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Alexis Torrance, Monachismes d’Orient: Images, échanges, influences. Hommage à Antoine Guillaumont. Pp. 337. Edited by Florence Jullien and Marie-Joseph Pierre., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 64, Issue 2, October 2013, Pages 752–755, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flt160
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This collection marks both the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘Christianismes orientaux’ chair at the École pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and the tenth anniversary of the death of Antoine Guillaumont, the first to hold this chair. The result is a wide-ranging and in-depth look at various aspects of monastic history that can all be linked in one way or another to the pioneering work of Guillaumont. The volume fittingly opens with a chronological bibliography of Guillaumont’s publications (excluding book reviews). The collection itself is divided into four parts: the first and largest deals with the transmission and development of monastic culture; the second with representations of the Oriental monk through history; the third with forms of monastic life (which includes a section on archaeology); and the fourth and shortest with non-Christian forms of monasticism. There is a total of 17 articles.
In the editors’ words, the volume brings together an interdisciplinary collection which emphasizes ‘the mutually reciprocating influences which crystallize the monastic phenomenon in the different cultural areas of the Christian Orient, over a wide time-span: Sinai, Libya and Palestine, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Persian Gulf’. In keeping with Guillaumont’s own interests and with convention, the ‘oriental monasticism’ being treated is largely non-Greek speaking, though the formative influence of Greek monastic texts (especially those of Evagrius) is repeatedly highlighted throughout. The first article, by Paul Géhin, focuses on the reception of Evagrius in Syriac contexts, and in particular the debates surrounding the Gnostic Chapters and the extent of their Origenism (the predominantly accepted Syriac version had been extirpated of much of its overt Origenism). In an interesting historical twist, Géhin notes that the appropriation of Evagrius in the Church of the East ‘took place in a climate of open hostility towards Origen’, and that figures such as Babai the Great went so far as to refute Origen, using a sanitized Evagrius.
