 Many men and women in the early church deliberately chose celibacy. Why was this? We're joined today by Stephen Russell to talk about the roots of monasticism in early Christianity. Who in the early church would you see as the first nuns and monks? In one of Paul's letters, he talks about enrolling widows into a group, a group as those who are committed to serving the church and they're not going to get remarried. And so it looks like already in Paul's day, there are some women at least who were setting aside their lives as committed to serving the church. So I think that's probably the beginning of the nuns. The monks' origin has more to do with two things. Some people fleeing persecution and going into the desert and that probably at least some of them then kept up a life in the desert as appropriate for them to give themselves over to being reshaped by God. Without persecution decided that they want to give themselves as much as possible to the spirit working in their lives. As the church became more and more accepted by society, more and more people came into the church with a little bit more of a lukewarm approach. And so some people that were more fervent seemed to have withdrawn not from the church, but they would form small communities either in the desert or sometimes in the cities of people that wanted to give more of their time to letting God work in their lives. Those are probably the two things, the enrollment of the widows by Paul and then as the church became a larger group of people with some being a little bit less committed, those that were more committed started to form their own little communities, not withdrawing, not starting another church, but with their own little communities where the focus was on yielding more and more to God. What era was this? What dates would you put on that? Well, the letter Paul wrote is probably, well, he was probably executed in 64 or 67, somewhere in there. So late fifties or early sixties for that. As I said, some people fled into the desert and they found that a good place of refuge to turn their lives more and more over to Christ. So that's any time after 100. And then after Constantine, you get, and actually a little bit before that, you get more people coming into the church because there's less danger of persecution. And I think that that starts to cause some people to withdraw into small communities that are more focused on opening their lives to Christ. So part of it is from Paul's day. Part of it is from persecution under the Roman emperors. And part of it is as the church became more acceptable, more people came in to get the benefits without really committing as much. And that caused some people to form small communities that I think became the monasteries. In this episode, I want to focus on the specific motivation for singleness. Why did these men and women choose to live a life like this? That's a good question. It wasn't because sexuality is evil. In fact, that was clearly taught against. However, it was also taught that sexuality had been damaged. And there was actually a debate in the early church about whether it was better to be celibate or whether marriage or celibacy were equally good, or whether you could be celibate for a while and then get married. In other words, kind of committed to celibacy, but you could you withdraw that commitment in the long run, probably by sometime in the 400s, I think, pretty much went the direction of if you probably celibacy was seen as better in part because of the fallen state of our sexuality. But and also if you committed to it, you really shouldn't be able to withdraw. That was a possibility in the earlier days to be celibate for a while and then to get married later on. The general consensus became, I don't know, I think in the 400s that when you commit to celibacy, it should be permanent. But the reason for this, I think, is important. And that is the Christians recognized that the fall, however you want to talk about it, some of the early Christians called it a sickness that we had. Eventually, Augustine gives the title Original Sin. Whatever you want to call it, all the Christians recognized that we were damaged by the fall of Adam and Eve. One of the things that they felt they were doing, they weren't putting aside something that in and of itself was evil, in particular, I'm thinking about sexuality, but they recognized that their interior life was disordered. And so that was the key thrust of the monastic life, was to reintegrate every part of myself. They would have said, we are spirit, soul, and body. And so their desire was to get back to what they felt was the proper integration of that that had existed before the fall, which was that the spirit controls our soul. And our spirit is the part of us that has connection with God. And our soul is a spiritual thing, but it unites our spirit with our body. So it's where we have our emotions and things like that. And then our body is also controlled by our soul. But the worst situation is when a person lets his physicality control him. He becomes more bestial, they would have said. So the monks and the nuns were trying not to avoid something that was in and of itself wrong, like sexuality, but they were trying to get all of these aspects of what it means to be a human back in alignment in the proper way. I think that all of them would have said, it's never going to happen here in this life, but we want to work at becoming a person that's connected to God in our spirit. And our spirit learns to control our soul, which learns to control our body. There's something that Chesterton said that makes a lot of sense to me. In a book called The Everlasting Man, which is an attempt to explain history from a Christian perspective, he says that the fall in paganism led to an emphasis, eventually, not immediately, but eventually to an overemphasis and a bad emphasis on our sexuality, so an abuse of our sexuality. Chesterton believed that it was actually necessary for the church to pull back in a certain sense from an expression of our sexuality. To try and ring out the bad expression that had developed in late paganism. I think there's some sense to that. Your monks and your nuns, they renounced the practice of their sexuality, but that also would have led the typical Christian to at least consider how he expressed it himself. And Chesterton felt that there was a needed time of pulling back a bit so that we could be what we were meant to be, or at least closer to that. Anyway, I don't know for sure, but his argument is pretty convincing to me that the late Roman world had become immersed in a wrong kind of sexuality, and that the church went through a kind of, he was Catholic and he would have called it a kind of penance so that not to get rid of sexuality, but to actually bring it back to where it was more in line with what it was meant to be. And I kind of think that that's part of what the monastic movement was about. Would you see these monastics in line with the preference for singleness in 1 Corinthians 7? I think so. I don't hear Paul saying, like some people do, that the single life is better. I don't hear him saying that. I hear him saying, I wish you would consider it, and that way you can give more of your time to helping others understand what the kingdom is, bringing them into the kingdom, etc. I think there's place for everyone, whether married or single, to do those kinds of things, but obviously the single person can have, can give more of his time to that. And that is also what the monastics were doing. They were looking towards themselves trying to get their interior life aligned the right way, spirit controlling the soul, controlling the body. But they were also very aware that they had a task to do in the world, both with believers and non-believers. It's out of the monastic movement that you have schools established, that you have orphanages, that you have hospitals. The monastics actually, in a very practical way, reshaping the ancient pagan world into something that eventually becomes Christendom, which isn't all that, isn't good, just totally good, but it also has some really good parts to it. After the Roman Empire collapsed, the population of Europe collapsed as well. And so you had places like what we call France, which under the Roman Empire was basically a very fruitful, well-farmed area. And then with the collapse of the empire, the population collapsed, you had vast areas of what we call France becoming forested again. What the monastics did in the years like 800 and on, they would move out into swamp land. They would move out into forest and they would start a monastery and they would start clearing the land and they would start an economy there, peasants would come in. They would help them learn how to farm. And gradually, these monasteries did something very practical and they enabled a renewal of economic life that had basically disappeared in a lot of these areas. So I think there's a connection here and it's with 1 Corinthians 7. I don't think though that it was, well at least originally, I don't think they were necessarily saying that the monastic life is better than married life. I think over time that became the general consensus in medieval Catholicism. But I also think we need to recognize all the really good practical things they did, schooling, hospitals, spreading of farming again into areas that had lost it. So anyway, there was a spiritual aspect but there was also a very practical aspect. What opportunities for ministry did these monks and nuns who intentionally chose singleness have? One of the things that they would have seen is that because they don't have a spouse and they don't have children, they have time to give to others in various ways. And I already mentioned hospitals, schools, orphanages, but even the establishment of a monastery in a forest area and then the beginning of cutting the forest down and establishing fields and farms, they had time, they had all the time they needed to help in these areas whatever they felt called to and different monastic groups felt called to different things. Their celibacy, their singleness enabled them to focus on others. At least that's what it was meant to do. They would have had struggles just like people today have struggles and so it didn't work for everybody. But theoretically I think it provided a real resource for the church to have an impact on the rest of the population. Could you point us to a few things as an example in the early centuries that are instructive for us? Well, obviously we Anabaptists are mostly anyway not going to start monasteries or nunneries. However, I think that all of church history provides us with some good things, lessons to learn. You know, the church was oppressed under the Roman Empire and that's at least part of how these monasteries or these small groupings of men and women got started with an emphasis on how can I let God work in my life more. We're facing a time when Christianity is becoming a negative thing. Our society is, they're starting to call us haters. They're starting to say that a lot of the things that we want to do, even if only among ourselves, are wrong. We shouldn't be doing those things. And we definitely shouldn't be telling someone else that something like divorce and remarriage or abortion is wrong. One of the things that I think we could learn is that there might be a time when not that we should isolate ourselves, but there might be a time when we have to become okay with maybe restricting how much input, direct input we have in the general society. I don't like how I'm saying this, but because what I'm thinking about is perhaps they pulled back to strengthen their inner man. And maybe in today's world we can take a lesson from that. Maybe we have to, I don't want to say anything like we should become isolated. I think that's a wrong move, but maybe we can learn from them to hear from each other to benefit how to make our spiritual, our interior life stronger and better. Maybe there's a time to retreat like Jesus did, but not in the sense of I'm going to avoid contact completely. But maybe that's something we could learn from them as if the pressures continue to be intense or get more intense, maybe we need to learn to withdraw without separating, to withdraw without being isolated, to withdraw to strengthen the inner man so that we can have something to say. The Protestant Reformer called us the new monastics, us Anabaptists, because they said you are doing the same thing as the monks, you're just married. So you're pulling back and you're trying to be real religious like the monks, and maybe there's some truth in that, because the Anabaptists did say this has to really make a difference in you. And maybe as our culture becomes more antithetical to what we believe and practice, maybe a bit of withdrawal will be something that will strengthen us and enable us to say better. Here's talk to people who are so negative. It's just a possibility. I hadn't thought about it until you asked a question. Interesting. Well, I think that there would be a lot of space for developing what you're describing here can mean in practical terms. But I think we'll end the episode with this. So thank you for talking with us about early monastic movement. I appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for this episode. And thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at AnabaptistPerspectives.org. 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