What is it about monastic life that drew the children of wealthy ancient families to abandon their families and estates--as St. Anthony do dramatically did--and live ascetic lives of great severity and almost fanatical denial of the self? Equally dramatic departures came to others much later in live. We see in Bede's History and in later Anglo-Saxon and medieval history a similar tendency in the royal custom of retiring to a monastery and taking holy orders before death. In some cases, no doubt, it was a sort of insurance policy, a way to atone for a life not entirely well spent.
The desire for spiritual perfection (not uniquely the property of the Western European monastery) has had far-reaching consequences for Christians in the world, whose religious practices have been shaped in imitation of monastic religious observances. Of course there are major differences between living in the world and living in the monastery, and the treatment of sexual instincts is one of them. Consider this quotation from Arthur Mirgeler, Mutations of Western Christianity (Notre Dame UP, 1968):
...[T]he Church had always supposed that the sex-instinct would remain for the great majority of men the strongest determining factor in life and had been able therefore to treat of matrimony mainly in comparison with virginity--thus diminishing its importance and regarding it superficially. In so doing, she [i.e., the Church] had not anticipated that, as a result of the Enlightenment and the technical revolution [of the nineteenth century], not only the moral ends but even the full realization of sexual potential might be questioned. . . . The unanimity, too, of monks and people in dreaming of a better world did not allow for the fact that the dream would be realized in the form of an industrial world of technical perfection producing unheard-of wealth and that, precisely for this reason, the divinely willed contentment with modest surroundings would become superfluous and the ascetic appeal based on it incredible. (81)
Is Mirgeler right? Has the materialism of the post-industrialist ("late capitalist") world delivered on the promise of the "better world" that the monks and their urban followers dreamed of?
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