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In October 346, Alexandria was abuzz with word of Archbishop Athanasius's return from six years of exile. In that city, his Arian opponents were in retreat, and his followers were aflame with heightened zeal for their faith. Wives and husbands heeded Paul's advice (1 Cor. 7:5) to refrain from sexual relations and turn instead to prayer. Fathers persuaded children to renounce the world, and children encouraged parents in their asceticism. Young women who had looked forward to marriage chose instead to remain virgins for Christ, and young men followed the example of others and became monks. The laity's zeal had found embodiment in the renunciation of the world.

By the middle of the fourth century, asceticism was in the air and spreading, especially in Egypt. But what exactly did this life entail? And why were so many suddenly attracted to it?

Renunciation of the world, an orientation so at odds with our modern culture, had in fact nourished the growth of Christianity from the start, and by 346, persons who wished to embark on an ascetic life had many exemplars from which to choose.

Within cities, Christian philosophers and teachers learned from the ascetic lifestyles of their non-Christian counterparts. As young people had in the past pursued wisdom by going to the philosopher Antoninus, who according to an ancient account, "despised his body and freed himself from its pleasures," so now Christian youth sought out Christian ascetics under whom they might learn the new Christian philosophy.

In Alexandria, the theologian Origen (who lived in the early third century) had taught new converts about Christianity and amazed them with his renunciations, including sleeping on the floor, going barefoot, extreme fasting, and abstaining completely from wine.

In fourth-century Leontopolis (in the Egyptian delta), one Hieracas formed an ascetic association of single persons who came together for study and worship. These Christians rejected traditional marriage and advocated instead a form of ascetic companionship, in which the partners renounced sexual activity.

More traditional Christian leaders, however, abhorred the practice. Athanasius, for example, wrote letters to virgins warning them that to live celibately with a man was to pour fuel on the flame of passion. "For does a person tie up a fire in his bosom and not burn his clothes? Or does a man walk on a fire's burning coals and not burn his feet?"

Still, Athanasius encouraged young women to become "brides of Christ" within their parents' home or in a house of virgins. Male ascetics too lived in the cities in their parents' homes, alone (this is called "anchoritic" monasticism), or in small ascetic houses.

By 325, a more elaborate form of village asceticism had also emerged. In Upper Egypt, Pachomius brought ascetics together within a walled community to practice a common life under a shared rule ("cenobitic" monasticism). Priests and deacons in Alexandria sent ascetically minded youth up river to join the Pachomian community. Within the cities, towns, and villages of Egypt, ascetic Christians had become so commonplace that the author of the Historia Monachorum en Aegypto (a late-fourth-century travel journal) ventured to suggest that monks and virgins almost outnumbered the secular inhabitants in the town of Oxyrhynchus (on the Nile, about 100 miles south of modern Cairo). "The city," he asserted, "was so full of monasteries that its walls resounded with the monks' voices."

Gradually, the withdrawal from the world evident in these lifestyles, practiced often in the towns and villages of Egypt, became separate spatially as more and more ascetics withdrew into the desert. When Antony embarked on the ascetic life around A.D. 271, he first apprenticed himself with an old ascetic in a neighboring village. From there he moved into deserted tombs located some distance from the village, and then even farther away to a deserted fortress across the river. He eventually established a monastery at the inner mountain by the Red Sea.

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