Scaling the Text: The Ambiguity of the Book in John Climacus
With the kind permission of Associate Professor Alexis Torrance, here is an except from his article on the ambiguity of the book in John Climacus. For the full text and references, see Byzantinische Zeitschrift 111:3 (2018) 793–808. Early Byzantine monastic attitudes towards books, text, reading, and by extension learning and paideia , has long been recognized as an important facet of discussions regarding the broader reception, propagation, neglect, and/or transformation of classical culture in late antiquity and Byzantium. At one end of the chronological and ideological spectrum we have the ever-quotable Gibbon, for whom brutish monks, those “exiles from social life,” being “impelled by the dark and implacable genius of superstition,” had only disdain for any real culture or learning. Gibbon scoffs at the ancient claim that monastics pursued “divine philosophy,” wryly commenting that the monks “surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grec