The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [20]
PUBLIC CONVENIENCE
In the fourth century, St. Melania, the abbess of a women’s monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, successfully petitioned for a bath in the nunnery. Until then, her nuns had been walking down into the city and washing in the public bathhouses.
Most church authorities did allow Christians to patronize single-sex baths for the proper motives. Clement of Alexandria was a second-century teacher and writer whose views on most subjects were balanced and moderate for his time. In his guide to Christian thought and behaviour, the Paedagogus (Instructor), he writes that there are four reasons for visiting the baths—cleanliness, warmth, health and pleasure. Christians may not bathe for pleasure, nor (although this is a less serious objection) for warmth. Women may bathe for cleanliness and health, and men only for health—probably because men could wash in the river, which would be immodest for women. Clement prized the democratic nature of the baths, chiding ostentatious customers who arrived with a parade of servants, “because the bath [has] to be common and the same for everybody.” For the same reason, bathers should wash their own bodies, not relying on the care of an attendant.
Bishop Sissinius was asked why he bathed twice. “Because I couldn’t bathe three times,” he answered.
Even the austere St. John Chrysostom (ca. 344–407) classed bathing, like eating, with the necessities of life. Chrysostom’s ascetic credentials were impeccable: he had lived for four years as the disciple of a hermit, and then for two years alone in a cave, where he fasted and studied the Bible. Only the gastric difficulties caused by fasting brought him back to Antioch. But when the emperor Theodosius punished Antioch by closing its bathhouses in 387, Chrysostom protested that giving up bathing was too great a hardship and that he worried about the old, the sick, children and nursing mothers who relied on the bathhouse to safeguard their health.
When his outspoken reforms as the archbishop of Constantinople angered the emperor, who sent him into exile, the priests loyal to Chrysostom staged a protest in the public baths. It was customary to baptize new Christians on the eve of Easter, and the baths were convenient for a ceremony that was still performed at this date with a full immersion. To this annual event, the priests gathered large numbers of lay people sympathetic to Chrysostom, and they spent the Easter vigil reading from the Scriptures as well as baptizing the converted. During Chrysostom’s three-month journey into exile, his sadistic guard knew that refusing the prisoner the “refreshment of a bath” whenever they reached a city with a bathhouse would be a particular torment, and Chrysostom was forced to travel unbathed. But even a saint who appreciated the baths recognized that they held abundant temptations. Chrysostom expected Christians to make the sign of the cross when entering one, to guard against its dangers, and crosses were placed over bathhouse doors with the same aim in mind.
BLESSED BODIES
St. Lutgard’s saliva healed the sick, as did the crumbs chewed by St. Colette of Corbie. A man sent from England to the Netherlands for St. Lidwina’s washing water; he wanted to apply it to his afflicted leg. The water from St. Eustadiola’s face-and handwashing cured the blind and healed other illnesses.
Christianity’s relationship to the body and so to cleanliness was complicated. On the positive side, the body was intended to be a temple of God. Parts