Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/589

Rh of the Acts of the council of Ephesus, and he had vigorously seconded the patriarch of Alexandria during the Nestorian controversy, behaving as a fiery opponent of Nestorianism. Moreover, Cyril's immediate successor Dioscurus was the champion of Eutyches and the author of the type of thought less crude than that the old arcliiniandrite had expounded, which went by the name of the Monophysite heresy. The disgraceful proceedings of the "Robber Synod" were chiefly due to the conduct of Dioscurus and his monks—unworthy representatives of the Egyptian Church.

Again and again we see the turbulent Coptic monks leading the mob in some act of violence. At the storming of the Serapeum, in the murder of Hypathia, during the Monophysite disputes, when the worst deeds of violence were done, if this was not by the soldiery, it was by the monks who poured in from the Nitrian desert or some other distant retreat, crowding the streets of Alexandria, and stirring up the dregs of the populace to criminal outbreaks. We must remember that monasticism had first appeared in Egypt. Following the example of the Therapeutæ, first as solitaries in their huts and caves, then, in the second stage, founding the Cœnobite life, the Egyptian monks laid the foundation of the vast system that spread over Syria and Asia Minor, and finally took possession of the whole Church, to the extent of securing the position that though a man might be a monk without becoming a saint, he could not be a saint unless he had been first a monk. Now it is not to be denied that there were genuine saints among the monks. The ascetic life had a fatal attraction for the strongest natures; it seemed to present the loftiest ideal to them. Such a monk as Father Jeremiah, the hermit whom the Emperor Anastasius had known in his early days, and whom he highly honoured when he reached the imperial throne, appears to have been a really good man, unselfish and unworldly. No doubt there were many such, whose names have never been preserved in history. But herein lies the fatal evil