Origins and early expression

It was a relatively common custom among the early Christians of the Spanish Peninsula to retire to secluded places, nearly always for short periods of time, during significant dates within the liturgic calendar. The canons which were intended to fight Priscillian's heresy following the Council of Zaragoza (c.380) allude to people leaving their churches for such periods of reclusion during Lent and at Christmas. These customs reveal the beginnings of a practice which would grow stronger over the course of the Middle Ages – the beginning of a flight from the world, a kind of ascesis which also incorporated the world of sex, matrimony and virginity. Also at the end of the fourth century, Bachiarius, an ascetic of Spanish origin who was similarly suspected of being a Priscillianist, recommended to a married woman named Marcella that she retire into the small cell of a monastery because of the lack of a suitable desert. Such a cell should have only one table upon which to read the Holy Scriptures – her only spiritual food. Naturally this would be only a temporary retirement, to be undertaken at Christmas, following which Marcella was to resume her normal activities as the married woman that she was.

This type of temporary reclusion was both eremitic and lay (and attractive to the aristocracy, in particular), both male and female, and not always looked upon favourably by the official Church during this early period. It had a penitential character and people undertook it in an entirely voluntary way, embracing it in response to a drive for a new urban asceticism. However, this kind of reclusion was also often used as a punishment within church milieux, following the tradition of the ancient world.

The letter of Pope Siricius to Himerius, bishop of Tarragona, in 385 speaks about the problems which had arisen in the ascetic world regarding the maintaining of chastity. Any breach of sanctified chastity [propositus sanctitatis] resulting in procreation would be severely punished: sexual incontinence was an offence which was punishable by both civil and ecclesiastical law, and the monks and nuns who were convicted of it would be taken away from their communities, locked up in prisons for the rest of their lives, only to return at the time of death. It was an exemplary punishment for a serious misdemeanour.