The Hermits & The Law

How a murder mystery and a miracle give us a glimpse into a life beyond the law.

Part 7 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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There is a rather exciting murder mystery told in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. It was said that a man was on the run, having been accused of murder. The fugitive was seeking refuge among the hermits, when a cohort of men arrived demanding that the accused be handed over to receive justice.

As the story goes, the hermit Macarius asked to be taken to see the corpse of the dead man. When they arrived at the tomb, Macarius called out to the deceased and asked him if it really was this fugitive who had killed him. The dead man replied and said that it was not in fact the accused man who had killed him, but somebody else.

Here's the moment of divergence. As far as Macarius was concerned, the matter was solved because the accused was no longer in danger. But of course the justice seekers had a follow up question: “Please ask him who it was then, who committed the murder.” To this Macarius says “I shall not ask this thing: it is enough for me that the innocent goes free.”

I love this story for one reason that is characteristic of so many desert miracle tales. The point is not the miracle, but rather to what service the miracle is put. Macarius asks the dead man enough to liberate someone from the violence of the law, but he refuses to ask the question that would deliver someone else over to it. Today we might say that he was withholding evidence.

There is something to observe here, about where the imagination ends. For the mob, the law is a boundary and beyond it is nothing at all. To them, law is the last and only god to be satisfied. To Macarius it is different. Even though the answer to the second question would indeed have been the name of a guilty man, he refuses to be part of that process. He blasphemes the gods of law and refuses them satisfaction because his world is not enclosed by that boundary. He has seen fields beyond that domain.

The normal way of thinking about this would be to speak of ethics and virtues. We might discuss the virtue of mercy as a healthy balancing energy to the virtue of justice. There’s something gentle about this approach. It sits easily enough with Modernity's understanding of the role of religion: a realm that makes occasional moral appeals to soften the force of the state.

I want to consider the question through a different frame. Let's call it citizenship, or political allegiance. From this framework, Macarius is not moralising to the state, or to anyone, about tempering its violence with mercy. He speaks only for himself. Macarius is simply and flatly refusing to give his allegiance or participation in the justice system of whichever political body is overseeing the situation. He does not see himself as a citizen. He does not consider himself obliged. His obligation is not to any law or any state, but to the God who makes life, and to life itself.

I am interested here in the political exteriority of these ulterior lives. Of course, no one could read a single page of the Desert Fathers and Mothers without noticing that they have found a community of the most intense accountability and obligation: but it is not to any political state. They would disregard these without a second thought. In a sense, these were precisely the world they had left behind.

There are so many questions. Life apart from the law of the state is very difficult, so how did they do it? The state fulfills many good functions, so why did they do it? They were obviously not among those short-lived communes of a-moral relativists, so by what sort of code did they live, apart from the strong arm of state law and citizenly obligation; and how did that code keep its integrity without enforcement?

For now, we may at least begin by observing something like the principles of anarchy running under that community.

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