This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
By Georg Ebers
Translated by Clara Bell
In the course of my labors preparatory to writing a history of theSinaitic peninsula, the study of the first centuries of Christianity fora long time claimed my attention; and in the mass of martyrology, ofascetic writings, and of histories of saints and monks, which it wasnecessary to work through and sift for my strictly limited object, I cameupon a narrative (in Cotelerius Ecclesiae Grecae Monumenta) which seemedto me peculiar and touching notwithstanding its improbability. Sinai andthe oasis of Pharan which lies at its foot were the scene of action.
When, in my journey through Arabia Petraea, I saw the caves of theanchorites of Sinai with my own eyes and trod their soil with my ownfeet, that story recurred to my mind and did not cease to haunt me whileI travelled on farther in the desert.
A soul's problem of the most exceptional type seemed to me to be offeredby the simple course of this little history.
An anchorite, falsely accused instead of another, takes his punishmentof expulsion on himself without exculpating himself, and his innocencebecomes known only through the confession of the real culprit.
There was a peculiar fascination in imagining what the emotions of a soulmight be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilation of allsensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strange cave-dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulus tookform, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gathered roundit, growing at last to a distinct entity, which excited and urged me ontill I ventured to give it artistic expression in the form of anarrative. I was prompted to elaborate this subject—which had long beenshaping itself to perfect conception in my mind as ripe material for aromance—by my readings in Coptic monkish annals, to which I was ledby Abel's Coptic studies; and I afterwards received a further stimulusfrom the small but weighty essay by H. Weingarten on the origin ofmonasticism, in which I still study the early centuries of Christianity,especially in Egypt.
This is not the place in which to indicate the points on which I feelmyself obliged to differ from Weingarten. My acute fellow-laborer atBreslau clears away much which does not deserve to remain, but in manyparts of his book he seems to me to sweep with too hard a broom.
Easy as it would have been to lay the date of my story in the beginningof the fortieth year of the fourth century instead of the thirtieth, Ihave forborne from doing so because I feel able to prove with certaintythat at the time which I have chosen there were not only heathen reclusesin the temples of Serapis but also Christian anchorites; I fully agreewith him that the beginnings of organized Christian monasticism can in nocase be dated earlier than the year 350.
The Paulus of my story must not be confounded with the "first hermit,"Paulus of Thebes, whom Weingarten has with good reason struck out of thecategory of historical personages. He, with all the figures in thisnarrative is a purely fictitious person, the vehicle for an idea, neithermore nor less. I selected no particular model for my hero, and I claimfor him no attrib