[1043] The literature of early monkish life, descriptive and laudatory, is very extensive; see Gieseler, Eccles. Hist., i, 95, 96, etc. The most striking picture will be found in Evagrius, i, 21; iv, 33, etc. He is lost in admiration of them; they suppressed their natural appetites so rigidly that they looked like corpses wandering away from their graves. Some lived in dens and caves where they could neither stand nor lie. Some dwelt in the open air almost naked, exposed to excessive heat or cold. Others rejected human food and took to grazing like cattle, shunning human beings as if they were wild beasts. Both sexes embraced such lives of unremitting castigation. Some of the males made a practice of repairing from time to time to the cities in order to demonstrate their sexual frigidity by bathing in the public baths amongst nude women. They applied themselves to prayer, of course, until they brought themselves to the verge of exhaustion; cf. Sozomen, vi, 28, et seq. One Apelles had a conflict with the devil similar to that related of the English St. Dunstan.
[1044] The celebrated Simeon Stylites was the inventor of this sublime method of serving the Deity. From 420 he lived on columns near Antioch for thirty-seven years; Evagrius, i, 13; see Gieseler, i, loc. cit., for reference to fuller accounts, separate biographies, etc.
[1045] He was contemporary with Athanasius, who wrote an extant life of him; see Sozomen, i, 13, etc.
[1046] Sozomen, iii, 14.
[1047] Socrates, iv, 23; Sozomen, i, 12, et seq. Previous to Christianity there were at least two communities of Jewish ascetics in the near East, the Essenes, who dwelt west of the Dead Sea, and the Therapeutae, who lived by Lake Moeris, near Alexandria. The first have been described briefly by Pliny (Hist. Nat., v, 15) and the second by Philo Judaeus in a separate tract (De Vita Contemplativa) respecting the authorship and date of which, however, opinion continually fluctuates; I do not know whether at present it is on the crest of the wave or in the trough of the sea. These solitaries consisted of males and females, and were recruited regularly by persons who became sick of the world and determined to fly far from the madding crowd. About them generally see Neander, Church Hist., Introd.
[1048] Socrates, iv, 21; Gregory Nazianz., Laud. Basil (in Migne, ii, 577).
[1049] Nicephorus, Cal., xv, 23; see [p. 78]. Not psalmody, however, says Card. Hardouin, but restless application to work. Manufacture of fictitious documents he insinuates, doubtless.
[1050] Cod., XII, i, 63; Orosius, vii, 33; Jerome, Chron., an. 375; cf. Socrates, iv, 24.
[1051] The histories of monachism are numerous and voluminous, especially those composed some two or three centuries ago. Helyot’s Hist. des Ordres Mon., Paris, 1714, etc., in 8 vols., may be read for amusement as well as instruction.
[1052] Epicurus, the unavowed disciple of Leucippus and Democritus, the earliest atomists, conceived the coalescence of the particles to result from their rushing onwards always under the influence of a certain natural deflection which led to their meeting continually so as to become conjoined. As an Academic, and, therefore, a sceptic, Carneades could not accept this or any other theory, but in criticizing its fortuity, he remarked that it might have been perfected, or, at least, made more intelligible if Epicurus had conferred some faculty of will or intention on his atoms; Cicero, De Finibus, i, 6; De Fato, 11. With our increased knowledge of physics, we may now venture to supply the deficiency in accordance with the suggestion of Carneades. Not even in the process of crystallization can the motion of the atoms or molecules be considered as fortuitous, since they seem to be borne towards each other under the influence of some irresistible desire. The recent investigators strongly uphold the vitality of the process.