Eremites

St Paul the Eremite was a young aristocrat in Thebes, near modern Luxor, in Upper Egypt, sometime in the third century AD. During one of the periodic persecutions of Christians he fled into the desert, and having tried the life, decided he liked it. One could say, I suppose, what a 60 year old hippie once told me – that he “took a trip and never came back”. St Jerome tells us that St Paul wore a skirt of palm fronds and ate herbs and – the necessary miraculous flourish – bread which a crow brought to him daily.

Meanwhile, another eremite lived nearby: St Anthony the Abbot. His reason for solitude was probably schizophrenia. He lived among ancient tombs, feeding his feverish mind on the images of gods with dog’s heads and such and imagined that they came to frighten him at night. Bosch painted several versions of these “demonic torments”; the paintings have been great crowd-pleasers ever since. Pietro Liberi, a Venetian painter, on the other hand, imagined St Anthony being tempted by six healthy naked girls, standing around the saint in a circle and mooning him with their smooth pink butts. (Which would be your preferred type of torment?)

When very old St Paul was near death, an angel appeared to St Anthony in a dream and said: “Unbeknownst to you another saintly eremite has lived in this desert these sixty years. Get up, gird your loins, and go to him.” It is said that on the day on which St Anthony visited St Paul the crow brought a double portion of bread, enough to feed both saints. The visit, too, has been frequently painted. In all versions St Anthony appears to be talking – about his torments, perhaps, though it is possible that he was enquiring about some method to deal with the problem of painfully dry skin – dry skin being a the occupational health hazard of the eremites – while St Paul listens in silence. He appears to be thinking: will this bore never leave?