Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity by Andrew Crislip (review)

Andrew Crislip’s first book, From Monastery to Hospital (2005), gave us a history of health care and its development in late antique monastic communities. Focused primarily on the issue of healing, the evidence, read historically, painted a fascinating picture of the medical realities confronted in monastic life, their impact on that life, and the solutions offered in response. In Thorns in the Flesh, Crislip moves beyond the realities of disease and healing to examine the more figurative meanings of illness in late antique monasticism and its sources. He employs modern theory to shed light on the discourse of ascetic illness, which he shows to be varied, unstable, and occasionally contentious.

The volume is well thought out and organized. Following a brief introduction (chapter one), five chapters explore the meanings of illness that emerge in select sources of the late ancient monastic movement. These include three early letter collections (chapter two: Monastery of Hathor papyri, Letters of Pachomius, and Letters of Antony), select hagiographies (chapter three: Life of Antony, Life of Paul, and Life of Onnophrius), later collections of letters, rules, and treatises (chapter four: Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius of Pontus, Jerome, and the Life of Syncletica), the Great Coptic Life of Pachomius (chapter five), and Barsanuphius and John’s letters of spiritual direction (chapter six). It is unfortunate that Shenoute’s works could not be included, though the reason behind it, namely, the unfinished state of the critical edition, makes sense. We can only hope that the edition will soon appear.

The chapters quickly underscore the diverse and contentious nature of the discourse. While the texts from Hathor reveal simple concern for the health of the letters’ ascetic recipients, Pachomius finds greater theological and moral import in the sick, who supply an opportunity for the healthy to enact the federation’s communal ideals. The Letters of Antony, on the other hand, interpret sickness and health in the broader framework of salvation history. While the terms function symbolically in the Letters as ciphers for the mind and its struggle with the passions, Athanasius embodies them in his Life of Antony. He portrays the saint’s preternatural health as physical evidence of his ascetic merit, which connects him in turn with the health of Adam before the fall. While the impact of Athanasius’s view is well known, Crislip underscores the contentious ground on which it stood. Jerome’s Life of Paul challenges the portrayal by depicting Antony as weaker than Paul; the Life of Onnophrius moves the “healthy” paradise of desert asceticism out of reach; and Evagrius of Pontus, who favored moderation, singles Antony out “as an especially dangerous exemplar” (100). As a final example, in one of the most original and insightful readings in the book, Crislip shows how the Coptic author of the Great Life of Pachomius interpreted Pachomius’s chronic illness as an essential part of the story, “as fundamental to his identity as a saint as Antony’s health is to his” (137). One finds here authors who opposed exces sive asceticism and viewed the choosing of sickness as a threat to the ascetic life (Basil and Evagrius), and others who read the trials of illness as a form of ascetic practice (Life of Syncletica). The final chapter, which focuses on Barsanuphius and John’s lengthy exchange with the sick monk Andrew, sets the conflicted discourse into a real life setting, where the struggle for interpretation was ongoing, varied according to the need, and often enough ineffective. It supplies an ideal end to the presentation, bringing as it does the theoretical discourse on illness into direct contact with the existential reality of the sick monk.

One sets this book down with an appreciation for the complex readings of illness in late ancient ascetic circles, a complexity born in the end of the human predicament. Similar views are evident in biblical stories that, as Crislip notes, informed monastic readings, as well as...