The title of Zachary Smith's book gives an accurate description of its content but leads to complexities perhaps unexpected. Those complexities, nevertheless, provide the detail that gives the account its value. The result is a robust contribution to a debate far from over: it will foster progress, even if it does not invite consensus.

The term apophthegmata is to be taken seriously. The author's chief source is the alphabetical collection of the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” in its earliest form. Its dramatis personae are Egyptian (with Poemen and his associates at their heart). But this is an Egypt remembered rather than described. It is likely that one or more of the exiles, who had fled from the intermittent raiding that had devastated the eremitic society disclosed in the collection (henceforward AP), compiled the AP in the region of Roman Palestine around Gaza. Their earliest heroes predate the text itself by more than a century.

There are two important implications lodged here. First, the AP are selective; they focus on a particular type of “desert father” (this is Smith's contention), in order to make a specific point. They are not unlike Eunapius's Lives of the Sophists, singling out Iamblichus and his followers as the true heirs of the sophistic tradition. Second, the AP made this point to a new, non-Egyptian audience. This is potentially the most important step forward in the discussion and the least vigorously pursued. Jennifer Hevelone-Harper is mentioned (specifically, her Disciples of the Desert [Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005]), but reference to the work of Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony is limited to a single article in Vigiliae Christianae for 2003 (see especially her The Monastic School of Gaza [Brill, 2006]), and Susan Ashbrook Harvey is not mentioned at all (I am thinking most of her Asceticism and Society in Crisis [University of California Press, 1990]). This is not to suggest, of course, that the book's bibliography is not substantial and up-to-date. We never gain, however, a clear impression of what the Palestinian-Christian mind needed that only a calculated depiction of an earlier Egypt could provide.

So, what was the AP’s “specific point?” This is where “Episcopal Authority” comes in—a phrase that stands in here and there throughout the book for the authority of the ordained clergy in general. Smith argues that the AP defends an independent system of influence and organization peculiar to ascetic society, parallel to but quite separate from religious communities presided over and instructed by bishops. Even when clergy were present in the desert, and even when the Eucharist was a feature of ascetic formation (and Smith would deny neither), the status of clerics in the AP depended (according to him) entirely on their ascetic virtue. And let us not forget that this was something, apparently, that Palestine (in someone's opinion) needed to hear.

There is an immediate advantage to this thesis: clearly, the rival claims of bishops and ascetic masters—if rivalry is a fair description—still provided grounds for competition, right into and beyond the sixth century. This affects our understanding of ecclesiology. We need to assess very carefully the balance between personal self-improvement and participation in religious ritual, a balance intrinsic to the nature of Christian practice and belief and perhaps to any religious system. The distinctions implied have colored the meaning of “church” at every stage of Christian history.

Smith is too good an historian to be content with simplicities—charism versus office—and he expends great pains to justify his assertions by comparing the AP, as he understands it, with a considerable range of contemporary texts, a task that fills over a hundred pages in the central chapters of the book. This makes, unfortunately, for a fair amount of repetition. He acknowledges that some sources are heavily on the bishops’ side, as it were; some are to some extent against them; and some are ambiguous in their loyalties. This demands the perusal of documents first in one light and then in another, with reiterations that might weary a speedy reader. Yet it is precisely in these central passages that a patient and sympathetic reader will find an abundance of precise references that not only allows depth but encourages fresh reflection. One would be thoughtless to regret it.

There is more, however. The concluding chapters focus on “care of the self,” which was the adopted task of the “philosopher-monks.” Here we enter the world of Pierre Hadot and of “philosophy as a way of life” (the title of the 1995 translation of his 1981 classic, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique [Albin Michel]). This is what the desert fathers had to offer, according to Smith, as a contrast to what we might think of as the “care of souls” offered by a bishop. First, he describes “self-care” in classical (pagan) culture; and then he shows how Christian ascetics injected into it their own notions of fall and redemption. His overriding point is that bishops did not monopolize the strategy of healing that cura conjures in the mind.

One has reservations, naturally. Reading the AP, can we avoid the ambiguity that afflicted ascetics themselves about the role among them of ordained priests? How easy is it to weaken in our eyes, let alone ignore, the holiness of “holy bishops” as described by Claudia Rapp (Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, [University of California Press, 2005])? What must we make of the enduring ascetic commitment of Basil, Augustine, Theodoret, or Gregory the Great (to name only the obvious)? Above all, can we blind ourselves to the increasing drift of homilies toward the encouragement of virtue and self-discipline among the laity?

Yet this book, by its very caution and meticulous documentation, keeps alive the fundamental question, in the past and in our own day: who will best guide me in response to the desert disciple's characteristic question—“How might I be saved?”