Suz’s Reviews > The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity > Status Update

Disturbing: the children "donated" to the Church by families who were destitute, had no means to provide, or were trying to get "good karma" (in many cases all three). These young children would essentially grow up in monasteries or be confined at home (in the case of girls), totally alienated from society and their bodies, and were in all honesty, dehumanized. In the case of consecrated women, they weren't even really considered people anymore, but closer to sacred objects kept "sheltered from the world". However, this depended on how much money you had – consecrated women who were heiresses had considerably more power and mobility than their less fortunate sisters in the vocation. For men, specifically the ones who ended up going to the desert (e.g. in Egypt) to become hermits, the regimen was even more disturbing — particularly for the boys who grew up in such an environment. It would be wrong to call that brand of "asceticism" anything other than serious physical and emotional abuse. For example, because these monks were terrified of homosexuality, they not only were prohibited to interact with women, but had to remain "1 cubit" apart from each other at all times. Genuinely shocking to a modern reader.

Moving (as in, sorrowfully): the ever present specter of death in the ancient world. Death was everywhere. Only 4% of men lived past the age of 50, and fewer women. Constant war, plague, famine, disease, complications from childbirth, and etc. meant that death was everywhere and life was highly unstable — particularly as the Roman empire declined. It would seem that many of these early Christians looked to consecrated women as hope — their virginity and purity stood out sharply from the violence of the world around them. In Catholic theology, remaining in a virginal state was to remain as a witness, in anticipation for the kingdom of heaven. Undoubtedly the brutality of antiquity would have seemed apocalyptic to us; so we can imagine how desperate these people were to cling to something that echoed the unbroken state humanity would return to when the eschaton came.

Fascinating: despite the heavy restrictions put on female renunciates at the time, it was still a superior state to being married and subject to childbirth. The average Roman woman had to give birth to five children just to keep the population stable. This was done at a time without proper medical treatment or pain management, and death was incredibly common. Early Christian writers said plainly that even if their heaven didn't exist, it would still be superior for women to remain unmarried, if only to escape what awaited them in childbirth. Later, in many congregations, the number of women who remained virgins were at least on par with married women. Many of them had female "soul mates" and lived together.