Book Review: Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Abstract

Ascetic Culture: Essays Honor of Philip Rousseau. Edited by Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. xiii + 414 pp. $68.00 (cloth).Festschrifts can be like a pillowcase filled with Halloween candy: some treats you can't wait to eat, some are okay, and some you hand off to or trade with your younger sibling. The editors of this volume honoring Philip Rousseau, who has been writing on late antique asceticism and wider-ranging topics for forty-five years and whose curiosity is insatiable and his industry steady (p. 4), have supplied several generations of scholars not only with pillowcases but with plenty of treasured goodies. The editors and contributors to Ascetic Culture offer essays admiration and gratitude for many ways which his distinctive scholarly vision has shaped our field and his exemplary, generous friendship has supported our common Ufe (p. 8). The essays gathered here are wide-ranging both time and place and methodology; for scholars field of early Christian asceticism, book concludes with fascinating fieldwork essays on Adolf Hamack and Paleontological Layer of Church History by Claudia Rapp and From East to West: Christianity, Asceticism, and Nineteenth-Century Protestant Professors America by Elizabeth A. Clark.Ascetic Culture is divided into four sections. The first, Books as Guides, explores circulation of written texts and Egyptian monastic reading programs (p. 5), including essays on Pachomius, Antony, and Athanasius. Part II, Disciplines and Arenas, looks at the topic of disciplinary culture a variety of ascetic contexts (p. 5), such as early Byzantine monasticism and pious household of Macrina. In Part III, Landscapes (with Figures), essayists consider imaginary landscapes and ascetic self-fashioning (p. 6) early Christian Egypt, sermons of John Chrysostom, and writings of Evagrius of Pontus. The final two essays mentioned above Part IV, Founding Field, conclude volume. Taken together, editors conclude their summary of books contents, these essays bear witness to vitality of ascetic culture late antiquity (p. 7). Here by necessity I will focus on only a few of pieces that, their quests and questions they raise, may interest readers of this journal.The Life of Antony Egypt by Malcolm Choat, found Part I, raises several longstanding concerns about scholarly field of early Christian monasticism. Choat accepts that the purpose of Life [is] to establish orderly hierarchies leading toward ecclesiastical authority (p. 51). A reader who is not an adept field, and perhaps even one who is, could conclude here that Athanasius had no interest at all spirituality or inner life of his famous monk. The context of a work, of course, is vitally important for our understanding of text; as saying has it, text without context is pretext. For example, essay that follows Choat's, Apologetics of Asceticism: The Life of Antony and Its Political Context, Samuel Rubenson concludes by placing Life in shared intellectual culture of emerging monasticism, neo-Pythagorean revival, and Alexandrian theological and philosophical tradition (p. …