From The Holy Mountain (49 page)

'There was an old man who dwelt by the Jordan practising asceticism. One day he went into a cave to escape from the heat, and there he found a lion. It began to gnash its teeth at him and to roar. So the old man said to it, "Why are you annoyed? There is room here to take me and to take you also. If you do not wish to abide with me, arise and go!" And the lion did not carry him off but instead went out.'

Moschos first introduces this theme in a story told by Abba Agathonicos, the Abbot of Castellium, once the sister monastery to Mar Saba, now a ruin five miles further down the Kedron Valley:

'One day,' Abba Agathonicos tells Moschos, 'I went down to Rouba to visit Abba Poemon the Grazer. When I found him, I told him the thoughts which troubled me. When night fell he left me in a cave. It was winter and that night it got very cold indeed. I was freezing. When the elder came at dawn, he said to me: "What is the matter, child? I did not feel the cold." This amazed me, for he was naked. I asked him of his charity to tell me how he did not feel the cold. He said: "A lion came down and lay beside me; he kept me warm."'

But perhaps the most memorable fable of the Eden-like closeness of monks and beasts in the desert is Moschos's famous tale of St Gerasimos and the lion. Centuries later in the West, the story was mistakenly grafted onto the life of St Jerome, apparently through the ignorance of Latin-speaking pilgrims. In the Eastern Church, however, the tale has remained correctly attributed to St Gerasimos, and is still one of the most popular Orthodox saints' tales. Moreover, it is one of the few of Moschos's tales to have entered the repertoire of Byzantine art, and is occasionally found frescoed on Orthodox monastery walls: in Athos, for example, I saw several scenes from the story painted in the porch of the abbey church of the Monastery of Xenophontos. The story is set in St Gerasimos's monastery, 'about a mile from the Holy Jordan'.

'When [Sophronius and I] were visiting the monastery,' writes Moschos, 'the residents told us that St Gerasimos was walking one day by the banks of the Holy Jordan when he met a lion, roaring mightily because of the pain in its paw. The point of a reed was deeply embedded in it, causing inflammation. When the lion saw the elder, it came to him and showed him the foot, whimpering and begging some healing from him. When the elder saw the lion in such distress, he sat down and, taking the paw, he lanced it. The point was removed and also much pus. He cleansed the wound well, bound it up and dismissed the beast. But the healed lion would not leave the elder. It followed him like a disciple wherever he went. The elder was amazed at the gentle disposition of the beast and, from then on, he began feeding it, throwing it bread and boiled vegetables.

'Now the
lavra
had an ass which was used to fetch water for the needs of the elders, for they drink the water of the Holy Jordan which lies about one mile away from the monastery. The fathers used to hand the ass over to the lion, to pasture it on the banks of the Jordan. One day when the ass was being taken to pasture by the lion, it went away some distance from its keeper. Some camel-drivers on their way from Arabia found the ass and took it away to their country. Having lost the ass, the lion came back to the
lavra
and approached Abba Gerasimos, very downcast and dismayed. The Abba thought the lion had devoured the ass. He said to it: "Where is the ass?" The beast stood silent, very like a man. The elder said to it: "Have you eaten it? From now on [as a punishment] you will perform the same duties the ass performed." From then on, at the elder's command, the lion used to carry the saddlepack containing four earthenware vessels and bring water.

' [Many months later] the camel-driver who had taken the ass came back to the Holy City with the animal loaded up with the grain he hoped to sell there. Having crossed the Holy Jordan, he suddenly found himself face to face with the lion. When he saw the beast, he left his camels and took to his heels. Recognising the ass, the lion ran to it, seized its leading rein in its mouth just as it had been' trained to do, and led away not only the ass, but also the three camels. It brought them to the elder, rejoicing and roaring. The elder now realised that the lion had been falsely accused. He named the lion Jordanes and it lived with the elder in the
lavra,
never leaving his side for five years.

'When Abba Gerasimos departed to the Lord and was buried by the fathers, by the providence of God the lion could not be found. A little later the lion returned, searching for the elder, roaring mightily. When Abba Sabbatios and the rest of the fathers saw it, they stroked its mane and said to it: "The elder has gone away to the Lord and left us," yet even saying this did not succeed in silencing its cries and lamentations. Then Abba Sabbatios said to it: "Since you do not believe us, come with me and I will show you where Gerasimos lies." He took the lion and led it to where they had buried the elder, half a mile from the church. Abba Sabbatios said to the lion: "See, this is where our friend is," and he knelt down. When the lion saw how he prostrated himself, it began beating its head against the ground and roaring. Then it promptly [rolled over and] died, there on the elder's grave.'

Mar Saba,
28
October

Over the days that followed I explored many of the caves, cells and chapels which honeycomb the cliffs within the great boundary walls of Mar Saba. Earthquakes and Bedouin raids have led to much rebuilding over the centuries, but if you look hard enough, many fragments of the Byzantine monastery known to John Moschos still survive. The great cave chapel 'Built by God' stands as bare and austere as it would have done in the early Byzantine period. The only obvious additions are some late-medieval icons, a line of eighteenth-century choirstalls and the four hundred stacked skulls of the monks slaughtered in the seventh-century Persian invasion. In another grotto, the Retreat of St Sabas, the floor is still covered with the fragmentary tesserae of a simple geometric mosaic dating from the late sixth century. But the most interesting chapel of all is that built around the tomb and hermitage of St John Damascene.

John Damascene is probably the most important figure ever to have taken the habit at Mar Saba. He was the grandson of the last Byzantine Governor of Damascus, a Syrian Arab Christian named Mansour ibn Sargun. Ibn Sargun was responsible for surrendering the city to the Muslim General Khalid ibn Walid in 635, just three years after the death of Mohammed. Despite the change from Christian to Islamic rule, the family remained powerful. John's father, Sergios ibn Mansour, rose to become a senior figure in the financial administration of the early Umayyad Caliphate, whose accounts, significantly enough, continued for many decades to be kept in Greek. Because of this John grew up as a close companion of the future Caliph al-Yazid, and the two youths' drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the new Islamic capital. In due course John assumed his father's post in the administration, and he remained throughout his life a favourite of the Caliph. This relationship made him one of the very first Arab Christians capable of acting as a bridge between Christianity and Islam, even if, like so many who attempt to bring together two diverging cultures, he eventually ended up being regarded with suspicion by both: dismissed from his administrative job after Caliph Yazid's death and falsely accused of collusion with the Byzantine Emperor, he was nevertheless regarded with great mistrust in the Byzantine capital, where he was dubbed
Sarakenophron,
or Saracen-Minded.

John was in an excellent position to write the first ever informed treatise on Islam by a Christian, and when he retired to Mar Saba he dedicated his declining years to writing doctrinal homiles and working on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled
The Fount of Knowledge.
The book contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ). It never seems to have occurred to John that Islam might be a separate religion, and although he looked on it with considerable suspicion, he nevertheless applauds the way Islam converted the Arabs from idolatry, and writes with admiration of its single-minded emphasis on the unity of God.

If a theologian of the stature of John Damascene was able to regard Islam as a new - if heretical - form of Christianity, it helps to explain how Islam was able to convert so much of the Middle Eastern population in so short a time, even if Christianity remained the majority religion until the time of the Crusades. Islam was as much a product of the intellectual ferment of late antiquity as Gnosticism, Arianism and Monophysitism, and like those heresies it had its greatest success in areas disgruntled with Byzantine rule. Many Syrians expressed opposition to Byzantium and its ruthless attempt to impose its rigid imperial theology by converting
en masse
to the heterodox Christian doctrine of Monophysitism; later they greeted the conquering Arab armies as liberators and many converted again, this time to Islam. No doubt they regarded the Arabs' new creed as a small step from Monophysitism; after all, the two faiths started from a similar position: that God could not become fully human without somehow compromising his divinity.

Whatever the reason for its success, Islam certainly appealed to the former Monophysites, and within a century of the Arab conquest Syria was a mainly Muslim country. By contrast, the inhabitants of Palestine, who had done well out of Byzantine patronage of the Holy Places, never showed much interest in converting either to Monophysitism or to Islam, and Jerusalem remained a predominantly Orthodox Christian city until the Crusaders conquered it in 1099.

In Damascene's own lifetime, however, the most influential part of
The Fount of Knowledge
was not the section on Islam, but his attack on the heresy of Iconoclasm. For at the same time as John was becoming a monk, Byzantium was being engulfed by a wave of image-smashing. All the icons in the Empire were ordered to be destroyed, and their painting was henceforth banned. The reason for this may well have been the rise of Islam and the profound soul-searching which the loss of the Levant provoked in Byzantium. Many came to the conclusion that God was angry with the Byzantines for their idolatry, and thus gave the iconoclastic Muslims success in their wars.

Just as John's public life demonstrates the astonishing political tolerance of the Umayyad Caliphate in its willingness to employ a Christian in a senior administrative role, despite almost continuous hostilities with the rest of the Christian World, so his retirement demonstrates the surprising degree of intellectual freedom it permitted. For under the Umayyads John was able to do what no Byzantine was permitted to attempt: to write and distribute a systematic defence of images, in which he provided the fundamental theological counterblast to iconoclasm. John argued that although no man has seen God at any time, nevertheless, since Christ deigned to take upon himself the human form, it was necessary to worship the human face of God in the sacred icon. Moreover he demonstrated that not only was their cult based on reason, but that it was sanctioned by ancient precedent:

Paintings are the books of the illiterate. They instruct those who look at them with a silent voice and sanctify life . . . Since not everyone knows how to read, or has the leisure for reading, the Fathers of the Church saw fit that the Incarnate Christ be represented by images, like deeds of prowess, to serve as reminders. Often when we are not thinking of the Lord's passion, we see the image of the crucifixion, and being reminded of that salutary passion, we fall to our knees and revere
...
If I have no books I go to church, pricked as by spines by my thoughts; the flower of painting makes me look, charms my eyes as does a flowering meadow and softly distils the glory of God in my soul.

This afternoon, after I had woken from a siesta, Theophanes took me to John Damascene's old cell. We walked along the narrow staircases and winding paths that connect the different platforms of the monastery. Eventually we came to a small chapel backing onto the rock wall. 'This chapel was where St John's body used to lie,' said Theophanes, 'before your Pope's Crusaders came and stole him.'

'Where is he now?'