The Battle for Chastity: Miraculous Castration and the Quelling of Desire in the Middle Ages

I n 1985 F r e n c h p h I l o s o p h e r Michel Foucault published an essay entitled “The Battle for Chastity” in which he examined the struggle of holy men, hermits, and the desert fathers to control their sexual desires and their bodies. The essay was based primarily on a close reading of the work of the monk and theologian John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), specifically, the Institutes and the Conferences. Cassian spent considerable time traveling through the Egyptian deserts, particularly in Nitria and Scetis, west of the Nile and south of Alexandria, where there were an estimated five thousand monks and ascetics fleeing civilization for the harsh life of the desert. The experience of these monks formed the origin of the “myth of the desert,” a belief that isolation brought freedom from the world and its temptations. Cassian recorded their amazing feats of asceticism and absorbed and embraced their ascetic values and discipline, which were the foundation of his subsequent reflections on monasticism and chastity.