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There are several ways that a culture may embrace self-denial. Here is one: It was about three centuries after Jesus died that we first see evidence of anything like a forty-day fast before Easter. In his “Festal Letters,” St. Athanasius announced that his Alexandrian flock would have to start observing forty days of fasting preliminary to the stricter fast of Holy Week. In 339, having traveled to Rome and much of Europe, he wrote that people were going to have to start taking this seriously “to the end that while all the world is fasting, we who are in Egypt should not become a laughing-stock as the only people who do not fast but take our pleasure in those days.”6 People don’t fast only because it reminds them of death and hardship, but also because they want to fit in. Note that at one point this fast meant that you ate only one meal a day, avoiding all animal products. Later that was relaxed so that pious donations could be traded for a bit of dairy, which is why one of the towers at the cathedral at Rouen was long called Butter Tower.7

Here is another story of the rise of a culture of self-denial. It takes place in two utopian dreams on the Jersey shore: the “twin cities” of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park.8 These were vacations spots—visions of happiness. Ocean Grove came first. It was a planned “Christian Seaside Resort,” and that meant Methodist and temperance. In the 1880s, its summer population was around twenty-five thousand. Where Ocean Grove met land there was a wooden fence that was locked every midnight and all day Sunday. There were strict edicts against liquor, tobacco, novels, cards, and dancing. To make quite sure no business was done on Sunday, they emptied the penny-candy machines on Saturday night. The authors of the Baedeker guidebook couldn’t believe so many people chose to spend their summer vacation under a “religious autocracy.”9 The Grove included a sanatorium “where rest and relaxation may be obtained from the busy turmoils of everyday life in the cities and towns,” offering the usual services: special diets, water cures, mineral soaks, internal irrigations, and rubdowns. The center of life at the Grove was, however, the ocean itself. In 1874 Ocean Grove’s Reverend Aaron E. Ballard detailed the effect of the waves there:

The long, rolling surf-waves…gently shock the frame and stir the sluggish blood to fresher motion. That motion rolls, and bonds, and leaps through the veins—anywhere, everywhere—routing all the hosts of peccant humors which have ambushed themselves in all possible hidden places…. The torpid liver finds itself compelled to join the general activity, and to work like a disused steam engine newly set in motion. The nerves respond to the body’s school-boy holiday and scatter tingling sensations of pleasure over the frame…. The surf lubricates the joints like oil; grave men fling out their limbs like colts in pasture; dignified women, from the very inspiration of necessity, sport like girls at recess, and aged people tumble among the waves till one would think they were only in their teens.10

The mix of the erotic and the idea of the humors is delightful here, as is the industrial-age metaphor of the body as an old steam engine chugging back to life. Most intriguing is that the people depicted are dignified men and women who sport only when forced: the waves take them over, leaving them free to enjoy a good roll.

Ocean Grove’s twin city began when James Bradley visited the Grove and, soon after, bought five hundred acres adjacent to it, for Asbury Park. (It was named for the pioneer Methodist bishop in America.) Bradley set up a board of health, an advanced sewage system, and an electric trolley. He announced that “the Park,” too, was a temperance town and a Sabbath town. Bradley’s tale of why he first went to the Grove, and why he started the Park, was about nervous exhaustion:

Having for some time previous been in bad health, I concluded to try what I had been recommended—sea air. Too close application to business