Sites of the Ascetic Self

Niki Kasumi Clements

Description

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.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Religion
• Christianisme
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• John Cassian
• Monasticism
• Ethics
• Catholic
• Christianity
• History
• Foucault

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268107871
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sites of the Ascetic Self
Sites
of the
Ascetic Self
JOHN CASSIAN AND CHRISTIAN ETHICAL FORMATION
NIKI KASUMI CLEMENTS
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
The author thanks Peeters Publishers for the rights to adapt for chapter 5 of Niki Kasumi Clements, “Emotions and Ascetic Formation in John Cassian’s Collationes,” Studia Patristica . Edited by Markus Vinzent and Ioannis Papadogiannakis. Special Vol. 83, no. 9 (2017): 241–70.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020007576
ISBN: 978-0-268-10785-7 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10788-8 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10787-1 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For John Connor Mulligan
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: CONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHICS IN ASCETICISM
CHAPTER 1 Forms of Agency and Ways of Life
CHAPTER 2 Cassian the Ethicist
CHAPTER 3 Cassian on Human Effort
PART II: PRACTICES OF ASCETIC FORMATION
CHAPTER 4 Bodily Practices
CHAPTER 5 Affective Practices
CHAPTER 6 Communal Practices
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To acknowledge the sources of this book is to recognize sources over decades. From California to the Northeast to Houston, I have been supported, challenged, and motivated by individuals who have modeled how to live and think differently. I could ask for no better colleagues than those at Rice University, where this book took root in conversation with April DeConick, Jeff Kripal, Anthony Pinn, Bill Parsons, Elias Bongmba, Anne Klein, Marcia Brennan, Matthias Henze, Claire Fanger, David Cook, John Stroup, and Brian Ogren. Working across disciplines has its challenges and would not have been possible without the critical and charitable engagement of interlocutors in my department at Rice, in the Humanities Research Center, and across the School of Humanities.
From my time at Brown University, I am very grateful to the following: Thomas Lewis, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Stephen Bush, Harold Roth, Mark Cladis, Stanley Stowers, and Ross Kraemer for sharing their intellectual force and institutional acumen. The Religion and Critical Thought vertical cohort also saw this work from its time as a seedling, notably Megan McBride, Anna Bialek, Caroline Kory, David Lê, Jonathan Sozek, Douglas Finn, Alexis Glenn, Alissa MacMillan, and Matt Duperon. I also thank, as a bit of Brown in Houston, Bob and Nancy Carney for their years of friendship and wisdom.
To find mentors in one’s academic exemplars is a singular wonder, and I thank Elizabeth Clark from Duke University for enabling this book and the next, as well as Douglas Christie, from Loyola Marymount University, for his timely encouragement. From Harvard Divinity School, past and present, I am grateful for the critical formation of Amy Hollywood, Mark Jordan, Khaled Anatolios, John Behr, Jonathan Schofer, and Sarah Coakley. Elfie Raymond, Wendy Lipp, David Bernstein, Phillis Levin, Ali Nematollahy, and Cristle Collins Judd remind me of the best of Sarah Lawrence College and enabled my pursuit of the academic life. Cultivating the ethos of word and deed as a professor and writer has become an imperative through the examples of Biko Mandela Gray at Syracuse University and Gregory Perron at Rice University. For their exceptional generosity navigating the archives of Michel Foucault at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2019, Laurence Le Bras, Philippe Chevallier, and the Foucault estate have my thanks, with my regrets that most of this research could be featured only in the next book. I am also grateful to my editor, Stephen Little, that our paths crossed and for his stalwart support alongside the excellent team at the University of Notre Dame Press.
This book has been shared, shaped, and rethought in enlivening intellectual communities, including the Boston University Symposium on the Future of the Philosophy of Religion, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Elizabeth A. Clark Center for Late Ancient Studies at Duke University, the International Symposium for Contemplative Studies with the Mind & Life Institute, the Kosmoi-Leuven Centre for the Study of Religion and Worldview, the University of Chicago Divinity School, Villanova University’s “Affect Camp,” and the Rice Workshop in Humanistic Ethics. Special thanks to Ryan Coyne, Bob Davis, David Eckel, Sarah Hammerschlag, Anne Harrington, Jennifer Knust, Stephen Kosslyn, Laura Lieber, Margaret Mitchell, Matthew Peterson, Joseph Verheyden, and Vida Yao.
For various forms of support and solidarity through the years, I also thank Maria Aguilar, Melissa Bailar, Stephen Bradshaw, Lynn Brilhante, Kathleen Canning, Isaac Carroo, Nikki Carson, Silvia Cernea, Adam Clark, Davina Davidson, George Demacopoulos, Laura Dingeldein, Linda Dunleavy, Benjamin Dunning, Farès el-Dahdah, Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rebecca Falcasantos, Brett Grainger, Richard Harley, Diana Heard, George Hegarty, Sonam Kachru, Eva Kauppila, Jones College, Justin Kelley, David Liao, Sylvia Louie, Matthew Lyddon, Benjamin Marcus, Libby Matthews, Lynne McCabe, Zack Mezera, Jadrian Miles, Brenna Moore, the Mosles, the Mulligans, Marcie Newton, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Anya Parker, Amelia Perkins, Al Peters, Janet Peters, Daniel Picus, Aysha Pollnitz, Bilal Rehman, Ruth Robbins, Judith Roof, Malone Sams, Paula Sanders, Claudia Solis, the Solises, Robyn Schroeder, Kerry Sonia, Zoe Tao, Diane Terrill, Andrew Tobolowsky, Nicolas Shumway, Thaya Uthayophas, Matthew Wettergreen, Lisa Wahlander, Michelle White, Mara Willard, and Chloe Wilson.
The Clements family—TC, Michi, Sumi, Sachi, Suki, Kay, Frances, and Caleb—deserves my sincerest appreciation for their love, support, and hilarity through four decades. My dearest friends—Gwendolyn Bradford, Amanda Cadogan, Becca Cain, Holly Holmes, Tamsin Jones, Kristin LeMay, Rachel Smith, and Andi Winnette—all inspired and sustained me in this work. The existential and political urgency of committing to The Work came from Ryan Gosa and Paul Otremba, whose untimely passings motivated this book from beginning to end. This book—and indeed my self—would not exist at all were it not for the brilliance and unfailing support of John Connor Mulligan, who has enabled me to live in this best of fractured worlds with love, whimsy, Rabbit, and Domino.
Introduction
Around 380 CE, a well-educated young man of some means leaves his lushly wooded native land of Scythia Minor near the Black Sea for the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. 1 Submitting himself at the entrance to a monastic community in Bethlehem, he gains entry and learns the rudiments of communal living along with a traveling companion and dear friend. 2 In texts he would pen forty years later along the southern coast of Gaul, this man calls himself “Iohannes” and his companion “Germanus.” 3 Once established in their routine and living quarters in Bethlehem, John and Germanus receive a third inhabitant for their domicile. This old man seems to be the least amongst them—an ignoble entrant to the monastery occasioned by bodily infirmity and age as opposed to a true commitment to the monastic life.
But then come his stories. Pinufius, as the man calls himself, describes the wondrous workings of ascetics in the Egyptian desert, stressing their virtues of humility and obedience. There was Abba John, whose exemplary obedience led him to perform the most absurd of tasks: smashing a precious oil vessel, sweating while failing to move an impossibly large boulder, and watering a lifeless stick for a year simply because his elder commanded him to do so. 4 Yet more questionable was Abba Patermutus, whose obedience to his elder led him to throw his own son into the river at the elder’s command to prove he had divested himself of such worldly attachments; the elder fortunately stationed fishers for the boy downstream. 5 Then there was the brother who gave up his considerable wealth to join the community. In a test of his humility and endurance in his new social station, his shoulders were loaded up with ten baskets of wares to sell in the market as a common laborer, which he did with aplomb. 6
The most spectacular revelation of humility, however, is that of Pinufius himself. It turns out that this old man despised in Bethlehem is Abba Pinufius, the acclaimed elder of a community in Panephysis in the Egyptian desert. 7 Too esteemed and deferentially treated in his home community, Pinufius first sought the anonymity required for his exercise of humility by stealing away to a community at a great distance from his own in the Thebaid and obediently supplicating himself. His brothers, missing their shepherd, scoured the Egyptian desert, eventually finding Pinufius in a cenobium in Tabenna and dragged him back home. 8 Changing scale if not strategy, Pinufius soon departed the desert altogether, made the difficult journey by sea to the distant Bethlehem, and humbled himself as a novice at the entrance to the monastery near the Cave of the Nativity. Certain he would not be found in this world away from Egypt, Pinufius settled into life in John and Germanus’s community only to be spotted by chance by brothers from his home monastery making a pilgrimage to the sacred sites in Palestine, who carried him home once again. 9
Their imaginations captured by such stories, both told to them by Pinufius and enacted before their eyes through his example, John and Germanus receive blessings from their own superiors to set out for the desert cells of Egypt. 10 The Conlationes XXIIII , known in English translation as the Conferences , claims to chronicle conversations between the young friends and fifteen of