Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things

By Blossom Stefaniw

Christian Reading shifts the assumption that study of the Bible must be about the content of the Bible or aimed at confessional projects of religious instruction. Blossom Stefaniw focuses on the lesson transcripts from the Tura papyri, which reveal verbatim oral classroom discourse, to show how biblical texts were used as an exhibition space for the traditional canon of general knowledge about the world. Stefaniw demonstrates that the work of Didymus the Blind in the lessons reflected in the Tura papyri was similar to that of other grammarians in late antiquity: articulating the students’ place in time, their position in the world, and their connection to their heritage. But whereas other grammarians used revered texts like Homer and Menander, Didymus curated the cultural patrimony using biblical texts: namely, the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. By examining this routine epistemological and pedagogical work carried out through the Bible, Christian Reading generates a new model of the relationship of Christian scholarship to the pagan past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780520971929

Blossom Stefaniw

Blossom Stefaniw is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Council. She is the author of Mind, Text, and Commentary: Noetic Exegesis in Origen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and Evagrius Ponticus.

Book preview

Christian Reading

Christian Reading

Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things

Blossom Stefaniw

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2019 by Blossom Stefaniw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stefaniw, Blossom, author.

Title: Christian reading : language, ethics, and the order of things / Blossom Stefaniw.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049234 (print) | LCCN 2019007490 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520971929 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520300613 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Old Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History. | Didymus, the Blind, approximately 313–approximately 398. | Greek language—Grammar–History–To 1500. | Manuscripts, Greek (Papyri)—Egypt.

Classification: LCC BS1163 (ebook) | LCC BS1163 .S74 2019 (print) | DDC 261.5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049234

Manufactured in the United States of America

28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. A Narrative History of the Tura Papyri

2. Reading with a Grammarian

3. The Textual Patrimony: Knowledge, Language, and Reading

4. The Intellectual Patrimony: Ethics, Logic, and the Order of Things

5. Christian Reading: Chronography, Cartography, and Genealogy

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am always envious when I read other people’s acknowledgments. There was a time in the process of writing this book when I thought I would simply say, I wrote this alone, and it hurt the whole time. The time of writing this was a time of living in sustained isolation with fear and uncertainty, the grainy flayed feel of creativity. I couldn’t have written this, or anything else, if I had not holed up with those particular demons and learned to sit with them. So my first duty is to acknowledge that dark, grimy, gut-grinding, kerosene-in-the-veins aspect of writing. I wrote alone and it hurt the whole time. It hurt even when it was joyful, even in the sentence about the gecko’s feet, a moment of excruciating and tenuous joy in a hotel room in Leeds. The pain and loneliness that comes with writing is true, but it is not the only thing that is true.

It is also true that I wrote in the company of a gorgeous and highly implausible array of human beings and their hearts and their work. I was surrounded by the challenging affection of people who wanted me to win, smacked me on the back, and shoved me out into the fight with the valiant solidarity of the coach or teacher or fellow-soldier, with the same sharp raving love that I feel when I see someone pull ahead in a race or stick a landing. That love is the love of the one who watches, leaving the runner or fighter or gymnast to work alone, yes, but doing so with confidence and pride. Such sparks of enthusiasm and encouragement kept me jogging back out into the arena, ready to go another round. Here, in more or less chronological order, are the people who shouted to me from the sidelines, who trained a day or two with me, taped my ankles, turned up to watch a meet, or reminded me to keep my weight on my back foot and follow through:

Elisabeth Engler-Starck, who was my research assistant for several years before and throughout the process of writing this book, made numerous charts and tables, proofread and corrected my erratic bilingual spelling again and again, covered classes so I could attend conferences, found numerous things, coordinated never-ending lists of tasks on half a dozen fronts at the same time, helped on grant applications, lesson plans, bibliographies, and chapter drafts, and overall was a source of consistent, focused, competent, and reliable support, taking a huge amount of work off my shoulders and allowing this book to be completed in a timely fashion.

Benjamin Eckman read my first book and recommended me as a speaker at the Monastic Education workshop in Lund in June 2013. Without the interest and initiative of this graduate student, I would never have been part of the conversations which caused me to do the work to find out that Didymus was a grammarian. In Lund, Ed Watts questioned the assumption that the lessons were a form of Christian philosophy and encouraged me to look at other forms of education. Samuel Rubenson let me talk him into having me back to Lund in October 2013 to present at the international conference on Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia, which was the first time I argued that Didymus was a grammarian.

Colleagues present at that conference, especially Lillian Larsen, Kim Haines-Eitzen, and Ellen Muehlberger, encouraged me to pursue this research and write a full monograph on it. Roger Bagnall responded with great enthusiasm, funded a workshop at ISAW in May 2014 to support this research, and three years later reviewed the book manuscript with incredible attention and care.

I am especially grateful to the senior women in my field who spent their scarce time and prized attention on me, as if putting their money on a rookie fighter. Susanna Elm supported applications, supplied firm exhortations in the imperative mood, and inspired courage and resolution. Kate Cooper provided wise council, support for applications, and unflinching confidence with clear instructions. Raffaella Cribiore carefully read and commented on chapter 2 and did the years of work on grammar in late Roman Egypt which made this book possible. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, who was the first American scholar to take notice of me and support me as a young graduate student, included me in a workshop for the journal Studies in Late Antiquity, where I presented the first chapter of this book, and sat in numerous presentations emanating dig. Her friendship is a treasure in my life.

Heidi Marx invited me to speak at her institution early in the writing process, learned and grew with me, and faithfully cultivated a friendship which has helped to nourish and sustain me. In her name I want to thank my peers in the field whose welcome, talent, and camaraderie are vital, a tribe of women my age who have laid claim to the field with tenacity and good cheer in the face of adversity, who made space for me and my work.

In my adopted home in Germany, another tribe of wise and sure-handed women supported me. My colleague from Classics, Mariette Horster, read and responded to earlier drafts of chapter 3 and chapter 4. Frau Armoni and Frau Breternitz facilitated my work in the archives in Cologne with kindness, generosity, and care. Frau Friedrich and Frau Beer at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz filled in dozens of forms on my behalf and patiently and competently transformed my paperwork into money. Frau Stockfisch and Frau Doré guided me in funding acquisition. Frau Meyer sat down with me for several strategy sessions and shared her prudence, experience, and esoteric knowledge of institutions. Frau Gröpler at the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, which funded the research for this book, was unflinchingly professional, cheerful, and engaged as I wrangled the logistics of the funding scheme. Frau Kinder at the Martin Luther University of Halle took over the papers-to-money conjuring as I changed institutions in 2017. Christa Heimsoth-Pusch, my oldest and dearest German friend, has had an eye on me since 2001, before I ever dreamed of becoming an academic, and kept me company through the last phases of writing, week by week.

Eric Schmidt at UC Press acted as my editor with cleverness and care and colluded with me in the transatlantic search for healthful lunches during conferences. Archna Patel and Jeff Wyneken supported the final phases of manuscript preparation with patience, warmth, and professionalism.

Peter Mena embraced the approach to history used in the first chapter of this book as presented at the North American Patristics Society in May 2017 and has welcomed me and laughed with me from the start. In Peter’s name I express my appreciation for the warmth and collegiality of at least a dozen interested, amiable, and enthusiastic colleagues classed in my mind as boy-cousins and big or little brothers, whom I see year for year at NAPS and other conferences and whose sometimes rowdy and always plentiful good humor has nourished me. Three deserve special mention: Jamie Wood, who has grown up with me into academic life since we were both freshly out of our doctoral programs, read several chapters and provided useful feedback. Greg Given read the entire manuscript and wrote in marginal notes which fed my heart, changed my mind, made me laugh, and sharpened my words, finally coming into the trenches with me right before deadline to check my translations with thoroughness and excellence. Andrew Jacobs read the whole manuscript at a late stage and promptly returned comments and corrections I never would have thought of.

The Nordic contingent continued to support and accompany this project beyond its initial presentation in Lund. Hugo Lundhaug has welcomed and included me and this research in multiple workshops and summer schools. He and Brent Nongbri read the first chapter and provided valuable comments from their expertise in papyrology. René Falkenberg advised on translation puzzles and was a cheerful and encouraging friend. Liv Ingeborg Lied offered support and friendship and excellent conversation throughout the final year of writing.

Late in the day and with great generosity, Lincoln Blumell shared his introduction and new translations of the papyri held at BYU; Gregg Schwendner answered questions on epigraphy and dating; and Robert Dennis dug up information from forty years ago to answer questions about the circumstances of the presentation of the part of the find whose sale to BYU he helped to facilitate. I especially appreciate this collaborative spirit, as it was extended to me on trust and without ever having met me.

While I don’t know their names, I also want to acknowledge all the reviewers and committee members who sat in stuffy rooms or stayed up late and made decisions to support my applications for the position as Junior Professor for Ethics in Antiquity and Christianity which I held for the majority of the time I was researching and writing this book; an intramural research grant from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; a three-year project grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation; and a Heisenberg Fellowship with the German Research Council. Their service and their tolerance for tedium provided me with very ample funding, which has made a huge difference to the quality and scope of this book.

I thank my new colleagues at the Martin Luther University of Halle, especially Jörg Ulrich who agreed to host me. They have provided an amiable and welcoming environment in the final stages of writing this book.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my grandmother, Rosa Hils Stefaniw, who couldn’t read because she went blind, who was an immigrant and a displaced person, who survived the war, who taught me two true things and knew a past I was never told so that I could flourish in a new world with a new past and my own books.

Prologue

It’s a summer afternoon, a Saturday, three months into a brutal heat wave. I’m in the German National Library, holed up with these words while others are out in the park or at the lake. This is the second summer I have spent in this library. My task today, stated blithely on one of at least fourteen lists I have made for myself, is to put in an hour on the prologue.

I am sitting here in a striped summer dress, at a long wooden table studded with goose-necked lamps. There is wood paneling all around me and a mural on the front wall showing sturdy nudes, one of whom I think must be Narcissus, lying belly-down at the edge of a pond, reaching out for a flower my vision does not allow me to identify from here. The north side of the reading room has a row of long slender windows, showing the modernist passion for clarity, a self-monumentalization which fell short of the universal and is now only a quaint feature of local architecture. I am an immigrant from the United States, the wrong person for these slender windows to look down on. But if they turn away from me, they look out at a world they were never intended to see, their gaze displaced from the future for which they were built. This is the right place to write a book about defining and shaping the world through reading, a book about fragmented pasts. And perhaps I, as an immigrant, a reader, a displaced person, a writer with a fractured past, am the right person to write a book about reading as a way to do the work of time, space, and attachment.

Below the row of windows is a row of dictionaries, a solid twenty-five yards of them, for every conceivable language. The dictionaries split open onto whole worlds of words, orderly, alphabetical, overwhelming. Last year I bounced up and down out of my seat to drag dictionaries back and forth as I translated, clutching onto them to give me words my jumbled bilingual memory would not render up in either language quickly enough. In the middle of the row of dictionaries sits the guard, ensuring that I can safely leave my computer when I step out for a drink of water. The guards change every hour. They shake hands as they meet, going in and coming out, passing the baton in the aisle between the rows of tables facing east and those facing west. They are custodians of all of us readers, sentinels watching over a tiny microcosm of books and laptops and quiet. It is an orderly world, with clear labels stenciled onto the wooden shelves all around the room, announcing the categories of books you can find there: Literaturwissenschaft. Politikwissenschaft. Philosophie. Pädagogik.

On the south side of the reading room are the tall swinging doors where you enter, their wooden grips worn down by decades of hands grabbing and pressing, the day’s work done. When I come through these doors, I press against the long wooden handles with my left shoulder, because I am carrying twenty-four pounds of blue-covered editions and translations of the Tura papyri. My biceps bulge as I choose my seat for the day, taut like the biceps of the women in my village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In the very moment I am doing a thing so far away from the things I did as a little girl tagging along with those women, my body reaches into the past and recites my childish wonder at the strong arms I saw around me as a kid, a witness to the real past even as the books which weigh down those muscles ask me to participate in a different, Christian, European, scholarly past, to be the heir of the German editors of those volumes. The weight of these books splits my past and drags at my heart for just a second before I find a table and put them down, rematerializing in the present as a woman in a library trying not to bother those already at work, quietly taking her seat where she can see the clock. There are four marble busts arrayed between the doors, those of Haeckel, Helmholtz, Ehrlich, and one I have already forgotten, although I only just got up to see their names. Those are ancestors I don’t recognize. This might be the right room in which to finish a book on rearranging one’s patrimony. I might be the right person to tell you what it means to read yourself into an inheritance.

Sitting in this library is a quotidian fragment of the history of reading. I am reading and writing in a space which was built to archive the entire German past. After the war, its canon was purged of fascist or militaristic writings so that it might act as the foundation for the socialism which was to become the future of the new world. This library, from time to time, attached those who worked in these rooms to shifting visions of the past. In 1916, when it was built, during the first world war, the past was a national past which must be hoarded as a bulwark against political humiliation, a bid for an identity more homogenous than what had actually emerged. In 1936, when nationalism governed the archive, it suspended its commission to house each and every book written in Germany or translated into German elsewhere, removing certain books so that the revised past would seem to lead more cleanly toward the fascist present. After reunification, the comprehensiveness of the archive was restored and currently every single book published in Germany is housed here, along with all books written in or translated into German abroad. My first book is somewhere in the silo of stacks next door. The present book will not be housed here, although it has been written here, because the categories and policies at work do not admit of immigrants who publish in their home countries. Each revision of the archive has asked the textual past to anoint the particular present as inevitable and correct.

This room, in 2018, is sketched onto a different historical trajectory than it was in 1949. The past it trails behind it tallies the events of 1949 other than they were tallied in 1949, and the future it reaches for is a future unimagined in 1949. The same space, the same archive, has jumped the rails, even as its stillness and size assert its own constancy. And in this room of chronographic displacement, loosened attachments, and latent patrimonies, I am writing about another scholar who, in the Alexandria of the late Roman Empire, rearranged the archive and the march of time in order to attach his students to an honored patrimony, to equip them for a Christian future. He taught his students to read books from the Bible as the sort of books where one could find the principles governing words and texts, social life and the inner life, the physical and cosmic order of things. That scholar was Didymus the Blind, perhaps. Perhaps it was someone else from Alexandria or its environs in the late fourth century, one of dozens of unknown Christian teachers who, in line with other scholars of their time, expected certain texts to act as deposits of the knowledge of the world. We cannot be certain of that, but in reading these reading lessons together now, we can be certain that hard work was done around genealogy, timekeeping, and mapmaking.

Reading is an act of love. It places us in relationship with the past, as distant as the ancient world or as near as those who sit and read with us. Reading is also a way of arranging oneself in relation to time. In the first chapter of this book, I integrate my own patrimony as the heir of the last six decades of philosophy and criticism around text, narrative, knowledge production, race, gender, and history to tell you the story of the Tura papyri as they move through time, from reader to reader, circulating through diverse forms of Christian reading. The story ends with me writing the introduction, so in chapter 1 under the heading 2018 you will find what one expects to find in an academic introduction. In the second chapter I change my voice from the literary to the scholastic, arguing with some of the same methods of comparison, contrast, definitions, categories, and dialectic which Didymus also taught his students. That argument gives the name of grammar to the way a Christian teacher we suppose to have been Didymus the Blind read two books of the Bible with his students. That chapter was the origin of this book and the birthplace of the larger, more tenuous questions I found I still had to answer once I had done the technical work of diagnosing Didymus as a grammarian. These larger questions presented themselves because ancient grammar has to do not just with correct language but with a broader notion of literacy as a capacity to recognize order in certain revered texts. I could demonstrate that Didymus was teaching grammar in these two codices, but how on earth was I going to explain what he thought he was doing teaching grammar from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes? The third and fourth chapters of this book were written under that constant incantation: what on earth, what on earth, what on earth does he think he’s doing? I had to stay in that space of bewildered curiosity for a very long time, dodging received explanations for the relationship of Christian textualities and pedagogies to their pagan predecessors and counterparts. To get at a way to characterize the epistemic and chronographic work Didymus does in these lessons, I had to work with the lessons as if I were doing grounded theory, collecting reams and reams and reams of ad hoc verbal discourse and sorting it, tagging it in my mind and finally on the page for you, and only then building categories and concepts. You’ll find those concepts and categories in chapter 5.

What on earth is he doing? This was a question that could only be answered by sitting in the middle of the vestiges of his lessons and watching him teaching students to read well, by sitting in this postsocialist archive and wading around in another archive. Chapters 3 and 4 try to answer the question of what exactly Didymus is doing while at close grips with the text. Chapter 5 orients his epistemic project within a larger framework or knowledge in late antiquity. To make sure you do not have to bump into as many things as I did before establishing that these lessons are about order, time, and knowledge, I will show you the map of the house you are about to walk into.

Didymus’s lessons are not a bunker in which to hide from a dangerous, non-Christian world. They are not an enclave or a separatist’s ghetto. They are not a rescue ship or a commune’s campus. Nor are they a pirate’s cave, hoarding up treasures stolen from a pagan tradition. To walk into Didymus’s lessons is to walk into a museum. Like all grammarians, Didymus acts as a curator, mediating between the past and the present, showing a new generation their heritage and concealing the contingency, particularity, and fragmentation of that heritage so that it appears as an unimpeachable universal, guaranteeing not only its own value but the order of the present and the future which flow out from it. I will tell you more about the curator in the final chapter, but now I only want you to imagine Didymus, the teacher, as a curator, who has set up an exhibit for his students. On display are all the components of the epistemic patrimony, the elements of knowledge which together represent a canon, the set of everything one needs to know in order to navigate the social, moral, physical, and textual world of the late Roman Empire. That much can be said of any grammarian’s classroom. But most grammarians put on their exhibit in the texts of Homer, Hesiod, or Menander. Didymus has moved the exhibit into texts from the Bible, and he has added a few items to the patrimony, homogenizing a Christian past with the rest of the inherited past. He is not a radical or a hippie or a punk, burning down the museum or vandalizing it, stealing the artifacts or selling them off to pay for vaccines. He honors the museum and its function as much as any other teacher. He has just taken the customary exhibit and moved it to a different museum, a different exhibition space, a book one hadn’t previously thought an appropriate place for this type of exhibit. The patrimony on display is primary; the text museum in which we visit it is only incidental. That is the logic of curation. But beneath that logic we must acknowledge that the space in which one learns and reads makes a difference, so something significant, but not violent, has happened in these lessons. We must also acknowledge that Didymus is teaching in the Bible but not about the Bible. The biblical texts he reads with his students serve only as museums to wander through. You go there to see the exhibit, not the museum itself. Didymus teaches the patrimony, not the Bible.

So let me tell you a story of these codices, from their composition to my desk, before showing you extended translations from each set of lessons so that you can see this type of Christian reading unfold. Each chapter builds up from there to an exhibit of my own, of categories, concepts, and notions which govern pedagogy and knowledge production in late antiquity and which I offer as tools for a new theory of Christian reading.

1

A Narrative History of the Tura Papyri

376: ALEXANDRIA

He remembered the bright belly of the sea pressed up against the tender sky. He had loved to see the shouting blue of the water, the light falling in shards at noonday, smarting off the walls and streets. When he was called in for lessons, going home was the sudden dark at the threshold, the gallant coolness of the walls around him. He blinked and squinted as he sat down to practice his letters, hurrying his eyes into the indoor shade. He was just learning to read and write when the blindness came. He learned to read and he learned that he would only ever see what he had seen as a little boy, rushing into the proud whispering house from his play. The sudden dark of coming home to his lessons was now the home where he read.

Inside the darkness there was endless space, which words had shaped into rooms. He walked through them now as he gave lessons himself. The slave read out the first words of the psalm. He knew the space of those words around him like he knew the shady space he sat in now, the students arrayed in a half-moon arc before him, chattering and shifting. He pulled each word up out of the soil of the sentence around it and showed the roots and leaves and flowers to the young people who studied with him: this is how you live, this is how you speak, this is where we are, this is how it goes together. Just as his fingers would trace along the limp straps of his sandals to find the back and slip his foot into it, his mind would follow down the unlaced bindings of each phrase and buckle them: shod, we can walk out now, into the whole world.

They all hid from the sun in this room and searched out the words, Didymus leading them as he paced through the familiar halls. His father had had this monument of knowledge built in him, calling in one teacher after another, making the slaves read to him every day, until there was a whole world in his skull, until that world overbalanced and dropped down into his chest, reaching out long fingering roots and grabbing onto his heart and his gut. With the students, he walked measured paces, surveying, hefting, gathering, and counting out, showing them again and again how to know where they were and where their fathers had come from.

A little boy was his guide. A tiny socket of shoulder, nested in his hand, took him through the streets. When he heard the voice of the boy saying, We are here, Father, he felt at the same time the heat against his eyes retreat as the coolness of a darker dark anointed him. His foot reached over the threshold, leaving behind the dust and scritching onto the stone floor of the classroom. He let go of the bony shoulder of the little boy and went his accustomed way to his seat. The slave always put it in the right place, always kept the codex of the Psalms, always shushed the students if they became unruly.

The slave was an austere, irritable man, who craved order and precision, who sometimes complained about the pacing of Didymus through all the rooms, wanting it to slow down, wanting it to obey the words more closely, wanting it to be as careful and thorough as he was. The slave read out each verse doggedly, one by one, and then listened and waited for Didymus to pause, to let go of the last glistening thought and allow him to take up the next verse. At the end of the lesson, he paid the stenographers and collected their notes, chastising them if they were untidy, telling them when they would be wanted next, sorting the pages into his bag. Sitting quiet in the classroom gaping with absent students, Didymus heard the shuffling of the pages and the muttering of the slave who, if a gap had been left when the scribes had traded off, was always incensed, sometimes scratching in the missing sentence. The little boy would blunder against Didymus’s side then, leaning into the chair, one foot rubbing on top of the other, ready to go, saying, I am here, Father. Didymus reached out for the little shoulder once more and stepped out into the day, landing a foot in the filtering dust, the darkness at his eyes reddening hotter in the afternoon sun.

In the evening the slave sat up with the stenographers’ notes, writing them out in longhand, festering, thinking of how to persuade his master Didymus to hire others, how to compel each one to pay better attention. And in the morning when Didymus woke, the body of an afternoon’s pacing through the broad black halls his father had built in him lay there on the table, flat sliding layers of papyrus murmuring against each other.

384–395: ROME AND CONSTANTINOPLE

Arsenios turned his back on Rome, fleeing the sweet oil clinging to his skin and the fingers of slave girls hooked into his hair, the life he was brought up to, even his beautiful horse.

Retreat within his father’s house was no use. It was too easy to sit, clean and safe, and study the scripture and pray. He first apprenticed himself to the house ascetics but soon grew restless. He took no pride in their insistent restraint, perhaps eating only vegetables or only once a day, leaving off whoring and fighting, separating from their wives, growing beards. Virgins managed it well, for with neither men nor children clasping onto their bodies and pinning them down to the mortal earth, they ceased to be women. Arsenios was a man and always would be. No one had ever breached his body, and he had been taught to be master of himself and of others. He knew how to stay in the saddle, to show no fear, to push away weakness and scorn softness.

When he was twenty years old he had mastered these mores satisfactorily. Then there was nothing left. He was fit and watchful, he controlled himself in all things, he won when he fought and seldom had to fight. Now at twenty-nine he saw that the house ascetics were not more disciplined than that and certainly had never learned how to handle a horse properly nor how to handle themselves in public. He took a fraction of his inheritance and set sail for Constantinople. Travelers from the east had spoken of ascetic communities there, of the piety of the emperor, saying that the palace itself was like a monastery. He fasted on the journey eastward, shedding the ripeness of young muscle, and finding his way through the new Rome petitioned to enter a community.

Arsenios trained his body and his mind, he studied scripture diligently with every teacher he could find, he fasted, he sat up at night, he memorized Psalms, he humbled himself teaching Latin to the children of the emperor’s household like a common grammarian. In Constantinople he saw councils and controversies pass, and with them the passing of some other ascetics, leaving the city for the desert in Egypt. When he heard of the brilliant young deacon Evagrius who had left in shame a few years before, Arsenios resolved that he would be different from this upstart from Pontus. He was a Roman. He would not enter the desert in desperation. He would not go fleeing a woman. He would train deliberately until the work was done, and when his flesh was conquered he would go to Alexandria, study what he could, and set out for Sketis to die with the old men.

395: ALEXANDRIA

Didymus, of Alexandria, becoming blind while very young, and therefore illiterate, displayed such a miracle of intelligence as to learn perfectly dialectics and even geometry, sciences which especially require sight. He wrote many admirable works: Commentaries on all the Psalms, Commentaries on the gospels of Matthew and John, On the Doctrines, also two books Against the Arians, and one book On the Holy Spirit, which I translated in Latin, eighteen volumes On Isaiah, three books of commentaries On Hosea, addressed to me, and five books On Zechariah, written at my request, also commentaries On Job, and many other things, to give an account of which would be a work of itself. He is still living, and has already passed his eighty-third year (Hier., Vir. Ill. 109).

The Alexandrian brothers were learned men who cherished their books. Arsenios sent his slave back and forth, borrowing or buying all he could find. There were teachings of one Silvanus, works of the ancients Clement and Origen; he even saw one copy of the Sentences of Sextus, the same aphorisms he had been taught as a boy in his father’s garden. He meditated on all these works and sent out his slave again to hire girls to copy the ones he would keep. He troubled his hosts for more space and soon the girls were set up in a cool room away from the street with stacks of fresh papyri, copying from the books that could only be borrowed, while his slave kept a case for those they had bought.

Father, I have heard, the slave spoke from the doorway. I have heard that the holy man Didymus whom you sought is still alive, though he is aged now. He lives on the outskirts of the city and is said by all to be a great ascetic. He taught grammar for some time, and now that he is old he studies the scripture and prays and teaches only those who come to him. He has a good library and some of his own writings as well. We have asked if you might buy them or make a copy to take with you.

The old man was sitting under a mulberry tree, his eyes milky, his brown limbs withered with long fasting, his white hair lank around his shoulders. The slave watched over the old man with the desultory ease of a mother, keeping the flies away, finding the next word to the psalm when Didymus forgot the place. He hardly had to look into the book any longer; he had been reading out the verses now for years and years and sitting long hours under that tree as Didymus recited them each day. If no visitors came, he could do the whole Psalter in one day, the verses winding out of him like the silken web of a spider until they sat surrounded there in the shade, devoted minds in a nest of text: Let me not be ashamed, let not my enemies triumph over me. I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly nor stands in the ways of sinners nor sits in the seat of the scornful, for his delight is in the law of the Lord and he meditates on it day and night.

Once Didymus had caught river fever and in his delirium the Psalms went wrong. He wandered aimlessly from one verse to the other like a man picking his way through the ruins of his home, unable to find the kitchen or the door. The slave fretted terribly through that first long night and only calmed himself by sitting up with the book across his knees, reading out doggedly in the right order, the verses stacked behind each other as they always had been, reading a little louder to get hold of the old man’s mumbling and bring it back to the familiar track in his mind.

Now there were men coming up the path with two donkeys; never good, those were always the ones who wanted to stay many days. The slave stood up, closing the book. Father, there are men coming. The boy says it is one Arsenios of Rome, coming now from Constantinople, who begs to sit with you. Is it one donkey or two? It is two, Father. The old man sighed. Who is Arsenios? He is the Roman, Father, he has been in the city studying and wishes to go into the desert. In his home he would have been a great man but he set out for Constantinople when he was young and never went back. He left his father’s house many years ago with only a fraction of his great inheritance. Then let him come, I am here.

The slave went into the house to make ready water and flatbread, some herbs and salt and oil for their guest. They said Arsenios still had money and