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- tion,[1] they sought desert places and vast solitudes to pass their
lives in sordid discomfort, at one time grazing like wild beasts, at another immured in noisome cells too narrow to admit of any restful position of the body or limbs.[2] Some joined the class of stylites, or pillar saints, who lived in the air at a considerable altitude from the ground on the bare top of a slender column.[3] Such were the anchorites or hermits, who arose first in order of time and claimed for their founder an illiterate though well-born youth of Alexandria,[4]
- [Footnote: asexual, who are propagated in a passionless manner by divine ordination;
In Epist. Rom. Hom. xiii, 7 (in Migne, ix, 517); De Virginitate, 14, et seq. (in Migne, i, 544); cf. Ambrose, De Virginitate, 3; Rufinus, Hist. Monach., 7 (in Migne, 413).]
- ↑ Monks are enjoined by Theodosius I "deserta loca et vastas solitudines sequi atque habitare"; Cod. Theod., XVI, iii.
- ↑ The literature of early monkish life, descriptive and laudatory, is very extensive; see Gieseler, Eccles. Hist., i, 95, 96, etc. The most striking picture will be found in Evagrius, i, 21; iv, 33, etc. He is lost in admiration of them; they suppressed their natural appetites so rigidly that they looked like corpses wandering away from their graves. Some lived in dens and caves where they could neither stand nor lie. Some dwelt in the open air almost naked, exposed to excessive heat or cold. Others rejected human food and took to grazing like cattle, shunning human beings as if they were wild beasts. Both sexes embraced such lives of unremitting castigation. Some of the males made a practice of repairing from time to time to the cities in order to demonstrate their sexual frigidity by bathing in the public baths amongst nude women. They applied themselves to prayer, of course, until they brought themselves to the verge of exhaustion; cf. Sozomen, vi, 28, et seq. One Apelles had a conflict with the devil similar to that related of the English St. Dunstan.
- ↑ The celebrated Simeon Stylites was the inventor of this sublime method of serving the Deity. From 420 he lived on columns near Antioch for thirty-seven years; Evagrius, i, 13; see Gieseler, i, loc. cit., for reference to fuller accounts, separate biographies, etc.
- ↑ He was contemporary with Athanasius, who wrote an extant life of him; see Sozomen, i, 13, etc.
