From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. William Dalrymple
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walked over to the main church and Yacoub opened the great door. Amid the herringbone patterns of the brick vaults, the light of the storm lantern picked out the glittering mosaics with an almost magical brilliance. As we drew nearer, the shapes of crosses, vine scrolls and double-handled amphorae glinted in the dancing flame. With Yacoub still holding his lamp aloft, we passed through the sanctuary and into a small side-chapel. In the back wall were two openings, one near the ceiling, the other at shin-height.
‘At the end of his life Mar Gabriel walled himself up behind here,’ said Yacoub. ‘His food was put through that hole at the bottom. If he wanted to take communion he would stick his hand through there at the top.’ Yacoub pointed to the upper hole. ‘Mar Gabriel was a great ascetic,’ he said. ‘Behind that wall he punished his flesh in order to liberate his soul. Come and see what I mean.’
Before I had time to demur, Yacoub had pushed the lamp through the small lower aperture and wriggled in after it. Left in total darkness, I had no option but to follow. Lying flat on my back and pulling in my stomach, I found I could just fit through the hole. Yacoub extended a hand and helped me to my feet.
‘Look here,’ he said, pointing to a narrow slit in the wall. ‘Sometimes our Holy Father Mar Gabriel felt he was not being hard enough on himself, that he was sinking into luxury. So he would squeeze into this slit and spend a month standing up.’
‘Why?’
‘He used to say no slave should sit or lie down in the presence of his master, and that as he was always in the presence of his Lord he should always stand up. At other times, to remind himself of his mortality, he would bury himself in that hole in the corner.’
‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’
Yacoub was already on the floor, about to wriggle his way back to the church.
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he said, before disappearing into the blackness. ‘Mar Gabriel was a very great saint. We should all try to follow his example.’
The day at Mar Gabriel starts at 5.15 with the tolling of the monastery bells, announcing the service of matins. After four days enjoying the monks’ hospitality but sleeping late, I thought I had better make an appearance. So this morning when the bells began to peal, rather than covering my head with the nearest pillow, I rolled out of bed, dressed by the light of a lantern, then picked my way through the empty courtyard towards the echo of monastic chant.
It was still dark, with only a faint glimmer of dawn on the horizon. In the church the lamps were all lit, casting a dim and flickering light over the early Byzantine mosaics of the choir. I kicked off my shoes by the door and stood at the back of the church. To my right four nuns dressed in black skirts and bodices were prostrating themselves on a reed mat. Ahead of me a file of little boys stood in line, listening to an old monk. He had a long patriarchal beard and stood chanting from a huge hand-written codex laid on a stone lectern to the north of the sanctuary. Each phrase rose to a climax, then sank to a low, almost inaudible conclusion.
Slowly the church began to fill up; soon the line of boys stretched right across the length of the nave. Another monk, Abouna Kyriacos, appeared and walked up to the sanctuary. He started chanting at another lectern, parallel but a little to the south of the other, echoing the old monk’s chant: a phrase would be sung by the first monk, then passed over to Kyriacos who would repeat it and send it back again. The chant passed from lectern to lectern, quick-paced syllables of Aramaic slurring into a single elision of sacred song.
By now some of the older boys had also begun to go up to the lecterns and were standing behind the monks, joining in with them. The chant rolled on, as deep and resonant as Gregorian plainsong, but with a more Oriental feel, the strangely elusive monodic modulations reverberating under the rolling Byzantine vaults.
Before long an unseen hand was pulling back the curtains from the sanctuary; a boy holding a smoking thurible rattled its chains. The entire congregation began a long series of prostrations: from their standing position, the worshippers fell to their knees, and lowered their heads to the ground so that all that could be seen from the rear of the church was a line of upturned bottoms. All that distinguished the worship from that which might have taken place in a mosque was that the worshippers crossed and recrossed themselves as they performed their prostrations. This was the way the early Christians prayed, and is exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow. In the sixth century, the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice. Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention; it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.
The white light of dawn was filtering in through the great splayed Byzantine windows in the south wall. Inside the church, the tempo of the chant was now sinking. The curtains closed; silence fell. A last eddy of prostration passed through the congregation. The Archbishop appeared and the boys queued to kiss his cross.
Slowly the church emptied; from outside you could hear the birds stirring in the vine trellising.
However alien and eccentric Eastern asceticism sometimes seems, it had an extraordinary influence on the medieval West; indeed the European monks of the early Middle Ages were merely provincial imitators of the Eastern desert fathers. The monastic ideal came out of Egypt, that of the stylite from Syria. Both forms travelled westwards, stylitism, amazingly enough, getting as far as Trier before being abandoned as impossible in a northern climate, with the aspiring German stylite eventually yielding to pressure from his bishop to come down before he froze to his pillar. It was as clear and unstoppable a one-way traffic, east to west, as the reverse cultural invasion of fast food and satellite television is today.
What has always fascinated me is the extent to which the austere desert fathers were the models and heroes of the Celtic monks on whose exploits I was brought up in Scotland. Like their Byzantine exemplars, the Celtic Culdees deliberately sought out the most wild and deserted places – the isolation of lonely bogs and forests, the bare crags and islands of the Atlantic coast – where they could find the solitude that they believed would lead them to God.
Moreover, despite the difficulties of travel, the links between the monastic world of the Levant and that which grew up in imitation of it in the north of Europe were unexpectedly close. Seventh-century Rome had four resident communities of Oriental monks and many Eastern church fathers travelled ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ to the extreme west. Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent.
Many other more anonymous figures seem to have followed in his footsteps. The ‘seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig’ in the west of Ireland were proudly remembered in manuscripts of the Irish Litany of Saints, along with coracle-fulls of other nameless ‘Romani’ (i.e. Byzantines) and ‘the Cerrui from Armenia’. All these diverse figures seem to have found their way to the most extreme ends of the Celtic fringe, where they were revered for centuries to come: indeed so holy was the reputation of these travelling Byzantines that according to the Irish Litany of Saints even to read their names over a sick man was believed to prevent ‘boils, and jaundice and the plague and every other pestilence’.
If an intermittent flow of living monks from east to west was possible, then the flow of inanimate books was greater still. Up to the eighth century, The Life of St Antony of Egypt by Athanasius of Alexandria was probably the most read and imitated book in Europe after the Bible, and what was true of manuscripts in general was particularly true of manuscript illumination: that early Irish and Northumbrian gospel books took as their principal model work from the Byzantine east Mediterranean is now beyond question.
At Cambridge I spent my final year specialising in the study of Hiberno-Saxon art, and what above all pushed me on to try and get through to the Tur Abdin was the knowledge of the extent to which the early medieval art of Britain was indebted to the artists of the scriptoria of the monasteries there. For though these monasteries