Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (35 page)

Something like monastic systems are found at the margins of several world faiths - Jains, Taoists, Hindus and Muslims - but Buddhism and Christianity have made monasticism a central force within their religious activity. It is more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self. Christianity's parent religion, Judaism, is actively hostile to celibacy, one of monasticism's chief institutions, and Jewish groups which practised a form of monasticism are fairly marginal in Jewish history: the Essenes and the shadowy sect of the Therapeutae mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo. Descriptions of monasticism are notable by their absence in both Old and New Testaments, and we have seen that the one recorded attempt in Christianity's first generation to practise community of goods was short-lived, if indeed it happened at all (see pp. 119-20).

The spiritual writer A. M. Allchin called one episode in monastic history 'the silent rebellion', and this happy phrase can be more widely applied.
²⁸
All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church's decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization. In its early years, the Christian Church was a small community which found it easy to guard its character as an elite consisting of spiritual athletes proclaiming the Lord's coming again. Later, the gnostic impulse in Christianity encouraged this tendency, pushing Christians in the direction of austerity and self-denial, just like much contemporary non-Christian philosophy. The stance became increasingly hard to maintain as Christian communities grew and all sorts of people began flocking in; even the long process of instruction and preparation for baptism and admission to communion then customary for converts and born Christians alike could not prevent this process. There were arguments about this in Rome as early as the end of the second century, when the austere priest Hippolytus (see p. 172) furiously attacked his bishop, Callistus, for what he regarded as laxity in imposing penances on Church members who had fallen into serious sin.
²⁹
At the root of this quarrel, which resulted in Hippolytus severing his links with the mainstream Church, was the issue of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners. The same dilemma lay behind the schisms of the Novationists, Melitians and Donatists in the third and fourth centuries (see pp. 174-5 and p. 212), and it was all the more obvious when Christians generally ceased to have the opportunity to be martyred at the hands of non-Christians after the time of Constantine.

It was probably inevitable that the hardliners from Hippolytus to Donatus should lose the argument and leave the mainstream, since from its beginnings, at least as described in the Book of Acts, Christianity had a voracious appetite for converts. If the sort of rigorous moral standards which the purists wanted were applied, there would hardly be anyone left in the Church. But might there be a solution short of schism for those who wanted something more? The impulse to separate while remaining in communion with the mainstream Christian body is already perceptible during the third century, before the great surprise of Constantine's 'conversion'. Underlining the uneasy relationship between monasticism and the mainstream Church, its origins are in the lands from which gnostic Christianity had also emerged: the eastern border-lands of the Roman Empire in Syria, and in Egypt. Moreover, the first moves to founding monastic communities were made at much the same time as the emergence of that new rival to Christianity, Manichaeism, with its ethos of despising physical flesh. It may be that the famous austerities of Christian monks (see pp. 206-8) were imitations of similar feats of spiritual endurance by Indian holy men and that Manichees were responsible for bringing the idea westwards into the Christian world.

One text, known as
The Acts of Thomas
, hovered on the borders of acceptability in Christian sacred literature until the sixteenth century, when the Council of Trent (justifiably in its own terms) dismissed the book as heretical. Purporting to describe the life of Thomas, one of Christ's original Apostles, its preoccupations suggest a much later date than Thomas's time, probably early third century, so much later than the so-called Gospel of Thomas (see p. 78). Nevertheless, like that probably late-first-century text,
Acts
belongs to the Christian penumbra of gnostic works, and it is likely to have been written in Syria, at much the same time that the Syrian theologian Tatian was praising a life of abstinence and austerity (see pp. 181-2). Amid its descriptions of Thomas's adventures on his mission to India are fervent commendations of celibacy: the Apostle's first major move was to persuade two newlyweds to refrain from sexual relations. On another occasion, his eloquence on the subject of 'filthy intercourse' was such that the wife of an Indian prince repelled her husband with the equivalent of pleading a headache.
³⁰
The testimonies in this work and in Tatian's writings to the emergence of an ascetic (world-denying) impulse come at much the same time as the first evidence of organized celibate life inside the mainstream Church. Likewise, this was in Syria. Groups of enthusiasts called Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant vowed themselves to poverty and chastity, but they avoided any taint of gnostic separation by devoting themselves to a life of service to other Christians under the direction of the local bishop. Their role in the Syrian Church continued for several centuries alongside developed monasticism.
³¹

In Egypt there is a similar ambiguity about the first monastic institutions. It is worth noting that the richest modern find of gnostic literature, from Nag Hammadi, came from a Christian monastic community of fourth-century date. Egypt was peculiarly suited to a Christian withdrawal from the world because of its distinctive geography: its narrow fertile strip along the Nile, backed by great stretches of desert, means that it is easy literally to walk out of civilization into wilderness. It was here towards the end of the third century that the monastic movement first securely tied itself into the developed Church of the bishops and left a continuous history in conventional Christian sources, through the lives of two powerful personalities who could be presented as founder-figures: Antony and Pachomius, representatives respectively of two different forms of monastic life, that of the hermit and that of the community. The reality was more complicated. Much of this story of origins was an effort by Egyptian monks to claim priority for themselves in the monastic movement, in the face of their competitors and probable predecessors in Syria. Yet without such founding myths, it might have been less easy to integrate the new movement into the Church.

In fact the biography of Antony written by the great fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius makes it clear that he was not the first Christian hermit; from his boyhood in the 250s and 260s, Antony was already seeking out in fascination individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had taken to a solitary life or practised an ascetic discipline.
³²
Eventually his desire to live a Christian life out of touch with anyone else led him into the desert or wilderness: from the Greek for wilderness,
eremos
, comes the word 'hermit'. After twenty years of solitude, Antony was faced with a new problem: hordes of people were coming out to join him in the desert. Diocletian's persecution of Christians and the sheer burden of taxation in ordinary society were powerful incentives to flee into the wilderness. As persecution ceased, not everyone wanted to go to such an extreme. So the community life already in existence in Syria found its parallel in Egypt, where groups of people withdrew from the world in the middle of the world, founding what were in effect specialized new villages in the fertile river zone: the first monasteries. They owed their existence principally to Pachomius, a soldier who converted to Christianity during the Great Persecution, impressed by Christians' ready support for suffering fellow Christians even if they had not previously known them.

Life in the army was self-selecting and communal, with clear boundaries and conventions, and it may be that the ex-soldier Pachomius drew on that experience when he devised a simple set of common rules for hermits to preserve their solitude while becoming members of a common group living together. An example of the practical good sense of his arrangements was the stipulation that seniority in his communities was acquired simply by the date at which the individual joined. This would be important when those joining began to include people from the upper end of the social scale, who might seek to perpetuate their status.
³³
Notably, Pachomius set up his first community not in the desert, but in the deserted houses of a village which he found conveniently abandoned close to the bank of the Nile. A second takeover of a deserted village followed; one might therefore see Pachomius's movement as an effective way of remedying third-century social disruption, to which the growing tax burdens had significantly contributed. Pachomius's sister is given the credit for founding female communities along similar lines, with a programme of manual work and study of scripture.
³⁴

Remarkably soon, the word
monachos
('monk') gained its specialized religious meaning in Greek: the earliest known use is in a secular petition in an Egyptian papyrus dating from 324.
³⁵
There is a significant curiosity in the implication of this word, because the Greek/Latin
monachos/ monachus
means a single, special or solitary person, but a truly solitary way of life is not the most common form of monasticism. Nor was that first-designated Egyptian
monachos
living in a wilderness, since the reason that we know about him is that he was a passer-by in a village street who stepped in and helped to break up a fight. Historically, most Christian monks and nuns have lived in community, ever since the time of Pachomius, rather than becoming hermits. Indeed, '
monachus
' with its cognates is a particularly inappropriate piece of Christian lexical imperialism when it is applied to Buddhism, whose concept of monasticism, the
Sangha
, centres firmly on community, and where hermits are even more in a minority than among Christian monks.

It is perhaps difficult for modern observers of Christianity, who accept hermits, monasteries and nunneries as a traditional feature of Christianity, to see that this acceptance was not inevitable. The Church might well have seen the 'silent rebellion' as a threat, not simply because of the dubious and possibly gnostic origins of monasticism, but because the most 'orthodox' of hermits, simply by his style of life, denied the whole basis on which the Church had come to be organized, the eucharistic community presided over by the bishop. Indeed, that worry was translated by the Eastern Church authorities into a vague menace called 'Messalianism', a deviant enthusiasm for emphasizing one's own spiritual experience in asceticism rather than valuing the Church's sacraments - and the 'Messalian' accusation frequently hung over early ascetics or ascetic communities.
³⁶
How could Antony receive the Eucharist out in the desert, and how therefore did he relate to the authority of the bishop? Moreover, he was not part of the dominant Greek culture of the urban Church - he did not even speak Greek, but the native Egyptian language, Coptic. Pachomius came from an even humbler Coptic background.
³⁷
As it happened, Antony amply proved himself in the eyes of the Church authorities, first by leaving his isolation during Diocletian's persecution to comfort suffering Christians in Alexandria. He then became a great friend of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who wrote an admiring biography of him, which has been described as 'the most read book in the Christian world after the Bible': a risky claim, but certainly in the right order of magnitude.
³⁸

Athanasius painted a portrait of Antony which suited his own purposes: an ascetic who was soundly opposed to Athanasius's opponents, the Arians (see pp. 211-22), and was a firm supporter of bishops such as Athanasius himself. The biography was specifically addressed to monks beyond Egypt; the bishop's aim was a triumphant assertion of Egypt's spiritual prowess, providing a model for all monastic life. Its first half was a dramatic account of the solitary's twenty years of lonely struggle with demons of the desert, often in the shape of wild animals, snakes and scorpions; worse still, in the form of a seductive woman. At the end of the first great contest, the Devil, deranged in his exhaustion and frustration, was reduced to the shape of a little black boy from Ethiopia, and Antony was able to sneer at the 'despicable wretch . . . black of mind, and . . . a frustrated child'. That was an unfortunate literary conceit, since many early monks in imitation came to use the same image for the Prince of Darkness, with a conscious racism directed towards Africans: a backhanded compliment to the success of Athanasius's work, and not the best of stereotypes for promoting good relations with the Church of Ethiopia.
³⁹
It was not the last time that Christians would associate black races with evil and fallenness (see pp. 867-8).

If anything bonded monasticism into the episcopally ordered Church, it was this pioneering hagiography ('saint-writing') from one of the most powerful bishops of the fourth century. It also established Egyptian monasticism in its image of desert solitude, encapsulated in that paradoxical word '
monachos
', and equally in Athanasius's gleeful paradox that 'the desert was made a city by monks'.
⁴⁰
The image was a significant and useful one, because Christian cities were presided over by bishops; it was a symbol of victory over the Devil's city and his rebellion against the purposes of God (not to mention the purposes of God's bishops). As a description of the origins and development of monasticism, however, it was to a large extent a fabrication. Athanasius deliberately emphasized the desert as he told Antony's story, and the accidents of later history have subsequently reinforced his distortion: when Egyptian and Syrian Christianity faced being marginalized by conquering Islam (see pp. 261-7), it was indeed the remoter desert monasteries which were best placed to preserve monastic life and culture, and hence the common description of the spiritual literature from this society as being written by 'the Desert Fathers'. But that does not represent the earlier reality of the fourth- and fifth-century Church or the place of monasticism in it: far more part of the everyday experience of urban and farming landscapes.