Life’s too good: Literal Devils
Well I certainly would not have believed it if I hadn’t read it, but apparently a lot of Christians
missed the persecution, torture, suffering and death that attended their fledgling years under the Roman Empire, and when Constantine came to power and made their religion the state one, thus legitimising and forever removing the threat of punishment for being a Christian, many of them legged it to the desert, eager to seek new temptations, hardships and horrors. Bloody Christians! Didn’t know when they had it good.
The idea seems to have been, if you can credit this, that Christianity was seen to be based on struggle, hardship and suffering, and once they were free and recognised in the empire there was no more of that. They felt cheated, as if they couldn’t pursue the major point of their belief.
In the desert they were faced - no doubt to their delight - with new dangers, and stories arose from there of monks battling
actual Devils. These were probably metaphorical ones - boredom, a sense of loss, the searing heat, thirst etc - but were written in the accounts of, among others, Saint Athanasius and Bishop Palladius. Reading further, there seems to be a certain odd logic in their choice, at least, in the context of their religion. It seems some of the more let’s say hardline monks wanted to emulate Christ by going out into the desert and facing the hardships he faced, the temptations that assailed him. As the man himself said:
“Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ ” (Matthew 19:21).
These people were called the Desert Fathers, and while he was perhaps a little ahead of the curve to be considered one, Saint Paul of Thebes seems to have been the first, going into the desert during that Decian Persecution we spoke of earlier when looking at Origen. It can of course be assumed that life in the desert, especially for someone who has not spent his life there like a bedouin or the operator of a caravan, is going to present a whole lot of problems, and between heat exhaustion, dehydration, hunger, sunstroke and coping with the myriad of insect life the desert uses to refute the allegation it is a dead wasteland, the mind is likely to be put under increasing strain. Hallucinations and visions are likely to be all but commonplace, and so much the more so, I would imagine for holy men, who almost want to see these things, to prove to themselves and others that they are real.
Which is why I have no problem accepting that the likes of Saint Paul and later Saint Anthony wrote of having actual, real, physical battles with the Devil out there in the wilderness. Grappling with their own slowly slipping sanity and succumbing to hallucinations, these men seem to have truly believed they were assaulted by and battled with the Devil, and because they believed it, and wrote of such encounters with fervour and sincerity, their adherents believed it too. And so the idea grew that the Desert Fathers had in fact managed to recreate the experience of the Saviour, their piety and sacrifice and dedication to God calling forth his Adversary to try to tempt, or slay them, under the burning desert sun.