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Augustine's Vergilian Retreat: Reading the Auctores at Cassiciacum by Joseph Pucci (review)

The results were mixed. Aspiring monks did not simply choose to turn left for basket-weaving in Egypt or right to beg or stand on pillars in Syria. Indeed, Brown’s characteristic nuancing of the diverse threads across these polarities is perhaps (at least to this reviewer) the most appealing strength of this compact and welcome study. For instance, “holy poor” might still own property despite rhetoric to the contrary. Monasteries were surrounded by social bustle, often a few hundred yards from the nearest village. Families took individual monks under their special care to benefit from their power to heal, bless, and pray. And “sons” and “daughters of the Covenant” across Syria tended to stay put at home and were not necessarily poor at all. So why did the pro-work model win out for the West? Why are modern Christian ideals of ascetics different from, say, the Hindu sadhu or the Buddhist with a begging bowl? One answer, Brown suggests, may lie in an element often “airbrushed out” of these ascetic narratives: the role and influence of the proximal laity. As both church and monks gained wealth and institutional stability into the fifth century, donors increased their generosity to both “holy” and “real” poor. And work, at least conceptually, was part of dynamic appeals for “treasure in heaven,” particularly through language of sacred abundance and incarnational theology. For Egyptian monks, “to accept the body was to abandon any pretense to be an angel. It involved taking on the poor, so as to show compassion for bodies like one’s own. . . . Condemned to work so as to eat, the monks were linked by labor to the sufferings of the poor” (108, 117). Lay connections were fundamental to these dynamics. This does not mean the Syrian model disappeared, of course. Ascetics in both Egypt and Syria were implacably “linked by a continuous muffled dialogue” (xiii) across borders in an interdependent world. By the fifth century, Brown concludes, we find clear evidence of a “blended tradition” that draws from both. In sum, Treasure in Heaven reminds us how religious meaning takes shape in distinctly non-angelic social realities, and what such ideological differences may look like in community and individual expressions of aid, “holy” poverty, and wealth. Its broad-scope exegetical exploration on how work shaped sacred meaning in an important historical moment has far-reaching implications for global conversations that continue today.