Women also became solitaries.  Alexandra, one of these, shut herself in an empty tomb and lived there for ten years without leaving it to see anybody.

=Asceticism.=—­These men who had withdrawn to the desert to escape the world thought that everything that came from the world turned the soul from God and placed it in the peril of losing salvation.  The Christian ought to belong entirely to God; he should forget everything behind him.  “Do you not know,” said St. Nilus later, “that it is a trap of Satan to be too much attached to one’s family?” The monk Poemen had withdrawn to the desert with his brothers, and their mother came to visit them.  As they refused to appear, she waited a little until they were going to the church; but on seeing her, they fled and would not consent to speak to her unless they were concealed.  She asked to see them, but they consoled her by saying, “You will see us in the other world.”

But the world is not the only danger for the monk.  Every man carried about with himself an enemy from whom he could not deliver himself as he had delivered himself from the world—­that is, his own body.  The body prevented the soul from rising to God and drew it to worldly pleasures that came from the devil.  And so the solitaries applied themselves to overcoming the body by refusing to it everything that it loved.  They subsisted only on bread and water; many ate but twice a week, some went to the mountains to cut herbs which they ate raw.  They dwelt in grottoes, ruins, and tombs, lying on the earth or on a mat of rushes.  The most zealous of them added other tortures to mortify, or kill, the body.  St. Pachomius for fifteen years slept only in an erect position, leaning against a wall.  Macarius remained six months in a morass, the prey of mosquitoes “whose stings would have penetrated the hide of a wild boar.”  The most noted of these monks was St. Simeon, surnamed Stylites (the man of the column).  For forty years he lived in the desert of Arabia on the summit of a column, exposed to the sun and the rain, compelling himself to stay in one position for a whole day; the faithful flocked from afar to behold him; he gave them audience from the top of his column, bidding creditors free their debtors, and masters liberate their slaves; he even sent reproaches to ministers and counsellors of the emperor.  This form of life was called Asceticism (exercise).

=The Cenobites.=—­The solitaries who lived in the same desert drew together and adopted a common life for the practice of their austerities.  About St. Anthony were already assembled many anchorites who gave him their obedience.  St. Pachomius (272-348) in this way assembled 3,000.  Their establishment was at Tabenna, near the first cataract of the Nile.  He founded many other similar communities, either of men or women.  In 256 a traveller said he had seen in a single city of Egypt 10,000 monks and 20,000 vowed to a religious life.  There were more of them in Syria, in Palestine, in all the Orient.  The monks thus united in communities became Cenobites (people who live in common).  They chose a chief, the abbot (the word signifies in Syriac “father"), and they implicitly obeyed him.  Cassian relates that in one community in Egypt he had seen the abbot before the whole refectory give a cenobite a violent blow on the head to try his obedience.