§ 39.4. =Paul of Thebes.=--The withdrawal of particular ascetics from ascetical motives into the wilderness, which was a favourite craze for a while, may have been suggested by Old and New Testament examples, _e.g._ 1 Kings xvii. 3; xix. 4; Luke i. 80; iv. 1; but it was more frequently the result of sore persecution. Of a regular professional institution of anchorets with life-long vows there does not yet appear any authentic trace. According to Jerome’s _Vita Pauli monachi_ a certain =Paul of Thebes= in Egypt, about A.D. 250, during the Decian persecution, betook himself, when sixteen years old, to the wilderness, and there forgotten by all the world but daily fed by a raven with half a loaf (1 Kings xvii. 4), he lived for ninety-seven years in a cave in a rock, until St. Anthony (§ 44, 1), directed to him by divine revelation and led to him first by a centaur, half man, half horse, then by a fawn, and finally by a she-wolf, came upon him happily just when the raven had brought him as it never did before a whole loaf. He was just in time to be an eye-witness, not indeed of his death, but rather of his subsequent ascension into heaven, accompanied by angels, prophets and apostles, and to arrange for the burial of his mortal remains, for the reception of which two lions, uttering heart-breaking groans, dug a grave with their claws. These lions after earnestly seeking and obtaining a blessing from St. Anthony, returned back to their lair.--Contemporaries of the author, as indeed he himself tells, declared that the whole story was a tissue of lies. Church history, however, until quite recently, has invariably maintained that there must have been some historical foundation, though it might be very slight, for such a superstructure. But seeing that no single writer before Jerome seems to know even the name of Paul of Thebes and also that the _Vita Antonii_ ascribed to Athanasius knows nothing at all of such a wonderful expedition of the saint, Weingarten (§ 44) has denied that there ever existed such a man as this Paul, and has pronounced the story of Jerome to be a monkish Robinson Crusoe, such as the popular taste then favoured, which the author put forth as true history _ad majorem monachatus gloriam_. We may simply apply to this book itself what Jerome at a later period confessed about his epistles of that same date _ad Heliodorum:--sed in illo opere pio ætate tunc lusimus et celentibus adhuc Rhetorum studiis atque doctrinis quædam scholastico flore depinximus_.