Early Christian bathing

[bunnyjadwiga]

From the The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenberg, p. 56-57

...mixed bathing was forbidden, though this was not immediately clear to everyone. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, scolded a devout Christian woman who patronized a mixed bath, which was apparently an unremarkable practice in third-century Carthatge. The woman, who had taken a vow of chastity, responded stoutly that she was not responsible for the motives of people who might look upon her nudity: "As for me," she wrote, "my only concern is to refresh and bathe my poor little body."

Cyprian disagreed, claiming that by delighting the eyes of others with her nudity she was corrupting herself.

In the fourth century, St. Melania, the abbess of a women's monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, successfully petitioned for a bath in the nunnery. Until then, her nuns had been walking down into the city and washing in the public bathhouses.

The objection, however, was to the mixed bathing, not the bathing itself:

Most church authorities did allow Christians to patronize single-sex baths for the proper motives. Clement of Alexandria was a second-century teacher and writer whose views on most subjects were balanced and moderate for his time. In his guide to Christian thought and behavior, the Paedagogus (Instructor), he writes that there are four reasons for visiting the baths-- cleanliness, warmth, health, and pleasure. Christians may not bathe for pleasure, nor (although this is a less serious objection) for warmth. Women may bathe for cleanliness and health, and men only for health-- probably because men could wash in the river, which would be immodest for women. Clement prized the democratic nature of the baths, chiding ostentatious customers who arrived with a parade of servants, "because the bath [has] to be common and the same for everybody." For the same reasons, bathers should wash their own bodies, not relying on the care of an attendant.

Even the austere St. John Chrysostom (ca. 344-407) classed bathing, like eating, with the necessities of life... when the emperor Theodosius punished Antioch by closing its bathhouses in 387, Chrysostom protested that giving up bathing was too great a hardship and that he worried about the old, the sick, children and nursing mothers who relied on the bathhouse to safeguard health.

Ashenburg goes on to point out that many saints and ascetics spurned cleanliness as self-denial and/or a way of rejecting the flesh/protecting virginity, and that Christianity's relationship to cleanliness of person was conflicted.