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| Chapter I. Of the Monk's Girdle.
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Chapter I.637
| 637 Cf. Basil’s
Greater Monastic Rules, Q. xxii., from which a considerable portion of
this chapter is taken. |
Of the Monk’s Girdle.
As we are going to speak
of the customs and rules of the monasteries, how by God’s grace
can we better begin than with the actual dress of the monks, for we
shall then be able to expound in due course their interior life when we
have set their outward man before your eyes. A monk, then, as a soldier
of Christ ever ready for battle, ought always to walk with his loins
girded. For in this fashion, too, the authority of Holy Scripture shows
that they walked who in the Old Testament started the original of this
life,—I mean Elijah and Elisha; and, moreover, we know that the
leaders and authors of the New Testament, viz., John, Peter, and Paul,
and the others of the same rank, walked in the same manner. And of
these the first-mentioned, who even in the Old Testament displayed the
flowers of a virgin life and an example of chastity and continence,
when he had been sent by the Lord to rebuke the messengers of Ahaziah,
the wicked king of Israel, because when confined by sickness he had
intended to consult Beelzebub, the god of Ekron, on the state of his
health, and thereupon the said prophet had met them and said that he
should not come down from the bed on which he lay,—this man was
made known to the bed-ridden king by the description of the character
of his clothing. For when the messengers returned to him and brought
back the prophet’s message, he asked what the man who had met
them and spoken such words was like and how he was dressed. “An
hairy man,” they said, “and girt with a girdle of leather
about his loins;” and by this dress the king at once saw that it
was the man of God, and said: “It is Elijah the
Tishbite:”638
i.e., by the
evidence of the girdle and the look of the hairy and unkempt body he
recognized without the slightest doubt the man of God, because this was
always attached to him as he dwelt among so many thousands of
Israelites, as if it were impressed as some special sign of his own
particular style. Of John also, who came as a sort of sacred boundary
between the Old and New Testament, being both a beginning and an
ending, we know by the testimony of the Evangelist that “the same
John had his raiment of camel’s hair and a girdle of skin about
his loins.”639
When Peter also
had been put in prison by Herod and was to be brought forth to be slain
on the next day, when the angel stood by him he was charged:
“Gird thyself and put on thy shoes.”640
And the angel of the Lord would certainly not have charged him to do
this had he not seen that for the sake of his night’s rest he had
for a while freed his wearied limbs from the girdle usually tied round
them. Paul also, going up to Jerusalem and soon to be put in chains by
the Jews, was met at Cæsarea by the prophet Agabus, who took his
girdle and bound his hands and feet
to show by his bodily actions the
injuries which he was to suffer, and said: “So shall the Jews in
Jerusalem bind the man whose girdle this is, and deliver him into the
hands of the Gentiles.”641
And surely the
prophet would never have brought this forward, or have said “the
man whose girdle this is,” unless Paul had always been accustomed
to fasten it round his loins.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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