Samuel Kaldas: Flight of the Living Dead: Asceticism as Living Death in the Desert Fathers and Late Platonists

In late antiquity, some Desert Fathers and late Platonists professed a vehement desire to be dead. This was because they both considered ordinary human life — life in a body filled with passions — an unnatural condition which could only be escaped by death. But neither community advocated suicide. Instead, they both strove to approximate the state of being dead as far possible through ascetic living: Platonists fasted, abstained from sex and fled from political society; not to be outdone, the Desert Fathers adopted a variety of ascetic practices that took literal corpses as models for imitation (for instance, taking up residence in abandoned tombs or taking vows of silence). In this way, without committing the sin of suicide, they could begin to enjoy the blessed release from the tyranny of the passions which they hoped bodily death would eventually bring them.This paper compares the 'philosophies of death' that underlie the ascetic practices of the late Platonists and Desert Fathers, particularly with regard to their differing attitudes about the body. To wit, while the Platonists viewed the body itself as an evil: living death was a way of preparing the soul to make a permanent exit from its bodily prison. But Desert Fathers (constrained by the doctrines of the incarnation and general resurrection) viewed their living death as a participation in Christ's death, and a means of cleansing the body from its fallen condition and preparing it for resurrection.