UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an ethnography of asceticism after and amid destruction. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork at Antiochian Orthodox monasteries in Lebanon, it considers the inheritance of this form of Christian asceticism as it intersects with a particular history of dispossession following Lebanon’s civil war. Tracing out the grammar and practices of this tradition of withdrawal, the dissertation moves through the historical archive of the monastic properties, their ruination and reinhabitation, the hagiographic narratives of the ascetics, their theological and philosophical writings, as well as the reproductive and poetic labours of the broader communities that are sustained by them. These elements are not gathered under the terms of institutional monasticism, but under a singular sensibility of ascetic withdrawal. Tracing out this movement toward ‘the desert,’ as both a metaphorical place of passage for the soul and the physical space of the monastery, coordinates this tradition of spiritual struggle even as it dissolves it. Part One traces out the history of monasticism in Lebanon, attending to the waning of monastic life in the early twentieth century and its return under the impetus of an Orthodox revival movement before the Civil War. The dereliction of the present is translated by my ascetic interlocutors into a space for spiritual struggle; its estrangement beckons a return to humility. Part Two turns to the therapeutic dimensions of ascetic practice and its particular attention to stillness and the soul. The stillness in the desert of the soul here works to metabolize the traumatic effects of post-war life, opening to a shared experience of divine tribulation. Part Three considers the language of subjectivity and ethics, counterposed by the ascetic interdiction against the moral ‘self’, as it also moves to understand the staging of Islamic poetics at the monastery. The common retreat to God, a destructive limit that forms a relationship to an outside, is finally found in the repose of death. In this, the dissertation as a whole focuses on the ambivalence of destruction for my interlocutors; its paradoxical capacity to disclose through destitution.