Leadership Journal

As a history professor, I have asked my students, "What is monasticism?" and I often get suspicious, negative answers: "Monks withdrawing from the world."

"Unhealthy isolation and no evangelism." "Men and women who won't engage with the surrounding culture."

"Those who thing the body and material world are evil."

"Those too busy in self-centered devotions to care for others."

"My students think they know what motivated the early monks: obsessed with their own salvation and afraid of their own sexuality, they retreated to the desert to fight "demons," which were actually vivid manifestations of their own libido-right?

Interestingly, the early monks did fear the temptations of demons, but what sorts of temptations did those demons actually present to their would-be victims? Sure, fornication was among them. But what did fornication actually mean?

For at least one of the original monks, Antony of Egypt (A.D. 251-356), fornication stood for anything that dragged the heart away from God—any flirtation with an idolatrous replacement for the Lord. Fornication could mean sex and sensuality, but it could also mean forsaking vows, going home, and being caught up in the commerce and competition of life in the Nile Valley. In ancient dream theory, if a man dreams of a woman, he is dreaming of his business—how he supports the woman. That was the deepest fear of the monk: not that he would merely indulge himself sexually, but that the entire direction of his life and affections would shift from following God to the distracting entanglements of "life in the city."

Antony's story is helpful. The son of a prosperous farmer, Antony launched into his life of spirituality as a young man who had recently lost his father. He took to heart the words he heard at church one day: "Sell all you have, give to the poor and come, follow me." So he sold his birthright—200 acres of lush, fertile Nile valley land. Then he began to live as a solitary, at first just at the edge of his small town. He apprenticed himself to a local holy man, absorbing from his elder everything he could learn about the ascetic life.

Asceticism—askesis in Greek—meant "training." Before the Christian monks picked up the term, it referred to the cultivation of soul and body (stripping down and doing leg-lifts while reciting poetry) the Greeks had always been so keen to practice in their gymnasiums. Certainly, as anyone who has done physical training today knows, there were certain disciplines involved in this "training." But as the Christian monks began to practice it, askesis never entailed merely giving up things like food or sex. Rather, it was a mode of exercising the heart and building up oneself in godliness.

Ironically, Antony's pursuit of solitude made him that much more valuable to the community. He was recognized as possessing a spiritual power that was a valuable resource for the community at large.

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