“Severe Initiation”, Monastic Personas, and Communal Membership in the Late-Antique Mediterranean

Abstract This article examines the use of “severe initiation” rituals—that is, difficult and degrading entrance rites—in communal monasticism in the fourth- to seventh-century Mediterranean. Imposed soon after a new recruit’s arrival at a monastery, monastic sources pitch “severe initiation” as a way to identify, emphasize, and manage the dynamics between leaders, subjects, and their putative community boundaries. As such, these trials are an underappreciated avenue through which we can consider the late-antique rhetoric around monastic identifications. Abbots and abbesses used and emphasized “severe initiation” rites to construct an exclusive monastic persona around concepts of authority, hardship, and service, while simultaneously erasing the prior lives of their followers. Moreover, the descriptions of these rites were influenced by initiations into other comparably enclosed collectives, in particularly scholastic communities. By drawing parallels with and inspiration from scholastic membership rites, monastic leaders justified their imposition of “severe initiation” procedures and their positions of authority to broader audiences through long-established norms. Despite the rhetoric of reclusion from the world, this connection indicates a close relationship between monastic and other corporate identifications in Late Antiquity. In this manner, “severe initiation” provides us with an underexploited manner of thinking about monastic personas from the beginnings of Christian monasticism.