Underlining the uneasy relationship between monasticism and the mainstream Church, its origins are in the lands from which gnostic Christianity had also emerged: the eastern borderlands of the Roman Empire in Syria, and in Egypt. Moreover, the first moves to founding monastic communities were made at much the same time as the emergence of that new rival to Christianity, Manichaeism, with its ethos of despising physical flesh. It may be that the famous austerities of Christian monks (see pp. 206–8) were imitations of similar feats of spiritual endurance by Indian holy men and that Manichees
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