Our People

Asceticism—with a little help from the Desert Fathers

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, Third Conference

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
29/11/2005

There is a recurrent theme in world religions that a holy person is one who gains self-mastery through abstinence from some of the good things of this life. Anthropologists tell us that abstinence of one kind or another, especially from food and drink—and sometimes from haircuts, washing, company and sex—or at least particular kinds of each, or at least at particular times and places, or at least for particular persons, is as perennial an attribute of religion as prayer and sacrifice. The great world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism all have their food taboos, and their traditions of fasting. Our own religious tradition, too, is replete with such concerns. Nazarites such as Samson and the Baptist (or their pregnant mothers) abstained from strong drink (Num 6:2-21; Jud 13:3-7,14; Amos 2:11-12; Lk 1:15); John lived on locusts and wild honey (Mk 1:6 par). Ancient Israel and her neighbours marked repentance with fasting: Jonah’s Ninevite audience took him so seriously that every man, woman, child and animal went on the fast (Jon 3:5,7). Jesus, too, began his ministry by fasting in the desert for forty days (Mt 4:2 par). Paul, though in favour of medicinal brandy (1 Tim 5:23), warned bishops not to be drunkards (1 Tim 3:3: apparently they were a particularly high-risk group) and everyone else to beware turning their bellies into their gods (Phil 3:19; cf. Rom 16:18).

The first great collection of Christian ascetical writings is that of the Fathers of the Desert which date from the beginning of the fourth century AD. Traditionally the beginning of monasticism has been ascribed to St Anthony of Egypt, often titled the Father of Monks. He began in Fayum around 270 devoting himself to a life of prayer in the desert, about the age of twenty. At that stage of his spiritual journey his primary temptations were sexual – which is unsurprising. The Midrash Rabba charmingly describes young men of that age as “like a neighing horse, adorning his person and longing for a wife”. It is not so much the battles with the demon of fornication that concern us, but the fact of celibacy itself – a necessary requirement for distancing oneself from society at that time. Distance from normal social interaction was what it was all about.

Abba Pambo once said, “The monk should wear a garment of such a kind that he could throw it out of his cell and no-one would steal it from him for three days”. The Desert Fathers have many such sayings that are meant for our edification rather than our emulation. The purpose of “a word” was particular rather than general, it was designed not as a universal rule of life but as something for a particular person at a given time. The point of this saying is detachment, not just from physical things but also from self-importance. There is another passage dealing with Abba Simon: when he heard that an important man was coming to see him he put on his worst habit and sat at his doorway gnawing at a lump of cheese – just to make a bad impression.  It was not intended as clinical pastoral education for military chaplains!

As the threat of persecution receded and relations between Church and Empire became more settled Christian asceticism became a path for those who wished to renounce society and embrace what the historian Peter Brown describes as “self-imposed annihilation of social status”. “The World” of the first three centuries was a treacherous pagan place over against which the Christian set the community of the redeemed, with the ritual transformation of Baptism and Eucharist of the elect. After the Peace of Constantine “The World” was different. Now its alternative was not the Church of the Elect, winnowed by martyrdom as a present reality, but another, parallel society of the Desert, sifted rather by asceticism. This desire for an undiluted expression of Christianity has its roots in the wandering preachers-apostles-prophets mentioned in the first century Didache of the Twelve Apostles and parts of the New Testament – some of the apostles, Paul, and the author of The Revelation of John seem to have such. Celibacy, itinerancy and mendicancy were constitutive parts of this lifestyle. Even among Christians settled in communities there were groups of consecrated widows and virgins. The role of the Virgin Martyr was an important one in the second and third centuries, and still today we celebrate them in the First Eucharistic Prayer and our annual liturgical calendar. Their successors still haunt our churches as the professional pray-ers, keeping vigil as is our Advent calling.

The men and women of the desert in fourth century Egypt were engaged in making the life of the Beatitudes a living reality, bringing briefly to this Earth in the frailness of their own bodies, the paradise of the first Adam before the fall and of restored humanity after the second Adam, Jesus Christ. The severity of their fasts have led scholars commonly, but wrongly, to speak of “contempt for the human condition” and “hatred for the body” as their primary motivation. Peter Brown points out that there was much more to it. For one thing, the economic circumstances of the marginal land in which they lived suggests a society bedeviled by famine and unrelenting labour to obtain food. There is a “bleak and insistent physicality” about the sayings and anecdotes of the Desert that is shocking to modern Western sensibilities. For them the sin of Adam and Eve was gluttony, not sexual sin.  “In this view of the Fall”, says Brown, “greed and, in a famine-driven world, and greed’s blatant social overtones – avarice and dominance – quite overshadowed sexuality.” To fast was to undo the sin of Adam, to live without anxiety about food was to exist in the primeval Garden of Eden.
What worried them very much was Adiaphoria: a state of crossing the boundary between the human and the non-human. Brown describes it eloquently:

The most terrible temptation of all that pressed in continuously upon men perched, in this way, on the edge of the desert, was to betray their humanity. It was to break out of the confines of their cell and to expunge the regular alternations of vigil and prayer, eating and fasting. In moments when he was close to breakdown, the ascetic felt driven to wander as free and mindless as a wild beast, gnawing at the scattered herbs, mercifully oblivious at last, to the terrible ache of a belly tied to the morsels of human bread, cruelly spaced out by the human rhythms of prayer and fasting. This was the dire state of adiaphoria. In it, the boundaries of man and desert, human and beast collapsed in chilling confusion.

Food and the struggle to stay human while existing on a bare minimum of food was a constant preoccupation. One monk had written on the wall of his cell, as a warning to himself, the scriptural verse alluding to Esau’s selling of his birthright for a mess of pottage: “My brother, give me lentils!”

While there was, then, an agricultural and economic imperative behind some early Christian asceticisms, it had its spiritual uses too. Asceticism was seen as a process of cleansing, purgation, weeding of the soul. Having removed the thorns of vice and thistles of sensuality as far as possible from the soul it was hoped that there would be room for virtues to flower. And everybody needs that, not just the holiness professionals. In due course subduing the sense appetites and cultivating self-mastery through mortification and self-denial of various kinds, but especially through fasting and abstinence, became hallmarks of all serious Christians, not just of hermits in the desert.

Many of the saints were great abstainers. St Dominic, though not averse to a little extra turnip, was notoriously abstemious and expected self-denial from the brethren and sisters (Process canon.). His mortal enemies, the Albigensees, were to be out-fasted and out-abstained—though in this, as in many other things, the brethren were not always obedient. St Catherine of Siena, however, took matters to extremes, living for some time on her daily communion and a spoonful of herbs and ruining her health in the process. Fortunately she would not let her disciples follow her into anorexia. St Francis de Sales, though a moderate in such matters, recommended fasting as a way of elevating the spirit, subduing the flesh, maintaining mastery over one’s greedy passions, acquiring merit, and above all frightening Satan away, since “the Devil fears us more when he sees that we are able to fast” (Introduction to the Devout Life, III, ch. 23). Religious, especially, were expected to renounce various foods and drinks for much of the year or even all their lives. At least until modern times all Christians abstained from meat on Fridays, and fasted at various times, especially in Lent and our new-begun season of Advent. If nowadays Latin Catholics are only required to fast and abstain from meat twice a year, they are nonetheless exhorted to engage in some such practices voluntarily much more often. And wherever the Virgin Mary is said to appear these days, she seems to reverse her rôle as a Jewish mother trying to get her son to eat and to be calling us to eat less!

Sometimes renunciation can be taken too far, of course, or be hypocritical, or mark an heretical attitude to the world, the flesh and the devil. The prophets culminating in Our Lord inveighed against heartless and showy fasts which gained esteem of self and others but not of God. Gnostics, Manichees, Albigensees, Cathars, Puritans and Jansenists of various sorts — such as the guests at the theologically ingenious film Babette’s Feast — put themselves outside the Catholic pale because their enthusiastic self-denial represented an unhealthy dualism, a contempt for the created, physical, bodily world, for the Incarnation and the sacraments, for marriage and the Church. But in general, sound moral, pastoral and spiritual theology called on Christians to be ready to give up not just Chocolat in Lent, but other pleasures for the good of the soul.

St Thomas Aquinas – not famed for his slim waistline – recommended moderation both in eating and in fasting, as in most other matters. Eating and drinking are necessary and good, he said; they become gluttony and drunkenness when their excess amounts or leads to the violation of obligations to oneself, to one’s fellows or to God. If we eat so much (or so fast, or the wrong things), we will fail to take due care for our own health, to show self-respect oneself, to care properly for others, and to practice religion; the same is true if we eat too little. Following St Gregory’s Moralia, Thomas feared that gluttony and drunkenness can be ‘capital’ vices, that is ones that lead inexorably to all sorts of other sins. The five daughters of gluttony — daughters mind, not sons — were first, a blunting of the reason (apparently not only alcohol but the vapours of food had the power to dull the wit); secondly, a derangement of appetite producing, amongst other things, lascivious thoughts and deeds and a great deal of unseemly joy; idle talk; scurrilous conduct; and last but not least, what the manualists called mysteriously ‘filthiness’ but Thomas described in rather more down to earth terms as irregular discharges of superfluous matter, particularly of semen, causing gluttonous men to be sex-crazed as well (women, it seems, were exempt from this one) (ST IIa IIæ 148,6). Such moral-psychological views endured for many centuries: Mr Kellogg in the USA thought that masturbation was best prevented by dietary means, and so developed the world’s most famous breakfast cereal for this very purpose (Lancet  344 (1994): 1714)!

Gluttony, St Thomas thought, was in itself usually only a venial sin, but he moved drunkenness from the category of ‘venial’ sin in his earlier writings (de Malo  2, 8; 7, 4) to ‘mortal’ in his later ones (ST IIa IIæ 150,2): presumably what had changed in the meantime was that he had lived in several communities of Dominican friars and seen what the demon drink can do! Sobriety, he taught, was especially important for young men [such as soldiers], because high spirits so easily lead them astray; for women, it is crucial because they are not tough enough to withstand their secret longings; but even maturer men [such as officers and chaplains] need to be sober, because they have such weighty responsibilities to discharge (ST IIa IIæ 149,4)!

By the middle of this century moralists had honed all this asceticism down to a fine art of scruple-making. Bernard Häring, the best known modern moralist, taught that gluttony and drunkenness were the vices of excess in eating and drinking; that excess was having more than was absolutely necessary for nutrition; and that gluttony “conflicts above all with the imitation of Christ crucified. Consequently it is most effectively overcome through contemplation of the cross... penance and mortification... the stern realisation of the divine punishments, meditation on the pains of purgatory and of hell.” (The Law of Christ, Cork, 1960, vol. 1, p. 379). This rather wacky approach to feasting and fasting was, sadly, mainstream moral theology by the middle of last century. The New Catholic Encyclopædia (P.K. Meagher, vol. 6, p. 519), for instance, taught that the opposite of the vice of gluttony is not the virtue of temperance, of eating moderate amounts according to one’s physical needs, at appropriate times etc., as St Thomas insisted, but the virtue of abstinence – which Thomas thought was a vice in many circumstances. This is rather like saying that that the virtue opposed to the vice of sexual promiscuity is not chastity – sexual activity appropriate to one’s vocation, as Thomas taught – but perfect continence or sexual inactivity, in amongst married people!

New varieties of food and drink asceticism rear their heads in every generation. In the post-Christian West eternal life is to be won by the low cholesterol diet and the sacrament of health food—which in conjunction with face-lifts and hormone replacement therapy, gyming and jogging, promise a font of youth. Salvation is to be gained by eating only happy animals or better still no animals at all, and best of all by eating only happy plants, grown and harvested in politically correct ways and places. Plenary indulgences are to be gained by dieting and work outs, with extra days off the more sweat produced. The imitation of Christ and the Stations of the Cross have been superceded by jazzercise before a Jane Fonda video. A generation tired of being non-judgmental has found its new mortal sinners: those who fail to look after their own health and to make their bodies approximate those of Hollywood stars. Truck loads of high moral ground are imported on which to stand while wagging fingers at and excommunicating those who disobey the new kosher laws, eating at McDonalds, drinking high calorie drinks, or smoking. Some of this is secular common sense or even more common nonsense; but some of it, I suggest, is a post-religious culture groping for asceticisms to cultivate not just the body but the soul.

I will have more to say about the spirituality of food and drink in my next conference. The desert fathers were aware of other important asceticisms in areas other than the culinary and bibulous: self-denial in matters of human company, for instance. The hermits deliberately foreswore the cities and villages so as to strip away yet another series of distractions – family, work, the cares of this life, noise – following again the example of the prophets of old and the apostolic generation. Of course, the world often came to them, seeking counsel and blessing, as well as bringing much-welcome alms, and they brought the world to God in their prayers. But in their insistence on the values of solitude and silence, in offering us the space for contemplative poise, undistracted by having to entertain, they had something to say to military chaplains commonly far away from the company of other clergy. Solitude need not mean loneliness, and the man who cannot bear his own company (and that of God and the saints) will have little that is thoughtful and graceful to offer others when he joins their company.
To deny oneself some of the good things of life – food, drink, entertainments, chatter, company – at least some of the time is of course deeply counter-cultural today. Ours is an age obsessed with its own comfort and an economy determined to deliver that comfort to those who can pay. Though suffering remains the perennial issue for every human heart (and thus for our religion), our modern age seems determined to abolish it by throwing technology, counselling, more money, more regulation, more anaesthesia of one kind or another at it. If that fails, try euthanasia: put granny not out of her suffering but ours. Or put those who suffer out of sight, out of mind, so the rest of us can carry on undisturbed. None of us is immune. Deacons, priests, even bishops can, I dare say, become very self-centred, self-serving, comfortable and lazy in any age. But in an era of affluence the asceticism of the Desert Fathers can seem further away than ever before.

What strikes the often sex-obsessed modern mind is the strange concern of those desert hermits and early monks for moderation in food and drink, washing and company, and their apparent indifference, relatively speaking, to other areas of concern, such as sexual ones. There is a story of Abba Ammonas. A monk was keeping a woman in his cell and the other monks found out. It was not a monastery in the modern sense, but rather a collection of small cells and gardens around a few central buildings – so such a thing could have happened. The other monks demanded that he be investigated and punished and so Abba Ammonas went with this fourth century version of the Professional Standards Committee to inspect. The monk hid his concubine in a large storage jar and the Abba, seeing this at once, sat down on top of the jar and told the other monks to search the cell from top to bottom for the woman. Of course they could not find her, and the monk was vindicated. “The Holy Father hid the affair for the sake of God,” the text recalls. As he was leaving, he spoke to the offending monk whose reputation he had saved, saying, “Brother, from now on, pay attention to yourself.”

It was not as though the desert monks were unaware of the dangers of sexuality. There are some editions of the Sayings that have some sections either deleted by the censor or printed in Latin that only priests can read. Desert monks had sex on the brain as much as we do or can. It is recorded that some of those monks even sired children, presumably not by themselves. One monk even brought his son back to his cell to join the monastery and resumed his basket weaving as if nothing had happened. John Climacus in The Ladder of Divine Ascent makes reference to the dangers of bestiality with the monastery’s donkeys. Then there were always the novices as a source of temptation – “With wine and Boys around,” laments one old monk, “the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them”. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

To the extent that the Desert writings pay attention to sexuality, however, it is as barometer of spiritual health. The correspondence between Dorotheos and his Spiritual Father Barsanuphius, a hundred years later, reveals the course of one young monk’s spiritual journey. First there is the conquering of hunger and sexual temptation and then confronting “the serpent that lies coiled in dung at the bottom of the heart” – self-will and pride. Learning to turn the other cheek or to tolerate charitably fractious or dopey brothers was the real game.  Dorotheos had to deal with an old monk who used to stumble into his cell at night and urinate on his head and another who brought an infestation of fleas. Learning not to judge a brother was a harder kind of soul-weeding than putting aside sensual lusts. “Do not judge a fornicator,” said one Abba, “because he who said ‘Do not fornicate’ also said ‘Do not judge’.”

 Nonetheless, the conquest of sexual desire represented the line between the public and private domains of the monk. With the aid of his spiritual father, to whom he lays bare every movement of his soul, the seeker after holiness eventually achieves total transparency of will, in which the inner and the outer are perfectly at one, a true “monachos”, a man of oneness, a monk. He is “one mind and heart” with his brothers. There are no secret desires or hidden thoughts. The Lord has taken possession of his most inward parts. This total dispossession of self represents a final transition to the Other Kingdom in its flight from The World. It is even more than that, the Resurrection life made visible. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Monks were a living homily, a foretelling of the eschaton, indeed an announcement that the Kingdom has already come, for they live as do the just in heaven, neither marrying nor having children. The heavenly victory of the monk over sensuality and jugmentalism, though, was never the victory of the monk, but the victory of Christ stretching his hand down the ladder of the monk’s ascent. Christ alone is capable of bringing about this transformation.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the effect that such groups had on the wider society. The idyll of a desert monastic existence was only ever a myth, a productive and deeply felt myth nonetheless. The more a monk gained a reputation for sanctity and feats of fasting, the greater the number of pilgrims who came to visit him – officials to seek advice, pious women to see the divine, bishops looking for clergy, posses of laity with an elective disposition seeking new and better bishops. So much so, that one Abba said, “The good monk should never speak to women or bishops. If you speak to them once they’ll never give you any peace!” Such axioms demonstrate an historical reality. It was St Athanasius, the great Bishop of Alexandria, who is reputed to have written The Life of St Anthony. Athanasius fled to the desert himself a number of times during the Arian controversies, and he used the monks as his personal power base mostly because of their profound influence with the people, but also as a kind of holy militia to retake churches from heretics and offer him protection from his enemies.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the other literature from the desert of Scetis have embedded themselves in Christian spirituality by their influence on countless figures through the centuries, most notably the mendicant movement of the thirteenth century – even to the extent of imitating the literary form of collections of apothegms and anecdote. You are overcome by two contradictory movements when reading this literature: first of all, admiration of the majestic wisdom that gets to the heart of the spiritual life and the need for detachment; and second, a squirming revulsion at the alien harshness of the life described, and the thought that they had some aspects of human life badly wrong.

In all this there was never contempt for the body – it was, after all, to be glorified in due course by God in the Resurrection and in the meantime it was already the Temple of the Holy Spirit. What they sought was a taste of the life to come, to live as much as possible in the Kingdom of the Beatitudes. Self-denial was thus the visa to self-fulfilment. Whatever else we can say about the deserts of Egypt and the first flowering of monasticism, this was and remains a beacon of Gospel light calling us to wholeness and integrity in the service of Christ. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst… [and] mourn, for they shall be comforted.”