Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

monasticism 747
spiritual values, effective practices and hallowed or authentic genealogies.
Biographies could serve that reflective purpose also, as well as treatises on
virtue or prayer. Finally, any extended text could then be broken up again,
and pasted piecemeal within the rolling narratives of the ascetic world.
The classic example of such development we have mentioned already –
the Sayings of the Desert Fathers or Apophthegmata Patrum. As they stand in our
printed editions, the Sayings date from a period at least a little later than that
studied here. In addition to preserved elements of an originally oral tradition,
gathered from a range of places, but in the first instance, perhaps,
from Egyptian exiles in Palestine, they included brief extracts from longer
Lives, some of which we possess, and collections of embryonic ‘rules’. It is
possible to observe, also, not least by reference to independently preserved
though shorter collections, some of the staggered phases through which
the literary accumulation of the Sayings themselves progressed. 2 In the
matter of ‘rules’ more generally, the work of Jerome on Pachomius and of
Rufinus on Basil, when compared with later compilations, demonstrate the
piecemeal way in which at first such guidance was formulated and dispersed:
an impression corroborated in biographical accounts. 3
A readiness to add moss to such rolling stones did not die out in later
periods. John Moschus is the best example (died 619). He travelled widely,
collecting stories about ascetics here and there; but he did not attempt to
build, on the strength of that, an integrated picture of the religious life. To
some extent he reflected thereby the conditions of his age. By then, monastic
communities were less bound together under the banners of theological
party than they had been earlier in the sixth century, and more
threatened by the newer and rather different pressure of Persian aggression.
4 The central motive in Moschus’ work (as, perhaps, in the
Apophthegmata before him) was to record, as quickly as possible and as confusedly
as might be necessary, a way of life that seemed at any moment
likely to disappear. It is ironic that such improvisation in the face of apparent
decline should contribute, within the framework of monastic literature
as a whole, to a reversal of the process, whereby values challenged in the
sixth-century setting could be recollected and admired with almost canonic
tranquillity in the more assured circumstances of later Byzantine monasticism.
Turning back to what Moschus might have regarded as the secure
heyday of the ascetic movement, as recorded earlier in the sixth century by
Cyril of Scythopolis and John of Ephesus, we sense at once that we are
dealing with texts more consciously governed by a thesis (largely doctrinal),
even if anecdote and hitherto scattered literary sources can be detected in
2 The best existing introduction is Guy (1962); but the forthcoming edition of the Sayings by Chiara
Faraggiana will carry interpretation much further forward.
3 The development of the Basilian ‘rules’ is the best documented, by Gribomont (1953).
4 Binns (1994) 49.
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