ager 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 to
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. Mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 centu