Sites of the Ascetic Self

John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation

Niki Kasumi Clements

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268107871
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Religion

Sites of the Ascetic Self reconsiders contemporary debates about ethics and subjectivity in an extended engagement with the works of John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), whose stories of extreme asceticism and transformative religious experience by desert elders helped to establish Christian monastic forms of life. Cassian's late ancient texts, written in the context of social, cultural, political, doctrinal, and environmental change, contribute to an ethics for fractured selves in uncertain times. In response to this environment, Cassian's practical asceticism provides a uniquely frank picture of human struggle in a world of contingency while also affirming human agency in ways that signaled a challenge to followers of his contemporary, Augustine of Hippo.

Niki Kasumi Clements brings these historical and textual analyses of Cassian's monastic works into conversation with contemporary debates at the intersection of the philosophy of religion and queer and feminist theories. Rather than focusing on interiority and renunciation of self, as scholars such as Michel Foucault read Cassian, Clements analyzes Cassian's texts by foregrounding practices of the body, the emotions, and the community. By focusing on lived experience in the practical ethics of Cassian, Clements demonstrates the importance of analyzing constructions of ethics in terms of cultivation alongside critical constructions of power. By challenging modern assumptions about Cassian's asceticism, Sites of the Ascetic Self contributes to questions of ethics, subjectivity, and agency in the study of religion today.

PART I

Constructions of Ethics
in Asceticism

CHAPTER 1

Forms of Agency
and Ways of Life

Abba John of Lycopolis distinguished himself in the ascetic life with his unparalleled obedience. He subjected himself to the training of Abba Pambo so completely that Pambo advanced his trials to the point of absurdity. Given a nearly rotten stick, John unfailingly obeyed Pambo’s order to water it twice a day, “so that it would take root with its daily waterings, come alive again as a tree, spread out its branches, and offer a pleasant sight to the eyes and shade in the extreme heat to those sitting under it.”¹ Watering the stick required fetching water from two miles away every day, but this did not deter John. In winter chill or summer heat, in sickness or health, no excuse prevented John from carrying out Pambo’s orders.

In Cassian’s version of this story, the elder “silently and hiddenly observed this diligence of his day after day and saw him keep his injunction, as if it had been divinely issued, with a simple disposition of heart and without any change of expression or questioning of his reasons.”² Pitying the youth his labors over the whole year, the elder asked John if the stick had grown roots yet. After a quick inspection, the elder plucked the branch out of the ground and threw it aside. The young John, Cassian notes, thereby “trained every day in exercises of this kind, matured in the virtue of obedience and shone with the grace of humility, and the sweet odor of his obedience spread through all the monasteries.”³ John’s obedience involves concrete daily practices of fetching water over miles and watering the stick twice a day, in addition to his other ascetic responsibilities. His virtue, manifested by “a simple disposition of heart” (simplici cordis affectu), is confirmed for the elder and olfactorily spreads to the community at large.

Another account of a stick-watering John figures in the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers). This telling includes the abba’s injunction to take the stick and “water it every day with a bottle of water, until it bears fruit.”⁴ The distance of the water poses a particular challenge, as its source is “so far away that he had to leave in the evening and return the following morning.”⁵ This sleepless ascetic nevertheless perseveres in his discipline. After three years of watering, the wood sprouts into a fruit tree, miraculously rewarding John’s efforts. His elder then carries this fruit to nearby communities, instructing: “Take and eat the fruit of obedience.” Not the scent but the taste of John’s obedience spreads through monasteries, confirming his exemplary virtue.

In both tellings of the story, John captures the imagination of ascetics across Scetis through sensory signs of his own excellence. While the actual practice of watering a long-dead stick might be absurd, the disposition John cultivates through his unfailing obedience to his elder is the fruit that it bears. John, the young ascetic, matures into a desert elder himself. The difference between the two accounts primarily relies on the miraculous plot twist: in the Apophthegmata, the stick takes root and fructifies; in Cassian’s text, it is the story that takes root in the community’s imagination. In the Apophthegmata, the fruit is the miraculous testament to John’s virtue that overturns the natural world in the revification of a vitiated piece of wood. In Cassian’s version, the abba throws the stick away and proceeds to test John through other trials, none of which result in a miraculous end. John simply moves to the next exercise, fortifying the disposition of heart (cordis affectus).

It is in the sensible ecstasy of Cassian’s story that we can scent out his broader ethical objectives: exemplary marvels embodied in the improvement of one’s behavior and way of life, not in superhuman feats and miracles. Instead of relying on miracles, the ascetic’s form of life fructifies in his exemplary commitment to daily practices. He is an agent cultivating a disposition marvelous for its dedicated maximization, not its miraculous abrogation, of human possibility. His commitment both stems from his disposition of heart and fortifies this disposition itself. He expresses his agency in and through the daily practices of formation; not the spontaneous sprouting but the daily cultivation is most important.

Appreciating the force of human agency in Cassian’s asceticism—notably in their daily practices—involves engaging two modern philosophical domains: (1) scholarly turns to antiquity in order to articulate alternatives to modern morality and (2) theories of agency that range from the rationalist to the embodied. Reading Cassian’s texts in relation to these discourses counters the tendency to stress renunciation in asceticism, opening up ways of seeing Cassian’s texts as more continuous with philosophical practices and ways of life in antiquity. This allows us to engage Cassian beyond Foucault’s reading of him as obsessed with interiority and renunciation instead of attentive to transformative arts of living. In this chapter I set up the theoretical conditions for analyzing Cassian’s texts with (1) attention to ethics as a way of life common to other practical texts in antiquity and (2) contemporary theoretical foci of embodiment, affectivity, and social formation as central to understand agency. Methodologically, I illustrate how contemporary theories can help illuminate historical texts and how historical texts can help challenge theoretical discourses to recognize the contingency of their own categories.

This chapter, therefore, lays the methodological and theoretical conditions for what follows in my reading of Cassian’s asceticism and ethical agency. Attention to Cassian’s historical context (chapter 2) and understanding of human effort (chapter 3) further extend and transform these claims by considering the late ancient world as one rich with potential for the transformation of selves in uncertain times. By bringing together ethics as a way of life with theories of agency that range from rational to embodied, I argue that a form of ethical agency is at the heart of Cassian’s ascetic texts. Rooted in daily struggles of body, heart, and mind, such ethical agency produces not miraculous results but exceptional forms of cultivation. Analyzing Cassian’s works in this way clarifies the strengths and limitations of modern theoretical frameworks taken up by scholars at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and history.

ETHICS AS A WAY OF LIFE

For philosophers and scholars of religion, Greek and Roman antiquity has come to offer a view of ethics as including one’s whole way of life—through the dispositions one cultivates and the daily practices by which one shapes oneself—in an alternative to modern, code-based morality. Bernard Williams’s turn to Socrates allows him to pose the question of how to live as the “best place for moral philosophy to start.”⁶ Like Foucault, Williams is concerned with the inability of modern philosophy and its stress on rationality and procedural morality to cope with contemporary challenges, arguing that “the demands of the modern world on ethical thought are unprecedented, and the ideas of rationality embodied in most contemporary moral philosophy cannot meet them; but some extension of ancient thought, greatly modified, might be able to do so.”⁷ Williams justifies engaging ancient thought for its opening of practical questions of how to live.

Related interests focus on societies’ everyday practices, the challenges to living, and their ability to transvalue modern forms of morality from an alternative historical vantage point. Martha Nussbaum’s engagement with ancient tragedies as a site for ethical reflection on the limitations of reason and the corollary confrontation of human vulnerability contrasts an Aristotelian focus on the cultivation of character with ratio-centric engagement of modern philosophers such as John Rawls.⁸ For ancient tragedians like Aeschylus, “there were human lives and problems, and various genres in both prose and poetry in which one could reflect about these problems.”⁹ Pierre Hadot, who influenced Foucault as his colleague at the Collège de France, illuminates the everyday practices by which Greek and Roman philosophers articulate philosophy as “a way of life.”¹⁰ For Hadot, “spiritual exercises” (exercices spirituels) contour the daily domain of ethical action with the goal of self-transformation, accomplished by “mastering one’s inner dialogue, and mental concentration.”¹¹ Ethics as “aiming at a goal . . . that the common conduct of life hardly knew” requires the full reshaping of one’s life in light of the commitments that one arrives at through reflection.¹² Through a genealogical analysis adapted from Foucault and Nietzsche, Charles Taylor moves away from deontology and toward the good life intertwining “selfhood and morality” in and since antiquity.¹³ Taylor critiques moral philosophy’s tendency to focus on “what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life.”¹⁴

In addition to an Aristotelian emphasis on ethos and a Platonic view of philosophy as therapeia (θεραπεία), Edith Wyschogrod describes the ethical potential of engaging narratives in medieval saints: “A postmodern ethic must look not to some opposite of ethics but elsewhere, to life narratives, specifically those of saints, defined in terms that both overlap and overturn traditional normative stipulations and that defy the normative structure of moral theory.”¹⁵ Engaging Wyschogrod’s approach to life narratives as part of ethics, Cassian’s texts become fecund sites for theorizing agency. Emphases on human vulnerability, the role of reflection in transformation, the centrality of doing over being, and the dialectical relation between conceptions of the self and ethics also illuminate Cassian’s texts as practical and as defying “the normative structure of moral theory.” Reading Cassian for such emphases extends attention to late ancient contexts alongside the ancient and medieval as another site where ethics is not primarily focused on moral judgments and rational conformity.

Such philosophical turns to pre-modern historical contexts help displace assumptions that descriptive and normative forms of inquiry need be (or even can be) separated. Following and extending these philosophical turns to the ancient Mediterranean, I argue that Cassian’s early Christian asceticism might also help us think through questions of ethics and forms of life. As Foucault intimates in his late work, the domain of early Christian asceticism poses uncanny questions to our own understanding of resistance and subversion in an art of life. The desert ascetics who enchant Cassian’s world and have informed monastic communities since are neither easily dissociated from modernity’s utopian impulses nor neatly identifiable with its dialectics of individual and society. Exceptional human figures, demonic and angelic spirits, and dialogic considerations of the good proliferate in his work, offering us reflections, in a mirror darkly, of our own urgent ethical struggles to articulate ecosystems of self, community, and relationality.

Ethics in the Philosophy of Religion

The critical force of understanding Cassian’s ascetic ethics as a way of life registers best when read in the context of recent iterations of the philosophy of religion that both critique modern western emphases on beliefs as centrally defining religiosity and open space for recognizing the centrality of practice, embodiment, and lived experience. Tyler Roberts establishes a frame for the philosophy of religion in the transition from “explicitly religious thinkers” using philosophical tools for their own theological ends, to philosophers who constructively reshape discourses in this encounter “in a way that blurs the boundaries between philosophical and religious thought.”¹⁶ Kevin Schilbrack describes how moving the philosophy of religion beyond traditional attachments to the “rationality of theism” opens up questions of agency in “the philosophical study of the experiential, practical, and institutional aspects of religions.”¹⁷ Stephen Bush frames experience as ideological and a vehicle for power and social formation, yet also as part of political agency and group identity, with “a role in the formation of bodily habits that have political implications.”¹⁸ Thomas Lewis foregrounds the methodological intersection between descriptive and normative, or historical and philosophical work, in texts acr...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Constructions of Ethics in ASCETICISM
• Part II: Practices of Ascetic Formation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index