RBL Binns History Monasticism

RBL 03/2021 John Binns The T&T Clark History of Monasticism: The Eastern Tradition London: T&T Clark, 2020. Pp. xii + 253. Hardcover. $115.00. ISBN 9781788317610. Robert A. Kitchen Sankt Ignatios College John Binns has lived and studied in the midst of Eastern Christian monasticism for decades. Beginning with a study of the monasteries of Palestine (1994), then an introduction to the histories, cultures, and theologies of the Christian Orthodox Churches (2002), and most recently a history and characterization of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia (2016), Binns has surveyed the expansive panorama of the phenomenon of monasticism in Eastern Christianity—which he reminds readers is where it all began—and now recaps the whole story from the beginning to today. While his survey is segmented by regions, time periods, and languages, Binns weaves a flowing, interconnected narrative. The relatively modest length of the volume belies a dense layer of detail: holy men and women, deserts and deserted places, caves and cells and monasteries, theological and political conflicts. However, Binns’s retelling flows naturally as each distinctive piece, phase, and innovation seems to build into the other. Naturally, he begins with the first monk, but it is not who one might think. That is, the first named person labeled in a literary work as a monk is an Egyptian named Isaac who in 324 along with a deacon rescued a Greek writer from robbers. But what is a monk? Four principal ascetical themes are defined and illustrated: withdrawal, continence, fasting and food, and possessions. These practices mold would-be monks into countercultural lifestyles, directing them toward distinctive roles in the surrounding society. The This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. creation of a unique environment and space in the desert and later other nondesert locations inspired new kinds of human existence: the startling difference celibacy and virginity evoke in human relationships; the care of the poor out of one’s own poverty; a redefinition of what it means to own and share; and fasting as a discipline in which the poor can fully share. It did begin in Egypt, Binns asserts, and he sketches four primary pioneers of Egyptian monasticism. Antony is the first monk (for everyone except Jerome, who wrote about Paul of Thebes, whom Antony would visit at the former’s death). Antony was the consummate solitary, and then Pachomios conceived of and organized cenobitic or communal monasteries, which understood the quest for the spiritual life as not solely an individual venture. Shenoute was the rough-edged abbot and exemplar of Egyptian monastic life as it matured in the fifth century. Binns includes a nonmonk in the making of monasticism: Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius not only recognized and defended the worth of monasticism at a time when most prelates were suspicious of the monks’ independence but also wrote The Life of Antony, which among its widespread influences triggered Augustine’s conversion through a Latin translation. Egypt was the model that others first imitated, not only with the history and writing of these figures just noted, but through the dissemination of the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Fathers, over a thousand short stories and aphorisms of encounters with the Egyptian “desert fathers.” Compiled according to several literary principles, these pithy sayings were translated from their original Greek into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopic—which proved to be perfect for memorization and meditation by countless later monks. Binns’s depiction of the integration of monasteries in agricultural communities demonstrates a symbiotic relationship that endeared and endowed the populace with this monastic innovation. Widening the picture to Syria, Binns also aligns the search for holiness with the social and physical environment. The wandering Messalians, or “pray-ers,” who rejected the institutional church and its sacraments for unceasing prayer, were nurtured in the mountains of Syria. These holy men, described poignantly by Theodoret of Cyrrhus and interpreted by Peter Brown, had a place and role in society in which they were engaged, not distanced, both protecting the poor and mediating and arbitrating legal disputes. Idiosyncratic methods of asceticism introduced by Simeon Stylites, sitting on a pillar for decades, and the anonymous holy fools who pretended to be insane while ministering to the lowest levels of society were by-products of the monastic impulse to withdraw, yet challenged society with a countercultural display of the gospel. Away from the desert and wilderness, Binns shifts to the domestic approach of several influential fourth-century personalities—Melania, Macrina, and her younger brother Basil of Caesarea—who initiated household-based regimens of piety and devotion that developed into a monastic rule and community—not a withdrawal per se but a commitment to the Greek philosophical life. After This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. becoming bishop, Basil’s model of leadership as the monk-bishop became dominant in most places, with some exceptions. The transition from the desert proper never fully happened, yet the next movement was during Constantine’s transformation of Christianity’s role in the Roman Empire, moving the capital to Constantinople. His mother Helena visited Jerusalem in 326, finding it “depopulated and diminished.” Her search for the True Cross resulted in the revival of Jerusalem not just as the Holy City but as a Christian city, soon full of pilgrimage sites. Jerusalem quickly became the central station of various manners of monasteries in the city environs, Palestine, Gaza and the Judean Desert. Binns offers numerous excurses in order to demonstrate how monasticism functioned. The impact and influence of wealthy women in the establishment of monasteries: again Helena, wife of Constantine, and mother and granddaughter, Melania the Elder and the Younger, who sponsored convents for women in the Jerusalem. A friend of the younger Melania was Eudocia, wife of Emperor Theodosius II, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and stayed to endow a number of monasteries in the area. A laura/lavra, a lane off of which were small houses and shops in Middle Eastern suqs, or markets, became the title for monasteries built in deep valleys and wadis where the monks lived and prayed in caves on the cliffs, the first being the Great Laura of Mar Saba in the Palestinian valley of Siloam. Eventually, a laura/lavra became a common name for a monastic community and building no matter what its physical surroundings and design were. The urban monasteries in Constantinople proliferated, shifting the paradigm of monastic location. Chief among these urban models was the monastery and rule of Alexander the Sleepless/Akoimetos, in which monks prayed in shifts around the clock, so that prayer never “slept.” The Akoimetoi approach adopted absolute poverty, which also inhibited monks from working. They were rejected by many but eventually became influential, widespread, and always controversial. Binns continues the story in Syria, where events in Constantinople have had a critical impact. Following the ascension of Justin I as emperor in 518, the decision of Chalcedon in 451 was declared the empire’s rule, and all anti-Chalcedonian clergy were evicted from their churches and sees. These clergy, the miaphysites who confessed One United Nature of Christ out of two natures, and their cause did not disappear. Binns uses the controversial term generally rejected today of monophysitism, or simply One Nature of Christ, in which the divine nature would logically dominate and suppress the humanity of Christ. John of Ephesus compiled The Lives of the Eastern Saints, biographies of miaphysite holy men and women, intended to encourage the anti-Chalcedonian remnant. Jacob Baradaeus, starting in the This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. 540s, circulated in the region and ordained thousands of new clergy and reestablished churches and monasteries in what became known as the Syrian Orthodox Church, the largest now of the Syrian Christian family. The nickname for the faithful of this church was the “Jacobites,” referring fondly to Baradaeus. Monasticism then traveled far, on to China as a result of multiple missionary ventures by the Church of the East, Syriac Christians originally living in Sasanian Zoroastrian Persia and later under Islamic government. The origins of Ethiopian Christianity begin in the fourth century with a young Syrian captive, Frumentius, convincing bishop Athanasius of Alexandria to ordain a bishop for the nation. Athanasius ordained Frumentius, beginning the practice of Coptic Egypt sending its own clergy to govern the Ethiopian church until 1959. In the sixth century, the “Nine Syrian Saints” came to Ethiopia to develop a vibrant monastic culture. Both stories are still questioned by scholars, but Ethiopian Christianity would exhibit the influences of Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic-speaking Christianity. In the Byzantine tradition, the establishment of the monasteries on Mount Athos, a mountainous peninsula jutting out from northeastern Greece into the Aegean Sea, presents the epitome of the monastic inclination—isolated, nearly physically inaccessible—yet developing into an international republic of monks where no female is allowed and centuries of renowned spiritual fathers have expressed the authoritative voice of Orthodox monastic spirituality. Binns traces its known beginnings to the ninth century, rapidly expanding to forty large monasteries by the mid-eleventh century. There were also smaller monasteries, as well as numerous hermits in even more remote locations. The population was becoming unmanageable, and a remarkable agreement was reached by a consortium of abbots and monasteries, called the Tragos (the goat, for it was written on a goat skin), which laid down formal rules for life and conduct across the mountain. Twenty monasteries were able to continue through most of the second millennium, but the political situations of the twentieth century weighed heavily upon Athos, especially the Russian Soviet government, which cut off the flow of monks from the north. Athos nearly died but revived steadily from the early 1970s, aided by a restructuring of the monastic systems on the mountain. Binns has packed in too much material—because there is too much material—for a review such as this, so passing over important phenomena cannot be avoided. Binns gives a picture of what monastic life consisted of theologically and organizationally. A lengthy chapter follows the trail of the hesychastic movement from Origen and Evagrius Ponticus, Macarius, John of the Ladder, Symeon the New Theologian, the prevalence of the Jesus prayer, and, finally, Gregory Palamas. But a distinctive phenomenon with which to conclude is Binns’s assessment of a book: the Philokalia (“the love of the beautiful/good”). This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. As Binns describes it, the Philokalia is a tradition rather than a book. It began as a collection of Greek Athonite writings on the Jesus prayer, published first in 1793 in Venice, a second edition in 1893, and finally a new Greek version in 1957. It was in Russian, however, that the work became popular with the equivalent title Dobrotolubiye. In 1881, a small book, The Way of the Pilgrim (English title), appeared about a young disabled peasant wandering in Russia, describing his spiritual journey utilizing the Jesus prayer and reading the Dobrotolubiye with the guidance of some spiritual fathers. The book promoted the hesychastic approach to prayer, and multiple translations widened its circle. The English translation was prepared by Geoffrey Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (4 vols., 1979–1995). The sales surprised the publishers and continued to show the appetite for this approach to the spiritual life, which had expanded well beyond the Greek and Russian confines of Mount Athos. After such a diverse pilgrimage, Binns’s conclusion could have been his introduction, but it works best at the end after one has scanned the panorama. He cites Seraphim of Sarov, “Achieve silence and thousands around you will find salvation.” As Binns has indicated by his excurses throughout this history, the paradox of these holy men and women is that in their search for silence and withdrawal, they inevitably found themselves in the middle of the life of the community. The monks/ascetics saw themselves as disciples and martyrs, in but not of the world, the most obvious way to live the gospel. This review was published by RBL ã2021 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home.