Book description
The literature of late ancient Christianity is rich both in saints
who lead lives of almost Edenic health and in saints who court and
endure horrifying diseases. In such narratives, health and illness
might signify the sanctity of the ascetic, or invite consideration of
a broader theology of illness. In Thorns in the Flesh, Andrew
Crislip draws on a wide range of texts from the fourth through sixth
centuries that reflect persistent and contentious attempts to make
sense of the illness of the ostensibly holy. These sources include
Lives of Antony, Paul, Pachomius, and others; theological treatises by
Basil of Caesarea and Evagrius of Pontus; and collections of
correspondence from the period such as the Letters of Barsanuphius and John.
Through close readings of these texts, Crislip shows how late
ancient Christians complicated and critiqued hagiographical
commonplaces and radically reinterpreted illness as a valuable mode
for spiritual and ascetic practice. Illness need not point to sin or
failure, he demonstrates, but might serve in itself as a potent form
of spiritual practice that surpasses even the most strenuous of
ascetic labors and opens up the sufferer to a more direct knowledge of
the self and the divine. Crislip provides a fresh and nuanced look at
the contentious and dynamic theology of illness that emerged in and
around the ascetic and monastic cultures of the later Roman world.
"Thorns in the Flesh moves well beyond the
generalizations of a long tradition of scholarship on early Christian
attitudes to disease and medicine-disease as test, judgment, or sign
to others; medicine as divinely provided remedy or diabolical
temptation-to a specific and highly productive study of the ambiguous
position of the sick monk. The book rests on close and extensive
knowledge of the primary sources for early monasticism in Greek and
Coptic and thorough, justifiably critical deployment of the secondary
literature."-Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway University of London
Andrew Crislip is Associate Professor and William E. and Miriam S.
Blake Chair in the History of Christianity at Virginia Commonwealth
University.
