This AJR Forum, organized and guest edited by Candace Buckner, features responses from Ellen Muehlberger, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, and Ciara Mulcahy to Christine Luckritz Marquis’s book, Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt's Golden Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The forum concludes with a reflection penned by the author.
Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age
Using Theophilus’ raid of the monastic community and attack against the Tall Brothers at Nitria as its focal event, Christine Luckritz Marquis’ wonderful new monograph, Death of the Desert, argues that “violence was inherent in the Egyptian monastic project from its outset” (p. 5). Luckritz Marquis threads together various narratives of violence from fourth-century historians and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
Remembering Broken Promises and Shattered Voices
by Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos
In the wake of collective trauma, memory practices can be protective strategies that channel grief while also shielding the community from continuing harm. In Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age, Christine Luckritz Marquis proposes that we see just such a response in a case of violence that effectively ended the great ascetic experiment of the late antique Egyptian desert.
Evagrius of Pontus’s treatise On the Practical Life, written near the end of the fourth century, is a rich collection of advice for managing the rigors of his program of Christian discipline. Near the end of the text, he offers readers one more source of guidance beyond his teachings. “It is also necessary,” Evagrius wrote, “to make diligent inquiry of the upright ways of the monks who have gone before us and to correct ourselves with respect to these, for one can find many noble things said and done by them.”
Death of the Desert Forum | The Author's Response
My book sought to place the Origenist Controversy and Egyptian monasticism in more immediate dialogue, rather than as two separate scholarly discourses running parallel but rarely intersecting, as they often are. That was important to me because I was also committed to stressing the desert itself as a character in these narratives. And, as I offered close and complex readings of my sources, I sought to do so with a historiographical awareness of the ethical implications for our own time.