All these people of course were not completely isolated from society, but various texts seem to confirm that those times were generously filled with ascetic extremists. Anchorites in caves, Stylites living in pillars of ruined temples and Dendrites chaining themselves for up to decades to the topmost branches of lofty trees. All in all their social engagement was restrained and limited. What united them was a search for the union with the soul of god. And a first requirement of this consummation was withdrawal from the world to pray, meditate and practice asceticism. In short, Asceticism is an exercise designed to mortify the desires of the senses.Its aims is to purify the soul by renunciation and self denial, a spiritual high, with the attainment of spiritual perfection as its final aim. It invokes no sense of the nationalistic or of some form of romanticism.
Read More:http://sugarmeows.tumblr.com/post/23045073152/domenico-gnoli-illustration-for-the-first-edition ---Domenico Gnoli, illustration for the first edition of The Baron in the Trees (Il Barone rampante) (1957) by Italo Calvino---
( see link at end )…Cappadocia has been home to a succession of Anatolian peoples. The Hittites and Romans, Byzantines and Turks, all found Cappodocia’s valleys a welcome retreat from the barren Anatolian steppe. But it was the Byzantines who left the greatest mark on the area. During a period of unprecedented stability, from the ninth to 11th centuries, they embarked on a notable period of church-building, carving sanctuaries out of the surface of the earth. In pagan times Cappadocia had been a refugee for Zoroastrians. Later, Christians, fleeing the corruption of Antioch and Constantinople, or the advancing armies from the East, settled in these narrow valleys. Monks established sizeable communities during the height of extreme medieval asceticism, hiding in dingy caves, when the stylites passed their lives perched atop the pillars of ruined pagan temples, and the dendrites chained themselves for decades in the branches of trees. In this semi-desert, the monks sought salvation….Read More:http://www.cnewa.us/printerfriendly.aspx?ID=591&pagetypeID=4&sitecode=US
Read More:http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2011/09/st-symeon-stylite-according-to-evagrius.html---According to another writer, Theodoret, in Symeon's lifetime, he was visited by pilgrims from near and far: Persia, Ethiopia, Spain, and even Britain. To these at times he delivered sermons. He wore on his body a heavy iron chain. In praying, "he bent his body so that his forehead almost touched his feet." A spectator once counted 1244 repetitions of this movement, and then gave up reckoning. Symeon took only one scanty meal per week, and fasted through the season of Lent. It is alleged that the devil having afflicted him with an ulcer in his thigh as reward for a little self-righteousness, Symeon, as penance, never touched the afflicted leg upon the pillar again, and stood for the remaining year of his life upon one leg. ---
Believe it or not, a long time ago, Christian men and women used to literally wall themselves up, sealing themselves into tiny cells attached to churches. They were called Anchorites. They, and their fellows, also lived in caves, next to sacred pools or streams, or in little splintery chapels on islands where the whole idea was to live alone in prayer to worship God unceasingly, and without distraction. Their level of devotion made them holy in their own right, and regular people looked to them for guidance, counsel, and spiritual revelation….
Read More:http://www.coptichymns.net/module-library-viewpub-tid-1-pid-265.html ---Most probably that meeting came near the anchorites death and the Lords messenger used to shroud and bury him. They are human beings with flesh bodies that hunger and thirst and even fall sick. We are told that Abba Paul the first Anchorite used to eat daily half a loaf of bread which a crow used to bring to him. We are also told that St. Onophrius had had a palm tree that provided him with dates to eat. We also learn that Abba Pigimi the Anchorite and Abba Moussa the Anchorite who used to feed on the weeds of the mountain. They all used to drink from the water of the available springs or wells of the mountains. Likewise we learn that Abba Timothy the Anchorite was taken ill with a liver ulcer and the Lords angel cured him. At the end of Abba Onophrius life we also read about his suffering of a fever and red skin. Therefore it is not true that the anchorites are mere spirits.---
As a group they were called Solitaries. By the middle-ages, the movement was so pervasive and popular that special rites and blessings had evolved to govern the life of the Solitary, which was regulated by the Church. Sometimes Solitaries were monks or nuns. Other times, Solitaries were just very devout princes, princesses, sailors, wanderers, widows, reluctant brides, or whomever was inspired to take up the solitary life. Read More:http://www.historyfish.net/anchorites/what_are_anchorites.html
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Read More:http://www.stmaryscopticorthodox.ca/content/articles/other/monastic.pdf ---The Temptation of St Anthony 2 by Abraham Teniers, 1645---There were monks who set up their cells in complete solitude, either in the desert or later in the forest, or who found themselves a remote cave. There were others who had themselves shut up in their cells, who withdrew into the branches of a tree as "dendrites" or on to top of a pillar as "stylites" There were also the "boskoi" (the grazers) who did without any kind of shelter and lived on hay or wild herbs. Others deliberately made fools of themselves so as to ensure that they could not fall victims to pernicious pride. EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMAGE: The hermitages and the colonies of monks in the Nitrian and Thebaic deserts attracted many visitors, some of whom were seeking a religious uplift, while others were disgusted by the pampered life of the towns and were on a sort of "back-to-nature" quest.---
( see link at end) …In 1767 a young Italian of noble birth, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, acted with unparalleled defiance. Refusing to eat the platter of snails served to him for dinner, he pushed back his chair, exited the dining room, and scurried up an oak tree in the garden. In protest against the mores of society, as much as those of his aristocratic father, Cosimo resolved to live the rest of his life in an airborne, arboreal existence. Never again would he set foot on solid ground. Yet Cosimo was not an unlettered misanthrope, but rather a patron of the poor and a man of erudition who would insist tha
While keeping a distance from the world is imperative for any ascetic, in late antiquity “the primary contrast” between a dendrite and a stylite was, as Susan Ashbrook Harvey notes, the degree to which each was bound to society: “The tree-dwelling ascetic,” she says, “seems to have maintained the life of a recluse without the demands for spiritual and political patronage that generally plagued the late ancient holy man.” Read More:http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol12No1/HV12N1Smith.pdf
…Maro the Dendrite, known to us from John of Ephesus’s Lives of the Eastern Saints, lived in a hollowed-out tree near where his brother, Abraham, presided as the resident stylite of their monastery. Unlike David of Thessalonica who, it seems, welcomed visitors to his cell, Maro the Dendrite would shut the door of his tree and remain silent whenever someone approached in search of healing. When Abraham died, Maro reluctantly left his enclosure in the tree and took his brother’s place atop the column, evidently displeased to be inheriting not only his brother’s pillar but also the requisite public responsibility that came with it. ( ibid.)
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