Category: Christian Monasticism
Who the Demons Fear
Last night I was reading through a collection on the sayings of the desert monastics. I came across this interesting quote (which relates to Brian’s post on demons):
One of the brothers asked Isidore, the priest of Scetis, ‘Why are the demons so afraid of you?’ He said, ‘Ever since I became a monk, I have been trying not to let anger rise as far as my mouth.’ He also said that though he felt impulses towards the sins of concupiscence or of anger, he had not consented to them for forty years.1
Self-control is among the fruit of the Spirit; the Christian who exhibits self-control bears the fruit of the Spirit well. A Christian should not fear the demons. But the demons should fear the one who exercises self-control in by the Spirit.
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1 Isidore, Sayings 22 and 23, in The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, trans. Benedicta Ward (London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003), 23.[Back]
Scripture and the Desert Fathers and Mothers
As one concerned with right practice as well as right doctrine, I was reading through a work by Douglas Burton-Christie and came across a couple of paragraphs (one partial and one full), which has to do with hermeneutics among the Desert Fathers and Mothers (and is somewhat related to Brian’s post on meaning here). Burton-Christie opens with the theory of interpretation, described in this way:
The author’s intention and meaning of the text cease to coincide, and “[t]he text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it.”57 Thus a text, especially a powerfully evocative text, has the capacity continually to mean more, to overflow in an excess or surplus of meaning. A text never simply “means” one thing but continues to unfold new possibilities of meaning. (Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 20)
In other words, a written text can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and the meaning can go beyond the author’s intended meaning—although I would argue that it does not conflict with what the author intended but that is another discussion. For the Desert Fathers and Mothers, their hermeneutic results in a specific outcome, namely right living:
How and where these possibilities of meaning endured is one of the most interesting facets of the desert hermeneutic. Because there was so much emphasis in the desert on practice, on living with integrity, the monks interpreted Scripture primarily by putting it into practice. In the desert, Scripture’s surplus of meaning endured not in the form of commentaries or homilies but in acts and gestures, in the lives of holiness transformed by dialogue with Scripture. The sacred texts continued to mean more not only to those who read or encountered the texts but also to those encountering the holy ones who had come to embody the texts. The holy person became a new text and a new object of interpretation.58 (Ibid.)
One cannot neglect the ability of Scripture to transform the reader and hearer as Scripture continues to speak to people across all times and of all ethnicities.
[To read a little bit about one of the most prominent Desert Fathers, go here.]
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57 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 30.[Back]
58 . . . (“The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 207-8).[Back]
Prayer from the View of Modern Monastics
Here is a neat video on prayer from a modern monastic community in Germany.
Abba Anthony
Anthony the Desert Father is probably my favorite figure in Christian history. He was one of the early hermit monks of whom there is a considerable record. His way of practicing and living out his spirituality moves something within me. Here are some interesting tidbits:
According to Athanasius, the devil fought St. Anthony by afflicting him with boredom, laziness, and the phantoms of women, which he overcame by the power of prayer, providing a theme for Christian art. After that, he moved to a tomb, where he resided and closed the door on himself, depending on some local villagers who brought him food. When the devil perceived his ascetic life and his intense worship, he was envious and beat him mercilessly, leaving him unconscious. When his friends from the local village came to visit him and found him in this condition, they carried him to a church.
As if that wasn’t enough:
After he recovered, he made a second effort and went back into the desert to a farther mountain by the Nile called Pispir, now Der el Memun, opposite Crocodilopolis. There he lived strictly enclosed in an old abandoned Roman fort for some twenty years. According to Athanasius, the devil again resumed his war against Saint Anthony, only this time the phantoms were in the form of wild beasts, wolves, lions, snakes and scorpions. They appeared as if they were about to attack him or cut him into pieces. But the saint would laugh at them scornfully and say, “If any of you have any authority over me, only one would have been sufficient to fight me.” At his saying this, they disappeared as though in smoke, and God gave him the victory over the devil.
Read the entire wiki-article on St. Anthony here.
[Reposted from JDM - The Weblog.]
