EGLBS Student Paper Prize Winner

The Transformation and

Transmission of Paideia in Roman
Egyptian Monasticism

CARSON BAY
Classical paideia was a construct of education based upon a
certain corpus of literature that prepared aristocrats for
participation in high culture. Roman Egyptian monks developed
a similar system, likewise based upon a particular literary
corpus that prepared ascetics for participation in Christian
holiness. If Classical paideia facilitated social ascent, Monastic
paideia enabled spiritual ascent. This essay explores the
remarkable continuity between the educational-cultural systems
representative of the Roman Empire and Roman Egyptian
monastic culture respectively in late antiquity, marks some
boundaries for “Monastic paideia,” and discusses Monastic
paideia’s primary textbook type, hagiography.

Introduction
Samuel Rubenson recently has asked the question:

[I]s it also possible to establish a link between the

[Classical] traditions of elementary education, as well as
higher rhetorical and philosophical education, and see the

334
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 335

rise of monasticism as a direct Christian adaptation of the

schools of antiquity?1

This essay provides an afirmative answer to the question.

Scholars are no longer asking whether or not early Christian
“monks” (µοναχοί) participated in literary education and writing
but rather “‘how’ and ‘to what degree’ they did so.”2 Another
question is, how did the educational-cultural milieu of Christian
monks relate to Roman culture? Recently there has been renewed
interest in the unlikely relationship between “early monasticism
and Classical paideia,” particularly in the research group by that
name at Lund University.3 Within this larger range of inquiry, my
goal is to demonstrate that Monastic paideia: 1) while very
different from Classical paideia,4 shared many of its basic tenets;
2) had a fairly delineable character; and 3) used, as its primary
form of “textbook,” hagiographical writings.
Paideia, educated culture, always pursued personal
cultivation as a means to “ascend.” In the Roman mind this ascent

1
Samuel Rubenson, “Monasticism and the Philosophical Heritage,”
487–512 in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Late
Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 504.
2
Markus Vinzent and Samuel Rubenson, eds., Early Monasticism and
Classical Paideia: Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference
on Patristic Studies held in Oxford, 2011, Volume 3 (Studia Patristica LV;
Leuven/Paris/Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013), 4.
3
This group’s primary members are Bo Holmberg, Britt Dahlman,
Lillian Larsen, Henrik Rydell Johnsén, David Westberg, Andreas
Westergren, and Samuel Rubenson
4
When I refer to “Roman paideia,” I refer to the Classical model of
education and “high” culture developed in Greece and adopted, not
unchanged, by Rome. This is often referred to as “Classical” or “Greek”
Paideia.
336 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

was social; in the monastic mind it became spiritual. What was in

Rome a stepped program through standard texts for young men
became in monastic hands a perpetual discipline predominantly for
old men. The strain of continuity between these two systems
consists of shared vocabulary (παιδεία; παιδευτός; πεπαιδέυµενως),
similar features, as well as contiguous desired outcomes, one
aiming to give culture to young men, and the other to impute
holiness to ascetics. The basic concepts of Roman paideia were the
foundation stones upon which Monastic paideia was built; at the
same time, a new phenomenon, which we are calling Monastic
paideia, was sifted from the arid sands of Roman Egypt.
Monastic paideia largely followed the form of Roman
paideia. Roman Egyptian Monks studied a more or less fixed
literary corpus, as did Romans. This corpus operated in the same
languages, predominantly Greek and Latin, and imputed to its
students skill sets and attributes necessary for success. If a Roman
aristocrat would benefit from rhetorical skill or philosophical
conversance, a monk might prefer biblical or hagiographical
knowledge or spiritual “power.” Both forms of education and
culture functioned similarly and served related purposes. However,
Monastic paideia was an institution sui generis, and it is the
formation of this definite subculture that concerns us here.

Classical Paideia in a Greek and Roman World

Education in Greece and Rome was a standard social
institution, for the most part reserved for society’s upper echelons.
It was held up as the ideal for young Greek and Roman men and,
in public perception, it separated the ἀνηκόων παιδείας (those
“ignorant of education”) from the εὐσχήµονές (the “superior” or
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 337

“educated”).5 Its social character and function was thus one of

competition, prestige, and honor.
Education, as the means by which one might “know oneself,”
also had what we might call a “gnostic” function among
philosophers:

τὸ γὰρ γνῶθι σαυτὸν παραγγέλλει παιδευθῆναι καὶ

φρόνιµον γενέσθαι … οὕτω γὰρ ᾄν τις ἑαυτὸν γνοίη …
µόνως γὰρ ᾄν τις οὕτως ἑαυτὸν γνοίη καὶ ἕτερον, τυχὼν
παιδίας καὶ σθνέσεως περιττοτέρας.6

Since Plato this knowledge of self, foundational for

philosophia, had been an integral component of education.7 Some
were drawn to self-critical questions, while others found them

5
Aeschines Contra Timarco 1.141. This is one of the milder
expressions of the idea in antiquity, an idea that popularly boiled down to
the separation of “those with brains” from “those without.” Within Greco-
Roman androcentric culture, where everyone whose education mattered was
male, paideia might very well be considered that which separates “the men
from the boys.” Compare degradation of the uneducated, e.g., in Aeschines
Contra Timarco 3.117; Aristophines Knights 192–93; Aristotle
Eudomachean Ethics 1.1217a, Metaphysics 4.1006a; On the Team of Horses
16.33.
6
Diodorus Fragmenta Libri 9.10.2: “For that which says ‘know
yourself’ commends (one) to educate and to become wise, for only in this
may one know himself ... and the other, by grasping education and a superior
wisdom.” Compare this to Poeman’s assertion: “Quia custodire, et
semetipsum considerare, et discretionem habere, haec tria operationes sunt
animae” (“To guard [yourself], and to consider yourself, and to have
discernment—these are three operations of the soul”), Verba Seniorum 1.12.
7
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture II, In Search of
the Divine Centre (trans. Gilbert Highet; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), 61.
338 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

fodder for jokes.8 Paideia had, over time, been handmaiden to

lofty minds and ambitious socialites both. In Roman Egypt,
paideia was a social stratifier. Raffaella Cribiore, in Gymnastics of
the Mind, the best work to date on education in Roman Egypt,
validates the social significance of education there:

when [a student] reached the top, his superiority over the

rest of mankind was consecrated. The uneducated man was
marked not only by his insignificance but also by his
tenacious clinging to the earth and its material values, and
by his inability to rise above and fly ‘aloft to the region
where the gods dwell’ (Plato Phaedrus 246d).”9

Paideia was attractive to the inquisitive and the acolyte, but

was only available to the wealthy and thus often became a tool for
socio-economic success. Rhetoric, the ability to wax eloquent and
defame one’s opponent in court, was a necessary ability for the
aristocratic male.10
Before introducing Monastic educational culture, it is
important to note that some of the content of Classical paideia
would have been of little interest, perhaps even offensive, to many
monks. A poet like Ovid would have been intolerable to any
Egyptian ascetic who was apprehensive of or had abandoned

8
Epicrates 287.
9
Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in
Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2001), 220.
10
This is not to say that aristocratic girls always were barred from
pursuing an education. Female literacy is attested in Roman Egypt and many
upper-class females would have had access to an elementary education;
some even continued beyond grammar (Cribiore, Gymnastics, 246–47).
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 339

sexual activity. 11 Among the Greek and Latin authors most

commonly used in the educational process,12 one finds relatively
little thematic content in common with the products of Egyptian
Monastic culture.13 The form of Roman high culture worked for
monks, while the content had to cater to their distinct emphases.

Monastic Education and the Classical Model

Monks were certainly educated. 14 Like pursuing a Roman
education, pursuing the monastic lifestyle was to pursue a life of

11
Regardless of whether they adopted sexual abstinence, many,
perhaps most, Christians would have found literature like Ovid’s repulsive.
12
Greek: Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Aeschines,
Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Hesiod; Latin: Virgil, Ennius, Horace,
Terence, Cicero, Sallust, Livy. List compiled from Quintilian and others by
Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97.
13
The difference here transcends genre. Compare the content of the
Apophthegmata Patrum with popular Greek and Latin authors of any period.
Christianity’s idiosyncrasies set monasticism apart from Classical culture.
14
Mark Sheridan, OSB (From the Nile to the Rhone and Beyond:
Studies in Early Monastic Literature and Scriptural Interpretation [Analecta
Monastica 12; Studia Anselmniana 156; Rome: Pontifico Ateneo S.
Anselmo, 2012]) is comfortable citing the Pachomian rules as evidence that
the claim of monastic illiteracy “contradicts the[ir] explicit instructions” [to
be literate] (54–55); the same was noted much earlier by Elinor Mullett
Husselman (“A Bohairic School Text on Papyrus,” Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 6, no. 3 [1947] 129–51), who adds that monasteries had libraries and
even copyists trained in-house early on (133). Husselman also notes that
“[i]n the excavation of the monastery at Epiphanius, Cell B seems to have
been used at one time by a schoolmaster, for near it were found seven school
texts and three biblical and liturgical texts that appear to be the work of
students” (133). On the Pachomian rules see Johannes Leipoldt, Schenute
von Atripe und die Entstehung des national ägyptischen Christentums
(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903), 94.
340 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

learning and discipline. The monastic life involved a student-

teacher relationship, as did Classical paideia,15 but with the monks
it was based upon listening to and imitating living and dead
exemplars. Athanasius describes Antony’s early practice as a
disciple:

When Antony saw [an old ascetic], he … promptly began

to stay in the vicinity of the town. Then, if he heard of a
zealous soul elsewhere, like a wise bee he left to search him
out, nor did he return home before he had seen him; and
only when he had received from him, as it were, provisions
for his journey to virtue, did he go back.16

Such travel between instructors is attested in Classical

models of paideia as well, and it created steep competition for
educators of all levels in urban centers. As with Classical paideia,
Monastic paideia made use of student-teacher contact, but rather
than being taught to read and speak the student was learning
spiritual disciplines.
Paideia, in all its historical forms, had discipline at its core.
Cribiore notes that “the most conspicuous legacy of ancient
paideia was a system of training that assured good work habits and
discipline”;, moreover, “[t]he notions education transmitted were
subordinate to the training itself, since good training prepared

15
However, Monastic paideia differed categorically from Classical
paideia inasmuch as “[a]nti-intellectualism had been a feature of Egyptian
monasticism since Antony,” despite the fact that “some of the monks ... were
men of education themselves” (Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire,
AD 284–430 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 184).
16
Athanasius Vita Antonii 3, from Walter J. Burghardt and T. C.
Lawler, trans. and eds., St. Athanasius: The Life of Saint Antony (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist, 1950), 14.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 341

people for further instruction.”17 In the same way monks were the
“athletes of the desert,” bringing body and mind into a strict
discipline.
Both Roman and Monastic paideia prepared students for
specific styles of life through literary endeavors. If the two had
different objects of study, their philosophy of study was quite
similar. Both systems educated by example; as a student of
grammar would copy the letters an instructor penned, so an
aspiring monk would mimic the lifestyle of his teacher. This
practice was textually manifest in hagiographical writings.
Hagiography, like any writing, repackaged content available in a
living instructor and created the possibility for a protégé monk to
access instruction anytime, anywhere.

Hagiography as Monastic Textbook

In this essay, I argue that hagiography was the means of
paideia among certain Egyptian monks. (The imitation of monastic
paragons, however, did not require literacy; this was a convenience
for illiterate monks, and is representative of an even broader notion
of Monastic paideia.) Ideas and concepts were important to monks,
but were communicated in narrative form and attached to
important names. In the Apophthegmata Patrum18 we find a variety
of often gnomic sayings informing many areas of life. This
collection was a standard text for Monastic paideia. While
differing characteristically from vitae and not fitting the narrative

17
Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 250–51.
18
In this essay, this Greek text will be referred as Apophthegmata
Patrum (AP), the Latin as Verba Seniorum (VS), and others by their full
names. This will serve to differentiate different versions of the same basic
text, as there are textual differences.
342 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

form of much of what is considered hagiography, the

Apophthegmata Patrum are hagiographical in that they are writings
about holy people.19
Hagiographical literature was not the sole literary enterprise
of Egyptian ascetics. However, it did dominate the intellectual
landscapes of some and comprised the lion’s share of what was
passed on within those circles, orally or textually. This transmitted
wisdom encouraged not only learning20 but a constant, meditative

19
Claudia Rapp (“The Origins of Hagiography and the Literature of
Early Monasticism: Purpose and Genre Between Tradition and Innovation,”
119–30 in Christopher Kelly, Richard Flower, and Michael Stuart Williams,
eds., Unclassical Traditions, Volume I: Alternatives to the Classical Past in
Late Antiquity [Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
Supplementary Volume 34; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010],
120) has argued against the restriction of hagiography to what essentially
amounts to a modern definition of biography. She also disestablishes it as a
“genre,” giving it the fluidity needed for our application. I follow her in this
because semantically the adjective “hagiographical” seems to include any
“writing concerning holy (people).” Hagiography may take numerous forms,
“lives of the saints” being only one of those; the earliest are considered to be
the “acts of the martyrs and liturgical lists of the martyrs” (Richard Peterson,
“Hagiography,” 184–85 in Gordon S. Wakefield, ed., The Westminster
Dictionary of Christian Spirituality [Philadelphia: SCM, 1983], 185). The
AP’s stories may be classed as “acts” in many instances, their gnomic
character being ancillary.
20
For example: “[an old man said], ‘He who wishes to dwell in the
desert should become a learner,” Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.27a,
adapted from E. A. Wallis Budge, The Syriac Version of the Apophthegmata
Patrum: Book Two (London/New York/Bahrain: Kegan Paul, reprinted
2002), 162. For the parallel contents of the different Syriac manuscript
traditions, see Bo Holmberg, “The Syriac Collection of Apophthegmata
Patrum in MS Sin. syr. 46,” 35–58 in Markus Vinzent and Samuel
Rubenson, eds., Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia: Papers
Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held
in Oxford, 2011, Volume 3 (Studia Patristica LV; Leuven/Paris/Walpole,
MA: Peeters, 2013), 41–57.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 343

lifestyle characterized by discipline.21 Of course, the γραφαί were a

significant constant in monasticism, but even hermeneutical
method seems to have been largely a product of hagiographical
texts.22 Hagiographical works contained exegesis themselves23 but,
aside from scripture, the fathers had an authority of their own.
Early Christian monks in Egypt concerned themselves with the
question, “How can a mind find God?”24 The answer, for them,
involved “fasting … works … watching … [and] mercy” but also
“discernment,” which was found within the universal monastic
dialogue. Education took place in Egypt’s desert of late antiquity,
and often hagiography provided the key.25
Alongside the Bible, hagiographies were monastic textbooks;
monks relied upon hagiography as learning material. Following a
brief introduction to the salient points of early monasticism, a
description of hagiography functioning as textbook will provide a
fuller understanding of monks in Roman Egypt.

Early Christian Egyptian Monasticism

In the second half of the third century, a combination of
factors caused some Christians who sought a renunciatory lifestyle
to take to solitude in the Egyptian wilderness. Among these factors
were social upheaval (the Melitian persecutions); the lifestyle of

21
Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.73 (Budge, 2.172); also Abbâ
Zechariah in 2.i.82 (Budge, 2.174): “I give it as my opinion that the work of
monks consisteth in a man restraining himself in everything.”
22
Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.35, 79 (Budge, 2.163, 174).
23
Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.39, 97 (Budge, 2.164, 175).
24
Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.31a (Budge, 2.162).
25
Syriac Apophthegmata Patrum 2.i.31a (Budge, 2.162).
344 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

personal piety and extreme devotion propounded since the early

second century in the Church and witnessed in such works as The
Acts of Paul and Thecla; and related to this, perhaps the anti-
material, “heterodox” influence of Basilides and Valentinus and
their progeny in Alexandria.26 Whatever the reasons, the fact is that
the third century saw the beginning of a portentous trend into the
desert 27 for the monk’s life, anchoritic and cenobitic, 28 and it
inspired increasing numbers of Christians to abandon “the world”
to find God in the desert.29

26
Christopher James Kelly (The Sound of the Watchman: Mimetic
Exegesis and the Monastic Ideal in Cassian’s ‘Conferences’ [PhD
Dissertation: University of Iowa, 2007]) credits “[p]agan Stoic traditions and
various Gnostic and Manichean philosophies” with a role in the formation of
monasticism (10).
27
It should be noted that moving into the desert and thus away from
the (inhabited) world (οἰκουµένη) was not the only means by which Egyptian
Christian practiced the ascetic life. The ascetic lifestyle was practiced in
urban centers, a prime of example of which is no less a scholar than
Alexandria’s Origen. James E. Goehring (“The World Engaged: The Social
and Economic World of Early Egyptian Monasticism,” 39–52 in James E.
Goehring, ed., Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian
Monasticism (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity
Press International, 1999) addresses the misunderstanding that monks were
only desert-dwellers or were hermetically sealed from the outside world
(40).
28
Ἀναχωρητής and κοινόβιος respectively, roughly “(having)
withdrawn” and “(of) common life.”
29
The two former terms fall under the umbrella of the technical term
ἀποτακτικός, roughly “one who has renounced (the world?).” For a
discussion of the term’s evolution in scholarly understanding, and its
significance as simply “communal ascetics” in Roman Egypt see James E.
Goehring, “Through a Glass Darkly: Diverse Images of the Ἀποτακτικοί(αί)
in Early Egyptian Monasticism,” 53–72 in Goehring, ed., Ascetics, Society,
and the Desert (esp. 71).
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 345

Monastic paideia was one facet of this separated lifestyle.

Some monks retired to the desert with an impressive educational
resumé in hand. Evagrius Ponticus, for example, before retiring to
Palestine and then a monastery at Nitria in Egypt in 383, had
already received a thorough education, probably under Basil and
certainly under Gregory Nazianzen.30 On the other hand, Antony
and Pachomius, respectively credited with the “invention” of
solitude and cohabitation in monasticism, were probably products
of little, if any, formal education. 31 Nevertheless, even they
became the objects of a concerted literary effort.32 A system of

30
A. M. Casiday, Evagrius Ponticus (The Early Church Fathers;
London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 6–9.
31
Two notes should be made here: first, these two perpetuated the
inherited values of isolationism and communalism rather than “inventing”
them within monasticism; second, genuine biographical information about
either of these individuals is incredibly difficult to divine. Athanasius’ Vita
Antonii is our primary source of information on Antony, and is the work of
“a skilled literary artist ... who brought all of his theological talents and
biases to his work” (William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction
to the Literature of Early Monasticism [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004], 74). Pachomius’ life must be reconstructed from a plethora of
manuscripts in Coptic (Sahidic and Bohairic), Greek, Latin, and Arabic, a
task which, according to Harmless, is “every bit as complex as the search for
the historical Jesus” (Harmless, Desert Christians, 117).
32
Antony’s reputation transcended Christian borders; for example,
Synesius of Cyrene (a student of Hypatia, a non-Christian philosopher),
considered a “bearer of the traditional culture” by Peter Brown
(“Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” 601–31 in Averil Cameron and Peter
Garnesey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume XIII: The Late
Empire, A.D. 337–425 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998],
602), “invoked the names both of St. Antony and of Zoroaster…. Both could
now be spoken of as remote ‘culture heroes’, as the representatives of a
venerable Alien Wisdom.”
346 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

paideia followed naturally from the contemplative, and indeed

literary, life of the desert monks.
The monastic life revolved around contemplation and
discipline as means to holiness.33 Proximity to the divinity was the
driving force for the monks. Abstention from a world full of evil
was the only way to get there. However, some monastics were
prolific writers, and all of them, literate or not, were “(wo)men of
words” in a very real way. In fact, our most significant and
apparently oldest attestation to the lives of desert monks, the
Apophthegmata Patrum, comprise sophisticated sayings from a
partially illiterate cohort. Despite “book bashing” among the
monks,34 words were the trade in which they dealt.
Perhaps what they disliked about paideia was its traditional
role of determining social status and the arrogance that has often
plagued the learned. So Syncletica: “Sicut impossibile est, uno
eodemque tempore et herbam esse et semen, ita impossibile est ut
saecularem gloriam habentes, coelestem faciant fructum.”35 At the
same time, monks had a great respect for the cultivation of the
mind by reading: “Mentem nutantem vel errantem solidat lectio, et
vigiliae, et oratio.”36

33
Paul Monroe (A Textbook in the History of Education [New York:
MacMillan, 1906]) has called “monastic education ... [the] ideal of education
as a moral discipline” (245).
34
Verba Seniorum 5.6, 12; unless otherwise noted, all Latin quotes are
taken from J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 73 (Paris: 1860); see Elizabeth A.
Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 53.
35
“The same cannot be at the same time a seed and a bush; likewise
those having a worldly glory [reputation] cannot bear fruit to heaven.” Verba
Seniorum 8.20.
36
Evagrius, quoted in Verba Seniorum 10.20: “A wandering mind is
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 347

The monks’ love-hate relationship with Classical paideia was

understandable. These monks were not apathetic toward but would
have been diametrically opposed to the purported financial and
social success guaranteed by literary training.37 However, they had
an affinity for the “strengthening of the mind” that was available in
literary and non-literary forms. Thus, a new kind of paideia,
comprising a partial adaptation of traditional forms, emerged as a
reaction.
This monastic form of paideia was pluriform and differed
from paideia as traditionally construed. Rather than social standing
or economic gain, its end was spiritual standing before God,
personal spiritual discipline rather than literacy or rhetorical skill.38
Sanctification and self-discipline were the goals of “Monastic
paideia.” A primary format of this education’s object was
hagiography. To be an educated monk was to understand and reify
the wisdom contained in the lives of ascetic heroes, both in the
form of one’s teacher and in monastic legends. While not always a
literate enterprise, it often was,39 and hagiography comprised a
large part of it. Monastic paideia provided the means by which a

strengthened by reading, and vigilance, and prayer.”

37
The social and vocational advantages of paideia are recounted in
Herodas Didaskalos; Lucian Rhetorum praeceptor 6; John Chrysostum
Adversus oppugnatores vitae monsticae 47, all cited in Cribiore, Gymnastics
of the Mind, 249 n9.
38
See Frank Pierrepont Graves, A History of Education: During the
Middles Ages and the Transition to Modern Times (New York: MacMillan,
1914), 13.
39
Indeed, “a whole monastic literature ... grew up in Greek (and other
languages),” Averil Cameron, “New Themes and Styles in Greek Literature,
A Title Revisited,” 11–28 in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed., Greek Literature
in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2006), 15.
348 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

monk might learn by example the minutia of the holy life.40 One
sought personal holiness through conversation with texts, people,
and ideas. These three are married within the hagiographical
corpora of Egyptian monks.

Monastic Paideia through Hagiography

As mentioned before, one of the congruities between
Monastic and Roman paideia was a foundational student-teacher
relationship; in Monastic paideia this consisted of an understudy
and a “spiritual father.”41 Claudia Rapp avers that these spiritual
fathers offered advice “often in response to a prompting or a
question in an intimate personal encounter with a disciple.” The
effectiveness of their advice depended upon their understanding of
the disciple’s needs and their own lived example, which acted as a
guide.42 As the demand for instruction increased with an influx of
aspiring monks in the fourth century and following, the sayings
and teaching of revered monks were transmitted abroad and
eventually penned (in a variety of languages). These texts were
available to a much larger audience and obviated the need for
monks to find the best monastic teacher available; they could
simply read what he or she had said.43 The Apophthegmata Patrum

40
Rather than any kind of historical documents, James E. Goehring
(“Monastic Diversity and Ideological Boundaries in Fourth-Century
Christian Egypt,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5, no. 1 [1997] 61–84)
calls texts of the received Monastic tradition “guidebooks for a practice of
imitatio patrum” (61).
41
Columba Stewart, OSB, The World of the Desert Fathers: Stories
and Sayings from the Anonymous Series of the Apophthegmata Patrum
(SLG 95; Fairacres, Oxford: SLG Press, 1986), 1.
42
Rapp, “Origins,” 124.
43
Rapp, “Origins,” 124.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 349

in particular formed an “agglomeration of monastic wisdom,” a

kind of standard text for apotactic living.44 Rapp cites the preface
to the Alphabetical Collection of the Apophthegmata Patrum
inasmuch as “the audience … was expected to derive just as much
spiritual benefit (opheleia) as those who had profited from a
personal encounter with the ‘Old Men.’”45 Whether or not this
expectation was widely adopted, early generations of Egyptian
monks found their educational material and educational models in
hagiography.
In order to demonstrate that hagiography did comprise the
gravitational center of “Monastic paideia,” I will argue two closely
related points: 1) hagiography was in fact the main educational
medium used by Egyptian monks,46 and 2) the use to which these
materials were put merits the descriptor “education,” or paideia.
Upon showing this, I will continue to describe some salient
features of this educational model, including the relationship of
hagiography as education to saint cults and the question of
egalitarianism and women’s status in Roman Egyptian
monasticism and its paideia.
The most important textual evidence for Monastic paideia is
provided by the Apophthegmata Patrum. Internal evidence
suggests that the Apophthegmata Patrum text was central to
Monastic paideia. It is probably concerning these about which
Abba Ammon asked Abba Poeman in AP 11:20; should the
“sayings” or biblical texts be the subject of neighborly
conversation? Abba Ammon answered:

44
Rapp, “Origins,” 124.
45
Rapp, “Origins,” 124.
46
That monasticism existed within a world of oral/aural culture
should inform out thinking about what hagiography meant and looked like.
350 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

Εἰ οὐ δύνασαι σιωπῆσαι, καλόν ἐστι µᾶλλον ἐν τοῖσ λόγοις

τῶν γερόντων λαλῆσαι καὶ µὴ ἐν τῇ Γραφῇ. Κίνδους γάρ
ἐστιν οὐ µικρός.47

The λόγια των γερόντων were not only among the

conversational milieu of desert monks, but were preferable to ταις
γραφαις due to their ideological accessibility (whereas the biblical
texts were full of unfathomable mysteries). Monks learned by
dialogue. 48 Theirs was a life of isolated learning and, if the
Apophthegmata Patrum have any historical veracity to them, that
learning was often conversational. Thus, we have “some brothers
from Scete” (Fratres … de loco Scythi) on their way to see Antony
in Verba Seniorum 4.1. Their paradigmatic discussion concerned
the “sayings of the Fathers” (sermones Patrum), the “scriptures”
(Scripturis), and the “work of their hands” (opere manuum
suarum). Dialogic pedagogy was the modus operandi for Egyptian
monks, and the Apophthegmata Patrum played an important role in
this learning process.
These Apophthegmata exist as literature because of the
authority of the personages whose wisdom was included therein;
the sayings began as oral tradition, but were written because of
demand.49 As is oft repeated within the Apophthegmata Patrum, if

47
Idiomatically: “If one cannot help himself, it is better to speak of
the sayings of the fathers and not the scriptures. For the risk is lesser.”
AP 11.56 from Jean-Claude Guy, SJ, Les Apophthegmes des Pȇres:
Collection Systematique Chapitres X–XVI (Sources Chrétiennes 474; Paris:
Les Éditions du Cerf, 2003), 168. John Worthy (“How a Monk Ought to
Relate to His Neighbor,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53, no. 4
[2013]: 726–41) notes this “apparent preference of the sayings of the Elders
over the Holy scripture” (735).
48
Guy, “Educational Innovation,” 45.
49
Stewart, World of the Desert Fathers, 1.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 351

one wanted to know something about oneself, God, life, one asked
one of the older men. Sometimes multiple “fathers” were
consulted, and it is not unheard of that a monk had to receive the
same instruction numerous times for it to “sink in” (VS 5.31). The
effort to become educated in the Apophthegmata Patrum does pay
off, though; so, when Eulogius visits the older Joseph’s cell
(VS 8.4), he is taught to have “mental discretion” (discretionem
cogitationum) via both the words (verbis) of the elder and through
experience. This story is now found in the Apophthegmata Patrum.
The education of one became the education of many.
Athanasius’ Vita Antonii also served as a hagiographical
educational resource for the early Egyptian monks. The monastic
mindset was that learning was something that happened not only in
the mind, but in the whole self, mind and body.50 Learning by
example consequently became a primary means to Monastic
paideia.51 Thus the Vita Antonii appears as “a handbook for monks
in the guise of a narrative” 52 (emphasis mine). Monks (and
Christians in general) could learn from the Vita Antonii not only
exemplified wisdom and right living, but how to write

50
So VS 7.43: Bonum ergo est, ut extorqueat sibi ipse homo in omni
re propter Deum (“It is good that a man discipline his whole self for God’s
sake”).
51
So central was self-transformation to monastic construals of
education that Peter Brown (“Asceticism,” 603) can say, “[t]he claim to truth
of any one ‘philosophy’—or, we might say, way of life—was indissolubly
linked to the claim that its adherents could achieve, through it, a measure of
transformation.”
52
Brian Brennan, “Athanasius’ Vita Antonii: A Sociological
Interpretation,” Vigiliae Christianae 39, no. 3 (1985): 209–27, 209. See also
Clark, Reading Renunciation, 59.
352 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

hagiography.53 The educational process facilitated by hagiography

in monastic circles was polyvalent; however, emulation of the
hagiographical person was the primary purpose of hagiographical
pedagogy.54 Athanasius wrote his Vita Antonii, ostensibly, at the
behest of monks wanting to learn Antony’s life and follow his
example;55 whether or not this was the case, the Vita Antonii could
be used as a monastic textbook.
Another source for understanding Christian monasticism, or
at least asceticism, is Palladius’ corpus, especially the Historia
Monachorum and the Lausiac History, “the former … contained
bodily in the latter.” 56 These works also read as educational
hagiography. 57 The opening lines of the Lausiac History state
clearly the object and purpose of the book:

53
Such as Sulpicius Severus’ vita of Martin of Tours in the late fourth
century C.E. For discussion, see Christian Tornau, “Intertextuality in Early
Latin Hagiography: Sulpicius Severus and the Vita Antonii,” 158–66 in
M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold, eds., Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica,
Orientalia: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on
Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1999 (Studia Patristica XXXV; Leuven:
Peeters, 2001).
54
The authority of characters within hagiographical texts stemmed
from their bodies, “worn down by prayer and innumerable trials,” Gregory
of Nazianzen Poemata de se ipso 12.586.
55
Arthur Holder, Christian Spirituality: The Classics (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 15.
56
Edward Cuthbert Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, Vol. 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 7.
57
As with the Apophthegmata Patrum, the historicity of these texts
has been questioned, but the text as a text, not the historical veracity of its
contents, is what is salient in the present discussion.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 353

Ἐν ταύτη τῇ βίβλῳ ἀναγέγραπται ἐνάρετος ᾄσκησις καὶ

θαυµαστὴ βίου διαγωγὴ τῶν µακαρίων καὶ ἁγίων πατέρων
µοναχῶν καὶ ἀναχωρατῶν τῶν ἐν τῇ ἐρήµω, πρὸς ζῆλον
καὶ µίµησιν τῶν τὴν οὐράνιον πολιτείαν ἐθελόντων
καταρθοῦν καὶ τὴν εἰσ βασιλείαν οὐρανῶν ἂγουσαν
βουλοµένων ὁδεύειν ὁδόν.58

Palladius’ Lausiac History is a book about the model lives of

holy monks written for the purpose of instigating lifestyle change
within the reader. As such, it could operate as a textbook of
Monastic paideia. One could hardly ask for a better example. In
the opening line, Palladius provides not only the framework for a
hagiographical textbook, but also the most important terms for the
application of Monastic paideia, ἄσκησις (asceticism) and µίµησις
(imitation). If, as Peter Brown suggests, asceticism was defined by
an optimistic overhaul of the self,59 monks sought this through
imitation as commended in their texts.
Palladius’ Lausiac History is a hagiography lauding others
but also himself in a small way. In an effort to satisfy the
addressee’s (Lausus’) “desire of learning,”60 Palladius embarks on
a lengthy discussion of various imitable “fashions of plans of

58
“In this book is recorded the virtuous asceticism and wonderful
conduct of life of the blessed and holy monastic fathers and of the anchorites
in the desert, so as to produce zeal and imitation among those desirous of
realizing the heavenly lifestyle and having a will to travel the path that leads
to the kingdom of heaven.” Greek from Edward Cuthbert Butler, The
Lausiac History of Palladius, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1904), 3 (translation mine).
59
Brown, “Asceticism,” 605ff.
60
Palladius Lausiac History Prologue, Butler, The Lausiac History,
15.
354 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

life.”61 His own life path provides the narrative framework for
much of the work, while in his modesty Palladius describes
himself as “clumsy in utterance” (γλώττη ἀπαίδευτος) and having
“but a superficial acquaintance with spiritual knowlege”
(πνευµατικῆς γνώσεως ἀκροθιγῶς πως γευσάµενος). 62 Palladius,
himself a man of no little rhetorical skill, employed his literate
abilities to elevate venerable monks,63 and thus to perpetuate the
paideia of Christian monasticism.
A final example of how hagiography was put to pedagogical
use within monastic life in Roman Egypt is found in the writings of
John Cassian. In his Institutes, he catalogues the practices of
monastic sects and states that his book “is about the training of one
who renounces this world.”64 This training is primarily enabled by
the “specimen” of the deeds of certain elders who excelled in
virtue. 65 Steven Driver develops Cassian’s pedagogical agenda
further:

Cassian’s preface to his Institutes thereby serves as a

preface to a new model of Latin monastic literature. He
calls for a reciprocal relationship between reading and
praxis that goes far beyond the demand, common at the

61
Palladius Lausiac History Prologue, Butler, The Lausiac History,
16.
62
Palladius Lausiac History Preface, Butler, The Lausiac History, 4.
63
It should be noted that Palladius’ injunctions need not be restricted
to monastic life, as his “object of inquiry” is not bound by place; thus he
leaves unnoticed “neither those [paragons] in the cities nor those in the
villages or deserts,” Palladius Lausiac History Prologue, Butler, The Lausiac
History 16.
64
Cassian Institutes 4.23.
65
Cassian Institutes 4.23.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 355

time, to practice the principles espoused in the text. Instead,

the Institutes begin where the monastic life itself begins.
The text condescends to the reader as though speaking to
one who has just renounced the world, and the reader is
expected to assume this role.66

Cassian’s Institutes engage the reader dynamically. Indeed,

this “reciprocal relationship between reading and praxis” is a
constant in what we have been calling Monastic paideia. Thus, as
with other writers of the late antique, when Cassian wrote for
aspiring monks or ascetics, he used hagiography as a pedagogical
tool for training in that regard. Cassian even references
grammatical and rhetorical educational techniques in his writing as
a reconciliation between Monastic paideia and the paideia of the
larger culture.67 To be trained (παιδευτός) in the ascetic life was to
study and imitate hagiography.
Monasticism in Roman Egypt did indeed house “l’Université
du désert.”68 The Verba Seniorum is replete with questions directed
by students to spiritual teachers69 and dialogue between monastic
authorities.70 Unsolicited instruction is also common.71 Nor was

66
Steven D. Driver, John Cassian and the Reading of Egyptian
Monastic Culture (New York: Routledge, 2002), 73.
67
Rebecca Krawiec, “Monastic Literacy in John Cassian: Toward a
New Sublimity,” Church History 81, no.4 (2012) 765–95.
68
Henri Brémond, Divertissements devant l’Arche (Paris: Bernard
Grasset, 1930), 23.
69
De Vitis Patrum, sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V 1.1, 11, 19; 3.8;
passim, from Benedicta Ward, trans., The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the
Early Christian Monks (London: Penguin, 2003).
70
De Vitis Patrum, sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V 1.2, 6; 9.33, passim.
71
De Vitis Patrum, sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V 1.4; 2.11–12,
passim.
356 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

the conversation one-sided; teachers sought insight from students

as well. 72 A perpetual discussion about self-improvement gave
monastic Egypt an academic character, and the primary textbooks
were the hagiographical writings circulating within monastic
circles. These included not only the Apophthegmata Patrum but
the writings of Palladius, John Cassian, and Athanasius as well.
The “textbooks” that sought to inform and inspire, in short to
“educate,” monks, drew upon the lives of predecessors who had
achieved the desired holiness or self/world-renunciation.
A final question we must ask concerns the relationship
between hagiographical writings as Monastic paideia’s texts, and
what would seem the natural textbook for monks, the “canonical
writings,” the Bible. Were they supplementary texts? An important
argument to consider, put forward by Wilhelm Schneemelcher, is
that the biblical text was seen to recommend the ascetic lifestyle;
that is, the Bible provided the impetus for monasticism
originally.73 This argument was modified by Antoine Guillaumont
to include the Bible and Greek notions of “the quest for inner
unity” 74 as providing the fodder for the construction of
monasticism in Roman Egypt.75 So by the time that monastic life

72
De Vitis Patrum, sive Verba Seniorum, Liber V 1.6.
73
Wilhelm Schneemelcher, “Erwägungen zu dem Ursprung des
Mönchtums in Aegypten,” 131–41 in Klaus Wessel, ed., Christentum am Nil
(Recklinghausen: A. Bongers, 1964).
74
Mark Sheridan, From the Nile, 23.
75
Antoine Guillamount, “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du
monachisme,” 228–39 in Antoine Guillamount, Aux origines du
Monachisme chrétien: Pour une phénoménologie du monachisme
(Spiritualité Orientale 30; Bégrolles-en-Mauges, 1979); Antoine
Guillamount, “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du monachisme,” Numen 25
(1978) 40–51.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 357

had become accepted, what was the biblical text’s function among
monks?
It is sometimes assumed that monks were essentially
illiterate; Mark Sheridan challenges this assumption as one made
“without proof and without reference to the available sources.”76
He cites W. E. Crum’s analysis of a monastery that demonstrates
that at least certain monks read contemporary homiletic literature
and the Bible.77 Apparently a vast corpus including “most of the
Old Testament, the New Testament, the apocryphal writings, the
works of Athanasius, the letters of Antony, [and] some of the
Pachomian literature”78 were available in Coptic as early as the
fourth century. Sheridan goes on to show that reading in general,
and of the Bible in particular, constituted a key component of the
monastic life.79 Such scripture reading was recommended by the
hagiography of the time; thus Athanasius claims that Antony knew
the scriptures by heart.80 The Bible and the hagiographical material
were not competitors but complementary texts used in the same
endeavor. Perhaps the raison d’être for hagiography as monastic
textbook was the proclivity monks had for bringing a pragmatic
ideal to the biblical text itself. 81 However, whereas one often

76
Sheridan, From the Nile, 54.
77
Sheridan, From the Nile, 55–56; see H. E. Winlock and W. E.
Crum, The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes 1 (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1926), 196–208.
78
Sheridan, From the Nile, 56.
79
This reading contributed to a new vocabulary in the late antique,
including the “love of reading” (φιλόλογος) and “spiritual reading” (lectio
divina) linked to Antony and Athanasius. See Sheridan, From the Nile, 55
n31, 70–71.
80
Athanasius Vita Antonii 3, 7.
81
See Sheridan’s section on “The Concept of the ‘Useful’ as an
358 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

needed to construct an allegory to gain practical wisdom from the

Bible, hagiography often provided interpretation and was more
straightforward. If one were in search of a textual means to
holiness, hagiography was often more expedient than the Bible.
Still, the two were closely related. If, in the course of pursuing
asceticism, one wanted to know the practical outworking of
biblical injunctions, one only needed look as far as the
hagiography that would paint the picture.

Variants in Monastic Educational Tendencies

The ascetic educational process of Christian monastic life in
Roman Egypt had, in part, the same aim as paideia had for
aristocrats of the Roman Empire: the cultivation and equipping of
the person. The asceticism of Monastic paideia “summed up a
sense that the human person was refinable.”82 In this way, paideia
in the desert had remarkable affinities to cultural educational
values held in the Roman Empire’s urban centers. It gave the
Christian monk a similar prestige that “personal transformation”
would have to any contemporary aristocrat, albeit in different garb;
profound personal change through asceticism, the goal of Monastic
paideia, was not a new phenomenon.83 Its ideals were diverse and
fluid to transcend multiple lifestyles.
In pursuit of Monastic paideia, writers drew upon the success
stories of ascetic heroism. The holy, selfless fathers of the desert
provided the amateur monk with a guide to perfection, and
hagiography immortalized this guidance in a guidebook. By

Exegetical Tool in Patristic Exegesis” (From the Nile, 177–97).

82
Brown, “Asceticism,” 603.
83
Brown, “Asceticism,” 604.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 359

establishing the possibility of holiness, hagiography functioned

within Egyptian monasticism to beckon its readers to renounce the
world and to follow their predecessors into a life of discipline,
worthy of the kingdom of God.
While not a necessary feature of Monastic paideia, saint cults
in late antique Egypt are in some ways related to the education of
monks and may illuminate hagiography as a means of pursuing
Monastic paideia. If one could gain from interacting with the
example of saints through reading and imitation, what might one
gain through physical interaction with a site linked to a saint? Did
this provide a kind of “study abroad” opportunity for monks? For
example, a Christian cult site was established at Menouthis in the
fifth century. 84 Such a cult site’s importance came from its
commemorative value relative to the life and accomplishments of a
certain saint or group of saints (in this case, martyrs). To say that
“pilgrimage was to some extent a natural consequence of the
veneration of marytrs’ relics and the miraculous powers ascribed to
them”85 is tantamount to saying that pilgrimage would have been
the natural course of action for monks studying under a
hagiographical educational model. What hagiography did in words,
a cult site did materially. Of course, cult sites held popular appeal
in a way that, in practice at least, the ascetic lifestyle of monks and
its education did not. However, these sites certainly provided an

84
The Christian site’s relationship to long-standing local, pagan cults
at the site is unclear, but competition existed; see Dominic Montserrat,
“Pilgrimage to the Shrine of SS Cyrus and John at Menouthis in Late
Antiquity,” 257–80 in David Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in
Late Antique Egypt (Religions of the Graeco-Roman World 134;
Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 1998), 257–61.
85
Montserrat, “Menouthis,” 267.
360 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

opportunity for monks to enhance their education through travel in

a way similar and complementary to hagiographical study.
The significance of hagiography as a means to monastic
education lies in its provision of positive role models. Likewise
saint cults, often founded upon the blood of martyrs, were spaces
made sacred by proximity to the memory of such role models.86
This may be seen materially in the Menas flasks found at the Saint
Menas cult site near Alexandria.87 Some of these flasks boast an
image of Saint Thecla, a famous Christian martyr. Traditionally the
hagiographical partner of Paul, Stephen Davis has suggested that in
this instance “Thecla … seems to have been adopted as the female
hagiographical partner of Menas.”88 Thecla was remembered as a
hagiographical model in both text and monument. Monastic
paideia could certainly extend itself beyond the text to monument
and pilgrimage. It boasted a multi-media educational experience.
Mention of Saint Thecla leads us to the last characteristic of
Monastic paideia that we will explore: the question of gender.
Saint Thecla herself was an object of Christian hagiography.89

86
Saint cults and hagiography are explored in this regard, albeit in
reference to later Western emulation, in Paul Antony Hayward,
“Demystifying the Role of Sanctity in Western Christendom,” 115–42 in
James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward, eds., The Cult of Saints
in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter
Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 118–21.
87
See Stephen J. Davis, “Pilgrimage and the Cult of Saint Thecla,”
303–40 in David Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late
Antique Egypt (Religions of the Graeco-Roman World 134;
Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 1998), 305.
88
Davis, “Pilgrimage,” 314.
89
For Thecla as hagiographical object, see discussion and
bibliography in Kari Elisabeth Børresen and Kari Vogt, eds., Women’s
Studies of the Christian and Islamic Traditions: Ancient, Medieval and
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 361

Monastic paideia held, unlike the spiritual education processes in

certain contemporary “orthodox” circles, that the “potential for
spiritual achievement in human beings” was available to “either
sex and … all classes.” 90 Palladius mentions a Pachomian
women’s monastery in fourth century Egypt “across the river”
from the men.91 Female monasticism was normal at least as early
as the fourth century. 92 It thus stands to reason that female
monastics would participate in the same kind of paideia as their
male contemporaries, if literary endeavor was a staple of monastic
life. In fact, not only educated by hagiographical fancy, Elizabeth
Clark points out that at least one female ascetic (Marcella) was
drawn to the monastic life by “hearing tales of the desert monks”

Renaissance Foremothers (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic,

1993), 43ff.
90
Brown, “Asceticism,” 603. See also Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her
Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions Among Pagans, Jews, and
Christians in the Greco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), 11; the best examples of women as ascetic hagiography (in the Syian
tradition) can be found in Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey,
eds., Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1987).
91
Palladius Lausiac History 33 (see also 52, 143). Perhaps this is the
monastery mentioned in the Coptic Life of Pachomius as noted by Elizabeth
Ann Clark, Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical,
1983), 133.
92
For a book length treatment, see Jeffry F. Hamburger and Susan
Marti, Crown & Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth
Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For access to
source materials concerning women in late antique religions, see Ross
Shepard Kraemer, ed., Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A
Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
362 CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BIBLICAL WORLD Vol. XXXIV (2014)

as related in Jerome’s eulogy.93 Hagiography did double-duty as

textbook and recruiter.
Women in Roman Egypt could claim a full participation in
Monastic paideia and its hagiographical base. They served as both
objects of hagiography94 and learned from it themselves. While
admitting that little was known about the education of women
under Shenoute at the White Monastery, Rebecca Krawiec points
out that “religious education, including Biblical instruction” was a
required component of life there. 95 Of course, this education
operated under the suasions of male authority in the person of
Shenoute, but equality in male and female monastic education is
probably too much to expect from late antique Egypt.
Monastic life, and therefore Monastic paideia, was restrictive
to neither gender nor socio-economic status (a status obliterated
upon entrance into monastic life).96 It was an educational model
inextricably attached to the moral ideals of spiritual discipline built
into desert asceticism. The natural object of Monastic paideia was
in large part the hagiographical material that perpetuated monastic
ideals in narrative form. While not the sole object of literary
endeavor among Roman Egyptian monks, hagiography was a
favorite read due to its pedagogical, even transformative, value. As
the Christian monks of Roman Egypt, males and females alike,

93
Clark, Women in the Early Church, 133.
94
For example, see Palladius Lausiac History 33; Jerome Epistula
108, 127.
95
Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White
Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 19.
96
Roman paideia was not a system that rejected female learning, but
highly educated women were exceptional in Classical antiquity.
BAY THE TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSMISSION OF PAIDEIA… 363

sought to become closer to God, more self-controlled, more fully

Christ-like, they created a new version of paideia, a Monastic
paideia, with hagiography rather than rhetorical or philosophical
texts at its center.97 By attaching itself to hagiographical writings
as textbooks, Monastic paideia constructed its students upon the
shoulders of giants.

Carson Bay earned his Master of Arts in Theology & Religious

Studies from John Carroll University in 2014. He currently is a PhD student
at Florida State University focusing on Religions of Western Antiquity.

97
This is not at all to say that philosophical and rhetorical concerns,
even constructions, are not present within monastic literature, but rather that
they did not comprise the immediate object, or end goal, of education.