angielski dla dzieci - architektura -
In it monasticism took in organised ecclesiastical form. The church was served by priest-monks, and great communities of men and women carried on works of charity and evangelisation. Still further south lay Lycopolis, the home of John the prophet. This man was celebrated as well for his wonderful obedience as for his spiritual gifts. Lycopolis may be reckoned the outpost of the monasticism of lauras and hermitages. Beyond it lay the organised monasteries of the disciples of St. Pachomius. During the lifetime of the founder of Tabennisi, nine monasteries carried out his rule. Of these the most famous was that which was ruled by Bgoul and afterwards by his
nephew, Schnoudi. On the sea-coast, east of Alexandria, lay the settlements visited by Cassian. The Tannitic mouth of the Nile flows into what is now Lake Menzaleh. In Cassian's time this whole region was a desolate salt swamp. The sea flowed over it when the north wind blew, destroying all hope of fertility. On angielski dla dzieci the hills, which came to look like islands, stood the ruins of villages forsaken by their inhabitants. It was a land --
"Sea saturate as with wine."
Among the ruins and amid the surrounding desolation dwelt the monks who were the heroes of Cassian's earlier Conferences. No scene has seemed to me to convey
more vividly at once the pathos and the nobility of the monk's renunciation of the world than this one. In Nitria and Scete the ascetic is at least remote from all remembrances of common life. On the islands of Menzaleh he kneels in solitary prayer within the very walls where women once laughed to see their children sport. He gazes over brine-soaked swamps, which once were harvest-fields thronged with reapers. Westward from Menzaleh lay Lake Burlus. Between it and the sea stretched a desolate spit of sandy land, given up by farmers as hopelessly barren. This was the Diolcos described in the Institutes, and the eighteenth Conference. Here Archebius
and his architektura fellow hermits struggled for life in their inhospitable home, husbanding even their water as no miser would husband the most precious wine.
Thus we have five distinct and widely separated regions in which Egyptian monasticism existed and flourished during the fourth century. First, Nitria, with its offshoot The Cells; second, Scete; third, the region in Upper Egypt which came under St. Antony's more immediate influence; fourth, Southern Egypt; fifth, the sea-coast of the Nile Delta. In very close connection with these, so as to be predominatingly Egyptian in the tone of their monasticism, were the hermitages and lauras of south-western Palestine and the settlements in the Sinai
peninsula. Outlying from the greater centres were single hermitages and small lauras, wherever the monks hoped to find solitude.
In many places life was supported only with extreme difficulty. Sometimes water had to be obtained by collecting and storing the dew which fell at certain seasons. Sometimes it was carried with immense toil from distant wells. There were mieszkania districts where the hermits lived in constant dread of the irruption of barbarian tribes, which destroyed tranquillity and even threatened life itself. Bands of wandering robbers sometimes rifled the cells of their miserable furniture, or captured, insulted, and injured the hermits. At other times the silence of these retreats became so
awful, that the hermit was startled into uncontrollable emotion by the chance shout of some shepherd-boy who had driven his goats too far; or came to find the rustling of dry reeds in the wind an almost insupportable noise.
For the most part in the deserts north of the Thebaid the monks saw very little of each other. Even the inhabitants of grouped cells led almost solitary lives. On Saturdays and Sundays they met for public worship and perhaps a common meal, but during the rest of the week they lived alone in their cells, or with a single disciple. If the monk were wise, he worked. Sometimes he wove
mieszkania -
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