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Daniel Eastman An, "Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Marshall Po
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- [01:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Daniel Ahn about his book titled Fear of Practicing Immersion in Late Antique Monastasis, published by the University of California Press in 2025. This book takes seriously something that maybe we often overlook, which is the fact that if we go back to monastic communities in the late antique period and sort of the Mediterranean region, there's all sorts of references to fear of God. I mean, we even still have that expression today in a lot of religious contexts. But I don't think we usually think of it as like actually being scared of God in many senses. Like it's sort of seen as a placeholder for, I don't know, like, maybe. Aw, I guess. But it's not taken kind of seriously. And yet the fact that that phrase shows up maybe is an indication that we should be looking at it more, because it wouldn't be there if it didn't mean something. Right. So this book does that exact investigation of, like, what is actually going on with this expression. What does this mean in terms of religious community, in terms of understanding of God? All sorts of things are wrapped up in looking at this phrase. So, Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:37]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Oh, thanks so much for allowing me to be here.
- [02:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:45]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Absolutely. My name is Daniel Ahn. I'm a professor of Church History at Yonsei University in Seoul in South Korea. But this book is actually a revision of my doctoral thesis from 2022 a few years ago. Um, I would say that behind this lies a long interest in the cultural basis of emotions. So I've become more and more interested in how emotions are culturally constructed. We usually think of them as sort of basic to biology, as everyone has the same feelings, but increasingly we recognize that that's not the case. So this book is me applying that interest to my area of research, which is Ancient Christianity, and especially Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean and Late Antiquity.
- [03:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. That's helpful framing. Is there anything more you want to tell us about sort of where and when specifically you're focusing on within that and the questions you're asking within these broader topics you're interested in?
- [03:56]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Mm, yeah. So, as I mentioned, the focus of the book is the Eastern Mediterranean. So that's broadly the region encompassing what's now Turkey down to Egypt and then stretching eastward into what's now Iraq and Iran. And the time period is the period sometimes called Late antiquity, which is quite flexible. In this case, it's the 4th to the 7th centuries. And really, I'm focusing on monastic communities. And this is the period when monasteries start to proliferate throughout this region from the 4th century onward. And there's a flourishing of monastic life across the whole Eastern end of the Mediterranean. The questions I'm asking. Well, I'm interested in how monastics practiced emotions. In fact, this project began as a more generally framed project about ascetic emotions, that is, emotional training in monastic communities. But what I quickly found was that fear of God is really at the center. It's kind of the bedrock for other monastic emotional practices. So I started to ask, why was fear of God so central? How did monastics understand what it meant, and how did they try to put it into practice in their own lives? And, of course, to encourage one another to put it into practice? And then stepping back from that, what were the. The social and the relational consequences of this emphasis on fear of God in monastic life.
- [05:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a nicely targeted set of questions for us to discuss. But it does, of course, raise the question of, given how far back in time these people are and how sort of tricky emotions are to study generally. Right. As you mentioned, like, we don't even think of them always as objects of study, how do you go about investigating these questions?
- [06:09]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Thank you. It's, as you said, tricky. And in fact, you will find some historians today who said it's simply not possible because the question arises, well, what are the sources? How can you get inside someone's head? In this case, I proceed from the understanding that emotions are practices. That is, they are both actions that people do in the world, and they are also experiences. That is, sometimes we don't really control them in the sense of how we usually think about action, but rather we simply have them happen to us. And that depends on our environment. So what I try to do is look at how monastics both pursued emotions, but also how they were instilled in them by their community. And that involves basically three different kinds of emotional practices that I identify and explore in the book. The first of those is what I call naming emotions. And this is basically a philological approach. That is, I'm asking what are the particular emotional terms that monastics were working with and what did they mean? What are their semantic domains? And as I found out, that actually is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it already seems complicated, but because monastics in this area spoke different languages, then you end up with different terms that we translate today as fear. But they had different semantic domains in the languages that they spoke, namely Greek, Coptic and Syriac. That's the first part, naming emotions. And the second part is socializing emotions. You might call it a relational approach. So I'm asking what kind of relationship features the emotions that I've identified in emotional terminologies that monastics had? So, on the one hand, there's fear of God, but on the other hand, there's the other side of that relationship, if you like. That is the emotion terms that monastics had to describe God's feelings toward them, the reciprocal feelings of human fear. And that's typically an array of words that we translate today with things like mercy and pity, compassion or even grace, depending on the language in the word. So I'm asking what connects those together? And just to give some examples, I'm thinking of things like relationships drawn from other spheres of life, such as parent and child. Or doctor and ill person, or really, the one that comes to occupy the center of this book is judge and judge, because monastics really zero in on that as a way to understand fear of God and divine mercy. The third emotional practice that I look at is materializing emotions. You could call this an art historical approach, although maybe art historians might disagree. But what I'm interested in is how did the spaces in which monastics prayed either affirm or challenge the ideas about emotions that they had in monastic discourse? So it's really looking at built spaces, archaeological sources, paintings, inscriptions on the walls, and asking how those either align with or do not align with this connection between fear of God and God's judgment that we find in the written sources.
- [10:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so clearly there are lots of ways around these issues of answering the questions you've raised. Thank you for laying out the kind of many different axes that you investigate and giving us a whole bunch of threads then to pull through the rest of our conversation. And in many ways, it is this kind of linguistic question I'd love to move to next, in a sense, which is exactly what you've pointed out of, like, the socialization of emotions. Like, how do people know what emotions they are feeling and what emotions they're supposed to be feeling? That's not something that you just sort of come up with all by yourself. There is a big sort of socialized aspect of how we name emotions and what we as a community kind of decide are good and bad emotions, and what are the correct emotions to be feeling? So in this context, how did monastics know which emotions they were supposed to be feeling at any given point?
- [11:21]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Yeah. Thank you for that. Well, it's hard to make absolute and general claims in that area, but we can make guesses and sometimes quite educated guesses. Can I ask if you are familiar with the song? If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.
- [11:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes.
- [11:43]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Yeah. I would say that song is a good example of what historian of emotions William Reddy has called emotives. That is the idea that one speaks into being an emotional state by naming it. And sometimes they can be quite normative. That is, these ways of speaking, they have power. And even if you might not feel like you want to be happy, for example, you start going into a situation where everybody's singing that song and you become happy. So it's kind of an analogous situation that I'm trying to paint in the case of monastic life, namely the importance of the Psalms. Psalms, that is, the 150 prayerful poems that we find in What Christians call the Hebrew, the Old Testament, that is the Hebrew Bible. This is the center of monastic life in late antiquity. From the 4th century onward, you find all monastics across the Eastern Mediterranean heavily emphasizing the importance and the centrality of psalmody, that is the recitation and singing and memorization of the entire psalter. In fact, we find rules that say that all monastics have to learn to read. And the primary reason for that rule is simply that they need to be able to read the Psalms. So I spend a lot of time going through the Psalms and picking out the terms that occur there. And of course, the number one term for how humans should feel toward God is fear of God. It dominates this altar across all of the ancient languages that are in view here. So that's the basic point, that simply because every day they are reciting the Psalms and they're speaking this normative discourse that says I should fear God. Here I could note, of course, that most of the Psalms are first and second person speech, so they align very well with monastic prayer. In fact, prayer and psalmody just bleed into one another so that the voice of the psalmist becomes the voice of the monastic. Building on that, then of course, monastics know that they are supposed to be fearing God because it's then told to them by monastic writers and by monastic preachers, who are of course getting this from the psalter. So it's kind of a double set of sources in terms of this normative focus on fear of God. There's Scripture and especially the Psalms, and then there's the re emphasis of that by monastic leaders, monastic discourse, talking about what fear of God is and how to practice it.
- [15:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's exactly where I'd like us to go next. In fact, what did fear of God actually mean? And was God the only thing they were fearing?
- [15:17]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Well, you know, it depends on the writer in question, like the question of what fear of God means. If you look at a piece of monastic literature, it will depend on who the audience is and what the aims of the writer are. So the thing about fear of God is that it will often be emphasized more in writing that has a disciplinary component. Of course, not surprising that a writer who wants to instill discipline in novice monks, for example, is going to emphasize fear of God. What I was interested in exploring more was how the understanding of fear of God also depends on the educational background and the language that is the mother tongue of the writer. And what was quite interesting was the distinction between Greek and Coptic and Syriac, that is in the Language of fear. So in the case of Greek, phobos, which is translated with fear, and the standard definition is simply distress at future harm. So quite similar to what we think of as fear today, it's a narrower understanding. So if you look at other words for what we might call reverence or awe, that is the religious component, there's a separate vocabulary for that in ancient Greek. There's this language of eosabeia or eulabea and other terms that mean reverence. So that existence of that other vocabulary actually narrows the semantic range of fabos. So this is the issue that confronts Greek monastic leaders when they try to understand what fabos means in the Psalms, because it really just means distress of future harm. And so this is what I find influences these writers in particular, to really focus in on fear of God as fear of eschatological punishment, and to bring in this idea of God as judge and to connect the fear of God as judge with the fear of Roman magistrates, judges in that ancient setting. Because, of course, Roman justice is all around and people are being hauled before magistrates. And it's a very important part of social knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean. And you find it coming into monastic understandings of what God's judgment is like. That is also somewhat present in Coptic and Syriac, but not to the same extent. And I would say that's one of the most interesting things for me about this project is I did not realize before how important the semantic background of the term was, that it was actually influencing the way that people would interpret the Psalms, even though. Even if it has nothing to do with what's actually in the Psalms. Right. You could read through the Psalms and look at the language of fear and not really tie it to divine judgment. But if you have that strong emphasis on this word phobos as fear of future harm or distress of future harm, and that cultural surrounding of the Roman judicial system, then that really promotes that kind of understanding.
- [19:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting indeed, to kind of figure out the wider context and what influence that would have. And to some extent, I think, goes back to what you were mentioning earlier in terms of the kind of disciplinary feature, I suppose, when leaders are talking about the sphere of God and encouraging the emotion in their followers. In fact, you go further than kind of an individual leader saying it and talk about a, quote, penitential economy of monastic society. So can we talk about that as a sort of broader structure that's kind.
- [19:51]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Of tying into the question of how the vertical fear of divine punishment affected the, if you like, horizontal relationships among Monastics inside of their communities. And that was another thing that was a little bit surprising to me. I guess it. In hindsight, it's not surprising, but I wasn't looking for it from the beginning. And that is that as fear of God and fear of divine judgment is emphasized, at the same time, there's a strengthening of the emotional bonds between monastics. And that's where the penitential economy comes in, by which I mean simply that we find these stories of monastics actually performing penance on behalf of one another. So, of course, performing penance for themselves for their own sins. Yes, that's an important response to fear of God as fear of divine judgment. But then we find this also, for example, I'm in a monastic community and another novice monk does something wrong, and secretly I go to the monastic superior and I confess that monk's sin, even though I didn't do it, but still I confess their sin and I perform penance for it. So it's this kind of horizontal relationship of love between these monks which is being fostered by the overarching concept of fear of God. And that's related to another, you might say it's the flip side of another thing that I find, which is intercession, that is monks praying for one another. In fact, it gets quite complex in one of the monasteries that I look at where I find prayers inscribed on the walls of the monastery, which you can kind of build up this idea of a web of relationships between the monastics at the monastery. You find a prayer that is, for example, addressed to a figure such as Mary, which is asking for Mary's intercession on behalf not of the speaker, but of another monastic in the monastery who might be still living or be dead. And through that prayer, this relationship or this web of relationships is being established, again, based on, I would say, love between all of these members of the monastery, but under the overarching rubric of fear of God.
- [22:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's really having a pervasive effect in many different senses of relationships. Another thing you mentioned earlier that I want to make sure we don't forget, because I think it is a really interesting way of looking at this. Whatever art historians might say is looking at the spaces, the monastic spaces, that might be linked to what emotions monastics are feeling, or at least meant to be feeling. What can we learn by looking at this sort of architecture?
- [23:22]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Yes, let me preface my remarks to that question by saying that the search for connections between spatial emotion and antiquity, between archaeological sources and emotion, is still very much contested. And I would say it's still very little explored. So that part of the book, I'm sure, statistically has by far the most use of the subjunctive case in this exploration. But what I try to do is to juxtapose, on the one hand, the sources that I've explained, that I've explored in the first parts of the book, and that is monastic discourse. So this corpus of guidance literature by monastics, for monastics about how to feel and juxtapose that with what I call the surface figuration of monastic prayer spaces. So surface figuration here is things like wall paintings or paintings in the niches of oratories in monastic cells, or inscriptions in dipenti on the walls, and also on the floors of monastic cells, other spaces in the monastery, the monastic churches, and in one case, footprints on the floor of a monastic refectory. All of this kind of taken together, can be set alongside monastic discourse. And what I'm asking is, how does this visual material challenge or affirm the focus on fear of God and fear of judgment in the written sources? I do that in two places. So I look first at the church of a monastery in Southern or Upper Egypt, called the Red Monastery, and focus on the apse painting of that church, and then put that painting, which is Christ enthroned, next to homilies that were delivered in that church about the final judgment, and also alongside liturgical sources. So the kind of rubrics for what monks say during the celebration of the Eucharist, and actually found quite a few references to Christ enthroned, which appear very similar to Christ enthroned in the apse of that church. The other part is to look at the monastery of Apageremias, which is another Egyptian monastery which no longer survives outside of modern Cairo. And let me just give one example from that monastery and try to make this a little bit more concrete. So that example is conveniently on the COVID of the book, so that you don't need to purchase the book to be able to see it. And it's basically a paving stone from the refectory, the cafeteria of that monastery. And it has an inscription which reads, in Coptic, christ have mercy on my brother George the Eunuch and his fathers. And above that inscription on the paving stone, you can just make out the imprints of 2ft, left and right foot standing together. It's not the entire imprint, but just the prints of the toes and a little bit of the balls of the feet. So what I argue is that that paving stone, along with others like it actually preserves the footprints of George, this member of the monastic community. And what we are seeing is actually the accumulated evidence of lots and lots of prostrations during prayer in exactly the same place of this monk George. And I think that either during George's lifetime or afterwards, the inscription was added. So we get this prayer for George. And so what's interesting here is we can kind of trace these residues of the emotive affordances of this space over time, similar to what I was saying about the penitential economy and the economy of intercession. Here we find these connections being drawn between George, Christ, and then the subsequent monastics who are reading this inscription. Like, for example, if you read this inscription and you would have read it aloud, because that's how people read late antiquity, you're literally praying the prayer for George. And you are also putting yourself in the position of George's brother, Right? Because you have to say, george, my brother, and you're also addressing it to Christ. Right. So it's simply the fact of coming into the space. Reading the inscription puts the speaker in. Into relationship with George, in a relationship that's based on intercession and love, but is also putting the speaker into relationship with Christ in a way that hints at the overarching paradigm of divine judgment. We could go further and talk about the footprints themselves. I mean, we could wonder if subsequent monastics also stood in George's footprints, whether that itself would have made an emotional connection between the person standing in the prints and George, who made them. I would say certainly, yes. But again, yeah, you can hear me getting more into the hypothetical areas, but at the least, I think you could make a solid argument that this space was really helping its inhabitants, inviting its inhabitants into these relational paradigms of judgment and intercession with the emotions that they entail.
- [30:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, even if we can't definitively answer questions, it's still often really interesting and helpful to be kind of thinking about them and having them at least on the table to look at these sorts of hypotheticals. So then thinking about what those spaces might be doing and all the other aspects of this, too, right? The psalms that they're singing and the ways that they're talking within their communities. It does kind of sound a little bit doomful. Like, it sounds like they're sort of meant to be scared all the time. Is that the case?
- [30:35]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
No, I would say no. I mean, I guess you. Again, it depends on the writer. Some writers tend to stress fear of God a lot more than others. But even for those writers who really stress it. I think that there's an allowance that it's not possible to always be feeling this fear in a negative way. I'll give the example that opens the book, and that is the story of Pacomius, who is, of course, held up as the traditional founder of Kinabitic monasticism. The story goes that he was praying in his church and he was asking God to experience the fear of God. And an angel appears to him and asks, are you sure you really want to experience the fear of God? And he says, yes. And lo and behold, he is struck down by this ray of green light, and he's just writhing on the floor in agony. And he asks. He calls out for the mercy of God, which arrives in the form of a golden light, and the green light goes away, and he comes back to his senses and recovers. So here is Acomius, right? The sort of exemplar of fear of God, and yet he cannot endure it. So I think the answer is maybe, theoretically, yes, they're supposed to feel it all the time, but practically, no, it's just not possible. And I think for a lot of monastic writers, like I said, it's not everybody who is really stressing fear of God as fear of judgment. There are some who seem to see it more as just a basic disposition, more in line with what we think of today. Right. Like a reverence and respect even for God. And for those writers, it's much easier to have that basic disposition as a constant. And then, of course, there's many other emotions. Love and joy, humility and so on. That can overlay that.
- [32:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's, you know, less doomful, maybe, than I was thinking. That's good to know. And certainly something that I think is helpful to illuminate because there were lots of surprises for me in this book around, like, oh, and you're meant to be fearing it, then. Okay, all right. And it's in the spaces. Got it. You know, it really paints, in many ways, quite a vivid picture of monastic life at this point, which was really fascinating to kind of step into, in a way, through the book. Was there anything you found surprising in figuring all of this out?
- [33:26]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Oh, there are many things. One thing that was fascinating to me that I didn't really. I didn't get to explore it as much as I wanted to. It wasn't about fear of God, but it was about God's feelings. And it was the difference that I found between ancient languages when it came to God's feelings in the Psalms. So the big difference was on the one hand, the Greek version heavily emphasizes just one word, and that is elaos, or pity. That is God's normative feeling towards humanity. But what was surprising was when I looked at the Syriac, it was actually split between two roots, which didn't mean pity, but more compassion on the one hand, and grace. In fact, the Syriac word for grace, taibutha, is the same word that translates Greek charis in the New Testament. So all the New Testament material in the letters of Paul about the grace of God, suddenly that is tied together, it's the same word that is found in the Syriac psalter. That's something that really fascinated me and I am actually not aware of any research on that. So it's something that I want to look into further.
- [35:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that is what I like to end interviews with anyway, of what you might be looking into now that this project is done. So is that what you're working on next or do you have anything else you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [35:15]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Well, I am working on one article on that topic, but I have to say that the big next project is about something a little bit different, which is physical crosses. So one thing I noticed in this project was whereas the monastics that I focused on in Egypt were primarily praying to paintings of Christ or to other paintings of other figures in the context of Syriac speaking monastics in Mesopotamia, it was really just crosses. Crosses were the focus of prayer and that got me interested in actually, well, if it's really just all about crosses, then what are physical crosses doing as social actors in communities in Mesopotamia and in medieval Asia more broadly? So that's my next big project is a book project about the social lives of crosses in medieval Asia.
- [36:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. Best of luck with that project. And while you're pursuing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Fear of Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism, published by the University of California Press in 2025. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [36:37]
Dr. Daniel Ahn
Thank you so much, Miranda, for your time.
- [36:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sam.