 Evidence of extreme unnatural asceticism in Christianity appear in 2nd-century texts and thereafter, in both Eastern Orthodox Christian and Western Christian traditions, such as the practice of chaining the body to rocks, eating only grass, praying seated on a pillar in the elements for decades such as by the monk Simeon Stylites, solitary confinement inside a cell, abandoning personal hygiene and adopting lifestyle of a beast, self-inflicted pain and voluntary suffering.Such ascetic practices were linked to the Christian concepts of sin and redemption.Evagrius Ponticus, also called Evagrius the Solitary (345-399 AD) was a highly educated monastic teacher who produced a large theological body of work, mainly ascetic, including the "Gnostikos" (from Ancient Greek