Escape to an Austere Paradise
Ulterior Lives #2: On The Life of St. Paul the Hermit
Part 2 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.
This is the first of three posts about the life of St Paul the Hermit.
St Jerome admits that various people have been named the first monk (if there could be any such thing), but he puts his own money on an Egyptian called Paul of Thebes. Jerome's account, The Life of St. Paul the Hermit, is mythical and astonishingly beautiful: the tale of an orphaned adolescent who has inherited great wealth, but is obliged to flee the religious persecutions of Decius and Valerian, with nothing to his name. He finds a remote place in the desert where, for the rest of his days, as Jerome puts it, “the Blessed Paul lives the Life of heaven on earth.”
There is a peculiar mix in this story: precarity and destitution on one hand, and wondrous images of paradise on the other. Paul stumbles upon a cave, at the foot of some mountain, sealed by a stone.
“He moved the stone, and eagerly exploring came within on a spacious courtyard open to the sky, roofed by the wide-spreading branches of an ancient palm, and with a spring of clear shining water: a stream ran hastening from it and was soon drunk again, through a narrow opening, by the same earth that had given its waters birth.”
The scene is a strange simple paradise. It feels magical in its hiddenness: an open, enclosed within a cave; a river that appears and disappears back into the ground. A tree that none would find. Paul has shelter and water, with food and clothing from the palm tree. Jerome predicts the readers' disbelief and goes on to mention hermits he has met in his own lifetime who lived on muddy water and five dried dates a day.
I sense, in this sort of story, the idea that there is some secret door that secretly links poverty to paradise. But there’s something more. This story — along with others we might mention — asks me to believe in a sort of miracle that my lived experience tells me is impossible. It asks me to believe in the possibility of life apart from the centralising grid of civilisation. “These things will seem incredible to those who believe not that all things are possible to him that believeth,” says Jerome.
There is an economic idea at the heart of this legend. The wealthy young Paul of Thebes was in danger of betrayal by a family member who had an eye on his money. So Paul escapes from his wealth. But then as he wanders round the cave for the first time,
“There were, moreover, not a few dwelling-places in that hollow mountain, where one might see chisels and anvils and hammers for the minting of coin. Egyptian records declare that the place was a mint for coining false money, at the time that Anthony was joined to Cleopatra.”
There is, perhaps, some symbolic suggestion in these details; that having relinquished the wealth that tied him into a world of power and violence, Paul finds himself in a secret economy, a subversive economy, a hidden abundance against the gold of empires.
There is also a political idea thinly veiled in this legend. Paul escaped the violence and greed of a civilisation that claimed to bring peace and prosperity. Ironically, he finds peace and a simple abundance in the uncivilised wilderness, where he is blissfully unaware of the powers that be. He has no more use for the kings and caesars who claim to hold the world together against chaos. He has discovered that neither they nor their violence are necessary for peaceful and joyous life.
After a century in solitude he is finally discovered by St. Anthony. Paul asks him, “How fares the human race? Whose empire is it that now sways the world… snared in the error of demons?”
Jerome concludes the story thus:
“Be mindful of Jerome, the sinner: who, if the lord gave him his choice, would rather have the tunic of Paul with his merits, than the purple of kings with their thrones.”
This slow research project is supported by the Passionists, a Catholic religious order committed to works of solidarity with suffering people and the suffering creation, founded in 1720. You can read our previous series exploring Passionist writings here, or find out more about the modern-day order on their website.
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