Claiming the wilderness in late Roman Gaul

Abstract

The enthusiasm with which Christian authors of late Roman Gaul adopted the ideal of desert asceticism is well known. There is also general agreement that the appeal of the wilderness was, for many of these individuals, more rhetorical than actual. What has not been fully acknowledged is the extent to which their attitudes to wilderness were influenced by classical thought in addition to biblical and hagiographical literature. To the educated classical mind, the cosmos was built on a fundamental dichotomy between order and chaos that permeated the physical and natural world. Wilderness, in its raw natural form, was a manifestation of chaos, while human civilization reflected the principles of order. The argument of this article is that this dichotomy, thanks to a tradition of classical education, helped structure the response of educated Gallo-Romans to the Christian desert tradition as its ideals spread to the west. Despite the appeal of monastic asceticism per se, its association with the desert provoked suspicion among those who had been trained to regard wilderness as the antithesis of civilization and culture. It is, however, possible to detect an evolution in attitudes over the last century of Roman rule in Gaul, as successive generations responded to social and political transformations and, drawing on both Christian and classical tradition, developed new ways of relating to the natural world.