Ascetic Culture highlights the influence of Philip Rousseau's scholarship. Each author finds her/his own way to engage and honor the deep and abiding influence Philip has had on studies of asceticism. The book is broken into four sections: “Books as Guides,” “Disciplines and Arenas,” “Landscapes (with Figures),” and “Founding the Field.” The introduction does an excellent job describing not only Philip's career but also the breadth of the essays contained therein. While necessity dictates limiting description here, there is inspiring scholarship across the entire collection; every essay sheds new light on ascetic literature, practice, identity construction, or the history of asceticism as an object of study itself. Anyone interested in early Christian asceticism and early Christianity more generally should read it. The essays, though detailed, are written in a manner accessible to specialists and students alike.
As its title, “Books as Guides,” indicates, the first section consists of essays exploring the multiple reading practices of and circulation of texts by ascetics. The first two essays (Kalvesmaki and Timbie) consider how meaning was made through ascetic texts, while the latter three essays (Choat, Rubenson, and Frank) engage the relationship between Athanasius and the ascetic culture of Egypt. Choat and Rubenson both focus on how students of asceticism in Egypt are to understand the influence (or lack thereof) of the Life of Antony. Frank's piece, “The Memory Palace of Marcellinus,” embodies many of the concerns uniting this section. Frank argues that Athanasius's instructions for Marcellinus's use of various psalms is evidence of Athanasius's deployment of and Marcellinus's presumed ability to engage in Greco-Roman memory practices. She compellingly shows that Athanasius's entire letter is structured around memory technologies of his day. Athanasius uses garden imagery as a backdrop upon which Marcellinus will place memorized Psalms, thus being able to recall the appropriate psalm for a given occasion or malady. Through his letter, Athanasius betrays himself as very much an intellectual of his day, inviting Marcellinus into a praxis of self-formation through rhetorical memory practices focused on biblical psalmody. This recognition of ascetics as participants within their broader cultural context pervades this section and thus pays homage to Rousseau's abiding concern with situating ascetics as active in their cultural milieus. The other essayists similarly situate their pieces within broader ascetic, Christian, ecclesial, and neo-Pythagorean contexts.
The essays in the next section of the collection, “Disciplines and Arena,” consider the multiple ways and places that the ascetic body engaged discipline. Both Burrus and Elm explore ascetics in an urban context, each considering from differing angles how an ascetic could disrupt traditional notions of leadership's relationship to affective performances. So, Burrus lays bare how Gregory of Nyssa queered traditional gender roles within the household (making female submission into a male virtue), while Elm suggests that readings of Gregory of Nazianzus as naïve misrepresent his coy use of the absence of emotion to manipulate a politically delicate situation. An alternate arena for asceticism, the monastic community, is the focus of Caner's and Chin's essays. Caner highlights how increased emphasis on penance and mourning among monks was a public, affective performance that served as an eschatological reminder of final judgment. Perhaps the most provocative essay is Chin's, which troubles the notion of ascetic individuation in its reading of John Cassian. Appealing to theories of distributed cognition, Chin shows how Origen's apokatastatic views inspired Cassian to produce an ascetic that thought “with” the larger community, thus orienting the ascetic away from individual and toward communal cognition. She argues that Cassian does more than “encourage charity or humility between ascetics;” he imagines ascetic bodies as the building blocks of Christ's own body (148).
In “Landscapes (with Figures),” each author situates ascetic practice upon a different context: Goehring, the desert; Darling Young, Odyssean exile; Cox Miller, the bestial; and Leyerle, the countryside. Leyerle's essay touches on several of the issues considered throughout this section. In her essay, she unearths John Chrysostom's deployment of bucolic imagery, considering how nature imagery served not only to inspire virtue but also to convey an “ascetic agenda” (283). Chrysostom invited his listeners to reimagine their dirty, urban context as a luscious garden. Such displacements of physical realities had likewise served ascetics well in the image of the barren desert as ideal home (Goehring) or the ascetic life as exilic voyage (Darling Young). As Leyerle shows, such landscapes could function both to soften boundaries between ascetic and non-ascetic Christians (cf. how Cox Miller, similarly, sees blurring of boundaries between animals and humans) and to elevate and defend ecclesial authority (cf. Goehring, who highlights how ascetics were recast as exemplars of prevailing orthodoxy). She and her fellow authors in this section all underscore that landscapes served as more than mere backdrops, but could themselves be vital participants in developing a Christian imagination, bolstering certain identities while obscuring others.
The final essays, located in “Founding the Field,” trace the development of the field of early Christianity. While Rapp unearths how Adolf Harnack deployed scientific language to legitimate the study of theology among German scholars, Clark examines how the first American protestant faculty of Christian history demeaned and marginalized the importance of asceticism to early Christianity's formation. In her essay, she highlights the Orientalizing impulses that undergirded protestant erasure of asceticism from Christian history. These early professors' belief in the providential movement of Christianity from East to West saw only immature faith and practice in the East, with asceticism as the prime example of its puerility. Only because of its location in the West was western monasticism even recognized. As Clark acknowledges, the obscuring of asceticism's centrality to early Christianity would only be reversed by the renewed scholarly interest in ascetics expressed so fully in Rousseau's own oeuvre.
