Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (review)

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the way scholars understand and interpret early Christian monasticism. In the wake of the ground-breaking work of social historian Peter Brown, a generation of scholars has emerged for whom the study of Christian monasticism must be approached with a critical awareness of, among other things, issues of gender, power, and social construction. Although this methodological shift has sometimes resulted in a reductionistic reading of monastic experience, it has for the most part yielded a richer, more varied and textured understanding of the early monastic world than we have had before. David Brakke is among the most gifted of this new generation of scholars and is already well known in the field for his astute and original reading of the monastic ethos of Athanasius of Alexandria (Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism [Oxford, 1995]). Brakke turns his considerable skill here to a subject of crucial importance for understanding early Christian monastic spirituality: the monk's battle with the demons.

It is the singular contribution of this outstanding book to lay bare the roots of this important idea and to delineate the astonishing range of expressions to which it gave rise in early monasticism. One of the virtues of Brakke's disciplined historical analysis is that we come to see that neither "spiritual combat," nor "demons" meant one thing in early monastic experience. Rather, there were intricate and subtle differences between and among different authors, schools, and monastic traditions concerning what it meant to struggle with demons. It is Brakke's stated aim to investigate the idea of "spiritual combat" in all its complexity and variety, to understand how theological assumptions, ecclesial location, philosophical orientation, literary genre and other matters affected this crucial idea. But if Brakke is a careful historian, he is not historicist; that is, he is not interested only in situating the idea of "spiritual combat" historically. He wants to interpret it, understand how it came to expression in a range of genres and settings. He wants to understand what it meant to the early Christian monks to struggle in this way, with the demons, with God, with oneself. And if he cautions us against importing anachronistic ideas about contemporary psychology into our reading of the early monastic understanding of the demons (about which I will say more below), he neither underestimates nor dismisses the power of the demonic in early Christian monastic life. One might well characterize this work as "historical-phenomenological" in its outlook.

The book is divided into two main sections. Part I, "The Monk in Combat," consists of an excellent introductory chapter that lays out the main thematic and theoretical issues of the book, and in-depth analyses of works by or about some of the key figures from the early monastic movement—Antony of Egypt, Evagrius of Ponticus, Pachomius, and Shenoute. Part II, charmingly entitled "War Stories," engages in analysis of key thematic issues arising from the monks' experience of struggle with the demons: the diversity of stories and literary genres through which tales of spiritual battle came to expression in the first few generations of monastic life (Brakke considers the distinctive stories through which the History of the Monks, the Lausic History and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers imaged and configured spiritual battle); the image of the Ethiopian, through which fears connected to racial and sexual otherness came to be crystallized in the early monastic mind; the complex and ambiguous use of gender to render the demonic; and the role of the demonic in framing the ever shifting debate between Christian monastics and their pagan counterparts.

This brief summary hardly does justice to the complexity and depth of Brakke's analysis of the texts and figures from the early monastic tradition, or to the real theoretical sophistication that he brings to bear upon his interpretation of this material. But it does reveal something of...