Book Review: Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau:

Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau. Edited by Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. xiii + 414 pp. $68.00 (cloth).Festschrifts can be like a pillowcase filled with Halloween candy: some treats you can't wait to eat, some are okay, and some you hand off to or trade with your younger sibling. The editors of this volume honoring Philip Rousseau, who has been writing on late antique asceticism and wider-ranging topics for forty-five years and whose "curiosity is insatiable and his industry steady" (p. 4), have supplied several generations of scholars not only with pillowcases but with plenty of treasured goodies. The editors and contributors to Ascetic Culture "offer these essays in admiration and gratitude for the many ways in which his distinctive scholarly vision has shaped our field and his exemplary, generous friendship has supported our common Ufe" (p. 8). The essays gathered here are wide-ranging in both time and place and in methodology; for scholars in the field of early Christian asceticism, the book concludes with fascinating "fieldwork" essays on "Adolf Hamack and the Paleontological Layer of Church History" by Claudia Rapp and "From East to West: Christianity, Asceticism, and Nineteenth-Century Protestant Professors in America" by Elizabeth A. Clark.Ascetic Culture is divided into four sections. The first, "Books as Guides," explores the circulation of written texts and "Egyptian monastic reading programs" (p. 5), including essays on Pachomius, Antony, and Athanasius. Part II, "Disciplines and Arenas," looks at "the topic of disciplinary culture in a variety of ascetic contexts" (p. 5), such as early Byzantine monasticism and the pious household of Macrina. In Part III, "Landscapes (with Figures)," essayists consider "imaginary landscapes and ascetic self-fashioning" (p. 6) in early Christian Egypt, the sermons of John Chrysostom, and the writings of Evagrius of Pontus. The final two essays mentioned above in Part IV, "Founding the Field," conclude the volume. "Taken together," the editors conclude in their summary of the books contents, "these essays bear witness to the vitality of ascetic culture in late antiquity" (p. 7). Here by necessity I will focus on only a few of the pieces that, in their quests and the questions they raise, may interest readers of this journal."The Life of Antony in Egypt" by Malcolm Choat, found in Part I, raises several longstanding concerns about the scholarly field of early Christian monasticism. Choat accepts that "the purpose of the Life [is] to establish orderly hierarchies leading toward ecclesiastical authority" (p. 51). A reader who is not an adept in the field, and perhaps even one who is, could conclude here that Athanasius had no interest at all in the spirituality or inner life of his famous monk. The context of a work, of course, is vitally important for our understanding of the text; as the saying has it, "text without context is pretext." For example, in the essay that follows Choat's, "Apologetics of Asceticism: The Life of Antony and Its Political Context," Samuel Rubenson concludes by placing the Life "in the shared intellectual culture of emerging monasticism, neo-Pythagorean revival, and Alexandrian theological and philosophical tradition" (p. …