Primordial landscapes, incorruptible bodies. Desert asceticism and the Christian appropriation of Greek ideas on geograp

189 Pages·2011·6.29 MB·English

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ...........................................................................................................ix
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Introduction ...................................................................................................1
Definitions of a worldview ........................................................................2
Antony, Athanasius and the Vita Antonii ................................................7
Antony’s eclipsing early asceticism ...........................................................9
Previous research on the Vita Antonii ......................................................12
A short presentation of the book ..............................................................14
abc
1 Space and continuity ..............................................................................17
Seeing Antony’s desert as a Greek landscape ..........................................18
Greek gods in a Christian context ............................................................20
The cultural construction of landscapes ...................................................23
A question of cultural continuity .............................................................24
Athanasius and native Egyptian culture ...................................................28
Defining the Greek wilderness .................................................................30
The wilderness as antispace .....................................................................35
The Egypt of Athanasius ..........................................................................37
Conclusions on space and continuity .......................................................39

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2 Confusion of time and space ..................................................................41
Finding Eden in the desert .......................................................................41
Gods and demons .....................................................................................48
Trouble in paradise ...................................................................................53
A matter of life and death ........................................................................57
The geographical essence of primordiality ..............................................59
Utter confusion and boundless possibilities .............................................63
The city of the future ................................................................................67
A place of Biblical past ............................................................................70
vii
Conclusions on a primordial landscape ...................................................72
abc
3 The influence of landscapes ...................................................................73
Man transformed by space .......................................................................73
Animals as divine instruments .................................................................76
Food, sex, and geography ........................................................................77
Quantities beyond measures .....................................................................80
Primordial lore and the value of ignorance ..............................................82
Place, placelessness, and the question of authority ..................................90
Conclusions on the influence of landscapes ............................................95
abc
4 The athlete of God ..................................................................................97
The ascetic athlete ....................................................................................97
Athletes in the periphery ........................................................................100
The trial of space ....................................................................................102
The initiate in the periphery ...................................................................107
Controlling death, controlling the body .................................................112
The ascetic as martyr ..............................................................................118
Athletic conclusions ...............................................................................123
abc
5 The body in the periphery ...................................................................125
The hero who did not return ...................................................................125
Incorruptible bodies in the periphery .....................................................128
Antony’s body and the body of the martyr ............................................135
The primordial body ...............................................................................137
Bodies, demons and non-existence ........................................................140
The body of life and death .....................................................................145
Levels of imitation .................................................................................151
The attraction of the flesh .......................................................................153
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Conclusion ..................................................................................................163
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Bibliography ..............................................................................................167
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Index ...........................................................................................................185
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viii
PREFACE
For the last few years I have tried to follow Antony, the first desert father,
into the wilderness described by the fourth century bishop Athanasius in the
Vita Antonii. Setting out, I had indeed certain ideas what these landscapes
looked like but I soon discovered that the territory was not quite like my
map. Trying to navigate my way through a dazzling geography, I hope that I
have gained a clearer understanding of what I have seen. This book is the tale
I lived to tell.
Though sometimes feeling lost in these confusing landscapes, I have had
a number of helpers on my way. I would especially like to thank my formal
and informal advisor Ingvild Sælid Gilhus for her many years of assistance
and helpful advice. We have both been participants in The Construction of
New Identity in Antiquity, a comprehensive research project on Christian
antiquity, which through a number of seminars and smaller sessions has been
of great importance to my project. In this project I am especially grateful to
Jostein Børtnes, Tomas Hägg, Geir Hellemo, Liv Ingeborg Lied, Hugo
Lundhaug, Halvor Moxnes, Jorunn Økland and Einar Thomassen. Thanks to
the support of this project I have also had the opportunity to walk myself in
the footsteps of the real life Antony, the model for the figure Athanasius
presented in the Vita Antonii, climbing his “inner mountain” up to the cave
where he lived his last years as a reclusive figure celebrated by Christians all
over the Roman Empire.
I am also grateful to the Antiquity Programme of the Norwegian
Research Council for giving the financial means for my passage. I will,
moreover, like to thank Peder Anker, Bjørn Bandlien, Synnøve des Bouvrie,
Jens Braarvig, David Brakke, Jan Bremmer, Bernadette Brooten, Elizabeth
Clark, Matthew Dickie, David M. Gunn, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Ulla Heli,
Dale Martin, Robert Parker, Bjørn Qviller, Samuel Rubenson, Anne
Stensvold, Helge Svare, and Jesper Svenbro for their suggestions and kind
assistance.
ix
Knut Olav Åmås and my parents have been supportive all through this
passage and have also been mine valuable readers along the way.
Dag Øistein Endsjø
Bergen, September 2007
x
INTRODUCTION
As the first Christian ascetic venturing into the desert, Antony eclipsed all
his predecessors to such a degree that he is frequently presented as the
first Christian ascetic ever. This is not the case. Already soundly
established in cities and villages all over the Hellenistic Egypt, asceticism
in the third century had only yet to encroach on the wilderness. But when
it did, it would never be the same again. As Antony went into the desert,
the connection with this landscape transformed asceticism into something
close to an exclusive desert phenomenon effectively overshadowing all
other spatial dimensions.
The combination of asceticism and the geography of the wilderness
proved a potent combination in early Christianity. Not only would many
ascetics follow in the footsteps of Antony, but the space of the desert
would make a profound impact on Christianity. in general as the place
where piety at its most perfect was possible.
Athanasius’s Vita Antonii, the first presentation of Antony, remains
the key text on desert asceticism, not only proving itself to be something
like an ancient best seller, but offering the pattern for all later literary
presentations of this phenomenon. As such, this text also offers a number
of clues to why Antony so completely would put all his ascetic
predecessors in the shadow, simply by walking out in the wilderness.
Obviously the desert fathers gained prominence by reflecting such
Biblical images as various prophets and Jesus in the wilderness. Just as
important in this heavily Hellenized society was, however, the way desert
asceticism connected to a number of traditional Greek ideas on space,
body and humanity. Retreating to the wilderness, Antony as the first
desert father went into a landscape that traditionally offered a more
intimate connection with both divine powers and the dead. Not only did
this make the claim that the ascetic was closer to God seem more
convincing, but as a landscape where death and life never had been
properly separated, the claim that asceticism really meant dying daily got
a wholly other dimension than with the ascetics in the cultivated areas. The
uncultivated geography, long connected with rites of passage, mighty
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ordeals, and, indirectly, also with athletics, accentuated the asceticism of
the desert father. The essential primordiality Greeks traditionally
attributed to the wilderness, made it possible also to present the ascetic
desert as something close to paradise. Eventually the space itself would,
again in complete accordance with ancient Greek beliefs, affect Antony’s
body to the degree that he would appear physically incorruptible. As
such, the Greek geography offered a possibility to present the desert
father as foreshadowing the wonderful incorruptible body of flesh and
blood we may all hope for after the resurrection promised us by
Christianity.
Turning our attention to the role played by the wilderness in late
antiquity, we find that how this landscape was still understood in such a
traditional Greek way greatly contributed to its turning the Christian
ascetics into Christian superstars. But this presentation of the desert makes
it not in any way less Christian. When Christianity broke through, it did so
to a large degree within a traditional Greek worldview. As the new religion
gained a foundation in the minds of the Hellenized peoples of the Eastern
Mediterranean, it was often a question of a Christian appropriation of
Greek beliefs which were not contrary to the new belief. Most Christians
seem not to have denied even the Greek gods, but considered them, just
like in Athanasius’s Vita Antonii, misanthropic demons within a more
comprehensive worldview where God reigned supreme. Also the distinct
role played by the Pagan deities was in fact continued within a Christian
framework, although their activities now were generally seen as evil.
Pagans and Christians alike held that the old gods wanted man to remain
within the limits of the cultivated geography usually symbolically
represented by the polis, something which equalled a mortal existence and
death in the end. Christians differed by condemning the motivation of
these ancient deities, hailing instead a God who wanted humans to reclaim
what both Pagans and Christians considered their original state, that of
physical immortality. By making his home in the wilderness, Antony
defied the old gods turned demons, and thus challenged the very bounds
of mortality. With his apparently incorruptible body in the geographical
periphery, Antony in the Vita Antonii demonstrated the ultimate
possibilities of this new human ideal also within a traditional Greek
worldview.
Definitions of a worldview
Athanasius’s biography on Antony is in all matters a Christian text,
written in Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the Roman
Empire. It might, however, seem like an odd project to see a fourth
century Christian text from the Roman province of Egypt from the
perspective of a traditional Greek worldview. But as Egypt at this time had
gone through centuries of Hellenization through the Ptolemaic and
Roman eras, the main dilemma is not the Greek influence per se, but how
deep did this influence go? On the other hand, one cannot assume that
this Greek influence ended the moment anyone picked up Christianity.
In my reading I am not attempting to strip the text of Christian
influences. There are many ways of reading Athanasius’s Vita Antonii,
and one does not exclude the validity of the other. Lending his support to
2
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Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies
this claim, the scholar in early Christianity Derwas J. Chitty remarks that
the literary figure of Antony can be seen in relation not only to Biblical
prototypes but to “Greek […] philosophy and religion – Neo-Platonist,
Pythagorean, Stoic, Cynic, etc.”1 My emphasis is nevertheless not on
these philosophical aspects of Greek culture that Chitty emphasizes, but
on a more traditional worldview which for centuries formed the Greeks’
perception of themselves, their world, and their relationship with the
divine.
I am aware that what I call a traditional Greek worldview is not a
frequently employed term. This use therefore requires an explanation. I
could, more or less, exchange the term “traditional Greek worldview”
with “traditional Greek religion”. These two terms are to a great deal
overlapping, differing mainly by where one puts the emphasis. Whereas
the term “religion” often implies a stress on the supernatural aspects and
man’s interaction with these, a “worldview” is usually considered a more
comprehensive term where there are virtually no limits to what may be
included, and where the emphasis lies on man’s need and ability to make
sense out of a world originally devoid of meaning. In analyzing a
worldview, we, as the American religious scholar Ninian Smart puts it, “try
to depict the history and nature of human consciousness and society.”2 It
is both a search for the mentality of people, and an attempt to find what
makes them tick.
A traditional Greek worldview consequently reflects a complex
pattern where everything from space and time to the most inconspicuous
custom in some way may be put in order so that they all make sense in
relation to each other. Although it would be difficult to define a part of
this worldview which may not be connected in some way to religion, man
stood at its centre. The Greek understanding of everything connected to
human nature — food, gender roles, sexuality, rituals, life, death –
developed within a larger pattern. How the ancient Greeks thought of the
divine realities, the otherworld, animals, other peoples and their own social
structures was related to the way they understood human nature. Man’s
relationship with all these aspects that bordered upon his own identity also
contributed to form his existence and the structures of society. This
worldview was a pattern that was reflected in all interrelations between man
and everything that defined his existence.
My emphasis within this worldview has especially been on how these
ideas were reflected in the interrelation of man and space. As the Greek
city, the polis, was considered the only place where man could remain
truly human, there are countless perspectives that can be examined in
regard to how man and space were considered to influence each other.
Man’s existence was the result of a precarious balance that constantly had
to be renewed and confirmed through various rituals and everyday mores.
And this balance was also possible to recognize on the map depicting how
the Greek understood their physical universe.
As the traditional Greek worldview was what defined the everyday
world of the Greeks, their beliefs, even permeating their dreams as the

1
Chitty 1966:4.
2
Smart 1983:2.
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Dag Øistein Endsjø
classics scholar Robin Lane Fox so brilliantly has demonstrated,3 this
represented the background in all aspects of ancient Greek culture. The
people who lived within this worldview are all gone, but we may still try to
discern the pattern in what they left behind. It is found reflected in
archaeology, mythical epics, classical plays, historical presentations, laws,
and in various intellectual discourses.
In the last decades several scholars has produced a number of
excellent studies examining the connection between man’s role in a
comprehensive universe where the gods played the leading parts, and all
those ideas, rules and relations which in every possible manners organized
man’s everyday existence. These studies often involve the employment of
anthropological methods onto a classical material. Louis Gernet, Walter
Burkert, Marcel Detienne, and Jean-Pierre Vernant have played a seminal
part here, and have inspired a number of other scholars, among whom
Robert Parker, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin stand prominent.
My understanding of what comprises a traditional Greek worldview is
to a great extent based on the works of these scholars. My own
contribution consists of a theory of how one may discern a certain pattern
in this worldview, where the uncultivated geography betwixt and between
the human polis and the non-human spheres of the god and of the dead
played a role parallel to the intermediate phase of ancient Greek rites of
passage.4 My ideas on how the ancient Greeks considered the uncultivated
geography are consequently based on the theories of Arnold van Gennep
who considered spatial passage the origin of any ritual passage.5
Concentrating on a systematic approach towards the ritual material, he
never elaborated to what degree there remained an interrelation between
the transitional geography and the rites of passage. Van Gennep still
looms in the background as his ideas on space and the rites of passage
have helped me form my understanding of what comprised a traditional
Greek worldview.
Although there certainly were great changes in how Greek societies
developed from Homeric times until the early Christian era, some of the
most basic aspects of the general worldview demonstrated a remarkable
tenacity in the face of great economical, political and cultural changes and
innovations. The beliefs of the populace, which sometimes led various
philosophers to frustration, offer proof of the conservative nature of these
ideas. Although philosophers played an important part in Greek society, it
is essential to be aware that philosophical thinking did not permeate this
culture. This is, for example, seen by how various philosophers for
centuries criticized traditional Greek beliefs as irrelevant, if not outright
negative. Indeed, these old beliefs remained so influential that the
philosophers did not feel free to ignore them. The philosophical critique
did little to diminish the sway the traditional worldview held over the great
majority of people. As Henry Chadwick observes, “Platonic metaphysics

3
Fox [1986]:150-67.
4
Endsjø 2000:351-83.
5
Van Gennep [1909]:22.
4
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Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies
were the peculiar study of the few, of an intellectual aristocracy.”6
Accordingly, both Plutarch and Origen point to the fact that their own
beloved Plato was not widely read.7 The classics scholar Lewis Richard
Farnell maintains accordingly that
Greek philosophic speculation is by no means a
trustworthy witness, to speak for the average mind and
average faith, although […] the influence of the
philosopher was more likely to reach the people than has
often been the case in other periods and in other
communities.8
Athanasius, too, tended to demonstrate a negative attitude towards Greek
philosophy. The patristic scholar Khaled Anatolios points out how the
Church Father represented “a striking departure from a prevailing
Platonic identification of humanness with the soul (which is basically the
position of Origen).”9 Athanasius’s opposition to the Platonically
inspired Origenist ideas that were deeply influencing parts of
contemporary Christianity can be seen not only from his own theological
emphasis on the importance of the body, but also from the way he
apparently purged his presentation of Antony from any Origenist
inclinations that the alleged letters of Antony indicate that the desert
father held.10 The Alexandrian bishop was also profoundly negative to
the more speculative philosophical forms of Christianity, including the
way these ideas were dispersed through the informal schools that coloured
both Origenists and more Gnostic teaching. As the scholar of religious
studies David Brakke points out, Athanasius attacked “the academic
authority of the gifted teacher in favour of the institutional authority of
the bishop and his priests.”11 The scant regard Athanasius paid to the
prototypal philosopher was also demonstrated in the Vita Antonii, where
Antony was even presented as pitying the philosophers because of their
ignorance (74.2, cf. 72.1-80.7).12
New philosophical ideas were generally ignored by most Greeks,
especially if they were too much in opposition to the beliefs traditionally
held. At the same time one must realize that also the philosophers to a
great extent operated within the traditional worldview and can therefore
sometimes also be used to explain how aspects of this worldview was
perceived. Aristotle’s claim that “man by nature is a being of the
polis”13 was, for example, directly connected to traditional ideas of
geography. The octogenarian Plato’s more innovative thinking on the

6
Chadwick 1980:xi.
7
Plut. Mor. 328e; Or. Cels. 6.2.
8
Farnell 1921:386.
9
Anatolios 1998:64.
10
Cf. Dörries [1950]:193-99; Rubenson 1990:132-41; Brakke [1995]:145-49, 213.
11
Brakke [1995]:140.
12
All references by number only are to the Vita Antonii.
13
Arist. Pol. 1253a.
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