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OX F O R D E A R LY C H R I S T IA N ST U D I E S

General Editors
Gillian Clark Andrew Louth
THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on
the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of
Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the books are of interest to theologians, ancient
historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds.
Titles in the series include:
The Chronicle of Seert
Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq
Philip Wood (2013)
Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus
Andrew Hofer, O.P. (2013)
Ascetic Pneumatology from John Cassian to Gregory the Great
Thomas L. Humphries Jr. (2013)
Contemplation and Classical Christianity
A Study in Augustine
John Peter Kenney (2013)
The Canons of Our Fathers
Monastic Rules of Shenoute
Bentley Layton (2014)
Gregory of Nyssa’s Tabernacle Imagery in Its Jewish and
Christian Contexts
Ann Conway-Jones (2014)
John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy
The Coherence of his Theology and Preaching
David Rylaarsdam (2014)
Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture
Matthew R. Crawford (2014)
The Practical Christology of Philoxenos of Mabbug
David A. Michelson (2014)

Law and Legality in the Greek East

The Byzantine Canonical Tradition, 381–883
David Wagschal (2014)

Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead

Constructing Early Christian Identity
Outi Lehtipuu (2015)

The Role of Death in the Ladder of Ascent and the Greek Ascetic Tradition
Jonathan L. Zecher (2015)

Theophilus of Alexandria and the First Origenist Controversy

Rhetoric and Power
Krastu Banev (2015)
The Library of Paradise
A History of Contemplative Reading in the
Monasteries of the Church of the East

DAV I D A . M IC H E L S O N
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© David A. Michelson 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937769
ISBN 978–0–19–883624–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836247.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
TJ Books Limited
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 To Bethany, my wife of more than two decades.
Loving me has meant living half your life in a library.
Loving you has meant living half my life one step closer to Paradise.
Thank you for making this book and so many more important things possible.
I love you.
 I place my trust in the mercy of our Lord that He will give strength to
my weakness, and that I shall endure.1
—ʿEnanishoʿ of Adiabene, Paradise

1 ʿEnanishoʿ of Adiabene, Paradise, pt. II/24; translated in E. A. Wallis Budge, ed., The Book of
Paradise, Being the Histories and Sayings of the Monks and Ascetics of the Egyptian Desert . . . : Volume I
English Translation, trans. E.A. Wallis Budge, vol. 1 (London: Printed for Lady Meux by W. Drugulin,
Oriental Printer, Leipzig, 1904), 381 [numbered Pa II/19 in the 1904 edition].
 Acknowledgments

We books are many, but there is no one who reads in us. Behold, what
a great pity that we remain useless!1
—Annotation left by a medieval Syriac reader

Some of the first inklings of this project came during 2004–5 when I spent time
with the Syriac manuscripts in the Asian & African Studies Reading Room of the
British Library in London. I remain deeply grateful to those who welcomed me
there. I am specifically thankful to the former curator, Rev. Dr. Vrej Nersessian,
whose staff were always courteous and professional to the readers even during the
most unexpected of moments, such as when the 7/7 terrorist attacks forced them
to confine us with the books in the library for safety. I am glad that the collection
continues to be well curated today under the care of Ilana Tahan who has been a
leader in making the Hebrew manuscripts of the British Library accessible digi-
tally around the globe. May the Syriac manuscripts of the British Library soon
find new readers in the same way.
Initial research on this project was sparked by reading the warnings issued by
the eighth-century East Syrian author Joseph Ḥazzaya about the brain damage
which could occur from too much reading.2 As someone who is blessed or cursed
to read for a living, I was curious to understand the full context of those ascetic
warnings. As I pursued research on this project, I became increasingly aware of
the work of a small number of scholars who have studied the place of books,
reading, and exegesis in the history of the Church of the East. My book would not
have been possible without relying on these studies, especially the works of
Sabino Chialà, Muriel Debié, the late Mary Hansbury (may she rest in peace), and
Joel Walker. These publications have done much to make East Syrian exegesis and
East Syrian mysticism accessible to the scholarly public.

1 London, British Library, MS Add. 12,170, f. 135r. Sebastian Brock calls attention to this note in
Sebastian P. Brock, “The Development of Syriac Studies,” in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures,
ed. K.J. Cathcart (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1994), 102–3. My translation is from the text in
William Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, Acquired since the Year 1838:
Part II, vol. 2, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1871), 460. Caveat lector! This marginalium may be
more poignant than true, since it is ipso facto evidence of at least one reader. See the discussion of such
tropes in Section 2.1.1.
2 See Joseph Ḥ azzaya, Letter on the Three Stages of the Monastic Life, chap III sec. 68; edited and
translated in Paul Harb, François Graffin, and Micheline Albert, eds., Joseph Ḥ azzāyā: lettre sur les trois
étapes de la vie monastique, trans. Paul Harb, François Graffin, and Micheline Albert, Patrologia
Orientalis, 45.2 [No. 202] (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 338.
x Acknowledgments

Many academic colleagues have supported and encouraged me in this project

as it incubated. I am grateful to Peter Brown for his friendship and encourage-
ment to always wonder what ancient readers were seeking. I am thankful for Bob
Kitchen, who—along with Peter—never stopped asking about when this book
would appear, even when the pandemic of 2020 delayed me in my final revisions.
Adam Becker, Mary Hansbury, Kathy Gaca, and my parents Paul and Jean
Michelson also took time to read the whole manuscript and offer advice. Jeanne-
Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent and Daniel L. Schwartz were my frequent traveling
companions among Syriac texts and constantly encouraged me in writing this
book—thank you! A number of other colleagues have also put up with my ques-
tions related to my pursuit of lectio divina, Syriac readers, and helped me get
access to copies of manuscripts. Thank you to Chris Brady, Sebastian Brock,
Thomas Carlson, Dawn Childress, Stephen Davis, Muriel Debié, Mark Dickens,
Nathan Gibson, Kristian Heal, Christopher Johnson, Joel Kalvesmaki, George
Kiraz, Grigory Kessel, Jonathan Loopstra, Adrian Pirtea, Matteo Poiani, Gerard
Rouwhorst, Tina Shepardson, Columba Stewart, Jack Tannous, David Thornton,
Cynthia Villagomez, Joel Walker, and James Walters. These scholars only caught
glimpses of the project at various stages, so any “mis-readings” are my own—of
course—not theirs.
Encouraging colleagues at Vanderbilt University also provided key feedback.
Students in my seminars read and commented on some portions. Jay Geller was
always ready to be interrupted to help me see the value of our work as something
more than merely a glass bead game. He was always read-y with puns related to
my work. Juan Floyd-Thomas graciously commented on a chapter that strayed
into his domain of expertise. Jim Hudnut-Beumler offered thoughts on the gen-
eral structure of the project at an inchoate point in its formation. Annalisa Azzoni,
Paul DeHart, Kathy Gaca, Jaco Hamman, Trudy Hawkins-Stringer, Robin Jensen,
Amy-Jill Levine, Paul Lim, Vicki Matson, Bruce Morrill, Joe Rife, Jack Sasson,
Choon-Leong Seow, Phillis Sheppard, and Melissa Snarr offered encouragement
at moments when it was needed.
One portion of this book, the first half of Chapter 2, was previously published
as an article in a special issue of The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital
Culture.3 I appreciate the assistance of the editor-in-chief of the journal, Tim
Hutchings, in granting me permission to reuse and revise a portion of that article
as part of its open access publication policy. I am also obliged to Claire Clivaz,
Paul Dilley, and the other special issue editors for their feedback and for those
which they relayed from the anonymous reviewers. An early draft of this same
chapter was also presented to the Overlook Seminar of the Religious Studies

3 David A. Michelson, “Mixed Up by Time and Chance? Using Digital Methods to ‘Re-Orient’ the
Syriac Religious Literature of Late Antiquity,” The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 5,
no. 1 (2016): 136–82.
 Acknowledgments xi

Department at Vanderbilt University. Phil Liebermann, Bryan Lowe, Samira

Sheikh, and Tony Stewart among others gave me lively feedback.
Narrow sections of the book have appeared as papers at two conferences, one
hosted by the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University and the other jointly
sponsored by the History Department at the University of Alabama and the
Research Centre for the Comparative History of Religious Orders of the
Technische Universität Dresden. I am honored that Professors Peter Jeffery and
Henry Parkes invited me to present my work-in-progress at Yale. I am grateful to
Professors Gert Melville and James Mixson for their invitation and for publishing
material related to Chapters 6 and 7 in Virtuosos of Faith: Monks, Nuns, Canons,
and Friars as Elites of Medieval Culture (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2020).4 I am pleased
that LIT Verlag allowed me permission to reuse some prose from that chapter in
this book.
In addition, I presented very preliminary research at three conferences in 2015:
a panel at the North American Syriac Symposium hosted by the Catholic
University of America, a session of the Syriac Literature and Interpretations of
Sacred Texts unit at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Atlanta,
and a workshop held by the Regional Late Antiquity Consortium Southeast
(ReLACS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I am grateful to the many
colleagues who offered comments on those occasions including Dina Boero, Phil
Forness, Gregor Kalas, Cornelia Horn, Peter Martens, and Erin Walsh.
I originally published the maps used in this book in The Syriac World, edited by
Daniel King.5 To further the growth of Syriac studies, my co-author Ian Mladjov
and I have made these maps available for reuse through the Vanderbilt University
Institutional Repository at the following persistent link: http://hdl.handle.
net/1803/16426. The maps are copyright 2017 by David A. Michelson and Ian
Mladjov and reused under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Further
reuse of these maps is encouraged.
The final draft of this book has benefitted greatly from the editorial assistance
of Oxford University Press and the work of Andrew Louth, Tom Perridge, Karen
Raith, and Cathryn Steele. The suggestions of the anonymous reviewer allowed
me to trim the book and sharpen its argument. Thank you to copy editor Brian
North for making my prose better than I could have on my own and to Saraswathi
Rajan and the whole production team for negotiating the challenges of Syriac

4 David A. Michelson, “The Hidden Excellence of Lectio Divina: The Ambiguities of Reading as an
Elite Marker in East Syrian Monasticism of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries,” in Virtuosos of Faith:
Monks, Nuns, Canons, and Friars as Elites of Medieval Culture, ed. Gert Melville and James D. Mixson
(Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2020), 285–302.
5 David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov, “Diachronic Maps of Syriac Cultures and Their Geographic
Contexts,” in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (New York: Routledge, 2019), xxvii–xxxiii and
maps 1–14.
xii Acknowledgments

Unicode characters. David Calabro, Curator of Eastern Christian and Islamic

Manuscripts at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library suggested the cover image
of Elijah and Enoch in Paradise with the Tree of Life, an illustration of the
Anathema of Paradise found in Congregation of the Chaldean Daughters of Mary
Immaculate MS 18, folios 8v–9r.6 I am grateful to the Centre Numérique des
Manuscrits Orientaux (CNMO), Ankawa, Iraq and the Hill Museum &
Manuscript Library for permission to use the image. While the Anathema of
Paradise perhaps dates to a millennium later than the focus of my study, this
manuscript bears witness to the enduring fruitfulness of both Paradise and books
as theological motifs in the later East Syrian traditions. The other image repro-
duced in this book is an opening fragment with a faded rubric from a Sogdian
translation of Dadishoʿ of Qatar’s Commentary on the Paradise found in the
Christian Sogdian MS E28 (Fragment E28/8c Recto n208) now held by the
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. I am grateful to the Berlin-Brandenburgischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften for permission to use it here.
While an author may not live on “bread alone”, material and financial support
was nevertheless key in the preparation of the book. Sabbatical funding from the
Research Scholar Grant program of the Office of the Provost at Vanderbilt
University made it possible for me to take a year-long research leave to write the
book. Similarly, research leave and funding from Dean Emilie Townes of
Vanderbilt’s Divinity School was essential to the completion of this monograph.
When I was in the depths of writing seclusion, a number of faculty colleagues
including Ari Bryan, Kathy Gaca, Joe Rife, and Betsey Robinson made Cohen
Hall a Paradise where I knew I could find fruitful interlocutors or else the peace
and isolation to read as needed. Many Vanderbilt staff members provided ma­ter­
ial assistance such as printing pdfs of Syriac manuscripts, upgrading computers,
or signing for book deliveries, including Donald Grubb, Julia Kamasz (and
Luna!), Heather Lee (you are always anticipating things before I need them),
Tyrone Mallett, Ela May, Marie McEntire, Matthew McGlasson, Shelby Merritt,
Judy Peterson, Fay Renardson, and Drew Scott.
This study of reading required a good deal of reading in its preparation. My
work as a reader was supported by the selfless work of dedicated research as­sist­
ants who travailed away thanklessly entering bibliographic items into Zotero,
fetching ILL items, or tracking down obscure references in Revue de l’Orient
Chrétien. Ed Gray, Sarah Porter, Justin Arnwine, and Julia Nations-Quiroz pro-
vided research assistance before I was even sure what form the book would
take. Elizabeth Lefavour also assisted with ILL queries. Thank you all for help-
ing me read widely and quickly. Stephanie Fulbright, Julia Liden, Will Potter,
Lindsay Ruth, and Roman Brașoveanu helped bring the book to completion.

6 ʿAynkāwah, Iraq, Congregation of the Chaldean Daughters of Mary Immaculate, MS 18, https://
w3id.org/vhmml/readingRoom/view/500460.
 Acknowledgments xiii

Libby and Wills Michelson checked the footnotes for punctuation. During one
academic year, Stephanie and Julia were collectively responsible for submitting
one out of every seven interlibrary loan requests filled across the entire univer-
sity. Julia and Will provided key copy editing on short deadlines. Will, your
knowledge of Chicago Manual of Style should qualify you to be the editor of
the next edition! Thank you to all of you—this book would not have been pos-
sible without your essential collaboration. May you all continue to find Paradise
through reading.
The staff of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt were essential
to my completion of this project. Jim Toplon, Rachel Adams, and Robyn Weisman
have perhaps never encountered a more delinquent or voracious ILL patron, yet
were always gracious and efficient. Chris Benda, Bill Hook, Keegan Osinski, and
Bobby Smiley also surpassed my expectations for purchasing new Syriac ma­ter­
ials in the Divinity Library which made my work easier. Cliff Anderson put up
with sundry requests even though I often refused to return his favors since I was
“on leave”. Thanks for making our own Vanderbilt library a little Paradise.
A number of Syriac scholars and members of the Hugoye discussion forum
also provided copies of hard to find items. In particular, I am grateful to Bishop
Mar Awa Royel of the Assyrian Church of the East for providing me a copy of the
current version of the Hudra which is still in use in his tradition.
Besides the many academic colleagues and staff who provided material sup-
port for the project, I want to thank those friends who saw the spiritual value of
the project. Manuel, Dan, Yuri, Aaron, Ben, Andy, Brent, Ryon, Matthew, Morgan,
and other actual practitioners of lectio divina supported me with prayer, reading,
and a reminder that ancient spiritual practices might remain valuable today.
Susan Thrasher provided a suitably remote location ideal for revising the book
manuscript. Other friends were willing to risk a grumpy reply and ask if I had yet
found my way out of the Library of Paradise, especially Bill Brewbaker, Walter
Bodine, Tammy and Steve Casey, David Cassidy, Beth Cruz, Don Paul and Ginger
Gross, Fr. Travis Hines, Elizabeth and John Kea, Rachel and Aaron Kelly, Cor-inne
Michel, Jade Novak, Sherry Paige, Russ Parham, Tammy and Charley Petit, Seth
and Miriam Swihart, Matt Webb, and Fr. Sammy Wood. Brady Henson belongs in
a superhero category for his encouragement.
I also want to thank my family for sacrificing their time and my presence for
this book. My parents, Paul and Jean Michelson, taught me long ago the joys of
libraries, from the half-floor stacks in Urbana-Champaign to the warren-like
studies of scholars in București, to the familiar library at 1632 Station Road.
Thank you—and pace Borges and Hesse—for teaching me that the actual Paradise
is nothing like a library. Thank you as well to Sharry, Paco, Hee-Eun, Tirzah, and
Matt for encouraging Bethany as I wrote. I would choose family over books any
day (or at least on my best days). Most of all, to my Bethany, Simeon, Joel, Anna,
Libby, and Wills: Thank you! May reading and praying always lead you to know
xiv Acknowledgments

and love the Word who though he was beyond all words became flesh on
our behalf.
As an invocation for this book, I can do no better than to join with prayer of
Thomas of Marga: “I ask our Lord, through the prayers of Mar Abraham and of
the children of his holiness . . . that I may hear and relate His glories; that I may
speak of His glories in His saints . . . so that by the author and the scribe, and by
the reader and the listener, and by the confessor and the faithful may be woven a
cord of glories for His holy name for ever and ever.”7

David A. Michelson
The Feast of Denḥ a, 2022

7 Thomas of Marga, The Book of Governors, I:2; edited in E.A. Wallis Budge, ed., The Book of
Governors: The Historia Monastica of Thomas Bishop of Margâ A.D. 840: The Syriac Text, Introduction,
Etc., vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 20; translation adapted from
E.A. Wallis Budge, trans., The Book of Governors: The Historia Monastica of Thomas Bishop of Margâ
A.D. 840: The English Translation, vol. 2 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 24–5.
 Contents

Permissions xvii
Text and Romanizations xix
List of Figures xxi
List of Abbreviations xxiii
Maps xxiv

I . M E T HO D O L O G Y

1. Introduction: Framing Questions for the Study of Contemplative

Reading in the Church of the East 3
2. Manuscripts without Readers? Perspectival Obstacles to the
Study of Syriac Ascetic Reading 15
3. Was There a Syriac Lectio Divina? Models and Definitions for
the Study of Contemplative Reading in the Church of the East
in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries 44

I I . NA R R AT I V E

4. Contemplative Reading on the Banks of the Euphrates: The

Establishment of a Tradition from Ephrem the Syrian to Abraham
of Kashkar73
5. “Cloak, Tunic, Book, Cell”: Reading Evagrius in Syriac with Babai
the Great134
6. “Dense with Every Kind of Fruit”: ʿEnanishoʿ of Adiabene, Dadishoʿ
of Qatar, and the Harvest of East Syrian Contemplative Reading 187
7. Conclusions: Trajectories and Legacies of East Syrian
Contemplative Reading257

Bibliography 283
Index of Scriptural Passages 321
Index of Manuscripts 322
General Index 323
 Permissions

The front cover image is from Congregation of the Chaldean Daughters of Mary
Immaculate MS 18, folios 8v–9r (HMML Image file CSDMA_00018_009). Photo
Credit: Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in partnership with CNMO, Ankawa,
Iraq. Image may not be reused without permission.
The back cover image is from the Berlin Turfan collection, Christian Sogdian
MS E28, Fragment E28/8c Recto (n208) held in the Depositum der Berlin-
Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in der Staatsbibliothek zu
Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz Orientabteilung. Photo Credit: Orientabteilung
of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften. Image may not be reused without permission.
The maps on pages xxiv–xxviii were originally published in David A. Michelson
and Ian Mladjov, “Diachronic Maps of Syriac Cultures and Their Geographic
Contexts,” in The Syriac World, edited by Daniel King (New York: Routledge,
2019), pp. xxvii–xxxiii, and maps 1–14, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315708195.
To further the growth of Syriac studies, the authors have made these maps avail-
able for reuse through the Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository at the
following persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/1803/16426. The maps are © 2017
by David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov and reused under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license: https://creativecom-
mons.org/licenses/by/4.0.
Other portions of this book were previously published by the author in the
following publications and are reused, with revisions, by permission:
David A. Michelson, “Mixed Up by Time and Chance? Using Digital Methods
to ‘Re-Orient’ the Syriac Religious Literature of Late Antiquity.” The Journal of
Religion, Media and Digital Culture 5, no. 1 (2016): 136–82.
David A. Michelson, “The Hidden Excellence of Lectio Divina: The Ambiguities
of Reading as an Elite Marker in East Syrian Monasticism of the Sixth and Seventh
Centuries.” In Virtuosos of Faith: Monks, Nuns, Canons, and Friars as Elites of
Medieval Culture, edited by Gert Melville and James D. Mixson, 285–302. Zürich:
LIT Verlag, 2020.
All other quotations in this work are copyrighted by their original authors and
used under the provisions of academic fair use and fair dealing related to com-
ment and criticism.
 Text and Romanizations

The goal of transliteration in this book is to aid the non-specialist reader.

Romanization of Syriac words has followed the style guide of Hugoye: Journal of
Syriac Studies with the following exceptions. To facilitate English pronunciation,
‫ ܫ‬has been rendered with “sh” and final or vocalic ‫ ܐ‬has been omitted. For fre-
quently occurring Syriac proper nouns (e.g. personal names and some place
names) I have defaulted to standard forms when possible and have often avoided
marking vowel length to make the names easier for the English reader. Arabic
Romanization has followed The International Journal of Middle East Studies style
guide with similar allowances for ease of pronunciation. Greek words have been
transliterated using forms common for English readers without marking vowel
length (e.g. “theoria”).
 List of Figures

1. Congregation of the Chaldean Daughters of Mary Immaculate MS 18,

folios 8v–9r (HMML Image file CSDMA_00018_009). 2
Source: © Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in partnership with CNMO,
Ankawa, Iraq. Image may not be reused without permission.

2. Berlin Turfan Collection, Christian Sogdian “Manuscript” E28, Fragment

E28/8c Recto (n208) held in the Depositum der Berlin-Brandenburgischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften in der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preussischer
Kulturbesitz Orientabteilung. 281
Source: © Orientabteilung of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the
Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Image may not be
reused without permission.
 List of Abbreviations

Add. Additional
BNUS Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg
CNMO Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux
CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium
DQC Dadishoʿ of Qatar, Commentary on the Paradise
DQE Dadishoʿ of Qatar, Epitome of the Commentary on the Paradise
LXX Septuagint
MS/MSS Manuscript/Manuscripts
NF New Find
KBK Det Kongelige Bibliotek København
SEDRA Syriac Electronic Data Research Archive
SEERI St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute
TSEC Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity
UBT Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen
VHMML Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
Map 1 Near East before the Islamic Conquest
Source: © David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Map 2 A Diachronic Map of Northern Mesopotamia
Source: © David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Map 3 A Diachronic Map of Egypt and Palestine
Source: © David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
 PART I

MET HOD OLO G Y

Figure 1 Congregation of the Chaldean Daughters of Mary Immaculate MS 18, folios 8v–9r.
Source: © Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in partnership with CNMO, Ankawa, Iraq. Image may not be reused without permission.
 1
Introduction
Framing Questions for the Study of Contemplative
Reading in the Church of the East

I read the opening of this book

and was filled with joy,
for its verses and lines
spread out their arms to welcome me;
the first rushed out and kissed me,
and led me on to its companion;
and when I reached that verse
wherein is written
the story of Paradise,
it lifted me up and transported me
from the bosom of the book
to the very bosom of Paradise.1
—Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise

Jesus of Nazareth never authored anything, but the history of Christianity has a
long and complex interrelationship with the history of reading.2 One Syriac theo-
logian of the sixth century ce considered reading so central to the human
encounter with God that he speculated that even in the Paradise of the Garden of
Eden there must have been reading: “God wrote a short psalm on the tree . . . so
that [Adam] might read it and learn the difference between good and evil.”3 Over
the last half century, historians of Christianity and historians of reading have

1 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Hymn 5.3; translated in Sebastian P. Brock, trans., Hymns
on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 103.
2 This is stated eloquently, for example, in Margaret M. Mitchell, “The Emergence of the Written
Record,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 178. The archeology of textuality in early Christianity
is still in its developing stages. An excellent summary of the field is Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The
Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
3 Barhadbshabba ʿArbaya, The Cause of the Foundation of the Schools, 352 [numbering follows
Becker’s translation which uses the pages of Scher’s edition as section numbers]; edited in Addai Scher,
ed., Cause de la fondation des écoles, trans. Addai Scher, Patrologia Orientalis, 4.4 (Paris: Firmin-­Didot,
1908), 352; my translation adapted from Adam H. Becker, Sources for the History of the School of
Nisibis, trans. Adam H. Becker, Translated Texts for Historians 50 (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2008), 123.

The Library of Paradise: A History of Contemplative Reading in the Monasteries of the Church of the East.
David A. Michelson, Oxford University Press. © David A. Michelson 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836247.003.0001
4 The Library of Paradise

increasingly turned their attention to this intertwined narrative of religion and

reading.4 Jean Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God sparked a
robust scholarly discussion and literature on the Christian monastic practice of
lectio divina (contemplative reading) in the Latin Middle Ages.5 Our inquiry
sheds light on a related but distinct form of Christian reading, “contemplative
ascetic reading” in the Church of the East.6 Although this Syriac Christian ascetic
reading tradition shares a common intellectual genealogy with its Latin monastic
sibling (both are heirs to the contemplative theology of the Egyptian desert
­mothers and fathers), it has generally been overlooked by Western scholars.
Only a glance is needed to see that the scale of the Syriac literary tradition is
remarkable. Classical Syriac is a middle dialect of Aramaic, one of the most suc-
cessful dialects within a language family that served as a lingua franca of the Near
East for over a millennium.7 Syriac texts are the third largest body of Christian
literature (after Greek and Latin) to survive from the late ancient Mediterranean
world.8 According to the best scholarly estimates, digital preservation projects have
now documented more than twenty thousand Syriac manuscripts and fragments.9
Although these texts have survived as historical artifacts and a small portion have
even been made available in modern scholarly editions, we are only beginning to
ask what reading meant to the communities who produced and consumed these
texts. There are many types of reading which could be examined in these sources
and it would be impossible to study them all here. This book tells one particular story
of how a Syriac tradition of contemplative reading developed in Mesopotamia
among the Christian monastic communities of the Church of the East in the sixth
and seventh centuries ce.

4 See Guy G. Stroumsa, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016).
5 The original was published as Jean Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de dieu: initiation aux
auteurs monastiques du moyen age (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1957). This study will refer to the 1982
third edition of the English translation: Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God:
A Study of Monastic Culture, 3rd edn. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). A general o ­ verview
of Leclercq’s work can be found in Duncan Robertson, Lectio Divina: The Medieval Experience of
Reading, Cistercian Studies 238 (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications/Liturgical Press, 2011),
4–11 and a survey of his influence in Bernard McGinn, “Jean Leclercq’s Contribution to Monastic
Spirituality and Theology,” Monastic Studies 16 (1985): 7–23.
6 For a discussion of the title “Church of the East”, see Section 4.1.
7 Sebastian P. Brock, “The Development of Syriac Studies,” in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary
Lectures, ed. K.J. Cathcart (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1994), 94. See also the discussion in
S. Kaufman, “The Aramaic Language,” Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, accessed January 17, 2017,
http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/aramaic_language.html.
8 Sebastian P. Brock, “Saints in Syriac: A Little-­Tapped Resource,” Journal of Early Christian Studies
16, no. 2 (2008): 181.
9 This estimate has increased dramatically since the early 2010s. In an informal conversation with
me in 2010, a leading scholar estimated the total at ten thousand, but this larger number, based on
digitization, was suggested by Columba Stewart in an unpublished lecture: “VHMML, OLIVER, &
Reading Room” (Hugoye Symposium IV: Syriac and the Digital Humanities, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University, 2015).
 Introduction 5

Early medieval Syriac ascetics taught a contemplative practice that moved from
reading, to meditation, to prayer, to the ecstasy of divine encounter. One of the
leading teachers at the maturation point of the tradition, Dadishoʿ of Qatar (7th c.),
described this discipline of contemplative reading as a step in “spiritual reflection”
[‫ܪܢܝܐ ܪܘܚܢܐ‬, renyā ruḥānā], a process by which the mind “departed” the bodily
world and was led to God.10 By understanding the practice and theology of con-
templative ascetic reading which guided these Syriac monks as they copied, read,
recited, memorized, and contemplated on texts, we can gain a wider ­perspective
on both the history of Christian asceticism and the history of reading.

1.1 “Reading Takes No Measures against the Erosion of Time”:

Guiding Questions for the History of Reading

Looking at the history of reading in early Christianity is part of a larger scholarly

turn over the past fifty years in which historians, bibliographers, and literary the-
orists have pursued the “History of Books”.11 Social historian Robert Darnton has
led the way by proposing a series of key questions for how historians could inves-
tigate the production and consumption of books.12 Darnton positioned the study
of readers as the ultimate and most difficult stage of inquiry into the history of
books.13 The difficulty arises from that fact that both writers and readers are
needed to make meaning from texts, but unlike writing, the work of reading
leaves less trace for the historian, a condition that is certainly true for the study of
Syriac contemplative reading in the Church of the East. In an evocative turn of
phrase, Michel de Certeau commented on this aspect of reading: “Writing accu-
mulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its
production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no meas-
ures against the erosion of time . . . .”14

10 Dadishoʿ’s use of this term is discussed in Section 6.3.3.

11 The term “books” here should be seen in a very broad sense that includes many ancient forms of
media, including scrolls, codices, and even writing on the walls of a monastic cell.
12 The field called “l’histoire du livre” in French is interchangeably referred to as “book history”
or “history of books” in English. See Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111,
no. 3 (1982): 65–83, see especially p. 68.
13 In 2007, Darnton’s recapitulation of his earlier schema into these questions makes this progres-
sion even clearer: “How do books come into being? How do they reach readers? What do the readers
make of them?” (Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual
History 4, no. 3 [2007]: 495).
14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), 174. It should be noted that Certeau develops this observation in tandem with
his more widely known metaphor of the reader as “poacher”. Certeau seems to be drawing on the
image of the migrant which has a long and sometimes racist history. The mistaken nature of Certeau’s
stereotyped analogy does not diminish the usefulness of his observation that readers have left few
traces of their work. In fact, the weakness of the “poacher” analogy is betrayed by the rest of Certeau’s
interpretation where he offers a more positive vision of the reader as creator. It is likely not a coinci-
dence that de Certeau’s analysis here is apt for the study of Syriac asceticism, given his extensive study
6 The Library of Paradise

While Darnton noted that “reading remains mysterious . . . the inner experience
of ordinary readers may always elude us”, he also observed that “we should at least
be able to reconstruct a good deal of the social context of reading.”15 To this end,
he proposed the following “first steps toward a history of reading”:

In short, it should be possible to develop a history as well as a theory of reader

response. Possible, but not easy; for the documents rarely show readers at work,
fashioning meaning from texts, and the documents are texts themselves, which
also require interpretation. Few of them are rich enough to provide even in­dir­
ect access to the cognitive and affective elements of reading, and a few excep-
tional cases may not be enough for one to reconstruct the inner dimensions of
that experience. But historians of the book have already turned up a great deal of
information about the external history of reading. Having studied it as a social
phenomenon, they can answer many of the “who”, the “what”, the “where”, and
the “when” questions, which can be of great help in attacking the more difficult
“whys” and “hows”.16

The overarching question for our study takes its cue from Darnton at this point:
How and why did East Syrian ascetics view reading as part of their contemplative
practice?
Darnton proposed five methodological techniques for approaching the “whys”
and “hows” of reading when the sources are limited. The historian of reading
works inward from the margins of a practice (reading) which has left only
faint historical evidence.17 First, the historian must identify the “ideals and

of Christian mystical readers: Michel de Certeau, “Exégèse, théologie et spiritualité,” Revue d’ascétique
et de mystique 36 (1960): 357–71; Michel de Certeau, “‘Mystique’ au XVIIe siècle: Le problème du lan-
gage ‘mystique,’” in L’homme devant Dieu: mélanges offerts au père Henri de Lubac, vol. 2 (Paris: Aubier,
1964), 267–91; Michel de Certeau, “La lecture absolue (Théorie et pratique des mystiques chrétiens:
XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” in Problèmes actuels de la lecture, ed. Lucien Dällenbach and Jean Ricardou,
Bibliothèque des signes (Paris: Clancier-­Guénaud, 1982), 65–80; Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable,
trans. Michael B. Smith, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Michel de Certeau,
“Mysticism,” trans. Marsanne Brammer, Diacritics 22, no. 2 (1992): 11–25; see also the interesting dis-
cussion of Certeau’s relationship with Henri de Lubac and his interest in spiritual exegesis in Brenna
Moore, “How to Awaken the Dead: Michel de Certeau, Henri de Lubac, and the Instabilities between
the Past and the Present,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 12, no. 2 (2012): 172–9.
15 Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” 80. To this end, Darnton emphasized that the insights
of multiple disciplines would be needed, citing relevant work in sociology (e.g. Wolfgang Iser, Walter
Ong, D.F. McKenzie), literary interpretation (Stanley Fish), and the annales school of historical
research (Henri Jean-­Martin, Roger Chartier).
16 Robert Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Australian Journal of French Studies
23, no. 1 (1986): 7.
17 See, for example, Jonathan Boyarin, ed., The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7, no. 1 (2004):
303–20; Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey, eds., The History of Reading: A Reader
(London: Routledge, 2011); Jonathan Rose, “Arriving at a History of Reading,” Historically Speaking 5,
no. 3 (2012): 36–9.
 Introduction 7

assumptions underlying reading in the past”.18 As an example, Darnton suggests

attention to the role of reading as a performance when done as a religious prac-
tice. As a second approach, Darnton advises examining how reading was learned
and taught. As a third approach, Darnton proposes taking advantage of rare but
rich autobiographical sources:

If the experience of the great mass of readers lies beyond the range of historical
research, historians should be able to capture something of what reading meant
for the few persons who left a record of it . . . . Saint Augustine, Saint Theresa of
Avila, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Stendhal, for example . . . .19

As a fourth approach, Darnton advises that historians take what insights they can
from literary theory, especially the agency given to readers by reader response
criticism and the renewed attention to reception history.20 As the fifth and final
approach, Darnton emphasizes the continued importance of “analytical bibliog-
raphy”, that is to say attention to books as physical objects and what their form
can reveal about their use.21 As will be evident in the chapters that follow, all five
of these strategies are useful in analyzing the sources which can open a window,
however indirectly, on the practice and experience of contemplative reading in
the Church of the East.
In this book, I have used Darnton’s five approaches to frame the following spe-
cific questions about Syriac ascetic reading: What were the intellectual roots of
contemplative reading as practiced in the Church of the East? What ascetic dis­
cip­lines and theologies provided the “ideals and assumptions underlying” Syriac
contemplative reading? How was contemplative reading learned and taught in
East Syrian monastic communities of the sixth and seventh centuries? Who are
notable examples of Syriac contemplative readers in the Church of the East “who
have left a record of their reading”? How was the relationship of the reader and
text perceived by Syriac readers? What was the goal of contemplative reading?
Finally, what can surviving physical evidence from manuscripts or textual layout
reveal about how Syriac contemplative readers used their books?
Out of necessity, these questions adopt a simple working definition of
“­reading” as “encounter with texts”. This definition is merely a starting point; the
questions themselves are designed to help us circle closer and closer to a thicker

18 “Throughout most of Western history, and especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
reading was seen above all as a spiritual exercise. But how was it performed? One could look for guid-
ance in the manuals of Jesuits and the hermeneutical treatises of Protestants . . . . But for most people,
reading remained a sacred activity. It put you in the presence of the Word and unlocked holy myster-
ies. As a working hypothesis, it seems valid to assert that the farther back in time you go the farther
away you move from instrumental reading” (Darnton, “First Steps,” 16).
19 Darnton, “First Steps,” 19. 20 Darnton, “First Steps,” 20.
21 Darnton, “First Steps,” 22.
8 The Library of Paradise

definition of contemplative reading in the specific context of East Syrian

­asceticism. Darnton notes the complexity of this task:

Reading has a history. It was not always and everywhere the same. We may think
of it as a straightforward process of lifting information from a page; but if we
considered it further, we would agree that information must be sifted, sorted,
and interpreted. Interpretive schemes belong to cultural configurations, which
have varied enormously over time. As our ancestors lived in different mental
worlds, they must have read differently, and the history of reading could be as
complex as the history of thinking.22

In other words, the practice of reading is historically contingent and polyvalent.

“Reading” can be defined only with respect to particular cultural and intellectual
contexts. Following Darnton, Roger Chartier elaborates on this need for his­tor­ic­al
particularity in the study of reading:

. . . reading is a practice that is always realized in specific acts, places and habits.
Unlike the phenomenological approach that considers reading as an anthropo-
logical invariant and ignores its concrete modalities, we must identify the
­distinctive traits of communities of readers, of reading traditions and ways of
reading.23

In our case, that distinctive context is the monastic communities of the Church of
the East from the sixth to seventh centuries ce. Accordingly, the definition of
Syriac “contemplative ascetic reading” developed in this study can only be arrived
at cumulatively, increasing in specificity as we are able to identify moments in
which our sources reveal how reading was practiced in particular times and
places.24
Because of the need for contextual specificity in interpreting reading practices,
scholarship on the history of reading is still in its earliest stages. In 2010,
Darnton noted:

22 Darnton, “First Steps,” 24.

23 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the
Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 2. This argument
is made both in Chartier, The Order of Books, and in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier,
“Introduction,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1–36.
24 As we shall see in Chapter 2, another needed methodological development in the history of
reading is attention to the longue durée of reading material, including attention to how reading of cer-
tain books has changed. In this regard, many of the volumes in the Princeton University Press series
“Lives of Great Religious Books” serve as excellent models for the current study; for example, Alan
Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
 Introduction 9

Curiously, however, the study of reading has only recently become part of the
larger effort to interpret cultural systems. Why this neglect? In part because we
are so familiar with reading that we fail to see its problematic character, in part
because we have not located sources for systematic research. The source material
abounds, but it must be quarried out of locations that are inaccessible to most
people—­manuscript diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, instruction
manuals, library records, fictitious and graphic representations.25

Similarly, David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery have described this contextual
study of reading as “the missing link” of book history.26 They emphasize that
“meaning” in reading is made at the intersection of the reader, the text, the book,
and the community.27 Accordingly, the story of contemplative reading in the early
medieval Church of the East must be found at the specific historical intersections
in which the monk, the text, the school, the monastery, and the broader ascetic
tradition met.28

25 Robert Darnton, “Foreword,” Open Collections Program, Reading—­Harvard Views of Readers,

Readership, and Reading History (2010), http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/scope.html; while the
foreword is undated, a date for the database is indicated in W.S. Brockman, review of Reading: Harvard
Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History, by Robert Darnton, Choice Reviews Online 48,
no. 1 (September 1, 2010), http://doi.org/10.5860/CHOICE.48–0100.
26 One of the major changes Finkelstein and McCleery note between their first (2005) and second
editions (2013) is that “materially and theoretically grounded studies of the history of reading in cul-
tural terms have begun to appear in greater numbers” (David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An
Introduction to Book History, 2nd edn. [New York: Routledge, 2013], 101). These additional introduc-
tions and surveys have shaped my approach: Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose, “An Introduction to
Book History,” Book History 1, no. 1 (1998): ix–xi; Price, “Reading”; Shafquat Towheed and W.R. Owens,
eds., The History of Reading, Volume 1: International Perspectives, c.1500–1990 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); Katie Halsey and W.R. Owens, eds., The History of Reading, Volume 2: Evidence from
the British Isles, c.1750–1950, vol. 2 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Rosalind Crone and
Shafquat Towheed, eds., The History of Reading, Volume 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Towheed, Crone, and Halsey, The History of Reading: A Reader; Rose,
“Arriving at a History of Reading”; Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book
History (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2017).
27 Finkelstein and McCleery comment: “Wolfgang Iser argues that meaning emerges from the
­interaction of text and reader. To the creation of meaning the text brings its words, a set of linguistic
units, while the reader brings an individual set of experiences that color the semantic value given to
those units separately and jointly. There is, therefore, no particular ‘correct’ meaning, although the
range of possible meanings is constrained by the fixed nature of the text, of its component words.
Jerome McGann would add at this juncture that the reader interprets not a text, but a material object—­
the book; that the words of the text are in a particular font and size, on a particular paper, in a particular
book, between particular covers; and that these particularities of the physical book also influence and
constrain the range of possible meanings. Stanley Fish might then . . . stress that the range is constrained
by the individual reader’s values, experiences, and cultural references . . . Common meaning . . . signals
our membership of ‘interpretive communities,’ broad groups of other individuals with whom we share
values, experiences, and cultural references” (Finkelstein and McCleery, Introduction, 117).
28 It is also useful to ask if various Syriac monastic traditions of reading can be identified as func-
tioning similar to Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities” or Brian Stock’s “textual communities” in
which reading is shaped by communal context. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority
of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Brian Stock, Listening
for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). See also
the discussion in Stroumsa, Scriptural Universe, 57 and the related discussion in Finkelstein and
McCleery, Introduction, 117. For an excellent example of a close study of how a communal context can
10 The Library of Paradise

1.2 A Catalogue to the Library of Paradise

Having crafted a number of guiding questions for the study of Syriac contempla-
tive readers in the Church of the East, we may plot out how these questions will
be answered over the rest of the book. The book proceeds in two parts: the first
part undertakes the methodological groundwork for the study of contemplative
reading. The second, longer part then tells the story of the development of the
tradition in the Church of the East.
Chapter 2 is the first of two methodological chapters in Part I. This chapter
grapples with a preliminary question. Before we can begin to study the history of
Syriac reading, it is useful to first understand why so little attention was paid to
Syriac monastic readers during the past two centuries of Western scholarship
on Syriac texts. The answer lies in the intellectual assumptions and perspectival
biases that led scholars in the nineteenth century to ignore and even devalue
Syriac monastic readers. William Cureton and William Wright’s work cata­loguing
Syriac literature has been foundational to the field. At the same time, their schol-
arship was firmly situated in their external outlook as nineteenth-­ century
European readers writing in an age of empires based on ideologies of civiliza-
tional and racial superiority. Some aspects of Syriac literature which they favored
as “modern” readers became central to subsequent scholarship. Chartier reminds
us, however, that “the history of reading must not be limited to the genealogy of
how we read now.”29 Accordingly, Chapter 2 is a cautionary prologue and a
­methodological challenge to future scholarship. Our recovery of the neglected
history of Syriac contemplative reading must not only be aware of how our own
modern perspectives as readers might mislead us but also seek to identify the
concerns of past readers inside the Syriac monastic traditions. What can our
­primary sources tell us about how they were read or intended to be read?
Informed by these perspectival questions, the next chapter offers a constructive
methodology based on the wider scholarship on contemplative ascetic reading in
Late Antiquity. Chapter 3 reviews the scholarly literature on lectio divina with two
goals in mind. First, it draws on studies of lectio divina in Egypt and Europe for
models of how we can trace the formation of a related ascetic discipline in the
Church of the East. Second, it surveys existing work in which Syriac scholars have
begun to ask, “Was there a Syriac lectio divina?” Their answers have been tantaliz-
ing but brief. Three key articles—­by Muriel Debié, Joel Walker, and Sabino
Chialà—­ have called attention to the available evidence for Syriac monastic
­readers, especially in East Syrian sources. Further, several scholars have noted the
importance of reading in the asceticism of the prolific seventh-­century East

serve as a hermeneutic see Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation
as an Exercise in Hope (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020).
29 Cavallo and Chartier, “Introduction,” 4.
 Introduction 11

Syrian ascetic theologian, Isaac of Nineveh. Yet another group of studies by

Brouria Bitton-­Ashkelony, Jason Scully, and Serafim Seppälä have examined
an East Syrian tradition of “spiritual exegesis” and prayerful “non-­knowledge”
culminating in Isaac’s contemporary, Dadishoʿ of Qatar. Chapter 3 identifies what
is missing between these excellent accounts of the growth of monastic literacy on
the one hand and the study of reading in Dadishoʿ and Isaac on the other. This
observation frames the scholarly contribution of the monograph as a whole.
There is a need for a broader narrative of how contemplative reading became a
well-­established spiritual discipline in the Church of the East from its origins in
the Syriac adaptation of Evagrius of Pontus up to the epoch of Dadishoʿ and Isaac.
The Library of Paradise is the first book to trace the origins and establishment of
East Syrian contemplative reading as a monastic institution. The chapter con-
cludes by offering a working definition of contemplative ascetic reading by argu-
ing that although it might be useful to speak of a Syriac lectio divina, it is more
accurate to define the Syriac tradition as “ascetic reading” (a term coined for the
Latin West by Brian Stock). East Syrian contemplative ascetic reading is an inde-
pendent but sibling tradition to Latin lectio divina. Indeed, both are offspring of
the contemplative reading systems taught by Evagrius. Moreover, Syriac contem-
plative reading was not the only type of reading done in East Syrian monasteries.
There were other competing types of monastic reading, so this study uses
“­contemplative ascetic reading” to designate one particular type (e.g. Evagrian
contemplative reading) designed to lead to a mystical experience of “divine vision”.
While Part I of The Library of Paradise frames the scope, method, and
­contribution of the book, Part II is an historical narrative which traces the
­development, definition, and diffusion of East Syrian contemplative reading. The
evolution of East Syrian contemplative reading occurred in three historical
phases: the establishment of the practice of contemplative reading, the articulation
of the theology of contemplative reading, and the maturation of contemplative
reading as a tradition as exemplified by Dadishoʿ. Each of these stages is treated in
a separate chapter, namely Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Chapter 4 describes the first phase, the establishment of East Syrian contem-
plative reading as a practice in the sixth-­century monastic reform of Abraham
of Kashkar (d. 580s), abbot of the Great Monastery on Mt. Izla in upper
Mesopotamia. Abraham’s reform was built on a long history of Syriac “proto-­
monasticism”. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Syriac-­speaking Christians had
developed rich and varied theologies and configurations of asceticism as they
sought to devote themselves to the form of “angelic” life which Adam and Eve
once enjoyed in Paradise. One common theme in early Syriac ascetic theology
was the strong emphasis placed on the reading and interpretation of Scripture.
These Mesopotamian patterns of reading Scripture, prayer, and renunciation in
Syriac asceticism were also intermingled with Greek ascetic theology emerging
from Asia Minor and Egypt in the same period. The resulting hybridity of Greek
12 The Library of Paradise

and Syriac ascetic theology can be seen in the works of Pseudo-­Macarius and
John the Solitary in which contemplative reading practices stood alongside prayer
and meditation as tools for the pursuit of stillness and purity on the path to spir-
itual perfection. Such ascetic concepts and vocabulary were among the theo­logic­al
raw materials available in the Church of the East when Abraham of Kashkar
began a comprehensive reform of monastic practices in the sixth century.
Abraham’s reform imitated Egyptian models of monasticism in an effort to
stabilize asceticism in the Church of the East after a century of flux and tumult.
The role of reading in Abraham’s reformed monasticism is evident from a
number of sources. The structured ascetic use of reading was regulated and
codified in the various monastic canons associated with Abraham of Kashkar
and his successor abbots of the Great Monastery on Mt. Izla. The fullest vision
of Abraham of Kashkar’s teaching on contemplative reading can be found in a
narrative about his “first-­born” disciple, Rabban Bar ʿEdta. Such hagiographic
representation of contemplative reading also offers a glimpse into the literacy of
ascetic women such as Ḥanah Ishoʿ, Shirin, and Febronia who were portrayed
as playing an ideal­ized role in teaching or fostering contemplative readers.
Abraham of Kashkar’s reform drew upon the East Syrian scholastic movement
and Egyptian monasticism to shape East Syrian contemplative reading into an
essential monastic practice.
Chapter 5 takes up the second phase in the history of East Syrian contempla-
tive reading—­its theological definition in the works of Babai the Great, who died
in 628. He was Abraham of Kashkar’s second successor as abbot of the Great
Monastery on Mt. Izla. In the early seventh century, Babai wrote three commen-
taries on the fourth-­century author Evagrius of Pontus, one of the most influen-
tial prolific theorists of Egyptian ascetic practices. Babai’s work sought to
reinterpret and harmonize the Egyptian and Syriac ascetic traditions brought
together in Abraham of Kashkar’s reform. Babai’s reinterpretation of Evagrius
exemplifies the reception of Evagrius into Syriac monasticism (the so-­called
Evagriana syriaca). Evagrian literature influenced readers in seventh-­century
Mesopotamia as staple reading materials for monastic communities. The Syriac
translations of Evagrian texts also embodied and modeled a variety of ascetic
reading practices including commentary, antirrhetical reading, psalmody, and
contemplative reading. Syriac ascetic teachers such as Babai taught and promoted
these practices within the framework of spiritual progress found in Syriac
Evagrianism. Babai taught monastic readers both how to read Evagrius and how
to read in an Evagrian contemplative manner, that is, as an essential but delimited
step toward the divine vision found in theoria (contemplation). Babai’s work
reflects the separation between the literary cultures of monastery and school in
the Church of the East in which ascetic and scholastic modes of reading were
increasingly in conflict. Contemplative readers, influenced by Syriac Evagrianism,
rejected forms of scholastic reading as incompatible with their pursuit of divine
 Introduction 13

knowledge. The end result of this phase in the history of contemplative reading in
the Church of the East was that East Syrian monastics could now claim their own
distinctly Evagrian purposes for reading.
Chapter 6 examines the final stage in the development of East Syrian contem-
plative reading, the widespread dissemination of a mature tradition in the second
half of the seventh century. The sources from this period, such as the works of
ʿEnanishoʿ of Adiabene and Dadishoʿ of Qatar assumed that their readers were
familiar with the common tradition of Evagrian contemplative reading as devel-
oped over the two centuries prior. From the works of these ascetic teachers, we
may fill out our picture of how East Syrian contemplative reading was taught and
practiced. The earlier of these authors, ʿEnanishoʿ, compiled what would stand for
centuries as the essential text for contemplative reading, the Paradise—­an anthol-
ogy he collected of hagiographic and apophthegmatic texts including Syriac trans-
lations of Palladius’ Lausiac History and Athanasius’ Life of Antony. The Paradise
was an expression of East Syrian demand for Egyptian ascetic reading matter.
Like Babai’s commentated text of Evagrius’ Kephalaia gnostica, the Paradise was
specifically designed for contemplative use. Its title reveals its pedagogic aim. In
one single volume (a portable library!), the Paradise offered a glimpse of celestial
Paradise through contemplation. Dadishoʿ similarly designed many of his works
to teach contemplative ascetic reading including his commentaries on Egyptian
reading material (both on Abba Isaiah’s Asceticon and on the texts in ʿEnanishoʿ’s
Paradise). Similar to the commentaries of Babai (which Dadishoʿ knew and
quoted), Dadishoʿ was keen to teach ascetic readers to resist other forms of read-
ing at odds with Evagrian contemplation. His warnings reveal the strength of East
Syrian contemplative ascetic reading as an institution in his day. Dadishoʿ railed
against popular forms of monastic hymnody and even against Antiochene exe­
gesis (revered as it was in the Church of the East) as inappropriate texts for con-
templative readers. Instead, Dadishoʿ championed what he saw to be the form of
reading exclusively fit for solitary ascetics in the Evagrian tradition. He described
this type of contemplative reading with a unique new name, “the solitary fathers’
commentary”. Moreover, he even gave a title to those who were able to use con-
templative reading to “spiritually” depart from their cells to commune with God
in Paradise, “the departers”.
The task of this book has been to reconstruct the origins of contemplative
reading as a monastic discipline in the Church of the East and to trace its devel-
opment into the era of Dadishoʿ. This practice did not end with Dadishoʿ however.
The final chapter of the book shifts our focus from a close up to a panoramic.
Chapter 7 suggests how the present study of East Syrian contemplative reading as
an institution can serve as framework for future scholarship. This final chapter
begins by summarizing the findings of the book as whole in the form of answers
to the questions about Syriac contemplative reading which we have just formu-
lated in this present chapter. Next, Chapter 7 demonstrates how the East Syrian
14 The Library of Paradise

tradition of contemplative reading offers a new historical context for the study of
Isaac of Nineveh and other mystical authors in the later centuries in the Church
of the East. Finally, the chapter concludes with a call for scholars outside Syriac
studies to investigate the wider legacies and implications of the East Syrian con-
templative reading tradition. The works of Dadishoʿ circulated in Sogdian, West
Syrian, Melkite, and Ethiopian monastic libraries where the East Syrian theology
of contemplative ascetic reading was adapted to new contexts. Moreover, it is now
clear that this East Syrian practice offers comparative insights into the closely
related traditions of Latin lectio divina and Greek and Slavic hesychasm. Finally, it
may even be the case that this tradition could reveal previously unidentified con-
nections between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical theologies in medieval
Mesopotamia.
In total, the chapters of this book document the particular history through
which the practice of “ascetic reading” developed as a contemplative tradition in
the Church of the East. This Syriac parallel to lectio divina is a related but inde-
pendent tradition in the history of Christian monasticism. While comparison
between the Syriac and Latin traditions is insightful due to their shared Evagrian
origins, the dramatic differences of context are the key to understanding the three
historical stages in which East Syrian contemplative reading developed. This
deeper understanding of contemplative reading in the monasteries of the Church
of the East not only adds nuance to our knowledge of the Syriac monastic tradi-
tions but also adds a diverse new chapter to the history of reading as a spiritual
and ascetic practice stretching from antiquity to the present.
 2
Manuscripts without Readers?
Perspectival Obstacles to the Study
of Syriac Ascetic Reading

To appearance it seemed as if on some sudden emergency the whole

library had been thrown for security down this trap-­door, and that
they had remained undisturbed in their dust and neglect for some
centuries.1
—Lord Prudhoe (Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland)

All historical interpretation begins not in the past but in the present, with the
evidence that has survived and the legacies of how it has been interpreted thus far.
In broad historical perspective, it is an advantageous time to undertake the study
of Syriac reading—­at least when judged by the number of editions, access to
manuscripts, or the increase of research in the field of Syriac studies.2 And yet, as
has been repeatedly noted, there remain basic lacunae in our understanding of
the history of Syriac literature.3 In spite of more than two centuries of critical
scholarship on Syriac texts, the study of Syriac readers and reading can only be

1 Quoted in William Cureton, “British Museum—­MSS. from the Egyptian Monasteries,” The
Quarterly Review 77, no. CLIII (1846): 52, 60.
2 See my overview of the state of the field in David A. Michelson, “Syriaca.Org as a Test Case for
Digitally Re-­Sorting the Ancient World,” in Ancient Worlds in Digital Culture, ed. Claire Clivaz, Paul
Dilley, and David Hamidović (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 59–85. For a more extensive overview, readers are
referred to Sebastian P. Brock, “The Development of Syriac Studies,” in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary
Lectures, ed. K.J. Cathcart (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1994), 94–113; Sebastian P. Brock, An
Introduction to Syriac Studies, 2nd revised edn. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006); Lucas Van
Rompay, “Syriac Studies: The Challenges of the Coming Decade,” Hugoye Journal of Syriac Studies 10,
no. 1 (2007): 23–35. For evidence of the recent development of Syriac studies, a survey of dissertations
demonstrates the exponential growth. A keyword search for mention of “Syriac” in the abstracts and
titles of dissertations indexed in the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global Database reveals nearly
three hundred fifty PhD theses related to Syriac since 1900. Of these, more than two hundred were
written in the last twenty years (since 2000) and more than one hundred of those have been completed
since the year 2010. (I am grateful to Dan Schwartz for helping me check these numbers). In addition
to primary research there have been several recent reference works, most notably Daniel King, ed., The
Syriac World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); Sebastian P. Brock et al., eds., Gorgias Encyclopedic
Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Beth Mardutho, The Syriac Institute; Gorgias Press,
2011), http://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/.
3 See the desiderata mentioned in Lucas Van Rompay, “Past and Present Perceptions of Syriac Literary
Tradition,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 71–103; Van Rompay, “Challenges.”

The Library of Paradise: A History of Contemplative Reading in the Monasteries of the Church of the East.
David A. Michelson, Oxford University Press. © David A. Michelson 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836247.003.0002
16 The Library of Paradise

said to have begun since the early 2000s.4 This chapter argues that one reason why
Western scholarship has often ignored or even disdained the topic of Syriac
ascetic reading is because of perspectival biases and prejudices which were deeply
embedded in the field of Syriac studies during its formative period in the nine-
teenth century.5
Numerous historians of reading have warned that we should expect just such a
blind spot because modern scholarship on ancient texts is itself caught up in the
act of reading those same texts according to modern modes of reading.6 Brian
Stock summarizes the dilemma this way:

It is common knowledge that reading practices have evolved over time. It is also
reasonably well known that Western assumptions about the place of reading in
relation to the individual and society are not shared by non-­Western cultures.
As academic readers, we are seldom inconvenienced by these details. When we
gather facts through reading, we bracket the history and ethnography of reading
and direct our attention single-­mindedly to the task before us. However, the
moment we step back from what we are doing and think about reading ana­lyt­ic­
al­ly, we have to acknowledge that no aspect of such a basic literate skill can be
investigated by literates like us without the observers becoming participants
in the phenomenon they are trying to understand . . . . The only way to move
beyond the limits of our present understanding is to expand the archive of
known reading practices; and this knowledge is perhaps the best guarantee that
contemporary practices will not be made the standard for evaluating the differ-
ent roles that reading plays elsewhere.7

For our study of Syriac contemplative reading, Stock’s observation is a reminder

that in order to understand what reading was historically, we must take care not
to let our own methods or values as readers blind us to other ways of reading.

4 The primary works are Muriel Debié, “Livres et monastères en Syrie-­Mésopotamie d’après les
sources syriaques,” in Le monachisme syriaque, ed. Florence Jullien, Études syriaques 7 (Paris:
Geuthner, 2010), 123–68; Joel T. Walker, “Ascetic Literacy: Books and Readers in the East-­Syrian
Monastic Tradition,” in Commutatio et Contentio: Studies in the Late Roman, Sasanian, and Early
Islamic Near East in Memory of Zeev Rubin, ed. Henning Börm and Josef Wiesehöfer (Düsseldorf:
Wellem, 2010), 307–45; Sabino Chialà, “Lettura e cultura negli ambienti monastici siro-­orientali,” in Le
vie del sapere in ambito siro-­mesopotamico dal III al IX secolo. Atti del convegno internazionale tenuto a
Roma nei giorni 12–13 maggio 2011, ed. C. Noce, M. Pampaloni, and C. Tavolieri (Roma: Pont. Institutum
Orientalium Studiorum, 2013), 177–90. See Chapter 3 for a more detailed literature review.
5 The history of Syriac scholarship in Europe is older than the nineteenth century and indeed
stretches back to the early modern period, as has been documented well in Robert J. Wilkinson, “The
Early Study of Syriac in Europe,” in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King, The Routledge Worlds
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 751–69. Nevertheless, in was in the nineteenth century that many of the
present contours of the field of Syriac studies began to take shape.
6 See, for example, Leah Price, “The Tangible Page,” London Review of Books 24, no. 21 (October 31,
2002): 39.
7 Brian Stock, “Afterword,” in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 270–1.
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