Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

CHAPTER 25
MONASTICISM
philip rousseau
Devotion to asceticism was a highly visible and in some ways alarming
feature of the late Roman world. That thousands of men and women were
ready to adopt a life of radical simplicity, sexual abstinence and apparent
indifference to wealth, status and power, and that even larger numbers were
willing to admire if not imitate their choice, tells us something remarkable
about the society in which they lived. Restrictions in diet and sexual behaviour
had been accepted for centuries; and abnegation was frequently
accompanied by a rejection of influence in public affairs and of privilege
and property. Christians, however, from the third century onwards, were
responsible for an unprecedented upsurge in ascetic devotion. The movement
transformed town as well as countryside: famous exemplars may have
congregated at first in remoter districts; but a new class of citizen became
more widely evident at an early stage. Distinguished at times by an appalling
emaciation of the body, by filth and infestation, by ragged, colourless
and skimpy clothes, large numbers of these ascetics converged, at
moments of crisis, on the cities themselves, forming virtual mobs that were
capable not only of menace but of real power. Within a relatively short
time, they occupied special and prominent buildings, administered successful
rural estates, broadcast their views in public fora, and gained the ear of
those in power – invading, in other words, the chief components of the
late Roman polity.
This outburst of negation – against the body, the family, the accepted
canons of economic and political success – demands historical explanation.
There was a view of the self and of the world that gave the ascetic
movement its cohesion, its capacity for organic development and its broadening
appeal. Conversely, the structure and growth of its institutions at
once encouraged and protected the ascetic urge. To that extent, the phenomenon
had a life and significance of its own. Yet ascetics developed also
a subtle relationship with society at large. They regarded their interpretation
of human nature, of psychology and anthropology, as defining both
the power and the destiny of any human person. So the stable society they
created for themselves – its routine, its economy, its sense of order and
authority – stood also as an invitation, a call to ‘conversion’. Ascetics could
745
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008