The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (36 page)

By the fifth century Christianity was dominant in Rome. Almost all the old families of Rome had converted and massive new churches were now built within the city walls—S. Maria Maggiore, completed in the 430s, and S. Sabina, 422–32, remain from this period. Their builders were the bishops of Rome and wealthy individuals who now had no fear of disturbing the ancient gods or their aristocratic supporters. The old temples, which, archaeological evidence suggests, were being restored as late as the 380s, were left to decay or were converted into churches. Jerome could now write, from Bethlehem, where he lived his last years, “The gilded Capitol falls into disrepair; dust and cobwebs cover all Rome’s temples. The city shakes on its foundations, and a stream of people hurries, past half-fallen shrines, to the tombs of the martyrs.”
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The transition from the old wisdom to the new was irreversible. One final message from the oracle at Delphi runs:

Go tell the king
Apollo’s lovely hall
Is fallen to the ground. No longer has the god
His house, his bay-leaf oracle, his singing stream.
The waters that spoke are stilled.
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16

THE ASCETIC ODYSSEY

A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.

THE ASCETIC PAULA, A ROMAN ARISTOCRAT, TO HER NUNS
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As should already be clear, the spread of Christianity was a much more complex and tortuous affair than conventional histories of Christianity allow. Not least of the complexities was the contrast between the new wealth of the church, exemplified by one of the greatest and most costly building programmes in European history, and the complete renunciation of wealth by the many individual Christians who sought refuge in asceticism.

The idea of disciplined training,
askesis,
was intrinsic to the ancient world, from the preparation for games or practice as a rhetor to the clearing of the mind for profound philosophical study. In a sense the victory odes of Pindar, the great poet of the fifth century B.C., which suggest that a winning athlete comes close to the gods through his success, celebrate the same attributes required by the Christian hermit who tortures his body so as to come close to his God. In both cases, discipline eventually brings the possibility of a spiritual transformation. Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:24 actually makes the comparison between training for the games and for the Christian life, in the latter case for “a wreath which will never wither.”

Asceticism is a complex phenomenon, and there are many issues raised by the adoption of an ascetic life. First there is the implication that the mind or soul has a relationship with the body (and that they are indeed separate entities), and that this relationship can be manipulated for some higher end, normally through the mind or soul “subjugating” the “desires” of the body. From the philosophical point of view Plato offers one of the clearest rationales for asceticism. The soul and body are distinct. The soul is made up of three parts, reason, spirit (emotion) and sensuality (desire), and when the “sensual” part of the soul aligns itself with the body the individual is prevented from reaching any kind of “higher” state. In the
Phaedo
Plato complains that the body “fills us up with lusts and desires, with fears and fantasies of every kind and with any amount of trash, so that really and truly we are never able to think of anything at all because of it.” So the body must somehow be subjected to the reasoning part of the soul, if there is to be any kind of philosophical progress. The association of renunciation and the achievement of a higher state of being is at the heart of the ascetic experience.
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Plato’s approach cannot be separated from other contexts in which asceticism appears in the ancient world. Continence and emotional restraint were widely valued, especially among the Roman elite, and they covered any form of excess passion, any behaviour which demeaned a man in front of his peers. This is why Stoicism proved so popular; it provided a philosophical framework that supported the traditional instincts of the elite, and there are many instances of upper-class Romans facing pain or death in service of a higher cause. A connection was made between a settled family life and good government, so that Augustus was able to make use of traditional “family values” in his stabilization of the empire after the civil wars. Sexual desire was, of course, one of the passions to be restrained, not least because the legitimacy of offspring was seen as crucial. Augustus tapped into older traditions of both the Greek and Roman world stressing the importance of sexual restraint. One pseudo-scientific theory, for instance, taught that a man had only a limited amount of semen and that its preservation helped preserve the body’s strength until it was needed to produce heirs. (Traditionally, men in both the Roman and Greek worlds married late.) Abstinence from sex and physical strength went hand in hand. “As long as he remained a virgin, his athletic career was brilliant and distinguished. But once he began to have sexual intercourse, he ended his career ingloriously,” one reads of an athlete.
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So when Christians turned towards asceticism they were taking a path that was not in itself remarkable, but there were nevertheless elements of Christian asceticism that took it well beyond mere conventional restraint, often into a realm of obsessive intensity. We should remember, however, that there were other groups, such as the Jewish Essenes, the Gnostics and the Manicheans, who also preached extreme asceticism. Jesus himself had enjoined poverty, and his death, as well as those of the Christian martyrs, enshrined a tradition of suffering at the heart of Christian history. Christians of the fourth century were haunted by the agonies of martyrs of the previous generation. “We have seen no executioners, we have not known swords drawn against us, yet we set up altars of divinity. No bloody enemy assails us today, yet we are enriched by the Passions of the saints. No torture has stretched us on the rack, yet we bear the Martyrs’ trophies . . . ,” as one bishop of Rouen put it as he welcomed the relics of martyrs to his church.
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For many fourth-century Christians, it was as if suffering had to be undergone as a mark of one’s faith, even to the extent of deliberately inflicting it on oneself.

This sense of guilt could only have been reinforced by the new wealth of the church and what the historian Eusebius was to call the “hypocrisy of those who crept into the church” in order to enjoy its benefits. Jerome confessed himself appalled at how “parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering, manuscripts are dressed up in jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying.”
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Cassian, who brought monasticism from east to west, and who, unlike (as we shall see) Jerome, had a relatively balanced and perceptive view of asceticism, put it more prosaically:

As their [the early Christians’] fervour cooled, many combined their confession of Christ with wealth; but those who kept the fervour of the apostles, recalling that former perfection, withdrew from the cities and from the society of those who thought this laxness of living permissible for themselves and for the church, to spots on the edges of towns, or more remote places and there practised privately and in their own groups the things they remembered the apostles had instituted for the whole body of the church.
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All this was set against the infinite rewards if the soul could be purified for heaven. Once the possibility of an afterlife was accepted, powerful images of it could be developed. Christianity’s heaven of eternal bliss and a hell of perpetual torment had a powerful impact. In his Letter XXII to Eustochium, Jerome waxes on the great glory of the virgin as she reaches heaven, while, in the same letter, he describes his own fears of hell. To be confident of salvation, one could not take the risk of anything less than total commitment. Sexual renunciation was a central issue. Augustine took it for granted that his conversion would involve the adoption of a celibate lifestyle, and one young Alexandrian from the 320s was equally clear about what Christianity would mean for him: “If the Lord leads me on the way that I may become Christian, then I will also become a monk, and will keep my body without stain until the day when the Lord will come for me.”
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So there were many impulses towards an ascetic way of life for Christians, and in the fourth century such a life was increasingly presented as drama. Written accounts of martyrdom had dwelt in prurient detail on the dismemberings, flayings, burnings and bone breaking involved, and the body now became the stage on which a different kind of performance was played out. Simply because the body has desires, for food, water, sex or human companionship, does not mean that they are necessarily difficult to control; many pagan philosophers appear to have seen an ascetic approach as requiring no more than a shift in perspective, a reorienting of the personality or soul (or, in many cases, simply living within the conventions of one’s class). As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, “there is nothing easier than to manage a human soul. What is needed is to will; and the deed is done, success is achieved,” and the practice of philosophy can continue. Christians, on the other hand, tended to dramatize desires, particularly those of sexual desire (and here they followed Paul), as if they were cosmic forces, inspired by demons with whom deadly battles had to be fought. Jerome is an excellent example. Always a restless man, wracked by guilt and desire, he had come to the desert as a young man, and he later recalled the experience.

O how often, when I was living in the desert, in the lonely waste, scorched by the burning sun, that affords to hermits that primitive dwelling place, how often did I fancy myself surrounded by the pleasures of Rome . . . though
in my fear of Hell
[my emphasis], I had condemned myself to this prison house, where my only companions were scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself surrounded by bands of dancing girls. My face was pale with fasting; but though my limbs were cold as ice, my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me while my flesh was as good as dead.

He was echoed by St. John Chrysostom, another preacher consumed by the rage of sexuality and profoundly influenced by Paul. “How shall we tie down this wild beast? How shall we put a bridle on it? I know none, save only the restraint of hell fire.”
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Augustine’s Confessions has an extended dramatization of its author’s struggles with his sexual feelings, while for Anthony (see below) the devil appears in the shape of a woman when his other ploys fail.

There is an important point to be made here. The aim was not to torment the flesh itself in asceticism but, as Paul reminded his readers, the sins of the flesh. After all, Christ himself had taken on flesh, and, at the last judgment, the individual’s flesh would be returned to his soul. So flesh could not be evil in itself, otherwise it would come to a final end at death and would never have been adopted by Christ. It was the demons who took advantage of the flesh who were the problem. Paul laid down one of the foundational statements of Christian asceticism as essentially a battle between the unworthy self and sin/demons when he wrote in Romans 7:18–20, “The fact is I know of nothing good living in me— living, that is, in my unspiritual self—for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not . . . when I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.” Asceticism is necessary to strengthen the will against the onslaught of demons (or “sin”), and the battle is better prepared for if the body, and the will, are trained.
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As Jerome’s account suggests, the place in which the battle took place became as important as the struggle itself. In retreating to the desert, the body is tested to its physical limit by submitting it to unremitting heat, dehydration and isolation and thus strengthening it for its task of overcoming sin. The desert was also removed from the city, the setting for any form of “civilized” living, and was outside the rhythms of the seasons so fundamental to preindustrial society. Life in the desert is constant, unchanging, in these senses very much, in fact, like the Platonic God on whom many ascetics meditated. In so far as the aim of asceticism was to bring the individual close to God, the very peace of the desert, its lack of distraction, the chances it offered to conquer the demons that held back the soul from union with the divine, was ideal.

The Egyptian desert was the first setting for the ascetics’ struggles. In Egypt there was a clear demarcation between the fertile Nile valley, watered each year by the floods, and the desert beyond, and the abrupt contrast between the two worlds provided a vivid backdrop for the ascetic drama. From the beginnings of Egyptian history the desert had been feared as the home of demons. If these spirits were now appropriated by Christians as “their” demons, entering the desert was taking the battle to the source of evil. So Egypt became the most prestigious ascetic destination—Cassian, who had spent several years in the Egyptian desert before moving west, told his audience of Gauls that they were unlikely ever to reach the perfection of the Egyptian ascetics. This did not prevent those who never travelled there from making use of its image. Martin of Tours in Gaul, for instance, discarded plain wool, the usual clothing of the ascetic, for a shirt of real camel hair, and another Gallic ascetic insisted on living on imported Egyptian herbs.
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Special desert tours to see the ascetics
in situ
and ask their guidance became a favourite of aristocratic women. A particularly apt story is told of one Arsenius, a Roman of senatorial rank, who had taken to the Egyptian desert. A “rich and god fearing virgin from Rome” had come all the way to see him, expecting to be received with enthusiasm by her social equal, yet Arsenius rejected her, taunting her with coming only so that she could boast to her aristocratic friends in Rome that she had seen him. The last thing he wants, he tells her, is a host of women “making the sea a thoroughfare” on their way to disturb him.
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His fears were justified. Eventually so many took to the desert that it was said to be as busy as a city. While the Egyptian ascetics were the most celebrated, those of the Syrian desert ran them close. Here the custom was for ascetics to ascend pillars (hence their name, Stylites, from
stulos,
a pillar) in the hope of coming to heaven. Some would stay up there for decades, with their lower limbs festering through inactivity. The faithful would be hauled up in baskets for consultations.