6 THE REDEMPTION OF THE FLESH

It is sown a soulish body; it is raised a spiritual body.… I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.

PAUL ON THE RESURRECTED BODY, 1 CORINTHIANS 15.44, 50

How wonderful will be that body which will be completely subdued to the spirit! … It will not be a soulish body. It will be a spiritual body, possessing the substance of flesh, but untainted by carnal corruption.

AUGUSTINE ON THE RESURRECTED BODY, CITY OF GOD 22.24

Ascetic practices had roots in both pagan and Jewish cultures, but over the course of the second through fifth centuries, Christianity developed these practices in new ways. Voluntary poverty, fasting, and especially sexual renunciation became premier expressions of Christian spirituality. The value of marriage was heatedly debated, while sensational acts of self-denial commanded attention, admiration, and respect. This promotion of the ideal of virginity and celibacy put the question, What was the relation of the body to the self? And what was the role of the body in final redemption?

Ascetic Preludes

Rome’s vestal virgins, chosen as children, were vowed to celibacy for thirty years while they tended the perpetual sacred flame at Vesta’s hearth on behalf of the city. Throughout the Mediterranean, worshipers abstained from certain foods and from sexual activity to be in a state of ritual purity when approaching the altar of some sanctuary or shrine. Bodily disciplines informed ritual protocols of purification. And, for practical reasons (according to ancient medical science), athletes were known to avoid intercourse before participating in competitions. Indeed, the word “ascetic” rests on the Greek askēsis (“discipline, training”), drawn from the world of Greek athletics.

On a more theoretical level, Platonic philosophers conceived a body/soul dichotomy: the true self was the immaterial, immortal soul, which housed the rational mind. The soul (psychē) had “cooled” (psychesthai) in its contemplation of the divine, and so fallen into flesh. Flesh thus served as the soul’s inconvenient vehicle as it sojourned in the realm below the moon: it was, in this sense, not the soul’s native home. The goal of this philosophy was the return of the soul to the divine, an effort that was aided through physical self-control.

Stoics theorized body differently—it was diffused with material spirit, they said—but their ethics were no less austere. They too urged lives of self-discipline. Sexual activity should be confined to marriage, strictly and (urged Plutarch) solely for the purpose of begetting children. Cynics, meanwhile, flamboyantly countercultural, renounced possessions, embraced radical poverty, and lived lives minimally attached to the structures of civic society. Both for cultic reasons (as with the Vestals) having to do with purity, and for philosophical ones, then, pagan culture expressed a range of ascetic behaviors.

Regular periodic abstinence from sex informed Jewish marital custom: spouses were to refrain from intercourse during the wife’s menstrual period. Priests at service were not to engage in sexual activity: they had to be in a state of ritual purity, as indeed did the person bringing the sacrifice. Food disciplines—most famously, avoidance of pork, or of meat retaining blood—were part of Jewish praxis. The Jewish year was punctuated with fast days. The book of Numbers chapter 6 describes ancient protocols to be followed by someone (whether male or female) who for a limited period consecrated him- or herself to God as a Nazarite: refraining from impurities, abstaining from wine, and not cutting hair for the duration of the vow. Periodic asceticism, both for priests and for lay Israelites, in short, was part and parcel of Jewish tradition.

In Roman-period late Second Temple Judaism, ascetic communities begin to appear. Philo speaks of a mixed group of celibate men and women, the Therapeutae, living communally outside of Alexandria. (Whether they were an actual community or Philo’s idealization of one is up for debate.) According to Philo, they were dedicated to intensive philosophical study of Jewish scriptures in Greek. The Essenes, too, formed their own groups, predominantly male, both within towns and also by the Dead Sea; according to Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder, they practiced celibacy. Essenes also communalized property and focused intensively on text study. Proliferating purity rules structured communal life.

The ascetic lifestyle of the Therapeutae, Philo claimed, was motivated by a philosophically informed quest for wisdom: disciplining the flesh freed the mind to concentrate on higher things. The Essenes, by contrast, were committed to an apocalyptic revelation of the approaching messianic end-time. It was this conviction that supported and informed their vigilance around issues of purity: they lived with angels in the foreshortened period before the final battle between the forces of good and of evil.

The missions of John the Baptizer, Jesus of Nazareth, and the apostle Paul, themselves (so far as we know) celibate males, evince a similar sensibility. The approach of the coming Kingdom called for preparedness. Repentance; immersion for purification; renunciation of wealth, of ties to family, and of sexual activity: these behaviors are promoted in traditions ascribed to John and to Jesus, and some appear in Paul’s letters.

Paul’s ascetic teachings especially cluster in chapter 7 of his first letter to his gentile assembly in Corinth. He ties them explicitly to his expectation of the travails to proceed Christ’s return and the establishment of God’s kingdom—“in view of the impending distress”; “the appointed time has grown very short.” He teaches his ex-pagan community that “it is well for a man not to touch a woman.” Yet, because of temptation, better that husband and wife live mutually in “marital debt,” though if both partners agree, Paul adds, they can temporarily abstain from sexual activity to devote themselves to prayer. The apostle frankly admits that he says this “by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am”—that is, celibate. The unmarried and the widows are to remain as they are unless they cannot exercise self-control. Repeating a teaching that will appear attributed to Jesus in the later gospels, Paul says further that a wife should not separate from her husband, nor should a husband divorce his wife.

Paul goes on to speak, on his own authority, of a special female category, the “virgins.” “Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free of a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin; and if the virgin marries, she does not sin.” Paul is reserved in this advice: marriage brings “worldly troubles,” and he would prefer that his hearers be spared those. He ties this immediately to the urgency of the hour. “The time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as if they do not; let those who mourn as though they were not mourning, those who rejoice as if they were not rejoicing … for the form of this world is passing away.” The unmarried can concentrate on the Lord; the married have divided attentions. Paul’s priority is to secure his people’s focused devotion in the brief period remaining before Christ returns. But “if anyone thinks that he is behaving dishonorably toward his virgin,” Paul continues, they may go ahead and marry; “it is no sin.” If the man is firm in his self-control, however, he should resist, resolved to keep her as his virgin. He who marries his virgin does well, and he who does not marry does better.

Traditions ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels likewise convey ascetic teachings. Jesus himself renounces family and advises those who follow him to do the same. Both he and his disciples are depicted as wandering from place to place, minimally prepared for “tomorrow,” proclaiming the gospel of the coming Kingdom. Interdicting divorce (to his disciples’ dismay), Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew continues, “There are eunuchs who have been eunuchs from birth, and eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Matthew 19.12). Elsewhere, Jesus teaches that marriage will have no place in the resurrected state, for the raised will be “like angels”—presumably not nongendered (since Jewish angels were usually gendered male), but not sexually active. Finally, when a rich man asks Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life, Jesus first recites some of the Ten Commandments, and then finally advises, “Go, sell what you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven, and come, follow me.”

Apocalyptic expectation informed these Jewish ascetic teachings preserved in these writings, Paul’s letters, and the Gospels. Their foreshortened time frame accounts for their extreme quality. In the second century, these teachings shifted from ways to prepare for the Kingdom’s imminent arrival to timeless stand-alone dicta, authorized by their evolving status as Christian scriptures. Various enactments interpreted the meaning of this heritage in changed circumstances, as the question of how to treat the body immediately impacted the issue of how to redeem the body—or, rather, the issue of what “redemption” itself meant. The result was a period of centuries-long experimentation, both individual and communal, in how to live a Christian life and, thus, in how to win eternal life.

The Ascetic Laboratory

The second through fifth centuries marked a period of widest, and wildest, Christian interpretation of these ascetic traditions, wherein pagan and Jewish practices and texts converged and merged with new concerns. The philosophical predisposition to see fleshly body as nonnative to the soul came together in the early second century with those forms of Christianity that saw the creator god of Genesis as other than the father of Christ. To escape the bonds of the flesh, which was the medium of the lower, creator god, celibacy was promoted and encouraged.

With Marcion, textual interpretation (the repudiation of Jewish scriptures; the prioritization of Paul’s letters) and a cultural/philosophical predisposition (flesh as other than self, which was identified as soul or spirit) contributed to the formation of a coherent community ethic: the baptized member of Marcion’s church, whether male or female, was vowed to celibacy. Marriage was a second-grade condition. (Marcion certainly had Paul on his side in support of this position.) Given how wide-flung and successful Marcion’s church was, we can only surmise that this perfectionist ethic did not impede membership. Indeed, this two-tiered model—a celibate elite sitting on top of a married (and sexually active) majority—would unevenly characterize those churches that emerged, after Constantine, as “orthodox.”

To make progress intellectually, ethically, or spiritually, the fleshly body had to be disciplined: that much would have seemed uncontroversial to any ancient person. But what was the empirical status of eschatological body? On this question—again, if we can trust their ecclesiastical opponents—both Valentinus and Marcion drew a consistent conclusion. Flesh was not saved; only spirit was. The redeemed “heretical” believer, according to Justin, expected to ascend individually up past the spheres of the material universe to his or her spiritual homeland above the realm of the fixed stars. Redemption from the flesh, not of the flesh.

Then to what end had Christ come, if not to redeem flesh? This question propelled the proto-orthodox rhetoric of “docetic”—that is, “appearance”—Christology. Heretics, said Tertullian, held that the Incarnation was a sham, thus the crucifixion a charade: Christ had not truly had a body, therefore he had not truly suffered on the cross. Tertullian’s concept of redemption disallowed such a construal of Christian tradition. But Marcionite and Valentinian Christology emphasized a different aspect of the Christian message: not Christ as sacrifice, but Christ as redeeming revealer. In bringing the good news of the purely good god, the god above (the Jewish, demiurgical) god, Christ brought the knowledge of salvation to those with ears to hear.

Marcionite asceticism particularly irritated Tertullian. Despite the routine rhetoric of abuse leveled at the ethics of Christian competitors—that seeming ascetics were actually libertines, or that docetic Christology undermined the entire idea of salvation—Tertullian had to grudgingly acknowledge Marcionite Christians’ practice of celibacy. Tertullian accordingly complained that Marcionite ethical behavior was itself intellectually inconsistent. If they worship a god of love, he opined, then they do not fear him. But why act ethically, if not fearing punishment? The highest god’s moral law is unstable, Tertullian insisted, if not reinforced through fear. “If you decline to fear your god because he is good,” he complained, “what keeps you from bubbling into all manner of vice?” (Against Marcion 1.27). Concealed in Tertullian’s invective is his description of Marcionite ethics: they were not bubbling into all manner of vice but were living according to the ascetic ethics they heard in their gospel, and in the letters of Paul.

The opponents of these repudiated Christians were no less focused on sexual renunciation. Justin in his Second Apology, mid-second century, approvingly spoke of a woman who, without her husband’s consent, decided to live a life of continence. (Paul had enjoined mutual consent.) And in his First Apology, he reported—again, approvingly—that a young man in Alexandria had recently petitioned the Roman governor for permission to be castrated by a physician. This enthusiast took literally Jesus’s clarion to those who would make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. (Origen, later Christians accused, had himself interpreted this verse in Matthew literally.) As the procedure was prohibited by Roman law, the governor forbade it; and so, Justin continued, the young man, refusing marriage, lived a life of continence. Two centuries later, the Council of Nicaea would move to discourage similar enactments of the gospel’s call to make oneself a eunuch for heaven’s sake.

Tatian, a Syrian student of Justin’s, also focused on the ascetic message embedded in Paul’s letters and the Gospels. He too, like Marcion, advocated celibacy as a condition for baptism—an opinion that earned him a label as “heretic” by the late second-century writer Irenaeus. He also advocated celibacy within marriage and, according to his critics, the avoidance of meat and of wine. Seeing Tatian past the blur of later orthodox accusations is difficult. He decamped from Rome after Justin’s death (ca. 165) and returned to the Syriac-speaking East, where he became an influential figure. As author of the Diatessaron, a harmony of the four Gospels, he created a New Testament text that would remain the standard in Syria until the fifth century. Tatian’s influence might also be seen in the wealth of apocryphal “Acts” of various apostles—Judas, Thomas, Paul, Peter—that retailed a message of extreme asceticism. To be a true Christian, proclaimed these stories, was to renounce social and sexual conventions, marriage in particular. The true Christian was the ascetic Christian.

The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a late second-century narrative, is a pristine example of this sensibility. The story evinces familiarity with the Gospel of Matthew: “Paul” preaches an asceticized version of Jesus’s Beatitudes, particularly extolling virginity as the Christian virtue par excellence. “Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they shall become a temple of God. Blessed are the continent, for God shall speak with them.… Blessed are those who have wives as not having them”—a reference to marriage partners who have disavowed marital relations—“for they shall experience God.… Blessed are the bodies of virgins, for they shall be well pleasing to God, and shall not lose the reward of their chastity.”

Thecla is an ascetic Christian iteration of the Greco-Roman novel. The heroine, “a certain virgin named Thecla … betrothed to a man named Thamyris” is sitting by her window when she hears Paul speak. She “listened day and night to the discourse on virginity as proclaimed by Paul,” noting the many women and virgins who heard him. Thecla does not see Paul—breaking the romantic convention of love at first sight—but hears his logos/word. It is enough to convert her to a life of radical lifetime renunciation. To her fiancé’s fury, she breaks off her engagement. The enraged Thamyris speaks with two men who tell him that Paul “deprives husbands of wives and maidens of husbands, saying ‘There is for you no resurrection unless you remain chaste and do not pollute the flesh.’ ” The author disavows this last message—the two speakers have been introduced as “full of hypocrisy”—but the kernel is the case: Thecla will not marry Thamyris, or anyone else.

The story bumps along as Thecla goes in search of Paul. She confronts hostile crowds, sustains the antagonism of her hometown, faces off with another importuning suitor (this one in Antioch), defeats wild beasts in the arena, baptizes herself, and is released by the governor. She then assumes male dress, acquires a band of male and female followers, and eventually finds Paul, who commissions her to “go and teach the word of God.” Returning to Iconium, she finds Thamyris conveniently dead, and witnesses to her (previously alienated) mother. The story ends with Thecla on the road, enlightening “many with the word of God,” and finally resting “in a glorious sleep.”

Thecla and her Acts attained a remarkable and wide-flung popularity. Her cult flourished especially in the fourth and fifth centuries, but her story—and example—were already unsettling Tertullian in the early third. He objected particularly to the idea that women could teach and baptize. Undermining the authority of the text, Tertullian argued that Thecla’s story was “wrongly inscribed with Paul’s name.” Thecla was the product of “a presbyter in Asia who put together that book, heaping up a narrative as it were from his own materials under Paul’s name when, after conviction, he confessed that he had done it from love of Paul” (On Baptism 1.17). Female prominence, Tertullian claimed, was characteristic of heretical sects.

The social pattern that Thecla presents—wandering charismatic celibate teachers, often accompanied by a retinue of other virgins and renunciants—did indeed exist in real life, up through at least the fifth century, especially in Iberia (with the hapless Spanish ascetic Priscillian), in Syria, and in parts of Asia Minor. Various Christian texts advised communities how to test for the real thing (if an itinerant stayed longer than three days, he was an imposter), or how to comport oneself properly if coming into a new village (males were not to sleep over in a household occupied solely by female Christians).

Such ascetic volunteerism could pose a problem for bishops: these charismatic figures, outside of episcopal jurisdiction, were a challenge to episcopal authority. Vowed to celibacy but circulating in mixed company, such groups were easy targets for accusations of covert promiscuity—as, indeed, the heresy-hunting bishop Epiphanius leveled against them. A notable example of scandal occurred in 374, when a certain Glycerius, ordained a deacon by no less a figure than Gregory of Nazianzus, collected a group of virgins around himself and began to wander about in Cappadocia. During a saint’s feast day, Glycerius shocked spectators by displaying his virgins as a kind of dancing troupe. Thereafter, he and his mixed assembly of vowed celibates dispersed into the countryside, Gregory’s requests for their return and promise of amnesty notwithstanding. These charismatics, women and men, remained independent of ecclesiastical authority.

Glycerius may have used his dancing virgins as a source of revenue, presumably for their support. Other itinerants, however, embraced radical poverty as well as celibacy. According to Epiphanius, they wandered, slept in public places, alternately fasting and begging for food—like Jesus’s original disciples, making no preparations for the morrow. In the mid-fourth century, Eustathius, son of a bishop and himself a monk, was credited with settling these groups into mixed monasteries; but this more stable social formation did little to diminish the radical nature of his ascetic commitments. According to the canons of the Council of Gangra (ca. 355?), Eustathius condemned marriage as closing off the path to salvation, a teaching that encouraged spouses (especially wives) to separate from their partners. He also proscribed eating meat, refused sacraments from married priests, and denied distinctions between slave and free, and between male and female (reinforced by these women’s practice of cutting off their hair). Condemnation did not hamper his ecclesiastical career: despite his entanglements with doctrinal controversies, the extremism of his teachings, and the abiding scandal of his mixed communities of male and female celibates, Eustathius was later elected a bishop himself.

Ascetic Alternatives

Paul’s letter to Corinth had already mentioned “virgins” and “widows.” His condensed time frame spared him the necessity of establishing any long-term mechanisms for their support. He does not reveal how these women would have been maintained, whether by their own means, by family members, or by the community at large. The deutero-Pauline pastoral Epistles—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—filled in the gap. Irenaeus, in the late second century, was the first to refer to these letters, which may have been composed specifically with Marcion in mind. Against any compounding of asceticism with authority, they make marriage a fundamental criterion for the man who would be episcopos, “overseer.” The letters promote a vision of the Christian assembly as an orderly, settled “household of God,” hierarchically organized, with women submissive to male authority, whether of “bishops” or of husbands. Women may not presume to teach or to have authority over men, though they may serve the community in the role of an assisting deacon. Widows are to be “enrolled” if they have been married only once, and are at least sixty years of age: ideally, though, they should be supported by their own families. Those who deny them such support are “worse than unbelievers.” Younger widows, more subject to passions, are enjoined to remarry and to establish their own households. Despite the sin of Eve, teaches the writer, women can be redeemed through bearing children.

The “apostle” warns throughout against false teachers who forbid marriage and advocate abstention from foods. Perhaps these other Christians also avoided wine, since “Paul” advises “Timothy” to drink it in moderation for reasons of health. Believers are not to engage in godless chatter with such teachers, that is, with those Christians who hold these other views. And, as usual, women are presented as the weak chink in the community’s defenses: they listen to anybody, says the author, especially to those who “make their way into households and capture weak women.” Women, thus unmoored, “can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” These deutero-Pauline letters, in brief, by conjuring a Pauline persona, tamp down the opportunities for charismatic ascetic volunteerism and implicit egalitarianism that could so easily be derived from Paul’s own teachings.

Both widows and virgins as paragons of lived holiness would have a place within (and, to the irritation of some bishops, also without) organizing ecclesiastical structures. Were these women disproportionately represented among church dependents? By the year 251, the Roman church was supporting fifteen hundred widows and poor people. Some fifty years later, church goods seized during Diocletian’s persecution included eighty-two women’s tunics and thirty-eight veils, but only sixteen items of men’s clothing: perhaps these proportions hint at demography. John Chrysostom claimed that his church in Antioch sponsored some three thousand widows and virgins. Female dependents, vowed to celibacy, made up a visible population within Christian communities.

Not all were indigent. Women could own property. Absent immediate heirs—the case certainly with virgins—women could leave bequests to the bishop. Female celibates, in short, also represented a financial resource. The wealthier the widow or virgin, the more prestige she might enjoy. This was certainly the case with the enormously wealthy elite women we hear of in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, women like the Roman widow Marcella (who convened a community of celibate women in her stately home), Macrina the virgin sister of Basil and Gregory (who did the same), the elder and younger Melanias (who gave extravagant endowments), Chrysostom’s patron Olympias, and Jerome’s Paula. These women were themselves highly educated. They sponsored controversial scholars and established celibate communities, whether in their own homes or by constructing common housing. They donated conspicuously to their churches and undertook significant building projects. Some traveled broadly. By cutting themselves out of the traditional social fabric of class and family, they had considerably more scope for enacting their own initiatives. They certainly received public and well-publicized praise from their erudite male admirers (and beneficiaries).

But there were many other arrangements. Perhaps the most sensational (and sensationalized) of these was the practice of “spiritual marriage,” individual women and men intimately cohabiting in the same household though vowed to continence. Arising from Paul’s discussion of virgins in 1 Corinthians 7, spiritual marriage had practical advantages: it provided the woman with stable social and financial support, while benefitting the man with domestic (if not sexual) services. Churchmen complained about the potential for scandal—Gregory of Nazianzus objected that such behavior oscillated between marriage and prostitution—yet the practice echoed the sort of domestic celibacy enjoined on married couples once past child-bearing, and on imperial clergy who, as married householders, were encouraged to live celibately with their wives once attaining higher office. No less a figure (and power player) than Pulcheria, the sister of Theodosius II and coconvener of the Council of Chalcedon, lived in such an arrangement with Theodosius’s imperial successor, Marcian. Such practices were seen, by those who supported them, as laudable acts of spiritual supererogation, a way for the individual to participate proactively in the process of redemption.

Outside of the individual family household, ascetics also clustered in mixed groups of men and women. While some were peripatetic, eventually others settled into organized, urban communities, where they often took part in theological and ecclesiastical controversies (such as contested episcopal elections). Indeed, their role in these controversies put the bishops in an awkward situation: to criticize or to attempt to regulate the ascetics was to risk alienating their support. Eventually, Basil of Caesarea stabilized arrangements in Asia Minor by establishing double monasteries, wherein male and female celibates no longer cohabited but lived in separate quarters. And by moving these settlements outside of the city, Basil muffled their potential as lobbying groups.

Egypt also proved fertile ground for experiments with asceticism, both in the city and in the desert. In Alexandria, virgins and celibates lived individually in private households and together in mixed groups. In the early 300s, they became actively involved in both sides of the Arian controversy. Some seven hundred female virgins, a later church historian reports, actively supported their teacher, the presbyter Arius. These women, complained Bishop Alexander and his successor, Athanasius, comported themselves in public, insulted their opponents, and vocally promoted their own theological position. Other Egyptian Christians gathered around the learned teacher Hieracas, who organized a mixed monastery (“a great crowd”) of celibates—virgins, monks, widows, people vowed to continence—in Leontopolis. He, not Athanasius, was the community’s ultimate authority, which doubtless accounts for the ultimate destruction of his scholarship and his condemnation as a heretic. Athanasius would advocate a different model of urban female celibacy, one that required withdrawal (including from the public baths), strict separation from males, and principled seclusion. Such a lifestyle would domesticate these women’s role in urban church politics: they would be under the direction of the bishop.

Athanasius himself is a bridge figure to a more radical form of ascetic solitude, the monks of the desert. Already in the late third century, men and women were withdrawing from city and villages to live in isolation in the wilderness, in caves or tombs or huts. Some lived as hermits (anchorites); others gathered in small groups (cenobites). Their isolation was not absolute: these people lived often on the edges of villages, which would supply them with their requirements for subsistence. Extreme fasting, minimal sleep, prayer, meditation on scripture, constant penitential self-reflection, wrestling with demons both external and internal: such were their prolonged labors.

The paradigmatic figure of the heroic solitary monk was Anthony (251–356), the subject of a famous Vita by Athanasius. As a young man, Anthony embraced radical poverty upon hearing Jesus’s injunction in Matthew 19.21: “Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow me.” Repairing to the desert, Anthony brought the cosmic battle between good and evil into an intimate struggle, a personal contest with demons. “Without a doubt,” he taught, “demons are afraid of ascetic practices,” which he then itemized: fasting, keeping vigils, prayers, gentleness, tranquility, poverty, moderation, humility, love of the poor, almsgiving, the absence of anger, and devotion to Christ (Life of Anthony 30). Anthony was one of the great heroes of desert spirituality.

Other monks lived in semi-isolation, gathering periodically for worship or (scant) shared meals. Much larger and well-organized institutions evolved out of this movement. A federation of desert monasteries (some for women) organized under a rule, with thousands of members, flourished under Pachomius, an important founder figure. Under Shenoute the White Monastery thrived: one ancient source gives a figure of twenty-two hundred monks and eighteen hundred nuns. People would come to these charismatic figures for advice, for exorcisms, for prophecies, for divination, for cures. (Consulting rooms and halls for visitors sprang up to accommodate this foot traffic.) Again, the charismatic authority of these desert ascetics could pose a problem for the bishops. Athanasius wrote his way around the problem. The Anthony of Athanasius’s Life of Anthony served as a spokesman for Athanasian theology: the monk’s prestige bolstered that of his “biographer.”

Stories of these ascetic volunteers, gathered by outside admirers, circulated and were preserved in collections. More than monks inhabited the desert, as these tales make clear: so, too, did demons. Extreme fasting and sleep deprivation led to visions, which had to be tested: demons might be their source. One semihermitic monk, Valens, saw Christ accompanied by angels. When he subsequently boasted to his fellows, “I have no use for communion, because I saw Christ this day,” the vision was unmasked as demonic. Valens was brought around by being put in irons for a year. Another monk, Heron, resisting instruction, was likewise put in irons when he refused to partake of sacraments. Sacraments were administered by priests. They represented a way to coordinate desert spirituality with church institutions. To refuse sacraments was more than prideful. It represented an intolerable degree of independence—something that heroic individualism might too easily sponsor. As the amma (“mother”) Syncletica taught, “While a person is in a monastery, obedience is preferred to ascetic practice. The former teaches humility, the latter teaches pride.”

Despite the development of monastic communities, spectacular individual acts of asceticism continued. In the case of the stylite saints—men who perched on the head of columns for years at a time—such was literally the case: they provided spectacle. Simeon, the famous mid-fifth-century Syrian holy man, was a star of the genre. He began life as a monk, then later became a hermit. He was bothered by so many pilgrims and visitors that he retreated to a column north of Aleppo, where he spent his next thirty-some years. He only attracted more attention. Eventually, a sizable community of admirers and fellow ascetics gathered at the column’s base, while petitioners and admirers were allowed to scale its side in order to put questions and requests. Simeon dispensed advice, gave opinions on theological issues, and mediated local disputes. His correspondents included the emperor Theodosius II and also the bishop of Rome, Leo. Later hagiographers depicted Simeon as acknowledging and acquiescing to monastic and episcopal authority. Isolated visually and physically, Simeon lived within a web of social and ecclesiastical relationships.

All these various acts of ascetic volunteerism were broadly publicized. Elite female asceticism was publicly mentored and broadcast. Letters—like Jerome’s to Paula’s virgin daughter Eustochium, and to Paula’s sister-in-law Laeta, and like Pelagius’s to the consecrated virgin Anicia Demetrias—were meant to be circulated. Such acts commanded respect and admiration—except when they did not. Nonorthodox groups were routinely reviled, the bona fides of their continence questioned. Those within the fold were eventually policed not only by bishops but, after Constantine, by emperors. One imperial law ordered that men who used monasticism as a way to dodge their public duties “under the pretext of religion” were to be rooted out and returned to service; refusal meant loss of family property (Theodosian Code 12.1.63). Another forbade ascetic women from shaving their heads: such behavior was “contrary to divine and human laws.” Women who did so were to be kept away from the churches and forbidden access to “the consecrated mysteries”—in effect, by order of the emperor, excommunicated. Bishops who permitted such behavior were to be expelled from office (16.2.27).

Another means of controlling ascetics was to label their behavior intrinsically heretical. Male Christian leaders who attracted female followers, who disavowed personal property, and who embraced physical disciplines such as celibacy and extreme fasting risked being labeled by rivals as “Manichaeans” (another church, much influenced by Marcion, that had a celibate elite and a sexually active laity) or as “Priscillianists.” (The ascetic Priscillian, though himself a bishop, had been fatally accused by rival bishops of Manichaeism and magic.) The trouble was, of course, that such behaviors were more or less practiced within the imperial church as well. As with “orthodoxy,” so too with “holiness”: both concepts, ideologically and socially, remained under construction throughout this period and beyond, weaponized as necessary. What was laudable when speaking of one’s own group was damnable when speaking of another.

Western monasticism tended to be more regulated, less extreme than those of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts that were its inspiration. Perhaps this was owed to elite Roman traditions of philosophical retirement, otium liberale: withdrawal to a country estate (for those who had the leisure and the property) to study and to read. In 386, having decided to join the Nicene church in Milan under Ambrose, Augustine engaged in such a retreat, repairing to a friend’s country estate at Cassiciacum. Later, he would found his own monastic community within the North African city of Hippo. In the following century, John Cassian, himself a tourist to Egyptian sites, established separate monasteries for both men and women in Gaul. His model would eventually influence the discipline of Benedictine monks.

The call of the wild, nonetheless, was still heard in the West. Gregory of Tours (538–93) relates the travails of a sixth-century would-be stylite who stood exposed to the elements in Trier. At the order of local bishops, this man descended from his column, which was then unceremoniously knocked down. The bishops—men of the residual senatorial aristocracy—would carry the day in the post-Roman West.

Marriage, Celibacy, and Virginity

In Genesis 1, God creates humanity male and female and blesses them with the command to be fruitful and multiply. In Genesis 2, he is a divine matchmaker, bringing Eve to Adam. The heroes of Jewish tradition—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon—were all married. In the New Testament, so were Mary and Joseph, who have children other than Jesus: James, Joses, Judas, and Simeon, as well as at least two daughters (Mark 6.6). So was Peter and, according to Paul, a number of other apostles. How was this literary legacy read in a period that prioritized virginity and celibacy?

Some Christians who, like Marcion, identified the Jewish god as a lower and lesser demiurge had no problem repudiating marriage and sexual activity as well. Indeed, as we have seen, Marcionite churches had a two-tier structure, with only the celibate receiving baptism. Manichaean Christians, much influenced by Marcion, likewise built their communities around a celibate (and mendicant, and abstemious) elite, the “elect,” and a broader community of supportive “hearers,” such as Augustine himself had been for ten years in his early adulthood. They associated the Jewish deity with the forces of evil and denied any positive standing to Jewish scriptures. Marriage, sexual activity, and procreation, accordingly, were seen as the works of this lower god. The married patriarchs of the Old Testament, they urged, should command only contempt:

We are not the ones who wrote that Abraham, enflamed by his frantic craving for children, did not fully trust God’s promise that Sara his wife would conceive … [but] rolled around with a mistress [Hagar].… And what about Lot … who lay with his own two daughters? … And Isaac, … who shamefully passed off his wife Rebecca as his sister? … And Jacob, Isaac’s son, who had four wives and who rutted around like a goat among them? … And Judah his son, who slept with his own daughter-in-law Tamar? … And David, who seduced the wife of his own soldier Uriah, while arranging for him to be killed in battle? … Solomon, with his three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines? … The prophet Hosea, who married a prostitute? … Either these stories are false, or the crimes that they relate are real. Choose whichever option you please. Both are detestable. (Against Faustus 22.5)

Thus wrote Faustus, a Manichaean electus and a former teacher of Augustine’s. Faustus’s polemic made two points clear. First, the Jewish texts were in no way serviceable as Christian scripture; and second, Old Testament figures could in no way serve as models of Christian morality. Small wonder, then, that the Manichees also favored the stories of extreme celibacy promoted in the apocryphal acts of the apostles—to the point where some catholic prelates discouraged reading these popular texts aloud in church assemblies.

The proto-orthodox of the second and third centuries, the orthodox of the fourth and fifth, were in a genuinely difficult position. They condemned the asceticism of their Christian rivals—Valentinians, Marcionites, the followers of Tatian and, eventually, of Mani—and especially their repudiation of marriage; but they also esteemed and emulated the same ascetic ideals. How, then, to find a place for Christian marriage?

The author of the Pauline Pastorals, as we have seen, simply advocated marriage for Christian leaders and laity both. The well-ordered, hierarchical episcopal household was the model for the well-ordered, hierarchically organized church. These marriages, however, were to be “chaste.” Justin, mid-second century, echoing a pagan philosophical ideal, emphasized that the sole purpose of marriage was for the production of children. Clement of Alexandria, a generation later, not only repeated Justin’s justification of marriage—a wonderful arena for the practice of self-control—but added that, since the good God created the universe, to participate in procreation was to cooperate with God’s work of creation. Further, he argued, Jesus’s prohibition of divorce demonstrated his support of marriage. And Jesus’s own birth proved that there was nothing reprehensible about the process itself.

Celibacy, said proto-orthodox thinkers, while encouraged, could not be required. But it was the higher path. Sexuality as now experienced, taught Cyprian, was tangled up in the sin of Adam (which, as Tertullian had emphasized, was really the fault of Eve, the devil’s “gateway”). The virgin clearly had the better prospect: her spouse, immortal, was Christ. Her choice enabled her to live already, in the time before the resurrection, like the angels of heaven. Besides, Cyprian observed, while being fruitful may have been incumbent on humanity in the days of the Old Testament, it was clear that “now” (ca. 250) the world’s population was more than large enough. After the martyr, he said, the virgin will receive the next greatest reward of grace in heaven, superior to that of her married coreligionists. Around the same period, Origen of Alexandria, looking to Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians, emphasized the importance of sexual abstention as preparation for prayer. And, pointing to the protocols of ritual purity in the Old Testament, Origen also taught that one should abstain before reception of the Eucharist. True for the laity receiving the bread of life; true, also, for the married cleric who consecrates it.

The Body, the Soul, and the Flesh

Compounding the problem of articulating a coherent ethic of sexuality were the questions that swirled around the issue of the origins of the soul and the theological status of flesh. The great Origen (187–254), in the early third century, had addressed these questions—and answered them—in the first work of systematic theology, On First Principles. Drawing deeply on Platonic philosophy, reading closely in both the Old and the New Testaments, Origen sought to understand in a coherent and coordinated way the full span of God’s saving activity, from the first fall to final redemption. The key concept of Origen’s system was the body.

Origen began with the standard Platonic definition of God: all good, all powerful, perfect, beyond time and matter, free from change. And God, Origen emphasized, is also radically, uniquely unembodied. True, stories in the Bible speak as though God had a body, but those passages invite the learned to investigate with spiritual understanding: they are metaphors and figures for aspects of the highest divinity, not simple descriptions of him.

But how, if creation is the work of God, can he be beyond time and change? What indeed is God’s relationship to matter? Here Origen draws on the idea of eternal generation. Without matter, there is no time. “Creation” therefore refers first of all to God’s timeless generation of nonmaterial creation, a universe of rational beings who had free will. These individual beings, said Origen, existed in what Paul had called “spiritual” bodies. In the eternal realm, spiritual body distinguished one rational being from another and distinguished all contingent beings from the nonembodied, self-existing godhead. This universe of rational, spiritually embodied beings had always existed together with the changeless God.

And these spiritually embodied rational souls had originally and appropriately concentrated their love on God. But then, says Origen, the soul (psychē) began to “cool” (psychesthai)—the old Platonic play on words. These souls’ attention wandered, turning from God. All but one soul fell away. (Again, this spatial language is metaphorical: absent matter, there is no space, just as there is no time.) One soul continued so intensely in its love of God that it fused with the divine Logos, the unembodied son. It would later enter history, assuming flesh, as Jesus. Other souls slipped away, catching their falls from God at various “distances” from him. The souls of Satan and his minions fell maximally.

It was in this circumstance that God the Father, through the Son, called matter into being from absolutely nothing. Creatio ex nihilo was a secondary order, and an act love: matter, thus time, would provide the fallen soul with the means to learn from its earlier, prematerial mistakes. The diversity of fallen souls explained the physical structure of the universe: some fell to a lesser degree and were embodied as stars or as planets; others became human; others, lower still, became demons. A beneficent God placed each soul in precisely the right physical pedagogical environment wherein it could learn from its mistakes, repent of its former error, and turn once again in love to God. Once it does so, shedding its body of flesh, the soul will ascend in its spiritual body back out of the material cosmos to its true immaterial home, with God. God is both just and merciful; he loves all his creation equally; in his infinite wisdom, his divine providence places each soul in exactly the material body it needs in order, ultimately, to choose the good. Eventually, taught Origen, the whole cosmos will be redeemed. Even Satan will be saved.

Origen’s system clearly resonated with certain aspects of Valentinian cosmology. For both Alexandrians, the material realm was not the native home of the preexistent (and immortal) soul. Both took seriously Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15.50: flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom. The raised body is a spiritual body. But for Valentinians, matter was a negative impediment to the soul’s progress, the unfortunate result of a cosmic mistake. For Origen, matter was a gracious act of divine providence: the entire physical cosmos was structured as a school for souls. Of course, in the meanwhile, celibacy was preferable to sexual activity. But ultimately, all ways led back to God.

By the late fourth century, more than 150 years after his death, Origen’s soaring speculations had come to seem uncomfortably close to heresy. Orthodox theologians were reading Genesis more literally. Adam and Eve were no longer metaphors, but enfleshed historical persons whose fall had affected all later generations with the punitive effects of sin and death. Resurrection of the body—of Christ and of the individual believer—had shifted to resurrection of the flesh. Hell was a place of permanent perdition, not (as for Origen) a metaphor for the soul’s alienation from and difficulties in turning to God. And no one wanted Satan to be saved.

This focus on the primal parents in turn put new emphasis on the sexual act. Were Adam and Eve to have remained virgins? Were they sexually active only after the Fall—and, if so, was sin not inescapably linked to sexual activity? Was the sinfulness of sex not the reason why Jesus had been born of a virgin?

All these questions swirled around Marian piety, which reached a new pitch in the fourth century. The late first-century Gospels of Matthew and Luke had originally presented Mary’s virginity as the fulfillment of a prophecy they saw in Isaiah 7.14. Second-century biblical apocrypha had embroidered the tradition enormously. The folkloric elements of the Protoevangelium of James—Mary’s consecration to God as a three-year-old; her being raised in the temple by priests; her wedding the much older Joseph with both vowed to continence—undergirded the text’s essential message: Mary had remained ever virgin, including during and after the (painless) birth of Jesus.

Many theologians rejected these ideas as too close to repudiated heretical teachings. Many who accepted Mary’s postpartum virginity hesitated to affirm that she had remained intact during the holy birth as well. If Jesus did not have a normal human birth, where did this leave the doctrine of the Incarnation? But the fashion of female virginity, cresting in the late fourth century, elevated Mary as its prime symbol. Bishop Ambrose of Milan was one of its most fervent spokesmen. Mary’s virginity not only modeled the life of the church’s consecrated virgins, he insisted; it also modeled the sacred integrity of the (orthodox) church herself. Not coincidentally, this imagery likewise bolstered the status of the bishop, who functioned more or less as the church’s guardian, much as Joseph had for Mary. And as impresario of the new ritual of the “veiling” of the virgin, Ambrose stood in the place of the paterfamilias, handing his virgin “daughter” over to her immortal—and virgin—bridegroom, Christ.

Other churchmen, themselves sworn celibates and monks, objected to this idea that marriage was a poor second to sexual continence. That position, they held, was tainted with at least implicit Manichaeism. These men defended marriage as equal in dignity and value for Christian life. God himself was the author of marriage, they said. He himself had enjoined fertility and childbearing on humanity. The saints of the Old Testament had had wives and children; so too, in the present, did many Christian clerics. While the extremist Jerome urged that humanity’s original state had been virginal, that to be sexually active was in some sense to recapitulate Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, and that monks, vowed to celibacy, were superior to married clerics, others, like Jovinian, insisted that sex was morally neutral, neither the cause nor the effect of an original sin whose punishment, rather, had been mortality. Christ had come to redeem humanity not from sex, but from death. Babies were born innocent of Adam’s transgression. Sin was a freely willed individual decision, not a standing and global condition.

All these arguments were complicated by the Origenist controversy, which burst on—and blew apart—the pan-Mediterranean community of orthodox theologians in the 390s and early 400s. A century and some after his death, Origen’s huge body of work, and the sensibility informing it, was regarded with suspicion, if not open hostility.

For Origen, souls had had no single ancestor in Adam. All had preexisted in eternity; all had, individually, sinned; all would freely choose, ultimately, to turn back to God. Spiritual body was redeemed; flesh, conjured to serve as a learning experience and as a temporary environment for the soul, would finally sink back into the nothingness from which it had been summoned. Flesh was not an essential part of the person. Later Latin thinkers, though, regarded the figure of Adam not as a metaphor, but as a historically existing person. He had been created body and soul, flesh and spirit, together. The body was as much a part of the person as was the soul. Adam as a historical actor served as the discrete point of origin for human flesh and for human soul both. Thus he was, as well, the historical origin of human sin and, thus, of human mortality.

Flesh came from flesh, these later theologians agreed. But did soul come from soul? Or was soul created afresh in every child? These were the only two options left, once the soul’s preexistence, thanks to the controversy over Origen, was off the table as an option for orthodoxy. But how then, in either case, was Adam’s sin inherited? Did sin not inhere in flesh and soul together? And if sin were inherited, how then was God just, to inflict the penalty of sin on unborn generations who had not sinned themselves?

These questions stood at the heart of the so-called Pelagian controversy, the prolonged face-off between Pelagius, an ascetic reformer and teacher in Rome, and Augustine, the North African bishop of Hippo. Pelagius, like Origen before him, emphasized divine justice and human free will. But unlike Origen, Pelagius saw Adam as the primal ancestor of humanity. Soul was meant to be embodied. Thus, for Pelagius, while flesh after Adam was mortal, it was not intrinsically sinful. Each soul, born anew and originally blameless, was the source of the individual’s sin, committed by the free choice of the will. The sexual act was natural, created by God, who commanded people to be fruitful and multiply: no divine command could be sinful. The just God in any case would not hold people culpable for what was theirs by nature: people were culpable only for that which they did by choice.

Pelagius and his followers were driven out of Italy to North Africa by Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. His way of thinking seemed foreign to the Carthaginian prelates, whose theories of the soul’s origins, thanks to Tertullian and to Cyprian, presupposed that soul came from soul. Defenders of Pelagius argued against this position: if soul came from soul, then, logically, the offspring of baptized parents should be born with souls already regenerated. Infant baptism, by this North African logic, they observed, would not be necessary. And if inherited sin were identified primarily with flesh, which was unquestionably inherited, was that not Manichaeism, which regarded flesh as evil? The question had a polemical edge. Augustine, who led the charge against Pelagius, had advertised his own Manichaean past in the Confessions, in order to disown it. Pelagius’s defenders, not so delicately, implied that Augustine, in terms of his theological instincts, had in fact not left his past so very far behind.

Was Augustine extremist, or simply original? Arguing earlier against the stridently ascetic Jerome, reading closely in Genesis, Augustine had held that God had created Adam and Eve with the specific intention that they would have had sex and, thus, that they would have procreated in Eden, had they not sinned. (Procreation was the whole point of sex. Had God not intended it, Augustine observed, he would have had no reason to create woman.) Now, against Pelagius and his advocates, Augustine refined his position and spelled it out particularly in City of God.

Three things had changed since Eden, Augustine insisted: the nature of the fleshly body, the soul’s ability to choose to act rightly, and the relationship of fleshly body to soul. Before the Fall, Adam’s flesh had been under the complete control of his will. This meant that the act of procreation, had Adam and Eve not sinned, would have been entirely volitional, under the right direction of the soul: flesh was entirely obedient to mind. Erection; the conjoining of male and female “seed”; conception itself: all would have been accomplished through unimpeded will. Eve’s virginity, too, would have been preserved: “The male seed could have been dispatched into the womb with no loss of his wife’s integrity, just as menstrual flux can now be produced from the womb of a virgin without loss of maidenhead” (City of God 14.26). Fleshly body—the original home of the human soul—would have been rationally directed by the soul, through a will that was entirely in control of itself.

But Adam sinned, disobeying the divine command. Primal disobedience changed everything. In punishment for disobedience, the will itself became disobedient, divided, wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time. And the body no longer obeyed the commands of the will. This was clear from the immediate effects of Adam’s disobedience. As soon as Adam sinned, Augustine explained, he had experienced an involuntary erection. This had caused him shame, precisely because it was involuntary—“the rebellion and disobedience of desire in his body.” Worse: irrational, involuntary desire from that point onward was necessary for each subsequent act of procreation, throughout the generations. The soul, in short, was no longer in control of its own desires, which escaped the command of the mind. Accordingly and in punishment, the soul was no longer in control of its own body. After Adam’s fall, enfleshed soul was importuned by disordered appetites. And flesh itself was doubly subject to involuntary insult: that of unwilled and uncontrolled carnal concupiscence; and that of death itself, which drove the soul, unwilling, from its corporeal native home.

Sex as now configured, Augustine concluded, was neither “natural” nor theologically neutral. On the contrary. As currently constituted, sexual procreation depended on this penal condition, carnal concupiscence. Adam’s original sin was passed on to each generation by the very process of generation. Baptism relieved the individual of the reatus, the guilt of original sin, but not of its consequences. Damaged soul came from damaged soul, damaged flesh from damaged flesh. It was for this reason that Jesus had been conceived by a virgin. Untouched by original sin, he embodied what Adam should have embodied: flesh and will united, unconflicted, fully free of the disruptions of desire, rightly ordered, at peace.

Christ was the model of true moral freedom. He had indeed felt human emotions, but he had done so voluntarily, by a free act of will. He had truly died, but he had done so voluntarily, by a free act of will. And at the resurrection, his body reunited with his soul, Christ had enacted the salvation of all the redeemed: he had ascended in his sinless flesh, up past the sublunar realm, into heaven.

Flesh itself, Augustine thus insisted, would be saved. As we have already seen, he held that the saints—a fraction of humanity, mysteriously chosen by grace—would themselves rise in their fleshly bodies. But that fleshly body would then be “spiritual.” Flesh would still be flesh, but it would no longer be “carnal,” that is, predisposed to sin; rather, it would be under the complete command of the soul. And the soul would be in complete command of its self, no longer subject to irrational desires. Body and soul would together, finally, achieve a harmonious whole.

Further, these bodies of the saints would be like Christ’s own body, raised as he was in his prime. The raised body would be physically perfect: people fat now will not be fat then, nor people thin now thin then. Amputees will have their limbs restored. Redeemed flesh would even have gender: women would be raised as women. And children would be raised as adults. But this communion of saints would be ranked. The highest rank was reserved for the martyrs; the next highest, for the virgins; then, thereafter, everyone else. The miracle would be that those lower than these exemplars of excellence would feel no envy toward the higher-ups.

Ideology and Identity, Rhetoric and Reality

Both pagan and Jewish cultures had made a place for ascetic practices and for periodic sexual renunciation. But Christian cultures developed an entire ideology of asceticism in new ways, ones that led to new social formations: groups of widows and virgins, supported variously; spectacular acts of self-denial, from those of impoverished Egyptian peasant renunciants to those of a cadre of wealthy aristocrats, especially women, both in the Latin West and in the Greek East; lifelong renunciants of both sexes; charismatic ascetics, whether wandering or stationary, solo or in groups, male or female; the astonishing evolution of the monastery, both male and female; the slow growth within orthodoxy of a celibate clergy. Virginity male and female was idolized, the examples of Jesus and of Mary held up for imitation. Whole literatures developed, expressing and popularizing these ideals: sermons, treatises, public letters, apocryphal acts, collections of sayings, and stories. The ideal was reinforced by ecclesiastical canon law.

How did these ideals impact the lives of most Christians? The canons of church councils and the complaints embedded in sermons give us a glimpse of a reality unanticipated, if we attend solely to the rich literature of ascetic achievement. On the evidence, most people—the “silent majority,” as one historian has called them—continued to marry, to have children, and to acquire and hold property. They led normal social lives, consorting and occasionally religiously cocelebrating (to their bishops’ irritation) with heretics, pagans, and Jews. They enlisted the help of nonecclesiastical ritual experts, availed themselves of amulets and astrology, sought out exorcisms and cures. They frequented the public baths. They enthusiastically attended the spectacles and gladiatorial contests that continued long after Constantine. Christian men, preachers thundered, had sex with prostitutes and, perhaps even more commonly, with their own slaves. (“Can’t I do what I want in my own house?” complains a Christian head of household in Augustine’s Sermon 224.3.)

The esteem with which voluntary poverty was lauded had little effect on moneyed Christians who, in sharing their wealth with bishops and with monasteries, became part of the elite power structure of the church. Wealthy ascetic women kept control of their resources, deploying them as they would—with notable independence—to promote their own programs, or those of the churchmen whom they sponsored. And they established their own celibate communities. Aristocratic largesse, a Christian iteration of classical philotimia, love of public honor garnered through acts of conspicuous philanthropy, continued to correspond to prestige.

Wealthy Christians, including bishops, paraded in cities with their retinues of clients and slaves. As the orthodox church continued in imperial favor—or, perhaps as accurately, as imperial favor continued to define orthodoxy—bishops increasingly accrued wealth, both through grants of land and through the direct bequests of the pious. Bishops did more than serve as urban magistrates: they acted like them, retaining enough control of funds at their discretion that their sons could sponsor public games. As John Chrysostom discovered, the ethic and aesthetic of asceticism had little purchase on the social functions that an imperial bishop was expected to perform. John was driven from his see in Constantinople in no small part for being too ascetic, to the point of alienating his own episcopal clientele and even the imperial family.

The ideology of asceticism dominates our sources in part because we are so dependent for this period on the writings of its spokesmen. The ethic of asceticism became a primary element in the articulation of high theology, especially over the questions of Christ’s person that convulsed church councils. And in part, it leaned on and grew together with the development of the post-Constantinian discourse of martyrdom: the ascetic was like a martyr and would receive the same reward as the martyr. Both discourses nourished the formation of an idealized Christian identity.

And as with martyrs, so too with the ascetics: the nonheroic majority was prepared to admire, from a practical distance, the accomplishments of the heroic few. The heroic few, whether as “heretics” or as “orthodox,” engaged energetically with asceticism’s demands. In confronting demons, in defying societal norms, in proactively participating in their own redemption, in living out their vision of the imitatio Christi, ascetics left an indelible imprint on evolving Christian culture.