THE CHURCH IN THE SIXTH CENTURY 235
refectory, school, guest-house and hospital, placed indeed far from the haunts of men, but becoming each a centre of life and culture in itself. Rabban Hormizd lies in a gorge of naked uncultivable rock — the church almost the only building; while cells by the hundred, hewn in the mountain-side, but placed without plan and often almost inaccessible, were the lodgings of the monks.
The one is a great organization; the other a gathering of ascetics only.
Kipling's "Purun Bhagat" is the ideal Eastern monk. He retires from the world, that he "may sit down, and get knowledge." Fast and vigil are his instruments; constant repetition of some holy formula (a "Name" in one case, the Psalms and offices in the other), the "Key to unlock the secrets of Paradise"; and, says Isaac of Nineveh, in the highest stage of the life of contemplation a stage that can only be begun in this life, the mind, free from its captivity in the body, "flits through immaterial realms."[1]
But, if this degree is to be attained, absolute solitude is a sine qua non. Human companionship is like frost, to the buds and fruit of the contemplative life, says Isaac of Nineveh; and of Sabr-Ishu it is recorded that he left the spot where people came to him to be cured, because his contemplation was disturbed thereby. As with the Indian hermit of the story, it never occurred to him to doubt the reality of his miraculous powers, or to be surprised at his own possession of them.
If, however, this contemplative ideal could produce, at times, saints of exceptional elevation of
1 Chabot, Isaac of Nineveh. Only comparison of those two very different works, Isaac of Nineveh and The Miracle of Purun Bhagat (Second Jungle Book), will show how very much the Indian and the Mesopotamian ascetic have in common, under the differences of their faith.
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