The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [21]
Clement of Alexandria forbade Christians to entertain in their private baths. Even without guests, another problem remained: the bathers “strip naked before their slaves, and are rubbed by them, giving to the crouching menial liberty to lust, by permitting fearless handling.”
Spartan types, such as St. Jerome (ca. 340–420), shrank even from the most virtuous private baths. One of Jerome’s crusades was the encouragement of lifelong virginity for women. To that end, he urged a low-stimulus life, with a meagre diet of mostly vegetables and mild herbs. Because heat was thought to be conducive to sexual desire, wine (which heated the blood) and hot baths were forbidden to virgins. In addition to the heat-sex connection, bathing was suspect because it might provoke a young woman’s interest in her appearance. The right-thinking virgin, as St. Jerome puts it, “by a deliberate squalor … makes haste to spoil her natural good looks.” His dear friend Paula, the head of a convent near his own monastery in Bethlehem, was a kindred spirit on the subject of feminine cleanliness: “A clean body and a clean dress,” she warned her nuns, “mean an unclean soul.”
If baths struck ordinary virgins (or their advisors) as dangerous, more than a few saints rejected them entirely. Particularly in the East, in the fourth and fifth centuries, dirtiness became a uniquely Christian badge of holiness. This particular mortification of the flesh was known as alousia, “the state of being unwashed,” and was largely chosen by hermits, monks and saints. For them, the only acceptable cleansing was baptism, which was sometimes called “the washing of regeneration,” as opposed to the more normal washing, which signified vanity and worldliness.
Many early saints embraced filth enthusiastically and ingeniously. St. Agnes never washed any part of her body during her admittedly short life of thirteen years. Godric, an English saint, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. (On this fragrant pilgrimage, he subsisted on minimal amounts of water and barley bread, but only after it had grown stale.) At home in his hermitage in the woods near Durham, he wore a hair shirt which, when combined with summertime sweat, supported abundant lice. St. Francis of Assisi revered dirt and was said to have appeared after his death to compliment friars on their grubby cells.
St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Taddeo Gaddi. Although he praised a dirty body as “a stinking badge of piety,” St. Francis demonstrated his charity by washing lepers.
THE ODOUR OF SANCTITY
A monk came upon a hermit in a cave in the desert, and humbly reported a piece of good fortune: “I, Pambo, this least one, smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away.”
Alousia punished the body so that the better part, the soul, could flourish. St. Olympias, a friend and patroness of St. John Chrysostom, lived her life according to those priorities. Beautiful, rich and noble, she seemed destined for pleasure but thwarted it at every turn. Born in Constantinople around 360 and married when she was a teenager, Olympias was widowed by the age of twenty. Female saints often refused to marry or mysteriously managed to live a celibate life within marriage, and Olympias falls into both categories. Somehow, “adorned with the bloom of youth,” as her anonymous fifth-century biographer puts it, she had remained a virgin throughout her marriage. When pressed to remarry, “like a gazelle, she leapt over the insufferable snare of a second marriage.” The young widow explained that if Jesus had wished her to live with a man, he would not have conveniently removed her husband. Since Christ knew