Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

748 25. monasticism
their compositions. These authors were more settled, wedded to the interests
of particular institutions, with access to libraries, albeit modest. They
worked in an atmosphere of enquiry, even scholarship; and their books
were preserved precisely by the survival of the physical resources upon
which they depended. 5
We have to be on our guard, therefore, not to confuse the development
of the literature itself with the development of forms of the ascetic life. A
suspicion, for example, that disjointed anecdotes, passed orally from
hermit to hermit, found their way eventually into the libraries of complex
communities is in any case a simplistic assessment of the surviving texts
and dangerously wedded to the notion that those texts reflect directly the
changing social patterns of the world that produced them. So, for example,
when Cyril describes a ‘return to the cities’ on the part of Palestinian monks
– a development described below – we should not imagine that all monks
in Palestine viewed their world in that way or shared in his delight. 6
When we do try to explain either the pace or the direction of development
in ascetic society, the lasting and, at times, paradoxical popularity of
Egyptian-based literature can tempt us to adopt a diffusionist view, taking
Egypt as the fount and all other places as dependent. Certainly, Egypt came
to occupy a special place in the Christian understanding of asceticism; and
its practices were adopted more and more elsewhere, supplanting local and
in some cases ancient traditions. That did not happen, however, simply by
transporting the ‘rules’ of Pachomius or any other prescriptive text to
different parts of the empire. By the early years of the fifth century, the
legacy of Pachomius, originating in the Thebaid, had in any case been
modified by his disciples and by transmission northwards within Egypt
itself. Besa’s Life of Shenoute, for example, whatever the attachment of its
hero to rigorous order, shows him operating happily within an ascetic
society quite loose in structure and tolerant of mobility, at one moment
loving solitude, at another in contact with the secular world: more akin to
what we find in Rufinus, Palladius and the Sayings of the Fathers, and sympathetic
to the traditions of the north. There is revealing irony in the fact that
a man of Shenoute’s character, recommending the practices he did, could
claim the heritage of Pachomius, from whom, in fact, he differed enormously
both in spirit and in monastic discipline. 7
Similar caution will temper our view of early Palestinian asceticism.
Hilarion – supposedly a Palestinian pioneer, made famous by Jerome in a
5 Binns (1994) 57f.
6 For the phrase and its significance, together with appeal to the idiosyncratic character of church
life in Scythopolis, see Binns (1994) 121f.
7 Besa, Vita Shenoudi (CSCO Script. Copt. 16) 119, 123, 144, 173. Shenoute died at an extremely
advanced age, probably in a.d. 466. A useful and fully documented account is provided by Elm (1994)
296–310.
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