The Wisdom of the Desert | Page 8

of crucifying their bodies. In our time the popular conscience
has come to have an almost morbid dread of pain. Perhaps the fact that
our religion is largely dominated by the idea of philanthropy is simply
one expression of a widespread shrinking from the suffering which is
the common lot of humanity. We have almost ceased to speak of this
shrinking as cowardice in the case of the individual who dreads pain for
himself. We frankly stigmatise as brutal the infliction of pain as
punishment, which former generations regarded as an edifying
spectacle. It is therefore peculiarly difficult for us to appreciate the
position of men who deliberately refused to gratify the cravings of their
bodies, who joyfully sought out suffering for themselves, and did not
hesitate to encourage others to "crucify" their bodies. It is not to be
denied that our position with regard to physical asceticism finds a
specious justification. We may ask whether it is believable that the
Creator can be pleased with creatures who reject His gifts and nullify
the instincts which He implanted in them; whether we can imagine the
tender and compassionate Saviour demanding as the price of following
Him such renunciation as St. Antony's. Such questions are not easy to
answer. They open up the whole problem of the place of asceticism --
asksis, exercise, discipline -- in the Christian life. It is not possible here

to enter on such a discussion. There are, however, two considerations
which, if they in no way solve the general difficulty, yet may serve to
mitigate the prejudice which the special austerities of the Egyptian
hermits arouse in us. In the first place, we must remember that these
men aimed at perfection, and hoped to attain it by a literal imitation of
Christ. Now Christ on one occasion fasted forty days and forty nights.
It is quite natural that men who aimed at imitating Him should fast and
should try to make their fasts like His in their severity. Christ also lived
a virgin life. It is only to be expected that His imitators should
determine to be virgin too -- virgin in body and, if we may use the
expression, virgin in mind, according to His explanation of the meaning
of purity. Christ describes Himself as homeless and poor. He was
worse off than the foxes and the birds. We cannot wonder that the
desire of imitating Him has led men to renounce their property and to
accept homelessness as one of the conditions of living perfectly.
Christ's life terminated in the torture of the cross. To "crucify"
themselves -- the word is a favourite one with them -- was part of the
ideal of the monks. They meant by "crucifixion" every kind of hardship,
privation, and pain home voluntarily for Christ's sake. It was nothing
else than an attempt at participation in the suferings of Christ. Once, on
a feast day, a disciple moistened his master's bread with a few drops of
oil. The old hermit burst into tears, and said, "My lord is crucified, and
shall I eat oil?" Christ proclaimed that a man could not be His disciple
without hating his father and mother and his own life also. The words
came as a challenge to those who wished to follow Him, a challenge
which the monks accepted literally. Of course, it is possible to say that
all such simple acceptance of Christ's teaching and literal following out
of His sayings is a narrowing, even a perverting, of the spirit of the
gospel, and that it leads to a kind of life quite different from that which
the Lord contemplated for His disciples. This may be so. To discuss it
is to enter upon that larger question of the place of asceticism in the
Christian life which we have already passed by. Whether we are
prepared to recognise the monastic ideal as the ultimate and loftiest
conception of the teaching of Christ or not does not for our present
purpose seem to matter. The hermits' life was certainly an attempt to
imitate Christ and obey His commandments. No one who loves the
Lord can refuse to sympathise with men who, even mistakenly, have

tried very hard to follow Him. The second consideration which I wish
to urge in mitigation of our prejudice against the extremity of the
hermits' physical asceticism is this. They never regarded it as anything
but a discipline, a means to an end. They have been accused of being
the slaves of a mechanical theory of virtue, of imagining that religion
consisted in outward observances, of teaching that fasting and watching
were righteousness. There is hardly any accusation possible which
would be more decisively disproved by an appeal to the facts of the
case. That it should have been made and repeated,