Between 300 and 450 C.E. thousands of Christians abandoned their
ordinary lives of marriage, work, and family to live in the Egyptian
desert or in communities devoted to God.  There they renounced sex
and money, ate very little, and spent nearly all of their time in
work and prayer.  So began Christian monasticism, one of the most
important features of western religious history.  This course will
focus on the pioneers of the monastic life in late ancient Egypt:
Antony the Great, the Pachomian monastic federation, Evagrius
Ponticus and the desert fathers, Shenoute and the White Monastery.
We will study how they disciplined their bodies, organized their
communities, fought with demons, and prayed to God.  We will also
look at the backgrounds of monasticism in the New Testament and in
Jewish and “pagan” cultures, and we will see how monasticism took
root also in western Europe (John Cassian and St. Benedict) and
Syria (Simeon the Stylite).  Along the way we will discover the
origins of the seven deadly sins.
Requirements:  Midterm, paper, final exam. Textbooks: Athanasius,
The Life of Antony and The Letter to Marcellinus; Armand Veilleux,
Pachomian Koinonia I: The Lives of St. Pachomius; Owen Chadwick,
Western Asceticism; Benedicta Ward et al., The Lives of the Desert
Fathers; Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks of Syria;
Course Reader (containing works of Antony, Evagrius Ponticus, and
Shenoute).