An Introduction to the Desert Fathers. Jason Byassee
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to spend more time traveling and less worshipping, like any administrator. One hopes that will not dim the childlike blaze in his eyes. A “younger” monk—actually retirement-age (they get as high a proportion of second-career persons as mainline seminaries do these days) spent one career as an Alaskan king crab fisherman, the most dangerous profession in the world according to insurers. He says he won’t eat seafood now since he can tell the difference between fish frozen for months and fish right out of the Bering Sea—so good it intoxicates. He then retired with millions to a ranch in Arizona, on which the Hollywood movie Tombstone was filmed. He calls that film “the good mustaches against the bad mustaches.” Then he retired anew to Mepkin. He says he misses the movies.
I’ve gone on at length about Mepkin, a place I’ve only visited half a dozen times, to make clear that living, breathing communities attempt to imitate the form of life described in the Sayings. The differences are key, of course. The Sayings describe monks who live in much looser community, perhaps near enough to celebrate Eucharist occasionally and share economically, but in individual cells, with far fewer breaks in a rigorous course of solo prayer. Western-style cloistered monasteries originated separately and take their inspiration more from Saint Benedict’s Rule than from the Sayings.10 Yet, these literatures and their imagined communities bleed into one another, as monks in cloistered community and hermits alike learn from one another’s founding documents. The similarities remain striking, however: forswearing the world in a certain sense, taking of difficult vows, devotion to unending streams of prayer. And perhaps most important, this: a witness to the broader church that a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience is extraordinarily beautiful and ought to attract smaller-version imitators among us who do not or cannot go all the way.
In this study guide on the Sayings, I write as one attracted to such a life, committed to imitating it insofar as a married person with children and academic and journalistic reputations to maintain can do so. I write for those interested enough in this oddly ancient, oddly relevant form of living to take up and read. My hope is finally for new and faithful forms of life to spring up in such unexpected places as mainline and evangelical Protestant lives, as befits a Lord who can make streams in the desert.
This Study Guide will follow the same pattern as our previous guide on Augustine’s Confessions.11 Hopefully, all participants can use the Penguin edition, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks.12 We expect groups to read along, for it is the ancient Christian texts that provide the nourishment here; this guide is only the seasoning. Or to shift the metaphor, these pages offer spectacles through which to view the texts. In them I will try to clarify what might confuse, and to draw attention to what might otherwise be missed. The questions at the end of each chapter are meant as points of departure for fuller discussion among yourselves about how to perceive God in these ancient texts, and how to live accordingly. A bibliography provides further resources.
Questions
1. What’s your initial impression with those who take monastic vows? With monasteries? How have those been formed? (experience? popular depiction in art? reading?).
2. Are there other settings, besides anything religious, in which you have experienced God in silence? Or in the keeping of difficult promises?
1. Recent scholarship has suggested that some of the first monks may merely have been tax evaders! See William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10. Before an “anchorite” was a cloistered monk, anakechorekotes was a technical term regarding the tax status of those who had fled. It later came to mean “fleeing the world to become a monk.”
2. See Brian Daley, “1998 NAPS Presidential Address, Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999) 431–61.
3. That Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (San Diego: HBJ, 1948) had great resonance among Protestants as well as Merton’s fellow Catholics is evidenced by the many monastic vocations he inspired (including that of my grandmother). Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead, 1996) has had a similarly wide appeal—and this from a Protestant theologian and layperson. For an account of how evangelicals are returning to monastic resources see my article “The New Monastics: Alternative Christian Communities.” Christian Century, October 18, 2005, 38–47.
4. It is from Geoffrey Wainwright at Duke that I learned to speak of John Wesley as a sort of “evangelical catholic.”
5. Monastic life at Mepkin and in most other present-day monasteries reflects the sort of communal living that began with the work of such saints as Benedict and Cassian and flowered in the Middle Ages. The sort of desert monasticism reflected in the Sayings was rather different. It features mostly people living as hermits, near enough to one another to offer spiritual advice and challenge and to provide spiritual and material sustenance to one another. I reflect on my own experience not to suggest that fourth-century Egypt, medieval France, and present-day Mepkin Abbey are identical—far from it. They are linked, however, as they draw on many of the same forms of scriptural and patristic inspiration (the Sayings above all). I also move freely between these forms of life to suggest that living as the desert fathers recommend is, indeed, possible. People are presently doing something very much like it. I hope that churches such as my own United Methodist Church can reimagine new ways to integrate this advice into concrete forms of life. Harmless describes the monastic settlements at Scetis as a “colony of hermits” (175).
6. Available in four volumes as The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite (New York: Catholic, 1975).
7. I owe this story to Professor Peter Dula of Eastern Mennonite University.
8. To give just one example, Nancy Klein Maguire describes how the Carthusian monks of England rejected Henry VIII’s claim to headship over the church in England and paid for it with their blood. See An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).
9. For a description of monks who do, see my piece on Christ in the Desert Monastery at http://www.thematthewshouseproject.com/criticism/columns/jbyassee/pilgrimage.htm.
10. Benedict, Saint, Abbot of Monte Cassino, The Rule of St. Benedict, trans. Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Maestro (New York: Image, 1975).
11. Jason Byassee, Reading Augustine: A Guide to the Confessions (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2006).
12. Benedicta Ward, trans., The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin, 2003).
I. Progress in Perfection
o One doesn’t have to read long in the Sayings to realize that these people were serious! There is a severity to desert spirituality not less intense than that of the weather in Upper Egypt. Christians fled to the desert to avoid the