The World of Lérins: Ontology and the Late Antique Monastery, 400–542 CE

In the fourth- and fifth-century Christian world, there were many different ways of being a monk—many “monasticisms” or what this project describes as “monastic worlds.” This dissertation examines one of these monastic worlds centered on the islands of Lérins in southern Gaul, roughly two miles off the coast of modern Cannes, which sat for a few decades at the center of elite Christian discourse in the Latin West. I follow this community of monks from its founding around the year 410 CE under Honoratus of Arles, through the work of its leading “mythographer” Eucherius of Lyon, to the writings of its emissary to the saeculum, Salvian of Marseille, and finally to a famous expellee-turned-bishop, Caesarius of Arles. I argue for the existence of a coherent “Lerinian monasticism” during this period, built on a local, historically contingent conjunction of facts about material, both human and nonhuman, and this material’s relationship to the divine. Throughout the fifth century, the monks of Lérins knew they lived in a place of transformation, a modulated Nitrian desert brought West, a paradise without struggle, insulated from Satan, and especially near to God. I reframe this monastic world around fourth- and fifth-century trans-Mediterranean debates on the nature of God and material emanating from the Origenist Controversy in Lower Egypt.

Throughout, I use the language of “ontology”—defined as the “basic assumptions” people hold “about what things are, and what they could be”—to explore this conjunction of facts inside the world of Lérins, asking what things were “real” for this group of monks and how they got to be that way. This language emerges from philosophy and anthropology but also, as I argue, from the monks themselves, who wrote about their and others’ monastic “conversationes,” a term I translate as “ways of being” and lend an explicitly ontological valence. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a new way of conceptualizing the diversity across the monastic landscape in Late Antiquity through the lens of one influential fifth-century community.