american-holocaust

156 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTOf course, such fanatically aggressive opposition to sex can only occuramong people who are fanatically obsessed with sex, and nowhere wasthis more ostentatiously evident than in the lives of the early Christianhermits. Some time around the middle of the third century the holiest ofChristian holy men decided that the only way to tame their despicablesexual desires was to remove themselves completely from the world ofothers. Moving to the desert, they literally declared war on their sexualselves, first by reducing their intake of food to near-starvation levels. "Whenone wants to take a town, one cuts off the supply of water and food,"wrote a sainted monastic named John 'the Dwarf. The same military strategy,he continued, "applies to the passions of the flesh. If a man lives alife of fasting and hunger, the enemies of his soul are weakened." 22Weakened, perhaps; but never, it seems, defeated. On the contrary, themore these godly hermits tried to drive out thoughts of sex, the more theywere tortured by desire. Thus, when one young monk, Palladius, reportedto an older one, Pachon, that he was thinking of leaving the desert because,no matter what he did, "desire filled his thoughts night and day,and . . . he was increasingly tormented by visions of women," the oldman replied that after forty years of exile and isolation in the desert hetoo "still suffered the same intolerable urges. He said that between theages of fifty and seventy he had not spent a single night or day withoutdesiring a woman." 23 But try he and the others did, with maniacal obsessiveness.Aline Rousselle provides a few examples:Ammonius used to bum his body with a red-hot iron every time [he feltsexual desire]. Pachon shut himself in a hyena's den, hoping to die soonerthan yield, and then he held an asp against his genital organs. Evagrius spentmany nights in a frozen well. Philoromus wore irons. One hermit agreed onenight to take in a woman who was lost in the desert. He left his light burningall night and burned his fingers on it to remind himself of eternal punishment.A monk who had treasured the memory of a very beautiful woman,when he heard that she was dead, went and dippled his coat in her decomposedbody and lived with this smell to help him fight his constant thoughtsof beauty. 24But let Saint Jerome describe for himself the masochistic joys of desertexile:There I sat, solitary, full of bitterness; my disfigured limbs shuddered awayfrom the sackcloth, my dirty skin was taking on the hue of the Ethiopian'sflesh: every day tears, every day sighing: and if in spite of my struggles sleepwould tower over and sink upon me, my battered body ached on the nakedearth. Of food and drink I say nothing, since even a sick monk uses onlycold water, and to take anything cooked is a wanton luxury. Yet that sameI, who for fear of hell condemned myself to such a prison, I, the comrade ofscorpions and wild beasts, was there, watching the maidens in their dances: