At last, on page 232 of the Elenchus, I find some trace of an argument of this kind: Jerome says that Paul the Hermit was the first founder of monks, and elsewhere that Antony was the first in Egypt, Hilarion in Syria. Therefore in the time of Dionysius the Areopagite there were no monks; consequently Dionysius the Areopagite was not the author of books in which monks are mentioned.
This is the force of your argument from Jerome, this afterpiece after the fable. I congratulate you because, with the comic curtain drawn aside and the license of old comedy at least for the time being marked off, you now begin to fight with human weapons: no longer contending with abuse but with learned words; no longer hurling, in place of argument, the dung of the privy, those sacred names of Cloacina by which you dishonored not me but yourself.
In truth, against Serarius and me, under the name of a letter, you performed a shameless and wicked comedy. From it the cause for blushing remained not for us but for you, not for the man who heard evil spoken, but for the man who spoke it.
Now I answer your argument. Saint Jerome, in the Life of Saint Hilarion, introduces the opinion of certain men about the beginning of monasticism, who refer it to Elijah and the Baptist; but Jerome himself disagrees, and prefers with others to bring it back to Paul the Hermit. In confirmation of this opinion he adds that Elijah was more than a monk, and that John began to prophesy before he was born.
That reasoning does not bind. For although John was a prophet before he was born, he was not therefore less a prophet because after he was born he embraced a solitary life. Let Elijah have been more than a monk; still before Paul he led the way in the monastic life. Paul was called the first of the hermits not because there were no hermits before him, but because perhaps he was the first in Egypt to persevere to the end of his life without any human companionship. Neither Elijah nor the Baptist did that.
Certainly not even in this way could the beginning of monks be referred to Paul, but rather to Elijah, who had a disciple as the companion of his life and perhaps not rarely lived with the sons of the prophets, of whom 4 Kings 2 speaks, as Elisha also did afterward in chapter 6 of the same book.
But you say: according to the same Saint Jerome, Antony in Egypt and Hilarion in Palestine were the first founders of cenobites. Yet who taught you that Gaius and Demophilus, to whom Dionysius writes, were cenobites and not hermits? Or that they were Syrians or Egyptians? Then, too, you refuse to attend to Jerome’s meaning, whose words are very clear: “They assert that Antony was the head of this way of life, which is partly true. For it was not so much that he himself was before all others, as that from him the zeal of all was stirred up.”
Therefore, according to Jerome, even in Egypt itself Antony was not so much the founder as the propagator of monks. If he was only the propagator, there were others before he propagated them; among these were those whom blessed Dionysius mentions. Jerome himself, speaking from his own judgment in book 2 Against Jovinian, near the middle of the book, writes that the cradle of monks began from John the Baptist.
I say nothing about the Essenes, lest I put my sickle into another man’s harvest. Let the most illustrious Cardinals Bellarmine and Baronius see to that, and also our own Gretser and Serarius; and let them go on adorning their own Sparta.