Daniel Becerra: Wild Monks and Rational Animals: The Subversion of Human Exceptionalism in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The study of Christian asceticism in late antiquity has traditionally been anthropocentric, meaning there is a pervasive focus on ascetic practice as experienced and undertaken by humans in pursuit of a more holy self. More recent scholarly efforts have begun to examine the role non-human agents in this process, a methodological turn consonant with larger “Post-Humanist” trends in scholarship which seek to redefine humanity’s place in the world as merely one life form among many.This paper further situates non-humans within scholarly narratives of ancient Christian asceticism by examining the discrete ways in which Christian authors conceptualized animals and their relationship to humans in ascetic contexts. Limiting my analysis to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and building upon the work of scholars like Patricia Cox Miller and Graham Gould, I will demonstrate that while the rhetoric of human exceptionalism—i.e. the assumption of humanity’s supremacy over other animals—pervades the Sayings, authors simultaneously undermine the strict binary between humans and animals through their anthropomorphic depiction of animals and their positive zoomorphic depiction of monks. Consequently, animality—i.e. living with and like animals—comes to be closely associated with holiness. Moreover, the ascetic ideals prescribed for intra-species interactions (monk-monk) in the Sayings are also frequently framed as normative for inter-species relations (monk-animal). This new social dynamic is understood to reflect the restoration of the pre-lapsarian state of the created world.