Christine Luckritz Marquis - Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypts Golden Age

Having liquored up some youths, he [Archbishop Theophilus] fell upon the monasteries in the dead of night.... First, he ordered that their saintly brother Dioscorus, bishop of the mountain, be deposed from his throne, literally dragged away by enslaved Ethiopians.... Next, he raided the mountain, giving the few possessions of the monks to his hired youths.... He set their cells on fire with sticks, burning all the sacred books of Scripture and other valued texts.

Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of John Chrysostom 7.3134, 3738, 4142

Under the cover of darkness, Archbishop Theophilus and his band of accomplices stormed the desert monastic community at the mountain of Nitria. Enslaved individuals violated Bishop Dioscoruss body and the sacrality of his bishops throne. Meanwhile, the drunken youths hired by Theophilus quickly looted and destroyed monastic property. Soon, the pitch-black sky filled with the light of homes set aflame. Fire devoured Scriptures, other valued texts, and perhaps even took the life of a young boy. The shock of unexpected violence, of abuse and destruction, traumatized the monks. Many left the Egyptian desert in the immediate aftermath. Although they had thought their desert home removed from the world, the monks living in the desert were no longer able to maintain their fragile illusion of separation. The monks were no longer safe, no longer outside the grasp of worldly, ecclesial power. Theophiluss raid rent the monks from their home and shattered the powerful mystique of the desert. The desert as it had been known was dead.

This vignette describing events that occurred in 401 C.E. introduces several of the individuals and adjacent communities central to this book. Theophilus was archbishop of Alexandria from 385 until his death in 412. Initially a student and then a friend of the monks at Nitria, his attack on them marked a sudden and sharp shift in attitude. Prominent among these monks were a group known as the Tall Brothers: Dioscorus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius. All four Tall Brothers were ascetics whom others frequently sought for advice and wisdom. Dioscorus, the local bishop, was especially revered. His appointment as bishop to the monks served as a marker of the respect with which the larger monastic community held him. The struggle that ensued pitted worldly, ecclesial power, as represented by Theophilus, against ascetic ideals, as represented by Dioscorus and his fellow Tall Brothers.

Other characters play unnamed but critical roles in the scene above. There are the unknown Nitrian colleagues and supporters of the Tall Brothers. They are depicted in the full version of this story as all rallying around Dioscorus and the other Tall Brothers, hiding three of them from the violence of Theophilus and his band. There are the drunken youths and the enslaved Ethiopians. Both of these groups would have been viewed as unsavory, as the mention of hired young men and enslaved Ethiopians would have evoked tropes concerning violent bandits and uncivilized barbarians, respectively. Finally, there is the author behind the vignette:

Previous scholarship has largely glossed over this moment of violence in the Egyptian desert, if it has noted it at all. Consigned to an early chapter in the so-called Origenist controversy, a theological dispute that eventually spanned much of the Christian world, Theophiluss attack has been treated as an anomalous event in Egyptian monasticisms otherwise peaceful Golden Age. In this book, however, I argue that this violent incident ought to hold an important place in historical narrations not only of the Origenist controversy but also of late fourth-century Egyptian monasticism more broadly, and of how it was later remembered. Understanding the significance of Theophiluss attack will require carefully revisiting scholarly reliance on a collection of sayings known as the Rather, they are reconstructed memorials made by late fifth-century monks in Palestine who gathered and edited the sayings to serve their communitys purposes. At best, what was retained across the fifth century were reverberations of a remembered past, one that sought to efface the actual trauma that brought the Golden Age to a closethat is, Theophiluss violence.

This book tells several overlapping stories at once. It moves through chronological layers of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the late fifth century, and the modern colonial and post-colonial periods. At its base, it attempts to figure out what we can meaningfully say about the history of the late fourth- and early fifth-century Egyptian deserta time and a place that take on quasi-canonical status in monastic memory and tradition. It is crucial to begin by attending to contemporary voices: Evagrius of Pontus, a transplant to the Egyptian desert but a pupil of some of the most prominent desert abbas and the deserts most prolific extant writer; Palladius of Helenopolis, who wrote not only the Dialogue excerpted above but also the better known Lausiac History; John Cassian, a previous member of the desert community who went on to found monasteries in Roman Gaul; Rufinus of Aquileia, a visitor and later regular correspondent with the Egyptian brethren; Theophilus of Alexandria himself, whose extant letters remain in translation and help us understand not only his attack on Nitria but also its context and his motives; Jerome, a one-time visitor to the Egyptian desert and later Bethlehem-based ascetic competitor; and the anonymous author of the History of the Monks of Egypt (sometimes referred to by its Latin title, Historia Monachoarum in Aegypto), the narrated travelogue of some adventurous Palestinian monks. Although scholars have previously deemed the writings of several of these authors to be too one-sided, partial, or hagiographical for reconstruction of the fourth-century Egyptian desert, I foreground them for their contemporaneity: All were written by figures who actually lived among or near the northwestern Egyptian desert monks or who visited them. As with the Sayings, the biases of these sources are themselves part of the history to be told, but they do not fully control the writings or the historical uses that can be made of them.

It is not inaccurate to highlight, for example, that Palladius is negatively biased in his presentation of Theophiluss attack or that Cassians focus is more on appropriation of Egyptian monastic culture for his Gaulic monasteries than on presenting it on its own terms. Theophilus and, to a lesser extent, Jerome offer important evidence of individuals who once allied themselves with the northwestern Egyptian monks but who later found themselves in deadly opposition to the abbas. I do not disagree that this list of authors fails to offer us a complete or fully accurate picture of this era of Egyptian monasticism. But if we accept that the text of the