Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler (review)

BOOK REVIEW 233 717. Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 178, $19.95 ISBN 089-0-8146-8500-6). The apophthegmata patrum have been read and meditated on for centuries. Even the most cursory introduction to early Christian monasticism will expose one to the sayings, and a deep dive into early monastic history reveals that there are thousands of these sayings extant, so we may assume that thousands more did not survive the course of time. They are a wealth of information regarding the mindset, spirituality, and, at times, structure of early Christian monasticism, especially that of the deserts of Egypt. At the same time they can be difficult to understand or puzzling to us moderns because their cultural location, philosophical-theological premises and telos are radically different from ours. Nonetheless, they are not so enigmatic as to be mere historical artifacts but have the power and ability to continue to inspire and guide the modern monastic or non-monastic alike in her quest for union with God. Thanks to the diligence of Tim Vivian and John Wortley over the past decade, many of the sayings are now available in English for the first time. Arranged topically, systematically and alphabetically, the sayings are bursting with meaning, and thanks especially to the scholarship of Tim Vivian (often in the pages of this very journal) we can see how rich the sayings are, showing a depth of theological wealth that has not always been recognized in the earliest desert dwellers. Wheeler's volume is meant to continue this deep exploration of the sayings, especially as they depict women, who are often missing from this literature. Or, as Wheeler shows, they are there but often in the background or on the periphery. Wheeler's goal is to bring these women out of the shadows, if you will. But I am not convinced that she has done this. Wheeler chooses to adopt Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's "creative hermeneutic" as her interpretive philosophy. The weakness of this approach is that Fiorenza's hermeneutic, originally applied to biblical studies, "imaginatively reconstructs" things (17). Yet, what control is there to this imaginative hermeneutic so that it does not become overly subjective? And how is it rooted culturally and linguistically to its source material so that the modern interpreter cannot bend the meaning of a text to suit her/his fancy? Does this imaginative project reveal the saying's meaning(s), or is it only a tool to take the saying's teaching and 234 ABR 72:2 – JUNE 2021 enable "contemporary readers to engage imagination and plumb this interaction for wisdom applicable to our own . . . situation" (46)? If the latter, then it seems reasonable to adopt such a hermeneutic inasmuch as one wants to apply these texts to today, but if it is the former, then what keeps one from the exaggerations of an overactive imagination? One example where Wheeler seems to have overstepped the text's meaning into something too imaginative occurs in her discussion of the systematic saying "Discretion 137." During a famine a monk decides to take food to his mother, but is stopped by a divine voice, assuring him that God will care for his mother. In response the monk returns to his cell. Three days later the mother visits the monk's cell to report that another monk brought her grain to make bread. This causes her son to glorify God and become "suffused with hope." I would suggest that the point of the story is to illustrate the monk's obedience to God and/or see it as an illustration of the truth of Jesus'teaching about anxiousness in Matthew 6:25-34. Or, given the reference to "three days" the author may have intended something more Christological vis-à-vis Jesus' resurrection; or, since it is categorized under the heading "Discretion," it is about that virtue (which Wheeler also concedes). In any case, in her discussion of the saying Wheeler writes, "It is impossible to overstate how ridiculously convenient this is for the man to not have to worry about his mother anymore." For Wheeler, the divine...