The Practices of Monastic Prayer: Origins, Evolution, and Tensions
By Columba Stewart
Living for Eternity: The White Monastery and its Neighborhood. Proceedings of a Symposium at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, March 6 – 9. 2003, edited by Philip Sellew (Minnesota, 2003)
Introduction: Egyptian monks were known for the commitment to unceasing prayer, but what did this really mean? This paper will explore forms of monastic prayer from historical, theological, and ascetic perspectives, challenging our assumptions about how early monastic men and women actually prayed and what their own experience of prayer may have been. Both textual and archeological evidence will be considered. Major issues will include the role of biblical texts in monastic prayer, tracing fault lines between different theological understandings of prayer, and establishing foundations for later development of prayer practice.
What can we know of how Egyptian monks prayed? There are the usual kinds of evidence, textual and archaeological, as well as the enduring effect of Egyptian monastic prayer practice on later—and even non-monastic traditions, down to the present day. We can derive a basic pattern of prayer with a distinctive character. But before describing this pattern, we need to reckon with some of the features of Egyptian monasticism that made it both so unusual and so powerful in the later monastic imagination, and which contributed to its spectacular development in the centuries leading up to the establishment of the White Monastery and the transition to a typically cenobitic pattern for Egyptian monastic life.
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