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Desert Christians : an Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism / William Harmless

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Desert Christians : an Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism / William Harmless Desert Christians This page intentionally left blank Desert Christians An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism William Harmless, S.J. 2004 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi HongKongIstanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harmless, William, 1953– Desert Christians : an introduction to the literature of early monasticism / William Harmless. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-516222-6; 0-19-516223-4 (pbk.) 1. Desert Fathers. 2. Christian literature, Early—History and criticism. 3. Monastic and religious life—History—Early church, ca. 30–600. I. Title. BR190.H37 2004 271′.009′015—dc22 2004000097 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Dedication For my parents, Roy and Mary Harmless, for a lifetime spent in a love that does not count the cost. This page intentionally left blank Preface The desert fathers were gifted storytellers. One story that circulated among them tells of three friends who had a reputation for hard work. Each of the three had staked out for himself a way of life he believed faithful to the Christian Gospel. The first one took to heart Jesus' beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers” and chose to spend his life reconcilingthose who foughtone another. The second adopted as his life's work the care of the sick. The third went out to the desert to live a life of prayer and stillness. The first, for his all efforts, found himself unable to make peace in a world bent on hatred and vengeance and war. Disheartened, he sought out his friend, the healer, to see if he had fared any better. But the second was equally dispirited. So the two went to the third. They told him of their own lives, how they had pursued the noble ventures of peacemakingand healingbut had somehow, alongthe way, lost heart. They begged him to guide them, to tell them somewhere to go, something to do. The three sat in silence a while. Then the third, the desert dweller, poured water into a bowl and told them to look at the water. It lapped up against the sides, agitated, swirling and bobbing up and down. They sat a while. Then he said to them, “Look how still the water is now.” When they looked down again, they saw their own faces. The water had become a mirror. And so the desert dweller said to his friends: “It's that way for someone who lives amonghuman being s. The agitations, the shake-ups, block one from seeingone's faults; but once one becomes quiet, still, especially in the desert, then one sees one's failings. ”1 This book is about those early Christian desert dwellers who, like the third man in the story, chose to explore the art of stillness and prayer. These first monks who, in Athanasius's famous phrase, viii “made the desert a city,” ignored or even fled from other noble Christian paths, the hard work of peacemakingor healingor any of the thousand other ways of beinga Christian that were possible in their time. And the messagethey offered their world—and perhaps, ours—was that to learn about stillness and prayer meant seeingharder and humbler things first, like one's true face, and one's failings. The aim of this book is modest: to introduce readers to the literature by and about the desert Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries. I do not presuppose that readers have already read this literature or that they are familiar with the history and theology of early Christianity. So I will need to tell the story to some extent, tracing out key figures and events and explainingtheologicalissues and terminology. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the background,offeringbasics on the geography, history, politics, and religious milieu of fourth- and fifth-century Egypt. The chapters that follow concentrate on the classic figures and texts: Athanasius's Life of Antony (chapters 3–4), the Lives of Pachomius (chapter 5), the Apophthegmata Patrum (chapters 6–8), the History of the Monks in Egypt and Palladius's Lausiac History (chapter 9), Evagrius Ponticus's works, especially his Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer (chapters 10–11), and John Cassian's works, both his Institutes and Conferences (chapter 12). Over the last twenty years or so, this literature has finally been translated into English. But much of it is not known, even to graduate students. I would also like to give readers a taste of current developments in the scholarship. A number of remarkable books on the desert fathers have appeared over the last fifteen years: Peter Brown's The Body and Society, Elizabeth Clark's The Origenist Controversy, Douglas Burton-Christie's The Word in the Desert, Graham Gould's The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, David Brakke's Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Susanna Elm's The Virgins of God, Columba Stewart's Cassian the Monk, and James Goehring's Ascetics, Society, and the Desert—to name only a few of the larger works in English. And behind this lie a number of scholars, mostly French—Antoine Guillaumont, Irénée Hausherr, Adalbert de Vogüé, Jean-Claude Guy, and Lucien Regnault—who have spent much of their careers uncoveringlittle-known texts or publishinglong-needed critical editions and translations. That scholarship has steadily undermined old verities, such as Antony as the “father of monasticism” or Egypt as its “cradle.” It is clear, for instance, that other regions, such as Syria, Palestine, and Cappadocia, had their own native traditions, as old as Egypt's, if less well documented and perhaps less influential in the longrun. New explorations of asceticism in the ancient world have set Egyptian monasticism against a much more variegated horizon. There were groups such as the Manichees and the Melitians, whose orthodoxy or church order proved suspect in the long run but that at the time may have influenced styles or simply provided good competition. Scholars have also shown that while the desert variety of monasticism got all the press, there were other Christian experiments in renunciation, such as households of ascetic women or holy men who lived on the fringes of villages or gyratory monks who wandered as perpetual exiles. These less publicized forms of ascetical ix livingwere sometimes either consciously ignored or unfairly written off by in fluential writers, leavingthe historical record biased. We also realize that the orthodoxy of the orthodox, whether Pachomius's monastery in Pbow, the compilers of the Apophthegmata, or even Antony himself, may have been more ambiguous than most have imagined, and that significant contributions came from people such as the Origenist Evagrius Ponticus—figures whose orthodoxy was perhaps suspect and whose names history has tended to forget or dismiss. But all this is to get ahead of the story. I decided to put the chapter on the origins of monasticism at the end rather than the beginning. That may seem counterintuitive, and it certainly defies proper chronology. But the decision is based, I believe, on good pedagogy. I have found from experience that people need to know the basics, the key figures and key texts, to appreciate recent scholarly discussions about origins. And so while the story of Antony may not be the historical beginning of monasticism, it is still best to begin there. Alongthe way, I will deal here and there with works little known outside of scholarly circles, such as the Letters of Antony and Ammonas, the Ethiopic Collectio Monastica, and the Coptic Life of John the Little. I will put a number of these into an excursus here and there within chapters to give readers a taste of their exotic flavor. A few of these have not yet been translated, others only very recently. Most are simply intriguing documents that I stumbled across in preparing this book. But several are quite important and have helped shape current scholarly assessment of certain larger issues. In fact, it has been scholarly rummaging through a whole host of lesser works, whether sermons by lesser lights, pseudonymous treatises, or pious fabrications, that has opened fresh perspectives on the classic figures and texts. I have had to put limits on the scope of the book. I have stuck to Egypt, roughly from 300 to 451—in other words, from the public career of Antony to the Council of Chalcedon. Not all figures covered are Egyptians, of course. Evagrius came from Pontus but made Egypt his home, while John Cassian, who came (perhaps) from Romania, stayed in Egypt long enough for it to shape him indelibly and then took Egypt with him, so to speak, to southern France. Admittedly, only some of the literature was actually written by Egyptians, such as Athanasius or the composers of the Lives of Pachomius. Much of it comes from outsiders, such as Palladius or the writer of the History of the Monks in Egypt; for that matter, the compilers of the most famous desert text, the Apophthegmata Patrum, may well have been monks workingnot in Egypt, but in Palestine. These limits in time and locale come from a decision to stick with the monks of Egypt, the so-called desert fathers, and not make this an introduction to early Christian asceticism and monasticism.
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