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

This outstanding book well deserves to be read by more than one audience, and among those for whom it holds particular relevance are historians of magic. Scholars of religion in late antiquity will perhaps not be surprised by the argument that monasticism and demonology developed in tandem, particularly if they recall Peter Brown’s famous dictum that the early monks viewed demons much the way we view bacteria, as a ubiquitous infection. Readers of Athanasius’s Life of Antony will hardly be startled to learn how centrally important demons are to this influential text, or to find that this hagiographic landmark was not unique in its emphasis on demons. But even a reader familiar with all this will surely still gain a deeper understanding from Brakke’s book of how demonology functioned in texts that respond to different contexts and manifest different views of the ascetic life. And historians of magic will find the book relevant to their work in both a broader and a narrower way.

The first part of Brakke’s book (“The Monk in Combat”) deals with the major figures of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism, known mainly from single-author accounts that reflect distinctive approaches to asceticism and demonology: Antony (“the new martyr and holy man”), Evagrius Ponticus (“the Gnostic”), Pachomius (“the vigilant brother”), and Shenoute (“the prophet”). If there is special novelty here, it comes from Brakke’s exploitation of the newly reassembled corpus of Shenoute, who emerges as a fascinatingly zealous partisan of social and moral righteousness, strenuous in upholding the rights of the poor but also in uprooting homoeroticism from the monastic life. The second part (“War Stories”) begins with a survey of slightly later sources that come from outside of Egypt and deal with the Egyptian monks as heroic, exotic, and larger-than-life figures, in no small part for their struggles with demons. This second part then turns to a series of themes: depiction of the racially other (demons as Ethiopian), representation of gender (women as sources of temptation and as exceptional for their attainment of manly virtue), and the monks’ dealings with paganism and magic (particularly their complicated role in the destruction or expropriation of temples). An afterword deals with the yet later appropriation of these themes especially in the West, where the struggle with demons becomes an inner, psychological battle.

The broader relevance to the history of magic is perhaps obvious: to the extent that magicians or their opponents view magic as demonic, it will be affected by the history of demonology. In the hands of Athanasius in particular, the monk’s temptations are paradigmatic of any Christian’s struggle against demonic adversaries. While Jerome plays only a peripheral role in this book, his vita of Hilarion shows how, even at roughly the time Brakke’s authors were working out their demonologies, the magician could serve as the demonically inspired and aided adversary of the ascetic saint. Without particularly meaning to, Brakke provides background and context for one of the most important themes in the history of magic.

The more specific relevance of this book for historians of magic comes in a section toward the end on “monks among other ritual experts.” In the key passage, Brakke begins by telling us that in fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian temples the priests developed into “mobile ritual experts who offered their services to clients in rituals that could be performed anywhere.” These wandering priests, perhaps like the itinerant soul-stealing Buddhist monks of eighteenth-century China whom Philip Kuhn has examined, served as magicians. Their rituals come down to us as the “magical papyri.”

As [the] infrastructure of temples slowly eroded, the priesthood sought innovative ways to maintain its ritually based power. As priests became or competed with ritual experts not based in temples, some of these new experts were (also) Christian monks. Monastic communities are among the most likely venues for the scribal production of the numerous magical papyri...