Word: lacarri
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...POSSESSED BY GOD by Jacques Lacarrière. 237 pages. Doubleday...
...there was method to their masochism. Jacques Lacarrière, a French historian who spent some time in surviving desert monasteries, has written a tender, subtle account of the hermits. Their existence, as Lacarriere unfolds it, was not so strange as it seems at first glance; and it was perhaps a reasonable alternative to the world they left behind...
...they discovered it in themselves. The martyr-saint who had been thrown to the lions was replaced by the ascetic-saint who was beset by private visions of demons. In the "barrenness and calm abstraction of the desert," man could come to grips with his true nature, writes Lacarrière. Life's superfluities dropped away; the moral choices were starkly clear. Ascetics went for years without seeing or talking to another person. They hacked out inaccessible niches in cliffs or burrowed in the sand like crabs...
Society of Angels. The ascetics, Lacarrière thinks, were not really alone. By conquering temporal time, they had gained a kind of eternity. By taking to the desert, writes Lacarrière, the ascetic joined a brotherhood that "made him one with all men of the past, since Adam. There were angels and demons, then the dead with whom he frequently spoke-the saints and martyrs of early Christian times, and also the dead of a distant past, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, whispering in the darkness of the tombs. All these surrounded the ascetic and constituted his true society...
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