Tolerating the Intolerable

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

This Research Reflection by Maia Kotrosits, Visiting Scholar, is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

In the middle of the first millennium, ordinary Christians participated in ascetic practices, including fasting, abstaining from sex, emotional impassivity, living on very little, or giving away all their possessions. These ascetic practices were widespread, and their undertaking was considered signs of powerful devotion that cleared the mess of daily life to create a closer experience of God. At the same time, though, ascetic practices worked as a kind of anesthetic against practitioners’ loss, and they spiritualized suffering by making the magnificent promise that endurance was a form of inner perfection.

The late Roman world was perilous. The average lifespan was two decades. The empire’s conquests caused consistent displacement and migration. Dangerous, exploitative work wore down bodies and souls. Personal and family property was seized by invaders from the outside and powerful Romans from the inside. Plagues circulated. Illness was constant. Childbirth bore devastating precarities for women and babies.

Scholars argue that first-millennium asceticism was personally transformative, altering practitioners’ entire beings. On closer inspection, however, ascetic practices, rather than producing a sublime metamorphosis, helped Christians survive the extreme conditions that characterized their late Roman world. Enduring these perilous conditions was granted cosmic gravitas, while the conditions themselves generally went unquestioned. The cause of one’s suffering hardly mattered compared to managing it. The goal was to be unshaken and focused on God.

Fourth- and fifth-century Christian literature on asceticism, especially literature celebrating the lives of the saints, describes constant dangers and perpetual losses. The theologian Gregory of Nyssa describes marriage and the birth of a child to be haunted by untimely death, stealing joy from these events. Gregory’s hagiographical tale about his sister, Saint Macrina, describes Macrina’s unflappable and serene demeanor through devastating, repeated deaths.      

The Life of Saint Antony, composed by Athanasius of Alexandria, presents the monk’s initial call to solitary life in the desert in response to his parents’ difficult deaths. Family life was a burden and restriction. Saint Antony leaves for the desert to avoid his sorrow and to evade responsibility for his parents’ property and his sister’s care. 

As a woman of extreme wealth, Saint Melania the Younger was pressed by her family to have children who would eventually care for the family estate, all despite her desire to live a life of chastity devoted to Christ. According to her hagiographer Gerontius, when Melania suffers the loss of her two young children, she mourns, but then she is free to live the chaste and devoted life she always desired. 

Ascetics “did without,” sometimes in spectacular ways. Exaggerated stories of famous ascetics abounded: saints living on top of columns or subsisting for decades in the desert with only a handful of food. These aspirational tales present ascetic saints as models for Christians to understand and tolerate otherwise intolerable conditions. Emphasizing restraint helped folk cope with the grief of their everyday lives, but it did so by suggesting that grief was an incorrect understanding of reality, for grief loses sight of the eternal.

When, in the Life of Saint Melania, the Younger, Saint Melania’s estate is overtaken by invaders, Gerontius places a lesson in her mouth, translated by Theodore Papaloizos and Elizabeth Clark: “What is sure about these things that exist today is the fact that tomorrow they will be destroyed either by barbarians, or by fire, or by time, or by some other circumstances. So how can these corruptible things that can be bought be compared to the eternal blessings that always remain the same and will last throughout infinite ages?” 

In the fourth century, there was an explosion of worship of the saints, appearing not just in sermons but in feast days, shrines, and images across the empire. In his sermons, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, describes the uncomplaining patience of ascetic saints when enduring sickness, exile, and violence. Saints were “lights,” he explained, illuminating the path to salvation. Saint stories were everywhere, infusing life with cosmic meaning: to suffer is to be closer to God. 

Monks and saints undertook extreme ascetic practices, but less severe practices were standard for the everyday faithful. Ordinary Christians’ suffering was likened to an athletic contest, imagined to be a test of strength and endurance. The otherwise debilitating became survivable and meaningful.

Propagating ascetic values and circulating saint stories conceived suffering simply to be an obstacle to be spiritually overcome and, ironically, did not work to change or even call attention to social and material conditions that caused so much suffering. The ascetic-oriented Christians were a population for whom no difficulty was too much because grief and deprivation were fodder for spiritual refinement. Ascetic practices rationalized and mystified socially produced deprivations, thereby creating a population that could always endure more.