Desert Monastics : Producers and Consumers of the Word. 

[The Eileen Stamper Memorial Lecture; 

given at Westminster College. Cambridge University. July 2023.]

John Anthony McGuckin.

    If we are to consider the developing spread of the Christian devotion to scriptural texts considered as both sacred and authoritative we should perhaps not take the customary road of considering the development of the canon. This was already a dusty road of studies many years ago, and usually catalogued as an obscure part of the history of dogmatics: which was a rather silly place to put it: as if the making of a Christian canon was something like those internet lists of the forty ‘must read books’.  Does anyone ever actually set down systematically to read through those so predictable things that take us from Dickens through Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut and Ben Okri, and used, until a few years ago, take in a jungle detour by way of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? In recent years that concept of a canon was slightly jazzed up as one considered the possibility of making a much bigger canon by being “inclusive” and then theological types added in the literature of the Gnostics; and literary types turned our attention to post-colonial writers. Among the young American theologians I used to teach in New York, poor old Irenaeus regularly got booed and the gnostics got a cheer when I introduced that part of early church history. Some even suggested I should devote the entirety of my 15 lecture course on the first millennium, to the allegedly “suppressed” gnostic literature alone: and most were surprised, and some deflated, when I argued that this was not so much suppressed literature as ‘remaindered’. 

    I have no idea what the question would mean if we asked: ‘What are Christians reading today?’  I think the answer would not be forthcoming simply if we went to Hatchard’s bookshop, for example: which oddly describes itself as: ‘Once, proudly, the site of Mowbray’s Religious Bookshop.’  Their advertised ‘Eight Best Books on Christianity’ are clearly an  egregious mistake, as they were all contemporary and by some oversight these did not include any of mine. And if we were to restrict ourselves to the core ecclesiastical canon of Christian Antiquity we would need to remember that reading was an élite achievement then reserved to very few producers of the word. So it might be better to ask not what early Christians read, but what did they have read to them. Or, since they clearly were more than a simple consumer society in their day: how did they appropriate the sacred text so as to give it (or more precisely to be able to afford it) a correspondingly sacred status. For only thus could they satisfactorily absorb such textuality when not necessarily being able to read independently themselves. And the answer to that puzzle (whereby importance afforded to a sacred text requires the accessibility of the aforesaid text),  is surely: recitation. 

    We of a certain age may well remember that dim and departed craft of the schoolteachers of the fifties and sixties, dinning into our little scholarly heads purple passages to learn by heart of poets and bards held sacred to them. In a small and weird sort of way this was a representation of a core canon of literature. I can still remember some of that as embedded within my own little head: the Catullan - Odi et amo / quare id faciam / fortasse requires which does service  along with the Arma virumque cano of Vergil to show that years of classical education went not astray. Or, on a  literary note: Let us go then you and I……..perhaps…  to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there …,  because: Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a continental shelf, the only answer is to get out as quickly as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.  I  must stop this before it develops into a Cento. And I presume you can recognize the quotes. I once tried this in a lecture to undergraduates about how they thought the ancients recognised New Testament writers’ citations of Old Testament references before chapter and verse marks were invented in the middle ages: such as Jesus’ reference to ‘The Bush’ (‘Moses showed the resurrection of the dead, in the Bush.’ Lk. 20.37.) Which modern translations lamely render as: ‘In that passage about the Burning Bush.’  To demonstrate how hard it might be to recognise a ‘classical’ quote if it wasn’t signalled by jumping up and down, I told my undergrads that I would insert some renowned English quotes in the course of the general lecture that day. Everybody excitedly got: ‘To be or not to be.’ But when I referenced the major modernist poem of the 20th century, Eliot’s Prufrock, with the sleight of hand of pretending I had meandered a little off the point I was trying to make, and said: ‘Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?’ A young lady in the front row said: ‘Sorry! My mum sent me a bottle of Chanel No 5 for my birthday last week,’ and perturbation reigned, until I supplied the reference. How they chuckled. The score that day was a couple of Shakespearean lines recognized but nothing else whatsoever: not Keats, Byron, Eliot or anything after him. And these were not complete ignoramuses: just ordinary divinity undergraduates in an age where recitation by heart had disappeared from the middle and secondary school curriculum. 

    This I suppose might be classified as a certain problem in literacy among the literate: those who in  a daily manner exercised reading and writing skills in an advanced manner. But what were things like in ancient societies where reading and writing were highly restricted skills?  We have to remember that if we made St. Paul the Apostle sit down and take an exam on what he could remember about the words of Jesus: we would get only two quotations: ‘This is my Body’, and ‘It is better to give than to receive.’ The first being comparable to ‘To be or not to be’ and worthy of only half a point: and the other a puzzling one because no-one else in the earliest tradition confirms it. So perhaps he used preacher’s licence and made it up?  Today, of course, we moderns have one particularly presumptuous attitude to text: we presume it was there for intellectuals to read. After all that is what we do with it, and we cannot help seeing things through our own lenses. We are proud of our ability to read. We just presume literacy to be a common achievement.  But even the contemporary degree of literacy is troublesome to those who look more closely, even in the so-called advanced societies.

    I was recently returning to an old interest of mine in Tibetan Buddhism, re-reading some of my old undergraduate text books purchased in the seventies and, in the general context of the subject of tonight’s talk, I was vividly struck when I came across this account of the training of Gelugpa scholar monks in pre-1959 Tibet. These were in the three major monastic establishments around Lhasa and in the Tashilumpo monastery where the  best intellects among the monastic novices were trained in both oral rhetorical argument (about Buddhist philosophy) and the details of Buddhist doctrinal tradition (the teachings contained in the  extensive sets of texts the monasteries held before the Chinese depredations). This account was given by Snellgrove and Richardson at a time when there were well over twenty thousand monks being so trained in dialectics and  history of doctrine: a course of instruction, we might note, that began when they were sixteen years of age and ended when they were twenty nine and licensed as teachers. They say this:

The main emphasis was on learning by rote to such an extent that writing and note-taking were discouraged when not actually forbidden. Learning to write and compose good Tibetan was regarded as the work of clerks and officials and so positively harmful to the acquisition of true religious knowledge…Examinations were entirely oral taking the form of conventionalized debates and successful candidates would have to display an extraordinary knowledge both of doctrines and of the relevant texts, from which they would quote with precision and great verbal accuracy. In the course of their years of training they would have learned by heart considerable quantities  of sacred literature so that they became, as it were, repositories of the doctrine, able to produce form their store any text or quotation which  served the immediate argument. It is noteworthy that despite the existence of a well-established written language, such a tradition of oral scholarship, clearly based on ancient Indian style, should have continued right into the mid twentieth century. But, at the end of their long training some of these ‘expert’ scholars might be unable even to write their own names properly, however well they might read.’

[D Snellgrove & H Richardson. A Cultural History of Tibet. Shambhala. Boston. 1967. p. 239.]

The passage strikes me as very closely applicable to the conditions operating in the early Christian monasteries  of the fourth and fifth century Egyptian and Judaean deserts. And it may be interesting shortly to turn more specifically to the desert and put a magnifying lens on some of their texts about texts, to show us what exactly they are doing with the idea of sacred literature. 

    So, what were texts for, if not actually for reading? Why did Christians invest so much obsessive interest in the word if not to read it? Well, in an age of Early Christian foundations, when a set of texts, which we would later call the Christian canon of scripture was being ‘assumed’ or ‘presumed’, the probable proportion of ninety five percent of the Church who were illiterate must surely make us think again over the issue of texts being predominantly for reading.  Someone had to read them to be sure – and the ordained office of the Lector in the churches ensured that small controlled sections of the  formal canon of scriptures would be regularly recited at the eucharistic assemblies of the city and village congregations. This was a strategy already set in place by Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century when he  set it as one of the main traditionalist rules of Church praxis designed to keep Gnostic literature off the podium, and thereby to keep the readings allowed in church within the clerical system and thus under the control of the episcopate.  But what happened at a more local level outside the official liturgical celebrations? Was that agreed body of sacred texts meant to be revered, influenced by the non-official?  Surely it was. And so it is necessary to be grounded in the realia of texts and text production: how Christian books were made, as much as why they were made, and by whom they were made, before we can be satisfied that we have a good perspective on what an accumulating canon really meant to the early Christians. And I take that primarily to mean an agreed body of texts that were important for prayer and worship. 

    Of course the  composition of an authoritative canon in antiquity, be it in Sumeria, Israel, or among the Christians, quintessentially affirmed that the  community’s sacred texts would  henceforth be synonymous with the school curriculum (the scribe generally insisted on it and policed it).  The Sumerians made their canon. Scribes memorised and  reproduced it. Israel made its own, part in emulation of, part in opposition to, Sumer; the Hellenists made theirs, and  the Christians did the same thing over again – adopting a new canon to mark the arrival of a new school: a new sense of awareness of communal identity, embodied by that school. After the elaboration of a canon the community can now read a certain body of literature ‘as opposed to’ another body of literature. Israel’s elaboration of a harder canon after the destructions of the Roman wars is an example of the elevation of a Hebrew canon in opposition to a Hellenistic canon. Rabbinic commentators show next to no awareness of Homer or Euripides despite the example of an earlier generation such as Philo. Christian learned men, such as the Cappadocian fathers, all educated for many years in the best universities of the Hellenistic world, have many decorative citations of the pagan Hellenistic canon scattered in their writings, but their work is really motivated by wholly different sets of literature. You see, one canon is meant, deliberately so, to exclude another canon, not to amplify or broaden its scope.  Canon building is a subversive act both in antiquity and even now, of course.

    Such approaches to canonicity, and the closely related notions of how to read those texts which are held as sacred, was not unique to these two communities of Rabbis on the one hand, and monks and bishops on the other. The central exegetical principle of  both Rabbinic and Early Christian exegetical interpretation namely: ‘Interpret the sacred text only through the sacred text itself’: was actually a principle first articulated by Aristarchus of Byzantium in the 2nd century BCE, and even the concept of compiling a definitive list – a canon of authoritative texts that would establish the  curriculum and the borders of what should or should not be cited in a scholarly environment – was the  mind-child of Callimachus, one of the first librarians of the Great Library at Alexandria. He serves as a model for the central role memorisation played in antique scholarship, and its appropriation of the word: for he was reputed to have known so much of the canon of great Hellenistic texts by heart that he was able to give new Greek poets chapter and verse where they had plagiarised, on first hearing their work recited. This centrality of memorisation in the schola tradition, of course was not the invention of the Hellenists, but goes back to the scribes of Sumeria, whose training involved the  committing of large portions of the sacred narratives to memory, from which memory they could be reproduced. The link between scribal memory and canonicity is important to note for it remains a constant across antiquity and even into very late modernity until copies of text became more widespread consequent on the inventions of printing, cheap paper, and more widespread literacy.

    So why, this evening, are we heading for the deserts of Egypt and Judea in the late fourth and fifth centuries of the Common Era?  Because I think it is a very illustrative place to show us in practice how scriptural texts were disseminated, memorized, and reflected on in a set of early Christian élite communities that were both producers and consumers of the word.  In the 5th and 6th centuries the Judean desert was a locus classicus of a local community which had deliberately moved away from the city churches with their ordained lectors, and those professional rhetoricians who had increasingly assumed the Christian episcopal thrones from which to make their crafted declamations. But here, in the wilderness around Jerusalem, and the expansive deserts with close access to the Nile, in the case of Egypt, were predominantly ordinary Christians, albeit zealots, most of whom were illiterate when they came to the  desert, but most of whom were not a-literate after they had been there a while. For here were numerous communities which were truly word-obsessed. In their heyday, for example, before the rise of Islamic power,  no fewer than 140 Byzantine monasteries flourished within the quite small area of Palestine [J. Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine. Oxford. 1994. pp. 314-361.] 

The common greeting of a monk to another senior monk was: ‘Abba, father, give me a word.’ We have accepted the trope that they were ‘desert Christians’ [Further see D Burton-Christie. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. OUP. Oxford. 1993]  and we imagine the isolation – a separation from normal commerce that can be tasted sharply even today if one goes out, for example, in the evening outside the walls of the Sinai monastery and listens to absolute silence. I was making a little film there some years ago and experienced this profundity of silence, marvelling on how different it was to our own dear life in New York city, when suddenly I was scared out of my wits by a very loud cough right in my ear. No one was there. But before I could credit it to an epiphany: it happened again, and then I noticed the culprit: a camel coughing about a mile off down the valley. Of course coming back into the Sinai monastery one  gets a more precise sense of community or cenobitic life in the desert: because the whole complex is instantly recognisable: as a Greek village walled in on all sides: with all modern cons: well, bakers, fantastic library, pharmacy, church, quiet streets for lodgings, meal hall for visitors hall with endless crusader graffiti on every stick of furniture and so on. Other parts of the  desert were, of course more quiet and off the track and some actually did have some cave dwelling hermits. But even the hermits had attendants and disciples clustered round them: the ‘Lavriotic’ style of monastic life, and even remote centres such as Skete and Kellia (from which our penitential (or penitentiary) word ‘cell’ derives) both here in Egypt and in the Judaean desert were actually ancient centres of transport: from the Syrian mountains, to the Jerusalem deserts to the mouth of the Nile by boat and access to all monastic centres even as far as Upper Egypt was a very passable motorway system in Late Antiquity, and the monasteries themselves were relay stations where text was mused over, produced, copied and disseminated as one of the élite activities of the early church: found elsewhere only in the large episcopal chanceries of the greater cities such as Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and later Constantinople.

    Let us look a little more intently at what was going in in this activity about the word. We should not think of the great pandects that grace our libraries and museums today such as Codex Vaticanus or Codex Alexandrinus. These magnificent objects were probably part of those famous fifty pandect copies ordered by Constantine to celebrate his great church building program in the Middle East after his victory over Licinius in the first half of the fourth century, and were made from an imperial commission to the scriptorium  of Caesarea Palestina and  to be disseminated out from Constantinople. There are other splendid examples of uncial production of scriptures  too, destined for church usage. But the monks wanted lectionaries more than they wanted pandects. And the largest demand in the desert communities (and which we find reflected in the many discussions of financial transaction that the monks were engaged on  (because it would be a big mistake to regard them as non-fiscal on account of their dedication to poverty)  - was for writings of the Fathers on prayer. We today often classify such literature as history of spirituality, and it is usually the first thing to be thrown over the wall in any discussion of levels of importance in a theological school curriculum. But the ancients would have classed all of this as scriptural commentary. How the sacred text became sacred by initiating  the reader or listened into the life of prayer: which was for them the life of the Spirit. And this was  how Christ’s redemption became real for them, why they were there in the desert to start with, and why the texts they perused were sacred in the first place. So if we lift a few typical and localised examples of the ‘word from the desert’ it might illustrate this process a little more precisely. 

    But before I launch into that example of exegesis I would like to make a very brief  excursus on what it is we shall be looking at, as it may be new to you. It is the practice of prayer monologistōs. The word is difficult to translate. It literally means ‘one wordery’. Its sense is the dynamic and intense focus on one word. Not just any word, of course, but a word from the scripture: so we see immediately that  the term word here means a logion or what we might call a gobbet. And monologistic prayer was its obsessive, incantational, repetition.

    The desert monks lived out a daily round structured by scriptural recitations (based around the psalms chiefly), Vesperal ceremonies at dusk where the Old Testament texts formed the basis of meditation along with the offering of incense sung to the accompaniment of Psalm 141, and nine hour eucharistic assemblies beginning at nightfall on Saturday, known as the synaxis, where the focus was on Pauline texts and the Gospels. Monks would be expected to use prayer techniques to radically re-orientate processes of mental consciousness in ways we rarely encounter today outside of contexts of radical therapy. But to put together only the Synaxis, Vespers and some manual occupation does not account for the long hours of a real day in the arid desert. So what was the  most common thing ‘going on’. This was the technique of monologistōs prayer: designed to keep the monk on the right track, or at least stop him  from going off the rails: for that way madness lay.

    Monologistic prayer means taking a short phrase and extending it before one’s individual consciousness. A phrase from the scripture or from a spiritual teacher would be selected (or given) to the monk. Such things as: 'The Lord is my light and my salvation' [Ps. 27.1], or 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart' [Mt. 22.37]; but endless ‘possibilities’ were possible; and the text chosen by the teacher was generally one he thought was fitting to the  present condition of the disciple. The monk was meant to take the 'word' (logion) in its form as either scriptural aphorism or short story of instruction (parable) from the master, and use it  as mental reflection for the rest of the day. In other words, as they went on their daily tasks they kept turning this over and over in their minds. If it was a short phrase they repeated it many thousands of times, like a prayer or incantation. I think both words are apposite since the ancients certainly used the scriptures in an oracular fashion. Since the  manual works that were encouraged in the desert were predominantly of a simple physical nature - the weaving of baskets, gardening, cleaning, building, for example. Some monastic groups favoured intellectual pursuits: seminar-like discussions and later text copying; but these were never the preponderance in Egypt, except in the circle around Evagrios. That normal practice of the repetition of a phrase for hours at a time, when the body was occupied with  simple tasks, became a powerful tool for  simultaneously charging and reorientating the human consciousness; focusing it, as it were, like a lens, on the singleness of the idea of the presence of God. 

    Ancients were just as well aware as us, that one’s consciousness, especially at times of prayer, had the tendency to wander round aimlessly. One might begin prayer with an intention to be focused but after very few minutes, the mind was making images for itself, and the attention was everywhere else except where it should be.  Monologistōs prayer was designed, therefore, to be the first stage in training for beginners.  

    The practice reflected a very fundamental anthropology elaborated by the Byzantine Christian writers. They tweaked both the  Hellenistic and Biblical anthropologies current at the time into a tri-partite synthesis. Accordingly, they regarded the Body (with its physical impulses and needs), the Soul (with its range of feelings and desires) and the Nous (the spiritual intellect with its aspirations for God) as three intimately related realities; though each one of a double kind (Diplos). The Body (Soma) stood also upon the flesh (Sarx). The Soul (Psyche) stood also upon Aisthesis. The Nous also stood upon Logismos or intellection. If the body was too hot, or sick, or agitated, none of the other two 'ranges' or zones of human consciousness, namely Soul or Nous, could operate independently. They would all be pulled down into the zone of dominance of the body. Usually, for a human day to day existence, the body was accustomed to be in charge of this human tri-fold reality, like the elder sister who had the driving licence and took charge of the  whole car and where it was going. The monks, however, wanted the body to be put into the backseat. Physical drives towards sexuality, increase of wealth and comfort, had to be managed carefully in such a life, if they were not to completely derail the spiritual consciousness of the practitioners. The monks were nothing if not realists. But how could bodily needs be controlled. Their answer was towards re-direction. Fasting, solitariness and hard labour were the  primary manners  they had, to sustain chastity as celibates: but it was much harder to manage thoughts and physical desires. And in the  hours of prayer when awareness was being raised, the monastics found that such things as physical attention and mind wandering, had a tendency to raise a storm. This was one initial reason why the sacred word or phrase had to be repeated so many hundreds of times. Its long-sustained repetition as a mantra stilled thought. There was no possibility to reason one's way out of the body's complaints that it was not getting enough satisfaction from such a desert life-style. So the body was given the tasks of weaving with the hands, ploughing the earth, while all the time the mind repeated that simple monologistōs phrase sotto voce.  

    If conflicting thoughts and distractions became unmanageable, the  phrase was repeated aloud for some minutes until the order of things had been re-established. In short, this was like a de-thronement of the body as the chief of the 'three sisters' that made up the ancients' tripartite psychology. But the soul, too was not a fully stable reality. The Soul, in antiquity, was the zone of empathy, feelings,  intentions, and involved much of what we today would call thinking processes.  Higher levels of reflection (ideals, metaphysics, theology) they located in the Nous, which was the  upper and most refined level of spiritual consciousness. 

    But, it was in this second lower level of soul-consciousness (psychic we could even say) that most thinking people lived habitually. Their prayer lives also were rooted here, and rarely, if ever, left the psychic domain to travel in the higher levels of noetic consciousness. And this was the overall intent (the skopos or telos) of the monologistos prayer also: to  quieten down  the psyche by using the mental faculties to so focus on the words of the prayer-phrase, that it stopped its habitual processes of furiously generating ideas and images (logismoi) associated with its words and thoughts. In other words, thoughts inevitably generate more thoughts. Words make more words. Using a single monologistos prayer was meant to kill the energeia of words and thoughts by means of a single word and a single thought constantly returned to.  When the monk became aware that he or she had intellectually wandered away into daydreams or their own world of thoughts, they returned back, via the vocalized focus on the phrase and its meaning, to a state where thought and thought-generation were stilled once more.  The two noisier sisters in the house, as it were, Soma and Psyche had been given something to do (as if to shut them up) so that the quieter sister, the Nous might be coaxed out of retirement so as to come into the leadership role in prayer. The Nous in  this Christian anthropology was understood as the  higher functions of human thought, namely terms of awareness of metaphysical order and, for the monks especially, the sense of transcendent presence: the monk's presence before God, and God's presence to the monk. 

    It was this sense of 'being in the presence' that all monastic  theory of prayer looked to. The monologistos phrase was the primary means to this end: so to still the  agitations of the  body and the soul, that the human Nous could sustain moments of being aware of the presence in a pure and unmediated way.  It was not that the monks despised vocal prayer, or simple recitation or meditation on the  scriptural texts; they knew this had its place and during the liturgical day often rotated forms of prayer with set times of scriptural reading, and recitation of the Psalms. It was just that they knew that prayer consisted chiefly of standing in the presence of their God: an active living presence: as real to them now as he was to prophets and apostles of old.  But to stand for more than an instant in this Noetic awareness was immensely difficult for a human being. Bodily awareness, and  soul-awareness were like unruly children, demanding so much attention because for the great majority of their lives and histories the monks had inhabited these lower domains of awareness for most of the time, as had most other people. In the desert they had to learn first of all how to access noetic awareness, and then once attaining to it, how to abide in it. This was the so-called 'prayer of the heart' in real, sustained, practice.

    One of the most favoured forms of monologistic prayer evolved from the New Testament came also to be known as the Jesus Prayer, which you may have heard of. It has endured as a major form of Christian mysticism in the eastern monasteries to this day. The Philokalia tradition (a compendium of the 18th century dedicated to reproducing these patristic teachings on prayer) is dedicated to it. [See Palmer (1983).] The Jesus Prayer adopted as the basis of its own monologistic recitation a conflation of two evangelical foundations: the episode of the Blind Man on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem who 'cried out' (a type of successful prayer we note), and the  parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the Temple (where Jesus himself gave a 'word' (a logion) about the character of  true prayer).[ Lk. 18. 10-14 & Mk. 10. 46-52.] Both stories offer up the first and second parts of the Jesus Prayer that digests and summates them, namely: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.' The monks regarded this particular monologistōs prayer, then, as a summation of the Gospel itself: a way of praying the whole Gospel in one sentence. They advocated the repetition of this many hundreds of times a day to retrain the consciousness towards noetic capacity of the divine presence. The  arrival at the awareness was a state where the prayer would lapse into silence, even though it would mentally continue in order to keep the body and soul in stasis, as it were. Yet, if attention lapsed, the prayer would be resumed vocally until spiritual order was re-established.  In saying the prayer at first aloud, then after many times making it sotto voce, the  first half of the phrase was instructed to be recited paradoxically on the in-breath (breathing in the holy name as it were) and the second part on the out-breath exhaling the symbol of evil along with the prayer for mercy. The breathing itself was regulated and slowed a little, so as to aid quietness (hesychia). This focus on  mental quietness gave many monastics attached to this spiritual movement, in later times, the name 'hesychasts'.

    The desert monastic teachers were able to describe all of this (complex as it may seem to us who are not  practising it too much of the time) in lapidary and simple styles. Antony the Great is recorded to have put it this way: 'The Abba Antony said this: Whoever sits in solitude and is quiet has escaped from three wars, those of hearing, speaking and seeing. Yet against one thing shall the monk never cease to wage war: his own heart.'[The Sayings of the Fathers. (Vitae Patrum) 5. 2. 2. tr. H. Waddell. The Desert Fathers. Oxford.1936. p. 81].   John Klimakos  [c.f. C Luibheid & N Russell. (trs.). John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. (Classics of Western Spirituality). New York. 1982], the abbot of Sinai monastery in the 7th century advocated monologistic prayer for both beginners and advanced monks. He taught extensively in his Ladder of Divine Ascent how the  process  brought attentiveness (prosoche) to the soul of the monastic. With simple graphic images he makes this into very approachable didactic material; saying, for example: 'Be concentrated without self-display; be withdrawn into your heart, for the demons fear concentration as much as thieves fear dogs.’ [John Klimakos. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. 7.15.]

    Another  early masters of the spiritual life was Diadochus, who became bishop of Photike in Greece in the 5th century. He demonstrates the close interconnection between the doctrine of the heart, and the practice of monologistic prayer. He argues that since the Christian's interior heart is the image of God, then the observation of the heart is like looking into a divinely placed mirror. This is the first step towards a living divine encounter. But the Fall has darkened the mirror; corrupted its facility for clear reflection: 'And after the Fall', he say: 'It became hard for the human Nous to remember God or his commandments. We should, therefore, always be looking into the depths of our heart, with continual remembrance of God, and should pass through this deceitful life like people who have lost their (outward) sight...... because the person who dwells continually within the heart is detached from the attractions of this world, and such a person lives in the Spirit and becomes ignorant of the desires of the flesh.[ Diadochus. On Spiritual Knowledge. 56-57.  Philokalia. vol. 1. (1979) pp. 269-270.] 

    For Diadochus, the heart is a source of the knowledge of God, which needs  attentive introspection (prosoche) to cause the spring of divine love to flow out despite the passions that tend to  distract it. He, and his doctrine of the concentration of the heart through focused prayer, became one of the central interpretations of the spiritual life for eastern monastics.  He softened and popularized the more esoteric teachings of the great 4th century philosopher-monk Evagrius, particularly that goal of prosoche or attentiveness to monologistic prayer when a practitioner could sometimes see his own heart emitting luminosity. Diadochus argues that this is an innate radiance it possesses in so far as it has become the renewed and cleansed  Ikon of that 'True Image of God' who is  the Logos, the Archetypal-Creator of the  soul. Listening to the actual text of his logion here, note how this whole gobbet  grows out of an exegesis of one line of scripture:

It is written that: ‘None can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12.3). Let the  spiritual intellect, then, continually concentrate on these words within its inner shrine, with such intensity that it is not  turned aside to any mental  images. Those who meditate unceasingly upon this glorious and holy name in the depths of  their heart, can sometimes see the luminosity of their own intellect. For when the mind is closely concentrated upon this name, then we grow fully conscious that the Name is burning off all the filth that covers the surface of the soul.  [Diadochus. On Spiritual Knowledge. 59. Philokalia. 1. (1979) p. 270.]

 

    In other words prayer was, for the early desert monks, a specific aspect of exegeting the scriptures understood in an oracular sense: sacred oracles that were meant to induct them into the perceived presence of God. They were not dealing with the scripture for reasons of historical research. It is important to remember that. Moreover, prayer, for the ascetics, was regarded as one of the most important moral cleansers of the soul; one of the key aspects of keeping the entire ascetical philosophy and lifestyle on the rails. One of  tales' of the desert masters recounts how a disciple once complained to his teacher that his prayer life was getting nowhere: just pointless repetitions day after day and no results to speak of. The master told the disciple to leave the cave and walk a mile or so to the spring and get water. But he gave him a worn out and filthy wicker basket in which to do it. After walking all the way and then back, the water had obviously leaked out entirely. The old man [the teacher monks were called 'old man (Geron),  or Father (Abba) titles that have survived to this day in the church for its clergy and monastics] sent him straight back for water several times without comment, and always the same result. Eventually the young monk lost his patience and  complained that the whole thing was ridiculous. His obedience of the water trip was  foolish, his work was pointless. This of course, was a parabolic trope of his previously un-vocalized spiritual attitudes towards his new vocation in the desert. The old man then quizzed him.' Do you see anything at all that you have accomplished? Do you see any difference in anything?' The young monk puzzled about it and then said:'  No, the only thing that is different is that the basket is now shining and clean.' And the master replied to him: 'That is the point with prayer. Keep at it and your soul will become clean like that.' Prayer was itself the greatest ascesis in the desert. It was the battle ground where the heart was brought into true obedience to God, rendered clean and bright, and scripture was the plough by which the heart was furrowed through monologistic prayer.

    So, what follows here as an example of such ancient exegesis can be lifted up as a typical ‘word from the desert’.  The incident comes from the 13th story of that set of texts known as the Apophthegmata Patrum.[ Apoph. Pat. 13. (ed). C. Stewart, 1986. p.34]. It is a logion, a saying or apophthegm, of a famous desert sage whose name has apparently been forgotten. So much for the tradition of the Hellenistic schools to attach the logion to the name of the renowned master who produced it. Some actual names have often been preserved in this Christian desert literature of course, but this logion has been kept for the value of the teaching in and of itself and out of admiration for the style. It goes like this:

An Abba once said:  Let us stand upon the rock, and even though the river may drench us with spray, do not be afraid and do not jump off. Instead chant this calmly: ‘Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion. He who dwells in Jerusalem will never be shaken.’   

    This citation is a Greek Christian quasi-midrashic conflation of Psalm 123 and Ps 124 in the Septuagintal version.  Where the apophthegm becomes explicit as a quotation of scripture, in its final part, it is more or less an exact rendering of the Septuagint of Ps. 124 – ‘Those who put their trust in the Lord …’ and so on.   But the contextual sense of the whole logion (a unit we note which is comprised of a sacred text and its contextual application set together) becomes apparent only to those who know the Psalter by heart: but not for others. For the immediately preceding psalm to this one being quoted is the very one that (off-line as it were) has supplied that essential  imagery of the rock and the raging waters swirling around it. And this is Psalm 123. 1-5 (LXX) which reads  in the Septuagintal version: ‘Let Israel say - If the Lord had not been on our side, when men rose against us, then they would have swallowed us alive in wreaking their anger upon us. Then would the water have engulfed us, then would the torrent have pressed hard on our life, that raging water;  then would our life have been swept away. Blessed be the Lord who did not give us to the teeth of the wild beasts.’ 

    The whole moral topos of the Abba’s saying is exactly parallel, in fact, with the topos which concludes Psalm 123 : in the mid sectional point of the  paraphrasis of these two psalms which underlies the Abba’s logion: It is this:  ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.’ (Ps. 123. 8).

    What is my point here?   That this was a logion that was designed for memorisation (we note also the construction of the original psalm in strophes designed the same way). It is certainly an apposite passage for a monk of the  Jordan desert  (we note the phrase: ‘he who dwells in Jerusalem’). In the  reed banks bordering the river, during the time of the Lenten monastic wandering (for they were commanded to leave the houses and live off the scrub for forty days), lurked many a wild beast,  of whom the monks were even more afraid than of the randomly appearing Saracens. Here, there were veritably lions and dragons from whose teeth  God only could save them. Then why not stay at home in safety?  Wandering was the monk’s lot during Lent: up the whole length and breadth of the Judean desert, armed only with a copy of part of the sacred scriptures (predominantly the psalms or the gospels) and lurking in that same area were the wild beasts – The beasts and torrents are at one and the same time metaphorical (describing the topography of the soul), and yet real: the whole logion of the Abba amounting to a quasi amuletic prayer to be delivered from  the assaults of lions and desert torrents of the Lenten spring time, and the very real psychic fears of solitary desert wandering.  

    Our microscope on this ‘word from the desert’ surely shows us the ancient scriptural principle in operation. It gains its force not from any scholastic engagement in the ongoing process of doctrinal development  - such would be the concern largely of an episcopal rhetor-theologian marshalling scriptural proofs in official documents of the  larger church chanceries. Instead it gains its impact from having been so memorized in a monastic schola, that one sub-verse recited,  illuminates a whole host of related passages in sub-textual  association. The process of memorisation of the scripture is profoundly centralized in the  education-pedagogy we see witnessed here in the system of the logion of the Abba: the senior monk repeats to the disciple the biblical text, now in a newly immediate context of application: the preparation for the Lenten wandering.  This emptying out of the  cells and  small  communes was an alarming challenge to the ancient Christian ascetics : like all men and women of ancient societies (perhaps it is still true today) personhood depended on communal communication. Here is the embracing of a strictly solitary ascesis for six long weeks in the  desert with only two loaves of dried bread. The  very notion of the self as exposed creature in a hostile  cosmos was thus deliberately brought to a pitch. The canonical psalm text (one that has been used incessantly in the worship of the monastery church day and night through the preceding weeks of the year, and in a regular weekly cycle of recitation of the entire Psalter during the night vigils in the individual cells) enters a more important part of the canon: namely that canon within the canon, of the actuality of usage of the sacred scriptures in the Christian movement.  The canonical verité whose criteria are utility and significance.

    Our little example reminds us how the creation of a canon of sacred text from the memorisation process is fundamental to the desert communities. But in turn the success of these monastic communities determined the  long-term reading of the Christian canon from the fourth century to the medieval era (and perhaps beyond).  This was because the  monastic communes were word-obsessed and highly word-productive.  It is the Christian monks, in all probability, who were the culprits who invented the Codex.  Origen in the middle of the 3rd century is still writing his John Commentary on scrolls, as he tells us, and  liturgical texts (from which the  eucharists were recited in churches) were still written on scrolls until the 12th century. The monks, however, showed early on that they had different ideas. The very first codices are written by non-professional hands. Written by ascetics for their own use, in the form of stitched sheets with a leather binding. Such a book was designed to be portable and durable, and condensed. It could be carried in the pocket of the monastic desert-wanderer  as an aide-memoire for further memorisations.  The canon of these sacred texts was synonymous with the essential library of useful apophthegms. The chance to   appropriate the word was not to be wasted. The books themselves circulated. Once one had memorised the  sections contained, whether it was the Gospels, or the Psalms, or the  writings of the prophets or the  Fathers of the Church about the Economy of Christ, a new extension of the canon of the individual monk could be arranged by exchange of handbooks among the travelling ascetics: and thus the process extended.  The memorisation, however, was not designed to extend one’s capacity for quotation. Such was not needful except for those clerics engaged in the Archiepiscopal schools in the great cities. The point of memorisation in the desert was that the sacred word would penetrate the marrow of the ascetic in the manner of a prophet eating the scroll of the word of the Lord. This was a process of digesting the word driven by ascetic utility.  The word was the kneading of the heart; or else the scripture was the plough (as one monastic source from Syria expresses it), ‘which worked the earth of the heart until it was made ready to bear and flower in a harvest.’  

    This very brief  look at the scripture (or canonical) principle operative in the Judean desert, is not as arid as the ancient topography: for the foundational issue remains with us even today: namely, what sense does it have nowadays to invoke the notion of a canon of sacred texts in the welter of our word-conflicted society? Word, such as we found could speak to the heart, (or dare I say it shape the heart?), is a question from which we should not allow post-modern philosophical aphorisms about moral relativity to shield us. In short, devoted passion and moral utility as criteria for canonicity might illuminate our scholarly paths in new ways, even today, as once they determined the paths of these long dead ascetics.

The Eileen Stamper Memorial Lecture. July 2023.

Westminster College. Cambridge University.                               

Archpriest John McGuckin.

Further Reading

Yizhar Hirschfeld    The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period.

            Yale Univ. Press. New Haven. 1992.

D Burton-Christie    The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early 

Christian Monasticism. OUP. Oxford. 1993.

J Binns            Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine. 

314-631.  Oxford.  1994.

T Vivian (tr)        Histories of the Monks of Upper Egypt & The Life of Onnuphrius. By 

Paphnutius.  Cist. Pub. Kalamazoo. 1993.

H Waddell        The Desert Fathers. Collins London. 1936, 1962 ( Selected excerpts from 

Desert literature such as the Verba Seniorum ).

C Stewart    The World of the Desert Fathers. SLG Press. Oxford. 1986.  (Apophthegmata Patrum Anonymous Series).