty cistern full of all sorts of objectionable reptiles. The Abbot could do nothing with the stubborn, opinionated, maniacally excited boy, and dismissed him to the career of verminiferous glory which he afterwards attained as the 45 first of the Stylites. But the effect he produced on the mind of Philip was that of disgust: he determined that no morbid impulses should ever make him join the half-demented band, in which many who had been mere mendicants and criminals surrounded themselves with the same halo of sham sanctity which is to this day enjoyed in the East by many a semi-idiotic yogi or repulsive fakir.

He never met Simeon again, but in after-years he heard, with a somewhat disdainful smile, of the Stylite’s performances in the barely human life which he spent in numberless genuflexions on the filthy summit of his pillar. ’I once watched him,’ said an admiring observer long afterwards, ‘and during his prayer he prostrated himself one thousand two hundred and forty-four times; and after that I left off counting.’

Philip was a Christian in those days, and his only reply was, ‘I find nothing in the Scriptures as to the advantage of bowing the head like a bulrush, or wasting inhuman lives in an atmosphere of dirt.’

The notion of living on the top of a pillar had not occurred to Simeon spontaneously. He had borrowed it from an Eastern hermit named Nicander. The practice was so revolting to the good sense of the West, that when a certain Wulfil did attempt in the sixth century to introduce it at Trèves, the bishop demolished his pillar; but even in the East, Nicander had been indignantly reproved by the good sense of St. Nilus, who, besides accusing him of levity, warns him that his extravagance was due to pride, and that he who exalted himself should be abased.⁴⁴St. Nilus, Epp. 114, 115.