Rereading Reading Renunciation

I was surprised to receive an invitation to “revisit” Liz Clark’s 1999 Reading Renunciation. What might it mean to write now about a work published almost a quarter century ago? And why that one? I wondered. The essays in Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith (1986) conjure Liz’s ground-breaking contributions to women’s history. And I’ve always been a strong fan of The Origenist Controversy (1992), where Liz so brilliantly remaps the social and intellectual landscape of late fourth- and early fifth-century Christianity. Other possible choices came to mind as well. But how, finally, could I pass up the honor and pleasure of spending time with Liz in this way, through the mediation of any of her books? She is so vividly present in all of them. Moreover, as I quickly discovered, Reading Renunciation is well worth revisiting on its own terms.

Let’s start with the material object. Like The Origenist Controversy (also published by Princeton), the book sports a piece of minimalist art from New York’s MOMA on its cover, its black-and-white palate evoking Liz’s consistent fashion choices. She loved to roll her eyes (framed by black-rimmed glasses, set off by stylishly cut white hair) and complain about the benighted editors who wanted her to have something “old” on the covers of her books, mistaking the power of art for mere illustration. And indeed Brice Marden’s “Untitled from Five Plates” (1973) makes a striking statement. For me, it evokes the austerity, even severity, of the ascetic readers who are the subject of the book—an austerity that Liz both shared and distanced herself from (never more than when pouring herself another Heineken). It also hints that, while the book may concern itself with ancient Christian texts, it does so through the uncompromising lens of twentieth-century literary theory.

“Theory” was part of Liz’s style, like modern art and black-and-white clothes and decor. Scholars who objected to the use of theory (i.e., most historians) also earned eye-rolls. Already in the book’s relatively brief introduction, we meet Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Stanley Fish, and Frederic Jameson. Other figures of similar interdisciplinary stature and currency populate the chapters that follow. Liz’s references to these thinkers are insistent but not flashy. Most often her tone is matter of fact: why shouldn’t the likes of Barthes and Derrida have something to say about the exegetical practices of the so-called Church Fathers, even when it involves comparing Patristic commentary to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s excessive masturbation as an instance of “supplementarity”(7-8)? She parses arguments and defines terminology doggedly. Her knowledge of these thinkers is never superficial. And her use of them is rarely playful or fanciful. Theory for Liz is serious business. Among other things, it is what brings Patristics—redubbed Early Christian Studies--into the realm of fully secular scholarship, taking it from the Divinity School to the Department of Religious Studies.

Liz wrote with the instincts of a teacher, generous with her introductions. The second chapter of Reading Renunciation offers a concise historiographic overview of the study of asceticism in ancient Christianity “designed to orient the non-specialist”(12); it is presented as an addendum to the literary critical introduction of Chapter 1, arguably designed to orient a different kind of non-specialist. The third chapter does the same for ancient Christian reading practices, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters all continue the work of framing the book’s topic of “Reading for Asceticism” from different angles. Liz revisits, and revises, traditional views of literal versus allegorical exegesis; she proposes a typology of eleven strategies used by ancient writers to produce ascetic readings of scripture; and she compares and contrasts three exemplary exegetes of antiquity. Almost half the book is thus involved in a kind of setting of the table.

There is a poignancy to this, for the invited guests—those hoped-for interlocutors from other fields (some of them “theorists”!)—did not always arrive, or not in great numbers. Wanting to address a larger readership, Liz ended up largely addressing her own field, it seems to me. But in so doing, she transformed it. Reading Renunciation (like others of Liz’s books) performs something of what I imagine Liz’s graduate seminars to have done, for a larger audience. Like theory, scholarly formation was one of her passions.

What did she want us to see and know differently? How did she want to shape us? Most basically, perhaps, she wanted to impress her readers with the strangeness of late ancient Christianity. How queer those Fathers—and Mothers too!—were, with their penchant for unconventional social and sexual arrangements and their commitment to scripture as a single, consistent, authoritative source of truth. How queer they were as readers, how endlessly (and necessarily) inventive! At the same time, Liz wanted us to see ourselves partly reflected back in these distant figures, to encounter the strangeness of our own textual cultures and to recognize the transmission of a certain legacy.

To accomplish this, she had to dismantle some deeply entrenched scholarly views—above all, regarding the role that allegorical exegesis (associated with Alexandrian tradition and frowned upon by Protestant and Catholic scholars alike) played in asceticizing resistant biblical texts (not as significant as has been assumed, Liz argues). She also had to dive deep into her sources. Sections Two and Three (which comprise the second half of the book) home in on two areas of particular challenge for ascetic interpreters, namely, the Old Testament’s frequent focus on marriage and reproduction and the inconsistencies within the Pauline tradition regarding ideals of marriage versus celibacy. Here even more than in Section One, Liz speaks directly to scholars of late ancient Christianity. The discussions are inevitably somewhat technical and (if I am honest) often somewhat dry.

Indeed, the thoroughness and deliberateness with which Liz marshals her arguments is sometimes at odds with her stated intention to reach an interdisciplinary audience and her apparent desire to inspire wonder and self-recognition. For this reason, when I first read Reading Renunciation, hot off the press, at age forty, my response was ambivalent; revisiting the book at age sixty-four, it still is, I suppose, though it feels disloyal to say it. I was, and am, incredibly excited by the questions Liz asks and the theoretical frameworks she places them in. But I was, and am, also disappointed by the book. It leaves me feeling restless. I want more direct follow-through and payoff from the theory. And I want more experimentation with method and voice.

But that wasn’t Liz’s style.

Liz had an amazing gift for setting a table; despite her shyness, she loved to host both parties and conversations. She was also a tireless worker. She read widely and seriously, both inside and outside her own field. After a slow start at publishing (which she liked to point out), she produced a long string of significant books. And in those books she constructed her arguments with such care, discipline, and lucidity that they had to be taken seriously even by the most conventional of scholars. That was her style, and it changed the field and is changing it still.

I like more direct follow-through and payoff from the theory than (it seems to me) we get in Reading Renunciation. And I like more experimentation with method and voice. That’s my style. It’s different from Liz’s. I can’t do what Liz did. But because of her, I don’t have to. Because of her, I can do what I do: she has already made room for me at the table.

Indeed, wherever I arrive, it seems Liz was there before me, whether I was conscious of it or not. I hadn’t revisited Reading Renunciation in quite some time. Meanwhile, exegetical cultures, especially female exegetical cultures, in late antiquity have drawn my attention across a series of projects in the last ten years, most but not all of them centering around two female saints’ Lives—the Life of Helia and the Life of Constantina—that are preserved in a small set of tenth-century Spanish manuscripts. Liz was there before me too, of course: the same manuscripts also preserve the Life of Melania, the study of which bookended Liz’s career, with publications in 1984 (around the time I first met Liz) and 2021 (the year of her death). I miss her a lot, but it is a comfort to know I am still following her paths.

Virginia Burrus is the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University.