It was against this background, for the first time, religious life as an organized way of Christian existence came into being. Its origin was to make sure that those values which stood at the heart of Christianity were not lost in the process of the Church’s growth and expansion. Those who went ahead with this project got inspiration from the Desert Fathers. For instance, the hermetic life of St Antony of Egypt inspired both solitary Anchorites and the communities of Cenobites. This radical form of Christianity was indeed a protest against the domestication of faith and falsification of Christianity by the Constantinian establishments. By opting for a heroic form of seeking God alone in solitude and asceticism, religious protested against, what today Pope Francis would call, the ‘spiritual worldliness’ of Christianity (Evangelii Gaudium, 93-97). However, later, in the process, what happened was that religious life began to be identified with asceticism. Moreover, unfortunately, while the message of protest against the domestication of faith was forgotten, the external form of religious life (asceticism) got reinforced.
