Volume 1
A history of the later Roman Empire : from Arcadius to Irene (395 A.D. to 800 A.D.) / by J.B. Bury.
- J. B. Bury
- Date:
- 1889
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A history of the later Roman Empire : from Arcadius to Irene (395 A.D. to 800 A.D.) / by J.B. Bury. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![But beside this ideal of a calm and cheerful social life there was the ideal of the ascetic and unsocial life of the hermit, which exercised a sort of maddening fascination over countless men of high faculties. The object of the hermit was to free himself from temptations to sensuality ^; and thus the men who embraced such a life were probably, in most cases, men of strongly-developed physical passions, seized with a profound conviction of the deadliness of impurity. They were therefore generally men of robust frame, and this may explain how they could live so long under privations and endurances which seem sufficient to bring the life of an ordinary man to a speedy end. A rage for the spiritual life, far from the world, seized on individuals of all classes. In the sixth century an Ethiopian king, Elesbaa, abdicated his throne to retire to fast and pray in the desert, where he lived as a saint of no ordinary sanctity and power. In the reign of Theodosius the Great, a beautiful young man, who attained to the highest political offices, sud- denly bade good-bye to his family and departed to Mount Sinai, stricken with a passion for the desert. But we need not enumerate here the countless disciples of St. Antony and St. Pachomius ^; they meet us at every page of history. In the same way among women the horror of unchastity —of desecration of the body, the temple of the soul—which had taken possession of the age with a sort of morbid excess, led to vows of perpetual virginity, and even children were dedicated in their infancy with a cruel kindness to a life of monasticism.^ When we regard the effects of these habits, we observe, in the first place, that the great value set by the triumphant Church on the unmarried life must have conduced to depopulation; and in the second place, that the refusal of \ the most spiritually-minded in the community to assist in advanced in civilisation and enjoyed a long peace ; and it did tend in that direction, as we can see by the mild character of later Stoicism. ]3ut, as Lecky points out, there were three great checks on such a tendency {History of European Morals, i. 287)—(i) the im- perial system itself—the cruelty of emperors worshipped as gods ; (2) the institution of slavery ; (3) the continu- ance of the gladiatorial shows. ^ Evagrius describes how certain monks of Palestine succeeded so well in their endeavours to mortify the flesh that they became unconscious of the differences of the sexes {Hist. Ece. i. 21). ^ The coenohitic monks who lived together in cells in the desert were practically hermits. ^ I do not propose to illustrate at length this subject, of which long ac- counts and numerous anecdotes may ho found in any ecclesiastical history.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29353300_0001_0059.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
