The role of death in the Ladder of divine ascent and the Greek ascetic tradition

273 Pages·2015·2.04 MB·English

by  Zecher

OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
General Editors
Gillian Clark Andrew Louth
THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on the thought and
history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the
books are of interest to theologians, ancient historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds.
Titles in the series include:
Irenaeus of Lyons and the Theology of the Holy Spirit
Anthony Briggman (2012)
Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite
“No Longer I”
Charles M. Stang (2012)
Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology
Paige E. Hochschild (2012)
Orosius and the Rhetoric of History
Peter Van Nuffelen (2012)
Drama of the Divine Economy
Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety
Paul M. Blowers (2012)
Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa
An Anagogical Approach
Hans Boersma (2013)
The Chronicle of Seert
Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq
Philip Wood (2013)
Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus
Andrew Hofer, O.P. (2013)
Ascetic Pneumatology from John Cassian to Gregory the Great
Thomas L. Humphries Jr. (2013)
Contemplation and Classical Christianity
A Study in Augustine
John Peter Kenney (2013)
The Canons of Our Fathers
Monastic Rules of Shenoute
Bentley Layton (2014)
Gregory of Nyssa’s Tabernacle Imagery
In its Jewish and Christian Contexts
Ann Conway-Jones (2014)
John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy:
The Coherence of his Theology and Preaching
David Rylaarsdam (2014)
Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture
Matthew R. Crawford (2014)
The Practical Christology of Philoxenos of Mabbug
David A. Michelson (2014)
Law and Legality in the Greek East: The Byzantine Canonical Tradition 381–883
David Wagschal (2014)
Debates Over the Resurrection of the Dead:
Constructing Early Christian Identity
Outi Lehtipuu (2015)
The Role of Death in
the Ladder of Divine
Ascent and the Greek
Ascetic Tradition
JONATHAN L. ZECHER
1
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For Jennifer and Rod, my parents
For Tatiana, my beloved

Preface
I first encountered the literature of Christian monasticism on a train from
Bucharest to Suceava in July 2006, while my wife Tatiana and I were traveling
around the monasteries of Romania for the summer. In a very warm second-
class compartment we read together the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in Helen
Waddell’s old and beautiful translation. We reread them many times that sum-
mer, and made them a daily practice while living at Varatec Monastery with
Mother Frosinica and Sister Poemena, who shared with us their monastic daily
rhythms of prayer and work, and the practical wisdom of repentance and
humility, so pithily expressed in the Sayings. It was not until later, though, dur-
ing my doctoral research, that I discovered the particular writer who would
become the focus of this study—a dweller of a different desert, St John Clima-
cus who was abbot of St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai during the mid-
seventh century.
Reading St John’s treatise, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, was a revelatory
exper ience, calling me back to that warm summer train. Here was the wit and
wisdom of the Desert Fathers, the psychological insight of Evagrius, Macarius,
and Mark; here was the flowering of spiritual direction worked out by Barsanu-
phius, John, and Dorotheus in their Gazan monasteries. St John not only
quotes, paraphrases, and alludes to numerous ascetics and theologians before
him, but the Ladder embodies all the finest points of a spiritual tradition that
expressed itself in a literary tradition. And yet, for all the Ladder’s traditionality,
here also was something new: a creatively worked-out theology of Christian
asceticism, in which at every moment John mediates his loyalty to the “discern-
ing Fathers” by appealing to his own extensive experience, wit, and insight. St
John’s Ladder thus beautifully connects the world of the Desert Fathers to later
Byzantine monasticism and its great movements in spirituality: it hearkens
after the fading world of late antiquity, but would do much to shape the world
of Byzantium, whose mystics and monks would often look to the Ladder for
authority and insight. The Ladder, like St Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua or
St John of Damascus’ Exact Exposition, is one of those rare but impressive heir-
looms that can be justly said to represent the “Fathers” (and “Mothers!”) to
their spiritual children and inheritors, both in later Byzantium and in contem-
porary Eastern Orthodox churches.
The first goal of this study is to present the Ladder to a new audience. Though
a masterpiece in its own right, and enormously popular and influential among
later Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox monastics, the Ladder has received very
little scholarly attention. This study seeks to redress that situation. However,
two hermeneutical considerations condition the kind of presentation I shall
viii Preface
make. They are necessitated at once by the Ladder’s position and its character.
First, the Ladder’s traditionality and influence can lead readers to listen more
for the echoes of source material or motifs of Hesychasm than the voice of St
John. To cope with these possible distortions, I will explore the Ladder in its
own integrity and structure while situating it carefully within a genealogical
study of the literary–spiritual tradition within which it fits and without which
it would be incomprehensible. That tradition primarily consists of ascetic writ-
ers whom St John knew: the Desert Fathers, Evagrius, Mark the Monk, Ps-
Macarius, and the Gaza Fathers feature most prominently. These, in turn, were
deeply rooted in the Christian Scriptures and the practices of Greco-Roman
philosophy. To understand the Ladder as both a unique achievement and a
traditional text requires tracing a genealogy of ideas down through the ascetic
literary tradition as it develops in intertextual dialogue over the centuries
before St John.
The second consideration is related, but arises more directly from the style,
structure, and content of the Ladder itself. It is sprawling, organic, often
obscure—features that fuel the meditative practices of monastic readers, but
that must certainly hamper a scholarly account. The Ladder is composed of
thirty chapters (called ‘rungs’) that treat practices, virtues, and vices of which
ascetic readers would need to be cognizant: detachment, obedience, repent-
ance, gluttony, greed, sleepiness, prayer, dispassion, and love, to name a few.
These are arranged very carefully in an order that moves the reader from the
basic requirements of monasticism, through the struggles of the practical life,
to the theological pinnacles of prayer, dispassion, and love. Yet the Ladder can
hardly be called systematic or even linear. Its coherence lies in the organic unity
of its writer’s thought and so, while it is possible to get lost among the topics
treated, it is not possible to choose one that defines the Ladder’s spiritual vision.
Nor is it possible that structural analysis alone will, by laying out the order of
argument and the particular relations among topics, provide a clear under-
standing of the content of St John’s thought. I have, therefore, chosen to focus
on an organizing feature, perhaps the fundamental organizing feature, of that
thought: the engagement with and practice of death. The “memory of death” is
treated explicitly in the sixth rung, itself one of the shortest in the Ladder. But
exhortations to remember, contemplate, imagine, and consider death reverber-
ate throughout St John’s work, focusing, conditioning, and explaining the
demands and ideals of asceticism as he presents them. The engagement with
death provides, then, a key to understanding the Ladder as a unified and coher-
ent text.
The nearness of death in ascetic literature shocked me when I first read the
Desert Fathers, as I think it must shock and dismay others. In the modern West-
ern world, death is taboo—perhaps the last taboo. We hide it away in nursing
homes and funeral parlors, take pains to look and feel “younger,” try any num-
ber of agonizing medical treatments if only to prolong existence for a few
Preface ix
months. In such a death-denying world, reading ascetic literature seriously
means being confronted by a reality we would rather not consider. The “mem-
ory of death” means making that confrontation daily, dwelling in sight of death,
and taking seriously our mortality and its consequences. Indeed, engagement
with death is one of St John’s greatest inheritances from earlier ascetics, for
whom “memory of death” was almost a watchword of ascetic rigor. While it was
of great concern to these authors, like the Ladder, death among ascetics has yet
to receive its scholarly due. A second goal of this study, then, is to explore the
ways in which Greek ascetic writers, and particularly St John, used daily engage-
ments with death to craft and cultivate a Christian identity and lifestyle.
Engagement with death means two things in the literature under considera-
tion. First, there is the “memory of death,” by which ascetic writers generally
mean two types of contemplative practice: meditation on one’s inevitable but
unknowable demise, and contemplation (even figuration) of the divine judg-
ment that follows. Both practices are simultaneously paraenetic and existential:
they bespeak the reality of ascetics’ mortal condition, and urge them away from
vices and toward virtues that divine judgment picks out as particularly salient.
The urgency that death imparts to spiritual practice is matched by the focus it
demands on the present moment, and both are of paramount importance in
Greek ascetic literature. Second, there is the “practice of death,” which, unlike
the “memory of death,” has no specific vocabulary. Rather, it is a term I use to
index a range of practices worked out as interpretations of Pauline and biblical
exhortations and admonitions to “die to oneself” or to one’s neighbor. Monas-
tic writers often interpret these very strongly and urge their readers to be “like
the dead,” to imitate corpses, to die—full stop. Underlying this strong rhetoric,
we find that actual practices vary a good deal in the literature and can range
from rather extreme forms of fasting and penance, coupled with bold claims
about attaining dispassion, to quieter exercises in meditation, forgiveness, non-
judgment, and that greatest of monastic virtues, humility. There is no one tra-
jectory of thought on death or of the theological claims predicated on its
engagement. Rather, in tracing a genealogy of ideas down to the Ladder, this
study will highlight the wide variety of claims and concerns about death in a
burgeoning literary tradition. Death provides, then, a specific test case for dis-
cerning St John’s location in tradition, his fidelity to it, and his unique voice in
light of it.
In the Ladder, “memory of death” provides the framework within which a
monk interprets every facet of his own past, present, and future. The realities
of death and judgment define his perception of events, conversations, and
even material objects. In turn, the “practice of death” becomes in St John’s
hands a means of harmonizing the monk’s life as an imitation of Christ with
the necessities of failure and repentance. Death becomes a way of cultivating
a Christian identity that takes account of human frailty. It is St John’s great
genius to take up so many ideas of his forebears—ideas that do not sit easily