Christian asceticism is thought to have started with the practice of various forms of supererogatory self-denial within the framework of ordinary family life. It is only gradually that ascetic ideals became intimately associated with the idea of total sexual abstinence and permanent separation from social life. A pattern of withdrawal to the desert or the mountains, however, is recorded as early as the third century in Egypt and Syria, reaching the West (at first Italy and Gaul) only around the fourth century. Significantly for our present purposes, this desert tradition already stamped Christian monasticism with one of its most fundamental ambiguities. Whether as the domain of wild animals and demons, or at the extreme opposite, as the paradisiac place of encounter with God, the desert represented the anti-city and anti-civilization. However, under the impact of monasticism it was also quickly transformed, as conveyed in what has become a locus classicus of monastic literature – the Life of Saint Anthony – into a “city” of sorts. The desert came to constitute, in fact, “a ‘counter-world,’ a place where an alternative ‘city’ could grow.”

Even at this stage, in what appears to have been a very fluid milieu where eremitic, semieremitic, and fully cenobitic forms of life coexisted, ascetic life could assume a highly structured, quasi-military character, as in the densely populated monasteries founded in the Egyptian Thebaid by Pachomius in the first half of the fourth century.