LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      The Authority of the Ascetic Male

      In contemplation he transcends heaven, and yet in his concern he does not forsake the carnal bed, because he is joined simultaneously to the highest and the lowest by the bond of caritas. By the strength of spirit within him he is vigorously snatched into the heights above, and by his pietas for others he is calmly rendered weak.

      —Gregory the Great, Regulae pastoralis liber 2.5.19–27

      In a popular tale from the late fourth or early fifth century CE, St. Martin of Tours (d. 397) happens upon a humble beggar alongside the road on a freezing winter’s day in the north of Europe. The weather is so severe that people have been dying in the streets. The poor beggar, barely dressed, entreats passersby to help him, yet all ignore his pleas for assistance. All save Martin, who immediately rushes to the beggar’s aid. At first, the future saint is at a loss for what to do. Martin is a young man, not yet entered into the professional religious life but rather serving as a soldier in the Roman frontier army, a common career path for a male of his birth and status within the Gallo-Roman patrician elite. He himself is clad only in a cloak and has very little else to give because, we learn, he had already offered the rest of his clothing earlier that day to others in need. Ever resourceful, Martin draws his sword, reaches around for his cloak, cuts it in two, and gives half to the poor man so that he can be warm. Witnesses have mixed reactions. Some laugh at Martin because he now looks foolish, standing in the cold, wrapped only in a ruined half-cloak among proper society. Others, however, feel shame. They chastise themselves because they had more to give than Martin and could have clothed the poor man without reducing themselves to nakedness; it had simply not occurred to them to do so. Later that night, as Martin sleeps in his bed, a vision appears to him in a dream. It is Christ, wearing the tattered half-cloak that Martin had given to the poor man earlier that day. Christ praises Martin and declares to a chorus of angels that in clothing the beggar, Martin has in fact clothed him. Quietly acknowledging the honor that Christ has granted him but not glorying in it, Martin humbly seeks out baptism and continues on to a remarkable career as a holy man and miracle worker.¹

      The trope of the deity hiding in the disguise of the poor was not a Christian invention, nor was the notion that random acts of care could win divine favor. What makes this story distinctly Christian and thus a useful opening exemplum for the discussion that follows is its specific framing of such behavior as a denial of worldly norms and a special marker of ascetic masculinity. The story comes from the Vita Sancti Martini, written by Sulpicius Severus (d. c. 425), and in the context of the vita as a whole, it is only the most dramatic of an entire litany of early life reversals and extreme behaviors that St. Martin performs in defiance of Roman social tradition. We learn that throughout his adolescence, Martin had persistently sought to turn away from the “natural” privileges of a wealthy Roman male and toward more spiritual pursuits. When Martin was ten years old, he had begged his parents, wealthy members of the aristocracy, to allow him to become a catechumen. They refused. At age twelve, the precocious youth decided that he would like to take the necessary vows to become a hermit—a denial of his birthrights. He was deemed too young. And when Martin finally did reach adulthood and entered the military service that was expected of him, he defied norms there, too. He took with him only one slave rather than an entourage, and it was Martin himself who did most of the serving. Martin polished his slave’s boots and served the meals that they ate together, not separately.² During his three years of soldier’s service, Martin chose to remain “free from the vices in which men of this kind usually become entangled”—namely, violent and rough behavior.³

      The vita continues to explain, however, that Martin’s actions require no special praise because his fellows already considered him to be not a soldier but a monk. The text’s term for Martin’s general demeanor is frugalitas—a word that in contemporary parlance conveyed not thrift (frugality) so much as self-denial: sobriety, simplicity, temperance, restraint. As a monk, Martin demonstrates his frugalitas through qualities such as benignitas (“benignity” or “kindness”), mira caritas (“wondrous love”), patientia (“patience”), and humilitas ultra humanum modum (“humility beyond the human norm”).⁴ He regularly performs bona opera (“good deeds”) in the service of others: aiding the suffering, working for the poor, feeding the needy, clothing the naked, and accepting only the military pay that he requires for his daily sustenance and nothing more.⁵ Last, he inspires the adoration of his fellow soldiers, with whom he bonded readily and easily, the text says, and who revered him in return miro adfectu (“with wondrous emotion”).⁶ The vita thus intimates that Martin is the rarest and strangest of birds among the rest of humanity, be they his military brothers or the passersby who relate to the beggar with either ridicule or oblivion. As a monk, however, Martin’s behavior is quite normal. As a monk, he rejects the normative rhythms of worldly society. As a monk, he manifests this rejection through deeds enacted on behalf of and in emotional response to the perceived need and welfare of others.

      This chapter traces in broad strokes the history of the late antique associations between fellow-feeling and Christian ascetic manhood that the story of St. Martin and the Beggar depicts. Early Christian ideologies of ascetic male authority have received extensive study in recent decades, fomented in great part by Peter Brown’s magisterial history of Christian sexuality and sexual renunciation, The Body and Society (1988).⁷ The interplay between these ideologies and discourses of affect, however, has not. As the chapter will show, cultural connections between ascetic masculinity and other-oriented emotion and care developed neither organically nor self-evidently but rather through complex and hard-fought fifth- and sixth-century philosophical discussions about the possibilities of New Testament morality in a world of Christian majority. The discourse of these debates would breathe new connotative meaning into ancient terms—pietas, clementia, and misericordia—and it would link these terms to a relatively new and distinctly Christian concept: caritas. These terms and the interrelations of meaning that they acquired during these centuries would become essential components of Carolingian ideologies of masculine authority in the centuries that followed.

      The chapter begins with the highly influential exegesis of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), who wrote passionately about the radicalism of early Christian ethics and the ways in which the New Testament founded Christian identity upon a bedrock of boundless other-oriented emotional care. The chapter then shows how, after the slow conversion of the Roman Empire during the fourth century CE, this extreme form of affective connection became increasingly associated with monks and the monastic cloister. Augustine would again be an authoritative voice, arguing that worldly Christianity had to adopt a more metaphoric understanding of New Testament ethics in order for society to thrive. A final section explores the writing of another towering pre-Carolingian intellect, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604). Gregory sought to reconnect monastic and worldly Christianity through the articulation of a universal ideology of Christian power. For Gregory, the ascetic male remained the paragon of Christian manhood and authority. Yet bishops and priests, whose duty it was to live and to work within the secular world—the saeculum—could gain vital access to this authority through the embodiment of deep emotional connection and care for the souls over whom they governed. Fellow-feeling became the bridge by which the secular Christian elite would ideologically traverse an ever-widening gap between the countercultural ideals of the first Christian sects and the new hegemonic exigencies of Christianity’s expansion throughout Europe.

      Caritas, Pietas, Clementia, Misericordia: Stoic Philosophy and Early Christian

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