Sinai and the Monasteries of the Nile

“I visited two monasteries of Saint Antony, which are occupied today by his disciples. I also went to the place where the most blessed Paul, the first of the hermits, had his home. I saw the Red Sea and the ridges of Mount Sinai, whose top almost touches heaven and cannot be reached by any human effort. An anchorite was said to live somewhere in its recesses, and I searched long and hard to see him, but could not. For nearly fifty years he had been cut off from all human company. He wore no clothes but was covered with the bristly hair growing on his own body, and by God’s gift he was unaware of his own nakedness. Whenever devout men wanted to visit him, he would hurry off into the pathless wilderness and avoid meeting any of his kind. He was said to have granted a meeting to one man only, about five years before my visit, and I believe that man won the favor through the power of his faith. In the course of much talk between the two, the recluse is said to have been asked why he avoided all human beings so carefully, and to have answered that the man who was often visited by mortals like himself could not often be visited by angels. From this, not without reason, the report had spread, and was accepted by many, that the holy man enjoyed the company of angels. [a]

“Be that as it may, I for my part left Mount Sinai and returned to the river Nile, whose banks on both sides I saw dotted with many monasteries. I saw that for the most part, as I said before, the monks lived together in companies of a hundred; but it was well known that as many as two or three thousand sometimes lived in the same villages. Nor would anyone have reason to think that the virtue of the monks living there together in great numbers was any less than that of those known to keep themselves apart from human company. The chief and foremost virtue in these places, as I have said, is obedience. In fact, no one who applies for admission is received by the abbot of the monastery on any other terms than that he is first tried and proved, it being understood that he will never afterward refuse to submit to any order of the abbot, however hard and difficult, even if it seems something unworthy to be borne.