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10 From Master of Wisdom to Spiritual Master in Late Antiquity Guy G. Stroumsa In his last set of lectures at the Collège de France, delivered shortly before his death, Michel Foucault defined it as his goal to describe and to explain the transmission of Hellenistic and Roman conceptions of the self to Christianity. Foucault rightly estimated that the process of this transmission was of prime importance for the future history of Europe. Although he was able to discern some major points of similarity and di√erence between ‘‘pagan’’ and Christian views of the self, he did not live to develop his intuitions into a sustained comparative study. The recent publication of these lectures, L’herméneutique du sujet, allows us to make a more precise assessment of both his achievements and his shortcomings.∞ Foucault realized the importance of Christian anthropological conceptions and understood them correctly as rooted in a religious worldview. He disregarded , however, the Jewish origin and the essentially Jewish nature of this worldview, thus depriving himself of the means to o√er a correct analysis of the new view of the self. The crystallization of a new anthropology in late antiquity cannot be understood solely as an internal development within Greco-Roman culture and society. In what follows, I will focus on the figure of the intellectual and spiritual teacher in late antiquity as a case study exemplifying the passage from pagan to Christian conceptions of the self and its implications. * * * When the great rhetorician Libanius was asked on his deathbed which one of his disciples should be considered as his successor, he answered: ‘‘John would have been my successor, had the Christians not snatched him.’’ This vignette 184 Guy G. Stroumsa alludes to the conversion of John of Antioch, ‘‘the most holy John,’’ as Theodoretus calls him, a disciple of Libanius who had also studied with the philosopher Andragathius. Stemming from a noble family, John had planned to become a lawyer. After his conversion, however, he abandoned his previous plans and persuaded his disciples Theodore of Mopsuestia and Maximus of Seleucia to renounce the life of a∆uent merchants and to choose a life of simplicity. The story of this conversion, as summarized by Sozomenus, shows to what extent, toward the end of the fourth century, the passage from pagan wisdom to Christian spirituality was both possible and easy.≤ I have juxtaposed, too schematically, pagan wisdom to Christian spirituality on purpose. The life of thought and spirit is of course infinitely more complex. One can certainly also speak of pagan spirituality and of Christian wisdom; however, my intention here is to underline mainly the vectors, the main trends. The issue at hand is a rather understudied aspect of the Christianization of the elites in the Roman Empire and of its anthropological consequences. Identity, which in the Hellenistic world had been defined, first of all, in cultural and linguistic terms, became essentially religious in the Roman Empire . This change amounted to nothing less than a revolution in the criteria of identity. This revolution was also reflected in the educational patterns of elites, in the modes of transmission of knowledge and of intellectual and spiritual power. The Christian elites knew, perhaps better than others, how to adapt to the cultural frameworks of the Roman Empire, and they adapted these frameworks to their spiritual demands and needs, in particular to their own educational traditions. In the Christianized empire, the education of the traditional elites (both the cultural and the social elites) would remain more or less identical to what it had been in the pagan empire. The clearer and most drastic change occurred within the new, purely Christian monastic movement, which radically broke from the traditional forms of elite education. A complete picture of the new forms of spiritual formation in early Christianity remains beyond the scope of this essay, which will be limited to some expressions of the monastic movement and will not deal with the Christian didaskalia or with theological schools such as the one in Alexandria. Although ‘‘spiritual direction’’ is a modern concept invented by postTridentine Catholicism,≥ it is legitimately used to describe a phenomenon already present in the formative period of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The term may be modern, but not the phenomenon. Spiritual direction represents a central aspect of religious practice in late antiquity, from Roman and Constantinopolitan aristocratic society to the monks of the Egyptian desert. No less important than the existence of the phenomenon itself...

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