Abstract

A strange fusion of history and autobiography, this study ranges across the themes of sound and silence, solitude and desert, community and home, combining the past and the present, the historical and the personal, in a unique way. Driven by the conviction that “our sounding world deeply shapes our sense of place and of who we are,” Haines-Eitzen, a scholar of early Christianity, seeks to understand how early monasticism was shaped by the soundscape of the Middle Eastern deserts, but also what it means to orient ourselves to a place through listening. Drawing on her field recordings of desert sounds (recorded in the deserts of Israel and North America and made available in the book through barcodes that can be scanned), Haines-Eitzen argues that hearing the nuances of desert sounds requires a “deep listening” founded on inner quietness, and she evokes this state through tales of the Desert Fathers, who spent decades in the deserts of the Middle East trying to cultivate this inner disposition. Their spiritual quest, according to Haines-Eitzen, was shaped by the “acoustic ecology” of the desert—the ever-present sounds of wind, thunder, water, animals, and even humans; their stories, preserved in early monastic sources, “reveal how monks became part of the natural history of the desert, [and] how they were shaped by their experience of desert sounds.”As an academic study of early monasticism (though I am not sure if the book was intended as such), Sonorous Desert is lacking in critical ways, and the monastic sources do not receive the attention and rigorous treatment they deserve. The monastic test cases examined serve as stepping stones in the author's own quest for inner quietness. But the reader who overcomes initial bewilderment over the book's methodology and style does gain something important: a new sensitivity to “the acoustics of solitude”—to the “striking acoustical paradox of the noisy and silent desert.” The Near and Middle Eastern deserts, far from being empty and silent, were (and still are) richly resonant and sonorous. Not only their landscapes but also their soundscapes helped to shape the religious quest of Christian monks, in late antiquity and beyond. By making us aware of and sensitive to the sonority of early monastic texts, Sonorous Desert contributes to a richer and more holistic view of early monastic spirituality.