The continuing interest among Protestants in the spiritual writings of ‘mystical tradition’ is further served by this useful collection of seven accounts, mostly excerpted from longer ‘lives’ of these exemplary monks. All of them withdraw into deserted, sometimes literally desert areas, to live in caves and off whatever vegetation was around. The settings are shared between Upper Egypt and Palestine.

Apart from Antony, the father of monasticism, part of whose tale is told here after the Coptic Life of Antony, the characters line up in increasing order of obscurity. That much of this fertile ground has already been worked is apparent from the excellent and right up-to-date annotations with references to secondary literature. The author has also provided introductions to the excerpts, highlighting the more significant passages and drawing out, to some extent the meaning for today. Two small cavils are: the omission of any maps; the reader is referred to maps in Hirschfield’s Desert Monasteries, but who is going to have a copy handy? Also, I would have liked the primary sources, the texts and translations set out at some point more clearly and fully than is the case of p. 193.

What links each figure at the centre of each account is the idealization of the virtues of courage and fortitude and the corresponding spiritual humility. The reader is usually implicitly invited to stand in the sandals of the narrator, or in the case of Pambo, to identify with him, the novice as he seeks enlightenment. The collection kicks off with Antony and the pattern is set: someone goes into complete isolation, and paradoxically, after fifteen years or so, the place is full of people wanting to imitate him. The pioneer had made unholy land holy, and lesser mortals can live the same life without having to go through quite the same amount of agony. ‘If he could do x, then you can do fix’ especially as the spiritual power let loose by his doing x is available in this place; he is, as are all the heroes in this book, not so much a type of Christ but one who is in loco Christi.

Therapy in the shape of unconscious forces coming to the surface—to which evangelicals have been introduced, say, in the writing of Richard Foster on fasting and prayer—plays a large part on the rationale of the fights with demons. The demons are shown to have no reality externally—they may seem to be in wild animals or in men that leave one bruised, but in truth they are internal, and the fathers were not so naive as to think otherwise. The gospels serve as inspiration, as do the Elijah narratives and the Psalms from the desert, in other words those Scriptural texts which speak of holy men filled with God’s power working the fringes of civilisation. This raises the question of why these people left for the desert, one which the author is not too concerned about answering. Was it for peace and quiet to pray. To get away from constraining external obligations, or to fight demons on their home ground (i.e., the non-human world)?

The historicity of the stories, especially the relating of visions, miracles and seemingly objectively visible events of an unusual character is another question skipped around by the author. His overall tone is far from sceptical, yet ‘The tale of Abba Pambo was never meant to be read as a historical document: it is written for those seeking a deeper understanding of God. It is an extended parable, set in its own archetypal landscape.’ Failing to resolve the deeper question of: did all these weird things happen, and in what manner? led this reader to be a little cynical when the author continues: ‘Pambo is like us’. No he isn’t. (Except in the limited sense, yes, that he is a novice.) Who else has seen Christ himself come and attend to the body of the deceased spiritual master, Cyrus, who marvellously dies on the same day as Shenoute (surely a ploy to elevate Cyrus to the same level as the more renowned Egyptian leader)? The point of the account is to show that there is no spirituality which goes any further than where Cyrus is at. As Cyrus says himself: ‘There is nothing beyond me except darkness and the punishments that sinners are enduring’.

The issue of women and spirituality is raised in the chapter on Syncletica. She has a life in her own right, not just a brief mention as a colleague of Melania the Younger. There is a lot of scholarly literature to be read and, pace Lucien Regnault’s theory that women made only a minimal contribution, she is an example of many women who simply did not have their stories recorded. Sometimes exaggeration to make a point is permissible, but it is hard to be sure that the orders of virgins mentioned in 1 Timothy were continued even in one locality through into the Fourth Century. At times he is aware of stepping between two camps (conservative orthodox and liberal feminist, on the question of the comparative influence of spiritual and social forces), at other times unaware (!): ‘Gregory of Nyssa wrote the Life of his sister Macrina, and yet their brother Basil, the ‘father of Eastern monasticism’, whom Macrina profoundly influenced, does not once mention her in his writings. Thus the mother of Eastern monasticism remains essentially unknown’ (at p. 39). I cannot think of a better example of self-contradiction in the space of two sentences. It is not ‘God’ but prayer that Syncletica held to be what she was looking for in wanting to be a monk; presumably this came after her father suggesting she could (para. 6, p. 48) be a monk with her husband. The threat to the continuation of the family line is not such a big factor in the explanation of the parental opposition, since married daughters would not continue a line as such. The factors are more social in the sense of the cohesion of society, and personally, in the sense of a father’s anxiety about his daughter. Where women’s issues are concerned, the author in his comments seems to stray into jargon he elsewhere avoids: ‘the theme of renunciation (an nunciation, really)’ (p. 44). A terrible play on words or on the next page: ‘she broke her silence and so moved into history, with its own shifting boundaries and territories of deep silence’.

The stories then are about pioneers and their rites of passage, more about leaving home, winning over the first temptations and dying or handing on one’s spiritual mantle to others than much about what happened on a day to day basis in the monasteries subsequently founded. One of the interesting places in the book is where ostensibly on George of Choziba the author sketches the dimensions and contents of caves and allotments in the Judean desert. A short analysis of monasticism in all its types (coenebitic, eremeticic, semi-anchoritic) would have been helpful. Prayer makes one calm and good at dealing with crisis in other people’s lives, viz, Abba Aaron’s miracle working. On a theological level the stories of George tell us about how developed (by 631) were the ideas of the Virgin Mary’s intercessions and the communion of saints and how those on earth could join in with the interceding powers of those already above, while the benefits for the political realm of spiritual powers are salient in Theognius’ Life (c. 530). Much of all the stories, but especially the later 6^th–7^th century ones, are to do with holy men as brokers, go-betweens, The last story (of Onnophrius) even suggests, as was to be continued by the hesychastic tradition of Mt Athos, that holy men could return to the place of Adam before the fall even after grave sexual sin, as evidence by the submissiveness of snakes to them, the visitation of angels with the Eucharist, the richness of the gardens of fruit, the harmony between two ‘brother’ monks.

The book is meant to serve as an introduction to early monastic studies. Yet it also tries to introduce lesse-known characters. The combination of these two targets usually works. However, these stories are hard to read all at once. At times the response may range from wonder, through respect, to consternation and scepticism. The depracation of sexuality may rankle particularly. However they do engage our responses and speak of the otherness of God to a Church which thinks more of marketing and the affirmation of solutions to the world’s problems only on shared common sense.