Robert Kitchen: Teaching Perfection Monastic Education in Dadisho‘ Qatraya’s Commentary on the Paradise of the Fathers

An unmined source for Syriac asceticism is found in the Commentary on the
Paradise of the Fathers by Dadisho‘ Qatraya (Church of the East; late 7th c.), organized into 399 questions and answers from the brothers or monks to an elder, in most cases Dadisho‘, centering around the stories and sayings of the Egyptian Desert Fathers (translated into Syriac), which were compiled by an older contemporary ‘Enanisho‘, and used for the monastic education of Syriac and later Ethiopian monks.Two aspects of this educational document will be examined. First, this Commentary is a rare witness to the continued existence of the ascetical level of Perfection (gmīrūtā) and its
practitioners, the Perfect (gmīrē), along with the lower consecrated
level of Uprightness/Upright (kēnūtā/kēnē), generally limited to The
Book of Steps and The Discourses of Philoxenos of Mabbug. Second, while the questions and answers roughly follow the order of Enanisho‘’s Paradise,
a pattern becomes discernible through the answers of a gradual progression for
the monks towards the status of Perfection, a spiritual and physical way of
life that is the result of the grace of education.

Panagiota Mikropandremenou: The virtue of discernment according to the Syriac fathers of the desert as presented in the Book by Evergetinos

The purpose of this paper is to examine some extracts from the book of Evergetinos, in which various passages regarding the charisma of discernment (διάκρισις), as it is expressed and interpreted in the ascetic anthology of the Syriac fathers, can be found. Discernment (διάκρισις-diakrisis-ܡܒܰܝܢܳܢܽܘܬܳܐ ) is defined as the charisma that gives someone the ability to safely understand/to distinguish the will of God in every place and time. It is considered the highest virtue that presupposes inner purity and protects the believer against spiritual falls and mistaken actions.According to the spiritual Syriac desert fathers, who followed the monastic rules, had solitary habits and taught the above virtue, discernment includes all virtues. Examining the way of ascetic living in the desert, Father Paul Evergetinos, who lived in the 11th century, got paradigms from their daily practice and used apophthegmata gathered through centuries in his book. In this paper, some of these instances of asceticism, used by the monks to avoid the temptation of the demons and gain the charismas, will be presented.

Columba Stewart: “Re-situating Aphrahat’s Demonstrations and the Book of Steps in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Marcionites, Manichaeans, and other conversation partners.”

This presentation will explore ways of recovering the broader ascetic context for the well-known Syriac Demonstrations of Aphrahat (ca. 270-ca. 345 CE) and the anonymous Book of Steps (?mid-late 4th century CE). Aphrahat wrote of the ascetic qyama or “covenant,” which was also promoted by other early Syriac authors; the Book of Steps describes a bi-partite church consisting of “perfect” ascetic members and “just” (married, property-owning) members. The origins of both the qyama and the distinction between “perfect and “just” Christians are obscure. Other ascetic movements in Mesopotamia that would have been considered by the authors of those texts to be heretical (Marcionites) or inimical to Christianity (Manichaeans) may offer avenues of approach to this problem, despite challenges of recovering a complete view of their ascetic practice because of the suppression of those movements in the Roman and Sasanian empires.The study of both Marcionites and Manichaeans (especially of the latter) has expanded enormously in recent years. Marcionites are known to have been active in Mesopotamia, and Mani’s own writings were composed almost entirely in Syriac. Despite challenges, it is possible to recover a sense of their importance in that region, and to infer from Marcionite and Manichaean traces in other parts of the Late Antique world how they would have played a major role in the development of early Syriac Christian asceticism and influenced the forms of asceticism discoverable in the literature that came to be seen as representing “orthodox” Syriac Christianity.

David Brakke: Cursing Monks: The Forms and Functions of Early Monastic Execrations

Early monasticism includes persons who lived and practiced asceticism in settings outside the traditional household, whether they did so alone, in loose confederation with others, or in highly organized communities, and whether they did so in cities, in villages and their outskirts, or in desert locations. Monasticism was characterized by the maximal ritualization of as many aspects of life as possible.  While ordinary Christians engaged in ritualized activities at certain times or for certain particular ends, in monastic communities even such activities as dress, food consumption, sleep, and labor were ritualized, so that they would embody communal values, set boundaries between the monastic environment and what was called “the world,” and establish internal hierarchies of authority and spiritual achievement.Cursing is ritualized engagement in conflict: people invoke supramundane beings or spiritual power to subdue or control another person or group.  Conflict characterizes all human activities, including monasticism, and can be found in early monasticism as a ritualized means of conflict at every level—from the individual to the institutional.  This paper examines the evidence for and ambivalence about monastic cursing from late ancient Egypt, ranging from “magical spells” to anecdotes in monastic literature to the discourses of Shenoute.  Cursing chastised deviant behaviors, enforced communal norms, and resonated with biblical tradition.  Yet cursing expressed an aggression and operated from a position of spiritual authority that conflicted with monastic values of humility and non-violence.  As ritualized aggression, cursing both suited monasticism’s maximal ritualization and seemed to violate some of its core values.

Yuliia Rozumna: Person and Activities of the Holy Spirit in the Monastic Lives and Writings of Late Antiquity

Whereas previous scholarship has focused on the Christological inspiration of early Christian asceticism, few thought to look at the role of the Holy Spirit in this context. After fierce debates which lasted for most of the century, the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (381) affirmed the divine nature of the Holy Spirit. Although discussions on the nature of the Spirit and his relations with the Father and the Son weakened after the Council and reappeared only in the seventh and eighth centuries, in the debates about the filioque, the presence of the third Person of the Trinity in monastic lives and writings never disappeared and continued to play an important role. In this paper, I will examine perceptions of the third Person of the Trinity and his role in the lives of ascetics in such Greek-language writings as the ‘History of the Monks of Egypt’ (400), the ‘Lausiac History’ (419/420) by Palladius, and ‘The History of the Monks of Syria’ (440) by Theodoret of Cyrrhus. I will look at how these authors described the lives of ascetics and their relations with the Spirit and how monks themselves viewed these relations. Even though we will discover that they approached the Spirit as a living Person and not as a rational concept, it would nevertheless be of interest to examine whether the doctrines on the Spirit made their way into literary ‘lives’ of the saints and in what way.

Katarina Pålsson: Virgins and priests: Jerome on female sanctity in the context of late fourth century debates over asceticism

In the debates over Christian asceticism during the end of the fourth century, arguments tended to centre specifically around female asceticism, and there is good reason to understand these conflicts partly in terms of a discourse of female spiritual authority. The celibate life certainly provided women with a degree of authority that they would not otherwise achieve, and resistance against lay asceticism often went hand in hand with resistance against female authority in the church. The present paper deals with Jerome's defense of the superiority of virginity in the context of these debates, and more precisely on how he used the virginal ideal to promote the spiritual authority of celibate women. Jerome clearly had motives for doing this: He based, to a great extent, his own spiritual authority on that of his female disciples. Not being a bishop himself and often at odds with ecclesiastical authorities, Jerome sought to construct a hierarchy of Christians which was not identical to the visible, ecclesiastical one. It implied an understanding of priesthood as an inner state rather than something accomplished through ordination. Instead, it depended on a person's degree of purity; a purity achieved not only from sexual abstinence but from seclusion from the “world” in a wider sense. I aim to demonstrate that in the debates over asceticism, Jerome sought to promote female spiritual authority by ascribing priestly attributes and functions to female celibates, and presenting them as the perfect priests.

Deborah Casewell: The Joy of the Saints: Habit and Practice in early Christian Asceticism

As Christian asceticism has involved self-renunciation and decreation, it has been characterised as privative, negative, and self-destructive. Yet the writings of Christian ascetics are replete with accounts of joy, in their actions and their emphasis on union with God. Within early Christian asceticism the goal and aim of the discipline is joy in union with God through renunciation of the self, in contrast to the Graeco-Roman tradition of askesis, the training that an athlete would undergo. Thus because of the goal oriented character of asceticism, it is eudaimonic, but the crown of the ascetic life would be joy, rather than the goal of an athletic achievement or happiness, as delineated by Aristotle.In order to fully explore the vision of joy that the Desert Fathers and Mothers seek, the paper aims to explore the particular habit and practices found in the early Christian desert ascetic tradition. How, for these Desert Fathers and Mothers, does the pursuit of both union with God and apatheia play out practically? What do the links between habit, practice, and desire in the desert ascetics reveal about their own account of the training they were called to, and the joy that they sought?

Joona Salminen: Urban Asceticism in The Epistle to Diognetus

Asceticism has often been linked with the citizenship of Heaven in a monastic context. However, various ascetic tendencies existed before monasticism. This paper argues that early Christian apologetic works contain ascetic discourses regarding Christian lifestyle in an urban environment. The Epistle to Diognetusrepresents and contextualizes Christians and their lifestyle in a city environment providing an ascetic discourse that opens intriguing perspectives to apologetics as a genre of early Christian literature. The Epistlehas a clear apologetic out-group function: Christians are portrayed as good, pious citizens (e.g. in chapter 5). While describing the Christian citizenship, the anonymous author also constructs himself an ascetic authority. This authority has an important ascetic in-group function in describing the Christian way of life. For the out-group, The Epistle to Diognetusserves as an apology (defense), but for the in-group it depicts Christians as ascetics with higher moral standards than their non-Christian peers. The author does not aim only at convincing the out-group about how good citizens Christians are, he gives high praise for his community in order to edify them as ascetics. In my reading, The Epistle to Diognetuscontextualizes Christians as urban ascetics in a way that resembles how Clement of Alexandria constructs a Christian lifestyle in Paedagogusor how Tertullian (e.g. Apol. 42-43), Cyprian (Demet. 3; 5) and, later, Augustine (Civ. 1.30-31) represent Christians as good citizens in their apologetic works.

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.

Peter Gemeinhardt: What is the Benefit of Being a Saint?

In the First Greek Life of Pachomius (ch. 136), the writer describes “a threefold blossoming in Egypt” – the martyr-bishop Athanasius, the saintly Abbas Antonius and the Pachomian Koinonia – “to the benefit of all rational beings”. This paper investigates the notion of “benefit” (opheleia) in late antique Greek Hagiography: is being a saint of benefit only for the saint him- or herself or also for other people and the Church? In the Life of Antony, this notion is frequently employed; here, it is God who “renders the ascetics famous due to their virtue and benefit for others” (94.1). Such a benefit is also ascribed to saints in other Greek hagiographical works, like the Religious History of Theodoret, but not in all of them (it is lacking, e.g., in the Life of Macrina or Cyril of Scythopolis’ Lives of the Palestinian Saints). Therefore, the present paper will ask where and why the ascription of benefits to individual saints figures prominently. Based upon this survey, several types of holiness (with regard to the public engagement of saints) and thus different aims of hagiographical writings will be discerned.

Michael Magree: Theodoret and the Love of an Ascetic

A recurring explanandum in late-antique Christian studies is the extreme to which Syrian Christian ascetics went in their spiritual rigors. It was a subject of discussion in late antiquity tself, and an interpretation that rewards further examination is that of Theodoret of Cyrrhus. In his reflective “Treatise on Divine Love” appended later to the Historia Religiosa, he develops the theme that “it is clearly desire for God that has made them [ascetics] surpass the limits of nature” (31.4).

In the treatise, Theodoret argues for two points. First, he says that the attraction to God is transgressive, that is, it subverts common conceptions of what is natural. Attraction to God is not mere distant admiration from some secure standpoint of human nature; instead, desire for God is profoundly disturbing. Sexual infatuation is a primary analogue for this divine attraction. Secondly, Theodoret claims that God is not merely the beloved but also the lover. Theodoret uses Romans 8:35 to highlight both God’s love for humanity and humanity’s love for God. For Theodoret, the result of the lover’s transgressing beyond the bounds of nature is union with God’s own dynamic loving.

The communication will conclude with a tentative proposal. In comparison to Theodoret’s other conceptualizations of asceticism in the Historia Religiosa and elsewhere, this conceptualization in terms of love seems to connect to the theme of loving union with Christ that has deep roots in specifically Syriac ascetic ritual, practice, and narrative. This connection deserves further study.

Marianne Sághy: Monica and the Ascetic Turn

Among its many literary, philosophical and theoretical innovations, Augustine's Confessions has become famous for including the very first biography of a woman: the life of his mother Monica. While Augustine's relations to women as well as his representations of women have been amply scrutinized in recent scholarship, Monica's function in the Confessions remains to be explored. This paper suggests that in Monica's biography Augustine offers a Bildungsroman, sketching the progress of his mother from an ambitiously overwhelming parent into an ascetic philosopher. Monica's is a „parallel life" in the Confessions: instead of a detached registration of the many conversions of his son, she becomes actively engaged in the life-changing transformations promoted by the ascetic revolution. I wish to argue that Monica will be the most perfect, most spiritual product of Augustine's ascetic turn: she will rise to the height of contemplation thanks to her utter estrangement from the world and to her strict rejection of the concerns of the flesh.

Kathryn Kleinkopf: A Landscape of Bodies: Exploring the Role of Ascetics in Theodoret's Historia Religiosa

From hunching over in compact wooden crates to suspending themselves in a box several feet off the ground, Theodoret’s ascetics as described in his Historia Religiosa perform awe-inspiring feats.  While previous scholarship has delved into the politics motivating this history or the differences between Syrian and Egyptian asceticism, most scholars have ignored the significant role that place plays in these stories except to acknowledge the text’s general setting.  Yet, to remove Symeon from his pillar or Domnina from her millet hut would be to ignore a defining aspect of their practice and the ways in which Theodoret constructs their religious identity.   In the Historia Religiosa, Theodoret fuses place with the ascetic in order to define and defend Christian space and Christianity.  In many instances, a walled hut or wooden box symbolize the face of the ascetic within, becoming their defining characteristic and symbolizing their relationship with the world around them.  In other instances, ascetics living in the open air become places themselves, infusing the very ground with their holiness. While becoming part of the landscape, these men and women establish themselves as limes of Theodoret’s power and Christianity, fortifying its borders with the watchtowers and fortresses of their bodies.  The fight that ensues between these Christians and their daimon assailants thus seeks control of the physical place and the souls of those who lay within its borders.  By inextricably linking his ascetics to their places, Theodoret forever alters the imagined landscape not only of Syria but of Christian asceticism itself.

Hannah Hunt: Asceticism and the body: late antique religions in dialogue?

Christianity, especially in its late antique Syrian guise, is at heart an embodied religious tradition. But how did the concept of Christian asceticism, with its at times negative responses to the human body, engage with other late antique religious traditions, especially Buddhism and Jainism? This communication represents work in progress on a project which draws together scholarship on the social, cultural and environmental implications of seeing the body as an agent of asceticism. 

Columba Stewart - Rabbula of Edessa: an “observable moment” in the development of Syriac monasticism?

Rabbula, fifth century bishop of Edessa, is famous for his legislation for clergy, bnay/bnāt qyāmā, and monks. These texts, frequently copied in the manuscript tradition, are unusual in two respects: they cover the entire range of ecclesiastical and ascetic roles (bishop, priest, deacon, bnay/bnāt qyāmā, monks) and are unusually detailed in their prescriptions. Despite their richness and the fact that they have been published in modern editions, misunderstandings about their original form and intention have obscured the significance of these texts as providing an observable moment in the transition from traditional forms of Syriac asceticism to the newer, monastic, paradigm.

This paper will address three questions: 1) how helpful can Rabbula’s legislation be in understanding the development of Syriac asceticism in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, particularly in the co-existence of the bnay/bnāt qyāmā and the newer monastic form of asceticism? 2) how were these texts used by later copyists and readers in the Syriac tradition? 3) how have modern scholars understood or misunderstood their significance?