vn] ORIGINS OF MONASTICISM 146 Had they been free from ascetic tendencies, they might have looked to the elevation of marriage and the fostering of family life as the true remedy of the prevailing dissoluteness. They would have deemed marriage praiseworthy and not merely permissible. But now they could not help looking on celibacy as the higher state. In Christianity all but the best incurs disparagement. With Christians, to assert ^ that celibacy is best is to assert that marriage is not good. The Church Fathers could not close their eyes to the need of continuing the human race, nor to the plain sanction of matrimony in the Scriptures. But for these two facts, the Church of the fifth century might have condemned marriage unconditionally. As it was, the Church lauded celibacy and gradually re- quired it of the clergy.^ The early Christians who lived as celibates from ascetic motives were not an organized order and ap- parently practised no austerities. It appears, however, from the Pseudo-Clementine Epistles, written near the beginning of the third century, that at that time 1 Any one reading much patristic writing is astonished at the extent to which this struggle with fleshly lust filled the thoughts and occupied the strength of the Fathers. Anthony struggling with filthy demons is not unrepresentative of the general state of the Church. Christians had to writhe themselves free from their lusts. Grudgingly the Fathers admit that Scripture sanctions marriage, and so it is not utter sin. Says Jerome : " Laudo uuptias, scd quia mihi virgines generant! " Ep. XXII, Ad Eustochium, § 'JO, a com- position which had great influence at the time. Ep. CXXX, to Demetrias, a virgin, is not quite so extreme. In the Epistle to Eostocbiiun, Jerome also considers the non-ascetic reasons against marriage: " Nemo enim miles cum uxore perglt ad proeliura " (tb., $ 21) ; and see Preliminary Dis<;ourse to Basil's Asoetica, Migne, Patr. Oraec, VoL XXXI, col. 619. L /
