The central issue at stake here is immediately revealed by the title: was “monastic education” in this period (whatever it might be taken to mean) equivalent to a “transformation of classical paideia?” The size of the book, the stature of its editors and contributors, and its richly illustrated and extensively documented presentation all match the crucial importance of the question.
Two issues are embedded here. First, the book continues (for the debate is in full flood) to resist the notion that committed ascetics of the period were opposed to learning—that they positively reveled in embracing ignorance. Second, interest focuses again on Pierre Hadot's 1981 volume, Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique (Études Augustiniennes), subsequently revised and enlarged, and probably better known in its English version, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Blackwell, 1995).
Samuel Rubenson has long been an advocate of monastic learning, of asceticism as philosophia—see his The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Fortress Press, 1995). Broadening his frame, he puts the matter succinctly: “My questions are not whether there were schools in the monasteries, but whether the monasteries were in essence schools; not whether education took place in the monastic setting, but whether monasticism was in itself an educational movement rooted in previous school traditions” (14). Lillian Larsen joins him in a slightly broader and more cautious summary: “As Classical sources and traditions melded with Biblical and monastic teaching and practice, existing norms were redefined and new structures of use were developed” (1). “Norms” and “structures” carry us further than “schools.”
The problem becomes one of novelty, therefore, and purpose. Continuity in the instruments of formation was channeled by a shifting sense of the purpose of paideia. If the old curriculum was designed to form virtuous and effective citizens, then a different city was now envisaged; a different range of relations and obligations; and a different field for the exercise of power. A monastery did not exhaust the opportunities or the ambitions. The specifically Christian timbre of formation, ever more forceful, took a variety of forms, encouraged by different figures operating within different venues. Members of the clergy and the independent laity had their own pulpits, as it were—the basilica; the household—and even emperors and kings felt the need to have their say—at the court; in the law.
In a limited review of so masterly and inevitably influential a collection, it is best to map out a central path. This is not to underestimate the meticulous detail of chapters like Larsen's own (101–124) or that by Roger Bagnall (75–100), nor the broad sweep of Blossom Stefaniw (153–181). But I am sure they will allow me to suggest that a few papers continue to emphasize the deeper bourdon of this inquiry, which has yet to reach its conclusion (if it ever does), and which is destined to affect for some time our understanding of ancient asceticism.
I would start with Arthur Urbano, a relatively new voice in this conversation, moving forward from his stimulating 2013 monograph, The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity (Catholic University of America Press). Repetition in his chapter here (236–255) suggests some careless haste; but he has caught well the implications of the editors, noting how ascetics “simultaneously mirrored and challenged previous philosophical paradigms” (236). To mirror and to challenge—that species of simultaneity—is to pinpoint the crux. Urbano does this more than once. “Intellectuals [who] invested in changing the balance and rules of the game were products of the very paideia that produced what they challenged” (238). When he comes to discuss Theodoret, he suggests that Christians were only engaging in the sleight of hand that pagans had practiced already—asserting a discontinuity at the heart of what was in fact an enduring culture. “An apologetic mode of interpreting Plato belonged to the Platonist tradition itself, as did the strategy of claiming that one's intellectual opponents had strayed from Plato's intent” (245). Texts, therefore, like Theodoret's Therapy for Hellenic Maladies and Religious History were creating “a space for negotiating the cultural goods of paideia” (243). They at once “reflected and directed transformations” (255).
It is this essentially subversive dialogue with the past that allowed the new pedagogues to safeguard values they appeared to reject. Urbano is not alone in disrobing this subterfuge, and I think that the penetration of disguise represents the book's best addition to the debate. Peter Gemeinhardt (33–52) calls it a “translation” of paideia, and observes it mainly in the different versions of the Life of Antony. Gemeinhardt himself has a distinguished record here, reaching back to his 2007 work, Das lateinische Christentum und die antike pagane Bildung (Mohr Siebeck).
Comparably prominent in this book is the chapter by Henrik Rydell Johnsén (219–235), which grapples even more vigorously with the paradox of “the virtue of being uneducated.” Why was this risky dismissal embraced by writers and (perhaps) practitioners who wished, nevertheless, to preserve a genuine learning of their own? Johnsén makes a splendid job of showing that such unease had lurked for centuries in the deeper layers of ancient erudition. He acknowledges the insights of Sarah Rappe (now widely available in a range of works), picking out a paper, “The New Math: How to Add and to Subtract Pagan Elements in Christian education” in Y.L. Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Brill, 2001). The root of the unease was the danger of mere speculation, and an inadequate attention to the practice of virtue. Betterment of self and fruitful insight were by contrast entirely worthy, and yet dependent on study and discussion.
Thus we find summarized the thrust of a valuable volume.
