Caroline Schroeder: The Ties That Bind: Monks, Children, and Emotions

Despite the ascetic imperative to renounce family upon taking up the ascetic life, monks joined communities with their own children or monasteries in which other children were present.  In house asceticism, the bonds between parent and child posed a challenge, but ascetics also drew upon these bonds to persuade their relatives to become ascetics or to instruct them in the ways of ascetic life. Recent work on children in late antique and Byzantine Christianity has called attention to the emotional ties between parents and children.  As Cornelia Horn and Robert Martens have observed in their book, Let the Little Children Come to Me, the Gospel of Luke captures the joy of a mother giving birth to a healthy baby in its accounts of Mary and Elizabeth.  Many of the essays in Becoming Byzantine, the proceedings of the 2006 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium on children, call our attention to the extensive representations of affective bonds between parents and children in hagiography and other literary sources.  However, the social significance and effects of these representations of emotions has been undertheorized.  This paper will examine the emotional ties between adults and children specifically in monastic and ascetic contexts, paying close attention to the ways in which emotional bonds are formed, renegotiated, and challenged by the reconfiguration of familial relationships in communities that often privilege the ascetic family over kinship ties. Children sometimes joined monasteries with their parents, and adult monks forged relationships with children in their communities to whom they were unrelated. This paper will analyze the role of emotions between ascetic adults and children in the formation of monastic communities, ascetic households, and ascetic identities using the Apophthegmata Patrum; the writings of Cassian and Jerome; and sources from Pachomian and Shenoutean monasteries.  I will argue that Stoic theories of emotions influenced the ascetic negotiation of emotional relationships and the representations of those emotions in our sources. Moreover, these emotional connections were inflected by the social status and gender of the ascetics involved.

The paper will be part of the Workshop entitled “Rethinking the Family in Ancient Monasticism.”