GruntGod 2.8.5: Standing Out vs. Standing Apart
The Asceticism That Actually Looks Christlike
This is drawn from the revision of the Pachomius chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
The standard account of early Christian asceticism goes like this: the martyrs died, the persecutions ended, devout believers needed a new form of witness, and so they fled to the Egyptian desert to live alone and pray. Antony of Egypt becomes the icon. Jerome, Athanasius, John Cassian carry it west. Western monasticism follows. That account is true but incomplete. It skips the Syrians, to the East.
Syrian Christian asceticism developed differently from the (southern) Egyptian tradition. Where Egyptian anchorites fled the cities for the desert, Syrian ascetics built their shanties against city walls. They wandered within city limits as itinerant vagrants. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, whose History of the Monks of Syria is the primary source, notes that for these Christians, contact with the outside world was cultivated rather than shunned.
The theological geography matters. Daniel Caner, in his study of wandering monks in late antiquity, argues that Syrian and Palestinian Christians occupied a middle position between the Roman imperial imagination of the west and the anti-imperialist desert resistance of the Egyptian south. Their practice of following Christ meant active engagement with the world they had renounced, as Christ’s representatives, rather than permanent social withdrawal.
They renounced the same things the Egyptian hermits renounced — wealth, comfort, status, family. But they renounced them publicly, in the city, in the face of the people whose lifestyle they were critiquing. They stood out. The hermits stood apart.
The distinction is sharper than it sounds. When piety is driven by frustration with the world, the world remains the object of attention. You’re not praying toward God; you’re praying away from the people you’ve left behind. Self-righteousness masquerades as self-devotion. The Syrian ascetics understood this — they knew that the minute your holiness becomes primarily a critique of other people’s unholiness, you’ve lost the thread.
This maps uncomfortably well onto certain patterns in veteran culture. The rural migration of veterans — which I discuss in Chapter 2.8 using Pew data and VA statistics — is often framed as spiritual: getting back to what’s real, away from the noise and superficiality of civilian life. Sometimes that’s true. But ‘getting away’ has never been a Christian virtue in itself. Joshua+ went to the wilderness for forty days, not forty years. He came back.
The Nazirite model is instructive here. Nazirite vows were time-limited, public, and ended with a communal meal at the temple. You didn’t take a Nazirite vow and disappear into the desert. You became visibly different — the unshaven head, the abstention from wine — and then you went back to your life. The holiness was worn in public as an argument, not practiced in private as a preference.
The asceticism that actually looks like Jesus is the Syrian kind: present, visible, engaged, and strange enough to make people ask questions. Not isolated, self-sufficient, and content to have escaped.
Pachomius built communities rather than hermitages. But the theological grammar underlying that move — the difference between standing out and standing apart — is older than Pachomius, older than the Egyptian desert, and more clearly rooted in the biblical tradition than the hermit tradition ever was. The Syrian ascetics knew it first. They just didn’t get famous for it.
