Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age by Christine Luckritz Marquis Daniel F. Caner Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age. By Christine Luckritz Marquis. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2022. Pp. 224. $65.00. ISBN: 9780812253627.) “When Scetis was laid desolate, he left crying, saying, ‘The world has lost Rome, and the monks Scetis’” (Apoph. patr. coll. alph. Arsenius 21). Readers of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers will be familiar with their nostalgic tone and vague historicizing. Most scholars have followed Hugh Evelyn-White’s explanation that such anecdotes ultimately look back to the abandonment of the original monastic desert communities of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis in northwest Egypt after three successive “barbarian” raids in the early fifth century. Those mentioning the death of a desert father named Moses and his disciples during a barbarian attack would seem to support that reconstruction. Marquis, however, argues that we have been misled by deliberate efforts of the later monks who crafted the Sayings collections in Palestine to forget the gang violence that Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria instigated against the settlements in 401 A.D., due to their regard for Origen and protection of Origenist monks. The collections themselves are not anti-Origenist, Marquis maintains, but seek to construct a more comfortable, if still remorseful, remembrance of a ruined utopian experiment. “Through memory sanctions and nostalgia, emerging out of and in response to acts of violence, the Sayings collections became textualized, portable images of a paradise lost” (p. 156). [End Page 792] This is a deeply researched, heavily theorized, fascinating, and provocative book. I am not entirely persuaded by its historical contention that stories of barbarian attacks against the monk Moses were constructed to displace memories of episcopal violence, or that Evelyn-White’s reconstruction should be dismissed as pure speculation: Sayings quoted by Marquis herself refer to a series of attacks (“first,” p. 115; “third,” p. 117), and ancient towers at the sites, though not securely dated, indicate the possibility of them happening.1 Indeed, the sentences in the last chapters of Marquis’ book are full of speculations and conditional constructions (e.g., “quite plausibly would have,” p.145). Yet her reasoning is always cogent, and in any case, there are really two books here. Her first three chapters, on the desert in the monastic imagination, on psalmody and prayer as ascetic weapons, and on the problematic role of memory in monastic training, will be essential reading for those interested in understanding early monastic culture. This is because of their novel focus on the theme of violence. Marquis made me appreciate how extensively this culture was infused by imagery and instructions involving or promoting violence, against oneself as much as against one’s demons. Such emphasis could, of course, lead to fanaticism and mob violence, but what Marquis brings out (partly by using her own translations of Greek, Coptic, and Syriac Sayings, whose force has been softened and obscured by other translators) is how intrinsic such language was not only to traditional educational practices but also to the Psalms, to Evagrian theories, and to the ways monks were taught to imagine how to transform themselves and their desert from an abode of demons to one of angels. Marquis then relates all this to practices of damnatio memoriae against idols both internal and external. It is a shame that this central theme of the book is not signaled in its title, because it explores episodes and dimensions of late antique religious violence that have been ignored by recent scholarship on the subject. Daniel F. Caner Indiana University Bloomington Footnotes 1. Hjalmar Torp, “Murs d’enceinte des monastères coptes prímitifs et couvents-fortresses,” École française de Rome. Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 76 (1964), 173–200. Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press