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Folkways, by William Graham Sumner
A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages,
Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
CHAPTER XVIII
ASCETICISM
The exaggeration of opposite policies. — Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency. — Luck and welfare; self-discipline to influence the superior powers. — Asceticism in Japan. — Development of the arts; luxury; sensuality. — The ascetic philosophy. — Asceticism is an aberration. — The definitions depend on the limits. — Asceticism in India and Greece; Orphic doctrines. — Ascetic features in the philosophic sects. — Hebrew asceticism. — Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes. — Roman asceticism. — Christian asceticism. — Three traditions united in Christianity. — Asceticism in the early church. — Asceticism in Islam. — Virginity. — Mediæval asceticism. — Asceticism in Christian mores. — Renunciation of property; beggary. — Ascetic standards. — The Mendicant Friars. — The Franciscans. — Whether poverty is a good. — Clerical celibacy. — How Christian asceticism ended.
672. The exaggeration of opposite policies. It is not to be expected that all the men in a society will react in the same way against the same experiences and observations. If they draw unanimously the same conclusions from the same facts, that is such an unusual occurrence that their unanimity gives great weight to their opinion. In almost all cases they are thrown into parties by their different inferences from the same experiences and observations. There is nothing about which they differ more than about amusement, pleasure, and happiness, and as to the degree in which pleasure is worth pursuing. Those who feel deceived by pleasure and duped by the pursuit of happiness revolt from it and denounce it. Inasmuch as others not yet disillusioned still pursue pleasure as the most obviously desirable good, there are two great parties who divide on fundamental notions of life policy. Two such parties, face to face, tend to exaggerate their distinctive doctrines and practices. Each party goes to extremes and excess. We have seen in the last chapter (secs. 624 ff.) that at the beginning of the Christian era moral restraints were thrown aside and that all 606living men seemed to plunge into vice, luxury, and pleasure, so far as their means would allow. There were, however, a number of sects and religions in the Greco-Roman world that held extremely pessimistic views as to the worth of human life and of those things which men care for most. They renounced the ordinary standards of welfare and happiness, and sought welfare and happiness in merely denying the popular standards. The old world philosophies no longer commanded faith, and they seemed to be rejected with active hatred, not with mere indifferent unbelief. The poor and those who were forced to live by self-denial joined these sects of philosophy or religion. The age which saw extremes of luxury and vicious excess was also the age which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the "ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never can be verified by experience. It purposely runs counter to all the sanctions which are possible in experience. If any one declares evil good and pain pleasure, he cannot find proof of it in any experiment. The mores produced out of asceticism are therefore peculiar and in many ways instructive.
673. Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency. We have seen that the mores are the results of the efforts of men to find out how to live under the conditions of human life so as to satisfy interests and secure welfare. The efforts have been only very imperfectly successful. The task, in fact, never can be finished, for the conditions change and the problem contains different elements from time to time. Moreover, dogmas interfere. They dictate "duty" and "right" by authority and as virtue, quite independently of any verification by experience and expediency. All the primitive taboos express the convictions of men that there are things which must not be done, or must not be done beyond some limited degree, if the men would live well. 607Such convictions came either from experience or from dogma. The former class of cases were those things which were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter class of cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine of ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or conciliating superior powers, — either men or spirits, — which consist in renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and the performance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevolent, or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or appeases and conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention. Thus we meet with a fundamental philosophy of life in which it is not the satisfaction of needs, appetites, and desires, but the opposite theory which is thought to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want; do what you do not want to do; pursue what is repugnant; in short, invert the relations of pleasure and pain, and act by your will against their sanctions, so as to seek pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due measure and limit upon the rational satisfaction of needs and desires is turned into an absolute rule of well-being. Within narrower limits the same philosophy inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation, which produce no results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded as beneficial or meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in self-control and self-denial. It is not to be denied that such a gymnastic has value in education, especially in the midst of luxury and self-indulgence, if it is controlled by common sense and limited within reason. Nearly all men, however, are sure to meet with as much necessity for self-control and self-denial as is necessary to their training, without arbitrarily subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that kind.
674. Luck and welfare. Self-discipline to influence the superior powers. The notion of welfare through acts which upon their face are against welfare is directly referable to experience of the impossibility of establishing sure relations between positive efforts and satisfactions. The lowest civilization is full of sacrifices, renunciation, self-discipline, etc. It is the effect of the aleatory 608element and of the explanation of the same by goblinism (secs. 6, 9). The acts of renunciation or self-discipline have no rational connection with the interests which they aim to serve. Those acts can affect interests only by influencing the ghosts or demons who always interfere between efforts and results and make luck. Soldiers, fishermen, hunters, traders, agriculturists, etc., are bidden to practice continence before undertaking any of their enterprises. Hence arises the notion of a "state of grace," not the state produced by work in the workday world, but a state produced by abstinence from work, from enjoyment, and from the experience of good and ill. Abstention from wine, meat, other luxuries of food and drink, and from women gives power which is magical, because it has no real causal connection with desired results in war or industry. Uncivilized people almost always have some such notion of reaching a higher plane of power, or more especially of luck, by self-discipline. Acts of self-discipline, e.g. fasting, gashing, mutilating one's self, also enter into mourning. In some tribes parents who expect a child engage in acts of the same kind.2150 Asceticism in higher civilization is a survival of the life philosophy of an earlier stage, in which the pain of men was believed to be pleasant to the superior powers. The same sentiment revives now in times of decline or calamity, when the wrath of God is recognized or apprehended. We appoint a fast when we are face to face with calamity. The same sentiment is at work in sects and individuals when they desire "holiness," or a "higher life," or mystic communion with higher powers, or "purity" (in the ritual sense), or relief from "sin," or escape from the terror of ghosts and demons, or power to arise to some high moral standard by crushing out the natural appetites which according to that standard are base and wicked.
675. Asceticism in Japan. The Shinto religion of the Japanese "is not an essentially ascetic religion; it offers flesh and wine to its gods; and it prescribes only such forms of self-denial as ancient custom and decency require. Nevertheless, some of its votaries perform extraordinary austerities on special occasions, — 609austerities which always include much cold-water bathing. But the most curious phase of this Shinto ascetism is represented by a custom still prevalent in remote districts. According to this custom a community yearly appoints one of its citizens to devote himself wholly to the gods on behalf of the rest. During the term of his consecration this communal representative must separate from his family, must not approach women, must avoid all places of amusement, must eat only food cooked with sacred fire, must abstain from wine, must bathe in fresh cold water several times a day, must repeat particular prayers at certain hours, and must keep vigil upon certain nights. When he has performed these duties of abstinence and purification for the specified time he becomes religiously free, and another man is then elected to take his place. The prosperity of the settlement is supposed to depend upon the exact observance by its representative of the duties prescribed; should any public misfortune occur, he would be suspected of having broken his vows. Anciently, in the case of a common misfortune, the representative was put to death."2151
676. Development of the arts. Luxury. Sensuality. In the development of the arts there has been an increase of luxury in the ways of living. This has seemed to be a good. It has seemed like successful accomplishment of what man must do to win and enjoy power over nature. Luxury, however, has brought vice and ill, and has wrought decay and ruin. It is the twin sister of sensuality, which is corruption. Is luxury a good or not? Men have lost faith in it, and have declared that the triumphs of the arts were delusions, "snares to the soul," corruption of the individual and society. They have turned back to the "old simple ways," and have renounced the enjoyments which were within their reach by the power of the arts. Such renunciation has always been popular. The crowd has always admired it. It is certainly a noteworthy feature in the history of civilization that there has always been present in it a reaction, a movement of fear and doubt about the innovations of every kind by which it is attended, which has caused sects of philosophers and 610religious persons to refuse to go on, to renounce luxurious novelties, and to prefer the older and inferior ways.
677. The ascetic philosophy. Here then we have a life philosophy, or a life standpoint, from which the things to be done are presented inverted. It is ill luck, loss, calamity, etc., which have inverted human nature. The element of luck crossed and cut off the relations between effort and satisfaction, and disturbed all the lessons of industry. All effort would be vain if the ghosts who control luck were not propitiated. If they were friendly, labor was of no importance. Self-discipline, therefore, entered into everything. This is asceticism. It is always irrational or magical, addressed directly or remotely to the superior powers, as an appeal to their will and favor, their mystical friendship, and a prayer for the transcendental communications which they give. Pater2152 says that asceticism is a sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that the latter may survive; or a harmonious development of all parts to realize an ideal of culture. If the first sentence of this statement could be accepted as a fair definition, the second cannot. Asceticism does not aim at a harmonious development and never could produce it. It selects purposes and pushes towards their accomplishment. The selection has often been made with the purpose to attain to holiness, or a higher realization of religious ideals. The ideals are necessarily arbitrary and are very sure to be extravagant. They do not have good effect on character, and they produce moral distortion. They are, however, an outflow of honest religious emotion.
678. Asceticism is only an aberration. The great viewpoints and the great world philosophies are found logically at the end of a long study of life, if anywhere. If one is found or adopted, it furnishes leading for the notions of ways to be employed in all details of life. This is equally true if it is reached on a slight, superficial, or superstitious view of life. The ascetic philosophy produces contradiction and confusion in the acts of men, because some of them work for expediency and others for inexpediency at the same time. Therefore also the mores, if they are affected by 611asceticism, are inconsistent and contradictory. Nevertheless asceticism is only an aberration which starts from a highly virtuous motive. We must do what is right and virtuous because it is so. It is right and virtuous to fight sensuality in personal character and social action. The fight will often consist in acts which have no further relation to interests. By zeal the work of this fight absorbs more and more of life, and it may engage a large number associatively. It becomes the great purpose by which mores are built. Then the notion of pleasing superior powers by self-inflicted pain is thrown out, and all the primitive superstition is eliminated. We find a vast network of mores, which may characterize a generation or a society, which are due to the revolt against sensuality, either in the original purity of the revolt (which is very rare) or in some of its thousands of variations and combinations.
679. The definitions depend on the limit. Especially in connection with food, drink, and sex the asceticism of one age becomes the virtue of another. The ideas of temperance and moderation of one age are often clearly produced by previous ascetic usages. The definitions are all made by the limit. A stricter observance than the current custom is ascetic, but it may become the custom and set the limit. Then it is only temperance. It is often impossible to distinguish sharply between taboos which only impose respect for gods, temples, etc. (cleanliness, quiet, good clothing), and those which are ascetic. When the ascetic temper and philosophy assumes control it easily degenerates into a mania. Acts are regarded as meritorious in proportion as they are painful, and they are pushed to greater and greater extravagances because what becomes familiar loses the subjective force from which the ascetic person wins self-satisfaction. Asceticism then becomes a mental aberration and a practical negation of the instinct of self-preservation. It leads to insanity.2153 If it takes a course against other persons, it explains the conduct of great inquisitors like Conrad of Marburg.2154
680. Asceticism in India and Greece. Orphic doctrines. In India ascetic acts were supposed to produce not only holiness 612but also power, which might arise to superhuman degrees or even avail to overcome gods. Rohde2155 finds that the theological ascetic morality of the later history of Greece, which was not a determination of the will in a given direction but a mode of defending the soul from an external evil influence which threatened to soil it, had its first impulse in the notion of the antagonism between soul and body, because that notion would cause the body to be regarded as a base constraint from which the soul would need to be "purified." The notion of the pure soul imprisoned in a material sensual body, and stained by the base appetites of the latter, was current amongst the Greeks for five centuries before Christ. Hence the antagonism between the soul and the "body," the "flesh," or the "world." The soul passed from one body to another, according to the Orphic sects, with intervals in which it underwent purification. In each incarnation it underwent punishment for the misdeeds of the last previous existence. The soul is immortal. The soul of the bad man goes on forever in reincarnations from which it cannot escape. The soul which is purified by the Orphic rites and Orphic mode of life is redeemed from this eternal round and returns to God. Orpheus gives salvation by his rites, but it is a work of grace by the redeeming gods. Orpheus provides by his revelations and intercessions the way to salvation, and he who would walk in this way must carefully obey his ordinances. This is a life which must be lived. It is not ritual only. Here asceticism comes in, for the thing to be renounced is not the errors and faults of earthly life, but earthly life itself (worldliness). The man must turn away from everything which would entangle him in the interests of mortal life and the appetites of the body. Renunciation of meat food was one of the leading forms of this asceticism; sex restraint was another. The rites do not free men from the touch of demons. They purify the soul from the unclean contact with the body and from the dominion of death. Mysticism is conjoined with this doctrine of purification. The soul came from God and seeks to return to him. It is released by the rites and practices from everything on earth, including 613morals, which are only petty attempts to deal with details, and therefore are of no interest to a soul which is released. The dead are led to the place of the dead. The Orphic priests described this "intermediate state" with graphic distinctness, surpassing that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Probably this was the most popular, although not the most original, part of their teaching. The doctrine was not a folk notion; it was "holy doctrine" that there would be in Hades a judgment and a retribution. Then woe to him who had not been purified in the Orphic orgies! The Orphic sects also had a doctrine that the living, by the rites, could act upon the fate of deceased relatives in the other world.2156 These sects began in the second half of the sixth century before Christ. We do not know the course or mode by which they spread. They formed close associations or conventicles to practice the cult of Dionysus.2157
681. Ascetic features in the philosophic sects. The Pythagoreans also formed, in the sixth century, at Crotona, an association to practice moderation and simplicity. The use of meat food was limited, and by some it was renounced entirely.2158 Our knowledge of this sect is very slight and vague, although the tradition of its doctrines was certainly very strong in later times. It is believed that there was included in its teachings disapproval of prenuptial unchastity by men.2159 This would not be considered ascetic by us, but it appeared so to ancient Greeks. The Cynics were ascetics. They renounced the elegances and luxuries of life, and their asceticism became more and more the essence of their sectarianism. Some Greek priests were married, but others were bound to be chaste for life or while engaged in priestly duties. Sometimes some foods were forbidden to them, and this taboo might be extended to all who entered the temple. All must be clean in body and dress.2160 In the tragedies we find mention of the ascetic notion of virginity.2161 In the Elektra (250-270) the heroine lays great stress on the fact that her 614peasant husband has never taken conjugal rights. Orestes asks whether the husband has taken a vow of chastity, so that a vow of chastity was not an unknown thing. The notion of virginity was very foreign to the mores of the Greeks, but it existed amongst them. It gained ground in the later centuries. At the time of Christ it is certain that a wave of asceticism was running through the Hellenistic world.2162 It may have been due to the sense of decline and loss in comparison with the earlier times. It seems to bear witness to a feeling that the world was on a wrong path, in spite of Roman glory and luxury. If they could not correct the course of things, they could at least renounce the luxury. That seemed like an effort to stem the tide. More commonly the sentiment was less defined and less morally vigorous. It was only world sickness. Cases occurred of individuals who renounced marriage, or lived in it without conjugal intimacy.2163 The Stoics, Cynics, Neopythagoreans, and Neoplatonists all had ascetic elements in their doctrines. The wandering preachers of these sects were rarely men of any earnest purpose, and their speeches were empty rhetorical exercises, but they popularized the doctrines of the sects. Simon Stylites only continued a pagan custom. There were in front of the temple at Hierapolis two columns one hundred and eighty feet high. Twice a year a man climbed one of these and remained on top of it for seven days to pray and commune with the gods, or in memory of Deukalion and the flood. He drew up supplies with a rope. People brought him gifts of money and he prayed for them, swinging a brazen instrument which made a screaming sound.2164
682. Hebrew asceticism. The Jewish tradition was that at Sinai all the people were ordered to refrain from women for the time, but that for Moses this injunction was unlimited (Exod. xix. 15). In the rabbinical period it was established doctrine that any one who desired to receive a revelation from God must refrain from women.2165 Other cases in the Old Testament show that persons who were under a renunciation of this kind were in 615a state of grace. The ritual of uncleanness was ascetic and it enforced ascetic views of sex and marriage.2166
683. Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes. The Nazarites were Hebrew ascetics by temporary vow (Num. vi.). They did not cut their hair or drink wine, and never touched a corpse.2167 The Rechabites were a Jewish ascetic association of the ninth century B.C. They renounced the civilized life of the nation at that time and reverted to the pre-Canaanite life. They adopted wild dress and coarse food, and renounced wine. They lived in tents and cultivated Bedouin mores. The Essenes of the last century before Christ were an ascetic community with puritan and rigoristic tenets and practices. The laws of Antiochus Epiphanes that unclean animals might be brought to Jerusalem opened a chance that faithful Jews might eat of such. The attempt to guard one's self was made easier if a number had meals in common. This may be the origin of the custom of the Essenes to have common meals.2168 The company cultivated holiness by set rules of life, ritual, washings, etc. Their philosophy was that fate controls all which affects man.2169 They performed no sacrifices in the temple, but had rites of their own which seemed to connect them with the Pythagoreans. They were "the best of men," and "employed themselves in agriculture." They thought evil of all women, and educated children whom they adopted. All who joined the society gave their property to it and all property was held in common.2170 They used rites of worship to the sun. Their asceticism was derived from their doctrine of the soul's preëxistence and its warfare with the body.2171 They were stricter than the Pharisees. They rejected wealth, oaths, sensual enjoyment, and slavery.2172 They renounced all occupations which excite greed and injustice, such as inn keeping, commerce, weapon making.2173 Sex intercourse was so restricted that they could not fulfill the primary duties which the law laid on every 616man to beget children. Often they were persons who entered the society after having fulfilled this duty.2174 They had extreme rules of Sabbath keeping, food taboo, purification, and extreme doctrines of renunciation of luxury and pleasure. They either died out or coalesced with Christians.2175
684. Roman asceticism. The primitive Roman mores were very austere, not ascetic, and the institutions of the family and sex were strictly controlled by the mores. The Vestal Virgins might be cited as a proof that virginity was considered a qualification for high religious functions, so that it seemed meritorious and pure and a nobler estate than marriage.
685. Christian asceticism. Christianity is ascetic in its attitude towards wealth, luxury, and pleasure. It inherited from Judaism hostility to sensuality, which was thought by the Jews to be a mark of heathenism and an especial concomitant of idolatry. We distinguish between luxury and pleasure on the one side and sensuality on the other, and repress the last for rational, not ascetic, reasons.
686. Three traditions united in Christianity. The three streams of tradition which entered into Christianity brought down ascetic notions and temper. The antagonism of flesh and spirit is expressed, Galat. v. 16, and the evil of the flesh, Romans vii. 18, 25; Eph. v. 29. Yet ascetics are denounced, 1 Tim. iv. 3, "forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by them that believe and know the truth." In 1 Tim. iii. 2 and Titus i. 6 it is expressly stated that a priest or bishop is to be the husband of one wife. In Revelation xiv. 4 a group are described as "they who were not defiled with women, for they are virgins." The notion that procreation is "impure" and that renunciation of it is "purity" is present here. Cf. Levit. xv. 16-18. In 1 Cor. vii the doctrine is that renunciation of marriage is best; that marriage is a concession to human frailty; that all sex relation outside of marriage is sin. If there is a 617technical definition of sin, virtue, purity, etc., it can only be satisfied by arbitrary acts which are ascetic in character. The definitions also produce grades of goodness and merit beyond duty and right. The "religious" become a technical class, who cultivate holiness beyond what is required of simple Christians. Saints are heroes of the same development. In general, the methods of attaining to holiness and saintliness must be arbitrary and ascetic, — fasting, self-torture, loathsome acts, excessive ritual, etc.
687. Asceticism in the early church. It has been sufficiently shown that the Greco-Roman world, at the birth of Christ, was penetrated by ascetic ideas and streams of ascetic usage. In the postapostolic period there was a specific class of ecclesiastical ascetics. There were many different fields of origin for such a class in the different provinces.2176 Epictetus (b. 60 A.D.) had a spirit and temper which have always been recognized as closely Christian. He thought the aim should not be to endure pain and calamity with fortitude, but to suppress evil desires and to cultivate discipline. There were congregations in the earliest days of Christianity which were composed of persons who wanted to lead a purer life than was common amongst Christians. They adopted rules, as "counsels of perfection," such as renunciation of marriage and of eating meat.2177 The ascetic tendency got strong sway in the church in the second half of the second century, but the practices were voluntary, suggested by the religious impulses of the individual, and the leaders tried to hold the ruling tendency in reason. They held it to be absurd that self-inflicted pain could please God.2178 The tendency, however, could not be arrested. It was in the age. All the philosophies except Epicureanism, and all the sects in the mysteries, had encouraged it. The Christians had doctrines which were not hostile to it. It therefore flourished amongst them. In the second century there was a deep desire for a moral reformation, and to further it moral discipline was formulated in rules and made a system. The individual was taught to endure hardships, 618to drink water rather than wine, to sleep on the ground oftener than on a bed. In some cases they submitted to corporal cruelty, being scourged and loaded with chains. The converse error here appeared, for they made a display of their powers of endurance.2179 The moral gymnastics could be best practiced in solitary life. Many philosophers urged their disciples to leave home and to practice elsewhere, — in another town or in loneliness.2180 At the end of the third century the ascetic party, in spite of the withdrawal of the puritans, was very powerful. The ascetic sentiment was stimulated and was spreading on account of the ideas of neoplatonism, the increasing confusion in the Christian body, the excitement and anxiety of a period of social decline, and finally on account of the need to provide other means of expending the passionate love of God which had formerly driven Christians to martyrdom. When the church became a religion recognized by the state there was no more martyrdom. A similar tendency marked the sects of philosophy at the same time. The author of the Letters on Virginity ascribed to Clement (about 300 A.D.) is a strong admirer of celibacy. He has heard of shameless Christian men and women who consort, eat, drink, gossip, slander, and visit each other, although unmarried persons. The ascetics were forced to separate themselves entirely from the rest. They wandered, praying and preaching and casting out devils, having no means. The motives of asceticism were the apprehension of the end of the world, enthusiasm, dualistic philosophy, fear of sensuality, and gnostic doctrines. In 300 A.D. the ascetics were corrupt and venal and needed more complete isolation (monasticism).2181 In the fourth century an ascetic life, instead of a form of life for Christians inside the church, came to be thought of as an independent form of life. It was thought of as a "philosophy," most closely related to Cynicism. In externals Cynics and Christian ascetics were alike. The coarse garments and uncut hair gave them the same appearance.2182 In the fourth century the ethics of Paul were abandoned by Christians. The average Christians 619were average citizens. They held the current ethical ideas of the society. The intellectual scaffolding built by current culture was stronger than the new ideas which were accepted. The mores held sway against the new influences. In place of the notions of justice and holiness the old notion of "virtue" prevailed. Instead of the law "Love thy neighbour as thyself," the old enumeration of virtues constituted ethical reflection. At the end of the fourth century this transformation was recognized by the leaders of the church.2183 The Manichæan sects practiced asceticism even more zealously than the orthodox. Renunciation of "the world" was selfish. The period was one of turmoil. The burdens of the state were excessive. It was an evil that the best men renounced the duties of the state and civil society. Virginity was praised as Christlike and taught in opposition to society and the family. Marriage was not forbidden, but a special mystery attached to it, to explain how it might be honored, although it was so depreciated. The body of that soul which desired to be the bride of Christ must be virgin.2184 If any one turned to a home and family he must understand that he descended to something inferior and doubtful. The Roman state had been trying for three hundred years to stimulate marriage and increase population. Constantine repealed all the laws against celibacy. Later emperors liberated ecclesiastics from the "municipal burdens which were eating out the heart of the empire." All were eager to become clerics, and as the number of settled priests was limited, they became monks. The wealth of the church also attracted them.2185 The situation produced hypocrites, false ascetics, and vicious clerics. After the middle of the fourth century the church began to legislate that those who took vows must keep them. The penalty of death was to be inflicted on any man who should marry a sacred virgin. Pope Siricius, in 384, described the shameless license of both sexes in violation of vows.2186 In part this was due to another logical product of the conception of purity as negation, especially of sex. Men and women exposed themselves 620to temptation and risk by sensual excitement, holding themselves innocent if they were not criminal.2187 These tricks of the human mind upon itself are familiar now in the history of scores of sects, and in the phenomena of revivalism. Ritual asceticism is consistent with sensual indulgence. The sophistry necessary to reconcile the two is easily spun.
688. Asceticism in Islam. Islam, at the beginning, had an ascetic tendency, which it soon lost. Mohammed and his comrades practiced night watches with prayer.2188 Jackson found in the modern Yezidi community a "sort of ascetic order of women," fakiriah, corresponding to fakirs amongst men.2189 The dervishes are the technically religious Moslems, and in the history of Islam there have been frequent temporary appearances of sects and groups which regarded pain as meritorious.
689. Virginity. Virginity is negative and may be a renunciation. It then falls in with the ascetic way of thinking, and the notion that virginity, as renunciation, is meritorious is a prompt deduction. Christian ecclesiastics made this deduction and pushed it to great extremes. The renunciation was thought to be more meritorious if practiced in the face of opportunity and temptation. The ascetics therefore created opportunity in order to put themselves in the midst of the war of sense and duty.2190
690. Mediæval asceticism. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the ascetic temper underwent a revival which was like an intellectual storm. It was nourished by reading the church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. It entered into mediæval mores. It was in the popular taste, and the church encouraged and developed it. It was connected with demonism and fetichism which had taken possession of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries. Relics were fetiches. The Holy Sepulcher and the Holy Land were fetiches; that is, they were 621thought to have magical power on account of the spirits of the great dead in them. Transubstantiation was the application of magic and fetich ideas to the ceremony of the mass. All the mediæval religiosity ran to forms of which asceticism and magic were the core. Cathedral building was a popular mania of ascetic religion. Pilgrimages had the same character. We may now regard it as ascertained fact that asceticism, cruelty to dissenters, fanaticism, and sex frenzy are so interlaced in the depths of human nature that they produce joint or interdependent phenomena. That an ascetic who despises pain, or even thinks it a good, should torture others is not hard to understand. That the same age should produce a wild outburst of sex passion and a mania of sex renunciation is only another case of contradictory products of the same cause of which human society offers many. That the same age should produce sensual worldlings and fanatical ecclesiastics is no paradox.
691. Asceticism in Christian mores. The ascetic standards and doctrines passed into the mores of Christianity and so into the mores of Christendom, both religious and civil. In the popular notion it was the taboos which constituted Christianity, and those were the best Christians who construed the taboos on wealth, luxury, pleasure, and sex most extremely, and observed them most strictly. Such persons were supposed to be able to perform miracles. In the Middle Ages the casuists and theologians seemed never to tire of multiplying distinctions and antitheses about sex.2191 In fact their constant preoccupation with it was the worst departure from the reserve and dignity which are the first requirements in respect to it. A document of the extremest doctrine is Hali Meidenhad,2192 of the thirteenth century. The aim of the book is to persuade women to renounce marriage. Marriage is servitude. God did not institute it. Adam and Eve introduced it by sin. Our flesh is our foe. Virginity is heaven on earth. Happy wedlock is rare. Motherhood is painful. Family life is full of trials and quarrels. Virginity is not God's command but his counsel. Marriage is only a concession (1 Cor. vii.). This was the orthodox doctrine of the 622time. Among the religious heroes of the age not a few were irresponsible from lack of food, lack of sleep, and the nervous exaltation which they forced upon themselves by ascetic practices.2193
692. Renunciation of property. Beggary. Those who did not practice asceticism accepted its standards and applied them. A special case and one of the most important was the admiration which was rendered in the thirteenth century to the renunciation of property and the consequent high merit attributed to beggary for the two following centuries. The social consequences were so great that this view of poverty and beggary is perhaps the most important consequence in the history of the mores which go with the ascetic philosophy of life.
693. Ascetic standards. All who were indifferent or hostile to the church and religion maintained the ascetic standards for ecclesiastics in their extremest form. All the literature of the Middle Ages contains scoffing at priests, monks, and friars. In part, they were scoffed at because they did not fulfill that measure of asceticism which the scoffers chose to require, and which the clerics taught and seemed bound to practice.
694. The mendicant friars. The notion that poverty is meritorious and a good in itself was widely entertained but unformulated at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Jacques de Vitry, who was in Italy in 1216, and who left a journal of his journey,2194 met with an association in Lombardy, the Umiliati, who held the doctrines of the later Franciscans. The ideas which were current at that time about the primitive church were entirely fantastic. They had no foundation in fact. They were in fact deductions from ascetic ideals. The church of the thirteenth century was the opposite in all respects of what the primitive church was supposed to have been. Francis of Assisi and a few friends determined (1208) to live by the principles of the primitive church as they supposed that it had been. It is certain that they were only one group, which found favorable 623conditions of growth, but that there were many such groups at the time. De Vitry was filled with sadness by what he saw at the papal court. All were busy with secular affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired the Franciscans, who were trying to live like the early Christians and to save souls, and who shamed the prelates, who were "dogs who do not bark." The strongest contrasts between the gospel ideals and the church of that time were presented by wealth and the hierarchy. Francis renounced all property. Poverty was idealized and allegorized. Since he would not produce or own things, he had to beg or borrow them from others who were therefore obliged to sin for him. The first corollary from the admiration of poverty was the glorification of beggary and its exaltation above productive labor.2195 There is a rhapsody on poverty in the Roman de la Rose. If it is base and corrupting to admire wealth, it is insane to admire poverty. It never can be anything more than a pose or affectation. The count of Chiusi gave to Francis the mountain La Verna as a place of retirement and meditation. Armed men were necessary to take possession of this place on account of beasts and robbers.2196 Here, then, we have all the crime, selfishness, and violence of "property." The legendary story of Francis is fabulous. It is a product of the popular notions of the time. He was said to perform miracles. Crowds flocked to him. His order spread with great rapidity and without much effort on his part. Evidently it just met the temper, longings, and ideals of the time. Its strength was that it suited the current mores. Unlimited money and property were given to it. Francis died in 1226 and was canonized in 1228. Dominic (1170-1221) aimed to found an order of preachers in order to oppose the Albigenses and other heretics. He wanted to found a learned and scholarly order which should be able to preach and teach. He made it a mendicant order in order to preserve it from the corruptions to 624which the conventual life was exposed. The two orders of friars became fierce enemies to each other and fought upon all occasions.2197 In their theory and doctrines they exactly satisfied the notions of the time as to what the church ought to be, and "they restored to the church much of the popular veneration which had become almost hopelessly alienated from it."2198 The age cherished ideals and phantasms on which it dwelt in thought, developing them. Suffering was esteemed as a good, and self-denial with suffering made saintliness. Francis and his comrades cherished all these ideals and had all these ways of thinking. Francis became the ideal man of his time.2199
695. The Franciscans. Other mendicant orders prove the dominant ideas of the time. These were the Augustinian hermits (1256), the Carmelites (1245), and the Servites, or Servants of Mary (c. 1275). The mendicants did not live up to their doctrine for a single generation. In the middle of the century Bonaventura had to reprove the Franciscans for their greed of property, their litigation and efforts to grasp legacies, and for the splendor and luxury of their buildings.2200 The two great orders of friars became an available power by virtue of their hold on the tastes and faiths of the people. They became the militia of the pope and helped to establish papal absolutism. They "were perfectly adapted to the world conditions of the time."2201 The doctrines of poverty were at war with the character, aims, and ambitions of the church. The Franciscans, in order to establish the primitive character of their system, asserted that Christ and his disciples lived by beggary in absolute renunciation of property. This was a Scriptural and historical doctrine 625and question of fact, on which fierce controversy arose. It divided the order into two schools, the conventuals and the spirituals. In 1275 the spirituals, who clung to the original ideals and rules of Francis, were treated as heretics and persecuted. They rated Francis as another Christ, and the rule as a new revelation. They always were liable to fall into sympathy with enthusiastic sects which were rated as heretical.2202 The Franciscans also, in their origin, were somewhat independent of hierarchical authority and of established discipline. It was necessary that the order should be brought into the existing ecclesiastical system. The popes of the thirteenth century until Boniface VIII accepted the standards of the age and approved of the mendicant friars. In 1279, in the bull Exiit qui seminat, the Franciscan rule was ascribed to revelation by the Holy Ghost, and the renunciation of property was approved. The use of property was right, but the ownership was wrong.2203 Boniface was of another school. He was a practical man who meant to increase the power of the hierarchy. Absurd as was the notion of non-property, it was at least germane to the doctrine of Christianity that Christians ought to renounce the pomps and vanities of wealth and the struggle for power, and to live in frugality, simplicity, and mutual service. The papal hierarchy was in pursuit of pomp and luxury and, above all, of power and dominion. Boniface ordered the spiritual Franciscans to conform to the rule of the conventuals. Some would not obey and became heretics and martyrs. Their zeal for the ideas and rule of Francis was so great that they welcomed martyrdom for their adherence.2204 The most distinguished of the martyrs of the spirituals was Bernard Delicieux, who found himself at war with the Inquisition and the pope, and who, after a trial in which all the arts of browbeating and torture were exhausted, died a prisoner, in chains, on bread and water.2205 The other party also had its martyrs, who were willing to die for the doctrine that Christ and his apostles did not live by beggary.2206 Any doctrine that the apostles lived in poverty, by begging, was a criticism of the hierarchy as it then 626was. John XXII, another non-sentimental pope, declared that the doctrine that Christ and his apostles lived in negation of property was a heresy. Then Francis of Assisi and all who had held the same opinions as he became heretics.2207 In 1368 the strict Franciscans split off and formed the order of the Observantines, and in 1487 the Recollects, another order of strict observers of the rule, was founded in Spain, with the authorization of Innocent VIII. The stricter orders were always more enthusiastically devoted to the service of the papacy.2208
696. Whether poverty is a good. The history of the mendicant orders is an almost incomprehensible story of wrongheadedness. That poverty is a good is an inversion of common sense. That men do not want what they must have to live is a denial of all philosophy. The mendicants did not invent these dogmas. They were in the mores, and they made the mendicants. That the mendicants at once became greedy, avaricious, and luxurious, emissaries of tyranny and executioners of cruelty, was only an instance of the extravagances of human nature.
697. Clerical celibacy. If according to Christian standards virginity was the sole right rule and marriage was only a concession, it might justly be argued that the clergy ought to live up to the real standard, not the conventional concession. This was the best argument for sacerdotal celibacy. It was well understood, and not disputed, that celibacy was a rule of the church, and not an ordinance of Christ or the Gospel. It was an ascetic practice which was enjoined and enforced on the clergy. They never obeyed it. The rule produced sin and vice, and introduced moral discord and turpitude into the lives of thousands of the best men of the Middle Ages. In the baser days of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the current practice was a recognized violation of professed duty and virtue, under money penalties or penances. Yet the notion of celibacy for the clergy had been so established by discipline in the usage of priests and the mores of Christendom that a married priest was a disgusting and intolerable idea. At the same time usage had familiarized everybody with the concubinage of priests and prelates, and all Christendom 627knew that popes had their bastards living with them in the Vatican, where they were married and dowered by their fathers as openly as might be done by princes in their palaces. The falsehood and hypocrisy caused deep moral corruption, aside from any judgment as to what constituted the error or its remedy. Pope Pius II was convinced that there were better reasons for revoking the celibacy of the clergy than there ever had been for imposing it,2209 but he was not a man to put his convictions into effect. The effect on character of violation of an ascetic rule, acknowledged and professed, was the same as that of the violation of one of the Ten Commandments.
698. How Christian asceticism ended. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the ascetic views and tastes were all gone, overwhelmed by the ideas and tastes of a period of commerce, wealth, productive power, materialism, and enjoyment. In the new age the pagan joy in living was revived. Objects of desire were wealth, luxury, beauty, pleasure, — all of which the ascetics scorned and cursed. The reaction was favorable to a development of sensuality and materialism; also of art. Modern times have been made what they are by industry on rational lines of effort, with faith in the direct relation of effort to result. The aleatory element still remains, and it is still irrational, but the attitude of men towards it is changed. All the ground for asceticism is taken away. We work for what we want with courage, hope, and faith, and we enjoy the product as a right. If the luck goes against us, we try again. We are very much disinclined to any increase of pain or of fruitless labor. There is a great change in the mores of the entire modern society about the aleatory element. That change accounts for a great deal of the modern change of feeling about religion.
2150 Spix and Martius, Brasil, 1318.
2151 Hearn, Japan, 165.
2152 Marius the Epicurean, 357.
2153 Galton, Hered. Genius, 239.
2154 Lea, Inquisition, II, 330.
2155 Psyche, II, 101.
2156 Rohde, Psyche, II, 121-130.
2157 Ibid., 104.
2158 Ueberweg, Hist. Philos., I, 45.
2159 Lecky, Eur. Morals, II, 314.
2160 Stengel, Griech. Kultusalterthümer, 35.
2161 Euripides, Hippolytus, 1300; Trojan Women, 38, 975.
2162 Mahaffy, The Grecian World under Roman Sway, 180.
2163 Lecky, Eur. Morals, II, 315.
2164 Lucian, De Syria Dea, sec. 28.
2165 Jewish Encyc., V, 226.
2166 Levit. xv. 16, 18; Deut. xxiii. 11; Josephus, Cont. Ap., II, 24.
2167 Judges xiii. 4-14; Amos ii. 11.
2168 Lucius, Essenismus, 102.
2169 Josephus, Antiq., XIII, 5, 9.
2170 Cook, Fathers of Jesus, II, 30, 38.
2171 Hastings, Dict. Bib., Devel. of Doct. in Apoc. Period; Supp. Vol. 292, a.
2172 Lucius, Essenismus, 54, 59, 68.
2173 Ibid., 52.
2174 Jewish Encyc., V, s. v. "Essenes."
2175 Cook, Fathers of Jesus, II, 48; Lucius, Essenismus, 131; Graetz, Gesch. der Juden, III, 92 ff.
2176 Harnack, Pseudoclement. Briefe de Virg., 3.
2177 Hatch, Griechenthum und Christenthum, 121.
2178 Lea, Sacer. Celib., 29.
2179 Hatch, Griechenthum und Christenthum, 108.
2180 Ibid., 109.
2181 Harnack, Pseudo-Clement. Briefe de Virg., 19, 21, 22.
2182 Hatch, 122.
2183 Hatch, 123.
2184 Harnack, Dogmengesch., I, 747.
2185 Ibid., 59.
2186 Ibid., 60.
2187 Such perversions have been very frequent. See Todd, Life of St. Patrick, 91, for a case; also, Lea, Inquisition, III, 109. Sometimes the test was to show that the temptation was powerless. Lea, Inquis., II, 357; Sacerd. Celib., 167.
2188 Wellhausen, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, III, 210.
2189 Hist. of Religions, section of the Amer. Orient. Soc., VII, 22.
2190 Achelis, Virgines Subintroductae. The author thinks that the relationship was one of Platonic comradeship.
2191 See Peter Lombard, Sentent., IV, 31.
2192 Early Eng. Text Soc., 1866.
2193 Cf. Lea, Inquis., II, 214, about Peter Martyr.
2194 Nouveaux Mem. de l'Acad. des Sciences, lettres et beaux arts de Belgique, XXIII, 30.
2195 The ideas of Francis had been promulgated by the Timotheists in the fifth century. They were then declared heretical (Lea, Sacerd. Celib., 377).
2196 Carmichael, In Tuscany, 224.
2197 Lea, Inquis., I, 302.
2198 Lea, Sacerd. Celib., 377.
2199 Little, St. Francis of Assisi, 138. Carmichael (In Tuscany, 228) is satisfied that Francis received the stigmata. He says: "No serious person any longer seeks to dispute the fact." The stigmata were imparted by an angel and consisted in "long nails of a black, hard, fleshy substance. The round heads of the nails showed close against the palms, and from out the backs of the hands came the points of the nails, bent back as if they had pierced through wood and then been clinched." The wounds caused pain so great that Francis could not walk. Little does not reject all the fabulous details in the life of the saint as the legends have brought it down.
2200 Lea, Inquis., III, 29.
2201 Michael, Gesch. des Deutschen Volkes, II, 78.
2202 Lea, Inquis., III, 33.
2203 Ibid., 30.
2204 Ibid., 51.
2205 Ibid., II, 75, 99.
2206 Ibid., 59.
2207 Lea, Inquis., I, 541.
2208 Ibid., III, 172, 179.
2209 Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italien, 465.
