Ambivalence about the Angelic Life: The Promise and Perils of an Early Christian Discourse of Asceticism

The equation of the ascetic life with "the angelic life" permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians; indeed, contemporary scholars often use this same discourse as shorthand for the ascetic movement in Christianity. While the analogy between renunciation and angels began as an inventive exegetical extension of a gospel story, it found traction among the fourth-century bishops who were pressed to make sense of new ascetic movements in their territories. Those in late ancient renunciatory communities knew that lay Christians referred to them as "living the angelic life," and community members put this trope to use among themselves: by envisioning angels as a constant audience for their practices, ascetics created and sustained the boundaries between their communities and the world. Imagining ascetic communities to be places where angels could appear at any moment also created constructive solutions for the sometimes difficult navigation between the strict ideal of perfection in virtue and the flexibility demanded by life in community. At the same time, angelic appearances generated their own difficulties on occasion—both conflicts of authority and crises of identity. Far from an entirely positive identification, being thought of as living "the angelic life" was a prospect received in ascetic literature with ambivalence, and at times disdain. Near the end of the fourth century, a small group of monks from Palestine traveled to Egypt, there to observe the way of life of the ascetics living in the desert. One of the travelers gave an account of the journey and the wonders he beheld, which begins:

I saw many fathers living the angelic life as they went forward in the imitation of our divine savior, and I saw other new prophets who have attained a divine state by their inspired and wonderful and virtuous way of life. As true servants of God, they do not worry about any earthly matter or consider anything temporal, but while dwelling on earth in this manner they have their citizenship in heaven.¹

This is the opening to the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto which is only one of a large number of texts from Christian antiquity that utilize the special lens of the "angelic life" for viewing the feats of those ascetics who renounced sex, family, and food to adopt a new lifestyle. The equation of the ascetic life with the angelic one is a theme that permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians.

It also permeates twentieth-century scholarly treatments of asceticism in late antique Christianity. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, at least four monographs and twice as many articles on this topic appeared in French and German, the majority of which attempted to account for the novelty of the ascetic movement by asserting that the imitation of angels was the driving force of this new development three hundred years after the life of Jesus.² Perhaps the most well-known of these studies is Karl Suso Frank's 1964 work ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΟΣ ΒΙΟΣ: Begriffsanalytische und Begriffsgeschictliche Untersuchung zum "engelgleichen Leben" im frühen Mönchtum.³ It argues that early Christian ascetics understood themselves, even in the smallest facets of their practice, to be imitating angels. Peter Nagel in his 1966 book, Die Motivierung der Askese in der alten Kirche und der Ursprung des Mönchtums, came to a complementary conclusion, having searched for an origin of the Christian ascetic movement and finding it in the idea of enacting the angelic life.⁴ While the heyday of studies of this "angelic life" was over in the late 1960s, the trope did not drop out of circulation entirely. More recent scholarly work, particularly in English, also references early Christian ascetics as those who live the "angelic life." Robin Lane Fox's popular book, Pagans and Christians, dedicates an entire chapter to asceticism with the title "Living like Angels."⁵ A scholar no less impressive than Peter Brown discusses Syriac ascetics under the rubric "These are our angels" in his book about late antique asceticism, The Body and Society.⁶ Robin Darling Young uses the angelic life as a...