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Biblical Authority, Bishops, and Monks

Introduction

A 5^th-century monk wrote that “Whoever lives not by his own judgment but by the example of our forebears will never be deceived.”  But who were these “forebears” of monastic life?

Monks generally invoked the authority of elder monks as spiritual predecessors rather than bishops, clergy members, or earlier theologians like Irenaeus or Tertullian. In fact, many monastic writings drew a clear, bold line between monks and bishops, a line meant not only to separate the two but to actually exclude bishops and clergy from monastic life.

In addition, however, many monks claimed that some of the best-known biblical figures – Elijah and John the Baptist – were the founders of the monastic way of life. Accordingly, monastic writings drew examples from the Bible, including the apostles, to show that they, rather than the clergy, were heirs of a spiritual authority of practice.

From these interpretations of the Bible, monks made repeated appeals to distinct monastic traditions, intending to show how truly holy figures should behave by systematizing correct monastic practices with an emphasis on asceticism. Moreover, they subtly denigrated clergy and some of their theological heroes, delicately disparaging them for not measuring up to the monastic and ascetic standards they defined.

Texts:

Preface to Cassian’s book The Institutes. From about pages 16 to 19 of this link.  This is the preface,  not the introduction.

Cassian, the 5^th century monk we will discuss, prefaces this work telling us about his purpose in both his Institutes and Conferences. He introduces his method of reading biblical figures into monasticism.

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson: This is the September, 2024 Bible and Beyond discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and your guest this evening is Dr. Joshua Schachterle. We are going to be talking about Biblical authority, Bishops and Monks. His book is on John Cassian and the creation of Monastic Subjectivity, which is what we’re going to be talking about in a moment. And I want to say, please don’t forget how sincerely, we appreciate your regular financial support. These discussions can’t happen without you both being here and making financial donations. The most helpful thing to do is just sign up for a monthly donation on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/bible and beyond. But if your help comes by check or PayPal, I assure you, we’re still super grateful. Thank you so much. So Joshua, I want to thank you for being here. Welcome.

Joshua Schachterle: Well, thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Shirley Paulson: We’ve got a nice group who’s gathered together here tonight, so we’re going to have a lot of fun with this discussion. So I think that most of our participants are pretty familiar with the Bible and realize that there’s a great big wide world out there that happened in antiquity that didn’t get into the Bible, and we realized that the church took off in a direction officially based on the outcome of the fourth century Nicene Council. But early on, people practiced their faith lives in different ways. Some wanted positions of authority like priests and bishops. Others wanted to focus on their faith as monks in a monastery. So I thought maybe we should start tonight by describing what those differences might’ve been.

Joshua Schachterle: So interestingly, the earliest monks were not even in monasteries. They were solitaries. Our English word monk actually comes from a Greek word, which literally means solitary one. So the earliest monks we know about . . .  I should go back, this was mostly happening originally in Egypt, which at the time in the fourth century was a part of the Roman Empire. So the monks we know in Egypt that started the ball rolling, went out to live alone or in small groups at first in the Egyptian deserts, outside cities, and focused on asceticism, which is self-denial, especially in a religious or spiritual context, as a way of connecting with God. So bishops and priests, by that time, had more official and liturgical duties in the institutional church. And so the strange thing was at the time, monks were not officially. . . a monk was not like a term that you used officially in the church. You didn’t say, as we might now in the Catholic church, monks, nuns, priests, deacons, elders, et cetera. They were sort of outliers and in a lot of ways for that reason, nobody knew what to do with them.

Shirley Paulson: I see. Oh, that’s interesting. Nobody knew what to do with ’em. Okay. So then maybe you can describe the transition between say, disciples to monks and priests. I mean, so we know about disciples and then all of a sudden, where do these guys come from?

Joshua Schachterle: Well, so it’s hard to know for certain. Are you asking about where the monks got the idea to do this?

Shirley Paulson: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to, yeah.

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah. So in one way, I think if you look into Jewish tradition preceding Christianity, there were groups like the Essenes who lived out in the desert separate from the Jerusalem temple and were like a community. They were basically a sort of monastery, but for Judaism and wrote their own texts in a lot of ways and things like that. A first century Jewish philosopher named Philo of Alexandria, which he was a Jew living in Egypt. He wrote about a community that was there that was very similar, a Jewish community. He called the Therapeutae. So I have to think, I mean, there’s no way to be a hundred percent certain in anything from ancient history, as I’m sure you know. But the real forebearers of religious communities and even hermits going out and living on their own in the wilderness was from Judaism.

Shirley Paulson: Very interesting. Okay. That’s very helpful to get that context that they just didn’t fall out of the sky and become priest. Alright. Okay. Then I’m kind of curious about the role of authority in all this. If they were just sort of people wanting to follow Jesus, certainly the question of authority starts to come into somewhere. So priests and bishops had power over the church, but did everybody also think of the writings in the context of authority? Or is it just people who had authority?

Joshua Schachterle: No, I think you’re absolutely right. So as I’m sure you know, in the earliest centuries of Christianity, including the fourth century, when monks first began to have their profession, there were no universal agreements about which writings were scripture and which weren’t. I mean, I think Shirley, you talk a lot in your work about books that got excluded from the Bible eventually. So some of those books in the fourth century were still considered scripture, at least by some people. So there were a lot of debates about those obviously. But those who claimed scriptural status for certain books based their authority, at least partially on how they interpreted those books.

Joshua Schachterle: Have to remember, we all know that the Bible can be interpreted in wildly different ways, and it was no different in the early centuries of Christianity. So bishops in the early church derived their authority from something called apostolic succession, and that was the idea that, well, it was based on Matthew 16: 16-18 specifically, when Jesus tells Peter that he’s the rock upon which he will build his church. So that story in Matthew, by the second century, basically that was interpreted by the institutional church, the main church, as Peter being the first bishop or even Pope of the church. So future bishops were then to derive their authority and teachings from Peter or one of the other apostles. So that’s why it’s called apostolic succession. In other words, you were a real bishop if your authority somehow came through one of the original apostles, and then that authority was supposed to have gone directly back to Jesus. And the Catholic church still operates on that assumption. So biblical authority was extremely important here because based on that interpretation, future bishops would claim the authority of the apostles, which of course went right back from Jesus and they continue to do this. So that was their authority. And then monks came along and there was a slightly different interpretation of that.

Shirley Paulson: Oh, tell us. That’s interesting. What happened to the monks then?

Joshua Schachterle: Well, so it’s hard to imagine now, but as I said earlier, monks have been an official part of Catholic church and the Orthodox church and probably several other denominations that I’m not aware of for centuries now. So it just seems like, okay, well you have priests and bishops.  . . .

But originally the church, as I said, didn’t know what to do with them. They weren’t priests and they weren’t bishops, so they couldn’t be seen as that kind of authority. And yet they weren’t exactly lay people either. And it turns out that the laypeople in the church saw monks as authoritative on spiritual matters. So in a big city like Alexandria, Egypt, for example, you would have people walk right past the church sometimes when they had a problem and go out, risking their lives in some cases, to the desert, to visit these monks who, because of their holiness, (perceived holiness, at least) based on asceticism, based on their self-denial, they believed that they had a more direct link to God in some ways than bishops. Unsurprisingly, bishops did not like this.

Shirley Paulson: Okay. Right.

Joshua Schachterle: But on the other hand, it turns out that monks, for the most part, did not want to be bishops. There are stories of church officials going out to the monks in the wilderness and forcing them, in some cases really kidnapping them, in order to force them to become priests or bishops. The thought being, okay, they’re popular with the people, they have authority with the people, and if we officially ordain them, then they’re one of us, and we get that popularity too. So on the other hand, monks, it seems from the early monastic writings we have that monks actually wanted to be free to live alone or with other monks and monasteries and be able to practice their form of asceticism, which was very difficult to do in a regular church setting as a bishop.

Shirley Paulson: That is so fascinating. So in other words, the people who were powerful because of their spiritual connections didn’t want human power, but people who wanted power wanted them to have the power.

Joshua Schachterle: Yes, exactly. And there are some sort of crazy stories about things that monks did, like running away and hiding. And one monk even was said to have, again, we can’t for sure know the historicity of these stories, but one monk was said to have mutilated himself—cut off one of his ears, in a Van Gogh-like move, in order to say, in Leviticus it says that priests can’t be mutilated, so I can’t be a priest anymore. So whether or not that’s a hundred percent true, all of it together shows that monks much preferred to live out in the wilderness and practice asceticism themselves.

Shirley Paulson: Well then did the monks dislike the bishops or they just want to be left alone?

Joshua Schachterle: So for the most part, it seems that they just wanted to be left alone. But it’s interesting, in a lot of these early monastic stories, there are stories and sayings, the main book being called The Sayings of Desert Fathers, where bishops would come out and visit them. Some bishops actually saw them as holy as well. They came out to sort of pay honor to them. And monks in a lot of these stories do not treat the bishops the way they’re used to being treated. They treat them like any other human being. They say, here, you want some tea? Here you go, okay, see you. They just kind of almost dismiss them and ignore their status. So there’s no sense really that monks don’t like bishops. It’s more the sense that they don’t have any respect for their status any more than they have respect for anyone else’s status.

Shirley Paulson: Oh gosh, this is so fascinating.

Joshua Schachterle: Me too.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah, I can see why you got into this subject. Now, the title of your book includes the name of somebody called Cassian. Who was he?

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah, so John Cassian was a monk born in the late fourth century and lived until about 421. And so I’ll give you a quick synopsis of his life. He was born, we think [he doesn’t write about himself very much, and unfortunately that’s a thing that monks generally did. Humility was very important to them. So they would not often not even refer to their own lives.] But he seems to have come, based on how educated and high level his Latin is, he seems to have been born somewhere in modern day Romania, which was again a part of the Roman Empire at the time. And somehow he got the urge, probably through reading some of the early monastic literature, to become a monk. And so he walked from there. Again, we have no idea of this journey, but it was just the only way to go really. He walked to Bethlehem in Israel, if you look that up on a map, walking from Romania to Bethlehem is no easy feat!

But so after being there for a while, I think you get the feeling that he and a friend of his, who was another monk, decided that these monks in the monastery, in other words, real monks in the real world were not as cool, were not as holy as the monks they had read about. The monks they had read about the ones who were getting all the press at the time were in Egypt. So they were pretty young at the time. My guess is they were in their early twenties. Cassian and his friend Germanis decided to travel with the permission of their abbott to Egypt and meet some of these monks. And according to Cassian’s writings later, he met a lot of them and had a lot of amazing conversations with them, and ultimately decided to stay there and joined a small community of monks, the two of them, land stayed for about 15 years.

Eventually there came some theological conflicts. Without going into too much detail, there was a conflict over whether God was embodied, which some people believed, and the bishop claimed—the bishop of the area where they were in Alexandria and Cassian and his group of monks were. They were all sort of educated monks, and they knew a lot about Greek philosophy, which influenced I think, their decision. But they had decided that that was not the case, that God did not have a body. So ultimately, back in those days, theology was very high stakes. It was not just, oh, that’s what you think? Well, I think this. It was, “we’re going to burn you with the stake if you have the wrong views.” So according to the several sources, actually, that bishop ordered some monks who agreed with him to march out there and burned down their monastic settlement.

Shirley Paulson: Oh my goodness. Okay.

Joshua Schachterle: And Cassian and some friends escaped. I’m sure that not all of them did. And they ran away to Constantinople where the bishop at the time, and I don’t know if those of you listening have heard of this guy, but the bishop at the time in Constantinople was named John Chrysostom, and he basically took them in and gave them protection until Chrysostom himself got in theological trouble and was exiled. So Cassian, and it was just like from disaster to disaster, Cassian and his friend at that point decided, okay, we need to go to a real authority for someone to stop his exile, for someone to take up his cause. So they, from there, traveled all the way from Constantinople, which is in Turkey, to Rome to speak with the Bishop of Rome. Unfortunately, it did no good because on their trip they found out later Chrysostom had died.

Shirley Paulson: Oh, no. Okay.

Joshua Schachterle: So the final chapter of the story, and we don’t know exactly how this happened, but probably through some connection he made in Rome, Cassian ended up going to modern day France, which was then called Gaul, and joining a monastery, which was in present day Marseilles. And there he was asked by the bishop of the area, interestingly enough, to write a manual or manuals for the monks living there because that bishop and Cassian himself thought that those monks were not doing monasticism, were not being correct monks, and he ended up dying there eventually.

Shirley Paulson: Oh my goodness. He was quite a traveler.

Joshua Schachterle: He really, really was.

Shirley Paulson: Good heavens. Okay. So did he win his point that God was not embodied? Or was that just what went on and on? Or, what happened?

Joshua Schachterle: 

So what’s interesting is that later on, not too long after that, his position became sort of the normative position. So if you ask the Catholic church, I know that . . . I’m not Catholic, but I have had friends who are Catholic, and in your catechism class as a kid, they ask you, one of the questions they ask you is where is God? Now, if God has a body, you could say God is in heaven or God is here. But the correct answer apparently is God is everywhere. That’s a disembodied God.

So it seems to me that eventually he won, although it didn’t do him very much good, but it’s interesting that that’s the way things go.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah. So in the readings that you gave us to think about, for those of you who found this on our website, you had us reading the Introduction to The Institutes, and as far as I understand, he was speaking to the Pope in a very, very, very, very humble way.

Joshua Schachterle: Yes.

Shirley Paulson: What was he trying to accomplish there?

Joshua Schachterle: Yes, so this guy, Pope, at that time in Latin, which was papa, actually was just another word for Bishop. So I mean, the translations, I always feel like they really should just put ‘Bishop,’ but they put ‘Pope’ because it seems similar. So this guy was a bishop of the area in which Cassian ended up in France, but he is the one who apparently asked Cassian to write these manuals. And so that introduction is Cassian, basically accepting the commission to do that and saying, this is my introduction to what I’ve written. I hope you approve of it, and I hope that it helps with your monks. But you’ll see other things in there as well. Being a very educated person of the ancient Mediterranean world, he had studied, he never says this, but it’s clear that he had studied rhetoric and oration and how to make good speeches and how to convince people through writing.

And he ends up saying things like, he mentions other well-known Christians of the time. Jerome is one of them, and another one named Basil of Caesarea, who were both very acetic people and were writers and were definitely considered to be Christian authorities. But he says, those guys are so eloquent, I can’t hope to match them, but at least I’m speaking from experience. Well, those guys clearly are writing about things they just heard about. So he’s a little catty in that. And at the same time, he acknowledges, I think at one point, that it’s been at least 20 years since I’ve been in Egypt, and the bishop clearly wants him to, the bishop clearly agrees with Cassian that the Egyptian monks are the only ones that do monasticism correctly. And so he wants Cassian to bring that system, that idea to his area.

Shirley Paulson: Wow. Okay. So then we understand then about the monks and the bishops. What about getting into the theologians or scholars, or Irenaeus? What did he think about them?

Joshua Schachterle: Well, it’s interesting. What’s most significant about his attitude towards them is the silence. And he’s not alone in this. Most monastic writers don’t mention a lot of those earlier theologians that we know were really influential. Irenaeus, for example, or Tertullian, as you mentioned.

Those are clearly considered authorities. But I noticed when I read Cassian and a lot of other early monastic literature that when they were referred to spiritual authority, they only referred to other monks.

So it was almost like they were forming this a closed system, is the way I put it in my book. They were saying, only monks have the real spiritual authority, at least over other monks. So it’s hard to know how much they were consciously excluding these people and how much they just lived that way. They lived in isolated lives. So even the famous theologians they heard about would’ve been mostly other monks.

Shirley Paulson: Well, now you’re really making me curious about this business of spiritual authority, and nobody’s around them, they’re alone. What does authority look like when you’re all by yourself and you are having a conversation with God?

Joshua Schachterle: I mean, that’s an excellent question. I think it’s probably extremely difficult. To illustrate that, there’s a famous, probably the most famous early Egyptian monk was named Anthony. In the Catholic church, he’s called Saint Anthony  the Great. Actually, I think it’s the very first saying in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is, [They’re sayings and stories.] the first story is about Anthony when he first goes to live alone as a monk, and he’s living either in a small cell that he made himself out of clay or he might’ve been living in a cave or something as he did later. But he prays to God and he says, help me. I don’t know how to live and my thoughts are attacking me. This is a constant theme in monastic literature, as you might imagine with solitary people. If you’re out there alone, no matter how good your intentions are, you’re going to be assaulted by all kinds of other thoughts that you don’t want to be having.

And so at the moment when he asks God for guidance, he looks up to see another, what he thinks is another monk that looks a lot like him. And this monk is standing and going through prayers, and we think it was probably sort of liturgical prayers as opposed to just conversing with God, and then sitting down and doing some kind of manual labor. I think he’s weaving a basket. And then after doing that for a while, he stands up and prays again, and eventually he is told that that was an angel who was showing him the way to live as an isolated monk. In other words, keep your mind busy through prayer and then keep your hands busy by doing some kind of manual work.

Shirley Paulson: So that’s authority.

Joshua Schachterle: Authority would be: you have to exercise authority over yourself because that’s what God wants you to do. Now, it gets a little different as monks begin living in communities, even small communities had a leader, and the leader would set up rules. Okay, we pray at this time. We stop and do manual labor at this time. We sleep at this time, we wake up at this time, which is the way monasteries are still run today. So in that case, a leader becomes the authority.

Shirley Paulson: Right. Okay. So going back to the scholars and intellectuals, it seems like Cassian or the monks are thinking that they are doing what I hear in the gospel of Luke where he says, “Woe to you lawyers. You’ve taken away the key of knowledge. You do not enter, you didn’t enter yourself, but you hindered those who were entering.” So is this kind of thing that Cassian might been concerned with, or what kind of knowledge do you think Cassian really was wanting then?

Joshua Schachterle: So I think for one thing, monks, including Cassian thought that being out in the wilderness and living the correct way, as Anthony showed everybody, was a sort of mystical. It was an effort at a mystical connection with God. In other words, a direct connection rather than just saying, I follow the rules of the church, therefore I am a Christian, or I believe the correct things. I’m a Christian. They would not have disparaged that view. They would’ve said, yes, if believe the right things, you are a Christian. However, for a monk, we have to basically order our lives and through that order, our minds, such that we are making direct connections with God. And so I actually call that apostolic succession.

I think… in my book I called what the monks were trying to do, apostolic praxis, which just means practice. In other words, instead of talking about, “Do you believe the correct things?,” it’s “Do you do the correct things? “And this is also, I would argue, another connection back to those early Jewish communities like the Essenes. Judaism obviously has beliefs, but it was much more about do you do the correct things? I hope that makes sense and answers your question. It all comes down to a asceticism, to when do you fast, when do you pray? How do you do these things? Do you do them correctly? And Cassian, in The Institutes especially, goes through and really lays down the law about this is how they do it in Egypt, therefore this is how you have to do it.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah. So can we go back to the Bible again? You made the point that they leaned on the Bible authority to say that Peter was the beginning of the apostolic succession. So who would’ve been important teachers or role models for them in the Bible? Or was that just simply that one passage that was everything for them?

Joshua Schachterle: No, there were several figures. First of all, they were very enamored of Elijah, who they thought he was a prophet living in the wilderness and having that direct connection with God, if you’ll remember the story of Elijah and the still small voice,

That was what they were aiming for. So Elijah was a big hero to them. And following Elijah, John the Baptist, who clearly also was sort of a hero worshiping Elijah by his lifestyle. If you look at descriptions of John the Baptist in the early part of the gospels, and then you go back to 1 Kings or something and read about descriptions of Elijah, they’re so similar that it seems that…  I would guess that John the Baptist himself was doing that on purpose. But certainly the gospel authors writing much later saw him that way, saw him as yet another prophet in the lineage of Elijah. And then finally they saw the apostles, at least as depicted in Acts, as proto-monks, as sort of like pre monks in a way. You may remember, and your listeners may remember, Acts 2:44 – 45 says “All who believe [this is the community pre Pentecost, but or maybe it was post Pentecost.  I don’t know. Anyway, the earliest church community after Jesus had ascended] all who believed were together and had all things in common, they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all as any had need.”

So the whole idea about having all things in common, part of the monastic ideal, part of their asceticism, was to own as little as possible. And there’s lots of stories about monks having a hard time giving things up and things like that. So Cassian uses those figures and the way they’re depicted in the Bible to establish the authority of monks as ascetic practitioners. And so while bishops were said to inherit Christian teachings through apostolic succession, Cassian says, monks inherited the apostles actual practices. He doesn’t deny apostolic succession. I want to make a point of that. He never says Bishops don’t have authority. He just says that monks should have their own authority over themselves. Bishops should not have authority over monks. And so I think in the book I pointed out that some of this attitude for him probably goes back to the fact that he was chased out of his monastic settlement by a bishop.

I mean, I wouldn’t give you a really great view of bishops.

Shirley Paulson: Right. Oh my gosh. Well, I have many more questions to ask you, but it is time for us to open this up to everybody else who’s here who probably also have questions. So for those of you who have not been here before, what we need to do is raise your hand. I see we already have a hand up, so use your electronic hand because I can find you better if you use your zoom hand. If you can’t find a zoom hand, I’ll still try to look for you. Or maybe Peggy will tell me if you’re there. But we have several people asking questions already. So, okay, here we go. Joshua, we’re going to start with Helen Mathis. Go ahead and tell us what you think.

Helen: Hi, What about women monastics like Melania the Elder and the Lausiac History that chronicled the women that were making these Desert Mother communities as well? I’d love to hear, and do you cover that in your book?

Joshua Schachterle: I mention it in my book because my book focuses so much on Cassian. I don’t focus on it as much as I would’ve liked, but it’s essential when you talk about these early monastics to talk about women, because we know that women joined monasteries or became solitary monastics as well in the fourth century, very early on. So social scientists have looked at this and have said, what would be the appeal for women? Well, the main appeal was that ancient women were controlled from birth to death by men. First, their father, then their husband, and then even their sons when their sons grew up. So becoming a nun, a woman was among other women in a monastery or even a solitary. There are plenty of famous solitaries that are in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They have an autonomy, especially those solitary that was unthinkable for ancient women at the time, and they even had a kind of authority over some men.

There’s great stories of men visiting some of these solitary women nuns and begging them for their wisdom. This would not happen in any other setting in the fourth century or any of those centuries around early Christianity. So I find it fascinating. And you mentioned Melania, the elder. Melania wasn’t technically a monastic. She kept her wealth, but basically gave away most of it and a lot of it to monasteries. But we’re told that despite her wealth, she lived like a nun. She still lived in decent, pretty fancy house and everything that she had inherited, but she was a widow, and her kids were grown by that time, and she was very ascetic. She fasted a lot. She traveled from Rome to Egypt to visit these monks and nuns. So yeah, there’s just so many fascinating women monastics at the time. And you mentioned the Lausiac History. I’m impressed that book, that’s one of my favorites of monastic literature. It’s written around the same time as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and it contains a wealth of information about women. Women definitely are important in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, but in the Lausiac History, it’s almost like they’re half the monastics that are written about. So yeah, fascinating.

Helen: Fascinating. Yeah. And the sister of the two biggies in the Eastern Orthodoxy, Chris, I can’t remember. Yeah, right. Marina or Marca or something like that.

Joshua Schachterle: Macrina, yes.

Helen: That’s it.Yeah. She was another very important ascetic.

Joshua Schachterle: Absolutely.

Helen: Absolutely. So they’re out there.

Shirley Paulson: Oh, that’s fun, Helen. Thank you so much. I hope you saw Helen’s cheer there. That was great. Okay, two, I want to go to the chat, and then we’re going to go to Anne and Maureen. But in the chat, we have a question from Joy saying, what is the correct way to be a monk according to Cassian?

Joshua Schachterle: Yes. So the book that I asked people who were interested to read, for which they read the Introduction, that entire book is about answering that question.

Cassian has this idea that monks need to pray this many prayers at this time. Then they only get to sleep this long. The rules are very nuts and bolts, very down to earth. That is the least mystical book you can probably ever find. Which is funny because his other book, The Conferences, is much more theological and spiritual. They’re talking about issues that cut across theology and philosophy and all kinds of interesting ideas. So he kind of separated the two. One is nuts and bolts. This is how you’re supposed to live. What’s funny about that to me is when you read a large amount of monastic writing from that era, there was a huge difference in communities in how they lived. There was no standard. It wasn’t as if all Egyptian monks believed what he did, lived the way he did. It was a huge disparity or a huge group of disparate practices and thoughts and feelings and theologies. But according to Cassian, it’s not. It’s just, nope, this is the one way you do it, and so do it this way. That’s how my people did it in Egypt.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s ironic, isn’t it, that he’s living with such a variety of things and he says that there’s one way to do it, and he has his own authority, I guess. Okay. Okay. So another question in the chat from AnnSayas is, does John Cassian have any connection to Mary Magdalene?

Joshua Schachterle: Not that I know of, no. When I talk to people about Cassian, I’m often asked, so he was Catholic? But that question doesn’t make sense for the fourth century because there was really just the one church at that time. You hadn’t even split off from the Orthodox Church, which wouldn’t happen until the year 1000. So in a sense, yes, he was Catholic, but in another sense there was just really the one church. There were lots of different views and arguments over authority, but were monks praying, for example to saints, or did they feel directly connected to some of them? I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised. But I don’t see any direct evidence of that.

Shirley Paulson: And perhaps this question comes from the idea that Mary ended up in France, in lower France anyway, in Marseilles.

Joshua Schachterle: Ah, right! I forgot about that. Anyway, if he does, he never writes about it, so.

Shirley Paulson: Right. That’s fair enough. Okay, so on to Anne, your question.

Anne: Hi. Thank you, Joshua. I’m wondering if this tension between the bishop and the monks made any contribution to the Roman Catholic church’s long history of distrusting experiences with God, and therefore only through the Bishop can you get to God?

Joshua Schachterle: I think that idea was already there when before monks even started.

And I think that, I have to think that that might’ve been part of the impetus for monks even thinking of becoming solitaries. We don’t exactly know how far back that goes. It goes back at least to the year 250. But my guess is it didn’t just start in 250. There were people going out and being solitary in the desert, and even Hebrew prophets, we have stories of them like Elijah doing that. So I have to think that that was part of the impetus of “I want a direct connection with God rather than through a bishop.” The bishops obviously wouldn’t have liked that, but later on you have someone like St. Francis of Assisi in the Middle Ages, many, many, many centuries later, who claims to have had several direct connections with God, and yet he still feels that it needs to be sort of ratified by the bishop. So it becomes sort of a compromise, I would say, by the time of the Middle Ages. Does that answer your question?

Anne: Yeah, really, very much so. Do you know what started that whole idea that you have to go through the Bishop instead of having a direct experience with God?

Joshua Schachterle: Well, I would go back again to apostolic succession.

Where does authority come from? Well, ultimately from God through Jesus, through the apostles. Who has the authority of the apostles? Bishops. And that seems to happen maybe even at the end of the first century. So pretty early on, we have a letter from a guy named Clement of Rome who writes about these bishops who have Peter’s authority, et cetera. So that idea comes very early on. And so it’s almost as if through apostolic succession, bishops have a direct line to God and certainly to Jesus. So I think that just became sort of the inference. If you really want to connect with God, you have to go through the church, which means the bishop. And I actually don’t think that that’s that antiquated of an idea. I think plenty of Catholics and certainly Orthodox Christians as well still believe that in a sense. But I also think that they believe that it’s also possible to have a direct connection. In my experience, anyway.

Anne: Thank You.

Shirley Paulson: Very interesting. And Maureen?

Maureen: Okay, this is my first time to ever even consider a difference between monks and bishops. So I don’t want to oversimplify, and I don’t want to just take what you’ve said and stick it in my little filters and stuff, but again, it sounds like a difference is: to be a monk, there’s a lessening of ego and of pulling away from worldly things that might pull at you. And maybe for the bishops as it began, it seems like a little bit more of an appreciation of privilege and power. And so those things seem to be a little mutually exclusive. And when you were saying if the monks would get their authority from other monks, I would think maybe they would be thinking that authority from bishops might be tainted by worldliness.

Joshua Schachterle: I think that’s entirely accurate.

Maureen: Okay.

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah, I think you see early on, I mean, I mentioned earlier that there are stories and sayings where monks kind of treat bishops the same way they would treat a farmer.

And the point of that is they don’t think anyone has more status than anyone else under God. There’s a great story where, well, there’s so many great stories. Humility, which is the way they sort of thought of lessening the ego, was definitely one of the top three values that monks had, and it was absolutely vital to their ideas and their practice. There’s a famous story where a monk goes into a church and, before they start the service, they are chastising another monk who had sinned in some way. And so they’re all yelling at him and saying, and then finally they say, get out. You don’t belong in this church. And this other monk who was there happens to be the elder of the whole community and sort of a respected spiritual master. And he stands up and starts to walk out and they go, where are you going? And he says, well, I’m a sinner too. That’s the kind of humility that they strive for.

Maureen: Right.

Joshua Schachterle: Being a bishop wasn’t just a spiritual position. You had worldly status, you had power.

Maureen: And for the monk to treat a bishop like a regular human being would not be rude or disrespectful from the monk’s point of view, but it would be from the bishops.

Joshua Schachterle: Correct.

Maureen: Okay. Alright, good. Thank you.

Joshua Schachterle: You’re welcome.

Shirley Paulson: And there’s another question that came to me anyway through the chat that I thought I summarized for you, that if Peter was the head of the church, then why didn’t he get that title when it was Jesus’s brother who became the head of the church in Jerusalem? So the whole idea of apostolic succession doesn’t seem logical.

Joshua Schachterle: I certainly would never claim it was logical.

And whoever that was, you’re absolutely right. James was a huge figure of authority, not least because he was Jesus’ brother, but also because he was known to live a very austere and good and prayerful life. It’s not entirely clear from the New Testament whether James was the head and Peter under him, or whether they were sort of co-leaders. Paul called them the pillars along with some other people. And so it seems to me like they were sort of co-heads of the church and the notion that the interpretation of that verse from Matthew that says, that means that Peter was the first bishop. I mean, that’s an interpretation. We don’t know for sure what was meant by that because it’s not 100% clear. He doesn’t say anything. I mean, Jesus wouldn’t have thought anything about bishops. That wouldn’t have been a thing yet. So obviously there are different ways to interpret that. But one way would be Peter was the preeminent disciple. And certainly there are plenty of other traditions even outside the New Testament that say that Peter was an important disciple. But remember that apostolic succession doesn’t just come from Peter. It also comes from any of the disciples who were all seen as leaders in the early church.

Shirley Paulson: I want to add to that, we’ve been doing a lot of studies on Mary Magdalene, that the extracanonical writers talk about her also as a leader. Maybe she was a co-leader with Peter too.

Joshua Schachterle: I think that’s entirely possible, and it’s unfortunate to me that the actual canonical gospels have so little about her, and yet they can’t refrain from mentioning her, which tells me that she was really prominent in a time when women were not supposed to be prominent. So I love Mary Magdalene.

Shirley Paulson: Cool. Okay, great. And Sarah has her hand up.

Sarah: This is sort of a 101 question. You mentioned that there were three prominent values for the monks, and you mentioned humility. What were the other two?

Joshua Schachterle: So humility might’ve been the most important. Another one was related to asceticism. So in other words, living with very little. There are different collections of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. There’s an alphabetical one, which is kind of the most well known. The stories are based on the first names of the monks and go alphabetically in Greek. So Anthony is first. Then there’s a thematic collection where somebody took the same stories or most of the same stories and put them under themes. So one of them is possessing nothing, and it’s stories about why they should try to possess nothing. Another one is humility. And then another one is, I think you might find it funny that this was such a major thing for them, but it’s: not gossiping. I think they had a big thing about…, and I think this only shows when you make an official rule of something. It only shows, in my opinion, that it already happened and maybe was even very prevalent. So I think gossiping among monks, I mean, you could think of them as holy beings or something, but they were still human beings. So we have a lot of stories of monks gossiping about each other and it causing a lot of problems. So I would say those are the big three.

Sarah: It must have been a huge temptation to just want to talk to somebody.

Joshua Schachterle: Absolutely, absolutely. And what do you talk about? Other people.

Sarah: That’s all you see. Talk about the desert creatures. I guess.

Joshua Schachterle: I remember there’s a story, it’s more from the Middle Ages, but of somebody asking a monk, like a lay person asking a monk, what’s the hardest part about being a monk? And he said, other monks.

Shirley Paulson: And of course Anthony thought the hardest part was fighting with the demons, which is basically his own self.

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah, absolutely.

Shirley Paulson: Oh dear. Okay. So you’re not inspiring us to be monks there, but the humility works.

Joshua Schachterle: Sorry

Shirley Paulson: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, Peggy,

Peggy: Did Josephus tell much about the monks during his time period? You had said a lot of ’em were Judaic.

Joshua Schachterle: I think the earliest, well, so Josephus was writing at the end of the first century. There were no Christian monks yet at that

Peggy: Time. Okay.

Joshua Schachterle: So Josephus wouldn’t have known about that. However, he did write about different Jewish groups, and he wrote about the Essenes who…

Peggy: Right. Well, that’s what I wondered about the basis for where the monks came from.

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah, he wrote about them quite a bit just because he was noting all the different groups. He said, there are Pharisees, there are Sadducees, and there are Essenes. And he described their life a little bit. So yeah, he was definitely, I mean, I think every Jew around that time was probably had at least heard about the Essenes, because they had a reputation for being uncompromising, and yet they were separatists. They thought that the Jerusalem temple and its authority was corrupt. So they went out and lived in the desert. Going out and living in the desert—that’s being a monk as far as I’m concerned. So they were predecessors for sure.

Peggy: Okay.

Shirley Paulson: So this is Anne Cooling again, who says, wasn’t the start of monks in response to the Roman Empire’s involvement of Christianity and the monk’s concern that this was a loss of Christian practice according to Jesus, like the practice of the Sermon on the Mount?

Joshua Schachterle: So I think that was probably in there, but I think more importantly, at least according to the monks themselves, was the fact that once Constantine became emperor in 318, and Christianity was no longer outlawed, there were no more martyrs. And we all know that early Christians loved their martyrs. They wrote stories about them. They were extremely important to Christian theology early on. Suddenly there are no martyrs because it’s not illegal to be a Christian anymore. So there are a lot of monks who write that being a monk, living in the wilderness, being isolated, living ascetically, living austerely, fasting a lot, all these things were another way of being a martyr, almost like sort of taking on the martyr role yourself when no one’s going to do it for you anymore.

Shirley Paulson: Ooh, that’s harsh

Joshua Schachterle: It sure is. It was a harsh time.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah. Okay. So then if nobody else has any questions, I’ve got something I want to go back to again. I’d be really interested in hearing what kind of impact you think monks like Cassian had on the direction of Christianity. You have a historical context here. So what influence do you think Cassian had or people like Cassian?

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah. So I would say, first of all, it’s important to acknowledge that Cassian’s idea of only monks have authority over monks failed miserably. Today, if you ask about a monastery, a monastery is under the purview of a bishop. And so it basically went the way that it was going to go. But as I’m sure all of you know, from the earliest days of Christianity, there were different types of Christianities. By the way, when you write in MS Word, if you try to write ‘Christianities,’ it will tell you that that’s not a word.

Shirley Paulson: It corrects it!

Joshua Schachterle: But it is, because there were so many different forms. Even for example, Paul’s Christianity clearly conflicted a little bit with Peter’s version, and you see that in Galatians with the two of them fighting. So what eventually happened was that Cassian, I mean, after Cassian passed away, monasteries continued to develop, and especially throughout Europe, and he was a big influence on that. So that’s one thing. But if you think about the influence of monasteries over time in Christianity, I think it changed a lot of things, although maybe not in the way that Cassian would’ve liked. For one thing, monasteries emphasized education and literacy. So from pretty early on, the bigger monasteries made everyone that entered learn to read and write at least a little bit. And back then, in the fourth century, maybe 10% of people could read and write.

So I think that continued to where monasteries in Europe, for example, became the keepers of a lot of famous manuscripts and copied those manuscripts and disseminated them, and that includes biblical manuscripts. So I think that had a huge impact. And then if you think about some of the famous monks and nuns over the years, I mean St. Francis of Assisi, I mentioned earlier—a huge influence to this day, I would say. And then in the modern world, think about Mother Teresa, for example. I mean, her example is massive for anyone wanting to help people less fortunate than themselves. So I think the point, I guess the biggest impact I would see is that they became examples and that a lot of Christians saw it as a good thing, saw them as good examples, and as showing ways that the Christians should behave, although not clearly as rigidly, as regimented as they are.

Shirley Paulson: Oh, so maybe you can expand on this a little bit and tell us how many monasteries were there? And how many men became monks, or how many… I mean, give us a feel for how it felt in the world, in the ancient world then at that time, during Cassian’s time.

Joshua Schachterle: Yeah. So it’s interesting, one of the early monastic writings, after Nicaea, says that there were so many monks in the Egyptian desert, monks and nuns that they had made the desert into a city. Now, again, ancient writers, like modern writers, I suppose, exaggerated hugely. So we don’t know, but we know that beginning in the fourth century, it grew as an idea. The whole idea of being a monk or a nun grew very fast. So there were tons of monastics living out there. And eventually, I mean, now in the Catholic church, for example, you don’t have solitaries for the most part, in the same way. Maybe there are some, but for the most part, there are only large monasteries. In the Orthodox church, I believe they have a little bit more of a place for solitary monks and nuns. But even there, it’s mostly large monasteries. But the hard part is, we don’t know for sure how many men and women went out there because no official census or anything was taken.

But I would say there were enough… Well, one thing I guess I would point out is that I always thought, when I first learned about this, about early monasticism in Egypt, I always thought, okay, so it was all people who had this spiritual calling. And there were obviously many of those. But there were also, for example, we know there were elderly people who had no means of support, and thus would join a monastery, if they would take them. There were people who had lost everything, lost their home, they were destitute, they would sometimes move in. So there are a large number of motivations to join that. And poverty being so common in the ancient world, I have to think that they were just an enormous number of monasteries by the time Cassian got there.

Shirley Paulson: Yeah. So related to that, you might also help us think about if everybody was wanting to become a monk or a nun, were there churches going on too?

Joshua Schachterle: You mean out in their communities?

Shirley Paulson: Well, I’m trying to think about …  We have a tendency to think of church being like our churches today,

Joshua Schachterle: Right.

Shirley Paulson: So I’m trying to re-envision the world of monks and what a church would’ve been like.

Joshua Schachterle: I see. No churches were, I mean in some ways, the only real difference would’ve been that churches were in the city. Monks were in the wilderness, right? There’s a lot of stories about why are they in the wilderness? Well, because the wilderness is not made for people. It is the realm of the demons. So monks went out there to confront the demons. God bless ’em. Whereas churches, laypeople, bishops, et cetera, they stayed in the city where it was safer. And however, as the institution of monasticism grew in Egypt, some smaller churches were built out there because monks still valued things like communion and the rituals of the church. And so they would go occasionally, maybe they wouldn’t go every Sunday, but they would go maybe once a month to receive communion and to basically do those kinds of things. And there were even some monks who became priests just in order to administer things like that to the other monks.

Shirley Paulson: I see.

Joshua Schachterle: So mean, again, anything that happens when it starts small, it can be sort of have this sort of purity, but as it grows and grows and grows, you come up with problems. You’re like, well, now how do we get enough food for these people? Everybody wants to take the Eucharist. How do we do that? And so it became more of an administrative nightmare, which I’m sure it still is.

Shirley Paulson: Oh, wow. So we got so many more questions I want to ask you, and I want to make one other comment. You were talking about the lasting impact of the monks, and I was just going mention to people that we’ve talked a lot about the Pachomian Monks that helped us to discover the Nag Hammadi collection. So Nag Hammadi came from the monks near the Pachomian Monastery, so that just makes a little connection there too.

Joshua Schachterle: Joshua. Absolutely.

Shirley Paulson: And so, Toto, you always have such great questions, and you had something, did you want to say something kind of quick at the end here?

Toto: I’ll be super fast. How much of it was also marketing? I was thinking about why you were talking about Anthony. I remember, was it Athanasius that wrote the Life of Anthony?

Joshua Schachterle: Yes.

Toto: And it seems so embellished, to me that would be an attraction to the church as well.

Joshua Schachterle: Okay. It was a huge attraction. The Life of Anthony, written by a bishop named Athanasius, was an ancient bestseller. Even non-Christians loved it. It went all over the place. In fact, Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, huge influence in the church. If you read his Confessions right before his conversion experience, he’s upset because he’s reading the life of Anthony and thinking, how can this poor peasant be so spiritually elevated? And I’m such a spiritual wuss. So it was a huge influence. And on the other hand, you are so right. It was incredibly embellished. And luckily we have some actual letters written by Anthony, and it doesn’t show him to be anything like that. He just seems like a pretty mild mannered nice guy.

Shirley Paulson: Fascinating. Oh, you can tell. You really hit an interesting nerve for us here tonight, Joshua. Thank you so much for coming to be with us and getting us thinking about things we’ve never thought about before. So I would suggest that people have more questions, post them on our Facebook group we have for conversations: Early Christian Texts Conversations, on Facebook, and I bet you we can get Joshua to keep answering some questions, right?

Joshua Schachterle: Absolutely.

Shirley Paulson: That’d be really fun. I hate to say goodbye. This has been so much fun, but we need to kind of move on, so I know that everyone joins me and thanking you so much for being with us.

Joshua Schachterle: Thank you all.

Shirley Paulson: This was the September, 2024 Bible and Beyond discussion titled Biblical Authority Bishops and Monks with Guest Scholar, Dr. Joshua Schachterle. Once a month from eight to 9:00 PM Eastern time on Monday nights, usually the fourth of the month, we provide a discussion of one or more early Christian texts each month, one of our knowledgeable scholars leads these sessions sharing a well-framed overview of these early Christian texts and allowing participants time to ask questions and share their insights. And one last thing, don’t forget how much we appreciate your Patreon support. There’s a whole community involved there on Patreon with us on the Bible and Beyond part, and they’re donating anywhere between $5 a month to $50 a month. So go to patreon.com/bible and beyond to pick out what’s just right for you, and let me tell you what’s happening next month. It’s so cool that Joshua talked about the demons in the desert, because next month we’re going to be talking with Tupá Guerra, and her topic is on the demonic origins and Magdalene. So she’s going to tie Mary Magdalene in with the demonic origins. That’ll be next month on October 28th. Wow. It’s going to be fun next week, next month, just like it’s been this time. So thank you so much, Joshua, for being with us.

Joshua Schachterle: Thank you.

Shirley Paulson: And if you’d like to, you can stay on because Reverend Karen Hagen is with us again tonight, and I’m looking forward to her sharing her focus with us on these early Jesus followers as we move from head to heart. She’s always has a wonderful way of helping us think deeply about the spiritual meaning of what we’re talking about. So if you’re finished with us, you’re free to go ahead and go, but if you stay, I’m going to turn off the recorder and we’ll get Karen on.

Joshua Schachterle: Okay. I’m going to go. Thank you so much, everybody.

Shirley Paulson: Thanks so much, Joshua.

Joshua Schachterle: You’re welcome.