Embracing Solitude

Women and New Monasticism

Flanagan

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781630870027
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Embracing Solitude focuses on the interior turn of monasticism and scans the Christian tradition for women who have made this turn in various epochs and circumstances. New Monasticism is a movement assuming diverse forms in response to the turn to classical spiritual sources for guidance about living spiritual commitment with integrity and authenticity today. Genuine spiritual seeking requires the cultivation of an inner disposition to return to the room of the heart. The lessons explored in this book from women spiritual entrepreneurs across the centuries will benefit contemporay New Monastics--both women and men. The accounts will inspire, challenge, and guide those who follow in the footsteps of the renowned spiritual innovators profiled here.

1

Syncletica

Embracing Solitude in Early African Christianity141

Profound changes in the spiritual culture of a historical era are often extroverted into the landscape. These spiritual changes are usually grounded in shifts in social, political, and economic realities. The latter realities were particularly important in the birth of the early Christian embrace of solitude in the North African desert. While some historians have linked the rise of Egyptian desert anchorites with ananchoresis—the term used in fourth-century Egypt to describe the phenomenon of tax evasion by means of flight—this etymology is not widely accepted.142 Instead, the spiritual movements of committed Christians seeking solitude who migrated to secluded settings on the urban margins or in the desert were mainly constituted of persons who enjoyed the benefits of the rising wealth of cities. The widely acknowledged founder of the north African exodus-to-the-desert movement, St Antony of Egypt (252–356), was reputed to have had a considerable amount of land. This affluence was not sufficient, however, to satisfy the deeper yearnings of Antony and many others like him, and a city with an alternative culture grew from the migration of these seekers to the desert.

Peter Brown, in his classic work on sexual renunciation in early Christianity, describes well the iconic character of the move to the desert.143 Moving out to the uninhabited place set the desert dwellers apart from the busy life of urban Christians. The journey to the secluded place enacted the process of disengagement from the dominant expression of Christian community at that time. The strangeness and challenges of the new landscape are captured in the variety of insects and other intimidating creatures that inhabit the writings of the desert solitaries. These insects may be considered as archetypal representations of the manner in which the radical change of external geography, achieved in the move to the desert, evoked new spiritual awareness in its thoughtful inhabitants. The routines of the city, set by common work patterns and shared city services, had melted. A new sense of being at home in this strange land had to be cultivated. Foundations had to be set in a place where no roots had yet been sent forth. The confirmation of vocation had to be wrenched from an unflinching engagement with the environment and fanned into sustainability by daily attention. The dwelling chosen had to create the conditions for the dweller to step back from immersion in daily trivialities and yet provide the dweller with perspective on the surrounding rhythms of life.144 Drawing closer to one of those who took this journey into the desert may illuminate women’s new search today for solitude.

Amma Syncletica (270–350 CE)145

It has first to be acknowledged that the historical factuality of Syncletica has been contested, so in referring to her life and work I will build on the scholarship of Kevin Corrigan, who has made a strong scholarly case for accepting the reality of her life and contribution to the early Church.146 The text of her life was little known until the seventeenth century when there was a general revival of interest in early Christian literature. In the West a tradition developed in the fourteenth century of attributing the authorship of her life to Athanasius147 and of designating Syncletica as the foundress of female monasticism, paralleling Antony as the founder of male monasticism.148

Given the focus here on Syncletica, there is then the further challenge of choosing an approach to reading her life and teaching in a manner that illuminates the contemporary emergence of new monasticism. Mary Schaffer’s study of the text of the Life of Syncletica provides an excellent scholarly account of the form and structure of the text, as well as the influences evident in it from surrounding theological, biblical, and spiritual writers and teachers. Schaffer attributes her original insights into the text to her practice of “contemplative” engagement with the text. Similarly here, the text has been read with a contemplative attentiveness to the teaching it can offer to women embracing a spirituality of solitude today.

I do not intend to get involved in the sociocultural meaning of the ascetic behavior of women in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Instead, I accept the work of a wide community of scholars that has argued that the solitary, celibate choice of women in this era was not a private religious choice but an embodied protest against the social roles to which women were assigned.149 Lastly, I will read the available fragmentary material in the awareness that while the textual sources are limited, the overall conclusion of contemporary scholarship is that in this era “women’s asceticism had sizable numbers, varied lifestyles and considerable vigor.”150 At all times the originality of the imagery in the text witnesses to a vivid personal voice behind the author’s inscriptions.151

Amma Syncletica grew up in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. She was rich, well educated, and interested in spiritual questions from early in her life. She resisted her parents’ encouragement to get married. After the death of her parents, she sold all that she had, distributed the funds to the poor, and moved from her parents’ home, with her blind sister, to the vicinity of the family tomb on the outskirts of the city.152 Just as the teaching of many other solitaries of the fourth century is still available to us today, so the wisdom of Amma Syncletica is recorded in the collection of aphorisms which in Greek is called Apophthegmata.153 In this collection of brief wisdom teachings from 127 “desert fathers,” she is one of only three women, the other two being Amma Theodora and Amma Sarah.154 She is credited with twenty-seven sayings in this collection. Further information regarding her life and spirituality is available in a fifth-century document by Pseudo-Athanasius, The Life & Regimen of the Blessed and Holy Teacher Syncletica.155

As previously stated, the purpose here is to reflect on perennial aspects of the life of this fourth-century woman spiritual innovator against the background of the increasing number of women who set out on a God quest by embracing forms of intentional solitude today.156 In this context, what is immediately striking is the dialectic between Syncletica authoring the shape and style of her own committed spiritual journey, while at the same time her journey enriches and builds up the Christian community around her. It is also notable how she was reluctant to assume the spiritual leadership thrust on her as she wrestled with the uncertainties generated by moving in an uncharted path. In Saying Nine from the Apophthegmata she communicates vividly in the imagery of sailing157 the uncertainty and struggles that were the atmosphere of her journey:

Those of us who put out to sea at first sail with a favorable wind; then the sails spread, but later the winds become adverse. Then the ship is tossed by the waves and is no longer controlled by the rudder. But when in a little while there is calm, and the tempest dies down, then the ship sails on again. So it is with us.

It would be easy today to look back on this era of innovation in the form of the God quest among women and imagine that those living in those early Christian centuries could see the same patterns that we can observe with the benefits of hindsight and historical analysis. Indeed the imagery of the sea conveys how much Syncletica’s quest was carried along by a power much greater than her personal inner resources, a power that is intuitively learned rather than read from a map in unerring detail.

Amid the confusion about the core identi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Reflection on Solitude
• Reflection on New Monasticisms
• Reflection on New Trends in Religious Experience in the West
• Narratives of Solitude Fulfilled
• Chapter 1: Syncletica
• Chapter 2: Moninne
• Chapter 3: Mary of Oignies
• Chapter 4: Angela Merici
• Chapter 5: Nano Nagle
• Chapter 6: The Contemporary Turn to Solitude in Women Writers
• Contemporary Testimony to Embracing Solitude
• Bibliography