This study of the ethics of TriTrac has been divided into two main blocks. One chief aim of the study as a whole, apart from exploring the ethics of the text, has been to elucidate the workings of early Christian determinism, and to highlight that it did not entail the simple denial of human choice. The first part of the study was devoted to investigating the mechanism and theoretical framework of TriTrac’s ethics. How could a fixed anthropological system have been used to legitimize ethical discussion? The second part of the study was devoted to the practical and social implications of TriTrac’s ethics. What social structures did the fixed anthropological categories produce and how were they legitimized?
In Chapter 1, we discussed the ontology and epistemology of TriTrac. The three substances that make up the world—pneuma, psychê and matter—are related to three different ways of reflecting knowledge and the divine: as pneumatic images that retained knowledge of the divine, as psychic likenesses that in a limited way reflected knowledge of the divine, and finally as material imitations that did not reflect the divine at all. These three substances, as well as the three epistemological levels, are combined within each human, as per ancient anatomies of the human body and mind. In order to attain knowledge of God one needs to get “unmixed” from one’s material parts and instead become “blended” with the Savior and the collective. This language draws upon Stoic and Aristotelian physics, wherein immoral people are described as unfavorably mixed and virtuous people are those who possess the correct blending of the substances making up each person. This chapter demonstrated the importance of ontology and epistemology to ethical considerations.
Chapter 2 investigated the theory of passions employed in TriTrac and questions of how human cognition works. In TriTrac there are three levels of emotions, corresponding to the three substances that make up the human body and the three powers in heaven. The lowest and basest emotions, like envy, rage, and fear, are identified with materiality and called sickness and femininity. Pneuma is identified with good emotions like enjoyment, love, brotherly love, generosity, and joy. Psychê is in a middle position and attached to honor, ambition, and pursuit of glory. The text does not follow any known list of passions but there are, nevertheless, strong similarities to Stoic theories of emotions, especially in the depictions of the good emotions. The way the Logos is described as closely associated with motion and movement is also very similar to Stoic concepts of initial tremors that afflict everyone, motions that are not full-blown emotions. The Logos is without blame in TriTrac, as are those who experience initial tremors in the mind. TriTrac maintains that, while base emotions and materiality are to be combatted, they are useful in highlighting the need for salvation as well as in the governance of the cosmic system. Emotions affect humans through the body and, consequently, they are likened to demons and lower cosmic powers that coerce people into believing false things. The emotions attached to the psychic substance are depicted as more beneficial, and the psychic humans are told to help the pneumatics. The pneuma should control them both. This resembles the Platonic and Aristotelian tripartite view of the soul where the two lower parts are associated with passions while the third, logical part, is wholly above both. TriTrac even uses the same metaphor as found in other depictions of this view of the human mind, of an intellect as a driver driving a carriage made of baser emotions. Here, too, we can see the social application of such a theory, especially given that there are three classes of humans in TriTrac called material, psychic, and pneumatic.
Chapter 3 engaged with how TriTrac relates to the question of free will and human choice. Here we followed up in greater detail the workings of the cognitive theory of the text initiated in the previous chapter. In common with other Christian theologians, the text utilizes the Stoic notion of assent (συγκατάθεσις). The human mind creates mental images by being exposed to different impressions; the impressions that people create for themselves and consequently act upon depend on the constitution of each mind. However, in TriTrac the human mind is not in the possession of self-determination, a technical term used in ancient thought for free will. The will of self- determination is restricted to the highest realm, and the Aeons in the Pleroma are the only beings described as possessing this characteristic. The Aeons are in perfect alignment with the will of God—also how some Stoics defined free will. However, it is not possible for humans to attain this state in the cosmos, according to TriTrac. Rather, proairesis is the faculty that defines a human’s moral worth, that decides whether a person can assent to the appearance of the Savior or not. Pneumatics have a good proairesis, a preference and natural inclination to assent to the Savior. The proairesis of psychic people needs convincing and instruction; they need to imitate the pneumatics’ example. The proairesis of material people is always inclined to follow temporary honor and the empty glories of the cosmos. The nature of the proairesis depends on each person’s constitution, on whether one was born with a pneumatic, psychic, or material preference. However, this does not mean that there is no room for moral improvement, at least for some; both pneumatic and psychic people are described as undergoing moral formation. The concluding part of this chapter was devoted to the context of TriTrac’s anthropology and it was argued that the way the Valentinian opponents of Origen of Alexandria are described in his work On First Principles resembles the anthropology we encounter in TriTrac.
Chapter 4 explored the anthropology of TriTrac, arguing that the tripartite anthropology in TriTrac should not be read from the lens of other Valentinian anthropologies, since there seem to be clear points of difference. The tripartite anthropology functions in three principal ways: (1) as a pedagogical schema to point out different roles and responsibilities humans have in relation to each other and to teaching and learning the message of the Savior; (2) to explain why people have different responsibilities and roles to play in the world; and (3) to create and sustain a hierarchy within the community. The pneumatics are described as ethical experts and play the role of teachers for the members of the community, while the psychics are described as helpers of the pneumatics and as the students of pneumatics. An anthropology that restricted human choice would have been just as effective an ethical system as one that subscribed to the doctrine of free will. As previous scholars have pointed out, the only way one would have been able to know if a person was a pneumatic, psychic, or material human, would have been through scrutinizing that person’s behavior. The behavior that reveals one’s nature is determined by social factors; in TriTrac (as in most anthropological systems I would imagine) each category is defined by its relation to the group and, as group dynamics are prone to change, the categories probably functioned fluidly in practice, which a fixed anthropological theory would likely have supported effectively. It would have been virtually impossible for everyone to live up to the standards of a pneumatic and not everyone could become a teacher and moral expert.
In Chapter 5 the aim was to analyze the social organization from which TriTrac stemmed, by way of the mention of a school and the language of teaching and learning. At the outset, we should recognize the technical way the term ἐκκλησία is used in TriTrac to refer to the collective of pneumatics and not the community as a whole. How should the community be organized according to TriTrac? We quickly concluded that school language and the metaphor of the cosmos as being like a school for the soul was immensely popular, not only among Christians. The ideal social structure in TriTrac was modeled on the relationship between the Aeons in the Pleroma. The Aeons are described as existing in a collective with a clear hierarchy, differing in degrees of knowledge and instructed to help one another develop. Gaining knowledge of God is likened to gaining form. This ideal is reflected in the earthly community, which is a place where the pedagogical vision of TriTrac culminates. This includes the following: (1) an attitude that no one could advance alone; (2) a need for teaching and learning for all; (3) higher pneumatic members teaching lower psychic members and the Savior teaching the pneumatics; (4) psychics seeing to the needs of the pneumatics and engaging in worship in the community; (5) oral instructions delivered by the teachers of the congregation, including pre-baptismal instruction; (6) a community made up of psychics, probably with a lower educational level, who are expected to follow the example of the teachers and leaders; (7) an upper level identified with the pneumatics who possessed the ability to consider moral questions, topics that would most likely have demanded a high level of education.
In light of this model of the community I argued that it was likely that the context reflected in TriTrac is a dual one, with a group of pneumatics comprising an inner circle within a larger community. We are not dealing with a formal school structure in either case. The larger collective is envisioned as following a pedagogical structure controlled by the pneumatics. The latter point highlights the important differences between people; some are made for more advanced studies, when the metaphor of “invisible” and “silent” learning is used. The socioeconomic reality of ancient education fits with the fixed anthropology we encounter in TriTrac: not all could devote themselves to the “leisure” (σχολή) that a pneumatic would have needed for engaging with moral questions, and not all had the intellectual interest or ability for a life of contemplation. Yet pneumatics were not necessarily from the wealthy upper classes; indeed, the text appeals to the psychics to support the pneumatics. Nevertheless, a background that included basic education in physics and epistemology would have been of great value for anyone discussing normative ethics on the level of TriTrac. Concluding the chapter, the term, ‘School of Valentinus’, was discussed. This is not a term that should be utilized generically to indicate the social context of the disparate phenomena that are often called Valentinianism, yet, as TriTrac exemplifies, school language is very important, at least in some Valentinian texts, for visualizing the ideal structure of the community.
In Chapter 6 the nature of the text’s attitude toward politics and social involvement was scrutinized. TriTrac presents the cosmos as a beautifully ordered system designed to teach pneumatic people about life on earth. Different material and psychic powers rule the cosmos and psychic people and material people retain positions of power on earth. This is sanctioned and approved from above. The importance of the concept of honor, so central in Roman society, was accentuated in this chapter. Psychic humans are described as driven by honor but they are told to recognize the transient nature of the earthly variety and follow the advice and example of the pneumatics. At the same time, TriTrac maintains that the psychics should retain their positions of earthly power and start working for the benefit of the pneumatics. In light of this last chapter a clearer vision of the social context of TriTrac emerges. Psychic humans include people who do not hold leadership positions within the group, but who are engaged in worldly affairs. The pneumatics most likely wielded great authority within the community, given that they were the moral experts with a monopoly on ethical interpretation.
The aim of this study, as stated above, has partly been to show what ancient Christian determinism—a topic omitted by many scholars while others have recently presented it as heresiological invention—could have looked like. Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen might have been familiar with Stoicism and a lot of the criticism leveled by them at Valentinians resembled the accusations directed at Stoics: that determinism destroyed moral choice and thus also accountability and the interest in moral improvement.1 The first part of this study reveals the many similarities between TriTrac’s cognitive theory, view of emotions, and notion of the nature of human choice, and popular Stoicism, which could explain why some scholars today have thought that the church fathers’ critique of Valentinian determinism was a repetition of the older critique of the Stoics. As this study has made clear, however, early Christian determinism was not the invention of heresiologists, at least if we take TriTrac as an example of the notions the church fathers opposed. I am not arguing that Irenaeus and Clement, for example, read TriTrac, but the anthropology that we find in TriTrac probably derived from interest in similar theological thoughts as those we find rejected by Irenaeus and Clement.2 As I argued at the end of Chapter 3, the views of Origen’s deterministic opponents are very close to what we find in TriTrac, although just because we find many Stoic notions in TriTrac, it does not mean that the people behind TriTrac necessarily read the Stoics directly, or, if they did, would have admitted their dependency on Stoicism or ever have thought of themselves as Stoics rather than Christian. Failing to recognize the multimodal nature of Christian discourse is one of the pitfalls that seems to have led previous research astray with regard to the existence of viable early Christian anthropological and ethical systems that restricted human choice. The counterarguments with which the heresiologists combatted Valentinians might have been similar to those with which Aristotelians and Platonists combated Stoics, but as this study has shown, this is no coincidence. The ethics of TriTrac is thoroughly indebted to many philosophical traditions, Stoicism in particular. Nevertheless, Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen were engaged in an intra-Christian discussion and utilized the terminology that belonged to that discourse, sometimes even recognizing their dependence on previous philosophy.3 Christianity did not stand in clear opposition to Platonism, Aristotelianism, or Stoicism in ancient time.
Even though I have placed great weight on Greek philosophical thought for the development of TriTrac’s particular anthropology, it should be reiterated that we are dealing with a Christian text and Christian thoughts. This becomes clear in TriTrac’s epistemology, theory of passions, and tackling of free will, which are very much its own. TriTrac does indeed reject the possibility of free will in the cosmos, even going beyond Stoic restrictions of free will to the sage. It seems to define free will in similar ways to the Stoics—as always doing the will of the Father and as a mind that is free of outside coercion—but always doing the Father’s will in the cosmos was impossible in light of how materiality was described: the first substance created outside the Pleroma, an illusion destined for destruction, and a substance of which all humans partly consist. However, as we have seen, this does not mean that human choices or attitudes are irrelevant. On the contrary: living a good and moral life means subjecting oneself to a pedagogic plan of gradual moral improvement. Depending on the constitution of one’s mind, this plan varied, which in TriTrac is presented in terms of psychic and pneumatic classes of humans. Psychic people depend on the pneumatics for advice, but the pneumatics in turn depend on the psychics for worldly support. This reciprocity was reflected in the anatomy of the mind, in the way the different parts of it were thought to engage with one another: cognitive and social structures were in this way interrelated.
The second part of this study shows that a worldview, anthropology, and theory of cognition that restricted human choice, would indeed have worked to create and sustain group identity as well as a viable ethical system. The three categories of humans presented in TriTrac were fixed in theory but would most likely have been fluid in practice, which would have helped explain unforeseen events like membership fluctuations. The person/people behind the text most likely thought of themselves as pneumatic Christians. Considering this, the fixity of the text’s anthropology would have been an effective tool for consolidating power. A deterministic worldview would also have been reinforced by the context of the community, the thoroughly unequal world of the third- and fourth-century Mediterranean world.
1 TriTrac’s Alexandrian Context
Considering the very mobile life many ancient intellectuals led, it is hard to pinpoint a text geographically.4 Yet, even though it is virtually impossible to be sure of the geographical background in which TriTrac was composed, there are nevertheless several aspects of the text which we have discussed above that are compatible with an Alexandrian intellectual context. The concept of the image of God, for example, has a central place of importance in the history of Alexandrian Christianity. Origen’s theology and his vision of what was entailed in being a good Christian were greatly inspired by his exegesis of Gen 1:26. Everyone should struggle to attain the likeness of God. As argued in Chapter 5, this often took the form of imitation of one’s betters, in accordance with the exampla-tradition, and just like in a school milieu.5 Moral progress lay within each category; the task is to make the image or likeness clearer. The image of God became a political question and a hotly debated topic in the Origenist controversies of the fifth century.6 As Socrates, writing in the first half of the fifth century, tells us, the topic of the image of God had been controversial for a long time in Egypt.7 TriTrac would clearly have been viewed as belonging on the side identified as Origenist. According to TriTrac, the highest Father does not have a form; his essence is completely other to materiality and it cannot be grasped by anyone. Only God can grant knowledge of himself and this is done through the Son, who is called the form of the formless Father (53:27, 61:11–13, 66:13–14, 72:28–73:2). Somewhat similarly to Didymus,8 TriTrac maintains that there are different levels of moral excellence that are reflected in the terms “likeness” and “image”.
However, contrary to Origen and Didymus, TriTrac rejects the possibility of progress between likeness (the psychic level) and image (the pneumatic). I propose that TriTrac derives from a context resembling that shaped by Origen, that is, an intellectual milieu in early third-century Alexandria. This is, apart from similarities in the interest in approaching the form of God, suggested by the deterministic stance we find in the text, a position that Origen felt the need to reject in On First Principles. Nevertheless, the theology we encounter in TriTrac is in many points very close to Origen’s thoughts, in terms of, for example: (1) viewing the first stages of creation as a time when a group of Intellects, in possession of free will, lived harmoniously worshiping God; (2) the doctrine that human souls existed before they came down into the body; (3) the doctrine of apokatastasis; (4) support for a non-bodily resurrection; (5) the engagement of the Stoic theory of assent and proto-passions. These ideas, shared by Origen and TriTrac, would inspire generations of Christians after TriTrac and would undoubtedly have interested Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries, a time when Origen’s theology was still a great inspiration and hotly debated.
These issues are far from the only aspects of TriTrac that find resonance in Alexandrian theology. The practice of imitation and the portrayal of the community in heaven as a πολιτεία, a structure on which the earthly Christian community should model itself, are very similar to Athanasius’ vision. Athanasius obviously rejected the idea of a Pleroma, but he nevertheless uses similar language to that found in TriTrac. In the words of David Brakke, Athanasius “accounted for the Church’s unity and diversity” by “defining the Church as a πολιτεία (‘commonwealth’ or ‘way of life’) that was formed through imitation of the saints”.9 As I have argued, TriTrac can be viewed as portraying the same vision for the community.
There are, of course, central points of theological difference between Athanasius and TriTrac, but both visualize the “commonwealth” of the community as consisting of people pursuing the path of moral improvement on two levels: higher-order members totally engaged in the topics of theology and prayer (monks and bishop for Athanasius, and pneumatics for TriTrac) and lower order members who are the ‘ordinary’ constituents of the community. As we saw in TriTrac, Athanasius modelled his ideal community structure on the πολιτεία of the heavens, writing that Christ came into the world so “that we might receive the pattern and example of the heavenly πολιτεία”.10 Again, TriTrac’s and Athanasius’ views of what heaven was like differed, but the language is the same. Brakke has argued that Athanasius’ vision of the Christian community included the language of asceticism, and that this represents a later development of the ‘theme of imitation’. As discussed in Part II above, the practice of imitation, so central for ancient paideia culture, stands in close proximity to how the pneumatic teachers are represented as models for the larger group. Athanasius, also employing the theme of imitation for his vision of the ideal community, presents the practice of imitation as something common to all Christians, not only those requiring basic formation. Athanasius’ imitation was not only something taking place between humans, but between humans and God, the ultimate model. According to Brakke, Athanasius maintained that all Christians should strive to follow the example of the monk, to imitate the divine. This could, however, be done on different levels; ordinary Christians should renounce only some parts of worldly life while monks and virgins should renounce all of it. This emphasis on imitation of the divine, according to Brakke, represents a turn away from intellectual Alexandrian Christianity—of which I argue TriTrac is partially representative—wherein imitation took the form common in the classic school setting, and where it was something operating between humans on different levels, not between all humans and God.11 It is clear where TriTrac belongs on Brakke’s historical reconstruction: to an earlier form of Egyptian Christianity (probably Alexandrian), which emphasized imitating one’s betters, someone in one’s own congregation, rather than ‘otherworldly’ images like God or characters from the Biblical stories.12
The ethical ideals at the epicenter of TriTrac reverberate in another Egyptian context: the emergence of Christian monasticism. In that context, as in TriTrac, there was a great focus on education, formation, combating the passions, and the view that there are degrees in learning in which higher members are tasked with taking care of lower members. At the center of the burgeoning monastic movement in Egypt, we find characters like Antony who was portrayed by his biographer (Athanasius) rather as some bishops of third- and fourth-century Christianity liked to portray themselves: as pious reclusives uninterested in worldly learning and totally devoted to a life in isolation and prayer. However, such images created by fourth-century bishops do not hold up under scrutiny. The bishops’ asceticism has been questioned,13 while many monastic figures, as Samuel Rubenson has shown in the case of Antony, were anything but ignorant peasants before becoming monks, as Athanasius’ Vita and the Apophthegmata patrum would suggest; Antony was, rather, a learned man, a teacher of rank.14
Even though there are examples of powerful people in the burgeoning monastic movement coming from humble backgrounds—Pachomius seems to be one example15—leadership positions in the monasteries most likely demanded higher education, just as the role of bishop and any administrative position in society would have required.16 In fact, the image of authority and moral excellence as detached from formal learning was a classical ideal.17 Several recent publications18 have highlighted the connections between the Hellenistic culture of paideia and the early Egyptian monastic movement.19 Rather than breaking off from classic culture—which was for a long time the paradigm—Rubenson et al. have shown that the early monasteries were places of learning with strong ties to classic philosophy and the Greco-Roman education system. Monasteries were used as schools;20 popular monastic texts were used in a similar pedagogic way as classic literature in the Greco-Roman education system;21 and the ideal monk was similarly portrayed, and engaged in many of the same topics as the philosopher of old.22 The monastic movement in Egypt began in the cities and monastic literature was much inspired by the theology developed the century before the first monasteries began to surface.23 Origen and Clement’s theology was widely popular in the early monastic milieus and here, too, we find many of the same ideals that connect monasticism to philosophy. The hierarchy between intellectually advanced members and laity that is prevalent in the anthropological outlook of pre-monastic Christian intellectuals (Clement, Origen, and those behind TriTrac) was also reflected in the later monasteries; the influx of uneducated members became an increasing problem, according to Shenoute.24 I suggest that TriTrac is best understood as deriving from a third-century Alexandrian context, from the milieu of Origen, Clement and Didymus, the climate of pre-monastic intellectuals who would furnished their later monastic counterparts with much of their philosophical stuff. We find no insistence on isolation in TriTrac, but the text does envisage a split community, with lay Christians taking care of the moral experts who function as models for everyone else, experts who are devoted to moral questions. A practice that became popular in monastic settings was the repetition of Bible passages and the memorization of other formative literature in order to combat evil and develop morally.25 This practice is not clearly reflected in TriTrac, but perhaps it could cast light on the peculiar usage of ϫⲉ in the text.26
The connection between demons and passions as mental images is strongly indicated in TriTrac and also a feature that fits Origin’s thought,27 but it became much more pronounced in early monasticism, Evagrius Ponticus being the most obvious example.28 Thus the composition of TriTrac best fits the period before communal monasticism became organized on a large scale. Even though the bishop, presbyter, and deacon structure would prevail in the Church as a whole, a structure which does not seem to be reflected in TriTrac; the image of a moral superior detached from the world and engaged in study promoted in TriTrac and among Alexandrian theologians like Clement and Origen, continued to a large degree as an ideal, especially in the east. This is indicated by the way some early, powerful bishops portrayed themselves, for example, but also by the recruitment of bishops from the monastic movements, which increased after Chalcedon (451) and eventually placed the hierarchy of the Eastern Church virtually under the control of monks.29 A context where the ecclesiastical structures had not yet become prevalent is a better fit with TriTrac.
Thus, I contend that TriTrac derives from a pre-monastic city context,30 consisting of semi-isolated pneumatics engaged in inner formation (which is indicated by the way psychics are described as engaged in the world); the “church” would open up to, or visit, lay Christians at times for communal worship and for basic educational purposes. There are indications that Christian places of worship also functioned as places of education.31 One should be careful of reifying a whole community from a single text but, as Roger Bagnall has pointed out of the pluralistic world of second- to fourth-century Egyptian Christianity, there is little to suggest that the people, doctrines, and loyalties deemed heretical at some point—like Melitians, Arians (or Valentinians I might add)—were necessarily social forces clearly distinguishable from the Christian community as a whole.32 As we have seen, TriTrac is at home within the context of mainstream third- to fourth-century Egyptian Christianity, so we do not have to reify a Valentinian community in clear opposition to other Christians. There is interaction and even overlap between the community of Origen and Valentinian Christians. There are undoubtedly clear doctrinal and mythological particularities in TriTrac that would have set it apart, but there are also enough similarities to have enabled the people behind TriTrac33 to take part in a broader Christian context. Considering the similarities and affinities of cosmogony, it is easy to see how a pneumatic or a psychic individual could have been convinced by Origen to leave the Valentinian group and join his school, or the other way around.
Finally, I wish to highlight the relevance of bringing texts like TriTrac—as well as other Valentinian texts, for that matter—into the discussion and study of the nature and development of early Christianity; not as examples of fringe movements, but as part of larger intra-Christian discussions, such as those over claims to authority or how Christians should conduct their ethical lives. As I have argued in detail above, one concrete way in which TriTrac was part of the formation of early Christianity concerns its involvement in discussion of the nature of human choice. As I have argued, the doctrine of free will, which was to become a cornerstone in orthodox theology, was no obvious or easy position, but rather a stance that grew out of the intricate discussions over the nature of the human mind and cognitive apparatus, a discussion of which TriTrac was a part.
For the detailed arguments, see Löhr, “Gnostic Determinism”, and Bobzien, Determinism.
See Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.6.2, II.29.1–3, IV.37.2; Clement, Stromata II.10.1ff, V.3.3, II.111.3–4.
For example, Clements discussion on the nature of the human soul in indebted to the Stoic division of the human soul into eight parts, a fact that Clement recognizes. See Clement, Stromata IV.
Clement of Alexandria’s life could be seen as a good example of the life of a philosopher or early Christian intellectual: He traveled widely in order to study and discuss with the best and brightest of his day before finally settling in one of the intellectual metropoles of his time (Alexandria in the case of Clement). For more on the life of Clement, see Eric Osborn, Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–28.
Didymus the Blind, an ardent follower of Origen, presented the Christian progress in moral excellence as a development from a likeness to a perfect image of God. For the importance of the image to Didymus, see Grant D. Bayliss, The Vision of Didymus the Blind: A Fourth-Century Virtue-Origenism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 130–134.
Some desert monks are said to have caused a riot in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century after rumor spread that Bishop Theophilus had claimed that God was without form. Other theologians, some of whom favored Origen, accused people of a simplistic view of God, calling them Anthropomorphites who believed that God had human body parts. Theophilus is said to have rejected the Origenist side and instead begun a persecution of those who could be attached to what he himself first was accused of. Some monastic communities were attacked, people were exiled, and books were burned (Palladius, Dialogus 7). For details on this controversy, see Clark, Origenist Controversy, 43–84; and Hugo Lundhaug, “The Body of God and the Corpus of Historiography: The Life of Aphou of Pemdje and the Anthropomorphite Controversy” in Bodies, Borders, Believers: Ancient Texts and Present Conversations: Essays in Honor of Turid Karlsen Seim on Her 70th Birthday, eds. Anne Hege Grung et al. (Eugene, Or.: Pickwick, 2015), 40–56. Some banned the seeking of the “image of God” outside the structures of the community; other debated the theology behind the term “image of God” in the first place.
Socrates, Church History VI.7.
Bayliss, The Vision of Didymus, 130–134.
Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 144.
Festal Letters 2.5. Translation from Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 164.
Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 180–182.
Peter Brown has argued that this form of imitation, common between the perfect monk saint and his followers, derives from the classic paideia relation between student and teacher. Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity”, Representations 2 (1983): 1–25. See also Philip Rousseau, “Ascetics as Mediators and as Teachers”, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown, eds. James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45–59.
Elm, Sons of Hellenism.
This conclusion is drawn from close study of the letters of Antony. See Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony, 11, passim.
For a study of the educational background of famous monastic leaders, see Timbie, “The Education”, 34–46.
Bagnall, Egypt, 302.
Henrik Rydell Jonsén, “The Virtue of Being Uneducated: Attitudes Towards Classical Paideia in Early Monasticism and Ancient Philosophy”, in Larsen and Rubenson, School and Monastery, 219–235.
Publications resulting chiefly from a research project lead by Samuel Rubenson, entitled “Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia”, ongoing at Lund University from 2009–2015.
See, for example, Larsen and Rubenson, School and Monastery.
Lillian Larsen, “Excavating the Excavations” of Early Monastic Education”, in Larsen and Rubenson, School and Monastery, 101–124.
As Lillian Larsen has shown, the sayings of the desert fathers were often employed like Homer; they were memorized and used for learning grammar and rhetoric, as well as argumentation techniques (Larsen, “Early Monasticism”, 13–33).
Some examples of motifs found in both monasteries and philosophy schools include: withdrawing from the outside world; the idealization of being uneducated in formal learning; engaging the mind and combatting passions; and forming one’s inner person by repeating memorized passages. Henrik Rydell Jonsén, “Renunciation, Reorientation and Guidance: Patterns in Early Monasticism and Ancient Philosophy”, Studia Patristica 55:3: Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2011, eds. M. Vinzent and S. Rubenson (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 76–94; see also See Rydell Jonsén, “The Virtue of Being Uneducated”.
Goehring, “The Encroaching Desert”; Rubenson, “Asceticism and Monasticism”.
Janet Timbie, “The State of Research on the Career of Shenoute of Atripe” in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, eds. Birger A. Pearson and James Goehring (Philadelphia, P.A.: Fortress Press, 1986), 265.
This is also a practice that was developed in rabbinic Judaism, see Wyn Schofer, Making of a Sage, 67–119.
The use of ϫⲉ needs further research, and reading it in light of different practices in monastic contexts is indeed an avenue that should be pursued.
Origen, On First Principles III.2. See also The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
Kathleen Gibbons, “Passions, Pleasures, and Perceptions: Rethinking Evagrius Ponticus on Mental Representation”, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 19:2 (2015): 297–330.
Bagnall, Egypt, 294.
As Roger Bagnall has shown, in third-century Egypt, bishops, deacons, and presbyters are not mentioned in their formal capacity like a hundred years later. However, we do hear of lectors. Bagnall, Egypt, 279–281, 283–284. For a work on the function of lectors in early Christianity, see Dan Nässelqvist, Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscript, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
For a study of how the place of worship seems to have functioned as a school in early Egyptian monasticism, see Larsen and Rubenson, School and Monastery. Compare also the use of synagogues among Jews in antiquity; for example, during the Sabbath the synagogue would have been used for educational purposes. Heather A. McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue: The Question of Sabbath Worship in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
Bagnall, Egypt, 309.
However, we cannot rule out the possibility that the text was a product of a single individual. Even though I find this unlikely, even in this case, this individual would most likely have been part of a larger Christian community.