Some light reading: The Life of Saint Antony, the most popular monk and ascetic in the Roman and Medieval periods. Mentally comparing that worldview to Daoist and Confucian alternatives to corrupt societies--such a relevant question for our own corrupt age. A snippet: "to our bustling, comfort-loving age, even the life of Antony has its lesson. It has undoubtedly exercised a powerful and wide-spread influence. Upon it Jerome modelled his highly idealised tales of Paul and Hilarion; at Rome and all over the West it kindled the flame of monastic aspirations; it awoke in Augustine the resolution to renounce the world and give himself wholly to God. The ingens numerus of Latin manuscripts, and the imitation of its details in countless monastic biographies, testify to its popularity in the middle ages. Like monasticism itself, its good influence was not without alloy; but on the whole we may claim for it that it tended to stimulate the nobler of the impulses which underlie the monastic life."
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 19:39:50 +0000
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