Vision Becoming Joy: The Desert in History and Imagination

It has been almost thirty-five years since the publication of Peter Brown’s groundbreaking essay, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”1 For scholars who were drawn into the study of early Christian asceticism and monasticism in its wake, it is almost impossible to recall how we imagined and conceived of Christian Late Antiquity before its publication. But the challenge of conceptualizing this world in light of the tremendous outpouring of work that has emerged from the subsequent generation of scholars is perhaps even more daunting. How many can really claim to have kept abreast of or arrived at a meaningful way of making sense of the avalanche of new critical editions and translations, archeological and papyrological discoveries, studies of the theological or socio-cultural dimensions of early Christian monasticism?

One might argue that there is no compelling reason to even at~ tempt such a synthesis, that the diversity of subjects, methods and ideological perspectives that have come to characterize scholarship of early Christian monasticism ought to be recognized and celebrated for what it is, a necessary and creative corrective to an earlier, more homogenized view of this world that we have now come to see as having been far too narrow. Still, one of the chanlenges of working in a field that has seen such an explosion of creative scholarship appearing in so many different arenas simultaneously, is precisely that of asking whether certain patterns or trends have begun to emerge in our understanding of early Chris tian monasticism and, if so, what they are.