Among the Greeks there were many philosophers who taught ascetic principles.  Pythagoras, born about 580 B.C., established a religious brotherhood in which he sought to realize a high ideal of friendship.  His whole plan singularly suggests monasticism.  His rules provided for a rigid self-examination and unquestioning submission to a master.  Many authorities claim that the influence of the Pythagorean philosophy was strongly felt in Egypt and Palestine, after the time of Christ.  “Certain it is that more than two thousand years before Ignatius Loyola assembled the nucleus of his great society in his subterranean chapel in the city of Paris, there was founded at Crotona, in Greece, an order of monks whose principles, constitution, aims, method and final end entitle them to be called ‘The Pagan Jesuits[B].’”

[Footnote B:  Appendix, Note B.]

The teachings of Plato, no doubt, had a powerful monastic influence, under certain social conditions, upon later thinkers and upon those who yearned for victory over the flesh.  Plato strongly insisted on an ideal life in which higher pleasures are preferred to lower.  Earthly thoughts and ambitions are to yield before a holy communion with the Divine.  Some of his views “might seem like broken visions of the future, when we think of the first disciples who had all things in common, and, in later days, of the celibate clergy, and the cloisteral life of the religious orders.”  The effect of such philosophy in times of general corruption upon those who wished to acquire exceptional moral and intellectual power, and who felt unable to cope with the temptations of social life, may be easily imagined.  It meant, in many cases, a retreat from the world to a life of meditation and soul-conflict.  In later times it exercised a marked influence upon ascetic literature.

Coming closer to Christianity in time and in teaching, we find a Jewish sect, called Essenes, living in the region of the Dead Sea, which bore remarkable resemblances to Christian monasticism.  The origin and development of this band, which numbered four thousand about the time of Christ, are unknown.  Even the derivation of the name is in doubt, there being at least twenty proposed explanations.  The sect is described by Philo, an Alexandrian-Jewish philosopher, who was born about 25 B.C., and by Josephus, the Jewish historian, who was born at Jerusalem A.D. 37.  These writers evidently took pains to secure the facts, and from their accounts, upon which modern discussions of the subject are largely based, the following facts are gleaned.

The Essenes were a sect outside the Jewish ecclesiastical body, bound by strict vows and professing an extraordinary purity.  While there were no vows of extreme penance, they avoided cities as centers of immorality, and, with some exceptions, eschewed marriage.  They held aloof from traffic, oaths, slave-holding, and weapons of offence.  They were strict Sabbath observers, wore a uniform robe, possessed all things