Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis Dana Robinson Christine Luckritz Marquis Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022 Pp. 212. $65.00. Death of the Desert begins and ends with a single incident: Theophilus of Alexandria's raid on the monks of Nitria and the expulsion of the Tall Brothers in 401 c.e. In the pages between, we are guided through an exploration of multiple modes of violence: prayer and psalmody as weapons against demonic powers, memory sanctions as violent erasures toward others and toward the self, and the Roman discourse of "barbarians" and the boundaries of empire as real and rhetorical violence toward the imagined Other. All these modes coincide in Theophilus's raid and in the ways it was later remembered; in Luckritz Marquis's reading, this moment was the real end of any monastic Golden Age and the beginning of a selective rehabilitation of memory that in itself did violence to the monastic past. Luckritz Marquis frames the project by arguing that the Sayings of the Desert Fathers cannot be taken as straightforward historical witnesses for events of the late fourth and early fifth centuries and, perhaps more controversially, that fourth-century witnesses such as Palladius, Cassian, Rufinus, and Theophilus himself are more valuable despite (or because of) their political, personal, and theological entanglements. Most pointed of all is her claim that many modern scholars of this period have been so formed by colonialism that they are uncritically ready to accept fifth- and sixth-century claims that the monastic Golden Age was violently brought to an end by outsider, "barbarian" attack. Instead, she suggests, the built-in violence of Christian asceticism and Roman imperialism created the conditions under which Theophilus's violent raid served as flashpoint. The individual chapters strike out into a varied landscape of theoretical discourses while attempting to keep the overall trajectory in view—an organizational challenge, especially given current expectations that book chapters should [End Page 259] function as reasonably free-standing units. Luckritz Marquis provides summaries of the argument at the beginning and end of each chapter, which is helpful for the reader to keep track of the multiple layers of analysis as they unfold, but can also produce a repetitive feel for a reader of the whole book. But this is a complaint about how current publishing conventions push authors in unfortunate formulaic directions, not about Luckritz Marquis's argumentative coherence, which is strong throughout. Chapter One treads some familiar ground regarding the desert as a locus of ascetic imagination, but raises the stakes by casting the relationship between monk-settlers and demon-inhabitants as one of violent colonization. This violence extends to the ascetic body, as monks attempt to transform both self and desert. Despite the usual contextualization of Theophilus's raid as part of the Origenist controversy (and the book blurb highlighting this context), the immediate theological stakes of this dispute remain subordinate to the political and rhetorical. Origen's thinking itself surfaces only in this chapter's discussion of demonic bodies (although his influence through Evagrius is also clearly present). Chapter Two takes up the subject of prayer and psalmody, again through the lens of violence and materiality. Prayers are weapons against the demons, but they are also instruments of divine violence against the self. Luckritz Marquis turns to Evagrius and Cassian on pure prayer and angelic bodies, portrayed with images of fiery transformation in the later retrospective of the Sayings. The monk in states of true prayer becomes fire, with all its purifying and destructive potentialities. Thus "divinized embodiment was understood as inherently violent" (72). Chapters Three and Four turn to the relationship between ascetic training and modes of violence against human others. The mapping of internal and external violence becomes even sharper in Chapter Three, which identifies parallels between the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, the violent Christian destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria (instigated by Theophilus), and monastic memory training. Chapter Four turns to the Roman discourse of the "barbarian" Other and...