Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity

Abstract

Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and in Early Christianity. By Elizabeth A. Clark. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiii + 420 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). Anyone who looks through book catalogues will note that commentaries on scripture continue to be written in prodigious numbers. This is not a modern or post-Reformation phenomenon: Church wrote hundreds of volumes of scriptural commentary and these are now receiving renewed attention in patristic scholarship, and not only by Roman Catholics and Anglicans; Intervarsity, an Evangelical Protestant press, has a new series entitled Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. In her new book, Reading Renunciation, Elizabeth A. Clark turns her attention to scripture and asceticism in late antiquity and analyzes how Christian from second to mid-fifth centuries made meanings of Biblical texts in their own highly asceticized religious environments-or environments wished to render highly (p. 3). Clark emphasizes important role that (certain) readers had in late antiquity, and how, through their commentaries on scripture, Christian writers indeed a new, asceticized Scripture (p. 5). Reading Renunciation exhibits Clark's customary breadth and depth of scholarship, cogent argumentation, and clear writing. As two quotations above intimate, Clark believes that ascetically minded Christian authors were confronted a Scriptural corpus that, on surface, provided dubious support for their programs of renunciation. Yet Scriptural passages could, imaginative be harnessed to carry a more strict ascetic (p. 233). There is no doubt that Clark is right that ascetic such as Origen, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine (the four she focuses on), with imaginative assistance, did pursue an ascetic agenda in late antiquity. The bulk of this book impressively catalogues, examines, and queries exegetical strategies that the Fathers used to produce ascetic readings. But in her conclusion Clark pushes further: created a new, highly asceticized version of (p. 371, emphasis added). But was ascetic Christianity so new? Clark herself acknowledges (pp. 177-78) that Jesus was ascetic. If one starts asceticism of John Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and primitive Christian community depicted by Luke (Acts 4:32) and adds to it encratism of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings of second and third centuries, asceticism of a Jerome hardly seems new (although some of his critics thought it was). In fact, it seems more than likely that lineage of a desert ascetic like Antony Great (251-356) can be traced back through village ascetics to encratitic communities of previous centuries to widows and orphans mentioned in scripture and, finally to Jesus himself. The chief tenet of asceticism, it seems to me, is to place God ahead of things of this world; if that is true, then not only is Jesus ascetic, but so is most of Bible. Given our sex-obsessed culture, I worry (and this is not Clark's fault) that uninformed reader might gather, on perusing this volume, that early Christian asceticism and monasticism was only about renunciation. Such skewing fits our age. Clark, thankfully, acknowledges that sexual abstinence was merely one . . . aspect of ascetic renunciation (p. …