ffered the pangs of hunger.... Some of the hermits
lived in deserted dens of wild beasts, others in dried-up wells, while
others found a congenial resting-place among the tombs. Some disdained
all clothes, and crawled abroad like the wild beasts, covered only by
their matted hair. The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a
pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become
one hideous mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with
enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch of monachism, had never, to
extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet.... St. Abraham, the
hermit, however, who lived for fifty years after his conversion, rigidly
refused from that date to wash either his face or his feet.... St. Ammon
had never seen himself naked. A famous virgin, named Sylvia, though she
was sixty years old, and though bodily sickness was a consequence of her
habits, resolutely refused, on religious principles, to wash any part of
her body except her fingers. St. Euphraxia joined a convent of one
hundred and thirty nuns, who never washed their feet, and who shuddered
at the mention of a bath."[166]

It is difficult to realise what it is exactly that some writers have in
their minds when they praise the purity of the ascetic ideal, and lament
its degradation as though society lost something of great value thereby.
The examples cited realised that ideal as well as it could be realised,
and its anti-social character is unmistakable. If it is intended to
imply that an element of self-denial or self-discipline is essential to
healthy development, that is admitted, but this is not the ascetic
ideal; it is that of temperance as taught by the best of the ancient
philosophers. What the ascetic aimed at was not self-development, but
self-suppression. The discipline of the monk was only another name for
the cultivation of a frame of mind unhealthy and anti-social.
Eventually, the rapidity with which this mania spread, the fact that for
several centuries it raged as a veritable epidemic, carried with it the
germs of a corrective. The more numerous monks and nuns became, the more
certain it became that many of them would develop passions and
propensities they professed to despise. The love of ease and wealth, the
lust of power and pride of place, was sure to find expression, and if by
the degradation of the ascetic ideal is meant the fact that the
preachers of poverty, and humility, and meekness, became the wealth