the source of value. Augustine was especially fascinated by the fact that circumstances and motives are
primary in evaluating the moral significance of an act.
The most striking manifestation of Christian detachment from the secular appears in the monastic
movement of the fourth century. In a sermon of the mid third century Origen observed that renunciation
of the world is not achieved by physically moving oneself out into the desert, a remark which suggests
that already somebody thought otherwise. The complex motives that drove men and women to become
hermits or, more commonly, to join communities of ascetics living under obedience are only partly
visible to us. The fourth-century Church experienced the movement as a shock to its system. Many
bishops opposed the weakening of urban or village congregations which resulted from the exodus of the
most dedicated members into special separate communities owing an allegiance to their abbot and often
showing a cool reserve to the ordinary life of the Church. The earliest document yet found to mention a
monk is a papyrus from the Fayum of 6 June 324. Athanasius of Alexandria portrayed the hermit
Antony in a Life which owed something to Pythagorean hagiography about their founder. In the Nile
valley from about 320 the Copt Pachomius was establishing large communities of monks under virtually
military discipline, some of which were embarrassingly successful in agriculture. In Asia Minor in the
360s and 370s Basil of Caesarea composed rules for communities under rule with a common habit and
dedicated to the service of the outside community.
The monks enraged writers such as Libanius or the Alexandrian schoolmaster Palladas, whose
embittered epigrams won a place in the Palatine Anthology, or in the West the poet Rutilius Namatianus.
The Platonic Christian, Synesius of Cyrene, disliked their rejection of culture, and much misgiving was
provoked by the readiness of some monks to form bands for the dismantling of pagan shrines. Augustine
begs his people to win the minds and hearts of their pagan neighbours, not to infuriate them by insulting
matters they held dear, even if obviously corrupt and superstitious.
The Church and the End of the Ancient World
The change of religion had some social consequences which affected the world from which the Church
wished to be detached and independent. The capture of society, in principle largely achieved by 400
(though pockets of pagan resistance long continued), also affected the Church itself. Could the Church
be respectable in class terms without losing its sense of obligation to and identification with the poor?
The first charge on the local church chest was the maintenance of those whose names stood in the
'register of the poor' (the phrase is first attested in 422, but the thing is much earlier). Augustine knew
that the alms of the faithful were inadequate to the problem of destitution, and longed for the imperial
government to provide subsistence benefit, financed by redistributive taxation that, he felt sure, good
men would B.C. happy to pay. Rich benefactors usually preferred to see their money put into buildings
or mosaic and marble decoration in basilicas. Then there were questions about compromise with the
political and social system. Gregory of Nyssa boldly attacked the institution of slavery. Augustine
thought the domination of man over his neighbour an inherent wrong, but saw no way of ending it and
concluded that, since the ordering of society prevented the misery of anarchic disintegration, slavery was
both a consequence of the fall of man and at the same' time a wrong that providence prevented from