Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

ORIENTAL ASCETICISM. 107
even so distinguished a father of the Church. In truth, a
competent judge of numbers on a great scale is rare even at
the present day. But there were enough of them swarming
about the deserts and established about the cities of Egypt,
to revive in another form the ancient sneer, that in Egypt
it was far easier to meet with a god than with a man.
In judging of this Oriental asceticism we must take account
of the manners and habits of the Eastern peoples, and of
their climate which renders shelter and any but the simplest
food needless
;
we
must remind ourselves of the kind of
world from which the monks came out, and must recognise
the fact that these fanatics did really have heavenly aspira
tions, and that they did honestly desire to live a spiritual
life detached from all earthly trammels, and masters of ap
petite, affection and lust. However amply we may recognise
these special features of the position, it seems hard to speak
of Eastern monachism with the respect that so powerful and
popular an institution deserves. The Oriental monks appear,
as a class, to have been filthy and prurient. Constantly
lighting against a certain class of temptations, they kept them
constantly and engrossingly before their sight. Save in one
respect, as we shall presently see, they
ministered but little
to the culture and progress of mankind. Simeon Stylites,
facile princeps of Oriental ascetics, on his single pillar where
he lived for 37 years and where he finally died, is no
lovely figure spending as he did his days in countless pro
strations, and lifting himself, as he said, every few years
nearer to heaven by raising the height of his pillar !
It is true there is no lack of flowers of rare and ex
quisite grace
scattered over this monkish waste. Touches of
beautiful affection, acts of heroic courage and constancy,
begem what were else a dismal history. The monks of the
Thebaid were, at any rate, not afraid of the worst which
the world could inHict on them. Athanasius found in them