Download PDF | Jitse Dijkstra, Mathilde van Dijk - The Encroaching Desert_ Egyptian Hagiography and the Medieval West- (2006).
297 Pages
INTRODUCTION: THE ENCROACHING DESERT
In 1993, James Goehring published an important article entitled ‘The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt,’1 in which he unravels the myth presented by the early Christian sources that in Late Antiquity the Egyptian desert was filled with monks. Beginning with the metaphorical dichotomy between desert and city, Goehring shows that the “desert myth” was a literary construct in which holy men withdrew to the desert in massive numbers to renounce the world. The desert itself thus became a spiritual city, to paraphrase the famous words from the prototype of all saints’ lives, the Life of Antony. In this literary construct, the desert was needed to emphasize the spatial renunciation. Although the reality of early Egyptian monasticism was much more complex, “in the literary model, the desert encroached more and more on the portrayal of ascetic space.”2
After the first monks had wandered into the desert in the third century, it was Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria who around 356 CE created the literary model of the Egyptian desert hermit in his description of the life of Antony.3 This literary model was quickly imitated, and the resulting new works presented in turn new saints to imitate, which began an endless, self-generating process of literary production. Whether it was the Syrian or the Egyptian desert in which hermits first removed themselves from society in this way, is not of great concern for us here.4 It was the lives of the Egyptian desert fathers, as transferred through the works of admirers such as John Cassian in his Institutes and Conferences) and Latin translations (most notably, the translation of the Life of Antony and collections of desert father material such as the Vitae patrum), that subsequently circulated in the Latin West. Although the physical presence of the desert itself was absent, the desert myth of renunciation from the world proved particularly appealing, and it is well known that the Egyptian desert lure continued to influence western monastic thought throughout the Middle Ages.
This volume centers on the theme of Egyptian hagiography: in what contexts was it used in Late Antiquity, and how were its themes and motives transferred to and reused in the different contexts of the medieval West? Our study is not intended as an exhaustive study of Egyptian hagiography and its literary evolution in the medieval West, but as a series of case studies that underline the complexity of the ever-changing contexts in which the desert father material was interpreted. In this introduction, we would first like to offer some remarks on the origins of the workshop in order to show how this volume has taken shape. Second, we will give a brief overview of the various contributions. Initially, the plan for the workshop was rather modest, namely to invite David Frankfurter to Groningen. In 1998, he had published an important and thought-provoking book about religion in late antique Egypt, in which he presents a refreshingly new perspective on the transformation from the Ancient Egyptian religion to Christianity in Late Antiquity (fourth to sixth centuries).5 Far from describing how Christianity was imposed upon traditional local religion, Frankfurter looks at the interaction of Egyptian religion with Christianity on a local and regional level. In this “bottom up” approach, Frankfurter sees no swift “triumph” of Christianity over “paganism,” but rather a dynamic process of, what he calls, assimilation and resistance. According to Frankfurter, the process of transformation can even be seen in terms of the “resilience” of the traditional local religion of the countryside. In this way, the Christian “triumphalism” that has dominated the study of Egyptian religion in Late Antiquity for so long can definitively be discarded — at least in his opinion. Ever since its appearance eight years ago, Frankfurter’s book has evoked both praise and criticism.6
Although undoubtedly correct in its claim that the process of religious transformation in late antique Egypt was more complex than has been acknowledged thus far, not every scholar has agreed with Frankfurter’s interpretation of the sources. Being a historian of religions, Frankfurter naturally uses anthropological models and parallels to reconstruct local religious tradition. Another main source he uses is Egyptian hagiography, written in Greek and Coptic, a genre of which the usefulness as a historical source has often been disputed.7 Admittedly, Frankfurter duly recognizes the limitations of these sources for reconstructing traditional local religion, but they are still one of the main sources for his work. Whereas there has been ample discussion of Frankfurter’s interpretation of some specific passages in hagiographical works, the more fundamental discussion of the usefulness of Egyptian hagiography as a historical source has not yet occurred. That was why the firstmentioned guest editor, who was inspired by Frankfurter’s work when writing his Ph.D.-thesis on the religious transformation of the region of the First Cataract in southern Egypt in Late Antiquity, for which one of the main sources is a hagiographical text, the Coptic Life of Aaron, wished to invite Frankfurter to Groningen on the occasion of the public defense of his thesis.8 As two other specialists of Egyptian hagiography, Jacques van der Vliet and Peter van Minnen, were also attending the defense, they were asked to respond to the lecture by Frankfurter from the perspective of their own disciplines, Coptic studies and ancient history, respectively.
Speaking about his plans with the last-mentioned guest editor in the pleasant environment of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, the idea was formed to extend this symposium into a small workshop. As she was working on some biographers from the Devotio Moderna who made extensive use of the desert father material, she was particularly interested in other ways in which the Egyptian desert material was reused in the Middle Ages. We therefore decided to combine our interests and ask, in addition to the specialists in Egyptian hagiography, several medievalists to present their case studies at a two-day workshop. As a result this volume is divided into two different sections. The first section contains three papers and discusses the use of Egyptian hagiographical works as historical sources for late antique Egypt. The second section contains seven papers outlining different cases of reuse of the desert father material in the medieval West. This division was already apparent in the workshop. The first day started with a public key-note lecture by Frankfurter and was followed by the presentation and discussion of the papers by Van der Vliet and Van Minnen. Like all other papers, these had been precirculated and were already in an advanced stage of preparation, so that there was ample room for discussion.
The workshop itself was of a closed character, so that the first morning session was not open to the public. In the afternoon, we went on a guided tour of several fine examples of medieval village churches in the countryside of Groningen. The second day was entirely devoted to the Middle Ages. We began with a session on the Early Middle Ages (Leyser and Coon), followed by two sessions on the Later Middle Ages (Roest and Signori; Saak and Van Dijk). The day was rounded off with a concluding lecture by Arjo Vanderjagt and some final remarks by the guest editors. As the questions posed to the late antique material were different from the ones asked of the medieval material, at the end of the workshop it was felt that there was a need for a proper introduction to the essays on the medieval West after the section on Egyptian hagiography. We therefore invited Claudia Rapp to fill this gap, and her essay traces the concept of the desert from the Bible down to its transferal to the medieval West.
The articles that follow are arranged more or less chronologically. The first concerns the reuse of the desert fathers in the fifth- and especially the sixth-century West (Leyser), and the next the appropriation of Egyptian materials in the Carolingian West (Coon). The following essays cover two of the Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans (Roest) and the Augustinian Hermits (Saak). The volume concludes with case studies on the imitation and interpretation of the desert father material in several descriptions of the Swiss hermit Brother Klaus (Signori, a paper originally delivered in German) and in the biographers of the Regular Canons and Canonesses of Windesheim in the Low Countries (Van Dijk). These case studies are intended to offer a few examples of how medieval men and women reused the desert father material in widely different contexts. Other important cases, such as Irish monasticism, the Cistercians and the Dominicans will be left for future studies.9 Together the ten papers presented here constitute some snapshots of the use and reuse of Egyptian hagiography written by some of the foremost specialists in their fields.
They cover three major periods in history (Late Antiquity, the Early and Later Middle Ages) and well over a thousand years. In our opinion, the importance of this volume lies in the fundamental discussion of Egyptian hagiography as a historical source for the study of Late Antiquity and its contribution to the scholarship on the reception of the desert fathers in the Middle Ages. In general, the papers show from different perspectives and disciplines how the Egyptian desert kept encroaching upon literature, and even on architecture (see the article by Coon). Having given an overview of the origins of this book and its contents, let us now have a closer look at the papers individually. The first in a series of three articles discussing the use of Egyptian hagiography as a historical source is the essay by David Frankfurter, ‘Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion in Late Antique Egypt: Memories, Inventions, and Landscapes.’ In this essay, Frankfurter once more sets out his ideas about the use of hagiographical works for the reconstruction of local Egyptian religion. Despite their limitations because of biblical and literary distortions, what he calls with the words of the poet Marianne Moore “imaginary gardens,” he still thinks there are “real toads” in them. In the remainder of his paper, Frankfurter gives some examples of how these authentic details can be recovered from Egyptian hagiographical works. He argues that in some cases the landscape and gestures can preserve a significant amount of authentic memory.
On the other hand, he is hesitant about the authenticity of the representation of Ancient Egyptian priests in the sources. In the concluding part of the paper, Frankfurter defends the use of anthropological models and parallels for the interpretation of hagiography and applies this approach to two passages from Christian literary works. In the second paper, ‘Bringing Home the Homeless: Landscape and History in Egyptian Hagiography,’ Jacques van der Vliet continues on Frankfurter’s theme of authentic details in the landscape. In contrast, he actually sees the construction and reconstruction of a Christian landscape as one of the central functions of Egyptian hagiography and does not think that hagiographical works reflect historical processes of the past, but rather that they were attempts to explain and legitimize contemporary landscapes. He illustrates this point from the Coptic Martyrdom of Saint James the Persian, which postdates the Arab conquest of Egypt but relates events dating back to the fifth century, and the sixth-century Life of Aaron, which goes back to events in the fourth and fifth centuries. In between, Van der Vliet discusses shifting attitudes towards the cult of saints’ relics in several Egyptian monastic sources.
He ends by discussing the tradition of the Holy Family in Arab Egypt as an example of the later “rewriting” of the Christian landscape. The first series of articles is concluded with a paper by Peter van Minnen, ‘Saving History? Egyptian Hagiography in Its Space and Time.’ This paper most clearly diverges from Frankfurter’s ideas of Egyptian hagiography’s use for history. As an ancient historian, Van Minnen is actually highly skeptical of the use of hagiographical works in reconstructing traditional local religion. First of all he introduces a number of nuances in the prevalent view that Egyptian hagiography mainly consists of the lives of the desert fathers and that it was highly important in late antique society. In Egypt the impact of ascetics was dwarfed by that of martyrs and, generally speaking, hagiography was relatively unimportant. A second precaution is the muddled transmission of our sources, which often makes interpretation difficult. It is only occasionally that authentic details, called “nuggets” by Van Minnen, can be isolated, as in the case of the ascetic Apa Bane whose feature of having a troubled spine could be confirmed by the discovery of a skeleton with similar features during recent excavations. In most cases, Van Minnen argues, we are on less firm ground, since most saints’ lives were written at a time when “paganism” definitively belonged to the past, the second half of the fourth century and later.
This circumstance suggests to Van Minnen that rather than preserving “cultural memory” the authors of the hagiographical works used the texts available to them, most notably the Bible, and the landscape around them to explain the past, with which Van Minnen thus agrees on the latter point with Van der Vliet. According to Van Minnen, it is better to view Egyptian hagiography as a series of stories about how people were saved, in other words as “Salvation history.” This is a nice transition to the fourth article, Claudia Rapp’s ‘Desert, City, and Countryside in the Early Christian Imagination,’ which sets the scene for a series of six papers on the reuse of Egyptian hagiography in the medieval West. Rapp follows the concept of the desert from the Egypt of the Old Testament to the Judaean desert of the New Testament and back again to the Egyptian desert of early Christian hagiography. She agrees with Van Minnen that the early monastic project in Egypt may be conceived of as a means of seeking salvation and that Egyptian hagiography can thus be seen as “Salvation history.” Meanwhile, however, the concept of the desert was also dislocated from the specific location of the Egyptian desert and internalized, which means that the desert could also be sought elsewhere, outside of Egypt. This evolution is quite literally embodied by John Cassian who is generally regarded as the bringer of the Egyptian desert material to the West. If we think further along these lines, the desert could become a “typological landscape,” in which the concept merely stands for monastic retreat. Such a retreat could even become restricted to a small period of time as is evidenced by many of the important early Church fathers who retreated from public life to the “desert,” only to return as powerful Church officials. In this sense, the desert has become only a transitional phase in the spiritual formation of the Church fathers. Be this as it may, it was Cassian’s message of the desert as a lifelong struggle that penetrated the West.
The following article, by Conrad Leyser, discusses this reception in the fifth- and especially the sixth-century West. Whereas John Cassian has usually been contrasted with Augustine of Hippo, the former being represented as a passive transmitter of the Egyptian desert experience and the latter as a critic thereof, both shared a concern about the proper application of asceticism. The asceticism of the fifth- and sixth-century West can be perceived as an attempt to reconcile their solutions, Cassian emphasizing moral expertise and Augustine communal charity, that culminated in the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict. The initial enthusiasm over the arrival of the Egyptian desert experience in the West, such as at the island of Lérins near modern Cannes, under the influence of Cassian and Augustine, was tamed in the fifth century, only to emerge with more vehemence in the sixth. Leyser argues that in the hands of bishops such as Gregory of Tours, Caesarius of Arles, and Fulgentius of Ruspe the desert in fact became a key instrument for exerting episcopal authority in the sixth-century West. On the basis of the Life of the Jura Fathers, he also illustrates the revived interest in the desert on the part of sixth-century monastic communities. The next paper brings us to the Carolingians. In her paper ‘Collecting the Desert in the Carolingian West,’ Lynda L. Coon refutes the image that the Carolingians were passive collectors and demonstrates how in the ninth century they used the Egyptian desert material not only as a model to be imitated but also as a prelude to the asceticism of the West.
They did this by what is called in Ja≤ Elsner’s terminology an “aesthetic of bricolage,” that is, a careful control of the past by collecting, embodying, and displaying. Coon mentions three types of bricolage; literary, visual, and ritual bricolage, and thus she focuses not only on texts such as Eigil’s Life of Sturm, but also on architecture. A case in point, and perhaps the most telling example of Carolingian eclecticism, is the abbey of Fulda, in modern Germany, in which eastern and western relics were collected in the eastern and western crypts to symbolize the history of Christian asceticism. The next two papers concern the Mendicant Orders, and therewith we arrive in the Later Middle Ages. In the first essay, ‘The Franciscan Hermit: Seeker, Prisoner, Refugee,’ Bert Roest writes about the importance of the Egyptian desert experience for the Franciscan Order. Although in modern discussions of this and other orders the emphasis has often been on the pastoral and apostolic element, Roest argues that, from the beginning, the ascetic element also played a prominent role. In fact, the history of the orders can be viewed in terms of a constant tension between both elements. Roest first describes several instances of the flourishing ascetic movements in eleventh- and twelfth-century Italy. Within this framework, he then compares the Lives of Saint Francis of Assisi with its ultimate model, the Life of Antony by Athanasius, and analyzes the Rule for hermitages written by Francis himself. Yet, despite the retention of the eremitical tradition within the Franciscan Order, the tension with the pastoral and apostolic runs throughout its history and is traced until the early sixteenth century.
The second essay on the Mendicants is ‘Ex vita patrum formatur vita fratrum: The Appropriation of the Desert Fathers in the Augustinian Monasticism of the Later Middle Ages’ by Eric L. Saak. He argues that the Egyptian desert was still very much alive in the fourteenthcentury Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine, which appropriated the desert material for the sake of its own identity and mission. The chief architect of this process of appropriation was Jordan of Quedlinburg who with his Liber vitasfratrum and other works was highly influential within the Order until the early sixteenth century. Saak analyzes this text in detail and demonstrates how Jordan, inspired most of all by the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad fratres in eremo, traced back the origins of the Order to Paul of Thebes, the First Hermit, and its foundation to Augustine. Thus Jordan construed a version of the past that served as an explanation and a legitimization of the origins of the Order. The last papers are yet two further examples of the rich afterlife of the Egyptian desert of the Later Middle Ages, respectively, in Switzerland and the Low Countries. In the penultimate essay, ‘Nikolaus of Flüe († 1487): Physiognomies of a Late Medieval Ascetic,’ Gabriela Signori describes the different representations of the physical appearance of the fifteenth-century Swiss hermit Brother Klaus in a series of literary sources, from Jacob of Waltheym to Albrecht of Bonstetten. Rather than telling something about what Klaus really looked like, these texts show what the authors (and their public) expected him to look like. Signori argues that these expectations were inspired by a close reading of the lives of the desert fathers in the Vitae patrum.
The final paper, ‘Disciples of the Deep Desert: Windesheim Biographers and the Imitation of the Desert Fathers,’ by Mathilde van Dijk symbolically brings the volume to a close by returning to the editors’ home country, the present day Netherlands. In her contribution, Van Dijk looks at the influence of the Egyptian desert material on the Devotia Moderna, in particular on two works from the Chapter of Windesheim, De viris illustribus by John Busch and the sisterbook of Diepenveen, the former describing the lives of brothers, the latter of sisters from the two most important monasteries of the Chapter.
In the De viris illustribus, John Busch portrays his brothers as the new desert fathers, using the original fathers as models but at the same time adjusting his portrayals to the evolving ideas on the nature of true piety. Although there are many similarities in the sisterbook with Busch’s account of the brothers, the authors of the sisterbook were forced to deal with gender differences. Van Dijk suggests that the biographers’ representation of sin was less gendered than in the Vitae patrum and their emphatic stress on the inner person made the Diepenveen sisters more like their male counterparts.
The common thread that runs through these papers is the fact that they are all witnesses to the endurance of the desert myth. Leaving aside the question of the historical use of Egyptian hagiography, in itself highly important, the contributions on late antique Egypt demonstrate that in this period the desert material had already been appropriated to reflect the contemporary place and time. This is most clearly found in Van der Vliet’s contribution, who interprets, for instance, the Life of Aaron as an explanation and legitimization of a sixth-century Christian landscape. In the Middle Ages, the appropriation of desert father material from a contemporary perspective was essentially the same. For example, the Life of Aaron is reminiscent of the Augustinian Hermits’ attempt to explain and legitimize the existence of the Order by seeking its origins (Saak), although in both cases the point of departure, the specific time and place, is rather different. Here, then, we have come to the unifying theme of this volume, though a loose one (e pluribus unum): although the contexts in which the desert father material was interpreted may have been different, in each case it was appropriated to reflect the “here and now.” This does not mean that medieval people did not think highly of the desert fathers — far from it. For some sixth-century bishops, the desert fathers were an instrument of power (Leyser), and those same fathers played an important role in discussions about the direction the Franciscan Order should take (Roest). On the other hand, although in the abbey of Fulda the desert fathers were still important models to imitate, they had now become only part of a larger history of Christian asceticism (Coon).
The Windesheim brothers and sisters also closely imitated the ascetic behavior of their ancestors, but had to “translate” it to their daily lives (Van Dijk). In sum, each case discussed says something about a given time and place. The ways in which the appropriation was carried out also differed greatly. Thus we can see how the famous model of the Life of Antony is reused, as in the case of the Life of the Jura Fathers (Leyser) and the Lives of Francis (Roest), how themes and motifs are reused, as in Busch’s De viris illustribus (Van Dijk), or how even small details are reused, as in the different depictions of Brother Klaus (Signori). In addition to this literary level, the appropriation may finally manifest itself in material form, as in the abbey of Fulda, where the desert father material consisted quite literally of their relics (Coon). We hope to have illustrated that by investigating from a multidisciplinary point of view, with its differing perspectives, the complex process of the recycling of the desert myth can be laid bare, be it in late antique Egypt, early medieval France or Germany, or later medieval Italy, Switzerland or the Low Countries. Many more studies are still needed to fill in the lacunae of the vast and complicated reception of the desert fathers, which had such a large impact on late antique and medieval literature and architecture. The concept of the Egyptian desert may have started out as a myth, but it soon became a daily reality for the many men and women who aspired to true piety. The value of the study of the desert father material lies in what its appropriation says about those people.
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