Religious asceticism played a large part in reconfiguring European culture after the fall of Rome. So much of Christian history flows from this ascetic philosophy of purity; and so many bodies were subsequently constrained, cleansed, or physically altered because of it—especially those of monks, nuns, and many other devout men and women. In order to appreciate the milieu of cleanliness in medieval and early modern Europe, we need at least some grasp of the seismic events that occurred in that crucial 500-year period of religious upheaval in the Late Empire. The basic outlines are fairly clear. There was a religious revolution in which the moral duty to ‘know thyself’ became infinitely more important than the secular hygienic duty to ‘look after yourself’.1 As a result, the ideology of cleanliness was turned upside down and inside out. Judaeo-Christian asceticism insisted that the cleansing of the inner soul was absolutely imperative, whereas the cleansing of the outer body was a worldly distraction, and its ornamentation a positive sin. In effect the extreme religious devotion that was previously reserved for the sanctified few was now being urged by ascetics as daily practice for the masses.
Asceticism itself was an ancient phenomenon. The effect of severe privation on the human body suggests that ascetic practices were connected to earlier psychic, ecstatic, trance-like, or otherwise ‘magical’ religious states that demanded exceptional physical self-control; and various ascetic regimes—including celibacy and virginity—are practised worldwide.2 In ancient Eurasia formal theologies gradually evolved at both ends of the continent as the tide of institutional priesthoods and wealthy, temple-based gods swept over earlier local pantheons; as we have seen, the discipline of purification was well entrenched, with many types of physical and sensory privations enforced on temple servants. Throughout later ancient Eurasia, highly specialized mind–body training regimes for the selected few were being practised in religious communities from an early age by young priests (novices), leading by degrees and stages to full wisdom and perfect spiritual attainment. Among the earliest of these ‘religious virtuosi’ was Pythagoras (581–497 BCE); another was the young aristocratic ascetic Sakyamuni, later known as Buddha (c.560–480 BCE), whose Vinaya rules of self-discipline became canonical in eastern Eurasia in the centuries after his death (and almost certainly reached western Eurasia via the trade routes).3
Advanced Eurasian asceticism included the physical techniques of isolated meditation, trance and breath control, gymnastics, music, and dance: the whole object of Taoist tai chi, Vedic yoga, Kerala martial arts, or the Kathakali dance form, is to spiritually ‘centre’ and fortify the spirit–body through physically controlling and training it. In China the earlier traditions of self-cultivation through the myth of Ancestor Peng gave way to the highly theological Xian cult, which concentrated on training the body for transcendent spiritual immortality, obviously a much more glamorous prospect than mere healthfulness. Greek meditations on the soul were a pale echo of the innumerable steps of Tantric initiation into the superconscious state of the Vedic samadhi; or the four stages of Buddhist dhyana.4 The Greek word askesis was derived from the word for ‘athletic training’: an ascetic was a spiritual athlete. A preliminary paraskeuazo (‘getting prepared’) ascertained the true state of the soul, but there were no set gymnosophic rules or craft techniques; Greek ethics proceeded by logic and dialogue. By the first and second centuries AD the Stoic philosophy had become fashionable among educated imperial classes, requiring a daily meditation and a thorough exagorusis (from exagmen, or ‘tongue of balance’) of your soul; as the emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80) wrote in his Meditations, ‘a man who values a soul … no longer cares for anything else, but aims solely at keeping the temper of his own soul and all its activities rational and social, and works together with his fellows to this end’.5
Without increasing mass literacy, none of the new utopian prophetic religions that emerged in Eurasia between c.500 BCE and AD 500 would have survived, or spread so quickly. Asceticism played a large part in driving those literacy rates up. Ascetic prose supplemented the earlier holy scriptures—all the ceremonial instructions, calendrical mathematics, sacrificial duties, purification rules, and prophetic utterances that had begun to find their way into collective ‘holy’ books, alongside theological myths and courtly sagas of gods and human heroes (like the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek Homer, or the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata). As the knowledge and habit of reading and writing spread, ascetic sermons, letters, and rules came in a deluge. There were increasing numbers of narrative stories of heroic personal asceticism from lone hermits, sages, and ‘disciples’ of ascetic prophets such as Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, or Muhammad. The ascetic lives of the early Christian saints and martyrs in particular were written up in highly literate style by the early Christian commentators, the Fathers of the Church, in reams of critical, passionate, and effortless Roman rhetorical prose.
As group bonds and state security disintegrated in the western Eurasian lands, maybe the mass of the people did not feel so well guarded as before—or so the Roman Christian author Arnobius thought: ‘Since the nature of the future is such that it cannot be grasped or comprehended by any anticipation, is it not more rational rather to believe that which carries with it some hopes, than that which brings none at all?’6 Scores of ecstatic religious movements, guided by charismatic leaders and aimed at the rural and urban poor, were moving away from the older rites and ceremonies of ancient civic life and demanding more onerous religious duties. In a single thirty-year period in Babylonia, c.AD 220–50, in a region only 200 miles long and 50 miles wide, there were followers of Mazdeism, Manichaeism, Mithraism, Judaism, and Christianity.7 The so-called ‘locus of the supernatural’ was shifting away from the temple and towards the sacred holiness of self-selected, highly trained ascetic individuals, or groups of individuals, in constant communication with their god.
Cleanness was innate to the Holy Spirit. According to the early theology of Jesus Christ, Jesus carried his holiness within and about him, in incorruptible flesh. Like any sacred priest, anything he touched made it holy. When Jesus washed the leper’s feet, or embraced other untouchables, such as the poor, the sick, or the prostitute Mary Magdalene, he was not thereby rendered unclean. On the contrary, his holiness, his cleanness, healed them and made them whole. For Christians, full purity was only achievable through the act of baptism into the faith, which enabled the Holy Spirit to enter the individual converted soul: ‘Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean from all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you. And a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you…’.8 It was for this reason that the Christian Church was sometimes called a balaneion; at the same time, baptism recalled old lustral rites. It poses the crucial problem of how far the new Christians were prepared to go in breaking away from their old Judaic faith and customs, and how much they retained.
Asceticism was firmly planted in Judaism. The wandering holy man was an ancient religious type, a solitary ‘scapegoat’ who took on the sins of the community by cutting himself off from the world—a living human sacrifice; while the ancient tradition of desert retreat in Egypt (the right of being able to move away from your neighbour) was strongly linked to the nomadic herder’s ancient distrust of settled life. The radical Judaic shepherd–prophet Amos spoke for the masses living beyond the town and temple gates, expounding a trenchant form of anti-urban, anti-capitalist puritanism that became central to the ideology of Christian religious fundamentalists:
They hateth him that rebuketh in the gate … Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them … woe to them that are at ease in Zion … that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches … drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments …9
But for the Judaic scribes who wrote the holy books, mere ignorance did not let any sinner off the hook: the population had to be taught the rituals of cleanness and uncleanness. Hence the book of Leviticus (and hundreds of other Old Testament passages) in which the defilements, abominations, and uncleannesses of cursing, copulation, unclean women, plague, leprosy, the menses, sperm, blood, nakedness, physical blemishes, clean foods, and correct ritual sacrifices were fully written out. But genuine faith counted most. A single God spoke directly to the heart, mind, and soul. As the later medieval Jewish theologian Maimonides put it in his commentary on the ‘Book of Cleanness’ in the sacred Mishneh torah, even though the temple rules laid down in Scripture were ‘not matters about which human understanding is capable of forming a judgement’, nevertheless, ‘he who has set his heart on cleansing himself … becomes clean as soon as he consents in his heart… and brings his soul to the waters of pure reason’. Judaism was a religion of the heart; and so was Judaic Christianity.10
Nothing could have been more different from the shaven heads of Egyptian priests than the wild, flowing, uncut beards and hair of the Jewish prophets; they had clearly set themselves against this aspect of Egyptian purification ritual. Their particular type of asceticism rejected the worldly vanity of close body care. In this regard we should note especially the lesser-known grooming prohibitions of Leviticus: ‘Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you’; and ‘They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in the flesh.’11 This was mild rebuke against ancient body culture compared to other testament writers. The prophet Isaiah’s blistering attack on women and cosmetic beauty was an explicit reference to sexual disease, and a withering description of urban fashions:
Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires [headdresses] like the moon, the chains and the bracelets … And it shall come to pass, that instead of a sweet smell there shall be a stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well-set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.12
The Essenes from Engeddi, by the Red Sea, were a celibate, ascetic Jewish group known for their sober ways, rites of baptism, vegetarianism, and white robes—Jesus is thought to have had Essene family connections, through John the Baptist. The ascetic renunciations required by Jesus and his wandering followers were severe enough—‘Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor’—but they were benevolent. They were not extreme, exclusive, or hermetic. After all, Jesus himself had deliberately broken almost all the purity laws of the Torah by associating with unclean people all his life, telling the priests: ‘They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ The proselytizing Apostles of Jesus, like Paul of Tarsus, were resolutely inclusive. They did not insist on circumcision for non-Jews, or on making a division between clean or unclean food, or clean or unclean women, or other customary matters: while they were spreading the word, no one was to be excluded. The Apostles were thus emphatically not priests, but radical ecstatic mystics in the Judaic tradition.13
Most of the Church Fathers were soaked in the classics of Roman scholarship: St Jerome had to put himself under a special penance to stop himself from reading them. The pagan philosophies themselves were still strong and active. The Alexandrian philosopher Plotinus (AD 205–70) had inspired an ascetic, Neoplatonic, or ‘gnostic’ tradition within the early Christian Church, and his prolific writings on the joys of contemplation lived long after him.14 Plotinus believed that all physical matter was inherently evil. It clogged up the soul and kept it earthbound, when its true celestial existence depended on weightlessness, mingling with the universe above to attain the state of the pure absolute Being, the One. The pure soul had minimal bodily needs, and had to renounce all sexual desire; chastity was an essential qualification. Neoplatonic asceticism was widespread among intellectuals of the small farm or villa population, and among poor but spiritually ambitious civic scholars such as St Augustine (354–430), who was converted to contemplative asceticism by Plotinus, and later turned to his mother’s religion, Christianity, to help him sublimate his strong sexual urges by adopting celibacy, or chastity.15 Chastity had always been an attribute of priesthood but was now the ultimate ascetic challenge for the Christian believer.
Thanks to the Neoplatonic–Manichaean ‘twofold’ philosophy of the outer body and inner soul, ordinary Christians now had two bodies to look after—and one of them was inherently evil, full of burning lust, and a mere mortal shell. As St Paul described it, ‘Though our outer person is wasting away, the inner is being renewed.’ St Athanasius explained this ‘two-body’ early Christian physiology in a sermon On Sickness and Health: ‘In short, one must know that the body is composed of members, but the inner person is not composed of bodily members, but rather possesses the significance of the member’s action…so too the intellectual substance of the soul accomplishes the entire work of the commandments with the five senses.’16 The duty of the Christian ascetic anchorite (anakhoretes, from anakhoreo, ‘retire’) was to subdue the natural sensory impulses that threatened the inner person, by literally starving them into submission, sense by sense. The shrivelled bodies of the anchorites told this tale precisely: sleep deprivation, semi-starvation, minimal water, no comforts, hard labour, coarse clothing, and unwashed skin. Jesus’ asceticism was moderate compared to some of his followers. He went into the desert and fasted for forty days and forty nights; but Saint Anthony (AD 251–356) spent twenty years there. The penances of the holiest ascetic (male or female) were the most severe; the monk St Pachomius only ate every third day, though lesser anchorites were allowed a meagre daily ration of bread with salt, and water.17 Like the actions of the Vedic yogi, anchorite asceticism contained pathological self-wounding elements deliberately designed to test the will and train the soul to a point just short of suicide. Many, many anchorites underwent sufficient suffering to attain sainthood in later centuries.18
During the first four centuries the Christian debate on spiritual virtues of continence and celibacy was urgent and highly charged. A wave of self-mortifying sects arose after Jesus’ death, experimenting with every form of bodily abasement.19 The burning fires of lust were the worst of evils—and so difficult to put out. Commentators such as St John Cassian, St Augustine, and St Benedict regarded male nocturnal emissions as a special challenge, especially when male members were gathered together under one roof. St Pachomius’ monastic Rules on celibacy included covering knees when sitting together; not bending down or pulling tunics up too high when doing laundering; keeping the eyes lowered, avoiding direct glances, never performing ‘intimacies’ such as bathing or oiling one another, or removing thorns from the skin; never talking in the dark or holding hands, and always keeping a distance. Nudity was forbidden, even when alone, and for this reason bathing was discouraged, except for the sick or aged; under St Benedict’s Rules, even washing was a complicated procedure that involved keeping the body concealed at all times with different bits of clothing.20
Asceticism was either highly democratic or highly anarchic, and was not easily controlled.21 St Athanasius’ Life of Anthony (published only a year after Anthony’s death) became the inspiration for a surge of Christian rock-dwelling anchorites pursuing ‘the myth of the desert’ in Egypt. Pachomius (AD 290–347) founded the first disciplined monastic settlement of anchorites in order to house them, which had quickly multiplied to thousands of monks during his lifetime (and became worryingly wealthy from their daily labours). By the time St Simeon Stylites (387–459) drew crowds from nearby Antioch to see him perched on top of his 70-foot rock pillar, Pachomine monasteries were being visited by a constantly increasing stream of devout pilgrims from all over newly Christianized Europe—the ‘Egyptomania’ of the age.22 Despite certain reservations, the Catholic Church was being inexorably shaped and moulded by popular religious asceticism, both in the desert and in the towns.
The Apostles—including St Paul—had always carefully distinguished between ‘moderate’ asceticism for most of their flock and ‘advanced’ asceticism for the ‘ardent’; and were careful never to impugn sex in marriage (though strictly for the purposes of procreation). From the third and fourth centuries AD onwards, with the numbers of ardent ascetics increasing, the politics of the Church swung constantly between the moderate and radical ascetic camps. Radical ascetics were at first removed from bishoprics, but then returned; or moved to activism in Corinth, or Jerusalem, or Gaul. One significant purity law that was resurrected after the Council of Laodicea in AD 352 forbade women to serve as priests or preside over churches; but ordaining the sexual celibacy of the male clergy was evidently a tougher proposition. Ever since Nicaea internal debates had raged, with married priests at first defended (in 362) so long as they had married before ordination and their wife had been a virgin—not a widow, a divorced woman, or a concubine. But the Church puritans were not to be denied. In AD 385–6 Pope Siricius, pressured by ascetic propagandists centred on Jerome and his circle in Rome and Bethlehem, finally persuaded the bishops to bind the higher clergy to ‘inviolate celibacy’ and offered the promise of a pure priesthood vowed to chastity. Thus another ancient purity law was reinstated.
It was the excesses of Roman urban life that really repelled the ascetics—food, clothing, and public baths especially. ‘Why do you gorge your body with excess?’ asked St John Chrysostom (c.AD 347–407). ‘Consider what comes of food and into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at it? The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of filth.’23 Most early Christians were city dwellers. Lacking a synagogue or a legal meeting place, they had turned their households into churches; some went further and turned them into ascetic cells; and many of these ascetics were women. After AD 352 hermetic virginity was almost the only route left to the ardent female. The Virgins of Alexandria, Rome, and Jerusalem were impressive individuals and a crucial support to the early Church.24 Virgins were among the first martyrs; they joined the early Christian communities in large numbers, and played host to them; they also played a large part in funding the early Church, and later hospitals, abbeys, and convents, out of the proceeds of their relinquished estates. When later gathered together in institutional convents, they were called nuns.
The Christian virgins first appeared among the educated or wealthy female elites: people who had plenty of material goods to give up, but who would normally be under the complete control of their families, such as widows or heiresses, but who now openly and rebelliously vowed themselves to celibacy, sackcloth, and ashes. Early Christians were exhorted to see the advantages of having a virgin in the household, like an amulet, insurance policy, or shrine: ‘The virgin is an offering for her mother, by whose daily sacrifice divine power is appeased. A virgin is the inseparable pledge of her parents, who neither troubles them for a dowry, nor forsakes them, nor injures them in word or deed.’ Many centuries later the notorious virgins of Venice, the unwanted daughters of aristocratic families who could not afford their dowry payments, were locked away in large numbers for precisely these reasons.25
The ascetic virgin was designated the ‘Bride of Christ’, eternally betrothed to Jesus, and the virgin’s special role was that of the chief female mourner. The great rhetorical theme of virginity was penance, and weeping for the sins of the world. Weeping real and constant tears, it was said, ‘cleanses and prepares a person for purification’. The physical dirt on the holy body was both potent (in the sense of an inverted pollution) and a sign of faith. The redoubtable virgin Paula, the platonic friend and companion of St Jerome, ‘subdued’ him with her lachrymose behaviour and fetid appearance: ‘She mourned, she fasted, she was squalid with dirt, her eyes were dim with weeping.’ When the widow Fabiola became a Christian penitent, she put on sackcloth and publicly confessed her sins, standing in the Basilica in Rome ‘with dishevelled hair, pale features, soiled hands and unwashed neck … she took the millstone and ground meal, she passed bare-footed through rivers of tears … That face by which she once pleased her second husband she now smote with blows, and she hated jewels, shunned ornaments and could not bear to look upon fine linen.’26
Because they inevitably lived in towns, and at the centre of their households, female virgins had an extra set of sensory deprivations to undertake. Spiritual seclusion could be achieved through the self-imposed purdah that Churchmen called ‘modesty’—anonymity, silence, and guarded movements, gestures, and gait: ‘Thus the movement of the body is a sort of voice of the soul … That virgin is not sufficiently worthy of approval who has to be enquired about when seen.’ As well as penitential fasting, praying, and weeping, virgins should veil the head, cover themselves down to their fingertips, walk with ‘sober gait’, talk in a low voice, look at the floor with ‘bashful countenance’, stay silent and speechless, avoid visits and visitors, keep company with no men, attend no feasts, and keep a distance from all strangers ‘lest your foot ever stumble against a stone’.27
Instead of perfumes, a holy virgin gave off the true odour of sanctity: ‘Thy first odour is above all spices, which were used in the burying of the Saviour, and the fragrance arises from the mortified motions of the body, and the perishing of the delights of the members. Thy second odour, like the odour of Lebanon, exhales the incorruption of the Lord’s body, the flower of virginal chastity.’28 The pungent fragrance of bodily perishing and mortification was not only a sign of genuine hermeticism but was all the more likely when that body was heavily clothed (closely covered) but rarely washed. In the early days of the virginity movement desperate times had clearly called for desperate measures, and washing—or rather not washing—became a symbolic act of public defiance. When the virgin Melania began her long campaign to persuade her reluctant husband, Pinian, to make a joint vow of chastity, her first act was to stop bathing (she eventually succeeded). Rather less amusing, and less common, was the fate of the early virgin martyr Thecla, condemned to death for defending herself against a noble suitor, who claimed Christian baptism as she leapt into a tank full of sharks in the Antioch arena, crying out ‘now is the time for me to wash!’29
Later virgins did not have persecution to contend with, but washing was still fraught with religious implications. St Augustine thought that holy dirt was ‘ostentatious’ and washed daily; St Anthony never washed at all. Somewhere in between was a range of personal preferences and personal solutions. The wealthy virgin Olympias lived like a nun at the centre of a large palace, with a luxurious bath suite, but always took her baths covered in a voluminous black robe.30 Modesty was natural, said the theologians, and the private parts shameful: ‘those parts in which there is a compliance with the necessities of nature, she has partly put away and hidden in the body itself, lest they should present a disgusting appearance, and partly, too, she has taught and persuaded us to cover them. Is not nature herself a teacher of modesty?’ Many people covered themselves in the baths, St Ambrose continued, so ‘that part of it at least may be covered’, and recommended loincloths or breeches ‘as it was told Moses by the Lord: “And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their shame: from the loins even to the thighs they shall reach”.’31 St Jerome regarded daily bathing as an ‘over-niceness’ and a refinement, and constantly cited ‘frequenting the public baths’ as an evil in his Letters—especially by those he regarded as loose public women, who ‘allow themselves more liberty than ever, frequenting the baths, flitting through the streets, showing their harlot faces everywhere’.32 Perfumes, paints, hairstyles, golden jewellery, open litters, music, drink, dancing, costly clothes ‘dragging’ on the ground, were all anathema. They belonged to what St Athanasius contemptuously called ‘the adorned class’.
By contrast, Athanasius’ silent, gentle, dovelike virgin had no need whatsoever of the noise and commotion of the public baths, or to be mingling with the daughters of Babylon parading their nudity. A passage from his chapter on the ‘dangers of the public bath’ in his Second Letter to Virgins gives us a just a breath of that virginal air—and also tells us that small basins, not large baths, were to be the Christian bathing implements of the future:
The dove is acquainted with the bath in the ordinary waters in the basin; she does not take off her garment or reveal her nudity. Observe her appearance: see how her appearance is pure, without force or cleansings, how she is adorned by her insight and not from the adornment that enters from outside.… A basin is sufficient for you to wash away your dirt. Ask and learn how Sarah washed herself while living in a tent; how Rachel followed the flock; how Miriam sojourned in the desert without water… Have you not heard that the apostles and disciples of our Lord ate food without washing their hands (Matt. 15: 1–20) and St Peter declined to have his feet washed by the Lord (John 13: 3–11)? And who is purer than the aforementioned people? For they who were pure on the inside were also completely pure on the outside (Matt. 23: 26). But learn how the women who bathe have been injured and have dragged others down into corruption. The first is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, who, when she stripped, instantly stripped such a great man of holiness and rule (2 Sam. 11)…. Was it not by the greatness of his repentance that he returned to power? Did he not eat ashes like bread and mix his drink with tears (Ps. 101 (102): 10)? Was it not with tears he dampened the defiled bed (Ps. 6: 7)? Did not his knees become weak with fasting and his flesh lean from anointing (Ps. 108 (109): 24)? Did he not make sack-cloth his garment (Ps. 68 (69): 12)? Did he not also take off his pure linen garment? You see how she who wanted to bathe poured out filth on such a man; for because she washed her body, she defiled another man’s soul.33
Where Athanasius led, many others followed then and in later centuries. The public liking for public baths survived the fall of the Roman Empire, but a vociferous minority of religious puritans always opposed them.
Early Christians evidently had a rooted aversion to baths and nakedness, but in this they were strangely alone, compared to their neighbours: even the northern Eurasian pagans had their weekly Saturday ‘washing day’. From the unique Christian perspective, baths and cosmetic care were dangerous, if not an abomination. It was therefore quite impossible for them to adopt any religious code of washing or cosmetic practices, such as those laid down later (and further south) by the prophet Muhammad in the Qur’ān from c.AD 625, in which cleanliness was commended as ‘one half of the faith’. As in ancient Egypt, and in Persian Zoroastrianism, Islamic washing practices were no light undertaking. First and foremost were the wudu, the minor ablutions of the appendages of the body. The ghusl (total ablution of the whole body) was performed at certain times and in a certain minimum amount of water that must touch every part and every hair of the body, and usually took place in the hamam (plunge pool). The minor wudu of the parts was performed five times daily before each of the five prayer sessions, from a water tank or tap. Various other natural practices (fitrah) of personal cleanliness were also sanctioned by the Prophet: ‘It would seem that filth in any form was repugnant to Muhammad, particularly to his olfactory sense…tradition is insistent in ascribing them to Muhammad.’ These fitrah included the use of the toothpick, cleansing the nose and gargling the mouth with water, clipping the ends of the moustaches, clipping fingernails, cleaning the finger joints, depilation of the armpits, shaving of the pubic hair, cleaning with water or dry earth or a piece of stone after evacuation and urination, washing hands before and after meals, and circumcision (nowhere mentioned in the Qur’ān, but a fitrah which appears in other writings).34
In Christian Europe later popes never revised the Church’s somewhat ambiguous teachings on personal cleanliness, with their prejudices no doubt revived by the diametrically opposed practices of Islam. They merely discouraged what they saw as empty bodily rituals—Pope Gregory I (‘the Great’) was indifferent as to whether or not menstruating women or unclean men should be allowed sacrament in church—and focused on inner mental strength instead, and the cleansing power of the confessional. Nevertheless, most Christians clearly believed in, and wanted, some liturgical purification rituals; so the Church did not disallow them, but left them to individual discretion. A simplified liturgical discipline was maintained through baptism, ‘churching’ (a month’s exclusion from the Church after birth), not eating meat on Fridays, fasting at Lent, clothing, feeding, and cleansing the poor on Maundy Thursday; and diverting the pre-existing rituals of house and body-cleansing towards the Lord’s day (moved from the Judaic Saturday to the Christian Sunday).
But the true mark of Christian self-denial was to give help continually to others; and, especially, voluntarily to touch and treat the foul bodies of the sick poor. Jesus had taken up a healing mission as evidence of his care for all others, even those beyond his religion’s sacred boundaries, while noticeably not taking a great deal of care of himself, in defiance of Roman fashion. St Augustine had also felt a charitable Christian love for the poor and dispossessed. The rising numbers of sick poor, and those without kin or homes to help them in need—slaves, soldiers, travellers—were increasingly visible all around the remotely administered Empire. From these new if barely perceived needs came the development of the last major public building of the classical world, the only one specifically devoted to medicine itself, the Roman hospital. The first Roman military hospitals (valetudinarium) started in the first century AD, and set high standards of medical equipment and architectural design; but most civilians (and slaves) were treated at home. The first civilian hospitals appeared after Christianization in the mid-fourth century AD; there was one in Rome but far more in the eastern Empire, and in the great Christian capital of Constantinople in the eastern Empire. In Constantinople in AD 388 Olympias turned her wealth over to the Church, and her palace over to sick poor relief—gardens, bakery, baths and all; while St John Chrysostom, the charismatic Patriarch of Constantinople, spent most of his revenues on the city’s hospitals, thus earning his later title as one of the Doctors of the Church. By AD 500 a sixteen-volume Galenic canon had been adopted, probably used in the civic hospitals and monastic infirmaries, with further well-written compilations in the sixth and seventh centuries showing evidence of continuing research. By AD 600 Constantinople and Antioch had large hospitals with a total of 600 beds, divided into male and female wards; three centuries later the hospital movement continued to flourish within the Islamic Empire, with hospitals sponsored by wealthy rulers, pious women, and local citizens.35 The healing mission was perhaps the greatest single legacy of the late Roman ascetic Christian faith.
The monastic Church therefore nurtured the classical medical traditions in western Europe and kept them alive. The Holy Roman Church itself was also very much alive and growing—the barbarian invasions of Roman Europa were closely followed by an evangelical and military campaign of Christian religious conversion. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church of Rome was steadily accruing wealth through its growing monastic lands and labour, at the same time as the well-endowed Orthodox Church based in Constantinople emerged as the standard-bearer of the ancient civilized life. When barbarian or pagan leaders were converted or submitted to Christianity in Europe, what the Church represented to them, above all, was the potential for economic and social development.36 Later on, they settled down and started producing great artistic and cultural icons of their own. Asceticism was eventually tamed: nowhere had such excellent baths and latrines as the grand medieval monasteries.