Syriac Christian Culture

The always-fascinating Syriac tradition constitutes, in the charmingly inapt metaphor of the great Syracist Sebastian Brock of Oxford, the "third lung" of Christianity, offering a unique perspective alongside the Latins in the West and the Greeks in the near-East. The Syriac tradition's riches are on offer in a new book released this month: Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance, eds. Aaron Michael Butts and Robin Darling Young (Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 400pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this: 

Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanistic heritage of the last two millennia.

The present volume brings together fourteen studies that offer fresh perspectives on Syriac Christianity, especially its literary texts and authors. The timeframes of the individual studies span from the second-century Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible up to the thirteenth century with the end of the Syriac Renaissance. Several studies analyze key authors from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serugh. Others investigate translations into Syriac, both from Hebrew and from Greek, while still others examine hagiography, especially its formation and transmission. Reflecting a growing trend in the field, the volume also devotes significant attention to the Medieval period, during which Syriac Christians lived under Islamic rule. The studies in the volume are united in their quest to explore the richness, diversity, and vibrance of Syriac Christianity.

The Legacy of Evagrius

As I have noted before, there remains a debate about the supposed "heterodoxy" of Evagrius, about whom a steady stream of books has been published in the last fifteen years. I am of the view that such doubts and debates have now been concluded in favor of Evagrius thanks to the landmark work of Augustine Casiday, whom I interviewed here.

But those debates do not seem to be over, and a new book edited by an important Catholic patristic scholar, Robin Darling Young, together with Joel Kalvesmaki, will bring us further insights from them and other scholars, including Gregory Collins, Brian E. Daley, Luke Dysinger, Julia Konstantinovsky, Columba Stewart, and others: Evagrius and His Legacy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 376pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345-399) was a Greek-speaking monastic thinker and Christian theologian whose works formed the basis for much later reflection on monastic practice and thought in the Christian Near East, in Byzantium, and in the Latin West. His innovative collections of short chapters meant for meditation, scriptural commentaries in the form of scholia, extended discourses, and letters were widely translated and copied. Condemned posthumously by two ecumenical councils as a heretic along with Origen and Didymus of Alexandria, he was revered among Christians to the east of the Byzantine Empire, in Syria and Armenia, while only some of his writings endured in the Latin and Greek churches. 

A student of the famed bishop-theologians Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius left the service of the urban church and settled in an Egyptian monastic compound.  His teachers were veteran monks schooled in the tradition of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Anthony, and he enriched their legacy with the experience of the desert and with insight drawn from the entire Greek philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through Iamblichus.

Evagrius and His Legacy brings together essays by eminent scholars who explore selected aspects of Evagrius’s life and times and address his far-flung and controversial but long-lasting influence on Latin, Byzantine, and Syriac cultures in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Touching on points relevant to theology, philosophy, history, patristics, literary studies, and manuscript studies, Evagrius and His Legacy is also intended to catalyze further study of Evagrius within as large a context as possible.

"The scholarship on Evagrius Ponticus has seen a veritable explosion in the last ten to fifteen years. Now recognized as a major fourth-century intellectual figure, Evagrius and his role within contemporary networks continue to be reassessed. Evagrius and His Legacy is a valuable contribution to that effort; focused and excellently structured, this splendid volume represents the state of the art of Evagrian scholarship while leading the way toward further inquiry." —Susanna Elm, professor of history and classics, University of California, Berkeley

The Culture of Asceticism

Given David Fagerberg's recent excellent book (which I recently finished and reviewed for Nova et Vetera) as well as a few others either recently published or soon to emerge, it seems that there has been a recent upsurge in interest in "asceticism," which rather raises all sorts of interesting questions. One very much hopes that this is not the Christian spiritual equivalent of the latest "fad diet" that will soon be dropped in pursuit of whatever trend next emerges promising "spiritual enlightenment."

When it comes to asceticism broadly understood, I regularly hear some very good questions from my students, the Catholics especially, who wonder why it is that, in today's world, eating a $10 piece of salmon on Friday is somehow "ascetical" or constitutes "fasting" while eating a $3 chicken breast does not. Over which does God scruple more--the money spent or the nature of the flesh consumed? How, in a state like Indiana far from the oceans, is spending a lot of money to eat shrimp or scallops or, better yet, lobster, in keeping with Great Lent whereas eating pork or chicken or even beef is not? The best answer to such questions, I think, was suggested by my friend the Orthodox priest and theologian Michael Plekon: the important thing is to eat simply so as to free up money to give to the poor and free up time to give to prayer. If grabbing a cheap burger allows both to happen, but preparing an elaborate tofu and quinona concoction does not, then perhaps one ought to go with the former. But doing so is an individual decision when fasting and abstinence are also communal or ecclesial practices and if there is a change then perhaps we should all change together.

Given periodic shifts in ascetical practices, discussed in a book just published this week, perhaps it is time to revisit these issues today--an item, as some Orthodox have suggested, for the agenda of the council in the works lo these many decades:  Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young, eds.,  Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 416pp.

About this book we are told:

Ascetic Culture honors Philip Rousseau’s pathbreaking work on early Christian asceticism in a series of essays exploring how quickly the industrious and imaginative practitioners of asceticism, from the early fourth through the mid-fifth century, adapted the Greco-Roman social, literary, and religious culture in which they had been raised. Far from rejecting the life of the urban centers of the ancient world, they refined and elaborated that life in their libraries, households, and communities.

The volume begins with a discussion of Egyptian monastic reading programs and the circulation of texts, especially the hugely influential Life of Antony. A second group of essays engages the topic of disciplinary culture in ascetic spaces such as the monastery, the household, and the city. A third group focuses on the topic of imaginary landscapes and ascetic self-fashioning. Ascetic Culture concludes by surveying the scholarly study of asceticism over the last one hundred and fifty years, arguing that previous generations of scholars have regarded asceticism either as a product of the inner dynamism of early Christianity or as a distortion of its earliest aims. Together, the contributors recognize, reflect upon, and extend the themes explored in Rousseau’s work on early Christianity’s ascetic periphery—a region whose inhabitants reflect in various ways the aspirations of their religion, from the daily to the otherworldly.