Note 245.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

The first, and in its epiphany one of the earliest and most wide-spread excesses of Christian morality, was Asceticism. The temptation to this lies very near, in the practice of the Christian life, and is suggested in the strongest manner by its very language. If sin is the flesh, and some of its most shameless and rampant exhibitions are characteristically designated the lusts of the flesh, it would seem that the simplest way to get the mastery of such lusts is to keep the body under, as St. Paul has it,—to frown upon cakes and ale, and perhaps even to extirpate certain passions, as you would pull up dock by the long tape root, to make more room for the grass. Nor was this altogether an unreasonable procedure. It might be very admissible, in certain cases, to become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake; “for the present need” he who abstained from marriage might save himself from much incumbrance and from some misery. The error lay in setting up that as a general ideal which was valuable only as a device for special occasions, and possible only in a rational way to persons of a peculiar temperament. Our Saviour showed himself publicly at marriage-feasts as well as retired into the mountains; he was found eating and drinking, and even changing water into wine. St. Paul also never denied that a glass of wine was a good thing; but Christians afterwards very soon began to act as if the stern Baptist of the wilderness, and not the social Jesus of the waysides, had been the pattern set up for their imitation. This degeneration, no doubt, was the fruit of the anti-sensuous impulse which it had been necessary to give them; and they saw daily in the streets of Rome and of Corinth unseemly spectacles enow, of which the lesson seemed to be: it is better to abstain than to be poisoned. Add to this that Plato and his Alexandrian successors had thrown the whole force of their ethics of reason on the spiritual side, and spoken of the body often in terms of greater contempt than the Christian apostles had ever done of the flesh. Of Plotinus, his biographer Porphyry tells that “he lived like a man who was ashamed of being in the body at all;” and Clemens of Alexandria, one of the most intelligent of the Fathers, though not going to the extreme of these Platonic devotees, speaks of a good dinner in a style calculated to lead by a violent plunge on the other side into an artificial appetite for dry pease and hard crusts. “We must not,” he says, “have any care of external things, but be anxious rather to purify the eye of the soul and to chasten the flesh. Other animals live that they may eat; man eats that he may live; for neither is eating his business nor pleasure his good. Therefore those are strongly to be condemned who seek after Sicilian lampreys, Mæandrian eels, Pelorian mussels, oysters from Abydos, sprats from Lipara, Attic flounders, Mantinean turnips, Ascræan beetroot, thrushes from Daphne, and Chalcedonian raisins.”[245.1] Of course the sensible old Father meant this partly as a protest against the monstrous gastronomic luxury of the Romans, of which we read in Suetonius and other Latin writers of that age; but it seems no less true that he was carried away in these matters by an ideal of extravagant anti-sensualism, which had then strongly taken possession of the Christian Church, and was indeed a rank native growth of the East, specially of Syria and Egypt, as Church history largely testifies. Nay, even in modern times, and in Western Europe, where the cold climate partly excuses, partly necessitates, high feeding, we find young persons, in the first start of a religious life, not unfrequently led into a course of ascetic practice, as prejudicial to their bodies as the excessive bookwork of the colleges is to the mind. Young Whitefield, we are told, suffered not a little from exercises of this kind; and the prolonged formal fastings prescribed as God-pleasing by recent Ritualistic clergymen in this country, have on more than one occasion enfeebled for a whole lifetime the bodily functions of their virgin devotees. This is sad enough; but it is not the worst. Such absurdities make Christianity ridiculous, and force revolted nature into the school of a benign Bentham or an easy Hume, where one may at all events be moral and reasonable. When we read in the biography of some modern Anglo-Catholic saint that he feared nothing so much as the soft seduction of a slice of buttered toast, and the golden deliciousness of a glass of Madeira, we begin to sigh for Aristotle; it were better to have no religion at all as an inspiring soul of morality, than a religion which lends importance to such puerilities. But if these things have been done by certain pseudo-Christians, and are paraded even now, there was one belief, very common in the early ages of the Church, which tended not a little to intensify the tendencies which lead to them. At all times it is possible for the expectation of a future life to encroach on the enjoyment of the present; and the growth of the asceticism of the first centuries was beyond doubt powerfully aided by the overwhelming influence of a newly promulgated and greedily accepted immortality, and yet more perhaps, by the belief in the speedy second coming of Christ. The renunciation of the world, and the more characteristic worldly enjoyments, becomes of course much more easy when the machinery of the world is shortly expected to stop. And thus the weakness of human nature concurred with a number of accidental causes to make the ascetic caricature of Christian ethics one of the most wide-spread diseases, and an altogether astounding phenomenon in the moral history of man. The ascetic oddities of Diogenes and a few Greek cynics were nothing to it. The multitude of strange, and ridiculous, and even disgusting forms which it assumed, will be found amply detailed in the second volume of Mr. Lecky’s excellent History of European Morals, and need not be enlarged on here.