By Meredith Cutrer and Colleen M. Thomas
Despite significant research, there is much that we still do not know about Ireland’s ninth- and tenth-century stone crosses, the renowned symbols of medieval Irish artistic prowess, including the precise functions they served in their communities. A number of Ireland’s early stone crosses contain a mystery that might lend a clue, however, to an important function of the high cross. In panels positioned at prominent locations on crosses in some of Ireland’s most famous monasteries—Moone, Castledermot, Monasterboice, Kells and Armagh, to name just five—we find an unusual scene in Western art, virtually unprecedented in its time internationally and peculiar to contemporary Irish and Scottish sculpture: two Egyptian saints receiving bread in the desert. What did the scene represent and why did the medieval Irish place such importance on it?
THE SAINTS ON THE CROSSES
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Irish high crosses overwhelmingly featured panels depicting scenes from the Bible. On the occasions when they did include non-biblical figures, they were usually images of contemporary Irish clerics—monks or bishops. No image of an Irish saint has been firmly identified on the crosses and therefore the regular appearance of two non-biblical Egyptian saints is extraordinary. Their ubiquity tells us the value that the medieval Irish monks placed on them.
The Irish panels of the Egyptian saints feature two men facing each other, holding between them a circular loaf of bread, usually delivered by a raven descending from above. The earliest version of the scene was found on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross in Irish-influenced northern England, where the raven is omitted but where mercifully there is an inscription surrounding the panel—‘Saints Paul and Antony, two hermits, broke bread in the desert’—confirming the identity of the figures. Paul and Antony images survive in greater number in Western art after the twelfth century. It was the Harvard art historian Arthur Kingsley Porter who, in 1929, recognised the composition on Insular sculptured stones from his research on twelfth-century Romanesque sculpture in Spain and France.
Each Irish panel representing the Egyptian saints is unique. Some designs represent them with familiar symbols of Irish monks, with their croziers and hooded cloaks. Others emphasise their Egyptian heritage by showing Paul’s garment made of fabric woven from palm leaves. Whatever distinctions the panels may feature, however, they all share the same scene, which shows the two saints re-enacting their famous desert meal, detailed for us in the early Christian writer Jerome’s fourth-century work The Life of Paul.
THE STORY BEHIND THE SCENE
In AD 250, the Emperor Decius issued an order that all people living in the Roman Empire (except for Jews) had to perform a pagan sacrifice. Christians who were unwilling to perform this sacrifice were imprisoned or executed. To escape this persecution, Paul of Thebes (d. AD 341) fled into the Egyptian desert, never to return. He was content with his desert-dwelling life, where he lived as a hermit in a cave, open to the sky but protected by a palm tree and fed by a spring located deep in the eastern Egyptian desert.
When Paul was 113 years old, another famous Egyptian hermit, Antony of Egypt (d. AD 356), then 90 years old, learned in a dream that Paul was a far more perfect monk than he. News of this superior monk piqued Antony’s interest, so he decided to pay Paul a visit. Antony trekked through the desert and came at long last to Paul’s abode, where he met a rather chilly reception. After some persistence on Antony’s part, Paul eventually relented and invited Antony into his dwelling.
When it came time to eat, Paul told Antony that for the past 60 years a raven had brought him half a loaf of bread daily, but on the day of Antony’s visit the raven miraculously brought a full loaf to accommodate Paul’s guest. A dispute subsequently arose as to who should break the loaf: should Antony, the guest, or Paul, the senior monk, have the honours? Finally, they decided that each would hold part of the bread and pull simultaneously, and they ate their meal in Christian harmony.
Other than the raven’s miraculous provision, this story is rather unremarkable: two Egyptian monks squabbling in the desert over dividing a loaf of bread seems hardly worthy of commemoration on Ireland’s extraordinary monuments centuries later and thousands of kilometres away. Nevertheless, its regular appearance on Irish high crosses speaks to the importance that this scene and the figures in it had to the medieval Irish communities. Jerome could hardly have imagined the success that his biography of Paul would have in medieval Ireland, but he would have been pleased, for just this type of influence is exactly what he had in mind when he sat down to write The Life of Paul.
JEROME AND THE ORIGIN OF MONASTIC MODELS
The great Patristic author Jerome is best known for having translated the Bible into Latin, but he also wrote commentaries, homilies and saints’ lives, and maintained correspondence with other important early Christian theologians. When Jerome wrote The Life of Paul, Christian hermits and monks were a new and controversial phenomenon. Monastic practices emerged from the Holy Land, and communities experimenting with new styles of Christian devotion like living communally in small groups (cenobitic monasticism) or alone in remote isolation (eremitic monasticism) were especially prevalent in Egypt.
Antony was already revered as the first Christian monk, having established several popular monastic communities in the Egyptian deserts. By about the year 360 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, had written The Life of Antony in Greek. Within a decade Evagrius, who would become bishop of Antioch, made a Latin translation. Then, in the mid-370s, Jerome was a guest in Evagrius’s house, where he chronicled Paul’s life story in between his own forays into the desert to attempt life as a hermit. Paul’s story was set to go global and would find its way to Ireland within the next few centuries.
The Life of Paul was first sent to one of Jerome’s patrons. As Jerome was a recognised authority on Christian doctrine, his texts enjoyed considerable popularity, but he further boosted the circulation of his work by requiring visitors who wished to copy any one of his texts to duplicate other items that he had authored as well. These strategies helped to ensure that Jerome’s favourable views on desert monastic practice, articulated through his story about Paul the Egyptian hermit, were well represented in the West.
The Life of Paul placed these new Christian practices from the Holy Land into a context that was more recognisable for Western audiences. By characterising Paul as a more venerable figure than Antony because he lived in isolation, Jerome provided all subsequent Christian monks and hermits with models for spiritual development. This structure for monastic hierarchy, with Paul and Antony as the standards, was replicated in the earliest rules for monks written across the West by important founders, including Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, Columbanus, an Irish monk who founded monasteries at Luxeuil and Bobbio, in the seventh century, and the Irish monastic regulations Collectio Canonum Hibernensis in the eighth century.
IRELAND’S SPIRITUAL ANCESTORS
In addition to serving as models for Christian monks, Paul and Antony represented a monastic lineage linked to desert figures in the Bible. The introduction to The Life of Paul listed the various candidates who might have been considered as the earliest hermits. First, the Old Testament prophet Elijah was sent by God to live in the desert during a punishing drought but was sustained by a nearby stream and a raven who brought him food each day. From the New Testament came a second desert prophet, John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness wearing clothes made from camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey.
After Paul’s death, Jerome wrote that Antony proclaimed to his followers: ‘I have seen Elijah and John the Baptist in the desert and truly Paul in Paradise’. These final words completed a symmetry whereby Antony acknowledged Paul as the heir to the lineage of desert ascetics, which Jerome asserted in the introduction, establishing credibility for Paul—and, by extension, Antony—on the basis of ancient biblical authority.
It may seem an unlikely mix to find images of Egyptian hermits from a biography written by Jerome in the fourth century carved on Irish high crosses made in the ninth and tenth centuries, but to early medieval Irish monks it made perfect sense. The pair represented the very origin of monastic practice and were emblems of monastic progression from novice practitioners to the most spiritually advanced. Paul and Antony provided a spiritual lineage that bound the Irish monks by belief, not by blood, connecting monks of early medieval Ireland to desert prophets in the Bible. Centuries after they lived, the Egyptian hermits on Irish stone crosses served as daily inspiration for monastic communities as a key source of identity and heritage.
Meredith Cutrer is a doctoral candidate in early medieval history at Oxford University; Colleen M. Thomas holds a doctorate in the history of art from Trinity College, Dublin.
Further reading
É. Ó Carragáin, ‘The meeting of Saint Paul and Saint Anthony: visual and literary uses of a literary motif’, in G. Mac Niocaill & P.F. Wallace (eds), Keimelia: studies in medieval archaeology and history in memory of Tom Delaney (Galway, 1988), 1–58.
A.K. Porter, ‘An Egyptian legend in Ireland’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenshaft 5 (1929), 25–38.
C.M. Thomas, ‘Beyond the desert: the narrative composition of medieval images for the hermits Paul and Antony receiving bread from the raven’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 2013).
C.M. Thomas, ‘Hermits and their habitats’, in N. NicGhabhann & D. O’Donovan (eds), Mapping new territories in art and architectural history: essays in honour of Roger Stalley (Turnhout, 2021), 19–30.