The Worm in the Apple

 

I.

Unto the pure all things are pure, says the poetess Sappho, and the apostle Paul, of all people, has quoted her with approval. In 424 BC. was the premiere of Lysistrata. You should read it to your spouse, when you are alone with her. 26,000 people filled the amphitheater of Athens with waves of roaring laughter. Almost 700 years later Longos wrote a story about two pubescent shepherds who began discovering their hormones. Surrounded by their animals who do “it” all the time, the kids somehow manage not to have a clue before we reach the last page. Very romantic, very charming, mildly arousing – your spouse might like it, too – but not so funny anymore. A sign of the progressing ages. These days hardcore pornography is proliferating on our desktops, but bawdy humor is on the retreat; I wonder why? In our porn flicks the couples fuck as if it is for the Olympics but barely utter a memorable phrase. Compare this with the work of the Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). It is still a seminal goldmine for lewd language; and his Lordship has dished it out with elegance and wit. Our presumptuous jargon of political correctness would have struck this aristocrat as the telltale sign of low breeding. Stable-boys who want to be kings.

In 1922, the postmaster general ordered to seize and burn a shipload of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the end Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was "not pornographic." At the time this was hailed as a landmark decision. But was it really? God forbid that a book should affect us as an aphrodisiac – in legalese: "dirt for dirt's sake" (Judge John M. Woolsey, 1936, in his ruling on James Joyce's Ulysses). The legal definition of the word "obscene" is: "tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts" (Judge John M. Woolsey).

Impure? What’s impure about lust? And why this fly-fishing for legal definitions in the first place? What business is it for secular legislation to interfere in my privacy and enforce somebody else’s religious taboo? Especially if it is not my taboo? “Prude” and “pure” have only one thing in common, the first letter.

Most statues that have survived from antiquity are disfigured at their noses and penises. When Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) unveiled his "David," the bigots threw stones at the statue and broke off an arm; the repair marks are still visible. Northrop Frye has observed that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have descended from the same line of a “revolutionary tradition,” which "has tended to a good deal of prudery about the naked body, to iconoclasm, and to a rejection of spectacular art, especially when representational" (The Great Code  II:117). Moses' law is listing 36 crimes as punishable by death. Half of these involve sex, including "the uncovering of one's nakedness" (Exodus 20.26, 28.42; Levi 18.6-19). A prudery that seems to go with revolutions everywhere. For the Marxists in Russia and China the un-blurred view at our genitals is just as anathema as it is for Puritans and Ayatollahs, or the American television. We cry "foul" should children catch a glimpse of one inch of penis or the pubic area of a pussy. I heard intelligent people defending censorship for fear of having "kids carrying pornography in their satchels." I had to pinch myself to believe what I just heard. These days kids pack cigarettes, drugs and handguns; but, oh, beware of pornography! So what? The boys wank it off over a centerfold from Playboy, while girls manually explore their feelings further south under a glossy of Tom Cruise on the bedroom wall, and most of the girls do it already at an age when boys not even think of wanking. Michelangelo had to paint boobs on a young man, because for that scene in Paradise, he couldn’t get a female to model for his Eve. (I’ve always wondered what, on the fresco, Eve was doing before she reached for the apple: just look how the naughty Michelangelo has positioned the two.) When Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (971 – 1030) raided the temples at Khajuraho, the Islamic Jihadis encountered carved walls with figurines in complicated group positions, masturbating, giving blow jobs, shagging front and aft. Occasionally one of these sculptures is depicted averting its eyes at the sight of somebody penetrating a horse. The temple is a Kamasutra hewn in stone. It was too much for even the horniest of the Muslim Jihadis. The slaughter in the name of Allah was indiscriminate.

In the West the renunciation of sexuality not only became the batch for one’s unhesitating availability to God – “there are some eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake” (Matt. 19:3-12), as Jesus used to put it – on the scale of Christian virtues the complete disconnect from all sexual urges became the most significant of any quality required for leadership in the hierarchy of the medieval church. The theologian Origen went so far as doing a bit of DIY surgery on himself. But other saints, embroiled in their lifelong struggle with sexual fantasies, felt this was cheating, it made celibacy just too easy. So to make absolutely sure that no other cleric would ever follow Origen’s example, the cardinals in Rome introduced a new election procedure. With the candidate hoisted up on a special chair, the electoral college passed single file underneath a strategic gap in the chair’s seating area. After a short and sharp glance at the not yet holy testicles, they pronounced that the new pope was going to be intact: “Testiculum habet et bene pendente” (W. E.H. Lecky, 1838 – 1903, History of European Morals). I am not sure whether the historian here fell for an urban legend or whether the procedure was actually introduced to make sure that no other woman could become pope, after the true identity of Pope John VIII (855 – 858 AD.) had been discovered, as she went into labor on the stairway to the Lateran Church. “Clearly the broad we merely imagine is worse than the one living next to us,” said the “Doctor Seraphicus,” St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221 – 1274), a sexually particularly screwed up specimen of catholic sainthood. He watched with approval a nun sucking off the scabs from a leper and getting an orgasm – pardon, a vision of Christ of course – when swallowing. Having his own mother sitting next to him without a chaperone made him break a sweat; perhaps he was afraid, or had reason to be afraid, the old woman might jump him for a last hurrah. And today, in the 21st century, there are convents in Italy where the nuns take showers only if dressed in an ankle-long shirt, so as not to offend their divine bridegroom with their immodesty. As if God can’t look through the linen. And why shouldn’t he: “Don’t you think,” says the Benedictine, Bernard of Clairveaux (1090 – 1153), that “from time to time even God would like to lay his eyes on something pretty?” The dog-collared celibate breaking the wafer knows the feeling, but the only pretty thing at his disposal is the altar-boy swinging the smoking censer. Abuse is still endemic. Not everybody has an escape into virtual orgasms like the beguine St. Agnes Blannbekin.

In 1315 she imparted to her confessor that “from childhood on she was in a habit to profusely weep at the feast of Circumcision, touched to the heart that Christ had condescended so early to suffer and spend his blood. It made her wonder what became of Jesus’ foreskin. And one day she felt it on her tongue, like the skin of an egg, full of great sweetness, and she swallowed it. Then she felt the little skin again, and swallowed it once more. And she did so a good hundred times. And it was revealed to her, that on the Day of Resurrection the prepuce was also resurrected. So great was the sweetness when she swallowed this little skin, that in all her limbs and in all the muscles of her limbs she felt a sweet transformation” (The Lord’s Prepuce, chapter XXXVII). Yes – these sweet transformations. (And now I have of course forgotten what I wanted to say.) By now, the Church has decreed that anyone writing or speaking of the Holy Prepuce is to be excommunicated. Meditations on the foreskin may wander off to – you know where. So, no wafer for me.

Always concerned to fend off the temptation of information, the Holy Office has never tired to condemn every book “which deals with fleshly passion,” because “no other danger is greater” (Cardinal Merry del Val, Palazzo del S. Uffizio, 1929). What earned Voltaire a secure position on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was initially not his anticlerical griping, but the reputation of his unpatriotic poem La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) for being comically pornographic.

The first book on how to have sex, marital sex of course, I ever read, was a product of the late 50s. The Joy of Sex was still a thing of the future. The book was allegedly authored by a pair of gynecologists who in great detail dwelled on the anatomy but mentioned orgasms merely as a side effect, pleasant to have but inessential (for her, not the man of course) and “if you absolutely must, there is nothing to object to, to see your wife without a stitch on her body” (the guy was advised to keep on his jim-jams). There were long sections about sexual perversions, “everything is allowed that is leading to the child,” and both doctors seemed to agree “that there is really a lot to learn from moral theology.” I was too young then to pay any attention whether there was an “Imprimatur” on the title leaf. But, believe it or not, on the dust jacket the book was hailed as a liberation. Women, in a whisper, began to speak of orgasms. An exotic affair by now, after 1,600 years of Catholic sex-education. Prior to Jesus, the ancient moralists still insisted that screwing had a function in the general scheme of things, it was the glue of society. They took for granted that a vigorous discharge of "generative heat," accompanied by sensations of physical pleasure in both sexes, was sine qua non of conception. Conception and passion could not be disjoined. In the year when my mother wrapped me in a bundle and we left the maternity ward, things were different; only the smallest percentage of women living in the Christian West, had ever heard of orgasms, let alone ever had one! This included my mother.

So why has the demonizing of sex been allowed to pull so much weight in Christian circles? What has done more harm to mankind? The Bible, the Koran, or the Kamasutra?

 

II.

The Shepherd of Hermas has by a hair’s breadth missed to become canonical. The book is included in many of the ancient collections of the New Testament – “kainê diathêkê” – a term that came up the first time in 192 AD.; Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have it included as well. In a parallel Universe the Shepherd may even be the only holy book of those extraterrestrial Christians; and for good reason. The book is a kind of ancient Pilgrim’s Progress, its author was what theologians in their specialized jargon use to call an “adoptionist.” For Hermas, Jesus was the chosen son because he had been "walking honorably in holiness and chastity." Salvation by grace was not Hermas’ cup of tea. Instead “all men who are able to do right shall not cease to practice good works; for it is useful and will receive a reward” (The Shepherd, 5th parable).

The world of the Shepherd is a place where the church was under the sponsorship of rich patrons. Their contacts with the pagan neighborhood provided protection and prestige. Predictably the mind of the influential Christian was torn between the demands of solidarity to his religion and the concerns for his day to day business. Jesus came from a rough neighborhood and his particular pet hate were the wellborn and the rich; he didn’t mince his words: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mt. 19:24; Mk. 10:25; Lk. 18:25). But the underprivileged in the community, like Hermas, couldn’t help noticing how even the pillars of the church were utterly absorbed with their concerns for wealth and success, albeit seasoned with a twang of bad conscience. I think it was Ortega y Gasset who said, that the virtues we do not possess are those that mean most to us. However there was one thing about the Christians, that was duly noted and respected even among the gentiles. Galen, arguably the greatest medical capacity of the millennium, was struck by the “sexual austerity of the Christian communities.”

Hermas (c.75 – c.155 AD.), “patient, not given to indignation, always with a smile,” was no simple soul. Although in bondage, he was an educated man who served in an urban household. He felt disturbed by sexual attraction to his own mistress. She was a good Christian woman, but thought nothing of asking her slave – Hermas – to help her out of the bath when she was naked! The fight for continence under this condition became a heroic act of faith.

After his manumission, Hermas inherited a well-trimmed little vineyard, a property in the residential area just outside of Rome’s city limit. It became the setting for his book. The idyllic genre is the traditional vehicle for erotic imagery; Hermas used it as the counterfoil to stage his vision of a smallholder’s bourgeois morality: "Keep purity, and let not a thought enter your heart of another's wife, or of fornication, or of any such like evil deeds (sic!); for in so doing you are committing a great sin. So remember your own wife always, and you shall never go wrong.” If after a divorce the wife “repents and desires to return to her husband,” the husband who receives her not, “brings great sin upon himself; since one who has sinned and repents must be received, yet not often; for there is but one repentance for the servants of God, and therefore the husband ought not to marry again for the sake of her repentance” (Shepherd, Mandate IV).

Less than twenty years later, Hermas was still alive when a new arrival at Rome’s Christian community, a certain Marcion of Sinope (85 – 169 AD.) set out to reform the church.

It was a matter of urgency. Jewish blacksmiths in Palestine had begun to hold back weaponry from their orders by the Roman armory. After a period of preparations the sudden outbreak of Bar Kokhba’s insurrection took the Romans completely by surprise. The insurgents proclaimed a sovereign Jewish state. Emperor Hadrian sent in his generals and in 136 AD., after a drawn out campaign of torched earth, the sedition was finally extinguished. For a brief period Jewish religion lost its status as “religio licta,” a legal cult (Dio, Epitome IXIX, 10-14), and for this the synagogue is still laying a curse on Emperor Hadrian. For a Christian this could mean only one thing. It was time to sever whatever connection there was, and once and for all draw the line between him and Judaism. Marcion was the man to do the drawing.

He wrote a book, the Antithesis. But his book was way too radical. Marcion enunciated Jesus as the harbinger of a supreme but previously unknown deity of compassion and mercy, vastly different from the stern Demiurge, the creator of good and evil known from the Septuagint. Marcion wrote: "All that the Good God is asking of us in order to escape from the dominion of the Demiurge, is faith in His love. Jesus has emancipated us from the legalistic requirements of Judaism." Therefore Christians should not allow themselves to be soiled by the teachings of the rabbis and their holy book.

Yet the older members in Rome’s congregation begged to differ. They had not forgotten the days when the Septuagint had been their only reference to anything that was remotely resembling “scripture.” It contained the prophesies they quoted to confirm their faith, and Marcion’s dismissal of the Old Testament, in their eyes, was merely an opportunistic ruse in order to weather the political tide. It didn’t chime well with these seasoned confessors. Much better received was Marcion’s edition of the Pauline letters. It added shape to the orthodox canon of the Church. “Marcion’s prefaces to the letters of Paul were retained in several versions of the Latin Vulgate Bible, and many of his proposed emendations have turned up in numerous surviving manuscripts, showing that his legacy was intimately integrated at various levels throughout the surviving Church, affecting the transmission as well as the selection of the final canonical texts” (Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance 94-9). 

Marcion agreed with Paul’s opposition to the institution of marriage. When we are told that Christianity is all about “love,” loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, holding out the other cheek, this sort of thing, they usually don’t tell us what exactly they mean with the term “love.” The apostle says: “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13). “Charity!” Not quite the same as “love,” isn’t it? Although Paul seems to understand that there is little charity without empathy. So what has Paul to say in the cases where “love,” the real thing, actually matters, the love for your spouse, your family, your friends? Paul is unequivocal: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (I Cor. 7:1). “I say therefore to the unmarried and the widows, it is good for them if they abide as they are.” The next sentence then is the most degrading thing anybody has ever said about sex and marriage: “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” You heard him right. Marriage for Paul is merely the piss pot for our physical needs. But perhaps all this is just a misunderstanding, Paul may simply not get the drift what his boss is saying? Well what does Jesus say?

“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Lk. 14;26). A statement worthy of a suicide bomber. And regarding sex Jesus is even more explicit, again combining it with a slur against the institution of lawful marriage: “There are some eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake” (Matt. 19:3-12), for in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven (Mt. 22:22-32). Paul hadn’t got it wrong after all. Consequently Marcion made continence mandatory for the admission to the Eucharist, which in his congregation apparently excluded the married couples. A schism tore apart the Church of Rome. Marcion was asked to hand in his membership card.

Another Christian Taliban picked up where Marcion had left. In 168 AD., a certain Tatian published his tirade Against the Greeks. He called for tearing down the temples and destroying the statues, and he denounced a popular icon of Hellenic culture, the Greek poetess Sappho (631 – 572 BC.). He called her names and said she was a "love-crazed fornicator who even sings about her own licentiousness." In 380 AD., Bishop Gregory Nazianzen (330 – 390 AD.), a man I once used to give credit for his learning and culture, put his parishioners to work and had them collect all the copies of Sappho's work they could find in his diocese. He burned the lot (Girolamo Cardan, 1501 – 1576). Manuscripts that had escaped the holy arsonist fell in neglect and the papyrus was recycled for tax receipts and the wrappings of mummies. But 700 years later, in 1073, according to Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540 – 1609), there was still enough left of Sappho's work to send a refreshing breeze through the stuffy scriptoria in the monasteries. So the prudish Pope Gregory VII and his counterpart in Constantinople joined forces and simultaneously burned the remains, it is stated, "in celebration of the reunification of the two Churches." The new found union lasted eight years.

One very incomplete manuscript escaped, and surfaced 300 years later in Florence, together with the notes of an admirer from the 1st century. In 1497, in the backyard of Medici's library, another fucked up radical, the self-appointed champion of public mores and the poor, Savonarola (1452 – 1498) stood barefoot next to a blazing fire. He hollered up to the people in the library to toss him the manuscript. A torch could fly through the window, so the intimidated librarian parted with the last remnant of Sappho's work. Since then we have only the quotes from lexicographers and grammarians and the occasional find on a mummy wrapper. I don’t know what this has done to improve the plight of the paupers, but I do know that only months after the incident, Savonarola, was burned alive as a heretic. He still didn’t wear shoes. 

 

III.

In 380 AD., Christianity was no longer a movement of illegal revolutionaries hiding from the police and sending their people on suicide missions into the arena. (Quite literally, the objective was to receive the “crown of martyrdom.” The Circumcellions did everything to provoke a hostile reaction, not unlike modern suicide bombers.) The constitutional coup from February 27 had made it not only legal to be a Christian, it decreed Catholicism to be the only legal religion in the empire. From now on the formula of Nicea defined who received the protection of the law and who didn’t: “According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians.” Christians who had the temerity of begging to differ, “since they are foolish madmen,” were to be branded “with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their gatherings the name of churches” (Codex Theodosius XVI.1.2). When John Chrysostomus preached his sermon On Virginity in 382 AD., one can’t help sensing the giddy excitement of a man who envisions the human race on the threshold to a new age: “The things of the resurrection now stand at the door. The days for our artifices and buildings, cities and households come to a close, men and women will soon breathe in the tremendous hush of God’s presence. Stepping on the enamel-green grass of Paradise, with Easter-palms fanning the air, we shall live among the patriarchs, converse with the prophets, walk in the company of the apostles and meet the martyrs, the mighty men of power.”

Marcion’s extremism was rejected, but the underlying principle lived on in the Christian liturgy. When the service had progressed to the Eucharist, the un-baptized were herded out of the building. For the believers this was the signal to bring their offerings to the altar and to participate in the “Mystical Supper.” Bishops and clergy first, then a lineup of the unmarried or widowed. And only then, significantly last of all, the married laity was permitted to the altar. The custodians of dogma knew exactly what they were doing. Since the council of Nicea in 325 AD., there had been repeated demands on the married cleric to abstain from cohabitation with his wife, even if he had received holy orders only after his marriage. The Abbot Paphnutius, good man, protested against the imposition. But his protest was soon forgotten. While in the Jewish communities the rabbinate rose to preeminence and accepted marriage as a near compulsory criterion of living the life of wisdom, the leaders of the Christian communities moved in the exact opposite direction. Access to leadership became identified with near-compulsory celibacy.

During the 3rd century the gentile legislator recognized for the first time the wedlock between slaves; Emperors styled themselves as guardians of private morality. Suicide, once the batch of libertine independence, came to be branded as an unnatural “derangement.” To set themselves apart, the Christians seemed to have only their sexual discipline left. “A man who divorces his wife admits that he is not even (sic!) able to govern a woman,” said John Chrysostomus (347 – 407 AD.).

After the February revolution the government of the new Christian state turned on the soft targets first. Already in 314 AD., only weeks after the last and most severe of the anti-Christian persecutions had ended, the Council of Ankara had considered as the most pressing business to exclude all homosexuals from receiving the Eucharist. In Europe, homosexuality had never been a civil crime before. Now Constantine’s sons became the first to write capital punishment for queens into the law: “Every person who condemns a man’s body to acting the part of a woman, shall be burned” (Codex Theodosianus IX, 7:3). In 390 AD. this was no longer an empty threat. The Roman populace fell silent at the novel sight of male prostitutes burning alive on slow smoldering faggots. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian was a firm believer that the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah was an example of how God is going to deal with cities that allow the queens to live among the denizens. He really feared it could happen again. So he wrote into the law that "because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences" (Novellae 77, 538 AD.). When in 543 AD. a plague swept through Constantinople, the terrified Justinian made it known that "there will be no relaxation of enquiry and correction so far as this matter is concerned" (Novellae 144, 544 AD.). Justinian ordered the arrest of every gay man who refused to repent in order to receive "extreme punishments." First they cut off his testicles. Then sharp reeds were thrust into the penis before the man was dragged naked through a jeering public to the stake, where he was burned alive. Even members of the clergy, Bishops like Isaiah of Rhodes and Alexander of Diospolis were mutilated and dragged in agony through the streets before a frenzied mob.

As often in such cases, the law was a pretext for multitasking: Procopius in his Anecdota says that slaves were forced to falsely accuse Justinian's political enemies, and that the streets were filled with mutilated and humiliated victims of his fanaticism. In Spain the king of the Goths, King Kindasvinth, issued an edict against the "execrable moral depravity" in 650 AD. It raised the bar even further. Not only were those caught in the act, ordered to repent or suffer excommunication and castration. The law also treated the convicted homosexual as legally dead, and allowed his wife to remarry and his children to immediately inherit the criminal’s property. King Egica at the 16th Council of Toledo, in 693 AD., added flogging and disfigurement to the penalty of castration and exile.

Apparently there was a grey area where the law could interpret taking the partner “a tergo” as an act of sodomy, even if it was not homosexual and penetration went into the vagina. That seems long ago. However, should in a motel in Maine, in the year of the Lord 2004, some snoop spot you doing it doggy style with your own wife, it still could get you booked for "sodomy," should the peeping tom call the cops.

 

IV.

Chrysostomus knew what he was fighting for: a new kind of cultural identity, a kind of all-Christian theme park here and now. Previously, the adolescent gentile feeling the urge could take a cold bath or go to the local brothel. At the entrance you purchased from the mama-san a set of bronze tokens, each in detail depicting the particular service you expected: missionary position, doggy style, a hand-job, a mouthful of cock, you name it. You then handed the token to the prostitute and she, at closing hour, would return to the mama-san all the tokens she had collected in a day and receive her fee minus the proprietor’s percentage. Should the drippings of a customer lead to consequences, there were methods to effect a miscarriage. Girding tightly the abdomen accompanied by a pessary soaked in hellebore and oils of common rue was pretty popular; doctors also prescribed to swallow birthwort and surgeons kept their curettes ready. If all that failed, there were ways and institutions to dispose of the unwanted baby.

The adolescent Christian male on the other hand was herded to the altar before he even could reach puberty. Lawful wedlock became to be considered as the antidote for sexual temptation. Especially women, it was hoped, would be disciplined by early marriage and by the insinuation that the piercing gaze of God was penetrating into the most intimate recesses of the bedchamber. Nakedness had become a problem.

Chrysostomus chastised aristocratic ladies for exposing their pampered flesh before the eyes of the entire train of their retainers. Hermas’ mistress still had thought nothing of been seen by her slave dressed only in her jewelry. He was just a slave. To have him look at her naked body meant even less to her as it means to us to be looked at by our pets when we step on the scales in the bathroom. In gentile society, in the public baths, in the arena, at the sports, it was the indifferent deportment in the nude that marked you as a member of your class. Now even the scanty dress of the poor was thought to create distressing fantasies. But then things began to change. In the 5th century, the master’s body was swathed in uniform, a heavy, close-fitting and many-layered dress, with stitched on panels that signaled position and rank and depicted scenes from the gospel and the portraits of wife and children. Should the need occur for a change of costume, or for a dip in the pool, trained valets were ready to veil the scene behind curtains and portable screens. It added to the mystique of the master’s position. The higher your rank the better you were protected from profane curiosity.

Our sexuality became the intensely debated focus not just for lewd fantasies. This was a big thing, the root for the fateful drive to marry and produce children and thus perpetuate a society that on every Sunday confessed to the belief in the imminent end of the world. It even affected the common practice of charity. In the 4th and 5th century the laity preferred to give alms rather to the monks, the “ceremonial poor,” whose prayers were known to be effective, than to the noisy and repulsive lot begging at the entrance to the basilicas.

 

V.

People who adopted the life of a monk or virgin were seen to anticipate the dawn of man’s true nature, getting “ready to receive the Lord of the Angels.” Admirers did not doubt that the monk, as a “lonely one,” had recaptured a touch of the original mystery and majesty of man. The monk impersonated Adam in his single-hearted worship of God before his fall. The barren and asocial landscape of the desert was seen as a distant reflection of Paradise, the first and true homeland of the human race, before marriage, greed, and labor had robbed Adam and Eve of their serene majesty. The life of the monk mirrored the life of the angels on earth, and from the desert he brought with him the peculiar smell of unwashed holiness, the lynx-effect of sainthood.

In many cases it is difficult to draw the line between asceticism and profound neurosis. Sylvia Plath found herself institutionalized because to her “it seemed so silly to wash my clothes and my hair one day when I would have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

By the middle of the 4th century monastic settlements began recruiting the very young. To keep the heritage together the well-to-do dedicated their surplus of children to the service of God. These adolescent monks and nuns did not simply vanish behind the monastic walls. Years later, they tended to reappear as members of a new clerical elite. The monastery was the first institution to offer a Christian education based exclusively on liturgy and the Bible, something very similar to the kind of instruction into the Kor