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Monks at Work

Ideals and Reality in Early Egyptian Monasticism

By Dana Robinson

WHAT IS A MONK’S JOB? For many early monastic leaders and ascetic theorists, the job of a Christian monk was the self-work of ascetic disciplines: fasting, prayer, sexual renunciation, obedience, and voluntary poverty. Undertaken alone or in community, these ascetic (i.e., self-denying) “labors” enabled monks to develop the virtues of humility, spiritual insight, and freedom from material ties. Actual physical labor could also be an ascetic discipline: a physically difficult, demeaning, or tedious manual task that purifies the spirit by humbling the body. Giving every member of the monastic community the same humble task, like weaving flax ropes or […]

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Endnotes

1.
This article is based on Dana Robinson, “Social Spaces of Monastic Labor,” in D. Brooks Hedstrom, ed., Late Antique Monasticism: An Archaeological and Historical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming).

2.
For archaeological overview, see Louise Blanke, An Archaeology of Egyptian Monasticism: Settlement, Economy and Daily Life at the White Monastery Federation (New Haven: Yale Egyptology, 2019). For translations from Shenoute’s writings, see Bentley Layton, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014) (referenced here as Layton #), and David Brakke and Andrew Crislip, Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).

3.
Miko Flohr, “Constructing Occupational Identities in the Roman World,” in K. Verboven and C. Laes, eds., Work, Labor, and Professions in the Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 148–172.

4.
My translation from Johannes Leipoldt, ed., Sinuthii Archimandritae Vita et Opera Omnia, vol. 4, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 73 (Paris: Typographeum Reipublicae, 1913), p. 42 (i.e., White Monastery codex XM 462).