The Growth of Asceticism

There were however exceptions to this acquiescence of Christians in traditional values. While many Christians enjoyed being in and of the world, exercising their power as bishops or as advisers to the emperor, a minority saw the world as a haven of wickedness. This was perhaps reinforced by the new-found wealth of the church which appeared to many to be a betrayal of the teachings of its founders. Jerome’s comments on Christ lying naked outside the doors of opulent churches has already been quoted. The endless bitter doctrinal disputes must have impelled many to escape the city and seek a life of independent meditation.

So there was withdrawal. The Egyptian Antony, so-called ‘father of the monks’, lived 70 of his purported 100 years in the desert, remote from any human contact. (A life of Antony, ascribed to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, was the first in a long line of hagiographical accounts of holy men and women which provided exemplars for those who wished to renounce the world.) In Syria some holy men climbed pillars and lived on top of them for years with thousands of curious or devout visitors coming to stare. Not all could bear the lack of immediate human contact. In Egypt the withdrawal from the world took place in communities. Thousands of ordinary men, most of them villagers by birth, crowded into settlements where they lived according to a routine of prayer and manual labour. These were the first monasteries. The founding figure of monasticism is usually seen to be one Pachomius, an ex-army man, who stressed the separation of the monastery from the rest of the clergy and the importance of monks living as equals within their community. The most influential of the early monastic leasers of the east outside Egypt was Basil of Caesarea (333-79) (see above, p. 615). Basil believed that hospitality was an essential element of monastic life. Monastic communities should work and live in poverty passing on all surplus produce to the poor. Basil himself founded a whole complex of buildings outside Caesarea including a hospital and a leper colony.

However successful an individual might be in escaping from other human beings he or she still had a physical body to contend with. It was a problem well known to the Greek philosophers, who had long asserted that the desires of the flesh hampered them in their search for the spiritual world. So asceticism was not a Christian invention although Christians were more preoccupied with sexual desire than the Greek philosophers were. Peter Brown in his Body and Society traces this preoccupation back to Paul and it seems that celibacy was also practised by some Jewish communities such as that at Qumran. By the fourth century the preoccupation had become an obsession, part of the more widespread movement of renunciation of physical pleasures followed by the first hermits and monks. The act of sex in itself was now viewed by many with intense distaste. Some extremists, such as the Egyptian Hierakas, even doubted that married couples who had enjoyed the sexual act would be admitted to heaven. The more conventional view adopted by the church was that sex between married couples was acceptable but only as a means of creating children (or, as Jerome put it, more humans who could consecrate themselves to virginity!). The fulfilment of sexual desire as an end in itself was morally wrong. (See David Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy and Heresy in Ancient Christianity, Oxford, 2006, and Peter Brown, The Body in Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd edition, New York, 2008.)

This left women in an ambiguous position. On the one hand they could be cast, in the tradition of Eve, as temptresses to be avoided. The works of the church fathers are filled with dire warnings of the perils offered by glimpses of female flesh. On the other, those who made a commitment to virginity could achieve a certain status denied to their more carnal sisters. Even Jerome, who was more troubled by sexuality than most, could accept the company of virgins who were prepared to devote themselves to pious study. A minority of women, usually from upper-class backgrounds, discarded their wealth and founded hospitals or monasteries. Melania the Younger is the best-known example. She and her husband surrendered vast estates and Melania later founded a religious community on the Mount of Olives.