Liturgies of the Monastic Self in Symeon the New Theologian

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 13
Room: 
001
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

In a series of discourses preached to the monks of the monastery of St. Mamas between 980 and 998, Symeon the New Theologian encouraged the formation of a monastic self through liturgy, prayer, and interior dialogue. Examination of Symeon's instructions for the cultivation of interiority reveals an indigenous Byzantine theory of subjectivity. Byzantine religious leaders had long understood that repetition effected the formation of religious dispositions. The Eucharist figured largely as a penitential rite, and liturgical hymnography composed for Lent offered Byzantine Christians models for knowledge of the self as sinner. Ritual repetition inculcated patterns of self-accusation and self-formation, as participants became the subjects of liturgy. Within the monastery, ritualization extended to all aspects of self-reflection. Moving beyond Foucault’s insight that Christian subjectivity emerged in acts of confession in monastic settings, this paper seeks to understand how collective confessional practices and the patterning of tearful first-person performances of compunction effected the formation of the self.

Derek Krueger is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his AB from Amherst College in 1985 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1991. He has written on a variety of subjects in late antique and Byzantine cultural and religious history, including hagiography, monasticism, the everyday religion of lay Christians, and the reception of the Bible. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of two books on early Byzantine Christianity: Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (University of California Press, 1996); and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and is the editor of Byzantine Christianity, in the series A People's History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2006). He is currently working on two books: one explores how the culture of monasticism in Byzantium produced ideas about masculinity, gender, sexuality, and friendship and another considers the formation of ideas about the Christian self in Byzantine liturgical celebration. He served on the advisory committee for an exhibition of medieval relics and reliquaries at the Cleveland, Walters and British Museums, for which he wrote the essay entitled “The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.” He currently serves as President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America.