Azazeel (28 page)

So the temple remained standing until the time of Jesus the Messiah but it fell into ruin as the years took their toll. When people abandoned it Azazeel and his cohorts – devils and fiends
– moved in and lived inside the temple with their human followers, who at that time worshipped the devil. But when Azazeel failed to tempt Christ, as is written in the Gospels, and the word
of the Lord triumphed, a mighty earthquake took place and the temple was destroyed. All that remained was these stones here and there and the broken columns. Then it happened that some of the early
fathers were preaching in the region, and the Romans killed them. Their disciples buried them in this eastern part of the temple and when Christianity spread in this parts the spot became a place
of pilgrimage. This building was built over the tombs of the martyred fathers for fear they might be disinterred by the pagans, who resented the followers of Christ and hoped to restore their old
temple to its former state. The Christians erected this structure to surround the resting place of the early fathers and at the wall on the side of the square there were three contiguous walls,
which could not be breached because of the hardness of the rock and the thickness of the three walls. As for the other three sides, they were fortified by nature because they were on high ground
overlooking the precipice. Eventually the building became a refuge and stronghold for monks.

The abbot paused a while, then continued: ‘When I was fifteen I was here when bandits surrounded us and we spent five full days in the building, not a month as is said. We almost perished
of hunger and thirst. When the bandits failed to breach the walls they gave up and left. They didn’t know there was nothing in the building to steal anyway.’ The abbot paused again a
moment, then added, ‘There’s no truth to the story about the nails which were hammered into the body of Jesus and which glow by night. That, Hypa, is all I can tell you about this
building, so after today do not ask me about it again.’

The abbot had finished speaking, but I was still puzzled and my thoughts were confused. I did not understand much of what he said. He had been speaking to me as though he were reading from a
text he had memorized. Even his face showed no expression as he spoke.

I hesitated a moment, then without thinking I pursued the subject. ‘But father, I’ve heard subdued sounds coming from inside the building when I put my ear to the wall. That’s
happened to me several times.’

‘Hypa, those are sounds that come from inside you, not from inside the building. There may be big rats or snakes or insects in the building, because it hasn’t been opened for many
years.’

‘But father, you’ll open it if one of the monks dies.’

‘No, we no longer bury anyone in it, and it will never be opened,’ he said.

SCROLL FIFTEEN

T
he monks in this monastery and in the surrounding areas differ from their brothers in Egypt and Alexandria. Both groups are pious, love the Lord
and have a deep interest in divinity, but the approach of us Egyptian monks is tougher and more inclined towards arduous forms of worship. That is no surprise because we Egyptians invented
monasticism and gave it to those parts of the world where Christians live.

The monks here are amazed at my asceticism and my spiritual exertions. They admire my patience as a reader and my constant application as a writer. They were, and still are, surprised at how I
sleep in a chair most nights and how I stay secluded in the library most days, so much so that several months after I arrived they started to call me Hypa the Strange. Little by little their
surprise diminished as they grew accustomed to me and came to know me better. But they continued to call me ‘the Strange’, and sometimes ‘the Physician’. Here they are less
interested in news about Alexandria than the monks in Jerusalem, and so they pestered me less. In fact, the truth be told, they did not pester me at all, though in the beginning they were keen to
find out what was behind the connection between me and Bishop Nestorius. When I told them the truth about how we met in Jerusalem they relaxed, and when they found out about my skill in medicine
and the arts of healing they became more friendly. When they had observed me for months and had not noticed anything troubling in my behaviour they were reassured. They used to visit me in the
library and sit with me in the upper courtyard after the long masses.

At the start I was not very talkative or sociable, and they respected my silence and my solitude. Then day by day I became more like them. I started to enjoy sitting with them and delighted in
their constant cheerfulness. My closest friends were two of the most honest monks. One I called Laugher or, in full, the Dignified Laugher because he combined the two qualities, which rarely occur
together. After two years with me here, he recently moved to Antioch, where he settled in the suburbs in a monastery they call Eupropius.
¹⁰
While he was
here he filled everyone around him with joy, love and serenity. The features of his face, especially his upper lip which arched to reveal his teeth, gave the impression that he was always smiling.
He did in fact smile often, as if the Lord had favoured him with good news to dispel any cares he might have. He had a glint in his eye and would laugh on the slightest pretext, and when he laughed
he would cover his mouth with his hand like a girl. But he was also quick to tears. He was present once when I was treating a poor child who had an inflammation in his neck of the type we call
Persian fire, and he burst into tears and left because he could not bear to hear the child crying. After that he would leave the library as soon as any patient came in. I could not hold back my
tears when I said goodbye to him at the monastery gate on the day he suddenly left, and I never saw him again after that, although I often longed to see him and I missed his company.

The other monk is now the one closest to my heart. He has spent twenty years of his life here and he is the monk most like the abbot, though twenty years younger, fatter and with a thicker
beard. He is strikingly short with a large belly, so when he walks quickly, as he always does, he looks like a rolling ball. His hands and feet are as tiny as those of a small boy and he also has
the smile of a boy or an adolescent. But what makes him look like a man is his baldness, his thick black beard, his puffy cheeks and the black rings around his eyes from staying up late or
indigestion. His eyes are wide, full of intelligence and curiosity, and he is goodhearted in a way which strangers would miss but which is obvious to those who grow close to him.

At first I saw him several times in church, then with time we became as brothers, especially after he helped me with great enthusiasm to prepare the library, which had been an abandoned
building. As he helped me arrange the books on the shelves he would look at them like someone fascinated with texts, but I rarely saw him reading. The monks here call him by a strange name: the
Hypostasis Pharisee. I started calling him by the same name, which neither irritates nor pleases him.

At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, when we were sitting at the monastery gate one day, he told me he was of Arab origin and spoke the languages of both the Arabs of the north and those in
Yemen. At the time I did not know there were two Arabic languages, northern and southern. He told me his father was a wealthy man who worked in trade and lived in a large house in the middle of
Aleppo. But he died young and when his uncle married his mother to preserve his father’s wealth, Pharisee left their world and joined the parish there as a servant and then as a deacon. He
became a monk at the age of twenty-five and lived in seclusion for three years, then came here and settled in the monastery.

When I came to know him better, he told me some of his secrets, such as the fact that in his early youth he disobeyed the Lord with women several times and wrongly saw them as fair game for
erotic adventures. Then he suffered for his sins, repented and confessed to the abbot everything he had committed. He found out the secret of how to tap into the mercy of the Lord through
confession and he gave up the debauchery which had both troubled and delighted him. But after he joined the church he hated women, in fact he could not abide any female, even if she were a dumb
animal. One day I said to him, after he had talked at length in denigration of females: ‘Take it easy, Pharisee, the Earth is female and the Lord came from the Virgin.’

‘No, Hypa,’ he replied. ‘Femininity and women are the cause of every misfortune. Earth, sky, water, air and plants are neither female nor male, but the Lord’s gifts to
Adam who was led astray by his wife Eve, and what happened happened. The Virgin Mary is a solitary exception and the Lord made her faultless so that our Lord Jesus Christ could stem from her and to
show us that the most sublime things can come from the least of things, just as pearls take shape in sea shells. Or else what would the Virgin be, had she not given birth to Christ?’

I was surprised at him saying ‘stem from her’ but I did not want to argue with him, because he had not studied theology in Egypt to know that ‘stem from’ is a
philosophical term that should not be used to express incarnation and that Christ took from the body of the Virgin his humanity, and hence he was half human, judging by what they used to say
there.

At the time, he stopped for a moment and gazed into the distance, then suddenly, as though he had discovered something important, he said, ‘Look at this monastery, and all the monasteries
and churches, why does peace prevail in them? Because they do not have women in them, and are spared all the calamities and betrayals that women cause.’

‘Are all women unfaithful?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, definitely. The only man who could be sure that his wife was faithful was our ancestor Adam because his wife had no other man with whom to betray him, either in her bed or in her
imagination. Yet she still betrayed him with Azazeel the accursed and allied herself with Azazeel against Adam.’

Pharisee loved to talk at length. He would shake his head when he was engrossed in telling a story, wave his arms in the air and illustrate the words with his hands and fingers as though he were
talking to someone who was deaf. He did not like to be interrupted and he never looked at the face of the person he was arguing with. When he was carried away, it was as if he were addressing
another group of people. Once, to provoke him gently, I said, ‘And what about convents?’ He gushed like a waterfall in full flood. ‘Argh, they’re an innovation that has no
basis. Monasticism means chastity, serenity and abandonment of the ephemeral world and one of the most important features of it is avoidance of women, so how can women practise it? Have you not
seen what Matthew the Apostle wrote in his Gospel, quoting Jesus as saying that anyone who can bear to renounce marriage should do so and what Paul the Apostle says in his first Epistle to the
Corinthians: “It is good for a man not to marry.”’

‘But Paul the Apostle said in the same epistle that since there is so much immorality in the world, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.’

‘But after that he said that those who are unmarried should stay unmarried.’

Pharisee was very argumentative that day but he is no longer like that. He has memorized all the legal books, the four Gospels and the epistles of the Fathers. He cannot stand heresies and
banned writings, and is suspicious of the non-canonical books which we recently started to call the Apocrypha. He is always rebuking me for keeping copies of the banned gospels in my room, but he
has never told anyone else of this secret, which I revealed to him one year after I settled here. Philosophy enrages him greatly, although he is in fact inclined to philosophizing, which is by
nature close to theology. He is interested in the resolutions of the local synods and the great synod held a hundred years ago in Nicaea, attended by the bishops who drafted for us the famous
creed. He is curious about the interpretations of this creed and the commentaries on the interpretations. Naturally he is interested in biblical exegesis and he has a great passion for everything
related to the hypostasis or nature of the elements in the Trinity. He never stops talking about it, thinking about it and taking a dogmatic position on it. That is how he acquired his nickname
Pharisee,
¹¹
which those close to him have expanded into the Hypostasis Pharisee.

The monks loved to rile him by asking him about the nature, essence and intrinsic reality of Jesus Christ, and about some of the many other expressions which are synonymous with the puzzling
word hypostasis, especially in those regions which speak Greek, Syriac, Arabic and other less important languages. Pharisee knew all the variants of the word in these languages, and as soon as he
met me he asked what the Egyptians and Alexandrians mean by the word hypostasis. I told him that it means the person or intrinsic entity and that we rarely use the word in speech, and he said
‘Well done!’ If he responded to the monks’ provocation, and he generally did, he would embark on an explanation of the three holy hypostases: the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit, and he would go over in intricate detail all the citations, the schools of thought and the heresies, finally coming down on the side of the view that God and Christ, the Father and the Son,
are one hypostasis or one nature. The monks would often drift away from the group, while he remained deep in his explanation, until the last listener also left or prayer time came and at the church
door he was forced to break off his interminable presentation. He was always saying that he would write a thesis on the three hypostases. Then a few months ago the abbot categorically forbade him
from broaching these hypostatic matters again and reprimanded the other monks for bringing the subject up with him. None the less the nickname the Hypostasis Pharisee stuck, even after it was
forbidden to talk about the subject.

During a pleasant conversation one day I asked the abbot why he prevented the monks from discussing the question of the hypostasis. He answered firmly and decisively that it was a sterile debate
and likely to provide opportunities for strife and heresies, even if it was discussed calmly for the purpose of theological study and as conversation to pass the time of day. ‘The monastic
life is more important than that,’ said the abbot, who was visibly displeased. Like everyone else I agreed with him and none of us ever discussed the matter again.