"The ascetic instinct is intimately united with the religious instinct. There is scarcely a religion of ancient and modern times, certain forms of Protestantism excepted, that does not recognise asceticism as an element in its system.... Brahmanism has its order of ascetics.... Mohammedanism has its fakirs, subduing the flesh by their austerities, and developing the spirit by their contemplation and prayers. Fasting and self-denial were observances required of the Greeks, who desired initiation into the mysteries.... The scourge was used before the altars of Artemis and over the tomb of Pelops. The Egyptian priests passed their novitiate in the deserts, and when not engaged in their religious functions were supposed to spend their time in caves. They renounced all commerce with the world, and lived in contemplation, temperance, and frugality, and in absolute poverty.... The Peruvians were required to fast before sacrificing to the gods, and to bind themselves by vows of chastity and abstinence from nourishing food.... There were ascetic orders for old men and nunneries for widows among the Totomacs, monastic orders among Toltecs dedicated to the service of Quetzalcoatl, and others among the Aztecs consecrated to Tezcatlipoca."[165]
It was argued by Bingham, a learned eighteenth-century ecclesiastical historian, that although asceticism
was known and practised in individual cases from the earliest period of Christian history, it did not establish itself within the Church until the fourth century. It is not a matter of great consequence to the subject under discussion whether this be so or not. It is at least certain that Christian teaching contained within itself all the elements for such a development, which was bound, sooner or later, to transpire. The antithesis between the flesh and the spirit, the conception of the world as given over to Satan, the ascetic teaching of Paul, with the value placed upon suffering and privation as spiritually disciplinary forces, could not but create in a society permeated with a special type of supernaturalism, that asceticism which became so marked a feature of medieval Christianity. And it is certain also that in no other instance has asceticism proved itself so grave a danger to social order and security. Allowing for what Lecky calls the 'glaring mendacity' of the lives of the saints, a description that applies more or less to all the ecclesiastical writings of the early centuries, it is evident that the number of monks, their ferocity, and general practices, were enough to constitute a grave social danger. It is said that St. Pachomius had 7000 monks under his direct rule; that in the time of Jerome 50,000 monks gathered together at the Easter festival; that one Egyptian city mustered 20,000 nuns and 10,000 monks, and that the monastic population of Egypt at one time equalled in number the rest of the inhabitants. At a later date, within fifty years of its institution, the Franciscan Order possessed 8000 houses, with 200,000 members. In the twelfth century the Cluniacs had 2000 monasteries in France. In England, as late as 1546, Hooper,
afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, declared that there were no less than 10,000 nuns in England. Every country in Europe possessed a larger or smaller army of men and women whose ideals were in direct conflict with nearly all that makes for a sane and progressive civilisation.
The general character of the monk during the full swing of the ascetic epidemic has been well sketched by Lecky. His summary here will save a more extended exposition:—
"There is perhaps no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper and more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of mouldy water; another who lived in a hole and never ate more than five figs for his daily repast; a third who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin like a pumice stone.... For six months, it is said, St. Macarius of Alexandria slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to the stings of venomous flies....
His disciple, St. Eusebius, carried one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for three years in a dried-up well.... St. Besarion spent forty days and nights in the middle of thorn bushes, and for forty days and nights never lay down when he slept.... Some saints, like St. Marcian, restricted themselves to one meal a day, so small that they continually suffered the pangs of hunger.... Some of the hermits lived in deserted dens of wild beasts, others in dried-up wells, while others found a congenial resting-place among the tombs. Some disdained all clothes, and crawled abroad like the wild beasts, covered only by their matted hair. The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become one hideous mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch of monachism, had never, to extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet.... St. Abraham, the hermit, however, who lived for fifty years after his conversion, rigidly refused from that date to wash either his face or his feet.... St. Ammon had never seen himself naked. A famous virgin, named Sylvia, though she was sixty years old, and though bodily sickness was a consequence of her habits, resolutely refused, on religious principles, to wash any part of her body except her fingers. St. Euphraxia joined a convent of one hundred and thirty nuns, who never washed their feet, and who shuddered at the mention of a bath."[166]
It is difficult to realise what it is exactly that some writers have in their minds when they praise the purity of the ascetic ideal, and lament its degradation as though society lost something of great value thereby. The examples cited realised that ideal as well as it could be realised, and its anti-social character is unmistakable. If it is intended to imply that an element of self-denial or self-discipline is essential to healthy development, that is admitted, but this is not the ascetic ideal; it is that of temperance as taught by the best of the ancient philosophers. What the ascetic aimed at was not self-development, but self-suppression. The discipline of the monk was only another name for the cultivation of a frame of mind unhealthy and anti-social. Eventually, the rapidity with which this mania spread, the fact that for several centuries it raged as a veritable epidemic, carried with it the germs of a corrective. The more numerous monks and nuns became, the more certain it became that many of them would develop passions and propensities they professed to despise. The love of ease and wealth, the lust of power and pride of place, was sure to find expression, and if by the degradation of the ascetic ideal is meant the fact that the preachers of poverty, and humility, and meekness, became the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most corrupt, and the most tyrannical order in Christendom, the reason is that not even monasticism could prevent ordinary
human passions from finding expression. They might be suppressed in the case of a few; it became impossible with a multitude. That they found expression in so disastrous a form was due to the fact that the disciplinary agent of these passions, a developed social consciousness, played so small a part in the life of the monk.
It is no part of my present purpose to trace the full consequences of the ascetic epidemic. Some of these consequences, however, have a more or less direct bearing upon this enquiry, and it is necessary to say something upon them. One enduring and inevitable consequence of monasticism has not, I think, been adequately noted by many writers. This is its influence on the ideal of marriage, on the family, and on the domestic virtues. In India and Egypt celibacy had been closely associated with the religious life, but the ascetic was regarded as a man peculiarly apart from his fellows, and the family continued to be held in great honour, even by religious writers. Christianity provided for the first time a body of writers who made a direct attack upon marriage as obstructing the supreme duty of spiritual development. The Rev. Principal Donaldson, in his generally excellent book on Woman, professes to find some difficulty in accounting for the growth among the early Christians of the feeling in favour of celibacy. He remarks that "no one with the New Testament as his guide could venture to assert that marriage was wrong." Not wrong, certainly; but anyone with the New Testament before him would be justified in asserting marriage to be inferior to celibacy. It is at most taken for granted; it is neither commended nor recommended, and of its