Catholic church is, therefore, admissible at most only in a partial and indirect way. 154 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. the living God in Clirist. And the effects of the two are equally different. Though it is also unquestionable, that, not- withstanding this difference of principle, and despite the con- demnation of Gnosticism and Manichseism, the heathen dual- ism exerted a powerful influence on the Catholic asceticism and its view of the world, particularly upon anchoretisra and monasticism in the East, and has been fully overcome only in evangelical Protestantism. The precise degree of this in- fluence, and the exact proportion of Christian and heatheii ingredients in the early monachism of the church, were an interesting subject of special investigation. The germs of the Chi'istian monasticism may be traced as far back as the middle of the second century, and in fact faintly even in the anxious ascetic practices of some of the Jewish Christians in the apostolic age. This asceticism, particularly fasting and celibacy, was commended more or less distinctly by the most eminent ante-Nicene fathers, and was practised, at least partially, by a particular class of Christians (by Origen even to the unnatural extreme of self-emasculation),' So early as the Decian persecution, about the year 250, we meet also the first instances of the flight of ascetics or Christian philoso- phers into the wilderness ; though rather in exceptional cases, and by way of escape from personal danger. So long as the church herself was a child of the desert, and stood in abrupt opposition to the persecuting world, the ascetics of both sexes usually lived near the congregations or in the midst of them, often even in the families, seeking there to realize the ideal of Christian perfection. But when, under Constantine, the mass of the population of the empire became nominally Christian, they felt, that in this world-church, especially in such cities as Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, they w-ere not at home, and voluntarily retired into waste and desolate places and mountain clefts, there to work out the salvation of their souls undisturbed. Thus far monachism is a reaction against the secularizing state-church system and the decay of discipline, and an earnest, well-meant, though mistaken effort to save the virginal purity ' Comp. vol. i. § 94-9'7. I § 28. OEICm OF CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM. 155 of the Christian church by transplanting it in the wilderness. The moral corruption of the Roman empire, which had the appearance of Christianity, but was essentially heathen in the whole framework of society, the oppressiveness of taxes,' the extremes of despotism and slavery, of extravagant luxury and hopeless poverty, the repletion of all classes, the decay of all productive energy in science and art, and the threatening incur- sions of barbarians on the frontiers — all favored the inclination toward solitude in just the most earnest minds. At the same time, however, monasticism afforded also a compensation for martyrdom, which ceased with the Christian- ization of the state, and thus gave place