Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/157

VII] ORIGINS OF MONASnCISM 139 included a consideration of the whole nature of man, with subordination of the physical to the spiritual elements. From Plato onward, there was * a growing tendency to regard the soul as supreme and to find human welfare in the soul's freedom and independence of circumstances. This was the stoical ideal. But, though ascetic in tendency, stoi- cism was not asceticism, since it had no thought that matter was evil, and that the soul should therefore be purged from sense-contamination. In its own way it reached the conclusion that the emotional side of man should be suppressed. Neo-platonism, however, held that matter was evil, and so pre- sented a philosophic basis for ascetic living, which was inculcated by its philosophers. Much in the life of St. Anthony might have been rationally based on teachings of Plotinus and Porphyry, whose ethics laid such stress on the purification of the soul from the contamination of matter and the ties of sense.* So in the first three centuries of the Christian era, ascetic thoughts were familiar to Hellenically educated people. As Christianity spread among them, their understanding of it was affected by con- ceptions derived from the later systems of philos- ophy. Yet it does not follow that Hellenic ideas were among the direct causes of Christian monasti- 1 There is at least one distinctly Hellenic note in the Athanaaian Vita S. Antonii : when many people sought Anthony out, importu- nate to see him and imitate his discipline, Anthony, after twenty years* solitude, came forth from his hermitage initiated in the my»- teries and filled with dirine spirit. His soul was pure, and undis- turbed by grief or pleasure ; he appeared like a man in every way guided by reason ( Vita AnUmU, Sao. 14). y