BETWEEN THE CITY AND THE DESERT: DEFINING A PROPER PLACE FOR MONKS IN THE EARLY BYZANTINE WORLDCristian Gaspar (Bucharest)
Most of the literature produced in monastic circles during the late fourth and early fifth century, whether for internal consumption or for the benefit of lay audiences, is adamant that the proper place for a monk is the desert. Only there, far from the cities of the Eastern Roman Empire and their innumerable temptations, could a monk find the peace and tranquility he needed in order to attain perfection and save his soul through relentless ascetic efforts. This traditional conception, which described the uninhabited desert as the cradle and the most congenial environment of Christian monasticism, went unchallenged for a long time and was also taken over by some modern scholars.
This paper examines evidence that paints an entirely different picture. During the early Byzantine period in many places throughout the Roman East, and most prominently in Constantinople, the early monastic movement was closely associated with the urban milieus. This view, increasingly present in recent works of scholarship (such as studies by Dagron, Wipszycka, and Goehring) pays particular attention to different types of interaction between monastic circles and the urban environments in which these appeared and evolved.
I will argue that, compared to the classical model of desert asceticism, the monks who dwelled in cities appear as extremely problematic figures. They tended to interfere with the proper functioning of state institutions and often challenged the authority of the bishops. Such activities soon caught the attention of the civilian authorities and, eventually, of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
The first attempts to prevent unwanted monastic interference in secular affairs and to define a proper relationship between the monks and the cities date from the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries A. D.
To support this interpretation I will present an analysis of data extracted from different types of sources dated to this period. They will be drawn from legal texts (constitutiones of several Roman emperors preserved in the Codex Theodosianus), monastic writings (the Apophthegmata patrum, the works of John Cassian and St Jerome as well as the hitherto unexplored Logos asketikos of St Nilus of Ancyra), and hagiographic texts (the Lives of Hypatius and Alexander the Sleepless).