ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how ascetic lifestyle was reconciled with traditional Roman values by embedding the family terminology in the ascetic Christian rhetoric. The bishops addressed their congregation as their children, and were correspondingly described and addressed as fathers. The fatherhood of a bishop or even of an ordinary priest is also reflected in the belief that if he did not already practise asceticism, he should renounce sexual relations with his wife after his consecration, although this official line was not unanimously supported and there was local opposition to this principle. Fatherhood entails obligations and, indeed, the earliest ecclesiastical rules concerning asceticism stressed the need to put these precepts into practice. On the other hand, asceticism was at the outset the very negation of family life. As symbolic and spiritual kinship were constructed as a basis for the new Christian identity, the familial language became not only useful but also inescapable in propagating the Christian lifestyle and, even more pointedly, asceticism.
