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Charles Kingsley. The Hermits
The Hermits
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
SAINT ANTONY
THE LIFE OF SAINT PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT. BY THE DIVINE HIERONYMUS THE PRIEST (ST. JEROME.)
PROLOGUE
THE LIFE OF PAUL
SAYINGS OF ANTONY, FROM THE “WORDS OF THE ELDERS.”
HILARION
PROLOGUE
THE LIFE
ARSENIUS
THE HERMITS OF ASIA
BASIL
SIMEON STYLITES
THE HERMITS OF EUROPE
ST. SEVERINUS, THE APOSTLE OF NORICUM
THE CELTIC HERMITS
ST. MALO
ST. COLUMBA
ST. GUTHLAC
ST. GODRIC OF FINCHALE
ANCHORITES, STRICTLY SO CALLED
FOOTNOTES
Отрывок из книги
Charles Kingsley
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Over all Europe, even to Ireland, [15] the same pattern of Christian excellence repeated itself with strange regularity, till it became the only received pattern; and to “enter religion,” or “be converted,” meant simply to become a monk.
Of the authentic biographies of certain of these men, a few specimens are given in this volume. If they shall seem to any reader uncouth, or even absurd, he must remember that they are the only existing and the generally contemporaneous histories of men who exercised for 1,300 years an enormous influence over the whole of Christendom; who exercise a vast influence over the greater part of it to this day. They are the biographies of men who were regarded, during their lives and after their deaths, as divine and inspired prophets; and who were worshipped with boundless trust and admiration by millions of human beings. Their fame and power were not created by the priesthood. The priesthood rather leant on them, than they on it. They occupied a post analogous to that of the old Jewish prophets; always independent of, sometimes opposed to, the regular clergy; and dependent altogether on public opinion and the suffrage of the multitude. When Christianity, after three centuries of repression and persecution, emerged triumphant as the creed of the whole civilized world, it had become what their lives describe. The model of religious life for the fifth century, it remained a model for succeeding centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his compeers were founded the whole literature of saintly biographies; the whole popular conception of the universe, and of man’s relation to it; the whole science of dæmonology, with its peculiar literature, its peculiar system of criminal jurisprudence. And their influence did not cease at the Reformation among Protestant divines. The influence of these Lives of the Hermit Fathers is as much traceable, even to style and language, in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as in the last Papal Allocution. The great hermits of Egypt were not merely the founders of that vast monastic system which influenced the whole politics, and wars, and social life, as well as the whole religion, of the Middle Age; they were a school of philosophers (as they rightly called themselves) who altered the whole current of human thought.
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