The Literature of Early Eastern Monasticism

Egyptian monasticism began and spread as a movement of popular piety, but successive generations of theologians attempted to give it inner theological coherence and consistency. Although we may find some clues in the early monastic terminology and even if we can engage in well-founded speculation, we shall never know what inspired or motivated the many thousands who took up the monastic life in Egypt at the end of the third century and the early fourth century to do so. They did not leave behind any written testimony. Our literary sources such as the Life of Antony and the Lives of Pachomius and his successors come later and they are clearly aimed at creating an ideal of the monastic life, an ideal that owes much, to be sure, to the earlier philosophical and spiritual tradition concerning the possibility of spiritual progress.

Monastic Education in Late Antiquity, 2018

This essay explores the interpretive record that attends the excavation of education related artifacts associated with emergent monasticism in Egypt.

This book situates discussions of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine within the socioeconomic world of the long Late Antiquity, from the golden age of monasticism into and well beyond the Arab conquest (fifth to tenth century). Its thirteen chapters present new research into the rich corpus of textual sources and archaeological remains and move beyond traditional studies that have treated monastic communities as religious entities in physical seclusion from society. The volume brings together scholars working across traditional boundaries of subject and geography and explores a diverse range of topics from the production of food and wine to networks of scribes, patronage, and monastic visitation. As such, it paints a vivid picture of busy monastic lives dependent on and led in tandem with the non-monastic world.

Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 2021

Monasticism is voluntary sustain and systemic program of self discipline and self denial in which immediate sensual gratifications are renounced in order to attain some valued spiritual or mental state. Monasticism demands to get away from normal sentiment & human emotions particularly to attain spirituality. Purposes of monasticism are to find out the pure inner self, raise above all flaws & human deficiency, spiritual excellence, liberation, and deliverance. The research paper is an approach to show the comparison between the monastic worlds as revealed through the texts of Semitic religious communities. The comparison of monastic text has the potential to yield a large amount of informative facts. In the areas of asceticism, spirituality, and the balance between sacred and routine life, analogies are numerous and propose many avenues of further comparison still waiting to be explored. The research paper is an approach to show the comparison & in- depth analysis of the Babylonian ...

Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition. Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward SLG, ed. Santha Bhattacharji, Rowan Williams, and Dominic Mattos , 2014

Th e last 50 years have seen more revisions in understanding the history of Christian monasticism than any comparable period since the Reformation. Some new evidence has been discovered, but the changes have come mostly as a result of reading more broadly than the traditional monastic canon, and reading the familiar texts with the tools of modern historical-critical scholarship. Th e implications for monastic history of the approaches that created the nineteenth-century upheaval in biblical criticism became clear only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Although these new perspectives are now taken for granted in academic circles, they have yet to make a serious impact on the historical self-understanding of monks and nuns. Some may reasonably argue that there is no reason they should, and that the traditional interpretations of monastic history and the traditional corpus of monastic literature have served well and continue to nourish new monastic generations. But as someone who, like Sister Benedicta, inhabits the realms of both vowed monastic life and the modern academy, I feel it necessary and important to make the eff ort to bridge them in the hope that both will benefi t. My own interest in frontiers between regions and cultures, and in the transmission of ideas across those frontiers, has made me all the more sensitive to the shortcomings of some of the standard monastic narratives, and correspondingly excited about eff orts to revisit them for the sake of better understanding of the sources of monasticism and of its continuing potential for transforming the church and the world. Th e present essay, off ered in tribute to one who models for so many of us both monastic fi delity and scholarly rigour, must be modest in scope. I will consider some of the basic assumptions of traditional accounts of the origins of monasticism in the Christian east, and then turn to analogous problems with the received narrative of the rise of Benedictine monasticism in the west.