Bernadette McNary-Zak and her collaborators hope to introduce English- speaking readers to Ammonas, the fourth-century Egyptian monk who was a disciple of Antony the Great (d. ca. 356 C.E.) and who later became a significant monastic leader in his own right. In the book's first part, McNary-Zak discusses Ammonas's writings and then discusses his view of spiritual formation; she emphasizes the spiritual guide's gift of discernment, which increasingly became important to the work of bishops as well that of monastic leaders. The second part of the book presents English translations by Nada Conic, Lawrence Morey, and Richard Upsher Smith, Jr. of works attributed to Ammonas and extant in Greek. Although the book may provide an inspiring resource for "spiritual directors of the twenty-first century," as the back cover suggests, it elides or avoids too many significant historical questions to be very useful to the working historian.
McNary-Zak's extended essay in the book's first part provides learned and thoughtful reflections on spiritual progress and discernment inspired by the corpus attributed to Ammonas. After initial chapters that introduce early monastic life and literature in general and the writings of Ammonas in particular, McNary-Zak devotes the third chapter to Ammonas's understanding of "the monastic journey"; here she rightly emphasizes his distinctive teaching that the monk receives a divine "fervor" or "sweetness" that serves both as the monk's reward for repentance and ascetic cultivation and as his helper or guardian as he makes further progress toward mystical knowledge. Although differences with the mystical teachings of Evagrius of Pontus and Pseudo-Macarius are quickly noted, McNary-Zak emphasizes a shared "broader mystical tradition within Christian monasticism" (53).
In Chapter Four she focuses on the monastic gift of discernment, which is notoriously difficult to define. McNary-Zak appears to understand it as essentially (quoting Ammonas) the ability "'to discern the difference between the good and bad in all things' and so to identify and address this state of monastic practice"; the gift of discernment, "when cultivated, fostered a particular way of perceiving the true purpose and function of human beings" (65). In the following pages "discernment" seems to expand to include intercessory prayer, modeling the Christian life for others, healing, and everything that constituted the monastic holy man of late antiquity. One misses here sustained engagement with the extensive scholarship on the topic, for example, Antony D. Rich's Discernment in the Desert Fathers: "Diakrisis" in the Life and Thought of Early Egyptian Monasticism (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007).
Chapter Five discusses how discernment came to be an essential characteristic of the good bishop during the fourth century. McNary- Zak turns to this topic because, she says, "the Apophthegmata Patrum contends that it was precisely the gift of discernment that made Abba Ammonas particularly suited to service in a position of ecclesiastical leadership," citing Ammonas 8 in the alphabetical collection (86). I will have more to say about this issue below, but for now we should note that, although Ammonas 8 may show "Bishop Ammonas" exercising exemplary judgment (in the case of a pregnant young woman), it never uses the word "discernment" (diakrisis). In any event, because there are no sources other than this short saying that depict Ammonas acting as a bishop, McNary-Zak's main example of a monk-turned-bishop is Serapion of Thmuis, whose Letter on the Death of Antony attributes Arian victories in the late 350s to the death of the great monk and so to the loss of his intercessory power.
McNary-Zak concludes her discussion with an epilogue, in which a fictional Christian woman hears stories about Ammonas, is inspired to visit him, and later learns that he has become a bishop. According to McNary-Zak, this woman would have learned a great deal from her experience of Ammonas through personal contact and narrative accounts:
UNSPECIFIEDIn all of this, our Christian would have realized that it was precisely because others acknowledged Abba Ammonas' activity as a testimony to the constant breath of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian community that his contribution was a valued one. Because he was recognized as having experienced subsequent, postbaptismal, graces his life attested to the continual presence of the Holy Spirit as teacher and as guide in the life of the individual Christian and in the shared life of the community. In the midst of the clerical and doctrinal formalization of the late fourth century, Ammonas' life held up as an example the experience [sic] on which such formalization rested. His acquisition of the gift of discernment allowed him to see in a way that was crucial and necessary for others in this period; as a result, his vision contributed directly to the formation and development of a distinctly Christian worldview (111).
I expect that these are the lessons that the readers of this book are supposed to gain as well, and indeed the book provides an inspiring portrait of discerning Christian leadership at work.
But the historian might ask, Is it a true portrait? To be sure, when it comes to monastic literature, whether any given saying or story is "true," in the sense of historically accurate, may be the least interesting question to ask. The values, anxieties, and beliefs that a story transmits--the cultural work that it performs--may be of far greater significance. But readers of this book are presumably meeting a real person, Abba Ammonas, and so certain questions arise.
We can begin with the sources. The most important surviving texts attributed to Ammonas are his Letters, which McNary-Zak briefly explains survive in Greek, Syriac, and partially in Latin. Some of the Latin and Syriac letters are identical, and McNary-Zak points out (certainly correctly) that Ammonas would have written in Greek (18). English translations of the Greek Letters appear at the end of the book, with McNary-Zak's two sentence introduction stating that they attest to Ammonas's affiliation with Antony, his view of spiritual development, and other matters (114). From all of this I expect that most readers would conclude that McNary-Zak's understanding of Ammonas is based on these Greek letters and that they as well should read them if they want to learn about Ammonas. But careful readers might notice that, in the notes to her explications of Ammonas, McNary-Zak never cites the Greek version of the letters, but the Syriac, as translated by Derwas Chitty and Sebastian Brock (The Letters of Ammonas, Successor of St. Antony [Oxford: SLG Press, 1979]). She is correct to do so because, as she and all other scholars have recognized, Ammonas may have written in Greek, but the Syriac version is much closer to the original; the extant Greek version has been severely edited to remove or play down problematic material (such as Ammonas's long quotation from the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah) and, in general, to create an Ammonas more palatable to later (Greek-speaking) monastic consensus.
Unfortunately, McNary-Zak never tells her readers that real study of Ammonas should rely on the Syriac version of the Letters and make use of the Greek only to recover some of Ammonas' original vocabulary. This conclusion makes one wonder what purpose the book's English translation of the Greek letters is meant to serve, for interested readers should study Chitty and Brock (not this translation, however excellent) if they want to get to know Ammonas's own thoughts as closely as we can recover them. Moreover, the tendency in the Greek tradition to "tame" Ammonas provokes skepticism about the other Greek texts attributed to Ammonas and translated here, the Instructions and Exhortations, or Paragraphs of Encouragement. These works appear to me (at least on an initial reading) as fairly generic early Byzantine monastic teaching, lacking the distinctive themes one finds in Ammonas's Letters (in Syriac). The Exhortations, for example, stresses extreme humility to an astonishing degree. McNary-Zak cites the fourth chapter of this work in support of her claim that Ammonas teaches that the monk becomes a "useful servant" by participating in the work of Jesus Christ and following his example (74). Frankly, I do not find this idea there, rather merely exhortations to make oneself "disreputable, as a dung-hill and earth and dust, and last of all and slave of all," to think of oneself as a worse sinner than all other Christians, to consider one's justice "like the rag of a menstruous woman," and "never to be joyful and never to laugh" (158-159). Certainly the Ammonas we meet in the Letters encourages humility and warns against vainglory, but this rhetoric does not otherwise comfortably fit the epistolary Ammonas's hortatory style.
The other Greek source that McNary-Zak uses is the sayings by and about Ammonas found in the alphabetical collection of the Apophthegmata Patrum. As we have seen, it is one of these apophthegmata that suggests that Ammonas became a bishop and thus inspires McNary-Zak's chapter on discernment in the episcopal office. In the epilogue, the fictional devotee of Ammonas returns to visit Ammonas at his monastic retreat and does not find him there; she "would be told that he had left the desert to assume an episcopal appointment" (111). But the accompanying note leads the reader to this statement: "Abba Ammonas may have been consecrated bishop at some point although there is no recollection or record in the ecclesiastical lists" (112). Indeed it is not at all certain that the Ammonas who wrote the letters under study here is the same Ammonas that appears in the apophthegmata as a bishop. Ammonas was a common name, and the Sayings may give us a fairly good picture of monasticism in northern Egypt during the fourth century, but they are not the most reliable sources for specific information about individual monks. In fact, McNary-Zak herself in her 1997 doctoral dissertation wrote that "it is not likely that this Ammonas [of the Letters] should be identified with the Ammonas of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers" ("Pre-Theodosian Ascetic Piety in Fourth-Century Egypt: A Study of the Ascetical Letters of Bishops and Monks" [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1997], 54). Again, the reader of this book is never told this. Rather, here the letters of a monk associated with Antony's monastic network in Middle Egypt can become, in agreement with Johannes Quasten, "the most instructive and precious source for the history of the earliest monachism [sic] in the desert of Scete," far to the north (53).
To be sure, McNary-Zak acknowledges the historical problems with the material she is using: early monastic literature, she acknowledges, is "propagandistic" and often "unverifiable" and must be treated with "caution" by the historian (26). But that caution does not appear here often. Instead, any and all sources come into play, and the Ammonas of this book correspondingly takes on a generic character that reflects the homogenizing tendencies of the Greek textual tradition. Certainly the fragmentary nature of the evidence for Ammonas, the disciple and successor of Antony, requires that the historian use other representative material to fill in gaps (such as how the guide- disciple relationship worked in practice). Here, however, that strategy produces an Ammonas who is simply a representative late ancient monastic holy man whose gift of discernment makes him an excellent candidate for the episcopate. He is the ideal leader for the increasingly asceticized espicopal Christianity of the late fourth century, rather than the quirky monastic guide with distinctive teachings about the value of monastic withdrawal, the "divinity" or "fervor" that indwells the monk, and the mystic knowledge to which the successful monk may aspire. The former figure may provide inspiration for contemporary spiritual directors and even provide general readers an apt example of fourth-century Christian ideals, but I hesitate to recommend this book even to such non-specialists, who are probably unaware of the historical caveats that do not appear here. Certainly historians in search of the historical Ammonas will need to look elsewhere. A good place to start would be Bernadette McNary-Zak's earlier pioneering work on monastic letters in Egypt: Letters and Asceticism in Fourth-Century Egypt (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000).