Erēmos: Landscape, Architecture and Spirituality in the Christian Asceticism of the Third and Fourth Centuries. A Watsujian Reading

Abstract

In this article, I carry out a reinterpretation of the desert fūdo (sabaku) and its religious derivation. Such an interpretation develops from the view proposed by Watsuji in his Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (1935). Watsuji argues that landscape shapes man and man shapes landscape: both are involved, in symbiosis. As a consequence of this mutual affectation and constitution—landscape-man—Watsuji concludes that cultural forms are also forms derived from the landscape: society, art, and religion are determined in their particularity by the human experience of the landscape. In this sense, the sabaku is interpreted as a climatic matrix that generates a series of cultural determinations. However, Watsuji limits his reading of the sabaku to the more general expression of two desert religions: Judaism and, to a lesser extent, Islam. In my interpretation of the desert fūdo, I make a treatment not of the Jewish or Islamic religion, but of the third monotheism: Christianism. For that purpose, I will focus on a particular period of its historical development and landscaping, the third and fourth centuries, and on a particular phenomenon that develops in that period: desert asceticism, also known as desert mysticism. The question posed here is how the desert experience (erēmos) determines the Christian spirituality of the ascetics of the third and fourth centuries. As a result of the experience of this fūdo I inquire what particular features this Christianity acquired in its way of life and its experience of the sacred. Religion and landscape are mutually determined. Undoubtedly, places also have in their specificity a particular way of speaking to us about God; how did the desert speak to the men who entered its sands?