Monastic Diversity and Ideological Boundaries in Fourth-Century Christian Egypt

A simple history of the origins and development of Egyptian monasticism is no longer possible. The received tradition, the standard source of that history, has been challenged on two fronts. First, analysis of the traditional literary sources has increasingly called into question their value as descriptive documents of actual historical events. While the degree and nature of the history preserved in these sources remains a subject of debate, there can be little doubt that the authors and compilers of this literature were fashioning their subjects as saints. The literature has rhetorical and ideological purpose. It preserves the figures of monastic origins as ascetic trail blazers who opened up new paths for Christians to follow. The texts are in fact guide books for a practice of imitatio patrum, and as such they present the ascetic fathers in terms of the ideals that the authors and compilers of the texts wanted their readers to imitate. The degree to which the author’s ideals were those of the monk whose story he tells is, at best, difficult to know. It is the recognition of this fact that complicates the use of the literary sources in the reconstruction of monastic history. The saints of monastic origins have receded from the historian’s grasp in the same way as the figure of Jesus. The unlettered, anti-Arian Antony of the Life of Antony represents the religious ideology of the Life’s author, Athanasius; ² the lives and teachings of the monks of the Apophthegmata have been problematized by an increasing awareness of the complexity of the sources and their origin; ³ and the originality and orthodoxy of Pachomius and his com-munities appears increasingly anachronistic. ⁴ While the sources surely contain history, efforts to unravel it from its literary embodiment are proving increasingly difficult.

In addition to the difficulties imposed on the interpretation of the traditional literary sources, manuscript and documentary papyrus discoveries have added a wealth of new evidence revealing the controlled perspective of the literary sources and suggesting a diversity and complexity within ascetic development hitherto unimagined. Documentary papyri have indicated the significance of women in the initial stages of the ascetic movement, ⁵ underscored its early urban setting, ⁶ and supplied unique evidence of the strength of so-called Melitian ascetics in fourth-century Egypt. ⁷ The discovery of Manichaean manuscripts has shed light on their considerable presence in Egypt, ⁸ and the papyri evidence coming now from the Dakhleh Oasis promises more exciting information on their social location. ⁹ The Nag Hammadi and Dishna manuscript discoveries ¹⁰ have added further challenges for the study of early Pachomian history and led to serious reevaluation of the sources. ¹¹

The evidence increasingly indicates the diversity of ascetic paths available in early Christian Egypt and suggests that interaction across such paths was more common than previously thought. Manichaeans have been credited, for example, not only with influencing the formative stages of coenobitic monasticism, but also with surviving into the later centuries hidden within mainstream monastic communities. ¹² Such contact appears to be at odds with the general picture offered by the received tradition, and that fact alone argues for a more careful and critical examination of that tradition. Historical forces preserved the literary works of those authors whose religious ideologies conformed with and furthered an emerging ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Manuscript discoveries have yielded literary texts representing views expunged from the record by the same historical forces, and documentary evidence, preserved by chance, offers additional data. Together, they allow for a fuller, if still unfocused, picture of monastic development in Egypt.

The increased awareness of the diversity of ascetic practitioners in Egypt raises interesting questions about the scope and nature of interaction between monks of different ideological persuasions. There is, of course, no single or simple answer to this question. The degree and nature of the ideological difference, as well as the personalities of the individuals and groups in question and those of their patrons, necessarily impacted the degree and nature of the interaction. Nonetheless, there is increasing evidence that interaction among...