Yalla Jabaleya! - Landscape of John Climacus and the desert hermits

Landscape of John Climacus and the desert hermits

The rocky landscape of Sinai owes its origins to the massive tectonic wrenching that started 30 million years ago and continues to this day, pulling apart Sinai from the African continent and opening up the Red Sea. As the severed land-masses were thrust up and twisted, erosion exposed basement rock formed a billion years earlier.

It was in this tortured landscape that monotheism was born and faith first tested.

Amongst the tremendous buttresses and peaks of Mount Sinai, Moses received the Law and made a covenant between his people and God. And when his people betrayed their covenant by worshipping the Golden Calf, it was at the foot of the mountain that three thousand of them were slain by the tribe of Levi, guardians of the Law and priestly class of the Israelites. And when they faltered in their zeal to conquer the Promised Land, it was in this “waste howling wilderness” that they were condemned to wander 40 years until all who had known slavery in Egypt had passed away, leaving the conquest of the Promised Land to the next generation.

The exact location of Mount Sinai disappeared from the historical records, and no Jewish tradition ever preserved it, but in the fourth century of the Common Era, Christian hermits sought out the deserts of Egypt to have their faith tested anew.

Through mortification of the body, relentless vigils and manic sleep deprivation, they were delivered of visions that revealed to them the true location of Mount Sinai. And at the foot of the mountain, they discovered a rare bramble that they revered as the Burning Bush and built a shrine around it which became the centre of a thriving monastic community known from the 10^th century by the name of St Catherine whose bones were seen in a miraculous vision flown by angels to the summit of a nearby mountain.

In its remote outpost, the monastery became a stout defender of the Imperial Church of Constantinople, while the Coptic Church of Egypt severed its links in disputes over patriarchal authority and the nature of Christ’s divinity. To this day, the monastery of St Catherine remains an orthodox member of the Greek community, a monastery apart from the great Coptic foundations of Egypt.

In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian fortified the monastery in a vain effort to stave off further attrition of his empire by ecclesiastical squabbles, plague and the onslaught of marauding armies. In the apse of the Basilica, he installed one of the most glorious mosaics of Byzantium, the Transfiguration, a triumphant affirmation of the dogma of the two natures of Christ, human and divine, challenging the Coptic heresy which asserted their miraculous union in a single nature.

By the beginning of the seventh century, the monastery fell under the control of the Arabs, who had the grace to leave it in peace. The Abbot of the Monastery was one named John, nicknamed “the ladder (Climacus)”, in honour of his book on ascetic practice, The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

In this extraordinary book we learn of what drove the early hermits to reject society and embrace the wilderness: “compunction”, an abiding fear of the Day of Judgment which fueled an unrelenting torment of the conscience.

Only by heartfelt contrition and absolute obedience to God’s will could the hermits hope for salvation.

If they were lucky, they might be graced by the “gift of tears”, a paradoxical flood of grief and gratitude which washed the soul clean again, a second baptism, salvation through Christ, a release from the tyranny of the human will.

Perhaps they were wrong to reject so much that makes life worth living: sex, dance, song and wicked jokes. But we all need humility, and this was the ultimate experiment in submission, not a mewling self abasement in front of others (despised by John as sensual gluttony) but an awe inspired surrender to a power greater than us all.

And life was no joke: there was little opportunity for partying in the wretched conditions of the peasantry. Plague, taxes and conscription were decimating villages and destroying lives (some of the earliest monasteries established by the pioneering monk of the fourth century, Pachomius, were in abandoned villages in the Nile valley; it was in the army that he had been converted to Christianity; it was from the plague that he was to die).

The unremitting struggle between the pull of society and submission to God was fought out in the hermit’s own body, most notoriously in his battles with sex. As the vigour of his body craved physical partnership, his spirit yearned for union with God. As marriage brought conscription into the social nexus of toil and child rearing, the spiritual journey demanded isolation and a single-minded dedication to God’s will. As physical love stirred turbulent passions, spiritual love brought serenity.

For sexuality was believed to be rooted in a tenacious willfulness in rebellion against God, ensnaring us in society and distracting us from our duty to God, a product of our fall from grace. By subduing the sexual drive and directing their love to God alone, the hermits hoped to heal the rift and regain the freedom and purity of Adam before the Fall.

As John so disarmingly put it, to love God while being drawn to society’s pleasures was like trying to swim and clap one’s hands at the same time.

The body was not viewed as in opposition to the soul but as the instrument through which a new harmony of body and soul might be achieved. Though appalled by the bodily passions, the hermits had a palpable sense of the union of body and soul. As John said, “How can I break away from him [the body] when I am bound to him forever? How can I escape from him when he is going to rise with me?”

Impatient for God, they sought to transfigure the body as a premonition of the final resurrection of the body. By fasting, hard work and prayers, the hermit sought to reduce the animal drives and dry up superfluous bodily fluids.

With the body tamed, it was then necessary to subdue the impulsive heart and galloping tongue. It wasn’t enough for a monk to present a brave face to the world while suppressing his inner turbulence for he believed his heart to be exposed to the awful scrutiny of God and was compelled to root out all enmities, fantasies and resentments to restore the heart anew.

Isolated, exposed to the elements, quartered between the rocks and sky, his heart bared for judgment, a hermit had no place to hide. Never has belief in God been so exacting.

Their faith was fanatical, but they terrorized only themselves. Tortured by demoniacal visions, wracked by nocturnal emissions, gnawed by hunger, shamed by thoughts of vainglory, theirs was an unending struggle. To others, they demonstrated only love and compassion.

Like fanatics everywhere, they were inspired by martyrs, those who had met death while testifying to their faith during the frenzied persecutions of the Roman Empire. Such martyrs had been dubbed “the athletes of God”, canonized as saints and presented to future generations as the ultimate heroes and role models.

With the dispensation of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion, zealous young men felt robbed of the opportunity to test their faith in the public arena and sought a new martyrdom in self mortification.

If they survived, and many were lost to disease and madness, they emerged with a body lean and dry, a charismatic serenity and discernment: a capacity to see into the souls and tribulations of others.

The final challenge for a hermit was to enter again the world of men and to pass on the peace of God. Having no stake in society, they were sought out by others to arbitrate disputes or give comfort to souls.

The heroic age of desert asceticism has passed. Perhaps the monks overdid it. Perhaps they failed to understand the full beauty of creation, for surely salvation is not reserved for those who closet themselves off in cells and see the glory of the Lord only in visions, blind to his immanence all around us.

But in the experience of the original desert hermits, we retain a memory of what it was like to give up society’s pomp and piffle to live a life in the glare of God alone.

The desert is still haunted by these strange and extraordinary men. To climb the mountain tops, eroded into granite domes pushing into the sky, you can still feel how small a space divides us from God.

The monks of St Catherine now live together, drink a fine wine imported from Greece and worship in a Basilica, gleaming with the gold of antique icons. They chant in unison. They worship the Risen Lord in all his Glory, the hope of resurrection for all. They manage vast estates, protect the holy shrines and welcome pilgrims and secular tourists.

The monastery also retains a record of the Church’s rediscovery of the glory of creation. In the 8^th and 9^th centuries, Byzantium was ravaged by an ideological war between those who thought icons were idolatrous and those who believed their beauty was a doorway to the divine. As icons were destroyed across the empire, it was only in the remote outpost of St Catherine that they survived, leaving us a legacy of the earliest icons in Christendom, including an astonishing 6^th century Christ Pantocrator, a vivid rendering of Christ using techniques that go back to 1^st century. When icons were again legitimized and integrated into the liturgy, the late Byzantine style flourished in the monastery. When Byzantium finally collapsed in 1453 a cosmopolitan style emerged from exiled artists in Cyprus and Crete. And for those interested in the more shadowy twists of cultural history, the monastery has a unique collection of crusader icons where Byzantium, Rome and Palestine found a common expression.

As monks have moderated their zeal, so has time softened the landscape. While the monks continue to affirm the mystical union of body and soul, the Bedouin remind us that we are only truly as God conceived us when we are in touch with our environment. From this arid landscape, they have tapped water from the rocks to irrigate their gardens where apricots, pomegranates, figs and almonds grow. From the mountain herbs, rich in potent oils and alkaloids, a chemical arsenal against grazing animals and infesting insects, they have developed a herbal pharmacopoeia to treat asthma, toothache, diabetes, diarrhea or flu. And as the monks reject personal wealth, so the Bedouin eschew unnecessary possessions to wander freely with their goats and camels, the rhythm of their lives measured out by the slow movement of the moon and stars.

This is a place of harmony between monk and Bedouin, a holy place for Christian, Muslim and Jew.

Sinai is still relatively unknown. Though many climb Mount Sinai in the night to see the dawn, they are too tired to see much more and quickly descend the mountain to be hustled through the monastery, indifferent to the miracle of the Icon Gallery, ignorant of its spiritual saga. Slumped on the bus, they are driven back comatose to the bars and beaches of Sharm El Sheikh.

Yet there are opportunities to stay in the Monastery Hostel, to study the icon collection at leisure, to sleep in a monastery garden on the mountain and explore its hidden valleys and chapels.

And for those with the desire to withdraw, time can be found for reflection or meditation in the Bedouin gardens which form a web of shade and greenery throughout the wadis and gullies of the Mount Sinai region.

And from the Bedouin, visitors can learn about the aromatic herbs that sprout from clefts in rocks and colonize the sandy basins, the basis of traditional Bedouin medicine.

And when night comes, visitors can gaze at the stars and hear stories of the birth and death of galaxies and marvel at the vast space and time that is our universe.

And for the more adventurous, there are opportunities to learn how to ride a camel and take camel safaris to explore the landscape where the scattered ruins of monastic cells bear testimony to the monks who lived as solitaries, affirming the eternal supremacy of the spiritual life.

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