A guide to the history of physical education

No sooner had the Teutonic tribes overrun Romanized Europe than they began to yield, in turn, to the proselyting activities of the young and lusty Christian Church. And with it came the doctrine of asceticism, which left its mark on education for a thousand years and more, and tended to counteract, in a measure, the invigorating effect of the barbarian strain.

The Hindu fakir, the Christian saint of the desert, and the Mohammedan dervish are different expressions of a belief which at some time or other has prevailed among a very large proportion of the human race. It has been one of the fundamental ideas of the oriental religions that evil inheres in matter, while mind or spirit is essentially divine and pure. According to this view, the flesh and the spirit wage perpetual warfare on each other; the body is not a useful servant, but an enemy, and to be resisted therefore at every point and struck down whenever its head is raised. The ideal life is one of solitude, contemplation, and strict abstinence from sensual indulgence in any form. Asceticism has thus been an important factor in the ancient religions of China, Tibet, Siam, India, and Persia, and very early in the Christian Era, or before its dawn, this principle had found its way into Syria and Egypt, and through the Alexandrian schools of philosophy into southern Europe. Brought into contact with Christianity, it helped to prepare the way for the movement now under consideration, and in like manner gave its impress to Mohammedanism at a later period.

But in the case of the early Christians, living for the most part in cities and brought into close and daily contact with all the abominations of the decadent pagan society of the Empire, a violent reaction from the prevailing luxury and sensual self-indulgence was inevitable. Men of deep religious feeling desired to escape contamination from such worldliness, and it is not strange if in protest against its excesses they sometimes carried their stern self-restraint so far as to deny themselves the common comforts of life and decline to gratify those cravings of the body which are innocent and natural. The healthy appetites and impulses of the normal man are not to be eradicated without a struggle, however, and the constant discomfort which resulted from unsatisfied desires they viewed as insubordination. This in turn led to belief in the innate depravity of human nature. To subdue the rebellious flesh they resorted to renewed and more severe privations, or punished it with self-inflicted tortures. Mortification of the body acquired the dignity of a religious exercise, while the idea of pleasure came to be closely associated with that of vice.

A third cause of the outbreak of asceticism is found in the persecution to which many converts of the growing church were subjected. This soon kindled an intense religious enthusiasm which welcomed martyrdom and glorified the sufferings that attended it. The liberated soul, it was taught, entered at once into eternal blessedness. Pain and torment came thus to be considered meritorious of themselves, and the direct road to salvation; and after the persecutions ceased, the self-torture of the ascetic took their place as a means and measure of human excellence. When once the movement to the deserts was started, the desire to escape from the burdens imposed by corrupt government, from social disorders, and later from the wretchedness that followed the invasions of barbarian hordes from the North, helped to crowd the ranks of the hermits and swell the numbers gathered into monastic communities.

It was in the latter half of the third century that the first Christian hermits fled to the deserts of Egypt, where natural caverns, or caves easily hewn out of the rock, supplied the only shelter necessary in such a climate, and a grove of date palms with a spring close by it solved the problem of sustenance without labor. But the movement did not gather much headway until the early part of the next century, when Anthony’s career had given dignity to the solitary life and made it widely popular. At the time of his death, in 365, the deserts on either side of the Nile from the Cataracts to the Delta were dotted with the retreats of hermits, and it is said that Pachomius, who was the first to gather his disciples into organized communities and formulate a monastic rule, had no fewer than 7000 monks under his authority. By the fifth century the numbers had increased to 100,000 in Egypt alone, and the practice had extended into Syria and Palestine, Armenia, Mesopotamia, parts of Asia Minor, and Italy, whence it soon reached the whole of Western Europe.

The greatest extravagances are found among the Eastern “saints of the desert,” accounts of whose austerities were collected by wandering pilgrims and excited the admiration of all Christendom. Some dwelt in deserted dens of wild beasts, in tombs and dried-up wells, on the summit of narrow columns, or spent days in the midst of thorn bushes. Others never lay down during months and even years, or they slept naked in swamps, exposed to the stings of insects. Many abstained from food altogether for long periods, or restricted themselves to quantities too small to relieve the pangs of hunger. Bodily cleanliness was frequently abjured, and a long list of strange penances was devised.⁠[5]

Severe self-torture was less common in the Western monasteries, especially after the earlier code had been supplanted by a new one drafted (529) by Benedict of Nursia, founder of the order that bears his name. This is distinguished by the absence of any severe austerities, and substitutes manual labor in place of contemplation and penance. But the conception of supreme excellence was much the same in the West and in the East. Asceticism became a part of the accepted teaching of the Church and the practice of a large proportion of her leaders and adherents. Of Simeon Stylites, the famous Syrian monk of the fifth century, we read that “from every quarter pilgrims of every degree thronged to do him homage. A crowd of prelates followed him to the grave. A brilliant star is said to have shown miraculously over his pillar; the general voice of mankind pronounced him to be the highest model of a Christian saint.”

The physical effects of the ascetic life upon the individual must have been disastrous as a rule. Not only did it lead to broken health, such as embittered the lives of some of the greatest among the Church Fathers, but long-continued austerities and overwrought emotions produced a disordered nervous system, and supplied all the conditions for hallucination. Lecky has also called attention to certain moral qualities that suffered from the prevailing conception of excellence. “What may be called a strong animal nature,” he says, “a nature, that is, in which the passions are in vigorous, and at the same time healthy action, is that in which we should most naturally expect to find ... good humor, frankness, generosity, active courage, sanguine energy, buoyancy of temper. (These) are much more rarely found either in natures that are essentially feeble or effeminate, or in natures that have been artificially emasculated by penances, distorted from their original tendency, and habitually held under severe control.”

Among the people at large the physical consequences of the prevailing doctrine were hardly less pernicious. It justified the personal and public uncleanliness and the neglect of simple sanitary precautions to which they were already prone enough, and thus became to some extent accountable for the unprecedented succession of plagues which decimated the population of Europe again and again throughout the Middle Ages. None of these widespread epidemics suggested sanitary improvement, but they were regarded as “visitations,” and attributed to the wrath of God, or to the malice of Satan. It is not unlikely that such phenomena, even, as the dancing mania, the processions of Flagellants, trials of innocence, and the persecutions of Jews and witches depend in part upon the fact that communities and nations, no less than individuals, lacking real physical hardihood, were often crazed by nervous excitement, and impelled by an overstimulated emotional nature fell an easy prey to weird delusions and morbid fancies, of which a series of moral epidemics was the natural result.