Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen has been doing some very interesting research and writing in the past few years. When I last
interviewed her at the very beginning of 2013, it was about her then-new publication,
They Who Give from Evil: The Response of the Eastern Church to Moneylending in the Early Christian Era. It is a fascinating and welcome contribution to the field of patristic moral and socio-political theology. Now this year she has come out with a study of an early and important monastic figure:
John Moschos' Spiritual Meadow: Authority and Autonomy at the End of the Antique World (Ashgate, 2014), 181pp. I recently had a chance to interview her about this latest publication. Here are her thoughts:
AD: Tell us how you’ve moved from a recent book on money-lending to a book on John
Moschos.
BLI: It is hard to believe that they are
related, but there is a link! I had always wanted to write on Moschos’ Meadow, and in the Preface of the book I
write of how I first encountered the text as a graduate student. For whatever
reason, it just kept getting sidetracked as a scholarship project. But one of
the tales in the collection always stuck with me, and that is the account of a
woman who, when her pagan husband
suggests that they loan their money and live off the interest, convinces him to
loan fifty coins to the “God of the Christians” because that God will
return the money and double it. To make a short story even shorter, the couple
ends up profiting at an interest rate of five hundred percent, and this, Moschos
writes, persuades the man to immediately become a Christian. It is easy to
dismiss this as a fable, but there is
so much to learn from this beneficial tale about Byzantine social history:
Christians are engaged in lending with interest, a practice forbidden by the
Councils; women are financial managers in some households; there is a
prevailing belief that those who invest in God will be rewarded, with interest;
and, finally, sometimes people are converted when they profit, and this
highlights for us the occasional financial advantages of a particular religion
and the way in which economic advantage can encourage conversion. So as
I was finishing my monograph on moneylending, I decided that it might be a good
time to start exploring accounts of “miraculous wealth” in Byzantine Beneficial
Tales. The study of those texts led me to discover that I had perhaps more than
just an article here, that there were some interesting themes worth exploring
in the collection as a whole, even those not addressing money!
AD: Your
subtitle speaks of “Authority and Autonomy at the End of the Antique World.”
There seems to have been a number of books on authority, power, and social roles
in the Christian East of late. What are we learning today about those issues in
this time-period?
BLI: Patristic and other scholars of eastern
Christianity and antiquity have done a great deal of magnificent work in the
last decades of unpacking types of critical expression—one might even suggest
subversion—present in the texts of the Christian East. Popularity of
theorists like Foucault and Butler has also changed how we read now, and they assist
us in understanding how language and ritual contributes to the subjugation of
people, or specific groups, genders or castes. I believe that this is
particularly important work, too, because I think that what we are finding—or,
at least, what I am finding—is a variety of creative approaches to oppressive
systems. I am heartened by little expressions, quiet moments of
self-sufficiency that are demonstrated in the texts, and most especially when
there is next to no comment because that speaks to the importance of the
subversive method.
AD: You
begin your preface with a winsome story about how you first encountered
Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow, and the amusing story of the dead monk. Do we too
often miss the humour in the literature of the desert and of the monastery? Are
there others writing about the lighter side of monastic pursuits?
Yes, I think that we are so eager to
ascribe serious, spiritual meaning to texts within religious history that we
fail to see moments of levity. The
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers are replete with humorous moments, such as the two
monks who attempt but are unable to argue over a brick, or John the Dwarf being
shut out of his cell without his cloak. Anyone who has spent time in a
monastery knows that there are often subtle—or even not so subtle—glances,
phrases or movements that carry with them deep significance, and that
significance can be hilarious easily as well as spiritually transcendent. And
if, in a monastery, that glance occurs when the observation of something funny
is not appropriate, or when noise is not allowed, that can quickly reduce
everyone at the table to silent tears of laughter. Such laughter is important,
if for no other reason than the slightly naughty feeling one enjoys when one is
laughing when one is supposed to be silent or serious. The British anthropologist
Mary Douglas writes about precisely
this in Implicit Meanings, in which she notes that the essence of a
joke is the undermining of something formal by something informal, which
affirms that tense and shifting relationship between authority figures and
those over whom they claim authority.
AD: You
begin your introduction by admitting how little we know of John Moschos. Give
us a quick sketch of what we do know about him with some certainty.
Well, we do not know where or when
he was born and there are scholarly arguments about when he died, but in between
we do have a few details of which we can be fairly certain! He was a sixth-century,
Chalcedonian Christian, possibly from Damascus. He began his monastic career at
the large, well-organized monastery of St. Theodosius. Located about five miles
from Bethlehem, this monastery housed hundreds of monks and was known as a site
of hospitality for the physically and mentally ill, the elderly and the poor.
At some point in his early monastic life he was joined by his companion—and
future Patriarch of Jerusalem—Sophronios, who with John practiced two types of
ascetic activity: a voluntary, rootless existence in which the monastic figure would
be dependent entirely on the hospitality of others, and the collecting and
writing of spiritually beneficial tales. For approximately forty years these
two wandered through Palestine, Syria, Mount Sinai, Egypt and Rome. The debate
about the time and place of John’s death is lively; what is more interesting to
me is that after John’s death Sophronios, during a time of great unrest and
instability in Palestine, endeavored to return his companion’s body to the
monastery where they met; quite a poignant detail, in my opinion.
AD: You
speak (pp. 10-11) of some difficulty in classifying Moschos’ writing, which has
been seen as a series of “beneficial tales.” How should 21st-century readers
approach him, and what should we expect in reading him?
I think that a twenty-first century
reader might want to think of Moschos as a sixth-century “John Jacob Niles.” He was an American
composer who believed that it was his duty and task to preserve early American
music, in addition to writing and recording it. While many people recognize the
popular Christmas folk hymn “I Wonder as I Wander,” we might not have had that hymn
had Niles not heard strains of that Appalachian tune sung by a rag-tag girl
with a beautiful voice. And while many people recognize the important account
of St. Mary of Egypt attributed to Sophronios, we might not have had that vita had Moschos’ not heard strains of
it and included it in his Meadow. In
this way, I think that Moschos collected for spiritual posterity the snippets
of beneficial tales of monks who found their way to one monastery or another,
just as John Jacob Niles collected for cultural posterity the snippets of the
music of British, Irish, Welsh and Scots who—in the nineteenth century—found
their way from one country to another.
I make this comparison also because of
your question about what to expect; I believe that because Moschos is a
collector as much as a composer, and that because he is collecting tales of which
only portions existed, that we should expect that much of what we are reading
might be lost on us. That is not to say that we cannot derive either pleasure
or joy from reading “spiritually beneficial tales,” for the name alone suggests
several good things, but the casual reader must know going in that there are
layers and elements of social, cultural or political history that are not
obvious parts of the tale.
AD: Tell us about the influence of Moschos on monasticism in his own day,
and does he remain influential today on monastic life in any way?
I am hesitant to
suggest that Moschos was influential for monasticism in his day, much less for
ours. This is not usually the claim that a scholar wants to make, really, for
part of our job is to point out ways in which previously unexamined—or
‘under-examined’—people, ideas, events or artifacts are ‘oh so important.’ Sophronios’
was certainly influential for several reasons, but Moschos was, in many ways,
more of a silent partner, even if the Spiritual
Meadow is credited to him. As I reflect on the question, I think that the
ways in which Moschos ‘matters’ is that aside from the text itself, his
activity in the world affirms the variety of ascetic practices of the late
sixth and early seventh centuries. Byzantine and patristic scholarship has
demonstrated so well the ways in which monastic and ascetic figures interacted
with lay persons in the Eastern Empire, a good reminder that not all monks are
living behind walls or dying unseen in caves. Moschos also matters because his
ascetic practices—walking around and writing—do not fit the traditional model
of monastic discipline, and so this is an affirmation of the creativity of
eastern monastic practices. Derek Krueger has written some important and
insightful articles on this topic, and his work has been helpful for me in
understanding the possibilities that exist beyond standard ascetic practices.
AD: Your
third and fourth chapters treat medical issues and those of mortality. Are
there spiritual or practical insights here that have perhaps been lost but
should be recovered?
I was astounded to uncover so many
accounts in the Meadow about medical
issues, healing, suffering, dying, infertility, and so forth. It should not
have surprised me, but it did, how many of the tales dealt with the frailty of
our existence and an acute awareness of this. I was writing these two chapters
on curing, enduring, death and dying while a friend of mine was dying of
cancer. Naturally this had an impact on the way I read and the way I wrote, and that—as
much as the texts—has refined my thinking on this theme. My reading of monastic
texts, martyr accounts and theoretical approaches to suffering and pain has led
me to conclude that an individual in pain forms a relationship with that pain.
We cannot just treat pain as something independent of the body and mind of one
in pain: we must also treat the relationship
with that pain, and, further, we must consider why one forms that relationship
to begin with. This manifests itself in monastic texts as “spiritual sickness”
or the “ascetic sick role.” This relationship might have at its core a physical
reason, or it might be emotional, cultural or spiritual. Either way, illness is
used in monastic and ascetic environments for a purpose, and we can assume that
this is true of laity as well. We would be wise to think about how illness is
used and what it means to people as we seek treatment for their bodies or seek
to force treatment upon them. We should also consider if treatment is even what
is needed. I suppose if there is a spiritual or practical insight that has been
lost but should be recovered, as you ask, it might be to remember that death is
also a form of treatment, and illness might also be a cure.
AD: Sum
up the book for us and who should read it.
This book is an attempt to uncover
some of the social history of late sixth-century life among monastics, desert
ascetics, and the laity they encountered and lived among. I make no claims that
we can know this period perfectly, but I think that these spiritually
beneficial tales can provide us with glimpses of how individuals on the fringes
lived and how they might have thought about basic life issues such as Christian
discipline, getting, giving or losing money, ill or good health and dying. As
for who should read it? I think that it is appropriate for those studying
asceticism, Palestinian monasticism, early Byzantine or late Antique social
history.
AD: What
projects are you at work on now?
It seems that each of these chapters
had prompted thinking for me, and each has—in its own way—pushed me towards
some future project. The chapter on interaction between laity and ascetics has
challenged me to think more about the development of Christian asceticism
independent of organized communities; the chapter on death has challenged me to
think about how soteriology is understood and defined among monks and the
chapter on healthcare has challenged me to think about the use of suffering and
pain. As for the chapter on economics? I think I am done thinking about that
for some time! My most current work is on the martyr Stephen the Younger. I was
invited to think the use of pain imagery in Byzantine martyr vitae at a conference last year with Dr.
Vasiliki Limberis and Dr. James Skedros, and this has led me—quite possibly—to
my next large project.
