Landscape and Rhetoric: The Environment in Late 4th Century Accounts of the Desert Fathers

Abstract

This thesis is a close study of how two texts, St Jerome’s Vita Pauli and the anonymous Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, engage with classical ideas about distant landscapes in their presentation of the Egyptian ascetic movement. The works are both products of a loose monastic literary circle which existed in the East in the final decades of the fourth century AD, writing for an elite pan-Mediterranean audience. The thesis argues that each text is highly innovative in its depiction of the monastic environment, adapting and altering core ideas of the classical ‘discourse of distant lands’ in order to create a landscape that meets the author’s rhetorical needs. In the Vita Pauli, Jerome presents a desert landscape very different from that which was imagined by classical authors. Instead of making St Paul the Hermit’s desert abode into a locus amoenus surrounded by a flat, sandy void, he constructs a stony desert mountain range full of naturalistic detail. Examination of the state of Jerome’s career at the time of composition suggests a reason for this unconventional realism. Needing to differentiate himself in the intense competition for elite literary patronage, Jerome creates a landscape that implies he has a uniquely genuine understanding of what the monastic environment is like. The Historia Monachorum presents a landscape which mimics much of the imagery of classical utopias. This enables its anonymous author to suggest that the Desert Fathers live a heavenly or angelic life, in keeping with the utopian tradition of divine sponsorship. However, the classical discourse’s focus on the total separation of the utopian from the ordinary world is definitively rejected; the author instead locates these places in the heart of Roman Egypt. This, too, is the product of the author’s rhetorical goals. In attempting to persuade his elite audience to adopt ascetic practices, he makes the heavenly life seem geographically accessible and hence genuinely attainable for his readers.