Visiting and News: Gossip and Reputation-Management in the Desert 1

Abstract

Visiting and News: Gossip and Reputation-Management in the Desert1 Maud Gleason (bio) Despite the ideology of solitude for which its anchorites were celebrated, the Egyptian desert was, in its way, a busy place, teeming with uninvited guests. Colleagues, potential disciples, clergy, and lay visitors (not to mention demons) might appear outside one’s cell at any time. The eremetic context was surprisingly rich in the challenges posed by human relationships. Graham Gould has given us a valuable exploration of the spiritual dimensions of these challenges.2 My goal in this article is to examine the social behavior of the holy men of the Apophthegmata patrum, anchorites and semi-anchorites who explicitly eschewed the structured life of the cenobium. Though the bond between master and disciple is probably the relationship most often studied,3 here we shall look at other relationships: the interactions of hosts and guests, the encounters, occasionally at cross-purposes, of one abba with another, and the delicate task awaiting those attempting to provide unsolicited guidance to aspirants not formally their disciples. I have been particularly concerned to look for traces of the making and management of reputations in this environment. The desert’s most highly evolved holy men conducted themselves with a simplicity and [End Page 501] panache that can be construed either as a total lack of self-consciousness or as a seamless fit into a stylized role. Whether we choose to see unself-consciousness or stylization probably depends on our own views about the possibility of spiritual perfection. But what of the aspirants, the monks whose perfection was still in the making? We need to become more aware of how they lived out their askesis self-consciously, with half an ear cocked to the responses of others. This paper takes a closer look at the role that gossip played in this process. Gossip in the desert? Though what we might call the “hagiographic imperative” has purged the surviving apophthegmata of unedifying content,4 the sayings of the Old Men that have come down to us traveled by the same pathways as the exchange of news on less elevating topics. The corpus is littered with prohibitions against gossip—, defined by their nonspiritual content, and slander, , defined by its disparaging tone.5 The tension between the ideal of impassivity and the reality of competitiveness was perpetual. How, in an ascetic context, where the most minute interaction with one’s physical environment was charged with spiritual significance, could one dismiss as mere such fascinating tidbits as “Abba so-and-so and his disciples use oil twice a week”? How, in an environment in which each aspirant was closely monitoring his own progress, could monks fail to be interested in the progress of others? Although the preserved sayings of the old men uniformly disparage gossip, we should not conclude that the monks’ indulgence in it was perverse: the practice of gossip was in fact a vital part of the desert experience because gossip generates shared meanings. Gossip constituted part of the acculturative process of desert monasticism, the unacknowledged counterpart to the laconic paradigm supplied by the old men. As a sociologist would put it, gossip is “a process of applying abstract principles to the complex reality of daily life . . . to generate shared interpretations of the moral meaning of events.”6 Gossip transforms [End Page 502] events into stories, and stories shape a community’s memories of itself.7 A monk who shared a piece of information in gossip may indeed have been promoting a private agenda or trying to enhance his personal reputation,8 but the essential fact is that he framed his communication in terms of what he felt to be the values of the group, and in so doing became part of the process of articulating the values of ascetic culture. Let us assume that those who pursued their askesis in the desert as anchorites and disciples constituted a de facto society. When we examine the social behavior of these indomitable individuals, the corpus of their sayings and stories yields evidence of two processes characteristic of social groups: status negotiation and behavioral regulation. Gossip played a critical role in both. To claim first of all...