This slim volume sheds valuable new light on the already popular area of early Christian monasticism, by adding material from pre-Christian philosophical traditions as well as from the Syrian east and Asia Minor, to be read along with the better-known texts from fourth century Egypt. It is a vivid and informative new slant on an area of great contemporary interest.
Chapter one presents a detailed and carefully expounded discussion of philosophic asceticism, by giving an account of the different practices and approaches to physical discipline of Cynic, Stoic, Neo-platonic schools of thought as well as in Graeco-Roman cults. This absorbing chapter is followed by an analysis of the more familiar area of Jewish asceticism, looking behind Philo to ascetic groups in Hellenistic and later Rabbinic Judaism. The third chapter gives a longer account of Christian asceticism, carefully suggesting the influence of both pagan and Jewish thought in this area. The author rightly stresses the complex nature of early Christian asceticism but comments that this has been ‘too long ill-served by accounts which unduly privilege the Egyptian monks’ (p. 7); a thought-provoking point of view, in which one might take exception to the words ‘ill-served’ and ‘unduly privilege’.
Chapter four gives an account of the ascetic theology of Origen, stressing his extensive influence on the growth of Christian asceticism in relation to personal sanctity. Chapter five looks at areas of Christian asceticism in relation to personal sanctity. It looks at areas of Christian asceticism which the author suggests were independent of Origen's influence, in Syria and North Africa and among those (previously ignored because ‘unduly privileged’) desert fathers, not the hermits but monks in Pachomian monasteries. The author's ‘final thoughts’ constitute a reflection on the influence of early Christian asceticism on the church as a whole. There is a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and an index.
This book throws an engaging new light on the transmission of ideas about the place in human life as well as in religious life of abstention from sexual relationships, fasting from food and drink, poverty and detachment, as well as the limiting of contact with others in silence and solitude. It gives a carefully nuanced picture of the wise transmission of ideas and practices and shows how they changed in contact with different cultures and times.
