Fantasia in the Desert

In Palladius’ Lausiac History we read this story:

[1] THERE was a man named Valens, a Palestinian by race, but Corinthian in his character—-for St. Paul attributed the vice of presumption to the Corinthians. Having taken to the desert he dwelt with us for a number of years. He reached such a pitch of arrogance that he was deceived by demons. For by deceiving him little by little they induced him to be very proud, supposing that angels met him. [2] One day at least, so they told the tale, as he was working in the dark he let drop the needle with which he was stitching the basket. And when he did not find it, the demon made a lamp, and he found the needle. Again, puffed up at this, he waxed proud and in fact was so greatly puffed up that he despised the communion of the mysteries. Now it happened that certain strangers came and brought sweetmeats to the Church for the brethren. [3] So the holy Macarius our priest received them and sent a handful or so to each of us in his cell, among the rest also to Valens. When Valens received the bearer he insulted |105 him and struck him and said to him: “Go and tell Macarius, ‘I am not worse than you, that you should send me a blessing.’ ” ¹⁷⁹ So Macarius, knowing that he was the victim of illusion, went the next day to exhort him and said to him: “Valens, you are the victim of illusions. Stop it.” And when he would not listen to his exhortations, he retired. [4] So the demon, convinced that he was completely persuaded by his deception, went away and disguised himself as the Saviour, and came by night in a vision of a thousand angels bearing lamps and a fiery wheel, in which it seemed that the Saviour appeared, and one came in front of the others and said: “Christ has loved you because of your conduct and the freedom of your life, and He has come to see you. So go out of the cell, do nothing else but look at his face from afar, stoop down and worship, and then go to your cell.” [5] So he went out and saw them in ranks carrying lamps, and antichrist about a stade away, and he fell down and worshipped. Then the next day again he became so mad that he entered into the church and before the assembled brotherhood said: “I have no need of Communion, for I have seen Christ to-day.” Then the fathers bound him and put him in irons for a year and so cured him, destroying his pride by their prayers and indifference and calmer mode of life. As it is said, “Diseases are cured by their opposites.”

Chapter XXV, trans. W.K. Lowther Clarke

In the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto — translated as The Lives of the Desert Fathers by Norman Russell in Cistercian — we also meet a monk named John whom a demon tempts by appearing in the likeness of a priest offering the Eucharist, but John sees through the deception. Moving from the fourth century to the sixth, John of Ephesus’ Lives of Eastern Saints includes the story of a monk who is deceived into venerating a prostitute because the demons doll her up and perform miracles with her, so the monk thinks she is the Blessed Virgin Mary.

All three of these stories are examples of what one may call fantasy, or fantasia (phantasia). If you, like me, are a reader of The Philokalia, you will recognise the term immediately. Fantasy, in philokalic terms, is the arising (or even calling) to mind of images at prayer. Perhaps they come from within. Perhaps from without. Perhaps one may even be perceiving the world of Platonic forms! But who knows? There is every likelihood that they are fallen and from within or demonic, evil, from without. Therefore, philokalic spirituality eschews the ascetic using his imagination at prayer.

In vol. 1 of The Philokalia, Evagrius writes:

When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity, and do not let your intellect be stamped with the impress of any form; but approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner, and then you will understand.

Be on your guard against the tricks of the demons. While you are praying purely and calmly, sometimes they suddenly bring before you some strange and alien form, making you imagine in your conceit that the Deity is there. They are trying to persuade you that the object suddenly disclosed to you is the Deity, whereas the Deity does not possess quantity and form.

Evagrius the Solitary (Ponticus), Chapters on Prayer, 67-68, in Philokalia, Vol. 1, p. 63

Imageless prayer is the call of the day from The Philokalia so as not to end up like Valens and so as to resist the devil like John. Part of this concern could also be framed in the dangers of what Thomas Merton, in The Inner Experience, calls “illuminism” — that seeking after special experiences so common to some within the “mystical” and “charismatic” communities alike. The danger is that you may get the experience you are seeking — but, as Evagrius notes in ch. 73 of the Chapters on Prayer, that may well come from the demons. And their purpose is to distract you from God himself.

The result of this is that you become a Valens.

Seek God in the silence of imageless prayer, repeating the simple prayer of the neptic fathers:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Your Own, Personal Theologians

Over on Twitter, James Wood tweeted yesterday (@jamesrwoodtheo1):

After Christ and your family, committing to a few key theologians is a profoundly life-giving enterprise.

My studies have been largely framed by Augustine, Calvin, Torrance, and de Lubac. I imagine these figures will always be with me.

I had to pause and think about which theologians I am or would like to be committed to. I scribbled on a Post-It note thinking about who are the people who have framed my own studies. I came sideways into theology as a philologist and historian — which I principally am! Who are the theologians I circle back to, though? They must be there, at one level.

Some, I circle back to in my mind. Others I reread or read more of. I don’t have the Post-It with me, but as I recall contenders were:

• Athanasius
• Augustine of Hippo
• Leo the Great
• Boethius
• Maximus the Confessor

And then I thought — but wait! I spend so much time with ascetics and mystics…

• Cassian
• Evagrius
• Bernard
• Benedict

This leaves out Anselm, though, a man whose work I circle back to in my head and heart quite often. I never got around to even writing down Gregory Palamas.

It was also noteworthy that James listed some 20th-century greats on his list. Am I not influenced by people after St Bernard?? What about my own Anglican tradition?

I looked at my calendar and realised that the next day — today — was the commemoration of Richard Hooker. His Learned Discourse of Justification is something that sticks with me. It’s the only piece of modern stuff I have published on, after all! But also, of course, the Prayer Book. The single theological text I have read the most.

So I settled with Hooker but also reflected that there are two lists. Athanasius, Augustine, Leo, Anselm, and increasingly Maximus and Boethius with Hooker on the one hand, and then Cassian, Evagrius, Bernard, Benedict with the BCP on the other. It may seem like a lot of theologians to invest my time in. No doubt they will settle with time. But the one list is the guys I read for theology-as-argument, the others I read for, well, theologia — “If you truly pray, you are a theologian.” Not that the two categories are hard and fast, as any reader of them knows.

Before pondering, “Why these?” you may ask: Why the experiment?

I think James is right in this. It’s an idea a friend once floated at Davenant as well. Devote yourself to a few whom you will read deeply and repeatedly. Get to know them as friends and companions. See their various facets from multiple angles. Love them. Engage with their ideas. Disagree with them.

Doing this will train your intellect and hopefully also your delights and loves. It will help you focus your mind as well. There is so much out there to read and know, coming back to one person and finding his resonances and particular themes and shades and variations and transformations helps train the mind beyond the chaos that our modern social media age creates.

It also teaches us to read deeply, and to reread deeply. My most-read explicitly spiritual books (so not Homer, Virgil, or The Lord of the Rings) are the Confessions of St Augustine, On the Incarnation by St Athanasius, the Life of St Antony approved by St Athanasius, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, the letters of Pope St Leo the Great, and the Rule of St Benedict. I go back to them over and over. There is something new every time. Or things I’ve forgotten. This is why these authors. I choose these specific books as companions because they delight me.

I am also exploring the vast, spreading corpus of Augustine, including multiple readings of De Doctrina Christiana, The City of God, and hopefully soon De Trinitate. I would not have wanted Augustine on my list of contenders 10 years ago. But I’ve had to grapple with him because of his importance and because teaching him is, I believe, important. And I’ve come to love the Bishop of Hippo.

The wider Athanasian corpus I also delved into for the “historical theology” and anti-Arian stuff but found much more hiding there about the doctrine of God and the Trinity than a standard, pop-level church history book could ever give a whiff of.

Why Leo? Good golly. I have sat with the medieval manuscripts of the letters. I have probably read his famous Tome more times than any other piece of ancient theological writing! That’s “Why Leo?”! I also appreciate his ability to synthesize, not to mention his evident rhetorical skill.

The newcomer Maximus is burned into my mind because he came to me like an electric strike of lightning and set me on fire. As you may know, my original patristic loves were the monks (hence Cassian, Evagrius, Benedict, Bernard). And then I began working away at Christology, greatly enjoying the work of Cyril of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch, and others. When I met Maximus, it was both of these worlds colliding at once. The ascetic and the mystical wedded strongly to what we today call theology, explicating the beauty of the hypostatic union and Chalcedonian Christology, all within a trajectory clearly set by Athanasian Triadology! The blossoming of the legacy of both Athanasius and Evagrius.

Finally, though: Hooker and the BCP. I’m not sure if Hooker will be my long-term Anglican companion. But I’d like to find one. I am Anglican, after all. I pray with the Prayer Book. I sing Anglican hymns. I read Herbert and Donne. I listen to Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. And I once upon a time proposed the idea of an Anglo-Patristic Synthesis! But I think Lancelot Andrewes might end up being my Anglican theologian. Maybe Jeremy Taylor? We’ll see.

This doesn’t mean I won’t read others. Of course not! But these will probably be my mainstays, even as I go further with the Cappadocian Fathers or St Ephrem the Syrian or the scholastics or Palamas.

Who are your theological companions?

The Dogmatic Consciousness

St Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)

I have been taking a long, disjointed journey through St. Sophrony of Essex’s St. Silouan the Athonite. One of the ideals/ideas that St. Sophrony expresses, one of St. Silouan’s teachings, is the idea of “dogmatic consciousness.” He writes:

The dogmatic consciousness I have here in mind is the fruit of spiritual experience, independent of the logical brain’s activity. The writings in which the Saints reported their experience were not cast in the form of scholastic dissertations. They were revelations of the soul. Discourse on God and on life in God comes about simply, without cogitation, born spontaneously in the soul.

…

Dogmatic knowledge, understood as spiritual knowledge, is a gift of God, like all forms of real life in God, granted by God and only possible through His coming…

St. Sophrony, St. Silouan the Athonite, pp. 186-87

I do not think that St. Sophrony is here criticising the scholarly pursuit of knowledge and structured argumentation in our thought about God. He himself uses logic in his writings, after all, as do the great fathers of the Greek church, including mystical theologians such St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Gregory Palamas.

Rather, he describing something else — something that may even be superior (without disparaging the dialectical pursuit of theological truth). He is saying that you can, by grace, come into a consciousness, a cognizance, a true knowledge, of real theologia without reasoning yourself into it. This would be the kind of noetic knowledge that, when people try to make distinctions, is the deeper knowing, more intimate, less distanced than modern conceptions of “intellectual” knowledge.

And before anyone starts going off on or for scholastics in light of this, it is worth noting that two of the biggest and best scholastics, Sts Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, both had mystical experiences and, I would put forward, experienced this kind of dogmatic consciousness — famously, St. Thomas stopped writing because of a mystical experience (which may actually be an indictment of his works…).

Anyway, a couple of pages later, St Sophrony says:

It is clear from the Staretz’ writings that without any inconsistency he lived the One God in Three Persons. In his prayers he applied the same names — Father, Lord, Master, King, Creator, Saviour, and so on — to each separate Person of the Holy Trinity, as also to the Three in One.

The Staretz testified categorically that the Divinity of Jesus Christ is made known in the Holy Spirit. The knowledge of Christ’s Divinity thus acquired through spiritual experience enables man to comprehend in Christ the unfused union of two natures and two wills. The uncreated nature of Divine Light and the other dogmas of our faith are likewise made known through inner experience in the Holy Spirit. …

Ideal — abstract — conceptions may correspond to the facts of existence but, separated from positive experience of grace, they are not that knowledge of God which is actual life eternal. Yet they, too, are precious for at any moment they may afford help to a man in his spiritual life.

St Sophrony, St Silouoan the Athonite, p. 189

That last section of the quote is just to show you that St Sophrony is not opposed to theological writing such as what I do.

The earlier sections, on the Trinity and Christology, hit at an idea that I first found articulated by Fr. Andrew Louth, either in Discerning the Mystery or Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology. The idea is this: Although the doctrine of the Trinity was not articulated until the fourth century, and the homoousion was not a major term (indeed, even Athanasius is no big user of it at the beginning of his career), it corresponded to the experience of the church at prayer and at Holy Communion through the ages, and so when Arius challenged it, people rose up. And when the likes of Athanasius and the Cappadocians started articulating it, they were putting the formal logical/philosophical shape and articulation to what the church, the Body of Christ, had always known to be true.

And so, while I am a huge fan of theological study (come study Augustine’s preaching with me this autumn through Davenant Hall!), we need to invest ourselves in seeking God Himself and not just our ideas of Him.

Bread in the Desert

Last night was a bit sad for me because it was the last session of my Desert Fathers course for Davenant Hall — “Streams in the Desert: The Christian Wisdom of the Desert Fathers.” We closed with Sts Barsanuphius and John, a pair of monastic fathers in sixth-century Gaza who left behind a corpus of 850 letters of spiritual instruction. Letter 170:

Question from the same brother to the Other Old Man [John rather than B.]. If a fantasy occurs to me by night and, on the next day, there is Holy Communion, what should I do?

Response by John

Let us approach with all our wounds and not with any contempt, as people who are needful of a doctor, and he who healed the woman with the issue of blood (Mt 9.22) will also heal us. Let us love much, that he may also say to us: “Your many sins are forgiven; for you have loved much” (Lk 7.47). When you are about to take Communion, say: “Master, do not allow these holy things to be unto my condemnation but unto purification of soul and body and spirit.” Then, you may approach with fear, and our Master, who is loving-kind, will work his mercy with us. Amen.

Trans. John Chryssavgis, Letters from the Desert (SVS Press 2003), p. 93.

There’s a lot that could be unpacked from this letter from the Other Old Man, about grace and trusting in God and loving God and so forth. What I want to point out is the Holy Communion. As I said on the first episode of my and my brother Jonathan’s podcast, the Holy Communion is paradigmatic for the entire devotional life. And so in Ep. 170 of Barsanuphius and John it is likewise: It is about approaching, doing what you are able, and trusting in God to be merciful even when we are weak.

It is about the coming of grace.

Holy Communion is not often talked about in relation to the Desert Fathers. Usually, and understandably, we talk about their teachings on topics such as interior prayer, fasting, Psalmody, watchfulness, apatheia, hesychia, etc. In the selection of letters in this volume of Chryssavgis’ (who has also translated them all in two volumes for The Fathers of the Church series), Holy Communion comes up in five letters, to both communicants and celebrants. Ep. 241 is a beauty; I’ll quote only a bit:

The deacon serves like the Cherubim, and ought to be all eye, all intellect, with his intellect and thought looking upward, with fear, trembling, and doxology. For he bears the Body and Blood of the immortal King. He even assumes the face of the Seraphim in proclaiming the doxology and in fanning the hidden mysteries as with their holy wings, recalling through these wings their levitation from this earth and from things material, crying out ceaselessly with his intellect in the temple of the inner man (cf. Rom 7.22) the victory hymn of the magnificent glory (cf. 2 Pet 1.17) of our God: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of your glory” (Is 6.3).

Trans. Chryssavgis, p. 107

The angelic allegory continues — this is what is recommended to someone serving at the altar in the role of deacon during the Divine Liturgy is meant to meditate upon. The liturgy is not just something we are doing here on earth — we join the host of heaven as we offer up the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. The angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven are worshipping with us. It is a deeply spiritual, powerful, mystical event, and God is present there to us and with us through the Holy Communion.

The desert tradition of spirituality is not, then, divorced from the common worship of the church in all ages. Now, it’s true that St Mary of Egypt went 40 years in complete solitude and thus didn’t received communion. And many of the hermits only received occasionally. But it’s also true that, say, St Simeon the Stylite went for an extended period living on nothing but Holy Communion! When the semi-eremetic communities emerged at Nitria, Kellia, and Sketis, the abbas of the desert all lived within walking distance of a common chapel. Even if they were hermits six days a week, the Desert Fathers, for the most part, got together for the assembly of the saints, the synaxis, and this was a service of Holy Communion.

They received communion at least weekly, and they believed in the Real Presence of Christ, as we see in the Sayings as well as in the discourses of St Shenoute of Atripe. The Sayings include a miracle story wherein one simple monk who doubted the veracity of the body and blood under the species of bread and wine had a vision of the priest offering him bloody flesh at Communion, and so came to believe in the Real Presence. And Shenoute is insistent about the reality of the bread as Christ’s body, sounding in many ways like St Cyril of Alexandria, with whom St Shenoute had contact.

They practised Holy Communion. They believed as did other Christians of the era both that it was truly the body and blood of our Lord and that it was a means of grace.

So, hopefully, this Sunday you will be able to engage in another aspect of Desert spirituality at your local parish church. And, like St Barsanuphius’ companion, remember that the angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, thrones, dominions, and powers are there, too, worshipping God with us.

Catholic Anglican thoughts (again)

13th-c mosaic on loggia, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

I think that perhaps one of the great problems with our society is that too many of us spend time thinking about our identities. For me, I spend time thinking about my religious identity. In particular, I often find myself feeling somewhat alone as a catholic Anglican — and not an Anglo-Catholic.

Like the majority tradition of Anglicanism, I embrace the teachings of the Fathers, the 39 Articles, the BCP, and what I’ve read of the Books of Homilies so far. I agree with Richard Hooker so much I wrote an essay recommending him for a real publication (as opposed to just another blog post). Moreover, I cherish the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Guite, as well as the hymns of Charles Wesley and JM Neale. I recently called Lancelot Andrewes a saint, so there’s that in the mix, too!

Most of this doesn’t really make me much of “catholic”, though, does it? I mean, it mostly makes me an Anglican. I reckon John Wesley liked those things, too, except for the ones from after he died.

But what if I told you, despite spending 8 years as a Presbyterian, the only other church that seemed truly enticing was the Eastern Orthodox Church? That an Orthodox priest (now bishop!) once said that I am Orthodox in all but name? Although this actually isn’t true (I don’t seek saints to intercede for me [filed under: 39 Articles] or believe in tollhouses [filed under: umm…], to grab two really quick examples), I do have enormous respect for the Eastern Church and think that we can learn a lot from them in the West after a few centuries of Enlightenment and Romanticism under our belts.

So, yeah, I read St Sophrony, St Porphyrios, Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Father Andrew Louth, The Way of a Pilgrim, and others in my devotional time. I love the Greek Fathers, and sometimes I think I’m a Palamite. Byzantine chant and Byzantine icons, yes, please. I love the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom. Once when I was in a foul mood, I read the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints Basil the Great just to cheer me up. And it’s beautiful and rich and makes anything from the West post-Vatican II (BAS and Common Worship, I’m looking at you) look like wading in shallow water when God has given us the skills requisite and necessary for surfing (or something like that).

I embrace the ancient and medieval heritage of the church — as interpreted through the 39 Articles and the BCP. Give me St Augustine. Give St Maximus the Confessor. Give me St Anselm and St John of Damascus and the Venerable Bede and St Benedict of Nursia and St Symeon the New Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa and The Cloud of Unknowing and St John of the Ladder and St John of the Cross and St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Gregory of Nazianzus and St Basil of Caesarea and Origen of Alexander and St Athanasius of Alexandria and St Irenaeus of Lyons and Pope St Leo the Great and Pope St Gregory the Great and St Cyprian of Carthage and St Francis of Assisi and St Bonaventure and Stephen Langton and Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton and Aelfric of Eynsham and Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl and The Dream of the Rood.

Give me the Ruthwell Cross. Give me Mt Athos. Give the Benediktinerstift Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. Give me St Paul’s in London. Give me Durham Cathedral. Give me the Durham Gospels.

Give me these things, clothe them in the music of Tallis or Purcell or Gibbons. I’ll kiss your icons. I once kissed the alleged crozier of St Gregory. Give me the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Give me a little incense.

Give me these things, for when I encounter these things, I find Jesus in them.

Most of all, then: give me Jesus.

And I find that Jesus is found in this catholic Anglicanism. I find him there better than elsewhere — whether because of my own temperament or something in the nature of the catholic tradition itself. But Jesus comes to me in the poetry of John Donne and the teachings of the Orthodox monks. He comes when I read Pearl and I am drawn up to him through the architecture of a place like York Minster.

IRL, one finds oneself with almost no Anglicans round about, and few digging deep into this.

But Jesus comes amidst them, anyway — of course.

This is part of the secret of the catholic tradition, that God is always right there waiting for you. If you can cultivate hesychia and find, by grace, some level of purity of heart, you will find Jesus wherever you are, and not just listening to Byzantine chant on Spotify or with fellow catholics on Twitter, but at your own local parish.

Watch out for him. He’s there. Pray the Jesus Prayer. Memorise a poem or two by John Donne. Like St Pachomius, see God wherever He is, especially in your brother in Christ. He’ll be there — he has promised he will.

Endless distraction vs monastic simplicity

As you may see in the sidebar of this blog, I am on Twitter. I initially joined under my own name in 2017 as a means to have and control a public professional persona. This purpose remains, but, after starting to teach for Davenant Hall, this public persona has expanded to include some of my own personal religious views, including this blog. And, to be honest, this self-promotion is also aimed to hopefully gain a few students.

Twitter — and even a private Discord server such as we have for The Davenant Institute — can be a great way to meet people. I have expanded my army of friends, and I am happy for that. Twitter and other social media — Facebook, Instagram, etc. — can also be a great way to distract yourself. And be endlessly distracted.

Sometimes, it’s okay. I’m willing to concede that we need a bit of distraction sometimes. It’s part of relaxation and restoration, I think. Take your mind off the pressures of daily life by following, say, @red_loeb to see images from medieval manuscripts, to name just one example. There are some interesting, amusing, informative, entertaining Twitter accounts to add to your feed.

Sometimes, it’s less okay. Like, say, the vast eruptions that happened after the USA’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Or when you see some less-than-pleasant characters falsely characterising your own religious beliefs. Or when you watch, say, a video of a news presenter taking down a flummoxed pastor over hot-button cultural issues. You get this fire burning in you, sometimes. Or you can’t direct your energy where it should be (*glances at The Life of Saint Pachomius*), continually thinking about the assault you have levelled against your nous.

I once Tweeted that Twitter is like having your nous assaulted by all 8 Evagrian thoughts at once.

The monks of the Desert would not have appreciated something like Twitter. Tonight in my Desert Fathers course for Davenant Hall, I am teaching about Pachomius, the reputedly first abbot of a coenobium, of a monastery designed for communal living. The monks were meant to live undistracted lives. This meant that if any of them had to leave the monastery on business, they weren’t allowed to tell the brothers what they had seen or heard. If someone came to the monastery, the porter was the only person they were allowed to interact with. Tabennisi, the village where the first Pachomian monastery was founded, was an abandoned village. Even walks in the abandoned village were not allowed.

Elsewhere, of course, in the anchoritic literature, we hear of monks refusing to listen to news of the outside world. Or they ignore people from outside sometimes. They avoid talking, even if news isn’t the subject. Curiosity, even about ones family that was left behind, is considered dangerous.

The point of all this is to help cultivate a heart that is undistracted and undivided. The monk is someone who is single-minded. Monks are monomaniacs for God. They aren’t interested in the emperor’s doings. They aren’t interested in visits from the priests of the outside world. They aren’t even that interested in the inner world of their souls, except inasmuch as it can help or hinder in the raising up of the monk to God.

Now, Twitter is actually part of my livelihood, since tuition pays my salary. So I’ll stay there. But we all need to know when to logoff and unplug and sit, undistracted, pursuing God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The simplicity of the monks and their spiritual practices, I believe, can help us there.

For me, as you no doubt know, a major monastic practice has been the Jesus Prayer — listen to my and my brother’s podcast to hear some more!

Boethius and monks on YouTube

I recently finished off Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and I really felt that he laid out the philosophical foundations for monasticism in the book. So I made this YouTube video. Enjoy!

The Desert Fathers and Anglican Devotion

Launcelot Andrews (1555-1626)

It’s pretty easy to make an argument for any Protestant to read the Church Fathers at large. Do you believe in the Trinity? Recite the Nicene Creed? Well, then, read St Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, St Augustine. Do you believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man? Well, then, read Sts Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, and Maximus the Confessor. Grappling with the question of religious images? Read St John of Damascus. Are you pondering why God became man? Well, then, read St Irenaeus of Lyons. Want to read the Bible better? Read St Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana.

From the perspective of Anglican devotion, St Augustine’s theology of grace gives us good insights into the theology of the Prayer Book collects. Sts Hippolytus and John Chrysostom show us something about the history of our Eucharistic liturgy — as well as the “Prayer of St Chrysostom”. At the heart of the Anglican daily office lies the Psalter: Here, Sts Athanasius and Augustine are a great help.

Spending time with these Fathers will only help us do a better job of being Anglican, Protestant, whatever.

But what about the Desert Fathers? What do we gain from celibate men and women who cut themselves off from normal society, were consciously sleep deprived, ate only once a day, and were professional pray-ers? What can ancient monks do for the devotional lives of Anglicans? And lay Anglicans, at that?

This question is particularly strong for people of my generation who grew up in Anglican churches, at least in Canada, that had a strong Sunday liturgical tradition of Holy Communion and even hymns, but whose devotional world, Monday-Saturday, was the same as that of the Baptist down the road. A lot of room to be truly healthy and holy, but not a lot that was specifically Anglican. At a certain level, hey-ho, that’s fine! Holiness is the goal, not Anglicanness.

But if a standard, evangelical “quiet time”, maybe with some charismatic elements tossed in, is what your devotional life is used to, then the Desert Fathers can be quite foreign, I can assure you.

They can also be quite reassuring and challenging in a good way, though. When I was an undergrad, like a lot of young people, I briefly flirted with the idea of not being purposely and consciously Anglican. And yet whenever I came up against something with which I disagreed, whether from Roman Catholics or evangelicals, I found myself simply Anglican. So I read the 39 Articles again and decided that, regardless of what it meant for other Christians to be Pentecostals, Ukrainian Orthodox, Baptists, or Free Methodists, I was, quite honestly, Anglican. It was silly to pretend otherwise.

Thus, one Lent I chose for my devotional exercise the praying of one office from the BCP (1962) every day. This ended up being Compline, and this time also ended up being my time of “conversion” (if you will) to the Prayer Book. Anyway, that was the same year I met the Desert Fathers and fell in love with their wacky monomaniacal devotion to the Triune God.

This compline-desert confluence is where the Desert Fathers help out the Anglican. The daily office, especially Morning and Evening Prayer, is fairly central to the Anglican devotional tradition. At the heart of the office, alongside the set canticles common to each day, are a monthly rotation through the Book of Psalms and a yearly cycle through the Bible.

Reading the Desert Fathers and learning about their rule of prayer is actually, at base, a simply encouragement for an evangelical Anglican who wants to discover the divine office, for here you will meet the antiquity of your own devotional practices. Not in a “Ha ha, Alliance Church!” sort of way, but in a reassuring way, that this is part of our own heritage and bigger than any single Christian tradition.

At the heart of the devotional life and prayer of the Desert and the tradition that flows from it, whether Benedictines and Cistercians in the West or Mount Athos and St Catherine’s, Sinai, in the East, is the Psalter, coupled with trying to live the words of Scripture. I’ll share some of the Desert Fathers’ wisdom on psalmody later, but their approach to the Psalms can really help transform the impact Psalmody has on the praying of the divine office.

I confess to not having read all of Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living, but it strikes me that one central aspect of his book is intentionality in what we do, as well as not attempting to seem holier than we really are. A large quantity of desert literature deals in this question of intention, using the term “watchfulness” (check most of Philokalia, Vol. 1). Watch your thoughts, watch the reasons you choose to do things, watch your feelings, watch your thoughts, watch your actions, watch your feelings, watch your thoughts. Seek purity of heart. Clear the mind of all but Christ.

And if you do decide to get down with the Anglican divines, you’ll discover that ascetic practices (fasting, regulating sleep, etc) are there in William Law and Jeremy Taylor, and the spiritual sense of Scripture peaks through Lancelot Andrewes. The Desert is not so far, after all.

The Desert and my career

I recently made a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video saying that you shouldn’t study the Desert Fathers (not my best video, but here it is) — look at me, after all! I went from being a happy-go-lucky evangelical-charismatic who wanted to study Virgil for his PhD to … whatever it is I am now. Let’s consider this journey briefly…

It all began, as I’ve said before, with Athanasius’ Life of Antony (in Carolinne M White’s volume, Early Christian Lives), alongside the Penguin Classics The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, translated by Sister Benedicta Ward of blessed memory, which had just come out in 2003 when I found it hanging out at the university bookstore. I already had something of an interest in monkish things — in John of the Cross’ poem of The Dark Night of the Soul and in St Francis of Assisi and Brother Cadfael and had read the Rule of St Benedict in history class.

With these texts in hand, it only made sense to take up my friend’s idea while taking a course Pagans and Christians in the Later Roman Empire: “Why not do those crazy guys who moved into the desert for your essay topic?”

So I wrote an essay about the Desert Fathers in third-year undergrad, looking at the “why” of anachoresis, of monastic retreat into the desert, adding the Life of St Simeon the Stylite to my small bundle of primary sources and relying heavily on Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” and Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert.

I loved it. (Today, I would revisit the sociological reasons given in that paper and lean even more heavily on what I now call the literal-mimetic tradition of scriptural interpretation.)

And so I took the sayings of the Desert Fathers with me to Cyprus when I worked for InterVarsity there. I picked up the Philokalia, too, and visited Byzantine churches and witnessed the divine liturgy of St John Chrysostom and got to know Orthodox priests. All of this made me desire to become more like the Desert Fathers as well as to study them academically some day.

And so, after returning to Canada, when I got around to my MA in Classics, I studied John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus. And when I did my MTh, I studied monks’ lives by Cyril of Scythopolis and John of Ephesus.

But the Desert Fathers were just my gateway drug. I studied a lot more Late Antiquity and I’ve taught both secular/political history and Christian history now. My PhD was not on a monastic topic (I thought I’d be more likely to get a job that way. Ha!) but on Leo the Great. But the monks have always been there both for personal devotion and academic study.

And now when I look at St Maximus the Confessor, a little bit of whose work I taught as part of my ecumenical councils course, I see the way the Desert tradition as well as the Athanasian-Cyrilline tradition is flowing through him. And when I teach St Athanasius (just finished a whole course on him a couple of weeks ago!), I see the ways in which his thought is part of the same thought-world as the Desert Fathers, even if he is more clothed in the garb of “Greek/philosophical” learning.

These are a few musings. The desert monks have helped me fight against anger, taught me how to pray, challenged my attitude towards food, brought me face-to-face with my failure to live the Scriptures, and reminded me how the entire devotional life of the Christian is undergirded by grace.

I hope they can help you, too.

PS: Today, September 14, is the last day to sign up for my course…

Who are the Desert Fathers? Why study them with me?

To promote my upcoming course on the Desert Fathers, I put together this little video: