Fellow Creatures & Mutual Aid
Ulterior Lives: How St Paul's hermetic life relates to creaturely life
A happy New Year from the Passio Project! There’s quite a few more of you on board since we paused for Christmas, and it’s lovely to have you here. We’ve greatly appreciated your suggestions for this Ulterior Lives series, so please keep those coming. We’re also starting work on our next print-edition Passio, so don’t forget you can still pick up a copy of Issue 14 while the limited stocks last. We ship worldwide!
Part 3 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.
This is the second of three posts on The Life of Saint Paul The Hermit, and perhaps before going any further, I should say something about the document itself. The Life of Saint Paul The Hermit was written by St Jerome around 375 CE. Jerome was a prolific scholar and theologian, best known for having translated the bible into Latin, where it stayed for most of Western Christianity.1 He spent time as a desert hermit himself before being called to duties in Rome by the Pope. The subject of the account, St Paul of Thebes, was said to have lived 227—341 CE — a rather astonishing 114 years: a high bar for the life expectancy of cave-dwelling hermits. The document reads as something mythical, though Jerome insisted (as good storytellers often do) that every detail was quite factual.
I'm particularly interested in how this story depicts the more-than-human world, and how hermetic life relates to creaturely life. In this short account of the first two hermits, St Anthony and St Paul, there are more non-human characters than human.
Here, then, are four astonishing encounters.
First, as St Anthony traverses the desert in search of St Paul (who he has heard about in a mystical experience), he chances upon “a man that was part horse.” That is, a hippocentaur. Anthony asks the creature where Paul lives. It responds “in some kind of barbarous speech,” points in some direction, and then gallops off. Jerome reflects thus:
“Whether the devil had assumed this shape to terrify him, or whether (as might well be) the desert that breeds monstrous beasts begat this creature also, we have no certain knowledge.”
And onward Anthony goes. But what is the purpose in an episode like this? This ambiguous encounter with some monstrous otherness? It might be the devil. It might be a creature giving helpful directions. No more is said; the centaur doesn't reappear in the tale. We are left having encountered something other, and it remains utterly mysterious: outside the realm of controlling knowledge.
Second, Anthony meets “a dwarfish figure of no great size, its nostrils joined together, and its forehead bristling with horns: the lower part of its body ended in goats feet...” The creature speaks to Anthony:
“Mortal am I, and one of the dwellers in the desert, whom the heathen worship, astray in diverse error, calling us Fauns, and Satyrs, and Incubi. I come on an embassy from my tribe. We pray thee that thou wouldst entreat for us our common God who did come, we know, for the world's salvation, and His sound hath gone forth over all the earth.”
Having met a centaur and now a faun, present readers will certainly feel they are reading a mythical tale. However, here Jerome insists that all this is factual, and that a dead faun had recently been preserved in salt at Antioch so the emperor could see it.
The meaning of this encounter is not at all ambiguous. It's spelled out in the astonished reply of Anthony:
“Woe to thee, Alexandria… who doest worship monsters in room of God. Woe to thee, harlot city, in whom the demons of the earth hath flowed together. What hast thou now to say? The beasts speak Christ and thou doest worship monsters in room of God.”
This is to say that while an imperial civilisation worships beasts, the beasts worship the Creator. Or perhaps it is to say that the beasts of creation appear demonic to the cities that shut them outside, but it is, in fact, the cities that are overrun with demons, while the beasts worship God.
There is an idea, well expressed in Paul's letter to the Romans and going back to the law of Moses, that a foolish nation worships the creature rather than the Creator. This idea has lent itself to moralising contempt for nature-based religions, from iterations of Christianity that have held creation itself in contempt in favour of immaterial visions of the afterlife. The present story reads things quite differently. Here, Roman nature worship was synonymous with civilisation’s alienation from the natural and monstrous, from its exploitation and domestication of nature, and from its reduction of the creature to an object of religious fancy. In this story, nature is not an object of worship but a subject. Nature is the immersive realm of worship itself.
Thirdly, when Anthony finds the hidden cave of Paul, meal time approaches. “As they talked they perceived that a crow had settled on a branch of a tree, and softly flying down, deposited a whole loaf before their wondering eyes.” Paul relates that the crow has delivered him half a loaf every day for sixty years, but today had dropped a full loaf since there were two of them.
This third encounter will remind some of the biblical tale of Elijah, who was also a political exile living in the wild. It is said that he was sustained by crows who brought him food every day. Since human civilisations emerged from agricultural development, beasts have been objects of the economy, bought, kept and traded. Here they are subjects. They are agents of the economy that sustains the hermits. The relationship is not one of ownership but of friendship.
In the fourth and final encounter, when Paul has died in his great age, Anthony despairs because he has no spade with which to bury him, no man-fashioned tool…
“But even as he pondered, behold two lions came coursing, their manes flying, from the inner desert, and made towards him. At the sight of them, he was at first in dread: then, turning his mind to God, he waited undismayed.”
The two lions halt at the body of St Paul and roar loudly in lament. Then they dig a grave for him with their paws. Finally they approach St Anthony to receive a blessing. And so an economy of life's work gives way to an ecology of friendship, in which the human and the more-than-human relate as fellow creatures, offering mutual aid.
There is something elemental to the tale in Anthony's first fearful reaction to the beasts, and then his choice to stay himself. Here lies a principle of the hermetic wilderness experience. There is a renunciation of the claims of civilisation, which promise to keep us safe from the violence of nature. Instead there is an entrusting of oneself to nature as the autonomous abundance of God. The creaturely realm is not to be alienated or managed by force, but to be befriended. After all, in Christian cosmology, everything, besides God, is creature. Apart from the peculiar noise of civilisation, all creation lives in a prayer of simple common awe.
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.
Though the course of things might still be young…
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