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Father Zossima left his monastery during Lent to enter the desert, hoping to find a spiritual father to offer him wisdom. Instead he met a woman, her naked body scorched by the Egyptian sun. Recognizing a life filled with holiness, he knelt and begged her blessing.

Reluctant with modesty, she spoke of her conversion from prostitution and of the 47 years she had lived alone in the desert: "I was burned by the heat of summer and frozen stiff and shivering in the winter … struggling with many and diverse needs and huge temptations but through it all even until this day the power of God has guarded [me]."

The woman, St. Mary of Egypt, was exalted in this popular sixth-century story as a source of spiritual wisdom who could teach even a godly monk like Zossima. But the characters in this story, a monk and a desert hermit, would have seemed strange or even distasteful to many pagan Romans, because they seemed to reject traditional values such as loyalty to one's city, marriage, and obligation to family. How did early Christians come to embrace such peculiar lifestyles?

After Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century, Christians no longer faced the specter of martyrdom as the ultimate test of devotion. Instead, many ardent Christians withdrew to the wilderness to fast and pray. The "monk" (meaning "solitary"—either male or female) practiced "asceticism" (literally "training"), a life of spiritual discipline, either alone in the wilderness like Mary of Egypt or within the structure of a monastery as Zossima did. The temptations to despair or pride experienced by monks living alone could be guarded against by living with others in community. The Christian ascetic inherited the mantle of the martyr, as a witness to a divine reality that ran counter to the expectations of Roman society. Early Christian monks rejected traditional social mores and embraced ascetic disciplines, such as prayer, fasting, celibacy, and giving up sleep.

Ascetic Christians also repudiated the Roman method of striving for immortality by producing citizen children, who embodied part of a parent's very body and soul and guaranteed the survival of the community. Christ had promised that Christians' bodies would be made immortal and had offered his own broken flesh restored as a pledge. Monks sought to live an angelic life on earth, neither marrying nor having children. By refusing to participate in the continual process of physically repopulating the earth, they recognized that Christ's coming had initiated a new age and believed that their lives could help usher in his kingdom.

Although early Christian ascetics sometimes borrowed rhetoric from Neo-Platonists or Gnostics who seemed to denigrate the body, in actuality Christian asceticism rejected any dualistic beliefs that elevated the spirit over the material world. Monks repeatedly emphasized the physicality of the gospel. Not only did Christ become human, but he endured great physical sufferings and the ultimate bodily humiliation—death.

In imitating Christ's sufferings through martyrdom and asceticism, the believer's body became an instrument by which God could work the mystery of salvation. Christ's bodily resurrection was the guarantee for Christians' own expectations of physical resurrection. For the monk, the body became the canvas on which to practice a new form of spirituality, taming physical passions in order to pursue union with God.

Early Christian ascetics were motivated by a literal interpretation of the gospel. Jesus had said, "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37), and anyone who does not "hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters … cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26).

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