Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity by David Brakke (Review)

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the way scholars understand and interpret early Christian monasticism. In the wake of the ground-breaking work of social historian Peter Brown, a generation of scholars has emerged for whom the study of Christian monasticism must be approached with a critical awareness of, among other things, issues of gender, power, and social construction. Although this methodological shift has sometimes resulted in a reductionistic reading of monastic experience, it has for the most part yielded a richer, more varied and textured understanding of the early monastic world than we have had before. David Brakke is among the most gifted of this new generation of scholars and is already well known in the field for his astute and original reading of the monastic ethos of Athanasius of Alexandria (Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism [Oxford, 1995]). Brakke turns his considerable skill here to a subject of crucial importance for understanding early Christian monastic spirituality: the monk’s battle with the demons.